“What you suspected?” Caroline’s heart began to pound again. Was her own mother on the verge of solving a crime before the police detectives even got here?
Hilda sat back, looking triumphant. “Yes. She has had a face-lift. I thought so.”
Caroline found a chair and sat in it.
“Why doesn’t anybody come?” her mother fretted, after they had waited what seemed an eternity alone with one another and the body of Claudia de Vries. Where only moments before she had seemed lost in her own thoughts, now Hilda turned and arched an eyebrow at her daughter. “You look like something the cat dragged in, Caroline. What if someone takes photographs? What if they print it in a newspaper? How would that look for Douglas to have his wife seen like this? Clean yourself up before somebody sees you.”
Caroline looked down at her clothing and her arms, which were coated with thick, damp mud. She had hardly been aware of herself since she sat down, so stunned was she by the events of the past twenty minutes. But now, as much as she hated to obey Hilda, suddenly she couldn’t bear to leave the mud on herself for an instant longer. Spotting a basin and faucet, Caroline hurried to rinse off as much as she could. She thought about taking off her clothes and putting on one of the terry cloth robes that hung on hooks but decided she didn’t want to meet the police that way, wearing something so intimate as a bathrobe. In lieu of that, she scrubbed her face and neck and arms until they stung and the water ran clean into the basin and down the drain.
Her mother, she noted, didn’t have a dirty drop on her.
Caroline had just sat down again in the leather chair when suddenly it seemed as if everybody was there all at once in a great loud chaos of discovery and dismay.
Claudia’s husband, Raoul de Vries, came rushing in first, followed by several of the guests.
“Claudia!” he shrieked upon seeing his wife’s body.
He didn’t go to her, however, but drew back in a way that looked almost superstitious to Caroline. The man looked, she thought, as if he were afraid this death might be catching.
His next utterance sounded horrified. “How could this have happened?” He stared suspiciously at Caroline and then at Hilda.
“We don’t know, Raoul,” Caroline told him sympathetically. She stood up out of respect for the widower and the occasion. “When we came into this room, we found your wife’s body submerged in that tub, and we pulled her out.” She was going to break the news that it appeared that his wife had been murdered, but Caroline paused at that point, feeling unsure of herself and suddenly wary of saying it in front of so many people.
Behind Claudia’s husband, Phyllis Talmadge was shaking her head in a deeply resigned and unhappy way, as if something she had feared had, indeed, come to pass. When she caught Caroline’s eye, she mouthed, “I told you so!”
King David had come in with them, too. Now he leaned back against a door jamb, staring at Caroline, so that she found herself stammering for that reason as well. He looked older this morning, she judged from the quick glance she gave him before looking away. His sybaritic face looked more deeply lined, the bags under his eyes were heavier, as if he hadn’t slept. But in spite of that, there was such a magnetism about him that it was all she could do not to keep glancing at him. She continued to be acutely aware of his gaze upon her face.
Beyond the door, she heard a man raise his voice and say, ″No, Ondine, don’t go in there!”
But the young model plunged through the open doorway, coming even farther into the room than anyone else had, so that when she did see the body, she gasped, and then screamed, and ran away from it like a little girl. The man she had pointed out to Caroline as her manager walked into the room, put his arm around her shoulders, and led her out again, saying, “Are you ever going to listen to me?”
Caroline risked a glance at King David.
He smiled ever so slightly and slowly winked at her.
It seemed wildly inappropriate, even lewd under the circumstances.
Caroline looked away again and this time firmly kept her own gaze turned away from the grown man who called himself King but who still seemed to want to be a bad boy.
Hilda, she noted, was hanging back, saying nothing.
Thanks a lot Mom, she thought, as she faced the widower alone.
Just then, Lauren Sullivan slipped into the room past King David and went to stand just behind Phyllis Talmadge. Her bruised eyes looked as wide and distressed as a wounded animal’s, and her famous little chin looked quivery, as if she might cry at any moment. She was so quiet, so unobtrusive, she might have been a maid coming in to assist all the celebrities, Caroline thought. And yet she was probably the most famous one of them all. She was also, it seemed, the most loath to call attention to herself.
