“No,” Polly said. “Why?”
“She’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared!” Polly stepped back. “Come in, Harry, and tell us what happened.”
Joan followed them back into the Osbornes’ living room.
Polly introduced them quickly. “Harry Schmalz, Joan Spencer. I think you met at the picnic.”
Harry nodded to Joan, but he addressed his words to Polly and the two violinists. “She said she was going out shopping with one of the other girls this afternoon to try to take her mind off the violin, but she didn’t come back. At first Violet waited supper for her, but finally we went ahead and ate. Violet was kind of teed off. Camila runs on Brazilian time, but she knows how we feel about mealtimes. We sure weren’t going to give her any grief about it today, though.” His face softened.
“And then you got worried?” Polly said.
Harry’s wrinkles climbed back up. “She’s just a kid, you know? And she’s a long way from home. So Violet started calling around. Turns out Camila didn’t go out with any of the other girls. A couple of them talked about it with her, but she never called them, and they haven’t seen her all day. Violet’s been on the phone trying all the fellows. No luck. Your phone was busy, so I came over.”
“Bob had some calls to make,” Polly said.
“I was out with Uwe this afternoon,” Bruce said. “We sure didn’t see her. Then I came home to practice.”
“I was just talking about going over to your place,” Nate said. “If there’s anything I can do …”
“That’s the hell of it,” Harry said. “I feel so damn responsible, but I don’t know what to do. It’s only been a few hours, and she’s over twenty-one. The police would laugh in our faces.”
“Not after what happened last night,” Joan said. “I’d call them.”
9
As Joan had predicted, the Indianapolis police responded quickly to the disappearance of the woman whose rare violin had been stolen only the day before. The quiet detective returned, this time with a partner, an older man with a louder voice and grim face.
“Detective Richardson,” the quiet man introduced himself. Joan had missed his name before. “And this is Detective Richards.”
Really? Joan thought, but she wasn’t even tempted to smile.
Sitting in the Osbornes’ living room again, they listened to the little that Harry Schmalz could tell them. Joan propped her feet up on the ottoman and leaned her head against the soft back of the sofa. It was turning into a long evening.
“You wouldn’t have a photograph of her, would you?” Richards said after taking down Camila’s general description.
“Are you kidding?” Harry smiled for the first time since appearing at the door. “She’s got a press kit you wouldn’t believe. Plenty of pictures over at my house.”
“Here’s one,” Polly said. She reached into the drawer of an end table and handed them her program booklet for the competition, open to Camila Pereira’s page. “It tells you a little about her. Mostly where she’s studied and performed.”
“Rio, huh?” Richards said, looking down at Camila, who flashed white teeth at them from the booklet. His grim face softened. “What do we know about her?” Richardson asked. “Besides the violin?”
“Her family’s wealthy,” Bruce said. “Her dad’s a banker. We were talking about that last night.”
“She called home every night,” Harry said. “The connection was always terrible, and she kept us awake, shouting in Portuguese.”
Joan noticed the past tense. As if Camila were dead.
“It was awful last night,” he said. “I couldn’t understand what she was shouting, of course, but I had the impression they were blaming her for losing the violin. I can’t imagine what they’ll do when they hear we’ve lost their daughter.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions, sir,” Richards said. “She may have gone off on her own.”
“God, I hope so,” Harry said, shaking his head.
“We’ll do our best to locate her,” Richardson said softly. “But we need to ask all of you if you have any idea who might want to harm her.”
They fell silent. Joan thought of the jealous words she’d overheard in the lobby. What do I know? Nothing, really. That young woman didn’t say anything about Camila I didn’t think myself. She’s a flirt, period.
Richardson’s eyes seemed to bore a hole through her. “You think of something?”
Joan sat straighter for a moment, but left her feet up. “Only that I heard a couple of cracks from some girls who were clearly jealous of her. Camila flirted with their young men.”
“She flirted with everybody,” Bruce said.
“And that got to you, did it?” said Richards, turning on Bruce. “You still willing to talk without a lawyer?”
