The Crasher (27 page)

“Poppy Gan isn’t here. This isn’t her crowd. That’s new
money, a downtown fast crowd. This is old money, slow, not half so much fun. I’ll give you a thousand bucks to buy a real
ticket for yourself if Poppy Gan’s here. Try again.” Johnny gave her an amused sardonic grin.

The blush was still on her face as for the next few minutes she obstinately clung to her Poppy Gan story, even throwing in
the monstrous Svank’s name. Johnny decided he’d had enough of her mental contortions. He pulled a crumpled sheet of paper
out of his pocket and handed it to her.

“What’s this?”

“A list of the table holders as of six o’clock tonight. So what’s it all about, Ginny? I really want to know why you’d sooner
be here than in a cozy little bar with pals of your own age.”

She looked like a cornered deer. “Why… why do you have such an up-to-date list? How can you be so sure Poppy isn’t here?”

Before he could speak, a languid blonde came up and placed a proprietary hand on his arm. “Hey, Johnny, so glad you finally
made it. The Rockefellers are at your table. We’re all waiting for you so the party can really begin.” She smiled, showing
perfect bonded teeth.

Johnny clapped a hand to his head. “Susan, did I tell you I was bringing a date? Ginny Walker, meet Susan Barker.”

Susan flicked a glance in Ginny’s direction, then averted her eyes quickly as if the sight was too painful. “No, you didn’t,
Johnny. That could be a problem.”

Squirming, Ginny couldn’t wait to make a getaway. “It doesn’t matter, really. I can’t stay long…”

“Neither can I,” said Johnny. “I’m on deadline.” He smiled at an increasingly flustered Susan, then taking Ginny’s arm, said,
“Let’s pay our respects to the Rockefellers, and squeeze in for the first course.” He grinned again. “We’ll be out of your
hair by the main course, Susan…”

“But Johnny… so many people are waiting to meet you…,” Susan wailed.

“I’ve met them, all of them,” he said firmly. “I’ve got the story.”

As he shepherded Ginny through the crowd Johnny was hailed and stopped time after time by people of all ages, most of whom
seemed to adore him.

By the time they reached the table, Ginny’s stomach was playing somersaults. It had nothing to do with Susan Barker’s unmistakable
disdain and cold fury. That was easy to put up with. No, as she’d stumbled along with this strange, sarcastic man, a lurking
suspicion had begun to build.

As introductions were made, and she heard his name loud and clear, her worst fear was confirmed.

“Johnny Peet, pleased to meet you.”

“Hi, Johnny, love your column. This is my wife, Sheila…”

“Glad to meet you.”

“Mr. Peet, a pleasure to meet the mastermind behind… what’s your magazine called?”

“Next!,
dear. Don’t mind my husband, Mr. Peet. He often forgets my name.”

John Q. Peet!

She’d been rescued by Dolores’s ex-husband, by John Q. Peet, who wrote the wickedly satirical column for
Next!
magazine.

No wonder he wanted her to answer his questions. No wonder he’d guessed she was a crasher. He was everywhere. He must have
seen her before. Her cover was blown. He would turn her into a laughingstock in his column, by exposing her as a gate-crasher.
Her fashion career was over before it began.

As often happened, Johnny’s alarm went off when he was already awake, although he hadn’t yet opened his eyes.

He lay still, trying to recover from a dream, more accurately a nightmare about his father. He didn’t need a psychiatrist
to explain it. He’d dreamed he’d let his father down in some terrible, tragic way. It had something to do with an envelope
he’d been entrusted to deliver, but no matter how fast he ran down a never-ending street, chasing his father’s shadow, he
never managed to catch him.

It wasn’t too different from real life. He’d been running and trying to catch up with his father for years. He was almost
thirty now, but his father remained as far away and as remote as ever.

He shrugged on a robe and went into the handsome bathroom of his new apartment overlooking the Museum of Natural History.
As he began to shave, his feeling of gloom and doom deepened. Again he knew why. He was lunching with his father in a few
hours at the Century, the illustrious club for men of letters, and, following a feminist hullabaloo that had changed the club’s
bylaws, now for women, too.

