Murder Under the Palms (11 page)

After the jewelry show, Spalding suggested that they leave, and since Charlotte and Dede had already been questioned, they did. Charlotte went up to the stage and briefly said goodbye to Eddie. Then they thanked Lydia and went back downstairs, where Connie and Spalding provided the policeman posted at the door with their names and address, following which a valet in a SS
Normandie
sailor cap promptly fetched their Cadillac. Within minutes they were heading uptown on South Ocean Boulevard.

As they headed back to midtown, Charlotte’s mind was swirling with questions, foremost among them being: Had Marianne killed Paul in a jealous rage? And then: Were those scratches on Paul’s face from Marianne’s fingernails? How could she have stabbed him if she was carrying her shoes? Charlotte found it difficult to imagine a scenario in which Marianne had set down her shoes, pulled out a dagger, and stabbed Paul, all without his taking notice. How would she have concealed the weapon? The
minaudière
wasn’t big enough to hide a dagger with a six-inch blade. Why didn’t she come back to the party? Had any of the guests who wandered out to the beach witnessed the murder? Or had any of them seen anyone suspicious in the vicinity? And where was Marianne now? Though the police had been busy all evening, they had yet to interview the most important witness: Marianne Montgomery.

“Okay, Miss Diana, let’s have it,” said Spalding sternly the minute they were underway, using the name he had called Dede as a child. “What happened out there?” he asked, looking up at her through the rearview mirror. “I want every detail, minute by minute.”

Dede started to sob, and Spalding pulled out a handkerchief and passed it to her.

After a minute, she began to speak: “I was with Paul out on the patio. We were talking about the preservation association. Our financial problems. I had seen Mother standing on the deck, and I knew she was watching us. That’s when I asked Paul if he wanted to walk out to the beach.”

She sat for a minute, the delicate diamond choker gleaming in the light from the headlamps of the oncoming traffic. “I knew it would piss her off. That’s why I did it: to provoke her.” She sobbed again. “She had been so obnoxious the night before at Paul’s.”

Connie looked at her sympathetically in acknowledgment of Marianne’s bad behavior and reached over the seat to grasp her hand.

“I wanted to get back at her, to make her think that there really
was
something between Paul and me, which there wasn’t. The idea is ridiculous: he’s old enough to be my grandfather!”

“Not quite
that
old,” Spalding observed.

Dede forced a smile. “Anyway, we stood on the terrace by the cabana for a few minutes, and then we went down the steps to the beach. We were walking along the beach—again, we were talking about the preservation association—when I heard someone coming up behind us.” She looked out at the ocean for a moment and then back at her grandparents. “When I turned around, I saw that it was Mother. I knew there would be trouble; I had been asking for trouble. She grabbed Paul by the arm and spun him around.”

Connie shook her head in disapproval.

“Was she carrying anything in either of her hands?” Charlotte asked. “Like her shoes, for instance?”

“Yes,” Dede replied. “She
was
carrying her shoes. In her left hand.” She looked at Connie. “Nana, do you think she could be taking anything?”

“Like drugs, you mean?” Connie asked.

Dede nodded.

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s just that she’s been acting so crazy lately. I know she’s been under a lot of stress with this jewelry debut, but she’s been under a lot of stress before and she’s only acted mildly crazy.”

“It could be,” Connie acknowledged. “I gave up long ago trying to account for my daughter’s behavior.”

Spalding turned his head toward Dede. “I’ve been saying that for a long time, but your grandmother refuses to acknowledge that her darling daughter could be a druggie,” he said. “I know she takes pills by the handful.”

“Nana, she was like a … a pit bull,” Dede said. “She stood there with her fist clenched, staring him in the eye, snarling at him about …” Tears started rolling down Dede’s cheeks, and she wiped them away with Spalding’s handkerchief. “I don’t even want to tell you what she was saying—it was so sick.”

“What then?” asked Connie.

“She ordered me to go back. She was screaming at me.”

“And did you?” asked Charlotte.

Dede nodded. “That was the last I saw of them.”

