Slugfest db-4

by Rosemary Harris

  “But why?” Lucy said. “Why not just steal it?” It was an excellent point.

  Labidou arrived, carrying a black plastic bag like dozens of others on the show floor. He also held a bunch of battered roses he’d picked up for free. When he saw something was up, he got into cop mode and pushed them on Lucy, who was too confused to respond but was used to men bringing her flowers, so she simply said, thanks, and tried to figure out if she knew him.

  Stancik placed the waterlogged evidence in the plastic bag and handed it to Labidou. Still wearing the gloves, Stancik removed the grate. “We’ll return this after we’ve had a chance to examine it. I don’t expect we’ll learn much but we have to check it for prints. We also have someone collecting the garbage carts, but I don’t know that we’ll find anything useful after this sprinkler business.” As the two men left, I was still pondering Lucy’s question, Why not just steal it?

  “Either they took what they wanted out of the bag,” I said, “or they wanted to make sure that something wasn’t in the bag. Something that might link them with Garland Bleimeister.”

  “Then why not toss it back under the table?” Lucy said, absentmindedly whacking the roses against her hand.

  Who knew? Fear? Fingerprints? Would there still be fingerprints on something if it had been floating in the water? The cops seemed to think it was possible, but would a criminal know that? Was it bad timing? If they’d been inspecting the bag on Nikki’s table, it might be easier to slip it in under the decorative grate if someone came by. If you were strong.

  A handful of rose petals fell, and Lucy bent down to pick them up. Instead of trashing them she tossed them into the water in the sarcophagus. “Oh, sorry.”

  “Go ahead,” Nikki said. “It looks good. Reminds me of a spa treatment I once had.” The two women floated the rest of the roses in the concrete tub.

  In lieu of the sarcophagus Lucy bought a pinecone nightlight she reckoned would be easier to get into a fifth-floor walk-up. We still had time before the doors opened and I planned to give Lucy a quick tour and drive-by introductions to Connie, Lauryn, and Rolanda, but she dragged her feet.

  “Okay, but let’s go this way,” she said. “We should probably stay away from the security guard at Hall E. I don’t think she likes me.” That was Rolanda’s post. It seemed they had already met.

  Fifty-four

  After the morning’s excitement the rest of the day was tame. Not many attendees remarked on the extra humidity, thinking, as Lucy had, that it had been ratcheted up for the tropical plants. And if there were booths and exhibits in some disarray, perhaps they were just closing up shop early. Those who did know about the morning’s disaster were impressed at how quickly people had bounced back, but for most attendees it was business as usual.

  Four of the pieces I had lent to other exhibitors had sold, so Lucy and I would have that much less to pack and ship back to Springfield. I was surprised Hank hadn’t called, but he was reliable and I expected to hear from him before Monday afternoon when everything had to be removed to get ready for the next event.

  Having lived with them for days, I had decided to purchase one of the sculptures myself. It probably meant I wouldn’t make any money for my efforts this weekend, but I was confident Primo would give me a discount. I’d grown fond of the piece, a four-foot oxidized metal sculpture Primo had called Spade and Archer. He had used fragments of a shovel and of a bow and arrow. Since my astrological sign was Sagittarius and I am a gardener and a mystery fan, it seemed to have my name on it as well as Sam’s and Miles’s. I remembered the dumplike backyard at Primo’s place and worried that I’d never find the piece again, so I opted to take that one with me in the Jeep when I left the city and not ship it with the others.

  At 1 P.M. Jensen swung by with formal invitations to Mrs. Moffitt’s after-show party in Hunting Ridge. Connie Anzalone had mentioned it on Friday and I had been faintly jealous, but now David, Nikki, and I had been invited, too. David’s unpleasant neighbor with the unsold fountains quietly seethed. Lucy cleared her throat.

  “Is it all right if I bring a friend?” I asked. “Maybe two?”

