On the bus, Rannie whipped out her cell, longing to tell Ellen about seeing the real, barely alive Charlotte Cummings, but her phone was out of juice.
Ellen, it turned out, had been trying to reach Rannie. At home, a message from Ellen was on the landline.
“Okay, Rannie, so I’m a nut job but I’ve got a week of vacation left and I’m booked on a flight to Martinique tomorrow at one. I’ll be back Sunday and by then the cops better have the right guy in custody. My assistant’s expecting the manuscript from you; just remember she knows nothing except it’s BIG and SUPER SECRET. So don’t you dare even mention Ret’s name or gab about the murder.” Then just before she clicked off, Ellen added, “Think of me on a beach with a strawberry daiquiri and some cute cabana boy oiling me up.”
Although Ellen was striving to keep her tone light, Rannie detected the undercurrent of anxiety in her voice, and when she tried Ellen’s number, it went immediately to a recorded message. “Ellen, it’s Rannie. I just came from Charlotte Cummings’s mansion! I saw her! What a creep show! I have a feeling you’re home, so please pick up.”
But Ellen didn’t, perhaps worrying that either Rannie might scoff at Ellen’s nervousness (which she might) or else try to dissuade her from leaving (which Rannie definitely wouldn’t). A week in Martinique? Who could argue with that?
Paid vacation. Now there was a concept that rated among the high watermarks of modern civilization. Rannie ambled into the living room, tossing her jacket on the sofa and surveying the premises with a hypercritical eye. When exactly had shabby chic crossed the border to just plain shabby? In the brief time since she’d set out for Charlotte Cummings’s palatial digs, her apartment seemed to have acquired an extra layer of dust, new patches of damp plaster had bloomed on the ceiling, and a mammoth water bug had gone belly up by the coffee table.
Rannie plopped down on the couch, a hand-me-down from Mary, and ignored the fact that the chenille throw over the back was as worn as the rose toile upholstery underneath. A low-level funk descended: it wasn’t a question of not appreciating how fortunate she was compared to practically every other out-of-work single mother on the planet: child support from her ex came like clockwork worthy of the Swiss; Mary generously footed the tuition bills; and—touchingly—several checks had arrived recently with a note, penned in her mother’s graceful script, that the “enclosed is a little mad money.” But, dammit, what she wanted was a job, the beauty of a bimonthly check, direct deposit, 401(k) deductions, to tend to spindly office plants and have an in-box stacked with manuscripts, all labeled RUSH. Even rush hour—she’d almost come to miss that too. It meant you had somewhere to rush to; you had a place in the wider world.
Then, cutting short her “woe is I” lament, Rannie forced herself off the couch and headed for the kitchen, the departed water bug shrouded in a Kleenex, bound for the trashcan. It was time to start dinner.
While she was excavating in the pantry cabinets for olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and other stuff, Rannie’s thoughts turned again to Bibi, who one day soon would be phenomenally, absurdly, filthily rich. What would it be like to become chatelaine of a mansion on Fifth and never have to worry about upkeep? It wasn’t a question of jealousy; jealousy, Rannie decided, was for the attainable—a job like Ellen’s, a week of vacation in the sun. The kind of wealth the Cummingses owned was simply beyond fathom.
Suddenly a picture of Brooke Astor’s oh-so-proper-looking son, heir and executor, popped to mind. At eighty-four, Anthony Marshall had been convicted of bilking his mother out of millions before her death. Was it possible that Ret had caught Bibi’s hand in the Cummings cookie jar, dipping into money that wasn’t rightfully hers yet? Rannie had spent all of an hour with Bibi. She hadn’t appeared to be tapping a foot impatiently waiting for Grammy to finally flatline, but you never knew.
Of course, Rannie was assuming that Bibi was sole or chief beneficiary to the estate. And as Rannie’s seventh-grade English teacher loved to remind students, “The word ‘assume’ makes an ‘ass’ of ‘u’ and ‘me.’ ” There might be siblings, half siblings, cousins, or fond old retainers also waiting in line for their slice of the Cummings pie.
