The Ghost and the Dead Deb Page 2

  There’d been no need for me to answer. My seventy-three-year-old aunt Sadie, and my partner in Buy the Book, had been locked and loaded.

  “The subject of Ms. Stark’s new book is true crime,” Sadie had sharply informed Brainert as she polished the glasses that dangled on a chain around her neck. “It’s all about the Bethany Banks murder. Angel Stark was there, and apparently knew the victim quite well. I hear the book is a real tell-all. So why don’t you listen to my niece—and lighten up already on Ms. Stark.”

  (What Sadie actually said was Miz Stahk. The “Roe Dyelin” accent can vary from light to heavy as you travel our state—the tiniest in the Union—but it’s murder to write out phonetically. To wit: Car, pasta, letter, and chowder would look more like cah, pahster, letta, and chowda. So, you’ll forgive my going with the conventional spellings here.)

  “Hmm,” Brainert had replied to Sadie, clearly intrigued in spite of himself. “I concede you have a cogent point.”

  An understatement if ever there was one since the Bethany Banks murder and subsequent investigation were the biggest scandals to rock the Newport jet set since Klaus von Bülow was accused of injecting his obscenely rich wife with enough insulin to send her into a coma until the twenty-second century. And when I’d heard that some of the chic book emporiums in Providence and Newport had refused to consider an author appearance by Angel, I’d immediately issued an invitation for her to come to Quindicott. Miracle of miracles, Angel—or her publicist, at least—had accepted our invitation, and here she stood in our packed Community Events room.

  I would have turned my attention back to Angel’s reading just then, but my thoughts were suddenly interrupted by another voice. The one in my head—

  In my day, dames with money from well-heeled families hired me to help them duck scandal on the QT. The last thing they’d ever do was write a book about it and tart it up in front of a ham-handed audience for applause.

  The booming, masculine voice was either Jack Shepard—the ghost of a private detective who’d been haunting Buy the Book since his murder here more than fifty years ago—or a delusion of what would have to be my half-demented mind.

  Which was true?

  Take your pick.

  “It’s a different world than the forties, Jack,” I silently replied, not a little annoyed that the ghost—who, so far as I knew, only I could hear—broke our agreement that he’d stay silent on evenings of important author appearances.

  I liked my world better, Jack shot back. The uptown crowd kept their trashy messes in the back alley, not on their bookshelves.

  “Shhh!” my thoughts insisted. “I want to listen to Ms. Stark’s reading.”

  “Bethany was our radiant star,” Angel continued from the podium, “and like moths to a flame we circled her, even though at times our wings got burned.”

  Brainert tsk-tsked again.

  I glanced his way.

  “Moths to flame?” he whispered. “Forget the Banks girl, these cliché’s are killing me.”

  I shushed him, too.

  “In medieval times, songs would be sung about a young maid’s beauty, her wisdom, her virtue. Bethany, like all my other pretty friends, lacked an intellect, an original mind, but no matter. Of her beauty much was written—in the gossip columns and fashion magazines, the Internet fan sites and fawning letters—for Bethany had beauty enough to be envied by all, not to mention a PR flack with a fat Rolodex. Her line of handbags, created by a ghost designer, was sweeping the world. Her face was used to sell magazines. ‘Bethany,’ the new fragrance by an exclusive cosmetics company, was just hitting the market.

  “In a life so short, Bethany Banks had possessed it all. But a perfect face, a perfect figure, perfect teeth, a perfect trust fund, and a perfect life were at least one perfect too many for someone. Clearly, that someone had decided that the only experience Bethany lacked was to be brutalized.”

  Listen, babe, I’m getting the drift—there’s a big chill unsolved here.

  “Yes,” I said. “This is a type of book we call in the book business ‘true crime.’ Most books of this type recount the murder, the apprehension, and the trial. This one covers the crime, but it’s still unsolved. And the author was a friend of the murdered girl.”

  So, the author’s got the inside scoop?

  “Yes.”

  Then who are her suspects?

  “She hasn’t gotten around to naming them yet.”

