Have Your Cake and Kill Him Too (4 page)

“Is he dead?”

Both of us popped open our doors and stepped out onto the gravel. Emma ran toward the car. I found myself trapped against the pickup by the fallen surfboard. Pierpoint Fitch, best known as “Pointy” to his friends, unfurled his storklike body from the car and stood up, looking bizarre, but uninjured.

“Hey, hot dog,” Emma called. “You okay?”

“No thanks to you,” he snapped, shoving his goggles to the top of his head. His hair immediately stood on end as if he'd stuck his finger in a light socket.

“Me? This is your fault!”

“Poppycock!”

Pointy Fitch, nearly eighty, had a pair of baggy shorts hanging on his bony hips—shorts that would have looked more natural on a skateboarding teenager than an elderly millionaire. His skinny, blue-veined legs disappeared into a pair of enormous sneakers, and he warded off the afternoon chill with a faded blue sweatshirt emblazoned with the name of a prep school he hadn't attended in sixty-five years.

He stomped around the Bentley to inspect his overturned trailer. The sight of the damage prompted him to let out a string of quaintly Victorian curses. “Blast! What an infernal, confounded botch!”

“Cool your jets,” said Emma. “We'll call a tow truck.”

“The devil with that!” He reared back and gave the trailer hitch an ineffectual kick. Then, “Ow!”

“What are you trying to do? Break your foot?” Emma bent and expertly pulled the pin from the hitch.

Immediately, the trailer disengaged from the car and keeled over. We heard the motorcycles crunch under the weight of the trailer.

Pointy squinted at my sister with new respect. “You're not half bad for a hoyden. You're one of those Blackbird widows, right?”

“Don't get your hopes up, old man. I only date grown-ups.”

Affronted as a maiden aunt who'd just heard a naughty limerick, he blustered, “Don't be ridiculous, young lady! I am a gentleman!”

“That's what they all say. Hey, are you hurt?”

“Certainly not. I'm as tough as pemmican.” He used his knobby knuckles to rap his own skull. “See? Indestructible!”

“Maybe we should take you to the hospital, just to be sure.”

“I'd rather be boiled in oil by South Sea savages than set foot in a germ factory like a hospital. No, thank you, no hospitals for me!”

“Humor me, you old geezer. Let's get you checked out.”

“You'll have to wrestle me to the ground,” he replied. “And a little wisp like you would have your hands full.”

“Who you calling a—hey, where are you going?”

He had turned away and marched back to his car. “I have pressing matters to attend.”

“But what about your trailer?” Emma called.

“Leave it!”

Without further exchange, Pointy climbed back into his Bentley, started the engine with a roar and drove off in a spray of gravel.

Emma walked back to me. “What the hell is a pemmican, anyway?”

“I always thought it was like beef jerky.”

“What a loon. Isn't he the maniac with the Frisbees?”

Millionaire Pierpoint Fitch had not settled into a dignified retirement from his long and spotty banking career with a suitably quiet pastime like stamp collecting. No, Pointy Fitch had taken up sports and traveled around competing in everything from miniature golf to the senior badminton championship. His family thought he was eccentric. Everyone else figured he was nuts.

Eyeing the crushed motorcycles, I had to agree with them. “I thought Pointy was into tennis and archery. This looks dangerous.”

Emma nodded. “Last I heard, he was shooting marbles at some coot convention in Atlantic City. Where do you suppose he's off to in such a hurry today?”

“A Mensa meeting?”

Emma laughed. Except for a few distant cousins, none of the Fitches were known for the sharpness of their wits.

“Look,” I said, “thanks for bringing me, but there's no need for you to stick around. I'll walk up to the house from here. Delilah's bound to be waiting for me.”

“Forget it,” said Emma. “I'll go park by the sheep barn and come find you. Don't slip and fall. This sidewalk hasn't been swept in years.”

As she drove away, I hiked up the slate walkway into the geometrically perfect garden of yews, ornamental trees and delicate ground covers. If the Fitches lacked the education and God-given talent to create great beauty, at least they had enough sense to hire those who did. Although it had been ages since a gardener had properly tended the elaborate plantings, I could still see the bones of good design beneath the overgrowth.

