The Odd Job

by Charlotte MacLeod

  The first time around, Sarah had more or less invited herself to tea. A man she’d known and detested had shown up and Lydia Ouspenska had walked off with Dolores’s tea cakes wrapped up in one of Dolores’s napkins. The other visits had taken place unannounced, two nights in a row. Both nights, Dolores had answered the door in a plissé kimono, a headful of old-fashioned metal crimpers, and a raging temper.

  Each time, the studio had been in next-to-perfect order. What would it look like now, with policemen’s footprints in the dust on the floor and nobody bothering to wipe them up? Sarah remembered a line from The Mayor of Casterbridge: “And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened, and things a’ didn’t wish seen, anybody will see; and her little wishes and ways will be all as nothing.”

  Dolores had had her wishes and ways, she’d voiced them often enough. How could nursing the peacocks and dusting Madam Wilkins’s bibelots have led to a hatpin through the neck in the flower-filled courtyard of the museum that had been her great and perhaps her only love?

  The will that Harris had turned up and not stopped to read might possibly give some kind of clue. Harris’s note had said only that he’d found one in Mrs. Tawne’s top dresser drawer, glanced through it, and left it for the executrix to deal with. As was right and proper, but Sarah wondered why Dolores had left so important a document—important to herself, at any rate—in so easily accessible a place. It wasn’t as if she’d lived like a hermit when she was not at the museum. She’d entertained a member of the board of directors to tea on a number of occasions that Sarah knew about; her brother would no doubt have been a frequent visitor, and so had Lydia Ouspenska during the years when she’d occupied the studio underneath Dolores’s and scraped out a precarious living by painting antique Byzantine icons.

  Lydia would not have been above snooping, nor would she have refrained from broadcasting anything that caught her interest to anybody who’d stop to listen. Max’s friend Bill Jones, for instance; Bill always liked to know things. Sarah had no idea where Bill was sleeping these days, but he’d often shared Lydia’s bed before she’d deserted la vie bohème in favor of steady employment, a comfortable home with congenial people, and three square meals a day. Not that Bill would have passed on any gossip about either Lydia or Dolores except possibly to Max Bittersohn or Brooks Kelling, but there it was.

  If only Max would come home! Or Brooks or Theonia, or even Jesse. The city had taken her summer away; Sarah had been back here only since Sunday afternoon and she was sick of it already. Why couldn’t she simply dump this job on somebody else, stop at the Rivkins’ hired cottage to watch Davy commune with his friend the minnow, drive home to Ireson’s Landing and let Anne teach her how to bed out chrysanthemums? Sarah wanted her husband. She wanted her child, she wanted her house, she wanted her own life. But she must not take what she wanted until she’d earned it; because that was how she’d been reared. And it served her right for not having the intestinal fortitude to squirm free of the Puritan ethic.

  Having sublimated her snit, Sarah took Dolores’s keys out of Harris’s envelope and braced herself to enter the studio. She must forget that the murdered woman had eaten at her table on several occasions. But how could she not remember that last nighttime meeting when they’d rousted Dolores out of bed and Max had accidentally thrown the artist into ecstasy by mentioning what superb copies she’d made of the Wilkins’s greatest treasures; how she’d rushed in her nightgown and curlers to put on the teakettle and rushed back with a trayful of chocolate marshmallow coconut fluffs; and how Max had recoiled in horror when she’d urged him to eat one?

  Dolores had been lifted to the heights and dashed to the nethermost pit. She’d climbed out and dusted herself off and picked up the pieces and got on with her job. She had, in her way, been an admirable person.

  Like Miss Tremblay, Sarah thought. Admirable people did not always get the best seats in the house or the biggest slice of the loaf. Perhaps, in a way, it was not so bad that Dolores Agnew Tawne had been spared further humiliation. Sarah could not for the life of her see how Dolores could ever have worked in anything like harmony with the Wilkins’s new head of trustees.

