Murder Under the Palms

by Stefanie Matteson

  “Yes,” Eileen replied. “Mr. Feder’s nephew has already arranged for the sale of his other things, as you can see, but he thought the furniture should remain, since it was designed especially for the house.”

  “It’s lovely,” said Charlotte, running her fingers over the antiqued surface of the massive sideboard, and admiring once again the long dining room table, with its sling-back chairs of Spanish leather.

  “It’s really a wonderful house,” Eileen said. “There aren’t many like this around anymore. Unfortunately, a lot of them have been torn down. People want to build something bigger, more pretentious.”

  “Yes, it is a wonderful place,” Charlotte agreed. She loved its hidden-away quality, and the way the shafts of sunlight filtering through the vegetation rippled over the walls, like sun shining down through the water.

  Without Paul’s personal belongings, it was easier for her to see how she might make the house her own.

  As they climbed the spiral staircase to the tower a few minutes later, Charlotte could feel herself falling under the house’s spell once again. And by the time they reached the tower room, she had talked herself into buying it.

  The tower room was empty now—its contents packed up and hauled away, including the album that was missing a couple of photographs, she thought, making a mental note to return them to Nikolai. Looking out at the waving crowns of the palms on the golf course, she could easily imagine herself spending the rest of her life here—or at least the rest of her winters.

  But she had at least two reservations about buying her castle in the air. The first was the fact that its previous owner had been murdered. She wondered if that event left a taint on the house. She wasn’t superstitious, but she imagined that even unsuperstitious people might hesitate before buying a house under such circumstances.

  “That’s easy,” said Eileen, when Charlotte broached the subject on their way back down the stairs. “There are all sorts of things you can do to purge a house of bad vibrations. You can burn sage, you can conduct a cleansing ritual, you can even call in a priest to do an exorcism,” she said. She stopped and turned to Charlotte. “But you know what I’d do?”

  “What?” asked Charlotte, who found it hard to imagine herself participating in a New Age cleansing ritual.

  “I’d sweep,” Eileen said.

  “What?”

  “I’d sweep. Isn’t that what women have always done down through the millennia? Swept in caves, in tents, in tipis; swept in log cabins, tract houses, castles. It’s always been the woman’s job to get rid of the old stuff. Superimpose their energy markings.”

  “Swept in one-point-seven-million-dollar Palm Beach houses,” Charlotte added, then asked, “Do you mean sweep, literally?”

  “Literally, and figuratively too,” Eileen replied. “Literally, what you need to do is clean the place up, especially the surfaces. Paint the walls, sand the floors, wash the windows.” She waved a bangled forearm around the entrance foyer, where they were standing. “It wouldn’t cost that much.”

  “Not in comparison with what the house is going to cost.”

  “Besides, the house needs some freshening up,” Eileen continued. “And figuratively. In the sense of starting over. Think of living in this house as the beginning of a new phase of your life.”

  “Sweep!” Charlotte repeated. The idea of sweeping as a metaphor had captured her imagination. She pictured herself in the coral block-paved courtyard with an old corn broom, sweeping the past away: not only the past inhabitant of the house, but her own past as well.

  But her other reservation couldn’t be dealt with as easily. It had to do with Eddie. She wondered if she should consult with him about buying the house. She didn’t want to push things with him, and consulting him certainly presumed a future relationship. But neither did she want to exclude him if he was going to be part of her future. On the other hand, would she want to have a relationship with a man who disapproved of a house that she loved?

  Finally, she dismissed the issue altogether. Who said Eddie would even consider leaving Pasadena? There was no point in making a decision based on information that wasn’t pertinent. It was Occam’s Razor again: she was eliminating all unnecessary elements in the subject being analyzed.

  From the entrance foyer, they headed out to the kitchen, which was small and dark—a remnant of the days when the kitchen was the realm of the staff. But that didn’t matter—Charlotte didn’t cook anyway.

  Then Eileen opened the back door. “I have something else to show you,” she said, leading Charlotte out to the rear patio.

  “The garage?”

  “That—and something else,” she said mysteriously. After pausing to greet Lady Astor, who was lying down in her lean-to, Eileen led Charlotte into a narrow passageway between the back of the house and the back of the garage.

