Murder Under the Palms

by Stefanie Matteson

  Then she spotted Marianne, who was wearing a pleated lavender gown of her own design. The fact that it was very similar to Charlotte’s was no surprise: Marianne was known for her revival of the Fortuny look.

  Marianne stood at the bar, watching Paul and Dede. The black eyebrows beneath the straight bangs of her Cleopatra cut were drawn together in a frown, and her narrow red lips were pressed together. Her fingers tapped a nervous tattoo on the surface of the bar, as if to say, What are we going to do about this?

  Knowing Marianne as she did, Charlotte would be willing to bet that the fur would be flying before the night was out.

  She was watching Paul take a cigarette out of his elegant cigarette case when she spotted Eddie standing near the piano.

  His hair was no longer black; it was now silver-white, but worn in the same close-cropped style. He was a bit heavier than he had been then, but otherwise he still looked much the same. But then, Charlotte had known how he would look from television. He was wearing a white tailcoat and white tie, the same attire she’d first seen him in fifty-three years ago.

  She was trying to decide what her next move should be, when he looked up and met her gaze. Their eyes locked across the crowded room, just as in one of her sappier movies. All that was lacking was a camera lens to shift the rest of the room into soft focus.

  He smiled and then turned to mount the step to the stage. Still moving with the same athletic grace, he leaned over to speak in the ear of the piano player, who rose to relinquish his place. The murmur of conversation died down as the guests turned their attention to the well-known pianist and bandleader.

  Charlotte wasn’t sure that he would remember; it had been so many years. And then the opening refrain came, delivered in Eddie’s mellow, intimate baritone, a little weaker than it had been, but still as smooth and easy: “As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend, ‘Fare thee well.’”

  The song was “Just One of Those Things.”

  He played the piano as he always had: so smoothly, so effortlessly, his long fingers seeming to ripple over the keys, and radiating the charm and showmanship that had endeared him to audiences for half a century. Except that in this case, he was playing to an audience of one.

  Charlotte suddenly was conscious of her feet again. They were no longer on the ground. In fact, they were ten feet in the air. Oh-oh, she said to herself. I thought I was done with men.

  After playing a couple of other old favorites, he stood up and bowed to the audience, which applauded enthusiastically. Then he stepped down off the stage and wove his way through the admiring crowd to Charlotte, removing two flutes of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter along the way.

  Reaching her, he handed her a glass.

  Seeing him standing there before her, Charlotte felt as if fifty-three years had magically evaporated.

  Then he wordlessly took her by the elbow and steered her out to the deck. If the house could be thought of as a ship that was sailing down island, they would have been on the aft sun-deck, looking out over the port side toward the Atlantic. The sight before them was lovely: a generous deep green lawn of Bermuda grass dotted with slender coconut palms whose swaying crowns were silhouetted against the orange-violet sky, in which a perfect crescent moon was suspended like a Christmas ornament.

  For a moment, they stood silently at the railing, looking out, their champagne glasses in hand.

  Charlotte found herself acutely aware of his physical presence. His smell; his size—much smaller than her former husband, who had been a bear of a man; how his skin had aged. She was surprised at how comfortable she felt with him. Nervous, and comfortable at the same time. She remembered how sick she had been on that long-ago voyage—unable to eat, unable to sleep. She had had all the symptoms of seasickness, except that it had been lovesickness. Now that she was back in his presence, she had the feeling that that sickness was about to flare up again, after lying dormant for over half a century.

  He looked up and then turned to her. “All that’s missing are the lifeboats dangling overhead.”

  “It’s true,” she said, as she leaned over the pipe railing, which was strung with canvas, just as on a ship. There were even the cane-seated deck chairs from the Normandie, covered with rust-colored cushions stamped in beige with the CGT logo of the French Line, Compagnie Generate Transatlantique. “And the blackout,” she added.

  The bright light that spilled out onto the deck from the party inside was a far cry from the intimate atmosphere created by the dimness of the enforced blackout on the Normandie’s last voyage.

