The Gate House (27 page)

Carolyn was not exactly following in my footsteps; I had been a Wall Street attorney and I made a lot of money. Carolyn was working for peanuts, as many trust fund children do, and she was prosecuting criminals, which sort of surprised me because she once held an idealistic view of the rights of criminal defendants. But perhaps three years in the criminal justice system had opened her eyes a bit. Maybe someday she’d be on the prosecution team in the case of
The State v. Anthony Bellarosa.
I said, “I am proud of her.”

“Do you think there’s any possibility of her joining your old firm?”

There was no possibility of
me
joining my old firm, and I didn’t think the remaining partners of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds wanted an actual Sutter to replace the dead one or the disgraced one. They’d kept the name, of course, so as not to incur the expense of changing it, and also my father was legendary on Wall Street. As for me, well . . . my fall from grace had begun with the lady who was now asking me about getting her daughter a job. Ironic. Also silly. Carolyn’s next move would not be to an old Wall Street law firm; it would be to some sort of civil liberties group, or some do-gooder firm. And that was okay; someone in this family needed to have a heart. Plus, it would piss off William. But to address Susan’s question, I said, “I will make inquiries.”

“Thank you.” The subject was employment and the law, so she asked me, “How are you doing in London?”

“Fine.”

“Can you be absent from your job until September?”

“I’m on sabbatical.”

“So you’ll return?”

My future plans seemed to interest a lot of people more than they interested me. Maybe, though, it was time to verbalize my thoughts, and to be truthful and unambiguous, so I said, “When I left London, I honestly thought I would return. But now, being here, I’ve decided to stay in the U.S. Beyond that, I have no definite plans. But I have gotten a job offer.”

She stayed silent awhile, then said, “I’m happy to hear that.” She asked, “What sort of offer?”

Rather than say, “Consigliere to the new don Bellarosa,” I said, “It’s bad luck to talk about it before it happens.”

She glanced at me, probably wondering when I became superstitious. She said, “Let me know if it happens.”

“I will.”

She advised me, “But you should take the summer off.”

Susan, like most people who are born into old money, was mostly clueless about that subject, so it never occurred to her that I might not be able to afford three months of working on my tan. I mean, if you’re a little short on cash, just sell an annuity. What’s the problem?

Also, regarding the subject of Stanhopes and money and work ethic, Edward and Carolyn received annual trust fund distributions and really didn’t need to work, but they did, to give meaning to their lives, and to do something interesting, or something useful for society.

Susan’s brother, Peter, however, was a totally useless human being, who’d spent his life and his trust fund distributions on perfecting the art of indolence, except for tennis, golf, and surfing, which at least kept his body in good shape while his brain atrophied. Peter was not a good role model for his niece and nephew, but thankfully, they knew that.

And then there was William, who’d managed to reach retirement age without working a day in his life, except for managing the family money. Well, to be fair, there
was
his two-year stint in the Coast Guard, which had been mandatory because of that annoying world war.

And let’s not forget Charlotte, who had been both a debutante and a dilettante before marrying William and becoming a full-time socialite. I suppose that could be a lot of work, but Charlotte would be hard-pressed to fill in the “state your occupation” box on an income tax form unless she wrote “Occupied with lazy household staff.”

As for Susan, she’d mostly followed in her brother’s footsteps, but then she’d embraced the newly enlightened concept of getting a job, and when I’d met her, she was working as the private social secretary for a fabulously wealthy publishing company heiress in Manhattan. This is a very acceptable job for a young lady of Susan’s social class, sort of like a lady-in-waiting for royalty.

We’d met, incidentally, at a summer wedding held under the stars at the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club. The bride was a Guest, or as I said to Susan that night, a Guest at her own wedding. That got a little chuckle out of her, and we danced. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Stanhopes, at first, accepted me because of my lineage, though they had concerns about my net worth. But in their world, it’s more about who your parents are, where you went to school, your accent, and your social skills. Money is good, but money without pedigree is too common in America, so if you’re William and Charlotte Stanhope, and you’re trying to marry off your daughter, you go for the pedigree and punt on the bucks, which was why Mr. and Mrs. Stanhope, Dad and Mom, gave us their blessings. They soon discovered, however, that they didn’t actually like me. The feeling was mutual, but it was too late; Susan and I were madly in love.

