The Odd Job

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Each of them was much like the others, each had for an ornament a round knob the size of a glass marble, covered with tiny jet beads. All their steel shanks were darkened by time, or by something. All the pins were in better repair than the one that Sarah had turned over to Lieutenant Harris, but none was anything special to look at. Thirty years’ worth of box rent for this? Paid by Dolores Tawne of her own free will? Preposterous! Paid by someone else? By whom?

  Dolores had let herself be gulled once, but that was for what she’d been led to believe was a grand and noble purpose; not to mention the side benefits to her personally: the wide scope she’d been given in exercising her phenomenal skills as a copyist and the gratification to her never-sated ego of hearing thousands of visitors over the years swoon over what they took to be a genuine Duccio, a Botticelli, a Rembrandt, a Manet, even a Sargent; but was in fact a genuine Dolores Tawne every time.

  The more Sarah thought about those fabulous stickpins, the less she could picture Dolores stealing them. Was it possible that the woman had been feather-headed enough to fall for another fairy tale? Had she let herself be manipulated into guarding stolen goods for that unconscionable rogue who was no doubt even now trying again to wangle a release from jail on the theory that money talked even louder than lawyers?

  Dolores, never one to look before she leaped, could easily have failed to realize until it was too late that once more she’d let herself in for something too hot to handle. She’d have been afraid to keep what wasn’t hers, but even more afraid that she’d be laying herself open to another charge of complicity if she tried to turn the stickpins over to the police. Just leaving them in her safe deposit box would have seemed the only sane and sensible thing to do. Notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, Dolores had always prided herself on being sane and sensible.

  As to this LaVerne box, Sarah didn’t know what to think. Dolores had had so little for herself, why would she have gone on paying rent on it year after year? Unless she’d made some kind of promise that she’d felt bound to keep; Dolores had always perceived herself as essentially a noble soul. She’d nobly nagged her poor soak of a brother until he’d put an end to her eternal badgering by walking in front of a Huntington Avenue streetcar. She’d nobly kept silent during all those years when she’d been painting her guts out—her own words, spoken in bitterness on the night of revelation—for an occasional pat on the head and a bottle of cheap champagne. Perhaps she’d kept guard over that enigmatic little key in the name of nobility, but what was there to be noble about in this pitiful handful of shabby relics?

  After a brief struggle, Sarah managed to separate one of the curled-up photographs from the roll and hold it down on the shelf. It showed what she supposed to be a line of chorus girls, seven of them, all wearing low-cut black evening gowns with flaring fishtail flounces of stiffened tulle, black cartwheel hats anchored almost vertically to one side of the head, and black mourning veils that obscured their features but were thrown nonchalantly back over their shoulders to reveal most but not quite all of their frontal elevations.

  Sarah recognized the chorines at once. She’d seen newspaper clippings of these same photos this morning in Dolores’s bottom drawer. She was wishing she’d brought the clippings along to read after dinner when Mrs. Fortune played a sharp tattoo on the cubicle door.

  “Finished, Mrs. Bittersohn? It’s two minutes to closing time.”

  “I’m coming.”

  Once Sarah let go of the photograph, it coiled itself back into a tight roll. She thrust it and the envelope that she hadn’t got to open into her handbag, locked the two boxes, and unhooked the door. The stickpins left her a bit qualmish, but they’d be as safe here as anywhere until she could get hold of Max and find out what to do about them.

  “Here you are, Mrs. Fortune. I’ve locked them both. I’ll have to come back when there’s more time.”

  Mrs. Fortune seemed less than enthralled by the prospect, she made quick work of tucking the two boxes away in their respective niches. “You’d better hurry. Go straight ahead as far as you can, then take a right. There’ll be a security guard on duty.”

  Officer Drummond, who hadn’t said a word since they’d entered the vault, offered a supporting arm; Sarah took it gladly and walked as fast as she could. By the time they got past the guard and out the door, her scraped knee was bleeding again.

