by Ann Aptaker
Chapter Sixteen
A young uniformed night-shift cop has taken over protective patrol of the Stern house. With no postfuneral gathering to go to, no social event going on inside, getting past him is going to be tricky.
Or so I thought.
Vivienne’s out of the car before me, and after a few words, a smile, and a handshake with the cop, she waves me along and I accompany her up the front stairs.
I ask her, “What magic words did you say to him?”
“I sent regards to his father. Don’t look so shocked, Cantor. Even Wall Street financiers with Mayflower pedigrees are sometimes disappointed in their children, and believe me, that young man’s father was sorely disappointed when his son decided to join the police force.”
So Wall Street and I actually have something in common; I might disown any kid of mine who became a cop, too.
After we ring the doorbell, the door opens and the widow Katherine Stern is even less happy to see me on her doorstep than George was to see me on Vivienne’s. Sneering at me from above the flouncy collar of a floor-length robe decorated with palm fronds and bought with more money than taste, she’s unsteady on her feet, a glass of what’s likely her preferred libation of straight bourbon whiskey in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She nearly drops the glass as she tosses her hair away from her face, the blond waves brassy in the light of the vestibule. Recovering, she gives me a glassy stare, then gives the stare to Vivienne, then gives it back to me. “Well, don’t you have your nerve,” she says, very much in her cups but not fall-down drunk, though she’s on her way. “I thought I got rid of you earlier, and now you show up at—What is it? Almost eleven o’clock? And with a trollop?”
Vivienne takes no offense at the trollop jab. She doesn’t have to. Katherine Stern’s insult reached no higher than the soles of Vivienne’s shoes. Smiling with the cool friendliness of someone more important than you are and who deigns to give you a few moments of their time, Vivienne says, “I’m Vivienne Parkhurst Trent, curator of European Renaissance paintings and drawings at the most important museum in the city. If you’re at all interested in finding out what happened to the Dürer watercolor, or who killed your husband and sister-in-law, you will let us in, Mrs. Stern.”
I’m not sure which of those possibilities did the trick, but after a few seconds’ boozy thought, the widow steps aside, letting me and Vivienne into the house. She doesn’t offer to take our coats.
When we’re all in the vestibule, I say, “Where’s Francine?”
Katherine Stern may not be the world’s best mother, but she’s still a mother, full of all those maternal instincts to protect her young at the slightest hint of trouble. Those instincts are aroused now, clawing through her liquored-up fog, ready to pounce. “Why do you want my daughter?”
“We need to talk to her,” I say.
“S’ppose you let me be the judge of that,” she says. “First you gotta tell me what you want to talk to her about.”
“Don’t you think Francine’s old enough to decide for herself?”
Mrs. Stern starts to answer back, but Vivienne doesn’t let her. “I don’t think you understand, Mrs. Stern. We are not giving you a choice. Cantor has a gun, and believe me, she will not hesitate to use it. Do I make myself clear? Now, where is that—where is your daughter?”
Too tipsy to push back, but fully understanding her situation, Mrs. Stern steadies herself as much as she’s able and pulls herself up to her full height in a last woozy effort at dignity. “All right, all right, you don’t have to get huffy, threaten me like you own the place.” She gives me the once over, eyes me through her whiskey haze with the same chilly attitude she gave me this morning. A day’s worth of bourbon hasn’t warmed her soul at all. The woman’s made of ice and stone, which are probably the only props keeping her on her feet. “All you want is to talk to Francine?”
“Just talk,” I say.
“Okay, but that’s all it better be. I don’t care if you do have a gun. This is a house of mourning. I’ve lost my dear husband”—I’m not sure if she’s choking on the whiskey or the word dear—“and Francine’s lost her father. We are both very upset. You make one nasty move against my daughter and I’ll scratch your eyes out, understand?” I bet she would, too.
“I’ll say it once more, Mrs. Stern, we’re just here to talk.”
“Do you…do you really have a gun?”
I open my coat, unbutton my suit jacket, pull it aside, and show her the iron in the rig.
