Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence (6 page)

At breakfast I tried, as you may recall, to talk to Jake in depth about Mr. Monti, hoping the past night’s stripping and staining and polishing, etc., had co-opted him. No such luck. He was up. He was out. He didn’t wish to discuss it. So I was left on my own to channel the full force of my intellect into strategies for defeating Mr. Monti. As I showered and dressed for the 98-degree weather, I daydreamed of how convenient it would be if Mr. Monti—his arteries choked with apple pie and pâté—should happen to drop dead of a coronary. Or if Mr. Monti—off on one of his trips in his corporate jet—should happen to slam into a fog-shrouded mountain. Or if Mr. Monti . . . Oh, well. Enjoyable though I found them, these fantasies were not resolving the problem. I slipped into my sandals and telephoned Jeff.

“How about lunch today?”

“What did I do wrong now?”

“That’s between you and your conscience,” I said briskly. “See you at the Four Seasons at twelve-thirty.”

I arrived at 12:15 and settled into a private corner of the upstairs restaurant, which, with its plants and flowers and homey groupings of overstuffed couches and black wicker chairs, is my favorite place in Washington to have lunch. You can order a fresh fruit platter which almost always includes plump raspberries and blackberries, or an inventive warm salad of greens and pasta and seafood, and never gain an ounce unless you lose
control and follow it up with their deeply, evil flourless chocolate cake. Besides, there is valet parking, which is guaranteed to do wonders for my digestion.

I am always fifteen minutes early. Jeff is always fifteen minutes late. He headed for my corner with that slow and slouchy it-don’t-worry-me walk, his jacket slung nonchalantly over one shoulder. He smelled delicious as he bent down to kiss me.

After the waitress had given Jeff his Campari and orange juice and me a frosty glass of spiced iced tea, I brought him up to date on Wally’s current difficulties with Mr. Monti. I waited for him to confide in me, and when he didn’t, I added, “Wally said Mr. Monti is also leaning on you.”

Jeff put on his glasses and studied the menu for an inordinately long time.

“Do you want to say something?” I asked.

“The smoked salmon looks good.”

“I mean about Mr. Monti.”

“I know what you mean, Mom.” Jeff had reverted to his old nervous habit of running the tip of his thumb up and down, up and down, up and down the cleft in his chin. I quietly reached over and pulled his hand away.

“I remember you talked a few times about wanting to maybe do a deal with Mr. Monti. Did you? Do it, I mean?”

“Yeah. I did. In fact, we went into a high-ticket project together.”

“A high-ticket project?”

“Very
high-ticket.”

“You must be richer than I thought.”

“Creative financings Mom. There’s a lot of creative financing in this business.”

“Instead of money?”

“Yeah, well . . . Mr. Monti said we were almost relatives. He said relatives had to help each other. And trust each other.”

“So he trusted you?”

Jeff got very busy trying to balance his knife on his spoon, and his fork on his knife. Then he said, “That isn’t the problem, Mom. The problem is that I trusted
him
.”

“Jeff,” I told him, well aware that I shouldn’t, but doing it anyway, “that was a big mistake. A big mistake.”

Now of course he already knew this—better than I did—so why in God’s name did I have to point it out? Don’t belabor the obvious, I strongly believe and always urge upon my readers. But who among us, especially with our children, is able to exercise that kind of restraint?

I hoped that Jeff would somehow not notice my lapse.

He noticed.

“A big mistake, Mom? Why, thank you so much. What a helpful insight. Will there be others? I can hardly wait.”

“Honey, I am really sorry I said that.”

“You’re always sorry. And you always say it.”

“I’m sitting my wrists. I’m groveling. I’m begging on bended knee. Will you please please please please please accept my apology?”

I have to point out that apologizing is one of the things I do terrifically well. I mean, why not? As I often tell my readers, the capacity to fully and freely admit that you are wrong is a necessary (though not sufficient)
condition of healthy adulthood. And if some folks do not feel they are receiving a full apology unless it comes with groveling, begging, etc., I say give it to them.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, the waitress—a shapely brunette with long legs and short hair—took our order, brought us our, lunches, and replenished our drinks. “Is there anything else whatsoever you would like me to do for you?” she inquired huskily, directing her question to Jeff and hinting at sweets far far beyond the flourless chocolate cake.

