by Ella Barrick
Uh-oh. Stalker city. “Don’t you have a job?” I asked.
He frowned at me. “I’m retired from the ministry. My time is my own.” I imagined he used that exact voice in the pulpit when he wished to emphasize a scriptural point. The effect was diminished somewhat when a small, faceted perfume bottle tumbled from beneath his coat and landed in the grass. We both ignored it.
“I guess you spend time with Randolph, too.”
He froze momentarily, then leaned toward me. Hunched over like that, with his long, skinny neck and beaky nose, he reminded me way too much of a vulture. “Why would you say that?”
“I was chatting with Randolph this weekend and someone mentioned you’d stopped by,” I said, forcing myself not to back away. What could he do to me on this grassy lawn with hundreds of bargain hunters nearby?
Some emotion flitted across his eyes; it looked like fear. “What I do and where I go is no business of yours, young lady.”
“I’m just trying to keep Maurice from being convicted of Corinne’s murder.”
“Whoever killed my beloved Corinne should be burned at the stake. It was an evil thing to do. Evil!”
He said it with an intensity that made me wonder whether he had all his marbles. “I think you have an ulterior motive for being here today,” I said, stooping to retrieve the perfume bottle. I held it on the flat of my palm, the way you feed a horse so you don’t get bitten, and he snatched it.
“As do you, young lady!”
His accusation startled me, and I gripped my purse tighter. Could he know about the typewriter cartridge? Was he here for more than the odd memento? Was he looking to retrieve the manuscript, too?
His next words dispelled that fear. “You’re here, like they are”-he gestured to the crowd-“out of vulgar curiosity. You’re here to feed on the beauty, the gentleness, the incandescent light that was Corinne. Scavengers, all of you! Ghouls!” He threw one arm up dramatically, and a foot-tall bronze figure of a dancer en pointe clink-clanked to the turf. Without another word, he bent, picked it up, thrust it into an interior pocket of his coat, and left. He strode rapidly across the lawn, trench coat flapping about his legs. I stared after him for a moment, not sure I’d accomplished anything by confronting him, then trotted toward where Tav and Poodle Guy were chatting by a pile of coffee-table art books.
Tav broke away from his conversation, joining me with a grin. I grabbed his arm and pointed to Hamish MacLeod as he disappeared down the driveway. “That’s Hamish MacLeod,” I said, “Corinne’s fourth husband.” I relayed our conversation and my conviction that the man was stealing easily portable items.
Tav looked after Hamish with interest. “Corinne certainly had eclectic taste in husbands,” he said.
I hadn’t expected him to go tearing after MacLeod and accuse him of theft, but his comment seemed anticlimactic. “Why do you suppose he was visiting Randolph at Hopeful Morning?”
Shrugging, he looked down at me quizzically. “Probably not for any nefarious reason. Perhaps you are so caught up in keeping Maurice out of prison that you are seeing suspicious behavior in very ordinary activities?”
His words stung a bit. “Well, I don’t call thieving ‘ordinary’ activity,” I said huffily.
We had reached the driveway by this time, and I stopped to put my shoes back on, using a hand on Tav’s shoulder to balance myself. I tried to slip him forty dollars, but he shook his head. “I want credit for doing my part in keeping Maurice out of jail. I only hope this cartridge contains something useful after all the hassle we went through to get it.”
The sun highlighted yellow flecks in his brown eyes as I smiled up at him. “You and me both.”
* * *
Since Tav was late for a meeting, I dropped him off at the Metro station before returning to the studio. Vitaly and I taught an international standard class at Wednesday lunchtime, and I had to hustle to get back for it. We introduced the Viennese waltz-harder than the regular waltz-to applause and groans.
“I don’t know how you manage to look like you’re floating, Stacy,” one woman said. “I feel like I’m wearing cement shoes.”
“Practice,” I said with a smile. “It’s all about practice. You can float, too; I promise.”
The class wrapped up at twelve thirty, and Vitaly stayed in the ballroom to coach an amateur-amateur pair who were excited about entering their first competition. I descended to my kitchen and called Maurice, leaving a message to let him know we’d finally acquired the typewriter cartridge. My hand was still on the phone when it rang, startling me.
