Too Much Money (24 page)

“Nobody goes in there until the medics have finished,” said Doddsie, standing guard in front of the closed door of the men’s room, blocking Ruby and Gus from entering.

“It’s Mrs. Renthal,” said Gus to Doddsie. “She has to go in.”

“Hold it. Hold it,” said Doddsie, in control. “They’re coming out with the stretcher. Everybody stand back. These men need all the room they can get. Don’t push in. Stand back. Mrs. Renthal, there will be room for you in the ambulance.”

The medics had covered Elias’s body with a rubber sheet. Elias opened his eyes for a second as he was being carried on a stretcher through the oval marble hall of the Butterfield to see the beautiful winding stairway packed tight with the friends of Adele Harcourt looking down on him, watching him, talking about him—“Ethan Trescher said he crashed”—as the medics made their way to a waiting ambulance with flashing red lights and a siren. He remembered the fart he had let out eight years earlier, the last time he had been in the club. He was wondering which of his two exits from the Butterfield was the more humiliating, as they were loading him on the gurney and sliding him into the ambulance. “I’m right here, Elias,” said Ruby, a line that was quoted in all the New York newspapers the next morning.

I
N THE
ambulance on the way to New York–Presbyterian Hospital, Ruby sat alongside Elias’s stretcher. She watched the frantic activity of the medics, knowing they were doing all they could to keep Elias alive. She felt helpless. The sable cuff on her
brand-new Karl Lagerfeld suit from Chanel Couture was damp and smelled of urine. She realized she must have brushed up against Elias when they transferred him from the stretcher to the gurney. The sable smelled of asparagus. She wished Gert hadn’t served asparagus the previous night for Elias’s first dinner in their new house. She opened her twelve-thousand-dollar Hermès Birkin bag and took out a white lace handkerchief drenched in Karl Lagerfeld’s newest perfume, which hadn’t come out in the United States yet, which Baroness de Liagra had brought her from Paris. The card that had accompanied it said in French, “My tongue needs something to lick.” Ruby held the handkerchief to her nose to keep from smelling her wet sable cuff. With her other hand she took out her cell phone and dialed her social secretary. “Oh, Jenny, yes, Adele’s funeral was simply beautiful. Oh, you saw it on television? I’ll tell Elias how well you said he looked.”

She looked over at her husband. “Is he all right?” she asked one of the medics.

“Yes, ma’am, under the circumstances,” answered the medic. Ruby went back to her cell phone. “Look, Jenny, there’s a few things I wish you’d do right away. Mr. Renthal has had an indigestion attack, and we’re taking him to the hospital. Phone the hospital right now, New York–Presbyterian, and tell them who he is, so the rooms will be ready when the ambulance gets there. Those check-in people never know who anybody is. Don’t say anything about, you know, where he’s been for the last seven years. Just say he is a distinguished financier, or something like that. He is going to need suite six hundred on the private tenth floor of the Harcourt Pavilion, the one Laurance Van Degan was in so long after his stroke. And tell them if they say they’re all full that Mr. Renthal gave Adele Harcourt money in the millions for the Harcourt Pavilion. No, Jenny. It’s not a bit serious, no, no. It’s just all the excitement of being home again.”

The two medics looked at each other over Elias’s body but said nothing.

“Next, call Simon Cabot in London and ask him to call me on my cell phone. If the newspapers call, say Mrs. Renthal is at the hospital with her husband, and a statement will be forthcoming later in the day. It’s urgent that you get Simon Cabot in London to call me on my cell. Tell Gert we won’t be in for dinner as planned and tell her she’s free to go to bingo night at St. Ignatius Loyola. Call Smythson’s in London and tell them to cancel the order for the invitations to the party for the opening of the new house, and cancel that fancy calligrapher Simon Cabot hired to address the envelopes. Say there’s been a postponement. Oh, yes, and call the manager for the Aquacade act at the Seraglio Hotel in Las Vegas and say that we have to cancel for the present time.”

Watching her unconscious husband as the ambulance, sirens screaming, raced for New York–Presbyterian Hospital on One Hundred Sixty-eighth Street and Broadway, it occurred to Ruby that the indoor swimming pool she had copied from the indoor swimming pool at the Hearst Castle in California, and where she planned to give an Aquacade cabaret on the night of the party that would transform the Tavistock mansion into the Renthal mansion, might only be used for Elias’s physical therapy, if he should live. The new trainer, Jaime, who had been the trainer for Konstantin Zacharias, right up until the night Konstantin was murdered at the villa in Biarritz, would guide Elias through his laps and kicks on his paralyzed left side. In her mind, she wondered if she would ever see her beautiful indoor swimming pool with hundreds and hundreds of gardenias floating in it, with synchronized swimmers and divers of great beauty performing to music, as she and Baroness de Liagra had planned in great detail over the previous months.

