The Beautiful and the Wicked Page 9

  “Jesus Christ.” Jack gasped when he saw her. “Cover yourself!”

  “Way to reinforce the patriarchy, Dad,” Josie snarled.

  “The patriarchy? I can see your goddamn tits!” Jack said, covering his eyes with his hands as he rushed into the bathroom and slammed the door behind him.

  “Really, darling,” Elise said to her daughter. “I know how you enjoy torturing your father, but remember what I told you. If you don’t behave, no semester in Bali. Got it?”

  “Whatever,” Josie said, with a practiced pout, as she sprawled out, half-­naked, on her parents’ bed.

  Josie had inherited the long leanness of her mother’s catwalk-­ready body but, unfortunately for her, she didn’t get her mom’s show-­stopping face. That prominent proboscis and weak chin sulking underneath a curtain of long, highlighted hair was one hundred percent from Jack Warren’s gene pool.

  Lila stood there, momentarily absorbed in the particular brand of gilded misery that was the Warren family life. Quite remarkably, none of the subjects of her careful study took any notice of her. They continued to ignore each other and her. So, as the unseen specter she was, she slipped out of the hornet’s nest relieved to find herself unscathed.

  CHAPTER 8

  THAT AFTERNOON THE crew of The Rising Tide was in full, frenetic swing putting the finishing touches in place for Jack Warren’s lavish birthday bash, which was set to begin at dusk. This one spectacular evening had required months of planning and preparation and millions of dollars to pull off. Every minute detail had to meet the exacting standards of Jack and Elise Warren. Each member of the crew was given intricate instructions outlining such specifics as how the polished ebony floors needed to be “shiny” but not “glossy” and how the pale pink peonies had to be the color of a ballet slipper, not darker nor lighter.

  Jack and Elise knew they had a reputation to uphold. After all, Jack’s parties were the stuff of legend. It was, unsurprisingly, the most eagerly anticipated event of the social season. With its A-­list celebrity invitees, a performance from the pop star du jour, and only the best food and wine known to man served in abundance, receiving an invite to one of his parties was akin to joining the world’s most exclusive club: a universe solely inhabited by wealth, beauty, and celebrity. Music moguls mixed with stars of the art world while models and actresses flirted with the titans of Hollywood and Wall Street.

  For the previous ten years, Jack had held his birthday party on his famed Antiguan estate, built on the grounds of an old sugar plantation. But for his fiftieth birthday, he wanted to do something special, something totally over-­the-­top. So he built himself a $500 million yacht—­which may seem like a very indulgent birthday present to give oneself, but with a net worth of over $30 billion, Jack buying The Rising Tide was roughly the equivalent of a millionaire buying himself a used Chevy Nova.

  Such was the magnitude of Jack’s fortune.

  But tonight’s party, rumored to cost about five million, was just the beginning of the birthday festivities—­an amuse-­bouche of sorts to kick off Jack’s celebratory fortnight. In order to truly honor the half-­century he’d spent becoming the legend he was, Jack decided one party wasn’t enough. Following tonight’s blowout bash to celebrate himself and show off his latest and greatest yacht to all the big wigs, movie stars, and models that were lucky enough to be his friends, Jack would set sail on a luxurious island-­hopping cruise for a ­couple of weeks, culminating with an intimate celebration of his actual birthday on September tenth, while sailing on the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea.

  Such was the magnitude of Jack’s megalomania.

  The guests were set to arrive at 7:00 P.M., so Lila was startled when she felt the leviathan of a yacht pull away from the marina when it was a little after four in the afternoon.

  “Are we moving?” she asked Sam, who was helping her make the bed in one of ship’s grandest rooms.

  “It feels like we are,” Sam replied nonchalantly.

  They were preparing one of the staterooms for the surprise musical guest that evening: the notorious Allegra Opal, a pop star who’d recently been released from a psychiatric institute following a very public nervous breakdown. The crew had been instructed to never look her directly in the eyes.

  Lila got a whiff of coconut tanning oil, so she knew Asher must be close. She caught a glimpse of him walking down the hallway and called after him.

  “Hey, Asher. Why’s the boat leaving the dock before the guests arrive?”

