Murder at the Spa (22 page)

“But I’m glad to be out too. Actually, the greatest danger isn’t that you’ll get shot. It’s that you’ll get fat and die of a heart attack or that your nerves will go. The work can drive you nuts. You see only the worst side of life. You start thinking the whole world’s like that.”

“Was your wife happy when you got out?”

“Ecstatic. She’d been wanting me to quit for a long time. She was always worried.” He held up his trigger finger. “I got hurt twice before this. I’ll never forget the day I told her. It was on Christmas Eve. I gave her this big package. I told her it was a Christmas present. Inside were my disability papers from the Civil Service Review Board.”

Jerry went on to talk about his wife, Rosalie, who’d been his high school sweetheart back in Bensonhurst. They had four children—all girls, all athletes. His oldest was in college. Paulina was footing the bill.

“That’s another benefit of leaving police work,” he said. “The boss lady might be a bitch to work for sometimes, but so was the city, and the city didn’t pay for the kid’s college education. If you’re loyal to her, she’s loyal to you, which is more than you can say of most employers.”

“Well said,” said Charlotte.

Jerry pulled out a picture: his wife, the plump, dark-eyed beauty whom Charlotte had seen at the fete, and four pretty, dark-eyed girls.

“Jerry, they’re lovely,” said Charlotte. They all had wide smiles and perfect teeth. The two little ones had Jerry’s dimples.

“Thanks,” said Jerry, putting the picture away. “What about you?” he asked. “I mean, are you married?”

Either he didn’t keep up with Hollywood gossip or he was too polite to admit it. Charlotte replied that she had been—four times. Over her crêpes, which wasn’t exactly the dessert for a sweltering June evening, but which tasted wonderful anyway, Charlotte talked about her life. She’d never had any children. In the Hollywood of the forties, having children was considered bad for the box office (it was important for a star to keep her face in front of the public, and taking a year or two out at the peak of a career was thought to be a ticket to hasbeenville). By the time she was big enough to stand up to the bosses, it was too late, in the sense that her second husband was soon to die of a heart attack. She had married again, but that marriage had been a disaster. After that, she’d been single for almost twenty years before marrying again. But she wasn’t entirely alone. She had half a dozen nieces and nephews and she was close to the children of her fourth husband. Although they had been married for only two years—as M.J. had quite accurately put it, he couldn’t live in Charlotte’s limelight—they remained good friends and she’d become a surrogate mother to his two grown daughters, whose own mother had died.

By the time they finished dessert, the adjoining bar was becoming crowded with young singles and it was getting noisy and smoky. A band was setting up in a corner. It was time to leave.

When she returned to her room after their visit to the casino, her head was spinning, and not just from the beer. A haggard Crowley had been glad to hear what Charlotte had to say and had offered a tidbit of his own in return. It seemed that Sperry had abandoned his lucrative Harley Street practice under a cloud of scandal. One of his patients had died as the result of an allergic reaction to an injection of cells. The patient had been sensitized by the first shot and had gone into anaphylactic shock following the second. As a result, Sperry had been ostracized by the British medical establishment. The British, Crowley explained, were less stringent than the Americans when it came to regulating the practice of medicine. A layman such as Sperry (his medical credentials were spurious) could set himself up in practice as long as he didn’t perform certain acts, such as operating under anesthesia or prescribing certain drugs. But an Englishman who called himself a doctor, whether or not he was listed on the British medical register, was expected to maintain certain standards of behavior. For those who tarnished the honor of the medical establishment, the punishment was severe: no patient referrals, no club memberships, no chummy backslapping at medical convocations. Sperry’s answer had been to emigrate—first to the Bahamas, where he set up a cell therapy clinic that never got off the ground, and then to the United States, where his connections in the carriage trade, along with his good looks and smooth way with women, landed him a job at That Woman’s fat farm in Arizona. He had been induced to come to High Rock during one of Paulina’s raids on the competition, but in his case Paulina was duped: That Woman had shrewdly taken advantage of Paulina to dump a problem employee.