“Not at the moment, thanks,” Jeff answered, tossing her a conspiratorial smile. “But promise that you’ll come back and ask me later.”

Jeff is so good at this lady-killer stuff that he can do it in his sleep, which—as I examined him more closely—it was clear he could desperately use. I also noticed that underneath the tan, his feline face had a slightly greenish tinge. He started rubbing his cleft again. I took his hand from his chin and gave it a pat. “lust tell me this,” I said to him. “On a scale from one to ten, exactly how much trouble are you in?”

“Eleven, Mom,” he answered and then my cocky firstborn son began to cry.

•  •  •

The last time I saw Jeff cry was in seventh grade, when he was suspended from Georgetown Day School for cheating on a chemistry exam. He swore, and I believed him, that he had only sought outside help on one of the questions. He then defended himself by observing that since the chem exam had twenty questions his dishonesty quotient was merely 5 percent.

Jeff was not an easy child to raise. A moral
corner-cutter with a fast mouth, he had many close encounters with die authorities. For all I know, he still does. He certainly still displays a devotion to hedonism that the rest of his hardworking family does not share—doing dubious deals, dancing and drinking half the night away, and wasting his substance upon glitzy, shallow women who could never be the mothers of my grandchildren. In addition (though I don’t mean to sound petty) Jeff is never on time, he never phones when he says he is going to phone, and people tell me (I won’t say who, but I’ve got my ways of knowing) that he almost never bothers to use his seat belt. I guess the good news about Jeff is that after a trip two years ago to the Sibley Emergency Room, he no longer snorts, smokes, or swallows controlled substances. That afternoon at the restaurant, he finally opened up and proceeded to inform me of the bad news.

•  •  •

Jeff told me that back in January, soon after the Monti-Kovner family dinner, he called Mr. Monti and said he would like some advice. Asking for advice, my shrewd but currently quite chastened son informed me, was the best way to ease into asking for bigger favors. Which he did.

“You’ve made some brilliant real estate moves,” Jeff said to Mr. Monti when they met and had ordered their second round of drinks. “I’m into a little real estate myself.”

“A profitable business,” said Mr. Monti. “Even in these tough times. But if, and only if, you know how to figure it.”

“That’s just it,” said Jeff. “With prices so low now, I’d like to buy some properties in the District, but the
neighborhoods I’m looking at could go either way—up or down—and frankly, sir, I
don’t
know how to figure it.”

“Help me, O Real Estate Maven,” was Jeff’s unexpressed but unmistakable plea. Mr. Joseph Monti, for his own unsavory reasons (I’ll get to them soon), chose to oblige.

“There’s a very sweet deal coming up with a block of buildings in Anacostia,” he told Jeff, who, as he listened to Mr. Monti describe it, almost fell off his bar stool with excitement.

According to Mr. Monti’s source—a person he characterized as “my own Deep Throat”—an urban revitalization project was coming up in . . . he mentioned a section of Anacostia. “Some office buildings, a Cineplex, a mini shopping mall—the works. If you owned in this location you could sell and quadruple your money in just a few months.”

“And who,” Jeff asked him breathlessly, “gets to own?”

“Could be us, kid,” Mr. Monti replied. “Sixteen buildings are up for sale, and I’ll cut you in on eight—if you can find four hundred thou for the down payments.”

Jeff gasped. “I don’t have that kind of money,” he said. “I was thinking of something smaller. A whole lot smaller.”

“Never think small,” Mr. Monti said. “Let’s examine your resources—all of them.”

At the end of the examination Mr. Monti offered to lend Jeff most of the money he needed for the down payments, with Jeff putting up as collateral the two houses he owned out in Rockville (bought, he explained
to me, after a fabulous day at the races and on which, he explained to me, he still owed plenty), his Watergate condo (bought, he explained to me, in the wake of a brilliant stock-market killing and on which, he explained to me, he still owed plenty), his brand-new Jaguar (bought, he explained to me, with the winnings from a high-stakes poker game and on which, he explained to me, he still owed plenty), and the twenty-five thousand dollars that his grandfather had left to him (but which he would not come into until he was thirty).

