Free Too Much Money by Dominick Dunne Page B

Jonsie.
    “If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell?” asked Brucie.
    “I promise.”
    “No, swear to God on your word of honor you’ll never tell.”
    “I swear to God on my word of honor I’ll never tell,” said Jonsie.
    “I steamed open his suicide note to Lil Altemus,” said Brucie.
    “You didn’t!” replied Jonsie, in a shocked voice.
    They became helpless with shamed laughter.
    “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” said Jonsie when he caught his breath from laughing. “What did the note say?”
    W INKIE WAS in his bed. As planned, he was wearing his blue silk monogrammed pajamas that Perla Zacharias had had made for him at Charvet in Paris, when he visited her at the villa in Biarritz. His best Porthault sheets, pillowcases, and sham were on his bed. On his bedside table were his beautiful tangerine roses in a Steuben vase that Lil Altemus had given him from the house in Northeast Harbor, when she had to give it up. A Louis Vuitton bag had been packed with the clothes Addison was to take to the Grant P. Trumbull Funeral Home the next day. For a person taking his own life, Winkie was in very good spirits. He and Addison were drinking very expensive champagne frombeautiful glasses. The vial of pills from the pain clinic at the Medicine Center was next to him on the bed.
    “How many have you taken?” asked Addison, who was simply ecstatic at being present at such a time as this.
    “I think about fourteen or sixteen,” said Winkie. “I’m kind of getting hazy. I’m planning on taking thirty-seven. The thing you mustn’t do is take too many. Did I ever tell you about poor Lupe Vélez? She was divine, Lupe. She was madly in love with Gary Cooper, and he went off with someone else, and she got herself all dressed up in the best nightgown she had, and her hair was done, and she was made up to within an inch of her life so she’d look beautiful when they found her in the morning, and then she took far too many pills, like sixty or something like that, and she vomited, and the maid found her the next morning with her head in the toilet bowl full of puke. Mustn’t have that.”
    They both roared with laughter.
    “Do you know something, Addison?” He took two more pills. “That was the last big laugh of my life.”
    “I guess so,” said Addison. “I’m going to miss you, Winkie.”
    “Now you’ll wash up the champagne glasses and then get out of here and come back in the morning and find me,” said Winkie in a very weak voice.
    “We’ve been over this fifty times,” said Addison. “I’ll wash up the glasses, take the dirty videos, and be out of here. I’ll leave the Vuitton bag here until tomorrow when I find you. How many have you taken now?”
    “About twenty-two, I think.”
    “Is there anything else?” asked Addison.
    “Yes.”
    “What?”
    “Tell me something about yourself that you’ve never told anybody in the whole world. Tell me your deepest secret,” whispered Winkie.
    Addison thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said. He reached out and pulled over toward the bed a French bergère chair that Donald Mendelson, Winkie’s second rich benefactor after the death of the rich South American in Paris, had bought for him from the Kitty Miller auction at Boothby’s back in 1962. Addison loved the history of the bergère chair and hoped that it would soon be his. What he was about to say he had never told another soul, but he knew that his secret would be safe with the nearly dead Winkie, and he knew that it would help him to speak the words.
    “Tell me,” said Winkie.
    “Do you remember the story you told me about the cook who jumped out the window at the Tavistock mansion on East Seventy-eighth Street?”
    “I was there when the poor woman jumped,” whispered Winkie. “So was Adele Harcourt. She landed on a terrace outside the dining room where the lunch party was going on. Plop, right there in front of us. Ruined the party.”
    “You’re pretty