Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  “Oh,” Combs said, “I thought we were developing a strategy to assure that you got possession of the paintings.”

  “Sure, we need to do that,” Palmer replied. “But if I’m doing life without parole for murder in the state pen, I doubt that I would be particularly interested in who gets the paintings. I suspect I would have other more pressing concerns.”

  “I suppose that is true,” Combs replied, deliberately ignoring the sarcasm. “So, we need a strategy to free you of a criminal charge, and then we can work on the original strategy. Is that how you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ok. So why do you think Hadley will keep at it? From the police chief’s press conference, it sounded like the Hayes woman’s confession was conclusive. Her solution to her dilemma certainly was. The chief sounded like he was closing the books on this one and that there was every reason to do that. Even if Hadley didn’t buy it, who was going to listen to any alternative scenarios now?”

  “People will listen to Shane Hadley, Jay,” Palmer said. “His voice still rings with moral authority in this city. Maybe it should. And when we talked, he seemed to put a lot of stock in this mysterious witness to my late-night visit to uncle Billy.”

  “Any idea who the witness was?”

  “I don’t know,” Parker replied. “But I suspect it might be Billy Wayne’s next-door neighbor. He was always hanging around. The two of them may have been lovers. I suspect that’s the case.”

  “Name?”

  “Issy Esser. Skinny kid with a birthmark on his face. I think he lives next door to uncle Billy but not sure of the address. Shouldn’t be hard to find him, though.”

  Combs opened up a fresh legal pad and wrote the name on the front sheet along with some notes summarizing what Parker had told him.

  “Look, Parker, my friend,” Combs said. “I don’t want to get into the business of doing a field investigation of this thing. That’s not what I know best how to do. But I would like to talk to this Issy guy. Maybe I can at least learn something that will help to delineate the problem. Maybe you’re over-reacting. Maybe the only real problem you have is figuring out how to capture those paintings.”

  Palmer sighed deeply and looked out the window.

  “I hope to God you are right about that,” Palmer said.

  “Maybe I should talk with our local hero, Sherlock Shane, as well. What do you think?”

  “Probably a good idea. But if you do, be damned careful. He’s one clever guy.”

  “Cleverness is often a fatal character flaw, Parker. We lawyers love burying our talons deep into the soft parts of the clever ones. Fresh meat!”

  Neither man smiled.

  “We may need some help from our friends in the press,” Combs mumbled to himself and wrote something more on the legal pad.

  Faces, Shane thought.

  He was waiting for Hardy to arrive. He had set the small table on the Printers Alley deck with a fresh bottle of his favorite wine, two of his treasured Oxford crystal sherry glasses, and a small array of cheeses and biscuits that he discovered by rummaging about the fridge and the pantry. He was thinking about faces.

  A fact about the human race that had intrigued Shane from his youth was the uniqueness of faces. Every one of the billions of the species inhabiting the planet had a unique face. Granted, some were close to duplicates, like in ‘identical’ twins. But they were never identical. Each person’s face was their sole possession. Shane thought that faces must say something about the nature of individuals, who they were, what drove their behavior. And, perhaps, a specific expression of emotions—love, hate, innocence, guilt. Especially guilt. He also thought that if he studied a person’s face intensely enough, he might sense some of that.

  Parker Palmer had a rather long, sharp nose, thin lips, close-set eyes, and a small mouth that seemed to expand unrealistically when he smiled. His chin was deeply cleft and his forehead remarkably wrinkle-free without any obvious evidence of chemical injections. At the Hayes woman’s funeral, there was nothing detectably different about his face. It was just the face of Parker Palmer. An ordinary kind of face that didn’t seem to say anything other than I am Parker Palmer. Deal with it.

  Vernon LaVista, III, had a meaty face that fit with his overall meaty persona. Broad forehead, heavy, wrinkled simian-like brow, large mouth, thick lips. He had the look of one who enjoyed pounding on large rocks with sharp objects. At the funeral, the emotion Shane sensed was more boredom than anything else. He was going through the motions as best he could, but his heart, if he had one, was not in it.

  Then, there were the two masked funeral attendees.

  The woman who called herself SalomeMe had covered her face entirely with an impenetrable black veil. Why had she hidden her face? Was it only an expression of mourning for her dead friend? Or did she fear that exposing her face would expose a great deal more, personal things that she did not wish to share?

  And Issy Esser was born masked. The large port-wine birthmark that meandered amoeba-like about his face seemed to conceal other facial characteristics that might be revealing. At the funeral, the nevus appeared to have taken on a much darker hue as though reacting to physiologic events beyond the young man’s control. Maybe Issy Esser was born a pretender, masked from the reality of his behavior by the big red shroud draped across his face by the gods of biology.

  Faces, Shane thought. They each had a story to tell. They did it with widely varying styles and results. But faces were a surface phenomenon. Potentially important, but only one small piece of the puzzle.

  Shane had assembled enough of the pieces of the puzzle to see the picture. The fact that he had done that was satisfying. But the picture was not.

  Chapter 33

  “So,” Hardy Seltzer said, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, “was the old guy murdered or not?”

