“More like it,” Scrappy announced.
The conversational hum quickly returned to the previous level. Within about ten seconds the only people looking at the bar were the ones in line for a drink. Later I tried to figure out how much time Lynda and I spent circulating after the drama was over, but that was hopeless. All I know is that we had just started to talk with Mo Russert, an old friend who was bubbling with plans for her long-dreamed of mystery bookstore, when we heard the scream.
The harp fell silent, making the alien cry seem even louder and the room smaller.
I don’t know why I was the first to respond. If I’d thought about it, I might have been more cautious. But I didn’t think about it. I just pushed my way through the crowd of stunned onlookers to the source of the scream. It was coming from an alcove at the end of the long room, the area where the restrooms were located.
Lillian Peacock, the elderly artist, was kneeling in the little hallway in front of the restrooms. She had found the corkscrew. It was embedded in Thurston Calder’s right eye.
II
An hour later, although it felt like much longer, Oscar Hummel was doing his best to look unimpressed.
“Through the eye right into the brain,” he said. “We had a case like that once in Dayton. A man shoved a filet knife into his wife’s eye. And then he killed himself. I kind of like it when they do that - no loose ends and you don’t have to worry about what some defense attorney may do at a trial.”
Before coming to Erin, Ohio, as police chief, Oscar had been a desk sergeant in Dayton. But he hadn’t always been a desk sergeant, and he occasionally liked to relive past glories. Oscar looked older than his forty-eight years and could stand a little exercise with me at the gym. He’s vain enough to usually wear a cap - tonight it was the Cincinnati Bengals - to hide his bald head.
“Fingerprints?” Mac asked.
Oscar regarded him scornfully. “Of course not. Wiped clean.”
“Look on the bright side, Oscar,” Mac said. “The circle of suspects is limited. As soon as I realized that something serious had happened, I asked Popcorn to keep an eye on the only door to make sure that no one left.”
That was a shrewd move. Give Aneliese Pokorny a task and she will execute it flawlessly. If she said nobody had left, Oscar could bank on it - and he knew it.
The chief looked sourly around the room. Oscar’s assistant chief, Lt. Col. L. Jack Gibbons, and the rest of his troops were talking quietly to the assembled art lovers, notebooks in hand. “There are eighty-seven people in this room, Mac, not counting my cops. I figure they’re all suspects. And one of them happens to be Her Honor the Mayor. Unless somebody confesses soon, I think I’m in deep guano. I don’t suppose anybody wants to confess?”
Oscar was just venting. We all knew that what he really wanted most - next to the cigarette that he knew he wasn’t going to get - was for Mac to identify the murderer in time for Oscar to get back to whatever game he’d been watching on ESPN. That didn’t seem likely, though.
“What have you been able to find out about the disappearance of the corkscrew?” Mac asked.
Oscar sighed. “Justin says he was in the can a few minutes before Scrappy Smith asked him for a glass of red. The murder weapon might have been taken then. It’s small enough to palm and nobody would have noticed. The bar area was pretty crowded, wasn’t it?”
“Very,” I said. “You don’t seriously suspect Justin, do you?”
“No more than anybody else. Not this time.” He meant in contrast to the time he did suspect Justin, which I’m surprised that Oscar would allude to, considering that it had not been his finest hour.
Oscar had already gotten our take on the evening’s festivities right after questioning Lillian Peacock and Justin. We’d reported everything we’d seen and heard, verbatim, including our unpleasant encounter with Calder earlier. Kate and Lynda, meanwhile, were on the other side of the room, queued up to talk with the unflappable Gibbons.
Mac nodded toward Mrs. Peacock, who was sitting on a couch in a corner with her granddaughter. “Did she see anything?”
“Just the body,” Oscar said. “As you might imagine, she was pretty wigged out by the whole thing. I could barely understand her through the sobbing. She was on her way to the bathroom when she found him.”
Beryl held her grandmother’s hand, the family resemblance between the two tall, pale women obvious as they huddled with each other.
