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  Murder at the Spa

  A Charlotte Graham Mystery

  Stefanie Matteson

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  To my mother

  1

  Charlotte Graham sat on the terrace of her brownstone on East Forty-ninth, sipping tea and savoring an unaccustomed feeling of leisure. She was an elegant woman in her early sixties, dressed in a starkly tailored suit of navy blue linen. She always wore white, gray, black, or navy blue—these were the colors that best complemented her alabaster complexion; her glossy black hair, which, though now dyed, still had only a few streaks of gray; and the striking features that were as familiar to three generations of movie-goers as those of their closest relatives. She pondered the day that lay ahead of her: a long window-shopping walk down Madison Avenue perhaps, or a walk along the river with its view of the somber flatlands of Queens.

  It was ten o’clock on a cool, clear Saturday morning in June. A sweet chirrup caught her ear. A wren had laid claim to a birdhouse that hung from the branch of an old crab apple. She followed his movements as he fluttered his wings with pride and popped in and out of the birdhouse—“See what a beautiful nest I’ve made,” he bragged to the female. After disappearing for a few minutes, he reappeared with a twig to add to the nest’s foundation. If the female accepted his proposal, she would feather it herself with feathers from God-only-knew-where. It always amazed her how nature managed to adapt to the hostile environment of the city. The eastern cottonwood that grew on top of one of the towers of the Queensboro Bridge; the Atlantic Ridley turtles that, having ridden the Gulf Stream up from Mexico, paddled happily about in Jamaica Bay under the flight paths to and from Kennedy; the peregrine falcons that nested on the girders of the Throgs Neck, oblivious of traffic to the Hamptons below. All seemed to her small miracles of Darwinian adaptation. And now her wrens. But then there was the example of the pigeon: adaptation carried to its loathsome extreme. Several had built nests in her gutters. She would have to call an exterminator to get rid of them; their excrement could destroy the masonry of a building faster than acid rain. She also noticed that the chimney needed pointing up, the shutters needed painting. Now that she finally had some time, she would have to take care of some of these things.

  She had just made three movies back to back. Two were expected to be big hits. There was talk of another Oscar. (She already had four on her living room mantel.) She was, thank God, hot, the way she had been early in her career. She was also bone-tired—she no longer possessed the stamina of her youth. But she wasn’t complaining; she was happy to be working. She had finally emerged from that stagnant stage in her career in which she was too old to play middle-aged women and too young to play old women. Grieving widows, monstrous matriarchs, and dotty maiden aunts—all were now grist for her mill. And since most of the actresses she’d started out with back in the forties were now sick, dead, or retired, she was back in demand. For a long time, Hollywood had ignored her. She had mentally labeled that period her “black years”—a ten-year stretch of little but television offers and precious few of those. But she had survived, thanks to Broadway, which had welcomed her with open arms. And now Hollywood had summoned her back. She loved Broadway; there was nothing like the rapport between player and audience—the big black giant as it was called in the business. But in many ways she preferred the movies. For one thing, they weren’t as physically taxing, which was an important consideration at her age. In the theater, even something as simple as talking on the phone was affected; you were always saving your voice for the next performance. For another, there were no nerve-wracking opening nights. And if you flubbed a scene, you had the luxury of doing it over. But mostly it was the size of the audience: not just a few hundred show-goers at a pop, but millions—millions!—of people, all over the world. She was a famous person who liked fame.

  Overhead, the sunlight trickled through the leaves. She would have to have the trees trimmed too; it was getting too shady. There was shade enough from the neighboring buildings without a dense canopy of leaves blocking the sunlight as well. She looked up; the leaves rustled in the breeze off the river. When she sat out here, it was hard to believe she was in New York. Not that she didn’t want to be in New York. It was unfortunate she didn’t get to spend more time here. She loved it. Her home here was her oasis, her refuge from Hollywood, where she had spent most of the last forty years. She liked fame, yes. But she also liked a break from it once in a while, and from the glitz that went along with it. Here she could put on an old pair of walking shoes and a pair of sunglasses and walk for miles without being recognized.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a voice from above. She looked over at the rear of the house. It was Julie, her Chinese housekeeper, who lived with her husband Jim on the fifth floor. They had been with her for years; they were like family. A cinemaphile friend had long ago nicknamed them Jules and Jim. Julie was leaning over the wrought-iron balcony that opened off of the third-floor library. Charlotte noticed that the grillwork needed painting too. The place was going to wrack and ruin.