  “If you will be so kind as to grant me a liberal definition of the term, I am quite certain Bechman Warren Fitzwallington nee Billy Wayne Farmer was indeed murdered,” Shane replied with his characteristic wordy excess, reminiscent of Soleri’s too many notes criticism of Mozart.

  Seltzer sat in a heavy cast iron chair, facing Shane, across a wrought iron table. The two pieces of furniture sat on the Printers Alley deck, carefully positioned at the geographic center of the space, poised and ready at any moment to accommodate the whims of their owner. On a sunny afternoon, those whims predictably included a bottle of sherry, sometimes accompanied by a small snack, and in recent months almost always included his detective friend. This afternoon fit the expectations of anyone paying attention to such things.

  “So, like the chief, you buy the Hayes woman’s note.”

  “I buy most of it as technically true, but not like the chief’s far too simplistic interpretation.”

  “Most of it?”

  “I believe, Hardy, that the note is entirely accurate except for the first sentence.”

  “How can that be? The first sentence is the confession, and the only imaginable justification for her suicide. The rest of the note is providing the facts that make the confession credible.”

  “Need I lecture you yet again on the difference between perception and reality, my man? They are quite different phenomena, you know.”

  There was silence for a while as the men sipped their wine, and Hardy tried to understand what his friend was telling him. Sometimes Hardy felt frustrated by Shane’s deliberately obscure approach to revealing information. Of course, it was deliberate, calculated. Hardy realized that it was probably his friend’s way of stimulating him to think things through for himself. And it worked sometimes. Hardy had a good brain, but he had not been taught to use it to capacity. Mostly he had been expected to believe what he was told and to behave accordingly. He had made his way through life by usually doing that. His rekindled friendship with Shane was starting to reveal to Hardy some depths in himself that life so far had not stimulated him to explore.

  Why would Fiona Hayes make up such a story
if the whole reason for it wasn’t true? Hardy thought long and hard about that—and about perceptions and realities.

  “She thought she killed him, but she didn’t,” Hardy said. “That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it? But he’s dead. How do you explain that?”

  Shane didn’t respond immediately. He fondled his glass of wine and looked out over The Alley, splashed liberally with shards of afternoon sun. He was giving his friend space to consider the question he had asked. Hardy, anxious to hear the whole story, waited for Shane to respond.

  At last, Shane turned back to face Hardy, leaned toward him, and set his glass down. He placed both hands flat on the tabletop, spreading his thin fingers, and said, “I fear there are several questions the answers to which we may never know—not only how, but when and perhaps even why the old artist died. However, the available information suggests that Ms. Hayes did indeed steal in the middle of the night to the Fitzwallington house, creep into his dark bedroom and, finding him resting quietly, seized a pillow from his bed and held it forcibly over his face for several minutes. She then created the scene that she wished to be symbolic by exposing the old man’s body in all its glory and carefully folding and arranging the removed bed linens in order to make it clear to a careful observer that this was not the appearance of a setting in which an old man died of ‘natural causes.’”

  Hardy listened intently while rummaging about in his brain, hunting for an explanation. After a long pause, he said, “The old guy was already dead, right? Dead when Fiona Hayes arrived. He appeared to be sleeping, and in the dark night and her hurry to do the deed and get out, she didn’t realize that she was trying to kill a dead man.”

  “Very good, my man,” Shane said. “Very good. And I’m sure we would agree that attempting to kill a dead man is a truly futile act. Since futility is a poor motive for suicide, we assume that Ms. Hayes believed she had actually done the deed. Well, that and the autopsy findings or lack thereof.”

  “What about the autopsy findings?” Hardy asked.

  Shane didn’t answer but just sat there looking directly as his friend. Hardy contemplated Shane’s statement implying that the lack of findings at autopsy was important and searched his memory for what that might mean. After a few moments, he vaguely recalled that death by suffocation resulted in small areas of hemorrhage in the mucous membranes of the lips and mouth. He didn’t remember any description of such lesions in Fitzwallington’s autopsy report. But he had something less than unlimited confidence in the medical examiner’s appreciation of such details. Maybe he overlooked them. What else was missing? He wasn’t sure.

  “The medical examiner didn’t describe the mucosal petechiae usually present in a victim of strangling. Is that what you mean? If so, you may have greater confidence in Doc Jensen than I do. Maybe he overlooked such tiny details.”

  “I doubt that,” Shane responded. “I talked with him, and he convinced me that he had looked and that they were not present. There may be something else missing that belies Ms. Hayes’s description of events. Did your people examine the pillows on the artist’s bed? One of them lay on the floor in the pictures you took of the scene. Likely that was the non-murder weapon. Did someone examine it carefully?”

  “I am told they did and didn’t find anything of note. A down pillow with no stains or residual deposits of anything.”

  “A down pillow,” Shane repeated. “When one is suffocated with a down pillow, it is not rare that in the struggle bits of down are dislodged and deposited in the victim’s mouth and oral pharynx. The good doctor Jensen informs me that the artist’s oral cavities were completely devoid of down.”