He wasn’t a member. Until recently he’d never given it any
thought, although as Quentin Peet’s son, he guessed he probably wouldn’t have a hard time getting approved by the board.

Johnny nodded at his bleary, sleep-deprived reflection, agreeing with himself that he had never sought membership because
he knew his father wouldn’t think he’d earned it.

That was what the dream was all about. No matter that the “perceptive spin” of his ego-pricking pieces on society and people
in the news in his
Next!
column were being talked about; that he now occasionally appeared on McNeill-Lehrer and Charlie Rose. His piece on the homeless
woman, wrapped in sacking, lying on the pavement beneath a fancy costume in a Saks Fifth Avenue window, had brought that about.
As far as his father was concerned he hadn’t earned anything, period.

Yesterday a messenger had brought a clipping to his office from his father. It was a flattering item in Liz Smith’s
New York Post
column that he’d already seen, praising his work. “Like father, like son,” she’d written, reminding her readers that, “after
all, the ‘Q’ in young Mr. Peet’s name does stand for Quentin.”

His father had attached a note, which told Johnny what today’s lunch was going to be all about.

“Quidnunc, if you ask me,” he’d written.

He didn’t know the word but he’d expected the worst, and looking it up in Webster’s, he’d been right.

“Quidnunc: what now?” he’d read, “an inquisitive, gossipy person; a busybody.”

“I don’t care,” he’d told himself yesterday, tearing the note to shreds and hurling it across the room. Working for
Next!
may not be as significant a career step as running the Albany Bureau of the
New York Times
(where, his father still cuttingly reminded him, many of the men now in top jobs at the
Times
had first been sent), but it provided a forum for him to write about whatever he liked; injustices, perversities, anomalies,
sometimes trivial (“The Art of Raising Money as a Form of Social Mountaineering”); sometimes consequential (“Who Runs This
Place? A Look at the Battle Between New York’s
Mayor and New York’s Governor”). So he hadn’t cracked a big one à la Woodward and Bernstein, but he was building a name for
himself, not only as a shrewd commentator, but as someone who stirred things up, sometimes for the better.

Yesterday, he’d thought bitterly how much he agreed with what a number of young reporters sneeringly called the old-time way
of “access reporting.” So his father knew the secretary of state, could get to him easily with one phone call, and then give
his millions of readers around the world the inside story about U.S. decisions in the world’s trouble spots, Bosnia, the Middle
East, Africa, but did his father ever sit down and explain what bungling had led to the mess in the first place? Did he ever
write about the suffering masses, about poor people—not only the ones thousands of miles away, but also those in New York,
on his own doorstep?

No, Johnny had thought yesterday, burning over the quidnunc crack. His father was too busy being James Bond, not accepting
that there was room in the world for another kind of reporting, the kind that was now bringing him kudos. If he had to have
a role model, he supposed it would be Robin Hood.

That was yesterday.

Today he cared, waking up, longing as much as ever to receive the look of approving camaraderie he’d seen his father give
brilliant young journalists such as Tom Friedman, who’d already earned a couple of Pulitzers as a foreign correspondent.

What was he going to do about it? There was no point telling his father that he wasn’t a lightweight, that along with his
column, he’d been working with a member of the DEA on a dangerous story to expose a link between two major New York robberies
and the international drug trade, tying that in with Rosa Brueckner/Rosemary Abbott’s horrific death by fire.

Would his father have been deterred by Ben Abbott’s threat to stay off his turf?

Of course not, so what was the point of proving to his father still more that he didn’t measure up, because he had been deterred.
The Licton/Licone lead had turned into a dead end,
and he’d filed the story away, not because he was trying to save his own skin, but because he did not know enough. Abbott
had been right. Inadvertently he might risk the life of somebody else. Even now a chill went through him, remembering Abbott’s
Joan of Arc crack. It would haunt him forever.

He turned on the triple jets in the fancy shower he loved. How lucky he was, thanks to his mother, to be able to afford such
a great pad. That was another thing. The old man had probably never forgiven him for inheriting his mother’s money, because
he’d been banking on inheriting it himself.

