Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence (25 page)

For those of you who are interested in the exciting world of high finance, let me explain the arithmetic of this enterprise: The down payments had totaled $400,000. Jeff had come up with $65,000. Joseph Augustus Monti had lent him the rest. To stall off Mr. Monti when he started demanding immediate payment in full, I’d given Jeff my personal check for $35,000—$25,000 of which was a loan to he repaid when he reached age thirty, and $10,000 of which was all of his birthday and Chanukah presents until he reached fifty.

I had nothing more to offer, financially speaking. But I hoped that my last-ditch pitch to super-rich Edmund Standish Voight could—while helping the homeless—solve my son’s problems.

It didn’t.

“The only thing that sounds better than the Voight Homes for the Homeless is the Voight Neonatal Center of Children’s Hospital.” Edmund gave me a warm and rueful smile. “I do so hate saying no to my favorite
columnist, but that’s where our family foundation money is going.”

“And it couldn’t spare just three hundred thousand dollars to contribute to another worthy cause?”

Edmund looked startled. “But surely you know that if we bought and donated those buildings, their mortgages would be part of the purchase price. And once you include the mortgages”—he spoke in the patient tones of a preschool teacher—“you’re asking us for a total contribution of maybe a million a million two.”

In other words, in my eagerness to cut a deal with Edmund, I seemed to have made a few miscalculations.

In other words, if you’re interested in the exciting world of high finance, don’t depend on me to do the arithmetic.

I could feel from the heat that my face had turned red with embarrassment. I could tell from his face that Edmund felt sorry for me. “Not that we’re unwilling,” he was quick to reassure me, “to give consideration to other good causes. Your request was quite legitimate, and I thank you for thinking of me and the foundation. Perhaps some time in the future—”

“Yes, of course, some time in the future,” I interrupted, still aflame with terminal embarrassment. “But right now could we please just change the subject?”

Boyohboyohboy, did we change the subject.

For without a moment’s pause, Edmund said, “I’ve got a little surprise. I’ve invited my niece to join us for dessert Won’t she be astonished when she sees who I am dining with today.”

It was clear from his guileless expression that Edmund knew nothing about the Sunny-Jake affair—neither about the original show nor about its very recent
revival. For a fellow who had spent his life in the diplomatic corps, he had really screwed up.

“You girls—I mean, you young women—used to be such constant companions,” Edmund continual. “So I thought, well, why don’t I do this, for old times’ sake.”

Right, I wanted to say, and while you were getting folks together, you should have invited Ivana Trump and Marla. I buttered a second roll instead, while chipper Edmund chatted. Except that, all of a sudden, I couldn’t hear him.

In fact, the entire horsy room, with its crowded red banquettes and too-small tables, was wrapped in silence. I looked around and all I could see were mouths. Thin-lipped, fat-lipped, chapped-lipped, lip-sticked, all of these mouths were in motion—talking and laughing and yet not making a sound. Oh my God, I thought, as my pulse accelerated, my heart began to pound. Oh my God, I’ve been struck with hysterical deafness.

A moment later my deafness was cured when a Leslie-Audrey voice greeted me with a melodious “Hello, Brenda.” An exquisite blast-from-the-past kiss-kissed my cheeks, then kiss-kissed Edmund’s, then sat down. Now who, I would just like to know, can go for eight years without aging a day? The answer, annoying to say, is Sunny Voight, who also displayed remarkable poise as she murmured, “What an unexpected pleasure,” and ordered a double decaffeinated espresso.

Wearing a chocolate-brown body suit and a chocolate-brown wrap-around skirt, she looked like a gorgeous elf with a high I.Q. Her intelligent oversized eyes displayed die only discernible makeup on a face that otherwise seemed to be dipped in dew. I have to confess that I, if I weren’t basically fond of fellows, could have fallen in
love with Sunny, who was effortlessly laying on the charm.

“I’ve been following your career. You must be so proud of what you’ve accomplished,” was Sonny’s opener. She ran her fingers through her gamine hair. “And the boys—I still remember how adorable they were. Those gorgeous smiles—exactly like their mother’s.”

The trouble with Sunny Voight was she probably meant it.

“You’re too, too kind,” I said, though I’d never spoken like that in my life. I was struggling to regain my self-command. It certainly was my plan to behave with dignity and maturity and grace, which is why I will swear on my children’s heads that I didn’t do it on purpose when I knocked the espresso into Sunny’s lap.

