Murder is an Art

by Bill Crider

  Jack ordered a chili relleno, and Sally decided on the veggie enchiladas.

  “And I’ll have a Dos Equis,” Jack told the waiter, one of Roberto’s sons. “Sally?”

  For just a second, Sally hesitated. What if someone from the college were to see the two of them sitting there drinking Mexican beer?

  On the other hand, who cared?

  “Sounds good to me,” she said.

  At Jack’s request, they were seated in a booth at the back of the restaurant, not exactly secluded, but not within easy hearing distance of anyone else who might come in.

  The waiter came back with two frosty bottles of Dos Equis and two glasses. He poured the beer for the two of them and left the bottles on the table.

  Jack took a sip of beer. It was a lot better than a Diet Pepsi.

  “So,” Sally said. “What’s your idea about Jorge?”

  “I’ve actually told you already,” Jack confessed. “But it seems to make more sense now.”

  “You mean about Jorge and Vera going to Val’s office to talk to Val and killing him there?”

  It sounded weak, even to Jack. Just as it had the last time he’d mentioned it to Sally. But he kept on going.

  “Jorge could have done it.”

  “You said that before, too. I didn’t believe it then.”

  “I know,” Jack said. “I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up again.”

  “But it does make more sense now,” Sally said.

  Jack brightened. “It does?”

  “Well, maybe not. But there’s the painting.”

  “Right. It ties Jorge to the murder.”

  Sally drank some of her beer. “I wouldn’t go that far, not if Vera is the killer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the painting doesn’t fit in with your idea that the murder has something to do with Vera, that’s why. Vera doesn’t have any connection to the painting.”

  “As far as we know, she doesn’t,” Jack said. “But what if there’s something we don’t know?”

  “There’s not,” Sally said. “Not about Vera, at least. I almost wish there were.”

  “Maybe we could think of something.”

  “No. The painting’s connected with the prison, not with Vera.”

  “The prison,” Jack said. “Ah-ha.”

  “Ah-ha?”

  “Sure. Who do we know who has served time in prison?”

  “Jorge. But we already know he has something to do with the painting. He brought it to the school, and it’s in his car right now.”

  “Unless he ditched it,” Jack said, and then he had another idea. “What if he went to the gallery and got into some kind of argument with Val about the painting?”

  Sally thought about it. She could imagine Jorge swelling with anger, his muscles cording under his shirt as he split the back out of his suit. She wondered why she kept having fantasies about Jorge. It didn’t seem very healthy. She shook her head.

  “Why would he have killed Val?” she asked. “And why take the painting?”

  “We could always ask him.”

  Sally didn’t laugh this time. “I just don’t think that would be a good idea. We can’t let him know we suspect him. If he thinks we’re onto him, he’ll just get rid of the painting.”

  “Well, we can’t let that happen,” Jack said. “After all, we’re going to do something really stupid about the painting.”

  Sally was about to agree, but the food arrived on sizzling hot plates. They stopped talking about the painting and began to eat.

  When they were done and the waiter had brought the check, Jack said, “Are you sure you want to pay for yours?”

  “Yes,” Sally said, without hesitation.

  Jack looked at the check. “Then you owe seven dollars and twenty-nine cents. Plus a tip.”

  Sally opened her purse and got out the money.

  * * *

  It was dark when they left the restaurant, but that didn’t mean the college parking lot would be dark. It was always well-lighted. Sally wasn’t worried about being seen, however. She wasn’t planning to be there long.

  “You’re sure Jorge is working tonight?” Jack asked on the way.

  “He works every night,” Sally said. “That’s why he can come in so late every morning. He told me once that he likes it that way.”

  Someone had to be on campus in the evenings to help with the copy machine, to take phone calls from part-time instructors who might be coming in late or not at all, and to handle any minor emergencies that might crop up.

  The campus police didn’t want the job. They had plenty of other things to do.

  None of the administrators or department chairs wanted the job, either. They wanted to spend their evenings at home unless they were teaching.

  But Jorge liked the work, and after being at the college for only one semester, he had volunteered for it. No one tried to talk him out of it.

  Sally drove the Acura into the parking lot. They had left Jack’s car at the restaurant.

  “Do you know where Jorge usually parks?” Jack asked.

  “No,” Sally said. “But the most convenient faculty spots are down by the Art and Music Building.”

  “Convenient?” Jack said.

  “Yes. And it would be convenient for anyone taking a painting out of the building, too.”

  Jack spotted the Celica. It was in a faculty spot, all right, but it was surrounded by cars with student stickers. The police patrolled the lot in the evening, but they never ticketed anyone.

  “What if the cops catch us?” he asked.

  “We’ll just have to be quick,” Sally said, “and get our business taken care of before they come around to this part of the lot again.”

  She pulled into a spot that was as close to the Celica as she could get.

  “Now comes the hard part,” she said.

  Jack knew what she meant. It had sounded possible when she’d told him about it at the coffee shop. Stupid, yes, but possible.

