49 49On the day before she left New York for good, to take up permanent residence at Merry Hill, Ruby Renthal, in a nostalgic mood, paid a last visit to her apartment, which was shortly to be divided up into three smaller apartments. Wandering through the large empty rooms, she wondered if people would continue to refer to it as the Elias Renthal apartment, even after they were gone, in the way that people had continued to refer to it as the Sweetzer Clarke apartment for many months after she and Elias had purchased it, before it had become inalterably their own through its magnificent transformation by Cora Mandell, with the help of Maisie Verdurin and Jamesey Crocus. Only that day Ruby had seen a layout in the Times Magazine section showing Yvonne Bulbenkian lighting tapers for one of her parties in a pair of silver candlesticks that had only recently been her own, on a Chippendale dining table that had also been hers, beneath a portrait of King Boris of Bulgaria in hunting attire that had until their scandal hung in her own dining room. She felt no craving to own them again.
In her persimmon-lacquered drawing room, nineteen coats, or was it twenty, she wondered, the windows were bare, stripped of their elaborate hangings with the fringe from France that had taken weeks to come. She looked at the spot on the wall where her Monet of the water lilies, that she and Elias had purchased from Maisie Verdurin’s wall on the night of her first party in New York, had hung, and the places on each side of the marble fireplace where her console tables with the inlaid rams’ heads, from the Orromeo auction in London, had stood until she discovered they were fakes and donated them to the White House, which had returned them at the time of the auction, for reasons unknown.
In her ballroom, which she had not entered since the night of her ball, she stood at the top of the stairs, where she had received on that night, and remembered how it was in the magnificent hours before her world had begun to topple. She walked down the stairway and heard the music, the waltzes, and stood in the middle of the dance floor and closed her eyes as she remembered waltzing with Elias, with Mickie Minardos, with Gus Bailey, and her royal princes, from countries that no longer wanted them, who used to impress her so much. She looked up and could see the ten thousand butterflies, in the thirty seconds of their beauty, and hear the exclamations of joy from the mouths of her four hundred guests.
“Well, Ruby Nolte, as I live and breathe,” came the voice that interrupted her reverie. She opened her eyes with a start.
Standing at the top of the short stairway leading to her ballroom was Lefty Flint. She watched him walk down the steps and across the dance floor to her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, trying to keep the panic out of her voice.
“Paying a call,” he replied. “You got yourself a gentleman caller, Ruby.”
“I told them you were expecting me.”
“But I don’t live here anymore. How did you know I was here?”
“I got my ways.” He looked around him, at the gold-and-white paneling of the room. “What do you call this room, Ruby? The ballroom? I didn’t know people still had ballrooms. My, my. Imagine, having your own ballroom. You did good, didn’t you, Ruby, for a stewardess? Look at you. Anyone who didn’t know what I know about you would think you were one of the swells.”
“Get out of here, Lefty, right now,” she said.
“We’ve got a few things to go over, Ruby.”
“No, we don’t. We have nothing to go over.”
“Oh, yes, we do. How fucking dare you come to my parole hearing and try to keep me in that place?”
“Obviously, it didn’t have any effect.”
“How could you do that to me?”
“I’d do it again.”
“Listen, rich lady. I went to prison. I did my time. I have atoned.”
“Only in your kind of circles, Lefty.” Calm now, sure of herself, she met his eyes.
He looked at her. “You’ve changed,” he said.
“You don’t know how much,” she answered. “If you have in mind to punch me out, I’d think again if I were you.” She opened her bag and looked in it as if she were searching for her lipstick or compact. She lifted out her pistol and pointed it at him. “When my husband bought me this pistol, I thought it was the laugh of the year. He would say to me over and over, ‘There are mad people out there, out to get people like us.’ I never took him seriously about that, but now I see how right he was. I told you once. Now I’m telling you again. Get out, just the way you came in.”
“Your husband in the slammer, that guy?” sneered Lefty.
“That guy,” she answered, holding the pistol on him.
“Who stole all the money,” she replied.
“You’re holding him up to me?”
“There’s one big difference between you and my husband, Lefty. He didn’t beat women or kill them. He can pay back the money. You can’t give back the life you took. Wherever you go, people will say, ‘He’s the guy who strangled Becky Bailey.’ You’re a murderer.”
Lefty said nothing. He moved toward Ruby.
“Get out of here, you son of a bitch,” she screamed.
“Hold it, Lefty,” came a voice from behind. Lefty turned quickly and faced Gus Bailey, standing on the stairs, his Luger drawn. During the split second before he fired, Gus remembered saying to Bernie Slatkin, “I want him to be looking at me at the moment. I want him to know it was me who did it.”
Gus fired.