“Next up, I have to talk to the gallery owner, Rosalie Hawthorne,” Oscar went on. “You guys might as well stay.” Why not, we’re practically unpaid deputies at this point. Although disdainful of Mac’s mystery novels featuring magician and amateur sleuth Damon Devlin - and I’m with him on that! - Oscar had been forced by experience to a reluctant appreciation of Mac’s real-life abilities as a crime solver.
Rosalie Gamble Hawthorne, a slim, attractive woman in her mid-forties whom I’d seen working out at Nouveau Shape, looked shell-shocked when she joined us at our low table in response to Oscar’s beckoning wave.
“I just can’t believe this,” she mumbled.
Clad in jeans and a vest, with her auburn hair hanging shoulder length below a fedora, she gave the impression of being a woman who didn’t expect to have her perfect plans ever go awry. With her youngest child recently moved into a dorm at St. Benignus, she had immersed herself just recently in art and artists. Is there anyone more unstoppable than a determined woman with a lot of time and money? But at the moment she looked more vulnerable than formidable.
“I understand you invited Mr. Calder here tonight,” Oscar said. “Is that right?”
“Yes. I’d heard he was in town for a couple of days.”
“He was a friend of yours?”
Give Oscar credit, he asked it without a hint of innuendo. Still, the question seemed to give pause.
“I guess so,” she said finally. “We didn’t exchange Christmas cards or anything like that, but we served on the Defense of Free Art Committee together.” I’d heard of that outfit - some kind of trendy anti-censorship group. “I greatly admired Thurston’s criticism.” She shook her head. “This is horrible. Just horrible. The gallery will never live it down. Who could have done such a thing?”
“And why?” Mac added softly.
III
The rest of the evening was spent in the painstaking process of Oscar and his men talking to everyone present, the sort of dogged police work that Oscar will tell you solves maybe 98 percent of all criminal cases. Chalk up another 1 percent to luck. The final 1 percent is where Sebastian McCabe comes in.
Nobody had seen anyone pocket the corkscrew or walk away with Thurston Calder. The art lovers had all been too busy chatting, drinking, or gaping at stained-glass birds, paintings of flowers, or bicycles on the wall.
“Or perhaps the killer lured Calder away while Scrappy had everyone else’s attention with his temper tantrum,” Mac mused the following day, pulling thoughtfully on his beard. “That is something to ponder.”
We had gathered with our coffee cups in his study after brunch on Sunday, the heat of the fireplace pleasant in the mid-October chill. It’s the finest man-cave I’ve ever seen, but women are welcome, too. Married less than six months, Lynda and I treasured our Sunday mornings alone together after Mass. But we needed to talk this out with Mac and Kate, so an older habit had reasserted itself. Besides, we still lived just a few feet away in my carriage house apartment over the McCabes’ garage.
“Frank did a good job on the story,” Lynda said with a note of pride in her voice, pointing to the Sunday morning edition of The Erin Observer & News-Ledger. Frank Woodford had once been a reporter, going all the way back to the days of manual typewriters, but he’d been editor of the paper for so long that Lynda hadn’t been sure he could still write. His specialty now was community engagement, and he was great at it. T
here wasn’t an important club in town he didn’t belong to or board he didn’t sit on. Frank had hired Lynda out of journalism school, but now she was a rung above him on the Grier Ohio NewsGroup organizational chart.
“Based on what we observed ourselves and on what Oscar and his men learned in their initial inquiries, I would agree that Frank’s article appears to be as accurate and as comprehensive as possible at this point,” Mac said. “To summarize, everyone at the gallery last night had the means and the opportunity. Unless we can find a way to narrow that down a bit, perhaps motive is the most promising line of investigation.”
“There was no love lost between Calder and Dante Peter O’Neill,” I pointed out. What am I saying? What kind of college PR director tries to finger an employee of his own institution for Murder One? I need more sleep.