You want to know how much liquid there is in a double decaf espresso? Plenty.

A waiter arrived with fresh napkins. A waiter arrived with club soda. Another waiter brought Sunny a dry chair. Everyone blotted and patted and mopped while I, in addition, apologized, with Sunny—who’s not into Freud or his slips—exclaiming, “Of course it was,” every time I wailed, “It was an accident.”

As I believe I’ve already mentioned, apologizing is something I do really well.

“This is terrible, just terrible!” I told Sunny.

“Please don’t feel upset,” Sunny replied.

“What a nasty mess I’ve made,” I told Sunny.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be all right,” Sunny replied.

“Can you possibly forgive me?” I asked Sunny.

“I doubt it.” Sunny—ha-ha-ha—was making a little joke. “But let me think about it.”

As we were speaking it dawned on me that, considering which of us had really hurt whom, Sunny (husband snatcher) and I (betrayed wife) should have teen delivering each other’s lines.

“This is terrible, just terrible!” Sunny should have said to me.

“Please don’t feel upset,” I would have replied.

“What a nasty mess I’ve made,” Sunny might have conceded.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be all right,” I would have lied.

Sunny: “Can you possibly forgive me?”

Me: “I doubt it—ha-ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha—but let me think about it.”

Sunny went off to the ladies’ room to do a few more repairs on her sopping self. I bounded from my banquette and went right along with her. As we stood in the white, mirrored room, I stared searchingly into her Leslie-Audrey eyes and, using a tactic I’d once proposed in a column called P
RETEND
Y
OU
A
LREADY
K
NOW,
I said, “You slept with my husband this weekend. Why are you starting in with him again?”

And then—and I’ll be the first to grant this was not mature behavior—I made a fist and punched her in the shoulder.

“I can’t say I blame you for doing that,” Sunny said to me, slowly rubbing the place where I’d landed my punch. “Not only don’t I blame you, but I love and admire you, Brenda, I always have.”

“Then why are you fucking my husband again,” I shrieked, as one of Edmund’s former mistresses half-entered the rest room and instantly backed out.

“It was”—Sunny rewrapped her wraparound skirt so the coffee stains wouldn’t show—“a regrettable lapse. It
happened, yes‧—she emptied espresso out of her brown suede shoes—“but that’s not what he came for. It happened and it was—” She silenced herself; a sensual shiver shook her fragile frame. “But truly, Brenda, that’s not what he came for.”

Sunny’s admission, however, was what I had come for.

“I hope you gain forty pounds,” I said to Sunny. “I hope you start sprouting unsightly facial hair. I hope the Smithsonian fires you for conduct unbecoming a paleontologist. I hope every night you go home and nobody’s there. I hope your tax returns are audited annually. I hope—” I took a deep breath “—that all four quadrants of your mouth require gum surgery.”

In the horrified silence that followed, I noticed that all of Edmund’s exes had entered the ladies’ room. Sunny and I departed, our heads held high.

“Don’t tell Jake I had lunch with Edmund,” I said to Sunny as we approached our table. “And I won’t tell him I tricked you into telling me that you two went to bed.”

‘Tell him whatever you wish,” Sunny said, her legendary poise still fully intact. “I don’t plan to see him again—as either a lover or a friend—unless he leaves you.”

•  •  •

I hated “regrettable lapse” and “unless he leaves you.” But it was something else Sunny said that seared my soul, something that she whispered to me while Edmund was saying goodbye to his former mistresses. “I know you’d never do to me—or to any woman, Brenda—what I’ve done to you. I acknowledge how cruel and destructive this can be. And I just want to
say”—she swallowed hard—“that in a better world, all of us would have your kind of purity, integrity, and decency.”

I went right home and called up Birdie Monti, To-ward whom, on March 18, I’d been cruel and destructive. Toward whom I’d failed to display any kind of purity, integrity, or decency. Toward whom—although I’d been trying to forgive myself—I continued to feel astonishingly guilty.

I reminded myself that she didn’t (and never would) know I had slept with her husband and that I wasn’t the one who had broken up her marriage and that, aside from adultery and (okay) attempted murder, I was basically, a decent human being. I still, however, felt guilty toward Birdie Monti. I needed to hear that she was doing okay.

