Murder is an Art

by Bill Crider

  Jack swallowed and tried to overcome his embarrassment. It wasn’t as if he was afraid. He’d just been startled, that’s all. He gave a closer look to his surroundings.

  He was surprised to see that the floor of the building was the same white caliche as the drive outside. The Thompsons didn’t put up much of a front.

  As his eyes got more accustomed to the dim light, he saw a building full of things he neither needed nor wanted: paper flowers, imitation pot plants, pink plastic flamingos, plaster figures of dogs and cats, picture frames, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, paddywack, give the dog a bone.

  “Stop it,” he said aloud.

  “Stop what?” Sally asked.

  “Never mind. I was just going quietly crazy.”

  Jack noticed that everything was coated with a fine layer of dust, as if it had been there for quite some time without having sold. The Thompsons obviously weren’t getting rich from their artsy-craftsy store. The idea of blackmail seemed more logical than before.

  “I was never fond of places like this,” Sally said. “What are we doing in here, anyway?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I was looking for clues.”

  “And I was just following you, to keep you out of trouble. We shouldn’t be in here at all, you know. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if our little friend was calling the police right now.”

  “She’ll have to get home first,” Jack said. “And I’ll bet she’s still around. But you’re right. We shouldn’t be in here. There aren’t any clues. Let’s go.”

  He was shoving the door when Sally said, “Wait a minute, Jack.”

  “Why?” he said, letting the door slam back into place.

  “Look over there.”

  Sally was pointing toward the back of the store where there were no windows at all. It was quite murky there, but Jack thought he could see something dark outlined against the light-colored floor.

  “It’s probably nothing,” he fibbed, not wanting to check it out.

  Sally shook her head. “I think it’s something. I’d better look.”

  Jack put a hand on her arm to restrain her.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  Sally didn’t try to stop him. Maybe the old woman’s mini-lecture on the good old days before feminism had had an effect. Or maybe she just didn’t want to see what was back there.

  Because she was sure that what she could see was a person’s arm, and if it was an arm, it was most likely going to be attached to a body.

  Sally watched as Jack knelt down beside the arm. He was looking behind the boxes, and she could tell that he was being careful not to touch anything.

  After a few seconds, he stood up and said, “You’d better come back here.”

  Sally took a step and then hesitated. “Is it…?”

  “I don’t know who it is,” Jack said. “But you might.”

  Sally forced herself to go forward. When she reached Jack’s side, she looked down.

  A woman was lying there, her face in the dust, her left arm outstretched. The hair on the back of her head was black with congealed blood, and there was blood on the caliche beside her. Flies buzzed busily around it.

  “I’m not sure who it is,” Sally said, feeling her stomach turn over. She thought it was Tammi Thompson, but she couldn’t be positive. “I need to see her face.”

  “I don’t think it would be a good idea to turn her over,” Jack said. He was feeling queasy, and a cold sweat popped out on his face. “Do you want to make any guesses before we call the police?”

  Sally’s answer was cut off as a sudden clap of thunder rumbled through the building. To his credit, Jack didn’t jump more than an inch or two, and he didn’t yell. Neither did Sally.

  “Someone’s at the door,” Jack said.

  “And I hope it’s not the police,” Sally said. “I’d hate to be caught trespassing in a building where there’s a dead body lying on the floor.”

  “Hey in there,” the old woman yelled from outside. “I saw you go in. Open this door! I want my flowers.”

  “You can deal with her,” Jack said. “I’ll call the cops.”

  “No,” Sally said. “You talk to her. See if you can get her to go home. I’ll make the call. After all, the police in this town and I are practically on a first-name basis.”

  “Aren’t they going to think it’s a little odd, the way you keep stumbling over dead bodies?”

  “I’m sure they are,” Sally said. “That’s why I want to be the one to call them.”

  “Be my guest,” Jack said.

  23

  Sally stared at herself in the mirror. She was never at her best in the morning, and the sight of her hair always reminded her of a passage she’d read in graduate school. It was from the diary of Samuel Sewall, one of the last of the Puritans, who kept a daily record of his experiences, probably as a way of examining his life. When explaining to a friend why he refused to buy a wig, Sewall said he believed that God had given us our hair as a kind of test, to see if we could be content with it.

  Sally had flunked the test many times. She had never been content with her hair, which also reminded her of another passage, this one from a more literary source, Shakespeare’s sonnets: “If hairs be wires, then black wires grow upon her head.”

  No matter how many strokes she brushed it, no matter how many times she ran a comb through it, her hair sprang back into black tangles. Like her office, it was a hopeless case.

  So she gave up on it and got out her pistol, intending to go to the range that afternoon. Then she gave Lola a kitty treat, for which she received small thanks, and left for school.

  Detective Weems hadn’t been pleased with her phone call the day before, and he was even less pleased when he arrived at Thompson’s Crafts to discover that the body was that of Tammi Thompson.

  Sally felt that she had to tell him about the forged purchase order. At first, that didn’t make him feel any better.

  But after Weems had thought about things for a minute, he’d changed his mind. In fact, he’d become positively cheerful, convinced that he now had the whole case well in hand.

