Murder Under the Palms (7 page)

“Have you seen M. Norwood in the intervening years?” René asked.

“Not since August twenty-eighth, 1939. If you don’t count seeing him on television, that is.” She looked over at Connie, who wore the motherly smile of a matchmaker anticipating the imminent culmination of her efforts.

“Aha!” said René. “Did you know that he is here this evening?” he asked with a mischievous little smile that set the debonair mustache under his long nose to twitching.

Charlotte nodded and glanced up at the stairs.

“Well, you know what they say: ‘True love never dies.’” Stepping up to Charlotte’s side, René offered her his arm. “Shall we?” he asked.

4

The staircase was narrow and winding, with a low ceiling, like that on a ship. As they ascended it, Charlotte was beset by the same sensations that she used to have on the opening night of a Broadway play, which was to say that her legs felt like rubber and the back of her throat seemed to be locked in a vise. People who weren’t in the theatre had the mistaken idea that stage fright was an affliction of the inexperienced. Not true. It was like allergies or myopia: if you were unfortunate enough to suffer from stage fright at all, you would probably suffer from it your entire life. It had nothing to do with one’s level of experience or one’s ability. The best actors fell victim to it, as well as the worst. In truth, she was inclined to think that the best actors suffered from it more, because they put more of themselves on the line. But she was fortunate in that she had a cure, the secret of which had been imparted to her years ago by her friend the actor Larry Olivier. It was to think of your feet. She had once seen an article in which Larry was quoted to that effect, in response to a question about the secret to consistently fine acting. The reporter had treated the quote as if it were a flip remark, but in fact Larry had been quite serious. There was something about shifting the attention to your feet that served to anchor you to the earth. The negative energy was conducted downward, just as a lightning rod draws lightning downward into the ground.

The staircase her feet were ascending was magnificent—a gracefully curving spiral with a polished brass handrail—and Charlotte could feel her nervousness diminish with each step. But the staircase was nothing by comparison with the room at the top. As in many oceanfront houses, the public rooms were located on the top floor to take advantage of the views.

“
Magnifique, n’est-ce pas
?” commented René, as they paused at the top of the stairs to pose for the photographers who were covering the event for the local society pages.

“
Oui
,” Charlotte answered reflexively in French, too taken aback by the splendor of her surroundings to realize how dumb she must have sounded.

The room was a replica of the Grand Salon of the
Normandie
, but smaller. There were the same, chairs covered in red-and-gray floral needlepoint tapestry; the same twelve-foot-high ruffled glass Lalique light fountains, each with a circular settee at its base; and the same art deco glass murals, or one of them anyway. The Grand Salon had featured four of these striking murals; this room had one, at the south end. At the north end was a stage, at one side of which a piano player was seated at a baby grand. Seeing him, Charlotte’s heart skipped a beat before she realized that he was too young to be Eddie.

Once she had regained her composure, she scanned the room full of ladies with bare shoulders and gentlemen with starched shirt fronts, but she saw no Eddie Norwood there, either.

Turning back to René, she asked, “Is this an original Dupas mural?” She was referring to the French artist who had designed the famous glass panels for
Normandie
’s Grand Salon.

“The very same,” he replied.

“But how did they …?”

As she spoke, a woman detached herself from the party of guests that had immediately preceded them, and headed toward Charlotte’s party.

“I’ll let our hostess explain,” said René, as the woman joined them. “This is Miss Charlotte Graham,” he said to her. “She was a passenger on
Normandie
’s last crossing. And this is our hostess, Mrs. Harley Collins, chairman of the preservation association and noted collector of Normandiana.”

“Please call me Lydia,” said the woman as she shook Charlotte’s hand. In her other arm she cradled a tiny silky terrier. “And this is Song Song,” she added, introducing the dog, whose silver topknot was tied with a yellow ribbon that matched her mistress’s gown, “I’m very pleased that you could join us tonight, Miss Graham.”

Charlotte returned the compliment. Lydia was one of those women whose most notable physical feature was her bouffant platinum blond hairdo, which was worn in a style that had once been described by Charlotte’s acerbic hairdresser as “fried, dyed, and shoved to the side.”

