Art of Evil

by Bancroft, Blair

  “You found someone else in the aerie?” I prodded.

  “And a great surprise it was, too,” Corbin admitted. “And quite disappointing, actually. I mean, there was no place else with a bed—”

  “Who was it?” I interjected.

  “No idea. Lydia knew the girl, I believe. But the dear child was so embarrassed, I couldn’t get anything more out of her.”

  “So you left?”

  “What else?”

  “How?” I asked. He stared at me blankly. “How did you get out? I presume the alarm systems were set?”

  “Actually, no. It was still early, and a number of people work late. Actually, it was really only the front of the museum we had to ourselves. We simply walked out past Security, as usual.”

  “But there must have been times . . .” My voice trailed off. Even FBI agents can stumble over embarrassing questions.

  Corbin grinned. Salaciously. “Well, if we wanted more than a quickie, we simply stayed through ‘til morning. We kept supplies up there. Rather delicious, actually. Like camping out.”

  “So who was the man?”

  “Really, Ms. Travis, I’m not a voyeur. One naked body’s much like—” He stopped, considered. Nodded. “Very well. I didn’t see much of the girl except short blond hair. Missionary,” he explained with considerable scorn, “and she turned her head to the wall. But he was a large man, not young. Hair so blonde gray doesn’t show. Good muscle tone. Not flabby. Still good-looking. Country club type.”

  So the Art History professor actually had an artist’s eye. “Did Lydia ever mention the name Patricia?”

  Corbin made a wry face. “You know how girls are. They’d die before peaching on another female. Sorry, I didn’t mean that literally, of course.”

  The blond hair fit Patricia Arkwright, who was supposedly having an affair with a VIP. The man could have been Parker St. Clair, but I was reaching again. And even if I was right, it probably meant nothing more than two sets of couples were enjoying the unique comforts of the aerie.

  Was I following another lead to nowhere? Looking for murderers or witnesses in entirely the wrong places? This case was seeming more and more like a banyan tree—twisted limbs extending in all directions, putting down roots, which expanded into thick trunks of information leading straight back into the ground. Dead end. Finis. Forgetaboutit!

  I thanked Professor Corbin, managed not to wince as I forgot and offered my hand. It was all I could do not to react to the pain. Before I said goodbye to Billie, I once again—and more strongly—advised him to get an attorney. “When your only alibi is an illegal act—twice—you don’t dare open your mouth,” I lectured. “When the police find you—and they will be coming for you—the only words out of your mouth must be, ‘I want to call my lawyer.’ Do you understand? Promise me, Billie. If you can’t afford—”

  “Hey,” he said, “I’ve piled up a lot of golf balls, girl. And I know who to call. I’ll be fine. You just get out there and find the guy who did it, okay?”

  He gave me a big hug. I had to sit in the Caddy for a few minutes before the mist cleared from my eyes. If only I could believe I was helping instead of spinning my wheels.

  Time to go home and clean up. But of course my cell phone rang.

  “I’m at the museum. Where are you?” Josh demanded, without preliminaries. I told him I was at the Art School. “The murder was all over the news. Are you in the midst of it again?”

  “I guess.”

  “Meet me in the Bellman parking lot. Trail side.”

  Such a gracious request. We Feebs don’t do humble well. Or subservient. In fact, we don’t take orders well at all. Not even from men like Josh Thomas.

  Evidently, my seething silence tipped him off. “I’ve got info on Parker St. Clair,” Josh offered in a slightly less dictatorial tone. “And I’ll spring for lunch.” Close to conciliatory now.

  I’d never thought the man was stupid.

  So I turned north, instead of south, and found Josh standing with his arms folded, leaning against his forest green rental car and managing to look as if he’d been waiting all morning, rather than five minutes. I pulled up next to him.

  I opened the Caddy window. Josh bent down to talk to me. And in ten seconds—or maybe it was less—he’d taken in the shell dust, the rip in my slacks, the dried blood. When I tried to hide my hands in my lap, he grabbed one and pried my fingers open, revealing the rapidly reddening lacerations. “Taken up gator wrestling, have you?”

