by Matt Witten
Sorry about the elderly guy, but I was in a hurry.
I needed to go back to Saratoga and kick some ass.
The return train was miraculously free of engine troubles, diagnosed or otherwise, so I made it back to Saratoga just after nine o'clock. I called Andrea from the Mobil station south of town to make sure all was quiet on the home front, and it turned out Dave was over at the house watching TV with the kids. My family was in good hands. Maybe Dave wasn't Mel Gibson, but at least he was a good solid Jimmy Stewart.
Andrea commiserated with me about not being able to get hold of Penn's application, then asked, "So where are you calling from?"
"Um," I began, and then, "I'm on the pay phone in the train. We're still south of Hudson. Be back in about an hour and a half, okay?"
"Okay, honey. Love you."
"Love you too, honey," I replied, and hung up, feeling guilty. Oh well, it wasn't like I was having an affair or anything. I just didn't want to get into an argument with her about what I was about to do. If I was going to try out my Philip Marlowe imitation, I needed some freedom to maneuver.
I borrowed a phone book from the Mobil cashier, found Gretchen Lang's address, and chugged over there. Gretchen lived in an old Victorian on North Broadway, which was emphatically the right end of Broadway, where heirs, heiresses, CEOs, and others of their ilk reside during the racing season. I knew Gretchen was well off, but I had no idea she was this well off. The front facade of her mansion was a wild mélange of Corinthian columns, captain's walks, French doors, and intricate flourishes painted in "traditional Saratoga colors"—purple, white, and green. It looked kind of like a giant gingerbread house, and would have been cutesy if it weren't so grand.
Gretchen's salary at the Arts Council must be pretty minimal, so I speculated, as I walked up the long tulip-fringed path to her front door, that her husband must be a robber baron businessman type. Moneymaker husband, artistic wife—a classic combo dating back 50,000 years to when some cavewoman in southern France figured out how to draw woolly mammoths on the wall with berry juice while her man went off hunting the real thing.
The wind shook the leaves of Gretchen's stately oak trees. It was a cold spring night, the kind that gets people talking about that big May blizzard of '78. I missed my jacket, the one I'd left behind in the burning Arts Council. Hopefully, it had been reduced to ashes before any cops got hold of it.
The outdoor light came on before I made it to the door, which made me think someone was home. But then I realized it was just one of those motion-sensitive anti-crime gizmos. In this part of Saratoga, homeowners don't forget to lock their doors. Some of them have bathroom fixtures that cost more than my entire house.
I rang the doorbell and waited. There was an exquisite antique stained-glass window next to the door depicting Noah's ark, and I tried looking through it, but I couldn't see inside. It wasn't even 9:30 yet, so Gretchen couldn't be asleep. Actually, it was hard to picture Gretchen ever being asleep; she seemed like way too much of a fireball to lie still long enough.
I rang the bell again and waited some more, blowing on my hands to keep warm, then headed back down the path. Gretchen's husband was probably away on a business trip—I recalled her mentioning that he was gone more often than not—and Gretchen must be out at a gallery opening or something. I'd have to try again in the morning. I stopped briefly to admire Gretchen's black tulips...
And that's when I noticed, from a corner of my eye, the curtains in a darkened window upstairs part ever so slightly. I lifted my hand and waved. But the curtains closed right back up.
So I marched to the front door and rang the doorbell a third time, then a fourth, but still no one answered. The wind was swirling and rain started coming again, and I was hopping up and down to keep from freezing. This was incredibly aggravating. How was I ever going to solve Donald Penn's murder if I couldn't even get Gretchen to open her front door? I stared up at those window curtains on the second floor and, without looking, pounded at the door angrily.
Only I missed the door. I was so riled up, I pounded the antique stained-glass window.
And broke it.
Instantly an alarm bell shrieked and kept on shrieking. The Noah's ark had sprung a leak right in the middle, and two giraffes and two elephants had fallen out. Yet more work for the glazier, and expensive work, at that. I was tempted to make a run for it, but just then Gretchen came racing toward me up the front hall, barefoot and wearing a white terrycloth bathrobe.
