Art of Evil

by Bancroft, Blair

  “Good luck,” I said. He waved and zoomed off toward the rose garden. I continued my long walk from the tram barn to the primary tram stop. Now that the weather topped out at around seventy-five degrees each day, there was no excuse to cadge a ride. My rotten miserable s.o.b. therapist said I should walk. So I walked.

  It was not one of my favorite days. Two tour buses arrived together, at least half their passengers convinced a seven-passenger tram could carry ten—and not hesitant about saying so. There was something about tour groups, I decided, that prompted inimical thoughts of a mob psychology course I had once taken.

  By five-thirty I was frazzled and thinking of Jody and the glass of Glenlivet on ice that would miraculously appear as soon as I walked in the door.

  God bless Aunt Hy.

  I am not, I have to admit, a morning person. Yes, my job had required early hours when in the office, but I had reverted quite nicely to my inclination toward being a nightowl. Sleeping in, I’d discovered, was one of the few advantages to being an invalid. So I wasn’t thrilled, when I picked up the shrilling phone the following Sunday morning, to see my digital clock proclaiming the hour as 7:00 AM. Burt, the tram boss, was apologetic when he heard my sleepy mumble, but one of the drivers had called in sick. Could I be there by nine-thirty?

  Now that I was up, I could have been there by seven-thirty I told him, possibly a bit tartly. He promised, gently, not to call me again before eight.

  Needless to say, I arrived at the Bellman well before the appointed hour. Betty, one of the Circus Museum’s security guards was just unlocking the door as I drove past. Instead of continuing on to the tram barn, I slammed on my brakes and zipped into the small staff parking lot next door to the Circus. Why stop that particular morning? I would always wonder. But it was only nine o’clock, and I’d been through the Circus Museum only twice before. It seemed a perfect opportunity to take another look.

  Yet my sudden urge to visit the Circus might have been more than that. My odd, erratic gift—call it intuition, empathy, whatever—seemed to be making a comeback. By the pricking of my thumbs . . .

  Betty and I chatted for a moment, then I headed straight for the main room, the one with all the old circus wagons, once drawn by teams of horses as the Bellman Circus announced its presence by a parade through countless heartland towns. To me, these were the embodiment of the circus, of the wonder and grace that could never quite be the same after the advent of the combustion engine.

  Wrapped in my customary early morning funk, still vaguely resentful of lost sleep, I charged past the miniature circus, whose animation and sound system had not yet been activated for the day, slowing only when I reached the brilliantly colored wagons. It struck me, for the first time, that they were arranged in a nearly closed circle reminiscent of old movies with the conestoga wagons circled against imminent attack, as if protecting the miniature circus in their center.

  I wandered past a fourteen-foot cage on wheels, painted bright green with ornate gilded trim, its four battered rubber wheels revealing its many miles across America. I wondered what animals had once paced within. Lions, tigers, bears, monkeys? Next was the red calliope cart, with jesters dancing on its sides, an open window offering the public a glimpse of its mechanized innards. There were enclosed wagons that must have carried equipment, one guarded by gilded griffins, in high relief. Its iron-rimmed wheels were painted to resemble a sunset. The huge band wagon, decorated with five classically clad ladies, one in danger of losing the top of her gown—I wondered how that had played in the heartland—was topped by scrolled bench seats for the musicians. The bass drum was still in place at the rear.

  I stood, gazing up at those seats high above my head and pictured the circus parading down the main street of some fair-to-middling town in the Midwest. It had to have been the single most exciting thing that happened in a farming community dogged by hard work from dawn to sunset. The boom of the drum, the blare of the brass, echoed by trumpets from the elephants, the roar of a lion, the cries of the barkers.

  Was it a simpler time, a time to be envied? Or should we think of all the progress we’d made? Of diseases wiped out, distances conquered? While so many things—war, poverty, tragedy—remained the same.

  Mentally, I snapped my shell back around me, struggled to zip it tight, like the plastic rain curtains on my tram. Philosophy and introspection I didn’t need. Like those twelve-step programs, I needed to live one day at a time. Slogging on and letting the world take care of itself. Analysis by Rory Travis was not needed.

