“The Kasbah.” Babette pinpointed her hometown. “My mother sold favors, my father was a steady customer.”
“Hush!” Gilbert chided her. “You must excuse her, Archy, she likes to shock. Actually, her mother was a school teacher and her father was in the diplomatic corps. This is Archy McNally, Babs; he’s a friend of Bianca’s. She’s inside examining our drawers — furniture, that is.”
“Naughty girl,” Babette said. “She wants to send poor Tony to the pen.
May I have your robe, darling.”
“Sorry, but there’s nothing but me beneath it,” Gilbert told her.
“So?” Babette said with a shrug, ‘we’re all friends, no, Mr.
McNally?”
“Sorry, Babette, but we’ve just met,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes off her and she reveled in the attention. No wonder Louisa had left.
She must have gone off screaming. The place was a zoo.
“Run along, Babs, and go dry off,” Gilbert advised. “I haven’t finished with Mr. McNally.”
“I run, but not with pleasure. Mr. McNally is cute. Do you swim, Mr.
McNally?”
Two miles every day, in the Atlantic. We don’t have a pool.”
“Do you like to do it on your back, Mr. McNally?”
“Will you get out of here,” Gilbert insisted.
Babette giggled, an incongruous sound owing to her amazing proportions.
She, too, disappeared behind the sliding glass door, looking as alluring from aft as from fore.
“I met her in Vegas,” Gilbert told me. “She worked the blackjack table where not even the most dedicated gambler could keep count. I saw a visiting fireman ask for a pull with two kings showing.”
“Is she staying with you?” I asked.
“Where else? Babette came to comfort me as soon as she heard of my loss. And a loss it was, Archy. I may be able to keep the house, which is doubtful at this time, but I couldn’t afford the upkeep, naturally.”
“It should net you a good sum,” I remarked, my mind on other things.
Algiers in July? Why not? It would broaden my horizons, among other things. I had been too long in Palm Beach pent, as the poet would say.
Gilbert was laughing and I feared I had missed the joke. “This pink palazzo, my friend, is mortgaged to the hilt. The rich don’t pay cash for anything and a huge mortgage has many tax advantages. Now tell me why I would want to murder my benefactress?”
I had to admit it. “You wouldn’t.”
Tell that to the lady who’s auditioning for the role of chief witness for the prosecution and here she comes.”
I sincerely hoped Bianca would not come rushing at us, waving a charm bracelet and shouting…
Bianca came rushing at us waving a charm bracelet and shouting, “I found it. I found it.”
Death, where is thy sting?
“Get her out of here, mister, and don’t come back!” our charming host said by way of a fond farewell.
Back in my car I read her the riot act. “That was the dumbest display I have ever seen in my life. You are loony, Bianca, with a capital L.”
“Oh,” she pouted, ‘what difference does it make? He knows what we’re after.”
“As of this moment we are not after anything and I suggest you stop playing Miss Marple and go find a job. The end.”
Undaunted, she went right on. “Did you see the woman he’s living with?
I met her upstairs. I think she’s a dominatrix.”
This was too much. “Can it, Bianca.”
“Okay. So, what did you think of Tony?”
“I think he’s sleazy and a leech who never did an honest day’s work in life, and he would sell his soul to the devil for a buck, only he can’t because even on a slow day hell won’t have him.”
“So…”
“So nothing. It doesn’t make him a guy who would murder to no advantage. He’s no dummy, Bianca, and he wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds unless he’s got a key to the candy store. It’s against his religion. His wife’s death has left him penniless. Now get off his case and mine.”
“Never!” Bianca cried. “Never.”
Good grief, she sounded just like Gillian Wright.
Eighteen
Casa Gran.
There was a panel truck parked near the main gate bearing the logo of a local security service and two guards on duty. These were clearly not Schuyler’s regular sentries, so they must have been hired for the occasion. More proof that he had interrupted his summer holiday in Southampton on short notice to put together a cocktail party in July.
It made no sense but then Harry Schuyler always had more dollars than sense.
The car in front of my Miata was being stopped at the gate and as I came to a halt behind it I noticed it carried a bumper sticker that read TROY APPLETON, in a blaze of red, white, and blue. It was a harbinger to which I paid scant attention. What was left of my mind after a morning with Bianca Courtney was focused on the Sabrina Wright mess and the Kasbah the ridiculous and the sublime. Or did I get that backward?
The car ahead moved on and I moved up just as another car lined up behind me. For a quickie reception someone had done a good job of rallying the freeloaders. But then who would turn down an invitation to Casa Gran? The guard looked into the car and, satisfied that I wasn’t carrying an arsenal, waved me through the gate. No name check?
This shindig was about as exclusive as a BYOB hop at the Feela Betta Thigh sorority house. Many are called and many more show up. Prescott would not have been pleased.
Thanks to Mrs. Trelawney I had gotten into a blue suit to represent McNally amp; Son. For a touch of color I wore it with a tie of vermilion silk. That worked so well I placed a matching hankie in my breast pocket. Humming “I’ve Got to Be Me,” I hastened to Casa Gran at the appointed hour.
It was a good mile drive from the gate to the house on a gracefully winding road. The flora, reputed to be in the care of fifty gardeners under the supervision of a landscape architect, was breathtaking, to say the least. After the final curve Casa Gran appeared like a shimmering mirage rising out of the sea.
An amber marble palace sitting on twenty oceanfront acres with a spa and pool in the basement, another indoor pool on the second floor, another on the roof, and one out back, it also boasted tennis courts, both clay and grass courts, croquet, squash, and a baseball diamond for the kiddies. So much for the recreational facilities. The serious business of living was conducted in quarters larger than life.
Like playing follow-the-leader I pulled up to the port-cochere where one of several car jockeys opened the Miata’s door and handed me a numbered ticket as I got out. Up the stairs to a grand portal guarded by a guy in a tux who pointed that away while intoning, “Cocktails in the solarium, sir.” I was on a marble terrace, wider than many country roads, which appeared to girdle the entire house. There was now a group of us, couples and singles, on the march.
Where the terrace angled to follow the Casa Gran’s contours, the ocean came into view and my fellow travelers and I joined the party that spilled out of the solarium and onto the promenade. Waiters proffered trays of champagne and canapes, music came from nowhere, and the early evening air was alive with the tinkle of glasses and the hum of conversation. The sky over the Atlantic was growing dark and tiny white lights in trees and shrubs began to twinkle like diamonds. Hey, who knows, maybe they were diamonds.
The solarium and terrace were separated by a series of glass doors that created a wall when all were closed and a multitude of entrances when all were open, as they were for the party. I made my way through the pretty
