Father’s Day Murder

by Leslie Meier

  It was in this somber mood that she ascended the dark and dusty stairs to the second floor, where treasures collected by Mrs. Gardner were displayed in the rooms where she had once entertained the great and famous.

  To Lucy’s mind there was something quaint and old-fashioned about the museum. Mrs. Gardner had stipulated in her will that nothing could be changed after her death, so everything remained as it had been during her lifetime. No new acquisitions could be added, and signs marked the empty places where the paintings once hung that were stolen in an unsolved theft. Especially fragile works, like drawings and lace, were contained in wood-and-glass cases with removable velvet covers that kept out the light. Lift to View Contents was printed on labels sewn onto some of the covers.

  It was hard to take it all in. The collection was so diverse, containing everything from Han Dynasty Chinese bears to gilded eighteenth-century sedan chairs to masterpieces by Rubens and Raphael. Sometimes Lucy could hardly make out a painting at all, due to the light pouring in from the courtyard; other times she would puzzle over a beautiful painting that caught her eye, looking in vain for a sign identifying the artist.

  One painting in particular caught her eye. It featured a classically columned courtyard filled with a crowd of people gathered in great excitement around the body of a beautiful young woman. Lucy had no clue as to who the unfortunate beauty was, but she could clearly identify the raw emotions displayed by the mourners: shock, denial, pain, grief, and rage. In fact, she thought, the scene was eerily similar to the one she’d witnessed Monday night at the banquet, when Luther’s death was announced. She wanted to know more about the painting, but there was no little plaque identifying it or the artist who created it.

  Discouraged, Lucy wandered around the room, gazing at the other paintings but inevitably drawn to the windows overlooking the courtyard. She stood there for quite a while, simply enjoying the ordered beauty of the lush interior garden. When she finally turned to go, she was surprised to see Carole Rose standing in front of the painting that had so fascinated Lucy. Carole was absorbed in a guidebook, busily shifting her gaze from painting to book and back again.

  “Hi,” said Lucy. “Are you playing hooky too?”

  Carole laughed. “You could say that.”

  “Isn’t this a wonderful museum? But frustrating. A lot of the paintings aren’t labeled, like this one. Would you mind telling me what it is?”

  “It’s a real eye-catcher, isn’t it?” said Carole. “It’s by Botticelli, The Tragedy of Lucretia.”

  “Oh.” Lucy studied the painting. “How did Lucretia come to die? Was she a martyred saint or something?”

  “Sort of,” said Carole, consulting the book. “Apparently she had a great reputation for virtue but was seduced by a villain who threatened to kill her if she didn’t yield to him. The next day she confessed all to her husband and father and killed herself to save her reputation.”

  Lucy was stunned. “My word. No wonder everyone’s so upset.”

  “Isn’t that always the way? The stupid woman kills herself instead of going after the guy who seduced her. If you ask me, she should have stabbed him.”

  “If she had, they probably would have caught her and executed her anyway,” said Lucy philosophically. “Women didn’t have a lot of options in those days.”

  “Probably,” agreed Carole. “But at least she would have had the satisfaction of getting revenge on the man who ruined her reputation.”

  “I guess she figured she could leave that part to her father and husband. By killing herself she pretty much guaranteed they’d go after him.”

  “This is exactly the kind of thinking that holds women back, even today,” said Carole. “Women are still turning their anger on themselves instead of at the guy who done them wrong. She should’ve killed him.” She paused. “How can she be sure her father and husband won’t decide the guy’s not so bad, and they all go out to the Coliseum together to watch the games and have a few flagons of mead?”

  Lucy found herself laughing and enjoying herself as she and Carole worked their way through the rest of the museum. Carole kept up a lively commentary, spicing up the information from the guidebook with her own pithy observations. Lucy was sorry when they ran out of rooms to explore, and suggested they prolong the afternoon by having a cup of tea in the café.

  “Sorry,” said Carole. “I’ve got to get back. I’ve got a meeting in half an hour. Do you want to share a cab?”

