CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

We’d covered most of her ten acres, except for the treed area around her stable, and I thought she might be avoiding that. Why? Because the stable brought back memories of Mr. Bellarosa, our new neighbor, insisting that his construction company do the work of moving the old Stanhope stables and carriage house from William’s land, which was for sale, to Susan’s property. It had been truly a Herculean task, disassembling the hundred-year-old structure, brick by brick, and reassembling it near the guest cottage. Plus, we needed a variance because the stable would be close to the Alhambra estate, and Frank Bellarosa had to sign off on that, which he was happy to do for us – or for Susan. And then Bellarosa’s guy, Dominic, gave us an estimate that looked like Mr. Bellarosa was underwriting most of the cost.

I mean, did I guess that Frank had the hots for Susan? Well, yes. Was I upset? No. Did I think it was amusing? Yes. Did I think Susan Stanhope was actually going to hop into bed with a Mafia guy? Not in a million years. Should I have paid more attention to what was going on? Apparently. Am I stupid? No, but I was preoccupied with my own tax problems, and I was entirely too trusting. Not to mention entirely too egotistical to even contemplate such a thing.

And little did I suspect that my buddy, Frank Bellarosa, had instigated this potentially ruinous and possibly criminal tax evasion charge against me so that he could pull a few strings and get me off the hook, thereby putting me in his debt, instead of the IRS’s debt. It was bad enough that a tax attorney had a tax problem, but solving the problem with the help of a Mafia guy was not one of my smarter moves. On the other hand, it worked.

Well, I certainly learned a lesson or two about life, and about myself, and about seduction and survival. Not to mention relearning an old lesson about the power and the mystery of sexual behavior. I mean, who would have thought that don Bellarosa, the head of a Mafia crime family, and Susan Stanhope, from a somewhat more prominent family, would have much to talk about? Actually, they didn’t; it was more You Jane, me Tarzan.

I could see the stables now, and I asked her, “Are you still riding?”

She glanced at where I was looking and replied, “Yes, but I don’t own a horse. I ride a little at a horse farm in Old Brookville.”

I nodded, recalling the night she’d killed Frank Bellarosa. She had saddled her horse, an Arabian stallion named Zanzibar, and announced to me that she was going for a night ride, which I advised her was dangerous, but she’d pointed out that there was a full moon, and the night was bright, and she’d ridden off.

About two hours later, Mr. Felix Mancuso of the FBI rang my doorbell and politely asked me to come with him to Alhambra. I knew in my guts that Susan had murdered her lover.

Mancuso’s colleagues had been house-sitting Frank Bellarosa since he’d become a government witness, and they’d done a very nice job of keeping him safe from his former friends and goombahs. Unfortunately, the FBI did not include Mrs. Sutter on their list of people who were not allowed access to don Bellarosa. In fact, Susan was high on the short list of people who had unlimited access to Frank because they’d been instructed, “Frank needs to get laid to keep him happy and talking.” Someone, however, should have remembered that (a) the female of the species is more dangerous than the male, and (b) hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Well, guys sometimes forget that, even FBI guys, and to be fair, they probably didn’t know about (b) until they heard the shots.

Susan, walking beside me now, was apparently thinking of horses, and not Frank Bellarosa or murder, because she said to me, “There are far fewer places where one can ride now. So many of the equestrian rights-of-way have been closed off, and many of the open fields and old estates are now subdivisions.”

Such as Alhambra. I said, with forced sincerity, “That’s too bad.” I recalled that one of Susan’s concerns, after she’d shot and killed her lover, was that Zanzibar was still tethered behind Frank’s mansion. I had to promise her I’d ride him home that night, which I did. I wasn’t overly fond of her high-strung animal, but I did unsaddle him and water him, though I didn’t brush him down, and if she’d known that, she would have killed me. Well… poor choice of words again.

She said, “The Ganzes turned the carriage house into a garage, and they used the stables to store lawn and gardening equipment, which is what I’m doing.”

“Good idea.”

“I really miss Zanzibar. I miss having my own horse. Do you miss Yankee?”

Yankee was my horse, and I hated him only slightly less than I hated Zanzibar, but I replied, “I think about him often.”

She glanced at me, then said, “Well, I found good homes for them.”

I was glad that the horses, at least, had a good home after she left.

It was a perfect morning, weather-wise at least, and I’d forgotten how magnificent these parklike grounds were. The entire three hundred acres of the original Stanhope estate had been planted with exotic and expensive specimen trees from around the world, and many of these trees were over a hundred years old. The estate had been in decline through the past few decades, but Susan – and the Ganzes – had maintained this ten-acre parcel, and I’d noticed that Amir Nasim had been putting some care into his property as well.

Coming back here, after so many years, I was struck by the fact that there could still be so many huge estates left on the Gold Coast, barely thirty miles from Manhattan, surrounded by a suburban county of well over a million people. The pressure to develop the remaining land to provide mini-mansions for newly minted millionaires was intense, but a new breed of multimillionaires, including foreigners like Amir Nasim, and people whose fortunes were of dubious origin such as Frank Bellarosa, had arrived with the resources to buy the old estates from the old families and breathe new life into them.

Before this had happened, however, there were probably a hundred or more magnificent estates whose mansions had been abandoned because of taxes, reversals of fortune, or maintenance costs, and when I was young, these ruins dotted the landscape, giving the appearance, as Anthony Bellarosa would agree, that an army of Vandals had passed through a wide swath of the Empire. Also, when I was a boy, these huge derelict mansions were the ultimate playhouse for games of make- believe. And when I got older, I played a different sort of game, called love among the ruins – some candles, a bottle of wine, a transistor radio, a bedroll, and a newly liberated young lady on birth control pills.

This all reminded me that one of Susan’s many talents was oil paintings, and her forte was painting these abandoned mansions. She had been locally famous for her romantic representations of these vegetation-covered ruins, which she painted in the spirit, if not the style, of Piranesi’s engravings of Roman ruins. But the architectural diversity of the Gold Coast mansions, as well as their varying states of decay, ranging from salvageable to lost, allowed her more latitude than Piranesi, of course, and she worked in oils and acrylics. If that sounds like I know what I’m talking about, I don’t; I got that straight from the artist. In any case, I was curious, so I asked her, “Are you still painting?”

She smiled, then looked wistful, I thought, and replied, “Not anymore. But I might.”

“Why did you stop?”

She thought about that, then replied, “I tried painting in Hilton Head… I did a few seascapes, and a lot of those palmetto trees… but somehow I just lost the… talent, I guess.”

“I don’t think you can lose talent.”

“Well… maybe the subjects didn’t interest me. You know, like when an artist moves from where he or she was inspired to someplace else.”