Murder Under the Palms

by Stefanie Matteson

  According to Dede, Lydia had diverted the $100,000 from one of the preservation association’s operating accounts on October 9. If she’d used the money to buy art, it must have been subsequent to that date. Sifting through the catalogues, Charlotte eliminated those dated prior to October. About halfway down the rack, she found the one she was looking for. The cover bore a reproduction of a section of one of the Dupas panels from the Normandie, showing the legs of a golden sea nymph floating on silver waves. The title was Ocean Liner Decorative Art and Furnishings. The date was October 30, 1992.

  The Dupas panels, listed as Lots No. 155 through 166, were obviously the choicest pieces of the sale. The description read:

  Twelve “verre eglomise” panels, designed by Jean Dupas, the glass executed by Jacques Charles Champigneulle for the Grand Salon of the SS Normandie circa 1934, the rectangular panels painted in gold and silver leaf and grisaille, depicting mythological figures, the tail of a sea monster, and a partial view of ocean waves—49 × 32 inches each.

  A lengthy footnote in fine print explained how the panels comprised part of one of the four murals that Dupas had been commissioned to design for the corners of the Grand Salon, and described his verre eglomise technique of painting the reverse side of a glass panel with gold or silver. The footnote was followed by detailed descriptions of each panel. The low/high price estimate for each panel was $7,000 to $12,000, or a total $84,000 to $144,000—a range that bracketed the $100,000 that Lydia had diverted.

  The police could easily find out who had bought the panels, but Charlotte was positive it was Lydia, using the money she had embezzled just three weeks before. As she herself had said, “I just had to have them.” Which meant that she wouldn’t have had any money left over to hire a hit man. An unnecessary constituent in the subject being analyzed had been eliminated. Charlotte could now conclude that: (A) Lydia hadn’t killed Paul; (B) she had done it herself, which was highly unlikely; or (C) someone she knew had done it for her.

  Which brought Charlotte back to Admiral John W. McLean III (USN, retired).

  An hour and a half later, Charlotte found herself climbing the winding staircase to the third floor of Villa Normandie for the second time that week, this time in the company of Maureen and one of the policemen on her team. They were escorted by a housekeeper into the Grand Salon, where they were to meet with Lydia. Presented with the evidence from the Christie’s catalogue, Maureen had also concluded that Lydia had used the $100,000 she had misappropriated in October to buy the Dupas panels, hence ruling out the idea that she had used that money to pay a professional assassin. But Maureen raised a possibility that hadn’t occurred to Charlotte, which was that Lydia could have directed a professional killer to steal the cigarette case in order to make Paul’s murder look like a jewel theft, and then sold the case in order to pay him off. Or had the assassin sell it off himself. At an estimated value of $200,000, the case would have been more than enough to pay for a hit, even if the seller received much less than retail value for it. Maureen’s team would be contacting their informants in the underworld to find out if anyone had ordered a hit. They would also be checking pawnshops and fences in the area to see if anyone had brought in the cigarette case, as well as issuing a notice of the theft to other police departments. The records from the preservation association’s offices would be confiscated, including those in Paul’s files. But before doing anything else, Maureen wanted to talk with Lydia to see if she could get a sense of whether the society matron was just an embezzler, or an embezzler who had committed murder to cover up the financial irregularities.

  Lydia was waiting for them in the Grand Salon. By day, it looked less like the real thing than it had by night. The crowns of the palms that could be glimpsed through the tall windows were a reminder that this was an earthbound vessel. Their suspect sat facing Lake Worth on one of the salmon-colored tapestry couches from the Normandie, holding her silky terrier, Song Song, in her lap. She was dressed in a black turtleneck sweater, worn with a heavy gold chain necklace, and black slacks with a gold belt.

  A man whom Charlotte presumed to be her lawyer sat in an armchair at one side of the couch. His open briefcase rested on the round salmon-colored lacquer game table before him, which also looked to be from the Normandie.

  At their arrival, Lydia and her lawyer stood up, and introductions were made. When everyone was seated again, the group’s attention turned to Maureen.

