The Hellfire Club (4 page)

8

“SURE, EVERY WOMAN
in Westerholm is frightened,” Alden said. “They’re supposed to be.”

“What do you mean, supposed to be?” Nora asked.

“You think I’m defending murder.”

“No, I just want to know what you meant.”

He surveyed the table. “When Nora looks at me, she sees the devil.”

“A
nonfiction
devil,” said Daisy.

“Dad, I don’t think I understand, either.”

“Alden wants people to think he’s the nonfiction . . . true crime . . . devil.” Daisy had reached the stage of speaking with exaggerated care.

“The devil does, too,” Nora said, irritated.

“Exactly,” Alden said. “Wherever this fellow goes, he’s hot stuff. He gets his weekly copy of the
Westerholm News
, and he’s on the front page.”

He helped himself to another portion of lobster salad and signaled Jeffrey, generally referred to as “the Italian girl’s nephew,” to pour more wine. Jeffrey took the bottle from the ice bucket, wiped it on a white towel, and went to the end of the table to refill Daisy’s glass. He moved up the table, and Nora put her hand over the top of her glass. Jeffrey gave her a comic scowl before he went to the head of the table.

Nora had never known what to make of Jeffrey. Tall, of an age somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five, his speech without accent, his fair brown hair thinning evenly across his crown, Jeffrey was an unlikely relative of Maria. Nora gathered that she had produced him some ten years before when Alden had begun to talk about hiring someone to answer phones, open doors, run errands. Jeffrey had clever eyes and a graceful, guarded manner that did not preclude playfulness. Some days he looked like a thug. Nora watched him offer the wine to Davey, turn away to twist the bottle into the ice, and return to his post at the edge of the terrace. In a close-fitting dark suit and black shirt, Jeffrey was having one of his thug days. Daisy reminded her of her private theory about Jeffrey by saying, “You’re usually more . . . original . . . than
that
,” and tapping her fork on the table in rhythm with her words.

Jeffrey had been hired to cover for Daisy.

“I’m not finished, my dear.”

“Then please, please enlighten us.”

Alden smiled universally at the table. His perfect teeth gleamed, his white hair shone, a flush darkened the smoothly tanned broad face. In a blazer and snowy shirt, the top button opened over a paisley ascot, with bright, expressionless eyes and deep indentations like divots around his mouth, Alden looked just like the kind of person who hired someone like Jeffrey. Nora realized how much she disliked him.

“Think of how many copies the
Westerholm News
is selling. People who never looked at it in their lives are buying it now. And this isn’t true just of our rinky-dink little paper. The tabloids in New York jump up and salute every time another lady is slaughtered in her bed. And do you think the security system business in Fairfield County is having the usual August lull? What about the handgun business? Not to mention fencing, yard lights, and locksmiths? How about television reporters, the photographers from
People
?”

“Don’t forget publishers,” Nora said.

“Absolutely. What’s your best guess on how many books are being written about Westerholm at this minute? Four? Five? Think of the paper that will go into those books. The ink, the foil for the covers. Think of the computer disks, the laptops, the notebooks, the fax machines. The
fax paper.
The
pencils.
”

“It’s an industry,” Davey said. “Okay.”

“A darn bloody industry, if you ask me,” said Daisy. Nora silently applauded.

“So was World War Two,” said Alden. “And so was Vietnam, Nora, if you’ll forgive me.”

Nora didn’t think she would.

“Ah, if looks could kill—but did or did not unit commanders have a certain amount of shells they were supposed to fire on a daily basis—not officially, I mean, but pretty specific anyhow? Didn’t we use up a tremendous amount of uniforms and vehicles over there, didn’t we build bases and sell beer and buy tons of food? Wasn’t somebody manufacturing body bags? Nora, I know I’m flirting with danger, but I love it when your eyes flash.”

He was flirting with her, not danger. She looked across the table at her husband and found him gazing at the napkin in his lap.

“Gee, I love it when your eyes flash, too, Alden,” she said. “It makes you look so young.”

“Actually, Nora, you’re the oldest person at this table.”

For both her husband’s sake and Daisy’s, Nora forced herself to relax.

“You were tempered in ways the rest of us were not, and that’s why you’re so beautiful! I’ve admired beautiful women all my life, beautiful women are the saviors of mankind. Just being able to see your face must have pulled a lot of guys through over there.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, and looked back at Alden. “Aren’t you sweet.”

“You must have had a great effect on the young men that passed through your hands.”

“I think your viewpoint cheapens everything,” Nora said. “Sorry. It’s disgusting.”

“If I could snap my fingers and make it so that you’d never gone to Vietnam, would you let me do it?”