“Stacy, I’ve got the CD with your proofs on it,” Sarah Lewis said when I answered. “I’m going to be at Tate Slade’s Fine Arts this afternoon, taking photos for a brochure for their new exhibition, and I can drop it by afterward, if you like.”
“How ’bout I meet you at the art gallery,” I said, feeling restless. “It’s on Royal, right, near the Episcopal church?”
I mopped the kitchen floor and then changed into white cotton slacks with a thin red stripe and a red peasant blouse before scooting upstairs to tell Vitaly I was leaving and to ask him to lock up when he finished. Walking the few blocks to the art gallery, I felt myself relaxing, sinking into the moment. I deliberately put aside thoughts of Corinne’s murder and the studio’s precarious financial position to enjoy the beautiful day. A calico cat looked down on me from his perch in a bay window, bricks herringboned the sidewalk in a hypnotic pattern, and the drone of an airplane high overhead made me glance up briefly. Reaching the gallery before I was ready to, I strolled past it to linger in front of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, letting the sand-colored stones of its Gothic revival facade warm me, and admiring the swooping arches that fronted the church. Reluctantly, I retraced my steps to the art gallery and went in.
Dimness cloaked me, and I blinked while my eyes adjusted. The space was largely open, with bleached wooden planks on the floor, white panels for walls, and lighting provided by stainless-steel fixtures directed toward the paintings. A thin man on a stepladder and a minion struggled to hang a wall-sized painting that seemed to consist of little more than a canvas painted off-white with a wavy blue line bisecting it.
“We’re closed to set up for the exhibition. The opening’s Friday night,” the man on the stepladder called.
“I’m looking for Sarah Lewis,” I said, wandering closer to see whether the painting offered anything more up close. Nope. I peered at the discreet price tag on the wall and almost gasped: twenty thousand dollars. Eep.
“Back there.” The man jerked his balding head toward the rear of the gallery. As he spoke, a flash of light told me where I’d find Sarah.
“Thanks.” I wended my way around the panels and past more paintings as monochromatic and inscrutable as the first one. I like my art to have recognizable objects in it-people, dogs, flowers-or at least to feature bright colors. As far as I was concerned, these paintings took minimalism, or monochromatism or whatever the style was called, to heights of boringness seldom scaled by an artist. I left off critiquing the paintings as I rounded a corner to find Sarah Lewis adjusting a light on an aluminum pole.
“Do you think you could hold this just so?” she asked, spotting me. “It keeps slipping.”
I obligingly wrapped my fingers around the cool metal, and watched as she checked a light meter and then took a few photos of the canvas in front of us.
“Thanks.” Letting the camera hang from a strap around her neck, she reached into a multipocketed duffel and withdrew a CD case. “Let me know which ones you want. Eighty dollars each.”
I took the case from her, noting that she seemed a bit stiffer than when we’d last met. She broke eye contact almost immediately to shift the strap around her neck.
“Vitaly and I will look at them and let you know,” I said. I hesitated, wanting to ask her about Marco, but feeling awkward about it.
“Look,” she said as I was on the verge of leaving. Her head snapped up and her eyes met mine squar
ely for the first time. “Marco told me about your visit yesterday.”
“Um.”
“He said you know.”
“I didn’t know you knew.”
“Since I was eighteen.” She tossed her head so her dark braid slipped over her shoulder. “He and Mom took me aside to tell me that I wasn’t my father’s daughter, that I was Marco’s daughter. They thought I should know the truth for medical reasons and what have you. Great birthday present, huh?”
“It must have been hard to hear.”
She met my gaze, unsmiling. “The hardest. Not only did I have to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t who I thought I was, but my mom wasn’t the person I thought she was either. All her blather about integrity and living authentically was just so many words. Great for spouting in the classroom but without any applicability to real life. We didn’t talk for a couple of years.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling intensely uncomfortable in the face of her anger and grief.
