a bottle of the Phelps Insignia ’ninety-one.”
“Very good, sir.” He went away.
They sat back and sipped their drinks until the caviar came, then they ate it slowly, sipping the lemon vodka and making it all last. A couple came into the restaurant, the young woman wearing a sleeveless sweater with the name “Chanel” emblazoned across her chest, in two-inch-high letters.
“A billboard,” Stone said.
“Typical of Palm Beach,” Callie replied.
“Eurotrash?”
“Just trash. There’s a lot of it about. Oh, there are still some old-line families around, living quietly, if grandly, but mostly it’s what you see here—people who somehow got ahold of a lot of money and want everybody to know it. They’ve bid up the real estate out of sight. A nice little house on a couple of acres is now three million bucks, and last week I saw an ad for what was advertised as the last vacant beachfront lot in Palm Beach—all one and a half acres of it—and they’re asking eight and a half million.”
Stone nearly choked on his vodka.
The waiter had just taken away the dishes when three people, two women and a man, entered the restaurant and were shown to a table by the street windows. Stone followed their progress closely. One of the women, a redhead, had something very familiar about her.
Callie kicked him under the table. “I thought that in this dress, I might get your undivided attention.”
“I’m sorry,” Stone said, “but I think I know one of the women. Except she’s a redhead, and the woman I knew was a blonde, like you. Well, not as beautiful as you.”
“She must have been important,” Callie said. “Tell me about her.”
“It’s not a short story,” Stone said. “More of a novella.”
“I’ve got all night.”
“All right.”
Dinner arrived, and Stone tasted the wine. “Decant it, please,” he said to the waiter.
When that was done, Callie said, “Continue.”
“Oh, yes. A few years back I scheduled a sailing charter out of St. Marks. You know it?”
“Yes, we’ve been in there on Toscana.”
“My girlfriend was supposed to follow, but she got snowed into New York, then she got a magazine assignment to interview Vance Calder.”
“Lucky girl,” she said. “My favorite movie star.”
“Everybody’s favorite. That’s why she couldn’t turn it down. Anyway, I was stuck there alone, and one morning I was having breakfast in the cockpit of the boat, and something odd happened. A yacht of about fifty feet sailed into the harbor, the mainsail ripped, and nobody aboard but a beautiful blonde. After customs had cleared the boat, the police came and took her away.
“The following day I was passing the town hall and there was some sort of hearing under way, and I went in. Turned out to be an inquest. The girl, whose name was Allison Manning, had been sailing across the Atlantic with her husband, who was the writer Paul Manning …”
“I’ve read his stuff,” she said. “He’s good.”
“Yes. Anyway, her testimony is that they’re halfway across, and he winches her up the mast to fix something, then cleats the line. She finishes the job and looks down to find him lying in the cockpit, turning blue. She’s stuck at the top of the mast, but eventually she manages to shinny down. He’s dead, probably of a heart attack. He’s the sailor, and she’s the cook and bottle-washer, and now she’s in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, alone, her husband starting to rot in the heat. She buries him at sea and, in a considerable act of seamanship for somebody who isn’t a sailor, manages to get the yacht across the Atlantic to St. Marks.”
“This is beginning to sound familiar. Wasn’t there something about it on Sixty Minutes a while back?”
“Then you know the story?”
“No, go on. Tell me everything.”
“St. Marks’s Minister of Justice doesn’t buy her story, and he charges her with murdering her husband. Stone to the rescue. I offer to help. She’s tried. With the help of a local barrister, I represent her. Long story short, she’s convicted and sentenced to hang.”
“Jesus.”