  Well, she better get to it soon, ’cause all this overblown yammering is putting me to sleep.

  “Jack, if you don’t settle down, neither of us is going to hear a thing!”

  Take it easy, doll. Don’t get your panties in a twist.

  I could feel the heat on my face and just knew my pale complexion was reddening. “I wish you wouldn’t use that phrase, Jack.”

  His response was a deep laugh—and a whisper of cold air to cool off my flaming cheeks.

  “Bethany wore a spotless white gown the night of the New Year’s Ball, the night of her murder—a radiant white so pure she appeared ghostly under the heavenly gleam of the chandeliers. When she floated down the stairs, all eyes followed. Then she paused to girlishly wave her gloved hand at us, her closest circle of friends, a group that, incredibly, held a person capable of murdering Bethany before the clock struck twelve midnight. Of course, at that dazzling moment of arrival under the thousand-bulb chandeliers, our princess was not dead. Not yet.

  “All Newport balls are resplendent, and this one was no exception. The Gilded Age mansion gleamed in polished marble and gilt-edged moldings. The army of waiters in white-jacket uniforms carried brimming silver trays. The bejeweled women and turned-out men were there, obeying the black-tie command printed in gold ink on the crisp parchment invitations. And, as usual, everyone appeared captivated by Bethany’s angelic beauty. But let’s be frank, since we’re telling the truth here. Not even Ms. Banks’s fiancé would describe her character as angelic, not with a straight face—for God knows, there wasn’t much virtue left inside that perfect shell. No, by this time, Bethany Banks had filled her mortal vessel with almost every vice imaginable . . .”

  Back to the trashy mess again, Jack complained. Is she ever gonna get to the suspects?

  “You’re trying my patience, Jack,” I silently scolded.

  “Still,” Angel continued, “Bethany had a way of diminishing the rest of us, of banishing us to bit parts, walk-ons—shadow players in our own lives. Here stood I, a literary light with a best-selling book and film adaptation on my resume, yet the fire that was Bethany Banks shone so much brighter.

  “For Georgette LaPomeret—pathetic, eager to please, eating-disordered Georgie-girl—it was her absurd dream that her grotesque couture would become a runway sensation.”

  Okay, finally, the first suspect.

  “Beyond her sad illusion of fashion immortality, Georgie lived for two things—the pharmaceutical fortune she would one day inherit, and copious amounts of a snowy powder distilled not in her family’s New Jersey factory, but South of the Border down Cartegena way. That habit—like all bad habits—was actively encouraged and enabled by Bethany Banks. Then there’s Henry ‘Call me, Hal’ McConnell, who lived for love, not that he ever got any . . .”

  Second suspect.

  “Hal was the sweet, clueless man-boy who had pined since elementary school for the girl next door Bethany Banks, the beauty he could never touch. The irony here was that ‘hands-off Hal’ Bethany had done more than touched so many others. . . . Katherine Langdon used the breezy, approachable nickname ‘Kiki’ as a façade to disguise her cold-as-ice interior.”

  Number three.

  “In a world of old money and old reputations, Kiki put the stiff in ‘stiff upper lip.’ With the calculated strategy worthy of Mary, Queen of Scots, or Catherine the Great, she became Newport’s Princess of Wales, another lady in waiting who would only have to wait a little longer.

  “And last but not least, there was the uncrowned king of our littl
e fiefdom: Donald Easterbrook, Jr.—‘Le Donald.’ The Prince who escorted the Princess to the ball, only to discover that his lady-in-waiting had not waited for him.”

  That makes four.

  “Of course, Donald shouldn’t have been too surprised. On that particular night, at that particular ball, Bethany Banks was not waiting for anyone. In fact, the Princess was fleeing her assembled subjects without leaving so much as a glass slipper behind.

  “It was midnight when Bethany Banks hurried out of the main ballroom and down the back stairs. Reality was stalking our heroine, you see. Adolescent no more, her debutante days behind her, Bethany was fast approaching the one true thing that none of us could deny or avoid. Soon Bethany would relinquish her belle-of-the-ball status to her little sister, her sorority presidency to an underclassman, her key to the ‘special rooms’ at Manhattan and Hampton nightspots. Adulthood loomed, and real life was closing in.