Lynda, sitting next to me on the love seat, took a sip of her high-test coffee. “I only spent about five minutes with the late Mr. Calder, but my guess is that if everybody who didn’t like him is a hot suspect, then the only possibility you’ve ruled out is suicide.”
I wish I’d said that.
“Maybe I have some books that would help,” my sister said. She left her chair and returned a couple of minutes later with three fat volumes, one of them a coffee table book.
“When I heard that Calder was a candidate for head of the art department, I bought some of his books,” Kate explained. “He’s also famous for his biting criticism in articles, but I wanted to read the books.” She picked up the coffee table tome, LaDonna McQueen: Her Violent Life and Vigorous Art. “He was always a controversialist. This was his first book. It started out as the dissertation for his doctoral degree in art history at Stanford.”
“Shows you what I know about art,” I said. “I’ve never even heard of this LaDonna McQueen.”
“Nobody had until Calder discovered her,” Kate said. “Or rather, everyone had forgotten her. LaDonna McQueen was an obscure urban guerrilla who was part of a gang that shot and killed a guard during a bank robbery in 1970. She was no kid like Patty Hearst; she was a thirty-year-old art teacher in San Diego who fell in love with one of her radical students and ran away with him. She never surfaced again after the robbery, but she left behind a cache of watercolors and oils. Decades later, Calder became fascinated with her story and tracked down her work.” Kate held up the book. “This was the result. Basically he argues that she was a tortured genius.”
Kate opened the book and paged through so that we could see the art. The subjects all came from nature - flora and fauna, mostly the former - but made bolder and brighter than real life. “There is certainly energy in these paintings,” Mac said.
“Creative violence, Calder called it,” Kate replied. “The family of the guard killed in the bank robbery was outraged at his book. They compared it to praising Adolf Hitler’s artwork.” She put that volume to one side and picked up the next one.
“Andy Warhol: A Post-Post-Modern Assessment,” I read out loud. “I guess that’s better than a pre-post-modern assessment.”
Lynda rolled her eyes.
“This is one of Calder’s later works, a revisionist, rather negative view of the art of Andy Warhol,” Kate explained. Oh, now I get it. “It’s probably no coincidence that he quietly left the faculty of the Warhol Art Institute shortly after it was published.”
So maybe an irate Andy Warhol fan ... No, I just couldn’t see it.
“It’s been a couple of years since that book and he hasn’t had an academic post since,” Kate continued. “He’s been busy, though.” She picked up the third book, The Sincerest Form of Fraud: America’s Strangest Art Forger. “This just came out earlier this year. It’s fascinating. You crime writers should read it. Calder was a bit of a sleuth himself. He was working a side job as a consultant to a small museum in Wheeling, West Virginia, a few years ago when he began to suspect that one of the paintings was a fake. It turned out that he was right, but there was a much, much bigger story there. Calder eventually found that a man named Carl Banks had donated more than a hundred watercolors and sketches, supposedly by minor but collectable artists, to at least fifty museums over twenty years. They were all forgeries and all by him.”
“But he donated them?” Lynda said.
Kate nodded. “He didn’t even claim a tax write-off on his income tax.”
“Then what was the point?” I asked.
“When Calder interviewed him for the book, Banks said he wanted to show that he was as good an artist as any of them, good enough to fool the museums. It also might be worth mentioning that Carl Banks has been hospitalized in mental institutions several times.”
“Mentally ill or not,” Mac said, “he managed to successfully perpetrate art fraud on a massive scale until Calder uncovered it. So Calder’s evident self-esteem was not without foundation. That is most revealing, Kate.”
The doorbell rang. It was Oscar, dressed in Sunday clothes and a panama hat. After he joined us in the study and Kate shoved a cup of caffeinated coffee into his hand, I expressed surprise that he wasn’t having lunch with his mother at the Bob Evans restaurant.
