Murder Among the Angels

by Stefanie Matteson

  Sebastian was back in a minute with their drinks. “I hear Aunt Lothian was in to see you again,” he said, as he set the drinks down.

  “How’d you know?” Jerry asked.

  “One of the waiters”—he nodded at a young man on the other side of the dining room—“saw her going in. Was it because she had seen Lily again?”

  Jerry nodded, and Sebastian looked concerned.

  “I’m worried about her,” he said. “Believing that she was seeing an angel was bad enough, but believing that she’s seeing Lily herself is even worse. Anyway, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry if she’s being a nuisance. I’m going to try to get her some psychiatric help.”

  Jerry nodded. “If she’ll accept it,” he said. “She doesn’t strike me as the type to be amenable to that suggestion.”

  “No,” said Sebastian. “It’s going to be tough.” He pulled out an order pad and asked them what they would like.

  Jerry inquired of Charlotte what she wanted, and then passed the order along to Sebastian: “The lady will have the foie gras and the lamb,” he said. He also suggested that she try a glass of the house cabernet sauvignon—a suggestion with which Charlotte was happy to comply.

  After Sebastian had left, Charlotte settled back with her Manhattan. She was just thinking how much at home she felt with the hilltoppers—after all, she lived in a time warp too—when it struck her that Jerry hadn’t ordered anything. “What about you?” she said. “I can’t believe you’re not hungry.”

  “I’m just not ordering,” he said. He explained: “It’s Sebastian’s fantasy to be the kind of restaurateur in whom the guests have such faith that they trust him to send out exactly what they want. It’s what they do at his favorite inn in France. To keep him happy, I indulge him from time to time.”

  “And does he always bring exactly what you want?”

  “Always,” Jerry said.

  Their appetizers arrived a few minutes later, served by a pretty waitress named Connie, who wore a short black skirt and a white button-down shirt, and whom Jerry appeared to know. To Charlotte’s astonishment, she brought Jerry an order of shad roe sautéed in butter and served on toast points, prompting her to wonder if it was her mind and not Jerry’s that the chef had read. “Is that exactly what you wanted?” she asked, wishing that she had had the foresight to follow Jerry’s lead. “Exactly,” he replied. As Charlotte had suspected, their minds were on the same track, as regarded food anyway and probably most other things as well. “How did he know?” she asked. “Experience,” Jerry replied. He explained: “I eat here often enough that he has a pretty good idea of what I like. Which is almost everything.”

  But Charlotte didn’t regret ordering the foie gras, which was delicious. The conversation, which before the arrival of the food had centered on the topic of Jerry’s four daughters and their various careers, became more intermittent as their appreciation for the food wrestled with that for the conversation, and then died out altogether as appreciation for the food gained the upper hand. Nor would either of them have dared to break the spell of the eating experience by commenting on how good the food was. They were like concertgoers rapt in the spell of the performance.

  At last their plates were empty. “Did you say you knew this Dr. Louria?” Jerry asked as the waitress cleared their places.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I met him when I was up here on Wednesday. That’s why I came up here: for a consultation with him about a face-lift.” She went on to explain her theory about a face-lift being the ante that she needed to stay in the game for another ten years.

  “No!” said Jerry, incredulous. (He was one of her biggest fans.) “Why? You’ve still got a pile of chips to ante up with; you look fifty if you look a day. Don’t do it,” he added. “You know what my sergeant says about these hilltopper ladies who’ve had face-lifts?”

  “What?” Charlotte said.

  “That they don’t look lifted, they just look surprised.”

  Charlotte smiled. It was true: something about a face-lift—the widened eyes, the taut cheeks—gave the recipients a startled look. She wondered how a face-lift would affect her acting. How was a woman who always looks surprised supposed to show other emotions? “I think I’ve decided against it,” she said.

  “Good. But before you go telling him that, I’d like to use you as my entrée. I’d like to talk to him about the skulls. Maybe he could tell us something that would help us narrow down the field. For instance, maybe the technique used for the chin implant is only used by certain surgeons.”

