Murder Under the Palms

by Stefanie Matteson

  Putting the thought out of her head for the moment, she headed toward a gate in the stucco wall of the courtyard, over which snaked a lush bougainvillea in full flower. Like the front door, the door in the gate was made out of the native pecky cypress, which had aged to a silver sheen. “I think we get to Dede’s through here,” she said.

  “No security system?” asked Eddie.

  “There’s one for the house, but none for the grounds, or at least there wasn’t when I was here with Connie and Spalding for dinner. Palm Beach has a low crime rate; it’s hard for burglars to get off the island without getting caught.”

  Opening the gate, they found themselves at the pool. Like the rest of the house, the pool was just right. Lined with colorful Spanish tiles and surrounded by lush vegetation, it was as inviting as a natural pool in the rain forest of a tropical paradise.

  As Charlotte surveyed their jungly surroundings, it struck her why she was drawn to this life. It was because the elaborate social ritual offered a camouflage that shielded one from the outside world as thoroughly as the lush vegetation shielded Château en Espagne from the street. By living amid it, but not partaking of it, she could be left to live her life in peace and quiet. There was something fundamentally soothing about the endless round of charity benefits—the same people doing the same things over and over again. They were like bake sales on a grander scale: inflated to monstrous proportions, but still basically small-town at heart.

  She could enjoy it, that was, as long as she wasn’t the one who had to bake the cookies. She had already gone that route out in Minneapolis.

  Skirting the pool, they followed a path through a garden of citrus trees hung with pots of orchid plants, and emerged at the guest cottage at the back of the house. It was a small two-story stucco structure with a latticework-enclosed veranda that was pierced with Moorish arches and blanketed with flame vines. Passing under one of the arches, they rang the doorbell.

  Dede answered the door.

  “Aunt Charlotte!” she exclaimed, kissing her on the cheek. “What a surprise! And Mr. Norwood,” she added, reaching out to shake Eddie’s hand. “Please, come in.”

  She was dressed in a flowing, caftanlike dress that went perfectly with the decor, which was Moorish in style, with low couches covered in exotic fabrics and heaped with pillows, and tables of polished brass. Ornate carved screens over the windows created the darkened atmosphere of a seraglio.

  “I feel like I’m in Fez,” Charlotte said.

  “The woman who owned the house before Paul decorated the guest cottage like this,” Dede explained. “I just stuck with the style. I like it very much. It’s well-suited to the climate.”

  “I’m glad we found you in,” Charlotte said. “I’m sorry we didn’t call first, but we were on our way back from Clearwater, and we thought we’d drop in to see if you were here.”

  “I just came from the preservation association office,” Dede said. “What were you doing in Clearwater?”

  Charlotte proceeded to tell her the whole story, from the official explanation for the Normandie fire to Eddie’s sudden recovery of his lost memories to their encounter with Roehrer and their theory that Paul was his accomplice. “What do you know about his background?” she asked.

  “Not much,” Dede replied. She nodded at one of the low-slung sofas. “Please,” she said. “Have a seat.” Then she took one herself. “I do know his parents were White Russians. They came to this country from Paris when he was eight.”

  “To Queens?” Charlotte asked as she sat down.

  Dede shrugged. “I have no idea. He went back to Paris after the war to be apprenticed to a relative who was a jeweler. That’s where he learned the jewelry trade. From there, he went to Fouquet.”

  “Ah!” said Charlotte recognizing the name of the famous art deco jewelry designer.

  “Eventually he opened his own shop in Paris, and then one in New York and one in Palm Beach.…” Dede went on.

  There was a long pause.

  “What is it?” asked Charlotte. Dede seemed disturbed by their conversation.

  “It’s just that I can’t believe Paul would do something like this,” she replied, shaking her head in disbelief.” He was so”—she grasped for a word—“solid. The preservation association was just one of the organizations he was active in. He was also the backbone of the civic association.”

