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.”
“Yes.”
“She hasn’t gotten around to naming them yet.”
“Jack, if you don’t settle down, neither of us is going to hear a thing!”
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 fiance 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 . . .”
“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.”
“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 . . .”
“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 facade to disguise her cold-as-ice interior.”
“In a world of old money and old reputations, Kiki put the
“And last but not least, there was the uncrowned king of our little fiefdom: Donald Easterbrook, Jr. —‘
“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.”
“Sexually transmitted diseases,” I silently informed him.
“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?”
“Five?” I whispered in my head. “Who’s the fifth?”
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.