But she had King David’s attention, whether she wanted it or not.
By accident, Caroline caught her eye and was amazed to see the wide, generous mouth curve up in a small, sweet smile. For just that moment, they seemed to Caroline to be caught in a circle of compassion that this beautiful, shy woman exuded by her very presence. And then the breathtaking smile was gone. Lauren Sullivan moved behind the others, so that she was out of sight of everyone, including Caroline.
Caroline stepped closer to Raoul, wanting to speak only to him. “I think you need to call the police,” she suggested quietly.
His response was anything but quiet in return. “The police? Absolutely not. Why would I do that? Claudia would kill me. The publicity …″ He turned slightly and clapped his hands once.”I want everyone to leave now. This is a private affair. I appreciate your concern, but this is a family matter. If you will all please step outside the room, I’ll handle this … .”
At that moment, Hilda finally did step forward to speak. “No, Raoul,” she said. ″I’ll handle this.”
He turned his handsome, aristocratic face toward her, looking surprised, condescending, even slightly amused. His distress seemed to have given way to brisk management, Caroline observed.
“You’ll handle it?” he asked Hilda with insulting politeness. “Is that what you said? Well, thank you, Hilda, I’m sure that’s very kind of you, but there’s really no need for your assistance. I may be distraught″—he didn’t look it, Caroline thought—”but Claudia was my wife, and I am now the owner of this spa, and—″
“No, Raoul, you’re not,” Hilda announced in the same strong, bossy tone. Behind him, his famous guests gaped at the little scene that was unfolding. Hilda cast a quick glance at her astonished daughter before saying, “You are not the owner of this spa, or at least you are not the majority owner. I am. I am sorry for your loss, Raoul, because I know what it’s like to lose a spouse, but I must tell you that you have lost more than you realize. I am the new owner of this business, and I will take charge of everything from this moment on.”
“Mother!” Caroline urgently pulled Hilda aside after a furious Raoul de Vries had been ushered out by the Adonis in the swimsuit who now, it appeared, worked for her very own mother. “Is this true, Mom?”
“No, I made it all up,” was her mother’s sarcastic reply.
“You’ve got to tell me more than you told them!”
“All right, come over here where he can’t hear us.” Hilda cast a queenly look at her employee and called out to him, “What is your name, anyway?”
“Emilio.”
“Emilio what?”
“Emilio Constanza, madam.”
With that accent, Caroline thought, she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear him say his name was Winston or Basil or Frederick, something as British as double-decker buses.
Her mother, who had honed her giving-orders skills on Caroline and her father for years, was already proving adept at taking charge and issuing edicts. That was the one part of this incredible turn of events that didn’t surprise her daughter in the least. She’d always suspected that her mother must have been Napoleon in a former life.
Hilda ordered King David to call the police immediately, an
assignment that he appeared to accept with relish and sardonic amusement. “Great publicity,” he murmured, as he sauntered off to accomplish the job.
“Black forces still threaten us all,” declared Phyllis V. Talmadge.
“Oh, mind your own business,” Hilda snapped.
The psychic departed in a huff of outrage.
Hilda then shooed Christopher Lund and Ondine out of the building as well.
The only guest who hadn’t appeared on the scene at all was Howard Fondulac, the producer Caroline suspected of being an alcoholic. So at least there was one guest whom her mother hadn’t yet managed to order around or offend.
Now only Emilio remained with them. He stood with his back against the door, instructed by Hilda to keep out everyone except the police.
Caroline was determined to demand answers from this astonishing woman who was her mother. She had already heard Hilda tell Raoul that she herself was the majority stockholder in this privately owned company that was the spa. But what Hilda hadn’t answered yet to anybody’s satisfaction was, “How? Why? Mother!”
