Later that day, Tuesday afternoon, I began to think about Phyllida. I had seen her on Sunday and she was coming to the show on Thursday, but that would be four days and at this point, considering my growing feeling for her, that seemed too long. So I emailed her and left a message on her cell asking if she could possibly squeeze in a brief dinner tonight, some time between 5:30 and 7:00. She called later and said it wouldn’t be easy, there was a full-court press at the magazine. I told her there was a Pret A Manger near her office; we could get a pick-up meal there and I would at least have a few moments with her. She said she would call me back shortly, and she did, saying OK, but it would have to be on the run.
I met her in the lobby of her office, rushed her off to Pret A Manger and had the satisfaction of being with her, if only for a short time. We both ordered quickly, and I asked her how things were going at Vanity Fair. She said they finally had the story on the patron affair nailed down. They were going with an idea similar to my original idea—“the impeccable past”—focusing on women trustees who had the right pedigree and experience, writing profiles of one or two from each of the major museums or performing arts groups and, of course, taking elegant photos of each one wearing designer clothes. There was also going to be a second, smaller piece, about generations: women who were second- and third-generation board members, carrying on a family tradition. The publication of my friend Sonny Beaufort, she said, had been invaluable. The newest issue was coming out soon, and one of the editors had obtained an advance copy.
She asked how the show was going. I told her briefly about Danny having been there the night before, and the plan I had arranged. Monaghan, with his wife and niece, were coming tomorrow night, and Dorothy’s daughter, Annie, and her husband on Saturday. “And who’s coming on Thursday?” she asked.
“The best of all, you, if you can still make it.” She said it wouldn’t be easy, but she had told the magazine about this commitment over a week ago; besides, she was working overtime to get her part of the story completed, so she felt sure she could make it. At this point I had to rush her back to her office, and had no time to waste getting to the theatre.
• • •
Wednesday morning, the first issue of Sonny Beaufort’s magazine Arts View since the two museum murders came out. There was a tribute to Dorothy on a full-framed page that included an attractive picture of her with the playwright and the director at an early rehearsal of The Unwitting Executor. Someone else, a man named Reginald Simon, wrote an article about arts subsidies that repeated the oft-cited fact that, unlike the United States, in Europe and elsewhere governments make large annual contributions to arts institutions. The National Theatre in London and the Comédie-Français in Paris, for example, each receive upwards of $30 million a year.
Another article provided an in-depth profile of board members of the seven most prestigious art and cultural institutions in New York. There were breakdowns in several categories: How many on a given board were longtime New Yorkers, and how many were recent arrivals? Where had the fortunes of trustees come from: was it inherited wealth or new wealth? How many were men, and how many women? What was the age breakdown? How many had had any real exposure to the discipline of their museum or performing arts group, and how many had not? The results were offered in a series of charts, one for each of the seven institutions. Needless to say, the results were quite eye-opening.
In addition to the signed articles, incoming emails, text messages, letters, and phone calls to the magazine were so voluminous that Sonny devoted eight entire pages to reprinting differing views and observations on the issues raised by the two museum murders. Needless to say, they ranged all over the place. Some advocated that arts organizations take money from wherever it was offered. If it was tainted, or the source was suspect, take it anyway: the arts needed all the help they could get. Others were more on the purist’s side: arts organizations should not take any questionable donations, even if they had to curtail their activities. And there were a certain number of comments about the responsibilities of trustees, the dumbing down of the arts, and the pernicious influence of cell phones.
Sonny himself wrote a thoughtful editorial focusing on boards and the naming of buildings. His position was that institutions should be extremely wary of naming any large bit of real estate for an individual who was not strongly identified with the arts as well as being above reproach in his or her business and private life. A theatre or a major wing in a museum are there, presumably, forever, and though it is tempting to jump at a huge offer of money, ethically, it may come at much too high a price.
• • •
That Wednesday evening Monaghan came to the show with his wife, Florence, and niece, Yvette. After the performance, they came backstage, and I got the impression that both Kevin and his wife were much more caught up in the evening than they had expected to be. Yvette, the aspiring actress, was clearly thrilled to be in the presence of real actors, especially ones she had just seen on stage. After I changed, I took the three of them to Joe Allen’s for a drink. I knew I was expected to impart some advice if not wisdom to Yvette. She was young, of course, and, if not glamorous, she was attractive and had considerable poise for her age. It turned out that she was a sophomore at Hunter College.
My advice to her was to stay where she was and finish college, not go chasing after Juilliard or Yale, where the odds were against anyone who was not somehow noticeably different. If she wanted to get theatre training in the meantime, she should seek out a good summer program. I did tell her, however, that on the basis of meeting and talking to her, she might have a chance to succeed, depending, of course, on both her talent and her willingness to work extremely hard. It was the kind of encouragement I had given to many aspiring young people, and I felt it was vague enough not to be disingenuous.