It had been a very good marriage, by any objective standard, including good sex, so if anyone had asked me what went wrong, I wouldn’t be able to answer, except to say, “She was screwing a Mafia don.” Of course, she was also a bit off her rocker, and I admit I can be a little sarcastic at times, but mostly we were happy with our lives and our children and each other.

I think, though, that Frank Bellarosa was like a malevolent force that entered Paradise, and no one was prepared for that. To continue the biblical theme, but with a different story line, Eve killed the serpent, but Adam stayed pissed off about her seduction and filed for divorce.

We walked in silence for a while, and I was sure that she, too, was thinking about the past, and I’d have liked to be able to read her mind, to see if her memories and mine had any similarities. Probably not; I was still dwelling on the negatives, and I was sure she was thinking happier thoughts.

I said to her, “Would you like to go back to the house?”

She replied, “No, I’m enjoying this walk.” She added, “Like old times, John.”

Indeed, if we could erase or forget that half year that ruined all the years before and the decade after, it would be better than old times; it would be just another summer Sunday together.

So we walked on, like old times, except we weren’t holding hands any longer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

W
e’d covered most of her ten acres, except for the treed area around her stable, and I thought she might be avoiding that. Why? Because the stable brought back memories of Mr. Bellarosa, our new neighbor, insisting that his construction company do the work of moving the old Stanhope stables and carriage house from William’s land, which was for sale, to Susan’s property. It had been truly a Herculean task, disassembling the hundred-year-old structure, brick by brick, and reassembling it near the guest cottage. Plus, we needed a variance because the stable would be close to the Alhambra estate, and Frank Bellarosa had to sign off on that, which he was happy to do for us—or for Susan. And then Bellarosa’s guy, Dominic, gave us an estimate that looked like Mr. Bellarosa was underwriting most of the cost.

I mean, did I guess that Frank had the hots for Susan? Well, yes. Was I upset? No. Did I think it was amusing? Yes. Did I think Susan Stanhope was actually going to hop into bed with a Mafia guy? Not in a million years. Should I have paid more attention to what was going on? Apparently. Am I stupid? No, but I was preoccupied with my own tax problems, and I was entirely too trusting. Not to mention entirely too egotistical to even contemplate such a thing.

And little did I suspect that my buddy, Frank Bellarosa, had instigated this potentially ruinous and possibly criminal tax evasion charge against me so that he could pull a few strings and get me off the hook, thereby putting me in his debt, instead of the IRS’s debt. It was bad enough that a tax attorney had a tax problem, but solving the problem with the help of a Mafia guy was not one of my smarter moves. On the other hand, it worked.

Well, I certainly learned a lesson or two about life, and about myself, and about seduction and survival. Not to mention relearning an old lesson about the power and the mystery of sexual behavior. I mean, who would have thought that don Bellarosa, the head of a Mafia crime family, and Susan Stanhope, from a somewhat more prominent family, would have much to talk about? Actually, they didn’t; it was more You Jane, me Tarzan.

I could see the stables now, and I asked her, “Are you still riding?”

She glanced at where I was looking and replied, “Yes, but I don’t own a horse. I ride a little at a horse farm in Old Brookville.”

I nodded, recalling the night she’d killed Frank Bellarosa. She had saddled her horse, an Arabian stallion named Zanzibar, and announced to me that she was going for a night ride, which I advised her was dangerous, but she’d pointed out that there was a full moon, and the night was bright, and she’d ridden off.

About two hours later, Mr. Felix Mancuso of the FBI rang my doorbell and politely asked me to come with him to Alhambra. I knew in my guts that Susan had murdered her lover.