  I should have seen it, smelled it, of course, the minute I came through the door. But it was only now, as I moved on around the circle of wagons that I saw the blood, pooling on the cement floor that had once held Richard Bellman’s Pierce Arrows and a Rolls Royce. Anger flared. Billie, you wouldn’t!

  No, he wouldn’t. And, besides, this didn’t look or smell like paint. Or fingernail polish.

  Perhaps three seconds for the above thoughts to chase through my mind. I raised my eyes. And knew immediately what I was seeing wasn’t an effigy or a mannequin. On the floor of a large white cage a woman was sprawled, face down, wearing nothing but blood. A knife with carved ivory handle was sticking out of her back. From a pool of red beneath her body a slow-moving rivulet of blood dripped off the edge of the cage floor onto the broad nose of a gilded griffin flaring out from the side of the cage below, some splashing into its open mouth, staining the sharp white teeth, before falling to the floor.

  It should have been Patricia, I thought. She was the only young woman who worked in this building. But this woman wasn’t blond. Her long dark hair, like the effigy of Lygia, was sprawled across the cage floor. Although her face was turned toward the rear, I found an angle along the bars and used my cane as a prop so I could rise on the tip of my one good foot. Ungainly but efficient.

  Oh, dear God! It was Lydia. Dear sweet Lydia, who could not possibly have had an enemy in the world. Lydia, whom Billie adored. Or said he did.

  Billie Ball Hamlin . . . who had just gone from the frying pan into the fire.

  There was no need to check her pulse—I knew death when I saw it—but I stretched my hand through the bars and did it anyway. Her neck was cold. Then I walked back out to the lobby and told Betty. As she rushed by me on her way to the wagons, a victim of stunned disbelief, I grabbed her walkie-talkie and called the Security Desk.

  After the golf carts began piling up outside, I told the Chief of Security where he could find me and went off to do my job. It was nine-fifty, and visitors were already coming down the incline toward the tram stop. I told the other two tram drivers what was going on. Hastily, we revised our route and our speeches.

  We’re so sorry, but the Circus Museum will be closed today.

  And then I remembered that Josh Thomas was back in town.

  Chapter 11

  I kept expecting my cell phone to ring. Twice, while waiting for passengers to load, I checked to make sure the battery was still strong. It was. Evidently, I was last on Detective Parrish’s list.

  Each time I took the back road that bypassed the Circus Museum, I got a full panoramic view—across a hundred feet of green lawn—of the line-up of police cars and unmarked law enforcement vehicles filling the narrow concrete ribbon of my usual route. And, as if that weren’t enough, I had to field the inevitable questions from my passengers. While my head seethed with my own questions and my mouth spouted platitudes (“an accident of some kind,” I kept repeating, “just an accident”), I was certain of only one thing—the serenity of The Richard and Opal Bellman Museum of Art had been brutally shattered. Tim Mundell’s suicide had been only a nagging blip on my early warning radar. The effigies, the mannequin, nothing had prepared us—prepared even me, who was accustomed to violence—for Lydia’s murder.

  So what now? I could pop back into my shell and lock the lid down tight. Or I could punch my way through the breach that was already there.

  Panic dictated I wasn’t ready, wasn’t s
trong enough. In mind or in body.

  Reality dictated I didn’t have a choice.

  Fortunately, there isn’t much time for reflection when you’re driving—wasn’t that why I liked this job? Yet I had no trouble picturing Billie in an interview room at police headquarters with Ken Parrish and another hotshot or two trying to tear him to pieces. No wonder Ken hadn’t yet gotten around to me.

  Less fortunately, I happened to be driving by when the body bag came out. There was a massive pregnant silence from my passengers. “Heart attack,” I lied, hoping none of them had been aboard earlier when I’d mentioned the word “accident.”

  Shortly after, I turned over my tram to my replacement, who had already heard the news. When I got to my car, Ken Parrish was not waiting for me. Odd. I had been almost certain he would be. After all, I’d found the body, hadn’t I? I recalled my vision of Billie in an interrogation room. Not so odd. It wasn’t too soon for Ken and Company to be pinning Billie’s hide to the wall.

