Cat in a Bag

by Angela M. Sanders

  “The Italian landscape. We got that one.” Adele moved to the canvas. “Can I paint while you talk?”

  “Fine. Mort, you move. I need that chair.” Gilda situated herself and turned her head slightly to the side to pose. Once they were settled, she said, “Not the golf club painting. Another one. I can’t quite remember the artist’s name, but it’s of a horse.”

  “George Stubbs,” Adele said. “It was a job for the Cohen heist in New York. Some old heiress owned the original.” She pushed at the blobs on her palette, seeming to wake them up.

  “She died, and Christie’s auctioned off her goods—what wasn’t snatched up by her family, that is. The horse painting ended up in Carsonville. An art professor owns it.” Gilda kept her gaze fastened on Adele’s expression.

  Adele’s already pale face blanched as the realization sank in. The hand holding the paintbrush dropped. “He—”

  “You think it might be him?”

  “Who?” Warren asked.

  Gilda sat back. This was Adele’s deal to work out—or not—as she chose.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was an art professor that I had in college.” Adele’s voice faltered. She set down the palette. “There aren’t a lot of art professors in Carsonville. This one had the family money to buy a Stubbs.”

  “Speak up,” Grady said.

  “This is private,” Gilda said.

  “You’re not happy about it. There’s something else,” Warren said. He looked so big compared to the girl. Gilda had seen a number of these Goliath-baby girl romances work out, though. Tiny little women with big, hairy guys. Often it was the women who ended up taking charge, too.

  Adele tucked in her chin. “In college, I had a professor who worshipped eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists. He called them the ‘true’ artists, and said they were some of the few who had mastered craft. He showed us so many slides simply of studies. You wouldn’t believe how lifelike, yet spare, these drawings were. Not like anything these days.”

  “People learn to draw now,” Mort said, undoubtedly thinking of his own mastery with his pocketknife.

  “It’s not valued the same way. Today, you can have a name for yourself as an artist and not be a competent draftsman.”

  It didn’t escape Gilda that this era was Adele’s specialty. The professor’s ego couldn’t take her skill. “And the professor’s own work was contemporary, right?”

  Adele nodded. “Can you find the name of the person who has the Stubbs?”

  “Do you really want to know? I mean, given everything….”

  She nodded again, this time with more urgency.

  Gilda sighed. “I’ll call Claudine right away, get a name.”

  “He took advantage of you, didn’t he?” Warren asked. His tone held no menace. A big guy like him might have been threatening, but his voice was gentle. He didn’t want to pummel the professor. He wanted to protect Adele.

  “It was my fault, too,” she said.

  “It’s never your fault when you’re a child and he’s someone with power, honey,” Gilda said. “Don’t you take the bait.”

  “I admit, I’ve heard enough of this in the confessional to back you up, Gilda,” Father Vincent said.

  “If nothing else, I must have that painting,” Adele said, “I—”

  The squawk of the P.A. system cut her off. “Mr. Copper on line one. Mr. Copper on line one.”

  The Villa’s residents looked at each other. The announcement didn’t have to do with a phone call. Oh, no. It meant something far worse. The residents scattered, Warren taking the lead.

  “Get under the bed,” Gilda yelled at Adele. “The police are here.”

  * * *

  The Villa’s residents sprang into action. With Adele hidden, Warren swapped out the room number outside with a plaque reading “Storage Closet” and locked the door from the outside.

  Gilda only remembered having to do this once before, when a resident’s nephew who was still in the business had decided to give the Villa a hot television set. That time, they played dumb, and the police were gone in twenty minutes. But that was a misdemeanor, and someone else’s crime at that. Harboring a fugitive was serious business.

  “Everyone!” Warren yelled. “Go to your places and get into your roles.” He yanked an orderly’s jacket from a closet and slipped it on as he raced down the stairs. Grady headed to his room to trace the police call.

  “How did they find out about Adele?” Father Vincent asked. “I was sure no one followed us. The county’s sedan was wiped. I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t know, but we’ll walk through it later. For now, get to your room and get out that prayer book.”

