Murder Under the Palms (32 page)

Dede laughed, revealing the charming gap between her front teeth. “It is wonderful, isn’t it?” she said, gazing out at the Atlantic Ocean with her sea-green eyes. “I come up here sometimes to sleep under the stars,” she added, nodding at a chaise lounge in the corner.

“Shouldn’t you be drying raisins or dates or something up here too?” asked Charlotte. “I thought that was the way it was done. Sleep on the roof with your dried food, and keep the animals downstairs.”

“I do keep the animals downstairs, usually,” said Dede. “Or rather, animal.” She leaned down to scratch the neck of Lady Astor, who lay at her feet, and who had managed quite gracefully to climb the spiral staircase.

Leaning back, Charlotte turned her face to the sun. The temperatures over the past few days had been cooler—in the sixties during the day and the forties at night—and the warmth of the sun felt marvelous in the cool air.

After a moment, Dede said, “I’m glad you came over. You can help me celebrate. I have some good news.”

“What?” asked Charlotte, turning to face her.

“The board has named me director of the preservation association,” she announced with a wide smile. “I just found out.”

Rising from her chair, Charlotte went over and gave Dede a hug. “Congratulations!” she said. “That’s wonderful! It’s impressive that they’re putting their confidence in someone so young.”

Dede nodded. “I was hoping I’d get the job, but I thought they’d choose someone from outside. Though they have separated the administrative function from the financial end. They’re going to hire a financial officer too.”

“I can understand that,” said Charlotte.

“I’m really looking forward to it,” Dede continued. “I never would have said this before, but I think I can safely say it now. Lydia wasn’t a very effective administrator.”

Charlotte wasn’t surprised.

“And it’s too important a job for an incompetent. One of the first things I want to do is try to save more of these old Spanish-style houses. Palm Beach was really the result of the vision of one man, Addison Mizner, and it’s a vision that I want to do as much as I can to preserve.”

Dede was really quite a remarkable young woman, Charlotte thought. She had it all: her grandmother’s beauty, her mother’s drive and creativity, and her step-grandfather’s sense of social responsibility.

“It’s going to be a tough job,” Dede went on. “What Lydia did really hurt us. It’s not the money so much. Between the Dupas mural and the fidelity bond, we’ll more than cover what she took. But that can’t make up for the loss of public trust. People are going to think twice before giving us money.”

“Yes,” Charlotte agreed. “But the public also has a short memory. And you have the flair it takes to be a successful fundraiser.” Charlotte wished her the best. “And what’s happening with Lydia now?” she asked. “I saw her right after Jack McLean died. Her house was on the market.”

“Another house that needs preserving,” Dede commented. “She’s been very depressed, but she’ll be all right. She’s going back to Flint, where, as Spalding says, being the widow of the bumper king will always count for something, even if she does end up doing time for embezzlement.”

Charlotte smiled. Spalding was right.

“What about you?” Dede asked. “Will you be going back to New York soon?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “Right after the Big Band Hall of Fame Ball on Sunday. I’m going to be filming a movie for public television in London.” She wondered briefly if Eddie’s upcoming tour included any London gigs. “But I expect to be back for the closing; and then I’ll stay awhile. I want to fix the place up.”

“Are you leaving on Monday morning?”

Charlotte nodded.

“That’s when mother’s leaving too. You might even be on the same flight. She’s going first to New York and then to Paris.”

“With Nikolai?” Charlotte asked.

Dede smiled. “They’re an item, despite the fact that he’s twenty years younger than she. She’s already talking about doing a collection with a French theme. I wonder what she could call it.”

Charlotte looked over at Dede, and smiled mischievously. “How about
Mésalliance
,” she suggested, and they both howled in the sparkling sun at the continuing escapades of the irrepressible Marianne.

