Too Much Money (8 page)

“What are you celebrating? It’s not your birthday?”

“Special occasion, Jonsie,” said Winkie.

“I’ve got just the bottle of Cristal champagne, although it’s six hundred dollars.”

“Money is no object today, Jonsie. And I’ll be paying in cash, if that’s okay.”

“Fine by me. Did you read Gus Bailey on Perla Zacharias?” asked Jonsie as he rang up the bottle of champagne.

Winkie nodded agreement. “Now he’s writing a book about the whole situation. Perla hasn’t found out yet, but she will be crazed over it. I wouldn’t want to have Perla for an enemy, I’ll tell you that. I saw Gus yesterday making notes on the corner of Eighty-first and Madison. Gus has got an inside source on that story, and it’s driving Perla mad because it’s so accurate. She can’t figure out who in her employ is talking to him.”

Winkie grabbed his change and reached for the bottle.

“Listen, sorry to rush, but I’ve got to run. So long, Jonsie.”

Jonsie, hoping he’d linger just a bit more, said, “Let me give you a holiday hug.”

Later, after it happened, Jonsie told people he’d hugged Winkie good-bye. “He was just skin and bones. I knew it was for the last time.”

From the liquor store Winkie walked through the lobby of the Rhinelander Hotel into the florist shop at the rear of the hotel.

“Hi, Winkie.”

“Hi, Brucie,” said Winkie. “Oh, it looks so festive in here. Look at the color of those roses. Too beautiful.”

“Tangerine, you know, my trademark,” said Brucie. “From this marvelous man in Peru.”

“Give me a dozen of those to take with me. Actually, make it
a dozen and a half. I’m here to spend a great deal of money,” said Winkie.

“Music to my ears,” said Brucie, who had been an understudy in the original cast of
Company
, and had gone on one time in the two-year run, when the leading man was sick, singing and dancing to Stephen Sondheim’s music. Winkie sometimes had Jonsie play the piano and Brucie sing Sondheim selections when he had a cocktail party for his society friends.

“This order is to go out in the morning two days from now. I want the best orchid plants in full bloom that you can find. Beautiful ones. Nothing skimpy. White phalaenopsis, like Lil Altemus used to have when she still lived on Fifth Avenue. I want them wrapped dramatically, in cellophane with blue and lavender ribbons. I have the addresses here on the envelopes.”

“My God, Winkie, this is going to cost you a fortune,” said Brucie.

“I have a check here made out to the shop and signed by me. Just fill in the amount.”

“Are you going away?” asked Brucie.

Winkie sang in a camp voice from the old Negro spiritual, “To a better land I know.”

Brucie joined in singing the spiritual, “I hear the gentle voices calling, Old Black Joe.”

They roared with laughter. “I used to cry for poor Old Black Joe when they sang that in school when I was a little boy about a hundred years ago,” said Winkie.

“I wouldn’t advise singing it in public these days,” said Brucie.

Brucie put green tissue paper in a white cardboard box and carefully laid a dozen and a half tangerine roses one by one inside.

“Do you want a card for this?” asked Brucie.

“No, the roses are for me, for the table next to my bed,” said Winkie. “I think I’ll take one of these scented candles as well.”

“Are you okay, Winkie?” asked Brucie. He felt strangely disconcerted.

“I’m fine. I’m even serene, in fact.” Winkie started to walk out. “So long, Brucie,” he said. “I’m so glad I was in the audience the night that you went on in
Company
when Larry Kert was sick.”

“It was the greatest night of my life, Winkie. I got a standing ovation.” The memory still brought him happiness.

“Good-bye, Brucie,” said Winkie, giving him a hug.

“Why do I feel like crying?” asked Brucie.

“Don’t,” said Winkie. “The orchid for Lil Altemus has to be extra special.”

