Murder at the Spa (13 page)

For all her cynicism as to the motives of her fellow spa-goers, however, she had to admit that she felt better: fit, relaxed—even thin, or thinner. She had no illusions, though, that her transformation would last. A visit to the spa was like taking Fido for a bath and clip: whatever Anne-Marie might say about our-bad-habits-giving-us-up to the contrary, she knew that it would take only a few weeks back in her natural habitat before she would revert to her former physical condition, which stood somewhere on the map of physical fitness between unregenerate slothdom and a base camp in the Himalayas.

The concert ended with a rousing number from
My Fair Lady
. The silence that ensued was punctuated by a booming voice: “Hello Humanoids,” it said. It was the fleet-footed Mineral Man from the television news. He had popped up like a jack-in-the-box at the center of the terrace. A tall, gangly, young man, he was wearing a court jester’s costume consisting of a black and gold diamond-paned tunic, a gold cape, and rust-colored tights. His face was covered by gold makeup, and his head by a floppy gold cap trimmed with bells. On his feet he wore boots with upturned toes, also trimmed with bells. As he moved, he jingled.

After launching his act with a less-than-perfect cartwheel, he performed a few magic tricks. As magician’s assistant, he had drafted Nicky, who, like most obese people, appeared embarrassed at having to stand up in front of an audience. After a few minutes, however, he got into the spirit of the act, supplying the Mineral Man with props from his red knapsack, and acquiescing with good humor to having gold coins produced from behind his ear and lengths of rope pulled out of his pockets. After these feats of prestidigitation, accomplished only with the aid of a few abracadabras and hocus-pocuses, the Mineral Man launched into his spiel:

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he said, taking off his cap and bowing to the audience. “I am the Mineral Man. I conjure water from the center of the earth to make Humanoids feel wonderful!” With that, he pulled a bottle of High Rock water out of his cap. The crowd applauded politely. “The water I conjure from the center of the earth is effervescent, full of bubbles.” Setting the bottle aside, he took some white balls out of the knapsack and proceeded to juggle them, tossing them into the air in imitation of a geyser.

As an acrobat, he wasn’t much, but as a juggler, he was very good. From juggling the balls in the usual manner, he went on to bouncing them off of his head and his feet, and throwing them under first one leg and then the other. His act was a well-honed combination of acrobatics, mime, juggling, and sleight-of-hand, interspersed with jokes and overlaid with a line of patter about the virtues of the mineral waters. Charlotte was impressed by his professionalism, but baffled as to his motives.

As she watched, a shadow fell over her table. Turning, she found herself looking up at Jerry, who had just ascended the steps at the rear of her table. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, which revealed what she had come to learn was called “deltoid definition.”

“May I join you?” he asked.

“By all means.”

He pulled out a chair and sat down. Catching the waitress’s eye, he asked her to bring another glass of High Rock water.

“This is the first time I’ve seen this guy. He’s pretty good.”

“Yes,” agreed Charlotte. “Do you know why he’s doing this?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

The Mineral Man was now back to juggling. From cups and saucers, which he had solicited from the guests, he had gone on to knives and forks, and then to napkins, which he miraculously made to appear in knotted lengths from the pockets of members of the audience. But his most remarkable feat was achieved using unopened bottles of High Rock water, which he juggled as if they were juggling pins while the audience sat spellbound, expecting one to smash on the flagstone pavement at any moment.

The act had attracted a crowd from among the guests who’d been lunching in the Pump Room or strolling under the colonnades or sunning themselves by the pool. They stood around the perimeter of the terrace in sweat suits or bathing suits, many with glasses of mineral water in hand. Turning around to survey the crowd, Charlotte noticed Anne-Marie standing behind her. Pulling out the extra chair, she invited her to join them.

Anne-Marie nodded hello to Jerry and sat down.

After a few more tricks, the Mineral Man wrapped up his act with a flip that just barely succeeded. He then withdrew a handful of mimeographed leaflets from his knapsack, which he passed out with Nicky’s assistance. The leaflet, which was entitled, “Analysis of the Waters of High Rock Spa,” gave a spring-by-spring analysis of the waters. The amounts of radium were highlighted, the point presumably being that the maximum allowable limit was exceeded at only a few springs, and at those only by a slight margin.

After distributing the leaflets, he picked up his knapsack and headed back into the Pump Room to the hearty applause of the audience.

