Too Much Money Read Online Free PDF Page A

husband will never forgive him for that, and I have to go along with my husband on things like this, but I sort of miss Gus at the sametime. Don’t tell anyone, but I have a strong bond with him that neither of us ever mentions. Years ago, in another lifetime, I used to go out with the same guy who murdered Gus’s daughter. He beat me up a few times, and I ended up in the hospital. I was supposed to be a witness at the trial, but the judge wouldn’t let me testify in front of the jury. Keep that one to yourself. Even my husband doesn’t know. I love that color, Frieda. What’s it called?”
    “Jungle Red,” replied Frieda.
    “From now on, we’re going to rename it Ruby Renthal Red.”
    Frieda, who rarely smiled, smiled.
    “So Adele Harcourt’s going to be a hundred and five, huh? I hear she’s gaga. She wears those straw hats all the time so the wig doesn’t come off.”
    “I wouldn’t know about that,” said Frieda.
    “Who’s Gert?” asked Ruby.
    “Mrs. Altemus’s cook.”
    “Oh,
Gert
. Of fig mousse fame, I suppose,” said Ruby. “They say that Lil used to bring her into the dining room after her dinner parties, and the guests would all clap for her.”
    “I wouldn’t know about that. Can I ask you something, Mrs. Renthal?” asked Frieda.
    “I suppose so. What?” asked Ruby.
    “It’s none of my business, really.”
    “What?”
    “When you and Mr. Renthal talk at the prison, do you have to talk over telephones through glass partitions, like they do on
Law & Order?”
    “Mr. Renthal is in a facility.”
    “Oh, I thought he was in prison,” said Frieda in an apologetic voice.
    “Facility,” repeated Ruby. She assumed the look on her face that she always assumed when people asked her about Elias inprison. It was not a subject she enjoyed sharing with others, but she knew that poor Frieda was probably worrying what it would be like if her son was sent to prison for dealing drugs (which he eventually was). “We did talk over phones through a glass partition in the beginning, when he first went in, but they’ve eased up a bit, and now I meet him in one of those little rooms where lawyers meet with their clients,” said Ruby. “I can’t stand being with those other prisoners’ wives. I never know what to say to them, and they all hate me. ‘Oh, how’s your private plane, Mrs. Renthal?’ one of them said to me right before she made her way to the Greyhound bus terminal.”
    “I was just wondering,” said Frieda.
    Ruby Renthal had changed over the years. Her basic sweetness had hardened since her husband, Elias Renthal, had gone to prison for financial malfeasance. People who used to be her friends no longer invited her to dinner. She was greatly criticized for divorcing Elias when he was in prison. She was also greatly criticized when she remarried Elias at the federal prison in Las Vegas, Nevada, several years later, after her divorcée status had not worked out as she had hoped.
    What people said about her was that she had tried to get Loelia Manchester Minardos’s former husband, Ned Manchester, but in the long run, she had come to realize that Ned had never really gotten over Loelia. Then there was Baron de Liagra in Paris, who never had any intention of leaving his wife for her, although he greatly enjoyed the afternoon pleasures they shared at a charming apartment on the Rue du Bac that he kept for such purposes. She felt cheap and used when she discovered that his intentions to make her his baroness were nonexistent.
    The trashy Ruby that she used to be before the first of her two marriages to Elias Renthal, the Cleveland billionaire, resurfaced. She threw the ruby bracelet the baron had just given her as a kiss-off present at him, hitting him in the face with it beforeit fell on the marble floor by the fireplace. She told him he was a lousy fuck, that his dick was too little and that it tilted sideways, and that he came too quickly. Then she put on her sable coat and stormed