by Mary Bowers
“You can lower your voice now,” I said primly. “Let’s let the college kids get this from mom and dad, once they’re all grown up.”
We were getting glances from the young adults across the coffee shop, and I was pretty sure they weren’t learning anything new. Like me, they were amused, not shocked. I was in my sixties, and I’d been up into hormones and out the other side again. Joy was just making me tired.
“You see?” she told me. “You’re just a prude. You don’t understand and you never will.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, not wanting to get into it with her. Perhaps I had no artistic soul, but I thought I could figure out what kind of inner bond Grant Rosewood was after with a pretty art student forty years younger than himself. I wasn’t even interested, except for what their sexual relationship had meant in real terms. I decided to go cautiously, but this was something I needed to know. It was part of the puzzle I was trying to work out.
“Had you reached the point in your studies with Grant that you felt you were ready to strike out on your own?”
“No.”
“Had he?
She stared at me.
I tried to phrase the next part carefully. “When it’s time for a baby bird to fly on its own, sometimes it has to be encouraged to leave the nest. You admit he didn’t understand the project you were about to start working on. You were beginning to go in different directions, artistically. Had Grant ever suggested that he had nothing more to teach you?”
Her eyes grew wet again, and she ran her tongue over her lips. “He’s gone. It doesn’t matter now. One way or the other, I have no teacher. But I am ready, even though it’s hard going forward alone. I know what I’m doing now.” She inhaled a ragged breath and said, “And that’s why it’s so important. Carmen is just going to destroy the pieces he was creating and everybody knows it. She doesn’t even do sculpture. She paints, and fools around with her little clay figures. Emerge,” she said derisively. “Her stuff looks like a kid did it.”
So that was what this was all about, I thought. She wants a crack at Grant’s unfinished works, and she’s pretty sure she’s not going to get it. That’s why she wanted to get into Grant’s studio so desperately. I wondered if she was even capable of theft. Working with him as she had, she probably had a key. Had she actually been in the studio since her mentor’s suicide?
“How many objects was Grant working on when he died?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Quite a few, from what I can remember. The project taking up most of his time was a small focal piece for a wedding venue. He wanted to knock it out, because he wasn’t that interested in it, to tell you the truth. But a major patron had asked for it as a favor, and Grant felt he couldn’t refuse. The patron wants it more than ever now, and there isn’t much left to do on it. Other than that . . . every artist stalls out, or puts something on hold when a new idea takes hold of him. Some of the projects were even abandoned, but they’re viable.”
“You haven’t gone in there to see?”
“Of course not.” After a moment, she levelled with me. “Okay, I tried, but after his death, Maida’s lawyer advised her to padlock it and install security cameras, since the work was so valuable. She had it done before I could even get in and remove my own tools. I had to buy all new tools for The Armor Plating of Our Peace, and my new work in progress called for me to buy even more, because of the difference in scale. I’ve already done a miniature of it, and now I’m going full-scale. For that, I needed serious tools.”
“You’re working on something new?” I almost mentioned that Carmen had already told me, but I caught myself in time.
“I suppose I should dedicate it to you, since you were the one who made me realize I needed a break from Peace. I was losing my intention. Right now, I’m working on A Soul in Agony.”
“About Grant? He’s the soul in agony? Still?”
“His soul, and mine. His soul then, and my soul now. At least he’s at peace, but I’m left to suffer. My vision for Agony is the moment before he made his final decision. Maybe I’ll make a companion piece for the peace that flooded over him, once he knew what he was going to do. I’ll face that when I finish Agony.”
I nodded, because there’s really nothing you can say to something like that.
The college kids got up and walked past us to the exit, listening with all their ears, but at that point Joy and I weren’t saying anything. As they walked past the window outside, I saw one of the girls take another look at us, then say something that made the others laugh.
“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, Joy,” I said, getting ready to leave. “I simply don’t know what’s going to happen to whatever is in Grant’s studio now.”
