Murder Under the Palms

by Stefanie Matteson

  Setting aside her empty glass, Charlotte picked up the tulip shell on the lamp table, the shell she had found on the beach. With her finger, she traced the path of the narrow brown band as it coiled its way around the body of the shell in an ascending spiral. René had been coming back to the same spot for fifty years, but instead of circling upward, he had been stuck on the same plane. For fifty years, he had been going around and around in the same path, until a deep groove had been worn into his soul.

  Sitting back, she found herself pondering the remaining gaps in the puzzle. How had he found his way to Roehrer’s tract house in Clearwater? she wondered. For that matter, how had he found out that the Normandie fire wasn’t an accident? Then her mind made one of those connections that is the serendipitous result of aimless daydreaming, or maybe the effect of a stiff drink. Reaching over to the table, she picked up the phone again.

  The second call was to the Jewish Documention Center in Los Angeles. She explained to the person who answered that she was following up on an investigation that was being conducted by Mr. Edward Norwood into the career of Nazi Oberscharführer Wilhelm Roehrer, and was immediately transferred to someone else. After several more transfers, she was finally connected with a woman who was able to help her.

  She told the woman that she was interested in the positions held by Oberscharführer Roehrer in the months immediately preceding V.E. Day. “I’m Mr. Norwood’s secretary,” she said. She didn’t want to get into an elaborate explanation as to why she needed the information, not knowing on what pretext Eddie had originally queried the center, or even if a pretext were needed.

  But as it turned out, the woman asked no questions. “That should be easy,” she replied. “We have all that information on our computer.”

  “Wilhelm Roehrer was his real name,” Charlotte said. “The alias that he used in this country was William Roe—Bill.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the woman said. “We have the information cross-referenced under all the aliases. Sometimes there are a dozen of them.”

  Charlotte could hear the computer keys clicking. “I have him,” she said after a minute. “Born in Köln, emigrated to the U.S. with his parents in 1933 when he was fifteen; active in the German-American Bund; returned to Germany in 1942. What else did you want to know?”

  “The position he held at the close of the war. Just before V.E. Day. It would have been in the spring of 1945.”

  “He was a warder at a prison in France,” she said. “It was in Fresnes, just outside Paris. It says here that it was a prison for political prisoners, mostly members of the French Résistance.”

  “Thank you,” Charlotte said, and hung up.

  14

  They arrived at Château Albert an hour later. There were three of them: Charlotte, Maureen, and Roberts, who, since his discovery of the dagger, had been promoted to the position of Maureen’s sidekick. After passing through the tall, clipped ficus hedges that concealed the club from the plaza, they made their way up the front path. Crossing the cobblestoned courtyard, they rang the bell at the door of the quaint half-timbered building with the steeply pitched roof. Standing by the French flag that hung from a flagpole, it struck Charlotte that this private dining club—so carefully constructed by craftsmen whom René had imported from his native province—was also a memorial to his aristocratic heritage and to the glory of France, just as the Normandie had been. He had spent an entire lifetime trying to resurrect his lost past.

  The door was answered by a member of the kitchen staff who informed them that the club didn’t open until eight. Upon asking for René, they were escorted into the kitchen, where they found him hunched over a counter, going over the menu with the chef. He looked only moderately surprised to see them, but then, he was a master at maintaining his composure. As usual, he was elegantly dressed in a navy blue double-breasted blazer and gray flannel slacks, and as usual he wore the red and black rosette of the Médaille de la Résistance on his lapel. Excusing himself to the chef, he escorted his visitors to a private dining room with red and white toile wallcovering, where they all sat down on rush-seated ladder-back chairs around an antique table under a large painting of Normandy peasants in wooden shoes harvesting apples.

  Then he beckoned to a waiter and asked him to bring them a bottle of pastis and some tumblers. “The drink of Marseille,” he announced. As an afterthought, he also asked the waiter to bring them some olives.

  If he was going to be arrested, Charlotte thought, he clearly wanted it to be under civilized circumstances.

  When the bottle arrived, René set tumblers before everyone and poured out the amber-colored liquid. Ever the attentive host, he then added water from a small ceramic beaker, which turned the aperitif a distinctive cloudy yellow color. Finally he passed around the saucer of olives. “Imported from southern France,” he said, as he popped one into his mouth.

  “Miss Graham has a story she would like to tell you,” said Maureen, introducing the subject as they had previously agreed. She sat tensely at the table, her glass of pastis untouched.

  “If you have a few minutes, that is,” Charlotte said, maintaining the pretense that this was a casual visit.

  René gestured with his hand as if to say, I have all evening.

  “It’s a love story,” Charlotte said. “About a man who was desperately in love with a woman. A woman of enormous beauty, grace, and charm. A woman sometimes of wit. A woman to whom the man had devoted his entire life.” She took a sip of the sharp-flavored anise apéritif. “Then one day, this woman’s life is prematurely cut down by a terrible tragedy.”

  René also took a sip of his drink.