  He nodded. “But you look just the same.” His long fingers reached up and gently touched the ruby pendant. “You’re wearing the same necklace, too. I remember how beautiful it was. How beautiful you were. Still are,” he added.

  Charlotte explained about its being a reproduction, then said, “I’m even wearing the same dress.”

  He looked down at the dress, and said, in mock exasperation, “Well, you can’t expect me to remember everything.”

  Charlotte smiled. “It’s been hanging in my closet for fifty-three years.”

  He looked at her and then turned to the view. “I wanted to call you, Charlotte. Or to write. I almost did, a number of times. All I thought about was you. But I thought I owed it to Celia to give our marriage one last chance, and I knew that if I saw you …” He looked back at her and his voice trailed off.

  “You don’t have to explain,” she told him. “I didn’t expect to hear from you.” He had made it clear that he felt an obligation to try to work things out with his wife. She smiled at him and then quoted a line from their song: “‘As Columbus announced when he knew he was bounced, It was swell, Isabelle, swell!’”

  “Touché,” he said.

  Below them, the guests had started to drift out onto the patio at the foot of the gangway to smoke. A few could be seen crossing South Ocean Boulevard to the beachfront cabana that went with the house, no doubt to admire the view of the crescent moon over the sea.

  Occasionally a car or a chauffeured limousine would pull into the driveway that ran alongside the tall hedge that screened the property from its neighbor, the headlights illuminating the figures gathered on the patio.

  Standing there, Charlotte remembered how dreamlike that voyage had seemed, the sense of timelessness. Every day the clocks had been stopped for sixty minutes, with the result that one never knew what time it was. Some passengers were on Paris time, some on New York time, some in between.

  And because of that timeless quality, what a shock it had been when they’d sighted the Nantucket lightship in the fog early that last morning. It was an anchored ship that had been painted red as a kind of lighthouse, and the first sign that they had made it home, that the dream was over.

  “‘It was swell, Isabelle,’” said Eddie, still looking at her.

  She nodded and looked into his eyes. She felt that same way now, as if she were on a cruise. The only trouble was that she had no idea what their destination was.

  Thinking back to that last morning, she remembered how relieved the other passengers had been. For them the lightship had meant the end of a dangerous crossing, not the end of a love affair. Six hours later they’d passed the Ambrose light at the entrance to the port of New York, and they were home.

  “We came so close to meeting so many times,” she said. “I always thought that fate must have been conspiring to keep us apart. Remember that awards dinner in Chicago? You left only two minutes before I arrived.”

  He nodded. “I didn’t find out that you’d been there until later,” he said. He deposited their empty champagne glasses on the tray of a passing waiter, then placed his hands on the railing, his fingers tapping out a rhythm.

  She remembered how his fingers had always been tapping, tapping. Even then he’d had music in his soul.

  For a few minutes they watched the guests coming and going below as they exchanged anecdotes about all the times they had just missed one another.
<
br />   Among the guests below were Paul and Dede, who, after lingering for a moment on the patio, headed down the driveway toward the beach. Charlotte watched for a moment until they disappeared down the path that led through a thicket of sea grapes to the cabana on the other side of the road.

  Eddie placed his hand over hers on the railing. “Like ships passing in the night,” he said of their missed encounters.

  Charlotte noticed that there were scars on the back of his right hand and wrist. With the forefinger of her free hand, she gently touched the scar on either side of his sleek gold wristwatch. “A burn?” she asked.

  He pulled up the sleeve of his dress shirt. The scars ran up his forearm almost to his elbow. “They’re from the Normandie. I was very lucky my fingers didn’t get burned. If they had, I might not ever have been able to play again.”

  It took Charlotte a moment to grasp what he was saying. “You were on the Normandie when it burned?” she asked, astonished.