  “I think that’s a very good idea,” Charlotte said.

  He shrugged. “It’s a place to start anyway. I thought we might go over to Lister’s after lunch and pick up the casts of the two skulls. Then maybe we could take them over to Dr. Louria’s.”

  “I’m not sure he’ll be there,” Charlotte said. “He might be at his office in the city. But we could call and check.”

  “Good,” said Jerry.

  The conversation ceased. Their entrées had arrived.

  On their way over to the Octagon House after lunch, Jerry said that Lister might even have finished the soft tissue reconstructions of the face of the second victim. He often worked into the wee hours of the morning when he was on a case. When he did finish, photographs of the sculptures (he was doing reconstructions of the victim’s face before and after cosmetic surgery), would be published in area newspapers, and flyers would be sent out to area police departments as well as to missing persons bureaus around the country. In the case of the first victim, these efforts had yielded nothing, but they now knew that Lister’s reconstruction of the first victim’s face had showed her as she had looked prior to the cosmetic surgery. Maybe if the reconstruction had showed her as she had looked after the cosmetic surgery, they would have had better luck. In any case, Jerry noted, they would have the opportunity to try these routes again when Lister finished the “after” reconstruction of the face of the first victim.

  Jerry had called ahead to tell Lister they would be coming. As they drove up the driveway, they could see him waiting as before on his colonnaded porch.

  As they walked up the front path after parking the car, Charlotte noticed that the sharp gray eyes under Lister’s shining foreskull appeared unusually intense. He didn’t smile as he greeted them.

  “You look tired,” Jerry said, noting the mug of coffee in his hand.

  “I’ve been up all night,” he said. “I finished the ‘before’ and ‘after’ reconstructions of the face of the second victim, and I did an ‘after’ reconstruction of the face of the first victim.”

  His manner was nervous and agitated.

  “What is it?” asked Jerry.

  “I think you’d better see for yourself,” he said. Turning on his heel, he led them through the Phrenological Cabinet and down the spiral staircase to a large basement studio filled with half-completed monuments in marble and granite. Then he passed through this studio to a door on the far wall.

  “I have to have a separate studio for the forensic sculpture,” he explained as he opened the door. “Because of the dust from the marble and granite. If I worked in here, it would get into the paint.”

  The door opened onto a small room in the middle of which stood a worktable. The carefully painted soft tissue reconstructions rested in their cork collars on the worktable: two heads with long, wavy, dark red hair; dreamy green eyes; level brows; long, delicate noses; and jutting jaws.

  They were identical.

  As Charlotte and Jerry stared, Lister stood by with his arms crossed.

  “The one on the left is the new ‘after’ reconstruction of the face of the first victim,” he said. “I had to build up the cheeks to reflect the cosmetic effects of the cheek implants. The one on the right is the reconstruction of the face of the second victim after the plastic surgery.”

  Jerry was moving his head from one to the other, as if he were watching a tennis match. “It’s the face of the Archibald woman who wa
s used as the model for the statue you have upstairs,” he said.

  Charlotte agreed. The face of the first victim, which before had borne a slight resemblance to that of the statue, now looked exactly like it, as did the face of the second victim.

  And her dead daughter, Charlotte thought.

  “Yes,” said Lister. “It is. The face of an angel.”

  5

  They rode back down the long, winding access road in silence. Charlotte sat on the passenger’s side of the car, holding the shopping bag with the bubble-wrapped casts of the two skulls safely in her lap. As she rode, she reviewed the case in her mind: a few hours ago, they hadn’t had anything to go on but two baffling skulls. Now they knew that the skulls belonged to two young women—both between twenty-five and thirty years old; both standing five feet six inches tall, give or take an inch—who looked exactly like a young woman who had supposedly drowned two and a half years before. But what to make of it? Her first thought was that Lister’s self-confessed artistic obsession with the face of the dead girl’s look-alike mother—the face of the white marble angel—had led him to reconstruct the faces of the victims to look like her. But then, why wouldn’t he have done this for the first reconstruction of the face of the first victim, the reconstruction that had borne only a faint resemblance to the doctor’s dead wife and her mother? And, if he had felt a compulsion to make his facial reconstructions look like the face of his artistic muse, why wasn’t that true of at least some of the dozens of other murder victims whose faces he had reconstructed, some of whom also must have been young women?

