The Rothman Scandal (38 page)

He turned into the drive to Gurney's Inn. “Well, here we are,” he said.

“Thank you so much, Mel.”

He parked the car. “My room is just down that little boardwalk there,” she said.

“I'll walk you to your room,” he said. “Those walks are pretty dark.…”

“And me, in my ridiculous high heels!”

They walked in silence down the boardwalk.

“I'd ask you in for a drink,” she said, “but—”

“I've got to get back to the party.”

“Of course.” At her door, she fished in her large shoulder bag for her key. “Oh, my goodness!” she said.

“Lost your key?”

“No—here's the key. But my money's gone!”

“Your money?”

“I placed two twenty-dollar notes right here, in this pocket of my bag, in case I needed money for a taxi home. They're gone!”

“You're sure?”

“Absolutely! I always carry my money here.”

“Do you need to borrow some money, Fiona?” he asked, feeling suddenly uncomfortable.

“Good heavens, no! I've lots of cash in the room. But it's just so strange! I've had my bag with me all evening, except—”

“Except when?”

“Except when I left it for a few minutes on the sofa in the women's changing room at the little beach house, before I went down to the beach. Do you suppose someone pinched my money out of it then? One of the servants, perhaps? I've never seen so many servants scurrying about.”

“Well, perhaps,” he said.

She laughed. “Well, it's certainly not enough to worry about is it—forty dollars? But thank heavens you came along. If you hadn't, I really would have been a damsel in distress! Thank you so much. And thank you for listening to me. I'll treasure what you said.”

“What did I say?”

“You said sometimes it helps to share your feelings with another person. It's true. I shared mine with you, and it helped. You are a kind man, Mel, and I needed kindness tonight. Thank you.” She reached up, touched his chin, and kissed him very lightly on the cheek, and he was suddenly conscious of the odor of gardenias from her perfume.

She opened the door quickly with her key, stepped inside, and closed the door behind her.

Mel walked slowly up the inclined boardwalk to his car.

When he got back to “Finisterra,” and the beach, waiters were clearing the tables. Dinner was over, and he had missed it.

“There you are, darling,” Alex said. “The McCutcheons and the Moores have asked us to join them for a nightcap at Bobby Van's after this is over. Shall we? It's on the way home.”

“Sure,” he said, and wondered, briefly, whether she had even noticed that he had been gone.

“Hurry, everybody!” cried Maggie Van Zuylen, who was now a little drunk. “Hurry! Hurry! Down to the water! The tide's coming in, and the sand castle's about to go!”

Some four hundred pairs of eyes turned toward the Atlantic Ocean to watch as the first of the castle's crenellated turrets, and the toy sentinel guarding it, sagged into the surf and were washed away. “I hear the florist charged three thousand for it,” someone said.

Later, at Bobby Van's, the local bistro, Mel and Alex, Mimi and Brad Moore, and Pussy and John McCutcheon were finishing their drinks. “This is my treat,” Alex said.

“No, let me get the drinks,” John McCutcheon said.

“No. I insist.”

“Why?”

“Because I feel like it. No arguments.” She reached in her Chanel bag. Then she said, “Oh, dear.”

“What's wrong?”

“My wallet's gone.” She looked at the others helplessly. “Well, perhaps I won't treat.”

Mel was looking at her strangely. “Cash?” he said.

“Cash—and credit cards.”

“Pussy, check your purse,” Mel said.

“What's the matter, Mel?”

“Pussy, check your purse,” he said again.

Pussy McCutcheon opened her bag, and squealed with dismay. “Mine's gone, too!” she cried.

“Mimi, check yours,” Mel said.

Slowly, Mimi Moore opened her clutch bag. “I only had a few loose bills in here,” she said. “But they're gone.”

For a moment, they all looked at one another uneasily.

“We've all been ripped off!”

“We all left our bags on that long green sofa in the women's dressing room while we were on the beach. It must have been then.”

“It must have been one of Maggie's staff.”

