Chapter 4 - The Alibi in the Ash Tray
The rain began to hit the leaded windows of the grand dining room with the sound of thrown rice.
Inside, the smell was shifting. The rich scent of the roast quail and the expensive red wine was being replaced by the sharp, metallic tang of fear and the damp, wool smell of the outdoors that had traveled in on Marianne’s alpaca coat.
Victoria did not look at her husband. She had moved away from him as if his sudden ruin were contagious, her back pressed against the carved oak paneling between two sconces that flickered as the wind rattled the exterior casements.
"This is illegal," Victoria said, though her voice had dropped from its earlier scream to a dry, rattling whisper. "You can't just come in here with some... some retired thug and tell us to leave. Julian is a partner at Montgomery & Croft. We have leases. We have rights as tenants."
Briggs did not look at her. He didn't even blink. He reached into his dark coat, produced a pair of thin, white cotton archivist’s gloves, and pulled them over his large, square fingers with a soft, snapping sound.
"Mrs. Montgomery," Briggs said in a voice that had the dry precision of a court reporter. "The lease agreement you signed on the third of October was between yourself and *Highland Gate Holdings*. Paragraph fourteen, subsection B, stipulates that any misrepresentation of identity or financial solvency on the part of the tenant renders the occupancy null and void *ab initio*. Your husband did not disclose the four outstanding judgments against him in Westchester County Court. You are not tenants. You are currently classified under New York State law as unlawful occupants with notice."
He turned to the leather case on the table, took out a small brass key, and unlocked the lower compartment.
"Arthur," Eleanor groaned from the floor. She had managed to drag herself up onto one elbow, her evening dress ruined, the dark silk front soaked in gravy and wine. Her hair, which had been styled that morning for eight hundred dollars at a salon on Madison Avenue, hung in greasy gray strands across her face. "Arthur, do something. Call Charles. Call the judge."
Arthur Mercer didn't move. He had sat down in his chair again, his hands resting flat on his knees. His chin had sunk into his collar, his eyes fixed on the small silver salt cellar that Briggs had pushed aside.
"Charles won't answer," Arthur said. The words came out slowly, like heavy stones being dropped into deep mud. "Charles retired three years ago, Eleanor. His son runs the firm now. And his son was the one who handled the Delaware filing for Elena."
He looked up then. Not at his sister, and not at Elena, but at the ceiling—at the great chandelier that he had bought at an auction in Paris to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, using money that he had told everyone was the profit from his Canadian copper venture.
"You knew," Arthur whispered, his eyes rolling back toward Elena. "You knew two years ago."
"I knew the day you asked me to sign the waiver for Grandmother’s estate," Elena said.
She walked slowly toward the head of the table. She didn't look like the girl who had been knocked to the floor ten minutes earlier. The cut on her cheek had stopped bleeding, leaving a dark, thin line that looked like a warrior’s mark against her pale skin. Her gray eyes were completely dry.
"You told me it was a routine tax reorganization," Elena said. Her voice was remarkably gentle, which made it all the more terrifying to the three people who were listening. "You told me that if I signed, the timber reserves would be protected from the estate duties. You gave me that gold pen Grandfather gave you for your graduation. You were so warm to me that day, Dad. You took me to lunch at the Union Club. You even remembered that I liked oysters."
She stopped beside his chair.
"And then I went to the ladies' room," Elena continued, "and when I came back, your briefcase was open on the banquette. You had left the distribution schedule on top of your yellow pad. Victoria was getting eighty-four percent of the liquid assets. I was getting eighteen thousand dollars a year from an annuity that expired when I turned thirty."
"Victoria had children to consider!" Arthur rasped, though he didn't have the courage to look her in the eye.
"Victoria had three dogs and a house in the Hamptons she couldn't afford," Elena said. "And you didn't even have that. You had eighteen million dollars of debt with the Bank of Nova Scotia that you’d hidden behind four layers of Panamanian shelf companies."
