Murder at the Spa (10 page)

From below, she could hear the murmur of conversation. The early arrivals had begun to cluster at the bar that had been set up on the terrace. A pianist at a white baby grand played Cole Porter. A few minutes later, she was ready. She wore a tailored white linen dress with a white shawl collar. Her glossy black hair—once worn in a famous pageboy—was now pulled back into a chignon. Like Paulina, she chose a chignon for the sake of convenience and like Paulina, her hair was colored, but not as blue-black as Paulina’s. But where Paulina’s hair style was dramatic and sculptural, Charlotte’s was looser and more natural. With her soft, delicate features and her pale skin, the effect was both gracious and elegant.

She took the glass elevator down to the lobby. In the distance, the mountains stood out crisp and clear against the deep blue sky. Emerging at the rear of the hotel, she headed directly for the bar. It was odd how being denied alcohol made her want it all the more. At home, she often went a week or more without a drink; now she was craving one after only three days. Manhattan in hand (she hoped she wouldn’t bump into Anne-Marie), she stood back to survey the scene. At least a hundred people had already arrived, all looking very stylish: the men in navy blue blazers and white trousers, the women in flowery dresses and wide-brimmed hats. The press, which was present in full force, wore red carnations and name tags. In the center of the terrace stood a department store cosmetics counter, looking as out of place as a yacht stranded on a Kansas prairie. On it was displayed “the product”: bottles, boxes, and countertop display stands of the Body Spa line, all richly packaged in mint-green and silver. The counter was flanked by store easels displaying poster-sized replicas of the national ad: a close-up of the flawless face of Corinne, the Body Spa girl. Nearby, Paulina was posing with the lean and leggy Corinne herself, next to whom she looked like a potato dumpling. Paulina made an unlikely Queen of Beauty, but it was part of her genius that she put her dumpiness to work for her. “If she can make herself look glamorous, then I can too,” went the rationale of the millions of dumplingesque, middle-aged ladies who were the backbone of her business.

It seemed to Charlotte that the concept behind Body Spa line was equally inspired. If she hadn’t already owned Langenberg stock, she would have bought some, despite the radium rumor. The Body Spa line was aimed at a different market, one whose appetite for beauty products had yet to be fully exploited. While the regular line appealed to the wealthy, idle, older woman, the market for the Body Spa line was a fresh, active, younger woman. For the Body Spa woman, beauty was less an embellishment than a part of fitness and health. To promote the idea of its being modern and scientific, the product was being sold by beauty “consultants” whose mint-green lab coats gave them an aura of scientific authority. Another gimmick was the “computers” (basically just question and answer boards) that the consultants used to assess skin type.

A group of expertly made-up consultants was circulating among the crowd, inviting guests to try the computer. Charlotte was about to take one of them up on it when she caught sight of Paulina charging in her direction, her red straw bowler bouncing up and down like the bobber on a fishing line. Jack followed like a lady in waiting to the queen. She was wearing an embroidered chemise-style tea gown with a matching shawl in Langenberg red, in which she looked like the Red Queen on a rampage. In her wake marched a retinue of red-carnationed press people. Emerging from the throng, Paulina stopped dead, raised an arm, and pointed at Charlotte. “There she is,” she said. Charlotte had the feeling she was about to add, “Off with her head.”

The press had espied their quarry. They were massed behind Paulina like the Red Queen’s retainers, only instead of clubs they carried cameras and notebooks. Why, they’re only a pack of cards, thought Charlotte, I needn’t be afraid of them. As she reached Charlotte, Paulina grabbed her drink and set it on a nearby table. Then she pulled a jar of Body Spa cream out of a bag Jack was carrying and stuck it into Charlotte’s hand. “Okay, shoot,” she ordered, striking a smiling pose. As the shutters clicked, Charlotte felt her face redden in anger. Dispensing free ink was a profitable sideline for many celebrities. Designer gowns, hotel suites, fine antiques—all were available on the cheap to those who were willing to have a picture taken here, drop a name there. But Paulina wasn’t playing by the rules. She hadn’t reduced Charlotte’s rate. All she had offered was a free lunch, which Charlotte would have turned down had she known what she would be asked to do in return. She was ordinarily indulgent of her fans—she would gladly sign autographs by the hour—but she resented having her face used to promote products.