Rannie persevered in the kitchen. Then as soon as the chicken breasts, awash in Peter Luger steak sauce the way Nate liked, were braising, the sweet potatoes were baking, and the salad was ready for dressing, Rannie sat down and unlocked the aluminum briefcase, determined to learn a little more about Barbara, aka Bibi, Gaines.
Since the only disk for the book was in the hands of the police, Rannie had to resort to the more laborious route of leafing through the manuscript page by page, her eye on the lookout for “Barbara,” “Bibi,” “grandchildren,” “inheritance,” “will,” “heirs,” “executor,” and so on.
All copy editors developed sharp, un-electronic “word search” skills, and in a few minutes Rannie had gleaned the following information: Barbara Beauchamp Gaines, now forty-eight, was the daughter of Charlotte’s only child, Madeline—the Madeline who had been Daisy’s good friend—and her husband, Frank Beauchamp, a charmer from a poor but old-line Lexington, Kentucky, clan. After divorcing Frank, Madeline traipsed down the aisle two more times but never had more children, making Bibi her grandmother’s only direct descendant.
One little wrinkle: upon her grandmother’s death, it did not appear that Bibi would take up residence in the Fifth Avenue mansion. Ret devoted several paragraphs to the house’s history. Built by Charlotte’s steel-rich dad, the house was left to Charlotte upon her mother’s death. Unfortunately, Charlotte’s first husband frittered away most of her money as well as his on ill-fated, dawn of the Depression land deals, and Charlotte was forced to sell the family manse. For many years, it operated as a posh hospice facility. Charlotte did not return to the Fifth Avenue address until after her marriage to Silas Cummings.
According to the spiel given by the walking-tour guide, Silas had bought back the mansion as an anniversary present for Charlotte. Ret said otherwise. And Rannie trusted Ret, who had a reputation for getting her facts straight. The manuscript said that Silas had only leased the mansion; the medical center that had run the hospice would reclaim it upon Charlotte’s death. In would come hospital beds and medical equipment and out would go the countless antiques and costly furnishings that Charlotte and Silas Cummings had snapped up over the years from cash-strapped castles and châteaus. All the costly furnishings were destined for the Met and other museums around the country.
So Bibi Gaines was losing out on a hefty chunk of prime Manhattan real estate. Rannie couldn’t even begin to guess at its worth. One hundred million? Two? More? Nonetheless, on balance Rannie didn’t feel too sorry for Bibi. There was still Charlotte’s fabled jewelry collection, including the knockout canary diamonds Rannie had glimpsed at the comatose invalid’s throat. No doubt the bling would be Bibi’s.
The tidbit of real estate trivia seemed like a good reason to call Tim and boast where she’d been.
“Guess who just spent an hour at Charlotte Cummings’s house,” she gloated in a purposefully annoying singsong. “And our guide on the walking tour—little Miss Columbia know-it-all grad student—didn’t have all her facts straight. Silas didn’t buy back the family digs for his beloved wife. The place is a rental!”
“Well, la di da . . . How’d you worm your way in there?” He sounded amused.
“No worming! No worming at all.” She told him about Daisy and Mary.
“So escorting tipsy old ladies around, that counts as a mitzvah?” Tim’s wife had been Jewish: he mock-prided himself on his knowledge of Yiddish, limited though it was and pronounced with an accent that owed far more to Irish Boston than to Eastern Europe. “The Cummings mansion.” He whistled softly. “I forget you hang with a swanky crowd.”
Tim had yet to meet Mary. There was no reason for him to, not yet. Maybe not ever. And more to the point, Rannie knew Mary’s drinking would trouble Tim. That, in turn, would bring out his stern, tight-lipped side. End result: neither one would like the other.
“Listen, I was about to call you,” he said. “You have any interest in hearing me qualify tonight? I’m speaking at an AA meeting at eight o’clock. It’s over on the East Side.”
