Murder Under the Palms

by Stefanie Matteson

  “My God, Spence!” cried Mrs. Weg.

  He looked over at his wife. “I could never tell you, honey,” he said. “For obvious reasons.”

  For a moment, they all sat quietly.

  In retrospect, the idea of McLean as a Nazi spy was ridiculous, Charlotte thought. People like McLean might have looked on Koprosky as a romantic aberration, a kind of condottiere in jackboots instead of egret feathers; they might have tolerated Walter Welland as a deluded eccentric—and they might even have respected Mussolini’s ability to make the trains run on time—but they never would have stooped to stiff-armed salutes and sieg heils.

  “Did you know about this at the time?” Eddie asked.

  Weg shook his head. “He didn’t tell me until after the war. Anyway, as you know, he recruited the two young men from the count’s fascist summer camp and set the sabotage plot into action. His plan was to demonstrate his loyalty to the Nazis by starting the fire, and then to see to it that it was put out. As you know, the Normandie was supposed to be unburnable: it had the most advanced fire-fighting capacity of any ship that ever sailed.”

  “Like the Titanic was unsinkable,” said Eddie.

  Weg nodded. “Actually, the Normandie’s demise was blamed on the fire, but it wasn’t the fire that did it, despite everything that went wrong. The fire was under control by six-thirty. Not as quickly as Jack had hoped, but under control nonetheless. With very little damage, I might add. Had the episode stopped there, she could have been refitted as planned and been carrying troops to Europe within a couple of months. But what he hadn’t counted on was New York politics. Mayor LaGuardia, the city fire department, the private fire tugs. Everybody wanted to be the hero of the hour. They kept pumping and pumping and pumping—they were pumping long after more water was needed—until the ship was so full of water that it just keeled over.”

  Charlotte was reminded of René’s scrapbook with the photo of the dead ship lying on its side in its muddy slip.

  “After that, Jack became a hero to the Nazis,” Weg continued. He had demonstrated his loyalty, in spades. They thought he’d orchestrated events just as they had unfolded. He was posted to Europe as a naval attaché, where he became an intimate in the higher echelons of the Nazi command. I remember him talking about lunching with von Ribbentrop. His mission was to feed the Nazis what the OSS called disinformation, particularly about Allied troop deployments, and in turn to collect whatever useful information he could.”

  “How did he end up confiding in you?” his wife asked.

  “Ah, here we get to the gist of the story,” Weg said. “Even thought the fire was extinguished, it wasn’t put out as quickly as it should have been. The general alarm wasn’t sent in to the central fire station as quickly as it should have been, the ship-to-shore fire alarm box had been temporarily disconnected by the workmen, half the fire extinguishers were out of order, the hydrant couplers didn’t couple with American hoses. It was Murphy’s Law in full force: whatever could go wrong, did.” He looked up at Eddie. “I don’t have to tell you this, Ed.”

  Eddie nodded.

  Weg continued. “A hundred and twenty-something men were injured …”

  Charlotte found her glance shifting to Eddie’s hands.

  “… and there were two fatalities: a man who fell off a ladder and another man who died as a result of his injuries a couple of days later. We were very lucky that that there weren’t more fatalities. Anyway, Jack held himself accountable, and in fact he became the Navy’s scapegoat.”

  “The conclusion of the Attorney General’s investigation was ‘There is no evidence of sabotage. Carelessness has served the enemy with equal effectiveness,’” said Eddie.

  “That’s right,” Weg agreed. “The trouble was, that was Jack’s conclusion too, as well as the conclusion of a Navy Court of Inquiry, which entered a black mark against his name, and which had no idea of his real role in the fire. After the war, he fell into a depression. It was quite severe. His wife asked me to help. That’s when he confided in me. The deaths and the injuries were on his conscience, to say nothing of the loss of the Normandie.”

  “Was that when you took, that fishing trip to Ontario with him?” Weg’s wife asked. “The one just after Joey was born?”

  He nodded.

  “Were you able to help him?” Eddie asked.