She stabbed some buttons on the wall to shut off the alarm, then turned on me, furious. "Do you know how much that window costs?" she screamed.
No, and I didn't want to know. I started to apologize, but some imp must have grabbed hold of my tongue, because what I actually said in a blustery John Wayne voice was, "You know, we never did get a chance to talk about Donald Penn." I guess I was following the principle that the best defense is a good offense.
Gretchen stared at me, speechless, then managed to stutter, "I should have you arrested!"
"We'll go to jail together, Gretchen. Obstruction of justice. You stole Donald Penn's application from NYFA."
Gretchen's mandible fell. Then it came back up again. "Where did you get that ludicrous idea?"
"From the Marx Brothers who gave you the file," I answered coolly.
The mandible fell again, but not as far this time, and it came back up a lot quicker. A complacent sneer formed on Gretchen's sweet, pleasant face. I'd never seen her sneer like this before. What else had I missed? "You're saying someone saw me steal something?" Gretchen asked, sarcasm dripping from her long teeth. "Someone actually observed me, what, putting something in my purse? And so now I'm going to jail? Is that what you're saying?"
I rocked back on my heels. No, Groucho Girl hadn't observed Gretchen stealing that file, and Gretchen knew it. As I tortured my brain for a clever comeback, a cop car roared up the driveway. In this part of town the cops responded quickly.
I looked back at Gretchen. She smiled grimly, enjoying watching me squirm. I was about to get busted for malicious vandalism or whatever the hell they call it. God, how much of my hard-won nest egg would this stupid stained glass window cost me? For all I knew about antiques, we were talking fifty grand. To say nothing of lawyers' fees and court costs.
What a fool. I had completely misplayed my hand. I thought I was holding the ace of trumps, and it turned out to be just a lousy joker.
The cop came out of his car. Oh, no. Just my luck, it was the same fat, bald, trigger-happy cop who'd taken a pot shot at me outside the Arts Council that night. He'd better not recognize me.
Accurately reading the tension between Gretchen and me, Mr. Fat, Bald, and Trigger-Happy kept his hand close to his gun as he headed up the path toward us. "You all right, Mrs. Lang?"
Gretchen bared her teeth in a leonine grin. She was about to throw me to the cops, and she was loving every minute. I tried a desperate shot in the dark. I hissed at her sharply from the side of my mouth, "I know all about the conflict of interest. You want me to spread the word?"
Like I say, it was just a desperate shot. It was just a wild half-court heave as the final buzzer sounded.
It was just fucking inspired.
Gretchen's mandible fell, and this time it stayed down.
Fat, Bald, and Trigger-Happy came cautiously closer. "Mrs. Lang, you okay?"
Gretchen quickly stepped outside and stood right in front of the broken window so the cop wouldn't see it. "I'm fine," she said, flashing him one of her patented warm smiles. "Just a false alarm, that's all."
Fat, Bald, and Trigger-Happy eyed us uneasily. "You sure?"
"Absolutely. I'm so sorry I made you come all the way out here for nothing."
The cop knew something was wrong, but didn't know what to do about it. He peered at me, and I could see a confused glimmer of almost-recognition on his face as he tried to remember where he'd seen me before. Finally he gave up, going back to his car and driving off while Gretchen invited me in
side.
Not too graciously, I might add. In fact, she was downright rude about it.
But hey, you can't please everybody. At least I was making the glaziers happy.
19
Gretchen led me into her living room. I was intrigued to find the walls covered by bizarre postmodern art, a hodgepodge of odd geometric shapes and skewed perspectives. Despite Gretchen's professed admiration for pointillist fat people, I would have expected her personal tastes to be utterly middlebrow, with an emphasis on still lifes of peaches. The lady was full of surprises.
Speaking of surprises, why did she get so spooked when I threw up that half-court shot about "conflict of interest"? I mean, sure, if people found out her panelists had cheated and given themselves grants without following the legal guidelines, it would look bad. But how much of a threat would that be to Gretchen herself?
Actually, maybe a big one, I realized. It could discredit Gretchen sufficiently that NYFA would stop giving her any grant money to disburse. That would take away a major source of her power.
