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someone important.
    â€œMy name is Ralph,” she explained. “I’m meeting my girlfriend here. Have you seen her?”
    A woman named Precious Mommy told anyone who’d listen just how she loved animals but admitting that very morning, “I ran over a squirrel!” And the trippy Jesus in pirate earrings who kept telling other guests how he began life wearing a gorilla costume delivering invitations to parties such as this one, “but now I know these people. And they know me!” A famous covergirl, slightly out of it, sat in the backseat of her own Mercedes parked halfway up the gravel drive, upright but fast asleep at five in the afternoon. Murphy, the book promoter with an uncanny knack for getting authors on the morning shows and even Oprah, and had a place somewhere out here, came at me wrapped in his accustomed wreath of cigarette smoke, muttering, “fabulous. Just fabulous.” I had no hint of what he was talking about but to Murphy, understatement was a sin. Anything even marginally “good” deserved “fabulous” or better adjectives.
    All of these folk and more would have made the New York magazine cover story if it hadn’t been scrubbed in favor of the murder.
    I worked the lawn, glass in hand, the grotesquerie made tolerable by the champagne, mingling with fashion designers and actors and TV news anchors and other stars, feeling like a blend of Robin Leach and Nick Carraway. I was marginally enjoying the show when Hannah’s corporate keeper came along, Hideo Hegel, U.S. rep for what was nicknamed the Seven Samurai, the huge Japanese conglomerate that bought Hannah and Hannah’s company for millions and paid her other millions each year to front for them; Hegel actually ran the thing. He was big, ugly, and competent. Oh, but he was competent, an interesting mix, half-Japanese, half-German, his late father a Nazi general who spent World War II in Tokyo as German military attaché. People played on his name, snidely referring to him as “Hideous.” Not Hannah. “The Axis Powers,” that’s what she called him, and to his face, rude and dismissive. Hegel took it; I don’t think he liked it. Having to account for Hannah to his masters in Tokyo, the Seven Samurai, he seemed to me to be leading a humiliating life of quiet exasperation. Except for those hours he whiled away with his girlfriend.
    â€œHallo, Stowe. You know the Countess, of course.”
    â€œOf course.”
    I’d met them before, had seen them in Manhattan and around the boroughs in Europe, and he knew my father by reputation. The Countess, a blonde invariably described by Liz Smith as White Russian, was nearly as tall as Hideo Hegel but much better looking. She belonged to him and provided services at which one could only, and pruriently, guess. The Samurai paid Hegel to keep an eye on Hannah Cutting. The cynical suggested they also paid the Countess to keep an eye on him.
    â€œHello, Beecher,” said Howard Stringer, the television supremo. That was a shock, seeing him at Hannah’s, and I said so. Stringer grinned, a big, amiable Welshman. “I know, I know. She’s a piece of work. Three networks in five years and she screwed every one of us. I should know; we stole her show from Ted Turner and Barry Diller stole it from us. One of these days Murdoch’ll steal her from Barry. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. If she pulled that stuff on CBS in the old days, Bill Paley would have sent someone to bump her off. Someone classy, Frank Stanton or Murrow, so that it would be done properly, even elegantly so.”
    Stringer was at her party, he admitted, “for the food and drink, since that’s the only profit I’m ever going to get out of the woman.”
    Beyond Stringer, a knot of men crowded around a slender young woman with dark brown hair down to the small of her bare and very lovely back. You couldn’t get close