The Rich Can Have All the Lemon Tarts They Want

Author : Janet Shell Anderson

Black holes can now be rented. Aliens may arrive! That’s the headline on everyone’s App.

“The rich can have all the lemon tarts they want.” Another headline. Giovanna Romanova Baldwin said that three days ago, then disappeared.

If Aliens landed, would they steal one of the best looking women in south Florida? She’s what divorce lawyers like me privately call the young second, third, fourth, blond, very good looking wives of older, successful men. Lemon tarts. Giovanna’s my cousin’s fifth wife, to be precise, who could very possibly become a First Lady.

I’m Eudora Pennifer. My cousin’s the ninth richest man on Earth, Perry Austrian Baldwin, a living legend on Wall Street, corporate head of Birnbach BirnBach, Austrian and Meese, United Micro Inc., and BalMart. Ninety-six but on regen, he looks twenty, has the energy of a teenager, is considering a run for the White House. Rich men have done it before. People who know him like him, he says.

I know him.

I know Giovanna too. Now she and her personal trainer Jordan Somebody have disappeared. Giovanna hasn’t been well received by the press since pictures of her on a bearskin rug appeared on everyone’s App. She’s actually a sweetheart.

So she’s an old man’s honey, a lemon tart, a beauty from Bulgaria, married, her big mistake, to my cuz in DelRay, Florida, in his huge house on the waterway. The mansion looks like a flying saucer that made an emergency landing. It gives me the fantods.

You have to drive through a cutout tree, some kind of evergreen that can live in South Florida, to even see the gate. Two miles down the very private lane, the monster residence looks like the White House and the Sydney Opera House, mated by drunken Martians. Wild Squirrel Monkeys slip into windows so high no one can close them properly. It rains in on Carrara marble floors. The monkeys spring across candelabras, hide in high niches with priceless vases. An alligator called Lazarus, because no one can kill him, favors the infinity pool. Maybe he’s eaten Giovanna. If Lazarus got her, he choked down all her designer gowns, Jimmy Choo shoes, and seven alligator bags. Giovanna’s black pug’s missing too.

What has been discovered so far is that two secret service agents assigned to Perry and Giovanna tried to film her in the bathroom, smuggled in three Hungarian prostitutes, swilled seventy bottles of beer. One agent was spotted dead drunk by the pool with Lazarus emerging from the foliage. There was a shooting; the alligator smirked, slid calmly into the waterway. A threatening note was found in the second largest dining room with a crude picture of Perry on it, but it was just written by his mother. She often writes threatening notes as well as novels, political commentary and new wills. She has her own reality show.

Perry’s newest girlfriend, Cynthia, a yoga teacher who’s twenty-one, is lying low in a little-known guesthouse deep in the shrubbery. Her skin’s gilded, her mouth a fuchsia dream; she can wrap her knees around her neck and often does. She’s either from Slovenia or Altoona; no one knows. A lemon tart-in-waiting?

Well, my money is on Giovanna. I think she’s rented a black hole and popped Jordan Somebody, her personal trainer, her designer dresses, Jimmy Choo shoes, alligator bags and herself into it.

Good luck, Giovanna, and remember to feed the pug.