  “Maybe that’s why he was so solid,” Charlotte said. “If he was inveigled as a youth into doing something that he later came to regret, perhaps he spent the rest of his life trying to make amends. If he was as upstanding as you say, the lives that were lost and the injuries”—she glanced over at Eddie’s hands—“must have weighed heavily on his conscience.”

  She thought of the mood of his house: quiet, meditative, almost monastic. Maybe his life of public service had been an act of penance. As was, perhaps, his role in Marianne’s Normandie collection. “How old was he?”

  “His obituary said he was sixty-nine.”

  “Which would have made him nineteen in 1942,” Charlotte said. “Young enough to be easily influenced. Especially if his parents were devoted to the Russian fascist cause.”

  “I suppose so,” Dede concurred.

  “We’re pretty sure that Paul Federov and Paul Feder are the same person, but we want to be positive before we go any further,” Charlotte went on. “We were wondering if we could look through his papers. Maybe there are letters or scrapbooks or something.”

  Dede looked hesitant.

  “I know the estate lawyers have entrusted you to look after the house,” Charlotte added in an effort to reassure her. “We would expect you to stay there with us. After all, you don’t want us pinching the silver or anything.”

  Dede smiled. “I don’t see why not,” she said finally, her doubts allayed. She rose, and, after fetching the keys from her tiny kitchen, led them to the door. “His personal papers would all be in his office in the tower.”

  After stopping to greet the dog, Lady Astor, who was tethered to a shelter that had been built against the garage wall, Dede led them into the house and through the kitchen to the tile-paved entry hall.

  “Have you found out yet what’s going to happen to the house?” Charlotte asked as they climbed the stairs to the second floor.

  “Paul’s great-nephew—his brother’s grandson—is coming from Paris to take care of the estate. But from what I understand, he’s not interested in the house. I imagine he’ll put it up for sale. I hope that whoever buys it lets me stay on. I love my little nest.”

  “And the business?” asked Charlotte.

  “The great-nephew is going to take over the business. He already manages the Paris store, so he’s the natural successor.”

  From the head of the stairs, they walked down a hall and then up a spiral staircase punctuated by small, stepped, arched windows, to the tower room. Looking up, Charlotte was intrigued by the view into the center of the narrowing spiral, with a spoked pecky cypress ceiling at its eye.

  Noticing Charlotte’s glance, Dede asked, “Do you know the story of why the exterior tower became a signature of a Mizner design?”

  “No,” Charlotte said. “But I’d like to hear it.”

  Dede proceeded to tell the story: “Mizner had no formal architectural training. As a result, he sometimes made technical mistakes. After forgetting a staircase in one house, he later added it in the form of an exterior tower. People liked it so much that they began asking for a ‘Mizner mistake.’”

  “That’s very interesting,” Charlotte commented.

  “I don’t know if it’s true, but it makes for a good story,” Dede said as they came to the top of Mizner’s mistake.

  If Charlotte had been in love with the house before, she was all the more in love with it once she had seen the tower room. By contrast with the rest of the house, which was sparsely and elegantly furnished, the tower room appeared to be where Paul had actually spent his time.

  It was filled with books,
papers, and comfortable chairs in which to sit and look out at the beautiful view, which was especially so at this time of day. To the north one could see downtown Palm Beach, with its barrel-tiled roofs of various heights and pitches and in various shades of terra cotta; to the south was the clear green expanse of the golf course, to the west the lake and the twinkling skyline of West Palm Beach, and to the east a view of the Atlantic Ocean.

  I could live here, Charlotte thought as she wandered around the room, looking out of the windows.

  “Terrific views,” commented Eddie, who was doing the same.

  “Yes,” Dede agreed. “This is the best part of the house. It’s also where Paul spent his time when he wasn’t at the store. Here’s the lead soldier collection that I was telling Aunt Charlotte about the other day,” she said, leading them over to a glass-fronted bookcase.