Traipse back across town again? No, truthfully she really didn’t want to. Tonight she wanted to bill hours on the manuscript. Nevertheless, Rannie’s response was an automatic yes. He’d told her what made him stop drinking fifteen years ago. Tim had been behind the wheel—“shit-faced,” he admitted—in the crash that killed his pregnant wife. Their son, Chris, was only three at the time. The first cops on the scene were buddies of Tim’s who covered for him so he could avoid conviction and raise Chris. Quid pro quo—he resigned from the force and entered rehab. But what had come before the fatal accident, he never discussed beyond alluding to his former self as “one sick angry fuck.” Asking Rannie to hear the story of his drinking was a significant offer, one she couldn’t turn down, although Rannie suspected there might be things that she’d just as soon not know.
“I’ll pick you up at seven thirty,” he said.
A minute later the arrival of Nate and Olivia brought the conversation to a close.
“You honestly like Hostess CupCakes?” Rannie heard Olivia saying to Nate.
“I didn’t say ‘like,’ O. What I said was, ‘There has never been a more delicious food experience than the Hostess CupCake.’ The second I heard the company went bust, I, like, went into every deli and supermarket on the West Side and bought them all up.”
“That’s crazy. For me it was always about Ring Dings. The creamy part . . . Mmmm.”
“But no chocolate icing with the squiggles. That’s key to the Hostess CupCake. You can peel it off whole and eat it separately.”
Was this what passed for lively debate between Chapel School seniors—almost seventy percent of whom would wind up at top-tier colleges?
Rannie, holding plates and cutlery, greeted them.
“Hey, Ms. Bookman,” Olivia said, followed by Nate lugging a ridiculously large Louis Vuitton suitcase for a one-night stay.
Exactly which room would their overnight guest stay in? Rannie quickly made an executive parental decision. “Just put the bag in the den.” Her rationale: let Olivia and Nate sneak around after she was asleep. “We’re going to eat in two minutes.”
It was lovely having a girl at the dinner table. Such a change from Nate, who, even under duress, would part with no more than grunts or monosyllabic answers to all Rannie’s conversational gambits.
Olivia was chatty without being a nonstop talker. She was hoping to enroll at FIT—the Fashion Institute of Technology—which was near the Garment District. “My great-grandfather came over from Odessa and was a tailor on the Lower East Side,” she informed Rannie. “I guess it’s in my genes. Our housekeeper taught me to sew when I was six.”
Rannie nodded, smiling back around a forkful of chicken while noting to herself that in three generations, Olivia’s family had come a long way from Delancey Street. Her father was a hedge-fund something and her mother, she of the brittle, overly wide smile, worked at Sotheby’s.
By dessert, the conversation worked its way around to the coincidence of meeting up at the Cummings mansion. “How funny that you know Mrs. Gaines,” Olivia said.
“Actually I never met her before this evening.”
“Oh. She’s one of my mom’s friends. When Grant was in bad shape, she helped get him in the place where he’s living now.”
Rannie was aware that “the place” referred to was a rehab facility in New Haven. Olivia’s older brother had been expelled from Chaps his senior year for dealing cocaine on school grounds.
Olivia was sitting beside Nate, the two of them directly across the table from Rannie; every once in a while Rannie stole a look at Nate stealing a look at Olivia. It was as if a thought balloon floated over his head. “You are a goddess,” it said.
It made Rannie simultaneously happy—what was more pure and intense than love at seventeen?—and scared—what was more painful than getting your heart ripped to shreds at seventeen?
It wasn’t fair. Nobody ever told you that being a parent meant living through the aches and disappointments of growing up all over again. And guess what? You didn’t acquire any perspective just because you were twenty years older and this time the hurt wasn’t actually happening to you; completely the opposite in fact: watching your child suffer was twice as painful. Rannie remembered times when a supposed best friend suddenly ganged up against Alice or Nate wasn’t invited to a birthday party that all his friends were going to. Rannie’s reaction: pure and simple, tear the offending child limb from limb. Anything less extreme meant you weren’t a devoted mother.
After dinner, while Nate and Olivia cleared and did dishes, Rannie managed to squeeze in more pages of copyediting, ones on Silas Cummings’s art collection. Ret’s manuscript corroborated what Bibi Gaines had told Rannie earlier: the Metropolitan Museum of Art would place all the paintings of saints on permanent exhibition in order to win the prize—“The Master of the Agony alterpiece.” Rannie cringed at the misspelling and made the correction just as the intercom buzzed.
