Murder at the Spa (14 page)

Charlotte’s first reaction was embarrassment at seeing Art naked. His shrunken genitals were dwarfed by the rolls of flesh—now a grayish white—that cascaded down his belly. Then a wave of nausea hit her. She was sure he was dead: his deep blue eyes—the eyes of a kindly knight—stared glassily at the ceiling. She thought of what he had said about the motel: fifteen bucks a night, holes punched in the doors,
scheduled for demolition
.

Jerry knelt down to examine the body. He looked first at the pupils. Then he felt for the pulse in the wrist. As he picked up the wrist, Charlotte noticed with the eye for detail that is heightened in moments of tragedy that Art’s arms—tanned to a freckly red below the line of his shirt sleeve—were covered by a fine fuzz of reddish blond hair.

Dropping the lifeless wrist, Jerry felt for the pulse in the carotid artery. “How long have you been at it?” he asked the attendant.

The young man checked his watch. “About ten minutes.”

Walking over to the cot, Jerry picked up a starched white sheet, unfolded it, and draped it over Art’s body. Only his toes protruded; the nails were already beginning to turn blue.

“Cyanosed,” said Jerry, following Charlotte’s gaze. “Is there a stethoscope?” he asked.

“In the case,” answered the young man.

Dana fetched the stethoscope from the resuscitator case and handed it to Jerry. Pulling down the sheet, Jerry pressed the diaphragm to Art’s chest. After listening for a moment, he said, “I think he’s a goner, but you might as well keep at it until the ambulance gets here.”

Charlotte could hear a siren wailing in the distance.

“How did you find him?” Jerry asked the attendant, a thin, pimply-faced young man with a scared expression.

“In the tub.” He nodded toward the tub, where the plastic pillow and the towel were still floating on the surface of the fizzing water. “I was only gone about fifteen minutes.”

Dr. Sperry entered and, deferring to Jerry, took a place near the door.

“Nobody’s blaming you,” said Jerry impatiently. “Just tell me how you found him. Not where, but how.”

“How?” asked the young man dumbly.

“Describe the position he was in.”

“Well, he was lying on his back.”

“Yeah …”

“And … and his feet were hanging out over the end of the tub.” He looked up at Jerry, unsure whether he’d gotten the answer right.

“Very good, Walter.” He looked over at Charlotte.

“Just like Adele,” she said.

7

The jitney bus pulled away from the curb and turned left onto Golf Course Road, the road that led to the Avenue of the Pines and from there to the highway. The bus—a free service for spa guests—made the trip to town twice an hour. No sooner was it in motion than Charlotte started nodding off. She had slept fitfully the night before. Periods of wakefulness haunted by images of Art’s dead body had alternated with periods of sleep haunted by dreams of loss. In her dreams, the loss of Art mingled with that of other loved ones. They were always lost, never dead—her lost husband, her lost mother, her lost dog.

She sat in front next to Regie Cobb. As on the news, he was wearing a Panama hat and a pin-striped shirt. Behind her, two fat women were discussing food binges. “It’s Oreos for me,” the one was saying. “If I buy a package, that’s it. It’s gone in nothing flat.” Her companion nodded her chin, or rather her succession of chins. Charlotte hadn’t noticed the women before. They must have been new inmates, to use Adele’s expression. The seat opposite them was occupied by the Role Model, who wore an expression of extreme distaste. He sat as far away from them as possible, as if they were carriers of contagion. The other seats were occupied by the pimply faced bath attendant who had discovered Art’s body and by Frannie’s husband, Dana, who had nodded pleasantly to her.

Charlotte suspected the three men had been summoned to town for the same reason she had, the investigation into Art’s death. Jerry had called the police soon after finding Art’s body, and they had responded within minutes. A squad of technicians had immediately set to work taking photographs and making sketches of the scene of the crime—if that’s what it was. The scene had been Sealed off, and those who were in the building had been held in the men’s lobby. One by one they had been called into a room to give their names and addresses. After being admonished not to discuss the case, they had been released with the stipulation that they might be called back for additional questioning. That morning, Charlotte had received a message from a Detective Crowley asking her to report to the police station at ten.