But although Crowley had learned a lot about Sperry, his efforts had been less successful when it came to actually pinning anything on him. As Jerry had said, none of the dozens of spa guests and employees who had been interviewed had seen him at the time of the murders. He had no alibi—he hadn’t actually been seeing patients. Charlotte’s interview with him had lasted only twenty minutes—just enough time for Adele to get over to the Bath Pavilion and into the tub. His next appointment wasn’t for thirty minutes, during which time he could have committed the murder. It was the same in Art’s case: there was an interval of about thirty minutes when he could have committed the murder. But he would have to have been lightning-footed and invisible to boot to make it from the Health Pavilion to the Bath Pavilion and back in that time.

Charlotte restively circled her room, hanging up her clothes, putting away her shoes, straightening the jars and bottles on the bathroom counter, as if by restoring order to her surroundings, she would bring order to the greater chaos. She was by nature a nester. It was a defense against spending so much time in hotels and rented rooms. Her brownstone in Turtle Bay, where she had lived on and off for the last thirty years, was her sanctuary, her retreat. When she wasn’t there, she took bits of it with her: a small flower vase of blue and white Canton ware; a picture of her second husband in a Victorian silver frame; an antique rosewood sculpture of the grave and gentle Kwan-yen, the Chinese goddess of mercy and protector of women; a small malachite clock with ormolu mounts; a volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay bound in Moroccan calf. These were the totems of her private life. She paid homage to them now, arranging them on the marble surface of her dresser. Picking up the volume of poetry, she read the poem on the page to which it opened: “The solid sprite who stand alone,/And walks the world with equal stride,/Grieve though he may, is not undone/Because a friend has died.” With a pang, she thought of Adele and Art. She was not undone, but nor could she call herself a solid sprite.

Setting the book aside, she walked over to the sliding glass doors, which stood open. She preferred natural ventilation to the artificial chill of air-conditioning. The moon hung low, casting an argent shadow over the lake. To the south, heat lightning shimmered through the clouds. Below her, a broad lawn stretched down to the lake shore. It was dotted with empty Adirondack chairs that seemed to have become animate by virtue of their contact with their former occupants. Some sat alone, staunchly independent of their chair fellows; others were gathered in gregarious clusters of three or four; still others were ranged in a line in mute appreciation of the spectacle before them, the geyser from which the lake took its name. In the moonlight, its fountain shone like a column of quicksilver, creating a host of ripples that slid across the calm, black water. To the west, the lawn was bounded by a path leading down to the gazebo at the water’s edge. Behind the path rose a backdrop of trees. The globes of the Victorian lampposts lighting the path made it appear as if the trees were hung with a necklace of giant glowing pearls. As she watched, the globes dimmed to a dull yellow and then went out. She checked the face of her clock with its garland of hand-painted roses: it was midnight.

After changing into her nightgown, she climbed into bed. She had just fallen asleep when she was awakened by the ring of the telephone. It was Tom. He apologized for calling so late, explaining that he’d been trying to reach her all evening. Her brain still muddled by steep, she had at first wondered why he was calling. In the confusion, she’d forgotten all about the radium. He was calling to tell her that he’d found out the name of the investment banker who’d hired the PR firm to plant the radium story. It was Raymond Innis. Apart from the fact that he was known as an up-and-coming, young M & A man (“mergers and acquisitions”), Tom knew nothing about him. Nor did the name mean anything to Charlotte, although the fact that he was an M & A man would point to a connection with High Rock Waters’s takeover of Paulina Langenberg. After hanging up, she lay in bed, the light of consciousness gradually stealing into her brain. Raymond Innis: maybe the name did mean something to her after all. She slid the hotel directory out of the base of the telephone and looked up the number for the front desk. Then she dialed.

Her voice, which was usually husky, was even more so at this hour. “This is Charlotte Graham in room six-fifteen,” she heard herself saying. She sounded as if she’d been up all night drinking whiskey. “Is there a guest staying at the hotel by the name of Raymond Innis?”

“Yes, Miss Graham,” answered the obsequious voice on the other end. “Mr. Innis is in room four-twelve. Would you like me to connect you?”

“No thank you,” she replied, and hung up.