I
T WAS GENERALLY AGREED AMONG THE STAFF AT
New York–Presbyterian Hospital that Mrs. Elias Renthal, or Ruby Renthal, or just plain Ruby, depending on how well you knew her, was a diligent and devoted wife during her daily hospital visits, reading the financial papers aloud to her husband, refusing to believe that he could not hear or understand her in his coma state, as the nurses kept telling her. “Of course he can hear me. Even in a coma, he wants to know the financial news. I know my Elias,” she said over and over to the nurses. “Money’s his favorite subject. That’s why he and Konstantin Zacharias were so close.”

The nurses and interns were utterly captivated by the glamour of Ruby, who dressed up for them each day and thrived on their compliments. Often she brought baskets of superb treats that Gert had made especially for them. She even promised that she would have Gert make her famous fig mousse for the staff, the way she used to make it for the late Adele Harcourt, after whom the private wing of the hospital where they all worked was named. “Tell Gert thanks,” the nurses would tell Ruby, especially Tammi Jo, who always ate three helpings and said Gert’s goodies were worth getting fat over. Word spread. For the
first time in years, the Renthals were being discussed at lunch and dinner parties.

“Elias is still in a coma, but I hear that Ruby reads him the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Financial Times
every morning,” said Addison Kent. His informant was an orderly at the Harcourt Pavilion, who had actually tasted Gert’s fig mousse when Ruby’s chauffeur, Jacques, carried it into the Harcourt Pavilion for Ruby to give to the nursing staff, the interns, and the orderlies. It was only a coincidence that Addison happened to be having what he called an affair-ette with the handsome young orderly who took Elias’s temperature each day, tested his heart-beat, and gave him enemas.

It was inevitable that the story of Ruby’s devotion would appear in Toby Tilden’s gossip column in the
New York Post
. Addison called Simon Cabot in London, and Simon called Toby Tilden in New York, and Toby Tilden called a thrilled Addison Kent, who always read Toby Tilden’s column the minute he awakened each morning. He saw the opportunity to make an important and useful alliance with Toby. Addison gave Toby bits of social information he heard at his lunch and dinner parties as the society walker for Perla Zacharias, and Toby wrote wonderful things in his column about Perla Zacharias’s great generosity. Mrs. Zacharias enjoyed having her philanthropy publicized. Addison Kent missed the perks he had enjoyed when he had been the walker for Adele Harcourt, the most revered woman in New York. With Adele now gone, that position was wide open, and Addison dedicated himself to helping Perla Zacharias ascend to it, no matter what it took. He would ride her sable coat-tails all the way to the top.

L
IL
A
LTEMUS ALWAYS GOT A LITTLE MIFFED WHEN
her stepmother, Dodo Van Degan, kept her waiting at the corner table in the back room of Swifty’s for their monthly lunch, which neither of them enjoyed. She sipped her white wine as she looked around the room to see who was there. She waved to Ormolu Webb, who was having lunch with Dexter Grenville, the nephew of Billy Grenville, who had been shot to death by his wife, Ann. Lil always reminded Dexter that his grandmother Alice Grenville had been a great friend of her mother’s and that they had had houses next to each other on Bellevue Avenue in Newport in the summers. “The Grenvilles were the real thing,” Lil often said when their name came up in conversation, after Gus Bailey wrote the book that brought the almost forgotten murder up again.

“Hellohowareyou?” Lil said to the very rich Carlotta Zenda, who was at the next banquette, in the tone of voice she used to use when she had money and had to speak to what she called the “new people.” It bothered her that people like Mrs. Zenda no longer yearned to be accepted by her. They had passed her by. Mrs. Zenda had become head of the board of the Metropolitan Opera, a position of social importance held by Lil’s mother
from the 1940s until the day she died. “It’s the beginning of the end when these new people take over positions like that in New York,” Lil had said on many occasions when referring to individuals such as Carlotta Zenda. Mrs. Zenda laughed when Lil’s line was repeated to her. “She takes the Madison Avenue bus, Perla tells me,” Mrs. Zenda replied.