Although Quentin Peet was among the world’s top-earning newsmen, for as long as Johnny could remember his father had always
talked about being short of money. Why? What a story it would make for
Next!
Few people knew—and they’d never know it from him—that Quentin Peet not only gambled with his life; he gambled on anything
and everything—horses, baccarat, politics, baseball, football, even Scrabble. His father was an addict and it had made their
family life, what there was of it, unadulterated hell.

Paying some of his inheritance out in alimony to get rid of Dolores fast hadn’t helped the situation either. His mother would
have approved, he knew that. He had his freedom and a clear conscience. He could have left Dolores in the gutter, where his
father thought she belonged, but he’d behaved like a gentleman.

Johnny looked carefully through his wardrobe. That was another great thing about
Next!
He could wear what he liked to the office and it was often jeans, a sweater and a cord jacket. Not today though. It was a
suit today, somber serge, the one he’d worn only a few times since his mother’s funeral.

When he reached his office around ten, there was a FedEx envelope on his desk. He glanced at the sender’s name and address
before opening it. He often received information he hadn’t asked for this way, from diligent or overanxious public relations
companies trying to signal that this communiqué was too good to miss, hoping to ignite a story idea for his column.
This “urgent” missive was from Fay Needham of Random House.

He opened the envelope with a sense of guilt. He knew what this was about and he’d definitely been negligent. More than a
month must have passed since he’d received the first letter from Needham, a senior editor at the publishing house, asking
if he’d be interested in writing a book for them, “a serious sociological look at a year spent ‘inside’ New York society.”

“We want the ultimate insider’s look; available to someone like yourself,” her letter had begun. “Single, attractive, invited
everywhere because of your eligibility, your humor, your family background, connections and, yes, of course, your column inches.
From reading your column, we feel you would bring to this study an unusually penetrating, unjaded and, we hope, witty perspective.

“Would you be interested in discussing this idea with us? Perhaps comparing ‘now’ with ‘back then,’ as well as comparing today’s
society in New York with that of other American cities, Washington, of course, Los Angeles, and any other city or cities you
might suggest”

He’d been intrigued and called to say he’d give the idea some thought, but with Rosemary’s death, it had completely slipped
from his mind.

Obviously his silence hadn’t hurt. Now they were suggesting an advance of two hundred thousand dollars for a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-word
book, subject to agreement on his outline. It sounded pretty good to him. Did he have the discipline to add that load to his
regular weekly thousand-word column?

He thought he did, and if he wrote a successful, good book, a soul-searching, truthful John O’Hara meets Tom Wolfe sort of
book, wouldn’t that be one way to redeem himself in his father’s eyes?

Should he bring it up at lunch? He already knew the answer. No way, not until he’d written every one of the one hundred and
fifty thousand words and the book was approved and at the printer’s.

He pushed Needham’s letter aside. He would meet with her group this week and then make a decision. He picked up the phone
to retrieve his voice mail. There were eight messages, two of them, both agitated, from a Ginny Walker, asking him to call.

Ginny Walker? Oh, yes, the gate-crasher.

He’d stayed at the Guggenheim longer than he’d intended to, enjoying some fast repartee with a modern-art-loving young Rockefeller,
and even taking to the floor for a brief body encounter with Ms. Walker (who, in his arms, surprisingly turned out to be nothing
like as bony as he’d expected from her skinny silhouette).

As midnight struck, she had done a disappearing act. He’d been relieved. He’d acted too impetuously and once she knew exactly
who he was, he’d wondered how he was going to cope with her jitters, which had shown up on the dance floor, when she’d started
pleading with him not to write anything about her. He hadn’t bothered to reply. If she thought she was about to be exposed
as a gate-crasher, perhaps she’d think twice about doing it again. Then again, the reason behind her gatecrashing did interest
him, but not that much.

Because he’d woken up so aware of his father’s continuing depressing effect on his moods, Johnny decided to be magnanimous.
He would put the young woman out of her misery and tell her she was not about to be skewered in
Next!
He dialed the number she’d left.