  “I fell. It was bound to happen sometime.”

  “You left your cane in the car.” It wasn’t a question. He knew I’d done something stupid.

  “It was pride I should have left in the car.”

  “So who were you trying to impress?”

  “Would you believe a woman from Brooklyn—in hair rollers, and seventy, if she was a day?

  Josh groaned. He reached in, grabbed my keys, and scooped me out of the Caddy and into his rental. Twenty minutes later, we pulled up in front of a waterfront villa on Pelican Key, in an area of newer and more modest homes than the imposing mansions where Aunt Hy had once lived. In Florida, “villa” is used to distinguish free-standing homes that are part of a condominium association from high-rise apartment-style condos. It was a handsome house, with a red tile roof and lush landscaping. Its most striking feature, however, was its location on a canal, complete with dock and a boat of about sixteen feet, with a sturdy outboard, a blue canvas canopy, and a jaunty blue stripe just below the gunwale.

  Boat. Shivers ran up my spine. Goosebumps rose on my arms. I’d spent considerable time analyzing how someone could come and go at the Bellman at night without being seen, and a small boat was at the top of my list.

  Josh, stabbing Lydia, slitting Rob’s throat? Impossible. For all the darkness in him, absolutely, utterly impossible. After a last lingering look at Josh’s boat, rocking gently in the nearly currentless canal on the far side of the road, I followed him into the house.

  I tried not to laugh, I swear I did. But Josh’s current home was a typical Florida rental. The kind so many people buy, then rent out during the season to help pay for their future retirement home. They are almost always furnished with light-colored furniture, upholstered in bright floral prints. Inevitably, the pictures on the walls are also flowers, palm trees, and beaches, with perhaps a child or two dabbling in the sand. (Sure-fire appeal to grandparents everywhere.) In short, the villa was about as far from a bachelor pad as one could get. Although Josh wasn’t wearing all black today, he looked about as at home in this setting as Aunt Hy would at a rock concert.

  “Don’t say it,” he barked.

  “I’m sure you’re very grateful to Martin for finding this for you,” I choked. But I was talking to his back. He’d disappeared into the kitchen.

  Josh was back out in a moment, carrying a large mixing bowl. Empty. “This way,” he said, and I followed blindly, without so much as a token protest. Josh is like that. If you don’t consciously fight him every minute, he carries you along, with all the inevitability of a rip current. Besides, I wanted to see if the bedroom was as totally Florida as the living room.

  It was. The bedspread and draperies were strewn with a mix of tropical flowers, mostly in hot pink and orange. Repressing a giggle, I followed Josh straight into the bathroom, where he was already running water and testing its warmth. He gave a curt nod toward the john on which he had thoughtfully lowered the lid. My giggles died in my throat. I don’t care how sophisticated a woman might think herself, I challenge you not to be at least a teeny bit uncomfortable when confined in a bathroom with a man you really don’t know very well and you’re sitting on the toilet. The lid, by the way, was soft and squishy, almost like sitting on someone’s stomach. It was clear vinyl with a mix of seashells embedded in some sort of viscous liquid. It should have been comfortable, but I seemed to have gone into some kind of suspended animation. I sat ramrod stiff, my brain shut down, the Bellman totally forgotten.

&
nbsp; I was as still as one of Billie’s effigies, while I watched Josh work on my palms, recovering enough to make a feeble protest only as he finished fastening off the second gauze wrap. “I look like a burn victim,” I said. “Aren’t you overdoing it for a minor scrape?”

  “Keeps the medicine on. Wiggle your fingers.” I did. “See,” Josh retorted, “you still have complete mobility. Now take off your pants.”

  I squeaked.

  “You heard me,” Josh said. “From what I can see, your knees are worse than your hands.”

  “I’ll just pull up my pant legs.”

  “Jesus, woman, you think I’ve never seen a woman’s panties before. Besides, I bet you’re wearing twice as much cloth as the string bikinis at the beach.”