  “Pleb control,” Asher said with his typical offhand smugness. He was, once again, wearing nothing but his Rolex and surf shorts. “It’s the best way to stop the uninvited from getting on board. Plus, a yacht really isn’t a real yacht unless you need a boat to get to it.”

  “Always important to separate the haves from the have-­yachts,” Lila said to Sam with a roll of her eyes.

  “Funny,” Asher said without a smile or a laugh. “Ladies,” he said, by way of goodbye. Then gave them both a suggestive wink and went off on his way.

  “I call dibs on him,” Sam blurted out, which made Lila laugh, thinking she was joking. When Sam shot her a hurt look, she backtracked.

  “Oh, sorry, Sam. I mean, he’s all yours.”

  “He’s not now, but he will be,” Sam said. “Oh, yes. He will be mine.” Then she broke into a faux Bond villain cackle that made both women break into genuine laughter as they got back to work.

  The boat stopped about three hundred feet from the marina and moored just off the southern tip of South Beach. Lila looked out the stateroom window to see that several small boats had encircled the vessel. Each was filled with paparazzi, their long-­range zoom lenses trained on The Rising Tide.

  Sam stood up to look at the boats now swarming like mosquitoes. She rushed out on the deck. “Hello, there!” she shouted, waving her arms. “Wanna take my picture?” She arched her back and stuck out her breasts in a suggestive pose, but the paparazzi weren’t biting. They wanted actual stars, not stewardesses with stars in their eyes.

  Sam sullenly returned to the room. “They’ll want pictures of me one day. I can tell you that much.”

  An hour later, after Lila was done preparing for the party, the chief stewardess surveyed all of her work.

  “An additional fifteen cater waiters will also be working the party to help serve food and drinks. But,” she warned, “it’s your responsibility to make sure everything runs according to my standards. Do you understand?” Lila nodded obediently, knowing that no one could possibly match Edna Slaughter’s standards.

  “You’ve got to change,” Mrs. Slaughter ordered, keeping her eyes down, studying the list she had in her hand.

  “I apologize, Chief Stewardess Mrs. Slaughter,” Lila said deferentially, sure to use the woman’s full name as instructed. “I will change. I won’t let you down.” She worried she was groveling.

  Mrs. Slaughter, with her chin still tucked down, turned her icy blue gaze to Lila. “I didn’t mean change like that, though don’t think your incompetence hasn’t been duly noted.” A little twisted smirk puckered her lips. “I mean you have to change your clothes for the party.”

  Lila felt her face flush beet red in embarrassment. “Oh,” she mumbled.

  “Your dress for tonight’s event is in your cabin, along with a picture of how you need to style your hair and makeup. The yacht will be full of VIPs and nothing can be left to chance.”

  By the time Lila returned to her tiny cabin, Sam was already there, dressed and applying the finishing touches to her perfectly applied makeup. Lila wondered how her bunkmate was always a few steps ahead of her.

  “Jesus,” she said when she laid eyes on her. “Is that what we’re supposed to wear?” Sam was in a long, flamingo-­pink satin halter-­top dress with a very high slit up the side. Her lips were painted a deep bloodred, her eyelids were lined with a delicately flick
ed cat eye, and a yellow orchid was pinned into her hair.

  Sam’s eyes widened. “What? Do I look bad?”

  “No. On the contrary. You look magnificent, but you look like sex on a plate.”

  “Then I look just right,” Sam said with a coy smile and a sultry wag of her shapely hips. “Maybe I’ll meet my future husband tonight,” she said, studying herself in their cabin’s tiny mirror. “And wouldn’t he be a lucky bastard.”

  “Well, he’ll be a bastard, at least,” Lila teased.

  As the sun began to set, throngs of ­people crowded the marina, hoping to catch a glimpse of the celebrities, heiresses, fashion icons, and CEOs as they boarded the speedboat shuttles bound for Warren’s decadent yacht, which sat glittering just beyond the spectators’ grasp.

  Upon boarding, the first thing partygoers discovered was that on Jack’s boat, there were absolutely no shoes allowed. This was an extremely unpopular rule for many of the guests. Why bother spending $800 on shoes that you weren’t allowed to wear? But those accustomed to the strictures of yacht etiquette, which held that street shoes must be taken off before boarding, just kicked off their heels or loafers and headed straight into the party. After all, everyone’s hair was already ruined from the speedboat ride. Why not abandon decorum and give in to the reigning mood of opulent debauchery?