  “I assume you know why I’m here,” the detective said to Lydia.

  Lydia nodded. Though her face was brightened by red lipstick, she appeared drawn, and she puffed nervously on a cigarette.

  The lawyer spoke first. He was a bald, portly young man with big, sad-looking brown eyes, under which the flesh hung in folds despite his youth. “I’ve instructed Mrs. Collins to be completely forthright with the police.”

  Maureen leaned toward Lydia. “Why don’t you tell us about it?” she said. She spoke softly and with as much sympathy as a police officer could offer. “In your own way, taking your time. This isn’t a formal police investigation.”

  Like hell it’s not, Charlotte thought as Lydia looked up hopefully.

  Maureen continued. “It’s just a chance for you to tell us in your own words what happened. Take it step by step,” she urged. “How did it start? What was it that made you take the money that very first time?”

  There was silence for a moment as Lydia rubbed the silky terrier’s neck with fingernails that would have been the envy of the Dragon Lady. She stared out the tall windows, with their views of the palm-fringed lake. Then she heaved a deep sigh and started to speak:

  “As I’ve already told Miss Graham, it started with an egg cup,” she said, speaking with the flat vowels of a Great Lakes accent. “A silver-plated Christofle egg cup. I paid three dollars for it at an antique shop in Detroit. The owner had no idea what it was. Today you couldn’t touch it for three hundred.” She shifted her gaze to Charlotte and Maureen. “I’ll never forget that egg cup. You know, when you’re being pushed, the first taste is always free.”

  “Collecting was an addiction for you, then?” asked Maureen.

  “Yes. After the egg cup, my husband and I would go out looking for other pieces. Only occasionally at first. But it ended up being nearly every weekend. At the beginning, we only collected silver and porcelain. Finding it was such a thrill. Once in a while, we’d purchase items that came up for sale at auction or at an antique shop. But we preferred scouring the flea markets and antique fairs.”

  “How long ago was this?” asked Maureen.

  The lawyer had started taking notes.

  “Oh, a long time ago. Fifteen years, maybe. We wouldn’t find something every time. That’s what made it so much fun. If you ran across something every time, you’d get bored. If you never found anything, you’d get discouraged. We’d turn something up every fifth, sixth, seventh time—just enough to keep it interesting. I have a cousin who’s a psychiatrist, and she told me there’s a name for this: it’s called intermittent reinforcement.”

  She looked over at her lawyer, who nodded his encouragement.

  “Anyway, it was still a recreational habit at that point. What turned it into an addiction was the furniture.” Lydia ran her fingers over the delicate gilt-wood arm of the couch. “We found it at a junk shop in Brooklyn, of all places. Talk about treasure amid the trash! We’d never seen anything like it: it was the combination of the Old-World elegance of the Aubusson-style tapestry and the modernity of the lines that intrigued us.

  “We knew the furniture was from the Grand Salon, of course,” she continued. “We bought it all. It had come from a Catholic church in Brooklyn, which had purchased it at a Normandie auction in 1945.” She looked around at the room. “That’s when we decided to turn this room into a replica of the Grand Salon. We started with the light towers. Harley commissioned a glass artist to make replicas of the Lalique originals.”

  They all turned to look at the magnificent ruffled glass l
ight towers.

  “Then, as luck would have it, the Dupas panels came up for sale at an antique dealer with whom we did business. We bought twenty-six in 1977, and another twelve in 1984. Then Harley died.”

  “Is that when your financial problems began?” Maureen asked.

  Lydia closed her eyes for a moment, as if she were damping down the pain of the memory. “Harley had made a number of bad investments. Or, I should say, he’d made one bad investment. An acquaintance here in Palm Beach convinced him to invest most of his fortune in an enterprise that went sour. Or,” she amended. “maybe it was sour to begin with.”

  Maureen mentioned the name of a company, and Lydia nodded.

  “You’re not alone,” Maureen told her.

  “I know. But being one of many doesn’t make it any better. Nor does the fact that the principals went to jail for fraud.”