  I was. Aunt Hy had given me ten pairs of white cotton briefs. Suitable for the Florida climate, she’d said. And they were. They were also about as sexy as one of those old-fashioned voluminous cotton nightgowns. I thought of all the sexy silk undies I’d packed away, along with my previous life.

  As if it mattered. There was no way my body could compete, no matter what I was (or wasn’t) wearing. It was pride I was suffering from, that was all. It couldn’t possibly matter if Josh Thomas saw me in white cotton Fruit of the Looms.

  I didn’t move.

  “Off now!” he said. “Or I do it for you.” He sounded like he meant it. Actually, I had never thought Josh Thomas the kind of man who bluffed.

  I wiggled out of my slacks, the john lid huffing and puffing beneath me. It was unnerving. Or maybe it was just Josh.

  My left knee, in particular, looked rather nasty when bared to the world. Speaking of bared, Josh took one swift glance at my white cotton panties, then ducked his head, and kept his eyes trained on my knees. I had the horrible feeling he actually felt sorry for catching me so totally unprepared for male eyes.

  Not, of course, that Josh Thomas counted. I still had moments when I felt he wasn’t quite human. He was not my type. Definitely not my type. But no matter which side of the law he was on, he understood how the great underbelly of the world worked. And for that reason we had an empathy, albeit sometimes reluctant and wary. That never trust anybody we’d learned in the school of hard knocks.

  Way off in the living room, where I’d parked my purse on the coffee table, my cell phone rang. Josh had it in my hands before the third ring. I began to see how he had appeared in my tram out of nowhere. The man was fast.

  “You told Billie to lawyer up!” Ken Parrish roared.

  “How could I not?”

  “Forgotten which side you’re on, Travis? Two people dead, and you’ve shut down our chief suspect!”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  “Great, you’ve gone psychic now.” His sarcasm practically leaped out of the phone.

  “Think premeditation, Parrish,” I snapped. Oh, lord, I’d planned to sit him down and discuss this in a reasonable manner, and instead I was yelling into a cell phone. Bad. Very bad. But I couldn’t seem to stop. “You’re thinking crime of passion with Lydia, but the guy had a knife. He used Rohypnol. He wore latex gloves. That’s not a sudden ‘I lost it.’ That’s premeditation. And Billie didn’t even know Rob Varney—”

  “That’s what he told—”

  I cut him off. “Rob’s murder was premeditated as well. The strop razor, the shaving cream. And I bet you found Rohypnol, right?”

  “Autopsy’s just beginning.”

  “It’s there. I’d bet on it. And, besides,” I added righteously, “even if you could prove Billie knew Rob Varney—and I don’t think he did—what possible motive could he have?”

  “How about Varney saw him attach the effigy to the bull?”

  My cell phone turned to ice. I had a feeling Ken hadn’t planned to tell me that juicy bit, but, like me, he’d gotten carried away by our argument. “Did he?” I asked. Only a thread was left of my confidant tone.

  “’Fraid so, Rory. We have it in writing.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Almost from the beginning. But since Hamlin confessed to the effigies, it didn’t seem very important.”

  “Something’s wrong,” I muttered.

  “No kidding. But women’s intuition doesn’t cut it, Travis.”

  I began to recover. “You know being caught for making the effigies is not sufficient motive for murder.”

  “But unrequited passion is. Maybe Varney made a habit of snooping. Maybe he saw something the night Hewitt was killed—”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  Ken sighed. “Hell, no. Don’t I wish.”

  I remembered that I liked him. “You’ll let me know about the autopsy?” I asked.

  “I’ll call you later. If it’s not too damn late, maybe we can have coffee?”

  “Sure,” I said, “that would be great. Bye.”

  Josh’s obsidian eyes were regarding me with considerable interest. “Have you made the Roman connection?” he asked. “You know, Roman chariot, Lygia’s sacrifice similar to Christians being fed to the lions. Lydia Hewitt ending up in a lion cage?”

  I widened my eyes. “And to think my office accuses me of making giant leaps instead of following a proper trail of hard facts.”

  “Those are hard facts.”

  “You’re saying someone specified the Roman connection, or someone with a better than usual education took advantage of what Billie did?”