  “I said all the usual things one would say in such a situation: that the deaths and injuries were a consequence of war, that the benefits that accrued to the Allies as a result of his proving himself to the Nazis probably ended up saving many more lives than were lost in the fire, that he shouldn’t take the blame personally, and so on.”

  “But it didn’t do any good?”

  He shook his head. “Oddly enough, the idea that finally started easing him out of his depression was one that came up in a casual conversation we had one day about the feminine qualities of the Normandie.”

  Eddie looked at him quizzically.

  “The ship was so exquisitely designed that one couldn’t help thinking of her as a beautiful woman, one who was perfect in every detail: her nails, her hair, her clothes, her figure.”

  It was the same thing that René had said, Charlotte thought.

  “But one of the fascinations of such beauty is its impermanence. One knows that it requires perfect conditions, and what’s more, that even under perfect conditions it can’t withstand the test of time.”

  “In other words, that she was doomed,” said Eddie.

  He nodded. “By the time we got her, of course, she’d been stripped. All the furniture had been removed, the art, the carpets. But the beauty was still there: The French crew that had cared for her were like an army of perfectly trained technicians, priests to the goddess—manicurists, hair stylists, masseurs—all dedicated to maintaining her exquisite attributes. We numbered only a handful, and we were untrained to boot. Did you ever see the plans, Ed?”

  Eddie shook his head.

  “There were acres of them, all in French. The French just left them all for us. No explanations; there wasn’t time. My point to Jack was that she was so complex, so high-strung, so finely tuned, that she was doomed.”

  “A hothouse plant in the real world,” Eddie said.

  “Exactly,” Weg said. “I once heard her called a blood ship. It’s a term used among ocean-liner buffs for a ship that’s met a tragic end: the Lusitania, the Titanic, the Andrea Doria. With the Normandie, you could see it coming, you knew she would be a blood ship even before the tragedy struck.”

  “And he understood that?”

  “Yes. If it hadn’t been then, it would have been some other time. It was like trying to turn an aristocrat into a peasant; it just wouldn’t have worked.” Weg paused for a moment to sip his coffee and then continued. “Eventually, he snapped out of his depression. He went on to a brilliant career, first in Naval Intelligence and later in the Bureau of Ships. But I don’t think he ever recovered fully from the Normandie fire. He was never the same after that. He was always withdrawn. I was his oldest friend, but even I never really felt close to him.”

  Charlotte remembered what Connie had said about his unwillingless to reveal himself.

  “The only time I ever saw him really let his guard down was on the Sea Witch,” Mrs. Weg said.

  “That’s true,” her husband agreed. “I think being on his boat consoled him. He always said he was happiest when he was trailing a wake behind him.”

  A career in Naval Intelligence, Charlotte reflected. If she and Eddie had known that, they never would have made the mistake of thinking he was the Fox. They would have suspected right away that he was a double agent. She should have questioned Connie more thoroughly. “Know your victim” was one of the rules of detection always cited by her detective friend, Jerry D’Angelo. “The victim offers as many clues to the crime as the perpetrator,” he’d said. It was a rule that they had paid no attention to. Nor had they paid any attention to the common sense dictate that a decorated rear admiral
made an unlikely enemy agent. Instead they had madly jumped to conclusions.

  Mrs. Weg, whose name was Meg (poor woman—little had her parents known when they named her Meg that she was destined to marry a Weg), had excused herself to get another pot of coffee, and she now refilled their cups.

  “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill the admiral?” Eddie asked. “Him and Paul Federov. We thought the killer might be someone else involved in Operation Golden Bird—a fourth man. We thought that because of the weapon, a dagger with a swastika inscribed on the hilt.”

  Weg shook his head. “If there was a fourth man, why would Jack have told me about the others, and not about him? Besides, it was all so long ago. What difference would it make now?”

  Which was exactly what Charlotte and Eddie had thought.

