Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence (24 page)

Anyway, there was Rosalie—who had never called her daughter snookums or lovey pie, who indeed had never gone in for what she once termed “that mommy shit” of snuggles and hugs—crawling around on nay living-room rug and drowning Hubert in praise for being the “bestest doggie traveler ever.” Several minutes passed before she stopped with the kisses and coos and managed to address a “Hi, Brenda,” to me.

Hubert, thrilled to be free of the car, exuberantly explored his Washington lodgings, loping from room to room and then up the stairs, returning—as I boiled Rose some tea—with my Donna Karan panty hose in his teeth. The panty hose for which I’d paid eighteen dollars. The panty hose I had worn only once—last night. The panty hose which, when I lunged for them, were shredded into bits in a game of tug-of-war with the bestest doggie traveler, and panty-hose wrecker, ever.

Afterward, to show me that he was not a gloating victor, Hubert nosed me up against the wall, rearing up on his back legs and putting his front legs on my shoulders and moistly licking my face from forehead to chin. “He seemed a whole lot calmer at your apartment,” I
grumped to Rosalie as I tried to escape this damply dogged embrace.

“He’s telling you that he likes it here, that he’s feeling right at home,” said my sister serenely. “You should be flattered.”

Flattered was not exactly what I was.

But, as I tell my readers, once you’ve agreed to do whatever it is you’re doing, get credit for it by (as I called my column on the subject) D
OING
I
T
G
RACIOUSLY
.

My point is that once you’ve agreed to dine with your husband’s boring former college roommate, be perky and charming—give it your absolute all. And once you’ve agreed to go shop for a dress with your cheap and hard-to-please cousin, be patient and sweet-natured—give it your absolute all. And once you’ve agreed to allow your sister’s panty-hose-chomping Great Dane to move his two-hundred-plus pounds into your house, be . . .

I tried. I did. I gave it my absolute all. Which, I’m sorry to say, was nowhere near good enough for Rosalie, who kept telling me, as she bustled about her business, “If you’d spend more time with Hubert, Bren, he’d be a happier dog, and you, I can promise, would be a better person.”

•  •  •

Rosalie was a dynamo: Preparing her yard plans for Carolyn. Taking bids from carpenters. Comparing the relative merits of flagstone and slate. Discussing the outdoor lighting and the underground watering system. Checking out shrubs and plants at various nurseries. “How did you learn to do all this stuff?” I once inquired uneasily. “You don’t think I know what I’m doing?” she replied. “You figure out how we all should live, but I
can’t figure out a lousy backyard?” I dropped the subject.

Most of the time Hubert accompanied Rosalie on her rounds, but on a few occasions she left him behind, assuring me that I would find him “an angel—no bother at all” and adding, “It wouldn’t kill you if you got down on the floor and played with him.”

I had no wish to get down on the floor and play with him.

Besides, I had serious business to attend to.

During the first week of Rosalie’s stay, I kept three different appointments with three different doctors, ac quiring three prescriptions—each for twenty of the painless poison pills. All the prescriptions were written for a Mrs. Yvonne Kaiser, of Stamford, Connecticut, a dear but forgetful woman who was visiting her son and had left her gout-prevention pills at home. A friend of her son’s, whose name she couldn’t remember, had recommended this doctor, she told each one. That modest fib, and payment in cash (instead of by a revealing personal check), evoked not the slightest tremor of suspicion.

Now all I had to do was go to three different pharmacies and fill my prescriptions, and my foolproof murder weapon would be in my hands. How it would get from my hands into Mr. Joseph Monti’s belly was my next challenge.

•  •  •

Though Jake and I had declared a tacit truce for the duration of Rosalie’s visit, my mood (though I concealed it well) was not merry. Jeff was calling me every day with the latest in his impending financial disaster, explaining that by October 19, if he didn’t come up with
three hunched, thou or a miracle, he would be handing over his Jaguar, his Rockville houses, and his Watergate condo to Monti Enterprises. After which he might find himself in need of temporarily moving back home.

“You still don’t want me to mention this business to Dad?” Jeff, not—I confess—for the first time, asked me.

“Not with those lawsuits on his mind,” I replied. “Obviously, if you move back home, we’ll have to tell him why. But maybe that won’t be necessary. Maybe”—I had one more avenue to explore—“there’ll be a miracle.”

