Generous Death

by Nancy Pickard

  I was stunned. Grateful. With any luck, she’d live another sixty years and it would be that long before The Foundation saw a penny of her gift. By then, I’d be too old or too dead to administer it. But her decision was enormously gratifying all the same, because it was a sign of renewed faith in The Foundation, and in me, I suppose. Perhaps it was a sunny omen that portended change in our drooping fortunes. I nearly cried in my cole slaw.

  “That’s wonderful,” I said inadequately. “I’m really grateful, and the trustees will be, too. I don’t know how to tell you what this means to us, Ginger, how very much.”

  She looked gratified and proud, as well she should. She excused herself to go to the restroom. Her mother waited until Ginger was out of earshot.

  “Well, now you see why we’re here,” she said.

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “Come on, Jennifer,” Franklin said impatiently. “You’ve got to help us talk Ginger out of dumping all that money on the museum. Everything she spends on it will be that much less for the rest of us.”

  “Dear God.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Maybe honesty is not the best policy after all. I think I wish you’d be a little less open in your greed.”

  “Don’t try to tell us you think it’s a good idea for her to give all that loot to Simon,” he countered. “You know Simon, you know how he is.”

  “Why does it matter to you, Franklin?” I was really irritated. “Odds are you won’t outlive Ginger, so you won’t get the money anyway. What do you care?”

  “What do we care?” Marvalene was shocked to the core of her stainless steel heart. “My dear Jennifer, one always cares about money. Every little bitty penny, one cares about.”

  By the time Ginger returned, her relatives and I were past speech. Well, I was past speech; they were past believing. And the awful, ironic truth was that I did want to talk Ginger out of giving money directly to the museum. Only now I couldn’t do it without arousing smug suspicions on the part of mère and frère that my motive was identical to theirs.

  I avoided further discussion by looking at my watch.

  “Ginger,” I said, “can you drop me off at Twelfth and Central? My car’s still out of commission. I’ve ordered a Lease-A-Lump.”

  The happy family made room for me in Marvalene’s Seville. They dropped me off a few minutes later.

  “Beauty is only skin deep,” the young woman at Lease-A-Lump pontificated. We stood in the cold slush beside the pitiful heap I had just leased against my better judgment.

  “True,” I said and kicked a tire to fool her into thinking I knew what I was doing, “but ugly goes clear to the bone.” She looked confused. “Or,” I amended, “clear to the U-joint, as it were. Are you sure this piece of junk will run?”

  I had offended her. She patted a broken headlight as if to console the car. “We guarantee all our babies to within one hundred and fifty miles of town,” she said reprovingly. “In the unlikely event that this car breaks down, we will drive out and pick you up and provide you with alternate transport.”

  “Ation,” I said irritably, under my breath. “Transportation.” Aloud, I whined, “You don’t have anything else? Something with fewer miles on it? A ’39 Hudson, perhaps?”

  I wrested open the door. It fought back, but I won.

  “My God, who had this car last?” I said. It was a mess of dirt and salt from the streets and sidewalks.

  She looked mortified.

  “I really am sorry,” she said and became, at once, human, “but we’ve been so busy we haven’t had time to clean our cars as well as we should. Really, though, I know the last driver took good care of it.”

  “Only driven by a little old lady on Sundays,” I muttered. “Listen, I’ve seen some of those Sunday drivers and what they can do to a car you wouldn’t do in a demolition derby.” Car dealerships of any kind bring out the worst in me; it’s because I feel so ignorant.

  “No,” she said seriously, “by a museum director, which is probably just as good.”

  “Not Simon Church by any chance?”

  “Yes!” She was pleased as punch to find some area of rapport with this difficult customer. “He just brought it back in this morning. Such a nice man, and so funny! Do you know him?”

  I nodded. “Poor Simon. I didn’t know he’d been having car troubles, too.”

  “He said he had a fender bender a couple of weeks ago and his car’s been in the shop ever since.” She handed me the keys to the ruined beauty and said, “If you talk nicely to her, she’ll follow you anywhere.”