“I don’t need a lawyer,” Bruce said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Where were you this afternoon?”
“Practicing something I take seriously.” His eyes flashed.
“Don’t get cute with me, son. You practice all afternoon?”
“No. First I was out with Mrs. Spencer here and Uwe Frech, another violinist. We went on a school visit—lots of witnesses. When we came back here, I started practicing. I kept at it until Mrs. Osborne called us to supper.”
“I heard him,” Joan said. “Brahms and Mozart.” But I didn’t hear all of it, she thought. I fell asleep. Do I have to tell them that? Surely Bruce didn’t stop practicing, do something to Camila, and come back in to wake me up for supper.
Richards nodded and turned to Polly Osborne. Joan’s eyelids drooped, and she was having trouble following his questions. The only policeman she wanted to spend time with right now was at home, in Oliver. She sat up again and chewed the inside of her lip to stay awake. Why was she so tired? Sure, it had been late before she got home last night, but she’d slept this afternoon. Stress, maybe? Then how must Bruce be feeling by now?
“If you were fixing dinner, you didn’t see him play,” Richards was saying to Polly. “You just heard him.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bruce asked. “You think I put on one of my tapes and took off?”
“You have tapes?” Richardson asked.
“Sure,” Bruce said. “Audition tapes, and tapes I make so I can hear how I sound. You can catch a lot of stuff that way.”
Joan didn’t doubt it. That’s why she never intended to tape herself playing viola.
“One night during supper we played a trick on him,” Polly said. “We put on a tape of one of the famous judges playing one of Bruce’s pieces, and told him it was a tape we’d made of him practicing that piece. He was horrified—said, ‘I sound like that?’ But when I couldn’t keep a straight face, he knew.”
A smile flickered across Bruce’s face but left him sober again.
“So it could have been the tape recorder,” Richards said.
“It could have been, but it wasn’t.” Bruce’s voice was steady, and he looked the man in the eye.
“Let’s move on,” said Richardson. “What can any of you tell us about Miss Pereira’s personal life?”
“Not much,” Harry Schmalz said. “She had a serious boyfriend back in Brazil. God, she called him every night, too. She’d keep us awake half the night and then sleep in, when we couldn’t.”
Hardly the ideal houseguest, Joan thought. Hard to imagine that young woman as the violinist I know she was—is. Now I’m doing it.
“You think she’d run home to her boyfriend?” Nate asked.
“Not after the way she played last night,” Bruce said. “She wasn’t about to give up.”
“We’ll check the airport,” Richardson said.
“And the shopping centers?” Harry Schmalz put in. “She told us she was going shopping with another violinist, but we’ve talked to all of them, and she didn’t. Maybe she went out alone, and someone recognized her from the TV last night and kidnapped her. By now everybody knows her family has money.”
“
Have you seen a ransom note?” Richards said. “Or had a phone call?”
“Hell, no,” Harry said. “But that wouldn’t do them any good. It’s her father who’s the banker, not me. Besides, Violet’s been on the phone all evening. The kidnappers couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise.”
“Maybe she’s had an accident,” Nate said.
“We checked the hospitals before we came here,” Richardson said. “And we’ll put out an alert, in case she’s brought in as a Jane Doe. We’d better go see the rest of those pictures and take a look at where she was staying.” The two detectives stood up.
“Sure,” Harry said. But when Polly opened the door for them, Violet Schmalz was standing on the front porch. “Violet!” Harry said. “Did you find her?”
“No,” Violet said, and came into the living room. “I called everyone I could think of,” she quavered. “The only people I didn’t call were the ones who run the competition. Oh, Harry they’re going to be furious at us.”
“Not half as furious as her family,” he said.
“I feel so guilty.” Violet turned to Polly. “You remember how much I griped about the crazy hours she kept, and when she took over my kitchen to cook that mess of Brazilian stuff with the black beans and rice. I even told you I wished she’d hurry up and leave, but I didn’t mean it, not really. I meant it right that minute, all right, but she was really a sweet girl, and I was rooting as hard as anybody for her to win.”
