Murder Under the Palms (21 page)

If Charlotte had been in love with the house before, she was all the more in love with it once she had seen the tower room. By contrast with the rest of the house, which was sparsely and elegantly furnished, the tower room appeared to be where Paul had actually spent his time.

It was filled with books, papers, and comfortable chairs in which to sit and look out at the beautiful view, which was especially so at this time of day. To the north one could see downtown Palm Beach, with its barrel-tiled roofs of various heights and pitches and in various shades of terra cotta; to the south was the clear green expanse of the golf course, to the west the lake and the twinkling skyline of West Palm Beach, and to the east a view of the Atlantic Ocean.

I could live here, Charlotte thought as she wandered around the room, looking out of the windows.

“Terrific views,” commented Eddie, who was doing the same.

“Yes,” Dede agreed. “This is the best part of the house. It’s also where Paul spent his time when he wasn’t at the store. Here’s the lead soldier collection that I was telling Aunt Charlotte about the other day,” she said, leading them over to a glass-fronted bookcase.

The bookcase appeared to have been custom-made, and stood on legs that raised the shelves to eye level. Dede flipped a switch that illuminated the interior. The soldiers were three or four inches high and rested on wooden pedestals of the kind in which Dede had found the filing cabinet key. They were wonderfully detailed, each with individual expressions. On the front of each pedestal was a label, which was handwritten in an elegant script.

Leaning over, Charlotte read some of the labels aloud: “Palace Grenadier, 1913; Subaltern, His Imperial Majesty’s Lancer Regiment, 1909–13; Private, His Imperial Majesty’s Cossack Regiment, 1812; Private, Kubordinsky Infantry Regiment, 1914–17.”

“As you can see, they’re all Russian,” said Dede. “This is the one in which I found the key.” She pointed to a knight of Muscovy mounted on a horse. “I thought it would be best to put it in here with the others.”

Straightening up, Charlotte’s glance landed on a manikin wearing a military greatcoat and a military cap.

“A Russian military uniform,” Dede offered by way of explanation. “I think Paul inherited it from his father.”

Next to the manikin was a small table on which stood a photograph in an elegant frame of chased silver. Charlotte picked it up. It showed a sad-eyed Nicholas tightly clasping his hemophiliac son. He was surrounded by Empress Alexandra and their four daughters.

“What is it?” asked Eddie, peering over her shoulder.

“The Russian imperial family,” she said. “I think we’re on the right track,” she added as she set the photograph back down.

“What are we looking for first?” Dede asked as she scanned the bookshelves lining the room. “Scrapbooks or photograph albums?”

“Either,” Charlotte replied.

It took only a minute to find them: a row of old photograph albums with bindings of crumbling leather. “Here they are,” said Charlotte. Pulling three off a shelf, she sat down with one in a leather armchair next to a computer desk and passed the other two to Dede and Eddie.

The yellowing photographs were clearly mementoes of Paul’s days in Paris as a jeweler’s apprentice. They showed him against familiar Parisian backdrops, usually with a group of young men, sometimes with a girl. He had been strikingly good-looking: tall and straight, with those penetrating gray eyes.

Charlotte passed her album over to Eddie, who was sitting at the computer. “Is this the man you saw throw the incendiary pencil in the Grand Salon on the
Normandie
?”

Eddie studied the photographs for a moment. Then he tapped a scarred forefinger on a photo of Paul sitting on the steps at Montmartre. “Yes,” he said. “That’s him. I remember those eyes.”

With that confirmation, they continued looking for evidence that would link Paul with the camp in Connecticut.

“I think I’ve got something,” said Eddie after a few minutes.

Setting her album aside, Charlotte got up and looked over Eddie’s shoulder at the album that lay open on his lap.

It was a five-by-seven portrait of the same young man. He sat with his arms folded across his chest, staring out at the camera through pale eyes, his blond hair worn
en brosse
. He was wearing a dark shirt with long sleeves, each of which bore a red armband with a black swastika in a white circle.

“It’s Paul!” Dede cried. She studied the photograph, and then said: “He looks like a poster boy for Hitler youth.”

“Russian fascist youth,” corrected Charlotte. “There was a difference. Though with all the storm trooper garb, it was often hard to tell. I wonder if there are any pictures of the camp?”

