Murder Under the Palms (27 page)

“The only Spencer. Though there were others Wegs.”

“That’s amazing,” Charlotte said. “That took all of a minute and a half. If Sharon succeeds in selling the system, you should get a cut of her commission.” She looked at the address again. “Do you know where this place is?”

He nodded. “It’s about forty-five minutes from here. It’s one of those gated, country club communities. It’s also the headquarters of the Professional Golfers’ Association.”

“A snowbird, I guess.”

“And if he’s got any smarts, he’ll be down here, and not up there,” Eddie said, referring to the weather reports, which were predicting more snow for the eastern seaboard states. “Do you want to take a ride out there tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said.

They dined that night at Château Albert, choosing to do so because they didn’t want to be driven out prematurely by admiring fans as they had been on Friday night at Ta-Boó. The dining room was full, but they were in a world of their own. They started with the cocktail that had been served in the Café-Grill on the
Normandie
. Named after the ship, it was half dry vermouth and half cassis. Then they ordered dinner. The food was just as good as it had been on their previous visit, and because it wasn’t a special Normandy night, the menu was wasn’t limited to entrees cooked in Calvados and cream. They were eating dessert—a napoleon for Eddie and
crème brulée
for Charlotte—when René approached their table carrying two thick black-covered books under his arm. Pulling over a chair from a neighboring table, he sat down and set the books on the end of their table. The cover of the one on top was mounted with a reproduction of the French Line’s famous bow-on poster of the.
Normandie
, which had served as the model for many ocean liner posters since. The view of the graceful, upswept bow showed as no other angle could the magnificent lines that had made the
Normandie
not only the world’s fastest ocean liner, but also the most beautiful. It was the marine equivalent of the Betty Grable pinup. Charlotte remembered René once commenting on the graceful way in which the flanks of the
Normandie
’s hull narrowed down to its keel. He had compared it to the way in which a woman’s hips narrowed down to her legs. “Ah!
Normandie
,” he had said. “She is just like a woman.”

Charlotte looked up from the books to their host. “Scrapbooks?” she asked.

He picked up the top book and showed her the spine. The year 1939 was written on it in white ink. “I thought you would like to look at this,” he explained, adding, “I like to think of everything that might please my guests.”

“I’m impressed,” Charlotte said. “Not only a fabulous dinner in an elegant setting, but memories included as well. Your reputation for thinking of everything is very well-deserved, René.”

He beamed.

As Charlotte and Eddie slid their chairs over, René opened the scrapbook to the section marked August 23rd. The first half was devoted to what antique dealers call ephemera: the daily schedules, the menus, the programs for special events. The second half was given over to snapshots of the first-class passengers, all of them clearly identified.

As they flipped through the pages, Charlotte recognized familiar faces from that strange and wonderful voyage. The family of Polish refugees, the director of the movie they’d shot in Paris, the famous children’s book author, the woman who had been convinced that her table mate was a spy, the pretty young widow who’d had her eye on René.

And there, whirling around the dance floor in the Grand Salon were Charlotte and Eddie. Looking so young! But then, they
had
been young. Charlotte only twenty, and Eddie twenty-four—barely out of the egg. His hair had still been black, though, as he had told her, it had started turning prematurely white soon after. How dashing he had looked! No wonder she had fallen for him.

“I thought you’d be interested in this photograph because it shows the ruby necklace,” René said. “The one you were wearing a copy of at Villa Normandie.” He pointed out the necklace around Charlotte’s neck.

The ruby necklace that had brought her luck—again, she thought.

The scrapbook contained a number of photos of Charlotte and Eddie: ensconced in deck chairs under steamer rugs, sipping bouillon and probably watching the
Bremen
tailing them off their port side; seated in wicker chairs in the elegant Winter Garden, with its tropical plants and exotic birds in glass cages; holding hands on a settee at the base of one of the Lalique light fountains.

She remembered again that first night, when they had watched the sunrise from the Café-Grill. They had stayed up all night because they didn’t want to be separated, and to share the same cabin was still unthinkable. It was to be another twenty-four hours before the walls of Jericho fell.