After her work-break with Dede, Charlotte returned to Château en Espagne. First she called Jeannie Stavola, as promised, and spent a good forty-five minutes filling her in on the case, including the fact that René was now in jail, awaiting arraignment on murder charges. Though the evidence against him was circumstantial, there was a lot of it, including the fact that he had been seen on the Lake Trail on the morning of Jack McLean’s murder. After her conversation with Jeannie, Charlotte opened all the doors and windows, allowing the ocean breeze to fill the house with the crisp, salty smell of the sea air. It was another form of sweeping, she reasoned, allowing the fresh air to scour the rooms. Then she resumed her mental decorating. She had just repainted the living room for the fourth time—she’d gone from ochre to sand to rose and back to ochre again—when she heard a knock on the door. Opening it, she was surprised to see Eddie standing there with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a hanging flower basket overflowing with geraniums in the other.

“Connie said I would find you here,” he said. He held up the bottle of champagne. “This is to celebrate your first day in your new house. And this”—he held up the flower basket—“is just for the hell of it.”

He was dressed in typical Palm Beach style: a white guayabera shirt and tan chinos with sandals.

Charlotte kissed him, and was surprised again at how compact he felt by comparison with the other men she had known, most of whom had been bigger. Then she set the flower basket down in the courtyard and led him through the pecky cypress gate to the swimming pool, which was the only place on the grounds, apart from the slat house, where there were still any chairs.

Next she went back into the house to look for glasses, returning a moment later with two of the antique silver mint julep cups in which Paul had served the rum cocktails on the night of his dinner party. She had found them among the jelly jars at the back of a kitchen cupboard, where they had apparently been overlooked by the movers.

“Well,” Eddie said, once they were settled in with their cups of champagne. “Here we are.” He looked around at the lush tropical vegetation surrounding the pool, which made it seem like a natural pool in the rain forest of a tropical paradise.

“Yes,” she agreed, “here we are.”

“I liked the inn at Hadfield. Very picturesque and all that. But I
really
like this,” he said, gazing out at the pool with its colorful Spanish tiles. “You know, I could get used to a life like this.”

“Could you?” Charlotte asked, with her signature arched eyebrow. He looked over at her and smiled. Then he changed the subject.

“What’s happening with the case?” he asked. Charlotte had already told him about René being linked with the murders through the dagger, and that he’d had the cigarette case taken from Paul’s body.

He also knew that René had been seen on the Lake Trail, but he hadn’t yet been filled in on the latest news.

“I talked with Maureen this morning, as a matter of fact,” Charlotte said.

“There weren’t any fingerprints on the dagger that were complete enough to tell anything from, but there
was
blood, and it matched McLean’s. Plus, René’s cleaning woman is willing to testify that she saw the dagger in his apartment.”

“Has he admitted to owning it?”

“To owning it, but not to using it. He says it was stolen from his apartment last year. Naturally he didn’t report the theft. He says he took the dagger from from the body of a Nazi that he killed in the course of blowing up a railroad, just as the clerk at L’Antiquaire Militaire had suggested.”

“What does he say about the cigarette case?”

“That he found it on the beach.”

“He just happened to find a gold-enameled cigarette case that’s worth two hundred grand on the beach?”

“That’s his story. What puzzles me is why he chose to take it out during our interview at Château Albert. I decided that it must have been an act of defiance, that he was saying, Nah, nah. I did it, but you can’t prove it.”

“Of course,” Eddie agreed. “He was flaunting it.”

“I also decided that he’s stuck in a time warp. In some section of his mind, he still thinks that this is wartime, and that he’s a
résistant
who can murder the enemy with impunity. I think he’s in for a rude awakening, because the police
can
prove it. Oh! I forgot to mention the footprints.”

“What about them?”

“The castings the police took of the impressions on the beach and at the tree match those from a pair of his shoes. The soles had a distinctive pattern—the shoes had been purchased in France. And there’s another thing: a possible answer to the question of why it took him so long to track down his victims.”

“What is it?”

“We don’t know for sure, of course, since he’s not admitting to anything. But Maureen’s connection at the CIA speculated that he might have tracked the
Normandie
saboteurs down through
Abwehr
archives that were only made available to the public after the Berlin Wall came down two years ago last November.”

“Is that how he found out that Roehrer had settled in this country under the William Roe alias—through the
Abwehr
archives?”

“Maybe. He did travel to East Berlin, or what used to be East Berlin, last summer. It might also be how he found out that McLean was the Fox.”

