My cell phone buzzed in my briefcase. I pulled it out—incoming from Chaim Salanter’s personal assistant. Mr. Salanter was waiting, and no, he didn’t want to reschedule to a more convenient time: this was his only convenient time. He was leaving for Brazil in the morning.
“Oh, my God!” I got to my feet. “I’m supposed to be meeting the world’s twenty-first richest person for dinner. Another thing that didn’t stick in my head.”
The dean stood with me. “The twenty-first richest person? How odd that they can be counted that way, from top down. I wonder if they know the twenty-first poorest person in the world?”
“I looked up the Forbes list this afternoon between meetings,” I said. “Five of the top fifty are women. I don’t know if Forbes could figure out where the fifty poorest live, but a dollar says they’re all female.”
“I’ll be praying for your friend,” the dean said. “In return, if number twenty-one is feeling charitable, the chapel can always use a billion or two.”
He held out a bronze leather handbag with a distinctive “H” picked out in the leather. “I found this behind the pulpit, with Ms. Ashford’s name on a nearby pill bottle. I put in the papers and a car key that might belong to her, but if she’s missing something let me know; our cleaning crew is very good about turning in the oddments people drop in church.”
I took the bag but pointed behind him at a little tower on the right side of the chancel. “Is that what you mean—behind that?”
“That’s the pulpit, yes. Is that a problem?”
“Leydon had to have been up in the west gallery to fall as she did. If she was carrying the bag, it traveled up the steps and thirty feet away from her.”
“If she’s bipolar and cycling high, maybe she threw it from the gallery.” His voice was diffident.
I went back to the gallery staircase. “Can you turn on a light?” I called as I climbed.
I waited a moment at the top until the dean had found the right switch, then went to the balustrade.
“Okay. Here I am, filled with irrational exuberance. I fling my bag.”
I did a windup and released the bag, throwing it as far as I could. It landed in the middle of the chancel, a good fifteen or twenty feet from where Knaub said he’d found it. The force of my throw propelled me forward; I had to clutch the low railing to keep from following Leydon over the edge.
“I can see how throwing the bag might have made her fall,” I conceded. “But she doesn’t have nearly as strong an arm as I do. You’d have to be Johnny Unitas to get that handbag from here to the back of the pulpit. Someone else dumped it there, but who?”
14.
ONE ARMAGNAC TOO MANY
IT WAS CLOSE TO EIGHT WHEN I REACHED CHAIM SALANTER’S appointed meeting place. The sun was low in the horizon and the air had that quiet warmth, a lover’s embrace, that it offers at twilight in summer. I left my car in the club’s loading zone and stood for a moment, eyes shut, listening to the birds cheeping their end-of-day messages, breathing the heavy scent from the flowers planted around the club’s stairs.
The Parterre Club was housed in one of those discreet old greystones on Elm Street, just off Lake Shore Drive—and a short walk from the Salanter mansion on Schiller Street. When I finally summoned the energy to climb the stairs to the front door, I saw a framed placard next to the bell: the club had been founded in 1895 for “Ladies and Gentlemen with an Interest in Ornamental Horticulture.” That was reassuring—all during my drive north, I’d been thinking of the parterres under cathedral balconies.
An attendant came to the door and took my car keys, while a stooped woman who looked old enough to be my grandmother escorted me to the ladies’ lounge so that I could “freshen up”—a euphemism for doing something about the blood that had dried in stiff brown Rorschachs down the right side of my dress. When I saw myself in the full-length mirror, I winced: my hair looked like Tom’s fur after Jerry had run an electric current through him. My olive skin had a gray sheen, fatigue mixed with sweat.
There was nothing to be done about the blood tonight, unless I stripped to the altogether and gave the dress to the attendant. I sponged off my feet. I’d sprouted blisters on the soles and around my little toes from running in high heels, but the lounge’s toiletry counter included Band-Aids along with combs, deodorant, and mouthwash. When I’d taped my feet and made myself presentable from the cleavage up, I let the elderly woman escort me to the second floor, where Chaim Salanter was waiting for me in the members’ dining room.
The ornamental horticulturalists had lined the club stairwell with bonsais and decorative shrubs. There had even been an array of sweet-smelling flowering plants in the ladies’ lounge.
My guide turned me over to a waiter, who led me to Chaim Salanter. The billionaire half rose to his feet when I reached him, but told the waiter to take me to the bar while he finished a phone call.