“Yeah, well, a lot of therapy has gotten me-us-through the worst of it. But then Corinne Blakely told Marco she was publishing her memoir, and that she was including the story of their romance and why she broke it off.” Sarah popped the lens off the camera and stowed it roughly in the duffel. She was silent for a moment, searching for a new lens and fitting it to the camera body. She mumbled something I didn’t catch.
“What?”
“I said I didn’t want Dad to find out that way. He loves my mother; he still thinks I’m his biological daughter. It would break his heart.” She looked up, her chin tilted a bit, defiantly. “That’s why when Marco told me you had the manuscript, I broke into your house to find it.”
My jaw dropped. “Say what? It was you?”
She nodded. “It wasn’t hard. I bought a crowbar at a hardware store and waited till I thought you’d be asleep. The waiting was the hardest part. I pried the door open and started searching, but then you woke up.” She loosed a long sigh. “I’m sorry I knocked you down. I hope you weren’t hurt?”
“I’ll live.” This conversation felt surreal. This woman had broken into my house with burglary on her mind, and now she was looking at me with concern. I tried to muster some anger, but the fact that it was my own lie that led her to break in kept me from working up any righteous indignation.
“Were you telling the truth when you told Marco you don’t really have it?”
I nodded.
“Then what am I to do?” Tears filmed her eyes.
“I think it’s totally possible there isn’t really a manuscript,” I said, relating what Mrs. Laughlin, Corinne’s housekeeper, had told me.
“Really?” Sarah stood a little straighter. After a beat, she added, “So someone killed Corinne for nothing?”
“Why would you assume Corinne was killed over the memoir?” I asked.
“Because the thought crossed my mind. And if it occurred to me, chances are someone else thought of it, too.”
I stared at the woman in front of me, so like me in many ways: She was close to my age; she worked for herself in an arts-related field; she was single (I thought) and childless. Had she just confessed to planning a murder?
“I didn’t do it, of course,” she said, perhaps reading my face. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t kill someone, not even to save Dad pain and keep my parents from divorcing. But I can’t really blame whoever did it-Corinne was asking for it.”
The tight expression on her face dared me to contradict her. Tap-tapping and a muffled “Damn!” floated over the nearest panel, and I started at the reminder that we weren’t alone.
“Do you suppose it crossed Marco’s mind?” I asked.
There was a barely perceptible hesitation before she burst out, “He wouldn’t! Marco’s a good man.”
Evidence of a daughter fathered on his wife’s sister to the contrary. I raised my brows.
“Sex is different from murder!”
No argument there.
“Just because he and my mom had an affair thirty years ago doesn’t mean he killed Corinne to keep it secret. Or that my mother did, either,” she added.
Hm, now there was a suspect I hadn’t thought of. Would Sarah’s mother kill to protect her marriage… or her job? It might be worth learning more about Phyllis Lewis. Except how would she have put epinephrine in Corinne’s pills? I decided Phyllis didn’t get a priority rating on my suspect list, although I might mention her to Phineas Drake.
“Are you going to tell the police?” Sarah asked in a low voice.
My thoughts were jumbled; I didn’t know what was best. “My concern is Maurice Goldberg. He’s my friend, and I’m not going to sit by and watch him go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”
I hadn’t really answered her question, but she nodded. “Fair enough. Look, I know it’s costing you time and maybe money to get your door fixed and all. Just pick the photos you want and I’ll get you another disk that’s not copyright protected-you don’t owe me anything.”
I regarded her somewhat cynically, recognizing a bribe when I heard one. “I’ll let you know.” I wasn’t sure what I’d let her know, but it sounded good.
We eyed each other awkwardly for a moment, not sure how to part, but then she half nodded and turned away to fiddle with the light stand again, and I slipped silently around the nearest panel. Out of sight of Sarah, I took a deep breath, blew it out, and hurried for the door, raising a hand in acknowledgment when the gallery owner called, “Don’t forget! Friday evening. There’ll be wine and cheese, and you can meet the artist in person.”
Whoop-de-do.