  It was Lila’s job to hand out flutes of champagne to arriving guests and then to collect their shoes, no matter how much they protested. After she tore the women away from their heels, she’d slip each pair into a purple velvet sack with a golden rope closure and give the women a ticket number to claim them at the end of the night, though Lila saw many of the guests absentmindedly drop their tickets as the party progressed. Mrs. Slaughter had said that lost shoes were a constant source of stress, so it was Lila’s job to monitor the endless pairs of Louboutins, Blahniks, Jimmy Choos, Roger Viviers, Guccis, Tom Fords, and Pradas that were slipped off the perfectly pedicured feet of the privileged.

  With bare feet and champagne in hand, the guests then climbed a flight of stairs and journeyed to the yacht’s main deck, which had been transformed to resemble a magical Japanese garden. Paper lanterns gave off a warm, pinkish glow and the long branches of cherry blossoms were woven together into a romantic canopy. The fifty-­foot pool on the yacht’s third level was filled with lotus flowers; there, two Cirque du Soleil acrobats, costumed in nothing but mermaid tails, shimmied and undulated like exquisite sea nymphs.

  From the galley on the lower level, Chef Vatel sent up tray after tray of delicate and delicious canapés served with flutes of Ace of Spades and Cristal. But the real coup of the evening was the presence on board of the legendary octogenarian sushi master Kazuo Murai. It was well known that Jack Warren was a consummate, bordering-­on-­obsessive Japanophile. So Elise Warren’s gift to the husband who had everything was hiring Kazuo Murai to cook for his birthday. Persuading this aged and taciturn genius to leave his Michelin-­three-­star, closet-­size Tokyo restaurant to spend a ­couple of days preparing his unrivaled food for Jack’s party wasn’t easy. It took months of delicate courting and plenty of bowing and scraping—­not something Elise was fond of doing. The cost of this extravagance was a measly $325,000, not including the round-­trip, first-­class airfare for Kazuo and his two sons.

  As Lila greeted the partygoers, she was on the lookout for the guests she knew would be joining the Warrens for a two-­week, island-­hopping adventure in the Caribbean. Namely: Senator Baines and his wife, Charity; the Brazilian power ­couple Thiago and Esperanza Campos; the artist Daniel Poe; the financier Paul Mason; and Warren Software’s CFO, Seth Liss.

  The Florida senator and his wife were the first of the core group to arrive. Though most of the party guests were dressed in the flowing linens and silks that an “Island chic” dress code requires, the Baineses’ look was pure, unadulterated Beltway. The senator had a magnificent mane of thick, pure-­white hair, which was combed back and away from his wide forehead. He was wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. There was a flag pin on his lapel, and Lila noticed his gold cuff links boasted the seal of the U.S. Senate. His wife wore a Republican-­red sleeveless dress that accentuated her perfectly toned arms and fine-­boned form. In keeping with her husband’s regal mane, Charity’s hair was swept up into a bleached, teased, and shellacked chignon that not even hurricane winds could shake.

  When Lila offered the senator a glass of champagne, he shot her a suspicious look. “Is that liquor there American made?” he asked. His voice was deep, slow, and southern, as if each syllable had to be pushed out of his mouth through a vat of thick molasses.

  “I believe it’s French, sir,” she replied deferentially. Though all she could think was, Is this freedom fries guy for real?

  “Well, I don’t drink my enemy’s swill,” he said as his face hardened into a menacing glare.

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  He then threw his head back, letting out a giant guffaw. “Lighten up, little lady. I’m just yanking your chain.” He grabbed the flute out of Lila’s hand and drained it in a single gulp.

  “My husband, the gentleman,” Charity said with mock exasperation. She whispered to Lila, “Do I really have to take off these shoes? I’m barely five foot without them. I’ll wind up trampled and it’ll be your fault.”

  “Now, honey, hand them over,” Clarence Baines said to his wife. “You know Jack’s rules are Jack’s rules.”

