Too Much Money (12 page)

T
HE NEXT
morning, at the very same time that Perla Zacharias had called Gus the day before, the telephone rang at his house in Prud’homme. The call was from Paris. The man calling spoke English with such a strong French accent that he was difficult to understand. He was also extremely agitated. He identified himself as Pierre La Rouche. He was Perla Zacharias’s lawyer. He was infuriated that an arrangement for an interview had been made without his knowledge. Gus had seen him at the trial in Biarritz, and afterward in Johannesburg, talking outside the synagogue following Konstantin Zacharias’s funeral. He had also spotted him on several other occasions when the nurse, Floyd McArthur, who had taken care of Konstantin because he suffered from a disorder of the nervous system, had been arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison for the crime.

Gus remembered Pierre as a dramatic looking fellow with a superior attitude and slicked-back gray hair who chain-smoked through a long tortoiseshell cigarette holder. Gus remembered disliking him.

“I am having a very difficult time understanding your English, Mr. La Rouche,” said Gus. “Perhaps if you would eliminate the anger in your voice, it would be easier for me to understand.”

“Madame Zacharias cannot have an interview. It is impossible. How dare such a thing be discussed without consulting me?”

“Calm down. You have the dynamic wrong here. Mrs. Zacharias, or
Madame
Zacharias, called me at my unlisted number in Connecticut that you are now calling. I did not call Mrs. Zacharias. I was greatly surprised to hear from the woman. It seems to me that if you’re going to scream at somebody, you should scream at her. But you probably can’t afford to do that
because she’s so rich and paying you a fortune, so you call and blow off steam to me. Get over it.”

“What sort of things do you intend to ask her?” The tone of La Rouche’s voice had changed considerably.

“About the fire. Where she was. How she found out the villa was burning. If she called Konstantin in the bathroom from her cell phone. Why the police kept the fire department from entering the apartment for two hours. Things like that.”

“But that’s exactly what she won’t talk about. That was all dealt with at the trial,” said La Rouche.

“Even you know that it wasn’t dealt with sufficiently,” replied Gus.

“There are other things to talk about. Her philanthropic works, for instance. Are you aware that the French government is presenting her with its highest civilian medal of honor for her philanthropic work for the poor children of Paris?”

“I’m not interested in writing about her philanthropic works, or her eighteenth-century French furniture or her Fabergé egg collection or her jeweled salt and pepper shakers. I repeat, she called me. I didn’t call her.”

“I have a solution,” La Rouche replied quickly. “Why don’t you e-mail me specific questions you are planning to ask Madame Zacharias. I will decide what you can and what you cannot ask, and I will be present during the interview.”

“Good-bye,” said Gus. He hung up.

F
OR REASONS INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO MOST OF HER
friends, Lil insisted on having regularly scheduled luncheon engagements with her stepmother, Dodo Van Degan, whom she was known to loathe and about whom she spoke badly behind her back. She would tell Dodo how important it was for the family that they at least give the appearance of unity. Lil also was heeding the advice of her nephew, young Laurance, who pointed out that it would be bad for his business if there was a public rift with Dodo. After all, he noted, she was the richest one in the family.

From the beginning, the hatred these two women felt for each other hung between them as they dined at Swifty’s. Every word and gesture, no matter how pleasant on the surface, was laced with contempt.

“The pea soup is simply delish,” said Lil to Dodo during one of their earliest attempts at preserving the Van Degan unified front.

“I hate pea soup,” said Dodo, disinterestedly. Raising her finger to get the waiter’s attention, she said, “Octavio, I’ll have a gin martini straight up, with an olive, and the chef’s salad.”

“Those are my mother’s pearls you’re wearing,” said Lil.

“Your father, my husband, gave them to me on my last birthday before he died,” replied Dodo, fingering her pearls. “He said he liked to look at them on my neck, that they were being wasted in that black velvet box.”

“My father had no right to give my mother’s pearls to you. If he wanted you to have pearls, he should have taken you to Mr. Platt at Tiffany’s. Mr. Platt knows more about pearls than anyone in New York. Mother always wanted me to have those, and my father knew it. My father was growing senile, and you took advantage of him.”

Dodo put her hands behind her neck and unscrewed the diamond clip of the pearl necklace. Before Lil could stop her, she dropped the necklace in her stepdaughter’s “delish” pea soup.