  Gilda’s job was to go to the cafeteria and play hard of hearing—but to listen intently and signal for reinforcements if needed. When she emerged from the elevator pushing her walker, two police officers stood in the entry hall, hands on their belts, talking to Warren.

  “Sorry, officers,” he said. “I was upstairs taking Mrs. Wilcox’s blood pressure. How can I help you? Don’t tell me one of our residents called you by mistake.” He leaned forward in a conspiratorial way. “We see a bit of dementia from time to time, you know.”

  The officer on the right, the one nearly as big as Warren, wasn’t having any of it. “We understand you have a rare dog bed on the premises.”

  Shoot. It wasn’t Adele at all they were after. It was the dog bed.

  Gilda saw Warren flinch. He recovered soon enough and pasted a surprised look on his face. “We don’t allow animals in the Villa, officers, except for companion animals, and we don’t have any in residence now. Could you be at the wrong address?”

  Lord, that Warren was a smooth talker. They could have used someone with his talents back in the day. Now, if only he could keep them from searching out the dog bed—and finding Adele. Gilda knew that stealing the dog bed would probably cost them a few years in prison, but harboring a fugitive would shut the Villa down for good.

  “We’ve got the right address, all right. Villa Saint Nicholas retirement home.”

  “If you don’t mind, we’d like to have a look around,” the smaller officer said. He had a dandy-ish way about him with his trimmed mustache and carefully manicured nails. In her younger years, Gilda would have had him eating out of her hand in five minutes. She shifted her gaze to Warren. He wouldn’t insist on a search warrant. That would be too suspicious.

  “Of course, by all means,” Warren said.

  One of the officers poked into Warren’s office, right off the entry hall. He lifted a fat novel with a ballgown-clad woman and a bare-chested man on its cover and cast another glance at Warren, who kept a straight face.

  “The residents’ rooms?” the larger officer said.

  “On the second and third floors,” Warren said. “Down here we have the cafeteria, sick bay—that’s the medical assistance room—and the TV room. Plus my office.”

  Gilda scooted to her place in the cafeteria. Bobby was already there, his deck of cards tucked in his shirt pocket. They both picked up magazines and did their best to affect a doddering look.

  “Would you look at that,” Bobby said. “A coupon for the casino bus.” It was a well-known fact among younger people that seniors were obsessed with slot machines.

  “I’ll be darned,” Gilda replied, keeping an eye on the police officers. If they were here for the dog bed, Grady knew by now. They’d take steps. Hopefully they had enough time.

  “And here’s the new TV schedule for the game shows. I just love game shows,” Bobby said.

  “All of us older folks do,” Gilda said, then remembered she was supposed to be deaf. “Eh? I hope they have tuna noodle casserole for dinner.” Dinner was, in fact, boeuf Bourguignon and a special Sunday dessert of lemon chiffon cake. Father Vincent was bringing out his homemade maraschino cherries for their Manhattans.

  The policemen strode toward the table near the window. Gilda stiffened and looked back to Warren, who barely percep
tibly nodded.

  “What’s this?” the larger policeman pointed to the dog bed.

  “Eh?” Gilda added for good measure.

  “Looks like a dog bed,” the smaller policeman said.

  Warren laughed nervously. “That thing?”

  “You’re a sharp one.” She smiled and looked him in the eye. “It’s a dog bed, all right.”

  “Wasn’t the description of that Marie Antoinette bed that it was about this size, like a little canopy bed with blue cushions?” the dandy cop said, ignoring her.

  “Yep, that’s it,” the larger policeman answered. “But something’s not right.”

  They both stood, hands on hips, and studied the dog bed. Gilda glanced at Warren again, and this time he nodded more firmly.

  “I don’t see Marie Antoinette’s dog bed having cushions made out of old towels,” the larger cop said, finally. He pulled out the bed’s cushion. “Says ‘Lucky Casino’ on it.”

  “We older folks enjoy our casinos,” Bobby said from across the room.

