An Inconvenient Woman (12 page)

“That was a very good-looking Chanel suit she was wearing. I almost ordered it myself,” said Pauline. She was totally unaware that the girl she was talking about was her husband’s mistress.

Neither Jules nor Philip responded, nor did they look at each other. Jules did not know that Philip knew Flo, but Philip, ever watchful, had the beginning of the idea that Jules might be somehow connected with the expensive red Mercedes that he had seen Flo drive.

“I don’t remember her name,” said Jules, shrugging, and went inside to Camilla.

“I’m rather touched by Jules’s concern for Hector,” said Pauline to Philip.

“How so?” asked Philip.

“In the beginning, Jules couldn’t abide Hector. Jules never likes men who, as he puts it, talk about dresses, and parties, and who sat next to whom at dinner the night before, all that sort of thing, and he is absolutely intolerant of any man who doesn’t work, so poor Hector had everything going against him, as far as Jules was concerned. But Hector was an awfully good friend to me when I first moved out here. Women like me need a Hector in our lives, to tell us we’re still pretty, or look good that night, the sort of things our husbands are often too busy to remember to say.”

Philip turned to look at Pauline. Her lovely face was momentarily sad. Seeing him look at her, she smiled and continued talking. “In time Jules, although he wouldn’t admit it,
grew rather fond of Hector. The fact is, Jules really adores hearing all the gossip about everybody; he just pretends he doesn’t. Last summer, in Greece, Hector was really a godsend on the boat. He was so funny the whole time, kept us in stitches.”

As she talked, Philip and Pauline walked across the lawn to the orangerie, which had trellised walls and espaliered trees. Through the orangerie was a cutting garden, in full bloom.

“This is very beautiful, Pauline,” said Philip.

“What’s a house without a garden? I always say. I brag about very few things, but I do brag about my garden and greenhouse. Look at my perennial border here. Roses, peonies, delphiniums, poppies, asters. Heavenly, isn’t it?”

Philip nodded.

“Come see the greenhouse, and then we’ll go back to lunch,” said Pauline. “The cook says if we’re not seated by one on the dot, the soufflé will fall. She is always full of dire predictions.”

They walked inside. There were orchids everywhere. An older man in jeans and a sweater came up and nodded a greeting to Pauline.

“Hi, Mrs. Mendelson,” he said.

“This is Jarvis. My treasure. People say about me that I am the most expert of orchid growers, but it’s not true at all. It’s Jarvis who does it all, and I get all the credit. This is Philip Quennell, Jarvis.”

The two men shook hands.

“That’s not true for a minute, Mrs. Mendelson,” said Jarvis, smiling at Pauline. He turned to Philip. “Mrs. Mendelson knows more about orchids than anyone.”

“Jarvis and I are perfecting a yellow phalaenopsis that we hope will startle the orchid world,” said Pauline.

Philip nodded, but he was interested in people, not orchids.

“You see, Jarvis,” said Pauline, laughing. “Mr. Quennell has no interest whatever in our botanical experiments.”

Walking up the lawn to the house, Pauline turned to Philip and saw him smiling.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked.

“I suppose that less than one percent of the country lives the way you and Jules live, Pauline, and I’m just glad I got to look at it,” said Philip.

“Do you think that’s true?” she asked. “Less than one percent?”

“Certainly, I do.”

“I never thought of that.”

“It’s just us,” Pauline said when they entered the garden room for lunch, as if Philip might have been expecting a lunch party. It was a semicircular room, entirely enclosed in glass. “You come here by me. Camilla there. And Jules there.”

They sat around a glass table on Regency bamboo chairs, looking out on the lawn. For a time Camilla and Pauline talked about the service: the eulogy, the music, the flowers, and the crowds of people. Dudley, the butler, passed the wine. Philip put his hand over his glass. Blondell, the maid, passed the poached salmon and cheese soufflé.

