The Tree of Death

by Marcia Muller

  “What, do you take shorthand?” I asked. But my mind was busy with the possibilities.

  He didn’t even acknowledge the question.

  “So he let someone in last night and reset the alarm,” I said. “Then that person killed him and…”

  “And what, Miss Oliverez?”

  And what indeed? No one could have left, not without the keys to reset the alarm.

  “What did this person do after killing Mr. De Palma?” Kirk repeated.

  “Well, he… he could have-” Of course! “He could have hidden in the museum until I got here this morning and then sneaked out.”

  “Wouldn’t you or Mr. Leary or Mrs. Cunningham and her volunteers have seen someone sneak out?”

  “Not necessarily…”I stared down at my hands. They were clasped together, white-knuckled. I closed my eyes and saw with dismaying clarity the way the alarm switch had looked when I unlocked it this morning.

  “Miss Oliverez?”

  I looked up at Kirk, my lips parted in panic. “Someone did leave the museum, though. Someone left between the time I set the alarm and the time I opened up this morning.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “When I set the alarm last night, the lock was in the down position. But, this morning, it was up. That means someone left through one of the other two doors-the loading dock or Frank’s courtyard-and reset the alarm.”

  “How, Miss Oliverez?”

  I stared at him, thinking hard.

  “How could anyone have done that when you, by your own admission, had one set of keys and the other was inside the museum when you arrived this morning?”

  “Maybe-maybe someone sneaked in and replaced Frank’s keys on the hook after I opened up.”

  “Oh, now we have someone sneaking in. But is that really possible, Miss Oliverez?”

  “No.” I’d gone straight to Frank’s office and seen the keys. No one could have gotten there first.

  “In other words,” Kirk said, “the only person who could have set that alarm was you. We have only your word for the fact that the alarm lock was in a different position this morning-the word of a person who had, as recently as yesterday, threatened Mr. De Palma’s life.”

  “I didn’t threaten him!”

  “What do you call it?”

  “I-I was angry… I didn’t mean-”

  “You appear to be an intelligent young woman, Miss Oliverez. If you were looking at the set of facts I have before me, what would you think?”

  “I…don’t know.”

  “Then let me tell you.” Kirk got up and leaned across the desk. His voice was soft and level. “That set of facts strongly suggests that you killed Frank De Palma.”

  six

  Eleven o’clock that night. I leaned forward at my desk, my head on my arms like a school child at rest time. The day had been grueling, and those to come seemed no more promising.

  Lieutenant Kirk had kept interrogating me for two hours, going over and over my frequent quarrels with Frank and making me demonstrate how the alarm system worked. He refused to listen to my theory that Frank’s killer had hidden in the museum all night and, frankly, I didn’t believe it myself. All the time Kirk probed into what he-referred to as my “professional jealousy of Mr. De Palma‘’ my mind returned to that one possibility-that someone had left the museum and reset the alarm without using either set of keys. When Kirk finally let me alone, his parting warning was that I should not leave town without letting him know. I felt like a character in a TV police show.

  I had then had Isabel call the press people who had been turned away that morning. At four, I met with them in the central courtyard and delivered my brief statement. There was considerable grumbling about the lack of information, but they left quickly, presumably to go bother the police.

  Of course, by that time my mother had heard the news. She called, full of questions and concerns. Was I all right? Did I want her to come down there?

  No, Mama, I had said.

  But was I sure I was all right? After all, I didn’t find corpses every day, and she remembered what a terrible time I used to have at funerals.

  I assured her I was all right.

  That worry disposed of, my mother’s voice took on confidential tones. Wasn’t it awful about Frank? she asked. But hadn’t she told me? Hadn’t she had a feeling?

  She certainly had, I replied.

  Would I call her if I needed anything?

  Yes, I would. I certainly would. When I hung up, there were tears in my eyes. It was wonderful in its way. No matter how old you got, your mother was still your mother.

  Dinner had been bites of tasteless hamburger in between calls to our board members. Carlos Bautista’s plane was due in at eight, and he would come directly to the museum for an emergency meeting. Carlos, the six other board members, and I gathered at Frank’s office-which by now had been thoroughly turned upside down by the police-and, for what seemed to be the hundredth time, I went over my discovery of our director’s body. The board then officially appointed me acting director, resolved that the Cinco de Mayo opening should go on as-planned, and drafted a letter of condolence to the De Palma family. By the time they’d left at ten-thirty, I felt physically exhausted. I had followed the last members to the front door, thrown the toggle switch on the alarm system, and retired to my office. While my body ached for sleep, my mind kept racing.

  Lieutenant Kirk had called again in the interval between the press conference and the board meeting. He wanted additional information on the museum-background information, he called it. The information, however, was more concerned with me than with the museum. How long had I worked there? What was my training? Who had hired me? Did I report directly to Frank? What were my ambitions? The questions confirmed that I was indeed a serious suspect. They seemed designed more to put pressure on me than to elicit facts.