  “There’s not much doubt about what happened,” he said. “Thompson found out about his wife and Hurley, and he decided he could collect a little money by way of revenge, which might have worked if his wife hadn’t squealed on Hurley. Thompson probably hadn’t even told her about the blackmail angle, and then she screwed it up by complaining about Hurley. He lost his temper and killed her.”

  “What about Val?” she asked. “Why kill someone who’s paying you money to keep quiet?”

  “Principle,” Weems said. “Hurley had been playing around with Thompson’s wife, after all, and he probably wanted revenge. And now that she’d squealed, there wouldn’t be any more money. Maybe he and Thompson even argued about it, and that’s when Hurley got it.”

  Sally failed to see how Val’s death would have been the result of someone’s high principles, but she didn’t want to get into a philosophical discussion with Weems. There were plenty of other things she didn’t understand, either, but Weems wasn’t going to talk about them with her. So she kept her mouth shut.

  The woman who’d been looking inside the Thompsons’ building didn’t mind talking, however, and she and Weems discussed Ralph Thompson’s violent tendencies at length.

  Finally, Sally and Jack had been allowed to leave the building. They had gone back to the college and tried to conduct their business there in a more or less normal fashion. Sally didn’t know how Jack had done in that regard, but she had felt odd for the rest of the day.

  And she felt odd now, but for a different reason. She’d had strange dreams all night, probably caused by what she’d seen in the Thompsons’ store.

  It wasn’t finding Tammi Thompson’s body that she’d dreamed of, or even the faces of the piñatas that had hung suspended from the ceiling.

  It was the picture frames.

  The frames in the store had all been empty, waiting
for someone to buy them and enclose a picture within their borders.

  But the ones in Sally’s dream hadn’t been empty. They had all held pictures of goats with the number 666 engraved in their foreheads between their horns, and of course, they had all reminded her of the painting that was missing from the art gallery.

  Sally couldn’t seem to get the painting out of her head. She was convinced that it had something to do with the murders. Weems’s explanation of what had happened made sense in a twisted way, and the detective might even have been correct in his assumptions.

  Sally, however, didn’t think so. She was virtually certain that the painting played a part in things, and yet there was really no way to connect the Thompsons to it.

  Which meant that someone else had to be involved.

  Who? Sally could think of only one person who might have a motive to take the painting: Roy Don Talon.

  Sally realized that she wasn’t a trained investigator. She knew that she could be completely wrong about Talon’s possible involvement. However, she didn’t like the idea of a puzzle with a missing piece that no one seemed interested in finding, so she felt that she had to do something to bring it to the attention of the police.

  She parked her Acura in one of the few faculty spaces not occupied by cars with student stickers and went directly to Chief Desmond’s office.

  Geri Vale, who had been in one of Sally’s classes a year or two previously, was the dispatcher. She was a short, stout blond woman who took everything very seriously.

  “Is Chief Desmond in?” Sally asked.

  “Yes,” Geri said. “Do you need to see him?”

  No, I was just checking up on him, Sally thought sarcastically. Then she said, “Yes, please.”

  Geri picked up her telephone and punched in four numbers. After a short wait, she said, “Dr. Good would like to talk to you, Chief.” Then she listened and said, “All right.”

  She hung up the phone and told Sally to go right on back to the chief’s office, which was one of three behind the dispatcher’s area.

  Desmond was looking spiffy, as usual. He was wearing a dark suit with a bright white shirt and a red patterned tie. He stood up when Sally entered, and she couldn’t see a wrinkle anywhere, not in the suit and not in Desmond’s face.

  “Good morning, Dr. Good,” he said. “What can the HCC police do for you today?”

  “You can tell me what you’ve found out about the painting that’s missing from the art gallery,” Sally said.

  Desmond laughed and asked her to have a seat. “I can see you’re still concerned about that. But you shouldn’t be. Not after what happened yesterday.”

  He looked at Sally. “Yes, I’ve talked to Detective Weems, and he told me all about your finding another body. But he says the case is all tied up in a neat bundle now. He says that the killer is Ralph Thompson. It’s just a matter of tracking him down. And I have to say that I agree with him.”

  Sally sat in a chair across the desk from Desmond. “How can you be so sure?”

  “The killer’s M.O.,” Desmond said. “It’s the same in both cases.”

  Sally didn’t ask what an M.O. was, and Desmond looked vaguely disappointed.

  “The victims were both struck by heavy objects,” Desmond said after a couple of seconds.

  Sally hadn’t seen any heavy objects near Tammi Thompson, so she asked Desmond how he knew.

  “Things like that are easy to tell if you’re a professional,” Desmond said. “I’m sure the autopsy will bear me out.”

  “But the statue that was used on Val Hurley was lying right there beside him. There was nothing near Tammi, so the M.O.’s not the same.”

  Desmond looked irritated. “There’s not that much difference. Thompson probably realized that he’d made a mistake the first time, so he took the weapon with him.”

  “And now the investigation is closed?”

  “We really didn’t have much to do with it in the first place,” Desmond said. “Our part was finished when Weems took over. But that doesn’t mean it’s closed. It won’t be closed until they catch up with Thompson.”

