“Mr. McGrath. Welcome.”
The woman who greeted us at the door of apartment 17D was in her fifties, dressed in a dust-gray suit. She had the dimmed-bulb face of someone who’d lived a life in servitude. Her eyes moved inquiringly to Nora.
“This is my assistant. I hope it’s all right if she joins us.”
“Certainly.”
Smiling, the woman ushered us into the foyer, where an old codger wearing a rumpled burgundy jacket appeared—seemingly from the walls—to take our coats. Wordlessly he drifted with them back down another dim hall.
“Right this way.”
She led us in the other direction down a dark gallery. The wine-colored walls were plastered with paintings, the way scaffolding downtown was covered with ads for concerts: only these happened to be Matisses and Schieles, Clementes, the odd Magritte, each painting sporting its own bronze lamp like a miner’s helmet. Between these masterpieces were dark open doorways, and I slowed to glance inside. Every room looked like a grotto, dank and stalactited with brocade curtains and Louis XIV chairs, vases and Tiffany lamps, busts in marble, ebony sculpture, books. We passed a formal dining room, the walls celery green, a crystal chandelier like a frozen jellyfish floating midair.
The woman led us briskly into a large sitting room. The windows framed a northwestern view, turning the city into a serene concrete still life with gray sky. A helicopter hovered over the Hudson like an errant fly.
The woman gestured for us to sit on the yellow chintz couch in front of a coffee table covered in miniatures: porcelain schnauzers, sheepherders, finger bowls. Fresh yellow and red tulips exploded out of a Chinese vase. They matched the yellow walls and the red jackets of the riders in the giant foxhunt oil painting looming behind us.
Nora sat down stiffly beside me, folding her hands in her lap. She looked nervous.
“May I offer you some tea while you wait? Mrs. du Pont is finishing up a telephone call.”
“Tea would be nice,” I said. “Thank you.”
The woman slipped out of the room.
“This is what you call jumbo rich,” I whispered to Nora. “These people are their own strange breed. Don’t try to understand them.”
“Did you see the shining armor on the way in? Real shining armor just standing there, waiting for a knight.”
“The two percent of the world’s richest people have over half of the world’s wealth. I think it’s all in this apartment.”
Nora, biting her lip, pointed at the small end table on my right, where there was a black-and-white photograph in an antique silver frame. It was Olivia standing with her husband, Knightly, probably some twenty years ago. They had their arms around each other, posing beside an antique Bentley in front of a colossal country manor. They looked happy, but, of course, that didn’t say much. Everyone smiles for a photograph.
Abruptly, Nora sat up.
A woman was entering the room. I stood up immediately, Nora following my lead, fidgeting to straighten her skirt.
It was Olivia.
She didn’t walk so much as float, three Pekingese dogs shuffling alongside her feet. The room had obviously been designed with her in mind, or vice versa. Her chin-length brown hair, streaked with silver—worn in a rich candy swirl around her face—matched the Persian rug, the carved lion-paw legs of the table, even the silver cigarette case with the elegant initials engraved on the lid—OPE—the fine lettering like tangled strands of hair clogging a shower drain.
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected—some grande dame blistering with jewelry—but she was surprisingly light and airy, devoid of ornamentation. She wore a simple gray-and-black dress, plump pearls roped twice around her neck. Her oval face was attractive and soft, neatly made up, long splinters of eyebrows framing her bright brown eyes, an elegant neck like a stalk on a flower just starting to wilt. How many times had Marlowe Hughes dreamed of wringing that thing?
As Olivia moved toward us, smiling, I realized her right arm hung limply in a sling fashioned out of a black-and-red floral scarf. The hand hung there like a broken wing, but she seemed resolved to pull off this handicap gamely. The fingernails on that withered hand were perfectly painted tomato red.
On the ring finger of her functioning hand, which she now extended to us, was a pale blue diamond, at least twelve karats. It stared out, unblinking, like a mesmerized eye.
“Olivia du Pont. I’m so pleased you could come, Mr. McGrath.”
“My pleasure.”
After shaking her hand, we all sat down, including her three Pekingese, which resembled fat girls stuffed into fur suits. Olivia settled into the white couch opposite, extending an arm over the white throw draped across the back, and the dogs piled around her as if to form some sort of fluffy stronghold, then stared at us expectantly as if we were meant to entertain.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. It’s quite mad around here with the move.”
