SUSAN SWAN
The Dead Celebrities Club
ALSO BY SUSAN SWAN
The Western Light (2014)
What Casanova Told Me (2004)
Stupid Boys are Good to Relax With (1996)
The Wives of Bath (1993)
The Last of the Golden Girls (1989)
The Biggest Modern Woman of the World (1983)
Unfit for Paradise (1982)
SUSAN SWAN
The Dead Celebrities Club
A Novel
Copyright © 2019 Susan Swan
This edition copyright © 2019 Cormorant Books Inc.
This is a first edition.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence
from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access
Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through Ontario Creates, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Swan, Susan, 1945–, author
The dead celebrities club / Susan Swan.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77086-544-0 (softcover). — ISBN 978-1-77086-545-7 (html)
I. Title.
PS8587.W345D43 2019 C813’.54 C2018-906274-6
C2018-906275-4
Cover design: angeljohnguerra.com
Interior text design: tannicegdesigns.ca
Printer: Houghton Boston
Printed and bound in Canada.
CORMORANT BOOKS INC.
260 Spadina Avenue, Suite 502, Toronto, ON M5T 2E4
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For M.
Contents
Also By Susan Swan
Dedication
Prologue
Part 1: Hoosegow
Dale Paul: 1-6
Tim Nugent: 7
Dale Paul: 8-10
Tim Nugent: 11
Dale Paul: 12-14
Tim Nugent: 15
Dale Paul: 16-24
Tim Nugent: 25
Dale Paul: 26-27
Part 2: The Dead Celebrities
Dale Paul: 1-3
Meredith Paul: 4
Dale Paul: 5-9
Tim Nugent: 10
Dale Paul: 11-14
Tim Nugent: 15
Dale Paul: 16-23
Part 3: Homecoming
Tim Nugent: 1
Dale Paul: 2-9
Meredith Paul: 10
Dale Paul: 11-16
Tim Nugent: 17
Dale Paul: 18-20
Tim Nugent: 21
Dale Paul: 22-25
Part 4: Trouble
Dale Paul: 1-11
Tim Nugent: 12
Dale Paul: 13
Part 5: Deathwatch
Tim Nugent: 1
Dave Paul: 2-12
Meredith Paul: 13
Dale Paul: 14-17
Tim Nugent: 18
Dale Paul: 19-24
Tim Nugent: 25
Dale Paul: 26
Tim Nugent: 27
Dale Paul: 28-29
Dale Paul: Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Landmarks
Cover
Frontmatter
Start of Content
Backmatter
PageList
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PROLOGUE
A TALL MAN with a head like an emperor on a Roman coin is lashed to a swim chair. His mouth, his hands and ankles, his arms and chest are bound with duct tape. How absurd. He’s as good as glued to the plastic while an oaf with a pea-sized brain is getting the best of him, an ill-bred ruffian who isn’t fit to kiss his big toe. A friend’s warning rushes back: You should get the hell out of the country.
But he didn’t leave when the going was good. And now it’s humiliating to be tied up and gagged like a victim, to understand that no matter how hard he struggles, he’s helpless. What are the odds he won’t get out of this one? Best last guess: one hundred to one. If he could talk, the odds would be even money.
Ready for a little joyride? His assailant presses a button, and the fancy-schmancy chair swings out over the pool, its seat rocking. The man experiences a rush of light-headedness as the chair inches downward. Soon he feels the oddly intimate sensation of water touching the soles of his feet. Now his calves. His knees. The water of the pool laps against his waist. The chair keeps moving down, carrying the man to his unhappy fate, like a witch on her ducking stool.
PART ONE
HOOSEGOW
MY NAME IS Dale Paul. Not Dale. Not Paul. But two names together like the Pope. I was born in an age of swindlers. A time when fraud was as natural to the human race as breathing.
1
Dale Paul
MOTHER HAS FALLEN asleep in her chair, her dinner tray on her lap, her snores rising and falling with the soft, pestering sound of the rain on the windows. Outside, thunderheads lie across the Adirondacks. Twilight has brought a late spring storm. I spot one or two misty lights across Straw-berry Lake. Well, maybe three. It doesn’t matter. The reporters are still out there in the darkness.
Perhaps you think I deserve their contempt. Or perhaps you, too, believe in getting what is owed you, but aren’t brave enough to admit it. If that is the case, then you should keep reading.
Unlike Mother, who remains stuck in the rut of binary oppositions, assuming things are either this way or that, I know there is always a third alternative, the somewhat murky nether region — the creative in-between, in other words, where I often find myself living, a zone that lends itself to playful experiments.
But tonight, I’m at a loss. How did I get myself into this position? Before you can murmur the phrase wire fraud, I have been convicted and sentenced to twelve years in a low-security prison.
