Too Much Money (4 page)

“I suppose so. What?” asked Ruby.

“It’s none of my business, really.”

“What?”

“When you and Mr. Renthal talk at the prison, do you have to talk over telephones through glass partitions, like they do on
Law & Order?”

“Mr. Renthal is in a facility.”

“Oh, I thought he was in prison,” said Frieda in an apologetic voice.

“Facility,” repeated Ruby. She assumed the look on her face that she always assumed when people asked her about Elias in
prison. It was not a subject she enjoyed sharing with others, but she knew that poor Frieda was probably worrying what it would be like if her son was sent to prison for dealing drugs (which he eventually was). “We did talk over phones through a glass partition in the beginning, when he first went in, but they’ve eased up a bit, and now I meet him in one of those little rooms where lawyers meet with their clients,” said Ruby. “I can’t stand being with those other prisoners’ wives. I never know what to say to them, and they all hate me. ‘Oh, how’s your private plane, Mrs. Renthal?’ one of them said to me right before she made her way to the Greyhound bus terminal.”

“I was just wondering,” said Frieda.

Ruby Renthal had changed over the years. Her basic sweetness had hardened since her husband, Elias Renthal, had gone to prison for financial malfeasance. People who used to be her friends no longer invited her to dinner. She was greatly criticized for divorcing Elias when he was in prison. She was also greatly criticized when she remarried Elias at the federal prison in Las Vegas, Nevada, several years later, after her divorcée status had not worked out as she had hoped.

What people said about her was that she had tried to get Loelia Manchester Minardos’s former husband, Ned Manchester, but in the long run, she had come to realize that Ned had never really gotten over Loelia. Then there was Baron de Liagra in Paris, who never had any intention of leaving his wife for her, although he greatly enjoyed the afternoon pleasures they shared at a charming apartment on the Rue du Bac that he kept for such purposes. She felt cheap and used when she discovered that his intentions to make her his baroness were nonexistent.

The trashy Ruby that she used to be before the first of her two marriages to Elias Renthal, the Cleveland billionaire, resurfaced. She threw the ruby bracelet the baron had just given her as a kiss-off present at him, hitting him in the face with it before
it fell on the marble floor by the fireplace. She told him he was a lousy fuck, that his dick was too little and that it tilted sideways, and that he came too quickly. Then she put on her sable coat and stormed out of the flat on the Rue du Bac, slamming the gold and white door behind her. The next morning at the Hôtel Ritz, in the Coco Chanel suite overlooking the Place Vendôme, Ruby Renthal drank cup after cup of black coffee and deeply regretted her behavior of the night before. She was back to her ladylike self, and she wrote the baron a charming note, apologizing for her appalling behavior and asking him if he would please—“please, please, please”—return the ruby bracelet to her, as a keepsake of a love affair she would always remember as a high point of her life. The baron never replied. The fact was, on her own she was just another ex–trophy wife who had lost her social footing in New York. A year later, she remarried Elias in the warden’s office at the federal prison in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the warden and his wife as witnesses.

“Every time you come out to visit Elias, you must come and see us, Mrs. Renthal. There are some wonderful restaurants in Vegas. We even have a Le Cirque here. I bet you didn’t know that,” said the warden’s wife, Estelle Gelson, who remembered reading about Ruby back in the 1980s when she and Elias were conquering New York. “Oh, I’d love to,” replied Ruby. She never did, of course. She had no intention of becoming friends with Estelle Gelson, the warden’s wife, thank you very much. She flew out to Las Vegas on Elias’s plane and she flew right back after the visit. She never spent an extra minute in Las Vegas.

Soon Elias would be out of prison, and Ruby had already started to plan their new life.

“I can’t tell you how much I hate that orange jumpsuit they make you wear, Elias. I can’t see
why
on visitors’ day they can’t let you wear the blue jumpsuit instead of the orange one. Or
khaki; they should have khaki uniforms. You look thinner in the blue, unless you’re putting on weight again, with all that junk food you eat from the vending machines. You just ate two whole bags of Fritos in about eight minutes.” She opened her Hermès Birkin bag and brought out the new magazines and paperbacks. “That mean guard with the shaved head was on duty, and he took away all the magazines and paperbacks I brought you, but the nice guard, the one I like, Spike I think his name is, the one I gave the Gucci wallet to last Christmas with the hundred-dollar bill in it, he gave them back to me.”

