The Rich Are Different (57 page)

We fought
our way outside. It was a battle every inch of the way to our car and when we finally crawled inside we were on the verge of collapse. Halfway uptown to the Van Zale mansion Caroline was able to say: ‘Steven, I didn’t know you had it in you. I’ve never been so proud of anyone in all my life.’

We held hands tightly. All I could say was: ‘That hymn “Jerusalem”.’

‘Darling, don’t remind me. I feel on the verge of complete and utter disintegration. God only knows how Sylvia must feel – I expect she’ll have to be hospitalized.’

There was to be a small reception at Paul’s house for the family, the partners and their wives, and within minutes of our arrival we were feeling better. In his minutely detailed instructions for the funeral Paul, smart to the last, had ordered the very best champagne to be served to his mourners.

‘Remember you didn’t have any breakfast,’ warned Caroline as I knocked back my first glass in a single gulp and tapped the nearest footman for a refill. ‘You’d better eat something.’

I grabbed half a dozen canapés and tried to step on the urge to get very drunk very fast.

Sylvia had just reappeared with Mildred. I went over to her.

‘Yes, I’m better now, thank you, Steve,’ she said evenly. She looked almost transparent with exhaustion and her eyes were swollen with weeping. ‘It was just that when you said, “He’s still alive”, I realized for the first time that he was dead … So ironic! Silly of me. It was such a wonderful speech, Steve, perfect, I always knew you were one who should do it …’ She started to cry again and presently Mildred led her away.

I was still staring unhappily after them when I heard a polite cough and found Cornelius, still as a statue, at my elbow.

‘Mr Sullivan, may I present Sam Keller?’

I saw the tall dark youth who had been sitting next to Cornelius in church. He had shaggy short hair, friendly brown eyes and an adolescent air of not knowing quite what to do with his arms and legs.

‘Hullo,’ I said kindly. ‘Cornelius was talking about you the other day.’

‘Mr Sullivan – how are you.’ He accepted the hand I offered. He had a strong firm masculine clasp.

I glanced from him to Cornelius and wondered if I could make one plus one equal one, but when I looked back at Sam Keller my instinct was to like him. Despite his adolescent movements his manner was unusually self-assured for the son of working-class immigrants. He had an easy smile, an alert expression and the damnedest Down-East accent I had heard in some time.

I would have asked the boy some questions but at that moment Charley called me away to ask about Sylvia, and when I left the room to make inquiries I met Mildred Blackett in the hall. She told me that Sylvia had asked to be alone.

‘Of course I knew beforehand it would all be too much for her,’ said Mildred. ‘Those
frightful
crowds outside the church, those vulgar journalists, that
inexpressibly
moving service …’ Mildred was a large handsome
woman in her mid-forties who liked to flash her dark eyes imperiously and heave her full bosom at the first sight of emotion on the horizon.

‘… and by the way, Steven, there’s something I simply must discuss with you.’ She put a bejewelled hand firmly on my wrist and propelled me into a quiet corner of the hall. Offhand I couldn’t think of a single other woman who could have swept me off like that. Mildred was a very powerful lady. ‘Wade and I,’ she said, referring to her husband, ‘are
desperately
worried about Cornelius, Steven. Of course inheriting all that
dreadful
money was the very last thing I wanted for him – I know it’s hardly the time to say one word against dearest Paul, but
really
, Steven! What a thing to do.
And no guardian! No trustee!
All that money
outright
! Naturally Paul didn’t expect to die when Cornelius was only eighteen, but surely he should have provided for every eventuality!’

‘It does seem kind of unfortunate,’ I agreed sympathetically.

‘Unfortunate!’ Mildred abandoned her stage whisper, drew herself up to her full height and regarded me over the top of her heaving bosom. ‘It’s disastrous! And now Cornelius is talking of casting aside his education and coming to live here in this perfectly
ghastly
house – all on his own – only eighteen years old in this – this
Babylon
of a city! Of course Cornelius has had a good solid moral upbringing, but nevertheless—’

Nevertheless he was just at an age when he would enjoy celebrating his liberation from the maternal apron-strings. I did feel sorry for Mildred, whom I liked, but I didn’t see how I could help her.