“It amazes me that the papers have not played up this case more,” said Philip. No one replied, and he continued. “It has all the elements for front-page stuff.” Again there was no reply. “Who do you think killed Hector, Mr. Mendelson?” asked Philip.

There was silence at the table.

“No one killed Hector,” answered Jules, quietly. “Hector killed himself.”

“Oh, but I don’t believe that,” said Philip, in a dismissive voice.

Jules was a man unused to having his statements challenged, let alone doubted. “The facts are incontrovertible,” he said. There was a tightening of his neck muscles, and his voice was purposely measured. “There can be no reasonable doubt. I have checked this out with Detective McDaniels, who solved the shooting of poor Madge White’s father two years ago in the garage of her house in Bel Air. You remember that, Pauline?”

Pauline, silent, nodded.

“Incontrovertible.” Jules repeated the word. “It was the word Detective McDaniels himself used.” He put stress on the word
detective
, as if that proved his point. “Suicide, he said. And the coroner agreed, a Japanese, I’ve forgotten his name. I was there. I heard.”

“But certainly you don’t believe that, do you, Mr. Mendelson?” asked Philip.

Jules looked at him without answering. It was a look that Philip remembered long afterward.

“I mean,” continued Philip, persevering, “we’ve all seen enough movies to know that a single shot in the mouth or the temple would do the trick far more effectively than five shots in the torso, not to mention the fact that it is virtually impossible for a person to shoot himself five times in the torso.”

There was silence again. Then Jules, red in the face now, threw his napkin on the table and slid back his bamboo chair on the marble floor with such force that the action produced a screeching sound. He stood up without speaking and headed toward the hall that separated the garden room from the house. Passing through, his massive body hit against the Degas sculpture of a fourteen-year-old ballerina, her feet in the fifth position, her hands held gracefully behind her back, with the original pink satin ribbon in her hair. It toppled from the marble pedestal on which it had stood in the Mendelsons’ garden room for fourteen years.

“Jules, the Degas!” screamed Pauline, rising.

Turning, amazingly agile for such an enormous man, Jules reached and grabbed the head of the ballerina at almost the same instant that it hit the marble floor.

“Oh, marvelous, Jules,” said Pauline. “Is she all right?”

He turned the piece of sculpture over in his arms as if it were a child he had pulled from a wreck or a fire and stared at it. When they were alone together, Jules and Pauline called the young dancer Clotilde. When he spoke, he spoke very quietly. “You were right, you know, Pauline, you always wanted me to have a Lucite case made for her, and I thought it spoiled her to be encased.”

“Is she broken, Jules?” asked Pauline.

“Cracked,” he said.

“Oh, Jules, how disappointing,” she said, with a concern that was less for her devalued treasure than for her husband’s concern for that treasure.

“Well, we can love her more, I suppose,” he said. He spoke gently, in a father’s voice.

“I’m very much afraid this is all my fault,” said Philip. “I had no idea I was making you angry, sir.”

Jules looked at Philip and left the room without replying, carrying the sculpture with him.

Philip looked to Camilla for confirmation of his position. She had been with him on Humming Bird Way. She had seen her uncle’s body, the blood on the walls, the shots in the mirror and on the ceiling.

Camilla, silent until now, lowered her eyes. “Certainly if there were something awry, Philip, the coroner and the detective would not have both arrived at the conclusion they did,” she said.

“I don’t understand you people,” said Philip, differentiating himself from the others. His voice had become perturbed. “A man has been murdered, and a cover-up is taking place, and you are all buying it, or participating in it.”

“You must understand, Philip,” said Camilla. “Jules believes it is for the best.”

“But the best for whom?” persisted Philip.

“You must not misunderstand my husband, Philip,” said Pauline. “There is no ulterior motive to what he has said. He is simply trying to protect the reputation of a great family. You heard him yourself say that the coroner said it was suicide.”