  “No, thanks,” said Lucy. “I’m going to check out the gift shop.” She paused. “If I don’t see you again, thanks for a lovely afternoon.”

  “See you next year, right?”

  Lucy was flipping through the postcards in the shop, looking for one of The Tragedy of Lucretia. What a story, she thought when she found it. Lucretia killed herself to save her reputation. Luther, too, had zealously protected his reputation when he was alive, but it would unravel fast now that he was dead. The Pioneer Press Group and the people connected with it would not come out of the trial unscathed; no one ever did. By the time the defense and prosecution attorneys had finished with them, reputations would be tarnished and family secrets would be laid bare.

  Pioneer’s reputation—and Luther’s too—had acted as a shield, protecting everyone connected with the company from inspection and criticism. They were literally above reproach. Beneath that facade, however, there lurked a tangle of motives and emotions: greed, jealousy, ambition, resentment. And somewhere in that tangle lay the truth, the identity of Luther’s killer.

  It was time, Lucy decided, to do some more research. But this time she wasn’t going to the library; she had another destination in mind. When she was finished, she intended to know more about them than they knew about themselves.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lucy hailed a cab outside the museum and directed the driver to take her to the offices of the Boston Herald. She had absolutely no idea where the newspaper’s headquarters were located, but the driver apparently did, because he merely nodded and pulled smoothly into traffic.

  For a brief moment Lucy savored the picture of herself as a sophisticated city dweller, a woman with an important job who routinely hailed taxis to take her to gleaming office towers housing the movers and shakers who made things happen. Then reality set in and she wondered exactly what she thought she was doing. Before she could change her mind and order the driver to take her directly to the comfort of the Park Plaza Hotel, however, he was pulling up in front of a grimy office building that had clearly seen better days. It was definitely the Herald, according to the sign and the adjacent parking lot full of delivery trucks. She paid the fare and clambered out, shaking off a piece of blowing paper that had wrapped itself around her ankle.

  Inside, Lucy stood at the reception counter and announced her intention to see Fran Rappaport, the gossip columnist responsible for the “Rap Sheet.” A uniformed guard stood by the elevators, keeping an eye on her. The idea of a newspaper needing security was a novelty to Lucy; at home, the Pennysaver office was open to all and sundry.

  “Do you have an appointment?” inquired the receptionist, a pleasantly plump woman with tightly coifed gray hair and a sprinkling of freckles on her nose.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t.” She leaned closer to the greasy sheet of Plexiglas that separated her from the receptionist. “I’m in town for the newspaper convention and thought I’d just take a chance and drop in on Fran, kind of spur of the moment, if you know what I mean.”

  Lucy was hoping to give the impression that she was an old friend of the columnist, but the receptionist wasn’t impressed.

  “Convention?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “The Northeast Newspaper Association—surely you’ve heard of it.”

  “No, I haven’t.” She shrugged. “But it doesn’t matter. Ms. Rappaport’s not in yet; she doesn’t usually show up for an hour or two. You’re welcome to leave a message.”

  Lucy blushed. She should have known that people working
for a daily paper didn’t keep nine-to-five hours. She looked at her watch, wondering if she should wait.

  “A couple of hours?”

  “I can’t really say. It varies, depending on her schedule.”

  Lucy nodded and decided to try again later. She turned to go, figuring there must be a coffee shop or bar nearby where Herald staffers congregated and she could hang out for a while. She was standing on the curb, looking around, when a woman in dyed-blond hair and oversize glasses with black rims approached her.

  “Are you looking for the Duck Tour, honey?”

  Lucy had seen advertisements for the Duck Tour, which took riders on a tour of points of interest via city streets and the Charles River in amphibious vehicles, actually refitted World War II landing craft.

  “Uh, no,” stammered Lucy, displeased that this sophisticated woman immediately took her for an out-of-towner. “I was hoping to talk to someone at the paper.”

  “Who?”

  She gave the woman a second look. “Are you Fran Rappaport?”

  “You recognized me!”