  He nodded. “I enlisted right after Pearl Harbor. I was assigned to the Normandie, or the U.S.S. Lafayette as she was then called. I was in the Grand Salon when the fire broke out. I tried to help put it out. That’s how I got burned.” His expression had turned pensive.

  “Were you badly hurt?” she asked.

  “I almost died,” he replied. “One of the rescue workers stumbled over me in a corridor in tourist-class and hauled me out. I have no idea how I got there. All I remember is feeling my way along those long, dark, smoky corridors, trying to find my way out. I still have nightmares about it. By that time, the ship was listing ten, fifteen degrees. So the corridors were tilted, like in a funhouse. You lost all your bearings.”

  “I remember,” she said.

  He looked at her oddly.

  “I was there,” she explained. “In the crowd on Twelfth Avenue.” She remembered the long lines of ambulances, moving like a line of cabs at a taxi stand through the smoke-filled side streets to the pierhead, and the stretcher bearers running up to them from the smoke-choked pier shed with their cargos of injured men. “I probably saw you being loaded into an ambulance.”

  “Like ships passing in the night,” he commented ironically. “I was in Bellevue for three months,” he continued, shifting his glance away from her. “A fractured skull and second- and third-degree burns. By the time I was well enough to write to you, you were married to Will. Then by the time he died, I was married to my second wife.” He looked back at her. “We could just never seem to connect, could we?”

  “Until now,” she said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Until now.” He paused, and then went on: “Maybe it wouldn’t have worked out. I was too hard-driving, a perfectionist. I saw everything in black and white then; there were no grays. I’ve mellowed,” he added.

  “So have I,” said Charlotte.

  The sound of conversation drifted up from the patio below. Marianne had descended the gangway and appeared to be questioning a couple who were standing off by themselves at the edge of the driveway.

  Charlotte saw the woman raise an arm and point in the direction of the beach. Uh-oh, she thought, then watched as Marianne marched down the driveway, crossed South Ocean Boulevard, and headed down the path to the cabana. A hurricane was brewing, and it wasn’t even the season.

  She returned her attention to Eddie. “Did you go back into active service after that?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Playing in a Navy band.”

  “It’s odd that so many people from the Normandie have ended up in Palm Beach,” she remarked. “I nearly fell over when René Dubord greeted me at the door. He’s been telling me his life story. He was quite bitter about the fire. Now he owns an exclusive private dining club in Palm Beach.”

  “So he told me,” Eddie said. “He looks great, doesn’t he?”

  Charlotte nodded in agreement. She was looking down at the crowd on the patio two stories below. The heads of the men were either bald or white. On second thought, she supposed it wasn’t so odd that so many Normandie alumni had ended up in Palm Beach: the population here was certainly of prewar vintage.

  “There’s another guest here who was on the Normandie, too,” Eddie said. “Our hostess’s escort, Admiral McLean. He was my commanding officer. I’m looking forward to seeing him again.”

  “I met him,” Charlotte said. “An imposing-looking man.”

  “A good officer, too,” Eddie added. “We used to call him Big Jack McLean.”

  “There he is,” she said, looking down at the tall man in the elegant uniform who was headed out toward the beach.

  “He still looks the same,” Eddie said, looking down at the admiral. “He was one of the officers who ended up taking the blame for the fire. But I always thought he was a scapegoat. Yes, the Navy was careless. But it’s hard to dot every i and cross every t when you’re under orders to convert a luxury liner to a troop carrier in five weeks.”

  “René Dubord wouldn’t agree with you. He had nothing good to say about the U.S. Navy.”

  “No. I suppose he wouldn’t.” Eddie turned to her. “And what about you?” he asked. “Are you still married?”

  Of course, Charlotte thought. How would he have known? She had the benefit of Connie’s espionage, but he had no spies working for him. Nor was she such big news anymore that her divorces were splashed all over the newspapers. Or maybe it was that she’d had so many husbands, nobody cared anymore.

  “I was divorced three years ago,” she said. “From my fourth husband. The first and second you knew about. The third was a very brief-lived mistake. And the fourth … The fourth was a mistake too, I guess I’d have to say. But not quite such an ill-considered mistake as the third.”

