Almost True Confessions

by Jane O'Connor

  Ret: I am willing to pay very handsomely for it.

  No, that wasn’t Ret-speak at all. Rannie revised Ret’s line.

  Ret: Look, would a million dollars—half for you, half for the museum—change anybody’s mind?

  Bibi: Hmmm. Let me see what I can do and I’ll get back to you.

  Bibi Gaines was a charming and persuasive person. Nevertheless, the Metropolitan Museum would never agree to breach the terms of Silas’s will and let her sell St. Margaret. Therefore, she needed to get creative.

  Forgery struck Rannie as a reasonable option. Ret unknowingly bought a counterfeit. Ret was housebound, so what were the chances of her showing up at the museum and seeing the original displayed with all Silas’s other martyred saints?

  However, Larry’s photo, the one with the painting partially revealed, had tipped off Ret to the fact that she’d been cheated, duped, screwed over royally. After that, getting even with Bibi would be easy-peasy: all Ret needed to do was call the cops, maybe insist on breaking the story to the media herself, and then be the star witness at Bibi’s trial.

  Rannie couldn’t remember when she’d felt so pleased with herself. She looked around for her cell to call Grieg, then stopped. Something didn’t compute. Think like Tim, she commanded herself. Then it hit her, like a safe falling on an oblivious cartoon victim. If Ret had followed this last scenario, she’d still be alive and Bibi would have been under arrest. And another thing—notifying the authorities immediately constituted the right thing to do; justice would have prevailed. Yet according to Sister Dorothy, Ret had been wrestling with her conscience over something she’d done, something sinful, morally wrong.

  Maybe it was time for Rannie to resurrect extortion as the motive for Ret’s murder.

  Ret: The painting you sold me is a copy, you twat.

  Bibi: Excuse me. How dare you accuse me of—

  Ret: Stop right there. I have proof. A photo of the real St. Margaret still hanging at Grammy’s. So here’s the deal. I keep my trap shut, but it’s gonna cost you.

  So Grand Larceny Bibi. Extortion Ret . . . Rannie knew what Harriet Bookman would have to say about two wrongs. Furthermore, in Bibi’s case, one wrong led to an even worse one—premeditated murder.

  It was Bibi! It was Bibi! She killed Ret and stole the forgery. Rannie jumped up. “Go, me!” she cried and did a spazzy victory dance in the living room just as Nate appeared, with tennis equipment, and headed to the front door. He shielded his face with the racket. “Stop, Ma! You’re hurting my eyes!” he cried and without breaking stride slammed the door behind him.

  Rannie called Grieg and waited for the beep. Now she had a motive for Ret’s murder. Of course, she still had no earthly idea why Ellen and Larry had ended up just as dead as Ret, but first things first.

  When Grieg called back a few minutes later, Rannie tried hard to keep the giddiness out of her voice.

  “This is all very complicated sounding, Ms. Bookman,” he said at one point when she paused to take a breath. “I’m not following how Gery Antioch is really a Catholic saint named Margaret.”

  “I realize it’s a little confusing.”

  “What about coming down to the precinct?”

  “I can’t. Not now.” Breaking her promise to stay put was not an option. “Maybe later this evening. What if I e-mail you now? It’ll be much clearer in an e-mail.” The written word was her stock-in-trade, after all. Suddenly Rannie remembered a piece of evidence that she hadn’t factored in. The semen on Ret’s body. Rannie couldn’t let on that she knew about it or how. So she added, “I know it must be hard to envision a woman committing the crime, but please consider what I’m telling you.”

  “Sure. E-mail me, Ms. Bookman. I’ll read it.”

  Suddenly Rannie replayed a day years ago when she’d walked into Ellen’s office as Ellen was ending a phone conversation with an unpublished writer, a friend of a friend. “Sure. E-mail me your manuscript. I’ll take a look at it,” Ellen promised, all the while rolling her eyes at Rannie and making the “let’s wrap it up” roll with her free hand.

  Grieg was taking Rannie no more seriously.