“You’re leaving the city?” I asked.
“Just for the season. We spend the winter in Switzerland. The whole family comes out. My grandchildren love to ski and hike, though Mike and I tend to just laze around. We really sit down in front of the fire and don’t budge for four months.”
She laughed, a crisp, elegant sound, bringing to mind a spoon tapping a crystal glass before some dignitary made a toast.
Boy, had the apple fallen far from the tree. It was astounding how a woman, when she struck marital gold, procured not just a new wardrobe and new friends but a new voice straight out of a 1930s gramophone (brittle, mono-stereo) and a vocabulary that reliably included laze, season, and terribly sorry. I had to actively remind myself Olivia was an army brat who’d grown up so impoverished, her mother had a third job cleaning the bathrooms of the very public high school she attended. Now Olivia probably had six estates and a yacht as big as a city block.
“My grandson, Charlie, is a huge fan of yours, Mr. McGrath.”
“Scott. Please.”
“Charlie’s in eighth grade at Trinity. He read your first book, MasterCard Nation, over the summer. He was quite impressed. Now, he’s reading Cocaine Carnivals and wants to be an investigative reporter.”
I assumed she was about to ask if I would please read some marvelous story he’d posted on his blog or else she wanted me to give him a job, thus coming to the reason behind this invitation.
“I never doubted you, you know,” Olivia said, arching an eyebrow. “That hoopla a few years back about you and Cordova, your fictitious chauffeur, the outrageous assertions you made on television. I knew exactly what was going on.”
“Did you? Because it was a mystery to me.”
“You’d done something to provoke him.” She smiled at my look of surprise. “Surely you’ve noticed that the space around Cordova distorts. The closer you get to him, the speed of light slackens, information gets scrambled, rational minds grow illogical, hysterical. It’s warped space-time, like the mass of a giant sun bending the area surrounding it. You reach out to seize something so close to find it was never actually there. I’ve witnessed it firsthand myself.”
She fell silent, pensive, just as her three uniformed maids entered with the tea. They set about arranging it before us on the coffee table, fine china, a five-tiered silver tower laden with cakes, petits fours, mini-cupcakes, and triangular sandwiches. Olivia slipped off her velvet heels—from Stubbs & Wootton, I noticed, the billionaire’s Nike—curling her black stocking feet underneath her. As the maids poured the tea, I noticed Nora was blinking in shock at the elaborate setup.
“Thank you, Charlotte.”
Charlotte and the other girls nodded demurely and darted away, their shoes silent on the carpet.
“You must be wondering why on earth you’re here,” said Olivia, sipping her tea. “You’ve resumed work on your investigation of Cordova, have you not?”
Her eyes met mine as she set down the teacup. They were bright as a schoolgirl’s.
“How did you hear that?”
“Allan Cunningham.”
“The director of Briarwood Hospital? I’ve done some charity work for them. He told me he caught you digging rather shamelessly around the grounds last week. Posing as a potential guest.”
Of course—Cunningham had hauled me into the Security Center and threatened to have me arrested.
“How is the investigation going?” she asked.
“It hasn’t been easy getting people to talk.”
Returning the teacup to the saucer, she sat back, staring at me.
“I’ll talk,” she announced.
I couldn’t help but smile, amused by her directness. “About?”
“What I know. It’s quite a lot, believe me.”
“Because of your sister?”
Her smile faltered. That was unexpected; I’d have assumed she’d gotten over Marlowe long ago, had put her away in some safe-deposit box of childhood and locked it, tossing the key. But the mention of her sister visibly irked her.
“I haven’t spoken to Marlowe in forty-seven years. I don’t know what she thought of Stanislas or what her experiences were. I had my own encounters. And I’ve never wanted to speak about them. Until now.”
“Why the change of heart?”
“Ashley.”
She said it matter-of-factly. Nora was leaning forward, nervously eyeing the petits fours, as if worried they’d scurry away if she went for one.
“Police think it was suicide,” I said.
Olivia nodded. “Perhaps. But there’s more to it.”
“How do you know?”