The threat under my arm makes its case. Mrs. Stern takes another gulp of bourbon to escape the threat, then says, “Well then, Francine’s upstairs in the den.” Cigarette smoke trails her as she turns and walks from the vestibule. Vivienne and I follow her through the living room and up a stairway carpeted in an all-over Chinese poppy motif. Poor Vivienne, walking behind Mrs. Stern. I’m sure the clashing colors and busy patterns of the palm-frond robe and the Chinese carpet are making her curatorial eyes cross. Even worse, Mrs. Stern is slugging down more bourbon along the way, turning her climb up the stairs into a dicey balancing act. If it fails, she’ll come tumbling backward into Vivienne and then me, sending us all rolling down the stairs, breaking our necks.
The laughter of a crowd drifts toward us on the second floor landing. The laughter comes from down the hall where Francine is watching television, lounging on a tweedy brown couch in the dimly lit den, catching the last few minutes of the Cavalcade of Stars as we walk in. A lamp on a side table throws a pool of light near the couch, the television screen sends a silvery glow across the reclining Francine. On the television, that hefty side of beef of a young comic named Gleason, gray faced and cramped on the small screen in its big mahogany console, must’ve just said something funny, setting off all that laughter from the studio audience. Then music comes on and two entirely too clean-cut guys and a girl-next-door kinda blonde sing the drugstore sponsor’s jingle, which sends Francine off the couch to turn off the set. With the silvery glow from the television gone, light from the single lamp is the only illumination in the room. The soft light and surrounding shadows treat Francine’s youth and Vivienne’s beauty kindly. They don’t extend the same courtesy to Katherine Stern. The shadows just carve her age and hardness even deeper.
Francine’s still in the same black flared skirt, white blouse, and open button-down black sweater she wore when I was here this morning after her father’s funeral, only now the blouse isn’t buttoned to the neck. The top three or four buttons are open, making for a whole different impression than the girl who gave me a peck on the check on my way out the door.
Seeing me, Francine throws me a big smile while she quickly runs her hands through her short blond hair to unmuss it, ignoring her mother and sliding a fast sidelong glance at Vivienne. “Cantor, what a surprise! What are you doing here? Though, um, I’m happy to see you. Are you happy to see me?” She sits on the couch again, pats the area beside her. “Come sit by me,” she says.
“No, thanks, not tonight, Francine.” I keep it polite but sidestep Francine’s flirty-girl routine. “This isn’t a social call. We need to talk to you.”
“What about?”
Mrs. Stern chimes in, “Yes, what about?” Her speech is slurring a little more now, giving her trouble with consonants she can’t quite peel off the roof of her mouth.
Francine snaps, “You’re dropping your ashes, Mom.”
A humiliated Mrs. Stern mutters, “Oh!” and quickly stubs her cigarette out in an ashtray on the coffee table, nearly tripping over it, which annoys Francine even more.
“Mom, why don’t you just sit down? No, not here on the couch. Over there in the club chair.” Francine doesn’t even help her mother, who finally settles into the chair without spilling a drop of her drink. Well, they say God and liquor-store owners love a drunk.
But the painful family drama between the pickled Katherine Stern and her devil-doll daughter nearly skins me, though it seems to just bore Vivienne. There’s no expression on th
at aristocratic face at all, not even disgust.
Lucky me, stuck in a room with a shriveling widow who’s losing herself in whiskey, a society dame who might be crazy enough to kill and is certainly proving cold-hearted enough to do it, and a wild child whose hatred of her mother is clearer by the minute, who might have hated her father just as much, and who may have her own violent soul.
The wild child pats the sofa again. “If you want to talk to me, Cantor, you’ll have to sit next to me.” The kid’s smile is sweet as peaches and cream, which scares the hell outta me. But I need Francine’s cooperation, and to clinch it I’ll have to sit down next to her on the couch.
Light from the lamp on the side table flows across the couch to Francine, usefully illuminating her face. She won’t be able to hide from me, can’t hide her first, true reactions to my questions. But the light’s finding other parts of her, too, like the bit of soft cleavage exposed by her open blouse.
Vivienne, standing against the back of the couch, notices me noticing what’s displayed by Francine’s open blouse. The small but acid smile Vivienne gives me threatens to strip the flesh from my bones.