I slowed my pace as I reached the fountain—empty today but for the marble figure of a naked woman taking aim with a bow and arrow, symbols of the Fitch family's favorite pastime. The huntress had always made me smile because her eyes were slightly crossed. I reached out and gave her bare behind a pat, then looked up at the tall windows of the ballroom.

I was too young to remember the days when bons vivants and madcap heiresses drank Prohibition liquor at glamorous Fitch parties, but I had certainly attended my share of swanky bashes in the house. My family and the Fitches went back a few generations. The spring balls were noisy and fun—fancy dress with big bands from New York and, later, with local rock groups that rattled the windows. The famous archery tournaments had been the kind of blazingly sunny summer afternoons where children played red rover on the lawn, chased everywhere by Fitch sheepdogs, while Fitch servants churned ice cream, and parents drank gallons of juleps and tried to shoot arrows at straw-stuffed targets.

But as I reached the first plateau in the garden, I suddenly saw a huge moving van parked on the lawn by the back door. The logo of Kingsley's auction house was printed on the side of the truck. The Philadelphia-based company specialized in estate sales.

It was never a good sign to see an estate sale company pull into your driveway.

Two uniformed employees struggled out of the house carrying a glass-fronted bookcase. A third Kingsley's employee leaned against the kitchen entrance by the dog door with a cigarette.

I stopped on the walk, struck by the end of a great family's story. Once moneyed and influential, the Fitches had tumbled to this—the day when all their possessions went off in a truck to be sold.

“Nora?”

I spun around to see Boykin Fitch standing in the brambles beyond the ornamental garden. In a pin-striped suit and a pair of thick rubber boots, he looked surprised and ludicrously handsome entangled in the weeds.

“You startled me, Boy.” I smiled. “But I think the first time I met you, it was right here in this garden.”

He grinned as he disengaged his boot from a thorny trap and began to climb over the hedge to greet me. “Were we looking for champagne?”

I steadied his arm as he lost his balance. “Yes! Your grand-parents chilled it in the snowbanks on New Year's Eve and forgot where all the bottles were. We used to keep those old kerosene lamps out here for searching, remember? Are you looking for some now?”

“No.” He managed to get over the hedge, but cast a puzzled glance at the weeds around him. “I think I dropped my wallet.” He grabbed one buttock and frowned.

“Have you looked in your other pockets?”

Amiably, he followed my suggestion and began to pat his clothes. “I know I had it earlier, but I—” When one hand struck the breast pocket of his jacket, his face cleared into a smile. “Golly, will you look at that!” He produced a worn Gucci wallet from his jacket. “I had it all along!”

Deep as a birdbath. That was Boy.

After he put his wallet into his hip pocket, I shook his hand. “It's nice to see you again after all these years.”

I hadn't bumped into him in a decade, but the years had been good to Boykin Fitch. He'd grown tall and distinguished with a patrician profile and a noble gaze prone to staring pensively into the distance. Or maybe he was just trying to remember his own phone number. For all his good looks, Boy Fitch was as endearingly dim as a Labrador retriever.

I'd known him as a teenager, when he'd been held back for a few extra years at prep schools better known for their athletic fields than for their libraries. Family connections got Boy into the Ivy League school where it took tutors and well-paid friends six years to help him acquire his degree. After that, he'd gone to a law school nobody ever heard of, but departed without a diploma, his academic performance best forgotten.

Lately, though, Boy had managed to find the perfect career for someone with his particular combination of good looks, good manners and lackluster intelligence.

He found politics.

With the help of a media genius, he'd been miraculously elected to the Pennsylvania legislature, where a young and handsome scion of an old family created quite a stir. By keeping his head down and other body parts out of scandal, he attracted the attention of his party's chieftains. Some tentative fund-raising turned into an avalanche of money and now there was talk of a campaign for a US Senate seat. For those of us who remembered Boy as the kid who knocked out his own front teeth with a tennis racket, it was hard to believe.