“I know,” Polly said. “You were both great hosts.”
“I’ll say,” Bruce said.
“Camila said so herself,” Nate chimed in.
Joan couldn’t stand it any longer. “You’re all talking as if she were dead!” she burst out. “And you—” She turned to the detectives. “You’ve been quizzing Bruce as if you thought he’d killed her. Why don’t you start by looking for Camila, alive? She probably took a walk and got lost. I could get lost on these crazy streets!”
“Maybe she thought she spotted someone with her violin and took off after him,” Nate put in. “She’d be lost in no time. But she might be in danger, too, you know,” he said to Joan in a calm, reasonable voice, the kind she’d used many times to head off an explosion from her children. “They’ve got to consider that possibility.”
“Ma’am, we consider this an urgent case,” Richardson said in the same infuriatingly calm voice. “We have to look in all directions at once. It’s just routine.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m just tired. If you don’t need me here anymore, I’d better go home.” She hugged Bruce and Polly and escaped to her car with as much dignity as she could manage. On the way home, she wished she could talk with Fred.
She wondered about the Schmalzes. Camila must have driven Violet wild. Wild enough to drive Camila off, or worse? She’d surely flirted with Harry, too. Had Violet seen her as a threat to her marriage? Was Harry more concerned about Camila, or did he suspect his wife of doing something drastic? Did Violet have a short fuse, or a long, slow one with a big bang at the end? Or how about Harry himself? Did he have a history of doing inappropriate things to young women? How would he respond to this one in particular?
It would be a relief to talk it all over with Fred. But when she finally called him, only his machine answered. He must have had some late-night emergency.
Well, that’s what I’m getting myself into, marrying a cop. “Hi, Fred,” she told the machine. “I’m home safe and sound, and really tired. Talk to you tomorrow.”
No sign of Andrew, either. She showered, brushed her teeth and hair, pulled on a clean nightgown, and crawled into bed, meaning to read herself to sleep. When she flicked the switch on the reading lamp, though, it refused to turn on, as it had for the last three or four nights. Rats. She kept meaning to change the bulb, but the extra bulbs were down in the furnace room, an inconvenient fact she never remembered until she was barefoot.
I’ll remember to bring one up tomorrow. I hope I’m tired enough tonight to go to sleep without a book.
Yawning once, she curled up and knew nothing more.
10
The boys who called 911 on Monday had reported “a dead man curled up in the gutter.” From the location, at the very end of a shady street that ran past the campus, Fred had expected to find a young faculty member at Oliver College, or maybe a student. The students called these the “tree streets,” and the upperclassmen who moved out into older houses that had been divided into apartments paid a premium to live on them. Not the kind of neighborhood that ran to dead men in gutters.
With Officer Jill Root driving, Fred had wasted no time getting there, but the ambulance had arrived first, and the fire fighters who doubled as paramedics were performing the obligatory CPR. Fred sighed when he saw them laboring over the man spread-eagled several feet from the gutter. They’d already compromised the crime scene—if there had been a crime.
Showing his badge, but keeping out of the way just in case the paramedics were right this time, and there was life left in the too-still body, Fred circled around to get a look at the face.
Root, who beat him there by inches, cried out, “Kyle! My God, Lieutenant, it’s Kyle Pruitt!” She was trembling, but didn’t interfere.
When the fireman bending over the head paused between puffs, Fred glimpsed the sergeant’s flaming hair and round, freckled face, often florid, but now abnormally pale. Fred had been putting some pressure on Pruitt to work off some of the extra pounds he’d carried around at least for the couple of years since Fred had arrived in Oliver. Never one to turn down food, Kyle had claimed in recent weeks to be jogging and biking five and ten miles a day, but Fred had seen little result.