Eddie nodded.

“But I suspect that how he tracked his victims down will remain one of the mysteries of this case. The other mystery is the event that set us on the path toward the solution in the first place, namely a dormant memory that suddenly pushed its way to the surface after being buried for fifty years.”

“That’s not a mystery. That was simply a matter of the circumstances being re-created exactly as they were on the
Normandie
. Speaking of circumstances,” Eddie said, “I have something for you.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a small blue leather box with “Feder & Co.” embossed in gold on the lid.

“I have the feeling that I’ve seen a box like this before,” Charlotte said as he handed it to her.

She slowly opened the lid. Inside was a pair of earrings in the shape of seashells. They were made of gold, enameled to look like mother-of-pearl, and they were inset with tiny diamonds, rubies, and sapphires.

“Oh, Eddie!” she said, gazing at the lovely earrings. She had wanted to buy a piece of jewelry to commemorate her reunion with Eddie, and he had bought one for her. Their minds ran on the same track. It was an encouraging sign.

With her forefinger, she slowly traced the path of the delicate gold braid that wound itself around the body of the shell, like the coil of brown on the tulip shell she had found on the beach. “A spiral,” she said.

“Yes,” said Eddie. “Always moving onward and upward, but always coming back to the same place.”

“Kind of like us,” she said.

15

Charlotte was sitting at a table at the Big Band Hall of Fame Ball, wearing her black sheath and her seashell earrings from Eddie. On the table in front of her was the
minaudière
that Marianne had given her, with its elegant lacquered compartments for comb, lipstick, and mirror—the souvenir of what was supposed to have been a restful vacation in Palm Beach. She was seated with Connie and Spalding and the honorary chairmen of the ball, who included several actors with whom she had been trading notes. The Venetian Ballroom looked quite different than it had when she had last been here. The crystal chandeliers blazed, the round wooden tables had been dressed up with pink tablecloths and centerpieces of pink roses, and the room was filled with Palm Beach’s most influential residents, twelve hundred in number, each of whom had paid $300 for the privilege of being present at the induction of Eddie Norwood into the Big Band Hall of Fame. On stage the music stands for Eddie’s sixteen-man orchestra each proclaimed “Eddie Norwood and His All-American Band,” in glittering gold script. Seated behind the stands, the members of Eddie’s band, wearing white dinner jackets and red plaid ties with matching cummerbunds, awaited the nod from their leader, who was being lauded as the “King of Dancebandom” by the Palm Beach society matron who served as general chairman of the ball. Above the stage, a banner announced the theme of the evening, which was New York’s Rainbow Room, the legendary club at the top of the NBC Building, which had been the site of Eddie’s radio broadcasts for so many years. If for only an evening, the Breakers’ Venetian Ballroom would be “sixty-five stories nearer the stars,” as the slogan of Eddie’s radio show had proclaimed.

After an address from the mayor, the chairman of the ball delivered a speech in which she likened the country’s big band musicians to Picasso and Rembrandt, and then went on to describe the plans for the Big Band Hall of Fame Museum in West Palm Beach, which would include—in addition to thousands of photos and pages of sheet music—such memorabilia as Jimmy Dorsey’s trombone, Benny Goodman’s clarinet, the mirrored ball that once hung in New York’s Roseland Ballroom, Xavier Cugat’s music stand, and an autographed baton from Eddie Norwood. Finally, she briefly described Eddie’s career, as a prelude to presenting him with an award for lifetime achievement.

The scenario was very familiar to Charlotte. Having worked so hard to get where she was, she was reluctant to be ungracious about such awards, but in fact it seemed as if a week hardly passed these days without her being honored by someone or other. As she was sure was also the case for Eddie. And so it was that her attention drifted off to the question of what to do about the kitchen at Château en Espagne before she realized that Eddie had already been presented with his award, and was now mounting the stage.

He was wearing a white tail coat and a red bow tie. The white of his coat accentuated the white of his hair and his deep tan. He looked wonderful. It was no mystery why he had been such a success for so many years; he had that glow that the Hollywood moguls called “presence.”