  Jensen said yes, and as soon as he left, Lucy pulled me aside. “Speaking of friends? Sarah called just after you left. That professor you asked about? Quite a character. I told her we’d call back since I wasn’t sure what you wanted to know.”

  Sarah Marshall picked up after five rings. According to her, the good professor had had an eye for the girl students. That may have been a contributing factor to his getting the boot, but the school blamed it on his unauthorized experiments on pest repellents. Something to do with toxins, Sarah wasn’t sure because the juicier part of the story involved an undergrad, and why stick to boring science when there were more salacious—and easier to remember—details?

  “First they pulled the plug on his funding and then they canned him,” she said. “I asked about students who might have worked for him. I don’t think the school would keep records of his former interns,” she said, yawning. “There were lots of them. I’m not sure if I could even get access to them. Especially now. Reporters have been nosing around because of that aggie student who died in New York. Garland something. The prof’s name was Lincoln Wrentham.”

  “How are you spelling that?” I asked.

  “With a W. Can I go back to sleep now?”

  We found a surprising amount of information online about Lincoln Wrentham. At least surprising to me, who prided myself on having the fewest links of most people I knew. Wrentham’s last known address was somewhere in New Jersey. No current employer found. No recent papers published. Divorced.

  My cell phone rang. It was Sarah, slightly more awake than she’d been earlier. I could hear her drinking something that I took to be coffee.

  “Listen, there’s something else. Wrentham’s daughter went to school here. Some free or discounted tuition thing. She was registered under another name, but when the revelations about her father came out, so did her real identity, and she left when he did. Just as well. It would have been awkward to have everyone know daddy was boffing her classmates.”

  “You remember her name?”

  “Sure. She was in my creative writing class. A-plus student. Emma Franklin.”

  Fifty-five

  Findthemnow.com found Lincoln Wrentham in Stilton, New Jersey, a small rural community not far from Philadelphia. He was listed with directory assistance as L. Wrentham. When I called it was only my mentioning Emma’s name that prevented him from hanging up.

  “Is this Professor Lincoln Wrentham?”

  “No one’s called me that for a while, but, yes, I am. What’s this about? Who are you and what do you have to do with my daughter?”

  “My name’s Paula Holliday. I met your daughter in New York this week, sir, and I think she’s in trouble.”

  The description matched, even as far as her propensity for storytelling.

  Wrentham and Emma’s mother had met at an airport in Dallas. They were trapped in the Admiral’s Club after one inch of snow had halted flights in and out. All the business and golf magazines had been scarfed up by other stranded travelers and the only reading material left was a six-month-old copy of Parents magazine that neither wanted. They spent the next three nights in an airport hotel. “It was as typical a late-eighties meet-cute as you could get,” he said.

  “We were both devoted to our careers and swore we didn’t want children, but that changed when we found out about Emma. It was harder for Judith, of course. She went back to work soon after Emma was born, but every time she had a professional setback, she blamed our marriage. My research was bearing fruit and I was offered speaking engagements and appointments all over the country. I started to take them. That led to some indiscretions and our eventual divorce.”

  “I suppose I was a terrible husband. Judith was bitter. But I was a good father for as long as I had a relationship with Emma. She was nine when we split up. Judith remarried soon after and insisted on changing Emm
a’s last name to Franklin, her new husband’s name. I objected, but in the end she got her way. She’s a shrink. She was able to convince a judge it would be traumatic for a child of that age to have a different name from her mother and her stepfather. I only wanted what was best for Emma, so I knuckled under. Later on, I learned she told Emma that I’d wanted nothing to do with her and that’s why they changed her name. She’s poisoned that girl against me for years.”

  At some point, the former Mrs. Wrentham read that the professor was developing a formula that could revolutionize farming and gardening: a foolproof pest repellent. She told Emma that her biological father stood to make a fortune and that the girl was entitled to part of it. It was her inheritance.

  “Judith became obsessed with the millions she thought I’d make.”

  “So did you discover a foolproof pest repellent?”