  “Now, the girls I know do not like real life. Anything close to reality sends them packing for underground shelters. As I’ve often been quoted, my saying still applies: ‘Why be neurotic when you can be numb?’

  “Bethany Banks ducked underground often—‘slumming’ in the Depression-era parlance of her Chief Justice grandfather. Like a Roman noblewoman cavorting with gladiators, on the last night of her life, Bethany Banks descended dark and narrow stairs to a dank hole in the wall, a workspace occupied by the peons who served her drinks and prepared her foods and tended her gardens and, as it turned out, fed her addictions to sex, to drugs, to popularity.

  “You see, Bethany Banks led a secret life. For her, low life and high life were interchangeable. She slummed with the best of us, too often (as we have seen) behaving like the worst of us. And the next morning she woke up, combed out her hair, pulled her clothes over her head, and went back home to Ma and Pa’s mansion to sleep it off. Seemingly untouched by the orgy of self-indulgence, and incapable of an orgy of self-recrimination, Bethany moved between the worlds with an impunity others were not lucky enough to possess. Bethany used drugs, but never became a slave to them—rather, she used the power of illegal drugs to enslave others.

  “Bethany swam in a sea of available young men, taking on lovers and dropping them as quickly and easily as last year’s fashion, and came away unscarred by abortion and unpolluted by STDs.”

  STDs? Jack queried in my head.

  “Sexually transmitted diseases,” I silently informed him.

  Ah . . . Neat little abbreviation. In my day, the lingo wasn’t quite so pretty.

  “What was it?”

  Jack whispered it in my head, and my face flamed again. Suffice it to say, I’m too much of a prude to repeat it.

  “After so many successful escapes, evasions, and near misses, Bethany must have felt herself immortal. How could she know that on this night, the precious, privileged, pampered Princess of Newport would face the consequences of her actions? How could our Duchess of Malfi know that one of the princes in her life—perhaps the very prince she came to meet in secret rendezvous—had shed his human guise and become a werewolf?

  “Perhaps the realization came after her gown had been hiked up, her panties removed—at the moment the leather belt wrapped around the tender marble-white of her throat and squeezed the life out of her.

  “Did Bethany know the hands that murdered her? Did she understand who she had wronged, and why the end had come? Or did she laugh as if it were a prank, until the leather noose tightened and silenced her laughter forever?

  “What were Bethany’s final thoughts as her lips turned blue, then purple? Before her green-flecked eyes grew dim, who did Bethany see? When her tongue turned almost as black as her sins, did Bethany know—did she really understand—why it was that she had to die?”

  And that makes five, said Jack.

  “Five?” I whispered in my head. “Who’s the fifth?”

  Who do you think, doll? Angel Stark herself.

  The slender young woman at the podium employed a lengthy pause, then loudly and emphatically closed her book, signaling to the audience that she had finished her reading.

  CHAPTER 2

  Dying for Applause

  While von Bülow saved himself for an exclusive interview

  with Barbara Walters, his mistress did a saturation

  booking on the television shows . . . and told

  friends she was writing a miniseries based on the trial.

  Von Bülow made plans with his publisher for his autobiography

  and, according to one friend, made arrangements

  for a face-lift.

  —Dominick Dunne, Fatal Charms and Other Tales of Today

  MY AUDIENCES AT Buy the Book could always be counted on to provide genial applause. But the intense emotions stirred by Angel Stark’s true tale of murder among the yachting class released a tide of screaming cheers and zealous hand-clapping I hadn’t heard outside of a rock concert.

  I have to admit, the noise level startled me, and I resisted the urge to slap my hands over my ears. After all, I thought to myself, how would it look?

  Who the hell cares? This racket’s giving me a headache. And I haven’t had a head for fifty years.

  Pointedly ignoring the ghost, I put my hands together in a polite show of unity with my enthusiastic patrons.

