Murder Under the Palms

by Stefanie Matteson

  She was a far cry from the gawky teenager of only a few years ago whose taste in fashion had leaned toward the streetwalker look: skintight shorts and skimpy halter tops worn with extra high heels. In some ways, Dede now had a better fashion sense than her mother, the famous designer. At least she had a more conservative fashion sense. Nowadays she always looked elegant and appropriately dressed, unlike Marianne, whose get-ups often ran to ridiculous extremes.

  Catching sight of Charlotte, Dede headed down the path and joined her in front of a bed of begonias. “This is one of my favorite places in Palm Beach,” she said after they had exchanged greetings. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

  Charlotte checked her watch. The funeral service wouldn’t begin for fifteen minutes. “Yes,” she replied. “Would you like to sit down?” she asked, nodding at a nearby garden bench.

  “I was going to call you today,” Dede said once they were seated. She sat quietly, her fingers fidgeting in her lap. “I wanted to thank you for getting Mother out of trouble.”

  Charlotte waved a dismissive hand. “They would have learned eventually that the cigarette case was missing.”

  “Nana said the police now think that the killer might have taken the cigarette case in order to make it look like the murder was committed during the course of a jewel theft.”

  “That’s one theory,” Charlotte said.

  Dede lifted her veil and looked at Charlotte with her big, pale green eyes with their flecks of gold, “I think I know who might have murdered Paul,” she said softly. “I’ve found something out.”

  Charlotte was stunned. “What is it?” she asked.

  Dede let out a deep sigh. “I didn’t know who to tell, and I didn’t know if what I found out warranted my going to the police.” She rested her forehead in her hands. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  After a moment, she continued. “It’s about the preservation association. As you know, Paul was the treasurer. It was a volunteer position. It’s mostly a volunteer organization: the only paid employees are Lydia and myself and a secretary. Though we contract out a lot of work.”

  Where on earth was this leading? Charlotte wondered.

  “But Paul worked at it very hard. He was very devoted to the organization. He hated to see the old Spanish colonial gems being torn down, as we all do. It was like a part-time job for him. He spent, I’d say, twenty hours or more a week at it. He kept a desk at the association’s office.”

  A few people had wandered into the garden and were strolling down the path. Dede waited for them to pass and then went on.

  “After his death I took it upon myself to clean out his office space. I was the natural one to do it. The estate lawyers had asked me to take care of the house. They’re Nana and Spalding’s lawyers too, so I knew them. I figured I’d move everything over there, and let the lawyers figure out what to do with it.”

  “Are you still living at the guest house?”

  “For the time being. I’m taking care of Lady Astor, who I guess I’ve inherited. I don’t know what will happen to the house. I don’t think Paul has any heirs in this country. He does have a great-nephew in Paris, who manages the Feder store there. I imagine the house will be sold eventually.”

  Charlotte nodded. The fantasy passed briefly through her mind that she might be the one to buy it.

  “Also, we shared an office,” Dede said, going on with her story, “and I didn’t want to keep looking at his things. He collected lead soldiers, and he had one on his desk, a knight of Muscovy. He specialized in pre-Revolutionary Russian soldiers. I was packing it up in its box when it became detached from its base.” She paused before continuing. “Hidden in the base was a little key. I had been wanting to clean his files out, but the cabinet they were in was locked. When the key fell out, I recognized it as a filing cabinet key and tried it on the locked cabinet.”

  “And it worked?” Charlotte prompted.

  Dede nodded. “The cabinet was full of files. I was at the office till all hours last night trying to figure out what they were about.”

  Charlotte noticed there were black circles under her eyes.

  “But eventually I did. He was building a case against Lydia Collins.” She looked over at Charlotte. “For embezzlement.”

  “Embezzlement!”

  Dede nodded. “She’s been embezzling money from the preservation association. As near as I can tell, she’s embezzled about three hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Whew!” exclaimed Charlotte, shaking her head.

  “That’s what I said.” A half-smile crossed Dede’s anxious face. “But my language wasn’t as polite.”

  “Over how long a period?”

  “About two and a half years. Maybe it’s even more money that that: it looked as if Paul was still assembling the case against her.”

  “I thought she had money. The widow of the bumper king and all that.”

  “That’s what I thought too. And maybe she did have money—once. But money has a way of evaporating around here: it’s a very expensive lifestyle to keep up. I know a lot of trust fund babies who’re suffering from chronic cases of ‘the shorts.’ Including myself,” she added, with a rueful smile.

  “But still …” Charlotte mused. “To steal three hundred thousand dollars!”

  “She wanted to keep up with the Joneses. Socially insecure people like Lydia are desperate to be accepted, but it takes more than just money. You also need to have social cachet. I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I think Lydia saw Villa Normandie as giving her that something extra.”

  “Her vehicle for climbing the social ladder,” said Charlotte, who was always amazed at the lengths to which people would go for social acceptance.

  “Exactly,” Dede said. “That’s how she got her job at the preservation association, which is a status job. She was hired because of what she’d done to restore Villa Norman-die. Villa Normandie was out of the ordinary. Anybody can have fine French furniture …”

  Anybody in Palm Beach, that is, Charlotte thought.

