Immediately, Billy’s house phone and cell phone began ringing incessantly. Friends or reporters? he wondered. He didn’t answer either line. His apartment buzzer went off five or six times—apparently, whoever was trying to get in had made it up to his floor, because then there was a pounding at his door that eventually went away. Billy took refuge in his bathroom. It was only a matter of time before they came for him. He, too, would be all over the newspapers and the Internet, and there would be clips of him on the news and on YouTube, his head bowed in disgrace. His behavior was justifiable, perhaps, because he needed money, but no one would see it that way. Why hadn’t he immediately turned the cross over to the Met? Because it would have besmirched Mrs. Houghton’s name. But she was dead, and now her name was besmirched anyway, and he was probably going to jail. In despair, he even wondered why he had ever moved to New York in the first place. Why couldn’t he have stayed in the Berkshires and been happy with what life had handed him in the beginning?
He opened his medicine cabinet and took out all his pills. He had several kinds now: two types of sleeping pills, Xanax, Prozac, and the Vicodin for his tooth pain. If he took all the pills and drank a bottle of vodka, he might be able to end it. But staring at the pills, he realized he didn’t even have the courage to kill himself.
He could at least knock himself out. He took two Vicodins, two Xanaxes, and one of each kind of sleeping pill. Within minutes, he was asleep in a vibrant, multicolored dream that seemed to go on forever.
Enid Merle was one of the first people to hear about Sandy Brewer’s arrest. A reporter from the paper who was on the scene called her immediately. As yet, all the facts weren’t in, and the conclusion was that Sandy had somehow managed to buy the cross from Mrs. Houghton, who had stolen it from the Met. This allegation, Enid knew, was false. While it was true that Louise had possessed the cross, Enid guessed that she hadn’t taken it from the Met but from Flossie Davis. Flossie had always been the obvious culprit, but what had never made sense to Enid was why Louise hadn’t returned the cross to the Met in the first place. Instead, she’d kept both the cross and the secret, protecting Flossie from being punished for her criminal act. Louise was a devout Catholic; perhaps a moral imperative had prevented her from revealing Flossie’s crime.
Or perhaps, Enid thought, there was another reason. Maybe Flossie had something on Louise. Enid should have gotten to the bottom of this mystery long ago, but she’d never considered it important enough. At the moment, there wasn’t time. She had a column due, and since it concerned Louise Houghton, she would have to write it herself.
Enid looked through several printed pages of research on Sandy and Connie Brewer. The story wasn’t of much importance in the larger world—certainly nowhere near the impact of a presidential election, or the innocent murder of civilians caught in a war, or all and any of the insults and indignities suffered by the common man. It was only about New York “society.” And yet, she reminded herself, the desire for some kind of society was an innate human trait, for without it, there could be no hope of civilized man. Picking out a clip of an article from Vanity Fair written about Connie Brewer and her fabulous country house in the Hamptons, Enid wondered if it was possible to have a desire for too much society. The Brewers had everything in life—four children, a private plane, no worries. But it wasn’t enough, and now the children’s daddy might be going to jail. It was ironic that Sandy Brewer and Mrs. Enid Houghton should end up in the same sentence. If Mrs. Houghton had been alive, she never would have acknowledged an arriviste like Sandy. Enid sat back in her chair. There was a big chunk of the story missing, but her column was due in four hours. Positioning her hands above the keyboard, she wrote, “Louise Houghton was a good friend of mine.”
Eight hours later, Billy Litchfield woke up in his claw-footed bathtub. Checking his arms and legs, he was surprised to find himself still very much alive—and inexplicably exultant. It was the middle of the night; nevertheless, he felt an overwhelming desire to hear David Bowie. Sliding a CD into the machine, he thought, Why not? and decided to play the entire four hours of a two-CD set spanning Bowie’s career from 1967 to 1993. As Billy listened, he walked around his apartment, dancing occasionally on the worn wooden floors in his bare feet, and flinging his paisley robe around his body like a cape. Then he started looking at photographs. He had hundreds of framed photographs in his apartment—hung on the walls, lined up on the mantelpiece, piled on top of books, and packed into drawers. While he was looking at his photographs, he thought he might as well play all his CDs. During the next twenty hours, he sensed that either his cell phone or land line was ringing again, but he didn’t answer either one. He took more pills and at some point discovered that he’d
consumed nearly a whole bottle of vodka. Then he found an old bottle of gin and, singing loudly along with the music, drank it down. He began to feel queasy, and wanting to maintain his dizzy feeling of pleasure in which nothing that had happened in the past seemed to matter, he took two more Vicodins. He felt a little better, and with his music still blaring—it was now Janet Eno—he passed out on top of his bed.
At one point, like a sleepwalker, he did get up and go to his closet. But then he collapsed again, and sometime in the middle of the night, his kidneys gave out, followed by his heart. Billy didn’t feel a thing.