She reached across the table and trapped me by the arm.
“You know, and you have to tell me.” Her face was hard, determined, and for a moment I was almost afraid of her.
Then I pulled myself together and remembered where we were. Ronnie was still behind the counter, setting up coffee for the noon rush, and outside it was just a normal day in downtown Tropical Breeze.
“I don’t know, Joy, and I think that by the time I do find out, you’ll already know. In the meantime, you’re working on A Soul in Agony, and maybe that’ll be therapeutic, to help you work through the loss of your mentor.”
I released my arm from her grip, thanked her for the cappuccino and left.
Chapter 19 – Juicy Gossip
When I came out of Perks, I took a quick look at Artwerks. It was right next door. The gallery finally had some customers, an elderly couple. When I looked in through the display window, I saw Adam explaining something to the lady about a bold, thickly worked abstract painting. It wasn’t to my taste – too many black spatters – but she seemed to like it. I was amused to see that her husband was more interested in Carmen’s under-the-sea painting. Maybe they’d buy both.
Adam looked better today, and I was glad to see it. I liked Adam. He’d been very open and friendly with me from the first, and now there was an air of tragedy about him that got to me every time I saw him. I would have liked to go in and say hi, but I didn’t want to distract the customers from possibly making a purchase (or two), so I walked up the street, just to kill a little time. When I got to the corner, my cellphone rang and I took it out of my purse to see who was calling. It was Lily.
I took the call, and instead of turning to walk back by Artwerks, I crossed the street and headed down Locust toward the pier. I might as well stare at the ocean while we talked.
“Thank God,” she said when I answered. “If I couldn’t get hold of you, I was going to explode. No kidding, girlfriend, this is hot. You will never guess what’s been going on here at the station.”
“Since I’ve never been to your station and I have no idea what TV stations are like, you’re right. What’s been going on there? Oh.” I stopped in my tracks. “Jesse? Wait a second, Lily. I’m about to get run over here.”
I stopped for a group of five motorcycles that had the right of way, then waited a few seconds longer for a little car going putt-putt down the road with a surfboard strapped to the roof. Then I stepped off the curb, crossed A1A and kept walking toward the ocean overlook.
“Okay, now. What’s he been up to?”
“Trying to get his job back, but it’s not going to work. Everybody can see that Treena isn’t going to work out, but the boss – remember me mentioning Carver Charteris? – he still won’t take Jesse back.”
“You expected that.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t expect what Jesse was going to do when he realized that he absolutely was not going to get back on the show. He needed an alibi for Maida’s murder, so he finally talked.”
“Wait – you’re mixing things up. First tell me about what’s going on at the station, then we’ll talk about Maida.”
“I am. They’re the same thing. Jesse wasn’t at his motel that night, and he wasn’t with Maida, either. He was with Carrie Charteris.
”
“Whoops. Your boss’s daughter?”
“His wife.”
I was dumbfounded. “Jesse was stupid enough to be sleeping with his boss’s wife?”
Lily launched into the details, talking so fast I had to concentrate to understand her.
“My boss lives in Ormond Beach, near the old Rockefeller estate, and he works here in Orlando. Most weeks, he spends so much time in Orlando he just spends the night at an apartment he has here. Sometimes he doesn’t go home for days.”
“And when he wasn’t willing to make the commute to Ormond Beach, Jesse was. Wow.”
“Exactly. He says that when she found out Jesse was doing a shoot in Tropical Breeze, just fifteen minutes up the road from Ormond, she wanted to see him. I mean she really wanted to see him.”
“I don’t need the sweaty details.”
“She wasn’t trying to get sweaty with him, although eventually she did. At first, she wanted to dump him, and she wanted to do it right up in his face. We haven’t managed to figure out all the details yet, but she was that mad at him, she was ready to kill him. So Jesse wasn’t going to admit where he was the night Maida was killed until he was absolutely sure he wasn’t going to worm his way back into his job on Orlando Sizzles! Still with me, Taylor?”
