Scruples (39 page)

Since Ellis had died, a year ago, Billy had evolved in several ways. When she found herself a widow and one of the world’s great heiresses, her first move had been to sell the prison citadel high in Bel Air and buy an estate in Holmby Hills, a comfortable four-minute drive from the shopping area of Beverly Hills. If she had planned during the five years in Bel Air what she would do when she was free to five however she liked, she would never have assumed that she would remain in California—but now it seemed like the only thing to do. Scruples was here, her exercise class was here, the women she lunched with were here. While Ellis was well, California was merely the place they went when he wanted to visit the winery at St. Helena; when he was sick it was where they had to live because of the suitable climate. Imperceptively, it had become the only logical place left in the world for her to call home.

As Billy, punctual to the minute, stood waiting for Spider and Valentine at the entrance of Scruples, her dashing, virile beauty had never been so potent. She was the kind of woman who only reaches her peak in her thirties, and the constant, illicit lubrication of secret sexual stimulation and satisfaction from the parade of ex-medics had given her face, particularly her voracious mouth, a voluptuous ripeness and readiness that made a complex and subtle contrast to her studied perfection of dress.

“Trouble,”
thought Spider, the minute he caught sight of her.

Billy, spotting him with Valentine at the same instant, found that she still thought with her cunt, a habit she had believed was confined to the hidden side of her life. It did not belong in her normal, daily existence and she would not permit it there—the risk was too great, too much was at stake. Her reputation, her special status, which was demonstrated by the respectful way in which the media treated her, all came from a position that put her above the crowd; her necessary safety lay in never showing a chink in her armor. These considerations had become more necessary to her every year that passed. The sight of Spider was like a punch in the gut: The impact of sheer masculinity carried without swagger or shyness, that happily sensuous aura—her practiced eye measured the insistence of his physicality and her practiced brain clamped down immediately. This was one man she could never allow herself. Too close to home. Enough of that, Billy told herself, as she advanced to greet Valentine, putting both hands on her shoulders in a gesture that was not quite a hug, yet more friendly than a handshake.

“Welcome to California,” Billy said wholeheartedly. She was delighted to see Valentine. She needed her.

“Thank you, Mrs. Ikehorn,” Valentine answered tensely. “This is Peter Elliott, my partner.”

“I’m called Spider,” he said, and bent to kiss Billy’s hand with that grace he was unaware of, that early Fred Astaire grace that is either born in the bones and the muscles or will never exist, since no training can develop it. Valentine had never seen him make this gesture to any other woman but herself.

“And I’m Billy—you too, Valentine. Everyone who moves to the Coast has a whole new set of manners to learn. Well, this is Scruples. What do you think of it?” She gestured proudly toward the exquisite building that put all its splendid neighbors to shame. Spider walked to one end of the building, turned and walked the full length of the frontage, and then returned to them. “Bad windows,” he said flatly.

“Bad! This building has already won three important architectural prizes and it’s been finished less than a year. Everyone in the art world knows about it. And you criticize the windows!” Billy was instantly outraged. “Just how would you redesign perfection?”

“I wouldn’t touch them. Only a vandal would. But the merchandise is overwhelmed by them. This is a store, after all. It’s just a small problem, Billy, once you spot what’s wrong. I’ll find a way to get around it. No sweat. Why don’t we go inside?”

Spider put one hand lightly in the small of each woman’s back and gently propelled them toward the double doors, nodding a greeting at the unknown doorman, grinning to himself. The windows really were a disaster. Thank God for small favors. A few more would be welcome.

Billy could hardly wait till they received the full impact of the interior of Scruples. It was her pride and joy. She had had it modeled exactly, meticulously, and at great expense after the inside of the House of Dior in Paris.

Spider stood stock-still inside the front doors of Scruples and looked around, sniffing the air like a hound dog. “Miss Dior,” he commented noncommittally about the perfume that pervaded the air.