  Drummond noticed. “You okay, Mrs. Bittersohn? I’d be glad to bring the cruiser around, but I sure don’t want to leave you standing here by yourself. Maybe the security guard—”

  Sarah Kelling had not been brought up to expect pampering. What if the blood of her forefathers did flow a little too freely just now? The plastic-covered patch was seeping again but she could deal with it when they got to the cruiser; she’d swiped a few tissues from Mrs. Fortune’s desk before they’d gone into the vault. And she didn’t feel a bit guilty. There had, after all, been more than a touch of the freebooter in some of those early Kellings. Also in some of the later Kellings, but they’d called their privateering by a less pejorative name.

  By the time she and Drummond got to where he’d parked the police car, she was thoroughly fagged and a trifle woozy, but that didn’t matter. She’d be back at Tulip Street soon, God and the traffic willing. She climbed ungracefully into the passenger seat and examined the damage as best she could without shocking Officer Drummond’s sensibilities. It wasn’t so bad, actually. Her new skirt would have to be cleaned before she could wear it again, but the bloodstains around the hem didn’t show up so badly on this dark-gray flannel as they would have on her good blue silk. She mustn’t forget to take her shopping bag, she hoped nobody had had the gall to pinch Theonia’s mohair stole. She made a pad of Mrs. Fortune’s tissues and held it against her oozing knee; by the time they got to Tulip Street, the bleeding had pretty much stopped.

  “You stay put, Mrs. Bittersohn, till I get out.”

  Officer Drummond came around to her side, opened the door, and gallantly assisted her to the sidewalk. She couldn’t let him go without once more expressing her gratitude. “I don’t know how to thank you, Officer Drummond, as you surely must realize by now. I’m going to phone Lieutenant Harris as soon as I get inside and let him know how you risked your life to save mine. That maniac could have killed us both, you know.”

  “The thought did cross my mind,” Drummond admitted, “but that was just part of my job. Want me to walk you up the stairs?”

  “No, I’ll be fine, thank you. There’s my butler coming, he’ll help me in. I do hope we meet again under less hair-raising circumstances.”

  “Don’t forget your shopping bag.”

  He handed it over, there was no time for further demonstrations of gratitude. Like most of Beacon Hill, Tulip Street was inconveniently narrow for the volume of traffic that crawled up it each day. A single car double-parked for the minute or two that it took to let out a passenger could evoke a cacophony of honks and curses all the way back to Charles Street.

  Even police cars were not immune, as several drivers were letting Officer Drummond know. He got back into his vehicle and broke the bottleneck by driving off with his siren howling. Charles bounded down the steps, relieved Sarah of her bags, and assisted her into the house as a good butler should, behaving as nothing more than an auxiliary mechanism constructed for the convenience of ladies in bloodstained skirts who were having trouble with their knees.

  Sarah most gratefully allowed him to lower her into the nearest chair. “Thank you, Charles. I’m going to change as soon as I can get my legs back under me. Have we anything other than salami sandwiches for dinner?”

  “Anticipating your query, I went down and bought us a barbecued chicken plus some veggies for a salad. There’s plenty of that good bread left. Would you care for an aperitif before you change? You look, if I may say so, as if you could use a wee dram of the mahster’s whiskey.”

  “That’s very perceptive of you, Charles. I’m going to take a quick shower first, though. G
ive me fifteen minutes or so.”

  Getting out of her clothes and washing the blood off her leg, not to mention the dust from Dolores’s studio and the general feeling of griminess, was an immense relief. The warm shower felt like a gift from the heavens. Sarah indulged herself in it for an extra few minutes regardless of the water bill, rubbed her fine, light-brown hair more or less dry, ran a comb through it, and poked at the natural waves that saved her so much in fuss, bother, and hairdressing fees. A clean nightgown, her all-concealing floor-length robe, a fresh gauze pad over the wounded knee and slippers on her feet were quite enough to cover the conventions as well as the wearer. Charles had been in too many backstage dressing rooms to go into a tizzy of disapproval over a housecoat at a potluck supper in her own house.

  Sarah noted that Charles had put her whiskey and water on a small table beside one of the library armchairs. She collapsed into the chair and picked up her glass. This was just what the doctor would have ordered if one had been called upon for a professional opinion, she decided. And think of the fee she’d saved.