The chief scowled. “She’s on a date with some old geezer she met at Kroger’s. They went pumpkin picking, which will be followed by dinner. I told him he’d better keep his hands on the pumpkins. Anyway, I’ve been on the Calder case, working the domestic angle. The first thing I wondered was whether the victim had a wife, or girlfriend, or both. Or maybe even a husband and/or boyfriend, whatever. I didn’t find any current romantic attachments, but there is an ex-wife.”
“That is promising,” Mac said.
Oscar shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Her name is Cherise Steele and she has an iron-clad alibi - she was taping a show for WSTV, that wine and spirits cable network, in front of a live audience in Pittsburgh.”
“Oh, I love that channel!” Lynda said.
“Surely her alibi is irrelevant,” Mac observed. “I presume we already know she was not among the crowd in the gallery last night. That is of no consequence. The media have been replete lately with stories of people attempting to hire hit men to deal with their spouses. Apparently that is cheaper than divorce.”
“That’s true enough,” Oscar said. “But these two were already divorced, and according to Steele she was getting a decent monthly alimony check from Calder that just got cut off. If that checks out, she doesn’t seem to have much of a motive.”
“Then who does?” I said. “That’s what we were talking about a few minutes ago, Oscar. Who benefits?” Then I had a brainstorm. “Why don’t we look at it this way: What’s changed by Thurston Calder being dead?”
I thought that was clever, if I do say so myself, until Lynda responded, “For one thing, he for sure won’t get to be head of the art department at St. Benignus.”
She had uttered two words I didn’t want to hear in connection with the murder - “Saint” and “Benignus.”
“Maybe I’m being selfish,” I said, “but I’d really rather this has nothing to do with the college.”
“Good luck with that, Jeff.” Lynda’s gold-flecked brown eyes looked bright over her coffee cup. “St. Benignus was Calder’s only connection to Erin.”
“Not exactly,” Oscar said, beating me to it. “Rosalie Hawthorne invited him to the party where he was killed. She knew him from some national arts committee they were on together.”
“Rosalie wouldn’t harm a fly even if it were in her Marvini,” Kate said. “Maybe there was something else Calder was going to do here that got prevented by his death - give a lecture, or meet with somebody, something like that.”
“If so,” Oscar said, “we’ll find out eventually. Somebody will know. Or it will be recorded on his calendar.”
“I presume the next step is another round of interviews with those among last night’s guests most likely to know or to have s
een something that did not surface in the first round,” Mac said.
“Bingo. I also want to make sure we didn’t miss anybody the first time.” The chief reached into the side pocket of his coat and pulled out a spiral-bound book, about six inches by five, with ruled pages. “You might recognize this as the guest book you signed when you came in. I borrowed it from Mrs. Hawthorne. It took us half the night, but we talked to everybody in this book. I want you to look at the names and see if you can remember anybody being there last night whose name doesn’t show up.”
He handed it to Lynda and me, the closest to him.
With Lynda looking over my shoulder, I quickly ran down a list of familiar names, people whose faces I had seen last night - Fr. Pirelli, Lafcadio Figg, Adam Mendenhall, Josiah Gamble, Amy Quong, Trixie LaBelle, Tony Lampwicke, Sister Mary Margaret Malone ...
“Who the heck is Reginald J. Smith?” Lynda asked, putting her finger on the name.
“Better known as ‘Scrappy,’” Oscar said.
“Oh, sure,” Lynda said. “I never knew his first name. Well, he seems more like a Scrappy than a Reginald.”
“He’s earned the nickname, all right. Scrappy’s the most entertaining of all my frequent guests at the lockup, but for his sake I wish he’d stop getting into fights. One of these days he’s going to lay into the wrong person.”
“Well, that did not happen last night,” Mac said. “Justin was obviously quite shaken by their contretemps. Surely Scrappy cannot be a serious suspect, either - a killer would hardly call attention to himself or to the missing corkscrew that turned out to be the murder weapon.”
“Isn’t that just what a clever killer would want us to think?” I suggested.
Oscar snorted. “Only in one of Mac’s books.” The look on his face showed what he thought of my cleverness - and Mac’s.
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