“I met her once.” She paused to sip her tea, and when she set the teacup down, she looked at me, her eyes piercing. “Do you believe in the supernatural world, Mr. McGrath? Ghosts and the paranormal, unexplained forces we can’t see yet nonetheless affect us?”
“No, not really. But I do believe in the human mind’s ability to make something like that seem very real.”
“Stanislas and his third wife, Astrid, have an estate in the Adirondacks near Lows Lake.”
“Yes, I know. The Peak.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You’ve been?”
“I tried stopping by to pay my respects five years ago. Never got past the security gate.”
Olivia smiled knowingly, sitting back against the couch. “I went there the first week of June in 1977. I was a struggling actress. Twenty-nine years old. Cordova was preparing his next film, Thumbscrew. His assistant, Inez Gallo, wrote to my agent and said Cordova had seen me in Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre and was very impressed by my work.” She smiled with visible embarrassment.
“I had a rather pitiful walk-on role, my back to the camera the entire time. So it seemed a cruel joke. But the assistant insisted he loved my look and was considering me for a very unusual part, which he’d written specifically with me in mind. He invited me to stay for the weekend at The Peak so we might discuss the role. I lived in the East Village then. I borrowed money from a girlfriend to rent a Packard station wagon, and I drove all the way up there, all by myself. I hadn’t booked a job in over a year. I was desperate. As I drove I made a pact with myself that I’d do anything—absolutely anything—for the role.”
She paused for a moment, her hand idly stroking one of the dogs.
“The drive in was quite beautiful. When you’re past the woods and the security gate, it becomes a leisurely drive through oak trees and undulating hills. There wasn’t a soul around. It was bright, hot. The sun was out, and yet I remember feeling so nervous, it soon slipped into terror, as if I were entering a graveyard in the dead of night. Every now and then I could hear a flock of birds, crows, screeching overhead. But when I slowed the car and looked up, there was nothing in the sky or the trees. Nothing.”
She sipped her tea.
“When I arrived at the house, a dark, colossal mansion straight out of—I don’t know—a Poe short story, I parked by the other cars. There were quite a few, as if other actresses had been summoned as well. Yet I found myself unable to get out of my car. It was a terrible feeling. But I wanted that part. I needed it. To be in a Cordova picture was really the ultimate, you see. I’d heard it could not just make your career, but your life.”
She paused to smile ironically at this last comment.
“I climbed out and knocked on the front entrance and immediately found myself greeted by a stunning Italian woman who acted oddly withdrawn. Without saying a thing to me, she beckoned me to lunch, already under way outside on a loggia draped with wisteria. There was a large group eating there—no one I recognized. Cordova’s groupies, I imagined. But there was no sign of the man himself. Not that I had a clear picture of what he looked like. I asked someone where he was and was duly informed he was working. They pulled up a chair for me to sit at the table. They were all talking about this object someone had just purchased at a private auction. They were passing this object around. Eventually it came to me. And for some reason when I had it everyone went very silent, and they asked me what I thought it was. It was odd. It looked like a sort of dagger. The bronze handle was intricately carved, the blade narrow, about five inches long, with a strange loop in the middle of it. A young blond man in clerical garb sitting at the very end of the table—he was beautiful, like an Adonis—suggested that I should stick it in my wrist to see what happened, and they all erupted in loud laughter. The only person who didn’t laugh was the gorgeous Italian woman who’d answered the door. I came to understand that she was Cordova’s wife, Genevra. She only stared back at me with a haunted look, like a prisoner too terrified to speak. I felt so emotional and upset, for a moment I thought I’d burst into tears, but then someone snatched it from me and the lunch was finished. Later, I looked it up and discovered what it was.”
“What was it?” I asked when she didn’t immediately go on.
She looked at me, her face somber. “A pricking needle. They were used in European witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They’re made of precious metals, artfully engraved. The ‘pricker’ would use it to stab the accused woman, usually stripped naked, all over her body. When he at last found a spot that didn’t bleed or cause pain, he’d found the witch’s mark. If he found such a place, it was of course because she could no longer scream. She’d been stabbed by this needle some three hundred times and was unconscious, slowly bleeding to death. These things, archaic instruments of torture, have a vibrant market today for certain willing collectors.”
Nora was so captivated she’d forgotten to chew the rather large piece of cake in her mouth. A crumb fell from her lips, which she hastily collected from the hem of her sweater. She swallowed with a loud gulp.
