Клео Коул - On What Grounds

“So I decided to meet women…Sometimes we hit it off. Sometimes we don’t. I just want a little romance, a little fun, before the lights go out for good.”

We sat in silence for a moment. Matt seemed to have run out of questions. Finally I spoke.

“Did Ms. Hart ever mention a stepdaughter named Anabelle?”

“No, never,” Eddleman said. “Darla said she had friends in New York City, but I didn’t meet any of them.”

“One more thing we’d like to confirm,” Matt said, rising. “And then I think we’re finished.”

“Sure,” Eddleman said. “Anything to help prevent drug peddling or smuggling or…whatever you’re doing.”

“Were you and Ms. Hart together this past Wednesday night?”

Eddleman didn’t even hesitate. “The whole night,” he replied. “My wife went to Scarsdale to visit our daughter. I met Darla at eight o’clock, Wednesday evening, right here at the hotel. We had dinner at the Rainbow Room, then walked around the city. We got back around midnight, and I left at seven or seven-thirty Thursday morning—my wife was due back at noon.”

Matt and I exchanged glances. Darla’s alibi was solid, all right. I nodded.

“Thank you, Mr. Eddleman,” Matt said, taking him by the elbow and leading him to the door.

“Should I stay away from her?” Mr. Eddleman said, pausing on the threshold. “Darla, I mean.”

“That would be wise,” Matt replied. “But if you do see her again, don’t mention this encounter. It may jeopardize our investigation, and that’s a crime.”

So’s impersonating a federal official, Matt, I thought.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” Matt said, pushing the door.

“Nice meeting you, Ms. Vanderweave,” Eddleman said with a creepy smile that told me the guy wasn’t about to quit with Darla. Yuck, I thought. And with his wife still at dinner right downstairs.

He was still waving at me, his eyes on my cleavage, when Matt closed the door.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Matt said. “Darla could come back any minute.”

“Even worse,” I replied, my stomach rumbling. “We could miss the main course.”

George Gee and his Make-Believe Ballroom Orchestra had just begun bouncing big band swing off the four-story ceiling, coaxing a slow parade of couples toward the dance floor, when Matt and I returned to the charity dinner.

“The band’s good,” said Matt over the jaunty jump of woodwinds and barking brass.

“Very,” I said. “That’s George Gee and his band. They’re the darlings of the Rainbow Room these days.”

The Rainbow Room was one of the most elegant dinner-dance clubs in New York—high atop Rockefeller Center, it was about the only place left where dancing cheek-to-cheek in elegant evening clothes was even remotely possible.

“Wanna take a spin with me?” Matt asked.

I gave him the puh-leeze get real look. “I’m going for the Engstrums,” I said, double-checking the seating chart in the silent auction program.

“What are you going to do?”

“Stir up the nest,” I said. “See what flies out.”

“Good. I’d like a whack at Junior, myself.”

I noticed Matt’s fists clenching and made a split-second decision.

“No,” I said. “Let me do this, Matt. I’ve got an act in mind. It will work better solo. Get a drink at the bar and wait for me there.”

“Really? You think you can pull something off alone?”

“Sure,” I said, even though I wasn’t. On the other hand, the Vanderweave impersonation went pretty well, and my doing it alone was a much better bet than bringing Matt along wearing his fury on his sleeve.

“Well, okay, honey, if you’re sure. You knock ’em dead for me. Especially that little shithead.”

The “honey” caught me off guard, but I let it pass. Matt and I were working well together tonight, I thought to myself as I wove around the tray-toting waiters and crowded tables in the vast ballroom. We were even having a little fun with each other, but that didn’t mean we were a couple again. Matt had to know that, I assured myself, so there was no need to set him straight.

The Engstrums were seated at table fifty-eight, about mid-room and not far from the dance floor. I recognized Richard, Senior, from photographs in the Web site articles Darla had bookmarked on her laptop.

A typical Swedish blond, the man wasn’t exactly an albino but close. A white rabbit would be a fair comparison.

His wife, “Fiona,” according to the articles, was a brunette of the Jackie O. variety. A willowy WASP in the way all socialite wives are willowy WASPs (even when they’re Greek or Jewish or Nordic and not even technically the garden-variety Anglo-Saxon Protestants). I don’t know why they all have the same looks and mannerisms. Maybe it’s the extreme hygiene and slight dehydration from hours spent at spas and health clubs that cause the perpetually pinched, unamused look, the long, strained neck, the tight lips and drawn skin.

In face and form, Richard, Junior, appeared to take after his mother with a svelte stature, refined features, and dark hair. Odds were good he was part of the type I’d encountered many times before among the wealthy of this burgh. The “born of money and indifference” earmarks were there: floppy haircut, careless posture, even the “sensitive, intelligent boy” look about the eyes. Odds were he’d play up the latter in the presence of check-writing Mother and Daddy, but would drop it fast around his male college friends, who would share his penchant for mocking everyone and everything but their own pursuits of pleasure, usually drinking, drugging, and copulating.

Beside him sat a gravely thin young brunette with sunken cheeks and an expression of above-it-all boredom. Her little black sleeveless dress, the conforming little socialite number sold as a WASP “classic” by every high-end boutique in the city, seemed to be the carbon copy of his mother’s. The two even wore similar strings of pearls at the neck.

Since I was certain that Anabelle had been seeing Richard, Junior, over the summer—and was now pregnant with his child—I had assumed upon approaching the table that the bored young woman sitting beside Junior here was a sister or cousin of his.

Time to find out, I thought.

Gathering my courage and suppressing some but far from all of my nerves, I glided up to the table with as haughty a mask as I’d ever pulled off. “Excuse me,” I said, looking down my nose as far as I dared without appearing ridiculous, “but are you Mr. and Mrs. Engstrum?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Engstrum. “And who might you be?”

The tone was not polite and not meant to be. It was a tone for intimidating and squashing, for warning a possible inferior to keep her distance. I’d come up against it countless times before and so barely batted an eyelash.

“I go by C. C., and I’m helping out the Town and Country photographer tonight,” I said with an intentionally plastic smile. “Taking a few notes on select guests so we can follow up with a photograph. Would you mind speaking with me?”

Richard, Senior, looked right through me about halfway into my spiel. “I’m getting a drink,” he said to his wife and brushed past without so much as a “Pardon me.”

The rudeness didn’t surprise me. Richard, Senior, was the sort who saved his efforts and manners for people that “mattered,” and I was not pretending to be from the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times. My periodical front was the bible for the modern American social register, which meant Mrs. Engstrum was the one I had to buffalo—and the one I meant to buffalo.