  Now it just sounded stupid, but he knew he had to go through with it. He didn’t want Sally to think he was a coward.

  They got out of the car, their faces eerie in the yellowish parking-lot lights. Sally opened the Acura’s trunk. Lying inside it was something called a slim jim, a long thin piece of metal that the campus police used to open locked car doors.

  “I locked my keys in the car a week ago,” Sally had explained to Jack. “Desmond couldn’t send anyone to help me, and he was busy, too, so he just gave me the slim jim and told me to open the car myself.”

  “He’s a trusting soul.”

  “He didn’t trust me at all. He was just too rushed to be any help, and I was pretty upset. So he got rid of me the best way he could.”

  Jack looked at the slim jim. “So you know how to use that thing?”

  “It took me awhile, but I finally got the door unlocked. You just slide the slim jim down beside the window glass, and if you get it in the right place, you can pop the lock.”

  “Desmond didn’t want his slim jim back?”

  “I’m sure he did. I just forgot about it. I can give it back to him when we present him with the painting.”

  Looking down at the slim jim now, Jack wondered what he was doing there. He wasn’t the criminal type, and his palms were getting sweaty. But he reached down and got the slim jim anyway. When he did, he saw the pistol case.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  Sally told him. “I was hoping to get in some target practice today. I didn’t think about the funeral.”

  “You take target practice?”

  “Now and then. It relaxes me.”

  Jack was beginning to wonder about Sally. She shot pistols, and she knew how to jimmy a car door. He wasn’t the criminal type, but maybe she was.

  He pushed the trunk shut and looked around the parking lot. There was no one around. The students and instructors were all safely inside, in the classrooms.

  “The coast is clear,” Jac
k said.

  “Now you’re doing it,” Sally said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Never mind. Let’s go.”

  They started toward Jorge’s car. Jack had a sudden thought.

  “What if the doors aren’t locked?”

  “They’ll be locked. He wouldn’t leave the painting in the car without locking the doors.”

  “Makes sense.”

  They were at the car then, and Jack tried the door handle. It was locked, all right. He looked inside.

  “There’s another possibility,” he said, turning to Sally.

  “What’s that?”

  “Have a look,” Jack said.

  Sally glanced into the car’s interior. The painting wasn’t there.

  32

  “Now what?” Jack said, secretly relieved that he wasn’t going to have to engage in any overtly criminal activity.

  “Maybe he put it in the trunk,” Sally said.

  A cold sweat popped out on Jack’s forehead. Trying to open the car door was one thing. Trying to open the trunk was something else. He was sure that even Sally had never done anything like this before.

  Or had she?

  “I don’t think it would be a good idea to break into the trunk,” Jack said. “Especially since that’s the patrol car coming around the corner.”

  Sally saw the white police car moving slowly in their direction. She held the slim jim at her side, making it nearly invisible.

  “Let’s put this thing back in my car,” she said. “I have a feeling I know where the painting is.”

  “Where?” Jack asked, holding his breath as the patrol car passed slowly by the end of the row where they were standing.

  “You’ll see,” Sally said, without even a glance in the car’s direction. “I don’t think he got rid of it, though.”

  Sally opened the trunk and returned the slim jim to its place. Jack pushed the trunk shut again.

  “All right,” he said. “Now, where’s the painting?”

  “Follow me,” Sally said, and headed in the direction of the art gallery.

  They climbed the stairs to the gallery and looked through the glass doors. There was a light on in the gallery, and high on the wall there was a TV camera moving slowly from side to side. Desmond had already installed the security system, though it didn’t make Sally feel any safer.

  The painting of the goat was hanging on the wall at the end of the gallery as if it had never been gone.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t there all along?” Jack asked when Sally pointed it out.

  Sally gave him a look that made him wish he’d kept his mouth shut.

  “There’s something different about that goat,” she said. “I have to get a closer look.”

  She tried the door handle, and the door swung open.

  “Why isn’t the door locked?” Jack asked.

  “They never lock the rooms until after classes are over,” Sally said. “There might be a class in here some evening, so the doors are left open.”

  “No wonder things get stolen. It would have been easy for Jorge to replace the painting any time he wanted to.”

  “Yes. Now let’s have a look at it.”

  They walked to the end of the gallery. The painting didn’t look any different to Jack, but then he hadn’t studied it very carefully in the first place.

  Sally had. “It’s not the same. The 666 is gone.”

  “I thought you told me it was never there.”

  “It wasn’t. But Roy Don Talon thought it was, which was the important thing. In fact, I thought he was the one who’d taken the painting. If we hadn’t seen it in Jorge’s car, I would have confronted Talon about it.”

  “That might not have been a good idea.”

  “I’m not afraid of Roy Don Talon. But someone obviously is. This painting’s been altered. You can see what that means.”

  Jack wasn’t sure that he could. He’d already had so many theories shot down that he didn’t even want to venture a guess this time.

  “I’m afraid I can’t see a thing,” he said.

  “It means that Naylor and Fieldstone didn’t trust the judgment of an independent panel. That was just something they cooked up. I thought it was Talon who didn’t trust a panel to make the right decision, but I had it backward.”