“That would make me as young as you are, Alden.”

“Benefits come in all shapes and sizes.” He distributed a smile around the table. “Is there anything else I can clear up for you?”

For a moment nobody spoke. Then Daisy said, “Time for me to return to my cell. I’m feeling a little tired. Wonderful to see you, Davey. Nora, I’ll be in touch.”

Alden glanced at Nora before pushing back his chair and getting up. Davey stood up a second later.

Daisy grasped the top of her chair and turned toward the door. “Jeffrey, please thank Maria.
Lovely
lobster salad.”

Jeffrey’s courtly smile made him look more than ever like a dapper second-story man disguised as a valet. He drifted sideways and opened the door for Daisy.

9

ALDEN AND DAVEY
took their chairs again. “Your mother’ll be right as rain after her nap,” Alden said. “Whatever goes on in her studio is her business, but I have the feeling she’s been working harder than usual lately.”

Davey nodded slowly, as if trying to decide if he agreed with his father.

Alden fixed Nora with a glance and took a sip of wine. “Planning something with Daisy?”

“Why do you ask?”

Davey flicked his hair out of his eyes and looked from Nora to his father and back again.

“Call it an impression.”

“I’d like to spend more time with her. Go shopping, have lunch someday, things like that.” Alden’s gaze made her feel as though she were lying to a superior.

“Terrific,” Alden said, and Davey relaxed back into his chair. “I mean it. Nice thought, my two girls having fun together.”

“Mom’s been working hard?”

“Well, if you ask me, something’s going on up there.” He looked at Nora in an almost conspiratorial fashion. “Was that your impression, Nora?”

“I didn’t see her working, if that’s what you mean.”

“Ah, Daisy’s like Jane Austen” she hides all the evidence. When she was writing her first two books, I never even saw her at the typewriter. To tell you the truth, sometimes this voice in my head would whisper,
What if she’s just making it all up?
Then one day a box came from one of my competitors, and she whisked it away into her studio and came back out and handed me a book! Year after that, the same thing happened all over again. So I just let her do her thing. Hell, Davey, you know. You grew up in this crazy system.”

Davey nodded and looked across the table as if he, too, wondered whether Nora possessed secret information.

“All my life, I’ve dealt with writers, and they’re great—some writers anyhow—but I never understood what they do or how they do it. Hell, I don’t think even they know how they do it. Writers are like babies. They scream and cry and bug the hell out of you, and then they produce this great big crap and you tell them how great it is.” He laughed, delighted with himself.

“Does that go for Hugo Driver, too? Was he one of the screaming babies?”

Davey said, “Nora—”

“Sure he was. The difference with Driver was, everybody thought his dumps smelled better than the other brats’.” Alden no longer seemed so delighted with his metaphor.

“Daisy said you met him a couple of times. What was he like?”

“How should I know? I was a kid.”

“But you must have had some impression. He was your father’s most important author. He even stayed in this house.”

“Well, at least now I know what you and Daisy were talking about up there.”

She ignored this remark. “In fact, Driver was responsible for—”

“Driver wrote a book. Thousands of people write books every year. His happened to be successful. If it hadn’t been Driver, it would have been someone else.” He struggled for an air of neutral authority. “You have a lot to learn about publishing. I say that respectfully, Nora.”

“Really.”

Davey was combing his hair off his forehead with his fingers. “What you say is true, but—”

His father froze him with a look.

“But it was a classic collaboration,” Davey continued. “The synergy was unbelievable.”

“I’m too old for synergy,” Alden said.

“You never told me what you thought of him personally.”

“Personally I thought he was an acquaintance of my father’s.”

“That’s all?”

Alden shook his head. “He was this unimpressive little guy in a loud tweed jacket. He thought he looked like the Prince of Wales, but actually he looked like a pickpocket.”

Davey seemed too shocked to speak, and Alden went on. “Hey, I always thought the Prince of Wales looked like a pickpocket, too. Driver was a very talented writer. What I thought of him when I was a little boy doesn’t matter. What kind of guy he was doesn’t matter either.”

“Hugo Driver was a great writer.” Davey uttered this sentence to his plate.

“No argument here.”

“He was.”

Alden smiled meaninglessly, inserted another section of lobster into his mouth, and followed it with a swallow of wine. Davey vibrated with suppressed resentment. Alden said, “You know my rule: a great publisher never reads his own books. Gets in the way of your judgment. While we’re on this subject, do we have anything for our friend Leland Dart?”

This was the most exalted of their lawyers, the partner of Leo Morris in the firm of Dart, Morris.

Davey said he was working on it.

