Murder at the Spa Page 8

  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.

  Indeed, it was clear from Paulina’s indulgent expression that she considered Gary a man in her own mold. It was another of Paulina’s idiosyncracies that she had no interest in people who had inherited money. Titles, blue blood, family fortunes—these impressed her not at all. But when it came to people who had earned fortunes, she wanted to know what they ate for breakfast. Charlotte suspected that Paulina was quite impressed by the Seltzer Boy, although she never would have admitted it. He had, after all, amassed a small fortune, and he had done it very quickly.

  “Sales will bounce back,” he was telling Miss Small. “The consumer is a lot smarter than most of us give him—or her—credit for, and a lot more loyal. As long as the product is okay, the consumer won’t desert the ship. He’ll recognize that the product’s image has been unfairly tarnished. The important thing is to get the message out.”

  The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the first course, oysters served on the half shell by a squadron of efficient waiters in black bow ties. With the oysters came goblets of champagne.

  Miss Small was still listening intently. Gary had her wrapped around his little finger. His dark, sharp face combined with his muscular physique gave him a Panish quality, slightly playful, slightly lascivious, that Charlotte imagined many women would find very appealing.

  “Then there’s nothing wrong with the water?” she asked, still on first base with her notebook.

  “Nothing,” replied Gary. He went on to talk about the safety tests to which the water was subjected and about the fact that the contaminated waters were not among those bottled by High Rock. Miss Small took it all down, oblivious to the fact that she was being led around by the nose.

  Charlotte was impressed; he had turned a potentially embarrassing situation into one that was to his company’s benefit.

  After the oysters came the entrée: lobster with truffle sauce and filet mignon. With it came an assortment of fine wines, both red and white. And, of course, High Rock mineral water. It was quite a spread.

  “What about the stock?” asked Miss Small in a fleeting moment of skepticism before digging in to her lobster.

  “Oh, that’s dropped too,” Gary replied blithely. “But it will come back.”

  “Eat,” Paulina urged her.

  Miss Small nodded and settled down to her meal. In fact, the stock had dropped precipitously. After talking with Paulina, Charlotte had checked. By comparison with the drop in High Rock Waters stock, the drop in Paulina Langenberg stock was nothing. But what society reporter was going to bother to check the stock listings, particularly with a bellyful of lobster?

  During the main course, Paulina finally succeeded in steering the conversation away from radium. The new subject was jewelry, specifically the rubies that bedecked Paulina’s throat, wrists, and earlobes. A ruby brooch was even pinned to her hat. While Miss Small oohed and aahed, Charlotte took stock of her surroundings. The neighboring table was occupied by Jerry and his wife, a dark, plump, pretty woman; Elliot and Claire, who looked like a throwback to the sixties in her Mother Hubbard skirt; and Dr. Sperry and Corinne. The table grouping was completed by another red carnation. Across the room, Charlotte noticed Frannie and her husband sitting at a table with some other spa employees. With her hair done and her face made up, Frannie actually looked pretty, proof of Paulina’s dictum that there are no ugly women, only lazy ones.

  By the time Charlotte returned her attention to the conversation, it had moved on to the yellow stone on Paulina’s finger. “You like it?” Paulina asked. Removing it from her finger, she thrust it into the hand of the astonished reporter. “It’s yours,” she said. “For luck.” It dawned on Charlotte that Paulina must have worn the jewel—probably an inexpensive quartz—for the purpose of making just such a show of generosity. When it came to manipulating the press, Gary had nothing on Paulina.

  The waiters returned to clear the dishes and to serve dessert and coffee. As dessert—an ice cream bombe—was served, the ceremonies began. The first speaker was an official who talked about what Paulina’s stewardship of the spa had meant to the state. Before Paulina Langenberg, he said, the state had been subsidizing the baths to the tune of ten dollars each. Five years later, the royalties paid by Paulina Langenberg were enriching state coffers by hundreds of thousands each year. The story was similar for the bottling plant. After a few platitudes about a profitable future, the official went on to introduce Gary, who was the featured speaker.

  Gary excused himself and made his way up to the mint-green-skirted podium. He had the broad shoulders, stra
ight back, and narrow hips of the natural athlete. He also had a very good tailor. He mounted the podium with an energetic jump. After starting off with the obligatory joke, he moved on to the substance of his speech:

  “In the summer of the year 1767, Sir John Williams, who had just returned from a visit to High Rock Springs, wrote a friend: ‘I have just returned from a visit to a most amazing spring, which miraculously effected my cure.’ These words launched the spa that would become famous throughout the world as High Rock Spa. The story of the development of High Rock Spa is a story of the American entrepreneurial spirit, the spirit of hard work and dedication and the ability to respond to the needs of the marketplace, the spirit that built this country and made it great.”

  Paulina sat with one hand cupped around the back of her ear. “What did he say?” she asked Anne-Marie in a loud voice.

  Anne-Marie repeated the gist of his words.

  Paulina nodded, smiling.

  “High Rock’s first great entrepreneur was Elisha Burnett. It was Elisha Burnett who had the vision and fortitude to clear High Rock’s famous spring, to build its first inn, to lay out its streets and roads. In his footsteps followed other entrepreneurs, men who carved a city out of the wilderness. One of these was Dr. William Allen, who was to become High Rock’s second great entrepreneur.” He went on to talk about Dr. Allen, who, on a visit to High Rock in 1820, was so impressed by the number of visitors who had come to take the waters that he purchased the spring and set up a bottling plant. A new industry was born.