  Charlotte considered how one set of financial transgressions had led directly to another, in a cycle of monetary greed.

  “I didn’t know anything about it until after Harley died,” Lydia continued. “I was shocked to find out after his death that there was very little money left. I quickly figured out that I could make enough to cover my overhead by renting out the house. I would leave for a couple of months a year and stay in a cheap pension in Italy. To everyone here, I was traveling abroad. But I couldn’t rent for any longer than that without people suspecting that I did it because I needed the money.”

  “Which would have meant sacrificing your social position,” Maureen said.

  Lydia nodded. “We had worked so hard to get here,” she said, her eyes darting around the room, with its opulent furnishings. “It meant so much. It was everything that Flint wasn’t, you know?”

  Charlotte knew. The grace of Palm Beach had worked its magic on Lydia too, but she hadn’t had the resources to pay for it.

  Lydia continued. “The rental income covered the real estate taxes and the utility bills, but that was about it. Fortunately the job at the preservation association came along. But even with my salary from that, I didn’t have nearly enough. Not to support myself and my addiction. The misappropriation of funds started in small amounts—just enough to cover my latest fix: another piece of furniture, another piece of silver.”

  Setting the dog down, Lydia reached forward and stubbed out her cigarette. Then she stood up and walked over to the window. From the back, she looked like a girl, so petite was her figure. “Why did I do it?” she said, asking the question that was on everyone’s mind.

  “Yes,” Maureen said. “Why did you do it?”

  Lydia turned around. “It’s like asking a drug addict why he does crack. I needed the money to play the game. Several times, when I had to convince a dealer to let me have a piece on credit, I felt like one of those addicts who’s always reassuring his dealer that he’s good for the money. By the way,” she added with a bitter chuckle, “it’s no coincidence that they’re called dealers in the antiques trade, too. Then I’d take the money from the preservation association’s accounts.”

  “I kept thinking I’d get caught,” she continued as she turned back to the view. “In a way, I think I was hoping I would get caught. Then the missing panels came up for sale at Christie’s.” Her eyes shifted to the bottom of the huge glass mural that dominated one end of the room. Then she looked over at her lawyer. “Ron?” she said.

  Reaching forward, the lawyer removed a letter from his briefcase and passed it to Maureen. “This is a letter from Mrs. Collins to the president of the preservation association. In it, she offers to transfer ownership of all fifty of the Dupas panels to the preservation association.”

  Maureen gave the letter a cursory glance and then passed it back to the lawyer. “Restitution is a matter between Mrs. Collins and the preservation association,” she said. “It has nothing to do with the police.”

  “The panels are worth between seven and twelve thousand each,” Lydia said. “Or between three hundred fifty and six hundred thousand for the fifty. That should more than make up for …” Her voice trailed off.

  Maureen shrugged. “I’m sure that the preservation association will be delighted to recover the money that’s been lost, but your offer to make restitution doesn’t negate the fact that you’ve committed a crime. If you’re expecting to avoid prosecution, I think you’re operating under a delusion.”

  Lydia looked questioningly at her lawyer, who nodded agreement. Then she resumed her seat on the couch, with Song Song on her lap. With her fingernails, she carefully combed the dog’s fur out of its eyes.

  Maureen leaned forward in her chair. “Mrs. Collins, we need to know the answer to one very important question.”

  Lydia nodded.

  The detective fixed Lydia with her gaze. “When did you learn from Mr. Feder that he was aware that you had misappropriated funds from the preservation association’s accounts?”

  Lydia stared at her blankly. “When did I learn that from Paul?”

  “Yes,” said Maureen.

  “I never discussed it with Paul. The first I knew that he had found out was when I talked with you a short while ago.” Then it dawned on her. She spoke as much to herself as to them: “You think that I killed Paul as part of a cover-up?” She leaned against the back of the couch and raised her red-lacquered fingertips to her forehead “Oh, my God.”

  “I’m not drawing any conclusions,” Maureen said. “But Mr. Feder’s discovery that you embezzled the funds does provide you with a motive for his murder. Were you at the party for the entire evening?”