  Sitting there easing her knee on a hassock and drinking her mild whiskey and water, Sarah felt as if this day had gone on forever. According to the clock on the mantelpiece it was a few minutes short of four in the afternoon. There was still time for a report to Lieutenant Harris; he ought to know what she and the invaluable Officer Drummond had been doing. When Charles came in to ask whether she’d like her drink refreshed, she shook her head.

  “I’m still working on this one, thanks. What I want you to do is bring me Max’s portable phone and Lieutenant Harris’s extension number at police headquarters. It’s on the Rolodex. I don’t want to get up because my knee still hurts, as you must have noticed.”

  “Would an ice pack help?”

  “I don’t know. Do we have one?”

  “There’s a package of frozen peas in the fridge that will work just as well and cost less. And you can eat them afterward.”

  “I’ll think about it. How are you at getting bloodstains out of wool, by the way? I hate to send my new skirt to the cleaner when I’ve only worn it once.”

  “No problem. I’ve played enough valets in my time to know the drill. Sponging with cold water, plus judicious use of a pressing cloth and a warm iron should do the trick easily enough. Where did you leave the skirt?”

  “Over the foot of our bed.” The “our,” of course, referred to Sarah’s absent spouse. “Since I really don’t have anything else that’s right for this weather, I’d be grateful if you could have it ready for me to wear tomorrow.”

  “Your wish is my command. I’d better call the cops first. No, by Jove, I’ll get you the mahster’s telephone first.”

  Having made sure that the hassock under Sarah’s afflicted limb was in the optimum position and Max’s cordless phone ready to her hand, Charles went to fetch the bloodstained skirt. Sarah managed all by herself to dial Lieutenant Harris’s number, only to find that he was even then on his way to deal with some malefaction heinous enough to warrant his personal attention. Having a phone in the car and an assistant to do the driving, however, he was quite ready to hear what Mrs. Bittersohn had to say. Her report was impressive enough to warrant his full attention.

  “I’ll make sure the incident goes on Drummond’s record, he’s about due for a promotion. But you’re okay, Mrs. Bittersohn?”

  “Thanks to Officer Drummond, yes, barring a banged-up knee and a certain amount of shock. I cannot for the life of me understand how Mrs. Tawne had become possessed of those stickpins, unless she’d inherited them from a rich uncle or was keeping them for somebody else, which would have been more like her.”

  “Any idea who the somebody might be?”

  “Only the one whom you put in jail, and that’s rather unlikely considering what the judge said at the sentencing. You may be interested to know that Officer Drummond and I found a second safe deposit key in Mrs. Tawne’s bottom dresser drawer, which turned out to fit a box that had been rented under a different name and paid for but never opened since 1967. What fascinates me is that there were six of those old-fashioned jet-trimmed hatpins in the box, and not much else. Would you by any chance happen to remember a showgirl from the sixties named LaVonne LaVerne?”

  “Not me, lady. I’ve only been on the force for nineteen years and I never ran around with showgirls. First my mother wouldn’t let me and now my wife won’t. What I could do is have a search made in the police records in case—” Whatever he said next was drowned out by what sounded to Sarah like a burst of machine-gun fire, “Oops, I’ve got to go. ’Bye, Mrs. Bittersohn.”

  Sarah laid Max’s cordless phone on the table beside her empty whiskey glass and shut her eyes.

  Chapter 14

  SARAH COULD HAVE SWORN she hadn’t been dozing for more than a few minutes, but it was three and a half minutes after five when the telephone woke her. She knew by instinct who was on the other end; she could picture Cousin Anne doing a countdown until five o’clock had struck and the cheap rate was on. Anne would have given herself an extra couple of minutes’ waiting time just in case her own clock happened to be running a trifle fast. Not that it ever had, but one never knew when it might, and an ounce of prevention was greatly to be recommended. Sarah picked up the phone and braced herself for a half hour of horticulture.

  “Hello, Anne.”

