Charlotte Douglas - Holidays Are Murder

Mother rang her silver bell again. “Dr. Fellows will say grace.”

Before I bowed my head, I caught a sympathetic look from Bill, who had been assigned the seat across from me.

“Heavenly Father,” Dr. Fellows began.

The beeper on my belt shrilled, shattering the room’s quiet.

“Really, Margaret,” Mother said with no effort to hide her disapproval. “Can’t you turn that thing off?”

Dr. Fellows smiled, but Caroline, Michelle and Sandra glared with as much disapproval as if I’d just stripped topless.

“I’m on call, Mother. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll use the phone in the foyer. Please, go ahead. Don’t wait for me.”

I’d have felt relief at being snatched from the jaws of social responsibility, but I knew a summons on a holiday had to be bad news.

I was right.

Darcy Wilkins answered at dispatch when I phoned the station. “We’ve got a drowning at a private residence on the beach.”

“Accidental?”

“It’s your call,” she said. “The M.E.’s on her way.”

She gave me the address. I braced for Mother’s disapproval and returned to the dining room to announce my regrets.

Bill dropped me off at my condo, where I picked up my car for the trek to the beach. As I drove across the causeway, I saw that the city crews had already strung Christmas lights and decorations, and their festive glitter provided an ironic contrast to my mission. Even if the reported drowning turned out to be accidental, one family would have their future Thanksgiving holidays marred forever by memories of tragedy.

The causeway emptied into the commercial district of the beach, high-rise hotels and condos, restaurants, fishing piers and dozens of shops crammed with T-shirts and tacky tourist souvenirs made in Taiwan. The streets were crowded with out-of-state and rental cars and the sidewalks filled with folks who had forfeited the traditions of home for a holiday in the sun.

I turned north and the asphalt of the commercial district gave way to ancient brick streets. Homes, modest in size and style but worth a small fortune because of their beach location, lined the roadway. The street ended at a huge wrought-iron gate, more symbolic than obstructive, since it always stood open. It marked the entrance to the beach’s most upscale residential area, Yacht Club Estates. I drove past the clubhouse where, a few weeks ago, I’d apprehended two armed punks attempting to rob my mother. Most of the houses were screened from the road by massive hedges, since their coveted views came from the Intracoastal Waterway on the east side of the street or the white sand beaches of the Gulf of Mexico on the west. The price of real estate on this end of the beach started at seven figures, then soared like a bottle rocket.

A few blocks past the yacht club, another ornate gate loomed, this barrier the real deal with an electronic surveillance system and pass-card entry. Tonight, however, the usually locked gates stood ajar. Death, the great leveler, hadn’t needed a key to infiltrate this bastion of the wealthy.

I drove through the open portal and approached the cluster of vehicles gathered on the beach side of the street. A P.B.P.D. green-and-white and a paramedics’ van stood with their emergency lights strobing the adjacent sea grape hedges with flashes of red and blue. Adler’s SUV was parked beside the cruiser. After I climbed from my car, he met me at the break in the hedge.

“I’d hoped we’d get through the day without a call,” he said. “No such luck.”

“Did you miss dinner?” I asked.

He shook his head. “We ate early, so I’m missing only football games and the washing up. How about you?”

“No big deal.” I felt only a momentary twinge of guilt over the fact that I’d rather work a signal seven than have Thanksgiving with my relatives. “Who’s the vic?”

“Vincent Lovelace.”

“The cable channel giant?”

“Founder and owner of Your Vacation Channel. And from the looks of this house, this guy didn’t need a vacation. He lived one.”

“He’s on permanent holiday now.”

Adler nodded. “Paramedics pronounced him when they arrived. Doc Cline’s on the way.”

We stepped through the gate in the hedge and the house, a huge four-story tower of glass and steel with lights blazing from every level, rose in front of me. I could see through the rooms of the first floor to the brightly illuminated terrace with its lap pool and the beach and Gulf beyond. On the pool deck lay the body of Vincent Lovelace. Rudy Beaton, a P.B.P.D. patrol officer, was taking statements from two paramedics. A woman with wet hair sat huddled in a blanket on a deck chair on a raised terrace at the north end of the pool.

I recognized Mrs. Lovelace instantly. Until that moment, I’d forgotten that Vincent had married Samantha Weston, daughter of Mother’s best friend Isabelle. With a sinking feeling, I knew, no matter how this investigation sorted out, Mother was not going to be happy.

I walked through the house with its minimalist furnishings, enough vibrant splashes of primary colors for a Jackson Pollock canvas or a day-care center, and immaculate housekeeping. The whole place looked as if it had been staged for a photography shoot for a spread in Architectural Digest. Classical music, a Vivaldi mandolin concerto, flowed from surround-sound speakers and blended with the crash of the surf from the adjacent beach. Sandalwood-scented candles glowed on the fireplace mantel and coffee table but couldn’t quite mask the cooking aromas from an earlier meal.

Adler and I stepped onto the patio where Rudy met us.

“The wife called 911,” he said. “Said she found her husband on the bottom of the pool. Pulled him out and tried CPR, but couldn’t revive him. He was dead when the paramedics got here.”