“Hi, Lil. Sorry to be late,” said Dodo, sitting down after Robert pulled out the table. “Octavio tells me you’re already on your third glass of white wine. That’s how my late alcoholic mother used to start her days. How do you like my new seventy-five-thousand-dollar face-lift?”

“Dodo, for god’s sake, I hardly recognized you. You look completely different. And your hair! What in the world have you done to your hair?”

“Had it cut. Had it dyed. Had it highlighted. That’s all,” replied Dodo, who was pleased with her transformation.

“It’s awfully blond,” said Lil, looking at Dodo’s hair and frowning.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass if you don’t like it, Lil. Xavior likes it. That’s all that matters to me,” said Dodo.

“There is no need for vulgarity, Dodo,” said Lil, in a haughty voice. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I said it was awfully blond. That’s all.”

“Awfully blond is the point, Lil, according to my lover.”

“And your clothes! You used to look so dowdy, so old-maidish. I saw that suit you’re wearing at Oscar de la Renta’s fashion show and then at Bergdorf’s. Too expensive for me, of course. I was shocked at how much it cost.”

“That’s the point too. Xavior picked it out, and I can afford it,” said Dodo. “I’m a rich widow with a gay lover I simply adore and, more important, am adored by.”

“Oh, Dodo, I mean really,” said Lil, making a gesture of mock despair at the utter inappropriateness of Dodo’s affair
with a gay undertaker. “You’re not thinking of marrying this Xavior person from Grant P. Trumbull Funeral Home, are you? Don’t count on me to call that one in to Kit Jones to announce your engagement in her column.”

“Of course I’m not going to marry Xavior. I simply adore living in sin. It’s a much more permanent commitment.”

“Oh, for god’s sake, Dodo. People are still talking about you riding in the front seat of the hearse at Adele Harcourt’s funeral, and you and Xavior shouldn’t have been laughing. I was never so embarrassed in my whole life. Between you in the hearse and Elias Renthal having his stroke or heart attack or whatever it was in the men’s room of the Butterfield, you ruined poor Adele’s funeral.”

“I’ll have a gin martini straight up, three olives, Octavio,” said Dodo.

“How in the world do you know that waiter’s called Octavio?” asked Lil. “I come here every day for lunch, and I don’t know his name is Octavio.”

“You’re not paying attention, because I call him by name every time we come here. Also, Xavior had quite a crush on him before he met me,” said Dodo, hoping to make her stepdaughter apoplectic.

“Oh, look,” said Lil, her attention diverted from Octavio. “There’s Perla Zacharias joining Carlotta Zenda. Someone said the other night she was back in New York. She’s giving money in every direction, people say. All the predictable social-climbing charities. The opera. The museum, the Whitney, MoMA, you name it, she gave to it, and all the board members are having her to dinner in return. And I can barely even speak about what is happening with the Manhattan Public Library. Darling Adele must be spinning in her grave. Oh, look. Now Addison Kent is joining the ladies. It’s perfect. He’s supposed to be the one who phones in all the positive publicity about Perla to Toby Tilden, or so Ormolu tells me.”

“Xavior once had a little fling-ette with Addison Kent in the toilet of the funeral home at the time of Winkie’s death,” said Dodo. Lil hummed and shook her head and waved her arm in the air, as she always did when Dodo talked dirty to her, pretending not to hear. “He told me that Addison has given up his job in the jewelry department at Boothby’s auction house and become the permanent walker of Perla Zacharias, taking her everywhere she is asked, even to the White House, where she sat next to the secretary of state. He takes Perla’s thank-you notes to Brucie, the florist at the Rhinelander Hotel, to send with masses of orchid plants to her hostess of the night before.”

“I’m riveted,” said Lil.

“I can’t believe I’ve told you some gossip you don’t already know,” said Dodo. “Are you going to snub Mrs. Zacharias, as usual?” asked Dodo.

“No. These days Mrs. Zacharias snubs
me
. Once I moved out of the Fifth Avenue apartment, she never had the slightest interest in getting to know me anymore. Money talks. Actually money
screams
, as Dolores De Longpre used to write.”

I
N HER
relationship with Xavior, Dodo Van Degan was happy for the first time in her life. She loved to hear all the news of the town that he had heard from Jonsie at the wine shop on Madison Avenue and from Brucie, the florist at the Rhinelander Hotel. She often sat with Xavior at night in the Grant P. Trumbull Funeral Home when he was embalming a body. Afterward they would fool around a little. Just the previous night, Xavior had had his face between her legs and had said to her, “This is better than rimming.”