  When I drove off the museum grounds, I turned directly south along the shore road, cruising through one of Sarasota’s finest neighborhoods, a mix of mansions built in Richard and Opal Bellman’s time, of more modest homes erected in the Fifties and Sixties, and imposing Mediterranean Revival edifices built in the past ten years, after homes from earlier times had been bulldozed to the ground. For a while the soothing blanket of beauty worked; but in the end—just like life—reality triumphed. I was dumped back on the ugliness of the Tamiami Trail and fought rush hour traffic all the way out to Pelican Key. Eventually, however, I found myself sitting at the picnic table I’d shared with Josh. Today, the sun was overhead, sparkling off the slight chop in the pass between the keys. The temperature was in the mid-seventies, and I had to remind myself it was almost Thanksgiving. There was a scattering of cars at the west end, near the wooden walk-over to the Gulf, but the area where I was sitting boasted one lone fisherman and a mother watching a toddler play in the sand.

  A good place to think. So, since I wasn’t ready to think about me, I thought about Lydia Hewitt instead. On the day after the Roman charioteer first shook the Bellman’s serenity, I had tried to talk to Billie. All I’d gotten from him were the glow of dancing blue eyes and a self-satisfied smirk. So I’d made a few inquiries and discovered where in the museum Lydia usually could be found. Unfortunately, it was in the offices high above the Art Museum entrance. I’d opened the door to the narrow staircase and groaned. Did I really want to do this? I’d grabbed both hand rail and cane in a death grip and started up.

  The second flight of stairs was reached only by crossing a small room and attacking steps leading in a totally different direction. Sighing heavily, I slogged on. (I swear the place was designed by Escher.) I was eyeing a third flight of steps with considerable anguish when I spotted Lydia on the far side of a large open room on the third floor. The ambiance of the room itself was an anomaly. Nearly every worker I encountered at the Bellman was mid-fifties and up. This entire expanse was filled with a bevy of young ladies, all seemingly thin, lovely, and impeccably groomed. Well, of course. This was Marketing. What better bait to use when attempting to extract money from wealthy patrons, so many of whom were male?

  I took a moment to admire the other view. Since I was at least ten feet from the nearest window, I could do so without my heart doing anything worse than continuing to pound from my first stair-climbing in seven months. The view was spectacular. The entire central courtyard of the museum, with its terraces, statues and fountains, spread out before me. At the far end, David stood sentinel, with a broad sweep of green lawn and the turquoise blue of Sarasota Bay behind him. Pelican Key was a low-lying ribbon in the distance, its skyline of high-rise condos pushing up at irregular intervals. Let’s face it, I thought. If a girl had to spend her time on the telephone, asking people for money, this was surely the most inspiring place to do it from.

  “Rory!” Lydia stood beside me, looking anxious. “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t have climbed all those stairs.”

  I was inclined to agree with her, but concern for Billie had forced me to it. “What’s up there?” I asked, nodding toward the next flight of stairs.

  “The aerie,” she whispered with a grin. “If you think our view’s good . . .” She rolled her eyes.

  I knew a bit of spicy gossip when I heard it. “Do tell,” I hissed, with a matching wicked grin. Lydia beckoned me to follow her to her desk in a rear corner.

  “Well,” she said when we were both seated, “rumor has it one of the curators had an apartment up there way back when. It even had a kitchen and, of course, a bathroom. It’s a VIP office now, only we almost never see anyone go up there.” Her color high, Lydia played with a pencil on her desk, peeked at me from beneath her long lashes. “Naturally, we’ve all been up there a time or two.”

  Sure she had. And she quickly confirmed the visions of my all-too-lively imagination.

  There’s a living room overlooking the courtyard, a bedroom that’s mostly all bed,” Lydia said with a suggestive waggle of her eyebrows. “A bathroom and an alcove kitchen with a little sink and a microwave. ‘Course anybody’d have to tromp straight through Marketing to get up there, so I guess it doesn’t really get used. At least not during office hours.” She shrugged, then spoiled her wide-eyed innocence with a naughty wink.

  I laughed, as I was supposed to. Somehow I hadn’t realized Lydia had both spunk and humor. I liked her and was beginning to understand why Billie liked her too.