“But I soon put the bizarre lunch out of my head, because someone—a masculine-looking hausfrau with a sweaty face and gleaming black eyes—announced that Cordova was ready to meet with me. I was escorted through various corridors, into a large room filled with filing cabinets and a long dining-room table. A man sat at the very end. He was like a king on a throne, stacks of papers and photographs of locations, costumes, scene notes, piled all around him. He was fat, but not grotesque in the way Orson Welles became, or Hitchcock, or even Brando. His massiveness was somehow distinguished. He had a round face with thick black hair, and he wore glasses, the lenses round and black as ink. He was handsome. At least I think he was. He had one of those faces that captivated you. And yet you couldn’t remember it a minute later, as if your brain just couldn’t memorize the features, the way it can’t memorize an infinite number. Possibly this was due to the glasses, the lack of eyes. For a moment I thought he was blind, but he wasn’t, because he stared at me without saying a word and then informed me I had parsley on my lip. I did, much to my chagrin. And then he asked if I wanted to be in his picture. Obviously I eagerly said yes, oh, yes. I’d been a huge fan since Figures. He smiled. Then he began to ask me a series of pointed questions, all of which became increasingly personal and unsettling. He asked if I had family, a boyfriend, if I was sexually active, how regularly did I go to the doctor, who was my next of kin. Was I healthy? Was I easily spooked? That was quite a preoccupation. He wanted to know what I was afraid of: heights, spiders, drowning, the sea. How much physical pain had I ever endured? What was my worst nightmare? I began to suspect the underlying purpose of the questions wasn’t so much to know me or see if I was right for the part but to learn how isolated a person I was, who would notice if I ever vanished or changed in some way. I kept asking what the part was. I very much wanted to see the script. He greeted such requests with only silence and a knowing smile. Finally another person came in—a woman—and escorted me out. It felt like I’d been grilled for over an hour. It was only fifteen minutes.”
Olivia took a deep breath and poured us more tea with her functioning hand. When she grabbed the tongs for a sugar cube and dropped it into her cup, I noticed with surprise her fingers were trembling. She was nervous.
“It became clear,” she went on, “that there would be further discussion of Thumbscrew after supper. I agreed. A maid brought me to my room. It was an enormous house, and my room was a suite, a wall of windows with gauzy curtains like long bridal veils and a view of a lake far down the hill. I’d never seen such a beautiful room. I lay down on the bed, intending to shut my eyes for just a moment, but fell into a deep sleep. I must have been more exhausted from the drive than I realized. Three hours later, I woke up very suddenly in the dark, gasping for air, my throat hurting as if someone had been strangling me. My wrists and arms felt as if they’d somehow been pinned down. They ached. But there was no one, no sign of any restraints. And then I saw with horror my suitcase was empty. All of my clothes had been neatly hung up in the closet. Even my underwear had been folded into meticulous piles in the dresser drawer. A dress of mine that I was seemingly meant to wear down for dinner was laid out for me, including earrings and a silver comb for my hair. The windows were open, too, the curtains blowing every which way. They’d been closed when I fell asleep. Every hair on my arms was standing up, as if I were about to be struck by lightning. I had only one thought. I had to escape. Dinner was starting at eight o’clock, and there were more guests arriving. I didn’t care. I threw my clothes into the suitcase and hurried out, managing to find a back staircase, running outside into the night. My car was exactly where I’d left it, and I drove out without turning on my headlights. At first I was sure someone was following me. There were headlights a few turns in the road behind me. But they were gone by the time I reached the gate. It was closed. I got out, unlocked it myself, and frantically drove away. I didn’t stop for six hours. But that feeling—a weight, a suffocation, as if my entire body had been put in some sort of vise—it didn’t go away for four days. I came very close to checking myself into a hospital.”
Olivia paused to take two orange petits fours from the tea stand, feeding one to herself, the other to a Pekingese. When she looked back at us, she smiled ruefully.
“Of course, the more time that went by, when I thought back to that incident I felt humiliated. Time leeches most horror and pain from our memories. All that so-called terror I’d felt, I reasoned it’d been my youth, an overwrought imagination. Distortion, his picture about the teenagers’ contagious insanity—it had made a deep impression on me. I’d gotten mixed up. I’d confused the art with the life. I wrote Cordova three notes of apology shortly after the episode and heard nothing back from him except a very churlish response.”