  “Miss Langenberg’s on the telephone,” she said. “Don’t get up. I’ll bring the phone out to you.” She waved the telephone and giggled.

  It was a new portable telephone. Charlotte had bought it a couple of months ago, but the gloss hadn’t worn off. Julie still got a thrill out of taking it out to the terrace. Being able to talk on the phone out-of-doors gave Julie almost as much of a kick as being able to barbecue on the grill indoors. Despite her origins, Julie had a distinctly American taste for novelty. Charlotte wondered why Paulina was calling. It wasn’t like her to call herself. Usually, her secretary called for her. Unlike Julie, who was gadget-happy (in addition to the indoor grill, the kitchen was equipped with everything from a built-in electric wok to a faucet that emitted boiling water), Paulina had a primitive distrust of modern conveniences. The telephone was her special bugaboo. She held it at arm’s length and yelled into the mouthpiece, as uncertain about the outcome as Alexander Graham Bell must have been when he spoke the first words over the telephone: “Mr. Watson. Come here. I need you.” Charlotte suspected that Paulina was also wary of being bugged. In the competitive atmosphere of the beauty industry, corporate spying was not uncommon.

  Paulina was the giantess of the beauty industry, one of the most famous, one of the richest, and one of the most fascinating women of her day. To say she was Charlotte’s friend would be a misstatement. It would be as difficult to harness Paulina in the yoke of friendship as it would be to harness a force of nature. But they had much in common: they were institutions of a sort, monuments of American culture. It was Paulina, along with her two competitors, who had founded the beauty industry when the century was still young. But Paulina deserved the credit because she had been the first. And she would be the last. Her competitors, to whom she referred as “That Woman” and “The Eye Shadow Man” (never allowing their names to be spoken in her presence), had both died eight years ago, coincidentally within only days of each other. Paulina had made wearing makeup respectable; before her, only actresses and loose women dared to wear it in public. The story was a legend: she had begun with the twelve jars of her mother’s homemade face cream that she’d packed in her trunk when she set out from her native Budapest as a young woman to visit relatives in Canada. (The date of this event was shrouded in mystery because of Paulina’s wish to keep her age, which was somewhere around eighty, a secret.) Her Canadian friends and relatives, whose skin had suffered from the harsh Canadian climate, envied her milky complexion. To her admirers, she passed out samples of her mothe
r’s cream. Before long, she was sending home for more. The demand eventually became so great that she started selling her Crème Hungaria Skin Food in her own “salon.” (Paulina was also the first to recognize the cachet of French in selling cosmetics.) It was only a matter of time before she had opened salons in New York, London, and Paris. She would turn a dozen jars of her mother’s cream into the country’s most profitable cosmetics company: a company with forty thousand employees in over a hundred countries and annual sales approaching two billion.

  That was Paulina.

  Julie emerged from the house with the phone and handed it to Charlotte. The voice that assailed her over the airwaves was deep and throaty, with a thick eastern European accent. “Is that you?” it bellowed. To avoid injury to her hearing, she moved the receiver a few inches away from her ear.