A
FTER
W
INKIE
had gone, Brucie, still humming “Old Black Joe,” looked through the blue envelopes that Winkie had left. He recognized almost all of the ladies’ names, as either they were customers of the shop or he had read about them in Dolores De Longpre’s column. For Lil’s plant, instead of the card, there was a letter on Winkie’s engraved blue stationery from Smythson of Bond Street in London. He picked up the letter addressed to Mrs. Van Degan Altemus, East Sixty-sixth Street, walked to the back room of the shop, where the teakettle was on a hot plate plugged into the wall, and turned up the heat. When the steam came out, he held Lil Altemus’s letter over it. He checked the front room for customers, and then he took the letter out of the envelope.

Brucie, ashamed, put the letter back in the envelope and sealed it. No one would have known it had been opened. He called Jonsie over at Thierry’s Wine and Liquors and said, “I have a bad feeling about Winkie.”

“I have the same feeling,” said Jonsie. “He bought a six-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne from me. He said it was for a special occasion. What did he buy from you?”

“Like almost eleven thousand dollars’ worth of orchids, to be sent to eleven of the fanciest ladies in New York. I think he’s going to do it tonight. He bought tangerine-colored roses for next to his bed, eighteen of them at six bucks a stem, and he never buys himself flowers unless he’s having one of those little lunch parties he gives. He also bought a scented candle.”

“Which scent?” asked Jonsie.

“He wanted the one named after C. Z. Guest, but I didn’t have any in stock, so I put the one named after Perla Zacharias in the bag,” said Brucie. “Did you know that Konstantin Zacharias’s male nurse, who was taking care of him because of the ALS he suffered from, started the fire that killed him in Biarritz with a scented Perla Zacharias candle?”

“Yeah, I read that in Gus Bailey’s diary in
Park Avenue
. Why do you think he’s going to do it tonight?” asked Jonsie.

“If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell?” asked Brucie.

“I promise.”

“No, swear to God on your word of honor you’ll never tell.”

“I swear to God on my word of honor I’ll never tell,” said Jonsie.

“I steamed open his suicide note to Lil Altemus,” said Brucie.

“You didn’t!” replied Jonsie, in a shocked voice.

They became helpless with shamed laughter.

“That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” said Jonsie when he caught his breath from laughing. “What did the note say?”

W
INKIE WAS
in his bed. As planned, he was wearing his blue silk monogrammed pajamas that Perla Zacharias had had made for him at Charvet in Paris, when he visited her at the villa in Biarritz. His best Porthault sheets, pillowcases, and sham were on his bed. On his bedside table were his beautiful tangerine roses in a Steuben vase that Lil Altemus had given him from the house in Northeast Harbor, when she had to give it up. A Louis Vuitton bag had been packed with the clothes Addison was to take to the Grant P. Trumbull Funeral Home the next day. For a person taking his own life, Winkie was in very good spirits. He and Addison were drinking very expensive champagne from
beautiful glasses. The vial of pills from the pain clinic at the Medicine Center was next to him on the bed.

“How many have you taken?” asked Addison, who was simply ecstatic at being present at such a time as this.

“I think about fourteen or sixteen,” said Winkie. “I’m kind of getting hazy. I’m planning on taking thirty-seven. The thing you mustn’t do is take too many. Did I ever tell you about poor Lupe Vélez? She was divine, Lupe. She was madly in love with Gary Cooper, and he went off with someone else, and she got herself all dressed up in the best nightgown she had, and her hair was done, and she was made up to within an inch of her life so she’d look beautiful when they found her in the morning, and then she took far too many pills, like sixty or something like that, and she vomited, and the maid found her the next morning with her head in the toilet bowl full of puke. Mustn’t have that.”

They both roared with laughter.

“Do you know something, Addison?” He took two more pills. “That was the last big laugh of my life.”

“I guess so,” said Addison. “I’m going to miss you, Winkie.”

“Now you’ll wash up the champagne glasses and then get out of here and come back in the morning and find me,” said Winkie in a very weak voice.