“To be truthful, I wonder if our friend Leland might be playing both ends against the middle.”

“Does this have something to do with the Driver estate?” Nora asked.

“Please, Nora,” Davey said. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Did I just become invisible?”

“You know what’s interesting about Leland Dart?” Alden asked, clearly feeling the obligation to rescue the conversation. “Apart from his utter magnificence, and all that? His relationship with his son. I don’t get it. Do you get it? I mean Dick—I sort of understood what happened with the older one, Petey, but Dick just baffles me. Does that guy actually do anything?”

Davey was laughing now. “I don’t think he does, no. We met him a month or two ago, remember, Nora? At Gilhoolie’s, right after it opened.”

Nora did remember, and the memory of the appalling person named Dick Dart could now amuse her, too. Dart had been two years behind Davey at the Academy. She had been introduced to him at the bar of a restaurant which had replaced a mediocre pizza parlor in the Waldbaum’s shopping center. Men and women in their twenties and thirties had crowded the long bar separating the door from the dining room, and the menus in plastic cases on the red-checked tables advertised drinks like Mudslides and Long Island Iced Teas. As she and Davey had passed through the crowd, a tall, rather fey-looking man had turned to Davey, dropped a hand on his arm, and addressed him with an odd mixture of arrogance and diffidence. He wore a nice, slightly rumpled suit, his tie had been yanked down, and his fair hair drooped over his forehead. He appeared to have consumed more than a sufficient number of Mudslides. He had said something like
I suppose you’re going to pretend that you don’t remember our old nighttime journeys anymore.

During Davey’s denial, the man had tilted back his head and peered from one Chancel to the other in a way that suggested they made an amusing spectacle. Nora had endured ironic compliments to her “valiant” face and “lovely” hair. After telling Davey that he should come around by himself some night to talk about the wild rides they’d enjoyed together, Dart had released them, but not before adding that he
adored
Nora’s scent. Nora had not been wearing a scent. Once they reached their table, Nora had said that she’d make Davey sleep in the garage if he ever had anything to do with that languid jerk. Give me a break, Davey had said, Dart’s trying to get in your pants. He gets it all from old Peter O’Toole movies. More like old George Sanders movies, Nora answered, wondering if anyone ever got laid by pretending to despise the person he wanted to seduce.

Midway through the tasteless meal, Nora had looked up at the bar and seen Dart wink at her. She had asked Davey what his old pal did for a living, and Davey had offered the surprising information that Dick was an attorney in his father’s firm.

Now Davey said to his father what he had explained to Nora at Gilhoolie’s, that Dick Dart lived off the crumbs that fell from the tables of Dart, Morris’s wealthier clients” he took elderly widows to lunch in slow-moving French restaurants and assured them that Leland Dart was preserving their estates from the depredations of a socialist federal government.

“Why does he stay on?”

“He probably likes the lunches,” Davey said. “And I suppose he expects to inherit the firm.”

“Don’t put any money on it,” Alden said. Nora felt a chill wind so clearly that it might have blown in off the Sound. “Old Leland is too smart for that. He’s been the back-room boy in Republican politics in this state since the days of Ernest Forrest Ernest, and he’s not going to let that kid anywhere near the rudder of Dart, Morris. You watch. When Leland steps down, he’ll tell Dick he needs more seasoning and pull in a distinguished old fraud just like himself.”

“Why do you want Davey to know that?” asked Nora.

“So he’ll understand our esteemed legal firm,” Alden said.

“Maybe Leland’s wife will have her own ideas about what happens to Dick,” Nora said.

Alden grinned luxuriantly. “Leland’s wife, well. I wonder what that lady makes of her son going around romancing the same women her husband seduced forty years ago. Leland took them to bed to get their legal business, and Dick sweet-talks them to keep it. Do you suppose our boy Dick climbs into bed with them, the same way his daddy used to do? It’d be a strange boy who did that, wouldn’t you think?”

Davey stared out at the Sound without speaking.

“I suppose you think the women are grateful,” said Nora.

“Maybe the first time,” Alden said. “I don’t imagine Dick gives them much to be grateful for.”

“We’ll never know,” Davey said, smiling strangely toward the Sound.

Alden checked the empty places as if for leftover bits of lobster. “Are we all finished?”

Davey nodded, and Alden glanced up at Jeffrey, who drifted sideways and opened the door. Nora thanked him as she walked past, but Jeffrey pretended not to hear. A few minutes later, Nora sat in Davey’s little red Audi, holding a Mason jar of homemade mayonnaise as he drove from Mount Avenue into Westerholm’s newer, less elegant interior.