  “Kind of crude carving, too, on this post.” The cop touched one, then drew back his hand. Gold paint stuck to his index finger.

  “I see you found Mort’s art project. He’s making a bed for a friend’s niece’s Chihuahua.” This part was true. Ruby would be delighted to have the bed for her rescues. “He saw something on the news about a queen’s dog bed getting stolen, and he thought he’d make one himself.”

  “It matches the description from the tip line,” the dandy said. “Ornate dog bed by the window.”

  “Busybodies.” The larger policeman looked at his phone and pointed toward his partner, then the door. “Let’s go. We’re through here.”

  “Is that all, officer? Nothing else I can help you with?” Gilda raised an eyebrow, hoping her false eyelashes were still firmly secured. At the smaller cop’s smile, she added, “Then I’ll see you in my dreams.”

  The larger cop complained to his partner about “folks who call in anything they see” and “wasting our time.”

  As soon as the parking lot was clear, the Villa’s residents crowded into the basement’s furnace room. Everyone looked a few shades grayer under the room’s single light bulb. The boiler kicked in, earning a yelp from Red, who stood next to it.

  “You got it down here in time?” Warren said.

  “Just barely. I told Father Vincent, and he hustled it into place.”

  Warren, pulling the orderly’s jacket over his head as he crossed the room, adjusted a few knobs on the building’s second water heater. Its front swung open. The Marie Antoinette dog bed rested safely inside. “Maybe we’d better keep it there for the moment.”

  “Good idea,” Gilda said.

  Warren closed the water heater and refastened its fake water lines. “I’ll go up and let out Adele.”

  When the furnace room cleared, Gilda remained behind. Yes, they’d made it through this visit all right. They were prepared. But instead of being relieved, she was more wary than before.

  Someone had called them in. Someone knew the dog bed was stolen and had seen Mort’s model in the Villa’s window. It could have been an innocent mistake. A passing pedestrian looked up, saw the dog bed, and called the cops. It happened sometimes. Some people didn’t know how to keep their noses out of other people’s business.

  The old building’s boiler kicked in, and its joists sighed in reply. Uneasiness stirred in her chest. Who would want to turn them in? Everyone at the Villa had run into trouble at some point in his career, but those chickens had come home to roost a long time ago. Gilda gripped her cane and made for the door. If it wasn’t simply a nosy neighbor, they were in for a heap of trouble.

  20

  Gilda took the recliner in Grady’s room, but perched on its edge to avoid the hassle of getting out of it later. After the police had left, the Villa began to quiet. Warren had extracted Adele from under the bed, where she’d said she had an idea for bringing more light to Gilda’s eyes in the portrait. Father Vincent had brought out his high-end tools, in both American and metric measurements, and prepared to work in the carport until lunch. A few of the other residents had gathered in the cafeteria for a post-mortem of the drill.

  Now, an hour later, Grady chuckled. “I wish I could have seen their faces when they found the one Mort started for Ruby.”

  “The carving was good,” Gilda said. “It was the cushion that gave it away.”

  “Let’s get down to business,” Grady said. He swiveled his chair toward the computer monitor and woke up the screen.

  With his bald top and cotton candy-like hair stuck out at all angles, Grady looked like the Wizard of Oz.

  He clicked a few keys. “Okay, what do we write?”

  “I’m worried,” Gilda said.

  “You want to tell him we’re worried? How’s that going to help things?”

  “Ha ha. I mean I’m worried about the Villa. Someone tipped off the police about us. I think we’re being watched.”

  “You don’t think someone was walking down the street, happened to catch sight of Ruby’s dog bed and said to himself, ‘Say, that’s the dog bed I saw on the news that belonged to that queen who got her head chopped off’?”

  Gilda clasped her hands in her lap. “No, I don’t. For one thing, you can’t see the cafeteria window from the street. It’s too far across the parking lot.”

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Maybe we have a mole?”

