Murder Under the Palms (18 page)

Charlotte nodded, and started on her plump, spicy mussels.

“Since no other major acts of sabotage occurred, I figured the answer must be number two. I also figured that he would probably have wanted to get out of the country after the fire. Then I asked myself, ‘What would he have done in Germany?’ And the answer was ‘Become a Nazi.’ Finally I asked myself, ‘How does one locate former Nazis?’ And the answer was the Jewish Documentation Center in Los Angeles, the Nazi-hunting organization.”

“Did you ever think about a second career as a private eye in your retirement?”

He shook his head. “I’m not retired yet, and I’m not planning to retire.”

Charlotte nodded again. It was reassuring to hear that Eddie thought the same way she did. Slow down maybe, but retire? Never.

“I have to admit that I was pretty proud of myself,” he continued as he took a bite of his appetizer. “I figured that if these Nazi hunters could track down Eichmann and Mengele, they might be able to track down my guy too.”

“And were they able to?”

Eddie leaned forward. “Charlotte, it was a snap. That’s where I’ve been for the past couple of days—out in L.A. They have a worldwide network of sources and informants, and all their information is computerized. I gave them the names on the carpet company roster, and they checked them against their archives. The whole process took twenty minutes. I figured that the names on the list were probably aliases, but that they might have used the same aliases on their passports or some other documents, and that the center might have a record of the aliases.”

“And did they?” asked Charlotte.

He nodded. “One of the names on the roster was Bill Roe. Sounds like the soul of Ireland, doesn’t it? Well, there wasn’t a Bill Roe in the center’s archives, but there was a Wilhelm Roehrer. I can’t take the credit for spotting the similarity in the names. That goes to one of their staff people—they’re old hands at that sort of thing. He had been a minor Nazi, an SS
oberscharführer
, or technical sergeant. A small fish, not worth going after for them. He had worked as a prison warden. After the war, he escaped over the Alps into Austria, and from there into Italy, where he booked passage to the United States out of Genoa. He was carrying a fake International Red Cross passport.”

“Why America?” she asked.

“Why not? It was his former home; he spoke fluent English. Where else would he have gone? He wasn’t going to hang around Germany and risk being prosecuted. They told me at the center that a lot of former Nazis were among those who flooded into the U.S. after the war.”

“How do you know Bill Roe and Wilhelm Roehrer are the same person?”

“I don’t. But I have a sense that they are. Isn’t that the way an investigation works? You follow your nose?”

“Very much so,” Charlotte concurred. She had always thought that an investigation was not so much a matter of drawing a conclusion from the facts, but of marshaling the facts to support a conclusion. In other words, verifying the intuition instead of dismissing it. “How do we find out?”

“That’s where you come in. They gave me his address. He retired to Florida from Richmond Hill, Queens, where he worked as a heavy-machinery mechanic. He lives in Clearwater, which is near Tampa. I want you to go there with me. I figure that we can pose as investigators for the OSI, the Office of Special Investigations. It’s a unit of the Justice Department that’s assigned to investigating Nazis who entered the United States illegally. But I’m not good at that kind of stuff. You’re the one who’s the actress.”

“Have you thought of taking your findings to the authorities?”

He shook his head. “Two reasons. First, this is my baby. As I said, I’ve been obsessed with this for fifty years. It’s not something that I trust someone else to get to the bottom of. Second, who would I go to? The OSI tracks down ex-Nazis; it wouldn’t prosecute a sabotage case. The New York Attorney General’s office? Do you think they’re going to care about a lead on a fifty-year-old case? The people who worked on the original investigation are probably all dead by now. For that matter, maybe this guy Bill Roe is dead.”

He had a point, Charlotte thought.

“But if I were to present the authorities—the FBI, or whoever—with some concrete evidence, it might be different. I don’t have to reel the fish in hook, line, and sinker, but I at least ought to be able to show them that I have something on the line.”

It took Charlotte only a minute to make up her mind. Paul’s murder was now in the hands of the police, and shopping was something that held only limited appeal for her. Plus, a trip to the west coast of Florida offered the prospect of spending more time with Eddie.

