Dobbsie next quoted from a magazine article by the well-known hostess and social commentator, Dina Alstetter:
Two days ago, when I was visiting the stately Sutton Place town house where Babe Devens sank into her final sleep, Babe’s thirteen-year-old daughter, the remarkably poised Cordelia Koenig, asked me if I’d like to accompany her and her grandmother to see “Mommy’s room.” I followed them into a bedchamber done in marvelous Billy Baldwin earth tones, with a Renoir flower painting
(Les Trois Roses)
supplying contrasting accents of green and yellow.
There on the dresser were Babe’s silver-backed brush, comb, and handmirror—heirlooms that belonged to her maternal great-grandmother, the beloved philanthropist and cofounder of Saint Vincent’s Hospital, Yvelise Wilmerding of New York’s original Four Hundred.
On Scottie’s side of the double bed was a silver-framed photograph of a teenaged Babe Vanderwalk at a Waldorf Democratic Party fund-raiser, dancing an uninhibited Charleston with then-President of the United States Lyndon Baines Johnson. Beside the photo was a small, strikingly handsome lacquer box, designed by Erté, intended to hold shirt studs and cufflinks. I opened the box. Inside was a matchbook from the Colony, with the phone number of “Jeanne” scrawled within the cover, and an unused bottle of injectable insulin—manufacturer S. Merck, lot number R-4756-18.
Dobbsie pointed to the poetic justice in the fact that these ill-matched twain—the “shucks-ma’am” boy from Kentucky and the bejeweled, dumpy siren from Marshal Tito’s workers’ paradise—are bound together, forever, by the secret which was no secret at all—except to that stone lady wearing the blindfold.
For that bond, say many who know both these upwardly driven social overachievers, has already turned into a hard-drinking, hard-cursing, fist-fighting shackle. “I wouldn’t invite them anywhere,” says one prominent Manhattan hostess. “Not because of the murder—I couldn’t care less—but because of the filth they scream at one another in public.”
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., won’t sit down at the same table with them.
Neither will Brooke Astor.
And don’t mention their names to actresses Celeste Holm or Dina Merrill.
Dobbsie found some consolation in the fact that, whether or not justice will ultimately be done in the courts of man-made law, justice has been achieved in a more poetic sense: Scottie and Doria have been sentenced to lifelong doses of one another. “It’s a far more horrible punishment than the crime,” says a Coty-award winning designer, “especially for him.”
On the final page of the book, in a somber concluding note, Dobbsie said he had begun his research convinced of Devens’s innocence, but an exhaustive analysis of the record and thirty thousand pages of interviews had forced him to change his mind.
The real mystery, he said, was not who had injected Babe Devens, but how any sane man or woman could question the considered verdict of twelve impartial jurors. How much longer, he concluded, will society ignore the drumbeat of reason and step to the danse macabre of money?
Babe closed the book.
Dobbsie’s cunning interweaving of fact and conjecture astonished her. The man was a shrewd and ruthless master of implication. If the book had been commissioned by the prosecution, it could not have been more effectively calculated to damn Scottie Devens.
Babe telephoned Ash. The machine answered and beeped.
“Ash, it’s Babe. Are you sleeping?”
“Not now I’m not.” Ash’s voice sounded as though she had just crawled out from under a half-dozen Nembutals. “Hi, doll. What time is it?”
“It’s early, I’m sorry. I’ve just read Dobbsie’s book.”
“Don’t you love it? Champagne truffles all the way.”
“I think it’s horrible.”
“Then you must still be in love with that bastard Scottie.”
“Maybe, but I doubt it. I didn’t know your sister wrote magazine articles.”
“And books. Dina’s been an oral journalist for four years. She tape-records people and her secretary types up the tapes. She interviewed Pope John Paul for Sewanee Review; it’s been anthologized to hell and back. And she did a great book on Sid Vicious for S and S. She had help on that, Dobbsie edited it a little.”
“She certainly did a job on Scottie. I suppose she had help on that too.”
“She was just trying to be obliging.”
“Who was she obliging?”
“Your family. They wanted the insulin in the lacquer stud box brought out and none of the papers were touching it.”
“But Ash, there was no insulin in the lacquer stud box.”
“How do you know? You weren’t exactly there.”
“Because there wasn’t any lacquer stud box. Scottie used a little ceramic bowl to hold his cufflinks and studs.”
30
CARDOZO NUDGED RICHARDS AND nodded over the heads of the crowd. “Here he comes. Old Faithful.”
The tall, thickset blond man moved down the stairs with a drunken cockiness, an almost falling-down swagger. He had an enormous smile on.
It was close to three in the morning and Cardozo and Richards had been waiting for him almost two hours.
Loring stood a moment in the confusion of the vestibule, rocking back and forth as though physically colliding with the amplified waves of music.
“Tripping on the moon,” Richards observed.
Loring stumbled out of his clothes. Pushing an armload of denim in front of him, he jostled into the clothescheck line.
The clothescheck man flipped Loring’s jeans and T-shirt and jacket over a hanger and slid Loring a numbered chit. Loring stuffed the chit into his right tube sock and slid a dollar back across the counter. Cardozo made careful note which end of which rack the hanger went onto.
The clothescheck man cheated a look at Cardozo.
Unencumbered now, Loring narrowed his eyes and scoped the scene. The main room was mucky, rutted, steaming like a basin in a public pissoir. Shadowy figures grouped and regrouped with the urgency of viruses stalking vulnerable cells. Loring zigzagged into the party area, helping himself to every available wall and pillar.
“Stick with him,” Cardozo told Richards. “Don’t let him leave.”
Richards went after Loring.
The clothescheck man watched Cardozo with a bemused look, studying him. Cardozo let his face open into a warm, wide grin. He crossed to the counter.
“Hi.” The clothescheck man’s eyes were cheerful and his mouth had a tough, defiant twist. “You alone?”
“Not now,” Cardozo said. “My name’s Vince.”
The clothescheck man leaned against the counter and looked at him. “Arnold.”
Cardozo accepted a bone-crushing macho handshake.
A smile slopped down Arnold’s face. “You’re new?”
“Just heard about the place.”
“Who told you about it?”
“You just checked his clothes.”
“Claude?”
“You know him?”
“Everyone knows Claude. He’s wild.”
“You ever partied with him?”
“Hell no. He likes kids.”
“You don’t?”
“I’m into grown-ups.” Arnold’s eyes were probing. “You?”
Cardozo shrugged. “A little of everything.”
“I got some nose whiskey, premium blow.”
Cardozo grinned. “Why not?”
Arnold called, “Hey Herb, cover for me!” He opened a door, and a bright wedge of light fell across the clothes racks. He motioned Cardozo into the rear room.
A naked overhead bulb spotlighted a clutter of mops and crates and empty bottles. The brick walls were covered with decomposing movie posters. The air smelled of mildew.