  “Et tu, Ms. Holliday? Foolproof and safe are two different things. But it’s not ready for general use. The unintended ecological consequences could be disastrous. No responsible person would bring something into the market until it had been tested exhaustively.”

  Clearly we were dealing with a person who didn’t give a rap about the unintended ecological consequences if they’d killed one or maybe two people to get the formula.

  Emma had gone to see him about a year ago.

  “I don’t know how she found me. I haven’t made a secret of my whereabouts, but we haven’t exactly stayed in touch. She asked for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I asked her what kind of trouble she was in, and she said no trouble—she joked that it was just back allowance plus interest.”

  The girl seemed to think that would be pocket change for Wrentham, but despite what her mother had said, he claimed not to have it. He’d bought a small farm and set up his own research facility with the settlement the school gave him, and he lived modestly continuing to test his formula.

  “Emma will inherit whatever I own at the time of my death, but if I dropped dead tomorrow, it wouldn’t be in the millions of dollars as she and her mother think I’m sheltering. I’m afraid I’ll disappoint them again,” he said. “Lately, I’ve felt she was very close to me. I just hoped that as she got older, she’d want to hear my side of things, perhaps learn to forgive.”

  “Her proximity might have been more than a feeling, Professor Wrentham. Did you ever employ a young man named Garland Bleimeister?”

  “I did. I hire seasonal employees to help with the gardens and bring produce to the farmers markets. Garland was with me for three summers. Good boy. Although I know he had his issues. He ran down to Atlantic City more than I thought a boy his age would. At first, I thought it was for women.”

  “Sir, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Garland has been murdered.”

  “I heard.”

  “And Emma is somehow involved.”

  He hadn’t heard that. Wrentham agreed to take the next available flight from Philly to Westchester Airport, where Lucy and I would pick him up.

  “How do you know when the next flight is?” I asked.

  “I can be there in—two and a half hours. I have friends.”

  “He’s smart, single, straight, and has friends with private planes?” Lucy said. “If he can cook, I want him.”

  “I didn’t ask. So Emma and Garland were a couple, but she keeps that from Daddy. Garland needs money and Emma thinks she’ll just ask Daddy, but that doesn’t work. And,” I said, “given her mother’s influence—some might say brainwashing—Emma thinks he’s holding out on her. She and Garland steal Wrentham’s formula and offer it to someone who’ll pay handsomely but keep their names out of it by claiming to have invented it himself. They don’t want a long-term relationship, just a nice, simple payoff. And who knows—maybe Emma thinks her father will never find out and she can go back to the well at some point in the future after she dumps Garland.”

  “Isn’t that like kids nowadays?” she said. “No work ethic.”

  “Their buyers—and it’s got to be either the SlugFest or the Bambi-no people—initially said yes and then must have reneged on their agreement to pay, otherwise Garland would be lying on a beach somewhere instead of on a slab at the morgue.”

  “Who’s got the most dough?” Lucy asked.

  “Neither of them is rolling in it. The SlugFest guy looks a little more prosperous, but looks can be deceiving. And Bambi-no looked like a mom-and-pop operation. What if the payoff was contingent upon one of them getting a fat licensing agreement at the show?”

  “And Emma?” Lucy said.

  My guess was she pulled the strings but stayed in the background.

  “I think she sicced the cops on Jamal as a diversion because she was still trying to make a deal. She didn’t want the buyers arrested—even if they were killers—until she got her dough.”

  “I can’t wait to meet this girl—preferably with a plate-glass window between us.”

  “In addition to being an accomplished liar, Emma is a remarkable and gutsy young woman. Her father’s been called a genius and her mother is a vengeful psychiatrist. That could make you feel smarter than everyone else. Too smart to get caught,” I said. “Let’s hope she’s smart enough to not get herself—or us—killed.”

  Fifty-six

  “How do you know they’ll both be there?” Lucy asked.

  According to Jensen, Scott Reiger and the Shepards were both invited and had said yes. That was all we had to go on. Jean Moffitt’s party was a big event in gardening circles. It would be telling if the SlugFest or Bambi-no exhibitors didn’t show up.

