The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [170]
Rosa leapt to her feet. “Excuse me,” she said faintly, “I’ve just thought of something very important I have to do.”
Missie was sitting in the kitchen having a cup of coffee with Beulah. “What is it?” she asked, alarmed by Rosa’s flushed face and glittering eyes.
“Arnhaldt is dead!” Rosa cried. “Killed in a road accident yesterday. It’s all in the papers. Oh, Missie, Missie. All your troubles are over!”
New York
“King” O’Hara surveyed his crowded nightclub with a grin as big as his cigar, counting the noisy, glossy customers with a practiced eye, mentally assessing his take—and his profit. And profit was mostly what it was. King O’Hara’s prices were so exorbitant, everyone knew it must be the best and they fought to get in.
Now he had opened a second club, O’Hara’s Purple Orchid on West Fifty-second Street, with even higher prices and a classier image: cool gray, lilac, and gold decor, the band in dinner jackets, gold champagne coolers imported from France, crystal stemware, and hothouse flowers fresh daily, with a single exquisite, expensive purple orchid for each lady and a specially dyed purple carnation boutonnière for each man. King O’Hara’s counted anybody with enough bucks and enough clout to pay for the cover and the drink as its clientele, but the Purple Orchid was high class. Its customers were the wealthy scions of high society, the leaders of café society, and the cream of the theater world. No one was ever granted membership in the Purple Orchid without O’Hara’s personal say-so, and, pinned to the trailing fox furs of a beautiful, bejeweled young lady, the purple flower had become the chicest accessory in town.
The gold-studded dance floor at the Purple Orchid and the black glass dance floor at King O’Hara’s were packed nightly, and even with the huge payoffs necessary to keep him from being raided, O’Hara was making a fortune—even more than the Oriconne brothers who had given him his start. And that was his one big problem. The brothers didn’t like their ex-employee muscling in on their territory. They objected to him buying his bootleg liquor from another supplier, especially as he had used their contacts to get it at lower prices than they could offer. And his nightclubs were in direct competition with their own café-clubs in Manhattan, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago.
The nice Oriconne brothers, Giorgio and Rico, had invited him to a nice “family-style” party at Rico’s mansion in New Jersey. It was Rico’s daughter’s sweet-sixteen birthday party. O’Hara had gone to Tiffany and asked for a suitable gift, and young Graziella Oriconne had been thrilled with the slender gold chain with sixteen exquisite pearls interspersed with angelskin coral.
“Never thought I’d see the day when I’d admit you had good taste, O’Hara,” Rico had commented, smiling at his pretty dark-haired daughter’s pleasure, “but I gotta hand it to you, when you adopted a new name—’King’—you bought yourself a touch of class to go with it.”
“Yeah, well, about King O’Hara’s, Rico.” He puffed on his cigar, glancing at Rico through the smoke. “It’s no skin off your nose, me running a place like that. And the Purple Orchid—well, it’s just another nightspot, one among hundreds.”
“Sixteen of which are the Oriconnes’,” Giorgio said softly.
O’Hara watched him, waiting for what was to come next. Rico was easy to read; dark hair, soft eyes, short and plump, a real nice gentle family guy. Just look at today’s party for his daughter. What real bad guy could throw a bash like this? The place was crowded with family and friends, young people and little kids—babies even—running around the sun-dappled lawns and drinking lemonade beneath the