McNally's Dare (16 page)

“No doubt,” I said. “But you have to admire him, Denny. He’s gutsy.” I was thinking of the way Talbot had handled Mr. Rodgers at the funeral, carefully skirting an awkward moment.

“Whatever you do,” Denny warned, “don’t blow my cover.”

“Not to worry. I won’t lay down all our cards. Not yet, anyway. But I did arrange for you to meet with Lance. You’re going to get a call from Mrs. MacNiff to invite you to a pool party at the scene of the crime.”

“Sounds ghoulish,” Denny said.

“Perhaps, but I arranged it. Lance will be there and I insisted you come, too. If Jeff dropped your name as a threat, I want to see how Lance acts in your presence, I told the MacNiffs you were interested in doing a story on his charity.” Lies fall from my lips like honey sifting through the comb.

“Talbot hardly noticed me at the MacNiffs’ the other afternoon,” Denny recalled. “Do you think his lady friend will be there?”

“Holga? I’m sure she will. What did Lolly have to report on her?”

“She’s a baroness who’s seventy—at least. The Baron is a vampire who’s a thousand—at least. He operates a rejuvenation clinic high in the Alps where he injects his followers with—well, I don’t want to spoil your lunch.”

Unbeknownst to either of us my lunch was already jeopardized when a young lady entered the club and followed Priscilla to a corner table in the bar. It was the strange girl I had seen in church. As soon as she was seated, I beckoned to Priscilla. “Who is that?” I whispered.

“Binky’s fiancé,” Priscilla announced with glee. “She has carte blanche on his account. Don’t you love it?”

Before the shock wore off, Denny turned to look at the subject of our conversation and said, “She was at the funeral. After Lolly showed me your car he spotted her coming out of the church and went rushing off to talk to her.”

Priscilla caught me as I slid off my bar stool.

T
HE LEOPARD LOUNGE IS
a popular oasis for cocktails after sunset and a nightcap before sunrise. In season the bar is particularly crowded and boisterous with tourists showing off their newly acquired tans and joyfully exchanging the exciting news of blizzards and cold fronts pummeling the northeast. Their drinks come in tall, chilled glasses filled with a variety of fruit tidbits and often topped with miniature parasols.

The Palm Beachites labor to look bored and pray the tourists’ chatter doesn’t tempt the gods to blow a little of that cold front our way. It has been known to happen. Their drinks, except for the occasional olive or pearl onion, are unadorned.

Going to the Leopard Lounge affords me a chance to wear khakis with a safari jacket I purchased from Abercrombie & Fitch in the days I spent more time browsing around New York than frequenting lecture halls in New Haven. But that, like the heyday of Abercrombie & Fitch, is a thing of the past.

I was happy to see that Lance Talbot had secured a table far from the madding crowd where we could hear ourselves talk and enjoy our libations, of which I was in desperate need. It had been, as you may have guessed, one hell of a day. One would imagine that starting with a funeral, things could only get better, right? Wrong!

After learning that Binky’s squeeze (what a loathsome idiom!) was the mystery woman I had seen in church, I was told that she was pursued by none other than Lolly Spindrift. Is it any wonder my brain short-circuited? It will be rumored that Archy McNally fainted at the Pelican bar while talking to Dennis Darling. This will lead to speculation that Darling had just treated McNally to the more salient paragraphs of
The Palm Beach Story
exposé. Finally, the news will reach Ursi before I reach home.

Nonsense. I didn’t faint. I simply took a
turn,
as they say, and teetered off my stool and into the arms of Priscilla Pettibone. I can think of less harmonious places to teeter into. I rallied in time to stop her from shoving a vial of smelling salts under my nose, which Mr. Pettibone had produced from his cache of restorative aids beneath the bar. The incident was over in a matter of minutes, drawing a minimum of attention from the lunch crowd. Ms. Duhane, I noticed, was busy scribbling away in a notebook she had produced from her handbag.

I wasn’t about to tell Denny, and especially not Priscilla, that Ms. Duhane was recording the occurrence for inclusion in the next chapter of
The Adventures of Skip McGuire,
and that I was Skip’s archetype. At times like this I longed to be in a monastery, sporting a hair shirt and reclining peacefully on a bed of nails.