“Sure,” she said.

They left early the next morning after a hearty breakfast at Charlotte’s hotel. It was a five-hour drive. They spent the first part of the trip making plans: Charlotte, with her acting skills, would pose as the OSI investigator, and Eddie would pose as her assistant. Their strategy would be to offer Roe an ultimatum: either admit to sabotaging the
Normandie
or face extradition to Germany. That was,
if
there was any evidence that Bill Roe, as he called himself, was in fact a former Nazi, and not an innocent retiree. They had no idea what form this evidence might take. As Eddie pointed out, it wasn’t as if he was going to have a swastika hanging in his living room. A German accent, perhaps; a clear expression of recognition when addressed by his German name; a strong reaction to being confronted with his past misdeeds. There was even the remote chance that Eddie might recognize him. Their secondary goal would be to induce him to implicate the others who were involved in the plot. They knew for a fact that there was an accomplice, but those two, in turn, must have been taking directions from a higher-up. They hoped that Roe would be induced to confess by the threat of extradition. But if the intimidation ploy didn’t work, they were prepared to resort to the age-old method of eliciting information: buying it.

They spent the second part of the trip riding in silence—there wasn’t even anything worth listening to on the radio—and watching the flat, yellow scrubland of central Florida roll by. They were skirting the northern boundary of the Everglades, and the land had been drained and diked to create fields for sugar, rice, cattle—even the occasional alligator farm. Charlotte knew there were people who enjoyed this kind of country. Spalding and Connie had acquaintances who owned cattle ranches in central Florida, and she had known others who liked to hunt here. But it held absolutely no appeal for her. However, she did enjoy riding with Eddie, feeling his presence, looking at his profile. She was reminded of her first reaction to him fifty-three years ago. It had been as if they were connected by the blue-violet arc of a surging electric current: thrilling, but also a little frightening. They had spent much of the previous evening reminiscing about those four wonderful days. Now it was different. It was as if they shared the same glowing cocoon, a cocoon that was bathed in the same blue-violet light, but now the light was gentler and more subdued, tempered by the years. Comfortable.

After a little more than three hours of driving across the central Florida savanna, they came to Fort Myers and then headed north along the densely developed coastal strip. At noon, they crossed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, the long, high bridge over Tampa Bay, which deposited them in St. Petersburg, just south of Clearwater. They had no trouble locating Roe’s home, which was only a few blocks from the Gulf to Bay Boulevard, the main east-west highway. It was a small, neat, Spanish-style bungalow on a cul-de-sac at the end of a street lined with similar bungalows. A neatly clipped hibiscus hedge lined the foundation, and a cluster of palm trees were planted in the center of the small front yard.

It appeared that someone was at home: a car was parked in the carport.

They parked on the street and walked up the path to the arched entryway. Charlotte was carrying a briefcase in order to appear more official, and she had worn her reading glasses and a skirt-and-sweater outfit that was suitably conservative. Eddie wore a golf cap over his short white hair. In addition to looking like investigators, they also wanted to disguise themselves: their well-known faces could easily give them away.

Glancing at white-haired Eddie, Charlotte had to smile. “The senior citizen investigators,” she joked as she rang the bell. Though they both looked considerably younger than their real ages, they were still pretty old for Justice Department investigators. But she supposed they wouldn’t stand out as much in a state full of retirees as they might elsewhere.

A large-boned woman with a stern mouth and blond hair going to gray answered the door. She wore an apron that was dusted with flour.

“We’re here to see Mr. Roe,” Charlotte said. “Are you Mrs. Roe?”

The woman nodded.

She looked to be in her mid-fifties to early sixties, considerably younger than her husband, whom they had figured to be at least seventy.

“He’s very sick,” she told them, speaking with a heavy German accent, which was an encouraging sign.

“We’re from the Office of Special Investigations,” Charlotte said and quickly flashed her Actor’s Equity card. What the hell—the woman’s eyesight couldn’t have been that good. Whose was after fifty?

The woman’s glance shifted from Charlotte to Eddie, who was standing just behind her on the doorstep, and then back to Charlotte.

