Flesh and bones

3

So-Be-Mo," Rusty MacLean said, giving each syllable a little push. "South Beach Models. Catchy, no?"

"Catchy, yes," I agreed.

We were sitting in his office on the third floor of an Ocean Drive Art Deco building. The facade of the 1930s structure had recently been repainted seafoam-green with flamingo-pink racing stripes. The windows were topped by cantilevered shades that looked like eyebrows, and the lobby was framed in keystone and decorated with ornamental friezes that seemed to celebrate leaping sailfish.

Rusty's office walls were decorated with covers of magazines that were not on my regular reading list: Mondo, Grazia, Esprit, Vogue, and Elle. Each cover displayed a beautiful young woman in fancy duds, some of the models displaying enough cleavage to distract a guy who wouldn't know Ralph Lauren from Ralph Cramden.

"The Wall of Fame," Rusty told me. His girls who had made good. I recognized Chrissy Bernhardt's pouting lips on a cover of Marie Claire.

An interior window looked into an adjacent office where one of Rusty's talent scouts, a chain-smoking middle-aged woman with eyeglasses on a chain of imitation pearls, interviewed a mother and her two teenage daughters. All three were dressed identically in tank tops, black miniskirts, knee socks, and high-heeled white sneakers.

"Mom's living through her daughters," Rusty had said when he escorted me to his office past the glass-enclosed room. "They waltz in here on open-audition day, girls who aren't five-six on their tippy-toes, with mashed potatoes where their cheekbones should be. Eileen Ford used to say there's no such thing as a model with a short neck, but nobody gave the word to these moms."

I looked outside through the other window, across Lummus Park to the ocean. The beach was dotted with blue umbrellas, and a mile or so offshore, a cruise ship was making its way through turquoise water with a thousand happy tourists aboard.

"Not a bad view, eh?" Rusty asked. He gestured toward a telescope at the corner of the room, its barrel pointed due east toward the water. "The Tenth Street beach is topless these days. Wanna take a look?"

"Another time, Rusty. I've got to get to the women's jail and-"

"Brazilians," he said.

"What?"

"They started it. Just took off their tops. Didn't wear much of a bottom, either. Then the local girls started doing it. Pretty soon you had a topless beach. Go farther north, up to Haulover, and it's totally nude."

"Rusty, do you think we could talk about Chrissy?"

He shrugged and pulled a large scrapbook from a shelf. "She walked in here with a first-rate book about a year ago. I knew right off she was a winner, a real gravy train for an agent. Maybe not what the French call the top du top des top models, but in the upper echelon. Hard worker who paid her dues in Italy, France, New York, the usual stops. Started doing real well about the time tits came back in."

"I never knew they were out."

"She had the raw material. You ever hear the expression 'cheekbones and chic bones'?"

"Don't think anyone at the Quarterdeck Saloon ever says that," I admitted.

"Well, Chrissy has it. Straight, thin nose, full lips, flawless complexion, long legs, and those shoulders. You gotta have shoulders to work the runway or the clothes look like shit. She's got an expressive face and great hair and can be ultrasleek and sophisticated or a California beach girl, whatever the client wants. Her body's perfect, everything in proportion, but a lot of girls have that. There's something else that's hard to define, a kind of spark that ignites in front of the camera, an energy that makes you watch. The best models are full of life, even when they're perfectly still. They're not passive unless the shot calls for it. You understand, Jake?"

"Not a word of it."

He was thumbing through the pages of her book, Chrissy in a swimsuit and high heels, in a striped silk blouse and miniskirt, in an ankle-length dress from a magazine ad. Then a couple of moody black-and-white shots taken in the woods. Sunlight filtered through leafy branches and Chrissy lay nude on her back on a fallen tree, her knee coyly raised to shield her groin, both hands hovering over, but not quite covering, her breasts.

"She had a reputation in Europe as pretty wild, but in this business, that's par for the course. She could party all night and still make an eight A.M. call. Took the work seriously. Used to give hell to the crews. The lighting, the makeup, the clothes. Everything had to be right and never was. In France, her nickname was Casse-Couille, 'Ballbreaker.' "

Rusty ran a hand through his long hair, giving his ponytail a little pat. "When she got back here, I landed one national commercial for her. Iced tea. She was in a white tennis outfit, and by the time she gulped down the tea, every man in America wanted to fuck her, marry her, or adopt her. Maybe a hundred fifty grand in residuals. Did some international spots, Latin America, a couple in the Far East, and a lot of fashion, five thousand a day for catalog work, some very classy editorial, too. The only negative, she wouldn't fuck me."

"Talented and smart, too," I said.

"Yeah, now that you mention it, she's pretty sharp. More than most mowdells. You know what they call a model with half a brain?"

"I have a feeling I'm going to find out."

"Gifted."

"That's dated, Rusty. Chauvinist, too."

"What does a model say when she's screwing?"

"What?"

" 'Are all you guys on the same team?' "

"Sometimes, Rusty, I think your emotional development stopped at about age twenty-two."

"Rookie year. A thousand yards in receptions, a babe in every city in the conference, two in Baltimore."

"The prosecution rests."

Rusty put down the book and walked to the window. He squinted through the telescope and fiddled with the focus knob. "Chrissy's different than most of the girls, 'cause she grew up rich. A lot of them come from farms in the Midwest, trailer parks in Georgia. They go off to New York or Milan when they're sixteen, and they don't read a book for the next ten years."

"Whereas you're a regular Edmund Wilson, right?"

"Who?"

"Never mind. What's the point?"

He thought about it a moment. Next door, the mother and daughters were gone. In a corridor, a booking agent was watching a female model step onto a doctor's scale. It reminded me of a jockey weighing in at the track, only the model was a foot taller and wasn't carrying a saddle. She looked fine to me, even a bit too thin, but the booking agent scribbled something on a clipboard and mouthed the words three pounds, her scowl making it seem like a capital offense.

Finally, Rusty said, "The point is that Chrissy had all the advantages. Do you know who Harry Bernhardt is?"

" Was," I reminded him. "From now on, Harry Bernhardt is purely past tense. Didn't he do some farming?"

Rusty barked out a laugh. "Yeah. And Johnny Unitas did some throwing. Harry Bernhardt is… was a goddamn conglomerate. Sugarcane, cattle, real estate, you name it. Houses in Palm Beach, Aspen, and London. Well connected both politically and socially, major contributor to both political parties at the state and national levels. The only red on that old boy's neck came from the afternoon sun in Monaco."

"Chrissy ever talk about him?" I asked.

"Not a word. She left home when she was a teenager. Damn few people even knew the connection 'til she aced him."

"Any other acts of violence? Ever see her threaten anyone?"

"Chrissy? Hey, Jake, listen to me. Chrissy Bernhardt might not be an angel, and she sure as hell has a past, but I've never known her to hurt anyone, with the possible exception of herself. So if she killed her old man, which you and I saw with our very own eyes, she had a damn good reason."