The Horse You Came in On

by Martha Grimes

  “So she would have had a chance of finishing her thesis before there was any further serious dispute. And, of course, she could simply have refused to let anyone else see it, couldn’t she? It belonged to her, after all. Now, this would be very clever: for her purposes, it makes no difference, aside from the intrinsic value of an authentic manuscript, if it is genuine since she’s attempting to demonstrate this point in her dissertation. Very clever. You invent a fake manuscript precisely in order to show it’s a fake.”

  “Yes, but if that’s the case,” said Wiggins, “why would anyone murder somebody in order to get their hands on a manuscript that’s not genuine?”

  “True.” Jury thought for a moment. “If there’s a question about its legitimacy . . . Why the church?”

  “Because people knew she’d be going there. January nineteenth is Poe’s birthday. Of course, I thought it was a peculiar spot to choose; it would be rather public, wouldn’t it?”

  Jury was looking down the bar; Patrick Muldare had left. “What about Patrick Muldare? This third set of initials. Why do you think she meant him?”

  Ellen shrugged. “I don’t know why. They were very good friends. Well, I think maybe lovers. And she worked at the shop his brother manages.”

  Wiggins had his pocket notebook out now. “Where would that be, miss?”

  “It’s sort of an offbeat antique shop . . . well, not really antiques, I guess. It’s called Nouveau Pauvre. It’s over on Howard, with all of those antique shops. It’s gotten to be kind of trendy. There’s a cafe now attached to it—the Hard Knocks, it’s called. Beverly worked there part-time. I don’t know if she worked in the shop or the cafe. Then there’s the professor I mentioned. She was Lamb’s assistant. I don’t know anything about her other friends.”

  Jury thought for a moment as he reread the Inquirer piece. “Philip Calvert.” He looked at Ellen. “Did she ever mention Philip Calvert to you?”

  “Not directly, no. But you see there that he worked for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Last semester Beverly was taking a course in art appreciation; the Barnes Foundation offers a number of courses. So it would be quite a coincidence if there wasn’t any connection.”

  “No one—the police, I expect I mean—has indicated in any way that the murders are connected.” Melrose had spread the articles out and was going from one to the other. He looked up at Ellen. “What information did Beverly Brown have the police didn’t?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jury was still studying the torn page. “She’s certainly linked the names. Assuming, of course, the initials stand for those three names.”

  “They must. I mean,” said Ellen, “it’s not just the newspaper clipping; but what other JJ could she mean with that hyphen between the J’s? John-Joy.”

  Jury leaned back. “I’m going to this little town in northern Pennsylvania tomorrow. Blaine, Pennsylvania. Perhaps I can manage to talk to the friend of Calvert’s at this Barnes Foundation on the way.”

  Wiggins asked, “Will you be needing me to go along, sir?” His tone suggested he clearly didn’t want to.

  “No. This is a holiday for you, Wiggins.”

  “I really would like to see the sights. Johns Hopkins, for instance.”

  “Go with me,” said Ellen. “I have to teach tomorrow morning.”

  “I was thinking more of the hospital.” Wiggins drank off the dregs of the white stuff.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Bromo-Seltzer, sir. Quite tasty, it is.”

  Jury rolled his eyes and shook his head; then he said to Melrose, “Perhaps you could call in at this antiques place where Beverly Brown found that trunk. Where was it again?” he asked Ellen.

  “Aliceanna Street. A couple of blocks over from here. And I’m through teaching at two, so afterwards you can meet me at Hopkins. Gilman Hall.”

  Some quiz show had now replaced the game, and the regulars at the bar were staring up at the television in that slightly slack-mouthed way of viewers who aren’t really interested but, having nothing else to watch, watch whatever’s available. The flickering bluish shadows gave their faces a slightly cyanotic appearance. At the rear of the room, a young guitarist was setting up a couple of portable amps and a mike.

  Jury looked at his watch. “It’s after one a.m. London time and we haven’t had any dinner yet. I’m starving. How about the rest of you?” He drank off his beer and started up. Ellen pulled him back down.