“What was it?”
“Something to the effect of, if I was the last person on Earth, he’d never cast me in one of his pictures. I suppose that invitation to The Peak was my audition and I’d blown it.”
I couldn’t help but smile. What she said corroborated seamlessly with Beckman’s letter from Cordova to Endicott, the one he passed around to his students.
She shrugged dismissively. “It was fine by me. Two years later, I was a married woman. I had a family, real love, a real life. I’d long given up my actress dreams, dreams of fame, which I understood was nothing more than consigning oneself to a cheap carnival where one lives forever in a cage, applauded and ridiculed by equal measure. Then, in 1999, I received an invitation quite out of the blue. It was from Cordova. He was inviting me to a private dinner at his home, this time in the city. This was a few years after his final film, To Breathe with Kings, long after he’d buried himself underground, when he was more secretive and chilling a figure than ever before. I was hesitant to accept, but then again, it was Cordova. I was still a fan. I’d gone to considerable lengths to obtain copies of his contraband work. To me he was more of a magician, a hypnotist in the vein of Rasputin. Not a filmmaker. All these years later, I still felt unrequited about him. It gnawed at me, ever so slightly, this question about him I needed answered. The location of the dinner was almost next door, just across Park Avenue on Seventy-first Street. If I felt uncomfortable I could leave at any time and simply walk home.”
I glanced at Nora, and she nodded imperceptibly, making the same connection I was. The townhouse Hopper had broken into last night was on East Seventy-first; Olivia had to be referring to that very house. I also recognized the sentiments she described, the unrequited feeling about Cordova, the need for a resolution, for an end, how it nibbled at you over the years; I had it myself.
“By then, I was fifty years old, no longer the skittish ingenue. I’d been married for twenty years, had raised three boys. It would take a hell of a lot more to terrify me.”
She leaned forward, taking another cake. The three Pekingese’s eyes were glued to it. To their evident heartbreak, she placed it in her own mouth, chewing.
“It was a beautiful dinner, but oddly enough Cordova wasn’t even there. There was only his wife, Astrid, who explained her husband had gotten waylaid working in the country and wouldn’t be able to make it. I was thrown by this. I suspected something was wrong, as if it were a trap. And yet it was a wonderful mix of people, two of whom I knew from my old theater days. Whatever reservations I had about being there soon dissipated. A Russian opera star, a Danish scientist, a French actress known for her immense beauty—and yet the unmistakable center of attention was Cordova’s daughter, Ashley. She was cultivating a rather stellar piano career at the time. She was twelve, the most beautiful child I’d ever seen, eyes almost clear. She played for us. Shubert, a Bach concerto, a movement from Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and then she joined us for dinner. Oddly enough, she chose to sit right beside me. Immediately, I felt disconcerted. Her eyes, they were so beautiful and yet so …”
Olivia clasped her hands, frowning.
“What?” I prompted.
Her eyes met mine. “Old. They’d seen too much.”
She paused to take a deep breath, smiling ruefully.
“Dinner was fantastic. The conversation, fascinating. Ashley was charming. And yet when she fell silent she seemed absent, as if she’d slipped off somewhere else, into some other world. When dinner was over, Astrid suggested we play a Japanese game that she claimed the family often played after dinner, having learned it from a real Japanese samurai who apparently lived with the family. It was called The Game of One Hundred Candles. Later, I looked up the Japanese term. Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai is what it’s called. Have you heard of it?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“It’s an old Japanese parlor game. It dates back to the Edo period. The seventeenth, eighteenth centuries. One hundred candles are lit, and each candle is blown out after someone tells a short kaidan. Kaidan is Japanese for ghost story. This continues, the room gradually getting darker and darker, until the final candle is blown out. It’s at this moment that a supernatural entity is finally inside the room. It’s usually an onryo¯—a Japanese ghost who seeks vengeance.”
Olivia took a long breath, exhaling.