Chapter 27
Seven o’clock that night found me at the Fox and Muskrat watching Maurice compete in a darts tournament. Anxious to get the typewriter cartridge to him, and to find out what Marco Ingelido had been referring to when he talked about a necklace disappearing on one of Maurice’s cruises, I’d finally gotten hold of Maurice and asked him to meet me for dinner. He’d countered with an invitation to the darts tournament. “I’ve been signed up for weeks, Anastasia,” he said. “I can’t back out now.”
Accordingly, clad in slim-fitting jeans and the red shirt I’d worn earlier, only with an extra button undone, I cheered for Maurice while he tossed darts at the target. Clumps of people gathered around the competitors aiming at two well-lit targets set on age-darkened beams. The rowdy participants included men and women and people of all ages, from a girl in a GWU sweatshirt who was maybe twenty, to a man who looked like he could have swabbed decks on the Titanic. Pretty much everyone was wearing jeans and sucking on a beer. Even Maurice had dressed down for the occasion, leaving his blazer at home to compete in a blue-and-yellow-striped rugby shirt and pressed jeans with loafers.
I’d been tickled to see that he had a little case containing his own darts. “You take this seriously,” I observed.
“There’s a lot riding on it.” By his tone, he might have been talking about the first space launch or the D-day invasion or a heart transplant. But then he winked at me and I laughed.
The “lot riding on it” turned out to be a free six-pack of English ale for the winner, and a free beer for Maurice, who came in second. I’d had no idea he was doing so well, since the scoring system totally mystified me. I clapped my hands as he rejoined me at a high-top table near the dartboards after collecting his winnings. Setting his beer on the table, he pulled out my chair. “Come on, Anastasia. It’s time you learned how to throw darts.”
Most of the crowd had dispersed, many of them leaving the pub, and no one was watching the twosome still tossing darts toward one of the targets. No danger of public embarrassment. “How hard can it be?” I asked, grabbing a hasty sip of my own beer before Maurice pulled me to a line on the wooden floor and handed me a dart. Showing me how to position my fingers on the ridged metal, he drew his arm back and pushed it forward to demonstrate the throwing motion several times. “Push the dart at the board. Don’t fling it. There’s no break in the wrist.”
I lobbed the feathered missile toward the board; it nicked the corner and clattered to the floor. Okay, so the game was more difficult than it looked. Maurice handed me another dart. “Not so hard. Relax into it.”
I tried relaxing and the dart nose-dived into the floor a foot in front of the target. I pouted.
“Not quite so relaxed,” Maurice said, hiding a smile.
I could see he was enjoying himself, maybe for the first time since his arrest, and I didn’t want to spoil his mood, but after another fifteen minutes of the darts lesson, during which I managed to sink most of my darts into the pockmarked beam supporting the target and a couple of them into the target itself (to extravagant praise from Maurice), I dragged him back to the table.
Squirming onto the bar stool, I said, “I’ve got some good news and a question.”
“Good news first,” Maurice said, signaling for another beer. He was drinking something dark and foamy that looked like it would hold a fork upright; I prefer a beer that light can penetrate, an India pale ale or the like.
Pulling the cartridge from my purse, I waved it aloft. “Ta-da.”
His brows climbed as he reached for it. “Anastasia! How did you acquire it?”
I told him about going to the estate sale with Tav and the stratagems we’d had to employ to secure the cartridge. “The Quest for the Cartridge ended in triumph,” I declaimed, “due to the perseverance and resourcefulness of the knight and his fair lady.” Whew. I’d had too much beer.
Maurice wiped away a foamy mustache and smiled. “Well done. Mildred and I will get started on deciphering it first thing tomorrow. I just hope that what it contains is worth all the money and effort you put into finding it.”
“If not”-I shrugged-“we’re no worse off than we were before.”
“You said you had a question?”
Someone plugged quarters into an old jukebox that had been turned off during the tourney, and a Kenny Rogers song drifted our way. It was incongruous in the British-feeling pub. “I talked to Marco Ingelido yesterday,” I said. “And to Sarah today.” Uncomfortable confronting Maurice with Marco’s story, I gladly wasted some time telling him about my conversation with Sarah.