“Do you think we should contact our lawyer, dear?” asked Connie, who by now was an old hand at getting Marianne out of trouble.

“Let’s wait,” said Spalding.

“I can’t believe Mother would have stabbed him,” Dede said. “Poor Paul,” she added, and started bawling again. “If only I hadn’t set out to provoke her, none of this would have happened.”

Charlotte didn’t think Marianne had killed him either, but the truth was, with Marianne, you never knew.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions, Dede,” said Spalding. “Just because they had an argument doesn’t mean that your mother is a murderer. For one thing, she doesn’t carry a dagger around with her.”

Dede looked at him hopefully. “You mean, it might have been someone else? But then, why didn’t she come back to the party?”

“She was upset, that’s all. Think about it. If she really was the murderer, don’t you think she would have come back to the party in order not to attract attention to herself?”

He had a point, Charlotte thought.

“I’m sure she just walked home,” Spalding went on. “We’ll talk to her when we get back and find out what happened. Maybe it was a robbery. Remember that couple who were held up on the beach last year, Connie?”

“What happened?” Charlotte asked.

“They were held up at gunpoint. They’d been walking home from a party. The wife’s diamond ring was taken, and some other jewelry. I don’t think the police ever solved that case, did they?”

Connie shook her head.

Remembering the
minaudière
lying in the sand, Charlotte hoped for Marianne’s sake that that was what had happened.

It was eleven-thirty when Spalding and Connie pulled into the circular driveway in front of Charlotte’s hotel. The doorman opened the door for her, and she walked into the old-fashioned lobby with its beamed ceiling, crisp black-and-white tiled floor, and yellow walls, where she was greeted by a young, tanned, handsome bellboy. She paused in the lobby for a moment, and then, lured by the music of a jazz combo, headed toward the hotel’s Rio Bar at the far end of the lobby. She wasn’t sleepy, and felt as if she needed to sit quietly for a few minutes before she went to bed, to sort out the evening’s events in her mind. A maitre d’ greeted her at the door and escorted her to a banquette at a small table at the back, where a waiter promptly appeared to take her order. When she explained that she only wanted to listen to the music, he graciously brought her a glass of ice water. Putting the murder out of her mind for the moment, she sat quietly, sipping her glass of ice water and studying the handsome, well-dressed, older couples who were swirling around the tiny dance floor. Watching them, Charlotte decided that the element that most characterized this island paradise was the quality of grace—grace, in the sense of acceptance. Though there was still quite a bit of inherited money, there was less than in the past, and most of the inhabitants of Palm Beach were people who had worked hard all their lives to fulfill their dreams, achievers who had reached the pinnacle of their field. At peace with themselves and with all the comfortable accoutrements that went along with wealth, they were at last free to quietly enjoy what time was left to them. It seemed as if the marvelous climate, the elegant buildings, and the tanned, handsome young men who were always standing at the ready—to open a door or fetch a glass of ice water—were there to pay homage to this quality of grace that seemed to hover in the gentle tropical air like a magic spell.

It was a spell that was quietly working its magic on Charlotte, like “that old black magic” of the song the jazz combo was playing. She had sensed that the island was casting its spell on Eddie too. They had both worked hard all their lives and they had both reached the top, in part because they had outlasted everyone else. Were they ready now to sit back and quietly enjoy their place in the sun? Eddie had admitted to being a different person now. They wouldn’t have gotten along back then, he had implied. They had both been too driven. She thought back to those four short days on the
Normandie
: their lives had been all ahead of them then. For Eddie, a career as one of the most famous bandleaders of his day. For Charlotte, dozens of movies, four Oscars. And now it was all behind them. Or mostly behind them. Charlotte wasn’t ready to throw in the towel quite yet. Had Eddie also been implying that they
would
get along now? she wondered. She was unsettled at how easy it was for her to imagine that it was she and Eddie swirling around that dance floor.

She had left the party without really speaking to him again; he’d been too busy with his band. The band had played on, despite the corpse on the beach. Charlotte thought of those shoes: the elegant patent leather tuxedo pumps buried in the sand. Handmade by the looks of it, and Paul’s long, thin fingers. His noble profile, with its high-bridged nose, still so handsome even at his age. His elegant house, and his gracious manners. Most of all, his talent. A creative life that it had taken decades to nurture, obliterated in a second.

