“Hmm,” Brainert had replied to Sadie, clearly intrigued in spite of himself. “I concede you have a cogent point.”
An understatement if ever there was one since the Bethany Banks murder and subsequent investigation were the biggest scandals to rock the Newport jet set since Klaus von Bülow was accused of injecting his obscenely rich wife with enough insulin to send her into a coma until the twenty-second century. And when I’d heard that some of the chic book emporiums in Providence and Newport had refused to consider an author appearance by Angel, I’d immediately issued an invitation for her to come to Quindicott. Miracle of miracles, Angel—or her publicist, at least—had accepted our invitation, and here she stood in our packed Community Events room.
I would have turned my attention back to Angel’s reading just then, but my thoughts were suddenly interrupted by another voice. The one in my head—
In my day, dames with money from well-heeled families hired me to help them duck scandal on the QT. The last thing they’d ever do was write a book about it and tart it up in front of a ham-handed audience for applause.
The booming, masculine voice was either Jack Shepard—the ghost of a private detective who’d been haunting Buy the Book since his murder here more than fifty years ago—or a delusion of what would have to be my half-demented mind.
Which was true?
Take your pick.
“It’s a different world than the forties, Jack,” I silently replied, not a little annoyed that the ghost—who, so far as I knew, only I could hear—broke our agreement that he’d stay silent on evenings of important author appearances.
I liked my world better, Jack shot back. The uptown crowd kept their trashy messes in the back alley, not on their bookshelves.
“Shhh!” my thoughts insisted. “I want to listen to Ms. Stark’s reading.”
“Bethany was our radiant star,” Angel continued from the podium, “and like moths to a flame we circled her, even though at times our wings got burned.”
Brainert tsk-tsked again.
I glanced his way.
“Moths to flame?” he whispered. “Forget the Banks girl, these cliché’s are killing me.”
I shushed him, too.
“In medieval times, songs would be sung about a young maid’s beauty, her wisdom, her virtue. Bethany, like all my other pretty friends, lacked an intellect, an original mind, but no matter. Of her beauty much was written—in the gossip columns and fashion magazines, the Internet fan sites and fawning letters—for Bethany had beauty enough to be envied by all, not to mention a PR flack with a fat Rolodex. Her line of handbags, created by a ghost designer, was sweeping the world. Her face was used to sell magazines. ‘Bethany,’ the new fragrance by an exclusive cosmetics company, was just hitting the market.
“In a life so short, Bethany Banks had possessed it all. But a perfect face, a perfect figure, perfect teeth, a perfect trust fund, and a perfect life were at least one perfect too many for someone. Clearly, that someone had decided that the only experience Bethany lacked was to be brutalized.”
Listen, babe, I’m getting the drift—there’s a big chill unsolved here.
“Yes,” I said. “This is a type of book we call in the book business ‘true crime.’ Most books of this type recount the murder, the apprehension, and the trial. This one covers the crime, but it’s still unsolved. And the author was a friend of the murdered girl.”
So, the author’s got the inside scoop?
“Yes.”
Then who are her suspects?
“She hasn’t gotten around to naming them yet.”
Well, she better get to it soon, ’cause all this overblown yammering is putting me to sleep.
“Jack, if you don’t settle down, neither of us is going to hear a thing!”
Take it easy, doll. Don’t get your panties in a twist.
I could feel the heat on my face and just knew my pale complexion was reddening. “I wish you wouldn’t use that phrase, Jack.”
His response was a deep laugh—and a whisper of cold air to cool off my flaming cheeks.
“Bethany wore a spotless white gown the night of the New Year’s Ball, the night of her murder—a radiant white so pure she appeared ghostly under the heavenly gleam of the chandeliers. When she floated down the stairs, all eyes followed. Then she paused to girlishly wave her gloved hand at us, her closest circle of friends, a group that, incredibly, held a person capable of murdering Bethany before the clock struck twelve midnight. Of course, at that dazzling moment of arrival under the thousand-bulb chandeliers, our princess was not dead. Not yet.
“All Newport balls are resplendent, and this one was no exception. The Gilded Age mansion gleamed in polished marble and gilt-edged moldings. The army of waiters in white-jacket uniforms carried brimming silver trays. The bejeweled women and turned-out men were there, obeying the black-tie command printed in gold ink on the crisp parchment invitations. And, as usual, everyone appeared captivated by Bethany’s angelic beauty. But let’s be frank, since we’re telling the truth here. Not even Ms. Banks’s fiancé would describe her character as angelic, not with a straight face—for God knows, there wasn’t much virtue left inside that perfect shell. No, by this time, Bethany Banks had filled her mortal vessel with almost every vice imaginable . . .”
Back to the trashy mess again, Jack complained. Is she ever gonna get to the suspects?
“You’re trying my patience, Jack,” I silently scolded.
“Still,” Angel continued, “Bethany had a way of diminishing the rest of us, of banishing us to bit parts, walk-ons—shadow players in our own lives. Here stood I, a literary light with a best-selling book and film adaptation on my resume, yet the fire that was Bethany Banks shone so much brighter.
“For Georgette LaPomeret—pathetic, eager to please, eating-disordered Georgie-girl—it was her absurd dream that her grotesque couture would become a runway sensation.”
Okay, finally, the first suspect.
“Beyond her sad illusion of fashion immortality, Georgie lived for two things—the pharmaceutical fortune she would one day inherit, and copious amounts of a snowy powder distilled not in her family’s New Jersey factory, but South of the Border down Cartegena way. That habit—like all bad habits—was actively encouraged and enabled by Bethany Banks. Then there’s Henry ‘Call me, Hal’ McConnell, who lived for love, not that he ever got any . . .”
Second suspect.
“Hal was the sweet, clueless man-boy who had pined since elementary school for the girl next door Bethany Banks, the beauty he could never touch. The irony here was that ‘hands-off Hal’ Bethany had done more than touched so many others. . . . Katherine Langdon used the breezy, approachable nickname ‘Kiki’ as a façade to disguise her cold-as-ice interior.”
Number three.
“In a world of old money and old reputations, Kiki put the stiff in ‘stiff upper lip.’ With the calculated strategy worthy of Mary, Queen of Scots, or Catherine the Great, she became Newport’s Princess of Wales, another lady in waiting who would only have to wait a little longer.
“And last but not least, there was the uncrowned king of our little fiefdom: Donald Easterbrook, Jr.—‘Le Donald.’ The Prince who escorted the Princess to the ball, only to discover that his lady-in-waiting had not waited for him.”