“That’s not your department,” Billy snapped, still smarting from his remark about the windows. “This place is perfect, just as it is. We’re going back to the stock rooms to look over the merchandise. I want to know exactly what you think and what your plans are for a new buying policy and—”

“Billy, excuse me, but I don’t think so,” Spider interrupted. “We’ll get to the stock in good time, I promise you. Retailing isn’t just stock. Retailing is romance. Retailing is mystery.” Especially, he thought, to me. “I assume that your stock changes from month to month, so let’s take a look at the romance first. Ladies?” He led the way, not bothering to see if they were following, into the great room. Spider explored the interior of Scruples from top to bottom, including the underground parking garage, without making any comment except a vague rumble in his throat, which expressed nothing at all but sounded thoughfully judgmental, at least to his ears. Valentine’s bewilderment, scarcely contained, was so strong he could almost taste it, but he paid no attention. Billy pressed her lips together repeatedly in vexation, but she was so confident that her store was impeccably elegant in its appointments and so vastly superior to all others in the size and luxury of its fitting rooms that she wasn’t sorry to give them the full treatment.

Toward the end of the tour, Spider looked at his watch and suggested that they have lunch together and hear his comments on Scruples before they attacked the stock. Billy agreed, only because she was hungry.

“Where is the nearest place to eat?” he asked.

“We could go to the Brown Derby across Rodeo, but since it changed hands over a year ago, I haven’t liked it. There’s no reasonably decent place closer than La Bella Fontana in your hotel—we’ll go there.” The three of them made the two perilous crossings, rushing across Rodeo at its widest point, hopping over traffic islands, dodging cars making legal right-hand turns on the red light, and then dashing across Wilshire Boulevard, hurrying so that the light wouldn’t change before they reached safety. Finally they found themselves in a peaceful, curtained booth in La Bella Fontana, with its walls covered in red velvet, a fountain trickling in the center of the room, flowers everywhere, and, surrounding them, the atmosphere, artfully contrived, of an old-fashioned hideaway in Vienna or Budapest.

“This is charming, Billy,” Valentine said, looking around her, happy just to be sitting down.

“And
that’s
the second thing that’s wrong,” said Spider.

“What do you mean?” Billy asked querulously. Her feet hurt.

“Let’s suppose you were a woman who was buying lots of clothes for a trip to New York or London or a wedding or winter in Palm Springs or the Cannes Film Festival, something so important that you needed hours to pick and choose, not to mention alterations.”

“That’s not exactly a novel thing to suppose. Scruples customers do that all the time,” Billy responded tightly.

“Suppose this customer had arrived at Scruples at eleven in the morning and suppose she had spent two hours looking and trying on things and hadn’t finished yet?”

“Well?”

“Would she be hungry? Would her feet hurt? Billy, I see you’ve taken off your shoes.”

“What has that to do with retailing, Spider?” In one minute she’d tell him about her investigation of his nonexistent credentials.

“Your shoes? Nothing. Your customer’s shoes? Everything. Your customer’s empty stomach? Even more. It is the
key.”

“You’ll have to be a little more explicit. We don’t sell shoes. We’re not running a restaurant—we’re running, or trying to run, a store.”

“Not until you start running a restaurant.” Spider smiled at her benevolently. “What happens when your hungry customer’s feet begin to hurt? Her blood sugar goes down. If she continues to try on clothes she gets irritable and difficult, and she decides that nothing she sees suits her. If she stops to get dressed to go somewhere for lunch, the chances are that she’d have to be absolutely desperate to find a particular dress on that particular day in your particular store for her to come back to Scruples after lunch. If you lose her at lunchtime, she’ll try another store later. So, first we’re going to build a kitchen by shutting off part of the garage, which is much bigger than you need. Then we hire a couple of cooks, maybe only one at first, and some waiters and offer our customers lunch on the house. Nothing too fancy, Billy, just salads or open-faced sandwiches. I noticed that there’s a chaise longue in each fitting room. Our customers can sit there and eat while they get a foot massage. A good one can rejuvenate the whole body.” He quirked one eyebrow at Billy. “You probably know the best masseuses in town? I doubt you’ll need more than three of them in the beginning. Then, after lunch, well sell those ladies the whole fucking store.” He signaled the captain to bring the menus.