  13

  It was out of their hands now, Charlotte thought as she drove down Worth Avenue, Palm Beach’s main shopping area. After leaving the PGA Resort Community, she and Eddie had picked up some sandwiches at a highway deli and eaten them on the ride back to Palm Beach. Then Eddie had dropped Charlotte off on Worth Avenue and headed back to the Breakers for a rehearsal. But first he would stop by the police station to tell Maureen that McLean had been a double agent. Maureen could then use her CIA connections to pursue the answer to the question of why the participants in an act of sabotage that had occurred fifty years ago were now being murdered. The only theory Charlotte and Eddie had come up with—apart from the fourth man scenario—was that Feder and McLean had been murdered in retribution for a death or an injury that had occurred as a result of the Normandie fire, and that it had taken the killer all these years to track them down. It was farfetched, but at least it was something. And it should be pretty easy for Maureen to check out, since there had been only two fatalities and a small number of serious injuries. Or maybe the murders had nothing to do with the Normandie fire at all. Maybe both victims had been killed by someone who preyed on men who were walking alone on the beach or on the Lake Trail. But then, why hadn’t there been other victims? And what about the dagger with the swastika inscribed on the hilt?

  Putting the murders out of her mind for the moment, Charlotte turned her attention to a more immediate problem: what to wear to the Big Band Hall of Fame Ball, where she would be the date of the guest of honor. She had decided on a dress—a black sheath she had worn to a recent awards dinner and that she’d asked her housekeeper to ship down to her—but she needed a necklace to go with it. She was thinking about buying a necklace from the Normandie collection: not the one she had modeled at the Villa Normandie—half a million was a bit more than her frugal Yankee nature would allow her to spend on a piece of jewelry—but something simpler. But she wasn’t sure if she should. On the one hand, she wanted to buy something from the collection as a symbol of her reunion with Eddie, and it had been a long time since she had splurged on something impractical for herself; on the other hand, she didn’t want an expensive reminder gathering dust in her jewelry box if things didn’t work out.

  She arrived at Feder Jewelers a few minutes later. As she approached the store, she took notice of the façade, which had escaped her attention on her earlier visit. It was pure art deco—polished black marble with a door of brushed stainless steel in a geometric design. The art deco lettering read simply: “Feder & Co. Diamonds, Jewels.” Though Charlotte doubted that Marianne had chosen her collaborator on the basis of the appearance of his store, it was fitting that her art deco jewelry should be displayed in a shop whose design appeared to date from that era.

  A doorman ushered her in, and she was greeted by a salesman, a handsome fellow in his thirties with a heavy French accent. She was about to explain that she was interested in the Normandie collection, when a door at the back of the salesroom opened, and Marianne emerged, looking smashing, as usual. She was wearing a chic red thirties-style suit that must have been from her Normandie fashion collection, with a red cloche to match.

  “Aunt Charlotte!” she exclaimed.

  “Hello, Marianne,” Charlotte said, kissing her goddaughter on both cheeks.

  Then Marianne leaned provocatively close to the salesman and ran her red-lacquered fingernails down the sleeve of his cashmere jacket. “I’d like you to meet someone. This is Nikolai Federov, Paul’s great-nephew. He arrived from Paris the day before yesterday to take over the management of the store.”

  “Very pleased to meet you,” said Charlotte, taking note of Marianne’s expression as she gazed at the jeweler: jaw protruding, nostrils quivering, sharp brown eyes staring. It was a look reserved for something she had to possess, usually a man. “Like a bird dog with a fix on its quarry,” was how Spalding had once described it. She had obviously wasted no time finding another point of light on her path to artistic enlightenment, Charlotte thought, one that was, once again, unsuitably young.

  The question was, what type of collection would Nikolai inspire? Actually, Charlotte couldn’t remember if Marianne had ever done a French collection. Her designs were usually more exotic, like the Uhuru collection inspired by the African nationalist or the Ballet Russe line inspired by the Russian ballet dancer who had defected to the United States. Maybe it was time for something basic, like a Champs Élysées collection.

