Murder at the Spa

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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 mother’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.