“The kid’s pretty good,” said Jerry, clapping enthusiastically.

“I guess the point he’s making is that the radium scare is a fraud,” said Anne-Marie, looking over the handout.

“That’s what Paulina thinks,” said Charlotte. “She thinks it’s an attempt to sabotage her business.”

“You mean, she thinks that someone set out to deliberately plant this rumor?” asked Anne-Marie.

Charlotte nodded.

“But who?”

Charlotte shrugged. But the thought had occurred to her that it could have been Gary. The mayor had called the person who planted the rumor “an enemy of our city.” Charlotte was reminded of Ibsen’s play,
An Enemy of the People
. It was a play she knew well, having appeared on Broadway as the doctor’s wife in a revival in the years before her Hollywood comeback. Or rather, the most recent of her comebacks. For as a critic had once noted, her career had been recycled more times than a reusable soda bottle. It was also a play that had been haunting her brain, a play whose plot bore some resemblance to the situation at High Rock. In it, a spa town’s livelihood is threatened by a rumor that the waters are contaminated by sewerage. The doctor is accused by the townspeople of planting the rumor in order to depress the price of stock in the baths. According to the townspeople’s scenario, the doctor is planning to buy up the stock at the depressed price and then announce that the danger is less critical than he had originally imagined. With the public’s fears allayed, the price of the stock would climb and the doctor would make a hefty profit.

Charlotte wondered if the same could be true at High Rock. Perhaps Gary had planted the article in order to buy up Langenberg stock at a depressed price. Hadn’t the stock dropped seven points as a result of the article? In any case, it seemed an unlikely coincidence that the article had appeared just before the announcement of High Rock Waters’s tender offer.

Anne-Marie, perhaps sensing the tack of Charlotte’s thoughts, or perhaps having similar thoughts herself, looked uncomfortable. “How is Paulina?” she asked, changing the subject.

“Unhappy,” replied Charlotte. “She thinks Elliot betrayed her.”

“She probably thinks I did too,” said Anne-Marie, as if reading Charlotte’s mind. “She won’t let me see her. If you see her, could you please tell her that I didn’t know anything about the takeover?”

“Of course,” said Charlotte.

“Your boyfriend sure has a flair for the dramatic,” said Jerry. “To say nothing of a lot of guts. Why’d he do it? Why take a chance when he’s sitting pretty on the mineral water business?”

Anne-Marie shrugged. “You said it—he likes drama, he likes risk. Now that High Rock Waters is a success, it’s time to move on. New peaks to conquer, so to speak.” She smiled.

Charlotte sensed that she was proud of Gary for making such a bold move. She also sensed that she was very much in love with him.

“Elliot just happened to come along at the right moment,” she went on. “Gary says it happens all the time in family businesses. There’s a falling out, and the injured party goes looking for a buyer.”

The waitress brought Jerry his drink.

“It was also a matter of eat or be eaten,” continued Anne-Marie. “High Rock Waters has big cash reserves. As you can imagine,” she explained with a little grin, “there’s not much expense involved in bottling water.”

“I’ll say,” said Jerry, hoisting his glass. “Take free water, put it in a bottle, and charge more for it than for beer. What a racket.”

“What you mean is,” said Charlotte, “that its cash reserves made High Rock Waters an attractive takeover target for some other company.”

“Exactly,” replied Anne-Marie. “If High Rock Waters hadn’t spent its assets on Langenberg stock, it might have been taken over by someone else.”

“Of course, he stands to lose a pile too,” said Jerry. “I mean, if it doesn’t work out. I imagine the boss lady’s going to put up quite a fight.”

“It should be interesting,” said Anne-Marie.

Actually, thought Charlotte, Gary had little to lose. If the takeover scheme worked, he would have a valuable stake in a company that was much larger than his own; if it didn’t, he could sell his Langenberg stock—probably at a profit—and move on to something else.

“I have to give Elliot credit for standing up to her,” said Jerry. “It took a lot of courage. She’s a great lady, but she sure can be a pain in the ass. It must be hell being her son.” He added: “But I wouldn’t be surprised if she respected him all the more because of it.”

“That’s just what he said,” said Charlotte. “He told her, ‘You only respect people who take money from you,’ or something to that effect. It got pretty heated: she’s threatening to disinherit him. She says she’s going to leave everything to Leon.”

