The Ghost and the Dead Deb (3 page)

“Of course, Donald shouldn’t have been too surprised. On that particular night, at that particular ball, Bethany Banks was not waiting for anyone. In fact, the Princess was fleeing her assembled subjects without leaving so much as a glass slipper behind.

“It was midnight when Bethany Banks hurried out of the main ballroom and down the back stairs. Reality was stalking our heroine, you see. Adolescent no more, her debutante days behind her, Bethany was fast approaching the one true thing that none of us could deny or avoid. Soon Bethany would relinquish her belle-of-the-ball status to her little sister, her sorority presidency to an underclassman, her key to the ‘special rooms’ at Manhattan and Hampton nightspots. Adulthood loomed, and real life was closing in.

“Now, the girls I know do not like real life. Anything close to reality sends them packing for underground shelters. As I’ve often been quoted, my saying still applies: ‘Why be neurotic when you can be numb?’

“Bethany Banks ducked underground often—‘slumming’ in the Depression-era parlance of her Chief Justice grandfather. Like a Roman noblewoman cavorting with gladiators, on the last night of her life, Bethany Banks descended dark and narrow stairs to a dank hole in the wall, a workspace occupied by the peons who served her drinks and prepared her foods and tended her gardens and, as it turned out, fed her addictions to sex, to drugs, to popularity.

“You see, Bethany Banks led a secret life. For her, low life and high life were interchangeable. She slummed with the best of us, too often (as we have seen) behaving like the worst of us. And the next morning she woke up, combed out her hair, pulled her clothes over her head, and went back home to Ma and Pa’s mansion to sleep it off. Seemingly untouched by the orgy of self-indulgence, and incapable of an orgy of self-recrimination, Bethany moved between the worlds with an impunity others were not lucky enough to possess. Bethany used drugs, but never became a slave to them—rather, she used the power of illegal drugs to enslave others.

“Bethany swam in a sea of available young men, taking on lovers and dropping them as quickly and easily as last year’s fashion, and came away unscarred by abortion and unpolluted by STDs.”

STDs?
Jack queried in my head.

“Sexually transmitted diseases,” I silently informed him.

“What was it?”

Jack whispered it in my head, and my face flamed again. Suffice it to say, I’m too much of a prude to repeat it.

“After so many successful escapes, evasions, and near misses, Bethany must have felt herself immortal. How could she know that on this night, the precious, privileged, pampered Princess of Newport would face the consequences of her actions? How could our Duchess of Malfi know that one of the princes in her life—perhaps the very prince she came to meet in secret rendezvous—had shed his human guise and become a werewolf?

“Perhaps the realization came after her gown had been hiked up, her panties removed—at the moment the leather belt wrapped around the tender marble-white of her throat and squeezed the life out of her.

“Did Bethany know the hands that murdered her? Did she understand who she had wronged, and why the end had come? Or did she laugh as if it were a prank, until the leather noose tightened and silenced her laughter forever?

“What were Bethany’s final thoughts as her lips turned blue, then purple? Before her green-flecked eyes grew dim, who did Bethany see? When her tongue turned almost as black as her sins, did Bethany know—did she really understand—why it was that she had to die?”

And that makes five,
said Jack.

“Five?” I whispered in my head. “Who’s the fifth?”

The slender young woman at the podium employed a lengthy pause, then loudly and emphatically closed her book, signaling to the audience that she had finished her reading.

While von Bülow saved himself for an exclusive interview
with Barbara Walters, his mistress did a saturation
booking on the television shows . . . and told
friends she was writing a miniseries based on the trial.
Von Bülow made plans with his publisher for his autobiography
and, according to one friend, made arrangements
for a face-lift.

—Dominick Dunne,
Fatal Charms and Other Tales of Today

 

 

 

MY AUDIENCES AT Buy the Book could always be counted on to provide genial applause. But the intense emotions stirred by Angel Stark’s true tale of murder among the yachting class released a tide of screaming cheers and zealous hand-clapping I hadn’t heard outside of a rock concert.