Raymond Innis was the Role Model. She had been introduced to him one night at dinner—the night he’d spurned yogurt as mucus-forming—but she’d forgotten his name. It was beginning to look as if her
An Enemy of the People
theory was right: Innis, who is hired by Gary, plants the radium rumor in order to depress the price of Langenberg stock, making it cheaper for Gary to acquire Paulina’s company. Being a guest at the spa enables Innis to stay on top of the action and fit in a short vacation as well. Like Art, he was probably killing two birds with one stone. In the morning, she would tell Paulina. She would be glad to carry out her promise. Although she liked and admired Paulina, she was becoming concerned about her increasing involvement in the machinations of the Langenberg family empire. She had the feeling that she was becoming the permanent understudy in Anne-Marie’s former role as Paulina’s confidante. It was a role she wasn’t anxious to fill.

Turning onto her side, she invited sleep, whose furtive arrival was ushered in by the syncopated voices of a hundred bullfrogs.

11

A morning mist clouded the surface of the lake like breath on a mirror, but the day promised to be clear and cool. The hot, humid weather that had hung over the High Rock plateau for the last twenty-four hours was gone, banished by the mountain breeze that flowed in through the screen of the sliding glass doors. Charlotte checked her clock: its gilded hands stood at the quarter past nine. She had missed Awake and Aware, breakfast, and Terrain Cure. So much for spa life. Picking up the telephone, she ordered an herb tea and a bran muffin—her penance for her self-indulgence the night before.

After breakfasting on her balcony, she changed into her sweat suit and headed over to Sperry’s office for her spa checkup and for the results of her Reinhardt test. The Reinhardt test was as far as she planned to go with cell therapy. She was counting on Sperry’s getting fired tomorrow. As she waited in his office a few minutes later, her eye was captured by the cover of the latest edition of a business magazine. The faces of Gary and Elliot peered out from behind a pyramid constructed of Langenberg products and bottles of High Rock water. Picking it up, she turned to the story. Inside was a shot of Leon with the caption “Heir apparent?” News traveled quickly.

She had just started reading when Nicky arrived. As he took a seat in one of the dove-gray chairs, his joints made a startling grinding noise. Looking up, Charlotte saw that he was grimacing in pain.

“My knees,” he explained. “The doctors say there’s too much weight on them. If I don’t lose weight, I’ll have to have operations on both of them. That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”

“Do the baths help the pain?” asked Charlotte with concern. The baths were supposed to be excellent for any kind of joint pain, or so Sperry had said. And Charlotte had noticed an improvement in her bad knee.

Nicky shook his head. “I can’t take the baths. I don’t fit in the tub.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Sorry that she’d made a faux pas, and also sorry for poor, sweet Nicky.

“That’s all right,” he said with his sad-eyed smile. “I’ve lost twenty-one pounds already. Probably a couple of more by now—I’ll find out in a few minutes. I want to lose at least ten more while I’m here. That will bring me down to three hundred. My long-term goal is one sixty-five. I know it’s going to take a long time, but I’m determined to do it.”

“Good for you.”

“I have a wish list of things I want to do. I want to run; to ride in a sports car—I mean, to fit in a bucket seat; to wear a gold chain—they don’t make them big enough for me; to cross my legs.” He demonstrated by trying to raise one leg over the other. “See, I can’t do it. Miss Andersen says that if I keep thinking of my wish list, I won’t overeat.”

“It sounds as if she might be right,” said Charlotte. She was happy that Anne-Marie’s doctrine of “our bad habits giving us up” was working for someone.

Sperry appeared at the door of his office and summoned Charlotte. After wishing Nicky good luck, Charlotte went in.

The meeting was mercifully brief. Mercifully, because Charlotte was barely able to conceal her contempt for Sperry now that the evidence was piling up against him. But if he knew he was under suspicion, he didn’t show it. He was as smooth as ever. After taking the usual weight and blood-pressure readings, he gave her the results of her Reinhardt test.

The test showed that she should get mostly glandular cells, he said. “Glandular cells are especially helpful for postmenopausal women who’ve experienced a decline in their endocrine secretions.” He widened his narrow mouth in a concupiscent leer, revealing his pointed teeth. “We also find that the rejuvenation of the sex glands helps protect against cancer.”