“Definitely okay” was Birdie’s cheerful response to my query. “My grandbabies are a blessing—the lights of my life. I’m sure going to miss my little Brittany when I move out of Gloria’s.”

“You’re moving?” I asked. “Where are you moving to?”

“Why, back to my house, of course. I think I mentioned it’s in my name.” Birdie sounded magnificently serene. “My lawyer told Joseph yesterday that he had to be out of my house by October eighteenth.”

“But where will he live?” I asked.

Birdie, busy burbling words of endearment to baby Brittany, somewhat sharply replied, “That isn’t my problem.” A few burbles later she added, “He told my lawyer that he’d probably move to the city. Let him call real estate agents. They’ll find him a place.”

This conversation returned to me as I drove, the next
morning, from pharmacy to pharmacy, filling my three innocuous prescriptions for what added up to deadly poison pills. To murder Mr. Monti I needed the will (which I had) and the way (which I’d just acquired). But how, I needed to figure out, would I find the opportunity to get close enough to slip him the fatal dose?

I’d been brooding about this question since Miami.

It came to me in a flash as I was paying (in cash, of course) at the third pharmacy, that Birdie Monti had given me my answer.

•

A
ttempted murder was getting awfully expensive.

What with the long blond, wig, the rental car, the uniform, the table, and so forth, my Swedish masseuse disguise had cost three hundred dollars. By the end of Monday afternoon I had spent almost four hundred more (including the past week’s doctors’ appointments and poison pills) to prepare to present myself to Mr. Joseph Augustus Monti as Elizabeth Fisher-Todd, ace real estate agent.

“Hah there,” I said in a husky honeyed
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
drawl when I reached Joseph Monti by phone on Tuesday morning. “Ah unnerstan’ y’all’s lookin’ to fond a place to live in the District. Ahm your puhson.”

(I’ll return to Standard English, but keep in mind that I’m sounding a lot like Blanche DuBois, with just a little Scarlett O’Hara thrown in.)

“I only now decided to move,” Joseph Monti growled. “How did you already get that information?”

“We got it because it’s our business to get it, and we’re the best in the business,” I silkily soothed him. “Fisher-Todd is a low-profile outfit with very high
quality clients. We only work with”—stroke! stroke!—“the cream of the crop.”

“Well then—” he softened; I knew that he’d be a sucker for “cream of the crop”—“what do you have to show me in, say, a luxury two-bedroom condo in north west Washington?”

“Oh, no no
no
!” I replied. “That isn’t at all how we do business at Fisher-Todd. Our slogan has always been More Than Realtors—Matchmakers. And to make the perfect match between you and the place that you next will call home, I’ll need to meet you and buy you a drink and chat a bit so I can grasp your essence.”

“Grasp my what?”

“Your essence. I can promise it won’t take long. This evening? Caucus, on Capitol Hill? Six o’clock?”

Mr. Monti resisted. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I want—”

“I’ll be the kind of . . . bosomy one . . . with the violet eyes and black hair and a little mole—like Liz Taylor’s—on my cheek.”

My fish was back on the line. “It sounds as if maybe more than your mole is like Liz Taylor.”

I sighed with becoming modesty. “Well, actually, people say like a
younger
Liz Taylor.”

•  •  •

With my black bouffant wig and my penciled-on mole and my violet-tinted contacts, I did—in the dimly lit Caucus—look somewhat Lizish, And I figured I’d look a lot more so when Mr. Monti, as I was counting on him to do, took off his glasses in order to impress me with his big blind bedroom eyes. But I knew I must have a backup plan in case my disguise didn’t wash, and, while praying I wouldn’t need it, I had prepared
one, intending, to tell Mr. Monti—if caught—that I’d tricked him into this meeting to beg for mercy. And then I’d say, “So I’m asking you, I’m pleading with you, I’m urging you, to please please please please let my family be.” And if he agreed (unlikely), I would happily flush the poison pills down the toilet. And if he refused (highly likely), I’d suggest that we have one last drink, for old times’ sake. And then he’d either sneer and leave or sneer and have that drink—in which case I’d kill him.

“Easy to find you among these yuppies,” Joseph Monti greeted me, sliding smoothly into a chair and immediately (whew!) removing his glasses.

“Charmed to meet you.” I reached out my hand in a crisp but certainly not unfeminine handshake. “My clients call me Elizabeth. I hope that you will too. And I do hope you will forgive my unbusinesslike garb.”