  I laughed and felt better about the whole dubious transaction. I climbed in the driver’s seat, turned the rusty key in the rusty ignition and backed jerkily out. The young woman and I waved at each other. She looked like a proud but nervous mother who’s never quite sure when she sends her kid off to school if the principal will call and say the kid’s in trouble again and will she please come pick him up and take him home.

  “Behave yourself,” I said to the car, “or I’ll tell your mother.”

  The massive auto and I rolled heavily if not merrily along to my office. “Baby” didn’t have power steering, but I muscled her into the parking lot. As I drove past the corner where Geof had been dropping me off of a morning, I thought of the morning after the night of the attack at the church on Minnie Mimbs, the morning when Simon and Derek “caught” us together. I grinned at the memory of their ribald kidding. I could still clearly see the utterly surprised expressions on their faces, Derek staring at me from the passenger’s seat and Simon from the …

  My heart skipped a funny beat.

  Derek had hitched a ride with Simon that day because Derek’s car was in the shop, not Simon’s. And yet the young woman at Lease-A-Lump said that Simon told her he wanted to rent a car because his own was being fixed.

  Why would he lie to a Lease-A-Lump lady?

  Why would he need two cars, one of them an old dump that nobody would recognize as his?

  I stopped grinning.

  Chapter 29

  The car seemed to swing of its own accord around the perimeter of the parking lot and back onto the street again, as if it were a dowsing rod and I the dowser. Its long blunt nose pointed aggressively in the direction of the Martha Paul. I felt as I had on the day when Edwin Ottilini and I had met at the Welcome Home because our feelings of unease spurred us into intuitive rather than rational action. Those same queasy feelings propelled me toward the museum.

  What did I think I was going to ask Simon? I didn’t know. What was I looking for? Didn’t know that, either. I had a feeling I was taking a risk, but I couldn’t have admitted, much less articulated, its specifics.

  I just went, sweating palms, jumping heart, terrible sensation in the pit of my stomach and all.

  The parking spot with the label “Director” was empty of Simon’s vintage Mustang. I stashed “Baby” a couple of slots down the row and walked in the staff entrance on the north side of the museum.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Cain,” the old guard smiled, though “old” is, I suppose, redundant in describing the guards at the Martha Paul. He pushed the buzzer that allowed me to open the security door, then he pointed out the empty line on the security log where I was to write my name, time in and the name of the person I wanted to see. I wrote in the name of an assistant curator whose car I’d seen in the lot.

  “I’d like to see Simon, too,” I said casually, as if it were an afterthought. “When do you think he’ll be back?”

  “Oh, not for an hour at least,” the guard said. “He’s off to some meeting or other.”

  “Okay, thanks.” With my heart beating preposterously fast, I walked down the hall toward the cramped suite of closets that passed for staff offices. Some other visitor came in behind me, distracting the guard’s attention so I was able quietly to try the door to Simon’s office. I knew it would be unlocked because none of the locks in the building worked anymore—they were old, rusted, useless.


  I breached Simon’s cubicle and silently shut the door behind me. I decided not to consider how mortified I would feel if someone opened the door and saw me standing there, alone, in the thin light from the window. If Simon walked in, well, I’d just cover my presence with a perfectly logical excuse like, “Oh golly, I thought this was the ladies’ room,” or else I’d proceed to feign amnesia, grand mal or, possibly, death. I felt like a spy in one of those movie scenes I’ve always hated—where the spy sneaks into an office and rifles the files while the audience squirms just knowing someone’s going to walk in on him.

  I squirmed for a long moment until my brain clicked back into gear. “Look,” it commanded, “Think Fast So You Can Get the Hell Out Of Here!”

