Scruples by Judith Krantz

Author:Judith Krantz [Krantz, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307803528
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 1978-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

In the two weeks that followed his call home, Spider needed all his resilience, all his trained eye for detail, all his leaping sense of taste, all his imagination and sense of what works visually and what doesn’t quite make it. Fortunately, it was late August, the busy time, when Beverly Hills stores begin receiving their fall merchandise. Also it was still sale time for summer things all over town.

Separately, both he and Valentine worked the streets foot by foot. North of Wilshire, they covered Rodeo, Camden, and Bedford drives up and down both sides of the streets. Then they investigated every shop on Dayton Way and Brighton Way and on “little” Santa Monica, crisscrossing them from east to west. They left little but the pavement unturned on Wilshire Boulevard, from Robinson’s on the west boundary, delving through Saks, Magnin’s, Elizabeth Arden’s, Delman’s, and finally, on the east corner of the shopping part of the street, Bonwit Teller’s. It all formed a dense, vaguely triangular grid, which in New York City would have been stretched out into blocks and blocks of Fifth and Madison avenues but in Beverly Hills was so compressed that any boutique, any store, was easily reached by foot. An average, medium-sized boutique on Rodeo paid a yearly rent of ninety-six thousand dollars so that the unsuccessful quickly closed.

Sometimes Spider, who did everything but lick the paint off the walls in his efforts to fix the qualities of a store in his mind, would bump into Valentine, busily going through the sale racks to see what they hadn’t sold last season, driving salesgirls to murder in their hearts as she carefully inspected every piece of new merchandise, filing it away in the sketchbook of her mind but never being “carried away” enough to buy, as she apologetically explained. Spider, obviously a potential customer in his beautifully cut, new clothes, hastily bought before he left New York, often pretended to be buying a present for his mother or one of his sisters as he loitered and eavesdropped and fell into conversation with unsuspecting store owners and customers and sales personnel. Together and separately, they covered all the smaller boutiques and such major shops at Dorso’s, Giorgio’s, Amelia Gray’s, Jax, Matthews, the Right Bank Clothing Company, Kamali, Alan Austin, Dinallo, Ted Lapidus, Mr. Guy’s, Theodore’s, Courrèges, Polo, Charles Gallay, Gunn-Trigère, Hermès, Edwards-Lowell, and Gucci.

During those two weeks eight parties were given for Spider, hastily arranged but large and festive.

Although the Elliott girls as children had always felt that there was such an abundance of Spider’s love that they did not need to compete for it, now, as adults, they found themselves rivaling each other in entertaining the legendary brother their Mends had heard so much about but rarely seen. Since not one of them could bring herself to even begin to believe that Valentine was merely Spider’s business partner—who was he kidding, with that sexy French look, that sparkly way she had, and those eyes—they were all exceedingly, excessively polite to her.

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