  “Not yet.” She was rooting through another bag now, this one full of books. “Before I eat, I’ve got to go and feed my cat.”

  Melrose glanced at the pouchlike bag. “It’s in there?”

  She shot a look at him. “Don’t be stupid. I’m looking for something.” She brought out a colorfully jacketed book and what appeared to be some more manuscript pages.

  “My book,” she said, indicating the manuscript.

  “Which one? The sausage one?”

  Ellen glared at him. “Sauvage Savant was not about sausages!”

  “You said it was a delicatessen. A deli somewhere in Brooklyn, you said.”

  “In Queens. Never mind about that. This is Doors.”

  “Doors?”

  “That’s the name of it. It’s the second one in the trilogy. After Windows,” she added.

  Jury picked up the gaudy-looking book, which appeared to be by some Italian, and asked, “What’s this all about, Ellen?”

  “She’s trying to steal Sweetie.”

  12

  Sweetie.

  “Is that your cat, miss?” asked Wiggins, who’d been about to go to the bar for another Bromo-Seltzer.

  “No. It’s my pro-tag-o-nist, Sergeant Wiggins.” Ellen all but hissed at him; her face flamed up and then saddened again.

  Unembarrassed by his error, Wiggins still looked sorrowful in the face of her distress. He went off to get another round of drinks.

  Melrose had never seen anyone look quite so woebegone as Ellen did at that moment, as she drew a worn copy of Windows from the bookbag. It probably wasn’t the best time for him to mention that a protagonist named “Sweetie” was causing him problems. He plucked up a few pages of manuscript, gave them a cursory reading, decided this book wouldn’t be any easier to understand than the first, and hoped he wouldn’t be expected to say anything intelligent.

  Apparently, Melrose’s intelligence was not in question—whether he had any, whether he didn’t. Ellen, the mind reader, said, as she fingered the copy of Windows fondly, “Some people have a hard time warming up to a character named Sweetie, which is understandable. Did you?”

  “Me? Well, I did wonder about . . .”

  “Not at all,” said Jury. “I think it’s a great name. I think it’s a great book, Ellen.”

  When did he . . . ? Melrose stared at Jury. On the plane! Jury’d read the whole book—well, it wasn’t very long—coming over here. No wonder Richard Jury was so successful with women and witnesses alike.

  “Well, but just look at this!” She held up the other book, which was wrapped in a glaring multicolored jacket with a Picasso-like fractured torso. Lovey was its title. That, thought Melrose, boded ill.

  “Listen.” Ellen began to read from Windows:

  Sweetie picked the white envelope from the carpet. It was damp from the humid morning. Sweetie felt her throat close as she pulled out the square of thick paper and saw the familiar handwriting. She read:

  “Lily: You must be careful.”

  Mid-morning, but Sweetie went upstairs to her bedroom and lay down while the morning turned into evening and that into night and that into another morning. All this time she lay there watching her ceiling. Sweetie had painted stars and a moon above her. The ceiling drifted above her with its silver stars and ghostly moon.

  “Now,” said Ellen, “listen to this.” She picked up the other book and opened it to a page marked with a paper clip.

  Lovey opened the door and looked up and down the street for whoever had rung. Heat, like
a warm hand, seemed to push her back, blossomed in her face. She saw no one. She walked out on the porch and nearly tripped over the wooden bench when she saw the package. It was the fifth one, addressed to her own fictional character, Baby. Lovey was afraid to touch it.

  Ellen slammed the book down on the table, shuddering the glasses there and causing several people at adjoining tables to stare. “She’s trying to turn Sweetie into Lovey and Lily into Baby. My God! ‘Her own fictional character, Baby’—she doesn’t have the remotest clue as to what’s going on in Windows!”

  “But that’s terrible, Ellen.” Melrose was truly incensed. “And this got published? How can someone get away with such a blatant case of literary theft?”

  “It happens all the time. If it’s not word-for-word, it’s nearly impossible to prove.”

  Melrose looked at the cover again. “Vittoria Della Salvina—she’s Italian?”