I have to admit, the noise level startled me, and I resisted the urge to slap my hands over my ears. After all, I thought to myself, how would it look?

Pointedly ignoring the ghost, I put my hands together in a polite show of unity with my enthusiastic patrons.

Author Angel Stark blinked her animated brown eyes, then tossed her long copper hair behind her shoulders. Her full lips tipped slightly and she cocked her head in poised acceptance of the ovation. The din continued, loud enough it seemed to blow the elfin wisp of a girl off the small portable stage.

I turned to Brainert. He was applauding, but only mildly.

“Well,” I fished, “her delivery was certainly dramatic, don’t you think?”

“Dramatic?” Brainert replied. “Try indulgent.”

“At least you can admit that Angel Stark knows how to play to a crowd,” I argued.

Brainert frowned and shook his head. “Showmanship does not an author make.”

“On the contrary,” interrupted Fiona Finch, sitting directly behind us. “An author knows how to tell a story. And her story is quite fascinating.”

As the applause died, I could hear the metal chain on Fiona’s large falcon-and-falconer brooch clink as she leaned forward to speak in my ear. Fiona herself was a small, brown-haired, wrenlike person whose most memorable characteristic, besides her compulsion for eavesdropping, was her colorful collection of bird pins—hundreds of them were in her possession, and she was forever on the yard sale hunt for more.

“A wonderful choice for your author event,” she gushed with a sincere smile as she patted me on the back of my cream-colored linen pantsuit. (I usually dressed more casually for work, especially on a warm summer day like this one, but this was a major author event, so I thought looking the part of a co-owner appropriate.)

“A very interesting reading,” Fiona complimented.

Brainert snorted.

Fiona was also Buy the Book’s number-one purchaser of true crime books, so this event was right up her proverbial dark alley.

“Too many books about crime and criminals are written by journalists or police investigators,” Fiona continued. “It’s refreshing to have an eyewitness and friend of the victim write a book—much more intense and immediate. The excerpt she read was . . . fascinating.”

Brainert rolled his eyes and mumbled something about “book review adjectives.”

“Really, Fiona. Any good thespian should be able to read the phone book and make it sound
fascinating
,” Brainert said. “And Ms. Stark certainly is a capable show-man, as I graciously conceded. As for the quality of her prose . . .”

Brainert raised one brown eyebrow above his straight brown bangs and shook his head in the perfect expression of an underwhelmed English professor. As the applause finally died completely, Brainert leaned toward me. “Shouldn’t you get up there and introduce the question-and-answer session?”

“No, the author’s instructions were quite specific,” I whispered. “Angel’s publicist is handling everything beyond my introduction and a nice send-off at the end of the event. So I get to sit this one out and enjoy the show.”

“What is there to enjoy?” huffed Brainert.

Even as he spoke, an elegant, thirtyish Asian woman, wearing a tailored, pinstripe suit with a surprisingly high hemline, approached the podium, clapping like the others and beaming a big smile to her client. This was Dana Wu, Angel Stark’s publicist.

Angel took a step backward as Dana stepped before the microphone.

“Ms. Stark has graciously agreed to answer as many questions about her new book,
All My Pretty Friends
, as she has time for . . . so I give you Angel Stark.”

When Dana stepped back and Angel moved forward again, I relinquished my seat to one of the many standing-room-only audience members and moved through the thick crowd to the back of the events space. The book signing would begin soon, and I wanted to make sure our copies of
All My Pretty Friends
were on the floor because it looked to be a sellout crowd.

On my way to the exit, I surveyed the audience. I was disappointed that one of our most loyal customers, Bud Napp, owner of the town’s hardware and plumbing supply store, whose favorite sleuth, surprisingly enough, was Miss Marple (whom Sadie said he’d discovered while trying to get his mind off his wife’s fatal cancer a few years ago), hadn’t made the reading, although I noticed that his handsome nephew, Johnny, was seated in the back wearing his typical outfit of baggy jeans and black T-shirt.