Elias smiled. “Kiss me,” he said.

“You’ve got elephant breath,” she said after obliging him.

Elias shook his head slowly as he stared at her. “Were you always such a bitch, Ruby? Or did love make me blind way back then, when I picked you up on American Airlines?”

“Oh, let’s not go all the way back to American Airlines again, please. You know you picked me up on a private jet. And anyway, didn’t we have enough of that ‘Mrs.-Elias-Renthal-the-former-stewardess’ talk when we were riding high?” said Ruby. She turned away, gathering her things as if to leave.

“You may as well put down your twelve-thousand-dollar Hermès Birkin bag and sit down. There are no early exits during visiting hours, and no doors to slam,” said Elias. “You’re stuck here in this room with me for the next two and a half hours. So, what are we going to talk about?”

Elias, to everyone’s surprise, was a good prisoner, liked by both the guards and the other inmates. He played bridge regularly with the former president of a rock-and-roll record company, who was doing time for shortchanging his stars on their royalties; a big-time Ponzi schemer, who’d ripped off a lot of very rich people, some of whom were friends of Elias’s; and a forger who signed a film star’s name to a bogus check and cashed it. Although none of his fellow card players was poor, exactly,
none could quite match the vastness of the Renthal fortune, or even come close. Elias rarely talked to them of his former exalted station in life, but they all knew of it, as did every prisoner and guard in the facility. Elias was hurt when he heard that his thirty-nine-room apartment, where the famous Renthal ball had taken place, had been sold, even though Ruby had told him she didn’t want to live there anymore. The Park Avenue apartment represented everything he had ever strived for in his life. He had enjoyed the astonished looks on the faces of even the most established and wealthy visitors when he showed them through it. “I bought that Tintoretto at Waring Hopkins’s gallery in Paris” was the sort of thing he used to say in better times.

“Look, Elias, I fly out here every other weekend, and I think you could show me a little more courtesy when I make all this effort.” She started handing him the magazines. “I’ve brought you
Time, Newsweek
, Friday’s
Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Financial Times
, and
Park Avenue
. Did you read Gus Bailey’s piece on Perla Zacharias in the issue of
Park Avenue
that I gave you last month?”

“Let me tell you something about Gus Bailey. Gus Bailey is all wet on Perla Zacharias,” said Elias. “Perla isn’t hiding anything, for Christ’s sake. I knew Konstantin. I did business with Konstantin. Konstantin was no choirboy, but he was the best financier in the world.”

Ruby was glad they had a subject they could hold a conversation about. She liked talking about the Zacharias murder in Biarritz. “It was odd, though, Elias, even you have to admit it, that there were no guards on duty on the night of the fire, the murder, or whatever you call it, when he had hired twenty-five guards trained by the Mossad and housed them in the barracks he built for them on the outskirts of Biarritz. I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse Perla of murder—there is no evidence of that—but I think there is more to the story than what’s being reported.”

“The guards drove Perla crazy. She couldn’t stand having them underfoot all the time. She hated it when they farted on duty. She said she didn’t have any privacy,” said Elias.

“How do you know so much about the guards’ farts driving Perla crazy?” asked Ruby.

“I called her collect from here after Konstantin’s funeral,” said Elias.

“How about the famous surveillance system not working that night?” persisted Ruby. “It was supposed to be the latest, the best in the world, or so Konstantin told me the last time I sat next to him at dinner before the fire. Do you know what was in the surveillance cameras on the night of the murder? Old footage of guests arriving at a dinner party Perla gave the week before Konstantin died for the Baron Alexis de Rede, who was visiting her from Paris.”

“Look,” said Elias, in his voice of authority, wanting to end the conversation. “There’s been an arrest. There’s been a trial. The nurse signed a full confession.”

“In a language he didn’t speak,” replied Ruby, topping him.

They looked at each other angrily.

“Is it true that Perla’s the richest woman in the world?” asked Ruby, changing the subject slightly.

“No, of course not. Maybe the third richest. She’s got more money than the Queen of England. That’s all I know about the matter.”

“Did I ever tell you about her diamond and sapphire salt and pepper shakers? She’s got twelve pair of them. And her dining room table seats forty.”