  “Yes. Of course I was. I was the chairman. The first I knew that Paul had been murdered was when my caterer, René Dubord of Château Albert, informed me of it at the beginning of the soup course.”

  “You didn’t go out to the beach?”

  Lydia stiffened her spine and carefully lifted a wave of fried, dyed hair away from her temple. Then she summoned every measure of dignity that society afforded the widow of a bumper king.

  “I may have had an addiction that I couldn’t control,” she said, “but I am not a murderess.”

  Charlotte pulled up in the Smiths’ circular driveway at five-thirty the next evening. She would be meeting Eddie at Château Albert at seven, but she had arranged to have cocktails beforehand with Connie and Spalding. The Smiths’ house was just around the corner from Villa Normandie: a big, rambling place in the Tudor style (what they used to call “stockbroker Tudor” in Connecticut) complete with half timbers, undulating slate roof, mullioned windows, and dovecote. Charlotte would have been willing to bet that it was the only Tudor in Palm Beach. It was a serious house and a far cry from most of the homes in Palm Beach, which had a fantasy element to their architecture that befitted the playground of millionaires. It was the type of house that one might expect to find clinging to a windswept Dorset cliff or overlooking a misty Scottish moor. It was, in fact, very similar to the Smiths’ house on the Cliff Walk in Newport. But then, so were Connie and Spalding out of sync with the local scene. That’s why she loved them. They could always be relied upon to react in an utterly predictable manner. They were prehistoric relics of another era.

  The door was answered by Marianne, who was wearing a voluminous orange silk kimono that Charlotte remembered from her Kabuki collection of a few years back, and which was the product of Marianne’s liaison with a Japanese actor. Now that Charlotte thought about it, maybe that’s where her subconscious had come up with the image of the orange life vest.

  Marianne was holding a leaf of Belgian endive heaped with dip. “Come in, dear Aunt Charlotte,” she said, gesturing with the endive, and proceeded to escort Charlotte through the center hallway into the living room, where Connie and Spalding were sitting with their cocktails.

  Like Connie and Spalding, the room was predictable: tastefully and elegantly furnished with beautiful antiques, many of them family heirlooms from Spalding’s side of the family, who could trace their Rhode Island roots back to the founding of the state.

>   “Charlotte, you look lovely,” said Connie, rising to greet her with the obligatory kiss to the air on either side of her cheeks. “Is this the night of your date with Eddie?” she asked.

  “Yes, it is,” Charlotte said as Spalding handed her a drink: her usual Manhattan, straight up. In a Manhattan glass, with a cherry.

  “Ready and waiting, and just the way you like it, I hope.”

  “Thank you,” she replied as she seated herself on the couch. Then she took a sip and looked up at Spalding. “Exactly the way I like it.” She turned to Connie. “Spalding’s arranged for us to eat at Château Albert for Normandy night, which I think is very fitting.” She turned to her host. “Thank you, Spalding.”

  “Anything I can do for the sake of romance,” he said.

  Marianne, who had vanished into the adjoining library, now reappeared with a rectangular box, elegantly wrapped in silver paper. She presented it to Charlotte: “This is to thank you for getting me out of a tight spot.”

  Charlotte looked up, surprised.

  “Don’t say you didn’t do anything,” Marianne warned as she sat down next to Charlotte.

  “But I didn’t,” Charlotte protested. Setting down her drink, she proceeded to open the present. “Someone would have thought of the jewelry angle eventually. Besides, if that hadn’t done the trick, the new information provided by your daughter certainly would have.”

  “Meanwhile I would have been rotting away in jail,” Marianne said, adding, “It’s not the first scrape you’ve gotten me out of.”

  “Nor will it be the last,” Spalding interjected cynically.

  Marianne shot him a dirty look.

  Charlotte removed the wrapping paper to reveal a box from Feder Jewelers. She looked at Marianne. “Whatever it is, you shouldn’t have done it.” Then she opened the blue calfskin lid. Inside was the cloisonné minaudière that Marianne had been carrying the night of the benefit, before she dropped it in the sand.