  Undaunted, Rannie grabbed a legal pad and scribbled down the facts—okay, maybe not “facts” exactly but “likely suppositions,” which she listed in a semilogical order. Then she started typing the e-mail. She stopped once, hit Save and returned to the site with the Cummings art catalog. The painting of St. Margaret of Antioch measured thirty-six by forty-one inches. In her mind’s eye, the Hallmark Madonna that had hung on Ret’s bedroom wall was smaller. Then returning to her e-mail, Rannie added, “I believe that after killing Ret, Barbara Gaines took the counterfeit St. Margaret and replaced it with the painting of a Madonna and Child that I saw on the day of the murder. If the Madonna is removed, my hunch is that the rectangle of cleaner wall paint will measure thirty-six by forty-one inches, the dimensions of the St. Margaret picture.”

  Rannie was still not finished typing when the landline rang. Rannie hit Save again and answered the phone.

  It was Olivia.

  “Sweetie, Nate’s not here. I’ll tell him you called,” said Rannie, unable to disguise the impatience in her voice.

  Olivia, however, did not disengage so easily. “Actually I was calling you, Ms. Bookman. I’m hoping I left a black silk reticule at your house.”

  A reticule? Was Olivia going through a Jane Austen fashion phase? Olivia said it might be in the den.

  It was. Harriet had “tidied up” before leaving yesterday and, perhaps thinking the purse was Alice’s, had hung it from a hook on the back of the closet door.

  “Yeah, it’s here. Nate’ll bring it to school tomorrow.”

  “Um . . . could you do me one more favor and see if there’s a Bloomie’s charge card in it?”

  Rannie pulled open the purse’s drawstrings while keeping the phone cradled in her neck. “Yup, it’s here. Also a piece of paper with an address and phone number.” Rannie read it to Olivia.

  “Oh, that’s Mrs. Gaines’s address. I don’t need it. As long as the card’s there. Thanks!”

  After they hung up, Rannie was still holding the crumpled piece of paper with Olivia’s round, surprisingly childish-looking print. A sickening little shiver wiggled up her spine.

  Bibi Gaines’s address was 69 East Sixty-Ninth Street. Same as Ret’s.

  Now Rannie could graft opportunity onto motive. Tenants’ spare keys were kept, according to the handyman, in the basement of the building. Bibi could have stolen the set to Ret’s apartment, slipped in and after killing Ret and switching the artwork, returned the keys to the basement. There would be nothing alarming about images of Bibi Gaines on security cameras. She was a resident.

  When she calmed down after some more self-congratulatory victory dancing, Rannie debated whether to call Grieg right away or finish the e-mail with this astounding bit of late-breaking news.

  She decided to finish her manifesto. Back on the sofa, she flexed her fingers and was about to resume typing when, to her mortification, she saw the long chunk of her message, which stopped abruptly in midsentence, had not been saved but sent to Grieg.

  Rannie called and cringed waiting for the beep. “Me again! Rannie Bookman,” she began. “I have critical information for you. Please call.”

  Grieg was dutiful, you had to give him that. “It’s Grieg.”

  “Th-thanks for calling,” Rannie stuttered. “Listen, I accidentally sent you an e-mail before I was finished.”

  “Is that your ‘critical information’?”

  “No. No. Of course not. Five minutes ago, I learned that Barbara Gaines and Ret Sullivan live in the same building. Well, lived in Ret’s case. Barbara Gaines could have stolen spare keys and let herself into—”

  “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Slow down. Tell me the address.”

  Rannie did.

  There were a few moments of silence. Rannie could hear the clacking of computer keys. Then it stopped and he said, sounding weary and exasperated, “N
o, Ms. Bookman, Barbara Gaines doesn’t live there. Her address is 302 East Seventy-Third Street.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “Tell that to the New York White Pages. I looked up Barbara Gaines . . . ‘B’ as in ‘Bravo,’ ‘A’ as in ‘Apple,’ ‘R’ as in ‘Rocket.’ . . .” Grieg insisted on going through the whole mishegoss of spelling out the entire name. “What made you think she lived at 69 East Sixty-Ninth Street?”

  Rannie wanted to cry. No way was she revealing her source was a teenage girl with a TCB tat on her tush. “I realize I have zero credibility with you now but I’m still sending the rest of the e-mail and I sincerely hope you read it.”

  Rannie wrapped up the manifesto, peppered with so many “possiblys” and “might haves” that if Grieg bothered wading through it, she tried not to picture him with eyes crossed, twirling a finger around his ear. Cuckoo bird. Cuckoo bird.

