Free Murder at the Watergate by Margaret Truman

really shouldn’t question Elfie’s motives, should we? I mean, she isn’t here to defend herself—the way he died was so shocking—it must have been—oh, there’s Elfie now. I will say one thing about her, Constance, she’s aged gracefully.”
    “Elfie, darling, we were worried about you.”
    “And dissecting me, I trust,” Elfie said, sliding into the chair held out by a waiter.
    “Oh, don’t be silly,” her companions said, almost in unison. “The usual?”
    “Yes,” Elfie said. “I’m afraid I’m a bit rushed today. I’m having tea this afternoon with Laughton Starkgrave.”
    “Oh? Brown’s?”
    “Home. Waiter, we’re ready to order.”
    Elfie’s multiple marriages provided plenty of grist for natter, as gossip was known to the British, and Elfie knew it. She wasn’t bothered by it; it was her opinion that being discussed was infinitely better than being ignored.
    Truth was that Dieter Krueger had not been a Nazi sympathizer. Like other business owners with a product useful or convertible to Hitler’s war effort, you went along or …
    He’d considered at one time injecting deliberate glitches into his production lines to hamper output. But pragmatism overruled that, and he rode out the war meeting his quotas and waiting for the inevitable collapse of the Third Reich, which came to seem more certain with each passing month.
    When the war ended, Krueger Industries was a sturdy, viable company, poised to expand to other European nations in desperate need of rebuilding. Krueger took advantage of it, beginning with Great Britain, then France, the Netherlands, and into Scandinavia. By the time he met the vivacious and charming Mrs. Dorrance-Robinson at a London party, he was a multimillionaire, a widower, and a prize catch among Europe’s eligible bachelors. That he was twice Elfie’s age—he fifty-nine, she thirty—only added to the newsworthy aspects of the relationship.
    There were those who preferred to view the marriage of Elfie Dorrance to Dieter Krueger as a classic pretty young thing snaring the wealthier older man. There wasa modicum of truth to that; Elfie would never have married Krueger if he hadn’t been wealthy. But she was hardly an impoverished waif, or a predatory gold digger. She brought to the marriage a trust fund, albeit a modest one, established by her deceased father, Malcolm Dorrance, who’d done well as a New England real estate developer. Created and funded when Elfie was in her teens—her formal given name was Elfreda, after her paternal grandmother—the terms of the trust stipulated that as long as Malcolm Dorrance was alive, the trust’s funds were unavailable to his only daughter if she married someone of whom he disapproved. That certainly applied to Elfie’s first marriage at the age of twenty-three to Wayne Robinson, an aspiring alleged artist who swept Elfie off her feet and whisked her away to Paris, where they immersed themselves in the West Bank’s bohemian life. It lasted a year.
    Elfie knew when she married Robinson that he was a drug user and heavy drinker. But she had neither the wisdom at that age, nor the inclination, to look ahead at what it might mean in terms of his treatment of her. His physical abuse and multiple infidelities led to their separation and divorce.
    A month after the papers had been finalized, Elfie’s father died of a stroke. Elfie and her trust fund had been liberated, and she took full advantage of both.
    Elfie and Dieter Krueger took up residence in his handsome home in Munich. But she hated Germany and its granitic culture, its harsh, impenetrable language, and Third Reich ghosts. Because her husband spent considerable time in Great Britain tending to business, she easily persuaded him to find a house there: “All those expensivebills from the Savoy and the Ritz,” she told him. “It would simply be good business to have a permanent place in London.”
    The house, in the elegant Belgravia section of the city, on Eaton