It had been easy and convenient for the police to write Adele’s death off to a drug overdose, but it wouldn’t be as easy a second time. A heart attack, maybe; but even a heart attack wouldn’t explain the position of Art’s feet. To her, the similarity of the deaths was too striking to ignore. But if the deaths had been unnatural, how had the victims been killed? To drown a healthy adult by forcing the head underwater would have required considerable strength, yet there was no evidence of struggle—no cries or screams, no wild splashing, no marks of violence—on Art’s body, and, she presumed, none on Adele’s. Besides, Charlotte suspected that it would soon be impossible for the police to dismiss Art’s death as lightly as they had Adele’s. The local paper had carried a small item that morning about the “body in the bath” case. It wouldn’t be long before the story would be getting bigger play in bigger papers. But conceding that Art’s death was unnatural was only the beginning. The hard part would be finding out who had murdered him. The award for the best opportunity went to the Bath Pavilion staff. Likewise the award for the most likely to have noticed anything unusual. Which was probably why the bath attendants were being called in. But the murderer could have been anyone at the spa. For that matter, the murderer need not be connected with the spa at all. The question was why. Why would someone at the spa, which was the most likely, commit murder, much less that of a total stranger?

The loud, gravelly voice of the woman behind her broke into her thoughts. “Not me. Chocolate, I can ignore. But salt. Get me near a can of salted peanuts and I go crazy. Or potato chips. Or pretzels.”

The Role Model moved closer to the window.

The bus passed the spa quadrangle and turned onto the Avenue of Pines. “Over there is the golf course,” said Regie. Ever the performer, he had taken it upon himself to conduct a guided tour. “High Rock Golf Course is the only therapeutic golf course in the world: no grade is steeper than five degrees. As you may know, High Rock Spa gained its fame as a spa for heart patients. In those days, exercise was thought to be bad for the heart. Now it’s just the opposite.” He lifted a hand from the wheel to point. “If you look over there, you’ll see a bunch of little buildings that look like outhouses. Those are the pump houses.” He turned around to look at the two women, his eyes twinkling. “I’ll bet you lovely ladies think the Lincoln water—that’s the water that’s used for the baths—comes from a single spring. Am I right?”

The two women nodded obligingly.

“That’s what most people think. But actually it comes from a grid of eight springs under the golf course. From there, it’s pumped to the power plant behind the Hall of Springs, where it’s heated. From there, it’s pumped to the baths. High Rock Spa uses one point nine million liters of mineral water a day, enough to supply the drinking water for a small town.”

At the end of the Avenue of Pines, the bus turned left onto the highway. After a mile or so, the highway strip development gave way to the flamboyant Victorian “cottages” of the town proper. One of Victorian High Rock Springs’s charms, Regie said, was its uninhibited celebration of wealth. “The motto of High Rock Springs,” he said, “might have been ‘too much is never enough.’” But Regie had lost the attention of the two women, who were back on food. From cookies and peanuts, they had graduated to rum raisin ice cream and beluga caviar. Charlotte wondered why they were torturing themselves—all they could expect for lunch was poached fillet of Dover sole and a couple of spears of broccoli (like the other guests, Charlotte had taken to studying the menu postings with the scrutiny she ordinarily accorded the morning newspaper). Unless they were going into town for the purpose of cheating—a transgression that probably occurred with more frequency than the spa management would care to admit, and one that would demonstrate a shocking degree of moral laxity in two new arrivals.

Tuning out the beluga caviar, Charlotte shifted her attention back to Regie. Only a few years earlier, he was saying, many of the cottages had been destined for the wrecking ball, but the revitalization of the spa had led to the restoration of many of the town’s fine old buildings. As they passed two particularly magnificent cottages, Regie explained that they had once belonged to the actress, Lillian Leonard, and her companion, “Diamond Jim” Morrissey. Known as “Beauty and the Beast,” they had been the leaders of spa society. The cottages were said to be connected by an underground passage.

“Imagine that,” said Gravel Gertie, craning her neck for a better view of Lillian’s house, which was a Victorian wedding cake affair.