“But Maggie's used that same crew for years! I've used them, too. I know most of those boys by their first names,” Pussy McCutcheon said.

“Would a waiter go into the women's dressing room?”

“The women's dressing room wouldn't stop a determined thief, lover,” Mimi Moore said to her husband. “Besides, I'm sure she had women in the clean-up crew.”

“They all come from Goldman's—the best caterer in the Hamptons!”

“I wonder how many others—”

“There were dozens of purses lying on that sofa.”

“Well, one thing we must all promise to do,” Alex said. “We must not tell Maggie Van Zuylen about this. It would kill her to know that something like this might have happened at her party. Mel, you are looking at me in the strangest way. Are you all right?”

“Tell you later.” He reached for his wallet. “I'll pay for drinks,” he said.

19

Mel Jorgenson's house in Sagaponack was his newest toy. He had designed it himself. It was low and large—ten thousand square feet—and sprawled across a beach-grass-tufted dune, facing the sea, and, at the rear, it overlooked three salt ponds. The walls of the house were almost entirely of glass, and the walls were uncurtained because—look for yourself, he would point out—there were no neighbors for as far as the eye could see. The levels of the house rose and fell in the pattern of the dune it was built on, and there were no interior doors at all, though sliding parchment panels could be opened and closed to shut off certain private areas. The house, as it climbed and descended Mel's private dune, could be treated as one enormous room.

Thick white rugs, so thick they were almost ankle-deep if you were standing in them barefoot, were scattered across the honey-colored polished hardwood floors, and the furniture—also designed by Mel and custom-built—was oversized, low slung, and deep. When he settled his tall, lanky frame into one of his white leather sofas, there was a kind of whooshing sound, and when he sank into one of these, and when Alex sat opposite him, his head seemed to sprout up from between his knees.

On the ocean side, a series of whitewashed decks led down to the pool, which was painted black to reflect the clouds and the sky, and, from the pool, another terraced series of decks led to the beach itself. The only sounds that ever approached this house were the
shuuuuu-shuuuu
sound of the surf as it broke and skittered across the sand, the moan of an occasional passing seagull, and the rustle of the wind in the beach grass.

A house like this had its drawbacks, of course, and the publicity it received when it was placed on the cover of
Architectural Digest
hadn't helped. Curious strollers from the beach sometimes made their way up the terraced decks and could be found with their noses pressed against the glass walls, hoping for a glimpse of their television idol. These intruders had to be politely shooed away. Also, as someone at the party had pointed out, the constant salt spray from the sea meant that the glass window-walls had to be washed at least once a week, if not oftener than that. Sand from the beach below blew into the black pool, which had to be regularly emptied and cleaned. Sand, like snow, drifted in the wind, and the contours of Mel's dunes were constantly changing and rearranging themselves. The house itself was stabilized—two dozen reinforced concrete pylons that supported the house extended down into the bedrock—but the earth around it was forever shifting. After a storm, or high winds, a maintenance crew had to be hired to shovel Mel's spectacular glass house out of the sand. Some sort of fencing, it had been pointed out to him, might prevent these periodic inundations, but Mel resisted the idea of fencing. After all, why should a man who had no neighbors surround himself with a fence?

No, no one could say that a house such as Mel's was exactly practical, or care-free, nor did honey-colored, highly polished hardwood floors take kindly to wet or sandy feet, nor to the comings and goings of Mel's dog, Cronkite. Still, Mel himself seemed oblivious to the shortcomings and headaches of beachfront living. In fact, the very impracticality of the house seemed to excite him. He loved the fact that the views through his glass walls were never exactly the same. “The wind does my landscaping for me,” he liked to say. This was the sort of house he had always dreamed of owning and, he said, if ever he retired from broadcasting, he wanted to live year-round in his costly Sagaponack fish tank. It was to this house that he and Alex were headed now, down the mostly empty highway, with Cronkite in the back seat.