  Rannie stared at the phone number that Olivia had written down and—what did she have to lose?—dialed it. An anonymous digitized voice answered. In frustration, Rannie flung her cell on the sofa, abandoned the computer, and felt so disheartened that even completing the Sunday crossword within an hour—“Wampanoag” fit for “Native New Englander?”—didn’t lift her spirits.

  The landline rang. Olivia again?

  No.

  “Hello, my name’s Fred Rumson. I’m calling from Chaps. Is this Nathan Lorimer’s mother?”

  “Yes. Is Nate okay?” Rannie’s breathing turned shallow, her heart rate jumped.

  “He’ll be fine. But he got whacked pretty hard with a racket. Right in the face. Got knocked out cold. My son and I were hitting balls in the next court. I waited till the EMTs came. They took him to Roosevelt Hospital.”

  “Who is this?” Warning flares went up. Someone—Bibi—was trying to get Rannie out of the house to waylay her.

  “Fred Rumson. My son goes to Chaps.”

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “A girl knew your son’s name. And the security guard had a school directory.”

  “What girl? I want to speak with her.”

  “I have no idea who.” The man sounded put out now. “Listen. I stuck around till the ambulance came because I thought if it was my kid . . .”

  Were my kid, not was my kid . . .

  “ . . . I’d want a grown-up around.”

  Rannie needed verification. “Can I speak to your son? Or the security guard?”

  “What! Look, lady, I was trying to be nice. I don’t know what your problem is. Your son should be at Roosevelt any minute. Sorry I disturbed you.”

  The line went dead.

  Oh God, what to do? She tried Nate, although he never answered once he saw her number on the cell screen. “Nate, please, please. If you’re there, pick up.” When he didn’t, Rannie flew to her room and dumped out the night table drawer. In the Chaps directory, yes, there was the listing. Frederick and Clea Rumson, parents of Gabriel, a ninth grader. No answer at their number. Or Olivia’s or Ben’s.

  Rannie tried Tim. She tried Chaps’s main number, which predictably on a Sunday went straight to voice mail. She tried Roosevelt Hospital and was shunted from one clueless person to another. In desperation, she tried Nate again. “PICK UP THE GODDAMNED PHONE, NATE!” Even before hearing the first word of his automated reply, Rannie hurled the phone at the wall, a pathetic girlie throw. The cell landed with a plop on her pillow.

  Okay. Decision Time. In her head, she knew this was a trap and if she left, she was going to fall—splat!—right into it. But her heart wasn’t so sure. What if Nate was hurt badly? A head injury? What if they needed to operate and she wasn’t there to give permission?

  She grabbed her fleece hoodie and tried to weigh consequences. In the end, her Nike-clad feet made the decision for her. She was powerless to stop them. She found herself propelled out the door to the landing, where her finger pressed the elevator button.

  Chapter 27

  Nate was fine.

  She wasn’t.

  Barbara Gaines had Rannie gripped about the waist. To passersby, unable see the knife held under Rannie’s fleece, they probably appeared quite chummy.

  Bibi had been waiting by the front door of the Dolores Court. “Hi there! I said to Tony the trick would work! And I was right!” she’d trilled as Rannie rushed out. “You’re a good mom! Honestly, I would have made a horren-dous parent!”

  A few doors down, between two buildings, there was a fifteen-foot-wide empty lot, where a structurally unsound brownstone had stood until the city finally tore it down. Bibi pushed her in there, stepping cautiously over fast-food containers, liquor bottles, beer cans, and more than one dead rat. They were many feet from the sidewalk on an unlit block, zilch chance of passersby taking notice of them.

  “Who’d you get to call me?”

  “Tony,” Bibi said, sounding pleased.

  “Tony? As in F. Anthony Weld?” Did it matter? No. But stalling for time did. “It didn’t sound like him.”

  “Oh, that phony baloney academic accent, he can turn it on and off like a tap on a beer keg.”

  “You had him forge a St. Margaret.” An art restorer was practically a euphemism for forger, “Tony” had said so himself. Rannie desperately tried remembering basics from the self-defense course she’d taken postdivorce, a single woman again. Fear of sudden death, however, was making it hard to focus: her head suddenly seemed stuffed with cotton candy, and her legs had turned as floppy as a rag doll’s.