  The bookcase appeared to have been custom-made, and stood on legs that raised the shelves to eye level. Dede flipped a switch that illuminated the interior. The soldiers were three or four inches high and rested on wooden pedestals of the kind in which Dede had found the filing cabinet key. They were wonderfully detailed, each with individual expressions. On the front of each pedestal was a label, which was handwritten in an elegant script.

  Leaning over, Charlotte read some of the labels aloud: “Palace Grenadier, 1913; Subaltern, His Imperial Majesty’s Lancer Regiment, 1909–13; Private, His Imperial Majesty’s Cossack Regiment, 1812; Private, Kubordinsky Infantry Regiment, 1914–17.”

  “As you can see, they’re all Russian,” said Dede. “This is the one in which I found the key.” She pointed to a knight of Muscovy mounted on a horse. “I thought it would be best to put it in here with the others.”

  Straightening up, Charlotte’s glance landed on a manikin wearing a military greatcoat and a military cap.

  “A Russian military uniform,” Dede offered by way of explanation. “I think Paul inherited it from his father.”

  Next to the manikin was a small table on which stood a photograph in an elegant frame of chased silver. Charlotte picked it up. It showed a sad-eyed Nicholas tightly clasping his hemophiliac son. He was surrounded by Empress Alexandra and their four daughters.

  “What is it?” asked Eddie, peering over her shoulder.

  “The Russian imperial family,” she said. “I think we’re on the right track,” she added as she set the photograph back down.

  “What are we looking for first?” Dede asked as she scanned the bookshelves lining the room. “Scrapbooks or photograph albums?”

  “Either,” Charlotte replied.

  It took only a minute to find them: a row of old photograph albums with bindings of crumbling leather. “Here they are,” said Charlotte. Pulling three off a shelf, she sat down with one in a leather armchair next to a computer desk and passed the other two to Dede and Eddie.

  The yellowing photographs were clearly mementoes of Paul’s days in Paris as a jeweler’s apprentice. They showed him against familiar Parisian backdrops, usually with a group of young men, sometimes with a girl. He had been strikingly good-looking: tall and straight, with those penetrating gray eyes.

  Charlotte passed her album over to Eddie, who was sitting at the computer. “Is this the man you saw throw the incendiary pencil in the Grand Salon on the Normandie?”

  Eddie studied the photographs for a moment. Then he tapped a scarred forefinger on a photo of Paul sitting on the steps at Montmartre. “Yes,” he said. “That’s him. I remember those eyes.”

  With that confirmation, they continued looking for evidence that would link Paul with the camp in Connecticut.

  “I think I’ve got something,” said Eddie after a few minutes.

  Setting her album aside, Charlotte got up and looked over Eddie’s shoulder at the album that lay open on his lap.

  It was a five-by-seven portrait of the same young man. He sat with his arms folded across his chest, staring out at the camera through pale eyes, his blond hair worn en brosse. He was wearing a dark shirt with long sleeves, each of which bore a red armband with a black swastika in a white circle.

  “It’s Paul!” Dede cried. She studied the photograph, and then said: “He looks like a poster boy for Hitler youth.”

  “Russian fascist youth,” corrected Charlotte. “There was a difference. Though with all the storm trooper garb, it was often hard to tell. I wonder if there are any pictures of the camp?”

  Eddie turned back to the preceding page, where a photo showed a group of youths posed in front of a building.

  “That’s it!” said Charlotte. “That’s High Gate Farm. Those are the chicken coops that Alex converted into barracks for his Russian fascist youth. And that’s the armory,” she said, pointing to the old stone silo that rose in the background. “It’s where Alex stored his guns and his ammunition.”

  “What did he use them for?” asked Dede.

  “To take potshots at photographs of Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Also, to defend himself from the impending Red menace. I wonder if any of these others could be Roehrer.” She pointed to a young man with a full face and a scowling expression. “This looks like him, don’t you think?” she asked Eddie.

  “Could be,” said Eddie. “He has more hair here.”

  Charlotte turned to Dede. “Do you think we could borrow this photograph and the portrait of Paul? We promise to bring them back. Scout’s honor.”