“It boggles the mind, but I’m hanging in there.”
“Good. So here’s the next part: once Jesse knew Carver was really through with him, he got his revenge by telling him about the affair, then he went straight to the police and gave them his alibi. What do you think of that!”
I paused, staring blindly at the waves coming in on the beach. “I think the guy’s a damn fool. Does he really think he’s going to get another job in broadcasting with that on his resume? And what if this Carrie denies he was with her that night? And – wait a minute – if she was breaking up with him – did he actually spend the whole night with her? If he didn’t, even if he did see her, he’s still got no alibi.”
“According to him,” Lily said in a highly suggestive voice, “they managed to kiss and make up. A lot. All night long.”
“But it seems like she’s not important enough for him to protect her by keeping the affair a secret. He needed the alibi, and he wanted to lash out against the boss, since he wouldn’t give him his job back, so he betrayed her. What a jerk.”
“And don’t forget the jerkette,” Lily said. “Carrie’s only got herself to blame, here. She shouldn’t have been sneaking around with a serial seducer like Jesse Mantrell. Listen, I gotta go. I’ll call you with more details when the rest of us here at the station manage to figure them out.”
“Okay, bye,” I said, then I walked up onto the pier and gazed around dumbly. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting Jesse’s shocker to be all about, but it sure wasn’t this. Jesse hadn’t really interested me at all, in fact, and I couldn’t think why. He had a history with Maida, and there was still a slim chance he had opportunity.
Groups of surfers were bobbing around in the water and the usual sunbathers were splayed out across the beach, reading, sleeping, or just people-watching while they got a winter tan. It was early March now, and it wasn’t all that warm, but our Canadian snowbirds seemed to think it was nice and toasty outside. At the end of the pier, several people were lazily fishing, setting their poles up and then strolling around to chat with other fishermen. And there I stood, leaning against the briny wood of the railing, trying to think through a murder.
An alibi from a mistress was a messy thing. Even if he did spend the night with her, he could have left in time to go to Maida’s house and attack her, then gotten back to Ormond Beach within the hour. If the mistress was a sound sleeper, or if he’d managed to drug her somehow, she might not have noticed him leaving and coming back again. But now that he had betrayed her, would she go out on a limb for him?
Maida had been found wearing lingerie. Exactly how sexy it was, Detective Frane hadn’t specified.
I shook my head. Lingerie might mean a man, or it might mean that a lady who was growing insecure about her attractiveness in middle age was just trying to make herself feel pretty.
No, it couldn’t be that, I told myself. Somebody had been there with her. Somebody who had killed her.
I ran through the list in my mind, quickly, almost squeamishly.
Carmen. She was the one person who had definitely been in Maida’s house that night. Never as beautiful as her mother, never as talented as her father, or so she’d been told all her life. Once her mother was dead, Carmen had seemed devastated, as if her last chance for a reconciliation was beyond her reach now. But devastation afterwards didn’t mean any lack of motivation beforehand.
Hank. Self-righteous, condemning and angry about something. He thought Maida was a tramp, and he wasn’t afraid to call her that to her face. In my experience, certain people always accuse others of their own shortcomings. Liars always think people are lying to them. Thieves always think you’re stealing from them. And people who are driven by lust tend to think everybody else is, too.
Adam. Devoted to Grant Rosewood and cast adrift when Grant killed himself. After the plans they’d made, Adam must have felt Grant had deserted him. But he’d been confident that at least Grant’s final works would pass through his hands, and then he’d been devastated again. By the time of the TV shoot, Lily said he had looked downright haggard. By whatever twisted logic, could he have blamed Maida, both for the suicide and the loss to his business?