  “It’s a common enough story,” Charlotte went on. “It’s the story of Juliet and Aïda and Madame Butterfly.”

  “And Camille,” added René, picking up another olive.

  Charlotte nodded. “Except for two aspects that make this story different. The first is that the woman doesn’t die as a result of suicide or from disease. She is murdered. The second is that the woman isn’t a human being, but a ship. A ship with sleek lines and beautiful decor, a ship that symbolized the greatest artistic achievements of France. As the man who loved her put it, ‘the world’s most perfect ship.’” She paused to gauge René’s reaction, but there was none. He removed the olive pit from his mouth, and set it on his napkin.

  “The name of the ship was the Normandie,” she continued. “And her murderers were Nazi fifth columnists, fascist saboteurs whose goal it was to see to it that she would never carry troops to Europe to aid the Allies. At the time it occurred, the Normandie’s lover thought the magnificent ship’s death, which was caused by a fire, was just a tragic accident, but later on—as a fighter in the French Résistance—he found out differently.” She looked up at René, who stared directly back at her.

  “It’s a very interesting story,” he said. He sat stone-faced, sipping his pastis. Then he turned to Maureen. “Don’t you agree, Miss White?”

  Maureen returned his stare. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  Charlotte continued. “As fate would have it, the man who loved the Normandie was destined to come face to face with one of her murderers. Toward the end of the war, he was captured by the Nazis and incarcerated in the same prison where one of the Normandie’s saboteurs was working as a guard. The prison was in Fresnes, just outside of Paris.”

  René nodded as if to confirm her story and then ran his thumb along the waxed surface of his dapper mustache.

  “At this point, I’m not entirely clear how the story goes,” Charlotte said. “It may be that the man who loved the Normandie overheard a conversation among the guards, or it may be that the saboteur bragged about having started the fire that led to the ship’s death. In any case, our lover discovered that the tragic end of the ship he had held so dear was not an accident, but a murder for which the prison guard was one of those responsible.”

  She glanced at Roberts, who was sitting next to her, hands in his lap. Though he looked
relaxed, Charlotte could see from her vantage point that his right hand rested lightly on the grip of his gun.

  “It was at that point that he vowed his revenge,” she continued. “He resolved to track down the men who had murdered the Normandie and murder them, in turn.” She leaned back in her chair. “A bit extreme, you might say,” she noted, looking around at her audience. “After all, the Normandie wasn’t a woman, she was a ship.” Charlotte had picked up a creamer from the table. It was from the Normandie. On its side was the CGT logo of the French Line. Setting the creamer down, she went on with her story:

  “But as it turned out, the man had other reasons to hate the Nazis. Not only had they killed his ship, they had executed many of his colleagues in the Résistance. And they had murdered his mother and his relatives in the Oradoursur-Glane massacre, one of the Nazis most heinous war crimes. The SS shot all the men and locked all the women and children in a church, and then burned it down. He didn’t know who had killed the members of his family, but he did know, or could find out, who had murdered the Normandie.”

  She looked up again at René. Tears were welling in his soft brown eyes, and he blinked them away.

  “In this man’s mind, the saboteurs of the Normandie became the scapegoats for the loss not only of the Normandie, but of all he held most dear.”

  René had refilled his glass, and he took a long swallow from it.

  “After the prison at Fresnes was liberated, our lover was free—free to indulge himself in his determination to track down the Normandie’s murderers. It became a hobby for him, in the way that tracking down one’s ancestors might be for a genealogy buff. He started with the Nazi technical sergeant who had been the prison guard. He became a detective: making inquiries, looking into old records, following up on leads. What he didn’t know was that he had made his job much more difficult than it really was.”

  “How is that, might I ask?” René interjected.

  Charlotte explained. “He was like a genealogy enthusiast who does all the legwork himself—traveling to distant countries to study the records in libraries, churches, and city halls—when he might have consulted a genealogy database. He was an avenger who had yet to enter the computer age. Unbeknownst to our vengeance seeker, the Nazi hunters at the Jewish Documentation Center in Los Angeles had already done all his work for him; the information he needed was in their computer records, available for the asking.”

  René shrugged.

  “Eventually, he tracked the prison guard down; it took him nearly fifty years. The guard’s name was Wilhelm Roehrer, and he was living in Clearwater, Florida, using the alias William Roe. But there was no point in killing Roehrer, because he was terminally ill. Roehrer was useful in another respect, though. With the aid of a bribe, he was induced to reveal the name of his accomplice in the sabotage plan, Operation Golden Bird. The accomplice was a Russian fascist by the name of Paul Federov.”

  There was a subtle shift in positions around the table as Charlotte drew near the dénouement of her story.

  “With a little detective work, the man who loved the Normandie discovered that Paul Federov was the prominent Palm Beach jeweler, Paul Feder. He had tracked Feder right to his own backyard. Feder was to be a guest at a preservation association benefit with a Normandie theme, for which our lover would be the caterer. How fitting that the Normandie benefit should be the venue of the saboteur’s death! Especially when the party was taking place on the fiftieth anniversary of that very act of sabotage.”