I didn’t have any miracles to offer my suffering Wally, who refused to turn to me in his hour of need, although he indeed was in need, as the slump of his shoulders, the pain in his Mel Gibson eyes, attested. As that recently overheard quarrel on the porch and subsequent snippets of phone conversation informed me, Wally and Jo were in a relationship crisis. And while I yearned to tell Wally that this speedy emergence of Josephine’s fierce sense of self might eventually augur well for their relationship, he wasn’t sitting still for any augurs. He ached, so I ached; he was cut, so I bled, as a good Jewish mother should. But my once-so-accessible son would not let me help him.

With his love life, that is. He did, however, allow me to give him a hand when he paid a home visit to one of his more intransigent socialwork cases. It seemed he’d been trying for quite a while to persuade his client, Dwayne to move out of his mother’s apartment and to sign himself into a psychiatric hospital. Dwayne, who was manic-depressive, not to mention somewhat paranoid, urgently belonged—Wally said—in a hospital. But so far he had refused, and his mother, no mental-health
triumph herself, was going to pieces watching him going to pieces.

“She can’t stop blaming herself—for his manic-depression, his paranoia, even his athlete’s foot. And she can’t,” Wally said, “stop interrupting my sessions with Dwayne to explain to me yet again why it’s all her fault.”

I had a terrific idea: I’d go with Wally and kind of sit there with Dwayne’s mother while he did some undisturbed one-on-one with Dwayne.

“No, thanks, Mom,” my son replied.

“Just this once,” I pressed. “Maybe you and Dwayne will have a breakthrough.”.

Wally reconsidered. “Well, it might be worth a try. But please,” he added, “don’t give her advice. I’ve got my own way of working with her, and I think it’s the right way to go. So make sympathetic noises, but no advice.”

We drove over to Eleventh Street, to a not-quite-middle-class block of peeling three-story houses and brick apartment buildings. The building we entered stood tall between a pungent carry-out and a laundromat.

A skinny mid-twenties man with thinning dark hair and dark darting eyes opened the door a crack, then tried to shut it, vanishing into his bedroom when his mother, in too-tight pants and a fuzzy pink sweater, invited us into her overly knickknacked apartment. Five seconds later, the introductions made, Dwayne’s mother was into nonstop mea-culpa-ing.

“So you’re Wally’s mother. So pretty. So calm. So relaxed. Yeah, relaxed—not like me. From the moment they handed me Dwayne I was tense as a tick, and they
pick up your tensions, you know, even babies do. And when he was three and he ran in the street, I lost my temper—I’m so ashamed!—and I smacked him, and I promised to come to his second-grade play, but I couldn’t because of this crisis at my office, and I’ll never forget what he said when I bought him a blue tenspeed bike for Christmas. ‘If you would have listened better,’ he said, ‘you would have remembered the color I wanted was black.’ ” She wiped away a tear from her careworn Shirley MacLaine-ish face. “You do wrong by your kids,” she said, “and they never recover.”

Wally joined Dwayne in the bedroom, while his mother, perched anxiously on the living-room couch, continued her psychological self-flagellation. “I should have read to him more and not let him watch all those violent programs on the TV, and when he was twelve I divorced his dad, which I wouldn’t have done if I’d known it would drive him crazy, and—”

“I won’t. I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.” The reedy refusal drifted through Dwayne’s bedroom door. “I won’t let my enemies lock me up in some mental hospital.”

“And who,” my shrewd Wally asked him, “are your enemies?”

“I don’t have to tell you,” Dwayne whined. “You know who you are.”

“I know I care about you. I know I’d like to help,” Wally said gently. “Can’t we—?”

His soothing words were interrupted by a high-pitched yowl. Dwayne was terminating his therapy session. “Out out out out out,” he yowled. “Out out out out out.” “Can’t we”?” Wally tried again. Apparently they couldn’t. “Out out out,” yowled Dwayne. “Out out out.–

“See you in a couple of days then.” Wally, who knew it was time to withdraw, withdrew, pausing to tell Dwayne’s mother, “Try to be patient. I think we’re making a little progress.”

“I hope and I pray that the hospital can undo the damage I’ve done,” she mournfully told him. “But how can they ever make up for that time I went to New York for the weekend, and he wanted to come but I forced him to stay with the sitter? Or that time—”

I couldn’t keep quiet another another minute. “Don’t dwell in the past,” I said. “Get out more, take an art class, train for a marathon, study French cooking, read to the blind, go join a—”

Wally pulled me away and, as we drove home, he observed, with a tad of irritation, “You can’t quit doing it, can you, Mom? You can’t lay off. You’ve always got to fix it.”