It made her sick.

6

She had dreamed that night of the
Normandie
. The ship was speeding through the misty gray waters of the North Atlantic, the threatening silhouette of the
Bremen
lurking off her port side. The
Bremen
’s immense red flag rippled in the breeze, a black swastika circled in white at its center. René had been in the dream. One by one, he’d summoned the passengers into a small stateroom, but instead of being interviewed by the police, they’d been individually fitted for life vests. Clamping a row of pins between his lips, he had fussed and fretted over every detail of the fit, like an overbearing French couturier. Then they had all assembled on the deck to model their vests. One by one they’d pranced down the promenade, twisting and turning like fashion models on a Paris runway. Dede was there, and Lydia, and the couple from the preservation association. Charlotte had been asked to be the mistress of ceremonies, but she found herself in the unfamiliar position of being at a loss for words. Despite the customized fittings, all the life vests looked the same to her. Except for Marianne’s. Her life vest was enormous: it pushed up under her pointed chin and reached down almost to her knees. It was so thick at the sides that her arms stood almost straight out. With her straight black bangs and blunt-cut hairstyle, she looked like a five-year-old in an overstuffed Halloween pumpkin costume.

Usually Charlotte didn’t remember her dreams, but she’d awakened that morning with this one fresh in her memory. She was sitting at the small table in the bay window of her sitting room, pondering its significance and dining on a breakfast of a boiled egg and toast with marmalade when she was interrupted by the ring of the telephone.

It was Connie Smith.

“I need to see you,” she announced without even bothering to say hello. Her voice had an hysterical edge.

“Where are you?” Charlotte asked.

“At the front desk.”

A few minutes later her distraught friend was sitting on the other side of the table, telling her story. It seemed that the police had come by the Smiths’ house a short while before and asked that Marianne accompany them to the police station for questioning.

Which hardly meant that Marianne was about to be charged with murder, but Connie didn’t know that. Charlotte poured her a cup of coffee from the pot on her breakfast tray.

“They also talked to her late last night, but this time they seemed more serious,” Connie said. “Charlotte, you have connections with the police,” she went on, referring to past episodes in which Charlotte had helped in murder investigations. “Can’t you do something?” she pleaded.

“What’s Marianne’s account of what happened?”

“She admits to arguing with Paul. She even admits to scratching his face, which is when she thinks she dropped the
minaudière
, but she denies murdering him. It was just as Spalding said: she climbed back up the steps to our cabana and headed home. She said he was smoking a cigarette when she left him.”

“Why didn’t she go back to Villa Normandie?” Despite Spalding’s explanation, this struck Charlotte as the most puzzling aspect of Marianne’s behavior. It seemed to her that the designer of the jewelry collection would have wanted to be present at its debut.

“She said she was plotting,” Connie replied as she added cream and sugar to her coffee.

“Plotting?”

“Knowing that her relationship with Paul was over, she was trying to figure out how to divvy up the business to her advantage.”

For Marianne not to return because she was upset over a quarrel was a scenario that Charlotte found hard to accept, but for her not to return because she was trying to make sure she got the best of a business deal—now
that
made sense. “Have you called your lawyer?” she asked.

“Marianne insisted on her own lawyer. But he’s in New York. He won’t be able to get down here until tomorrow. I was hoping you could smooth things over. I’m worried,” Connie said. “Especially after … you know.”

“You know” was the murder in Newport, four years earlier, of Shawn Hendrickson, one of Marianne’s boyfriends. Marianne had also been a suspect in that case. Charlotte had been called to the rescue then as well and had succeeded in identifying the real culprit.

Tears had welled up in Connie’s cornflower-blue eyes.

“Okay, I’ll go down there and see what’s going on,” Charlotte agreed. She swallowed the last of her coffee and set down her cup. “But if I get the sense that Marianne’s in real trouble, I want you to call your lawyer. Pronto.”

Connie nodded.