Murder Among the Angels (2 page)

As she gained the summit of the embankment, she sniffed the damp spring air, brimming with the promise of renewal, and turned to wave to Paula. Raising one hand and moving it slowly back and forth, she imagined Paula waving back from the “other side,” as Swedenborgians called the afterworld, her dark head bobbing on the sparkling waters, and the silhouette of Hook Mountain, gold-capped in the morning sunshine, looming on the Nyack shore.

Impatient with this familiar ritual, Homer pulled again at his chain, and Mrs. Snyder leaned over to unleash him. It was their usual procedure: she didn’t need to worry about a train coming along up here, and she trusted Homer not to venture from their route. A woman of habit, Mrs. Snyder always took the same loop through the cemetery, and always made the same stops, which included a greeting to one of the family circles of boulders, and a rest on a rock whose distinguishing feature was a surface whose contours fit those of her own amply padded behind. Depending on the time of year, this routine might vary. In recent weeks, she had been watching the progress of the blossoms in a colony of dogtooth violets growing in the leaf mold lining a depression where a body was buried. Though the buds had swollen, there were still no yellow flowers on the stems: only the erect pairs of brown-speckled leaves that guarded the emerging bud like sentries in camouflage garb. They should have been in bloom by now, but the wildflowers were just as dilatory as everything else.

Basically, however, the routine stayed the same. Which was why Mrs. Snyder was surprised when Homer dared to venture from their usual path. But dare to venture, he did. As they were heading back toward the path down the embankment, Homer suddenly bounded off toward the north, ears waving. Vexed at this uncharacteristic breach of decorum, Mrs. Snyder followed him through the woods toward a cluster of three headstones at the northern edge of the cemetery. They stood at the very edge of the embankment, two large ones and a smaller one. Though they were unmarked, Mrs. Snyder had always taken them to be another family group. Reaching the headstones, Homer proceeded to circle them as if he were a working dog of the Scottish lowlands, and they an errant clique of sheep. Then he paused, his forelegs braced against the ground, and started to bark: a sharp, disturbed bark that was distinctly out of character for a dog so mild in manner that he couldn’t even bring himself to bark at the neighbor’s cat when it deliberately set out to provoke him.

“What is it, baby?” Mrs. Snyder shouted with concern as she hastened her step, knowing that Homer must be very upset indeed to have broken with his own strict code of etiquette.

His response was to run back to her, circle her legs three times, and then dash back through the woods in the direction of the headstones.

Arriving at the cluster of headstones a few moments later, Mrs. Snyder saw immediately what he had been barking at, though she could hardly believe her eyes. Sitting on top of the most level of the headstones, which was the one in the middle, the patterns created by the sunlight filtering through the leafless branches playing over its gleaming white dome, was a human skull.

It stared out of dark, vacant eye sockets at the choppy surface of the river, as if it too were searching for someone it knew—someone who had decided to take a casual dip, and who was expected back any minute.

2

As Charlotte Graham drove across town toward the West Side Highway, she found herself pondering one of the weightier questions of her fifty-year career as an actress on the stage and on the screen. It was a question that she’d pondered many times before, both on her own initiative and on that of others. But on the previous occasions, the weight of the argument had always come down squarely on the negative side of the equation, and she’d managed to dispense with the whole issue rather quickly. But with the passage of time, the balance had shifted toward the center, with the result that the question had been dogging her now for several weeks: interfering with her sleep, her daily walks, and even—God forbid—the pleasure she took in a good meal. The question was this: to lift, or not to lift.

The issue had first come to the fore when her career entered the ten-year slump she called her black period: from the ages of roughly forty-five to fifty-five when her work had been limited to cameo television appearances and the occasional Broadway show. “Why don’t you get a lift?” her well-meaning friends had advised her, thinking that a younger look might give her career a boost. But Charlotte had resisted, sensing that it wasn’t because of her appearance that she wasn’t getting work, but because she fell into that awkward category—for female actresses, anyway—in which she was too old to play young parts and too young to play old parts. Which everyone knew wasn’t the case for men. Even the most wizened of Hollywood geezers could get away with the romantic leads until he was well into his fifties. Her looks weren’t the issue at that point anyway: she had been blessed with good skin, and could easily have played much younger women had Hollywood been willing. The real issue, as she later learned, was politics, but that was another story.