The shutters stopped clicking and Paulina retrieved the jar from Charlotte’s hand. “For
Society
magazine,” she offered by way of explanation. “Very important—over a million circulation. Good publicity—for you and for me.” But before Charlotte could object, she had marched back into the crowd in search of some other celebrity to have her picture taken with.

Charlotte gazed after her, still seething with resentment.

“Taking advantage, was she?”

The voice was Jerry D’Angelo’s. She realized she must have had a sour expression on her face. Sour enough to spoil the picture, she hoped. “Oh, well,” she said. “It was my own fault. I should have known Paulina had an ulterior motive in inviting me.”

“The boss lady never misses a chance to rustle up some free publicity. Can I get you a drink?”

“If you won’t snitch on me to Anne-Marie.” The glass that Paulina had taken from her had disappeared.

He smiled. “What will you have?”

“A manhattan—on the rocks, thanks.”

She watched as he made his way through the crowd at the bar. His broad back was squeezed into an ill-fitting suit that puckered at the seams. He looked more at home in a T-shirt and sweatpants.

He returned a moment later carrying her drink, which he handed to her, and a beer for himself. “Shall we sit down?” He nodded toward the tables, which were shaded by green and white umbrellas suggesting High Rock water and lime as “the perfect thirst quencher.”

“I’ve been meaning to talk with you,” he said as they took their seats on the red bentwood chairs. “I think we have a friend in common.”

“Who’s that?”

“Tim Connelly.”

Charlotte smiled. It was a different smile from the one she wore in public. Her private face had never been frozen, as had those of so many of her colleagues, into an expression that was too dazzling, too intentional. For friends, her smile was still as warm as a fire on a chilly night.

“Really!” she said delightedly. “How is he?” Tim Connelly was the detective with whom she’d worked on the Morosco case. Over the course of the investigation, her respect for his professionalism and her appreciation of his sense of humor had blossomed into a deep friendship.

For a few minutes, they reminisced about Tim and the other members of Manhattan Homicide with whom she had worked. Tim, it turned out, had been Jerry’s mentor. That is, before Jerry quit police work.

“Why did you leave? Or shouldn’t I ask. Maybe it’s none of my business.”

He held up the forefinger of his right hand. Half an inch was missing from the tip. “I got out on a disability pension—three quarters. It’s what’s known in the business as winning the lottery. Some cops make it happen: they slam their hand in the car door or slice the tip off their trigger finger. I had it done for me by a wacko with a gun.”

“You don’t sound too happy about it.”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t, at first. I’m adjusting. In a lot of ways, it’s better. A cop’s life isn’t the life for a man with a family. That’s why a lot of cops end up in divorce court. The money’s better here too. With my disability, we can live pretty well. Before, I was trying to support a wife and four kids on twenty-six grand a year. In New York. It was tough.”

“How did you end up here?”

“After I got out, I worked in a health club for a while. Somebody told me about this job. It’s a trade-off, like anything else. I’m not the guy in the white hat anymore, but I’m outside a lot, I’m making good money, and I don’t have to go home to the wife and kids day after day and pretend that I didn’t see a guy with his head split open lying in the gutter.”

A waiter came by with a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

“They didn’t serve grub like this at the station house either,” he added, helping himself to a cracker piled with caviar. “Actually, it wasn’t Tim that I wanted to talk with you about; it was Adele.”

“Adele Singer?” said Charlotte, puzzled.

“Yeah.” He spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent. He was leaning forward in thought, his beer glass cupped between his knees. His brow was furrowed. “I don’t think she died of a drug overdose.”

“What do you think it was? Suicide?”

“I don’t know. That’s the problem. It sounds good, drug overdose. Most bathtub deaths
are
overdoses, or suicides. Except that I saw the body, and it didn’t look right; it wasn’t in the position you’d expect.”

Charlotte remembered that Jerry had been one of the men who’d carried in the oxygen resuscitator. “What position was it in?”

“Her feet were hanging out over the end of the tub.” He pulled over a chair and draped his legs over the back. “Like this,” he said.

“But didn’t they find drugs in her blood?”

“Yeah. But that doesn’t mean anything. She was an addict. She could have swallowed enough to kill a horse and not even have felt it. I thought you might be able to help me figure it out. Why would her feet be hanging out like that? Some arcane female ritual that I’m not aware of?”