Joy. With a head full of squirrely ideas and boomerang thinking, could she have worked out a scenario where everything was Maida’s fault? Joy was wealthy, so it wasn’t about money, in her case. But she craved credibility as an artist. How far would she have gone for it? Frane had said that Grant Rosewood’s death had definitely been suicide, but Joy worked with him every day in his studio. Of all the people on my list, she had been the one closest to him. Forensic science was growing more and more precise, but could it really prove her hand hadn’t been the one holding the gun that killed Grant? With Joy, I felt I had the clearest idea of a motive: Grant was done with her. I found myself agreeing with Carmen: he didn’t want her as a mistress or a student anymore, and he was about to drop her. But then, why kill Maida? The answer brought me right back to my first thoughts about her: the woman was squirrely.
Somewhere in the matrix created by these four people, a deathtrap had formed. Because the answers were there, among all the relationships and jealousies and twisted love. It came down to these four.
No, five. Jesse. Why did I keep forgetting about him? He fit into all this somehow. Was he just a smooth-talking front man who turns out to be a bit player after all? An alibi that depends on your mom, your lover or your kids can be suspect, and his relationship with his boss’s wife seemed problematic, at best. The lady might say anything.
Going further down that road, Jesse’s motive for killing Maida, if in fact he had one, would have been based on revenge for getting him fired. His jobs seemed more important to him than his women. If he was willing to throw Carrie Charteris under the bus to get revenge against her husband, how far would he have been willing to go if he was convinced Maida had gotten him fired from the Jacksonville gig?
I gave a deep sigh and took in my view of the ocean for the first time. Looking down into the crest of a wave, in the strangely clear arc of green that forms below the peak, I saw a fish curl back onto itself violently as it was caught. It thrashed in the water and came up through the surface and then lashed back and forth at the end of the line. Above on the pier, reeling it in, a fisherman was suddenly surrounded by others, admiring the fish and happy for the man.
And then the poor fish flopped about on the boards of the pier, his silver body flashing in the sun.
Would I really be happy if I figured out who the killer was? The fish went into a bucket and I didn’t have to see it anymore, but I was aware that a living thing had been caught. I could never be a fisherman, but was a detective so very different? They fish for
humans.
I inhaled the salty air and settled within myself. Unlike that poor fish, whoever had killed Maida had earned his or her fate. Maida deserved justice, and until killers are stopped, the world is out of balance. There’s danger. If you discover the truth, it’s your duty to speak out, and I thought I was very close to the truth now.
One more interview and I would know. And when I knew, I would speak. I had a pretty good idea about how this killer could be caught.
So I went straight back to Girlfriend’s and asked Florence, “How well do you know your across-the-street neighbor, Jerry?”
Chapter 20 – Gone Fishing
“Jerry?” Florence said, startled. I’d popped into Girlfriend’s so suddenly and asked such an off-the-wall question, she took a moment and just stared at me. “I don’t think any of the neighbors know him very well. He keeps himself to himself. One day he’ll call a hello to you across the street, another day, he won’t even return your wave. Why do you ask?”
I was twisting my lips in thought. “Let’s hope he’s having a good day today. Do you know if he has any hobbies? Does he collect stamps or something? What kinds of things does he like to do?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know, really. I’ve never even been inside his house. I have seen him pack up and go fishing. We’re so near the pier, he doesn’t need to drive, and he rigged up his own box for his fishing gear that he can tow with his bicycle. He pedals off with the big white cooler on a mini-trailer, with his fishing rods sticking up in the air like crazy antennas. Why do you ask?”
“I thought I’d go have a little talk with him.”
“About Maida? He doesn’t know anything, I’m sure, and that detective already interviewed him.”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt to try.”
She regarded me speculatively for a moment. “You might just have more success with him than Detective Frane did, after all. You understand eccentric people. You can get through to them when other people can’t. Take the way you’re such good friends with Ed, for example. You may be the only true friend he has. But if Jerry doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t know anything. Still, like you say, it doesn’t hurt to try. What made you want to talk to Jerry, of all people?”