Faux Reel (Imogene Museum Mystery #5)

by Jones, Jerusha

  I awoke in a haze to Maurice patting my shoulder. “I’m just filling up, sweetheart. You comfortable?”

  “Apparently,” I mumbled.

  His door whooshed open, and he climbed out. The blast of fresh air woke me the rest of the way, and I gasped, remembering. I checked my watch and peered out the window trying to peg our location.

  An Alaska narrow-bodied commuter plane with a smiling Eskimo face painted on the tail roared overhead, wheels down — probably packed with the several times per day busload of passengers from Seattle, or Victoria, BC or Twin Falls. Which meant we were near Portland International Airport.

  I pulled out my phone and dialed the number for Astoria Trust and Loan. This time, Selwyn came on the line almost immediately.

  “We should arrive between 3:30 and 4:00,” I said.

  “109. 109,” he chanted, sounding gleeful. “I shall be ready. Do you have a case to transport the contents of the box?”

  “Oh,” I said, startled. “I’d been thinking along the lines of a will or maybe a handful of papers.”

  “109 is one of our largest boxes. I’ve never seen the contents, of course, but for John Smith to rent a box that size usually means—”

  “John Smith?”

  Selwyn chuckled. “No one ever used their real names, not for this sort of thing. At one time I had fourteen John Smiths on record. You’d think they could be a little more creative. If you have the key that fits the lock, then the contents of the box are yours. We don’t ask questions.”

  “How big?”

  Selwyn considered for a moment. “Don’t you worry, dear. I’ll make arrangements here so you won’t have a delay. See you in a couple hours.”

  Now I was certain Cosmo was — had been — certifiably crazy. Why couldn’t he have left a nice will and stash of bond certificates with his lawyer? It was as though he’d set up a scavenger hunt for his descendants — and by proxy, me. I glanced over my shoulder. The LaFerrari didn’t appear to have a trunk.

  CHAPTER 20

  When we reached Astoria and found the stalwart granite bulk of Astoria Trust and Loan, Maurice had to heft me out of the passenger seat. My swollen leg had stiffened into a semi-bent position.

  I hopped around on my good leg, moaning, as blood filtered back into my veins, throbbing as it did so. “Ow, ow, ow,” I panted.

  “You really ought to be in bed,” Maurice pointed out.

  I gritted a grimace that was supposed to be a smile but probably had nothing pleasant about it. “Tomorrow.” I grabbed the handrail and did a single-step-at-a-time shuffle up the steep stairs that rose like a pyramid to the bank’s impressive entrance. Because I’m classy like that — and I wasn’t about to ask Maurice to carry me.

  A lady behind a desk — a loan officer — took one look at Maurice and me and hurried over. I think she probably wanted to stash us — the circus strong man and the deformed woman — in a private office as quickly as possible to keep our sideshow from scaring off the other patrons. Either that or shoo us back out the door.

  “Selwyn Ferguson?” I blurted.

  The lady froze. “Oh. You’re—” Her eyes darted between Maurice and me. “Yes, well. That makes sense. If you’ll take the elevator to the basement?” She pointed to a set of burnished brass doors in the far corner of the bank’s marble cavern of a foyer.

  Maurice cocked his head at me.

  I nodded and tossed a ‘thank you’ to the lady over my shoulder.

  “This place is solid,” Maurice muttered once we were enclosed in the plush elevator. The doors sealed like an airlock, and a quiet hum indicated we were descending. “And old. Feels nefarious, doesn’t it?” He winked at me. “The underbelly of commerce, eh?”

  He made me laugh. “You might not be that far off. Did Leland tell you his suspicions about the painting?”

  “Nope. And I don’t want to know. I stick to cars. He does art.”

  “I might be committing a crime. I’m not sure.”

  Maurice shoved his hands in his pockets and rose to his tiptoes. “So I’m your getaway driver?” He grinned wide. “That’s fine by me, sweetheart. Just tell me where you need to go.” He pulled a theatrical frown for a second and stared down at me. “A crime of passion?”

