Too Much Money Read Online Free PDF

out of the flat on the Rue du Bac, slamming the gold and white door behind her. The next morning at the Hôtel Ritz, in the Coco Chanel suite overlooking the Place Vendôme, Ruby Renthal drank cup after cup of black coffee and deeply regretted her behavior of the night before. She was back to her ladylike self, and she wrote the baron a charming note, apologizing for her appalling behavior and asking him if he would please—“please, please, please”—return the ruby bracelet to her, as a keepsake of a love affair she would always remember as a high point of her life. The baron never replied. The fact was, on her own she was just another ex–trophy wife who had lost her social footing in New York. A year later, she remarried Elias in the warden’s office at the federal prison in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the warden and his wife as witnesses.
    “Every time you come out to visit Elias, you must come and see us, Mrs. Renthal. There are some wonderful restaurants in Vegas. We even have a Le Cirque here. I bet you didn’t know that,” said the warden’s wife, Estelle Gelson, who remembered reading about Ruby back in the 1980s when she and Elias were conquering New York. “Oh, I’d love to,” replied Ruby. She never did, of course. She had no intention of becoming friends with Estelle Gelson, the warden’s wife, thank you very much. She flew out to Las Vegas on Elias’s plane and she flew right back after the visit. She never spent an extra minute in Las Vegas.
    Soon Elias would be out of prison, and Ruby had already started to plan their new life.
    “I can’t tell you how much I hate that orange jumpsuit they make you wear, Elias. I can’t see
why
on visitors’ day they can’t let you wear the blue jumpsuit instead of the orange one. Orkhaki; they should have khaki uniforms. You look thinner in the blue, unless you’re putting on weight again, with all that junk food you eat from the vending machines. You just ate two whole bags of Fritos in about eight minutes.” She opened her Hermès Birkin bag and brought out the new magazines and paperbacks. “That mean guard with the shaved head was on duty, and he took away all the magazines and paperbacks I brought you, but the nice guard, the one I like, Spike I think his name is, the one I gave the Gucci wallet to last Christmas with the hundred-dollar bill in it, he gave them back to me.”
    Elias smiled. “Kiss me,” he said.
    “You’ve got elephant breath,” she said after obliging him.
    Elias shook his head slowly as he stared at her. “Were you always such a bitch, Ruby? Or did love make me blind way back then, when I picked you up on American Airlines?”
    “Oh, let’s not go all the way back to American Airlines again, please. You know you picked me up on a private jet. And anyway, didn’t we have enough of that ‘Mrs.-Elias-Renthal-the-former-stewardess’ talk when we were riding high?” said Ruby. She turned away, gathering her things as if to leave.
    “You may as well put down your twelve-thousand-dollar Hermès Birkin bag and sit down. There are no early exits during visiting hours, and no doors to slam,” said Elias. “You’re stuck here in this room with me for the next two and a half hours. So, what are we going to talk about?”
    Elias, to everyone’s surprise, was a good prisoner, liked by both the guards and the other inmates. He played bridge regularly with the former president of a rock-and-roll record company, who was doing time for shortchanging his stars on their royalties; a big-time Ponzi schemer, who’d ripped off a lot of very rich people, some of whom were friends of Elias’s; and a forger who signed a film star’s name to a bogus check and cashed it. Although none of his fellow card players was poor, exactly,none could quite match the vastness of the Renthal fortune, or even come close. Elias rarely talked to them of his former exalted station in life, but they all knew of it, as did every prisoner and guard in the