The Bernini Bust ja-3

by Iain Pears

  'Of course; nothing wrong with it. Not as far as I've been able to find out, anyway, and believe me I've looked. And even if there was, that slimy ball of fat would do anything to keep on Arthur's right side.'

  'When I met you briefly before the party you described your husband as a sweet old man,' Argyll reminded her. 'That doesn't fit too well with all this.'

  'So, sometimes I exaggerate, for appearances' sake. He was a mean old bastard. Please don't get me wrong; I'm sorry he's dead. But I can't deny that life will be much more pleasant without him. And that goes for everyone who worked for him or was related to him. Not just me.'

  'So what happens to the museum now? I mean, if I understand rightly, your husband died before transferring most of his money to the museum trust and you inherit the entire estate.'

  She gave a stiff little smile. It seemed pretty obvious what was going to happen to the museum, if she had her way.

  'I hope you don't mind me asking, but if the transfer had gone ahead, you wouldn't have been left penniless, would you? Not like your stepson.'

  Anne Moresby seemed to think this a bizarre question, one which she had never considered before.

  'No, not penniless,' she replied reflectively. 'No, not at all. I gather that I would have inherited the residue of the estate. About five hundred million.'

  'That's quite enough to make ends meet, isn't it?'

  Evidently, she didn't follow Flavia's line of reasoning. 'Well, yes. So what?'

  'So why battle for all the rest?'

  'Oh. Because it's mine. As the woman who put up with him and his meanness for all these years. You're right - it's far more money than I can spend. But that's not the point. If the museum continues, it'll enshrine his name in perpetuity. The great art lover, the great philanthropist. The great man. Phooey. And all those leeches, hanging around him, just to get their hands on his wallet, to aggrandise themselves. Phooey again. All conceit and fraud and dishonesty. That's why I want to stop it. Because, dammit, I married that man because I loved him, once upon a time. And nobody believed me. Not Arthur, or his son, or Thanet, or Langton. I hated them all for that. And eventually I stopped believing it myself. If they insisted I married him for money, then so be it. But in that case, I want it all, and I'm damn well going to get it.'

  An awkward pause followed this. Argyll, never comfortable with other people's outbursts, frowned heavily and pretended not to be there. Flavia, less typically, was also thrown off-balance and temporarily forgot what her line of questioning was. Eventually she retreated back to safer, less complex ground.

  'I see,' she said. 'Yes. Well, about this bust, then. I don't understand. I mean, you turned up and shouted at Thanet about it, but how did you know it was coming, and why did you reckon it was stolen or something?'

  'Oh, hell. There's no secret about that. I overheard Arthur talking to Langton about it. Arthur was exultant, punching his fist into his palm with those childish gestures businessmen have.'

  'He said it was stolen?'

  'Oh, no. But it wouldn't have been the first time things turned up in unorthodox circumstances, and it was obvious something fishy was going on.'

  'Why?'

  'Because Arthur had that gleeful look on his face that he only got when he'd shafted someone.'

  'And when was this, exactly?'

  'Christ, I don't know. Couple of months back. I was drunk at the time. I often am, you know.'

  'And what did they say?'

  She shook her head. 'I didn't hear. Just that Langton was to get that bust and was to use someone or other. That man whose body they found. The one at the museum.'

  'Use him for what?'

  She shrugged to indicate that she hadn't heard.

  'You knew about the trust for the museum?'

  She nodded.

  'And you knew it was unbreakable once it was set up?'

  'No such thing as an unbreakable trust.'

  'But if Thanet was a trustee and could veto . . .'

  'The director of the museum is a trustee,' she corrected. 'A new director might see differently.'

  'Like Langton, for example?'

  'Oh, no. Not him. He's as bad as Thanet in his way.'

  She smiled as sweetly as she could manage.

  'How do you know all these details?'

  'David Barclay told me.'

  'That was kind of him,' Flavia said. The comment got no reaction. 'When was this?'

  'Oh, last Wednesday, I reckon. Typical of Arthur; intimate family business and I get filled in by a lawyer.'

