Scruples [antikvár]

Chapter One In Beverly Hüls only the infirm and the senile do not drive their own cars. The local police are accustomed to odd com-binatíons of vehicle and driver: the stately, nearsighted retired banker makkig an illegal left-hand tum in his Dino Ferrari, the teenager speeding to a tennis lesson in a fifty-five-thousand-dollar Rolls-Royce Corniche, the matronly civic leader blithely parking her bright red Jaguar at a bus stop. Billy Ikehorn Orsini - whose faults did not normally in-clude a tendency to erratic driving - brought her vintage Bentley to a stop with an impatient screech in front of Scruples, the world's most lavish specialty store, a virtual club for the floating principality of the very, very rich and the truly famous. She was thirty-five, sole nűstress of a fortune estimated at between two hundred and two hundred and fifty millión dollars by the list makers of the Wall Street Jómmal. Almost half of her wealth was tidily invested in tax-free municipal bonds, a simplification little appreciated by the IRS. Hurried though she was, Billy lingered in front of Scruples, casting a piercingly proprietary eye over her property on the north-east corner of Rodeo Drive and Dayton Way, where, four years ago, Van Cleeff & Arpels had stood, a white plaster, gilt, and wrought-iron landmark, which looked as if it had been clipped off the Carlton Hotel in Cannes and shipped intact to California. Billy's tawny wool cape was lined in golden sable against the chili of the late aftemoon of February 1978. She pulled it around her as she looked quickly up and down the sumptuous heart of Rodeo Drive, where the two facinp rows of im-modestly opulent boutiques outglittered each other to create