  I chuckled. “A crime of nosiness. Poking about in other people’s business because I have the key.”

  “Sounds like fun.” Maurice held the doors open as I hobbled out into a cool, dank room.

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if the walls were coated in condensation. It felt as if we were a long ways underground — a complete absence of sound except Maurice’s recent comment which was still bouncing around the empty room.

  “Ms. Morehouse? If I may call you Meredith?”

  I jumped and searched, squinting in the dim lighting, for the voice’s source. A rail thin, stooped man shuffled softly into sight. His shock of bright white hair gleamed in the dusky shadows. He held his hands out in front of his body slightly, exposing white shirt cuffs from the end of his jacket sleeves. He’d sounded much younger on the phone.

  “Mr. Ferguson? Selwyn?”

  He came to a halt a few feet in front of me and straightened, casting his eyes my direction, and I suddenly realized why he soft-stepped heel to toe, why he felt with his hands — he was blind. His irises swirled pale blue with no pupils, as though his lenses were coated with cataracts, although I had a hunch his blindness wasn’t age-related. He had the sure and practiced air of someone who’d successfully dealt with his handicap for a lifetime.

  “Selwyn.” I reached out and touched his hand.

  He grasped mine firmly and held it, his skin papery and cool. “Ahhh. You’re a brunette, very pretty. I’m sorry about your leg injury. You’ll heal soon?”

  My mouth fell open. Then I laughed. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  Selwyn chuckled and tucked my hand under his elbow. “Come with me. Your friend can wait here.”

  I shrugged back to Maurice. He nodded and leaned against the wall with his legs and arms crossed as though prepared to spend hours. The room was blank of furniture or magazines to make his intermission more comfortable.

  “It’s a little game I like to play,” Selwyn continued. “Was I right?”

  “Yes — mostly. The pretty part’s arguable. How’d you know my hair color?”

  “Lucky guess. But I could tell from your footsteps that you’re favoring a leg. And now I can feel it too. I have an eidetic memory, but since I can’t see, I file people by voices and scents.” Selwyn guided me down a narrow, descending hallway. The air grew colder with each step.

  “So this John Smith who rented box 109, how would you describe him?” I asked.

  “Largish, portly. I can feel how much space a person takes up. Deep, gravely voice, familiar with the local area, but I’d say he’d spent some time in Orange County or Los Angeles because there was a slight sharpening of the hard consonants and laziness in the vowels. He was more hurried than most northwest natives. Smelled faintly of dry cleaning fluid and a powder-coated candy — I’d say Necco wafers.”

  “Wow,” I breathed.

  “So he’s your John Smith?”

  I nodded, then remembered Selwyn couldn’t see me. “Yes. Why here? This isn’t a safe deposit box, is it? Even though we’re in a bank.”

  Selwyn chuckled again. “Astoria Vault & Trust was here long before the bank was. They liked our building and the security the façade implies, and they infringed upon our name in order to piggyback on our reputation. Our business was decreasing, so it made sense to sell the facility. But we required them to lease the vault storage area back to us so we could maintain our contracts with our clients. They had a new vault installed for their needs.”

  “We?”

  “My twin brother and I, our father before us, our grandfather before him, and our great-grandfather before him. All blind. It’s a congenital defect that’s proved useful in this line of business. Back when Astoria was a booming shipping an
d fishing town, many seafaring men needed to store their valuables while they were gone for long periods of time. Often they wouldn’t want those valuables to fall into the hands of their families or loved ones upon their deaths, for various reasons. Or when they returned from trips abroad, they might bring home items that again, for various reasons, shouldn’t become public knowledge. We provided them security and anonymity.”

  Selwyn stopped and pivoted to the right. He pushed open a creaking wood door with huge wrought iron hinges. It felt as though we were in the dungeon of a medieval castle.

  “Perfectly legal when the business originated,” he continued, “but the laws have changed many times since then, and we’re operating in a sketchy gray area. We haven’t accepted new clients in a couple decades, but we’re still honor-bound to provide the service we contracted to existing clients.”

  We stepped into another dim room, this one equipped with a heavy wood table and two simple chairs in the center.