  “What about Roy Don Talon?”

  Desmond, who had been slumping a little in his chair, snapped to attention.

  “It wouldn’t be a good idea to drag him into this,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he had nothing to do with it, that’s why.”

  “You don’t know that. What other explanation is there for the missing painting?”

  “I don’t have to know anything, and I don’t have to tie in the painting. Weems is sure about Thompson, and that’s all that matters.”

  Sally stood up. Then she glanced down at Desmond’s desk, which was much neater than her own, of course. But that just made it easier to see the piece of paper lying there.

  It was the page that Desmond had taken from the guest register in the art gallery, and Sally saw that the last two names were those of Ellen Baldree and Jorge Rodriguez. They had been the last two people in the art gallery on the day that Val had been killed—or at least they had been the last to sign their names in the register.

  Sally thought about what Jack had told her, and she thought about her conversation with Ellen. Both of them would be considered suspects in Val’s murder if the police had been doing a proper investigation.

  She took another peek, trying to see if A. B. D. Johnson’s name was anywhere on the list.

  Desmond saw what she was looking at, picked up the paper, and put it in a drawer.

  “That’s not important anymore, either,” he said.

  Sally didn’t bother to comment. It was time for her to go to class.

  Before she left Desmond’s office, he said, “The college will be closing this afternoon at one for Val’s funeral. There should be a notice in everyone’s mailbox. You should probably tell your students.”

  “I’ll do that,” Sally said.

  She left the chief’s office and went down the hallway to her favorite classroom, the one that no one else liked because it was located near an air vent and was quite noisy. It was also considered too big by most of the other instructors.

  Sally didn’t mind the noise or the size. She liked the room because it wasn’t on the main part of the hallway, so she wasn’t likely to be disturbed by other instructors or their students.

  Sally’s own students were unusually attentive, especially when they learned that the college would be closing early and that they could skip their afternoon classes.

  Besides being attentive, most of the students had actually read the assignment. There was a lively discussion about the use of what the O. J. Simpson trial had taught the world to call the “n word” in Sherwood Anderson’s “I’m a Fool.” One student thought the story should be excluded from all textbooks and possibly banned from publication anywhere, forever. None of Sally’s arguments about freedom of speech, literary values, or characterization in the story could change his mind.

  Aside from that, however, the class was uneventful, something that couldn’t be said for the rest of the day. It would become known around the HCC campus as the day A. B. D. Johnson finally went ballistic.

  24

  It happened in the faculty mailroom just as Sally was walking by the half-open door. There were usually only a few people in there between classes: those who’d come to check their mail, those who were buying a Dr. Pepper from the faculty association’s soft-drink machine, and those who were passing through on their way to use the restrooms in the faculty lounge.

  And of course there were always a few of the part-time instructors, like Coy Webster, who was the one A. B. D. Johnson attacked.

  Sally heard the commotion when she was a couple of yards from the door. By the time she reached it and went inside, Coy was lying on the floor, a dented mailbasket beside him and campus-mail envelopes scattered all around.

  A. B. D. was standing over Coy, breathing heavily. He picked up the mailbasket and was about to give Coy anot
her good whack when Troy Beauchamp, who was standing beside A. B. D., grabbed the basket, jerked it out of A. B. D.’s hands, and set it on the counter behind them.

  “Are you crazy?” Troy asked.

  A. B. D. glared at him. “Don’t look at me! It’s not my fault that everyone’s out to get me. Fieldstone’s going to fire me if he gets half an excuse, and now that cretin”—he pointed to a quivering Coy Webster—“is telling everyone I was in the art gallery before Val was killed!”

  Coy Webster didn’t appear to have been injured, but Sally nevertheless felt sorry for him. He was short and thin and wore clothes that looked as if he found them in thrift stores and couldn’t be too picky about the fit. His scrawny legs stuck out the ends of his pants, and his socks drooped down around his ankles, covering the tops of his scuffed brown shoes. His faded shirt hung on him like a muumuu.

  Sally put her books down on the table that sat in the middle of the mailroom and bent to help Coy get up. Troy restrained A. B. D.

  “So, what were you saying about the art gallery?” Sally asked.

  “N-nothing,” Coy replied, rising gingerly and moving so that the table was between him and A. B. D. “I wasn’t saying a thing.”

  “Yes, he was,” Troy said. “He was telling me that A. B. D. was hanging around the Art and Music Building late yesterday.”

  “So what if I was?” A. B. D. said. “I have every right to be there if I want to!”

  “Coy says there was a lot of yelling going on in Val’s office,” Troy said.

  He tightened his grip on A. B. D., who was looking longingly at the mailbasket.

  “I-I’m not sure about what I heard,” Coy said. “I could be mistaken.”

  “And what was he doing there, anyway?” A. B. D. asked. “Doesn’t anyone want to know that? I’ll bet he was skulking around Val’s office, just waiting for his chance to off him. Ask him that! Go ahead and ask him!”

  Off him? Sally thought. A. B. D. had probably been watching too many old TV shows. Or maybe he hadn’t watched any TV since the sixties. That seemed more likely.

  “Why would Coy want to off—kill Val?” Sally asked.