  “I heard about number three,” he said. “I never heard about number four.”

  “Well, no use in boring you now. It was boring enough for me.” She looked over at Eddie. “I guess I kept trying to find what I had with you.”

  “Did you ever?” he asked.

  “Yes, once. But not with any of my husbands.” The other love of her life had been Linc Crawford, the cowboy actor. Funny how different the two men were. Linc: tall, quiet, serious. Eddie: short, garrulous, charming. “He died in 1957,” she said. “And you?”

  He shrugged. “Celia and I. Well, you know about that. I guess I could say that I loved Mary, my second wife. She died just last spring—in Pasadena, where we lived, where I still live. We were very comfortable with one another. But I didn’t love her the way I loved you.”

  “How long will you be here?” Charlotte asked.

  “Until after the Big Band Hall of Fame Ball. It’s at the Breakers, where I’m staying. I came down here early for rehearsals. I’ll be going out on tour for two and a half months right after the ball, which is on February twenty-second, two weeks from yesterday. Would you like to be my date?”

  “Very much,” she said.

  “I’m playing,” he added. “So it will mean a lot of sitting around.”

  “I don’t mind.” She smiled at him. “I’m sure the music will be good.”

  “Not just good—great,” he said. “But I’d like to see you before that. I have to go away on a little trip, but I’ll be back on Thursday. Would you like to go out to dinner on Thursday night?”

  Charlotte nodded. “René is having a special Normandy night at his private dining club that night,” she said. “Featuring the cuisine of Normandy. My friend Spalding Smith says the club has the best food in Palm Beach. He and his wife Connie are members.”

  “Could he arrange for us to eat there?” Eddie asked.

  “I think so,” said Charlotte. As she smiled at him, she noticed that her heart was pounding.

  Their conversation was interrupted by one of the white-jacketed stewards, who announced that dinner was about to be served. Passing through the sliding glass doors into the Grand Salon, they joined the throng that was drifting into the dining room through the doors on either side of the mural. Like the Grand Salon, the dining room was a
large, high-ceilinged room in which a couple of dozen round tables seating ten or twelve people each had been set up. Though it was a beautiful room, with sliding glass doors that stood open to the deck, it was not decorated in the style of the Normandie. Charlotte could just imagine what the Dupas mural must have cost if its other half was hanging in the dining room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; apparently even the resources of the bumper king were not extensive enough to decorate two large rooms with original Normandie artworks.

  They were greeted at the door by René. “Aha,” he said, his face radiant. “I see that the two lovebirds have met up again after all these years.” He spoke with the appreciation for romance that only a Frenchman could have. “Please come with me.”

  Winding his way among the tables with the authoritative air of a man who is in charge, he led them to the far end of the room, where Connie and Spalding were already seated. “The captain’s table,” he announced, as he pulled out a chair for Charlotte.

  After Charlotte had introduced Eddie to Connie and Spalding, they sat down. The place settings were identical to those on the Normandie, with elegant Lalique stemware and Haviland porcelain, each item bearing the CGT logo of the French line. A silver-plated coupe in the center of each place held an elegant tropical fruit cocktail.

  They were joined a minute later by Lydia, sans Song Song, and the admiral, and by a couple whom their hostess introduced as the president of the preservation association and his wife. Dede arrived a moment later. She looked as if she had been crying, and Charlotte wondered if there had been a scene at the beach.

  Introductions were made all around.

  “Nice to see you again, sir,” said Eddie when Lydia introduced him to the admiral. He went on to reintroduce himself: “Edward A. Norwood, Lieutenant J. G., U.S.S. Lafayette, Third Naval District. Assistant to Commander Jack McLean.”

  The admiral broke into a smile and extended his hand. “I remember you, Norwood. But I never realized that my junior officer and the famous bandleader were one and the same. Well, here we are on the Normandie again.”