I gave him some irritation right back. “That’s your father’s complaint. But it didn’t, I’d like to remind you, used to be yours. In fact”—I warmed to my subject—“I have a few things to say about Josephine that might help you reconceptualize your relationship, plus make you feel much better.”

Wally reached for the radio and turned up the music, loud, a trick—I regret to say—he learned from Jake. “Thanks for coming this morning,” he said, “but I don’t want to talk about reconceptualizing. Jo and I have to figure that out for ourselves.”

•  •  •

Jo, who had not been around for a while, dropped by our house after lunch and instantly fell in love with Rosalie’s Hubert. Instead of cuddling with Wally, she was down on all fours carousing with the dog. I’d
forgotten what a delightful girl this Josephine is,” said Rose, beaming with, approval at the sight of the two of them rolling around on the floor. To Josephine she presented what I’m certain she believed was the ultimate compliment: “You’re got a magnificent way with dogs. I can tell that you’re a lifelong animal person.”

“Not really,” said Jo. “I never had pets because I had so many allergies. But now I don’t have allergies anymore.”

“But I thought you were scared of big dogs,” said Wally, who clearly wished he, not Hubert, were getting Jo’s hugs.

“I used to be scared of all kinds of things,” said Jo, “that I’m not so scared of anymore.”

She continued cavorting with Hubert. Wally looked hurt.

“Stay for the rest of the afternoon, and I’ll make us an early supper,” I urged Josephine, hustling on behalf of my forlorn son.

“Thanks, but I can’t,” Jo replied. “I’m meeting my mom to go to the top of the Washington Monument.”

“The top of the Washington Monument?” Wally was amazed. “But how can you do that, Jo? Heights give you nosebleeds.”

Josephine glanced at her watch. “Oh, hey,” she said, “I’ve got to leave.” She leaped to her feet and then addressed Wally’s question. “Before my therapy, heights gave me nosebleeds,” she rather coolly informed him. “But heights don’t give me nosebleeds anymore.”

Going to this therapist, I thought, as Jo made her farewells, was surely the next best thing to going to Lourdes. Even though, at the moment, her impressive improvement was breaking my baby boy’s heart.

Philip’s heart, on the other hand, appeared to be mending nicely, or so his most recent phone call seemed to indicate. “Just checking to see if you’re feeling the need to use me again as a sex object,” he had said, chuckling. This time he took my refusal with cheerful aplomb.

•  •  •

On Friday, October 9, I lunched with Edmund Standish Voight, Sunny’s zillionaire uncle, who, with his pointy chin, pointy nose, and neatly trimmed mustache, could have been a suaver David Niven. We met at the Jockey Club, where the tables that day were mostly occupied by exes—retired ambassadors, defeated senators, once–numero unos of the CIA, and other former Washington stars, all of whom had now become consultants. A consultant, as I understand it, uses the contacts and knowledge obtained before he was exed to offer his clients access and information, much of which these clients—with a couple of telephone calls—could obtain for them-selves. These clients, however, can bill
their
clients for the consulting fees, and these clients’ clients can probably bill someone else. Besides which, people seem willing to pay for consulting and consorting with a former ambassador (from a well-known country), a former senator (from a well-known state), and (any) former head of the CIA.

“Awfully nice to see you.” Edmund pumped the pudgy hand of a former (and never should have been) cabinet officer. He also greeted three ladies who lunch—in the latest Ferre, Ungaro, and Saint Laurent—each of whom (I had learned on the highest authority) had once been his mistress. After dispensing a few more hellos and ordering our meals, and after some
flattering words and some casual chat, Edmund leaned back and said, “And now I’m eager to hear why you called and suggested this meeting.”

He listened most attentively as I spoke of the noble purpose of Harmony House. He continued to listen attentively as I urged him, over our creamy seafood pastas, to purchase Jeff’s eight buildings in Anacostia and donate them to CBBF to turn into the Voight Homes for the Homeless. The amount of the check I hoped he would write was precisely the same amount that Jeff had to pay Mr. Monti a week from next Monday. That $300,000, I noted to Edmund, was a mere three-fourths of the original down payment.