“It had to be one of the waiters,” Alex was saying. “I can see how it would happen. Those poor guys don't get paid much, and probably some poor kid, who's never done anything dishonest before in his life, has got his girlfriend pregnant, and she's pressing him for money for an abortion, or pressing him to marry her, and she's otherwise driving him crazy. He goes out to serve this party, where all these rich people are, where people are talking about four-million-dollar houses and where the hostess has spent three thousand dollars on a sand castle, just to see it get washed away, and he thinks—why do they deserve all of this? Why don't I deserve a share of it? And he passes a room where two hundred women have just tossed their purses, and he thinks—why don't I just help myself to some of it? Poor kid. He's probably home right now, ridden with guilt, wishing he hadn't done it, but of course it's too late now to put the money back. I feel sorry for him, actually.”

He chuckled softly. “Typical Alex,” he said. “Always writing a scenario.”

“Part of an editor's job, I guess. Trying to get the story to make some sort of sense. Still, it makes me mad. There's enough of the country girl in me to think that five hundred dollars is a lot of money—plus the nuisance of reporting all the stolen credit cards. Anyway, your weekend date is now penniless.”

“Fiona Fenton also had money taken from her.”

“What? Was she there? I didn't see her.”

“She only stayed a few minutes. She felt she was dressed all wrong. She was wearing a long evening gown and high heels, and everybody else was in sneakers and jeans. She was embarrassed, and left.”

“Huh! And this is the woman who has overseen the fashion needs of Britain's most fashionable women, or whatever it was Herb said about her the other night.”

“She didn't know what ‘beach party' meant. They don't have them in England.”

“And that's what Maggie meant when she said she had a surprise for me. She invited us both, hoping to see some fur fly between us, the bitch.”

“Now don't be too hard on Fiona,” he said. “I drove her home, and she's really a sweet kid who's had a very unhappy life.”

“Huh! Living in one of the biggest suites at the Westbury? Chauffeured limos? All paid for by Herb, of course. These titled Brits never have two nickels to squeeze together.”

“Just don't be too hard on her,” he said. “I drove her damn near all the way to Montauk, and we had a long talk. I think she may really need a friend.”

“Well,” she said. “She seems to have made quite an impression on you. Are you sure that's all you did with her? Drive her home?”

He glanced sideways at her. “Now that,” he said, “was an unworthy comment for you to make, Alex. Truly unworthy. She's really not after your job, as you seem to think.”

“Huh!”

“She's actually rather naïve. I don't think she had any idea what she was getting into with Herb. I think she feels quite out of her depth in this situation. She was appalled by the way Herb handled things the other night at your party. She knows how upset you are, and she feels very bad about that. She's even thinking about packing up and going back to England.”

“Good. Tell her I'll pay for her ticket.”

“Please, Alex. I've gotten to know the woman. You haven't.”

“Go back to England? Why should she, with a sugar daddy like Herbert Rothman picking up her tab at the Westbury? No way.”

“I don't think it's that kind of a relationship at all. She refers to him, very formally, as Mr. Rothman. I don't think they're even on a first-name basis.”

“Mel, I think you're the one who's being naïve.”

“She said to me, ‘I don't want to be co-editor. I'd work as a little editorial assistant, just for the thrill of working with Alex Rothman.' She admires you so.”

“Hah!”

“Don't be mean-spirited, Alex.”

“But don't you see? It's too late. It's too late for her to be just a little editorial assistant. The fat's in the fire. Herb has already made his announcement. It was in the
New York Times
. It's official. Herb can't offer her a lesser position now without looking like a damned fool, and if there's one thing Herb Rothman doesn't want to look like, it's a damned fool, with egg all over his face.”

“But will you just talk to her, darling? I think if you talk to her, you'll get an entirely different impression of this girl. She's no threat to you. What harm would there be in talking to her? Would you? I told her I'd ask you.”

“Well, I guess I'll have to talk to her at some point,” she said. “She's supposed to be coming to join the magazine on the first of July.”

“Good,” he said. “Have a talk with her between now and then. I think you'll see what I mean.” He patted her knee.