“You’ve told me that several times.”

“She knows how to spend money, that’s for sure,” said Ruby. “I hear she spends a hundred thousand a year on caviar.”

“You don’t do so bad yourself in the spending department, Max Luby tells me.”

“Oh, fuck what Max Luby tells you about me,” said Ruby.

Max Luby was one of Elias’s oldest friends dating back to his Cleveland days, before he and Ruby moved to Manhattan. He now handled Elias’s money. There was a time when Max Luby liked Ruby, but since her husband was incarcerated he had disapproved of both her conduct and her spending habits.

“Perla does nothing but good for people, with all that money she gives to charity,” said Elias. “She’s going to be one of the great philanthropists of our time. You wait.”

“Yeah, but she gives all that money for the wrong reasons. She doesn’t give to the Manhattan Public Library because she loves books. Her kind of philanthropy is to get her name in the papers so she gets invited to all the swell houses for dinner. I read that in one of Gus Bailey’s articles.”

“How’s that different than any of the rest of us? Perla’s going to get even with Gus Bailey. You wait and see. Perla’s the type who always gets even. She’s patient. She waits. She knows the right time to strike. That’s what I like about her.”

“Speaking of Gus Bailey, he’s being sued for slander by former congressman Kyle Cramden for something he said about Cramden on a radio show. Eleven million bucks worth of slander,” said Ruby.

“That’s the first good thing I’ve ever heard about Kyle Cramden,” said Elias, relishing the news with a shit-eating grin.

“Kyle Cramden was supposedly involved with that girl who disappeared, Diandra Lomax.”

“Kyle Cramden would fuck an umbrella,” said Elias dismissively. “So he’s suing Gus Bailey, huh? Good. Gus Bailey thought
I
was guilty, and he wrote it in
Park Avenue
, and I thought the guy was a friend. He came to our house for dinner, for Christ’s sake, if you remember.”

“And lunch,” Ruby reminded him, although she always felt guilty when she talked about Gus.

“Right. And lunch. You wait, that guy’s going to get it someday.
Perla Zacharias hates him. Gerald Bradley Junior hates him. We’re talking powerful people here. Somebody’s going to get him one of these days.” Elias clenched his fists in delight, barely able to contain his enthusiasm over the inevitable demise of that prick Gus Bailey.

By now Ruby had lost interest in talking about Gus Bailey, or Perla Zacharias or Gerald Bradley Junior. She had something on her mind that she had wanted to say for a long time. “You
were
guilty, Elias,” she said quietly, simply.

“I was
not
guilty!” Elias said angrily. “I can’t fucking believe you said that to me.”

“Oh, bullshit, you didn’t do it. I’m sick of that act. ‘Oh, Elias
never
could have done anything like that.’ I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to say that over the years, and those people all nod like they believe me, and none of them does. I can see the way they look at each other. They
all
think you’re guilty. Even the juror who sold tokens in the subway booth thought you were guilty. Just remember, I’m the one who picked up the phone that awful day when that poor Byron Macumber, with the two little daughters and the pretty wife, who jumped off the roof the following week, called you at the apartment. I heard the whole conversation. Now let’s change the subject.”

Elias started to breathe heavily. He hated to be reminded of Byron Macumber’s suicide. He didn’t bring up the fact that he had provided for Macumber’s widow and set up a trust fund for the education of his two little daughters.

“If there’s one thing I’ve discovered in my nearly seven years in prison, it’s that you’re not at the top of everyone’s popularity list. I don’t know what the hell happened to you, Ruby, but you lost yourself along the way,” said Elias.

“So did you, Elias. That’s why you’re doing seven years in the federal penitentiary, oh I mean facility, in Las Vegas, Nevada,” said Ruby.

“I never expected to be on my hands and knees on the bathroom floor cleaning the inside of a toilet bowl that forty-five prisoners have shit in,” said Elias.

“They didn’t make you do that?” replied Ruby, shocked. “You never told me that, Elias.”

“They all got a big kick out of watching the fat rich guy with the six houses and the G Five Fifty on his knees cleaning toilets. I provided a lot of laughs for them.”

“Oh, Elias, I had no idea,” said Ruby. “I’m shocked.”