• • •
The next day, Thursday, I had lunch with Monaghan. We had planned this a few days before, chiefly so I could get his take on what was likely to unfold in the Tremayne case. Before we got to that, however, he thanked me for the previous evening. “My wife and I enjoyed seeing the show much more than we thought we would.”
“I’m glad to hear you were pleasantly surprised.”
“And I especially want to thank you for being so kind to my niece.”
“She looks like she has better prospects than most young ladies I meet. Mind you, she’s chosen a tough path, trying to make a go of it in the theatre, especially as an actress.”
“We know that, and her parents do, too, but at this point there’s no dissuading her.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that. But—about Warren—what do you think is going to happen?”
“I can’t say with certainty, but my best guess is that the charge against Warren will be reduced from first-degree to second-degree murder on the basis that his deadly assault on his ex–wife was not premeditated or carried out with malice aforethought. Even so, he would be charged with murder and almost certainly convicted. There’s too much evidence against him—the upside-down prints on the wine bottle and Mikey’s eyewitness testimony, for starters. He’ll spend much of the rest of his life behind bars. They may work something out so that he goes to one of those white-collar prisons, but it will be incarceration none the less.
“As for Mikey, he will no doubt spend time locked away. Just how much depends on his silver-haired lawyer and the fact that he is a cooperating witness against Warren—the chief witness, in fact. The young man, Stuart, is a different story entirely. He had nothing to do with the murder, and if his story of total ignorance is believed, he may possibly get a short time away, and possibly even a suspended sentence.”
• • •
Thursday was the night Phyllida was coming to the show for the first time. If I said I wasn’t nervous, I would be lying. I realized I cared very much how she reacted to the play, but even more to my performance. I tried to pretend it was just another night, but it wasn’t. It’s odd, no matter how many years you have been doing this, there still come particular nights when the old nerves from the past kick in.
It turned out I need not have worried. After the performance, she came back to the dressing room. “It’s my kind of theatre,” she said. “I was around during the days when there was lots of avant-garde stuff, confrontation with audience members—that sort of thing. Never my cup of tea. I’m not against cutting-edge art, but sometimes, especially in theatre, it’s pretentious as hell.”
“Ours is a traditional piece,” I said.
“And a marvelous example,” she replied. “I was beginning to think this kind of theatre was going to disappear from the face of the earth.”
“It almost has.” I continued to change clothes, getting out of my costume and putting on a jacket and tie for dinner.
“Not quite. Your friends, and Dorothy’s friends, must love it.”
“Fortunately, they do.”
We headed for the restaurant. I had asked her to pick the place, and she had chosen a seafood restaurant on the East Side: Le Voyage. The décor, not surprisingly, had a nautical theme: portholes around the walls, large photographs of sailboats skimming across blue seas—altogether, an appealing and inviting atmosphere. This being a seafood restaurant, after we ordered a bottle of white wine, Phyllida chose branzino for her main course and I ordered sea bass. She had lots of questions about the production: How old was the playwright? What else had he written? Were there problems during rehearsals? Did we make changes? She told me her favorites among the actors, which ones were engaging for the audience, which ones seemed less authentic. Not surprisingly, she asked about my role. How did I feel about this character who was both real and unreal? Was that hard to play?
After I answered as well as I could, I told her it was my turn. How were things coming at the magazine? “We’re all under the gun,” she said, “as you might imagine. But if we keep at it, we can make our deadline of midnight tomorrow.”
Unfortunately, she said, that meant she could not linger tonight. She still had work to do on her part of the coverage to lock things in. And so, after lingering till past midnight, we hailed a taxi, and I took her to her house in Murray Hill. On the way she explained that the house was left to her by an uncle, the brother of her mother, who had no children and always said she was his favorite among his nieces and nephews. She lived on the first two floors and rented out the top two. At the house I asked the taxi to wait and took her to the door.
“I’m sorry I had to make an early night of it.”
“Midnight is not exactly early,” I said.
“Still.”
“Sunday is only three days away,” I said. “We can relax and be together all day if we want.”
“Scout’s honor?”
I didn’t answer but kissed her—twice. The taxi driver honked. I touched her cheek and left.
