Murder at the Art Class

by Nic Saint

  “Sylvia Koss worked as an assistant to the Great Bellocq for many years,” said Emily.

  Ansel picked up the portrait he’d taken down from Sylvia’s bedroom. “This is he,” he said, pointing at a puffy-faced man with a magician’s top hat. “And that,” he added, pointing at a fresh-faced beauty next to him, “is Sylvia Koss.”

  Shakespeare took the portrait and studied it. “I knew she’d worked at a magic shop. I had no idea she was capable of this kind of advanced trickery, though.”

  “She wasn’t just the Great Bellocq’s assistant,” said Ansel. “She was the one who designed and handcrafted all of his equipment. I went over to the shop earlier today. The Great Bellocq himself died over a decade ago, but his son still runs the shop. When I asked him about Sylvia he confirmed that she was an integral part of his father’s act. He couldn’t have done what he did without her. She was a genius designer with a gift for the unique and the spectacular.”

  “I’ll say,” grunted Shakespeare, studying the extendable crossbow a little closer.

  “So where is the lady?” asked Estevez, looking around as if she was about to pop up from some trap.

  “She’s not in the house?” asked Emily. “Then she must have taken off somewhere.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Shakespeare. “We’ll get her.” He patted Emily awkwardly on the back. “Good work, Miss Stone. Though next time you might call me before you break into the house of a killer. How did you get in, by the way?”

  “Oh, um… the door must have been open,” said Emily, her cheeks reddening.

  Shakespeare directed a skeptical look at Ansel and said, “Very convenient.”

  Chapter 31

  “So how did you figure it out, Miss Stone?” Mr. Skrzypczak asked.

  They were all seated in the drawing room of the Skrzypczak suite at the Ritz-Waldorf: Emily, Ansel, Emily’s mom and dad, her brother and her brother’s partner, Clara and Teddy from the Roast Bean, Judyta from the Community Arts School, Detectives Shakespeare and Estevez, and of course the Skrzypczaks themselves: Chus and Hideko and Taryn. All of them were seated on either the plush beige leather sofas, or on the equally plush single soft-backed chairs, with Tanton the lone exception. He stood near the door, no doubt hoping to ward off another attack by a magician’s assistant.

  Through a strange twist of fate the Skrzypczaks had been propelled to power again in Silvistan, the Silvistanian supreme court throwing out the results of the most recent election because of mass electoral fraud perpetrated by Manta Kanczuzewski’s party, and restoring Chus Skrzypczak to his former post of president. They were scheduled to return shortly.

  “Yes, Miss Stone,” echoed Taryn with a smile. “How did you figure it out?”

  “Well, it was the cat, mostly,” said Emily, feeling timid now that all eyes were on her.

  “The cat?” asked her mother. “Whatever do you mean, darling?”

  “The night of Jan’s murder Sylvia Koss showed me her collection of pictures of her goddaughters. They were in one of those fold-out wallets with the plastic picture holders? One of the holders contained a picture of a cat she claimed was hers. Which seemed a little peculiar at the time but I quickly forgot about it. Later she mentioned she’d had a parakeet that had died—which was also odd, as cat owners are rarely also bird owners. The two species don’t tend to get along. But once again, odd but I didn’t make the connection, especially as there was so much else going on. What with the political angle, and Emmerich and his sister.”

  “How are they, by the way?” asked Clara.

  “Fine,” said Emily. “Emmerich has lightened up considerably. This whole murder business shook him more than he let on.”

  “So the cat?” Detective Shakespeare prompted.

  “Yes. The next thing I noticed was that Sylvia had a band-aid on her finger the day after the murder. She said she cut herself peeling an onion. Again it didn’t strike me as relevant at the time, but later on it did—especially when I saw that cat video.”

  “Oh, I like a nice cat video,” said Emily’s mother to no one in particular. “They’re so cute, aren’t they? If I could I would take one in a heartbeat, but Jeff won’t let me.”

  Jeff looked up at this. “Mh?” he said.