Hilda smiled in a satisfied, superior way. “Claudia and Raoul always thought their benefactor—their majority owner—was a wealthy attorney in Atlanta.”
By the door, Emilio looked openly interested in this.
“But it wasn’t? Was it you and Dad?”
“Not your father, dear, just me. It was my secret little investment that I made long ago with money your father gave me when I asked him for it.”
Of course, Caroline thought, Hamlin Finch gave his wife anything she wanted to try to keep her happy, to try to keep the peace.
“But why did you keep it a secret, Mother? Why didn’t anybody know? Claudia was your old roommate, for heaven’s sake. Why didn’t you tell her?”
“She was my roommate but not my friend.”
Hilda glanced at their “guard” and pulled Caroline deeper into the room, away from his listening ears. And then in a few terse sentences, Hilda delivered to Caroline the biggest shock of her life. “Didn’t you ever wonder why I stayed at Brown for only one year?”
“Well, no, I—″
“You thought I left to marry your father, didn’t you? That was true, as far as it went, but that came later. The real reason I left was to have a baby.”
Her daughter gasped, and the man at the door looked at them curiously, though she thought he was surely unable to overhear their conversation.
“My parents knew, and my roommate knew, but nobody else—not even the father—knew about it. I had the baby, and I put it up for adoption—″
“Oh, Mom,” Caroline murmured, sympathy overcoming shock. But then she blurted in amazement, “I have a sister? A brother?”
“One of the above,” her mother said, with a hard, brittle humor that Caroline suspected hid her real feelings. At least, Caroline hoped it did; she would have hated to think her mother could really be that cold and unloving. “I didn’t want to know if it was a girl or a boy. I made them take the baby away without telling me. And then I let your father court and marry me, because I was afraid to go back to college.”
“But why?”
Hilda cast a lingering glance at the woman whose mudcovered body still lay on the tile floor. “Because she said she would tell everyone what I had done. She hated me, she was jealous of me, and she didn’t want me ever to return to school. I was afraid of her after that, always expecting her to divulge my secret someday. And then one day years later she called me and said she would tell your father about the baby if I didn’t give her enough money to start this spa.”
“Oh, Mom!” Caroline tried to clasp her mother in a comforting embrace, but Hilda didn’t want it and pushed her away. Still, Caroline whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
″Never mind that. The important thing is that I vowed my own revenge on that terrible woman. I began to buy her out, using an attorney, and she never knew it. It took me twenty years, but this year I finally did it. I finally became the majority owner of this place. And now I intend to run it my way.” Her mother’s smile was cold.”It’s the best revenge, Caroline.”
The owner of Phoenix Spa was dead.
The new owner was her very own mother.
But her mother was wrong, Caroline thought, even in the shock of the moment. That wasn’t the most important thing. Not at all. And it never would be. The most important thing was that all those years ago another baby had been born and then disappeared, perhaps into another family. She has another child! And I have a sister or a brother.
Caroline’s heart felt suffused with a warmth that nearly brought her to tears. But she saw at once that her mother wouldn’t appreciate any show of emotion or, worse, sentimentality. And then a very unsentimental thought occurred to her like a cold wind that froze the warmth in her heart.
If the police were looking for a good motive for murder, her own mother certainly had one.
4
DETECTIVE VINCE TOSCANA SURVEYED the scene. A bunch of people who were already too beautiful, standing around a beauty spa that had more marble than the Vatican, and all the people were covered with mud. In fact, they had paid good money to be covered with mud. Vince didn’t get it. Back home in Philly, if some knucklehead threw mud on you, you wouldn’t pay him for it, you would break his face, no question. You would have to break his face just to save yours, and you both would be better for it. Vince had learned that lesson from the boys on the corner, which is where he learned every lesson that mattered in life.
