Murder Keeps A Secret Read online

  Tobias joined the Navy in 1943, when he was eighteen, and sat out the rest of the war at a supply depot in New Orleans. He collected no medals for heroism—but he did learn three skills during his tour of duty: how to play jazz piano, how to do needlepoint and how to drink. None of which he ever forgot.

  After the War, Tobias enrolled at Brown, but that lasted barely two years, after which he went to work for his father. That continued for another two and was a disaster, since the boy had no business judgment whatsoever. And his lifestyle, centered on the City’s jazz clubs and late-night drinking, conflicted with the austere work ethic his father imposed on himself and wanted his son to emulate.

  Finally, they reached an understanding: Tobias would leave Great Kill and do as he pleased, supported by a healthy allowance from his father. (I believe it was $100,000 a year—big money in 1951.) All his father asked was that the boy avoid public scandal and publicity. Tobias more or less obliged; the jazz bars on Fifty-second Street and in the Village where he hung out did not attract Walter Winchell and the other gossip columnists. And Tobias at this stage did not carouse and get disruptive in public; his drinking was quiet and steady, mostly vodka and orange juice, from the time he got up at noon until the jazz clubs closed in the early morning.

  When Tobias announced in 1954 that he wanted to move to Paris, Hendrik was relieved. Jazz was apparently booming in France then, and Tobias wanted to be a part of the scene. His father encouraged him, glad to have the Atlantic separating them.

  It was in Paris that Tobias met Ines Amarante de Sousa, a glamorous Brazilian of twenty-two and the daughter of a well-to-do Rio industrialist, Nascimento Amarante de Sousa, who owned a string of paper mills scattered throughout Brazil.

  As Tobias told me the story years later, he met Ines at the Club Saint-Germain, where he spent most evenings. Ines was astoundingly beautiful, sitting in the club’s dim light. The product of a strict Sacred Heart education, she was still very much under her parents’ control and hungered to escape.

  Tobias, always happiest around music bars, his amiability fueled by his regular drinking, seemed to offer a way out, and she pursued him around Paris. After a brief time they were married in Paris and then set off to meet her parents in Rio de Janeiro and his father in New York.

  Ines captivated Hendrik. She was polite and cultivated, and these qualities appealed to the old man, as did her unquestioned beauty. She was not perhaps the upright Protestant bride he would have chosen for his son, but he thought she might actually reform Tobias, and, as he told me at the time, “she certainly beats the low-class types the boy used to bring home.”

  Tobias did not reform, and it was not long before Ines began creating a private world for herself. She took courses in drawing and painting and, as her English improved, art history, first at the New School and then at the Institute of Fine Arts.

  Amply subsidized by her own father, Ines began to patronize the galleries and soon was a part of the art scene, leading an independent life amid an ever larger circle of artists, gallery owners and hangers-on. Tobias did not seem to mind so long as his daily (or more precisely, nocturnal) routine was not disturbed.

  As their lives diverged, Ines and Tobias became, in effect, independent boarders, sleeping apart in the duplex maisonette at Park Avenue and Seventy-fourth Street. While no longer interested in each other, neither one was attracted to anyone else, so there was no reason to alter the status quo.

  All that changed when Tobias and the Principessa Montefiore del’Udine (née Robyn Mayes) started their affair in, I would say, 1963. At the time I did not know all the intriguing circumstances of how Tobias had first met the Principessa, only that he was seen more and more frequently with an American divorcee with an Italian title.

  Then, in the summer of 1964, the explosion occurred. Tobias announced to Ines that he wanted a divorce so that he could marry the Principessa. Indifferent as she had become to her husband, Ines summoned up a full dose of wronged-woman indignation and vowed that she would never give him a divorce.

  Tobias told her he would take up residence in Nevada and get what we lawyers call an ex parte divorce without her consent. (You will recall that the only ground for divorce in New York in those days was adultery.) Ines, in her fury, told him to go ahead, with the dire warning that if he got such a divorce and married the Principessa, she would have him jailed for bigamy.