Lunch was served and it helped to keep my mind off the scribe but I think Denny surmised the connection between my
turn
and Isadora Duhane’s appearance. No fool Dennis Darling. Ms. Duhane was having herself a hot lunch, with wine, on Binky’s account. What cheek. Binky’s account was, as always, in arrears, and I had generously advanced him a few quid to tide him over and keep him from the embarrassing position of being
non grata
at the Pelican until his anemic exchequer showed signs of recovery, which would be never. Steady employment at McNally & Son and a profusion of credit cards had enabled Binky to keep up with the Joneses, all merrily skipping along the yellow brick road to bankruptcy.

Now, it seems, I was feeding Ms. Duhane. If the writing team of Watrous and Duhane intended to reimburse me with the advance from their first tome, I would see the money when Alejandro Gomez y Zapata invades Cuba. And why did Lolly Spindrift accost Isadora Duhane? All in all, it was a most disconcerting repast.

Then, a funny thing happened between lunch at the Pelican and cocktails at the Chesterfield. Namely, a fax from Switzerland that awaited me in my office, to wit:

Dear Mr. McNally:

Herr Hermann is in Berlin attending to business. He returns when I am not sure. I will to him convey your request when next I see him here. He is sure to respond most soon. Thank you.

Greta Gottenburg,

Secretary to Herr Gregory Hermann

Translation? The fickle finger of fate had entered the fray and denied me the information I needed from the Swiss lawyer before my meeting with Lance Talbot. Here begins the all too familiar if-only mantra. If only Herr Hermann had not gone to Berlin on business. If only I had delayed seeing Lance Talbot until I had talked to Hermann. If only hindsight were foresight—and all that jazz.

Unable to resist, I called Lolly Spindrift at his office and, surprisingly, got him. “I’m just putting together my copy on Jeff Rodgers’s funeral for tomorrow’s edition. I haven’t seen so many names in the same place at the same time since Lady Cynthia’s reception for Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

Lolly does obits for extra moola, also weddings and bar mitzvahs.

“As I recall, Lol, the bonnie prince was a no-show.”

“Yes. How sad. He was up all night nursing his polo pony.”

“Really? I heard he declined her invitation.”

“No?” Lolly gushed. “Where did you ever hear that?”

“I read it in your column.”

Lolly does not like to be reminded of his more base literary offerings, so the faux royal affair was forgotten but not the fact that I had rung him up. “Did you call to make trouble, Archy, or to beg me for a date?”

I called to learn what he knew about Isadora Duhane, but with Lolly it’s always best to put him on the defensive before asking a favor, otherwise he’ll try to extract payment for his trouble. “I was surprised to see you rubbing shoulders with the Philistine in our midst. You know, the guy you nominated as the most worthy recipient of the PBCS.”

It took Lolly about ten seconds to think of a rebuttal. “You mean Dennis Darling? Oh, I’ve had a change of heart. After all, he is a colleague and I thought it in the best interest of the community to open up to him instead of having him ferret out misinformation from malcontents who are only too ready to feed us to the lions. Dennis is really a dear man. So giving, if you know what I mean.”

I knew, all right. Dinner and drinks at Cafe L’Europe. “If he has your blessing, Lol, we’ll roll out the red carpet for Mr. Darling. The one Lady Cynthia purchased for the prince.”

“Shame on you,” he tittered. “Now, about that date. I’m free for cocktails and dinner, after which we can jump aboard Meecham’s floating circus and mix with the bad and the beautiful. You game, Archy?”

“Sorry, but I’m booked this evening, Lol. Can I have a rain check?” It’s always best to humor Lol, but to my everlasting ignominy I admit to having had some interesting evenings on Meecham’s yacht.

“Don’t be morose, Archy. It never rains in Palm Beach.”

“Tell that to Dennis Darling. Now I must go—oh, I almost forgot. There was a young lady in church this morning wearing a kerchief and raincoat...”

“Isadora Duhane,” he shouted, almost rupturing my ear drum. “I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw her coming out of church. I didn’t get much out of her, but...”

“Whoa,” I cut in. Lolly sounded as if he had accidentally encountered the missing link coming out of a church in Palm Beach. “Who in blazes is Isadora Duhane?”

“Who is Isadora Duhane? Her mother is a Kalamazoo Battle, that’s who.”

I found myself reaching for the bottom drawer of my desk, but as Lolly expounded on the history of the Battle family I feared I needed more than a nicotine fix to survive the ordeal.

