McNally's Trial (31 page)

“You have indeed,” I assured her, “and I thank you for it. By the way, I won’t be able to join you and father for cocktails and dinner. Connie has returned from Miami and we’re going out for a night on the town.”

“That’s nice, darling,” she said brightly. “Have a wonderful time.”

“I fully intend to give it my best shot,” I vowed, kissed her velvety cheek, and left her asking a Merry Christmas begonia why it was drooping in such a shameful fashion.

The sea was paved that afternoon, but I was in no mood for a dunk. Nor did I have any desire to scribble in my journal and close out my account of the Whitcomb case. Instead, I lay on my bed fully clothed, stared at the ceiling, and suffered a severe case of weltschmerz.

I am not often depressed, being cheerful by nature, but recent events had brought me low. I was discomposed by so many people dancing about as if Walpurgisnacht would go on forever.

I suddenly realized what would cure my jimjams. I rose and called Connie Garcia, phoning her at the estate of Lady Cynthia Horowitz. I figured Connie had gone to work immediately to make up for all her absent days.

“Lady Horowitz’s residence,” she said crisply. “Consuela Garcia speaking.”

“Archibald McNally speaking,” I said just as snappily. “Is it on for tonight, hon?”

“You betcha,” she said. “You pick me up at seven and off we go to the Pelican Club.”

“Do me a favor, will you, Connie. I’d like to wear a dinner jacket. Will you get gussied up?”

Shocked silence. Then: “You want to wear a dinner jacket to the Pelican?”

“Yep.”

“You’ll be tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail.”

“I don’t care. It’s something I must do. Will you humor me?”

“Say ‘Please.’”

“Please.”

“Say ‘Please with sugar on it.’”

I groaned. “Please with sugar on it.”

“Okay,” she giggled. “I’ll get all dolled up. It’ll give me a chance to wear a neat coat dress I bought in Miami. It’s white silk and makes me look like a vanilla Popsicle.”

“Yummy,” I said. “See you at seven.”

Then I disrobed and went back to bed smiling for a much needed nap. If the Whitcomb affair had an almost operatic intensity, I was determined that evening would be as innocent and memorable as a pop tune. I don’t know the lyrics of
La donna è mobile
but I can sing every word of “It Had to Be You.”

W
HEN ATTENDING A FORMAL
affair in South Florida’s clammy clime, I usually don a white dinner jacket, soft-collared shirt, and a tie and cummerbund of a modest maroon or even a sedate tartan. But not that evening.

I unzipped a garment bag to extract my black tropical worsted dinner jacket and trousers. The jacket had black satin lapels, the trousers black satin stripes, but the costume was really as conservative as a shroud. I also laid out a starched shirt, wing collar, onyx studs and cuff links.

I knew exactly what I was doing. The Whitcomb case had been such a raw and vulgar affair that I needed a healthy dose of convention to restore my emotional balance. My traditional uniform was one small step in recovering the comfort of custom. I have neither the gall nor the desire to deny the past.

Showered, shaved, and scented, I dressed in my formal attire, prized my feet into patent leather shoes, and descended to the kitchen. I moved rather stiffly, I admit, as if I were wearing a suit of armor and feared I might creak.

Mrs. Olson was preparing dinner and turned as I entered.

“Oh my, Mr. Archy,” she said, awed, “you look so handsome!”

“Thank you, Ursi,” I said, preening. “Do you think perhaps I need a boutonniere?”

She pursed her lips and regarded my costume thoughtfully. “Possibly,” she said. “Something to add a bit of color to the black and white. But we have no fresh flowers available other than your mother’s begonias, and they won’t do.”

“No,” I said, “definitely not.”

“I do have some fresh parsley available,” she offered. “Do you think a sprig of that would help?”

“Just the thing!” I cried happily, and a few moments later I had a small bundle of that marvelous herb pinned to my lapel.

I had a hazy hope of how I wanted that evening to progress and end. And so I entered the pantry and searched the shelves bearing the McNally liquor supply. (The costly vintage wines are stored in a locked, temperature-controlled cabinet in my father’s study.) I found what I sought: a bottle of Korbel brut. I slid it with two crystal champagne flutes onto the lowest shelf of our refrigerator.