  An office supposedly tells a lot about the person who inhabits it. This one told only partial truths about Simon. Here was his public persona—the serious and respectable museum director, holder of advanced degrees and recipient of multitudinous honors. I knew that his apartment, however, displayed a rather different personality; his bookcases there held an eye-popping—and valuable—potpourri of pornography through the ages; the original paintings on the walls of his home and the sculptures on their stands pursued the same unnerving interest. Long ago, when he was an adolescent, Simon’s first porno-graphic purchases had undoubtedly been purely, so to speak, prurient. As he matured, however slightly, his devotion had changed to the more detached attitude of a collector. Simon’s apartment might be X-rated, but because of the quality of the art within it, it was not without its socially redeeming qualities.

  The only painting on the walls of Simon’s office, however, was a superbly executed and incredibly boring nineteenth-century still life with nary a phallic symbol to its name. The floor-to-ceiling books in this room had never required discreet brown wrappers; they were volumes on art history, museum management, photography, philanthropy; they were trade magazines and catalogs. The office was cluttered, but that was more an effect of space than personality. One advantage to its being small was that I didn’t have much to search.

  I started with the file cabinets and flipped through the folders. They only proved the enormity and difficulty of a museum director’s job, especially in a museum that was shamefully understaffed and underfunded. At the Martha Paul, Simon was jack-of-all-trades, but unlike the cliché, he was master of some of them. His expertise and love of his work shone from the full, professional and well-organized files. Holding them, I felt as though I had Simon’s heart in my hands. I hoped I wouldn’t do something stupid to hurt it.

  Like a proper television-trained spy, I Invaded his desk next. Nothing was locked. More files. More art catalogs. Personnel files on museum staff members. A file on The Foundation which contained nothing more incriminating than, an obscenely funny sketch beside my name. Pens, pencils, film. The same tourist magazine guide to New York that I had saved from our trip the previous week. Stuck inside was a paper napkin from an Italian cafe just off the Bowery, near Soho, with a woman’s name and phone number scribbled in the corner. Proofs of payment for tax purposes, and expense vouchers. Other paper napkins from other cafes and bars with other women’s names and phone numbers. Simon’s version of the little black book, I supposed. Loose paper clips, drafts of memos, two out-of-date calendars.

  I had a bad moment when there was a knock on Simon’s door. I ducked behind his desk, held my breath and waited. Whoever it was called “Simon?” once, then went away. I let my breath whoosh out, but it took a while longer for my heart to beat again.

  I commanded myself to finish the job; there wasn’t much left to search. I carefully moved an expensive looking camera off a straight-backed chair and leafed through the magazines underneath. Nothing. I put the camera back.

  Simon’s trenchcoat, left over from the last day of fall, hung on a hook on the back side of the door. I fumbled through its pockets, coming up only with lint, matches and a couple more napkins with the requisite phone numbers. I wondered if he ever followed through. What in heaven’s name did these women think when he took them back to his apartment for the first time? They felt paralyzing shock, probably. Maybe that accounted for the fact that I’d never known Simon to have a steady girl. They probably took one look at those paintings and sculptures, screamed “pervert” and ran back out the door without stopping to discuss redeeming social values. I had a feeling that Ginger Culverson would probably at least give Simon a chance to explain himself.

  There was nothing more to search except my own brain. And something very definitely was nudging me from in there. Something to do with what I’d just seen in the bookcases or the desk, something about a magazine, a napkin, an alibi. I didn’t know what it was yet, but I had a feeling that whenever it dawned on me, I wouldn’t like it one bit.

  And then suddenly, I had it.

  With fumbling fingers, I dug back into Simon’s desk drawer until I found the New York City tourist magazine with its advertisements for current attractions. I called a phone number in one of those ads and got an answer that put a name and face to the vague picture that had been ominously building in my mind.

  “Thank you,” I said to the helpful person who answered my call, “thank you very much.” But, in truth, I wasn’t grateful at all—I was shaken, appalled.

  And oddly, still puzzled.

  It made sense now, at least some of it.

  But not all of it.

  I called Geof at the police station and told him what I had found out and deduced. “Get out of there,” he said harshly, “and call me when you reach your office.”