“Anyone else in the house?” I asked.

Beaton shook his head.

I rounded the pool and scanned the victim. His abbreviated Speedo revealed the tan, fit body of a man clearly in his prime. A large gash ran down his left temple below his thick dark hair.

“Secure the scene and call in the Crime Scene Unit,” I told Rudy.

Beaton raised his eyebrows. “CSU? This is an accident, right?”

“We’ve yet to determine that. Ask the paramedics to clear their equipment and wait in the bus.” I turned to Adler. “Check with the neighbors. Find out if they saw or heard anything. I’ll interview the wife.”

Before I approached Samantha Lovelace, I studied the scene. The narrow lap pool ran parallel to the house along the western edge of the forty-foot terrace. At the south end of the pool, a wrought-iron deck chair lay on its side. Water puddled around it. A few feet away, a pole protruded at an angle from a clump of sea oats that edged the terrace. Closer inspection revealed a long-handled skimmer net. Several feet north of the overturned chair, Lovelace’s body lay in another large puddle of water, apparently where his wife had dragged him from the pool.

I stared at the beach beyond the terrace. Something was wrong with the picture and I took a moment to figure it out. A wide swath of sand, leading from the terrace between the dunes to the water’s edge, had been carefully raked, like the terrain in a Japanese garden. Nothing disturbed the perfection of the white sugar-sand, no footprints, not even bird tracks, although, in the light of the rising moon, a night heron skittered through the breakers farther up the beach. Several different-size feet had made deep impressions in the sand on either side of the raked area where people had walked the shoreline before the intervening sand had been smoothed. To the west stretched the seemingly unending expanse of the Gulf of Mexico, reflecting a swath of silver moonlight. The scene was peaceful and serene.

Except for the dead body on the pool deck beside me.

“What have we got?”

I jumped at the sudden voice at my elbow. Doris Cline, wearing her usual running shoes, had sneaked up on me. For someone who’d been called out on a holiday, she looked unusually perky, more like a gung-ho, high school, physical education teacher with her bouncy gray curls, wide smile and bright eyes, than a medical examiner.

“You’ll have a dead detective if you keep scaring me like that. Sorry to ruin your Thanksgiving.”

Doc nodded toward the body on the pool deck. “Mine’s not half as ruined as his. What happened?”

I walked her through the scenario I’d garnered from the evidence. “Here, at this first puddle, Lovelace’s head somehow came in contact with that overturned wrought-iron chair. There’s blood on the metal arm. Then he went into the water. His wife claims she found him in the pool, dragged him out and tried CPR.”

Doc knelt on the flagstone decking, poked a finger into the first puddle of water and lifted it to her mouth. I shuddered at the gesture, but figured clear water was the least gross of the fluids Doc had to deal with.

She lifted her eyebrows. “Salt. Was he swimming in the Gulf first?”

“Not unless he raked the beach behind him when he came out, and there’s no rake in sight.”

Doc approached the body and scrutinized the victim. “Bleeding on the temple indicates he was alive when this injury was sustained. Those long scrapes on his chest, however, were post mortem. Probably occurred when he was dragged from the pool.” She lifted the victim’s right hand that sported a diamond the size of a walnut set in a gold band.

“The fact that he’s still wearing that rock rules out robbery,” I said.

Doc checked his left hand with its plain gold wedding band. “His nails on both hands are broken and the tips of his fingers are scraped.”

“Signs of a struggle?”

She nodded. “As if he tried to claw his way out of the pool.”

“Could he have been groggy from the blow to his head, so stunned that he couldn’t pull himself out of the water?”

“I’ll know more after the autopsy.”

“Had he been in the water long?”

She shook her head.

The CSU team arrived. While Doc continued her examination of the body, I asked the techs to take samples of the two puddles and also water from the pool, as well as the blood from the chair arm. After requesting that they bag the skimmer net, I headed toward Samantha.

Although the day had been warm, the night breeze off the chilly Gulf waters was cold, and in her chair on the raised deck, Samantha was shivering. How much from physical discomfort and how much from emotional distress, I couldn’t tell.

“Why don’t we go inside where it’s warmer,” I suggested.

She looked up with a shell-shocked expression and recognition flitted across her deep blue eyes. “I know you.”

“Maggie Skerritt.” I took her arm, tugged her from the patio chair and led her into the living room.

“Margaret? Priscilla’s daughter? What are you doing here?”

“I’m a detective with the Pelican Bay Police Department.”

With the wooden expression of a sleepwalker, she sank into a chrome-and-leather chair beside a fireplace with a mirrored surround and tugged the blanket closer. She picked up a remote control from a side table, pointed it at the fireplace and punched a button. Flames flared from a gas log. Shaking her head, as if clearing mental fog, she asked, “Why are the police here?”

“Standard procedure whenever there’s a death.”

Samantha was ten years younger than I was. She’d always been a beauty and either good genes or a great plastic surgeon had preserved that youthful attractiveness into her late thirties. But with her makeup ruined by pool water and tears, her face appeared ravaged. My job was to sort out how much of that effect had been produced by genuine grief.