Smiling, Charlotte raised a skeptical eyebrow in an expression that had withered many of the screen’s leading men.

Jerry grinned. He had delightful dimples.

“Could she have been shaving her legs?” Charlotte offered. She leaned back in thought, stretching her long legs out in front of her. Her hand was draped languidly over the arm of the chair, her glass dangling from her fingers. She still possessed the distinctive liquid grace—at once both feline and ethereal—that was part of her sexy, radiant screen presence.

“No razor.”

“Maybe her legs were too long to fit in the tub.”

“She was short. And even if she wasn’t, she could have bent her legs. I’ve seen a lot of tall men get in and out of these tubs, but I’ve yet to see one who’s stuck his legs out over the end like that.”

Jerry was right—it was odd, unnatural. But she was damned if she could figure out why. She tried to think back to that moment. She remembered the footsteps. But that didn’t tell her much except that they weren’t Hilda’s. She would have recognized Hilda’s shuffle. “Did you tell the police?”

“Yeah, but they weren’t interested. They’ve got everything neatly wrapped up. They don’t want some smart ass from the Big Apple telling them they shouldn’t be so eager to close the file.”

Under the tent, the guests were taking their seats. Jack disengaged himself from a group of red carnations at the other end of the terrace and headed toward them, dispatched no doubt by Paulina. He looked like a southern planter in his fashionably rumpled white linen suit.

“Here comes the boss lady’s lapdog,” said Jerry.

“I gathered he’s at her back and call.”

“She’s all but got him on a leash,” he said disdainfully.

Jack arrived at their table. “Are you ready to dine, madam?” he asked with mock formality, offering her his arm.

“Yes, thank you,” said Charlotte. After saying good-bye to Jerry, she headed toward the tent with Jack. The tent poles were festively decorated with garlands of flowers and mint-green banners bearing the Indian maiden logo. Bouquets of green balloons floated above the tables. At each place, there was a gift certificate for twenty dollars and a miniature mint-green shopping bag filled with samples of the product. Wine them and dine them and give them presents—Paulina knew how to spend her money where it would do the most good.

Jack escorted Charlotte to Paulina’s table. In addition to Paulina and Jack, those at the table included Leon, Anne-Marie, Gary, and one of the ubiquitous red carnations, a heavily made-up reporter from
Society
magazine named Miss Small with inch-long orange fingernails and a straw hat to match. The topic of conversation was the radium scare. In response to Miss Small’s question about the effect of the radium scare on business, Gary replied that sales of High Rock water had started to slip. Wisely choosing to ignore the question, Paulina unsuccessfully tried to steer the conversation to the Body Spa line. But Gary persisted. He said he wasn’t concerned. “It’s going to be tough sledding for a while, but we’ll come out of it smelling like a rose,” he said with the businessman’s knack for mixing metaphors.

Miss Small conscientiously recorded every word in a reporter’s notebook, her charm bracelet jingling. It would make a nice item: “President undismayed by dip in sales. ‘High Rock water will recover,’ he says.” But the romance between Gary and Anne-Marie would have made much better copy. Charlotte could see now why Paulina thought him a good match for Anne-Marie. Like her, he glowed with vitality. He wasn’t handsome: he was losing his hair and he had an underbite. But he was magnetic, with heavy black eyebrows; small, intense brown eyes; and a pointed chin with a deep cleft. He was short in stature—no taller than Anne-Marie—but he had the presence of a much larger man. He struck Charlotte as smart, shrewd, and unabashedly ambitious.

Charlotte had often come across his picture in the gossip magazines in the doctor’s office, jogging or skiing across the pages. A former West Point cadet, he had gone on to become a Madison Avenue ad man, and was widely considered a marketing genius on account of his uncanny knack for spotting trends. Yogurt, blue jeans, running shoes—all had been largely Gary Brant creations. When the state put the High Rock bottling plant up for lease, he smelled a new market and decided to strike out on his own. He repackaged the water in sleek leaf-green bottles, marketed it as a chic alternative to soft drinks, and advertised like crazy. In just five years, he had turned a dusty upstate New York label into one of the country’s most popular beverages. In doing so, he had virtually created the mineral water market, just as Paulina had created the cosmetics market more than fifty years before.