  Emily knew for a fact that the reason her mother didn’t have cats was because they scratched her carpets, clawed her curtains, and rubbed themselves against her immaculate walls. Dad took it in stride, though, and went back to listening to his daughter attentively.

  “There was a news item about a woman who had to choose between having a baby and keeping her cat. Her husband felt the two didn’t mix. That’s when I suddenly remembered Sylvia’s cat—the picture and the parakeet. They didn’t mix either. The picture of the cat didn’t mash with the pictures of her goddaughters. And the cat didn’t mix with the parakeet. And since I’d just talked to Lynn Moray’s mother that day, it suddenly popped out at me: what if the missing picture was Lynn’s? What if Lynn was one of Sylvia’s goddaughters?”

  “Quite a leap,” said Shakespeare.

  “Not for Emily,”’ said Ansel proudly. “She’s very imaginative.”

  “She’s an artist,” Mom whispered loudly, giving Taryn’s mother a slight shove. The woman gave her a scathing look that told her she didn’t enjoy being manhandled this way.

  “From there I started wondering how Sylvia—if it was Sylvia—could have pulled this off. I remembered she said she’d worked as a shopkeeper’s assistant. But the first thing I did was call Mrs. Moray and ask her if Sylvia had been her daughter’s goddaughter. She replied in the affirmative, and even told me how they met. Sylvia worked for the Great Bellocq for more than thirty years, and Gerald Bellocq had been Aurora Moray’s husband’s uncle, which is how they met Sylvia.”

  “Amazing,” murmured Judyta. “And all this from a news item about cats?”

  “Oh, Emily is pretty smart,” said Teddy, nodding. “She’s the only barista I know who doesn’t have to write down her orders.” He tapped his noggin. “Keeps everything up here.”

  “I don’t write down my orders,” said Clara indignantly.

  “Yeah, because you shout them to me the moment you get them.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Can we please return to the matter at hand?” said Mr. Skrzypczak, casting an incandescent eye at Teddy and Clara.

  “So I paid a visit to the Great Bellocq’s magic shop,” said Ansel. “It’s called Bellocq’s Magic and is located on Thirty-Fourth Street. It’s run by Bellocq’s son David now and still doing brisk business. He told me Sylvia was in fact Bellocq’s secret weapon. She designed and built the contraptions and tricks that made his shows such an enormous success.”

  “Which explains how she built the device that killed my brother,” said Taryn softly.

  They all turned to her and for a moment a respectful silence descended upon the suite. Then Bill cleared his throat. “You said Sylvia had a band-aid on her hand, Em. How was that significant?”

  “At that moment it wasn’t. But when I was starting to wonder if she was the killer I remembered that band-aid and wondered if she got it from hastily removing the device from the table where Jan had modeled that night. It would also explain why the police never found the device—or even any sign it had been bolted onto that table in the first place.”

  “She not only removed the device but also switched the tables,” explained Shakespeare. “We checked the second table and Emily was right. It did contain the holes where the device had been screwed into place.”

  “She knew exactly where Jan’s head was going to be,” said Emily, “and so she designed the weapon to inflict lethal damage.”

  Judyta snapped her fingers. “And she gave him a cup of her tea!”

  “Yes, she did,” said Emily. “The tea would make Jan drowsy. And since it was warm in there, and he was lying in a comfortable position, the tea would make him fall asleep.”

  “So he
wouldn’t change positions when she fired that bolt,” said Bill. “Gotcha.”

  “Yeah, she got him all right,” said Taryn with a sigh. “Horrible woman.”

  Emily decided not to get into the reason Sylvia had done what she’d done. It didn’t paint Taryn’s brother in a favorable light either.

  “She must have done a few practice runs,” she explained. “Using a dummy to make sure the crossbow was perfectly positioned.”

  “So who removed the dummy?” asked Judyta. “Did you ever find out?”

  “That wasn’t Sylvia,” said Emily. “That was simply the janitor cleaning up. I’m guessing Sylvia dumped the dummy in the basement, but some kids must have found it and dragged it back upstairs, where Adelric found it and returned it back to the basement.”

