Shades of Fortune (62 page)

The entry for the following day was once again in her grandfather's hand, and his words were especially terse.

June 6, 1941

My suspicions confirmed. Henry came into my office this morning. Told him I will handle everything. Alice leaves for Bar Harbor immediately. Servants there have their instructions. Everything else to be taken care of. Alice! She is Henry's nemesis, his bane, his curse, his bad penny. Told Henry that. Also told him that this is the last time we will be using his uncle Leo's friends. For ANYTHING
.

What had her grandmother said that night at the dinner table? “She killed a man once, you know. It was all in Adolph's diary.” With a feeling of despair, Mimi thinks: This was the man she killed, the man Granny meant, not Daddy. Oh, Mother, Mother, she thinks—was that you? The pretty lady in the big white hat? Was the white hat ever a part of her dream? She cannot remember, but this man was the dark shape flying across the windshield of the car, and those screams were perhaps not her mother's screams but his screams, or the screams of the onlookers standing at the intersection or trying to cross the street. Slowly, all the pieces of the puzzle now are tumbling into place: Why she could never tell her grandparents about her scholarship, why there was never enough money, why her mother and father exchanged those dark, secret looks, why her parents fought all the time, why there was always the hidden threat of tension and misery in the air on 97th Street. Why her mother drank. As Granny Flo said, it was all in Adolph's diary.

She turns the page to find another clipping from the
Times
.

5TH AVE. HIT-AND-RUN VEHICLE BELIEVED FOUND

June 8. The automobile involved in the vehicular homicide which occurred on Fifth Avenue at 54th Street Tuesday afternoon has been found, police officials say. The accident, from which car and driver fled the scene, left one man dead and others slightly injured, while creating pandemonium and disrupting midtown traffic for nearly an hour.

The automobile, a black 1940 Lincoln Zephyr sedan, was found abandoned on the street in the docks area at the foot of West 23rd Street. The car matched eyewitnesses' descriptions of the death vehicle. Its hood and right front fender were deeply dented, police say, and tests showed that spatters of dried blood on the hood and windshield matched the blood type of the victim, Larry J. Elkins, 39, a schoolteacher from Utica, N.Y.

The car bore painted-over license plates with the numbers HLG-031, which also closely correspond with eyewitness accounts. This license number, however, corresponds with no known owner of record in New York State. Under the painted-over plates, police were able to identify the luxury vehicle as one reported stolen from a Brooklyn garage in April of this year. Tests of the car's interior revealed no fingerprints.

“The fact that the vehicle was stolen hamstrings our investigations somewhat,” Police Chief Walter O'Malley told the Times today. “But we are determined to find the perpetrator of this homicide and are actively pursuing various leads.”

Now Mimi is puzzled. Would her mother have been driving a stolen car with painted-over plates? It makes no sense. The driver must have been an entirely different person. And yet why would her grandfather have devoted so much space and attention to this accident in his diary? She turns the pages slowly now but finds no more reference to the accident in the weeks that follow. Then, under the date of August 9, she finds the following:

Executed final phase of Step 6 today. Summoned Leo to my office. Have refused to see or speak to him since Step 1. Jonesy, all smiles, showed him in (she knows what's up!). Leo looked thinner, paler. Held out his hand to shake mine, then noticed portrait of “Our Founders,” which has been significantly altered. Portrait now titled “Our Founder.” They say, “I hate to see a grown man cry.” I didn't. I liked it. Leo blubbered like a baby, said, “How can you treat your own brother this way?” I said, or in words to this effect, “Face it, Leo, you're through in this company. I have no further use for you. This company has no further use for you. You've had it, you're finished, you're through, you're out. Now go back to your office, clean out your desk, get out of here and never come back. I have the goods on you, you know. I know all about your dealings with those friends of yours. It's all on record, it's all written down. Now get out.” After he left, Jonesy stepped in and gave me a saucy little wink. She's kind of cute. Tonight, Flo and I to celebrate with dinner at “21
.”