In the contract Mr. Monti. drew up, it said that his loan to Jeff was “payable in full upon demand.” But, he assured Jeff, “that’s just a formality, to keep my accountants happy. Listen, we’re practically relatives—you shouldn’t give the matter a second thought.”

The buildings were purchased in March. They figured to sell them in early June when the project went public. That’s also when Jeff intended to pay off the loan. But in May, Mr. Monti found out—though he neglected to notify Jeff—that the urban renewal project was dead in the water. Mr. Monti unloaded his buildings. Jeff did not.

“And then,” Jeff said to me, “you know what he did? He called in my loan. He said he wanted payment in full, immediately.”

What a surprise, I was tempted to say. I didn’t. I bit my tongue and said, “What a shame!” instead.

I completely understood why Jeff had made this high-flying deal with Mr. Monti. My boy was greedy. I also had some thoughts about why Mr. Monti had chosen to do what he’d done to Jeff.

I think he had lent Jeff the money as a way of trying to get his hooks into Wally, who was far more
independent than he liked the men in his daughters’ lives to be. By helping Jeff make money, he would be saying to Wally, “Look what I’ve done for your brother. I’ll do it for you—if you’ll submit to me.”

And when Wally didn’t submit» when Wally appeared to mock and defy him on this stupendously supercharged issue of conversion, take-no-prisoners Joseph Monti took his revenge by striking out at Jeff.

Trying to look on the bright side, I said to Jeff, “You’ve still got the Anacostia buildings. Couldn’t you fix them up—make something out of them?”

Jeff groaned. “I said I had trouble figuring out if a neighborhood’s going up or going down. Well, I’m not having any trouble trying to figure
this
neighborhood out. It’s going down. Fast.”

He groaned again. “And Mom, so am I So am I.”

•  •  •

I once got a touching letter from an “Inadequate in Islip,” who wrote:

D
EAR
B
RENDA:

When it comes to the daily disasters of life I do great like you wouldn’t believe. If my furnace conks out, if my tire goes flat, if my water, pipes freeze and burst, I am cheerful and calm and on top of things because I always can say to myself, Could be worse. My problem is that when it
is
worse, when disaster really strikes, I fall apart at the seams and am incapable of rising to the occasion. I am not pleased, for instance, with the way I behaved when my husband embezzled this money from his company, and ran away with the bookkeeper on exactly the day I had surgery for my . . .

I won’t go into the rest of the letter (which was quite poignant) or my reply (which was quite constructive). I simply want to say that although I, too, bring my can-do attitude to things like broken furnaces and flat tires, I find them harder to cope with than the big stuff. Indeed, unlike “Inadequate in Islip,” I’m at my best when disaster really strikes.

Leaning over and giving Jeff a reassuring hug, I said in a voice of absolute conviction, “Don’t worry, darling. Don’t worry. I promise that we’re going to straighten this out.”

Now all I had to figure out was how.

•

A
couple of years ago, at Nora’s annual New Year’s Day party, Philip Eastlake confided to me that he had been born an Epstein in Newark, New Jersey. He said he was telling me this because he sensed what he called a
“simpático
something” between us, a
simpático
something which, were we not married to two other people, would surely have burgeoned, he said, into something quite . . . passionate, I think he fondled my earlobe as he confided this to me, but having consumed several cups of Nora’s famous champagne punch, I was feeling far too fuzzy to be sure.

Last year Philip was at Nora’s party with a Cher-like brunette approximately his daughter’s age Unhappily, he confided to me, his marriage of thirty-seven years was through. He added that although he was finding some temporary solace between the silken thighs of his well-toned companion, he remained convinced that the seasoned consolations of September were far, far richer than those of girlish May. He then plunged his eyeballs so deeply into mine that I felt that I had been ocularly raped.

Philip, who possesses the carved beauty of Gregory Peck in his middle years and whose silver hair is so magnificently coiffed that I have often teen tempted to ask him the name of his stylist, flashed me his internationally famous TV smile, “If only . . .” he began, but at that point girlish May beckoned to him across a crowded room. He sighed, pressed his cheek against mine, and departed, his padded shoulders drooping in an eloquent gesture of reluctant adieu.