  “So Mrs. Koss activated the crossbow,” said Shakespeare, “and it fired its bolt unseen to the rest of the class, as it was concealed from view by Jan, who was in an elevated position. It was designed to make it appear as if the bolt had been fired through the window, causing us all to scratch our heads and make us chase our own tails. When it had done its deadly work, the device snapped back into place, undetectable by a cursory examination.”

  “She took a big risk,” said Clara. “The police could have found the device.”

  “If only they’d taken a closer look,” said Mrs. Skrzypczak with a scathing glance at Shakespeare and Estevez.

  “She calculated that we wouldn’t find the device immediately, distracted by the fact that the bolt seemingly had been fired through the window,” said Shakespeare. “And by the time we paid attention to the table, she’d already switched them around.”

  “The device was hidden extremely well,” said Estevez. “Seamless, in fact. Impossible to detect with the naked eye. A truly remarkable piece of work.”

  This time more than one scathing look was directed in the police officer’s direction, and he quickly shut up.

  “If you look closely,” said Emily, “you can see the difference in the pictures of the table taken before and after Sylvia made the switch. It didn’t jump out at me at the time, but you can see the plank she put in place to conceal the device. I only discovered it when I took a second look—when I was already onto her.”

  “I should have spotted it,” said Shakespeare ruefully.

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it, Robin,” said Bill. “Nobody did.”

  “It’s a terrible business,” said Emily’s dad distractedly. “Terrible, terrible business. Did you catch the woman that did this, Inspector Shakespeare?”

  “It’s Detective Shakespeare,” said Detective Shakespeare, “and yes, we made the arrest yesterday. Sylvia Koss had fled the state and returned to her home town of Colorado Springs, where she still has family. She’ll be transferred back here next week.” His face took on a stern look. “Don’t worry. She won’t escape justice.”

  “Better watch her,” said Ansel. “She is, after all, a magician’s assistant.”

  Shakespeare nodded, indicating he’d keep a close eye on Mrs. Koss.

  Taryn got up from her perch on the arm of the couch and bent down to envelop Emily in a hug. “Thank you so much, Em. I knew I did the right thing when I asked you to find my brother’s killer.”

  “That’s my daughter,” said Emily’s mother proudly.

  “And mine,” said Dad.

  “It wasn’t just me,” said Emily, a little flustered. “Ansel and I did it together.”

  “Yes, but you did most of the work,” said Ansel. “I just tagged along for the ride.”

  Mr. Skrzypczak had gotten up, too, and cleared his throat, then assumed the position of the president of his nation. “Emily Stone,” he declared loudly, and fished something out of his vest pocket, “with the powers vested in me by the State of Silvistan, I now award you this medal and induct you into the Most Noble Order of the Stocking. From now on you may call yourself Dame Emily Stone, Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of Silvistan.”

  And before Emily knew what was going on, he’d draped a gold medal around her neck and given her a formal curtsy. She returned the curtsy and added some more dip, at which point the Silvistanian president gave another curtsy, gingerly going through his knees.

  And this would have gone on indefinitely, or until either one of them was on the floor, if Mrs. Skrzypczak hadn’t intervened by taking her husband’s arm and announcing, “There are refreshments in the dining room. So if you would all please follow me…”

  Refreshments was the wrong word for the feast the Skrzypczaks had put on, and before long everyone was tucking in heartily. Halfway through what amounted to a banquet, Taryn asked for a minute of silence in honor of her brother.

  And as they stood around the dining room table, eyes reverently fixed on the parquet floor, Emily thought back to Lynn Moray and Justyna Tamowicz and even Judyta. All women whose hearts Jan had played fast and loose with. Justyna had returned to Silvistan—all charges dropped, both here and in her own country—and Judyta would live to teach another art class. Lynn Moray wouldn’t, and as Emily stood there, she sent a silent prayer to the girl whose death had started Sylvia’s mission of revenge.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw that Ansel had sidled up to her.