  They emerged a moment later in a small courtyard with a latticework roof from which hung a collection of orchids. Pots of the exotic plants also stood on tiered shelves against the wall, their blooms perfuming the air. The center of the small space was occupied by a wrought-iron table and chairs.

  “It’s a slat house. For orchids,” Eileen added. “Mr. Feder cultivated them as a hobby.” She took a seat at the table, on which the sun filtering through the slatted wooden roof had cast a basket-weave shadow. “Just the place to have your morning coffee,” she said, quick to point out the house’s best features.

  “How wonderful!” said Charlotte, thinking that the orchids that hung from the trees in the garden must have been raised here. Stepping up to the shelf of plants, she leaned over to smell an unusual yellow specimen whose petals were mottled with orange. “Are they hard to grow?”

  “Some kinds are,” Eileen replied. “But a lot are very easy. Most of these are moth orchids, which are very easy. They’re called that because the blossoms look like a group of moths in flight.”

  Taking a seat at the table, Charlotte could indeed imagine herself sipping her morning coffee in the cool, shaded, intimate space, or lying in the hammock that was suspended across the opposite end of the courtyard, reading a script.

  “Well,” said the real estate agent, “what do you think?”

  “I think I’d like to buy it,” Charlotte said.

  “Excellent,” said Eileen with a broad smile.

  Reaching into her handbag, Charlotte pulled out her checkbook and set it on the table. Sometimes, she thought, being a goddess had its rewards.

  After signing the purchase agreement, Charlotte walked down the street and past the clubhouse of the Everglades Club, following the route that she expected to become a daily part of her future routine. She had wanted to treat herself, and she had. She had bought a house. It was an act so extravagant that she could hardly wrap her mind around it. Like Mizner and Singer, she had come to Florida to recuperate (or at least to get away from the cold), and she had ended up with a castle in the air. Emerging on Worth Avenue, she turned right at the Spanish-tiled water trough with the “Dog Bar” sign above it (leave it to Palm Beach to have a water trough for dogs) toward the street that she was planning to take back to her hotel. She was so elated about the fact that this walk was to become a daily custom that she felt as if she was walking on air. Charlotte was a walker—a day in her life was not complete without a couple of miles around her East Side neighborhood, and what delighted her about Palm Beach was that it was a walker’s town. “It is a great art to saunter,” said Henry David Thoreau, one of her favorite philosophers. One could choose a vigorous walk on the beach or on the Lake Trail, or a more leisurely stroll down Worth Avenue, which Mizner had laid out specifically with the needs of the walker in mind. He had incorporated meandering alleyways, which he called vias, into his design for the town, which gave it the mysterious charm of an Eastern bazaar, albeit with somewhat overpriced merchandise. Charlotte loved the sense of surprise that came from wandering among the shops tucked away in the vias. One never knew what one would encounter next: a spiral staircase
ascending out of sight, a niche containing an urn overflowing with colorful flowers, an aviary filled with brilliant tropical birds, a courtyard occupied by stylish shoppers drinking coffee at umbrella-shaded tables. To say nothing of the exotic and unusual wares—so removed from the oh-so-ordinary merchandise of the standard (for Palm Beach, anyway) Cartier, Gucci, and Tiffany.

  And so it was that she found herself entering one of the cloistered walkways, drawn by the intriguing vista of a sunlit courtyard with an elegant marble fountain at its center. Once she reached the courtyard, however, it was the window display in the shop opposite that caught her eye. Standing in the window was a manikin wearing a Russian military greatcoat. It was identical to the manikin that had stood in the tower room at Château en Espagne. Her curiosity aroused, she headed across the courtyard to the store, which was called L’Antiquaire Militaire.

  Up close to the storefront, she was able to see that the greatcoat wasn’t the only item that had come from Château en Espagne. At the bottom of the window was a display of Paul’s toy soldiers. They were all there: the knight of Muscovy in the base of which Dede had found the key, the palace grenadier, the subaltern in the lancer regiment, the private in the Cossack regiment. There was even the photo of the doomed imperial family.

  Nikolai must have sold Paul’s collection to this shop.