Then I set out to rendezvous with the vanilla Popsicle.

Yikes! but Connie looked super, all slithery in white silk and with the excited, prideful look women get when they know they’re splendidly dressed. Her long black hair was down and gleaming. The only jewelry she wore was the diamond tennis bracelet I had given her. What a glittery manacle it was!

I embraced her gently, not wishing to crush her coat dress.

“Welcome home, darling,” I said. “I missed you.”

“Did you?” she said eagerly. “Did you really?”

“Scouts’ honor. I pined away while you were gone. Lost pounds and pounds.”

She pulled away to inspect me. “I don’t think so. Archy, you look spiffy, but what’s that in your buttonhole?”

“Parsley.”

“I hope you’re kidding.”

“I am not. It is a sprig of fresh parsley. It is decorative and should our dinner contain a gross amount of garlic, we can nibble on it to sweeten our breath.”

She hugged my arm. “Nutty as ever,” she said happily. “Let’s go.”

If Connie feared our finery would be greeted with raucous scorn by the raffish Friday night roisterers at the Pelican Club, she totally misjudged their reaction. Most of the lads and lasses beginning a bibulous weekend were clad in funky denim, leather, and T-shirts bearing legends ranging from the indelicate to the scabrous.

But when we entered, the chatter and laughter ceased as heads swiveled in our direction. Then many of our pals leaped to their feet and treated us to a vigorous round of applause interspersed with such cries of approval as “Oh, wow!” and “The baddest!”

Connie and I bowed graciously in all directions—royalty acknowledging their worshipful underlings. Then we paraded to the dining area where we claimed our favorite corner table. Priscilla came moseying forward to bring us down to earth.

“Going to a masquerade?” she inquired.

“None of your sass,” I said sternly. “We merely decided the joint needed a touch of class.”

“Gee,” she said, “I wish you had warned me; I’d have put on clean overalls. Naturally you’ll want champagne cocktails to start.”

“Naturally,” Connie said.

“I’ll have to serve them on paper napkins,” Pris apologized. “All our lace doilies are in the laundry. I’m sure you swells will understand.”

“Of course,” I said loftily. “Noblesse oblige.”

You would think, wouldn’t you, that in view of our splendiferous attire we might dine on pheasant under glass or perhaps a roasted capon stuffed with minced hundred-dollar bills. But the Pelican Club was unable to provide such amenities, and Chef Leroy’s special that night was pot roast with a fresh horseradish sauce so good it made one weep—literally.

Connie was at her magpie best during dinner, regaling me with trivia about her trip to Miami, the recovery of her injured cousin, the trials and tribulations of her multitudinous relatives.

Earlier in this account I suggested my attraction to this woman was due to her providing an island of normalcy in the sometimes violent sea I was called upon to navigate. I imagine some of you faithful readers must have shaken your heads sagely and thought, “That Archy! Just another example of his dissembling. He likes Connie because she’s a dishy broad.”

Well, yes, that was certainly part of it. But as mother has instructed me, intimacy is rarely simple. What human bonds are? Sgt. Al Rogoff once told me of a case he handled in which a woman bludgeoned her husband with a cinder block while he slept. Her reason? “He snored,” she told the cops. But surely that was only one motive in a long, festering record of grievances.

We had shared a single dessert—a wickedly rich raspberry shortcake drizzled with Chambord—and were lazing over double espressos when Connie asked me what I had been doing during her absence.

“This and that,” I said.

“I’ll bet it was the Whitcomb case,” she said. “It’s been in all the papers and on TV every night. I’m sure you were mixed up in it because you asked me weeks ago about Oliver and Mitzi.”

“I was involved,” I admitted. “Up to my dewlaps. But there’s little I can add to what you’ve already heard or read. It was a mess, Connie. Listen, do you know what I’d like to do now?”

“Yes,” she said.

I laughed. “Later,” I said. “There will be a short station break. Stay tuned.”