Eddie turned back to the preceding page, where a photo showed a group of youths posed in front of a building.

“That’s it!” said Charlotte. “That’s High Gate Farm. Those are the chicken coops that Alex converted into barracks for his Russian fascist youth. And that’s the armory,” she said, pointing to the old stone silo that rose in the background. “It’s where Alex stored his guns and his ammunition.”

“What did he use them for?” asked Dede.

“To take potshots at photographs of Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Also, to defend himself from the impending Red menace. I wonder if any of these others could be Roehrer.” She pointed to a young man with a full face and a scowling expression. “This looks like him, don’t you think?” she asked Eddie.

“Could be,” said Eddie. “He has more hair here.”

Charlotte turned to Dede. “Do you think we could borrow this photograph and the portrait of Paul? We promise to bring them back. Scout’s honor.”

“I suppose so,” Dede agreed reluctantly. “These photographs wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else now, anyway. Not even to Paul’s great-nephew. Just don’t tell the estate lawyers you took them.”

As Charlotte proceeded to remove the camp photograph from the cardboard corners with which it was fastened to the page, she noticed that Paul was holding an attack dog on a leash: a German shepherd. The dog strained at the tightly drawn chain as if it were about to lunge at the viewer.

If there was any doubt left in Charlotte’s mind that Paul Federov and Paul Feder were one and the same, it evaporated in that instant. She remembered the dog in the picture as clearly as if she had seen it the day before.

“The dog!” she exclaimed, staring at the photograph she now gripped in her hands. “I’d completely forgotten about the dog.”

“What about the dog?” asked Eddie.

“Her name was Lady Astor!”

10

After leaving Dede’s, Charlotte and Eddie stopped at a travel agency and reserved seats on a flight to Boston for early the next morning. Then they strolled down Worth Avenue to Ta-boó, a legendary Palm Beach bistro, which had once claimed to be, along with Harry’s American Bar in Paris and “21” in Manhattan, one of the three most famous bars in the world. They had devoted the day to work; the evening would be reserved for romance. Having spent much of their time together reminiscing about their affair on the
Normandie
, they now moved on to fresh territory. They were still in the getting-to-know-you (again) stage of their relationship, and their dinner table conversation was largely a matter of filling in the blanks: finding out what had happened to each other over the course of fifty-three years, what they had sought from life and what life had delivered, and what they expected from here on out. Except for the fact that Eddie didn’t like raw oysters, they discovered that their attitudes toward almost everything were strangely similar. Like Charlotte, Eddie had been a workaholic who had sacrificed his personal life to his career. Like her, he was flirting with the idea of taking it easy: willing at last to let up on the ambition that had propelled him to the top, but wary of what might happen if he did. Like her, he was keenly aware that there wasn’t much time left. They departed around ten when the stares and whispers of the other diners indicated a growing awareness of the couple’s celebrity status and headed down Worth Avenue toward the Colony Hotel.

The Colony was a small, exclusive hotel at the end of Worth Avenue, a block from the ocean. Its Polo Cocktail Lounge was a Palm Beach institution, a place where the elite met to drink and dance, where people like Charlotte and Eddie could go and not be stared at. As they entered, Charlotte noticed that a few handsome middle-aged men were standing at the bar, eyeing the single older women. But their approach struck Charlotte as being more restrained and mannerly than that of their sycophantic counterparts in similar enclaves of the rich. She had once asked Connie why Palm Beach seemed to be relatively free of this particularly noxious (at least for single older women who weren’t interested) brand of human parasite. “It’s because Palm Beach is so much more sophisticated,” Connie had told her. “You have to be smart to play the game here. Your typical Miami gigolo wouldn’t make the grade.”

One representative of this species—a short, tanned, fit-looking man in a raw silk sports jacket—was making a play for a diamond-bedecked woman with a bouffant blond hairdo who was seated at the bar, opposite the door. Charlotte was observing his modus operandi when she realized that the object of his attentions was Lydia Collins. She was dressed in a tight-fitting orange jump suit, and she looked thin, chic, and miserable. Also perhaps, a little drunk. Had Charlotte been a career counselor, she would have advised Lydia’s would-be swain that this would be only a temporary position at best, that for long-term security he had better look elsewhere.