Her recovering alcoholic was waiting.
I was thirteen years old the first time I got drunk. I came to lying on the sidewalk with vomit all over me, my wallet gone, and a black eye, and I thought, ‘Wow! When can I do this again?’ ”
The audience at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue and Ninetieth Street, laughed, several men nodding in recognition. Rannie was sitting alone toward the back of the room. Fifty or so people had assembled on gray folding chairs in the church’s basement. It was a mixed crowd—there were many prosperous-looking men and women. There were just as many who looked down on their luck and seemed especially grateful for the cookies and hot coffee. It had touched Rannie that the “greeter” at the door—a man in his seventies from among the well heeled—knew everyone by name. Alcoholism was evidently a great social equalizer.
Tim had been talking for five minutes. Posters on the wall behind him said, “Easy Does It,” “One Day at a Time,” and “Keep It Simple.” His “drunkologue” quickly filled in his stats—he was from an Irish Catholic family south of Boston outside Plymouth, Massachusetts, seven kids, all girls except for Tim, who by age six was sipping beer from his dad’s can of Schlitz.
“He thought it was funny to hear a little kid slurring.” His father, a plumber, was a disappointed, bitter man who limped from polio contracted in the very last outbreak before the Salk vaccine. “Polio, according to my dad, was the reason for everything wrong with his life. Bum leg, bum luck, that’s all I heard. The only way we ‘bonded’ ”—Tim put air quotes around the word—“was over booze. And I loved to drink. Loved the taste. Loved holding a glass or bottle. Loved waiting for the buzz to kick in.”
Lots of nodding from everybody in the audience. It was then that Rannie happened to notice a well-coiffed blond woman in black, sitting a couple of rows ahead, doing needlepoint. Even from the back, there was something familiar about her, the perfect ruler-straight posture.
“I don’t even remember losing my virginity,” Tim went on as he rubbed his cheek and smiled ruefully. “Totally missed out on that. The girl filled me in. At least I was smart enough to stay sober the second time.”
More laughs, then Tim cut to the chase—the car accident that killed his wife, cop friends who covered for him, his stint in rehab, and the postrehab move to New York, where “I started piecing together a life for me and my son, Chris, who was three.” He looked around the room for a moment. “This program saved my life, sitting in rooms like this, listening to people’s stories and not being too stubborn to ask for help.” A moment later, he ended with a shrug. “There’s no magic; for anyone new in the program, I’m staying sober the same way you are, one day at a time.”
Right after that, everyone joined hands and recited the Serenity Prayer. “God grant me the strength to change the things I can, to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
As she unclasped the hands of her neighbors, Rannie once again took notice of the blond woman who’d been needlepointing. Rannie watched her turn to gather up a tote bag and black wool jacket, then rise and walk toward the exit.
It was Bibi Gaines.
Seeing her here was surreal. Rannie blinked; it was almost as if a life-size image of Bibi had been cut out and manipulated into the wrong background with Photoshop. Bibi didn’t belong in this dingy gray basement. Then Rannie stopped to remember what she’d been thinking just minutes ago about the democratic spirit of AA. Everybody here belonged here.
Encountering Bibi would be awkward, so Rannie ducked down and pretended to be fishing around for something in her bag and didn’t budge until she figured Bibi was safely beyond the exit door.
The room emptied slowly. Rannie waited in her seat while several people thronged around Tim, men shaking his hand, women offering hugs.
Of all the uncanny coincidences. Charlotte Cummings’s granddaughter exuded an air of “I’m in charge” confidence, something that to Rannie often seemed the birthright of tall, blond women with silly nicknames. Yet obviously there were demons lurking, and somehow knowing this about Bibi made Rannie like her better; it humanized her. Rannie’s gaze turned to Tim again. She watched him wrap an arm around a teary-eyed young woman. AA was a big part of his life. For all she knew, Bibi was one of Tim’s AA friends.
Tim strode toward her and together they walked up the stairs and out a side door of the church. The brisk night air underscored how stuffy, smoky, and overheated it had been in the basement. Rannie took in a couple of deep head-clearing breaths.