By the time she had aged enough to really warrant a facelift, her career was back on track. It had taken ten years and a number of false comebacks—a critic had once quipped that her career had been recycled more times than a soda pop bottle—but Hollywood had at last rediscovered her, and she’d spent a busy and productive fifteen years playing women whose ages approximated her own. But she was now seventy-two. She didn’t look it. In fact, people said she looked at least fifteen years younger. But she wasn’t ready to be put out to pasture yet, and she knew the offers would dwindle if she started looking old. The issue wasn’t one of vanity: she didn’t really care how she looked. She had inherited a streak of the kind of Yankee righteousness that viewed a face-lift as a frivolity, if not a downright self-indulgence. To such a way of thinking, a face-lift was on par with eating crackers in bed, an act that had always been cited by Charlotte’s stern Yankee father as a sign of moral turpitude, and one in which she still indulged with the gleeful perversity of the rebellious child. Apart from that, however, she actually took pride in the contours of her aging face, in the same way that the owner of a fine antique takes pride in its worn patina, as a record of its long and distinguished history. The issue was work. Work was her lifeblood; without it, she would wither and die. Her career was booming now as a result of the publication of her long-awaited autobiography, which had come out five months before to widespread acclaim. But what would happen when the hoopla died down? She remembered well the despair of her black years; it was an experience she didn’t care to repeat. Nor did she want to spend the rest of her life being the guest of honor at various awards dinners. If it took a face-lift to prolong her productive years—to function as her ante for a few more years as a player, as her agent would have put it—then so be it (practicality and resourcefulness being two other Yankee characteristics with which she had been amply endowed).

And so, she headed up the west side of the island of Manhattan toward the Henry Hudson Parkway, which would take her to the Saw Mill River Parkway, Westchester County’s main north-south artery, and ultimately to the home-cum-office of the renowned cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Victor Louria. Dr. Louria, she had been assured by her personal physician, her Hollywood agent, and a number of friends, was the celebrity’s cosmetic surgeon of choice, at least, the East Coast celebrity’s cosmetic surgeon of choice. There were a number of celebrity cosmetic surgeons in and around Hollywood, but Hollywood was a place Charlotte preferred to avoid whenever possible. Dr. Louria, she had been assured, had operated with great success on some of the world’s most famous faces, to say nothing of the most famous boobs, the most famous tummies, and the most famous posteriors. He could be trusted not to turn her face into a grotesque caricature of her younger self, but model it into a subtly improved and more youthful version. Moreover, he could be relied upon to be absolutely discreet: there would never be any leaks to the gossip columnists from his office.

His discretion was, in fact, why she was headed up to Westchester. Like many of Manhattan’s celebrity physicians, Dr. Louria had an office on Park Avenue near Lenox Hill, the hospital that catered to the rich and famous, and that was less than twenty blocks from Charlotte’s town house in the East Forties. But to avoid having celebrity patients snagged by the press on the way into or out of his office and to spare them the necessity of having to rub shoulders with the common folk, Dr. Louria had set up a satellite office at his home in Westchester County specifically for the likes of Charlotte Graham, four-time Oscar winner and owner of one of the most well-known faces in the history of the cinema. Should Charlotte choose to avail herself of Dr. Louria’s services, the operation would, of course, be performed in his surgical suite at his Park Avenue office. But the initial consultation—the artistic planning, as it were—would take place at his office in Westchester, as would the postsurgical checkups (being seen with a face wrapped in bandages not being a pleasant prospect for even the most humble of patients, and especially so for a famous actress). The doctor was already in receipt of a group of color slides of Charlotte’s face, taken by a photographer of his recommendation according to his dictates. The slides would somehow be entered into a computer (the wonders of computer technology still being a mystery to Charlotte) and used as the template for the design of her new face.

Just north of Tarrytown, Charlotte exited the Saw Mill River Parkway in order to join up with the old Albany Post Road, the colonial-era continuation of Broadway that followed the east bank of the Hudson north to the capital city. She had always loved this stretch of road, which was lined with the walls of the great estates that dotted the shores of the Hudson, and which in early spring offered peekaboo vistas of the river through the leafless trees. At this time of year, the barren woods were studded with the billowy blooms of the shadbush, which was the first of the woodland trees to flower, and was named after the fish whose annual migration upriver to its spawning grounds in shallow water coincided with its flowering time. The shadbush was Charlotte’s favorite among the spring-flowering trees because of the lovely contrast between its pale pink, almost white blossoms and its copper-tinted leaves, and she took great pleasure in seeing the flowers sparkling in the morning sun along the roadside. Besides, the flowering of the shadbush meant that spring had officially arrived. Though she didn’t usually mind winter, this last winter had been a hard one, and she was glad spring was finally on the way.

