The wedding plan changed. Instead of “just family” at the federal court building, they decided on family and close friends in the roof garden with an appeals court judge presiding. Craig would stand up for his father, even though Robert Leavitt would sign as the legal witness. Jane planned to have Cassie as her maid of honor. She had no close relatives, so her guest list would be mainly her friends from the office. She couldn’t invite Art. It would be tacky to invite an ex-husband, even though Art was the closest thing she had to a child.
The reception, too, was to be kept modest—cocktails and heavy hors d’oeuvres in the roof garden. William’s guest list was limited to a few company executives and their significant others and no more than a dozen business associates. Jane decided on Roscoe Taylor, Jack Dollinger, Marie Lyons—the secretary she and Jack shared—and their spouses. She added a young friend from her health club, Diane Trotta, to demonstrate that she had friends her own age. She was embarrassed to realize how few close friends she actually had. Craig invited a classmate from school, and Cassie asked a boy she had met at an equestrian event. A trio of strings would provide the music.
Simple as it sounded, Jane ran into problems immediately. First was the date of the affair. William’s secretary, Ann Packard, proved to be domineering and defensive. “There is no available weekend for the foreseeable future,” she said curtly, as if that was the final word on the wedding. There was only one weekend in the next two months when Mr. Andrews could be in New York, and two of the executives he would certainly invite would be away then.
“He’ll have to cancel something,” Jane suggested, certain that Bill would regard their wedding as more important than one of his business meetings.
“Fine,” Ann answered, clearly indignant that her decision was being challenged. “Who would you suggest we disappoint? The prime minister of Canada or a prince of the royal family of Saudi Arabia?”
“Whichever one is a month from Saturday,” Jane said, trying to be every bit as imperious.
“Neither Mr. Applebaum nor Ms. Annuzio will be available,” the secretary snapped, playing her trump card.
“Oh, that’s too bad. Mr. Andrews will be terribly disappointed.”
It took a few seconds for Ann to come to grips with the reality of a regime change. She made a desperate move to maintain her exclusive right to budget William Andrews’s time. “I’ll have to discuss this with Mr. Leavitt.”
Eileen McCarty wasn’t very helpful. Her mind was a complete blank on the names of suitable caterers. “Mr. Andrews hasn’t had many parties since I’ve been here. The cook and I handled his small business dinners.”
Then Craig proved balky when she got him on the telephone. “A what?” he demanded when she suggested that a dark suit would be appropriate for his role before the judge. And then, “Are you trying to tell me what to wear?”
By the end of her first day of preparations, Jane felt thoroughly defeated. There was a school of pilot fish permanently attached to the great shark she was about to marry, and none of them took to the idea that the meal ticket might let himself be distracted. The secretary wasn’t about to give up control of William Andrews’s date book. Jane sensed that she would have to tear it out of her cold, dead hands. The housekeeper wasn’t up to the task. And the children bristled at any sign of discipline in their selfish little lives. Art had eventually given her a major role in planning her first wedding because there wasn’t much that he could handle by himself. It seemed that William might not have any role to give her, because he had already parceled out his needs to retainers.
“How’s it going?” Bill asked when he called her the next morning.
“Wonderful,” she said, unable to conceal her sarcasm. “Why don’t you and I run off to a justice of the peace and never come back.”
“I’d love it,” he said. But then he immediately added, “Seriously, is everything under control?”
“Depends on whether you want to offend a prime minister or a prince, whether you mind if I serve hot dogs, or if you care what your son wears to our wedding. Right now I think he’s planning on cargo pants and sneakers.”
She went through her list of problems and was pleased that he exuded sympathy. “I’ve been in such a rut that the people around me have turned into stone. They’re all terrified of change.” But he didn’t offer to solve her problems. “Just be patient,” he said. “They’ll come around and learn to love you as much as I do.”
She agreed but then added that someone had to set the wedding date. “You’d better plan on shutting down Andrews Global Network for a Saturday. Otherwise, you and your guests will all be out of town.”
He promised that he would set a date and that if it wasn’t the Saturday she had suggested, it would certainly be within the next month. She asked him if he had any ideas on caterers. He mentioned the address file he thought Kay had kept on the computer. Or failing that, there might be something in the phone book in his desk drawer.
Jane went to the office, sat at the computer, and began reviewing the list of files. Kay’s personal records, she soon discovered, were behind a firewall that required a password. There was no way she could get through. She would have to connect one of the young computerniks from her office to Kay’s directories and let an expert try his magic.
She went to William’s desk and found the drawers locked. The locks were fragile, a simple toggle turned by a key. She could probably open it with a nail file, but she didn’t want to risk telltale scratches. She went back to the computer desk and found a small key among the rubber bands and paper clips. The key opened the drawers of Bill’s desk.
She found an address book and looked under “C” for caterers. There were none. Maybe “P” for parties. Again there was no listing. Patiently, she went through the address book, trying every conceivable entry. Nothing suggested caterers.
She saw a checkbook, a large leather-bound volume with three checks to a page and a whole journal for recording the payments. Maybe there was a check to a caterer. She laid the book on the desk and opened the cover. A year’s worth of monthly checks had been torn from the pages. Each had the same entry in the journal: “$100,000 to Selina Royce.” The last check had been entered just a few weeks ago. The first journal entry was eight years earlier. William was paying someone a hundred thousand a month and had been doing so for the past eight years. Just who in hell was Selina Royce?