  As Charlotte listened, Paulina went on in a garbled way about the murder at the Morosco case. Several years before, Charlotte’s co-star in a Broadway show called The Trouble with Murder had been shot dead on stage. It was actually Charlotte who had pulled the trigger; a real bullet had been planted in a stage prop. The case had been a sensation: the press had dubbed it “Murder at the Morosco,” after the Morosco Theatre. Charlotte was the one who had gathered the evidence that eventually put the murderer away. As a result of the book describing her role, which became a best-seller, she had developed something of a reputation as an amateur detective. It was for this reason that Paulina was calling her, she gathered. But Paulina’s message was hardly any more sophisticated than Bell’s. What it boiled down to was, “Miss Graham. Come here. I need you.” Someone was trying to sabotage her spa business, she said. She wanted Charlotte to find out who and why.

  Charlotte tried to ferret out more information, but Paulina, as usual over the telephone, was cryptic. She demanded that Charlotte come to the spa immediately. The details could wait. Ever imperious, she alluded to the fact that she wasn’t used to being disobeyed.

  Charlotte hesitated at first if for no other reason than she wasn’t used to being bossed around; a rude demand was apt to make her dig in her heels. But she quickly realized that it was a good idea. Paulina had been urging her to visit the spa ever since it had opened five years ago. (“Having the stars—it’s good publicity,” she always said.) Charlotte had turned her down, but now she was tempted. She needed a rest—a real rest, not one in which she had to play general contractor, which was what she’d be in for if she hung around home. She had never stayed at a spa before. She didn’t usually approve of indulging herself. She had a streak of the kind of Yankee asceticism that embraces cold showers and Spam, a streak that had been nurtured by her revulsion for the excesses of Hollywood. But this time, she felt as if she deserved to be pampered like a star. Because she was a star once again.

  And so she agreed.

  Although she had never been there, she knew quite a bit about Paulina’s precious spa. For years, it had been Paulina’s dream to open a spa—not a spa like That Woman’s famous spa in Maine, which was little more than a fat farm for overweight celebrities, but a spa like the continental spas to which she retired every year for the cure, returning recharged with her legendary energy. For Paulina, as for other Europeans, the annual spa visit was a vital necessity to health. The European spa had never fallen out of favor like its American counterpart; it had remained in the medical mainstream, promoted by European balneologists who studied the therapeutic virtues of the mineral waters. The idea of a spa had also appealed to Paulina because of its link with her roots: like most Hungarians, she had spent hours in the tub rooms at Saint Gellert or Széchenyi; no other city in the world was as richly endowed with mineral springs as her native Budapest. But she had also been shrewd enough to recognize that a European-style spa would never go over in the United States. Even the most luxurious of them had a depressingly clinical air, vaguely reminiscent of an old-age home or a mental institution. Her dream had been to create a new hybird, a spa that rejuvenated its guests like a traditional European mineral spa, that pampered them like a luxurious American beauty farm, and that prodded them into shape with diet and exercise like the spartan camps of the natural hygienists.

  A decision by the New York state legislature to lease a run-down upstate spa to a private investor provided her opportunity. The time was ripe: interest in health and physical fitness was at an all-time high, and only someone like Paulina had the money, vision, and power to realize such an undertaking. Two years and twenty-one million dollars later, it was finished—the Paulina Langenberg Spa at High Rock Springs. From the moment it opened its elegant bronze doors, it was a fabulous success, the jewel in the crown of the Queen of Beauty that Paulina had hoped it would be. But it wasn’t just a showplace; like all of Paulina’s enterprises, it was a moneymaker as well. The rich and famous paid four thousand dollars a week and more to be soaked, whirlpooled, massaged, manicured, pedicured, and coiffed. To say nothing of being starved on a diet of twelve hundred calories a day—a diet that was a feast for the eye, but for the eye alone. And the clientele wasn’t mostly women as it was at other spas. Paulina had recognized early on that in order to make real money, she had to attract men. To do so, she had spent a small fortune to groom the overgrown fairways and lumpy greens of the existing golf course to smooth green perfection. Lured by the golf course, the husbands flocked to the spa for its famous cardiac rejuvenation program. And if golf held no appeal, there was indoor tennis and outdoor tennis, an indoor pool and an outdoor pool, skeet shooting, bridle paths, cross-country skiing—you name it. The ratio of staff to guests was a sybaritic three to one. In short, the spa offered everything the most demanding spa-goer could ever want.

