Murder Among the Angels Read Free

fifteen years younger. But she wasn’t ready to be put out to pasture yet, and she knew the offers would dwindle if she started looking old. The issue wasn’t one of vanity: she didn’t really care how she looked. She had inherited a streak of the kind of Yankee righteousness that viewed a face-lift as a frivolity, if not a downright self-indulgence. To such a way of thinking, a face-lift was on par with eating crackers in bed, an act that had always been cited by Charlotte’s stern Yankee father as a sign of moral turpitude, and one in which she still indulged with the gleeful perversity of the rebellious child. Apart from that, however, she actually took pride in the contours of her aging face, in the same way that the owner of a fine antique takes pride in its worn patina, as a record of its long and distinguished history. The issue was work. Work was her lifeblood; without it, she would wither and die. Her career was booming now as a result of the publication of her long-awaited autobiography, which had come out five months before to widespread acclaim. But what would happen when the hoopla died down? She remembered well the despair of her black years; it was an experience she didn’t care to repeat. Nor did she want to spend the rest of her life being the guest of honor at various awards dinners. If it took a face-lift to prolong her productive years—to function as her ante for a few more years as a player, as her agent would have put it—then so be it (practicality and resourcefulness being two other Yankee characteristics with which she had been amply endowed).
    And so, she headed up the west side of the island of Manhattan toward the Henry Hudson Parkway, which would take her to the Saw Mill River Parkway, Westchester County’s main north-south artery, and ultimately to the home-cum-office of the renowned cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Victor Louria. Dr. Louria, she had been assured by her personal physician, her Hollywood agent, and a number of friends, was the celebrity’s cosmetic surgeon of choice, at least, the East Coast celebrity’s cosmetic surgeon of choice. There were a number of celebrity cosmetic surgeons in and around Hollywood, but Hollywood was a place Charlotte preferred to avoid whenever possible. Dr. Louria, she had been assured, had operated with great success on some of the world’s most famous faces, to say nothing of the most famous boobs, the most famous tummies, and the most famous posteriors. He could be trusted not to turn her face into a grotesque caricature of her younger self, but model it into a subtly improved and more youthful version. Moreover, he could be relied upon to be absolutely discreet: there would never be any leaks to the gossip columnists from his office.
    His discretion was, in fact, why she was headed up to Westchester. Like many of Manhattan’s celebrity physicians, Dr. Louria had an office on Park Avenue near Lenox Hill, the hospital that catered to the rich and famous, and that was less than twenty blocks from Charlotte’s town house in the East Forties. But to avoid having celebrity patients snagged by the press on the way into or out of his office and to spare them the necessity of having to rub shoulders with the common folk, Dr. Louria had set up a satellite office at his home in Westchester County specifically for the likes of Charlotte Graham, four-time Oscar winner and owner of one of the most well-known faces in the history of the cinema. Should Charlotte choose to avail herself of Dr. Louria’s services, the operation would, of course, be performed in his surgical suite at his Park Avenue office. But the initial consultation—the artistic planning, as it were—would take place at his office in Westchester, as would the postsurgical checkups (being seen with a face wrapped in bandages not being a pleasant prospect for even the most humble of patients, and especially so for a famous actress). The doctor was already in receipt of a group of color slides of