• • •
On Friday night, after I returned from the theatre, among my emails was one from Tracy Gammage, Steinmetz’s assistant, telling me that I should check the news on television first thing Saturday morning, which I did. There, on every channel, I saw news anchors excitedly proclaiming that the suspected mastermind in the so-called patron murders had been arrested. Sometime after midnight, they said, the FBI had carried out multiple arrests in a number of places in the eastern United States. Three computer geeks were arrested in Minneapolis, and half a dozen men in places like Little Rock, Amarillo, and Wheeling had been taken into custody, as well as a man in New York, Francis Kopec, a self-appointed know-it-all who posted gossipy blogs on music and art. The center of all this, however, was a man named Victor Arundel, who was arrested at his home on his eighty-acre estate near the Virginia–West Virginia border. Arundel, a volatile private equity giant, was alleged to be the person who conceived, planned, and ordered the two sensational murders. More details would be given later when more information was available.
• • •
In the days and weeks following the arrests, it was revealed how the enterprise had unfolded. Arundel, who himself had hoped to snag a trusteeship on a prestigious arts board, had become insanely jealous of the two victims, knowing that each one had corporate skeletons in his closet. A man known to have a volcanic temper, he set about planning his revenge. He already had in place many of the tools with which to do this. The three computer techies in Minneapolis, whom he had often used for corporate spying, particularly on companies he felt were takeover targets, had been on his payroll for some time. This was the crew that had hacked into the computers of the two museums.
The men arrested at various places around the South and Midwest were part of a team Arundel’s lieutenant, Hank Herkimer, had recruited and trained to engage in corporate espionage and other nefarious activities. The cadre was made up of a half-dozen ex-cons and renegade Special Forces men, for whom Arundel had built a large wooden lodge, with a number outbuildings, at a secret location fifteen miles from his home. This was the place where these men would gather to get their instructions from Herkimer, just before an operation was initiated, for activities such as pilfering emails, confidential memos, and secret balance sheets. In some cases, it was alleged, they had actually roughed up individuals who Arundel felt were withholding important information. These men, of course, were also the ones who had carried out the missions at the two museums.
As for Kopec, he had been hired by Arundel as someone who knew all the dirt in the arts world as well as plans for such things as galas and art openings. Kopec, it was thought, had helped Arundel identify and plan the locations and scheduling of the crimes. In every case, it was made clear that Arundel had paid handsomely for these services; each person involved, it was alleged, had received spot payments or annual salaries many times what they would otherwise have earned.
Despite this, even the rich rewards could not outweigh the threat of going to jail, perhaps for a long, long time. And so, when the case began to unfold, the three computer geeks and the arts blogger turned against Arundel. In each case they claimed, probably correctly, that they had been told this was all a prank: that Arundel simply wanted to play a trick on these men and embarrass them in a very public way. They were horrified, they said, that the outcome actually ended in murder.
Arundel hired a battery of very expensive lawyers, but it seemed unlikely that they could successfully counter the evidence mounting against their client. He had contributed, it was thought, to his own downfall—first, by having such a prodigious, uncontrollable temper, and second, by his massive ego, which led him to believe he was in some way invincible. He had lulled himself into complacency, especially when he became convinced that law enforcement would never suspect him as long as they had Bigelow and Catlett in their sights.
• • •
On Friday, six days after the arrest of Arundel and his operatives, the following article appeared in the New York Times under the byline of Georgina Fleming and Andrew Considine:
The nation of Cape Verde consists of an archipelago of ten islands in the Atlantic Ocean roughly 350 miles west of the coast of West Africa. The islands vary in size and topography, with the larger ones home to most activities, such as the country’s four international airports, the capital, and its luxury hotels. It was to Cape Verde that Thomas Catlett moved at a time that coincided with the second of the so-called Patron Murders. The timing of the move, together with the fact that Cape Verde has no extradition treaty with the United States, gave rise to the suspicion that Mr. Catlett might have been a suspect in the case. Since that is no longer the case, an interview with Mr. Catlett was obtained by the New York Times through the office of his attorney, Mr. Seth McFarland of Denver.
In conversations with Mr. McFarland several facts were established. The first was that Catlett’s leaving Aspen was not sudden or precipitous but had been long planned. The second was that the timing of his departure coinciding with one of the patron murders astonished Mr. Catlett as much as anyone else. And the third was that he had wanted to go public with the facts from the beginning but was persuaded by the FBI to delay any announcement until the actual culprit was in custody.
Mr. Catlett’s new home is on one of the medium-sized islands: a sprawling structure of rough, beige stucco walls, a red tile roof, and floor-to-ceiling windows with wooden slat blinds. Inside is a spacious living room; seven oversize bedrooms, each with its own bath; a state-of-the-art kitchen; and a makeshift office with books and cartons strewn on all sides. In the front is a wide veranda facing a stretch of lush, green lawn and a broad sand beach along the Atlantic Ocean. A series of verdant mountains rise in the distance behind the house. The compound also includes a number of outbuildings of the same stucco with tile roofs as the main house, an oversize swimming pool, gardens, and a helicopter pad.