  So to speak, Flavia thought. 'And you protested about it,' she went on.

  'Christ, no. That wasn't the way to get anywhere with him. No, I told him it was a wonderful idea; but I did want to undermine Thanet, and the museum, to make Arthur disenchanted with the whole scheme.'

  'Who did have a reason to bean him?' Argyll asked.

  She shrugged again, as though the murder of her husband was a minor detail in the overall scheme of things. 'Dunno. If you wondered who would like to kill him, then the list is endless. I can't think of anyone who liked him at all, and an enormous list of people who didn't. But I suppose you mean who had a good reason to do it. No idea. That slug of a son was at the party, wasn't he?'

  Argyll nodded.

  'A bum,' she said with a sneer that indicated that she had almost as low an opinion of junior as she had of senior. 'Pure and simple. Beer, checked shirts and bar-room brawls. And the traditional Moresby knowledge of the value of money. I'd put my money on him.'

  She saw Flavia calculating dates. 'Oh, he's nothing to do with me. Arthur's third wife. The third of five. Anabel, her name. Wilting ninny. She died, typically. Junior has the worst characteristics of both of them. The only thing going for him was the simple fact that Arthur loathed the very sight of him.'

  'Happy family,' Argyll said.

  'That's us. The all American nightmare.'

  'Were you, ah, happily married?'

  She looked at him suspiciously. 'And what does that mean?'

  'Well . . .'he began.

  'Listen. I'll tell you once, and once only. I'm sick to death of people prying into my life. That unshaven creep from the police department has been insinuating nonsense as well. My private life is none of your business, and it certainly isn't connected in any way with the death of my husband. Got that?'

  'Oh, right-ho,' he said, wishing he hadn't asked.

  She stubbed out her cigarette with ferocity. 'I reckon I've spent enough time talking to you. See yourself out.' And with that she rose uncertainly from the sofa and ostentatiously opened the door for them to go.

  'Well done, Jonathan. Soul of tact and discretion as usual,' Flavia said as they emerged into the sunlight once more.

  'Sorry.'

  'Oh well, it doesn't matter. I don't suppose she would have told us anything useful, anyway. Besides, we're late for lunch.'

  Chapter Eleven

  As far as Argyll was concerned, lunch epitomised why he preferred the company of detective Joe Morelli to that of someone like Samuel Thanet. The latter would have opted for some tastefully constituted French affair, all candles, expensive wine list and a somewhat unctuous atmosphere, but Morelli, coming from a very different background, had a very different notion of food. He took Argyll and Flavia to a run-down shack called Leo's Place.

  It looked a bit like a truck stop, and most of the clientele were as big as their trucks. The sort of people who, if they had ever heard of chloresterol, dedicated their lives to ingesting as much of the stuff as possible. Not a candle in sight, except when the power failed. A wine list commendable in its brevity, waiters who neither introduced themselves nor sneered at you during the entire meal, and some of the best food Flavia had ever tasted. Oysters and ribs, washed down with martinis, perhaps make up America's greatest contribution to western civilisation. Martinis certainly do. Argyll's enthusiasm made Morelli warm to him a little. Not many people drank martinis anymore, he said gloomily. Country was going to hel
l.

  While Argyll dug his beak into a second and beamed happily, Flavia ate and questioned. What were the police going to do now?

  'Looks as though we're going to arrest Barclay and Anne Moresby, I guess,' he said.

  'But will you manage to convict them?'

  'I hope so. Of course, I would prefer to wait a bit . . .'

  'Why?'

  'Because I'm not convinced we have enough. Persuading a jury is going to require more work. But those above me are getting alarmed. They want something to hand to the press. Did you know we live in a pressocracy in this country?'

  'Pardon?'

  'Pressocracy. Everything is run by, and organised for the convenience of, the press. Television, rather. They need an arrest to keep interest up, so I'm put under pressure to give them one.'

  'Hmm. So, what's the line? Ooh. How nice. More oysters.'