For a minute Billy was mesmerized. She could see it, just as Spider described it. But then she returned to herself. “Excellent idea. It solves exactly one small and nonessential problem—how to keep your customers from leaving at lunchtime. But, at the moment, I haven’t got that many customers to leave. Business is getting slower day by day. I haven’t got the right stock to show them, and no obvious gimmick like a new kitchen is going to make a difference. Are you sure you were never in the catering business, Spider?”

Spider turned to her with his most wicked grin, his cowboy-look, thought Valentine furiously, the one where she expected to see him kick a piece of shit and say, “Ah, shucks, Ma’am, it weren’t nothin’.”

“That’s for openers, Billy. I haven’t even gotten down to the God-awful, tight-assed way the store is decorated yet—and that’s a good half of your problem.” Billy stared at him in utter shock, too disbelieving to be angry yet. Spider thought then that she was going to be a pushover. “But we’ll talk about that after we’ve signed the contracts. ‘No point in giving it away,’ a gal I once knew used to say. Come on, ladies, let’s eat.”

The law firm of Strassberger, Lipkin, and Hillman took up two entire floors of one of the newly built towers of Century City, the twin glass monsters that make Beverly Hills residents shake their heads and think about earthquakes and doomsday whenever they drive past them on Santa Monica Boulevard. The firm, which enjoyed the quiet prestige of being one of the most powerful Jewish law firms in Los Angeles (where, as in many big cities, law firms like country clubs are either predominately Jewish or Gentile), had been decorated by someone who wanted, above all, to assure the firm’s clients that even if an earthquake should happen to hit while they were trapped high on the twentieth or twenty-first floor, they would perish in style, even splendor.

Valentine and Spider stepped out of the elevator into a wilderness of walnut and rosewood, of thick new rugs and thin old ones, of fresh flowers, of genuine antiques and a genuine smile on the receptionist’s face. The possession of a truly welcoming and charming receptionist is an infallible mark of any topflight business in Los Angeles. They had an appointment to sign their contracts with Billy Ikehorn’s personal lawyer, Joshua Isaiah Hillman.

Although the legal work of Ikehorn Enterprises was still carried on in New York, since Ellis’s death, Billy relied more heavily than before on her lawyer Josh Hillman. Much of his work now involved double-checking on the work done by the New York attorneys. Before Ellis died, she had just signed any necessary papers without worrying about them. In spite of the fact that Ellis could not advise her, she still felt as if she were under his protection. This essentially unreal state of affairs lasted until she became majority stockholder on inheriting Ellis’s shares in the business. Now Billy felt she should at least be thoroughly briefed before she signed her name to anything. Soon Josh Hillman found that more than half of his time was spent on Mrs. Ikehorn’s business; he employed several top attorneys within his firm just to oversee her affairs and report to him. Her legal fees became proportionately immense. No one suffered from this arrangement; even Billy’s New York lawyers approved, because Josh Hillman was an exceedingly brilliant lawyer. His advice was faultless. He protected Billy’s interests without trying to second-guess their own, far more informed, decisions.

At almost forty-two, Josh Hillman was exactly where an ex-child prodigy should be: at the top of his profession and possessed of an unlimited future.

He had grown up on Fairfax Avenue, the heart of the Jewish ghetto of Los Angeles, an only child, the son of the rabbi of a small, shabby synagogue. By the age of two-and-a-half, he could read; by fourteen-and-a-half he had been granted a full scholarship at Harvard; at eighteen-and-a-half he had been graduated summa cum laude, and at twenty-one-and-a-half he had been graduated from Harvard Law School as an editor of the
Harvard Law Review
, an editorship that is no more eagerly sought or won than that of
The New York Times
.

At this point, tradition dictated that he should go to work as a clerk for a Justice of the United States Supreme Court and start dreaming about that day in the future when, after perhaps forty years of consistently more brilliant legal work, he would take his mentor’s place.