Then she opened the door and escorted them through a small, neatly furnished living room and down a hall to a bedroom, where a pale, unshaven man with an oxygen tube in his nose was sitting up in bed watching a television game show. He had a long face that was still fleshy despite his illness, and full lips. His dark gray hair was combed straight back from his forehead.

The room was spotlessly clean, but it smelled of sickness. Framed photographs of family members hung on the wall, and more of them stood on the dresser top. A crucifix hung over the headboard, and there was one small window, which overlooked a concrete patio at the rear of the house. The oxygen pump made an eerie whooshing sound.

Mrs. Roe took a seat on the edge of the bed. “They’ve come back,” she said. “But it’s different ones this time.”

Charlotte and Eddie exchanged puzzled looks. What was she talking about? they wondered. Had someone else been here asking questions?

Then the woman said something in German, of which Charlotte caught only the word
geld
. She didn’t know German, but she’d picked up enough Yiddish over the years to know what
geld
meant.

The man nodded. “I’m dying,” he whispered.

On a hunch, Charlotte decided to play it straight. If he was dying, he didn’t have anything to lose. “Are you
Oberscharführer
Wilhelm Roehrer?”

He nodded wearily.

Charlotte wondered if Eddie recognized him, or vice versa. She tried to imagine how Eddie must be feeling—face to face with the man who had almost killed him.

“We came here to find out about the
Normandie
fire,” she said, then turned to his wife. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked. Realizing that Roe was too weak to say much himself, Charlotte wanted him to save his energies for the questions that were to come.

“Cancer in the blood,” the wife replied, shrugging in apology for not knowing the correct term in English.

Charlotte turned back to Roe. “Then you must have a lot of medical bills,” she said. She nodded at Eddie, who stepped forward with the briefcase, and opened it to display the cash. “Maybe this will help you with some of your expenses.”

“How much?” asked Mrs. Roe directly.

“Two thousand,” Eddie replied.

The man closed his eyes in visible relief, and Eddie closed the briefcase and handed it to Mrs. Roe.

“We want to know the name of the man who was giving you your orders,” Charlotte said. “Who was your boss for the
Normandie
operation?”

“The other man asked that too,” Roe said. He spoke in a hoarse whisper, with great effort. He also had an accent, but it was slight by comparison with his wife’s. With every exhalation, he made a wheezing sound.

“What other man?” said Charlotte.

“Isn’t he connected with you?” Roe asked. “He was here two weeks ago, asking questions. He came back two days later,” he added, the implication being that he returned the second time with the
geld
.

Charlotte exchanged looks with Eddie. Someone else was also onto the fact that this ailing Nazi had been involved in the sabotage of the
Normandie
. “Who was this other man?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Roe replied.

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him. I didn’t know my contact’s name,” he replied. “Just his code name, which was the Fox, and his number,
Abwehr
F473.”

The
Abwehr
was the German secret service.

“The code name for the
Normandie
operation was
Unternehmen Goldene Vogel
,” Roe continued. “It means Operation Golden Bird. It’s from the title of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. The golden bird was the
Normandie
. The fox was a character in the fairy tale.”

“How did you communicate with him?”

“By mail,” Roe said. “He sent the directions to me in the care of a member of the New York Bund.”

“Did you know anything about him?”

“Only that he must have had some pull. He arranged for us to get the jobs with Tri-Boro Carpet, and he made sure that we were assigned to the Grand Salon on the day the welding crew was taking down the light stanchions.”

“How did he recruit you?”

“My friend and I lived in the same neighborhood in Queens. It was mostly a Russian neighborhood. We had gone to summer camp together: a Russian fascist summer camp in Connecticut. The
Abwehr
agent had gotten our names through someone at the camp. He contacted us through a local Bund leader.”

“But the Bund leader wasn’t directly involved?”

Roe shook his head.

“And the man you ordered to throw the bomb—he was your friend?”

He nodded. “It was actually an incendiary pencil; it generated a heat of three thousand degrees. We picked it up in a locker on the ship. Our instructions were to throw it into the pile of life preservers when the welders were working nearby. He wanted us to make it look like an accident.”