  It wasn’t quite the remarkable coincidence that Fran’s delighted tone implied. The hairdo and glasses featured prominently in the little photo that accompanied her column and were as much a trademark as McDonald’s golden arches.

  “You’re actually the person I wanted to talk to,” said Lucy.

  “Really! And you are?”

  “Lucy Stone.” When Fran didn’t seem impressed, Lucy added, “From Tinker’s Cove.”

  “Ah. Summer home of Junior Read, our slayer du jour.”

  “That’s right,” said Lucy. “And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Well, come on up,” said Fran, taking her by the elbow. “I love a nice cozy chat about the neighbors, don’t you?”

  “I’m so glad you dropped by,” said Fran, indicating with a wave of her glossy purple-tipped fingers that Lucy should take the spare chair in her glass-walled office. It was one of a handful flanking one wall of the newsroom, which was otherwise filled with cubicles, about a quarter of which were presently occupied. “It’s those little homey touches that my readers love. I mean, when Ben Affleck comes home, of course I have to write about how he’s doing in rehab and who he’s dating and is he still friends with Gwyneth, but what people really want to know”—she paused for emphasis, staring at Lucy through those glasses—“is whether his mom made him peanut butter and jelly for lunch or a BLT!”

  “I don’t really know what Junior eats for lunch,” said Lucy, who was beginning to feel like a fly who’d walked into the spider’s parlor.

  Somehow she had to turn the tables, she decided, promising herself that no matter what happened she would not let the fact that Elizabeth worked for Junior Read slip out. That would be an unforgivable violation of her personal ethics, not to mention that she’d promised Junior that anything Elizabeth told her about the household would remain strictly off the record. This was strictly private information, and she would have to guard it like a state secret.

  “Of course you don’t know what he has for lunch,” said Fran, chuckling. “That was just an example. But I suppose you know what his house is like, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” agreed Lucy, enormously relieved. The Reads’ house could be viewed by anyone, as it stood alone on a rock promontory high above the harbor on Smith Heights Road. “It’s one of those old-fashioned seaside cottages. You know, big, shingled, with a porch, of course.”

  “And his family will be awaiting his return, now that he’s out on bail?”

  Danger! Danger! screamed a voice in Lucy’s head. Don’t go there!

  “I assume so,” she said, with a little shrug.

  “The folks in town will be greeting him with open arms?”

  Lucy chuckled. “Well, I don’t think there’ll be a parade or anything.”

  “He’s not too popular in Tinker’s Cove?”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” said Lucy, eager to clear up any misunderstanding. “He’s well liked. It’s just that…”

  “Yes?”

  “He has been charged with murdering his father, after all. People are going to reserve judgment, but there’s always the possibility that he is guilty. You know?”

  Fran nodded, tapping a pearly white tooth with a perfectly polished fingernail. Lucy noticed that her nail polish matched her lipstick. She was suddenly glad she was wearing her new shoes, and glanced at them.

  “Cute shoes,” gushed Fran. “I wish I could wear flats.”

  She was wearing a pair of stiletto heels with very pointed toes. Lucy couldn’t imagine how she could even walk in them, much less chase after stories.

  “I love your column,” said Lucy. “That photo of Catherine Read caught my eye….”

  “Great photo, wasn’t it?” exclaimed Fran. “Lesbian lovers! My readers eat that stuff up. They love to be outraged. The letters have absolutely been pouring in.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Lucy. She knew that newspapers loved to generate controversy and counted success by the number of readers who responded to a story. “I’m surprised you haven’t written about Inez—she’s pretty outrageous.”

  “Oh, I have, honey. She was the other woman, you know, in a very messy divorce.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Lucy.

  “Oh, yes. But that’s all ancient history. You can read all about it in the morgue. I’ll take you down, but first…well, what do you think Junior will do when he gets home? The very first thing? Will he go for a sail in his boat? Watch the sunset from his porch? Gaze at a favorite painting?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Lucy, laughing. “I suppose he’ll give his son a big hug. My daughter says Trevor really misses his dad.”