“We’ve been over this fifty times,” said Addison. “I’ll wash up the glasses, take the dirty videos, and be out of here. I’ll leave the Vuitton bag here until tomorrow when I find you. How many have you taken now?”

“About twenty-two, I think.”

“Is there anything else?” asked Addison.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Tell me something about yourself that you’ve never told anybody in the whole world. Tell me your deepest secret,” whispered Winkie.

Addison thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said. He reached out and pulled over toward the bed a French bergère chair that Donald Mendelson, Winkie’s second rich benefactor after the death of the rich South American in Paris, had bought for him from the Kitty Miller auction at Boothby’s back in 1962. Addison loved the history of the bergère chair and hoped that it would soon be his. What he was about to say he had never told another soul, but he knew that his secret would be safe with the nearly dead Winkie, and he knew that it would help him to speak the words.

“Tell me,” said Winkie.

“Do you remember the story you told me about the cook who jumped out the window at the Tavistock mansion on East Seventy-eighth Street?”

“I was there when the poor woman jumped,” whispered Winkie. “So was Adele Harcourt. She landed on a terrace outside the dining room where the lunch party was going on. Plop, right there in front of us. Ruined the party.”

“You’re pretty alert for—what is it now—thirty pills?” said Addison.

“That’s as good a memory as any to die on. What’s your secret?” asked Winkie.

“The cook was my mother. Her name was Doris. I was a year old at the time, living in a maid’s room on the top floor,” said Addison, relieved for having finally told his deepest secret.

Winkie, dying, smiled. “You never let me down.”

Addison took the glasses to the kitchen, rinsed them out, dried them, and put them in the bar. He picked up the tote bag of pornographic videos. He went over to the bed and looked down at Winkie’s dead body. “Good-bye, Winkie. Thanks for picking me up at the Red Lobster in Pensacola when I was still a waiter.”

On the bedside table, next to the empty prescription bottle, was Winkie’s gold cigarette case from the forties. Addison knew
that Winkie had promised Diana Vreeland to leave it to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum. Addison opened it and looked at the lyrics to Cole Porter’s song “The Extra Man.” The case was so stylish that it became irresistible to him. He told himself that Winkie would have wanted him to have it. He slipped it into his pocket and left.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
A
DDISON
K
ENT HEADED
over to the Grant P. Trumbull Funeral Home. On Winkie’s instructions, Addison met Francis Xavior Branigan, the assistant funeral director, and handed him an old Louis Vuitton bag of Winkie’s that Addison meant to keep after handing off its contents. Neatly packed inside were a gray pinstripe suit from Huntsman in London, a blue mono-grammed shirt from Turnbull & Asser on Jermyn Street in London, and a Turnbull & Asser lavender tie that Lil Altemus had given Winkie for his birthday.

“I didn’t know about underwear, whether you put it on for a cremation or not, but I brought some undershorts anyway,” said Addison to Francis Xavior Branigan as he was handing him the bag, giving him the eye at the same time. Addison Kent was a very promiscuous young man, and within five minutes of his handing over Winkie’s clothes, he and Francis Xavior had a quickie in a toilet stall in the men’s room, in much the same manner he had once had a quickie with Adele Harcourt’s first husband’s step-grandson in the bathhouse of the beach club in Harbor Springs, Michigan. Francis Xavior, mistaking the quickie for love, said that he preferred to be called just Xavior.
That was okay with Addison, who never planned to see him again anyway, until Xavior asked Addison if he would like to attend the cremation itself.

“I hadn’t thought of that, no,” said Addison. “Do you do it here?”

“No, in New Jersey. I’m going to sing,” said Xavior.

“You’re going to what?” asked Addison.

“I talked it over with Winkie when he was here to make the arrangements.”

“Winkie? You called him Winkie?” asked Addison, affronted by the impertinence of the assistant funeral director. “He didn’t tell me this, about the singing. That doesn’t sound like Winkie Williams at all. What were you planning on singing?”

“‘The Extra Man,’ by Cole Porter, that’s what he requested.”