  “Sarah, how clever of you to know it was me. I hope this isn’t a bad time to call, but Percy isn’t home yet and I thought you’d like to know that Mr. Lomax and I have the terraced beds for the chrysanthemums dug up and he’s going to bring a load of fish tummies from the packing plant tomorrow morning.”

  Anne allowed herself the frivolity of a giggle. “That’s not what Mr. Lomax calls them. He really is funny, isn’t he. Anyway, we’re going to fork them in along with the peat moss while we’re fresh and rested, then have a bite of lunch and drive over to the nursery in his truck. I’ve alerted Mr. Greengage to set aside plenty of the right colors but of course it will take time to check them over one by one to be sure they’re in top condition and just the right blending of shades. I know he hates to see me come because I’m such a pest about insisting on the best, but it does save fuss and money in the long run.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Greengage wishes he had more customers like you,” Sarah lied politely, trying not to yawn as she spoke. “You’re a dear to go to all this trouble.”

  “And you’re a sweetheart to let me,” Anne bubbled. “I haven’t had so much fun in ages. I can’t wait to get at all that lovely free fertilizer. I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d ever have a whole virgin hillside to landscape. Perhaps ‘virgin’ isn’t quite the proper word, because there’s not much virginity around these days, but you know what I mean.”

  Anne was in a merry mood, all right. “Honestly, Sarah, I can feel myself just spreading my petals and opening out like a night-blooming cereus. A gardener does need a new challenge every so often, but you know Percy. Every time I suggest making a truly meaningful alteration at home, he gives me his old soft-soap routine about how proud he is of what we’ve created together. Which is a lot of fish tummies because Percy never lifts a finger if he can help it. I’m learning a lot from Mr. Lomax, I can tell you that.”

  This was pretty wild talk from Anne Kelling; it prompted Sarah to bring up a topic that was even more organic. “Anne, there’s something I’m longing to ask your advice about, though I’m not sure how to put it.” She paused to swallow the watery lees of her whiskey. “The thing of it is, Dolores Tawne’s death has put me in a most peculiar dilemma. I learned only this morning that Dolores had stipulated in her will that she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes scattered over the courtyard garden at the Wilkins Museum.”

  “I see nothing difficult about that, Sarah. Bone meal not only aids in improving soil quality, it also can be used to repel ants and keep them from spreading aphids, which I should think would be highly desirable in a public place like that. Furthermore, bone me
al keeps leaf rollers away from strawberry plants, though I don’t suppose leaf rollers are much of a factor at the Wilkins.”

  “But I’m not talking about the kind of bone meal one buys in bags from the garden shop,” Sarah protested. “Hasn’t Cousin Mabel ever shown you that urn on her mantelpiece that she keeps her parents’ ashes in? It’s all gritty little bits and pieces with chunks of bone big enough to be recognized as such. The Wilkins’s garden is the one place visitors always want most to see; what would they think if they were strolling among the flowers and all of a sudden up came the remains of a leg bone or an eye socket?”

  For some reason, Anne thought Sarah was being funny. “Sounds to me as though Mabel had patronized a cut-rate crematorium, which I wouldn’t put past her for one minute. Anyway, I don’t see the problem. All you need to do is run the ashes through your blender till they’re all ground down into tiny bits, put them in a box or something until it’s time for the gardeners to take up the fall flowers and prepare the beds for spring, and just dig in the ashes when nobody’s looking. It’s not as if you’ll get any great heaps of bone meal, you know. What I’d do would be just to pick a favorite spot of hers in one of the beds and scatter her there. I’d be willing to help if you’d like me to.”

  Sarah could feel the wooziness coming back. Anne saw the blender as a sensible, practical solution with no qualms attached. Dolores herself would no doubt have been willing to grind up any number of calcined bones without turning a hair if she’d thought the museum’s garden needed a pick-me-up. Whether the board of trustees could be induced to go along with such a plan was quite another matter.

  Then why tell them? Those who had shared with Dolores Tawne the actual day-to-day work of the museum would have to know, of course. And what was wrong with that? Couldn’t they organize a simple, private ceremony on a Monday when no visitors were admitted, and get the interment over in a seemly but expeditious way?