  But I’d climbed those blasted stairs for a reason. One Roman warrior didn’t seem like such a heinous crime, but I didn’t want to see Billie mess up his life over a prank.

  “Lydia, I know you and Billie set sparks off each other,” I said, “but how well do you really know him? Do you think he could have made that Roman charioteer?”

  Just that fast, her eyes turned cold. “Of course not,” she retorted. “Whyever would he?”

  “Hey, I’m on his side,” I said. “I want to help, but I need to know if he’s good enough to have made that effigy. I mean, it’s very well done. Somehow it doesn’t seem like a guy who dives for golf balls would be good eno—”

  She took the bait. “He is too good enough!” Lydia declared. “Billie has real potential, that’s what the instructor says.”

  “You’re a student, too?” I asked.

  Lydia laughed. “I model,” she told me. “For both art and sculpture. Just part-time, of course. That’s why I work here as well.”

  Hm-m-m. Maybe Billie hadn’t been as out of line as I’d thought when he’d asked her to model for him.

  “So Billie could have made the Roman warrior?” I said.

  “Could have. I didn’t say he did.”

  “You haven’t heard him bragging about it?”

  “Not a word.” She looked me straight in the eye.

  So I’d let it go, and now Lydia was dead. Not that anything I might have done would have prevented it . . . But what if Billy had killed her? I’d vouched for him, protected him.

  No, not Billie, I wouldn’t believe it. But now—when it was too late—some of the puzzle was beginning to make sense. Billie had been well paid to keep silent. With ordinary student pranks, the truth always leaks out, as what’s the fun if no one else knows you did it? It takes serious money to buy silence.

  Billie had been paid to create two incidents. Incidents that somehow had to be related to Lydia’s death. Pure coincidence between the effigies and Lydia’s death would be way over the top.

  So now we had a motive for the effigies. Billie Ball Hamlin had been set up as a fall-guy, a patsy, or any other name you want to use for an idiot neatly framed, wrapped, packaged, and tied in a bow for the Sarasota police. Billie who had also had the misfortune to find a young suicide hanging from a tree.

  And Lydia—bright, bubbly Lydia—was gone. With absolutely no hint of any personal reason. As long, that is, as I clung to the notion that continued rejection had not snapped Billie’s artistic
temperament.

  The mannequin incident, however, remained a mystery. As well as why anyone would want to harm Lydia Hewitt. What had she known that could have gotten her killed? Certainly, nothing as innocuous as knowledge of Billie sculpting two effigies in papier maché. Had she seen something? Heard something? In that fourth-floor aerie, perhaps?

  Or had she been in the wrong place at the wrong time? Encountered a madman, a random act of violence? Making her death coincidental to Billie Ball Hamlin receiving payment in advance of two thousand dollars?

  Not likely.

  A robbery attempt gone wrong? The Art Museum and the Casa Bellissima were packed full of priceless objects.

  Again, professionals who tossed out twenty Ben Franklins to set the stage for a robbery didn’t do something stupid like carving up an innocent young woman with a hunting knife.

  My cell phone rang. I swallowed hard, dragged myself back to Pelican Pass. By now I recognized the number on the screen. “Good afternoon, Detective,” I said in my best, crisp Special Agent voice.

  “Can you meet me at Mike’s Place at seven?” It was as close to a bark as I’d ever heard from Ken Parrish. “I’ll buy you dinner,” he added, just as graciously.

  In spite of the tone, it was the best offer I’d had in a long time, but at the moment Detective Sergeant Kenneth Parrish was the Enemy. I had no choice, however. Dinner at Mike’s Place, which was far more elegant than it sounded, was a vast improvement over being interrogated in some windowless room at the local Police Central. I agreed to meet him. Truth to tell, I was rather looking forward to it.

  When I got home, Aunt Hy was all excited. Martin Longstreet had invited us to a concert at the Bellman. I opened my mouth to tell her about my day and realized, in the nick of time, it would be cruel and inhuman punishment. She would find out, of course. She read the newspapers faithfully each morning. And Martin would tell her. But where, I wondered, during a day in which Bellman Board members’ lives must have been seriously disturbed, had Martin found time to issue a concert invitation? I found out on Aunt Hy’s next breath.