  Charlotte was looking forward to it.

  She left the next day. Paulina’s secretary had booked her for the Ten-Day Rejuvenating Plan, which started on Monday. She set out in her rented car late that morning, happy to be getting out of the city. Although it had been cool, a heat wave had been forecast, and there was nothing worse than New York in the heat. It took only a little more than three hours to follow the Hudson a hundred and twenty miles north to the plateau at the foot of the Adirondacks where the town of High Rock Springs was situated. From the exit on the Adirondack Northway, she turned onto a local highway, and from there onto the approach road leading to the spa, a narrow road lined by a double row of majestic pines that wound its way through a two-thousand-acre state park to the spa. At the end of a curve, the Avenue of Pines, as it was called, opened up onto a vista of hotel and spa complex laid out in symmetrical splendor against a background of pine groves and misty blue mountains. Charlotte turned left onto Golf Course Road and headed toward the hotel: an imposing building of red brick whose neoclassical facade was dominated by a glass outdoor elevator (a Langenberg addition that allowed the guests to view the distant Adirondacks) and by a columned entrance portico in front of which stood a fountain in the form of a phoenix, symbolizing the rejuvenative powers of the mineral waters. To either side of the portico were screened verandas where busboys in red jackets were setting up for dinner.

  After dropping off her car keys at the rental desk, she checked in and took the glass elevator to her room. Her room was at the rear of the hotel on the sixth floor, which was the top floor (except for the seventh, which was occupied by Paulina’s penthouse). It faced south, overlooking a lovely lake called Geyser Lake, which, the bellman explained, took its name from the geyser that spouted from its island center under the pressure of carbonic acid gas from an expiring underground volcano. Charlotte counted; every three minutes, the geyser magically erupted, shooting a plume of white water ten feet into the air. The bellman proudly informed her that it was one of seven geysers at High Rock Springs—the only spouting springs east of the Mississippi. Her room was luxurious: large and high and filled with the sweet fragrance of fresh lilies. It was decorated in typical Paulina Langenberg style. If one were to give it a name, one might call it riotously eclectic: a chrome-based glass coffee table stood next to a marble-
topped Empire dresser; an abstract expressionist reproduction hung above a Greek caryatid lamp. The effect was dramatic, original, sumptuous; it made Charlotte feel spoiled. Which was the whole idea. After settling in, she called Paulina to announce her arrival. Then she took a few minutes to study the program for the Ten-Day Rejuvenating Plan (herbal wraps and mud packs and Swedish massages—it sounded delicious) and to read the literature on the spa. After that, she headed out. Her destination was High Rock Spring, the famous spring from which the spa took its name.

  The spring stood at the center of a long lawn called the esplanade, which was spread out in front of the hotel like a carpet of green baize. The esplanade was crisscrossed by gravel paths, but they were deserted; there were no people to mar the geometry of the neatly spaced rows of pollarded plane trees. It was the time of late afternoon naps or of before-dinner “cocktails” (which here consisted only of fruit punch lightly laced with white wine). In the hazy afternoon sunlight, the atmosphere was one of peaceful tranquillity. The muffled clink of silverware drifted across the esplanade like the sound of wind chimes. Even the grass had taken on a golden glow over which the shadow of the pavilion that housed the spring fell like the reflection on a lake. The only note of color was a bold Chinese red, a color known as Langenberg red for its association with Paulina’s theatrical style in the same way that a delicate shade of floral pink was associated with the more ladylike style of That Woman. The geraniums that hung in baskets from the wrought-iron lampposts were Langenberg red. As were the park benches that lined the walkways and the roses that were planted in beds in the center of the lawn. Both Paulina and That Woman had varieties of hybrid tea roses named after them, but there were no pink roses here. For that matter, there were no pink flowers at all. Paulina would never have stood for it.