“You awful woman! Look what you’ve done!” cried Lil in horror. “You’ve dropped Mother’s pearls in my pea soup. I’m sure they’re simply ruined.”

“Don’t be silly. Good for the sheen, I hear,” replied Dodo, a wide grin stretched across her face.

A
S TIME
went on, however, the two women began to grow more accustomed to each other, and the results of their luncheons became less disastrous. On their most recent date, Lil was sitting at her regular corner table in the back room of Swifty’s with Dodo across from her.

“Did I tell you I had the loveliest letter from Winkie Williams?” she said, before taking a dainty spoonful of her French onion soup. After the incident with her mother’s pearls, she could no longer stomach the pea soup.

She continued, “It was as if he had sent it from heaven. It came with a very expensive and beautiful orchid plant, everything written and ordered the night before he died. I’m to be the
executrix of his will. He said it would take my mind off my apartment, which of course you know I’m always complaining about. Good old Winkie. He always did everything right.”

After a pause and another sip of the French onion, Lil shifted in her seat. These lunches had taught Dodo enough about her stepdaughter’s gestures to signal to her that whatever was coming was the topic Lil Altemus was really dying to talk about.

Lil said, in a low voice, “Everyone’s acting strange lately, I don’t know why. Something astrological, probably. Mercury in retrograde, whatever that means. Like Gert, you know, my cook. I don’t know what’s the matter with her. There was no rose on my breakfast tray again this morning. And she got huffy with me when I counted the change she brought back with her from buying the groceries at Grace’s Marketplace.”

“That’s the same thing as accusing her of stealing, after she’s put up with your crap for twenty-five years. She had every right to be huffy,” said Dodo.

As always, Lil ignored what her stepmother said, especially when she used coarse language, which she knew Dodo did to rile her. “I suppose she could be upset with me because it’s time for her to go on another trip to Ireland to visit that niece of hers. She’s named after me, don’t you love it? Miss Lillian Altemus Hoolihan of Roscommon, Ireland. I have to keep from laughing when Gert calls her that. These annual trips of hers to the old country are getting a little costly for me, so I suggested to her that she go over to Ireland every
other
year rather than every year.”

“I told you to sell the pearls if you need more money,” said Dodo.

“I just couldn’t sell Mother’s pearls. Addison Kent of Boothby’s auction house looked at them and he said they were beautiful, and he could do very well with them at auction, but I just couldn’t sell them. Not just so my cook can make her trips.”

“No wonder she didn’t put any roses on your breakfast tray,” said Dodo.

“She’ll get used to it,” said Lil. “It’s cutback time. It’s as simple as that.”

T
HE TRUTH
was that Gert missed the old apartment on Fifth Avenue. The big kitchen. The maids. The butler. The dinners for twenty-four. That was what she had become accustomed to over the years. She liked having Adele Harcourt come into her kitchen to compliment her on her fig mousse. She especially liked it when Lil brought her into the dining room after a particularly delicious dinner to introduce her to the distinguished guests, who clapped for her and called her Gert. She wouldn’t say such a thing to a single soul, but she knew that she had been the star society cook in New York, and she missed her importance. She was the one everyone wanted to sit next to on bingo nights at St. Ignatius Loyola church, on Park Avenue at Eighty-fourth Street, where she went to early Mass nearly every morning. “Jackie Kennedy’s funeral was at St. Ignatius,” she often said when she described her church to her relatives in Ireland. She was thinking about those Fifth Avenue days as she walked home from Grace’s Marketplace, a fancy grocery store on Third Avenue and Seventy-first Street, carrying shopping bags of food back to the white-brick building on Sixty-sixth Street between Third and Second Avenues. She hated the building. She hated the apartment. She hated the stove in the kitchen. She was used to bigger and better. She hated the old linoleum on the kitchen floor. She particularly hated her room, which was half the size of her room on Fifth Avenue. But she would never say a word. She knew that Missus, as she called Lil Altemus, was having money troubles. She was a daily listener to Lil’s diatribes against her nephew, Laurance Van Degan Jr., who had put her
on a strict budget to live, and her stepmother, Dodo Van Degan, who had inherited all the money that Lil had thought she was going to inherit.