She reached out and picked up an antique crystal ashtray that had belonged to their grandfather—a heavy, octagonal block of Waterford crystal that Arthur kept beside his port decanter, though he hadn't smoked in twenty years.
She turned it over.
Taped to the green baize on the bottom was a small, white plastic card—a keycard for a private safe deposit box at the Credit Suisse branch on 57th Street.
"You forgot that Grandfather kept his real ledgers in the vault under the Plaza," Elena said softly. "The ones with the handwritten notes in the margins. The ones that showed you weren't his biological son, Arthur."
A sound came from Eleanor—not a cry, but a sharp, high gasp, like someone who had been plunged into freezing salt water.
Arthur’s head snapped up. His face had gone from gray to a terrible, mottled purple. "Shut your mouth," he hissed. "Shut your filthy mouth!"
"It was in the codicil, Dad," Elena said, her voice never wavering. "The one you paid the clerk in Dutchess County three thousand dollars to misplace in nineteen-seventy-nine. Grandfather knew Eleanor had been seeing the stable master at the Millbrook estate while he was in London during the war. That’s why you were never given the primary voting shares. That’s why Marianne had everything."
Marianne Mercer took half a step forward, her cane clicking once against the floorboards.
"You thought you were a Mercer, Arthur," the old woman said, and her voice had no pity in it, only the ancient, cold disgust of an old line looking at an interloper who had ruined the blood. "You spent fifty years spending our money, using our name, burying your failures under our crest. But you had no more right to this timber than the man who cuts the lawn."
"That's a lie," Victoria stammered, though she had let go of Julian’s shoulder and was now staring at her father with an expression of sudden, sickening revulsion. "Dad... that’s not true. Tell her that’s not true. We’re Mercers. We have the box at the Metropolitan! We have the plot at Saint Jude’s!"
Arthur did not answer her. He looked at his hands—those thick, soft hands that had never done a day’s hard labor in sixty-eight years, hands that had only ever signed checks that other people had to cover.
"Where is the car?" Arthur asked. His voice was empty. He sounded like an old man in a boarding house asking what time the soup would be served.
"The car is at the gate," Briggs said. "It will take you to the Stanhope on Eighty-First Street. Three nights have been paid for on a corporate card under Highland Gate’s account. After that, your reservations will depend on your personal credit."
"I don't have personal credit," Julian whispered from his corner on the floor. His eyes were wide, staring at the baseboard. "They canceled my Amex yesterday. Victoria... they canceled the platinum card at the club this morning."
Victoria turned on him with the sudden, vicious speed of a cat whose tail had been stepped on.
"You coward!" she screamed, her hand coming down across Julian’s shoulder, her long, manicured nails raking through the cashmere of his blazer. "You told me you had the equity! You told me the partners were giving you the bonus in November! You let me sign those leases!"
Julian didn't even try to dodge her. He simply sat there, letting her hit him, his head bobbing loosely with each blow like a straw dummy. "There is no bonus, Victoria," he said, his voice flat and dead. "There hasn't been a bonus in four years. I’ve been paying the office rent with cash advances from your mother’s account."
"Stop it!" Eleanor screamed from the floor. She had managed to pull herself up onto the edge of a chair, but her legs were trembling so hard that the mahogany frame rattled against the floor. "Marianne! Look at them! They're your family! Victoria is your namesake! Her middle name is Marianne!"
Marianne Mercer looked down at her niece with an expression that would have chilled boiling water.
"Her middle name is an insult," Marianne said. "And her conduct tonight—striking a child who has more dignity in her little finger than the whole pack of you have in your collective bodies—was the final confirmation that my father was right."
She turned toward the hall.
"Briggs," she said.
"Yes, Madam?"
"Have the local locksmith here at seven. I want every tumbler on the estate replaced before the sun is up. And call the nursery in Bedford. Tell them to bring two trucks. I want every rhododendron Arthur planted along the western wall dug up and thrown into the ditch."
She turned back once, her gray eyes settling on Victoria, who was now weeping with her face buried in her hands.
May you like
"You have three minutes," Marianne said.
***
