An Inconvenient Woman (67 page)

Flo’s Tape #29

“Lonny’s expecting me over at his little bungalow on Cahuenga, but I really want to spend my last night here in this house. God, how I love this house. What memories, including the lousy ones, but that’s what makes a house a home. I wanted to think about Jules in private, because after tomorrow, when the moving men come, everything’s going to be different for me. Sure, he had a lot of faults, but he was good to me. If I had it all to do over again, knowing what I know now, would I still have gone with Jules? I think about that a lot, and I’ve finally come to an answer. Yeah, I would.”

N
ot a single soul, except for Philip Quennell, who made the arrangements, knew that Camilla Ebury paid for the cost of Flo March’s cremation and burial in the Westwood cemetery.

Ina Rae attended every day of Lonny Edge’s three-week trial. She was distressed that he was so pale and thin and listless, but she reported to Darlene that he was as handsome as ever and always seemed pleased to see her in the courtroom. Throughout the trial, Archbishop Cooning, who was militant on morality, preached from the pulpit of Saint Vibiana’s on the tragic life of Flo March. The archbishop did not blame her alleged killer, Lonny Edge. The archbishop laid the blame directly on the late billionaire who had corrupted the young woman and led her into a life of luxury and entrapment. Poor Jules, his friends said in private. It was a good thing he was dead, so he didn’t have to hear what the archbishop had to say. He always hated to have his name in the newspapers.

It was as if Lonny Edge’s life mattered less because he had been involved in what was considered an unacceptable style of existence. He now resides in San Quentin, and will remain there, in all probability, for the rest of his life, which is not expected to be a long time. There have been rumors that he has a fatal disease. It has been reported that he looks more than twice his age and weighs but a fraction of what he weighed when he appeared in his pornographic videos, and that lesions cover his once-handsome face.

Nothing has gone right for Lonny. The lawyers for the publisher of Basil Plant’s lost manuscript of
Candles at Lunch
argued successfully in court that the manuscript had been stolen before Basil Plant’s death, and that Lonny was due no payment whatever. This was particularly distressing to Marv
Pink, the lawyer who agreed to represent him on the condition that 50 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the manuscript be turned over to him. The book will finally be published in the spring. There is great interest in it from both the book clubs and the movies.

Philip Quennell has visited Lonny in San Quentin several times. Philip is one of many who do not believe that Lonny killed Flo March, but that he merely left the door to her house open that night in order to allow unnamed people to enter and search for her tapes, believing that she would be in his apartment on Cahuenga Boulevard at the time.

“Lonny’s fingerprints were not on the murder weapon,” he said over and over to no avail. It was not a point that was stressed in the courtroom. He could never understand why so little was made of the fact that the drawers and packing cases in Flo’s house had been ransacked. Lonny Edge had lived in the house, and wouldn’t have needed to ransack anything. One of the many things Philip could not figure out was why one of the cushions of Flo March’s gray satin sofa was missing. The tapes, if they existed, and Philip Quennell believes they did exist, have never been found.

Kippie Petworth has not come to the bad end that Arnie Zwillman and the headmasters at several fashionable schools predicted he would. At least, as yet. He has become the young lover of Mrs. Reza Bulbenkian, who dotes on him completely and keeps him in very smart style in an apartment on Beekman Place in New York. Yvonne pays a publicist to keep her name in the papers, praising her parties and her clothes, and to keep Kippie’s name out. Her husband, Reza, of course, is totally unaware of the arrangement.

Kippie’s mother, Pauline Mendelson, became Lady St. Vincent, and lives at Kilmartin Abbey in Wiltshire. There is no contact between mother and son. She brought with her very few reminders of her past life, other than the vast Mendelson fortune, which was now hers, and two artworks that she did not sell. She tried to hang van Gogh’s
White Roses
in several locations of her new home, but it seemed inappropriate among the Canalettos in the drawing room, and out of place among the Raphael drawings that lined the walls of the library. The insurance company disallowed it to be hung in any of the hallways, for security reasons, or in any of the rooms
that the public was allowed to wander through on visiting days. Finally, Lord St. Vincent suggested to Pauline that she hang it on the wall of her morning room, where she attended to her correspondence, menus, and invitations each day, but she found the picture too overpowering for the small room, as her attention was constantly drawn to it for the memories it evoked of the twenty-two years it had hung over the fireplace in the library at Clouds. She did not wish to sell it, because of the attention it would cause on the international art market, and donating it to one of the many museums that had craved its possession would also have attracted the kind of media coverage that would resurrect the history of her previous marriage and the brutal death of Flo March. Finally, she had it wrapped in blankets and tied with twine. It has been placed in one of the storage rooms of the abbey, along with the great silver pieces that have not been brought out since the wedding of Lord St. Vincent’s daughter nine years ago.

The last time Philip Quennell saw Pauline St. Vincent, she was seated in the backseat of a Daimler in Beauchamp Place in London, staring straight ahead. He was sure that she saw him, but she gave no sign.

Clouds was sold to a Japanese who had lately become involved in the motion picture industry, having purchased Marty Lesky’s Colossus Pictures. Mr. Ishiguro’s plans for the beautiful house were more grandiose by far than anything the Mendelsons had ever dreamed. An indoor ice skating rink and a bowling alley were but two of the planned additions. In time Mr. Ishiguro came to feel that it would be less expensive to tear down the house and build again on the same site. The house has now been leveled, although the kennels and the greenhouses remain. Construction on the new house is expected to be completed in three years.