  Morelli leant back in his chair, wiped his mouth daintily with his napkin and reeled off his reasoning. And very good it was too, to Flavia's way of thinking. Motive was simple; Moresby probably knew his wife was having an affair, and was not the sort of person to take that lying down. He'd got through five wives already, and could easily go on to number six. Combined with setting up the trust for the museum, Anne Moresby's financial future was crumbling before her very eyes.

  'Now we know that Anne Moresby herself could not have killed him, if your Alfredo is telling the truth and she was in her car heading home at the time. But she must have talked it over with Barclay and given him her gun. The opportunity came when Moresby summoned Barclay to see him in Thanet's office. He went over and was told that a) he was fired and b) Anne Moresby was out as well. Barclay was within a heartbeat of getting his hands on billions – he only had to wait for Moresby to drop dead, then he could marry the grieving widow, and it's party time. What does he do? You could never talk a man like Moresby round when his mind was made up, so it was now or never. So Barclay shoots the old man, and runs back to say that when he got there he discovered the murder. No trust - and Barclay must have been one of the very few to know that the papers had not in fact been signed - so Anne Moresby inherits the lot. Success.'

  There was a pause as Argyll finished off the oysters and Flavia looked uncomfortable.

  'What's the matter?' Morelli asked.

  'Quite a lot of things,' she said reluctantly.

  'Such as?'

  'The camera, for one thing. That was knocked out sometime before. Before anybody could possibly have known Moresby might go to Thanet's office. So your notion of a sudden decision on Barclay's part doesn't hold up.'

  'If I remember correctly,' Argyll added uncertainly, 'people at the party reckoned there was only about five minutes between Barclay getting his phone call and rushing back.'

  'That's very approximate. It was actually eight minutes.'

  'Well. The point is,' Argyll said, taking over for once, 'that it was a busy few minutes, in your account. To walk over, have an argument, shoot Moresby, plan to do something about di Souza -why? for heaven's sake - steal the bust - why again? - run back and raise the alarm. I mean, is that really possible? I suppose it could be done, but only if it was rehearsed. Quite apart from the fact that Langton was outside the museum most of the time and should have seen all this coming and going, and I don't see how either Anne Moresby or Barclay slipped off to shoot Hector and dump his body. And on top of that . . .'

  'Yeah, OK. I got the point.' Morelli shifted uneasily in his seat as he mentally visualised a defence lawyer in court saying the same thing, with the jury nodding sagely in agreement.

  'And there's something else,' Flavia went on, disregarding the American's baleful look in her effort to refocus attention on the matter which concerned her. 'If the theft of the bust was planned in advance, it would have to have been by someone who knew where it was. At the time the camera was knocked out only Thanet and Langton knew that.'

  'And Streeter, of course,' Argyll chipped in. 'As security man. Didn't you say he was out of sight when the murder took place?'

  'Can't we keep this goddamned bust out of it for a while?' Morelli asked a little plaintively. Much of what they had said had passed through his own mind in the past hour or so, but he'd decided that the only way of proceeding was to tackle the two elements of the events separately.

  'It's a very big thing to forget. I think I'd leave Anne Moresby alone for a bit, if I were you.'

  'Hmm. That's going to go down well with my superiors. They'll crucify me.'

  'You'll be saving them from a nasty mistake.'

  'What's that got to do with it?'

  'Can't you tell them you're on the verge of getting hundred per cent proof evidence?'

  'We're not.'

  'No, but we could try a little harder. I think we should go and visit Mr. Streeter.'

  To say that Robert Streeter lived in a small, whitewashed house in a quiet, palm-lined street would say nothing about his accommodation. There was scarcely a single house in the whole area which wasn't whitewashed and almost no streets that weren't quiet and lined with palm trees. Not in the respectable bits, anyway. The expert would have noticed a few details that might have indicated something about his way of life. The absence of a basketball hoop on the garage indicated that he had no adolescent children in the house; the lack of a manicured patch of lawn out front suggested he was no gardener and that his more fastidious neighbours, who snipped - or had someone snip - each blade of grass as it poked its well-watered head above two-eighths of an inch, might have regarded this as a sign of rampant bohemianism. But apart from that there was almost nothing to indicate the character of the occupant, and neither Flavia nor Argyll would have picked up the signs even had they been present.