Apart from her hair and the dog, there was little to remark about Lydia: she was fashionably thin; expensively, if a bit ridiculously, dressed in a yellow off-the-shoulder gown with pouf sleeves and a billowing skirt in which she looked like an extra for
Gone With the Wind
; and attractive enough if one discounted the facial skin that was taut from too many face-lifts.

Charlotte could see why she wasn’t Spalding and Connie’s type.

After their hostess had greeted Connie and Spalding with kisses to the air on either side of their cheeks, Charlotte said, “I was just commenting to Mr. Dubord about the Dupas panels. I didn’t realize they had been saved.”

“Most of the artwork from the
Normandie
was removed at the time of the conversion in 1941,” Lydia said. “But it still wasn’t easy locating the individual panels that make up this mural. A lot of the
Normandie
artwork has disappeared.” She looked up at the mural, which must have measured twenty feet high by at least as wide. “This is half of one of the four murals that originally decorated the walls of the Grand Salon.”

The glass panels showed silver gods and goddesses riding on the back of an enormous sea serpent which was swimming in a scalloped sea set against a background of puffy clouds and the billowing sails of golden ships. The back of the glass was painted with gold and silver leaf, which caught the light from the light Lalique fountains.

“The murals depict the story of navigation in mythological terms,” Lydia explained as she scratched the dog’s neck with a hand whose most conspicuous feature was a huge emerald-cut diamond. “This is half of ‘The Chariot of Poseidon.’ The other half is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

“That’s right!” Charlotte exclaimed. “I’d forgotten. It’s in the dining room, over the bar.” She had often admired it there.

Lydia nodded her bouffant head.

“My half consists of fifty individual panels. Harley and I bought the first twenty-six from an antique dealer in 1977, and seven years later, we bought another twelve at auction. But for eight years, I’d been missing the twelve panels from the center of the two bottom rows.”

“That must have been frustrating,” Connie sympathized as she gazed up at the shimmering mural. “To have all but that one section. The mural wouldn’t have made sense.”

“Yes, it was frustrating,” Lydia agreed. “There was a great big hole in the center, just where the sea serpent is.” She removed her hand from the dog’s neck to point out where the gap had been. “The missing panels finally surfaced at Christie’s, and I was able to complete the mural.”

“You were lucky you weren’t outbid,” said Connie. “Wouldn’t it have been awful if someone else had gotten them?”

“I made sure I wasn’t outbid,” Lydia replied. “They were expensive, but I just
had
to have them.”

“And the Lalique light towers?” Charlotte asked.

“The light towers aren’t original. I had them copied from photographs of the originals.”

“You would never know,” Charlotte said. “The mood is exactly the same.” Like a crystal box, she had thought then. The room even had the same tall windows as the Grand Salon, from which one could easily imagine an uninterrupted ocean view.

“Thank you,” said Lydia. “I’ve tried to make it as authentic as possible.”

Her escort had joined her, and she proceeded to introduce him. He was the Jack McLean of the table-seating card, and he was a retired rear admiral and another acquaintance of the Smiths’. Despite its veneer of sophistication, Palm Beach was at heart the kind of small town where everybody knew everybody else.

He was a formidable-looking man, with a square jaw and deep-set gray eyes shielded by craggy gray eyebrows. He was tall and still very handsome, though he must have been close to seventy.

“I presume it’s the U.S. Navy that you’re retired from, and not the French Line,” Charlotte said, nodding at his flawlessly cut dress uniform, with medals and gold buttons and a black tie and a stiff, snow-white shirt.

“Oh, yes,” he assured her with a smile, his voice carrying a hint of a Southern accent. “It was Lydia who persuaded me to wear the uniform. I’m to play the role of the captain tonight. For the sake of verisimilitude.”

“It’s hard to have a captain’s gala without a captain,” Lydia trilled. “Lacking the real thing, we substituted a home-grown version.”

“Well, Lydia’s certainly done a wonderful job planning the party,” Charlotte said. “I especially liked it when the
Normandie
pageboy came to my hotel room with the menu.” She turned to her hostess. “That was a very nice touch.”