I said, “What's going on? Why is the Kingsley's truck here?”

Boy smoothed his thick brown hair off his forehead. He wore a patriotic tie printed with little waving flags. “My uncle Zell is selling the place. And everything in it.”

“Now? This minute?”

Boy nodded glumly. “He's trying to pull a fast one on the rest of the family. We got here as quickly as we could, but Kingsley's has security guards all over the house. We can't get inside.”

“Boy, how awful!”

“We want nothing more than a few family keepsakes, but Zell says no. I don't mind losing the house so much. It's kind of an ugly old pile, don't you think?” He looked up at the imposing structure. “But gee, I sure wish I could have my old train set.”

“The house is magnificent!” I argued, shocked that anyone would think of selling such an estate without the approval of the whole family. “And each room is a masterpiece. The library alone—with the Alfons Mucha lithographs embedded in the wallpaper! I love Art Nouveau.”

“Who's Art Nouveau?” Boy asked, genuinely mystified.

In that moment, I was sure Boykin had found his calling. Suddenly, I could clearly picture him walking in the shadow of a helicopter, amiably cupping his ear and playing deaf to the cries of his constituents.

“Uhm, Art Noveau is—well, I'm just sorry about the whole situation. You must all be devastated.”

“Yeah, my dad just left in a temper.”

“I saw him. He looked very upset.”

Boy sighed. “Frankly, I'm glad he took off. You never know when Dad might do something really crazy. He hasn't been himself lately. Did you see his motorcycles?”

“Yes, but he won't be using them in the near future. We had a little fender bender, and the bikes ended up in the ditch by the driveway.”

“Well, that's a relief.”

Boy's father, Pierpoint, had been raised at Fitch's Fancy along with various siblings. Due to a glitch in someone's will, the house had not passed to Pointy, but to his sister instead—and upon her death, to her second husband, best known to all of Philadelphia as “that rat bastard,” Zell Orcutt, who was universally disliked and snubbed by the Old Money crowd.

Zell, it appeared, was getting his revenge now.

Boy said, “Dad's ready to murder Zell over this.”

When he first rode into Philadelphia, Zell claimed to be an Oklahoma wildcatter and quickly won the affections of a rich, susceptible widow, Hannah Fitch Barnstable. After they eloped, Zell's true character started to show. First he was thrown out of the Schuylkill Club for cheating at cards. Then there was a hushed-up affair concerning missing bearer bonds. Instead of lazy, glamorous afternoon parties with longtime friends, Zell threw splashy bashes with lots of social climbers. He walked around carrying his own pint of cheap bourbon, slapping backs and nuzzling his wife's friends.

And everyone heard whispers that he'd impregnated two of his stepdaughter's high school friends.

My own unpleasant brush with Zell happened during a Christmas party at Fitch's Fancy. While whispering with a boy in the shadow of the staircase, I'd heard Zell slap his wife on the landing above us. My friend fled moments later when Zell strutted down the stairs, but I couldn't move. When Zell rounded the newel post and saw me, he came over and backed me against the paneling. He reached out and pinched my chin hard between his thumb and fingers.

“Hey, there, little lady,” he crooned. “What are you doing here in the dark?”

As I pushed his hand away, his wife leaned down over the banister and said in her odd, baby voice, “Zelly, don't.”

His boozy grin never wavered, but he let me go, giving my bottom a swat as if I were a heifer that needed a send-off.

As time went on, Zell humiliated his wife so regularly that she gradually found it easier to stay out of the public eye. In the last several years before her death, her daughter ran off, and Zell took over the estate. Hannah died a recluse.

That Zell ended up sole owner of Fitch's Fancy was bad enough, but selling it out from under the rest of the family was the act of a rattlesnake.

“I wish I could help, Boy. Want me to distract someone so you can run inside?”

He smiled. “Actually, my cousin Verbena just broke a basement window and sneaked in. I'm supposed to wait here in the garden. I guess I tackle the security guard if he makes a move.”