And then it suddenly dawned on me: If Gretchen got into a controversy over misuse of NYFA funds, she might very well have other grant money withdrawn from her. The NEA and the New York State Council of the Arts were both helping Gretchen build her beloved Cultural Arts Center. What if they decided they'd better steer clear of her and turn off the public money hose? And then how would Gretchen's private donors react, once she got the smell of corruption on her?
Were we talking about a serious domino effect here? Might those piddling eighteen-hundred-dollar grants that the panelists awarded themselves spell the death of Gretchen's lifelong dream to be in charge of her very own highly glamorous Cultural Arts Center?
And most important of all, was I the first person who'd confronted Gretchen about this—or the second? Was this what The Penn had blackmailed her about?
And how would Gretchen react if she saw her grand and glorious lifelong dream in danger of being destroyed by some pathetic sniveling bum, some caffeine-addled frustrated writer with one moth-eaten pair of pants to his name, blackmailing her about a two-bit, no-account "conflict of interest"? Would she have killed him?
I sank into an antique leather easy chair and eyed Gretchen, wondering who this middle-aged woman really was. She scowled back at me. "How dare you break my stained glass like that?"
The thing was, I really admired Gretchen. Like The Penn, she had devoted her life to art. But now was no time to be a sensitive guy, so I stuck to my Philip Marlowe routine and shrugged. "I'm sure you're insured."
Gretchen set off on an angry tirade. "All you people, you artists, you think I'm so rich. I am not rich!"
Sure, and Nixon was not a crook. I lifted an eyebrow or two at her, possibly even three. This fancy mansion, these paintings on the wall by artists with unpronounceable French and German names...
Gretchen read my mind, and gave a frustrated growl. "Damn it, that's my husband's money on the wall, not mine. He won't let me use his money for the Arts Council. He won't even let me buy any paintings from Saratoga artists. Hell, I have to pay my lousy twenty-five-dollar membership fee for the Arts Council out of my own pocket!"
I didn't know where this was going, but I had a feeling it was going somewhere, so I kept quiet and listened as Gretchen ranted on. "People act like I could just pay for the new Arts Center myself if I wanted. Hah! If you knew how much spending money I get, you'd laugh! I bet your wife gets more cash than I do. I bet she got more even before you wrote that stupid screenplay of yours."
On the other hand, maybe this wasn't going somewhere. As I'd discovered earlier, Gretchen was a master of distraction. "Why don't we talk about that conflict of interest," I told her. And about whether you killed Penn, I thought to myself, but didn't say it. I figured I'd ease into it later, try to catch her off-guard somehow. Hey, it worked for Perry Mason.
Gretchen banged her fist on the coffee table. "I can't believe you'd turn against me like this. I've spent fifteen years trying to help people like you! I'm the best friend Saratoga artists ever had!"
It was true, and I felt like a heel. Speaking of heels, I looked down at Gretchen's feet. They looked about size eight to me, but as I've said before, I'm not a foot man. Meanwhile, Gretchen kept right on. "Do you know how important that Arts Center is going to be for the artists of this—"
"Spare me the speech, Gretchen," I interrupted.
"Look, why do you even care about some little—"
"Just tell me the truth, and I won't do anything to hurt you."
She slammed the table again. Pretty hard, too; maybe she was taking boxing lessons from Bonnie. "Christ, you are such a typical artist." For someone who supposedly loved artists so much, she sure made it sound like an insult. "You have no idea how the world works, you are totally clueless! I had no choice! I had to make that deal with the mayor!"
Come again? Deal with the mayor?
Gretchen read the puzzlement on my face, but misunderstood the reason for it. "Get real," she snarled. "You think those jerks at City Hall would have given me that building for a dollar a year if I didn't grease their palms a little? Forget about it!"
Grease their palms?
Gretchen was really rolling now, nostrils flaring and lips curling in disgust. "Those philistines don't care about art. They go to The Nutcracker once a year and that's it! This is a bunch of Chamber of Commerce know-nothings we're talking about! And they run this town! So what do you expect me to do? If you want to play ball with the big boys, you gotta get up there and swing the bat!"
