Howard Engel - Getting Away With Murder

Basically, the Patriot Volunteer was got up to look like a frontier fort, with waiters dressed as minutemen and waitresses in hoop-skirts. A collection of muskets, drums, bunting in red, white and blue furnished most of the decor. There were reproductions of scenes from the Revolutionary War: the crossing of the Niagara on the morning of the Battle of Queenston Heights, the shelling of Fort Niagara, the burning of Niagara-on-the-Lake. The New Yorkers tended, just as we did on our side of the river, to confuse the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They were both costume pictures with three-cornered hats and clap pipes. The orchestra, a band of seven or eight sidemen, made no attempt at historical accuracy, so they blended better with the clientele. Most of the men were necktied and jacketed; the women wore cocktail dresses, except for a few in long dresses- suggesting that this was still a place to come to put the icing on the evening you had already had.

When the waiter insisted that waiting was something one did while holding a drink, I tried that red stuff that I’d run into at the Wellington Court: Campari and soda. The waiter frowned as though such a drink was quite out of place in colonial America. I thought that it should fit in very well considering that the cocktail was invented just down the road at Lewiston.

Julie came in with an entourage of five people: three men and two women. The three women together couldn’t have weighed much more than two hundred pounds. One was blonde, hacked about the head with sheep-shears and wearing a long man’s undershirt and making less of an impression in it than I would. Her collarbones were her most prominent frontal appendages. The other model, I took the first apparition to be of that profession too, was a gaminelike presence with red hair sculpted close to her head all the way around. She looked a little more womanly than the first: I could tell right off when she was facing me. She wore a long dress of rumpled earthy colours and never smiled. The three men were wearing dinner jackets, one in pink, one white and one in a floral pastel print. They all surrounded Julie, who seemed to be eating it up like chocolate, if she allowed herself to eat chocolate. I recognized her froth her parents: she had her mother’s height and sharp features and her father’s animation. She wore an amber-coloured dress that clung to her body like it had been put on with shellac. It was a good body, if a little undernourished. Her smile, under a set of big brown eyes, was nothing less than terrific.

They marched through a gap between the tables, followed by a platoon of minutemen, busboys and the maitre d’, forming squares around my tiny table, then moved off in good order to a big table with a Reserved sign and flowers on it. I was dragged along as a hostage. If we were any closer to the orchestra, we would have had to join the union. I carried my Campari and a minuteman brought my soda. How Julie recognized me, I’ll never know. Champagne came to the table in a magnum, with pink foil on top. There were also cans of Diet Coke and Pepsi for the working girls as well as bottled bubbly water.

“I’m Julie Long,” said Julie, whose last name had been the chief mystery I’d run into so far. “My Mom told me what you looked like. If that hadn’t worked, I was going to test voices. It would have been fun.” The pastel-jacketed guy in the blue aviator glasses was introduced to me as Didier Santerre, the publisher of Mode Magazine . The gamine was Morna McGuire, the local modelling success story, and I didn’t catch the full names of the others. The blonde was Christa. One of the men was a make-up artist called Pierre, and the other was Felix, a designer of rainwear from New York, who apparently was paying.

“How are we going to talk with this floor show in our laps?” I inquired. Julie just rolled her eyes.

“You have to forgive us, we’ve been on an all-day shoot on the Maid of the Mist. You can’t believe how cold it was. We nearly sank the boat with our electric generator. We needed so much light!”

“Couldn’t wait for spring?”

“Can you believe this weather? It’s-”

One has to fight the weather in this crazy business,” said Santerre. “When it’s cold, one shoots for summer. When it’s hot, naturally, one shoots with artificial snow and ice. But otherwise, we would have to anticipate the season by an impossible margin. The lead-time is bad enough already.” We exchanged names and handshakes.

“We had to get them to put the boat in the water early. Imagine what that cost?” the blonde interjected.

“What’s your place in all this?” I asked Julie.

“Julie has flair, style éclat,” the boyfriend answered again for her. I was beginning to regret the bridge toll I’d paid to get here and the one I was going to have to pay on the way back. Julie tried on a shy smile at Santerre’s praise. It didn’t suit her.

The designer, Felix, whose pink “smoking” appeared to have lost its lapels, was pouring out the champagne into far more glasses than there were people. The models were covering the glasses nearest them with their hands. One said she never drank champagne, the other said she ingested nothing after six. I liked “ingested.” She added that it was an inflexible rule.

“Who’s trying to kill your father?” I asked over giggles, and Julie’s turned head as she spoke with Santerre in French. When she turned back to me, with a little flip of her head and a smile, she said that her mother had robbed her of a night’s sleep with the news.

“Can’t imagine my life without Daddy,” she said, biting down on a slim piece of carrot. “He has always encouraged my interest in fashion and design.”

“I was guessing you got this from your mother.”

“True. Mommy adores clothes. She loves Sonia Rykiel better than the truth. But Daddy actually puts his money where his mouth is.”

“I thought you two didn’t get along?”

“Heavens no! He loves it now that I’ve found myself. Now that Didier and I have found one another.”

“That was written in the stars, chérie,” Santerre added. From it I guessed that Mode Magazine was in need of a backer with the financial clout Abram Wise could give it. As long as Wise was putting up part of the money, Julie could think herself into any social butterfly net she liked and Daddy would keep on paying. But, after all, that was what Abe Wise did best.

“Are you two planning to make this permanent?” I asked, trying on a wide ingenuous smile.

“Just as soon as we can make it legal,” Julie said, patting Santerre’s left hand with hers. There was a white mark on the third finger of one of the hands. It was Didier’s. “I’m still legally married to my old John Long but not for long,” Julie said making Didier and Morna laugh. The others were involved, thank God, in a conversation of their own. “But my divorce will be final in three months. I’ve already got my decree nisi. So, I’m going to do the bride thing again. Getting to be a habit with me, as the song goes, but this time, I think Didier’s going to make an honest woman of me.”

“My compliments to the bride and congratulations to the groom or vice versa.” Both beamed at me and then at one another, exchanging hugs and kisses.

“Benny,” Julie said, leaning into me in a friendly but unnecessary way, “would you be an angel and get a white paper bag from the front seat of our car?” She said it in such an intimate way that I thought she had fallen under the magic spell of my charm. In fact, the reverse, for the moment, was true. “I’ve got a perishing headache and there are some Tylenol there.” She took car keys from her bag and told me the car to look for. I took them from her and made my way out into the dark and the snow which was still coming down.