  I got out.

  “Jennifer Cain!” The curator of Oriental art almost trod on my foot as he rounded the corner. I still had my hand on the doorknob of Simon’s office.

  “Simon’s not there,” I said inanely and pointed back over my shoulder at the empty room. “I missed him.”

  “Ah,” he said Orientally.

  “Nice to see you,” I lied. I turned quickly toward the exit and escape.

  “I’ll tell Simon you dropped by,” the curator said.

  “Don’t bother!” I said, equally bright and cheery. I signed out, flashed my teeth at the guard and steered my shaky legs toward Baby.

  I finally made it to the office, where the mystical grapevine had been twining, telling wild tales of the previous day.

  “Jennifer!” Faye’s eyes were big with sympathy. “I can’t believe somebody would try to burn your house down!”

  “Don’t believe it,” I assured her. “Nobody tried to burn it down, they just made a mess of it.”

  “Is it related to the murders?” Marvin asked.

  “Probably,” I said. “Where’s Derek?”

  “Late from lunch.” Marv was disapproving. It was obvious that murders and mayhem were having serious effects on the discipline and morale of my staff. If the murderer wished to harm The Foundation, he was well on his way to success. I resolved not to be late or absent in the near future, no matter what.

  “Phone for you, Jenny.” Faye held out the receiver to me. The look on her face gave me a feeling that “no matter what” was about to be tested severely.

  “Miss Cain?” The voice was vaguely familiar. Whoever it was had an awful cold.

  “Speaking.”

  “Hampshire Hospital calling.”

  Oh God.

  “Do you think you could come out here as soon as possible?”

  Oh dear God.

  “What’s wrong with my mother?”

  “I don’t want to alarm you, Miss Cain, but the doctors feel you might want to, well, I’m afraid your mother is, uh …”

  I experienced a terrible, traitorous moment of thinking; Please, not yet, not now.

  I said, “Is she dying?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. I’m so sorry. Can you come out?”

  Mother, don’t die yet, I’m coming.

  “Thank you,” I remembered to say. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

  “You’re welcome, Miss Cain.”
r />   I heard the dial tone.

  The office behind me was repressively quiet.

  I dialed my sister’s home, but had to settle for leaving a message with the maid: “Please tell Mrs. Guthrie her mother is dying. Dying. D-y-i-n-g, Yes, that’s right. Thank you. I’m sorry, too.”

  I debated as to whether or not I should call my father in Los Angeles and decided to wait until after the fact. There was nothing he could do but wring his hands and feel guilty. He’d be as helpless now as he’d always been.

  I said to Faye, “Call Geof Bushfield at the police station, will you please, and tell him where I’ve gone and why. As for anybody else, it’s none of their business.”

  “Michael Laurence?” inquired Faye, ever hopeful.

  “He won’t call,” I said. “I think he may have left town already.”

  She looked as I imagined Cinderella might have looked if the Prince had not shown up with the slipper.

  I didn’t have to put my coat back on because I hadn’t been in the office long enough to take it off. I had my hand on the doorknob when the phone buzzed again. I waited long enough for Faye to silently mouth a name at me.

  “Simon Church,” her lips informed me. Her hand covered the mouthpiece.

  “Tell him I’ll call him back,” I said shakily. His call was a reminder of that other grim reality—the one in which death arrived via murder, not nature. Was I foolish to drive alone to the hospital? Geof might say I was and he might insist on a police escort—which is why I had asked Faye to call him for me. I couldn’t take the time to wait or to argue with him because minutes might make the difference between whether or not I got to see my mother before she died. Anyway, there wasn’t any risk. I knew I’d be safe; According to the pattern established by the killer, the danger to me lay within The Foundation, just as it had lain in wait at the museum for Arnie, the theater for Moshe, the Welcome Home for Mrs. Hatch and the church for Minnie Mimbs. Death might be waiting for me at the hospital, but it wouldn’t be my own.