“We began to play, all of us fairly drunk on port and dessert wine, each of us grasping at our stories, but when Ashley told hers they were perfectly succinct tales. I assumed she’d memorized them—unless at twelve she could speak so eloquently, right off the top of her head. Her voice was leisurely and low, and at times it sounded like it was coming from somewhere else in the room. Every story she told was riveting, some disturbingly violent. One I remember described a master raping a poor servant girl and leaving her for dead on the side of the road. I was amazed at how easily her lips formed the words as if she were talking about something perfectly natural. At times I had a sense of being outside myself as she talked, somewhere else. And then—I don’t know how exactly it turned out that way—there was one candle left and Ashley was up to tell the final story. It was a tale of unrequited love, a Romeo and Juliet tale of illness and hope, a girl dying young, thereby setting her lover free. Everyone was mesmerized. She blew out the candle, and it was pitch-black in the room. Too dark. People were giggling. Someone told a dirty joke. Suddenly, there was a sucking noise and I felt a cold finger touching my forehead. I was certain Ashley had reached over and touched me. I shrieked, tried to stand, yet both of my legs had fallen asleep. To my utter humiliation, I tumbled out of my chair, right onto the floor. Astrid, apologizing, helped me to my feet and turned the lights on. Everyone was laughing. Ashley sat there, without looking at me, but smiling. That feeling I’d had all those years ago when I was at The Peak, that pressing, as if my insides were being taken hold of, it was there again. I waited a few moments, feeling ill, then made my excuses and left. I went home, fixed myself some tea, and went to bed. But hours later, when Mike woke up beside me, I was in a coma. I’d had a stroke. I regained consciousness in the hospital and realized I’d lost the use of my right arm.”
Olivia gazed down at her limp arm cradled in the scarf, almost as if it were separate from her, the gnarled albatross she was forced to carry.
“I’d had a brain aneurysm. Doctors said it was my stress over the incident that must have triggered it. I’m a practical woman, Mr. McGrath. I am not prone to drawing hysterical conclusions. What I do know is that they did something to her, to Ashley, to make her behave in such a way.”
“Who?”
“Her family. Cordova.”
“And what exactly do you think they did?”
She looked thoughtful. “Do you have children?”
“A daughter.”
“Then you know she was born innocent, yet soaks up everything around her like a sponge. Their way of life at The Peak, my own encounter there all those years ago, the questions he asked me. It was as if I were an experiment. They must have done that to Ashley. Except, unlike me, she couldn’t run away. At least not as a child.”
I glanced at Nora. She looked spellbound. What Olivia said fit in with my assumption, that at the time of her death Ashley had been on bad terms with her family, hiding under an assumed name, searching for someone known as the Spider. What I couldn’t understand was why she returned to the townhouse, unless it was to meet with Inez Gallo. Perhaps Gallo lived there.
“Have you heard of someone connected to Cordova with the nickname the Spider?” I asked, sitting forward.
“The Spider.” Olivia frowned. “No.”
“What about Inez Gallo? It wouldn’t be her nickname, would it?”
“Cordova’s assistant? Not to my knowledge. But I don’t know anything about her, except I believe she was the woman who escorted me in to see Cordova. And while he interviewed me, she sat on his right side, as if she were his henchman or bodyguard, or perhaps his subconscious.”
I nodded. This subservient, looming position certainly backed up what was written about Inez Gallo on the Blackboards.
“Why doesn’t anyone talk about Cordova?” I asked.
“They’re terrified. They ascribe a power to him, real or imagined, I don’t know. What I do know is that within that family’s history there are atrocious acts. I’m certain of it.”
“Why haven’t you looked into it? You’re obviously quite passionate about the matter. Surely you’d have a vast array of resources at your disposal.”
“I made a promise to my husband. He wanted me to put the business behind me, given what happened. If I ruffled feathers, trying to get to the bottom of it, would I lose the use of my other arm? And then my legs? Because a part of me actually believes, you see, that yes, there was something in that room summoned by that girl, and what I was brought there for, an act of revenge, had happened exactly as they’d planned. I’d been made to pay for some perceived offense I’d done against my sister.”
I couldn’t help but think of the killing curse. Technically, my life had grown more hazardous since we’d walked through it; I’d nearly drowned. It eats away at your mind without you even realizing it, Cleo had told us. It … isolates you, pits you against the world so you’re driven to the margins, the periphery of life. I could actually understand such a phenomenon happening to someone going after Cordova.