  “And so our lover planned the murder of the man who had killed the ship he had so dearly loved. He would wait until Feder was alone, and then stab him with a knife he had taken from the corpse of a Nazi during his days as a résistant—a knife he had saved all those years specifically for that purpose. On that fateful evening, he was able to carry out his scheme exactly as he had foreseen it. Our lover, you see, was a man who had devoted a lifetime to making certain that events unfolded according to plan.”

  Charlotte continued, looking directly at René. “How satisfying it must have been for him to finally have taken his revenge! But the score wasn’t fully settled yet. There was a third man: the Abwehr agent who had masterminded the sabotage plot. His Abwehr code name was the Fox, after a character from the fairy tale from which the plot took its name. What our lover didn’t know was that the Fox was an imposter: he wasn’t really an Abwehr agent, but a counterspy working for American intelligence.”

  René looked up in surprise.

  Charlotte had risen from her chair, and now stood behind it, her hands resting on the top rung. “That’s right,” she said. “He was Lieutenant Commander Jack McLean, and he was the officer in charge of the Normandie conversion. The Abwehr had solicited his participation in Operation Golden Bird as a way of verifying his allegiances. McLean’s plan was to start the fire in order to demonstrate his loyalty to the Abwehr, and then to put it out and save the ship. But his plan went awry: the fire boats pumped and pumped until the ship foundered.” She turned and paced toward the fireplace on the opposite wall. “I don’t know if it would have mattered to the man who loved the Normandie that McLean wasn’t an Abwehr agent, but I suspect not. In his eyes, McLean would still have been accountable for the Normandie’s death.”

  Reaching the fireplace, she reversed direction and returned to the table. “I have no idea how the man who loved the Normandie tracked McLean down, since neither Roehrer nor Federov knew his identity,” she said, standing once again behind her chair. “But track him down, he did. Like Feder, to his own backyard. And so Admiral John W. McLean the third became his second victim—stabbed in the heart with a Nazi dagger while walking on the Lake Trail.” As Charlotte spoke, it struck her that McLean had done penance with his life for the crime for which he had carried the guilt for most of a lifetime.

  René had regained his composure and sat quietly sipping his drink. “But, madam,” he protested with his debonair little smile, “you have left out the most important part of the story.”

  “And what is that?”

  “The identity of this … man who loved Normandie.” His eyes had hardened, revealing the soul of the French Résistance fighter beneath the charming, pleasure-loving façade.

  “I will leave that part of the story to my friend, Detective White,” said Charlotte, looking over at Maureen.

  She resumed her seat, and the audience’s attention shifted to Maureen. In fact, Charlotte had turned matters over to Maureen because she had no idea where to go from there. She had expected René to admit to being the character in her story, but it was clear that his legendary savoir faire wasn’t going to crack.

  “Before Detective White takes over, I would like to offer my guests a cigarette,” said René. Leaning back, he removed a cigarette case from the pocket of his navy blue blazer.

  It was the $200,000 gold-enameled case from the Normandie collection, the case that Paul had said rivaled the artworks of Fabergé for its craftsmanship, the case that Paul’s murderer had removed from his body.

  Opening the lid, René slowly and deliberately offered the case to each of those assembled around the table. Then he removed a cigarette for himself and lit it. Finally he picked up the bottle of pastis and refilled his glass.

  The others sat in silence, mesmerized by his performance. As they looked on, René raised the glass of milky yellow liquid.

  “À la revanche,” he said looking at them through the smoke of his cigarette. “Douce revanche,” he added, and proceeded to down the contents of the tumbler.

  Then he threw back his head and laughed.

  It was three days later, and Charlotte had spent the morning sweeping. Not sweeping exactly, but cleaning out. Not even cleaning out, which was her excuse for being there, as much as daydreaming. Once she had signed the purchase agreement, she had been eager to get into Château en Espagne, to get a feel for her new house. The real estate agent had indulged her whim, though the actual closing wouldn’t take place for several weeks. She had spent the mo
rning sweeping up dead palm fronds from the courtyard with a corn broom that she had bought in West Palm Beach, and admiring the paving blocks of cut coral, which made the house seem like an organic part of the coral bedrock of the island. Because the courtyard was the part of the house that had first captured her heart, she had chosen to attend to it first. When she was finished sweeping, she cleaned the dead leaves and other debris out of the fountain, and then pruned and watered the lemon trees in the terra-cotta pots lining the entrance walk, and the potted gardenia plants in the courtyard. Then she tended to the neglected orchids in the slat house, immersing the pots in water to simulate a tropical rainfall, as directed in a book on orchids she’d picked up at a bookstore on Worth Avenue. After a ham sandwich eaten at the patio table in the slat house, she had spent the early afternoon in the empty house, sitting, thinking, wandering around. Ever since she’d decided to buy the place, she had been mentally running up and down the stairs, peering into empty rooms, and arranging the furniture. In short, building castles in the air.