DROP DEAD BEAUTIFUL 14: Message In The Bottle

February 27th, 2007 at 05:34am Michael Conniff 2

Chapter Fourteen: Message In The Bottle

So I was in. Now what?

The will had been drawn up by a white-shoe law firm as Eleanor O’Kell lay dying and it was all there in black-and-white. Eugene Koksher and the 75 other survivors of Eleanor O’Kell’s experiments were named by name in the will. Eleanor O’Kell, the radical eugenicist billionaire ex-nun, had never borne a child of her own, nor had she left any part of her fortune to her sister Diana Campobello or to Diana’s son Gino Campobello, but all of her inheritance – every penny, every stock and bond and share – was to go to the members of the male and female species she had created from scratch upstate in the last town along the canal.

I looked long and hard at the paperwork but there was no paper trail showing where all the money had begun for the O’Kells – nothing in the will to trace the trail of the inventor Jake O’Kell, the bastard son of Thomas Edison, to tell the story of how the bastard had turned his Industrial Age patents into a license to print money, nothing about how Atomic Tom O’Kell had sold his father’s patents and rolled the money over into nuclear power. The rest was in fact recorded history: Atomic Tom ran the Nuclear Energy Commission for President Kennedy when no one was looking, and his financial sleight-of-hand put him at the heart of every nuclear deal in the military-industrial complex.

All of that explained the source of the radioactive money Eleanor O’Kell used to bankroll her world without men, but in retrospect her methods were so primitive they were doomed to backfire – to produce three baby boys for every baby girl, presumably because it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

Eugene Koksher was not alone and now neither was I. In the world according to the O’Kells you were never alone. I put the paperwork down and I had to wonder why Eleanor O’Kell had bothered to set things right with the world in her will.

Guilt?

Somewhere in her soul she was still a Catholic: that never went away: guilt was like Mother’s milk to Catholics like me and her. But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe all of those prayers as a young woman in a habit had taken a toll on her conscience, had made her wonder about herself and her one true God more than fifty years later, as her life was counting down. Maybe the answer was in there somewhere in some basic way, but I couldn’t think of a way to find out, and I didn’t think Diana Campobello was about to tell me.

There wasn’t much in the stack of clippings Eugene Koksher had put together beyond the stories I knew so well about the O’Kells – the parties they went to, the people they were paired up with. The headline of one of them from The Daily News was “O’Kell Heir Found Drowned.” Below that was a paragraph that passed for an explanation: “O’Kell Consolidated Vice Chairman Will O’Kell was found drowned in a river in upstate New York Sunday as State Police remained uncertain as to the cause of his death, natural or otherwise. A memorial service is planned Thursday at the Frank Campbell Funeral Home in New York.” Another said: “Eldest O’Kell Takes Holy Orders” – that one was so old the edges crumbled off in my hands but there was a faded shot of Eleanor O’Kell as a beautiful young woman covered so completely by her habit that all you could see was a cutout of her face: eyes, nose, mouth, chin. There were stacks and stacks of stories by Declan Boyle, the warped old gossip columnist who knew too much about the O’Kells to really say very much in print. I wondered if he were still alive and if it might not be time to pay him another visit with McGuff.

All of the above was the known world, the part of the O’Kell family story that I already had a feel for – Will and Eleanor and Atomic Tom. But there was a whole separate folder about Diana Campobello. I had seen her during the O’Kell case, when she was studying to become a nun, before she had a change of heart and went back (iron fist in velvet glove) to where she once belonged in New York society. I had met her in the chapel at the convent along the Sound where she was studying to become one of the Sisters of Mercy. Atomic Tom had raped her, too, when she was growing up, and she was willing to tell the world all about it in a court of law. Even with Rick Tennyson’s help, I could not have brought Atomic Tom down without her. Her love of God was palpable in the chapel that day, but I wondered if she had ever made it all the way to nunhood. I wondered what could have happened to her to bring her down to earth. Had it been sins unimaginable, or simply the absurdity of an heiress entering the convent when she was way beyond middle age?

Enquiring minds (mine) wanted to know.

I did find some old stories about her husband Luigi Campobello, the tennis player who had won Wimbledon long before television and therefore prior to recorded history. Her transformation into the sisterhood and back was accounted for in the gossip columns, as was the trajectory of her ex-husband from tennis star to well-traveled gay-man-with-AIDS about town. That was it – nothing about their son Gino until Eleanor O’Kell’s wishes wended their way into the public record.

But there was no mistaking Diana Campobello’s power in the world of fashion. She was there at every party, thinner than thin even before that was in, her hair gone bright white while those in orbit around her tried to hold onto their youth with beauty-parlor dye that didn’t work. In the pictures, the edges of her body were so defined she seemed to have been cut out with a knife sharp enough to cut through cardboard.

Declan Boyle and Diana Campobello: I was starting to see another trip to New York in my future, and that meant there was business to be taken care of here – the small matter of manufacturing an heir in a small jar for Jimmy Burns and Angie Frangello, no small matter as it turned out. But there was always Amanda Madison to think of, and her magic was there – right where I needed it – and before you knew it the deed was done and the future of the Burns-Frangello clan was sealed up in a glass jar and sealed up safely in an overnight package, as close to an Amanda Madison-Arnold Bagdikian combination as I could ever imagine. The paths to immortality are many but the road is always the same.

Entry Filed under: Aspen, Drop Dead Beautiful, Mystery