  Author Angel Stark blinked her animated brown eyes, then tossed her long copper hair behind her shoulders. Her full lips tipped slightly and she cocked her head in poised acceptance of the ovation. The din continued, loud enough it seemed to blow the elfin wisp of a girl off the small portable stage.

  I turned to Brainert. He was applauding, but only mildly.

  “Well,” I fished, “her delivery was certainly dramatic, don’t you think?”

  “Dramatic?” Brainert replied. “Try indulgent.”

  “At least you can admit that Angel Stark knows how to play to a crowd,” I argued.

  Brainert frowned and shook his head. “Showmanship does not an author make.”

  “On the contrary,” interrupted Fiona Finch, sitting directly behind us. “An author knows how to tell a story. And her story is quite fascinating.”

  As the applause died, I could hear the metal chain on Fiona’s large falcon-and-falconer brooch clink as she leaned forward to speak in my ear. Fiona herself was a small, brown-haired, wrenlike person whose most memorable characteristic, besides her compulsion for eavesdropping, was her colorful collection of bird pins—hundreds of them were in her possession, and she was forever on the yard sale hunt for more.

  “A wonderful choice for your author event,” she gushed with a sincere smile as she patted me on the back of my cream-colored linen pantsuit. (I usually dressed more casually for work, especially on a warm summer day like this one, but this was a major author event, so I thought looking the part of a co-owner appropriate.)

  “A very interesting reading,” Fiona complimented.

  Brainert snorted.

  Fiona was also Buy the Book’s number-one purchaser of true crime books, so this event was right up her proverbial dark alley.

  “Too many books about crime and criminals are written by journalists or police investigators,” Fiona continued. “It’s refreshing to have an eyewitness and friend of the victim write a book—much more intense and immediate. The excerpt she read was . . . fascinating.”

  Brainert rolled his eyes and mumbled something about “book review adjectives.”

  “Really, Fiona. Any good thespian should be able to read the phone book and make it sound fascinating,” Brainert said. “And Ms. Stark certainly is a capable show-man, as I graciously conceded. As for the quality of her prose . . .”

  Brainert raised one brown eyebrow above his straight brown bangs and shook his head in the perfect expression of an underwhelmed English professor. As the applause finally died completely, Brainert leaned toward me. “Shouldn’t you get up there and introduce the question-and-answer session?”

  “No, the author’s instructions were quite
specific,” I whispered. “Angel’s publicist is handling everything beyond my introduction and a nice send-off at the end of the event. So I get to sit this one out and enjoy the show.”

  “What is there to enjoy?” huffed Brainert.

  Even as he spoke, an elegant, thirtyish Asian woman, wearing a tailored, pinstripe suit with a surprisingly high hemline, approached the podium, clapping like the others and beaming a big smile to her client. This was Dana Wu, Angel Stark’s publicist.

  Angel took a step backward as Dana stepped before the microphone.

  “Ms. Stark has graciously agreed to answer as many questions about her new book, All My Pretty Friends, as she has time for . . . so I give you Angel Stark.”

  When Dana stepped back and Angel moved forward again, I relinquished my seat to one of the many standing-room-only audience members and moved through the thick crowd to the back of the events space. The book signing would begin soon, and I wanted to make sure our copies of All My Pretty Friends were on the floor because it looked to be a sellout crowd.

  On my way to the exit, I surveyed the audience. I was disappointed that one of our most loyal customers, Bud Napp, owner of the town’s hardware and plumbing supply store, whose favorite sleuth, surprisingly enough, was Miss Marple (whom Sadie said he’d discovered while trying to get his mind off his wife’s fatal cancer a few years ago), hadn’t made the reading, although I noticed that his handsome nephew, Johnny, was seated in the back wearing his typical outfit of baggy jeans and black T-shirt.

  I’d only met Johnny once or twice, and he seemed like a nice young man—quiet and very intense with a muscular build and the kind of dark good looks that could have cast him in a Rat Pack movie—big brown eyes and a dimpled chin. I doubted that Bud’s nephew was here for Angel Stark—more likely he came to meet our clerk, Mina, for an after-work date.