  She turned this over in her mind. All the Villa’s residents except Adele had lived here for years. Warren was okay. Cook was okay. Their cleaning service was well vetted. Heck, they cleaned the manor for the head of the syndicate. The Villa was small potatoes for them. Hardly worth selling out for. As for the Villa’s residents, everyone had a past to hide. For a resident to point a finger at another resident was mutually assured destruction.

  “Nah. If someone here wanted to bring us down, it would have been done a long time ago. It’s got to be someone on the outside,” she said.

  “Someone might have seen the dog bed come in,” Grady pointed out.

  “It was in a trash bag.”

  “Any visitors?”

  “In the past day?” Gilda bit her lip. “Nope. Not even Mary Rose’s niece.”

  “I hear she’s moving to Omaha,” Grady said.

  “Hallelujah. I can’t stand her griping. I see why Mary Rose plays deaf.”

  Gilda rose and pushed aside the curtains. Grady’s room had a view of the street. No one would be able to spy on the Villa from this side, not with the trees in the way.

  “Are we going to write this ransom note, or not?” Grady asked. “My show’s on soon.”

  Gilda, still thinking, turned to Grady. “All right. Are you sure no one can trace it?”

  “Absolutely. I use a dummy computer as a server, and send through that. The best experts won’t be able to tell who or from where the message was sent. Now, hurry up.”

  Gilda returned to her chair. “I’m worried.”

  Grady pulled off his reading glasses. “I heard you the first time. I can’t speak for the rest of it, but I can tell you that this note will be safe. It’s fine.” He patted her arm and swiveled again to his laptop. “I’m ready.”

  She unclenched her hands. “Okay. Take this down. ‘Dear Dr. Lancaster. We have your Marie Antoinette dog bed. We will return it if you will perform surgery on a particular patient within three days.”

  “Slow down. I’m catching up.” He clacked at the keyboard. “Three days. You think that’s enough time?”

  “We don’t want to give him too much time. A week is too long.”

  “Fine. You got the photo, right?”

  Minutes later, the note was sent.

  * * *

  Gilda returned to her room and raised the blinds. Her room was on the top floor, two floors above the cafeteria. If anyone watched them, she should be able to make out their vantage point from here.

  Straight down, Father Vincent tinkered in th
e carport to the left. She caught flashes of his daisy-patterned work skirt. The parking lot’s six spots were empty except for Warren’s Jeep and Cook’s bicycle. They didn’t need cars with Father Vincent more than happy to chauffeur them wherever they needed to go.

  To the right was the street. Soon the trees lining it would be fully leafed out, and she’d only be able to make out the occasional neighborhood resident walking his dog.

  Across the parking lot, on the other side of a chain link fence, was the school. Its playground wrapped the school from the left in an “L” shape. The school was a floor shorter than the Villa and much bigger. Today was Sunday, so the playground was quiet, and the school’s windows dark.

  Gilda opened the door to the hall and yelled, “Red!”

  Holding a magazine, the white-haired woman stepped into the hall. “What?”

  “Can anyone see in on this side of the Villa?”

  “I should say not. At least, I haven’t noticed anyone.”

  “Can I borrow your binoculars?” Red kept a set of army-issue binoculars for watching the street. She’d especially chosen the room, despite having Grady and his TV below, for its access to the street. She’d even paid a tree trimming crew to prune away a few branches to widen her view. She knew everyone’s business from the lawyer with the never-ending series of girlfriends in the blue foursquare to the bookstore owner in the bungalow.

  “Not the night vision set?”

  “No. The regular ones.”

  “All right. If you give them back. I’m expecting the Stephensons’ mother-in-law to show up soon. That’s usually a good show.”

  “I just want to borrow them for a few minutes.” Gilda took the heavy binoculars to her window and trained them at the school. The improvement in the view was astonishing. She understood Red’s attraction. Gilda could even make out the ratty sweater hanging behind a teacher’s desk and the construction paper Humpty Dumpties on the wall.

  Adjusting the binoculars slightly as she went, she swept the row of classrooms. If someone had seen the dog bed, it would have been just after they brought it in on Saturday or on Sunday morning, when Ruby’s copy was finished. The school should have been closed.