  Elwyn Fleesom Turbot had already made it plain that his was going to be the hand that cracked the whip. Dolores Agnew Tawne had appointed herself chief bullier ages ago. She’d known everything there was to know about the Wilkins. It had been her knowledge, her experience, her skill that had kept the museum going so well for so long, especially through the dark years that by now had shown signs of brightening. Turbot hadn’t a clue about running a museum, yet he had the power to call the shots. He’d have driven Dolores until she balked, then fired her for insubordination and incompetence.

  The giving or withholding of pensions was, according to the museum’s charter, at the discretion of the board of trustees. Mr. Fitzroy had got one, and deserved it. An elderly, unattractive woman who’d threatened Turbot’s supremacy, as Dolores certainly would have, could have been turned out to beg on the streets and not one of the bemused old trustees would have ventured to question the big man’s judgment. But this was no time to sit and fume about what might have been. Officer Drummond was double-parking at the front door since there was no empty space at the curb.

  “Why don’t you get out and wait for me inside, Mrs. Bittersohn? I’ll find a place to put the car.”

  “I could go on up to the studio,” Sarah told him. “I know where it is.”

  “I’d rather you waited for me in the lobby, if you don’t mind. My orders were to stick with you as much as possible. Here’s your shopping bag.”

  Sarah couldn’t see why he hadn’t just locked it in the cruiser for the short time, she hoped, that they’d be here; but no doubt Officer Drummond knew best. She took the bag, hit the right key on the second try, and let herself into the lobby. About two minutes later, Drummond rapped on the door and called, “Mrs. Bittersohn?”

  “That was quick,” she remarked.

  The policeman shrugged. “Can’t arrest a cop on duty for a necessary parking violation. Where do we go?”

  “Upstairs and to the right, as I recall.”

  There was an elevator in the foyer, but Sarah didn’t bother with it. Her feet seemed to know the way well enough, they stopped at the door that displayed Dolores Agnew Tawne’s card in a tarnished brass holder. She sorted out the right key and let herself and Drummond in, half expecting to hear the thump of sensible shoes climbing the short flight of stairs from the studio up to the small balcony where they’d entered. Dolores would have invited them in and galloped back down to put on the kettle and get out the chocolate marshmallow coconut puffs, unless the policeman’s uniform put her off. If she’d been here.

  Sarah knew that an arrangement had been worked out with the interim board of trustees that each of Dolores’s meticulous copies would be returned to her as soon as its original was back in the museum. There was no reason why Dolores shouldn’t have displayed her own paintings in her own studio, Sarah was surprised that the artist hadn’t hung more of them. By now she must have amassed an impressive collection.

  Sarah was both amused and touched to see that Dolores had given pride of place to a full-figure portrait of one Ernestina Kelling, whose husband had been an attaché at the Court of St. James while John Adams was Minister Plenipotentiary, trying to form fresh diplomatic links between their former mother country and the by-then extant United States of America.

  Why Ernestina, middle-aged, lantern-jawed, and tough as a minuteman’s boot, had elected to have herself portrayed by the fashionable Mr. Romney as Venus, complete with doves and roses, was anybody’s guess. Why Dolores Tawne had never caught on that the supposedly original portrait Madam Wilkins had bought for her palazzo had been even then no more than a pretty good copy of Romney’s less than first-rate work was a question to which not even Max Bittersohn had found an answer.

  The actual simon-pure, incontrovertible Romney that Romney himself had painted was in Kel
ling hands, as it had been ever since Ernestina had got into a hairtangle with Abigail Adams and been sent home with her doves and roses and a piece of Abigail’s mind. For two centuries the genuine portrait had hung over one Kelling mantelpiece or another, most lately in Sarah’s Aunt Emma’s spacious drawing room. The alleged Romney that was neither a Romney nor a Tawne had easily been reclaimed by the museum once a too-gullible art collector had been made to realize that this particular Ernestina was both stolen and bogus. The painting was back at the Wilkins now, and few visitors knew or cared that she was just one in a series of Ernestinas.

