Confessions of a Murder Suspect

66

News of the Angel family scandal was aired on every channel that night.

It’s crazy to see yourself on television—crazy in a really bad way. You have no control over what people say about you. They can lie viciously, and they do. I’m beginning to have some compassion for Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears and everybody else caught in the media glare.

Believe me, it’s beyond awful.

Three one-hour specials about our family were going to air in the same time slot. Under Suspicion was the most outrageous of the shows. The host was Anthony Imbimbo, who was known for his investigative reporting of true-crime stories. That night’s special episode was titled “Under Suspicion: The New York Angel Family, Part One.”

The piece started with footage of our parents’ bodies being roughly unloaded from the ambulance behind the medical examiner’s office at dawn. Then Imbimbo narrated the fast-forward version of our parents’ lives in tiny bio snippets. Malcolm and Maud were portrayed as coldhearted capitalists without any humanity.

“The Angel family is no stranger to scandal, dating back to the Angel dynasty’s patriarch, William Harrison Angel, who, as a result of his spectacular gambling habit, lost more than half of the giant fortune he acquired by investing in Manhattan real estate. Still, the family managed to hold on to their magnificent wealth, and to increase it by many millions over the next several generations. In fact, for nearly a century, an often-mocked urban legend has circulated in elite Manhattan society about an actual Angel family guardian angel, supernaturally bound by God—or perhaps the devil—to ensure that the family is protected from any trouble it makes. And trouble, it seems, has a habit of seeking out the Angels.”

I rolled my eyes, amazed that such a silly story had found a way to live on into the twenty-first century. Despite how many still believe in the American dream, people never seem to grasp that our wealth has come from hard work. They have to make up stories that explain it away.

On TV, Imbimbo continued on with his blather. But I wasn’t able to dismiss the next part quite so easily.

“When the family’s eldest daughter, Katherine, died in a motorcycle crash in South Africa, her death was ruled suspicious at first.”

I stood up, not sure I really wanted to have this wound reopened.

“But the case was closed less than forty-eight hours later.”

I started punching buttons on the remote.

“And the most recent case was the quickly squashed scandal involving the disappearance of the Angels’ other teenage daughter, Tandoori, known as ‘Tandy’ to the few who have regularly interacted with this very sheltered child. Just a year ago, the girl was found—”

I clicked the power button on the remote.

But not before setting the DVR.

Someday, I might be ready to watch that part.