  This threat sent a very scared Tobias right into the arms of Chase & Ward. Up until then, I had the impression that he was slightly distrustful of our firm, which represented his father and had represented his grandfather before him.

  My trust and estates partner who would normally have dealt with Tobias’ problem was away on an extended vacation so, at Tobias’ insistence, I had to tend to the matter. I knew next to nothing about out-of-state divorces and, God knows, even less about bigamy; I’d heard others mention the bad repute of “mail-order Mexicans” and “one-day Alabamas,” but it was a subject I’d never encountered in my rather staid corporate practice.

  With the help of a bright young associate, I educated myself and concluded that if Tobias established residence in Nevada for six weeks, he could indeed get an ex parte divorce without Ines’ consent that probably would be valid. And if he married Robyn in Reno or Las Vegas, where the divorce would clearly be recognized, there would be no question of bigamy. To my ignorant surprise, having never considered the matter in my life, the crime of bigamy is the act of marrying a second spouse while still married to the first; it has nothing to do with ongoing living arrangements.

  I have seldom had a client more grateful for advice given than Tobias. For better or worse, it made him—and Robyn—our friends for life. We maintained the relationship through the years—helped a good deal by the Vandermeers’ generous contributions to Cynthia’s work at the National Ballet—and because of it we ended up as members of that damnable reading club of Robyn’s where Tobias was murdered.

  Tobias and Robyn were married just before Christmas in 1964, and she immediately set out to achieve two goals: to beguile Hendrik and to establish herself in New York society.

  Accomplishing her first objective was necessary to realize the second for, at the time she married Tobias, she had practically no money. Il Principe Montefiore del’Udine had given her a title, but little else. Indeed, it turned out that he had managed to squander what money she had brought to their marriage. And Tobias’ allowance from his father, while ample, really could not sustain the level of charitable giving Robyn felt necessary to buy her way into society.

  Disarming Hendrik was a formidable task. He had been horrified when Tobias dumped Ines, whom Hendrik had grown to like. And Robyn struck him as something of an adventuress.

  In that he was probably correct, though to give her proper credit, she did work hard at her charities, most notably READ. Ensconced in the Vandermeer living quarters—Ines had fled to Brazil as soon as it was clear that Tobias really was going to leave her—she surveyed the charity scene and saw that literacy was a cause without a wealthy and visible sponsor. There were some small groups dedicated to childhood literacy—teaching little wide-eyed minority children to read had its drawing power—but no one was much attracted to the plight of poor, and generally not very appealing, adult illiterates. To her credit, she set out to form a committee that would promote literacy programs for adults as well as for children, and the impossibly named READ (Reading Education for American Democracy) was created.

  The first time I ever met Robyn was when she came to One Metropolitan Plaza to talk with a group of us about setting up READ. Having expected a femme fatale, I was impressed. She wore what even I could recognize was a Chanel suit, a glamorous red one that showed off her lustrous brunette hair, dark eyes and trim figure to perfection. Her slight overbite, a legacy from her less-than-grand childhood, was her only imperfect feature. She was very businesslike and seemed, despite the years she had spent abroad, very knowledgeable in the ways of the not-for-profit world.


  READ was a spectacular success. The annual READ ball almost immediately became a must-be-seen-at social event. By inviting well-known authors eager for social pampering, she made the ball more interesting than the usual charity benefit; soon both socialites and authors were clamoring for invitations, the former at ever escalating prices and the latter, of course, for free. For years it has been the only benefit I know of that has a waiting list.

  Robyn’s success with READ eventually won Hendrik over. He became an enthusiastic contributor and, even in his nineties, made rare public appearances at the READ ball.

  The upshot of Hendrik’s approval was the now famous codicil that allowed Tobias to appoint a life estate to Robyn, if she survived him, in the income from the so-called Vandermeer Trust that Hendrik set up in his will.