His visitors were invited to join Mr. Catlett in his new office, a large space equipped with all the latest in computers and communication, but still somewhat in disarray due to the files and books that had not yet been shelved or put in cabinets. Making way for his visitors by pushing a few cartons aside and bringing a spare chair from the living room, he invited questions. A lean, seemingly fit man about five feet ten, he has red hair streaked here and there with a bit of gray. Though he has penetrating blue-green eyes, a sharp nose, and a firm chin, his face nevertheless was warm and welcoming, and he occasionally broke into a mischievous smile. He asked what we wanted to know.
There were two questions, his visitors said, the first probably easier to answer than the second: “Why Cape Verde as a place to retire?”
“I first came here,” he began, “a little over a year ago and was quite impressed. I had come because I’d made a sizeable investment in a firm that produced turbines for the wind farms Cape Verde is developing. Right now, 25 percent of the electricity for these islands is created by wind power, and in less than ten years the figure will be 50 percent. I’m also interested in helping the country get into solar panels and other non-carbon-producing energy initiatives. You’d be amazed: this place has an opportunity to become a showcase, a lab for the whole world, as far as cutting back on carbon emissions goes.
“But there was more,” he continued. “The country has an unbelievably moderate year-round temperature and great music—have you heard it?”
“Not yet.”
“You’ve got a treat in store. Beyond that, though, the place is a thriving young democracy, and has wonderful people.”
“Sounds ideal.”
“It is. But you had a second question.”
“Are you really leaving the U.S. for good?” he was asked.
“Absolutely,” he replied.
“Renouncing your citizenship?”
“We haven’t gotten that far.”
“When did this idea about leaving take shape?”
“Some time in the late ’90s, I noticed an insidious, creeping infection and immorality among financiers, business leaders, and politicians. It was a breakdown in ethics that people never mentioned and pretended not to see. It was like a person with a deadly disease that no one, including the patient, admits is there. Then one day they perform a CT scan or an MRI, and it not only turns out to be terminal, it has invaded the whole body.”
“Can you be more specific?” he was asked.
“Take finance,” he said. “Over the past twenty years, there has been a snowstorm, a veritable blizzard of new investment techniques—structured products, derivatives, high frequency trading—that have one thing in common. They are so maddeningly technical and highly secretive that no one can understand them. Actually, they have two things in common: they invariably benefit the few at the expense of the many.”
“Your friends at the Cloud Club said that your favorite phrase was noblesse oblige.”
“With rare exceptions, for today’s billionaires those words are not only a foreign term, they are a foreign concept. I’m not speaking of blatant crooks engaging in Ponzi schemes or out-and-out fraud. I’m speaking of the so-called ‘good guys,’ upstanding CEOs of admired corporations, major bank presidents, Silicon Valley gurus, hedge fund managers. Instead of noblesse oblige, their standard is: ‘Everybody’s doing it.’ Take the salaries of CEOs, which have become more and more inflated every year to a point where they are beyond all reason or justification. Board finance committees always justify such outrages by saying, ‘So and so’s CEO makes $32 million a year and ours only $12 million. What’s wrong with us?’ Whereupon they up their man’s annual salary to a ridiculous, entirely unnecessary figure. Believe me, I know what it takes to live a luxurious life—four houses, let’s say, a private plane, and the rest—and it’s not $32 million. A couple of million a year will do very nicely, thank you.”
“Are there no bright spots?’
“You tell me. Look at education. Day by day the United States is falling further and further behind the rest of the civilized world. Even now, half the adult population doesn’t believe in the reality of either evolution or climate change. How retro is that?”
“In your mind, is it really that dire, that bleak?”
“Right now” he replied, “America is like an ocean liner of a hundred years ago, the Titanic or the Mauretania. Like those ships, our boat has three classes. In first class are the billionaires, the .001 percent; in second, the reasonably well-off; and in third, everyone else. The ship has long since sailed, blindingly hoping to land on some enchanted shore where life is idyllic. The ship, however, had hardly left port when the first-class passengers were demanding more and more perks—and getting them. At the expense, I might add, of those in second and third. Those in second class, not to be outdone, were forcing some of their fellow passengers with little clout to move down to third, where both food and space were becoming scarcer and scarcer.
“And because the custodians of this vessel had long since given up any idea of maintenance or investing in the future, suddenly, when the ship was far out at sea, in the middle of nowhere, the rudders malfunctioned, making it impossible to steer the ship. Not long after, the radar went out, and then all satellite communication. There it was, this vast luxury liner, adrift in the middle of the limitless ocean, headed for who knows where, and time fast running out.”
“So you see no hope for the country?”
“At the moment, no—at least, not in my lifetime.”