  “She’s from Queens. Her name is really Vicki Salva. God! What a nonentity she was.” Ellen was grabbing at her hair, pulling at the roots. “A total zero. I should have known.”

  Jury was riffling through the pages. Probably have the whole thing read and indexed by the time Wiggins got back with the drinks. Melrose sighed. Why hadn’t he paid more attention? Well, he’d certainly read assiduously from here on in.

  “You mean you know this woman?” asked Jury.

  Her hands still on the sides of her head, Ellen nodded, as if the hands were moving the head, puppet-wise. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Two years ago I taught at the New School. You know, in Manhattan. I taught writing. It was just after Windows was published. This Vicki Salva sat right in the front row, sucking up to me like you wouldn’t believe. She’d hang around before class and after class—talk, talk, talk, about Windows and how marvellous it was. Talk, talk about my style, about Sweetie, about the theme. The point is, it was pretty obvious she’d read it; in other words, she certainly had what the law likes to call ‘access,’ usually the hardest thing to prove. But even with proof of that I can’t get at her. I’ve been to two lawyers. You have no idea how hard it is to prove something like this.”

  “But, my lord,” said Melrose, “it’s so damned obvious. You win this prestigious award and this—person . . . Hell’s bells, it hardly bears thinking about.” He added, “Poe, at least, is dead. He doesn’t have to suffer plagiarizing vampires.”

  “Not only that, but her writing’s terrible,” said Jury. “ ‘Heat blossomed’? The thing is, she’s such a rotten writer and you’re such a good one—that’s probably one reason people aren’t noticing.”

  “It sucks. The whole thing absolutely sucks.” Ellen laid her head down on her outstretched arm.

  This, thought Melrose, was really what she’d called about and why she’d wanted him to come to the States. “Never mind. Nobody will pay any attention to this tripe. She’s got this book published on the strength of yours. There’s an end to it.”

  “Oh, but it isn’t. She’ll do it again. I’m writing a trilogy with Sweetie in it.” She pointed to the manuscript of Doors.

  “Oh, surely she wouldn’t try it on again, miss,” said Wiggins, downing half of his drink.

  “Why not? She got away with it once, didn’t she?”

  Melrose looked at Jury. “What are you going to do about it?”

  Jury smiled. “I’m afraid it isn’t a case for the CID.”

  “When her second book comes out, it will be,” said Ellen.

  13

  The door of the shop on Aliceanna Street was flanked by cinder blocks doing service as planters for some frostbitten poinsettias probably left over from the Christmas rush. Although a rush at the shop on Aliceanna Street would have been a surprise, given the crowded assortment of objects in the window, in which hung a blue neon half-moon, throbbing off and on, along with a cabalistic design underneath it. Together, they gave the impression of a fortune-teller’s premises rather than an antique dealer’s. In front of this window clutter stood a girl, her face squashed against the glass and framed with both hands, peering in. When she found Melrose standing next to her, she looked around impatiently, and he saw she was quite young, her eyes like currants in a doughy face and with a very unpleasant expression. Interrupted in her survey of the window’s contents, she cast him a nasty look and walked off down the pavement.

  A bell jangled over the door as Melrose walked into a well of cool shadows. No one was about, although something had stirred the curtain over the door at the back of the shop and set the metal curtain rings clicking. He thought he heard the clatter of crockery from somewhere beyond that drapery, and in the dimness he could distinguish a large bird cage, from which came a sound like claws on sandpaper.

  It was not a large room, and it was stuffed—stuffed with small pieces of dark and undistinguished furniture, more secondhand than antique, he would have thought; glassy-looking necklaces and cameo brooches arranged in black velvet trays; racks of vintage clothing; carnival glass and a rather cheap-looking set of willow-patterned china; books, stacks of magazines. From a spill of books on a large oak bookshelf that helped to prop up the old velvets and organdies, Melrose took out one bound in leather the color of winter moss and thick with a gold edging. The pages crackled as he leafed through them. Dark, necromantic symbols and sinister designs of demonlike figures stared back at him. He put that book back and tried another, equally depressing, a story in woodcuts that depicted some poor wretch’s progress up a rocky promontory with a sack on his back.