  “Well, I’ll follow his rules only until the election,” she said with a smile as she gave up her red satin Valentino heels. “And after you’re reelected, I’ll won’t take off my heels for anybody.”

  “Hear, hear!” the senator exclaimed as he took his wife’s hand and escorted her to the main deck.

  For the next twenty minutes, Lila greeted an endless stream of mostly older men with giggling and doe-­eyed twenty-­year-­olds on their arms. She was beginning to lose focus as they all started to blend together. But she snapped out of her daze when Esperanza and Thiago Campos arrived. Though Lila believed that no one had more to gain from the death of Jack Warren than his wife, she was very interested in this mysterious ­couple from São Paulo, Brazil, who would both be aboard the yacht on the fateful night of Jack’s murder, a mere two weeks from this very moment.

  Thiago had met Jack Warren in 1976, when they were both freshmen at Harvard, and had been part of Warren’s inner circle ever since. He came from a prominent Brazilian family that was chock-­full of politicians, army generals, and industrialists. His father, General Humberto Campos, played a leading role in the 1964 coup that put a brutal right-­wing military dictatorship in power. The connection benefited the family’s coffers but damaged the family name.

  A bon vivant who was a known fixture on the international social scene, Thiago made the best-­dressed list of countless magazines out of Paris, New York, and Milan. He always brushed off these accolades as “mere trivialities,” but anyone who knew him understood that he was a man of great vanity about his clothes and his looks—­both of which were always impeccable. He was also vain about his new wife, Esperanza—­a woman of such profound beauty and poise that she was considered a muse to many of the best and brightest in the art and fashion worlds.

  Though she was only twenty-­three years old, Lucien Freud and Francesco Clemente had already painted her. She modeled for Patrick Demarchelier and Karl Lagerfeld. And she was a fairly accomplished painter in her own right. Almost thirty years her husband’s junior, Esperanza came from the same circle of privilege in São Paulo. Ten months before this very moment, they had met at a wedding in Capri, and four weeks later, Thiago proposed to her on a ski lift in Gstaad. They’d been inseparable ever since.

  Boarding the yacht with a casual grace, Thiago wore a white linen shirt unbuttoned to his sternum and a slim-­fitting white suit. Esperanza had long, straight black hair that fell around her thin shoulders and large, soulful dark brown
eyes. A pale lavender floor-­length dress with a plunging neckline and a hip-­high slit showcased her lithe body. They were locked in conversation when they boarded the yacht and continued speaking in Portuguese as they grabbed champagne and kicked off their shoes. Neither acknowledged Lila’s existence.

  A few minutes later, Paul Mason and Daniel Poe climbed onto the yacht together, surrounded by a gaggle of underage Russian models. They also would be on The Rising Tide the night of Jack Warren’s murder, so Lila was familiar with their backgrounds. Paul Mason, age fifty-­one, was a lawyer and a legendary investment banker, famous for brokering some of the biggest merger-­and-­acquisition deals of the last decade. He and Jack had been friends and colleagues for years after Paul was the lead banker in charge of Warren Software’s IPO, which made them both very rich men.

  Daniel Poe, age thirty-­eight, was a superstar of the art world, famous as much for his bad-­boy persona and his insatiable drug habit as for his over-­the-­top, multimillion-­dollar art installations. Like Jack, he was a working-­class boy done good. Today, he was the most successful living artist in the world, worth about $100 million, with every new piece breathlessly covered by all the leading art critics.

  On the surface, Paul Mason and Daniel Poe couldn’t have seemed more different. Where Mason was preppy incarnate, with his slicked-­back hair, Nantucket-­red pants, Sperry Top-­Siders, and custom-­made shirt, Poe had the rich-­artist look down to a T. He reminded Lila of Keith Richards in the seventies, before he started looking like a deranged pirate. He was disheveled and emaciated, but still wore leather pants that easily cost five grand. He had thick, black, square-­framed glasses, a black leather jacket, and a skull ring with diamond eyes on his left hand. Lila reckoned that Paul and Daniel’s odd-­­couple friendship was based on their shared love of money, beautiful girls, and getting their way.

  “Aren’t you a lovely thing,” Paul said to Lila as she was bending over to help one of the young models off with her heels. She could feel his eyes burrow down the front of her dress. Lila instantly shot back up.