As she drew near the Hudson River Valley town where Dr. Louria’s office was located, she started feeling the familiar sensations—a fluttering in the pit of her stomach, a scratchiness at the back of her throat, a weakness in her knees—that she recognized as stage fright. Common perceptions to the contrary, it was a fact of the performing arts that many experienced actors—herself among them—never got over this fear, no matter how long or distinguished their careers. In Charlotte’s case, this condition never afflicted her in front of the camera; it was only on stage, and in certain other instances, such as a visit to a cosmetic surgeon (or, for that matter, any other variety of doctor). The only remedy that had ever worked for her had been suggested by her late friend, the actor Larry Olivier. It was to “think of your feet.” This worked like a charm. By some mysterious process, the simple act of shifting one’s attention to the feet served to root one to the earth, with the result that negative energy was conducted downward, much the way a lightning rod conducts lightning downward through a cable. Charlotte tried this technique now, but found it awkward with one foot resting on the gas pedal and the other on the floorboard. Instead, she resorted to the diversion trick, and turned on the radio. The weatherman was reporting that the unseasonably cool and windy weather that had prevailed for the last couple of weeks would at last give way to more mild conditions.

Being the provident Yankee that she was, Charlotte had developed a fallback strategy in the event that she should decide to up and bolt from Dr. Louria’s office. She didn’t want to have wasted a day by driving all the way to Westchester for nothing. She had made a lunch appointment with an old friend named Jerry D’Angelo. A lunch would salvage the day. In fact, a lunch could even be viewed as an accomplishment—was, in fact, often the only accomplishment of the day for the phalanxes of ladies in her neighborhood who appeared to do little else. It was to Jerry that her thoughts now turned as she drove through the busy little downtown of Tarrytown.

She had met Jerry D’Angelo nearly ten years ago when she was a guest at the posh upstate mineral water spa run by her old friend, Paulina Langenberg. Like a face-lift, a visit to a spa was a luxury that Charlotte wouldn’t ordinarily have indulged in, but Paulina, having heard about Charlotte’s success in discovering the identity of the murderer of her costar in a play at Broadway’s Morosco Theatre, had invited her to the spa to investigate what she thought was an attempt to sabotage her business. Jerry was then working at the spa as a trainer after being forced to retire on a disability pension from his position as a detective with Manhattan Homicide after losing half an inch from the tip of his trigger finger in a shoot-out. When guests at the spa started mysteriously dying off in the mineral water baths, Jerry had sought Charlotte’s assistance in figuring out who the culprit was. Although they saw one another infrequently, Charlotte and Jerry had stayed in touch via telephone. Having tired a number of years ago of serving as majordomo to a bunch of overweight middle-aged women, Jerry had traded in his spa job for a brief stint as a private investigator before getting back into police work, and was now the chief of police in Zion Hill, which also happened to be the town in which Dr. Louria’s home and office were located.

Jerry, whose degree of reverence for good food approximated Charlotte’s own (his excuse was being Italian; she had none), had promised her a fine meal at a local bistro that had been awarded three stars from a
New York Times
reviewer, and it was on the prospect of a good meal rather than her visit with Dr. Louria that she concentrated her attentions as she passed a sign welcoming her to Zion Hill. A short distance past the sign, she turned left onto the Zion Hill Road and followed it down toward the river through a residential neighborhood of gracious old homes. At the foot of the Zion Hill Road, she turned left onto River Road, which was lined with enormous houses with magnificent views of the river, over which a luminous morning mist still hung. Dr. Louria lived at number 300, a stone mansion in the medieval style, with a massive tower overlooking the river. After parking in a small parking area, she passed through a door in a stone wall that bore a brass plaque with Dr. Louria’s name, and walked along a stone-paved path through a shade garden to a smaller building, also in the medieval style. Opening an arched door with a beautiful hand-tooled metal handle, she found herself in a waiting room that was painted off-white and decorated with paintings by well-known abstract expressionists that she recognized, as the result of having once been married to a collector of modern art, as being extremely valuable.