Act Four
18
That evening, Schiffer Diamond ran into Paul and Annalisa Rice on the sidewalk in front of One Fifth. Schiffer was coming back from a long day of shooting, while Paul and Annalisa were dressed for dinner. Schiffer nodded at them on her way into the building, then she paused. “Excuse me,” she said to Annalisa. “Aren’t you a friend of Billy Litchfield’s?”
Paul and Annalisa exchanged glances. “Yes,” Annalisa said.
“Have you seen him?” Schiffer asked. “I’ve been trying to call him for two days.”
“He doesn’t seem to be answering his phone. I went by his apartment, but he wasn’t home.”
“Maybe he’s gone away,” Schiffer said. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
“If you talk to him, will you let me know?” Annalisa asked. “I’m worried.”
Upstairs, Schiffer searched through a drawer in her kitchen, wondering if she still had the keys to Billy’s apartment. Years ago—years and years now—when she and Billy had first become friends, they’d exchanged keys to each other’s apartments in case of an emergency. She’d never cleaned out the drawer, so the keys should still be there, although there was a slim possibility that Billy had changed his lock. In the back of the drawer, she did find the keys. There was a blue plastic tag attached to the ring on which Billy had written LITCHFIELD ABODE, followed by an exclamation point, as if proclaiming their friendship.
Schiffer walked the three blocks to Billy’s building, pausing under the scaffolding before trying the key in the front door. It still worked, and she passed a row of metal mailboxes. The door to Billy’s mailbox was ajar, held open by several days’ worth of envelopes. Perhaps Billy was away. Renovations had apparently begun in the building—the stairway leading to the fourth floor was covered with brown paper and secured with blue tape. Hearing music coming from inside Billy’s apartment, she knocked loudly. At the other end of the hall, a door opened and a middle-aged woman, neatly groomed, stuck her head out. “Are you looking for Billy Litchfield?” she asked. “He’s gone away. And he’s left his music on. I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried to call the super, but he doesn’t answer. It’s all because of the conversion. Billy and I were the last holdouts. They’re trying to force us to move. The next thing you know, they’ll probably turn off the electricity.”
The thought of Billy being in this situation was depressing. “I hope not,” Schiffer said.
“Are you going in?” the woman asked.
“Yes,” Schiffer said. “Billy gave me his keys.”
“Will you turn off the music? I’m just about going crazy here.”
Schiffer nodded and went in. Billy’s living room had always been overcrowded with stuff, but he’d kept it neat. Now it was a mess. His photographs were strewn on the floor, empty CD cases were scattered around the room, and on the sofa and two armchairs, several coffee-table books lay open to photographs of Jackie O. She found the stereo in an antique wooden cupboard and turned off the music. This wasn’t like Billy at all. “Billy?” she called out.
She went down the short hallway to the bedroom, passing empty hooks on the walls where the photographs had been removed. The bedroom door was closed. Schiffer knocked and turned the handle.
Billy lay sprawled across his bed with his head hanging over the side. His eyes were closed, but the muscles under his pale, freckled face had stiffened, giving him a grim, foreign expression. The body on the bed was no longer Billy, Schiffer thought. The Billy Litchfield she’d known was gone.
“Oh, Billy,” she said. Looped around Billy’s neck was a long noose constructed of Hermès ties that trailed on the floor, as if Billy had been thinking of hanging himself but died before he could complete the act.
“Oh, Billy,” Schiffer said again. She gently untied the loose knot around his neck and, separating the ties one from another, carefully hung them back up in Billy’s closet, where they belonged.
Then she went into the bathroom. Billy was fastidious and had done his best with the space, placing thick white towels folded carefully on a shelf above the toilet. But the fixtures themselves were cheap and probably forty years old. She’d always assumed that Billy had money, but apparently, he had not, living exactly as he had when he’d first come to New York. The thought of Billy’s secret penury added to her sadness. He was one of those New York types whom everyone knew but didn’t know much about. She opened the medicine cabinet and was shocked by the row of prescription pills. Prozac, Xanax, Ambien, Vicodin—she’d had no idea Billy was so unhappy and stressed. She should have spent more time with him, she thought bitterly, but Billy had been like a New York institution. She’d always thought he’d be around.
Working quickly, she poured the contents of the prescription bottles into the toilet. As in most prewar buildings, there was an incinerator chute in the kitchen, where Schiffer disposed of the empty bottles. Billy wouldn’t want people to think he’d tried to kill himself or that he was addicted to pills. Back in the bedroom, she spotted a crude wooden box on top of his bureau. It wasn’t Billy’s style, and curious, she opened it to find neat rows of what appeared to be costume jewelry folded in bubble wrap. Did Billy have a transvestite bent to his nature? If so, it was another aspect of his life that he wouldn’t have wanted people to know about. Searching through his closet, she found a shoe box and shopping bag from Valentino. She put the wooden box into the shoe box and into the bag. Then she called 911.