  Regardless of its debatable provenance, Dolores had given the Tawne Romney her best shot, skimping neither the scrubbiest feather on the skinniest dove, the most wanly blushing petal on the sickliest rose, nor the calculating glint in Ernestina’s eye. She had worked hard on her subject, probably harder than Romney had done; a painter who’d preferred pretty young women as models and had managed to squeeze in nine thousand sittings in twenty years would hardly have taken time to dawdle over a subject so little to his taste as a middle-aged termagant from Boston, Massachusetts.

  Dolores had produced a thoroughly professional duplicate, using the right pigments for the period on an old canvas of the right size that must have taken her ages to locate. Once the painting was done and dry, she’d imparted by dark and devious methods exactly the right patina of antiquity, dirty enough but not too dirty. She’d considered Ernestina one of her all-time greats, she’d been entitled to get some enjoyment out of having her work to herself at last. Poor soul, she’d paid for it dearly enough.

  Dolores Agnew Tawne had really been a superb copyist, far too good to have been let run loose in a small museum where she’d had things pretty much under her own control. It was a marvel that someone so uniquely talented and so insurmountably gullible had been allowed to stay alive as long as she had. Why wasn’t Dolores murdered sooner?

  What a shocking notion to be entertaining, here in this studio that had been Dolores’s home for so many years. But one did have to wonder how she’d survived that fantastic debacle seven years ago, had managed by sheer gall to keep her foothold at the Wilkins and promote herself, for all practical purposes, to being its curator.

  One thing that Dolores had never done at the Wilkins, so far as Sarah knew, was to paint. Every stroke in that prodigious body of fakery had been laid on here in this studio, much of it done at night under special lamps, getting touched up in the morning’s light, and overlaid with enough tobacco-spit brown varnish to conceal any slight deviations from the original. But what had she done lately? The air here now wasn’t heavy with odors of oil and turpentine, the way it used to be. Even that half-finished canvas of a dead pheasant on a silver platter that Dolores had kept as a prop to hide what she was really up to from the few acquaintances who happened to wander in was missing. Had she given up painting entirely?

  The tools of her trade were still here: the big easel, the battered wooden table beside it that held tubes of paint in orderly rows, a scraped-down palette, a jug of brushes. But there was no canvas on the easel, no preliminary sketches, not even a stick of charcoal. This wasn’t a working arrangement but a still life, a dead thing. The whole setup ought to be taken away and burned. Sarah turned her back on the easel and considered the rest of the studio.

  Over by the staircase, Dolores had arranged a sort of living-room area with one comfortable easy chair and a rickety wrought-iron floor lamp beside it, a couple of wooden chairs with thinly padded seats that must once have belonged to somebody’s dining set, and a nondescript coffee table about which nothing much could be said except that it looked sturdy enough to hold a tea tray laden with plenty of chocolate marshmallow coconut puffs.

  Sarah had a memory for detail. These chairs had been shabby the day she’d first visited the studio; another seven years of city grime had not improved them any. Nor had the glare from the oversized windows that had been such a boon to so many artists over the years, even though they were heavily coated with dust from the constant flow of traffic going on and off the turnpike. There was no way to keep them clean, neither the windows themselves nor the thin curtains that were used in studios to soften the light or let in more according to the artist’s need. Sarah remembered Dolores’s curtains as having been a queasy yellowish gray in contrast to the immaculate room. The curtains she was seeing now were almost chalk-white.

  That was mildly interesting. These curtains couldn’t have been hung very long ago or they’d have been filthy from the smog. The fact that Dolores had gone to the bother and expense of putting them up suggested that she’d had no plans to move even though the rent must be fairly impressive by now.

  Dolores had been a frugal woman; she’d have had to be on what the Wilkins paid her. She’d known it was hopeless to keep curtains clean here, she couldn’t need them as light-breakers if she wasn’t painting. As long as they weren’t actually falling apart, she’d have been more inclined to leave them alone. Did the fact that she’d so recently invested in a new set suggest that she’d been intending to get back to her easel? Had she already taken Elwyn Fleesom Turbot’s measure and realized that she wouldn’t be able to run him the way she’d ran the interim board? Could she have borne to fall back into being just another employee now that she’d had her taste of power? Had it actually penetrated her stubborn head that she might soon be out of a job, and had she been preparing to meet the crisis with her paintbrush at the ready?