But then, a week later, on August 15, he still seemed to be worried about Leo.

Could Leo sneak back and find these diaries? Too dangerous. Ordered locks changed on all doors
—
closets, too. Consider ordering wall safe with combination lock to keep these in
.

And then, on August 27, she finds another entry that seems to allude to the accident, and to the fact that, even though Leo was now out of the company, her grandfather still feared him and his mysterious friends, and that Leo still wielded some ominous power over the family.

Leo has put 2&2 together re Alice
—
or thinks he has. Has approached Henry with threat. Wouldn't dare approach me! Henry in to see me this morning, very frightened. Wrote Henry cheque for $100,000, which is what Leo wants. Worth it, I guess, to shut Leo up. But told Henry
this is the end of it.
No more where this came from! Besides, Leo has no evidence, only guesswork. Police have closed case. End of this
.

There are only one or two other entries of interest.

September 20, 1941

Ordered combination wall safe today. Mosler people here to measure. Delivery: one month
.

Then she has come, again, to the final entry of all, the one dated October 10, about her father borrowing money from his mother. But now, as she flips absently through the blank pages, she discovers a loose piece of paper placed between two of these. It is a letter, and she removes it and reads it. It is typed on a letterhead that rings only a faint bell in her memory.

THE KETTERING PLAY SCHOOL

24 East 39th Street

New York 16, N.Y.

Nathan Myerson, Esq.
June 20, 1941

I West 72nd Street

New York 23, N.Y
.

Dear Mr. Myerson:

Thank you for your interest in the attendance record of your niece, Mireille, at our School. Our records show that little Mireille spent a normal, happy day at School on June 3, and was collected promptly by her mother at 2:30 P.M. to be driven home
.

Sincerely
,

Edith Kettering

Headmistress

June third, of course, was the date of the accident, which had occurred at 2:45
P
.
M
.

Suddenly Mimi realizes she is not alone in the room, and she looks up, startled.

“Hi, kiddo,” he says.

“How did you get in?” she cries.

“Just walked in off the elevator,” he says. “Nobody's here but you, but the place is wide open. I guess they were counting on you to lock up the store.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Walking down the street and saw the lights on in your corner office. Figured you might be here, reading the diaries.”

“How very strange.”

“What's strange?”

“Brad's girlfriend has been watching our building from across the street, and now you're watching my office.”

“Not watching, really. Just glanced up and saw lights on. I'm not as bad as our friend Mrs. Robinson, kiddo.”

“Is that her name?”

“Rita Robinson. Just like the song. ‘God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson, heaven holds a place for those who pray, ay-ay-ay.'”

“She's married, then.”

“Separated. I gather she thinks she can land a bigger fish with Mr. Bradford Moore. Mind if I sit down?” He flops in her sofa without waiting for a reply, kicks off his Gucci loafers, and, lying back, stretches out on the sofa, his stockinged feet up on the arm. He glances at the stack of diaries on her desk. “Well, what did you think? Did you get through all of it?”

“Yes.”

“I warned you that there'd be some unpleasant things there, but you insisted.”

“But I don't understand it all, Michael. For instance, what was Nate Myerson's role?”

“Can't you fit the pieces together, Mimi? Nate was Leo's son. Both of them,
père et fils
, were probably pretty bitter about the way your grandfather was treating Leo. But Leo wasn't the real blackmailer. The real villain of this story was Nate.”

“But what did Nate know?”

“Look,” he says, staring up at the ceiling from his sprawled position on the sofa, “this is what I figure must have happened. Your mother drove a black nineteen forty Lincoln Zephyr in those days, with a license number pretty close to the one those witnesses remembered. She picked you up at your nursery school that day. You were—how old? Three? Would you remember any of this? Probably not.”

“There's a dream I sometimes have. It involves a car, my mother screaming, a dark shape across the windshield.”