“Thank you,” Lydia responded. “Your necklace is lovely, by the way,” she added, obviously having been briefed on who would be modeling the pieces from Marianne’s
Normandie
collection. “We’ll be having the jewelry show right after dinner, just before the dancing.”

“Your brooch is lovely too,” said Charlotte. Their hostess was wearing another piece that was obviously from the collection, on the bodice of her flouncy gown: a diamond pavé brooch in the shape of the
Normandie
.

“Thank you,” Lydia said. “Paul has generously given it to me to keep.” Then, mindful of her social obligations, she glanced away to briefly scan the room, then excused herself and moved off to mingle with the other guests, the dog still cradled on the crook of her arm.

Following Connie and Spalding, Charlotte moved over to a table of
hors d’oeuvres
, the centerpiece of which was an enormous ice sculpture in the shape of the
Normandie
, filled with Beluga caviar. After heaping a cracker with the caviar, she stood back to survey the crowd.

She spotted Paul Feder right away. He stood out by virtue of his height He was talking with Dede, who looked like a princess in a long, simple white satin sheath with a crisscross back that fit her like a glove and which was a perfect complement to the simple elegance of the diamond choker.

Then she spotted Marianne, who was wearing a pleated lavender gown of her own design. The fact that it was very similar to Charlotte’s was no surprise: Marianne was known for her revival of the Fortuny look.

Marianne stood at the bar, watching Paul and Dede. The black eyebrows beneath the straight bangs of her Cleopatra cut were drawn together in a frown, and her narrow red lips were pressed together. Her fingers tapped a nervous tattoo on the surface of the bar, as if to say, What are we going to do about
this
?

Knowing Marianne as she did, Charlotte would be willing to bet that the fur would be flying before the night was out.

She was watching Paul take a cigarette out of his elegant cigarette case when she spotted Eddie standing near the piano.

His hair was no longer black; it was now silver-white, but worn in the same close-cropped style. He was a bit heavier than he had been then, but otherwise he still looked much the same. But then, Charlotte had known how he would look from television. He was wearing a white tailcoat and white tie, the same attire she’d first seen him in fifty-three years ago.

She was trying to decide what her next move should be, when he looked up and met her gaze. Their eyes locked across the crowded room, just as in one of her sappier movies. All that was lacking was a camera lens to shift the rest of the room into soft focus.

He smiled and then turned to mount the step to the stage. Still moving with the same athletic grace, he leaned over to speak in the ear of the piano player, who rose to relinquish his place. The murmur of conversation died down as the guests turned their attention to the well-known pianist and bandleader.

Charlotte wasn’t sure that he would remember; it had been so many years. And then the opening refrain came, delivered in Eddie’s mellow, intimate baritone, a little weaker than it had been, but still as smooth and easy: “As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend, ‘Fare thee well.’”

The song was “Just One of Those Things.”

He played the piano as he always had: so smoothly, so effortlessly, his long fingers seeming to ripple over the keys, and radiating the charm and showmanship that had endeared him to audiences for half a century. Except that in this case, he was playing to an audience of one.

Charlotte suddenly was conscious of her feet again. They were no longer on the ground. In fact, they were ten feet in the air.
Oh-oh
, she said to herself.
I thought I was done with men
.

After playing a couple of other old favorites, he stood up and bowed to the audience, which applauded enthusiastically. Then he stepped down off the stage and wove his way through the admiring crowd to Charlotte, removing two flutes of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter along the way.

Reaching her, he handed her a glass.

Seeing him standing there before her, Charlotte felt as if fifty-three years had magically evaporated.

Then he wordlessly took her by the elbow and steered her out to the deck. If the house could be thought of as a ship that was sailing down island, they would have been on the aft sun-deck, looking out over the port side toward the Atlantic. The sight before them was lovely: a generous deep green lawn of Bermuda grass dotted with slender coconut palms whose swaying crowns were silhouetted against the orange-violet sky, in which a perfect crescent moon was suspended like a Christmas ornament.