Greenwich Read Free

could raise both their children as Catholics, though David now chose to be a Jew. He bridled when someone compared her to the Kennedy women; he had no love for the Kennedys, but she did have the same high-bridged, strong nose and jaw, the same almost-ebony eyes and hair and long-boned frame; and he believed firmly that she and all the other black Irish were descended from the Spanish sailors stranded on their shore when the Armada was destroyed. He had corresponded with a noted Spanish historian, who held that there was no one in Spain who did not have a cupful of Jewish blood, even though as a linguist he was an enemy of that kind of thinking and as a Jew he was lackadaisical at best and immune to all of Mary’s arguments that a man could not live properly with no religion at all. When he first met her, at an undergraduate mixer at Harvard, she had said, “I’m Mary O’Brien,” to which he responded, “I’m Herb Greene, and I’m Jewish,” to which she said, “Thank God, and I’m glad you got that off your chest.”
    â€œThat dress is wonderful,” he said, now in Greenwich thirty years later. “Absolutely wonderful.”
    â€œI have a cashmere sweater that goes with it. You’re right. The Castles do live in an igloo.”

Two
    F rank Manelli drove his truck along the Castle driveway and parked in front of the Castle’s four-car garage at exactly 5:30. The Castle estate, as Richard Castle liked to call it, consisted of only five acres, but the very large house that dominated that five acres was commonly known as The Castle in the Back Country. The Back Country in Greenwich is that part of the township which lies to the north of the Merritt Parkway. While there are several other enclaves in Greenwich where the very wealthy live, none are as large or as consistently wealthy as the Back Country area.
    Manelli was headed for the servants’ entrance when Sally Castle emerged from the kitchen door, exclaiming, “Thank God, thank God! Oh, Frank, I was ready to put my head in the oven and end it all. I called you at ten, I called you at twelve.” She was bereaved, but not angry. Sally Castle was Richard Castle’s second wife, his trophy wife, as it was put around town; but if someone had called her that to her face, she would have smiled and nodded; she had once told Mary Greene she did not mind the appellation, although in truth, she resented it.
    Sally was good-natured to a fault, and gentle. At nearly forty, she was still lovely to look at, slender and long-legged with strawberry blond hair that fell to her shoulders and fine blue eyes. Herb had once remarked to Mary that Sally had been gifted with everything but brains, and she was proof that one could survive very well in our society with an IQ of 90 or so. She had once whispered to Mary that she had never stayed in school long enough to take an IQ test and Mary had asked her not to mention it to anyone else.
    Richard Castle had a son, Dickie, by his first wife, who had left him and the child for an adequate sum of money and a house in California. She told him to keep his money or shove it up his ass, yet she took it, spending most of it on liquor and dope. The marriage to Sally was now seven years old, and Sally still appeared to adore Richard and still basked in his approval. Sally was a Valley Girl, born and beach-trained in California, married and divorced in turn by a director and then by an actor. When she faced un-solvable problems or the minor disasters that on occasion daunted her, she fell into a pleading, beseeching manner that some men found irresistible.
    Frank Manelli did not find it irresistible. “I know, I know,” he said, “but I start my day with a program, Mrs. Castle. I try to give everyone a time. But it’s like when you go to the dentist. He tells you nine o’clock, and then he got a patient in his chair with twenty cavities. I never know what I’m