  The door stood open to the pleasant air and the sound of the gurgling fountain. Entering, Charlotte found that it was a shop that dealt in military antiques, military artworks, and antique toy soldiers. This was probably where Paul had originally purchased most of his soldiers, she thought as she wandered around, noting the mock-ups of battle scenes that were displayed in glass cases.

  She was halfway around the rectangular counter at the center of the shop when a display under the counter caught her eye. It was a collection of Nazi military antiques. There were armbands and helmets and medals, all with the swastika insignia. A sign in the case read: “Every item on display is certifiably authentic.”

  “May I help you?” asked the salesman when he saw her eyeing a sword with a swastika inscribed on the hilt.

  “Do you buy Nazi military antiques?”

  “Yes we do.”

  “I’m interested in selling a piece that I inherited. It’s a dagger with a six-inch blade. The hilt is silver, and it’s inscribed with a swastika and a lightning bolt. It’s very similar to this sword,” she said, pointing to the one under the counter, “but smaller, of course. Would you like to see it?”

  “Very much,” he said. He nodded down at the case. “As you can see, we have a large collection of Nazi memorabilia.”

  “Can you tell me anything about it?”

  “Of course. Daggers of the kind you describe were usually awarded to members of Hitler Youth at the age of eighteen, when they were accepted as full members into the National Socialist Party. They were a symbol of the fact that the youths had become sword bearers for the führer.”

  “It has an inscription,” Charlotte said. “Blut und Ehre.”

  “The translation is ‘Blood and Honor.’ It sounds like it’s the kind of dagger that I’m talking about. I couldn’t tell you how much I would be willing to pay for it until I see it, though.”

  “Of course,” Charlotte said.

  “But I’d estimate that it’s worth at least three or four hundred dollars. The value depends on the condition.”

  “Where would my relative have come by such a knife?” Charlotte asked. “I never really knew him, so I have no idea.”

  “Probably from a dead Nazi. The Nazis who had been members of Hitler Youth usually carried them. The Allied soldiers in Europe took them from Nazi corpses as souvenirs, in much the same way as soldiers in the Pacific took samurai swords from dead Japanese soldiers.”

  The image popped into Charlotte’s mind of the spiked German helmet that an uncle had brought back from the Great War; it had been a favorite item in her childhood dress-up trunk.

  “They were particularly prized as souvenirs among members of the French Résistance,” the clerk added.

  “Really!” said Charlotte.

  “Yes. They were a status symbol. Having one demonstrated that you had proved yourself by killing a Nazi. Was your relative French?”

  “As a matter of fact, he was,” she replied.

  After thanking the clerk, Charlotte staggered out into the afternoon sunshine. For a moment, she just stood there, blinking. Then she sat down on the rim of the marble fountain. It had come as such a shock: a chance remark from a clerk in a shop that she had just happened to saunter into.

  A chance remark that was a key to the puzzle of two unsolved murders.

  Her mind was spinning as she walked the four blocks back to her hotel. Ordinarily she would have enjoyed this walk. Ever since her arrival in Palm Beach, the weather had been perfect—sunny, and in the seventies—and this was another perfect day. But her mind was too agitated to enjoy anything. That she had just purchased a house for an almost unthinkable amount of money was by itself enough to throw her off balance, but that had been superseded by the shock of what she had just discovered: the identity of the furtive figure in the dimly lighted corridor of her dream. She now knew why she had seen him in that corridor—the corridor on the Normandie. She also knew why his uniform was blue-black, though it should have been trimmed in gold braid. She knew what was behind the door into which he had disappeared. She had all the pieces: she had found the exit. Now it was a matter of fitting them together. As she walked, she tried the pieces this way and that and searched among the leftover pieces for the ones that would fill the gaps. It wasn’t that she doubted her conclusion, rather that she wasn’t sure of the path that led to it.

  By the time she sighted the unassuming yellow stucco walls of her hotel fifteen minutes later, she had worked out a scenario for the sequence of events, and all it would take to confirm her conclusions was a couple of telephone calls.

  The first was to Wilhelm Roehrer, alias Bill Roe, in Clearwater. She had no difficulty in getting the number from Information.

  It was Mrs. Roehrer who answered.

  “He died on Sunday,” she said.