  Charlotte stepped forward to shake Nikolai’s hand. He was a good-looking man, shorter than Paul but with the same strong jaw and striking gray eyes. “I’m very sorry about your great-uncle,” she said.

  Nikolai shook his head. “He was a great artist,” he said. “He taught me everything I know. I will miss him very much. Are you the lady who is interested in buying my uncle’s house?”

  Charlotte wasn’t aware that she had expressed any such intention. “What makes you think that?” she asked, surprised.

  “Marianne’s daughter, Dede, gave us that impression. She said you admired the house very much. But perhaps she was jumping to conclusions when she said that you might be interested in buying it,” he added apologetically.

  But as he spoke, Charlotte realized that Dede hadn’t been jumping to conclusions at all. She had simply been reading Charlotte’s mind. “Is it for sale?” she asked, her intended purchase of a necklace now forgotten.

  “Yes,” Nikolai replied. “It’s going on the market tomorrow. Would you like the real estate agent to show it to you? I could call her right now. There’s no time like the present, as the saying goes.”

  Charlotte thought for a moment. “Yes,” she said finally. “I would.”

  Charlotte had been thinking about Château en Espagne ever since the idea had first occurred to her that she might buy it. It had insinuated itself into her subconscious the way something does that is meant to be. In the back of her mind, she knew that she and the house were fated to spend the rest of her life together. Besides its visual appeal, it met all the basic criteria: convenient to airport, town, and beach, in a community in which she already had good friends. And it wasn’t overly expensive, at least by Palm Beach standards. (Where else was she going to spend all her hard-earned money? She had no one to leave it to.) It even had a built-in caretaker. She was sure that Dede would gladly look after the house when she was away. Perhaps because Charlotte had spent so much of her life on the road, the place where she lived had always been very important to her. In her mobile world, the houses she owned were the only places that didn’t change. Which was why she moved so infrequently and chose her houses with such care. Besides meeting all the basic criteria, Château en Espagne filled a less obvious but more important requirement. A house was not just a sterile body of molecules, it was an entity with a soul of its own, and the soul of this house resonated with her own.

  Waiting now in the real estate office for the agent, who was on the telephone, Charlotte studied the brochure for the house, which was headed Old World Elegance. The text read: “Unique 1920s Spanish Revival villa, designed by renowned architect Addison Mizner, with signature exterior tower and spiral staircase. Superbly restored, with all the comforts of
modern living. European in feeling, with soaring arches, rich stone floors, and glorious ceilings. With the purchase of Château en Espagne, you will be acquiring a piece of Palm Beach history.” From there, the description continued in smaller print: “This three-story Mizner home offers privacy with an in-town location. A pool accents the beautiful, junglelike grounds. The home has high ceilings and two fireplaces, four bedrooms, three and one-half baths, plus a two-car garage and a studio cottage with a bathroom.” This was followed by the price—one point seven million dollars—which was enough to support an African village for a couple of decades.

  The real estate agent was a pretty woman in her forties named Eileen Finneran with the face of Ireland and the long, curly red hair to go with it. She had a vivacious personality and a leaning toward feminist New Age philosophies, evidenced by the plethora of crystals and amulets—many of them in the form of primitive goddesses—that hung from around her neck, dangled from her earlobes, and adorned the bangle bracelets on her freckled forearms. On the brief ride over to Château en Espagne, Eileen managed to deconstruct Charlotte’s fifty-year career in terms of the ascent of the ancient goddess over the modern patriarchal god. Charlotte wasn’t quite sure she liked seeing her career evaluated in such simplistic terms (her own talent and hard work had had something to do with it, after all), but she liked Eileen, and they hit it off immediately.

  Ten minutes later, they were walking through the empty house. Since Charlotte had last been there, Paul’s personal belongings had been removed, presumably by his nephew, though the massive, Spanish-style, Mizner-designed furniture, which was original to Château en Espagne, remained.

  “Does the furniture go with the house?” Charlotte asked as they entered the dining room, with its rich paneling imported from a Spanish monastery and its views of banana, orange, and palm trees through the undraped French doors.