“She picked you up at that school, headed uptown, and had the accident. Maybe she was drunk. Anyway, she left the scene, which is a bad no-no. I figure the first one to put two and two together was your father—with the license plate. And one look at the condition of his car would have told him something bad had happened. Maybe he confronted your mother, and she confessed and begged him to help her. Maybe the police had already called them for questioning. Anyway, your father was pretty scared and went to see his father the following day. The diary says he did.”

“Yes.”

“Your grandfather came to your mother's rescue, in the only way he knew how: using those people he refers to as ‘Leo's friends.' A plan was worked out. Your mother was shipped off to Bar Harbor, where the servants were instructed to say that she'd been there for several days, maybe weeks, and was hundreds of miles away from New York at the time of the accident. Meanwhile, those friends of Leo's went to work for your grandfather. A new pair of painted-over plates was slapped on the car, taken from a similar Lincoln that had been stolen in Brooklyn. The car was then driven to the West Side and abandoned, for the police to find it.”

“But how did Nate get involved in all of this?”

“I figure the second person to put two and two together was Nate. Nate and Leo then put their little heads together. Both Nate and Leo would have known what kind of car your parents drove, and either one of them, or both of them, could have recognized the license plate. The first one to put the screws on your father was Leo. He got his hundred thousand. But Nate had the foresight to write a letter to your nursery school and got exactly what he wanted: proof that your mother
was
in New York that day, and in fact had been just a handful of blocks away fifteen minutes before the accident happened. Using that letter, Nate was able to bleed your father for the next twenty years.”

She shivers. “And I was a part of it, too, wasn't I? I, or at least my nursery school, was part of a scheme to destroy my father. They used me, too. And—oh, my God, I've just remembered something else.”

“What's that?”

“How old was I then? A little over three? And yet I can remember someone—one of Granny's servants, perhaps, someone who was taking care of me—saying to me, over and over again, ‘If anyone asks you how long you've been in Maine, you're to say, “Mama and I have been here since my birthday party.”' I remember being made to repeat those words again and again, ‘Mama and I have been here at Granny's house ever since my birthday party.' My birthday is May twenty-fourth. It must have been that summer, and it must have been to help her establish—”

“Her alibi.”

“Yes. So I was part of the cover-up,
too!
”

“So it seems.
Did
anyone ask you how long you'd been in Maine?”

“I don't remember. I just remember being made to memorize that line. But if anyone had asked me, I know I'd have said what I was told to say. I was always the sort of little girl who did what she was told. Oh, Michael, this is all so awful.”

“Well, I warned you,” he says.

“But how could Nate go on doing this? It said the case was closed. Isn't there something called the statute of limitations?”

“There is no statute of limitations in a criminal manslaughter case, Mimi. That case could have been reopened at any time. Nate knew this, and he must have made it very clear to your father.”

“You mean the case could be reopened … even now?”

Still staring at the ceiling, he says, “Even now. Forty-six years later.”

“Oh, God,” she says.

He glances in her direction. “Look,” he says, “I don't think it's very likely. The prosecutor's office would have a hard time rounding up any witnesses after all these years. Most of the original witnesses are probably dead by now, or disappeared. But, technically, it could be reopened—the whole can of worms.”

“My mother could never be put through such a thing. Not at this point, Michael.”

“Meanwhile, Nate or Leo, or the-two of them, got hold of your grandfather's diaries, with all the other very incriminating stuff in them—the date of your mother's departure for Bar Harbor, and all. The diaries turned up in Nate's daughter's house.”

“How did they get hold of them?”

“That I don't know. But they obviously got them in the fall of nineteen forty-one. There are lots of ways they could have got them: bribed a security guard, bribed one of the building's cleaning staff. There are lots of ways to burglarize an office building. Look at Watergate.”

“Has Louise Bernhardt ever read these, do you think?”