We drove back to the McNally mansion manqué. It was a glorious night, almost completely cloudless with a wispy breeze from the northwest. The moon wasn’t full, of course—that would have been too much—but there was enough showing to remind me of Guy Kibbee. It was a loverly stage set that convinced me I’d live forever.

I retrieved the chilled bottle of Korbel from the fridge and popped the cork. Carrying the bubbly and two glasses, I conducted Connie down the rickety wooden staircase to the beach. She asked nary a question nor made any objection. I led and she followed. What a sweetness!

She was wearing no hose and had only to kick off her suede sandals. But I had to pry off my patent leathers and peel away knee-high socks. I rolled up my trouser cuffs and we left all our footgear in the moon shadow of a palm. Before we started our stroll I poured each of us a glass of champagne. We linked arms before sipping. Cutesy? I suppose. But there was no one to see but God and I hoped He approved.

We ambled down to the water’s edge where mild waves came lapping in. The ocean was still calm and it seemed layered with a pathway of aluminum foil leading to the rising moon.

“Oh,” Connie said, staring out at the glistening sea and breathing deeply. She tilted her face up to the night sky. “Look at all those tennis bracelets!”

“Exactly,” I said.

We wandered southward through warm froth that rarely doused our calves. The packed sand was cool and provided easy strolling. We saw the lights of fishing boats and the blaze of a passing cruise ship. Once we heard the melodious call of a seabird neither of us could identify.

“Binky Watrous should be here,” I remarked.

“Bite your tongue,” Connie advised.

We paused occasionally while I refilled our glasses.

You may think this barefoot ramble along a moonlit beach by a formally dressed couple sipping champers was a schmaltzy thing to do. But schmaltz is in the eye of the beholder—and you’ve never read a more disgusting figure of speech if you happen to know the original meaning of the word.

It was a fantasy and I was aware of it. After experiencing the crudity of the Whitcomb case I wanted to recapture the laughing elegance of a world I never knew and perhaps never existed: the clever, self-mocking era of Noel Coward songs, Fitzgerald novels, Broadway musicals, and William Powell movies. I was trying to recreate a madly joyous time I imagined.

“A penny for your thoughts,” Connie said, “and not one cent more.”

“I was thinking about dreams,” I told her. “And how they shape our lives.”

Then I described some of the dreamers I had met during the Whitcomb investigation:

Mrs. Sarah: Dying while listening to a tinkly music box.

Oliver: Driven by a fierce ambition to prove himself a money-spinner nonpareil.

Ernest Gorton: He of the green eyes with limitless greed and a vision of limitless wealth.

Mitzi Whitcomb: She saw a constantly expanding universe, of young studs and giggles.

Griffin Kling: A man nurtured by a vengeful rage that eventually destroyed him.

Rhoda Flembaugh: She yearned only for a chance to change her luck.

I said nothing of Horace Whitcomb and Sunny Fogarty. But they too had their illusions.

Dreamers all.

Connie listened intently to my brief recital and suddenly shivered. “Archy,” she said, “I’m getting chilly.”

I set bottle and glass in the sand, took off my dinner jacket, and draped it about her shoulders. She looked enchanting.

“Let’s go back,” I said.

“Let’s hurry,” she said.

We turned and skipped along the strand under the spangled sky, silvered by moonlight, and hearing the sea’s soft susurrus. We held hands and sang “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.”

We had reclaimed our footwear and were preparing to board the Miata when Ms. Consuela Garcia declared, “I know what I want to do now, Archy. You?”

“I concur,” I said.

“Then let’s do it,” she said.

And so we did.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Archy McNally Series

S
HE SLAPPED MY FACE.

I have mentioned in previous accounts of my adventures that I am an absolute klutz when dealing with a weeping woman. I am even klutzier (if there is such a word) in coping with a person of the female extraction who commits an act of physical aggression upon the carcass of Archy McNally, bon vivant, dilettantish detective, and the only man in the Town of Palm Beach who owns a T-shirt bearing a portrait of Sophie Tucker. (She once hefted her voluminous breasts and said, “Hitler should have such tonsils.”)