  “Mmm, interesting,” cooed Fran, tapping away on her keyboard.

  Lucy wished she could bite her tongue right off.

  Later, as she sat in front of a computer terminal in the paper’s morgue searching the archived files, Lucy decided she hadn’t done too badly. She’d made it very clear to Fran that even though her daughter did work in the Read household, she could hardly be considered a reliable source of information. Furthermore, the only knowledge Lucy had of the family was hearsay, like the business about not paying their bills. She didn’t really know if that was true or not. She personally had only the highest regard for Junior and absolutely believed he was innocent.

  Besides, even if she had been a tad indiscreet, it was a small price to pay for access to the Herald’s archives. They were a gold mine of information, all carefully cataloged and indexed and accessible with a click of the mouse, unlike the morgue at the Pennysaver, which was little more than a cramped closet full of bound editions dating back to the mid nineteenth century and stacks of recent issues, generally muddled and out of sequence. The Herald also employed an obliging librarian, who helped Lucy find the information she wanted.

  And the more information she found, the more convinced she became that Harold Read was behind Luther’s murder. Most telling were the accounts of his divorce five years earlier from the first Mrs. Read.

  Inez’s predecessor, Louise, had stated under oath that Harold had been unfaithful and had both verbally and physically abused her. She even claimed that he had tried to poison her to save himself the expense of a divorce. This had happened, she claimed, when the couple was estranged but had both attended their eldest son’s college graduation. Following a celebratory dinner, Harold had invited her to his hotel room to discuss some family matters and had mixed a drink for her, even though she had declined the offer. She was suspicious, she explained, “because he had never made a drink for me before in twenty years of married life but always yelled at me to make them for him.”

  Louise’s refusal to join in a toast to their son had so infuriated Harold, she told the court, that he threw the drink across the room, breaking the glass. She had been unable to save any of the liquid for testing, but had managed to slip a shard of glass into her purse when he wasn’t look
ing.

  Laboratory analysis had been inconclusive, because the tiny amount of residue had not been adequate for testing.

  “That doesn’t prove a thing,” she’d claimed, sniffling into a handkerchief. “I know what he was up to and I’m convinced I was lucky to escape with my life.”

  Lucy was somewhat skeptical of the story, because she knew parties in a divorce often tended to exaggerate their grievances; nevertheless it was interesting in light of Luther’s death by poisoning.

  The judge in the case hadn’t been impressed and had acted in Harold’s favor, reducing the size of the requested settlement. Lucy wasn’t convinced the judge had been absolutely impartial, however, since Harold had noisily supported his nomination for the judgeship with several laudatory editorials, a tidbit she picked up from Fran’s “Rap Sheet” column.

  Inez’s high-flying lifestyle hadn’t gone unnoticed by Fran, either. Through the years there had been frequent mention of arrivals and departures on vacations to Europe and the Caribbean, galas and expensive parties hosted by Harold and Inez at their Château Marmite, which was reportedly a replica of a French palace built in the New Hampshire mountains, and stays in top Boston hotels to visit her favorite hairdresser, masseuse, aesthetician, and plastic surgeon.

  Lucy jotted it all down in her notebook, but she was only too aware that it was probably a wasted effort. She had enough information for a story, but the chances that Ted would run it were slim indeed, and she didn’t blame him. Harold Read would certainly slap the Pennysaver with a libel suit, and he had enough powerful friends that he had a good chance of winning. If justice prevailed and he lost, Ted would still have the expense of a trial that he could ill afford.

  If she were home, thought Lucy, she might have been able to convince the police to look into her theory, but that was a very big might. Here in Boston, as she knew only too well, she’d be dismissed as a crackpot. If only there was some way to precipitate matters. She couldn’t bring all the suspects together for a confrontational meeting like Hercule Poirot; she hadn’t deduced a logical proof like Sherlock Holmes. All that she had was an unshakable belief in Junior’s innocence and a serious suspicion about his uncle Harold.