‘… so Wade and I thought that if you could have a
word
with Cornelius – oh Emily! I was wondering what had happened to you, dear. Steven, you remember my daughter Emily, don’t you?’

There was such a strong resemblance between Emily and Cornelius that they could have passed for twins. His features looked better on her, though. Now I found those dusty gold curls pretty, the sharp little nose and chin delicately attractive, the grey eyes starry and stunning. Twenty-year-old virgins aren’t exactly in my ball-park, but Emily was a cute little thing and I could tell right away she was nice-natured.

‘We met about five years ago, didn’t we?’ I said smiling at her. ‘But you’ve changed, Miss Emily! You had pigtails when I last saw you.’

‘It was ten years ago actually,’ said Emily, blushing as I took her hand. ‘Vicky’s funeral.’

‘It’s too bad we never meet except at funerals! What are you doing with yourself nowadays? I guess school must be no more than a distant memory by this time.’

‘Well, not exactly, Mr Sullivan. I’m at college and majoring in classical studies.’

Those Van Zale women were amazing! I had a vivid memory of Paul making a wisecrack in Latin and old Mrs Van Zale capping the joke in Greek.

‘Congratulations!’ I said amused. ‘I think it’s great for a woman to study when she doesn’t need to.’

‘I don’t
quite understand.’ She looked anxious.

‘Well, you’re so pretty you could just sit on your high school diploma and wait until your husband comes along!’

‘Oh, I … well, thank you, I …’ She blushed again and stammered to a halt. I grinned at her encouragingly. It always amuses me to see a brainy girl covered with confusion.

‘Who’s that blonde you were flirting with in the hall?’ hissed Caroline later.

‘Emily Blackett. Didn’t you notice the likeness to Cornelius? By the way, did you see Cornelius’ boy-friend?’

‘Shhh! Here comes Mildred.’

When we dragged ourselves home I was so exhausted I slept for sixteen hours but when I awoke next morning I felt as if I had just passed some monumental milestone. My partners believed Krasnov had acted only with the aid of Bruce Clayton. Everyone else, including the press and the law, had swallowed the story that Krasnov had acted alone. All I had to do now was to shore up the bank’s position and then once I was sure the storm had blown over I’d go after those assassins and send them one by one down to hell to be fried.

[1]

I had them watched but they never met. Greg Da Costa ran through his remaining money as effortlessly as a barracuda rippling through tropical waters but then dumbfounded me by marrying an heiress and winding up in California. The heiress must have been the dumbest of dumb broads, but that was Greg’s lucky break. I gave him no more than five years to dispose of his new fortune, but my brothers who had idled around with Greg during faraway summers at Newport said I was being optimistic.

Bruce Clayton might have escaped trial but Columbia University didn’t like one of their young professors knocking people off so they fired him. After six months spent having a nervous breakdown in one of those plush sanatoriums upstate he was packed off on a world cruise and when he returned he tried teaching for a time in a private boarding school up in Canada. That didn’t work out, and in the spring of 1928 he and Grace rented a cottage by the sea at Montauk, Long Island, so that Bruce could write a book. I never found out what the book was about but the operative who kept an eye on him for me reported that he led a secluded law-abiding life.

Terence O’Reilly disappeared. He was too quick for me, and although my operative began surveillance less than twenty-four hours after the funeral
he found only a deserted apartment, closed bank accounts and a neighbour who thought O’Reilly might have gone on vacation to Atlantic City.

Since I knew O’Reilly would eventually surface to claim his bride I wasn’t unduly worried by his disappearance but I was certainly puzzled when the best operatives failed to trace him. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t figure out where he was. I couldn’t see how he was supporting himself. Once he had a new job and a permanent address my operatives should have been able to turn him up but when they had no success I had to conclude he was unemployed. Probably he had plenty of money saved, but I knew he’d want that to feather a nest for Sylvia. It was puzzling. I half-wondered if he’d changed his name, but that would have been the act of a man who had something to hide and O’Reilly would want to act innocent. He’d have a lot of explaining to do to Sylvia if he resurfaced with a new name.