Philip nodded his head. “There’s something wrong,” he said simply. He pushed back his chair. It was clear he was going to leave, but he had more to say. “Let me for a moment accept the theory that Hector’s death was a suicide, which, of course, I do not believe. I was there. I saw the body. I saw the number of shots. Five. The suicide of a prominent man from a distinguished family who shot himself five times is a story in itself, and yet no such story is being written. It smacks to me of cover-up.”

“I really don’t understand why it should concern you so,” said Pauline, quietly, as she moved a spoon back and forth over her linen place mat. She was torn in the conversation, knowing Philip was right, but unwilling to counter the position of her husband.

“I’ll tell you why,” replied Philip. “I do not believe that powerful people have the right to decide what the public should and should not know.”

“Sometimes it’s necessary,” said Pauline.

“I don’t think so.”

“If it comes out, it could cause a great deal of grief.”

“If it doesn’t come out, that means I will be party to the same concealment tactics as you, and I can’t do that.”

Philip rose, aware that he was a guest who had overstepped a guest’s boundaries, but still unwilling to make anything less than a dignified exit. “Of course, I will leave, and I am very sorry for the trouble I have caused you, Pauline, but I have to say before I leave that the reason it is so hard for me
to say that it is all right for all of you to foster this bogus story is that a killer is being allowed to walk free. Remember that. I find that unconscionable. Good-bye.”

He nodded to both Pauline and Camilla and walked out of the room. In the hallway by the garden room, he was momentarily confused as to whether to turn left or right to find the front hallway and door of the enormous house. The butler, Dudley, walked into the hall and anticipated his question. “This way, sir,” he said, walking to the left toward the library, and then to the right toward the drawing room, and then to the left again to the hallway. There, on one of the console tables, Philip noticed that the Degas ballerina had been placed in a lying-down position facing upward. She looked forlorn, as if she were aware that she would no longer be desired by museums. Passing her, Philip did not stop to examine the crack.

The butler opened the door, and Philip nodded to him as he walked out. Dudley, who always assumed the attitudes of his employer, did not return the nod. Philip’s car was standing where he had left it earlier, but he noticed that Jules’s dark blue Bentley was missing. Turning on the ignition, he backed the car around, wondering why he had taken such a stand in a house of strangers. As he headed for the entrance of the courtyard that led to the driveway, he heard his name called.

It was Camilla, running toward him. “I’ll go with you,” she called.

Philip lay in Camilla’s bed, naked, with his hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling.

Camilla, next to him, ran her hand over his chest lightly and then leaned over and kissed his nipple. “I’ve had such an incredible desire to do that,” she said.

“Be my guest,” he said. He watched her for a few moments as she kissed his chest, and then began to rub his hands over her head. When she looked up at him, he smiled at her and brought her up to him to kiss her on her lips.

Later, after their lovemaking, they lay in each other’s arms. “You would have walked out of Pauline’s house today and left me there, wouldn’t you?” said Camilla.

“Yes. I meant what I said, you know,” answered Philip.

“Oh, I know you did. You’ve made yourself an enemy. You must know that.”

“Jules. I know.”

“A severe enemy.”

“I know. Imagine having antagonized Reza Bulbenkian and Jules Mendelson in the same year.”

“Something could happen to you.”

“It won’t.”

Later, when Philip was leaving, Camilla walked with him to his car.

“Beautiful night,” said Philip.

She kissed him good night. “Pauline likes you, I know, and Jules worships her,” said Camilla, as if she had been thinking about the problem.

“Yes, I think he does,” agreed Philip, “but I think Pauline would prefer love to worship any day.”

“What in the world does that mean?”

“Think about it.”

Flo’s Tape
#7

“I mean, Jules was a rich and famous man, and I was very flattered that he was devoting so much of his time to me. It was much more than a rich guy getting into my pants, believe me. I wouldn’t have stayed with him so long if that’s all it was. He taught me. He wanted me to better myself. Once he said to me, ‘Don’t say stoodent, say student.’ At first, I thought he was putting me down, but then I found out he wanted me to do things right
.