A dark green chauffeured Mercedes limousine pulled up by Gert as she was walking slowly down Third Avenue, the plastic grocery bags from Grace’s Marketplace weighing her down. A darkened window slowly descended.

“Gert?” a woman’s voice called out. “It is Gert, isn’t it? I thought I recognized you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Gert replied, trying to recognize the woman who was speaking to her.

The woman removed her dark glasses. “You don’t remember me, Gert. I’m Ruby Renthal. Mrs. Elias Renthal. My husband and I used to go to Mrs. Altemus’s dinners from time to time several years ago.”

Exactly once
, thought Gert. She had the same opinion of the Renthals that Mrs. Altemus had. She answered, “Yes, ma’am, I remember. Wasn’t it in your house that Mrs. Altemus’s father, Ormond Van Degan, died on the pool table during a party?”

“Oh, I wish you hadn’t remembered that unhappy experience,” said Ruby.

“Mrs. Altemus still talks about it from time to time,” said Gert.

“You’re still with Mrs. Altemus, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I hear she moved to that building they call God’s Waiting Room on Sixty-sixth Street,” said Ruby.

“It’s a very nice apartment, ma’am,” said Gert. “The other was getting too big for her, especially after the hip replacement. She had a hard time going up those winding stairs.”

“Say, Gert. Here’s my card, with all the private numbers here in the city, in the country, and at the house in St. Bart’s. Actually, I’m staying at the Rhinelander Hotel until my new house
is finished. You shouldn’t be carrying all those heavy grocery bags at your age. In my house, the chauffeur would do that. I’d save you for the parties I’m planning when my husband is able to return to New York. Whatever you’re earning at Mrs. Altemus’s, I’d go half again higher for the first six months and half again higher six months later. That would be double.”

“I’m very happy where I am, Mrs. Renthal,” said Gert. “I’ve been with Mrs. Altemus for almost twenty-six years.”

“Lil is
such
a marvelous woman. I so admire your kind of loyalty,” said Ruby.

“Thank you, Mrs. Renthal.”

“In my new house on East Seventy-eighth Street, the cook’s room has its own sitting room, and, of course, you could use my husband’s plane when you go back to Ireland to visit your family. Elias always has business in London, and he could just drop you in Dublin on the way.”

“Oh, my god,” said Gert, as she remembered something she had forgotten to do.

“What’s the matter?” asked Ruby.

“Nothing really, ma’am. It’s just that I forgot to stop at Clyde’s pharmacy to pick up a special order for Missus from England. I have to go back uptown,” said Gert.

“You’ll do no such thing, Gert. You get right in this car. Jacques will drop me off at the hairdresser and then he’ll take you up to Clyde’s pharmacy for Lil’s order, wait for you, and drive you back to Sixty-sixth Street, won’t you, Jacques.”

A
T THE
Wednesday night Sodality of Mary bingo game at St. Ignatius Loyola church, Gert Hoolihan, Lil Altemus’s cook, sat next to her best friend, Rosemary Quinn, who was Kay Kay Somerset’s personal maid. Gert and Rosemary had known each other since they went to Our Lady of Sorrows girls’ school in
Roscommon, Ireland, when they were ten. They had come to the United States at the same time nearly thirty years earlier. Between them, they knew all the stories of all the people who came to the two houses where they were in service. Gert always took a cake or a pie or cookies she had baked to the Sodality meetings. She was considered by the ladies of the Sodality of Mary to be the luckiest bingo player of the group. She and Rosemary could play and talk at the same time.

“Do you remember a woman who used to be around New York named Ruby Renthal?” asked Gert as she put a chip on G5.

“The one whose husband went to prison?” replied Rosemary.

“Her.”

“What about her?”

Gert looked around before she answered to be sure Mae Toomey, on her other side, who worked for young Laurance Van Degan, Lil Altemus’s nephew, wasn’t listening. “She offered me a job for when Mr. Renthal gets out of prison,” she said in a low voice.

“I don’t believe it,” gasped Rosemary. “She was a pushy one, as I remember, or at least that was what Mrs. Somerset used to say about her.”

“I was walking back to the new apartment with the groceries from Grace’s Marketplace, and she pulls up in her chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousine and rolls down the window and speaks to me,” said Gert.