  “My John Smith hasn’t paid his rental fee in forty years.”

  “He prepaid. One hundred years,” Selwyn answered.

  I gasped. “One hundred years?”

  “The longest term we offered. It was the renter’s responsibility to take care of their two keys or pass them along to trusted people for safekeeping. Whoever has a key can open the box. If no one retrieves the contents by the end of the term, we are permitted to drill the box and keep the contents — if we want to.”

  “What treasures you must have.”

  “Not really. You’d be surprised at what other people think is valuable.” Selwyn expertly ushered me around the table and through a second, incredibly thick, open door into a room covered floor to ceiling on all sides with cubbyholes ranging from standard mail slot to double-wide file drawer size. The doors to nearly all the cubbyholes hung open, exposing black, empty interiors.

  I thought back to Cosmo’s grotesque painting and smiled. “It is a matter of taste.”

  Selwyn pointed to the lower left corner at floor level where a two foot square door was still closed. “109. Try your key. You can remove the box inside and use the table in the anteroom to review the contents. I’ll wait in the hallway so you have privacy. Call when you’re ready.” He released my arm and padded away.

  I fished the key out of my purse and bent in half. Kneeling was out of the question. With blood rushing into my head and thumping in my ears, I fiddled with the lock. It took a fair bit of muscle, but the key finally turned.

  The door swung open silently. A wood box with a handhold hole rested inside. I slid it out and clunked it on the floor. There was no way I could carry it in my condition — it had to weigh close to fifty pounds.

  I stumped to the anteroom, dropped my purse on the table and dragged a chair back into the vault. I gritted my teeth against the pain and hoisted the box onto the chair seat. After leaning against the chair back for a few minutes, panting, I towed the chair into the anteroom, its legs scraping grooves in the floor wax.

  “Everything all right in there?” Selwyn called from the hallway, his voice wavering.

  “So far.”

  My thigh pounded in pain under the pressure bandage. I pulled the second chair beside the first and dropped onto it, propping my leg up.

  The box didn’t appear to have a locking mechanism, just a simple clasp that popped open with light pressure. I removed the lid and nearly dropped it.

  In half the box, stacks of banded hundred dollar bills stared back at me. The other half held a jumble of small, thong-tied leather pouches, their folds crazed with age, and a sheaf of yellowed papers.

  Rackets. Hadn’t Rupert used that word when describing Cosmo’s form of employment? I was pretty sure I was looking at a whole lot of ill-gotten gain. But by donating his painting and the key intentionally hidden in the paint to the Imogene, hadn’t Cosmo also donated the contents of the box?

  I exhaled. This was not a matter for me to decide. I didn’t know what time it was in Ireland, but Rupert needed to know as soon as possible. I thumbed buttons on my phone, but there was no reception in the insulated depths of the vault.

  I didn’t even want to count the money. I lifted out pack after pack, scanning the series numbers on the top bills — late 1960s and early 1970s. There’d be very few bills that old in circulation anymore. The edges of the packs ruffled unevenly, the bills dingy and worn — so the money probably wasn’t from a bank or treasury heist. They looked like they had been fondled and tallied by someone not terribly tidy.

  Inflation had taken its toll. The bills were worth a lot less than they had been when Cosmo stashed them away. Nonetheless, it was an astronomical amount of money — at least to me.

  I picked at the knot in a leather thong securing a pouch, and bits crumbled into my hand. Carefully, I spread the pouch open, revealing a pile of dull grainy powder, like coarse beach sand.

  But not sand. Gold dust.

  I did count the pouches — 23.

  The papers were newspaper clippings about the exploits and nominal jail sentences of several Los Angeles gangsters. Both Sam ‘Juice’ Junkerman and Charles ‘Gnocchi’ Nervetti were named as possible associates of the convicted wiseguys. Photos showed them dapper on courthouse steps beside equally well-dressed lawyers, smiles broad and cigars clamped between their lips. Cosmo sure knew how to pick his friends.

