The Saint Louisans Read Online Free

resurrected to haunt me in the person of Margot Desouche, the Margo Desouche who once been crowned Veiled Prophet Queen and who remained one of the association’s power brokers. And who had now asked me to help her die.

3
Nurse Cape
    I parked my car next to the gated tower that looked like it had been detached from one of Mad Ludwig’s Bavarian castles. Standing next to its graceful turret and iron gate, the security guard nodded to me. I was expected. A lifting breeze, the first suggestion of autumn, revealed the red silk lining of my blue wool cape.
    The tower belonged to Chouteau Place, built in the 1870s, a private street much like Portland or Westminster Place, those gated islands of St. Louis wealth; mansions running the gamut from early Federal to imitation Medici Palazzi; there is even a folly that begins with Heidelberg Castle and ends with King Tut’s tomb. Worlds of turrets, trianons, and the Romanesque … fancies permitted old money before egalitarianism and income tax laws took their toll.
    By the 1920s, old money in St. Louis began to move away from the commercial build of nearby Grand Avenue, and after the war, Chouteau Place was a tarnished jewel in the midst of a raffish neighborhood. The Desouche mansion was the centerpiece of the street. Saul adored it, and I saw it through his eyes. It was built in 1900, a copy of the Charles S. Hills house on the old Forest Park Terrace, once called Millionaire’s Row. All of those mansions had long been destroyed to make way for a new hospital, housing, and commercial interests, and by the mid-sixties, all had become urban blight. But this twin remained.
    Both pompous and delicate, the structure was built of Carthage stone,capped by a red-tiled roof. Its front portico boasted four pillars of Corinthian design, and on its side entrances were five pillars like Grecian bookends. Aunt Mary and Spud would have been delighted. The balustrades were complimented by stonework design around its windows, its stairs leading to a gabled doorway that promised a world Henry James might well have novelized. I could see why Saul loved the mansion. It was a man’s dream, wages for empire gained.
    The brass knocker shined with a lion’s grin above it. When the door opened, an elderly butler looked me over, a man with the posture and stiffness of a genteel drill sergeant. I wasn’t entering high society. I was going through customs. That kind of look over.
    â€œGood morning,” I said, “I’m—”
    â€œYou’re her.” The frost in his voice matched the outside. “You’re a minute late. And you wear a cape.” The accent was German, the tone locked and loaded.
    â€œWhich of those three am I most guilty of?”
    He bade me enter. “It is merely an observation. This way.”
    I thought to click my heels, but shrugged. I was impressed by the marble floor and statuary in the foyer, but when I entered the drawing room, the sensuality of its soft gilt and warm carpeting was a butterfly of pleasure. Huge French windows bathed one in morning light, and would later glow in sunset’s resignation. I could imagine the dinner parties and debutante’s laughter bouncing off these walls, the stiffness of first communion photographs. There were paintings: a Watteau whose playful rococo sensibility made the room smile. Portraits of Desouche Mere and Pere stared out in Gallic dignity, cautious about being submerged into American society, when the early 1800s city was swamped by Yankees—the “Bostons,” as the French irritatingly called their new masters.
    The portraits were painted by one of the itinerant portraitists of the 1830s: competent enough, but he had trouble with hands and knuckles. He curved them into trowels. The fourth painting was of Margot Desouche in her youth, exactly as Saul had described it to me. Chestnut hair curled, cheekbones high, a noble forehead bearing the tiara of the Veiled