If Earl were here, he would know what to do.
2
WHEN I LEFT the land of the pessimists for the land of the optimists to make my fortune, it was Earl who encouraged me to improve my prospects. He picked me up at LaGuardia in his limo and said he wanted to sell me a house he’d bought for his mistress, Kimberly Roderick. She sat between us in Earl’s limousine, a tired-looking blond woman who worked in Manhattan real estate, although she didn’t have much to say about buying houses that day. She knew Earl was going to give her the money from the sale because he was planning to marry his newest conquest, a former Miss Universe who disliked Earl’s habit of acquiring women like racehorses and then dumping them when they demanded too much of his time.
Kimberly’s thirteen-bedroom mansion was pleasingly located on the North Shore of Long Island, and as soon as Earl’s limo passed the village of Flower Hill, I knew I’d be happy just to be in the environs, smelling the ocean air with the other money men such as myself, the financiers and investment bankers, the lawyers, and the scions of wealthy families whose riches go back through the generations.
I was struck by the river birches and butternut hickories shading the blacktop roads; the surfeit of trees evoked a primeval age, when the Mon-tauks had the run of the place, centuries before the money barons built louche monstrosities along the old Aboriginal paths.
We drove through Sands Point and then turned down Half Moon Lane, where a For Sale sign was visible in front of Kimberly’s house. Modelled after a Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, the mansion’s gables and its singular eyelet window in the third-storey roof were new versions of the old style. As the ad in the real estate magazine said, there were too many features to list: fireplaces of imported Italian marble, heated floors, classic chef’s kitchen: two refrigerators, two freezers, two dishwashers, and two hemlock wood islands adjacent to the butler’s pantry. There were also a sauna with a massage room, a wine cellar, and heated paths to the Rockefeller rose garden, along with the four-car garage with double mahogany doors.
Admiring the wisteria vine climbing up the pillars of the veranda, I imagined my own name set off by a garland of gold rosettes on the tall stone columns that supported the wrought iron gates.
Already I was known for betting large amounts of money on small, overlooked companies with growth potential. I had founded Quaestus Capital, doubling the pension money I’d borrowed from the family firm by buying and selling undervalued corporations that were broken up and sold off in parts, far exceeding the purchase price paid for the whole.
Here in Sands Point I would be free, far from the jowly faces around the tables in northern boardro
oms, the host of sleepy pooh-bahs who stared blankly at me when I explained derivatives such as interest rate swaps.
Across Long Island Sound sparkled the world’s greatest metropolis, with its thundering horde of schoolteachers and politicians and television producers and bank managers and receptionists and waitresses and bellhops and taxi drivers and out-of-work pizza delivery boys, an army of willing bodies and minds who believed the world was still a decent place. They were waiting for me, and I was ready for them.
3
TWENTY YEARS LATER, it was Earl who told me the fraud charges were going down. From the sound of his voice that day, I knew my fortunes were about to change.
Earl was well into his fourth marriage by then, and photographs of his latest beauty queen wife appeared regularly in the media. My own marriage had collapsed. Esther and I were divorced, and she was living in Port Washington with my son, Davie. I stayed on at our home at Half Moon Lane. (It was my house, after all.)
I welcomed Earl warmly. He had come a long way from our days at Munson Hall, where he had been a round-faced boy with large eye sockets and odd ears that lay flat against the side of his head. Before I met him, he had been expelled from a private school in upstate New York for some unspecified crime, and his parents had sent him to the civil-tongued northlands to learn manners. “A common American,” Pater remarked contemptuously after meeting him for the first time. Earl seemed oblivious to my father’s jokes about my friend’s Brooklyn accent, although Earl never said anything as primitive as “toity-tree and a turd,” which was how gangsters talked in the movies we saw as boys.
I saw myself as a pale reflection of Earl and his success, a moon to his sun. His financial empire covered half of the western world and included television stations and newspapers in most English-speaking nations. His holding company on the New York Stock Exchange was valued at over twenty billion dollars, and he held court at his press conferences as if he were one of the robber barons whose summer homes had made my neighbourhood in Long Island famous.
I gamely accepted Earl’s fist bump, although such macho genuflections embarrass me. Earl was wearing one of his cut-rate suits and a garish Van Heusen shirt tightly buttoned to his chin, as is his habit.
Making friendly small talk, he followed me into my den, where we seated ourselves on a Montauk sofa that I had carefully positioned to set off the Sir Alfred Munnings engraving of fox hunters chasing the hunt master. Something was on Earl’s mind. I sipped my espresso, waiting for him to come out with it, but he kept turning our conversation back to his wife’s spending habits.
I asked him if he wished he hadn’t dropped Kimberly Roderick so many years before, and he looked at me warily as if he thought I was being critical.