“Do you have scrapbooks for every crossing?” Charlotte asked.

René nodded. “Every round-trip crossing: sixty-eight and a half of them. I kept them to help me remember the names of the passengers. So many of those who sailed on the
Normandie
were repeats,” he explained.

“So all along you had a crib sheet,” teased Charlotte. “And here we thought you were relying solely on your fabulous memory.”

He smiled. “My memory’s pretty good too,” he boasted. He looked down at the scrapbook and said sadly: “Little did I know that this would be the last voyage.” Then he closed the cover and reached for the second scrapbook. “The date on its spine was February 9, 1942.”

“The day the
Normandie
burned,” said Charlotte.

“I thought you might want to see this too,” he said, opening the cover. Inside were photographs of the fire, from late in the afternoon, when the public first learned of the disaster, to early the next morning, when the ship finally keeled over on its side.

It also included newspaper clippings. A story from the
Herald Tribune
carried a headline that now appeared sadly ironic: “Investigation rules out sabotage in
Normandie
fire.”

But it was the last photo in the scrapbook that tugged at Charlotte’s heartstrings. The great ship looked like a living thing that was breathing its last, a great whale that had been beached in the icy waters of the Hudson, a thing of power and beauty that now only looked oversized and ungainly.

“The saddest day of my life,” said René.

And as Charlotte looked over, she was surprised to see tears welling in his brown eyes.

Charlotte dreamed that night of the
Normandie
again. But this time, her dream wasn’t of a lifeboat drill or of the sinister
Bremen
flying its swastika flag. This time she dreamed of a corridor. It was a combination of the corridor in which Eddie had described finding himself after the fire broke out and her own memory of the
Normandie’
s passageways. There was also probably a dash of the long corridors at the Breakers. The one in her dream was tilted at an angle as a result of the list caused by the water that had been pumped into the hold. It was only dimly lighted, as the corridors aboard the
Normandie
had been after the blackout was enforced. Cold air streamed down the passageway. From where? she wondered in the dream. She had an overpowering sense of the importance of finding the exit. The corridor in her dream was also very long, so long that the parallel lines of the ceiling and the floor seemed to converge in the distance. And it was empty except for a solitary figure at the far end, wearing the blue-black uniform of the cleaning watch. In the dream, the figure would appear and then disappear, always with his back to her, always moving away from her, stealthily, silently.

Even in her dream, she recognized that the dark-shirted figure played a role in the riddle she was trying to solve, the riddle of who had murdered Feder and McLean. But she wasn’t sure if he was hero or villain. Was he helping her find her way out of the labyrinth or was he deliberately misleading her? If only she knew what was behind the doors through which he seemed to disappear.

They drove up to Palm Beach Gardens the next morning. Eddie had called ahead and found that Spencer Weg was not only in residence at his Florida home, but would be delighted to see an old shipmate, especially one who had gone on to become a famous bandleader.

The PGA Resort Community was a huge retirement community that had risen up from several square miles of Florida scrubland. It was comprised of a number of individual developments, each with its own golf course, tennis courts, fitness center, and so on, and each containing all levels of housing, from inexpensive condos to large and luxurious homes. It was the kind of place that Charlotte couldn’t imagine anyone actually living in, and in fact it looked as if no one did: it was characteristic of such places that no one was ever seen walking around (except on the golf courses), probably because these homes were only occupied for a few weeks or months of the year by most of the residents. But she supposed that golf lovers were willing to put up with almost any inconvenience—including a housing development that looked as if it had been hit by a neutron bomb—for the luxury of having a golf course right on their doorstep. No doubt there were practical advantages as well: security issues and the like. She herself preferred living in a community where there was evidence of human habitation: dog walkers, window shoppers, children playing, a newstand on the corner.