  “That went pretty well, didn’t it?” he said, forking a piece of pâté into his mouth.

  “It did,” she said, briefly fingering her gold medal.

  “Not the trinket,” he said. “The sleuthing. We should do it again sometime. Make this a regular thing.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “This was just a fluke. I’m not a detective.”

  Shakespeare and Estevez had also joined them. “I’d say it runs in the family, Miss Stone,” said Shakespeare, indicating Bill, who stood chatting with the Skrzypczaks.

  “I’m just a temp,” she said modestly. “I really had no idea what I was doing.”

  Shakespeare smiled—possibly the first time she’d ever seen him smile. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Emily. Personally I think you’d make a mighty fine detective.”

  But she shook her head adamantly. “I swear, this is the first and the last time I ever do a thing like this. Absolutely the very last time. And you can quote me on that.”

  Shakespeare grinned, then winked. “I won’t hold you to that. In fact I have a feeling we’ll meet again.” He tapped his nose. “Call it a hunch. See you, Emily. And you, Ansel.”

  And with these words both detectives walked away.

  “See? Even the professionals agree,” said Ansel. “We’re made for this, Em. Or at least you are. I’m simply your humble servant,” he added, bowing his head in mock supplication.

  “Oh, shut up, Ansel.”

  She gave his arm a playful slap then joined the others again. She hadn’t lied. She was sure this was a one-off. After all, what were the odds of stumbling upon a murder twice in one lifetime? Pretty slim. And a good thing, too. Nobody likes to get involved with murder.

  Not even a clever temp-slash-artist.

  THE END

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  Excerpt from Murder Motel (The Kellys Book 1)

  Chapter One

  The car was moving along at a snail’s pace. The snow was coming down hard now, and the freeway had become practically impossible to navigate. Tom Kelly was still determined to soldier on, though, in spite of the warnings from his family. He’d promised Dee and the kids he’d get them to Cincinnati safe and sound and he’d be damned if he was going to fail them.

  “Honey, you have to pull over,” his wife was saying, repeating the same mantra she’d stuck to for the past ten miles. “It’s not safe to be out in this weather!”

  “Yeah, Dad, quit trying to act like you’re Liam Neeson in Taken 4: The Snow Apocalypse,” said his son Scott. At twelve, Scott rarely took his eyes off his iPhone, and the
fact that he hadn’t even glimpsed at the thing since this deluge began was a testament to how bad the weather had become.

  “Isn’t there a motel where we can stay until the storm blows over?” Maya asked. She was petting the Kellys’ Goldendoodle Ralph, who was howling like a wolf, his nose in the air.

  “I think he needs to pee,” said Dee. “And as a matter of fact so do I.”

  “We’ll pee when we get there,” said Tom, his face practically plastered to the windshield now, hunched over the wheel and praying he wouldn’t hit something.

  “I’m not going to pee when I get there, Tom. I’m going to pee now,” his wife insisted.

  It was just a trick to get him to pull over, he knew. They’d stopped less than an hour ago, and he hadn’t seen her drink anything so it was physically impossible for her bladder to be full already. The dog was another matter entirely. If he had to go, he had to go, and if he wasn’t able to keep it in, he’d let it out on the back seat of the car, which, since it was a rental, he didn’t advocate.

  “All right, all right, all right,” he grumbled.

  At forty-eight Tom Kelly, or Professor Kelly to his economics students back at the University of Washington, looked younger than his years, with his floppy brown hair, square chin and engaging smile. He wasn’t smiling now, though, more like trying to keep it together, his fingers gripping the wheel until they were white at the knuckles and fervently praying the weather gods would show them some much-needed clemency. “What does the weather forecast say?” he asked for the umpteenth time. “Scott?”

  “Sorry, Dad,” Scott said. “No reception. Must be the storm.”

  Which would explain why his son had suddenly lost interest in his precious phone.

  “There!” said Dee, pointing to some to-him-invisible spot in the distance.

  “There what?” he asked, struggling to remain calm and poised.

  “Don’t you see the sign? There’s a motel up ahead.”