  “Do we bring a house gift?”

  “No time to shop. Besides, the woman probably has everything she wants,” I said, packing my things. “There doesn’t seem to be much of a waiting period between her admiring something and acquiring it.”

  “I know where we can get some lovely plastic tablecloths. Gently used.” Lucy had ripped down the Pilgrims and turkeys as soon as she’d gotten home, and they were now crumpled in the corner of her bedroom, the duct tape still attached.

  “It’s a good thing I travel light,” I said, “because Spade and Archer will be taking up a good chunk of the backseat.” Lucy looked at me blankly.

  “The sculpture. Primo’s piece?”

  I’d been told people wore everything from overalls to long dresses to Mrs. Moffitt’s post–flower show shindigs, but the red dress was not going to make a third appearance quite so soon. I opted for something more conservative: my all-purpose black jacket and black slacks. Lucy was more adventurous and when the phone rang, we knew her outfit had passed muster with Harold, who’d been delighted to learn Lucy hadn’t sold her apartment to a paranoid woman with bizarre taste in window treatments.

  The umpteenth white jacket Lucy cinched over her green floral dress was the charm—Harold agreed, although he did ask if she had it in red—and she modeled for him in her tiny bedroom. It walked the line between sweet and creepy.

  “I can’t believe you’re taking fashion advice from an eighty-year-old man, whatever his past CV. I may need to rethink your position as my fashion guru.”

  “I don’t always take it.” She looked at my outfit. “Wouldn’t you like to borrow something more festive?” she asked. “You look a little downtown for a garden party.” I stood in front of the full-length mirror. She was right. Next to her, in her sunshiney outfit I looked like our high school gym teacher on her way to a funeral.

  “We’re just taking a short drive out of New York City. We’re not going back in time. Besides, there may be a confrontation at this party and I don’t plan to be wearing white gloves and a big hat if there is.”

  “If it’s more than verbal sparring, I’m not sure I’ll be much use.” She tossed me one of her castoff white jackets, which made me look like the staff I was expecting Mrs. Moffitt to have. All I needed was a carnation. Hi, I’m Paula your waitperson. Beverage? I eyed the military jacket that I’d worn to the Friday night reception.

  “I’ve been hustled,
haven’t I? Go ahead,” Lucy said. “It’s you. But it’s still downtown. Take a scarf. Something bright.” She rummaged through a fabric-covered box and tossed me a piece of red nubby silk with a dragon pattern on it that was so long it could have been worn as a sari. I wrapped it around my neck five or six times as instructed. Harold would have approved. J. C. heard us in the hallway and cracked the door just a bit until she was sure it was safe to open it all the way.

  “Where are you two off to?” she asked.

  “Garden party at Jean Moffitt’s.”

  She motioned for us to come closer—the Dons were home and the walls were notoriously thin. Stancik and Labidou had returned, asking her about Jamal and the girl, and the Dons were on high alert.

  “It’s a good thing I didn’t know anything. That way I didn’t have to lie.” She looked around, although it was just the three of us in the hallway.

  “At least I didn’t know anything when they asked me.”

  She asked us in and closed the door behind us. Sitting on her sofa was Emma Franklin.

  “Let’s see,” I said, “who are you today? Runaway princess? Alien life-form?”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I deserve it. I’m a liar. I’ve always been a liar. Ever since I was a child. I used to make up stories about my famous father and how he was doing top-secret work for the government and that was why he couldn’t live near us and I had to change my name. Later I said he was in the witness protection program. What was I supposed to say? That the great man dumped me and my mother so he could indulge his appetite for nineteen-year-old girls?”

  Lucy and J. C. were softening. I could see it around their eyes that had morphed from skeptical slits to moist, round pools. Any minute, one of them would put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and she would own them. She’d be off and running, spinning another tale that had elements of the truth in it, but could not strictly speaking be called the truth. I reserved judgment until I heard all of this version.