  “I suppose so,” Dede agreed reluctantly. “These photographs wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else now, anyway. Not even to Paul’s great-nephew. Just don’t tell the estate lawyers you took them.”

  As Charlotte proceeded to remove the camp photograph from the cardboard corners with which it was fastened to the page, she noticed that Paul was holding an attack dog on a leash: a German shepherd. The dog strained at the tightly drawn chain as if it were about to lunge at the viewer.

  If there was any doubt left in Charlotte’s mind that Paul Federov and Paul Feder were one and the same, it evaporated in that instant. She remembered the dog in the picture as clearly as if she had seen it the day before.

  “The dog!” she exclaimed, staring at the photograph she now gripped in her hands. “I’d completely forgotten about the dog.”

  “What about the dog?” asked Eddie.

  “Her name was Lady Astor!”

  10

  After leaving Dede’s, Charlotte and Eddie stopped at a travel agency and reserved seats on a flight to Boston for early the next morning. Then they strolled down Worth Avenue to Ta-boó, a legendary Palm Beach bistro, which had once claimed to be, along with Harry’s American Bar in Paris and “21” in Manhattan, one of the three most famous bars in the world. They had devoted the day to work; the evening would be reserved for romance. Having spent much of their time together reminiscing about their affair on the Normandie, they now moved on to fresh territory. They were still in the getting-to-know-you (again) stage of their relationship, and their dinner table conversation was largely a matter of filling in the blanks: finding out what had happened to each other over the course of fifty-three years, what they had sought from life and what life had delivered, and what they expected from here on out. Except for the fact that Eddie didn’t like raw oysters, they discovered that their attitudes toward almost everything were strangely similar. Like Charlotte, Eddie had been a workaholic who had sacrificed his personal life to his career. Like her, he was flirting with the idea of taking it easy: willing at last to let up on the ambition that had propelled him to the top, but wary of what might happen if he did. Like her, he was keenly aware that there wasn’t much time left. They departed around ten when the stares and whispers of the other diners indicated a growing awareness of the couple’s celebrity status and headed down Worth Avenue toward the Colony Hotel.

  The Colony was a small, exclusive hotel at the end of Worth Avenue, a block from the ocean. Its Polo Cocktail Lounge was a Palm Beach institution, a place where the elite met to drink and dance, where people like Charlotte and Eddie
could go and not be stared at. As they entered, Charlotte noticed that a few handsome middle-aged men were standing at the bar, eyeing the single older women. But their approach struck Charlotte as being more restrained and mannerly than that of their sycophantic counterparts in similar enclaves of the rich. She had once asked Connie why Palm Beach seemed to be relatively free of this particularly noxious (at least for single older women who weren’t interested) brand of human parasite. “It’s because Palm Beach is so much more sophisticated,” Connie had told her. “You have to be smart to play the game here. Your typical Miami gigolo wouldn’t make the grade.”

  One representative of this species—a short, tanned, fit-looking man in a raw silk sports jacket—was making a play for a diamond-bedecked woman with a bouffant blond hairdo who was seated at the bar, opposite the door. Charlotte was observing his modus operandi when she realized that the object of his attentions was Lydia Collins. She was dressed in a tight-fitting orange jump suit, and she looked thin, chic, and miserable. Also perhaps, a little drunk. Had Charlotte been a career counselor, she would have advised Lydia’s would-be swain that this would be only a temporary position at best, that for long-term security he had better look elsewhere.

  Eddie and Charlotte were seated by an officious maitre d’ at a table near the bar, overlooking the dance floor. The band appeared to be on break.

  “There was something I wanted to ask you earlier,” Eddie said after they had ordered their drinks. “Why was the dog named Lady Astor?”

  “I presumed it was because of the Cliveden Set,” Charlotte replied. She went on in response to Eddie’s puzzled expression: “They were a group of British fascists led by Lady Astor, who lived at an estate called Cliveden, which is why they were called the Cliveden Set.”

  “I remember now. Nancy Astor. She was an American, from Virginia.”