  The walls, from which portraits of two censorious women (sisters, surely) looked down, hugging their prayerbooks to their chests and wearing lace mittens, dripped curses and benedictions: nasty looking African masks hung between old prints of pale saints, their heads ringed in milky aureoles. A plaster Virgin Mary in faded blue seemed unaware of the fat cherubs playfully dragging at her gown and apparently trying to call her from her matins.

  On a mahogany desk lit by a green glass-globed floor lamp were a stereopticon, some slides, and a small pamphlet, ribbon-tied. This was a souvenir booklet—or so it announced itself—of the St. James Hotel, on Charles Street. There was a picture of that hotel on the front.

  Melrose read the introduction, written by the St. James’s then-manager, a Mr. Adams, who had taken some care to detail the many pleasant hours that awaited the visitor to the St. James Hotel. Mr. Adams’s prose was languid, almost British in its wordiness, as though he were in no special hurry to survey the many advantages of staying in his hotel.

  To help the guests in their visit to Baltimore, Mr. Adams had thoughtfully included photos of points of interest in the city. One could stroll through the booklet’s text and pictures, stopping here at Druid Hill Park, there at Monument Square, in strangely untrafficked places, when one thought of the vast crowds now to be seen in Harborplace. A tiny ensemble of people against the snowbank of Monument Square and a child with a hoop on the corner.

  There were pictures of the lobby and of the dining room, where one could obtain dinner with wine for one dollar. And a room for a dollar and a half.

  Melrose took some change from his pocket. He looked at the several quarters, dimes, and nickels. Imagine! For this one could stay at the St. James Hotel. One could have a complete meal with wine!

  He picked up the stereopticon and wiped it and the dusty brown pictures with his handkerchief. Then he inserted one in front of the shovel-like lens. A railway station, the old Baltimore and Ohio station, sprang into three-dimensional relief. A little group of four—no, five—people had either just got off the train or were about to board it.

  He slotted in another picture and saw a hansom cab carrying several people—it might even have been the same group—along the cobbled street, the station now in the far distance.

  Next there was a shot of a wide lobby, potted palms against pillars and another little band of people, who might easily have been guests at the St. James, he thought; they might have come, pleasantly full, from their one-dollar table d’hôte dinner.

&n
bsp; Had these old pictures been arranged to tell a sort of tale? Or was the story purely accidental, the order supplied by himself? The point, he thought, was an important one, although he didn’t know why.

  Yet he wanted to join the little group, to pick up his bag, climb into the cab, feel the wheels’ rackety progress over the cobbles, and find himself, together with the others, disgorged from the cab into this well of sunshine that lay across the pavement in front of the St. James. The six of them would walk through its cool lobby up to the desk, where Mr. Adams would greet them cordially and hand each a ribbon-tied souvenir.

  Then down to the dining room. Half the tables would be full, and all would be white-clothed. There would be a broth to start, followed by a roast. He enjoyed his new companions’ conversation, though he could not hear what he or they said to one another. In the silence, curtains billowed, lips moved, waitresses darted—

  He came out of this fugue to see that although he still held the stereopticon, he had not replaced the last picture, so that he was looking through the shovellike holder at the face of a girl who seemed to have sprung up in all of her dimensions in the same way as the station, the horse and cab, the people. Her face was caught in the latticework of shadows created by the effect of a lighted wall sconce.

  “Oh. Hullo,” he said to her, embarrassed he’d been caught dreaming.

  “I put those that way,” she said.

  What was she talking about? Ah, the photographs. So the question was answered; the arrangement hadn’t been random.

  She was standing at his side, fingering the pictures. “The ones who got off the train look like the ones in the hotel. She’s wearing this hat.” The girl slotted a picture into the wire holder and held it up for Melrose’s inspection.

  Melrose frowned. Was he to validate this child’s fantasy? To appease her, he sighed and looked through the stereopticon. “Well, but how can you be sure they got off the train? Maybe they’re waiting for one.” Oh, good lord, why was he arguing?