Jane’s imagination went wild. A blackmailer, she decided. Selina Royce knew William Andrews’s darkest secret, and she was charging him a hundred thousand a month to keep quiet—$1.2 million a year! It must be quite a secret. She thought about the timing. The first check had gone out just a few months after Kay Parker’s untimely death. So if it was blackmail, it stood to reason that it had something to do with the murder.
But why would Bill be paying off someone in connection with the murder? Unless he was involved in some way. It was unthinkable, but suppose he had killed his first wife, as some of the reporters at the time seemed to suspect. Could Selina Royce, whoever she was, have known? Was that why he was sending her monthly checks?
Jane went back to the address book and looked under “R.” And there was the entry, Selina Royce, 24 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris. Her husband-to-be was sending over a million dollars a year to a woman who lived in the fashionable center of Paris.
She slammed the books closed and stuffed them back into the desk. She sat silently, trying to take in the information she had just uncovered. Blackmail? If that’s what it was, then Bill was probably involved somehow in his wife’s death. But maybe it wasn’t blackmail. Andrews was a young, virile man living without the wife he adored. Certainly he would be interested in women, and just as certainly he could easily afford to keep a mistress. That could be the answer, and it was easier to imagine than her fiancé’s being a murderer.
But even then the information was unsettling. Probably Selina Royce was the reason for William’s frequent trips to Paris. She remembered that at their first meeting, when he had introduced himself to her and taken her on a tour of the city, he had broken away for the afternoon in order to attend to a business affair. Could that have been a liaison with his mistress?
Jane was suddenly frightened to the point that her hands were shaking. She had spent the day trying to make arrangements for her wedding to a man she was growing to love. A man who, at worst, may have killed his first wife and, at best, was keeping a mistress whom he had continued to finance even while he was proposing to her. A man who was resented, maybe even hated, by his children and who had created a safe space by surrounding himself with a staff of loyal sycophants. My God, what did she really know about William Andrews? She knew about his public life, which was undoubtedly the creation of his PR department. She was well aware of his financial assets. She had met his children, who were spoiled, and a few of his employees and underlings, who clearly resented her intrusion.
There were a few other things she knew. When called out of his world of endless competition, he could be soft, sympathetic, and caring. He was a considerate and romantic lover. In some way that she didn’t fully understand, he seemed to need her. But who or what was he? What secrets would unravel as they spent more time together? What role would she play in his life?
She would go on with the wedding arrangements. She had agreed to marry the man, and he seemed aware of the problems she faced in competing with the memory of Kay Parker. But she would leave no stone unturned to find the answers to the questions he posed. In particular, she would find out exactly who Selina Royce was and what hold she had on Bill that made her worth more than a million a year.
Jane got back to business. She started with the caterers listed in the phone book, looking for the ones with high-rent addresses. Then she introduced herself to each one by saying, “I’m calling for William Andrews, the late Kay Parker’s husband.” Some of the caterers didn’t make the connection. But there were two who nearly jumped through the phone at the mention of Kay’s name. A bit of grilling showed which of the two had handled most of Kay’s parties and remembered the details. That was the one she invited for an interview.
She also browsed the shops of interior decorators, looking for hints of masculine taste and democratic restraint. She found one she liked, and the man who owned the business seemed to understand her problem in dealing with Kay’s carefully preserved bedroom. “Best to bite the bullet,” he said. “Half measures never please anyone.” Jane invited him up to see the apartment. Then she caught a train out of Grand Central and headed back to Southport to see what Roscoe knew about a woman named Selina Royce.
He shook his head at the mention of the name. “No one I can remember,” he said. “But I’ll ask. There are still a few of us around who reported on the fantasy life of Kay Parker.” He scribbled a reminder on his desk pad and then asked without looking up, “Is everything going well? Are you okay?”
Jane settled into a chair. “I’m an outsider,” she announced. “I’m going where I’m not wanted.”
“The groom’s ardor is cooling?”
“That might be impossible. The groom is already frozen.”
Roscoe folded his hands behind his head and tipped back his chair. “Maybe you’re moving too quickly? You might take a little more time to get to know each other.”
“Roscoe, he’s surrounded by gatekeepers who won’t let anyone get through. They portion out his time in thirty-second increments. They cover up his past as if he had an earlier career as the Boston Strangler. Bill lets them get away with it. He tells me to be patient, that they’ll come around.”
Jane stood and eased the office door closed. Then she took her boss through her research into Kay Parker’s death—the doubts about the existence of an intruder, the time delay in summoning the police, the previous night’s business meeting at the inn that seemed never to have taken place. “The investigation was a travesty,” she concluded.
“Powerful people don’t like ordinary folks looking into their affairs,” Roscoe said, not at all surprised that Jane’s investigation had confirmed his own suspicions.
Jane moved to the edge of his desk, nearly in his lap, when she whispered her findings about Selina Royce. “William Andrews has been sending a hundred thousand a month to a woman named Selina Royce in Paris.”
That news widened Roscoe Taylor’s eyes. Everything Jane had been telling him was old news. Her sense of alarm could easily be written off as paranoia coupled with prewedding jitters. But a hundred thousand a month from his private account smelled of blackmail. And the existence of blackmail indicated a secret that William Andrews didn’t want revealed, no matter what the cost. “How hard do you want me to press on this stuff?” he asked. “Not knowing might be a lot easier for you to live with than what we might dig up.”
Jane paused. “I guess I really want to know,” she concluded.
“You want to know enough so that I should try to find the lady in Paris and put a stringer on finding this Royce woman’s family? Because Andrews Global Network could easily find out that I’m snooping.”
Jane thought for a moment and then decided. “If you can do the fieldwork, I’ll stick with the newspaper morgues.”