That makes four.
“Of course, Donald shouldn’t have been too surprised. On that particular night, at that particular ball, Bethany Banks was not waiting for anyone. In fact, the Princess was fleeing her assembled subjects without leaving so much as a glass slipper behind.
“It was midnight when Bethany Banks hurried out of the main ballroom and down the back stairs. Reality was stalking our heroine, you see. Adolescent no more, her debutante days behind her, Bethany was fast approaching the one true thing that none of us could deny or avoid. Soon Bethany would relinquish her belle-of-the-ball status to her little sister, her sorority presidency to an underclassman, her key to the ‘special rooms’ at Manhattan and Hampton nightspots. Adulthood loomed, and real life was closing in.
“Now, the girls I know do not like real life. Anything close to reality sends them packing for underground shelters. As I’ve often been quoted, my saying still applies: ‘Why be neurotic when you can be numb?’
“Bethany Banks ducked underground often—‘slumming’ in the Depression-era parlance of her Chief Justice grandfather. Like a Roman noblewoman cavorting with gladiators, on the last night of her life, Bethany Banks descended dark and narrow stairs to a dank hole in the wall, a workspace occupied by the peons who served her drinks and prepared her foods and tended her gardens and, as it turned out, fed her addictions to sex, to drugs, to popularity.
“You see, Bethany Banks led a secret life. For her, low life and high life were interchangeable. She slummed with the best of us, too often (as we have seen) behaving like the worst of us. And the next morning she woke up, combed out her hair, pulled her clothes over her head, and went back home to Ma and Pa’s mansion to sleep it off. Seemingly untouched by the orgy of self-indulgence, and incapable of an orgy of self-recrimination, Bethany moved between the worlds with an impunity others were not lucky enough to possess. Bethany used drugs, but never became a slave to them—rather, she used the power of illegal drugs to enslave others.
“Bethany swam in a sea of available young men, taking on lovers and dropping them as quickly and easily as last year’s fashion, and came away unscarred by abortion and unpolluted by STDs.”
STDs? Jack queried in my head.
“Sexually transmitted diseases,” I silently informed him.
Ah . . . Neat little abbreviation. In my day, the lingo wasn’t quite so pretty.
“What was it?”
Jack whispered it in my head, and my face flamed again. Suffice it to say, I’m too much of a prude to repeat it.
“After so many successful escapes, evasions, and near misses, Bethany must have felt herself immortal. How could she know that on this night, the precious, privileged, pampered Princess of Newport would face the consequences of her actions? How could our Duchess of Malfi know that one of the princes in her life—perhaps the very prince she came to meet in secret rendezvous—had shed his human guise and become a werewolf?
“Perhaps the realization came after her gown had been hiked up, her panties removed—at the moment the leather belt wrapped around the tender marble-white of her throat and squeezed the life out of her.
“Did Bethany know the hands that murdered her? Did she understand who she had wronged, and why the end had come? Or did she laugh as if it were a prank, until the leather noose tightened and silenced her laughter forever?
“What were Bethany’s final thoughts as her lips turned blue, then purple? Before her green-flecked eyes grew dim, who did Bethany see? When her tongue turned almost as black as her sins, did Bethany know—did she really understand—why it was that she had to die?”
And that makes five, said Jack.
“Five?” I whispered in my head. “Who’s the fifth?”
Who do you think, doll? Angel Stark herself.
The slender young woman at the podium employed a lengthy pause, then loudly and emphatically closed her book, signaling to the audience that she had finished her reading.
CHAPTER 2
Dying for Applause
While von Bülow saved himself for an exclusive interview
with Barbara Walters, his mistress did a saturation
booking on the television shows . . . and told
friends she was writing a miniseries based on the trial.
Von Bülow made plans with his publisher for his autobiography
and, according to one friend, made arrangements
for a face-lift.
—Dominick Dunne, Fatal Charms and Other Tales of Today
MY AUDIENCES AT Buy the Book could always be counted on to provide genial applause. But the intense emotions stirred by Angel Stark’s true tale of murder among the yachting class released a tide of screaming cheers and zealous hand-clapping I hadn’t heard outside of a rock concert.
I have to admit, the noise level startled me, and I resisted the urge to slap my hands over my ears. After all, I thought to myself, how would it look?
Who the hell cares? This racket’s giving me a headache. And I haven’t had a head for fifty years.
Pointedly ignoring the ghost, I put my hands together in a polite show of unity with my enthusiastic patrons.
Author Angel Stark blinked her animated brown eyes, then tossed her long copper hair behind her shoulders. Her full lips tipped slightly and she cocked her head in poised acceptance of the ovation. The din continued, loud enough it seemed to blow the elfin wisp of a girl off the small portable stage.
I turned to Brainert. He was applauding, but only mildly.
“Well,” I fished, “her delivery was certainly dramatic, don’t you think?”
“Dramatic?” Brainert replied. “Try indulgent.”
“At least you can admit that Angel Stark knows how to play to a crowd,” I argued.
Brainert frowned and shook his head. “Showmanship does not an author make.”
“On the contrary,” interrupted Fiona Finch, sitting directly behind us. “An author knows how to tell a story. And her story is quite fascinating.”
As the applause died, I could hear the metal chain on Fiona’s large falcon-and-falconer brooch clink as she leaned forward to speak in my ear. Fiona herself was a small, brown-haired, wrenlike person whose most memorable characteristic, besides her compulsion for eavesdropping, was her colorful collection of bird pins—hundreds of them were in her possession, and she was forever on the yard sale hunt for more.
“A wonderful choice for your author event,” she gushed with a sincere smile as she patted me on the back of my cream-colored linen pantsuit. (I usually dressed more casually for work, especially on a warm summer day like this one, but this was a major author event, so I thought looking the part of a co-owner appropriate.)
“A very interesting reading,” Fiona complimented.
Brainert snorted.
Fiona was also Buy the Book’s number-one purchaser of true crime books, so this event was right up her proverbial dark alley.
“Too many books about crime and criminals are written by journalists or police investigators,” Fiona continued. “It’s refreshing to have an eyewitness and friend of the victim write a book—much more intense and immediate. The excerpt she read was . . . fascinating.”
Brainert rolled his eyes and mumbled something about “book review adjectives.”