  I fingered a stack of bills. Was this cache his revenge — or his getaway fund? Barbara had mentioned that Cosmo came to her father for advice — her father who had semi-escaped the mob.

  “Selwyn?” I called. “When was this box rented?”

  “Friday, October 5, 1973,” he answered. Gotta love that memory.

  The month before Cosmo donated the painting — plenty of time to stick one of the keys into wet acrylic and paint over it until it held fast.

  “Did John Smith ever come back and access his box again?”

  “Once. Friday, April 12, 1974.”

  Friday. The day before Cosmo died.

  “Did he come alone?”

  “Yes, both visits.”

  “The second time, did he mention a chartered fishing trip planned for the next day?”

  “Yes. Not eagerly as most do. I got the impression he was under some obligation to show a couple business associates a good time. The deep sea version of golf, good for deal-making.”

  Or unsuspected murder. How easy is it for someone to fall off a boat, especially if they get a nudge in the right direction and a billy club or gaff to the head? It could have been staged well enough that they might not even have had to pay off the charter captain, although that was a possibility too. Where was the other key? Maybe at the bottom of the Pacific.

  I roused myself from the morbid mental spiral with a deep sigh. “Selwyn, you mentioned a case for carrying these items. I’m going to need it. Or maybe two to distribute the weight — whatever you have.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Maurice relieved Selwyn of the army surplus duffel bags at the elevator. He tucked them under my feet and knees in the LaFerrari, giving me a footrest and support for my leg.

  “Worthwhile?” he asked once he was strapped in beside me.

  I nodded slowly. “Thanks for your help.”

  Maurice whistled a cheerful tune and eased the car out of the parallel curb spot.

  I shifted against the uneasy sensation of a pile of cash cushioning me from the hot pavement we were skimming over. Plus the gold — a better hedge against inflation than printed money, and in dust form which isn’t traceable as opposed to stamped bars. Cosmo had been planning something — saving for an uncertain future at the very least.

  I dialed Rupert’s number and left a cryptic message about needing to return my call as soon as possible. I insisted he try Frankie if he couldn’t reach me because sleep was crashing down on my body again. She’d be able to tell him about the key and the gold dust buried in the still life’s paint layers that hinted at so much more. My eyes drooped closed by the time I clicked off.
>
  Maurice is an awfully good sport. He woke me up a few miles from the Imogene, giving me time to run my fingers through my hair and wipe the sleep from my eyes. I slid my tongue over my teeth — gross.

  “Was I drooling?” I mumbled.

  “Nope. Not a peep out of you. What kind of drugs are you on, sweetheart?”

  “The good kind.”

  He braked and piloted the car onto the access road toward the marina and county park. He coasted to a stop in front of the museum, next to a black BMW I thought looked familiar. Maurice pressed a button and my door swung upwards. I felt as though I was about to be ejected from a time capsule back into the real world.

  Maurice bounded around the car and scooped an arm under my shoulders to lift me out. Once on my feet, a bit wobbly but upright, I spotted the astonished face of my stepfather through the BMW’s driver’s window.

  Alex popped his door open and stepped out. “Meredith?” His eyes darted over me, taking in my purple swollen leg, Maurice who was muscling the duffel bags out of the car, and the gull-winged, bright red LaFerrari. I was sure he was getting the wrong impression.

  “Alex.” I tried to smile.

  He enclosed me in an awkward hug. “Your mother called.”

  “About time,” I muttered.

  “She said you’d been shot — both of you.” Alex kept his arm around my waist and ventured another look down at my leg. “You should be resting.”

  Alex had changed since I’d seen him last. He’d eschewed the comb-over and was sporting a respectable short fringe above his ears. Perfectly tailored charcoal pinstripe suit and conservative maroon tie, black wingtips, as always, but he seemed softer, gentler somehow. New wrinkles at the corners of his mouth. Paler, and maybe thinner under the suit.

  “The doors are locked,” he said. “I’ve been trying to reach your mother since I arrived, but she’s not answering.”

  “She’s probably still in the basement and can’t hear her phone.” I fished the museum keys from my purse. “I’ll let you in. This is Maurice Banks.”