Charlotte, too, turned to look. If she could have chosen one person to have been in a former life, it would have been Lillian Leonard. For four decades, Lillian had dominated the American stage. Like Charlotte, she had played the virgin and the whore, the socialite and the social activist, but she had played them in real life as well. She had blond hair and a creamy complexion that appealed to the protective instincts of men, and a reputation that appealed to their baser ones. She was known for her extravagant displays of wealth—she had once pedaled around High Rock Springs on a diamond-encrusted bicycle—but she had also been a leader of the suffrage movement. Most appealing to Charlotte at this juncture was her legendary appetite: the Gay Nineties credo that too much was never enough also applied to female flesh; Lillian had weighed in at a hefty one hundred and eighty pounds, and the men had loved her for it. How times had changed.

Gravel Gertie had moved on to cashew nuts.

Regie continued: On their right was the High Rock Casino, which had once been the country’s most famous gambling hall. It was here, said Regie, that Diamond Jim had proffered his oft-quoted advice: “Never play another man’s game.” Alas, said Regie, the gambling interests had been vanquished in the early fifties. In an ironic transformation of vice into virtue, the former gaming rooms now housed the offices of the High Rock police.

Pulling over to a bus shelter at the far side of the park in which the casino was situated, Regie announced the first stop. “If you ladies are going shopping, you might want to get off at the next stop, in the center of town. Return trips on the hour and the half hour.”

“Where do we get off for Mrs. Canfield’s?” asked the sweets lover, confirming Charlotte’s suspicions. Mrs. Canfield’s Sweete Shoppe was High Rock’s most famous confectionary, a French patisserie whose delectables were the stuff of the dreams of the starved patrons of the spa.

“I don’t know if I should answer that question,” said Regie, turning around with a smile. “Ordinarily, regulations prohibit me from discharging passengers at Mrs. Canfield’s, but I guess I can make an exception for two such lovely ladies.” He tipped the brim of his jaunty hat.

The two women giggled.

Charlotte thanked Regie and got off. The three men also got off and headed in the direction of the casino. The Role Model took the lead, walking quickly and with an unusual stride, his heels rising with each step as if walking itself were a constraint. He was a textbook case of the Type A personality. Charlotte lingered behind, enjoying the lovely park. In a few minutes, she had reached the casino, a red-brick building in the flat-roofed Italianate style. Entering, she found herself in a dimly lit hallway. After taking her name, a dispatcher invited her to take a seat. The decor was heavily Victorian, with dark woodwork, parquet floors, and a huge chandelier. Above the door, plaster cherubs clasped their chubby arms around an overflowing cornucopia—a metaphor, she presumed, for the riches awaiting fortune’s favored at the gaming tables.

After a few minutes, the Role Model emerged. It was then Charlotte’s turn: a young officer escorted her into what had been the public gaming room. It was an enormous room with a vaulted ceiling perforated by octagonal stained-glass windows depicting the twelve signs of the zodiac. A long mahogany bar ran the length of one side. Tall windows hung with velvet drapes ran the length of the other. Between the windows hung enormous pier mirrors, which had once reflected the action at the faro boxes and roulette wheels, but which now reflected only an ugly warren of office cubicles.

Threading his way through the maze, the young officer led Charlotte to an office at the back, where she was introduced to Detective Crowley.

The interview itself was a letdown. Detective Crowley, a handsome man in his late thirties with a waxen pallor and prematurely graying hair, seemed mainly intent on establishing the chronology of events. He asked a few routine questions about when she had arrived on the scene, who had been present, and what had happened. She presumed that Jerry had already told him about Art’s feet, but she reiterated the point anyway. It didn’t seem to make much of an impression. In fact, Detective Crowley looked tired and somewhat overwhelmed. The cause of Art’s death, he reported, was drowning subsequent to cardiac arrest. But because of Adele’s death, they were giving his death more scrutiny than they otherwise might. In response to Charlotte’s inquiry, he replied that Art’s body had been released to his wife in Maryland. Funeral services would be held there on Monday. He gave her Art’s wife’s address and that of the funeral home. She intended to write a note and send flowers.

After being dismissed by Detective Crowley, Charlotte was escorted into another room, where her fingerprints were taken. “Elimination prints,” the young police officer called them. They would be used to distinguish her prints and those of others present at the scene from those of any unknowns. After the fingerprinting, she was escorted back out to the hallway. She checked her watch; her visit had lasted only fifteen minutes. She would be able to make the next bus. Resisting the impulse to follow her fellow C’s down the road to perdition at Mrs. Canfield’s, she returned to the bus stop to await the return of the bus and poached fillet of sole.