  With the usual Vandermeer financial good luck, when Hendrik died in 1974, at the age of ninety-four, the New York real estate market was badly depressed. Thus his estate was valued at a mere (!) $90 million for estate-tax purposes (this at a time when the Federal estate-tax rate was a crippling 61 percent and the New York rate was an additional 21 percent). The canny old fellow had enough liquid assets squirreled away to pay these taxes, leaving the Bloemendael Foundation and the Vandermeer Trust each with half the Great Kill stock, each half being worth roughly $30 million. The Great Kill stock is now being reappraised and, given the huge increases in New York City land values since Hendrik’s death, each half is probably now worth on the order of $150 million.

  The years between Hendrik’s death and the tragedies of this spring you know about, though I’ll be happy to talk with you concerning them.

  I realize that this letter is terribly disjointed, and I apologize for my stilted old lawyer’s prose. I do hope, however, that it helps to fill in the background. Cynthia and I both wish you luck with your project.

  Fondly,

  REUBEN

  2

  Getting Ready: I

  Kathleen Boyle was in a foul mood. Her Irish capacity for resentment, honed and refined over forty years as a domestic servant, was on display as she angrily plumped up the pillows on the sofa in the Vandermeer living room.

  Minutes before, Robyn Vandermeer had swept through, calling out instructions for things to be done. Her litany had included an icy order to remove a silver sugar bowl from the coffee table, her tone implying that she questioned why it was there in the first place.

  The maid bristled at the innuendo, but said nothing. She was perfectly aware that the sugar bowl should be removed, and she would take it away in her own good time. The only reason it was out on view at all was because of the overbearing Bill Kearney, the man who ran Mr. Vandermeer’s business and came to see him every Sunday. In his imperious way, Kearney had demanded a cup of coffee even before he had his coat off. Then, after he had been summoned by Tobias Vandermeer to the study on the next floor, the offending dish had been left behind.

  Kathleen Boyle’s grievances reframed themselves in her mind as questions. Why was Kearney around on Sunday anyway? Why didn’t he and Mr. Tobias do their business during the week like normal people? Getting a weekly report on how the books stood was probably not servile work, forbidden on the Sabbath, but it did seem inappropriate to her.

  And how could Mr. Tobias stand Kearney in the first place? Haughty to her, and even to Miss Robyn, always speaking to them in the condescending tones of an old-school monsignor, he changed completely when speaking to Mr. Tobias. No turnip-snagging peasant was more obsequious to his landlord than William Kearney was to Tobias Vandermeer. Sure, Mr. Tobias’ senses were usually clouded with drink, but even he must see what a toady his manager was. He must be good at what he does, Kathleen had reluctantly concluded.

  Normally she was able to avoid Kearney. All day Sunday and Tuesday afternoons were her time off. Except, for the last year or two, those Sundays every four months when it was Mrs. Vandermeer’s turn to entertain her reading club for supper and, what seemed to Kathleen the one time she stayed around for the whole event, interminable gabble about the book they all had copies of. She resented the reading club and its interference with her Sunday free time. Not that her Sundays were particularly exciting—generally a movie in the afternoon and the evening spent before the TV in her tiny quarters behind the kitchen. It was the smallest room in the eighteen-room Vandermeer complex, but it was comfortable and private.

  Spending her Sunday getting ready for the reading club did interfere with her routine. She couldn’t attend the eleven-thirty mass at St. Vincent’s, her favorite church, with the amiable Dominican friars and the choir, but instead had to trudge uptown to St. Jean Baptiste for the evening mass. And endless, endless sermons and “folk” music by a guitar-piano duo that struck her untutored ears as being not much short of sacrilegious. Vatican II and the sainted Pope John may have accomplished a great deal of good, but St. Jean’s folk mass did not prove it to Kathleen Boyle.

  Mulling over her immediate resentments as she worked about the living room inevitably fueled thoughts of older gripes and her growing apprehensions about working for the Vandermeers.