Mancuso’s colleagues had been house-sitting Frank Bellarosa since he’d become a government witness, and they’d done a very nice job of keeping him safe from his former friends and goombahs. Unfortunately, the FBI did not include Mrs. Sutter on their list of people who were not allowed access to don Bellarosa. In fact, Susan was high on the short list of people who had unlimited access to Frank because they’d been instructed, “Frank needs to get laid to keep him happy and talking.” Someone, however, should have remembered that (a) the female of the species is more dangerous than the male, and (b) hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Well, guys sometimes forget that, even FBI guys, and to be fair, they probably didn’t know about (b) until they heard the shots.

Susan, walking beside me now, was apparently thinking of horses, and not Frank Bellarosa or murder, because she said to me, “There are far fewer places where one can ride now. So many of the equestrian rights-of-way have been closed off, and many of the open fields and old estates are now subdivisions.”

Such as Alhambra. I said, with forced sincerity, “That’s too bad.” I recalled that one of Susan’s concerns, after she’d shot and killed her lover, was that Zanzibar was still tethered behind Frank’s mansion. I had to promise her I’d ride him home that night, which I did. I wasn’t overly fond of her high-strung animal, but I did unsaddle him and water him, though I didn’t brush him down, and if she’d known that, she would have killed me. Well . . . poor choice of words again.

She said, “The Ganzes turned the carriage house into a garage, and they used the stables to store lawn and gardening equipment, which is what I’m doing.”

“Good idea.”

“I really miss Zanzibar. I miss having my own horse. Do you miss Yankee?”

Yankee was my horse, and I hated him only slightly less than I hated Zanzibar, but I replied, “I think about him often.”

She glanced at me, then said, “Well, I found good homes for them.”

I was glad that the horses, at least, had a good home after she left.

It was a perfect morning, weather-wise at least, and I’d forgotten how magnificent these parklike grounds were. The entire three hundred acres of the original Stanhope estate had been planted with exotic and expensive specimen trees from around the world, and many of these trees were over a hundred years old. The estate had been in decline through the past few decades, but Susan—and the Ganzes—had maintained this ten-acre parcel, and I’d noticed that Amir Nasim had been putting some care into his property as well.

Coming back here, after so many years, I was struck by the fact that there could still be so many huge estates left on the Gold Coast, barely thirty miles from Manhattan, surrounded by a suburban county of well over a million people. The pressure to develop the remaining land to provide mini-mansions for newly minted millionaires was intense, but a new breed of multimillionaires, including foreigners like Amir Nasim, and people whose fortunes were of dubious origin such as Frank Bellarosa, had arrived with the resources to buy the old estates from the old families and breathe new life into them.

Before this had happened, however, there were probably a hundred or more magnificent estates whose mansions had been abandoned because of taxes, reversals of fortune, or maintenance costs, and when I was young, these ruins dotted the landscape, giving the appearance, as Anthony Bellarosa would agree, that an army of Vandals had passed through a wide swath of the Empire. Also, when I was a boy, these huge derelict mansions were the ultimate playhouse for games of make- believe. And when I got older, I played a different sort of game, called love among the ruins—some candles, a bottle of wine, a transistor radio, a bedroll, and a newly liberated young lady on birth control pills.

This all reminded me that one of Susan’s many talents was oil paintings, and her forte was painting these abandoned mansions. She had been locally famous for her romantic representations of these vegetation-covered ruins, which she painted in the spirit, if not the style, of Piranesi’s engravings of Roman ruins. But the architectural diversity of the Gold Coast mansions, as well as their varying states of decay, ranging from salvageable to lost, allowed her more latitude than Piranesi, of course, and she worked in oils and acrylics. If that sounds like I know what I’m talking about, I don’t; I got that straight from the artist. In any case, I was curious, so I asked her, “Are you still painting?”

She smiled, then looked wistful, I thought, and replied, “Not anymore. But I might.”

“Why did you stop?”

She thought about that, then replied, “I tried painting in Hilton Head . . . I did a few seascapes, and a lot of those palmetto trees . . . but somehow I just lost the . . . talent, I guess.”

“I don’t think you can lose talent.”

“Well . . . maybe the subjects didn’t interest me. You know, like when an artist moves from where he or she was inspired to someplace else.”