She poked a finger at my face and raved on. "How much money are we talking anyway?" This question threw me—did Gretchen think I was blackmailing her for money now?—but then she kept going and I realized she was just being rhetorical. "Even if we did the whole competitive bidding thing like we were supposed to, the renovation still would've cost at least two hundred grand, for those stupid handicapped ramps, elevators, a million other things. So when I gave the contract to the mayor's buddy from Hudson Falls for two fifty, all we're talking is a measly fifty grand at the max. Big deal. So the mayor and his buddy get forty, a couple of councilmen split the rest, and the city of Saratoga gets a terrific state-of-the-art Arts Center right on Broadway that'll benefit everyone in this entire town! So what's the harm in that? Why don't you quit being so goddamn self-righteous and tell me: Who's getting hurt?"
She eyed me challengingly, waiting. But I was still trying to get my bearings.
This was too weird. So I'd been right about Gretchen getting caught up in a conflict of interest, but I'd been wrong about which conflict of interest. No, cut the euphemisms, this was much worse than that—it was downright bribery.
"Why don't you tell me exactly how this deal worked?" I said.
"What, are you gonna blackmail me now?" Gretchen snapped.
Aha! "So this is what Penn was blackmailing you about?" Gretchen didn't answer. "How did he find out about this 'deal'?"
Gretchen snorted disgustedly, but then something seemed to fall apart inside her. She leaned back heavily in her chair and rubbed her forehead. All of a sudden she looked tired and vulnerable, sitting there in her white terrycloth bathrobe. "The little turd listened through the floorboards. Heard me talking to the mayor."
"And that's when he started blackmailing you for free coffee?"
Gretchen nodded. "Yeah, about six months ago. Knocked on the Arts Council door one day while I was eating lunch." She gave a loud, rueful sigh, then looked up at me pleadingly. "Honestly, Jacob, I didn't feel like I was doing anything wrong. Legally maybe, but not morally."
I kept my sympathy valve clamped down tight. "So what did he say to you?"
She shook her head unhappily. "Not much. It was bizarre. He kind of shuffled in and stared down at the floor. Then he mumbled the whole thing in this strange, real quiet monotone. How he knew about my deal with the mayor. But if I gave him a hot cup of coffee every morning, he'd keep his mouth shut." Gretchen laughed bitterly. "He
said it had to be Ethiopian, in an eight-ounce cup. And it had to be ready at nine o'clock sharp every morning." Her eyes appealed to me. "Can you believe it? Every day I had to come in at eight forty-five to make coffee for that awful creep. Thank God we finally got an intern to make it for him. Otherwise I would have killed him, I swear."
Now or never, I thought. I hit Gretchen with my toughest Marcia Clark look and said slowly, "You would have killed him?"
Gretchen stared at me.
"Did you kill him?" I asked.
Her face was a study in disbelief. "Is that what this is all about? You think I killed him?"
"Yes, I do." And I was only half lying.
"The man had a heart attack."
"You poisoned his coffee."
"You're crazy."
"I don't think so. You killed him to shut him up, and then you burglarized my house to get rid of his manuscript." Gretchen's mouth opened and then closed again, like a goldfish. "And you're the one who threw that brick in Molly Otis's window, aren't you? And you burned down the Arts Council office."
Gretchen gave me an incredulous look. "Why would I burn down my own office?"
"Because you were afraid I might find something in Penn's apartment upstairs."
Gretchen stood up and wrapped her terrycloth robe tightly around her. Her voice was cold and dignified. "I would like you to leave my house."
"No." Time for another shot in the dark. "Not until you give me Donald Penn's grant application."
She scowled at me. "I don't have it."
Maybe she was telling the truth, maybe not. I pushed harder. "Then I'm going to the police."
Gretchen hesitated for a quick moment—just long enough so I knew she was lying. "I told you, I don't have it."
I shoved myself out of the easy chair and stood toe to toe with her. "Gretchen, I don't give a shit about your deal with the mayor. It's not my fucking problem. But Donald Penn is my problem. Frankly I don't know if you killed him, but I intend to find out who did. And if you don't help me, you're going down. You better believe that, lady. You're going down so far you'll forget what up looked like."