  Dismissing that theory, she turned her attention to Aunt Lothian’s claim that her niece had been a victim of amnesia. Had the amnesiac young woman found her way back to her hometown, only to be brutally murdered? But that would explain one skull, not two. And what about the cosmetic surgery angle? Both Lister and Aunt Lothian had said that Lily had looked just like her mother, which meant that her face must always have looked as it did in the photograph. Ergo: she couldn’t have had plastic surgery, which meant that she was not one of the victims. Charlotte’s old friend Tom Plummer, the journalist who had secured her reputation as an amateur sleuth by writing about her role in solving the murder at the Morosco case, was fond of quoting a Latin proverb called “Occam’s Razor”: “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” which meant “All unnecessary facts in the subject being analyzed should be eliminated.” She was always teasing Tom about his penchant for quoting Latin proverbs being the only use he could find for his undergraduate degree in classics, but this was one proverb that she found useful to keep in mind. The unnecessary fact to be eliminated here was the possibility that Lily Louria was the murder victim. Which left her with two young women who looked like Lily Louria. Then she remembered what Jerry had said about Dr. Louria’s unwillingness to accept his wife’s death. Could it be that the skulls belonged to recreations of her carried out by her husband, the cosmetic surgeon? Was it possible that his love for her was so great that he had felt compelled to bring her back? He was one of the country’s foremost cosmetic surgeons. If anyone was capable of creating a clone of his dead wife, it was he.

  She turned to Jerry: “Do you think Dr. Louria could have been creating clones of his dead wife, and then killing them?”

  He nodded. “That’s the only explanation I’ve been able to come up with. But why would he kill them?”

  “Because they weren’t perfect reproductions,” she said. “Instead of killing his technical mistakes, which is what we thought earlier, maybe he was killing his artistic mistakes, just as a writer discards an early draft, or a painter paints over a canvas he’s dissatisfied with.”

  “But to what end?” Jerry asked.

  “Simply to gaze on his creation, like Pygmalion gazed on Galatea,” she said. “He must have been working on more than one at a time,” she continued, thinking aloud. “Aunt Lothian supposedly saw her niece last Tuesday, but that was about the time the butt and lower arm were found, wasn’t it?”

  Jerry nodded. “The butt was netted on Monday, and the lower arm washed up at the yacht club on Wednesday.”

  “Which means that the second victim had already been dead for ten days to two weeks when Aunt Lothian saw her niece in the drugstore. I suppose it’s possible that Aunt Lothian saw the look-alikes on the earlier occasions, but made a mistake when it came to this most recent sighting, but I doubt it.”

  Jerry thought about this for a moment. Then he changed the subject: “Speaking of Aunt Lothian,” he said. “We owe her an apology.”

  “That’s right. I guess Sebastian doesn’t have to start looking for psychiatric help for her either,” she added.

  “No. In fact, I think that before we go to see Dr. Louria, we should pay a little visit to Aunt Lothian.”

  He pulled the police cruiser into a driveway on River Road. Then he backed out and headed back the way they had come.

  At the end of River Road, they turned left and entered a quiet residential area of winding streets lined by drifts of naturalized daffodils, which were just starting to bloom. In another week, they would be magnificent. Charlotte had seen these plantings of daffodils along the roadsides elsewhere in Zion Hill, and now asked Jerry about them. “The residents planted them,” he said. “They’re part of an attempt to make the community more”—he groped for a word—“welcoming.” He went on to explain: “The people in the surrounding communities have always had a lot of false conceptions about Zion Hill: that it’s filled with religious fanatics. The daffodils were part of a public relations campaign that also included posting ‘Welcome to Zion Hill’ signs out on the Albany Post Road, with a brief explanation of Swedenborgianism. The community also started giving tours of the Zion Hill Church, which include a basic explanation of what the church is all about.”