The first Battle was a forty-niner who struck a vein that made Fort Knox look like a piggy bank. Hankering to become a gentleman rancher, he used a portion of his loot to buy a rather large hunk of Texas. While his son ran the ranch, daddy went off to the Klondike, where he struck a vein that made the California mine look like a piggy bank.

“His name,” Lolly said, “was Ezra M. Battle. It was rumored the M stood for Midas.”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Ezra’s grandson, weary of dehorning cattle, got a team of wildcatters to see if there was anything interesting under the sod and, as the Midas touch would have it, the ranch was soon pumping a million gallons of black gold a day with no end in sight.

The family grew and spread, until they could be found in cities from coast to coast, running giant holding companies that were the invisible owners of businesses as diverse as department stores and oil tankers.

“Isadora’s mother married a Duhane of Kalamazoo and resides there when not cruising on one of the Battle liners. Isadora attended Rosemary Hall, which is the distaff side of Choate and...”

And on and on. The nitty-gritty being that Binky Watrous, who owed me three hundred bucks, was cohabitating and collaborating with a zillionaire, and I wanted my money back.

“They call Isadora Izzy,” Lolly was saying as if he were on intimate terms, with the woman. If Lolly knew who held that position he would be writing his own obit for tomorrow’s edition.

“Izzy is the family black sheep, you might say. She’s always running off to weird places like Timbuktu and Bora-Bora,” Lolly raced along, hardly pausing to breathe. “As if Kalamazoo wasn’t weird enough for her. And she’s into projects. Women’s lib, conservation, archaeology, criminology, zoology, the list is endless. There was a rumor that she was in these parts but I didn’t believe it until I saw her myself this morning, and coming out of church, of all places. Any idea what she was doing at the funeral service, Archy?”

“Writing a book,” I answered.

“Oh, Archy. Be serious. I would be on every A-list if I had Isadora Duhane on my arm. She gave me the brush-off this morning but that won’t stop me. She’s the hottest thing to hit this town in years and I want an exclusive. I might even hire you to find out where she’s staying.”

“Try the Palm Court trailer park,” I told him.

“That’s not even funny, Archy.”

Like I always say, if you don’t want people to believe you, tell the truth and your secret is safe.

“Now I must fly,” Lolly gasped as if he just saw his train leaving the depot. “Babe Evans is giving a tea party to show off the abstract oils she purchased in Florence last summer.”

“I didn’t know that crowd was into art,” I said.

“They’re not,” he prattled. “Babe also brought back the artist. It was a package deal, I’m told. Everyone says he’s absolutely delicious.”

If he thought I was going to fall for that one, he was barking up the wrong pant leg. “Arrivederci, Lolly.”

My English Oval kept me from banging my head against the wall. The signs were not auspicious. In the good old days I could sacrifice a bull to allay the gods. Right now all I wanted to sacrifice was Binky Watrous and his solid-gold squeeze. If Isadora Duhane was all Lolly claimed she was—and when it came to delineating the rich and famous, Lolly Spindrift was a walking
Who’s Who
—I was in deep doo-doo.

I had thought that Binky went to the disposal dump and fell into a pot of jam. I now knew he went to the disposal dump and fell into an American dynasty. If a publishing company, or two, was among the Battle family holdings,
Skip McGuire
would be published and this discreet inquirer would be as discreet as Old Glory on the fourth of July. My clients would not be amused to find themselves the thinly disguised characters in a
roman à clef,
to say nothing of Father dearest.

While Binky cruised the seven seas on a Battle liner, Archy would be delivering the mail at McNally & Son. To keep the quo status, the dynamic duo of crime fiction had to perish before they published.

Georgy called to invite me to dinner. She promised to remember to put the can of mushroom soup in the tuna ’n’ noodle casserole. I told her that tunas were an endangered species and mushrooms were a fungus. “I have a business meeting at seven and can be at the Pelican on or before nine. Meet me at the bar and I’ll buy you dinner.”

“Nine is late for a working girl, Archy,” she protested.

“Trust me. I’ll have you in bed before midnight.”

“If that means what I think it means...”

“Georgy girl,” I pleaded, “it’s just a figure of speech.”

“So is buzz off, buster.”

“Nineish at the Pelican?”

“What’s on the menu?”

“Tuna ’n’ noodle casserole with real frozen crescent rolls,” I told her.

My wry humor not withstanding, she exploded, “And you know where you can go, Archy McNally.”