  Charlotte expressed her sympathies, thinking that if the person who murdered Paul and McLean had any intention of murdering Roehrer too, it wouldn’t be necessary now. Then she identified herself as the woman who had come to their door the week before with the white-haired man.

  “I remember,” said Mrs. Roehrer.

  “You said that another man had been there before us,” Charlotte went on. “You thought at first that we were connected with him. I believe you said you didn’t know his name. Is that correct?”

  “Ja,” she replied.

  “Can you describe him?”

  Mrs. Roehrer thought for a moment, and then spoke in her heavily accented English: “He was of medium height, about sixty years old, very good-looking; dark eyes, gray hair.” She paused, and then said, “Ein Franzose.”

  “Franzose?”

  “Ja. Sorry,” she apologized. “I sometimes forget to speak in English. I mean that he was a Frenchman.”

  Charlotte leaned back on the sofa in the sitting room of her neat little green and white suite and stared at the leaves of the banana tree outside the bay window. She was holding a Manhattan that she had picked up from the bar on her way in and thinking of a quote from Thoreau. “Simplify, simplify,” he had said when describing his life at Walden Pond. She and Eddie had concocted a complex plot filled with spies and counterspies and acts of sabotage when all along the murders had been committed for one of the oldest motives there was: revenge. More specifically, revenge for a murdered love. As Eddie had postulated to Maureen earlier that day, Feder and McLean had been killed in retribution for a death that had occurred as a result of Operation Golden Bird. Roehrer probably would have been killed too, had he not been dying already. But it wasn’t the death of a human being for which their murderer had taken revenge, but the death of a ship, a ship that he had loved like
a woman—more than a woman perhaps—a ship that had been his whole life until that icy February afternoon fifty years ago. “I loved the Normandie with a passion one usually reserves for a beloved mistress,” he had said.

  René Dubord had been one of the priests Weg had referred to, one of the attendants who had worshiped at the feet of the goddess. Even after his workday was through, he had paid her homage, documenting her every whim and passing moment in a series of scrapbooks that he collected over the years. Then she had died, leaving a vacuum in his life that he filled by fighting for his country. Later, he had somehow discovered that the death of his beloved Normandie wasn’t a tragic accident, but a coldly calculated murder, and he had vowed to track down his mistress’s killers and take their lives in revenge. He wasn’t a stranger to killing: he had killed in the Résistance—quickly, quietly, professionally. And he would kill again. He would take the lives of the hated Boches who had murdered his mistress, using a weapon he’d taken from one of them during the war. Over the years, he had doggedly hunted down his mistress’s killers. Until, one day, he found them—ironically enough—right under his nose. As it turned out, only one had been a Boche, but that didn’t matter. The second had been a Russian fascist and the third had been on the same side as he, but that didn’t matter either: in his mind, they were all murderers, no matter what side they had been on.

  But, Charlotte asked herself, was love of a ship sufficient motivation to drive a man to spend fifty years hunting down her murderers? There must have been something more, she thought as she sipped her drink. Combing her memory for clues, she latched on to the photograph of the original Château Albert, which hung on the wall in the barroom at René’s exclusive dining club. The elegant family château, centuries old—lost as a result of debts incurred by René’s father in the high-stakes gambling salons at Deauville. He and his mother reduced to living in the bakehouse on their former estate, the mother no doubt obsessed with the lost glories of her past life. Later, the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, in which the SS had taken the lives of six hundred and forty-odd inhabitants of his village, including his mother and all his relatives. She realized now that for René, the Normandie had been more than just a beautiful ship, a ship that he loved as he would a mistress. It had been the symbol of—and the replacement for—the elegant Norman château and the acres of fields and woods that his father had so callously gambled away at Deauville’s felt gaming tables. It had been the symbol of a life of wealth and privilege which was his birthright, but which had been snatched away before he was old enough to claim it. It had been the symbol of the grandeur of France, which had been gambled away by a weak, collaborationist government as callously as his father had staked the family patrimony on the deal of a hand. The elegant Normandie had been a memorial to his past: his castle in the air. In striking down her murderers, René had been taking revenge for more than just the death of a ship: he had been avenging the loss of his family’s honor, the defeat of France, the shame of it all. He had been taking revenge for the Nazi savagery that had destroyed everything he knew and loved.