“She’s said that before,” said Anne-Marie. “Every time they have an argument. She calls the lawyers; they make a few minor changes: she’ll leave this Picasso to Leon instead of Elliot, or that piece of real estate to her niece instead of Elliot. But that’s the extent of it.”

“This time she sounds as if she’s really going to carry through,” said Charlotte. “She’s fired him too.” She wondered briefly if she should be talking about Paulina’s affairs and then dismissed her qualms: there was little if anything that Paulina chose to keep private.

“I wonder who she’s going to get to replace him,” said Anne-Marie.

“You, for the time being.”

Anne-Marie made a face. “As if I don’t have enough to do already. Which reminds me, I have to get going,” she said, rising from her seat.

After she had gone, Charlotte and Jerry sat in silence for a few minutes, watching Anne-Marie as she strode down across the lawn with the grace and confidence of a professional athlete.

“What do you think about this merger, Jerry?” asked Charlotte after a while. “Do you think it will work?”

“I don’t know. Brant admires her. And she feels the same about him, or used to anyway. She liked to think of him as her protégé. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did work—after the dust settles, that is. She doesn’t have any respect for Elliot’s business ability, and Leon …”

“What about Leon?”

“He’s good on the money end of it, but he’s”—he cast her a look out of the corner of his eye—“he’s what the British used to euphemistically refer to as ‘a confirmed bachelor.’”

“A homosexual?”

“That’s probably putting it too strongly. I think he has those tendencies, but I don’t think he has the strength of character to act on them. Not that his sexual orientation would interfere with his business ability—but I do think it affects Paulina’s opinion of him.”

“She knows?”

“There’s not much she doesn’t know.”

Charlotte gazed out over the lawn. She suspected that many self-made men and women found themselves in Paulina’s predicament. “
Après moi, le déluge
,” she had said. After spending a lifetime building a company, they end up with no one to leave it to. The relatives are either disinterested or—in the eyes of the company’s founder anyway—unacceptable. Others in Paulina’s position might have sought out a merger candidate; instead, Gary had sought out Paulina. He might just be the answer to her problems.

A white-uniformed man had emerged from the Bath Pavilion and was heading across the lawn. Charlotte recognized him as Frannie’s husband, Dana. He was walking rapidly, as if he had pressing business. A few minutes later, he had reached the terrace. He bolted up the stairs and headed directly for their table. In an urgent tone, he asked to speak privately with Jerry.

Rising from his seat, Jerry stepped a few feet away, where he conferred with Dana for a moment. Then he returned to the table, grim-faced. “Come on,” he said, waving his arm, “we’ve got another one.”

As they headed across the quadrangle, Dana explained that the victim had been found unconscious by another bath attendant. The attendant, with Dana’s help, had tried to revive him, with no success.

“Have you called the ambulance?” asked Jerry.

“Yes,” answered Dana in his soft Carolina accent. “We’ve called Dr. Sperry too. We’ve got Walter on the oxygen resuscitator.” He looked over at Jerry. “But I don’t think it’s going to do much good.”

Dana led them down the long, white-tiled corridor of the men’s wing. Alert to the signs of something amiss, the male bathers stood in clusters in the corridor, just as the women had three days before. With their white towels draped around their middles, they looked like disciples of Gandhi. Among them, looking as brown and wiry as Gandhi himself, was the Role Model.

Dana stopped at the end of the hall and indicated a room on his left.

Charlotte was hesitant about entering—she wasn’t sure her presence was wanted—but Jerry urged her in. “I want your help,” he said.

The victim was Art. He was lying on his back in the hot, harsh glare of a shaft of early afternoon sunlight that streamed through the opaque window, bouncing brilliantly off the gleaming white tile walls. Beneath him, a towel had been spread out over the black-and-white-tiled floor, which was wet in places from the water that had dripped off his body when he was lifted out of the tub. A bath attendant was stooped over the body. He was operating an oxygen resuscitator. With one hand, he pressed the face mask over Art’s nose and mouth; with the other, he pushed down on the squeeze bag that was attached to an oxygen cylinder in the metal case on the floor. Lying on the towel next to Art’s ashen face were his dentures, removed to clear an airway. His head was fully extended, and his jaw jutted toward the ceiling. The oxygen valve that forced air into the mask was making an eerie whooshing sound.