  Jack thought he had it now. “So that’s why no one wanted to talk about the missing painting. They knew that Jorge was altering it. Now they can call in their panel, and everyone will see something that looks like the head of an ordinary goat.”

  “That’s right, except that I don’t think Jorge made the alterations. I think he took the painting to the prisoner who created it. That way, the same paint could be used. The change is subtle, but it’s enough to make sure that there’s no sign of a 666 anywhere, not even if you’re looking for it. After the panel examines the painting and finds nothing suspicious, Naylor and Fieldstone will bring Talon back, and if he says anything, they’ll just claim that his eyes were playing tricks on him when he thought he saw the 666. It might even work.”

  Jack should have been outraged at the deceit being practiced by the college’s administrators, but he wasn’t. For one thing, they had defended the painting to begin with and stood up against censorship. So what if they were cheating a little? It was for a good cause, and he didn’t really blame them. So what he felt instead of outrage was relief.

  “That means that Jorge’s in the clear,” he said. “He didn’t kill Val.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Sally said. “Val would have argued against anything as dishonest as switching the paintings, as well he should have. He might have been a philanderer, but he had high principles when it came to art. He wouldn’t have wanted to cheat. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with the painting as it was, and he wouldn’t have budged from that opinion.”

  Jack felt a little guilty for siding with the administration, but he didn’t mention it.

  He said, “And you don’t think Jorge could have persuaded him to change his mind?”

  “No way.”

  “So he killed him?”

  “I’m not saying that, but it looks suspicious.”

  “Fieldstone and Naylor may bend the rules their way now and then,” Jack said. “But I don’t think they’d cover for a murderer.”

  “Not if they knew they were doing it. It wouldn’t just get them in trouble; it would cause too much bad publicity for the school. But surely you don’t think Jorge would have told them if he’d killed Val.”

  “No,” Jack said. “Now that you mention it, I don’t suppose he would have. It seems like the sort of thing he’d want to keep quiet.”

  Jack looked glumly at the painting. There was no way he and Sally could prove that it had ever been gone, especially if Naylor and Fieldstone backed Jorge.

  “So what do we do now?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t have any idea,” Sally said. “Go home, I guess.”

  Jack heard a noise behind them. He turned to see what had made it, but there was no one there. Except for Sally and him, the gallery was deserted.

  “The classrooms,” Sally said.

  “What do you think it was?”

  “Probably nothing. But we should look.”

  Jack didn’t want to look. Not that he was afraid. He just didn’t think it was important. But Sally did, so he would have to look.

  He went toward the classroom. The door was closed, and it was dark inside.

  “Maybe someone’s showing a video to a class in there,” he said, not believing a word of it.

  “There aren’t any classes in here this evening,” Sally said. “If there were, we would have heard something earlier.”

  Jack put his hand on the door handle just as the door was flung open.

  He tried to jump back, but he tripped over his own foot and the door hit him in the face. He was stunned, and went down backward. He tried to catch himself, but he wasn’t successful. His arms collapsed under him, and his h
ead bounced off the unpadded Berber carpet.

  He shook his head and started to sit up, but a dark shape barreled out of the door and planted a foot squarely in the middle of his stomach.

  “Ooooooffff!” Jack said as all the air gushed out of his lungs and he fell back limply on the floor.

  33

  Sally didn’t wait around to see if Jack was all right. Instead, she took off after Coy Webster, who, after stepping on Jack’s stomach, had scooted out the gallery door with his baggy pants flapping around his legs.

  By the time Sally got outside, Coy was already in the parking lot. He must have taken the stairs three at a time, Sally thought. She couldn’t imagine how he’d done it, not in those pants.

  She didn’t know what kind of car Coy drove, but there was an ancient gray Dodge Dart in the lot, right under one of the light towers. Sally wasn’t surprised when Coy headed straight for the Dart.

  “Coy!” she called. “Wait a minute!”

  Coy either didn’t hear her or didn’t want to wait, so she hurled herself down the stairs as fast as she dared. Coy was inside the Dart by the time she got to the lot.

  Luckily, he was having a bit of difficulty getting the car started. Every time he turned the key, the starter ground noisily and the Dart shuddered like a palsied dog.

  When Sally reached the car, Coy still hadn’t gotten it started. He was sitting behind the wheel with a look of intense concentration, the starter grinding away, the car jittering up and down and from side to side.

  Sally tapped on the closed window. Coy looked up, startled, and then turned back and tried to start the car again.

  “It’s not going to start,” Sally yelled. “Give it a rest, Coy. I just want to talk to you.”

  Coy gave it one more try. This time, there was much less grinding. The battery was about to give up. Coy turned off the ignition and slumped back against the car seat, a look of frustration on his face.

  Sally tapped on the window again. Coy didn’t move for a second or two. Then he sat up a little straighter and rolled the window down.

  “Why don’t we go back inside?” Sally said. “We could talk for a minute, and we could see about Jack.”