Clearing my throat, and my head, I say, “Francine, there are a few things I need to know.”
This kid’s reading my dark side like a book, or maybe she’s just seen too many movies, swanning toward me like a B-picture femme fatale, lamplight sparkling in her green eyes and catching a far too adorable sheen of moisture above her lip. Either way, after a quick glance at her mother, who’s busy taking another drink, Francine slides my coat open and puts her hand on my leg. “Whatever you want, Cantor.”
What I want is to keep control of this conversation, and I can’t with the girl’s hand on my leg, where its warmth is giving me the shivers. I lift her hand but keep it in mine with just enough tenderness to convince Francine not to bolt, to stay with me and answer my questions.
I say, “Do you know anything about handling a gun?”
Mrs. Stern, drunk but not dead, pounces on that with the remaining shreds of her maternal dignity. “How dare you!”
But Francine just laughs at the question, or maybe at her mother. “Settle down, Mom. I don’t mind if Cantor knows I’m good with a gun. I bet she’s good with a gun, too. Aren’t you, Cantor? Maybe we could go out shooting together sometime. There’s a riflery club in the neighborhood with a target-practice range. I could show you just how good I am.”
I don’t think that last line has anything to do with shooting a rifle. And neither, evidently, does Vivienne, who grabs hold of both the conversation and Francine. Leaning over the back of the couch, taking Francine’s chin in her hand, and turning the kid’s face up to her, Vivienne says, “Since Cantor wasn’t polite enough to introduce us, and your mother’s in no shape to even remember my name, it’s up to me to do the honors. I’m Vivienne Parkhurst Trent, and I want to know just how you came by your expertise with firearms.”
Up to now, except for that first sidelong glance when we walked in, Francine’s ignored Vivienne as if she’s not here. But she’s lost that game now, caught in the grip of the older, more self-assured woman who’s trained for a lifetime in the art of getting her way.
Katherine Stern’s suddenly on her feet, more or less. “Take your hands off my little girl!”
The patrician Miss Vivienne Parkhurst Trent is not about to be bossed around by the drunken command of the boorishly nouveau riche Katherine Stern. Vivienne’s grip on the kid doesn’t let up. Mrs. Stern, defeated simply by being ignored, sinks back into the chair.
Francine, as sharp as her mother is dull witted, knows she has no way out. “It was something to do at school,” she says with a shrug.
Vivienne loosens her grip, nods for the girl to keep talking, and as Francine talks, Vivienne lets go of her. “A hoity-toity girl in my English lit class kept bragging about going off every weekend to her family’s country place to hunt and shoot.” Vivienne smiles a little at that, a smile full of nostalgia, but with enough chill under it to ice my marrow. As far as I’m concerned, she’s not off the hook for the Jacobson and Stern killings, even as Francine spills about her own prowess with guns. “That snobby girl loved to lord it over everybody,” the kid says. “Especially me. She kept spouting about how the lower orders and mongrel races were too clumsy to master the finesse of marksmanship. So I took up the sport.” She says this with such determined defiance it could make even a brute think twice about tackling her. “I got as good at shooting things as she was,” she says. “I even beat her in competitions. She absolutely hated it that with the right gun, I can bag a squirrel at fifty feet. A moving squirrel.” The glow in her eyes is terrifying.
Mrs. Stern struggles to sit up in her chair again, finally gets there by a desperate act of will. The day’s worth of whiskey is taking its harsh toll on her body, and tying her tongue in knots. “You’re my li—little girl and I love you, Francy. But your father and—your father and I hated all that gun business of yours,” she says. “He hated it ’cause he was weak. And I hate it ’cause you scare me.”
“And you disgust me, Mom,” is Francine’s sneery answer, making my skin shrivel on my bones.
But the kid’s just given me my way into the big, ugly question. “Did your father disgust you, too, Francine?”