I made a strong effort to find O’Reilly not just to satisfy my own curiosity but because by chance we needed him in connection with the bank. Bart Mayers was killed in an automobile accident only ten days after the assassination with the result that all attempts to sort out Paul’s papers were severely hampered, and Terence’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the private files would have been more than useful to us.

Eventually everything was sorted out, but two major personal files remained unaccounted for. One was the file containing all Paul’s correspondence with Vicky, and the other was his entire private correspondence with Dinah Slade.

Six months after the funeral I wrote to tell Dinah that the Mallingham deed had never surfaced and asked her what she wanted to do about it. As far as Paul’s estate was concerned Mallingham didn’t exist. I said that if she wanted to forward all the documents she had retained I’d take the matter of the missing conveyance up with the Van Zale lawyers, but my personal recommendation was that she should wait another six months. I found it hard to believe the deed would stay lost indefinitely, and once it did turn up I could still fix the transfer of title to her with the minimum of fuss.

Dinah wrote back to say she’d wait. More time slipped away. She was as busy with her business as I was with mine and our correspondence was irregular, but I always read the reports Hal Beecher mailed from our Milk Street office and was glad to see Diana Slade Cosmetics was making a mint and expanding fast. I could just imagine Dinah putting on hot-shot airs to all her clients while old Hal secretly pulled the strings and told her what to do.

Meanwhile I’d finished pulling all the available strings to conceal the conspiracy but I’d had one particularly nasty moment before the police had closed the assassination file. It turned out that two days before the assassination Krasnov had paid ten thousand dollars in used bills into his bank account. Since the police were acting on the theory that Krasnov had acted alone it was of vital importance that the amount should be explained away before they thought it was blood-money from anyone connected with Van Zale’s.

Fortunately I
had a friend in Washington who owed me a favour, and he promised he’d shut the police off by saying the money had come from a foreign government and was already the target of a top secret investigation. I took the opportunity to check whether this might even be true, but my friend said Bruce Clayton’s society had received no foreign funding and Krasnov had been unaffiliated to any secret Bolshevik group operating in the States.

I spent some uncomfortable nights thinking about that ten thousand dollars, but came to the conclusion O’Reilly must have put up the money. Bruce would surely just have told Krasnov he should commit the murder for the cause without expecting financial reward, although my partners, who still had no idea O’Reilly had a motive for murder, had no difficulty in assuming Bruce had donated the cash. None of us wanted to think much about it anyway. It was so much more comfortable to look the other way whenever the conspiracy began to raise its ugly head, and once the police let the matter drop I for one was certainly relieved to turn back to the soaring numbers on the ticker and tell myself it was a great time in the history of the world to be an investment banker.

My special project, our investment trust Van Zale Participations, was launched in the fall of 1926 and took off with all the glory of a rocket heading for the stars. The project was also special to me because I was at last able to provide properly for my brothers. Matt became the trust’s figurehead president, and Luke’s small brokerage house got all the trust’s business.

By that time we were all in love with the idea of investment trusts. This kind of trust issued shares to its subscribers and then invested the money in the shares of other corporations. In the early twenties investment trusts had been rare but after 1926 an avalanche of them hit Wall Street because the market was swinging upwards so hard that new ways had to be designed to cope with the huge flow of capital coming from the investment-hungry public. To enable themselves to expand in the market the commercial banks promoted the affiliate company and the investment banks championed the investment trust.

They took little extra manpower, hardly any space – some firms used a corner of the office but at least we had the decency to rent a suite further down Willow Street – and a few good connections to inspire confidence. Naturally Van Zale’s connections were first-class, and there was never much doubt that once we started milking the cow we’d skim off one hell of a lot of cream. After Van Zale Participations had been incorporated (we incorporated in Delaware for the usual tax reasons) we issued only common stock, a million shares in all. The bank, P.C. Van Zale & Company, took a hundred thousand shares at 100 and sold the rest to the public at 104 with a resulting profit of around three million dollars. Some cream! However, that was just the hors d’oeuvres of the financial feast. The capital was then organized and invested in a number of big enterprises, electrical goods, insurance companies and so on. These all paid superb dividends, and so successful were we that we were soon approached by another investment trust
run by a strong second-rank house. In the resulting merger we came out on top, retaining the name Van Zale Participations and increasing the corporation’s assets to double the amount we started with.