  “I remember passing one of the signs on my way up,” she said. “Has the public relations campaign worked?”

  Jerry shrugged. “I don’t think outsiders are quite as likely as they used to be to think that the residents of Zion Hill have five fingers and a dead body stowed away in the attic, as they put it.” He looked over at Charlotte.

  “But that may change,” she said.

  The houses in this neighborhood were smaller versions of the mansions that lined River Road. The architecture of the houses in Zion Hill, even the smallest of them, was unusual. No two were alike, and they were exceptionally quaint, with gables, mullioned windows, and picturesque porches and balconies Adding to the fairy-tale quality of the houses was the fact that, almost without exception, the properties were unkempt, at least by the usual standards of a New York bedroom community. Part of this was due to the fact that, being as old as the community was, the trees and shrubs had grown to the point where they needed constant cutting back not to look overgrown. Old ivy vines with stems six inches in diameter grew up the chimneys of the houses and around the trunks of the big old trees, and the foundation plantings of rhododendrons grew up to the eaves of the houses. But even areas that didn’t require an unusual amount of attention had been let go. The shady lawns looked like meadows, and features of the yard that in another community would have been relegated to a hidden corner if they were tolerated at all—things like chicken wire compost bins, unsightly treehouses made out of scrap lumber, and vegetable gardens still bearing the dead carcasses of last summer’s tomato plants—here were allowed places of prominence in full view of passing motorists.

  She wondered if this apparent disdain for the usual standards of suburban grooming was a measure of the community’s spiritual faith: that the need to create a Garden of Eden on earth was less pressing if you knew you were destined for the gardens of heaven.

  She was ruminating on the subject of landscaping as a measure of spiritual faith—what did this theory then say about the residents of places like Forest Hills, where there wasn’t a blade of grass out of place?—when they pulled into a forsythia-lined driveway of a stone Tudor cottage that looked as if it could
have come from a page in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

  After getting out of the car, they walked up a winding flagstone path to the front door, which was made out of planked oak and featured a stained-glass window with a design of a white steed.

  Standing at the door, Charlotte inhaled the air, fragrant with that wonderful spring smell of damp earth, and felt the wind off the river against her cheek. The sound of bird song was deafening.

  The door was answered immediately by Lothian Archibald, who was wearing a blue-and-white-striped cotton duck apron. The interior of the house smelled like chocolate chip cookies.

  “Oh, hello, Chief D’Angelo,” she said. Catching sight of Charlotte, she added, “Hello, Mrs. Lundstrom.” After wiping her hands on her apron, she held out a hand. “Excuse me,” she said. “I was just baking cookies for the church concert. I’m doing it in advance, and freezing them.”

  Jerry explained: “The annual church concert is one of the big events of the year in Zion Hill. The entire community comes out for a picnic on the lawn of the church, and all the church windows are lit. I believe we’re having a boys’ choir from England this year.”

  Miss Archibald nodded. “People come from all around for it,” she said. “Won’t you come in?” she added, ushering them into a small but charming living room, with a fireplace at one end and a low, beamed ceiling.

  Like the design of the house, the furnishings showed an unusual aesthetic sensibility. The furniture was dark and heavy, and medieval in character. Above the fireplace hung a tapestry of a woman, a woman with a jutting jaw, dreamy green eyes, and long, flowing red hair.

  There was that face again, Charlotte thought as they sat down on a couch facing the fireplace.

  Miss Archibald had taken a seat in a Gothic-style armchair. “The cookies are actually for the pastor’s reception,” she said. “He always has a little sherry reception before the concert for people who are especially active in the church. I’m the bell ringer,” she added proudly.