That was one of the things she liked most about Château en Espagne: its location. For a New Yorker, the midtown location held great appeal. Its envelope of greenery gave it a remote, isolated feeling, but it was only a block from the hustle and bustle of Worth Avenue. At the same time, it looked out over the palm-fringed fairways of the golf course and was only two blocks from the beach. In short, it had the best of all possible worlds. In the back of her mind, she was still toying with the idea of buying the house, imagining what it would be like to sit in the tower room, to tend the plants in the courtyard, to walk over to Worth Avenue for … what? Certainly not a quart of milk. What the hell—a diamond necklace.

But she still wasn’t sure she was ready to buy her castle in the air.

Spencer Weg greeted them at the door of his home, which was a Spanish-style ranch in a high-priced neighborhood overlooking a lake bordering a velvety green fairway with a gazebo-crowned island at its center. Which was exactly what one would expect of a house with a Fairway Island Road address. After introductions were made (Eddie introducing Charlotte as Mrs. Lundstrom), Weg led them out to a covered loggia by the pool. As Eddie had said, he was a tall man, deeply tanned, with gray-white hair, and a round, genial face. He looked as if he spent a lot of time on the golf course. His wife was also tall and thin, with a long, narrow face and a pleasant smile. Once they were settled in the comfortable patio chairs, Mrs. Weg served coffee and blueberry muffins. While the two men reminisced about their Navy days, Charlotte struggled to make conversation with Mrs. Weg, who was quite pretty and very charming, on the subject of how to make the best blueberry muffins (use only the small, wild berries, and never the fat, cultivated ones).

Finally Eddie got around to the purpose of their visit. “I suppose you’re wondering why I decided to get in touch with you after all these years,” he said.

“I am,” said Weg. “Though I was so shocked that you’d tracked me down through a computer information network that I never got around to asking.”

“It’s about Jack McLean. Did you know he lived in Palm Beach?”

“Yes,” Weg replied. “In fact, we get together on a pretty regular basis. He often takes us out for a day of fishing on his boat, the
Sea Witch.
”

“I’m sorry to tell you that he died yesterday,” Eddie said. He paused to let the bad news sink in.

Weg set down his coffee cup and sat for a moment with his forehead cradled in his hand. With his other hand, he reached out for the hand of his wife, who was sitting next to him. “He was my oldest friend,” he said in a broken voice. “We went to Groton and Yale together.”

“I know,” Eddie said.

“How did it happen?” Mrs. Weg asked.

“He was murdered,” Eddie replied.

Weg looked up. “Murdered!” he repeated, his sharp, dark blue eyes questioning how his friend could have been the victim of so horrible a crime.

“Stabbed in the heart while he was out for an early morning walk on the Lake Trail. That’s why we’re here,” Eddie explained. “We were wondering if you could help us find the killer by answering some questions. We think McLean’s murder might have something to do with what happened to the
Normandie
.”

“The fire, you mean?” Weg asked.

“Yes,” Eddie said and proceeded to tell the couple about Paul’s death, and about their theory that Federov and Roehrer were involved in a plot to sabotage the
Normandie
. “This is difficult for me to say about your friend and my commanding officer, but we think that McLean might have been their contact.”

“Contact?” echoed Mrs. Weg.

“We think he may have been the Fox, which was the code name for the
Abwehr
agent who was giving Federov and Roehrer their orders.”

“Impossible,” said Mrs. Weg, obviously offended that Eddie would dare to level such an accusation. “Jack was one of the most patriotic men I ever met. He won the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism in Korea.”

But her husband’s reaction was different: he simply nodded.

Eddie was watching him carefully. “Did you know about this?” he asked.

Weg nodded again.

Mrs. Weg was staring at her husband, open-mouthed.

“I suppose there’s no harm in talking about it now that he’s dead,” he said quietly. “He was an
Abwehr
agent.” Weg paused for a moment to collect his thoughts. Then he began: “He had a childhood friend who was involved in the America First movement at Yale.”

“Freddie Welland,” said Eddie.

“That’s him. Through Freddie, Jack was drawn into the movement as well, although only peripherally. He wasn’t unlike a lot of patriotic Americans who renounced their association with the isolationists after Pearl Harbor and went on to loyally defend their country.”