“What? No!” She’s the innocent again, the Daddy’s Girl whose smile opens the hearts and empties the pockets of fathers in living rooms across America. “How could you even think such a thing, Cantor? My father was the strongest, sweetest, most—”
Vivienne cuts off Francine’s loving litany with a sharp, “Cut the crap, girlie.” The kid’s Daddy’s Girl act must’ve triggered a surge of the Trent gutter-blood in Vivienne’s veins. She presses Francine with the blunt force of a stevedore. “We know all about your little escapade with Daddy’s car, and the unfortunate man you crippled while screaming that you wished your father was dead. So don’t give us any sob stories about dear sweet Daddykins. You’re a cold-blooded little monster. Even your mother’s afraid of you.”
Francine jumps up from the couch as if something bit her. “Who the hell are you to talk to me like that? Cantor, what is she doing here? Why are you letting her talk to me like that?”
I stand up, too, get face to face with the enraged wild child. “Because she’s got you pegged, Francine.”
“No, she doesn’t. She can’t. She’s making things up. Just ask the police. There’s no record of anything like that. You’ll see. You’ll see!”
Vivienne’s the calmest person in the room, the Parkhurst blue-blood dignity back in command as she comes around to the front of the couch and sits down with the easy confidence of the always privileged. Two minutes ago she was the foul-mouthed slum-queen Trent. Now she’s the aristocratic Parkhurst again. I don’t know if this flip in personality is just one of her skills, trotted out when required, or that streak of her mother’s madness. I just know it gives me the creeps.
In a cool, steady voice through an in-charge smile, she says, “Yes, Miss Stern, we know about that, too. Your father was an important man, important enough to have powerful people rid the police department of damaging paperwork and bury any scandal. But there are people in the world even more important than your father. And common things”—Vivienne’s accent on the word common is unmistakable—“like police paperwork, or lack of it, aren’t enough to keep secrets from their ears. So stop lying to us. You’re nothing but a dangerous good-for-nothing brat. In fact, we think you killed your father and your aunt Hannah.”
Francine doesn’t look at her accuser, but at me, her face hard with equal parts hate and fear. Her rage runs so deep, it gags her, gets stuck in her throat. “How—how—how could you think—why would I—?”
“You tell me,” I say. “Your aunt told you about the Dürer watercolor. Maybe you thought you could make a fast buck, get past the purse strings your father held too tight for your taste.”
But it’s Mrs. Stern who answers. “Oh yeah, that Dürer picture,” she
says with tipsy difficulty. “A guy called me ’bout that today. Guy named Hogan, no—”
“Hagen?” Vivienne and I say it nearly in unison.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Mrs. Stern says. “Hagen.” The now empty bourbon glass falls from her hand to the floor. She kicks it away like she’s angry at it, then says, “This Hagen guy says he can get me lotsa money for this Dürer picture. That is, if it comes my way. Francy, did you steal that picture from your aunt Hannah?”
I keep quiet, not about to let on that the Dürer was never stolen, and that it’s safe and sound in my vault. Let’s see who takes the bait.
It’s Vivienne. “Yes, Francine, that’s something we’d all like to know.”
The kid’s working hard to keep her temper and not give us fuel for Vivienne’s suspicions. “No, I did not steal the picture. I did not steal anything, and I did not kill anybody. Cantor, please, you’ve got to believe me! And…and besides”—her faulty teenage self-control is slipping, not with anger, but with nearly hysterical glee—“how could I kill my father? I was in the car with my mother on the way back from the funeral! We left before you. We were way ahead of you on the road back home. Mom! Wake up. Tell them. Tell them I was in the car with you when Daddy was killed!”
Mrs. Stern is nearly out for the count, her head down, her tongue dangling. With the last of her juice, she mumbles, “Course you were in the car, Francy. That rabbi was waitin’ for us…”
Which brings it all back to Vivienne. I give her a smile. It makes her wince.
The insertion of Hagen into the Stern story complicates things, though. I don’t know where Vivienne fits in. Maybe she’s gotten into cahoots with Hagen, or maybe she doesn’t fit in there at all.
There’s only one way to sort this out.
Vivienne’s surprised when I extend a hand to her, the gesture an invitation to help her up from the couch. But before Vivienne even has the chance to accept my hand or tell me to go to hell, Francine’s tugging at my elbow. “What do you want to take her hand for, Cantor? She’s mean. She’s been nasty to me. Please, Cantor, please take my hand instead.”