Vince sighed inwardly and wished, not for the first time, that he had never moved out of the city. He didn’t belong in Virginia. There wasn’t enough graffiti. Strangers greeted him on the street. People said “please” and ″thank you″ like it was going out of style. And now the mud people. It was crazy. But Vince loved his wife, Mary Elizabeth, who was from here, and so he had transferred, even though he was pushing sixty, two years from retirement, and the farthest south he had ever lived was a brick rowhouse on South Street.
And though Vince liked his fancy new house with the plush lawn, he often felt like the only Italian in the Confederacy. By day, he would find himself yearning for a steaming cheese steak and a growing crime rate. At night, his dreams were filled with the happy honking of congested traffic and the screaming of police sirens. He woke up relaxed when he had his recurring dream, the one where the cabbie cut him off and then cursed him out for it. Vince Toscana was homesick.
But now he had a job to do, and Vince loved his job almost as much as his wife. He flopped his tie over his shoulder, hitched up his khaki slacks, and eased onto his good knee beside the muddy body of Claudia de Vries. Vince suppressed his sympathy to serve his profession and appraised the lovely woman, now lifeless, with a critical eye. The medical examiner would determine the time of death for sure, but the pallor of the body and the tension in the facial muscles told Vince that rigor mortis had set in but not disappeared, so the murder was probably committed late last night. Plus the lady wore a fancy cocktail dress, like the kind his wife would wear at night. Then Vince noticed something strange. Down by the woman’s manicured hand, the filmy dress concealed an object behind it, formless as a shadow.
Vince slid a ballpoint from his breast pocket and edged the cocktail dress away from the hand, exposing the article clenched in its death grip. What the hell was it? Vince leaned closer. The hand held a piece of clothing that looked for all the world like a skimpy bathing suit. He probed it with his pen, ignoring the surprised murmuring of the mud people behind him.
The swimsuit was made of white jersey, with some sort of bright gold pattern, and Vince couldn’t tell without disturbing the suit if it belonged to a man or woman; it could have been either a man’s suit or the bottom half of a woman’s bikini. Vince wouldn’t touch the suit until it had been photographed in place, so he had to settle for eyeballing it from the other side of the body. A swatch of material bulged through the corpse’s thumb and index finger. A big yellow dot. A polka dot.
&
nbsp; “An itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie, yellow polka-dot bikini,” Vince said aloud, almost involuntarily, as the song sprang instantly to his mind. He heard more murmuring behind him, which he disregarded as his thoughts returned to the body.
What did it mean? Was it a clue? Did the color matter? Did the dead woman rip it from the killer? Or was it presented to her, in some sort of confrontation, as proof of an affair? Perhaps she was just doing her laundry at the time she was killed? A bathing suit? Vince could feel the mud people hovering over his shoulder at the discovery. “Please, step back,” he said. He waved them off as politely as possible, not wanting the scene contaminated more than it had been, until he heard a well-bred snort.
“I assume we can leave now,” a woman’s voice said, and Vince squinted over the top of his bifocals at a broad who had introduced herself as Hilda Finch. She was a definite number for her age, but too high-rent for Vince’s taste. Next to her stood her daughter, Caroline, who managed to look pretty even with mud covering her clothing and a frown tugging at the corners of her mouth. She looked confused at the sight of the suit, as if she hadn’t seen it before, or was too young to know the song, and Vince made a mental note.
“Mrs. Finch,” he answered, “you don’t have to stand here, but please wait for me in the front room, with the others. I will want to ask you some questions. For example, do you recognize that bathing suit in her hand?”
“Questions?” Hilda Finch peered down her small nose at Vince. “Detective, we don’t know anything about this matter. Caroline and I simply discovered the body. That’s the extent of our involvement.”
“I understand, but we will need a formal statement as part of our investigation.” Vince rose to his feet with difficulty. His knee hurt more, down South. All this clean air, and nobody had shot at him in a year. And it hadn’t escaped his notice that Mrs. Finch didn’t answer his question about the bathing suit. So much for Southern hospitality. “The department likes to do a thorough job, Mrs. Finch.”
Naked Came the Phoenix Page 5