  “… but only Lydia Collins had original art from the Normandie and the ideal art deco house to display it in.”

  “And you think the money went into the house?” Charlotte asked.

  “I’m sure of it. She spent a fortune on that place.”

  “Why hasn’t anyone discovered her crime before this?”

  “She was very clever about it. She knew what she was doing. The contributions would come in, and she would funnel them into her personal accounts at banks where the association also had accounts. I felt sick when I finally figured it out—sick at her greed and selfishness.”

  Charlotte was impressed that Dede had figured it out. It struck her that she had her mother’s smarts and her grandmother’s charm, without the brashness of the former or the flakiness of the latter.

  “Weren’t there outside auditors?”

  “Yes, but she was the one who prepared the books. Her title is Executive Officer for Administration and Finance. She wears two hats: administrator and finance officer. It’s like what they say about computers: garbage in, garbage out. If the information she gave them was phony, how were they to know?”

  “But something tipped Paul off.”

  “Yes. As I said, she was very clever. She worked with small amounts in order not to attract suspicion. She kept the money moving from account to account. Until last October, when she transferred a hundred thousand dollars directly from one of the association’s operating accounts into one of her own.”

  Charlotte raised an eyebrow in her signature expression.

  “It was as if she wanted to get caught,” Dede said.

  “What date was that?”

  “October ninth. I’m sure that transfer is what tipped Paul off. In retrospect, it all makes sense. We’ve had so many successful fundraising functions, plus we get a lot of donations and bequests. I could never understand why we were always short.”

  “Things like that always make sense in retrospect
,” Charlotte said.

  “I had the feeling something wasn’t right, but who was I to raise questions? It was my first real job.”

  “Have you told anyone about this?”

  Dede shook her head. “I didn’t want to upset Nana, and I haven’t been on good enough terms with Mother lately to confide in her.”

  “I wonder why Paul kept his files at the office, where she might come across him working on them, instead of at his home.”

  “There was a lot of work involved. Asset tracing, they call it. Figuring out where the money went. I imagine it was easier for him to work on the records there, where they were kept, when Lydia wasn’t around, than to risk her seeing him carrying them in and out.”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “But now I’m thinking that maybe she did find out, either indirectly or directly. He may simply have confronted her with the evidence.”

  “Whereupon she decided to kill him.”

  Dede nodded. “I don’t think Lydia could have done it herself. I don’t think she had the opportunity to leave the party. But she could have set him up to be murdered by a hired killer.” She looked over at Charlotte. “It’s a motive, anyway.”

  “A very good one,” Charlotte said. “Do you have any thoughts about where you want to take it from here?”

  “I’m leaving that up to you.” For the first time that morning, a smile broke out on Dede’s lovely face.

  “Thanks,” Charlotte said.

  What she would do with Dede’s findings, Charlotte decided as the two of them headed back to the church, was turn them over to the police. Whether or not Lydia had set Paul up to be murdered, she had committed a felony and stood to be prosecuted for that. Charlotte had recently read in the newspapers about the head of a national charitable organization who had been caught with his hand in the till to the tune of close to a million dollars and had been sentenced to six years in prison, a sentence that was reported as being unusually harsh for a white collar criminal. But she guessed that Lydia could expect to spend at least some time in jail. Actually, Charlotte was surprised there wasn’t more embezzlement in a place like Palm Beach, where charitable giving was a way of life. Maybe there was, but nobody was aware of it. Connie had told her that over a hundred charitable organizations had held fundraising events in Palm Beach last season—so many that there was even a catalogue of them. Charlotte suspected that many of these were run just as the preservation association was: by a handful of paid employees with access to large amounts of money, and only a part-time board of volunteers to oversee them. What’s more, she suspected that few of those volunteers possessed Paul’s dedication and financial acumen.

  Arriving at the entrance to the church with Dede a few minutes later, Charlotte noticed that the street was now lined with cars. She had once read that Palm Beach was the Rolls Royce capital of the world, and there were now half a dozen of the luxury automobiles parked in front, with a couple of Jaguars and Bentleys thrown in for good measure among the more ordinary Cadillacs and Mercedes Benzes. They were greeted at the door by an usher who Charlotte recognized as the young man to whom she had returned her necklace at Feder Jewelers. He escorted Charlotte and Dede to seats about midway down the long, soaring nave. The church was rapidly filling up. Paul may not have had any immediate family, but it looked as if the entire Palm Beach social community had turned out to see him to his maker.

  The beautiful church was filled with the best-dressed group of funeral attendees Charlotte had ever encountered. In most places, Charlotte’s penchant for hats would have been considered something of an affection, though one that was easily forgiven in an actress, but it was the norm in Palm Beach. The millinery industry was doing a land-office business here. Hardly a woman in the congregation was without a black hat, and the styles reflected the many ways in which one could acquire money: the older woman immediately in front of Charlotte wore a shabby velveteen number that would have been outdated in 1956. Undoubtedly, she was a bastion of the old guard. Then there were the safely stylish picture hats of the newly rich, and the daring ventures of the self-consciously arty, the most outstanding example of which was the foot-high turban worthy of Carmen Miranda that was worn by Marianne. Finally there were the timeless classics, a category to which Charlotte’s own signature fedora belonged. One of the few hat-less attendees was Maureen White, who was recognizable from the back by her starched denim shirt and long, honey-colored braid.