I’d only met Johnny once or twice, and he seemed like a nice young man—quiet and very intense with a muscular build and the kind of dark good looks that could have cast him in a Rat Pack movie—big brown eyes and a dimpled chin. I doubted that Bud’s nephew was here for Angel Stark—more likely he came to meet our clerk, Mina, for an after-work date.

I was also pleased to note that this was a very different demographic from the usual attendees of Buy the Book’s author events. For one thing, this crowd was much younger—college-aged and decidedly female, by a margin of about ten to one. And this was an affluent audience, too. Many drove in for this event from Brown University or the Rhode Island School of Design, and as far away from Yale and Harvard, if the decals and bumper stickers on the Volkswagens, BMWs, Volvos, Jaguars, Saturns, and Accords parked along Cranberry Street were any indication.

The visitors had been assembling since late afternoon, grabbing all the rooms at the Finch Inn—Quindicott, Rhode Island’s, only bed-and-breakfast, run by Fiona Finch and her husband, Barney—and filling the Comfy-Time Motel, which had opened up recently on the highway. They’d been tying up traffic and jostling the locals off the sidewalks since early afternoon, gathering in clumps around the diner, and crowding the commons in the center of town.

Yet few Quindicotters complained, because these visitors were also spending lots of money—at the Seafood Shack, Cooper’s Bakery, Koh’s Market, Franzetti’s Pizza, Gilder’s Antiques, and, yes, our bookstore. It was the kind of economic activity unknown in these parts just a year ago, and I was proud of my own small part in revitalizing this formerly sleepy little Rhode Island rest-stop of a town.

As I tried to push through the packed aisles to the back of the room, I nearly collided with another Buy the Book regular. Seymour Tarnish, avid collector of pulp magazines, was moving through the crowd, searching in vain for a seat, even as he surveyed the audience. By day, Seymour was our local mailman. On evenings and weekends, Seymour became a purveyor of frozen treats, dispensed from an ice cream truck he’d purchased a few years back with part of the money he’d won on
Jeopardy!

“Hey, Pen, good crowd,” Seymour said, grinning. “If you told me the title of Angel Stark’s book was
All My Pretty Young Half-Naked Friends
, I might have gotten here sooner!”

As he spoke, Seymour scanned—wide-eyed—the sea of attractive, college-aged young women packed into Buy the Book.

“Not funny,” I said to the forty-year-old avowed bachelor who lived in his late mother’s house with a middle-aged male roommate and their huge collection of valuable pulp magazines.

Seymour noticed that I was wringing the life out my hands—one of the nervous habits I sometimes exhibited during author signings. My aunt Sadie has always maintained that nerves of steel were essential commodities in the always-volatile book business. Lacking same much of the time, I relied on my aunt, and co-owner, Sadie to keep an even keel.

Me? I did all the fretting—more than enough for both of us.

Seymour continued to relish the view. “Wow! I haven’t seen this many navels since I got a bag of oranges from my retired uncle in Miami.”

“Didn’t you volunteer to work store security tonight?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Your aunt gave me the night off. Says your author has a publicist that’s handling everything. But I’m here to help out if you need me.”

“Stick close,” I replied. “I don’t anticipate trouble, but this is the largest crowd we’ve drawn in quite a while—and the youngest.”

Seymour spied a space between two young women—twins—with curly, honey-gold hair. When he was gone, I looked up in time to hear the first question from the audience, posed by a heavy-set young woman who rose when she spoke, even though she was clearly nervous. Despite the warmth in the crowded room, the questioner wore a long-sleeved Brown University shirt.

“How has Bethany Banks’s murder affected you and your friends?” the coed asked shyly and quickly sat down again.

Angel nodded to acknowledge the questioner, then stepped close to the microphone to answer.

“In
Comfortably Numb
I spoke about emotional fallout—a term I coined—and how toxic such fallout can be. I wrote my first book to purge myself of toxic emotional fallout caused by my abusive home, my clinical depression, my promiscuous behavior, and my dependency on illegal drugs.”

This is still a tough pill to swallow,
Jack complained.
You’re telling me this dame wrote this dirt about her own life. Wrote it herself and
wanted
it published?