  Streeter took a long time to answer the doorbell, and appeared in a bad mood when he finally opened the door. This, they assumed, was because he'd been having an afternoon siesta, but in that they were wrong as well. Despite living in a Mediterranean climate custom-built for afternoon siestas, Californians don't waste their time in this fashion. Besides, he was much too engrossed in an earnest, not to say frantic, discussion with Langton when the doorbell went to have much peace of mind left over for such frivolities.

  Indeed, he and Langton had just got around to the central issue. Streeter, who was thoroughly upset about the performance of his camera system and feeling that, as a security expert, he ought to do a little amateur investigation of his own, had just popped the question. In fact, as Morelli's tireless investigators had realised, he had been trotting around interrogating just about everybody in the museum with varying degrees of subtlety. As had everybody else. Neither he, nor anybody else had much to show for the effort, but it made them all feel a lot better. Besides, nobody was much in the mood for real work.

  Streeter's own investigation had left him feeling a little vulnerable. Having laboured so tirelessly to secure his position, he had this impression that recent events threatened to undermine it all. He had been thinking and plotting furiously and the general aim was now clear; that is, to make sure he was on the right side of whoever it was that emerged triumphant at the end. In order to achieve this, he had to know who was responsible. And strong suspicions were forming rapidly. In the course of several sleepless nights in the past week, he had constructed innumerable nightmarish scenarios, all of which ended in unemployment - and some where the outcome was much worse.

  So, with a good deal more directness than was his custom, he set about Langton when the latter flew back from Rome. Had it occurred to the Englishman, he asked, who stood to benefit from the death of Arthur Moresby? And who were the only people who could have killed him?

  Not perhaps the most sophisticated way of approaching a potential witness who had demonstrated, in Rome at least, his complete unwillingness to answer questions. Langton, a man who had spent much of his time travelling the world and negotiating the purchase of pictures, was much too self-possessed to be caught out answering questions gratuitously.

  He reacted
with a lightly amused smile. Yes, he replied indulgently. As far as he could see, only Anne Moresby benefited. And only three people could have killed him, that is, di Souza, who was with Moresby before the murder, David Barclay, summoned over at about the time it took place, and himself, sitting outside the museum and in a fine position to nip over and do the deed. But, he went on, unless someone connected Mrs. Moresby's motive with everybody else's opportunity, there was not much chance of any progress. He did not presume to speak for the rest - although Hector di Souza's own murder seemed to indicate a possible degree of innocence there, but he saw no connection with David Barclay. As for himself, Streeter's own cameras picked him up sitting placidly outside the museum. Whatever else he might have done, he had not murdered Arthur Moresby. Or anyone else either, he added as an afterthought. Just in case someone might start worrying about loopholes.

  It didn't get him much further, Streeter thought as he walked to the door to answer the sudden peal of the bell. But if the more obvious suspects were knocked out, the police would start looking at alternatives. He was very aware – having checked himself– that he had, quite fortuitously, been in the toilet at about the time of the murder. For reasons of human dignity, there were no cameras in the toilets. A grave mistake, that. His movements were thus unaccounted for. Which left his final defence; it was just a pity it was such a dangerous weapon.

  'Sorry if we've come at a bad time,' Flavia said brightly as the door swung open and she introduced herself.

  If Langton was never caught on the hop, Streeter was. He mumbled something that sounded like not at all, do come in, and was indicating the way to the little plot of concrete out the back before it had properly dawned on him that he should have told both of them to go away because they had no authority to ask anybody questions.

  'Well, what a surprise,' Flavia said as she saw Langton and started drawing exactly the sort of conclusions that Streeter so much feared. 'I thought you were in Rome. You do get around, don't you?'

  Both she and Argyll sat themselves down and accepted the offer of a beer. It was a hot afternoon, and this knocked Argyll out of most of the conversation. While Flavia began round two of her battle with Langton, he concentrated on trying to get at a profoundly annoying itch five inches down from the top of his plaster cast.