Dammit, Kyle, he thought, you drove me crazy sometimes, and I still don’t know how you made sergeant, but you didn’t deserve to have your life cut short like this. Did you collapse of a heart attack because you pushed yourself too hard? Or worse, because I pushed you too hard? Shaking his head sadly, he watched the useless effort to revive a dead man. You couldn’t dissuade these guys. He had seen paramedics attempt CPR on a man with his chest shot away.
The firemen finally stopped, as Fred had been sure they would. But then, checking Kyle’s heart one more time, they put an oxygen mask over his face.
Fred was suddenly hopeful. “Detective Lieutenant Lundquist, Oliver Police. This is Sergeant Kyle Pruitt. He’s alive?”
“Yeah, we’ve got a thready pulse,” one man said. “I know Kyle—went to school with him. He’s awful banged up.”
“Banged up?” Not his heart, then?
“Someone plowed into him pretty damn hard,” said the other man, now splinting Kyle’s left leg. “This whole leg is a mess. And he must’ve hit his head when he hit the ground. Might be a skull fracture.”
I didn’t do it, Fred thought. Relief flooded over him, and with it, new guilt, for caring almost more about his own responsibility than Kyle Pruitt’s life.
Root had pulled herself together and herded the little crowd of students gathering in the street back onto the sidewalk.
Fred radioed the dispatcher. “It’s a hit-and-run,” he told her. “I want Ketcham here. The victim’s on the job.” He omitted the name so that the Pruitts wouldn’t get the news from some scanner-happy neighbor, but he knew the department would send everyone it could spare to investigate this particular hit-and-run. Steady, intelligent, middle-aged Sergeant Johnny Ketcham was Fred’s first choice.
“Were the kids right?” the dispatcher asked. Fred translated: Is he dead?
“Not yet. He’s not moving, but they’re still working on him. And what happened to the kids who called it in, anyway? Did you get their names?”
“Negative—they were too scared. They sounded young—you could tell they were boys, but their voices hadn’t changed. I told them to go back there and wait for you, Lieutenant.”
Fred didn’t see anyone younger than a college student.
“Anybody see what happened here?” he asked, but no one volunteered. “Anyone here b
efore the ambulance arrived?” he tried.
“Only me,” said a young man on rollerblades, wearing an Oliver College T-shirt. “The rest of them came later. But I didn’t even notice the guy until the sirens stopped and the ambulance pulled up beside me.”
“Did you see them move him?”
“Oh, sure. They pulled him out of the gutter and rolled him over to do CPR.”
The gutter—so the kids were right about that, at least.
“Which way was he facing before they moved him?”
The young man frowned. “The curb, I guess. Or down, I don’t know. I didn’t notice him, you know?”
“No, I mean which direction was his body aimed? Against the traffic? Or with it, the way he is now?”
“Oh. Yeah. With it—he never saw what hit him. That’s why I skate the other way.”
Fred skipped the lecture about staying out of the street. “He never saw it—but did you?”
“I told you. All I saw was the ambulance.”
“Did you notice any kids around?”
“A couple, but they didn’t go near him. They came from over there,” and he pointed in the direction of the college library. “They took off when the guys got out of the ambulance.”
“You see where they went?”
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “I was watching the action here.”
“What did they look like?”
“I don’t know. Just kids, a boy of maybe ten or twelve and a bigger one about fourteen or fifteen. The big one stood yay high,” and he held his arm about five feet from the ground. “Grubby jeans, Indiana T-shirts. Both real blond—towheads. The little one had an old beat-up bike with a banana seat. The bigger one had a ten-speed he had to stand up to ride.”
Even with Fred’s pumping, he came up with no more details. His attention had shifted quickly from the boys who had left to the drama happening in front of him. Fred took down his name, dorm address, and phone number, and handed him a card. “Let me know if anything else comes to you.”
“Sure thing, Lieutenant.” The student glided off down the street, facing the occasional cars that Oliver thought of as traffic. Even half an hour earlier there would have been more witnesses, but the college offices had emptied at five, and most folks were home eating supper. Just bad luck. Or maybe someone had seen it happen but didn’t want to get involved?
The Vanishing Violinist Page 7