  “Well, obviously, I wouldn’t dare say Billie did it.”

  “Ha! Big macho spook scared of little old me?”

  Josh managed to look diffident. Not an easy feat. “Just scared of your displeasure, ma’am. Remember . . . I want you to work for me.”

  I grabbed my cane and levered myself off the john. Since Josh had put away all the medical supplies while I was talking to Ken, he was right on my heels as I stalked out of the bathroom. “Had lunch?” he asked.

  The tuna salad sandwich he made was so good he felt forced to admit the ingredients came out of a package. I didn’t mind. It tasted great, and it had been a long morning. As I wiped the last crumbs from my fingers, Josh said, “I found out about Parker St. Clair, but I don’t know if it means anything.”

  I put my elbows on the dining table, propped my bandaged hands under my chin. “Well?”

  “About fifteen years ago he founded a company called Clairity, an obvious play on his name. He seems to have had a lot of government connections, because the company never struggled. It was off and running from Day One. It provides ‘Services.’ A wealthy citizen, a company, a government, a country wants something . . . Clairity finds a way for them to get it.”

  “That’s a lot of bones,” I whispered, my mind spinning with the possibilities.

  “Oh, yeah. Clairity’s still at it, but lately there’s talk of watchdog committees, closer inspection of the government’s connection to Clairity. Questions about Clairity’s connections to other governments, some maybe not our friends. There’s even talk of vast sums of money gone missing, maybe into personal bank accounts, such as Parker St. Clair’s or his wife’s.”

  “You didn’t just find this out, did you?” I accused. “You recognized the name the minute I said it.

  Josh took a long look out the window toward the dock and the boat. “I had to think about it a bit. That Clairity could have any connection to the troubles at the Bellman seemed pretty remote.”

  “But it’s possible, isn’t it?” I prodded. “So why would Martin refuse to talk? Why would he—and you—protect someone like Parker St. Clair?”

  “Martin protects everything,” Josh returned with ease. “He’s so used to not talking that revealing information, any kind of information, is practically against his religion.”

  “But we have to find out what he knows!” It occurred to me I was sounding as eager as a novice just out of Quantico.

  “I like the we part,” Josh said. He wasn’t smiling.

  I ignored him. Josh Thomas being nice wasn’t an image I could handle. He was dange
rous. I was weak. I couldn’t ever let down my guard. “If Parker St. Clair feared someone,” I said, “he’d hire a hit, right? He’d never stage an elaborate set-up like this one. I mean, there’s no reason to murder people at the Bellman. He’s on the Board, for heaven’s sake!”

  “He’s an arrogant son of a bitch.”

  “You know him?”

  “Mostly by reputation, but Martin dragged me to a cocktail party at the St. Clair’s last Saturday. Under all that polish, he struck me as a ruthless son of a bitch.”

  Takes one to know one, I thought. “And we probably want to nail him because we don’t like him,” I sighed. “There’s nothing to connect him with Lydia—”

  “Well?” Josh demanded as I sat, suddenly silent, among the sofa’s fuschia flowers.

  So I told him what I’d learned from Mel Corbin.

  “Can’t have been the first time St. Clair’s been caught with his pants down,” Josh said when I finished. “Hardly a motive for murder.”

  I couldn’t disagree, but I told him I’d do my best to find out if the man in the aerie had been Parker St. Clair. “How about checking out Rob Varney?” I added.

  Josh gave me a slow wolfish atta-girl smile that almost made me forget what we were talking about. He dragged me up out of the overly deep sofa and steered me into a small guest bedroom. I shouldn’t have felt that teensy wave of disappointment when I saw we were headed toward a ridiculously fragile French Provincial desk with a laptop taking up half its surface instead of toward the bed. But for an instant—I admit it—my racing heart had nothing to do with the case at hand.

  I was thoroughly ashamed of myself

  Josh knew databases even I had never heard of. I was impressed. And he didn’t have to hack in. He already knew the way. But the only database that had ever heard of a Rob Varney was among the last we tried. The file came up, “Classified.”

  Oh, great. That’s all we needed in this case. Another spook.