  “Ok, I see how you conclude that Fiona Hayes didn’t kill Fitzwallington,” Seltzer said, nursing his wine, trying to make it as obvious as was proper that his glass was nearly empty. “But, come now, Shane. Do you really think that your story would fly in court? I mean, you have a confession by a person with a motive, even her own description of how she did it, who killed herself because of what she had done. Do you really believe that some non-findings at autopsy would carry the day instead of the hard evidence? I doubt that. I really do.”

  “Unless, of course, we identified the real killer,” Shane replied. “Humor me for a bit, my friend. Assume that the Hayes woman didn’t do it. Whom would you have next in line?”

  Hardy answered immediately, “Have to be Parker Palmer.”

  “And why are you so certain of that?”

  “He was obviously angling for possession of the Fitzwallington paintings with that lawsuit he filed challenging the legitimacy of the old man’s alleged daughter. From the story in the paper the other day, it looks like the artist may win, too. Apparently DNA paternity tests establish that the woman calling herself SalomeMe is not the old guy’s child. And then there’s Issy Esser’s sudden recollection of Palmer’s late-night visit to Fitzwallington the evening before he was discovered dead. Did you follow up with Esser?”

  “Yes, there is a story there. But first, a small revelation about Mr. Palmer. Although of possibly questionable ethical purity, I have it on good authority that the younger artist is in fact—by fact I mean, analysis of the relevant DNAs; such information is, I am told, as close to absolute truth as it is possible for information to be—a blood relative of Fitzwallington, possibly a nephew.”

  Seltzer stared at the face of his friend, trying to read his thoughts about this factual bombshell. Neither man spoke for a bit. These frequent lulls in the conversation seemed important as the story began to coalesce.

  “So,” Hardy said, continuing to stare at Shane’s face, “Parker Palmer may well be the sole living heir to whatever fortune his uncle left behind. Is that what you think? That could be a pretty convincing motive, it seems to me. Palmer is looking more and more like the killer.”

  “That does seem to be where the facts we have so far point, doesn’t it?”

  Shane picked up his glass from the table and wheeled over to the railing. There was some gathering foot traffic in The Alley, the usual early arrivers looking like the lost sheep they might well be, ambling about with no sense of purpose. The Alley was a good spot for lost sheep, going nowhere in particular, to wander. Much too early for the hard partiers.

  “But there is the rather sordid saga of the birthmarked one to deal with,” Shane said as he rolled back over to face Hardy across the table.

  Shane picked up the wine bottle and examined it, noting that they were close to exhausting their supply of his favorite beverage. This was his last bottle. KiKi should be bringing a new shipment of the wine from Oxford, thinly disguised as medical supplies, soon. Her desire to bring Shane pleasure sometimes overcame her characteristic scrupulous honesty; the ruse needed to get the wine was one example. Shane emptied the bottle into the two glasses.

  “According to Mr. Esser,” Shane began, “he was Fitzwallington’s lover. He was at the old artist’s house late on the evening in question. When Palmer showed up unexpectedly, Esser hid at some spot in the house where he could eavesdrop on Fitzwallington’s conversation with Palmer without being seen. The two men argued volubly for a bit. The topic under discussion was the old artist’s claim that he had filed the papers necessary to adopt his alleged daughter, which would restore her as his rightful heir, excluding Palmer. Palmer was very angry, apparently. They yelled at each other for a while and finally, according to Esser, Palmer left with Fitzwallington yelling after him.”

  “What did Esser do then?”

  “He says that he went home and did not return until the next morning when he discovered the lifeless remains of his neighbor and called in your people.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Actually, I do, although subsequent information may lead you to conclude that I am more gullible that is optimal for a careful investigator.”

  “Ok,” Hardy said. “Give me the additional information before my simple mind fixates on the obvious conclusion.”

  “A wise man,” Shane said. �
�Occam’s razor, employed prematurely, may not cut so cleanly.”

  Hardy took his small notebook from his shirt pocket, opened it, and wrote Occam’s razor at the end of a growing list of Shane’s words that he needed to look up.

  “It seems,” Shane continued, “that Mr. Esser is a pharmacist who until recently was employed in the research pharmacy at the university medical center.”

  “What’s a research pharmacy?”

  “I’m told that it is a special dispensary that manages drugs that are being used in human experiments. Those experiments require use of both active drug and placebo, inert sugar pills, which are formulated to look identical so that neither the people administering them nor the subjects receiving them know who is getting what. These are called double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. And I discovered by some judicious prying, that our Mr. Esser was recently discharged from his position at the university, for cause, in HR jargon. He did not tell me this when I talked with him. I could not find out what the cause was, and even with additional information, have no direct knowledge of it. However, I have what I believe to be a rather solid inference of some potential importance.”

  “Would you care to share that with me?”

  Hardy was losing patience with Shane’s predictably dilatory approach to storytelling. When Hardy had tried earlier to encourage Shane to more briefly condense his presentations of information, Shane had informed him that the solutions to many problems hid themselves in the minutiae (the word was on Hardy’s list). And the wine was running out.