Olivia sighed. She looked tired, the intensity gone from her face, leaving it drained of color.
“I’m afraid I don’t have much more time,” she noted, glancing across the room at the doorway. I followed her gaze and realized I’d been listening so attentively I hadn’t noticed that the woman in the gray suit who’d greeted us—Olivia’s secretary, I assumed—had stuck her head into the doorway, silently alerting her mistress to her next pressing appointment.
“You mentioned Allan Cunningham,” I said. “Ashley was a patient at Briarwood prior to her death. I wanted to know the circumstances of her being admitted there, but Cunningham gave me a hard time. Any way you could help me out with him?”
Olivia smiled, bemused. “Allan assured me Ashley was never a patient there. But I’ll certainly ask again. We’ll be in Saint Moritz through March.” She sat forward, slipping her feet into her shoes. “The number you have reaches my secretary directly. Contact her if you need me for anything at all. She’ll be able to get me a message.”
“I appreciate that.”
She stood up from the couch—her three Pekingese plopping onto the carpet around her feet—and arranged the silk scarf around her immobile arm. As Nora and I rose, Olivia reached out and took my hand with a disarmingly warm smile, her brown eyes gleaming.
“It’s certainly been a pleasure, Mr. McGrath.”
We started for the door.
“But one last thing,” I said.
She stopped, turning. “Of course.”
“If I wanted to speak with your sister, where might I find her?”
She looked irritated. “She can’t help you,” she said. “She can’t even help herself.”
“She was married to Cordova.”
“And the whole time she was addicted to barbiturates. I doubt she remembers a thing about the marriage—except maybe fucking Cordova a few times.”
There it was—beneath the flawless elegance—the scrappy army brat.
“It would still be invaluable to talk to her about what she saw up there, what the man was like, how he lived. She was an insider.”
Olivia stared me down imperiously, not accustomed to being disagreed with. Or perhaps it was exasperation that again, even after all these years, her sister’s name still came up in her presence.
“Even if I gave you the address, she’d never see you. She doesn’t see anyone except her maid and her drug dealer.”
“How do you know that?”
She took a deep breath. “Her maid comes here every week to give me her bills and an update on her health. My sister doesn’t know she’s bankrupt, that I’ve been paying for her care and drugs for the last twenty years. And if you’re wondering why I haven’t sent her away to Betty Ford or Promises or Briarwood, I assure you I have. Eleven times. It’s no use. Some people don’t want to be sober. They don’t want reality. After life trips them, they choose to stay facedown in the mud.”
“All right,” I said. “But if what you told us is true—”
“It is,” she snapped.
“Marlowe might be able to give me even more. The most unreliable witness still has the truth inside them.”
Olivia surveyed me challengingly, then sighed.
“The Campanile. Beekman Place. Apartment 1102.” She turned, swiftly gliding to the door, her furry entourage panting to keep up. “Speak to the doorman, Harold,” she added over her shoulder. “I’ll phone him this afternoon. He’ll make the arrangements.”
“When you do see her, don’t mention me. For your own well-being.” I swore I caught a faint satisfied smile on her face as she said this.
“You have my word.”
She escorted us through the gallery to the entrance hall, the old codger already waiting with our coats. He looked so stiff I couldn’t help but imagine he’d been standing there for more than an hour.
“Thank you,” I said to Olivia, “for everything. It’s been invaluable.”
“Hopefully you can do something about it. Avenge that girl. She was special.”
Nora stepped inside the elevator, and though I entered behind her, I stuck out my hand to prevent the doors from closing.
“One more question, if you don’t mind, Mrs. du Pont.”
She turned, her head inclined at that artful angle between curiosity and superiority.
“How did you meet Mr. du Pont? I’ve always wondered.”
She stared me down. I thought she was going to icily pronounce it was none of my business. But to my surprise, after a moment, she smiled.
“Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. We got into the same elevator. We were both on our way to visit Marlowe on the eighth floor. The elevator got stuck. Something to do with a bad fuse. When it got unstuck an hour later, Mike no longer wished to go up to the eighth floor to visit Marlowe.”
She met my eyes with a look of triumph.
“He wanted to come down to the lobby with me.”
With a soft smile, Olivia turned coolly on her heel and vanished down the shadowy hall, her dogs at her feet.