“Charlotte Cummings’s granddaughter was at the meeting,” Rannie said as they walked to his car. “She took me around the mansion, acted like we were old chums from boarding school. Do you know her? Her name is Bibi.”
Predictably, Tim said, “If I do, I’m not saying. And remember, whatever you heard—or saw—in there stays in there. Understood?”
“I know that, Tim. You don’t have to lecture me.”
He put a hand on the back of her neck and they continued down the street.
“So now you know all my secrets,” Tim said. As he unlocked the car door for her, Rannie decided that no, she was pretty sure she did not.
Tim dropped her off with a quick kiss. There had been no offer to take her back to his apartment nor any request to come upstairs to hers. Now, lying alone in bed, she felt deprived . . . or to put it more bluntly, horny. Being around Tim primed her body for sex, sometimes without her mind even being consciously aware of it.
And what were Nate and Olivia doing behind the closed door to the den? “Studying” had been their chimed, pat-sounding response to her “I’m back” announcement.
Rannie briefly considered putting in another hour of freelance work. But even sharpening her blue pencils seemed too strenuous a task. She simply didn’t have the mental acuity right now for copyediting. Instead she got under the covers and skimmed through Tattletale, the bio of Ret Sullivan that she’d purchased at Barnes & Noble that morning. It turned out to be a complete hoot.
The author, someone named Lina Struvel, had turned Ret’s life into an over-the-top rags-to-riches story. The adjectives most frequently used to describe Ret were “raven-haired,” “sultry,” “curvaceous,” and “luscious-lipped.”
As for the facts: Ret (born Kathleen Margaret) Sullivan had been orphaned at a young age and grew up in a Westchester convent, where Sister Dorothy Cusack had taken the girl under her wing.
Ah, thought Rannie, the nun to whom Ret had dedicated Portrait of a Lady.
After high school, Ret worked for U.S. Enquirer dreaming up weird UFO stories, including ones about an alien stalking Elizabeth Taylor. “Ret Sullivan had a real gift,” a former boss was quoted as saying. “She never underestimated the stupidity of our readers.”
A stint at Entertainment Weekly led to appearances on Fox Network gossip shows, which in turn led to her first book contract. In the past twenty years she’d cranked out twelve celebrity bios. A workaholic who never married “despite countless offers” and had no close friends, she enjoyed “a dream life attending movie premieres, press parties, and glamorous charity galas almost every night.”
There were a couple of howlers: Ret was described as “a consummate journalist” and a “crusader who spoke truth to power.”
Silly as the book was, the more she read of Tattletale, the sorrier Rannie felt for Ret. Okay, in reality the stuff that “the consummate journalist” wrote was scuzz but she worked so hard at it. And until she crossed paths with Mike Bellettra, she had carved out exactly the high-profile life she had longed for. How many people could say that?
At eleven, Rannie channel surfed but none of the stations had anything newsworthy about the murder. Every channel replayed the same archival footage of Mike Bellettra’s arrest after the lye incident, the same shots of Ret’s apartment building, and old photos of Ret herself in her heyday.
Rannie lay in bed, thoughts free floating, zigzagging from the horrifying sight of Ret Sullivan dead in bed to the slightly less horrifying sight of Charlotte Cummings nearly dead in bed. Rannie’s gut, which she usually trusted, judged it unlikely that the manuscript about Charlotte Cummings had anything to do with Ret’s murder. Yet somebody out there, somebody who might be asleep in his or her bed right this very minute, hated Ret enough to end her life brutally and sordidly. Tim, she knew, would argue whether hatred was the motive behind most premeditated murders. She couldn’t remember his exact words; however, he’d once said that murder was at bottom a selfish act. He didn’t believe most killers hated their victims; for whatever reason, they simply wanted them out of the way, permanently gone.
As she was about to turn off the light, the spine of Tattletale caught her eye. Dusk Books. That was the publishing house where Larry Katz worked now. As executive editor, no less.
Rannie hadn’t thought about Larry in eons, not until Ellen mentioned him earlier in the day. Maybe she should give him a call. Who knew? Dusk might be another source for freelance. Or maybe Larry had some idea what leads the cops were following.