  The black cloche worn by the newest suspect, Lydia Collins, fell somewhere between categories four and three: on the classic side, befitting her position as a community leader, but with the artistic flair expected of a woman who had amassed an outstanding collection of art deco works. The admiral stood beside her: tall, handsome, patrician. Quite a catch for the widow of the bumper king. Seeing him, Charlotte thought back to the night of the benefit. She hadn’t seen Lydia go out to the beach, and, like Dede, she had concluded that it would have been virtually impossible for her to have left, but she had seen the admiral go out there, alone. Could he have killed Paul on Lydia’s behalf? It struck Charlotte as unlikely. Admirals didn’t do that sort of thing. Unless their relationship was a grand passion, which she doubted. But she made a mental note to check it out. Admiral-type people were very good at concealing grand passions. Perhaps he himself was in on the scam. Which was a possibility, albeit remote. But who would have thought Lydia to be an embezzler? Charlotte made another mental note, to check out the admiral’s financial situation.

  The funeral service had begun. Unfortunately, it was a rite with which Charlotte was becoming increasingly familiar. So many of her old friends seemed to be dying off: a great era in Hollywood history was marching to its grave.

  The casket was like Paul himself: polished and elegant. It was borne by the usher who had escorted Charlotte to her seat and five other young men whom she presumed to be affliliated with Paul’s Worth Avenue store. As the pallbearers slowly carried the coffin up the aisle behind the priest, Charlotte found herself pondering that single $100,000 diversion of funds: a large and evident withdrawal following a series of small and well-concealed withdrawals. And probably the withdrawal that had tipped Paul off. Why would Lydia have risked detection by breaking her pattern? It was possible that she had simply become more brazen as time went on, that she had been driven by that feeling of infallibility that was said to affect criminals who go without getting caught. Or she could have been desperate for the money. If the latter were the case, Charlotte could think of only two things for which Lydia would have desperately needed money. One was art and the other was to pay a hit man.

  If Paul had indeed been killed because he’d discovered that Lydia was embezzling association funds, and if neither Lydia nor the admiral had killed him, that meant that he had to have been murdered by a hired killer. Also, the neatness of the killing would seem to point to a professional: a direct-in-and-out thrust, Maureen had said. No defense wounds. Charlotte had no idea how much a hit cost, but she suspected that the price was higher in Palm Beach. There was no reason why a hired assassin should be exempt from the soak-the-rich philosophy espoused by the providers of other services to Palm Beach residents. She did know that she’d always been amazed at how cheap a hit was when she’d read about them in the newspapers. She would have thought the price of taking a human life to be in the millions, and instead it often ended up being only twenty or thirty thousand. Triple the going rate for Palm Beach, and the price would be, say, almost $100,000—which was the amount that had been diverted in that final transaction.

  Thinking it unseemly to be considering the economics of a professional killing while a funeral service was in progress, Charlotte turned her attention to the rites, which included a choir singing the Psalms and the Canticles. Like everything else about Palm Beach, the service was tasteful and elegant.

  Fifty minutes later, the service was concluded, and Paul was received into the glorious company of the saints. After exiting the church, Charlotte waited for Maureen, who em
erged a few minutes later.

  After informing the detective that there was a new development, she made an appointment with her for later that afternoon.

  She had put off speaking with Maureen immediately because there was something she wanted to look into first. She had a friend who was fond of quoting in Latin the principle known as Occam’s Razor. Charlotte often teased him about his habit of quoting Latin axioms, suggesting that it was the only use he could find for his Ivy League education in the classics, apart from reading the inscriptions on the pediments of banks and public buildings. But she found Occam’s Razor helpful to bear in mind. She didn’t remember the Latin, but the translation was “all unnecessary constituents in the subject being analyzed should be eliminated.” In the subject currently under consideration, there was one constituent that might very well be unnecessary: the notion that Lydia had used the $100,000 she had embezzled from the preservation association to buy art. And Charlotte knew how it could easily be eliminated.

  7

  After the funeral Charlotte headed over to the Society of the Four Arts, which was on Royal Palm Way, Palm Beach’s equivalent of Forty-second Street. She had read in a tourist brochure that Addison Mizner had left his collection of art books to the society’s library. Over the years the society had added to the collection, with the result that it now had one of the finest collections of art books in the country. The library was located in a Spanish-style building in a complex overlooking Lake Worth. She entered through a triple-arched loggia flanked by a pair of panther sculptures. The inside wall of the loggia was adorned with a mural of maidens in classical dress symbolizing Art, Drama, Literature, and Music. Once inside, she was directed by a librarian to a revolving magazine rack at one side of the room. There she found exactly what she was looking for: a collection of recent auction catalogues from Christie’s Park Avenue salesroom.