  Chapter 11

  YEARS AGO, BEFORE SHE’D been recruited to the Wilkins by a far-seeing crook who’d been astute enough to recognize an almost unique talent going to waste, Dolores Agnew Tawne had been in some demand as a painter of meticulously rendered, deadly dull portraits of company executives and deceased relations, all done from photographs. Had it been in Dolores’s mind to work up a new clientele in that same field? Surely she wouldn’t have dared go back to copying old masters.

  “Anything you want me for, Mrs. Bittersohn?”

  “Oh.” Sarah had almost forgotten that Officer Drummond was with her, it was hardly fair to keep the man standing around with nothing to do. “I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to get my bearings, it’s so long since I’ve been here. Why don’t you sit down in that armchair and take a rest while I poke around? It shouldn’t take long.”

  She found pretty much what she’d expected. Partitioned off from the big studio was a slit of a bedroom with space for no more than a single bed, a tallish but not very wide chest of drawers, and a narrow standing cupboard of enameled steel that held Dolores’s few beige or tan dresses and skirts, her sturdy tan working shoes and a slightly less utilitarian pair for dress-up, a robe, a nightgown, a pair of house slippers, and a couple of felt hats, one beige, one tan.

  Off the bedroom was an even tinier kitchenette, barely more than a cubbyhole with a midget porcelain sink, a hot plate, a toaster oven, and a half-sized electric refrigerator doing extra duty as a food safe and a work surface. Some shelves above the sink held cups, saucers, plates, stainless-steel knives, forks, and spoons for four, a few cooking utensils, and a modest stock of groceries, including an unopened package of chocolate marshmallow coconut puffs. Sarah felt an insane impulse to have them buried with the woman who’d never gotten to eat them.

  The studio had no bathroom facilities. Dolores had joked to Sarah once about having to go upstairs and across the hall in bathrobe and slippers with her soap and towel and hope that none of the neighbors would catch her in the altogether, taking a sponge bath and shampoo in a long black sink that had been installed for more art-related purposes. She’d lived that way for so long that she’d come to take such makeshifts as a matter of course.

  Sarah wished she hadn’t thought about Dolores having to squat in the sink, she was not liking this invasion of a dead woman’s domain. Even though she had not only a right but a duty to be here, even though nobody was left to intrude upon, she still felt like an intruder. The mere thought of having to open that top dresser d
rawer was repugnant; she knew she was only staving off the moment of truth when she decided first to look for all those other paintings of Dolores’s that Max had returned after he’d retrieved the originals.

  What had Dolores done with them? Not under the bed; all Sarah could see was a film of dust that had already begun to collect. Not in the studio, certainly not in that pocket-handkerchief of a kitchenette. They must be in the storage closet, there was nowhere else. Officer Drummond was by now comfortably asleep in the easy chair, she slipped past him and climbed the stairs on tiptoe.

  There they were, all shapes and sizes, not in the elaborate frames that were by now back on the original paintings, but still on their wooden stretchers, stacked with their faces against the closet walls. She turned one around. It was blank. So was the next, and so were the rest, every single one of them. These were obviously old canvases, the sort Dolores had prowled the junk shops for at her wicked patron’s behest. Each had been sanded down to a smooth surface and primed with a fresh white ground. Dolores must have done this herself, but why?

  One explanation might be that Dolores had gone back to picking up old canvases because she was not about to waste money on new ones, assuming she had in fact meant to resume painting. A pretty scene copied off a postcard might sell better if it was dressed up to look like an antique; an elderly artist who could be on the verge of losing her job had to think of these things. Dolores had always looked upon her work for the Wilkins as a sacred trust, even though it must have taken a good deal of denial to persuade herself that she wasn’t involved in anything fishy.

  As to these canvases, Sarah was only guessing about what Dolores might have planned to do with them; but it was impossible to believe that they were copies that Max had returned to her. Dolores had been proud of her work, as well she deserved to be, considering how many years it had hoodwinked the art-seeking public. She’d never have scraped the canvases down and painted over them just to save a few dollars. Then where were her copies?