Eddie and Charlotte were seated by an officious maitre d’ at a table near the bar, overlooking the dance floor. The band appeared to be on break.

“There was something I wanted to ask you earlier,” Eddie said after they had ordered their drinks. “Why was the dog named Lady Astor?”

“I presumed it was because of the Cliveden Set,” Charlotte replied. She went on in response to Eddie’s puzzled expression: “They were a group of British fascists led by Lady Astor, who lived at an estate called Cliveden, which is why they were called the Cliveden Set.”

“I remember now. Nancy Astor. She was an American, from Virginia.”

Charlotte nodded. “I always thought the dog’s name was a political statement,” she said. “The way hippies in the sixties named their dogs Mao. Or maybe the dog really
was
named after Lady Astor. I know that Dorothy’s family—the Wellands—socialized with the British upper crust.”

The waitress had arrived with their drinks: a Manhattan for Charlotte and a martini for Eddie.

“Maybe Paul’s dog is a descendant of the original Lady Astor,” Charlotte continued after the waitress had left. “Or maybe she was just named after her. She was the mascot of High Gate Farm. Whenever anyone arrived, Lady Astor would come running out to greet them.” It was odd, Charlotte thought, how a life that had changed as completely as Paul’s could still harbor this one relic from a previous existence. Then one day life turns in on itself again, and that relic suddenly takes on new meaning, like the Fortuny gown that had hung in her guest room closet all those years.

“You never did tell me about your relationship with the count,” Eddie teased, his green eyes dancing.

“Do I have to?” she said. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“Yes,” he said firmly.

“Well, okay,” she conceded. “He had a sort of clubhouse at the farm, a hexagonal stone building with a big stone fireplace and a bar. The count’s clubhouse became the neighborhood hangout. The champagne was always flowing, at Dorothy’s expense I might add, though she was never there.”

“Where was she?” Eddie asked.

“I don’t know. But she didn’t seem to mind. She treated Alex like her spoiled little boy. He actually called her Mother. Anyway, Alex liked women, and he especially liked young women, of which there was a liberal supply at Miss Walker’s School for Girls, right next door.”

“And you were part of the supply.”

She nodded. “The school was like a prison. It even looked like a prison—a big, ugly, red brick Victorian monstrosity. I hated everything about it: the building, the teachers, the other girls. Alex’s clubhouse was everything the school was not: sophisticated, fun, lighthearted.”

“And Alex?” he asked.

“He was designed to be the heartthrob of every teenaged girl. Which was basically because he was a perpetual sixteen himself. He was very, very handsome, and very charming, and, of course, dashing.”

“Those jackboots,” Eddie said.

Charlotte laughed. “The Pierce Arrows helped too. When the school authorities learned that the girls were hanging out at Alex’s clubhouse, they declared the farm off-limits. But that didn’t stop us. We would sneak out of the dorm at night. Until we got caught.”

“What happened then?”

“I was expelled,” she said with a smile.

Eddie gave her a look of mock horror.

“Along with half a dozen others,” she added. “It was actually all very innocent, as far as I was concerned anyway. We would drink, dance, smoke cigarettes. Flirt a little, occasionally take pot shots at Stalin—that was about it. But our expulsions caused a full-blown scandal. A lot of the parents withdrew their daughters. The next year there was another scandal. Some of the girls got caught at a co-ed skinny-dipping party at the pond on the farm. There was a fire at the school right after that, and it was never rebuilt.”

Charlotte took a sip of her Manhattan, which wasn’t as good as the ones Spalding made. “I remember reading a newspaper account in which ‘the satyric depredations’ of the count were cited as a reason for the school’s demise,” she continued. “I always loved that phrase: satyric depredations.”

“What happened to you after that?”

“My mother more or less railroaded me into marrying my first husband,” she said. “I guess she figured it was one way of keeping me out of trouble. We moved to New York, and I enrolled in acting school and took a job as a cigarette girl at the Versailles Nightclub.”

Eddie clicked his tongue. “How risqué,” he said.

“My husband didn’t like it much, I can tell you that,” she said, and then continued: “In those days, every schoolgirl wanted to be a Powers and Conover model, so I decided to give it a try. I signed on and became the Jantzen bathing suit girl of 1938.”