  “Tony got the same wood, same paints. And he was meticulous about copying the painting. ‘The woman has one eye!’ I kept saying. ‘It doesn’t have to be so perfect, Tony!’ Then in the end, I decided, ‘Why not give Ret Sullivan the original?’ So all her screaming about how I’d cheated her wasn’t true at all. I planned to give the museum the forgery. They’d never bother to authenticate a painting they didn’t want to begin with. I loved that part, the Met exhibiting the copy. I mean, how ironical.”

  Rannie’s brain was functioning again; her inner copy editor autocorrected—ironic not ironical.

  “Do you know, I was right on the other side of the door when you rang Ret’s bell? ‘Hello! Hello! It’s your copy editor, Rannie Bookman.’ ”

  Bibi was not as accomplished a mimic as Harriet Bookman.

  “I was all set to leave. I’d wiped off my fingerprints and had St. Margaret in a Bloomie’s bag. If you’d arrived a second later, we might have bumped smack into each other!” Bibi had Rannie pinned against a rough exposed-brick wall. She was wearing a black Burberry raincoat and black pointy-toed flats. Her eyes glittered and her smile was manic. “And after that you just kept popping up everywhere! The next night at Grammy’s house and then at Bibilots. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, Bibi. Watch out for this one.’ ”

  The fog in Rannie’s brain began to lift. Another self-defense ABC came back to her—the element of surprise. However, shouting “Boo!” probably wasn’t going to cut it.

  “Just before, when we saw your son leave, Tony followed in his car, and when it turned out he was going to Chaps, well, an accident at school, what better way to get you out of the house.” Bibi’s tone was weirdly convivial. “Tony went to Chaps, back when it was all boys. He has scads of friends with kids there now.”

  One of whom was Fred Rumson, no doubt. Rannie came to a decision: klutz that she was, her kicks were halfway respectable. The self-defense coach had even said so. Bibi was too close to manage a chorus-line high kick to the groin, but a kick to the shin, hard and sharp, she could pull that off. It might make Bibi drop the knife. “So all along the two of you have been in this together.”

  “Well, there are a few teensy things Tony doesn’t know about,” Bibi said at the same time Rannie’s eyes fell on a wrinkly used condom near her feet.

  “The semen on Ret. It was his,” Rannie stated flatly.

  “That’s unpleasant. I don’t want to talk about it.” Now a dreamy expression flitted across Bibi’s face. “I shouldn’t have waste
d time tying Ret’s hair, but I couldn’t resist. You know, it’s the strangest thing, I had never murdered anyone before. I had no idea I’d be so good at it!” The remark was spoken blithely, as if she were talking about the accidental discovery of a hidden talent for macramé. Bibi glanced at her watch, then the street. Rannie’s heart started hammering. She had to keep her talking. God, how she wished she could trade shoes; those pointy-toed babies could inflict serious damage. “I understand why you murdered Ret. But Ellen Donahoe?”

  “That was absolutely not my fault!”

  “You didn’t kill her?”

  “It was Ret’s fault.” Bibi sighed irritably as if now the topic of homicide was beginning to bore her. “When I had Ret all tied up, I—I persuaded her to talk. She said her editor had toured Grammy’s on one of the days we open it to the public. Ret swore the editor was there just to get a few photos and didn’t know anything about the forgery. But I wasn’t taking chances.”

  The thing was, Ellen hadn’t taken the photos. Larry Katz had. Then it struck Rannie. Ret had been trying to protect Larry. To do that, Ret had sacrificed Ellen.

  “So the next morning you killed Ellen?”

  “Ret told me about her morning exercise routine. I hung out by her building and followed her. It was no fun, let me tell you. Pouring buckets out. I sprinted ahead and by those pine trees pretended to fall. A minute later she came running up to see if I needed help. Sometimes people are too nice for their own good. What I can’t understand: I left a scarf of Tony’s nearby. The police should have found it.”

  “You’re framing him.”

  “I’m protecting myself. And if I hadn’t just happened to turn on the TV and see Larry Katz, he’d be alive, too.”

  Catching Larry on the talk show was how Rannie made the connection between Larry and Audeo. It was also how Bibi made the connection between Larry and Ret.

  “I should have been more suspicious that day he came to Grammy’s. He didn’t look like an art expert, with those awful clothes and Brooklyn accent.”

  Actually a Long Island accent.