  There was, of course, the matter of the television. She had been insisting for months that her small set no longer worked properly. The picture was fuzzy, but Mrs. Vandermeer, after a personal inspection, pronounced it an irreparable fault of the cable hookup, not of the tiny set itself. This seemed wrong to Kathleen, since the large set in Mr. Tobias’ study always had a clear and distinct picture. To her, the struggle over the TV was simply one more example of the Missus’ increasing closeness with money. Never in Kathleen’s experience exactly open-handed, Robyn had some time ago become obsessed with saving money on the smallest items. Couldn’t the maid empty out the disposable bag in the vacuum cleaner and use it again? the Missus had asked her not long before. And she knew that Robyn Vandermeer reviewed the accounts of the new Japanese-American cook, Mr. Obuchi, all the time.

  Kathleen shrewdly guessed that Mr. Tobias must be keeping his wife on a short string, though she had no inkling why. Maybe it was just part of the overall change she had noticed in Mr. Tobias’ own habits.

  When she had come to work for the Vandermeers six years earlier, her predecessor, before packing up and retiring to County Clare, had warned her that Mr. Tobias “liked his whiskey.” This had not fazed Kathleen; after all, she had put up with a brother who not only liked whiskey but appeared to nourish himself on it.

  There was no denying, though, that Mr. Tobias’ drinking had become more intense. She recalled listening to him play the Steinway in the living room whenever it took his fancy, day or night. She had never cared much for the jazz music he pounded out, but she had recognized that his playing had deteriorated and become more discordant and painful to listen to as time went on. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what a noise he could make!

  Mr. Tobias had become a mean blackguard, Kathleen thought. Fits of temper were now frequent, or, what Kathleen found worse, he lapsed into a morose state that sometimes lasted throughout the day, almost as if he were haunted by some unspoken reality. Maybe he was keeping a closer watch on his checkbook as part of this withdrawal.

  The matter of money had come up specifically in connection with Kathleen’s extra duties on the reading club Sundays. When approached about the matter, Kathleen, trying to be obliging, had worked the first one and then protested. Serving supper to eleven people, and then acting as their waitress while they went on about their book over drinks, was too much. Besides, Mr. Obuchi had made clear when he was hired that he would never work on Sunday, reading club or no reading club. Robyn’s efforts to persuade him otherwise had been without avail; his command of English, such as it was, disappeared completely whenever the subject was raised. He had eventually agreed to prepare a supper in advance, the result being that Kathleen became an unwilling kitchen helper as well as a server in the dining room.

  After listening to Kathleen’s complaints, Robyn Vandermeer offered to pay her more money for the extra work. But Kathleen was more int
erested in her Sunday freedom and insisted that additional help was needed. Robyn was petulant and only agreed most reluctantly to hire a waiter to assist and to relieve Kathleen in the late afternoon (a much more expensive proposition than paying her over-time). He came from Bright Lights, the catering agency that Robyn, and half the hostesses in New York, used for their larger parties. The creation of Byron Hayden, a former child actor who outgrew his talent, Bright Lights possessed a Rolodex full of the names of hungry, out-of-work actors eager to staff everything from a small at-home dinner to a charity banquet in the Sixty-sixth Street Armory.

  This March Sunday, Bright Lights had served up Pace Padgett, an unemployed actor who had worked at the Vandermeers’ on several recent occasions, including the reading club supper the previous November and, that same month, a three-day “house party” when the Vandermeers entertained a dozen of Robyn’s friends who had flown in from Europe to attend the READ ball.

  Kathleen was of two minds about her helper. He was pleasant enough and, she thought, would even be good-looking if he shaved off his mustache and had his medium-length black hair properly cut. And, having worked the Vandermeers’ residence before, he did not ask a lot of dumb questions about such matters as where the wineglasses were or how to run the dishwasher.

  Pace had not won Kathleen’s complete approval, however. She did not at all like the arty manner in which he set the table, with flared napkins at each place. Nor the way he took charge and treated Kathleen as his assistant, rather than as the senior servant of the household, even to the point of answering the telephone, clearly Kathleen’s prerogative. And worse, going off to make calls of his own without asking her permission. He certainly makes himself at home, Kathleen thought, but did not challenge her only route to partial Sunday deliverance.