  Now as I sat with my head on my desk, I considered the lieutenant. I couldn’t understand how his mind worked. He seemed determined to ignore my claim that the alarm system had been set differently this morning than it had last night. It was almost as if he wanted to put the blame on me. Why? Ethnic prejudice? Some other subjective dislike of me? I couldn’t tell, couldn’t see what emotion, if any, hid behind those flat brown eyes. Kirk was too brown, too monochromatic. There was no telling what his reasoning might be.

  Suddenly I wished I could talk this over with someone. Ideally, that person would be my sister, Carlota. We’d always been best friends; I could tell her anything. And Carlota was logical, the steady one in the family. But it was after one in the morning where she lived, in Minneapolis. I didn’t want to upset her and ruin her night’s sleep.

  Well, I’d have to think it through myself. I hadn’t been raised to be the victim of any Anglo cop. J knew I hadn’t committed any murder.

  Who had? I didn’t know.

  And how could they have? It seemed impossible.

  Forget that, then, I told myself. Concentrate on Frank and your knowledge of the people around him. Almost everybody, even the Mexican Mafia members, hated him; there seemed to be no shortage of possible suspects.

  I began-feeling self-conscious and a little dramatic-to review them.

  Jesse. I started with him for the same reason Lieutenant Kirk had started with me. Jesse had admitted to having had a violent quarrel with Frank. What had he said? “I offered to break his fat neck.” Jesse had as much of a temper as I did, if not more. But would his anger be translated into action if sufficiently pushed? I d never had occasion to test that.

  Maria. She certainly had cause to hate her uncle by marriage. Normally she rode to and from work with Frank, but yesterday she had said she was walking home. Now that I thought of it, home was farther than the delicate Maria would normally deign to walk. Where else might she have gone? I’d need to find out.

  Rosa De Palma. Her husband, according to Vic, had been seeing another woman. I didn’t know Rosa that well, but many women of my background accepted these
affairs as part of their lot in life. Even so, didn’t resentment smolder under the surface? Couldn’t some event push the rejected wife over the edge? I needed to know more about Frank’s widow.

  The unknown woman. I needed to find out whom Frank had been seeing.

  Isabel. She could have been angry at the‘ cool reception given her arbol de la vida. Hadn’t she said she was going to have “a few words” with Frank before leaving the museum? Had she? If so, about what?

  Tony. Now I came to a real puzzle. Where the devil was the Colombian? I’d tried to call him that afternoon, but there was no answer at his apartment. Had he been so sick he couldn’t answer the phone? If so, where was Susana? When Lieutenant Kirk had called late this afternoon, he’d indicated he also had had no luck when he’d gone to Tony’s apartment. Kirk had merely sounded irritated about it, but to me Tony’s unavailability was suspicious. Learning his whereabouts, I decided, should be my first priority.

  Vic. I found it hard to suspect the big, sad man of anything. He’d been devoted to Frank. But then I thought of the look on his face when Frank had stalked out of the folk art gallery late yesterday afternoon. What did I know of Vic anyway? I would have to find out more…

  A sudden rasping sound raised chills along my spine and made me lift my head. The sound stopped, then started again. With a nervous laugh, I recognized the scraping of the branches of the tall jacaranda tree that draped its lavender-blue flowers over the roof of the office wing. I got up and went to the window. The fog was in, blowing in sheets across the grounds. It was so thick it might have been fine, gray snow…

  A shadow fell across the wall beside me. It was huge and unrecognizable and came from the doorway. I put my hand to my throat, but it did nothing to calm my racing pulse. Slowly I turned.

  It was Vic.

  “Por Dios, what are you doing here?” My voice sounded shrill and cracked.

  “I’m sorry if I startled you. I didn’t want to say anything to make you jump out of your skin.” His homely face twisted in a grin. “I guess silence wasn’t the right approach either.”

  “There is no right approach, not after a day like today.” I hugged my jacket closer around me and came away from the window. “This place is eerie at night, especially with the fog swirling around out there.”

  “Come on in my office. I’ve got the quartz heater on. I’ll give you some brandy.”

  It sounded good. I followed Vic across the hall. His office definitely looked cheery, the heater glowing and the curtains drawn. Ledgers and accounting sheets were spread all over the desk.

  “I didn’t even know you were here,” I said, taking a seat in one of his comfortable old chairs. “What are you working on?”

  He took a plastic cup from his desk drawer and filled it with brandy. From his high color, I guessed he’d had a fair amount of the stuff. “The accounts, what else? It occurred to me that the board would probably want to go over them, now that Frank’s…” He handed me the cup, his eyes melancholy. “At any rate, I wanted them to be as current as possible. With the opening coming up, I’ve gotten behind.”

  “Haven’t we all.” I sipped brandy, welcoming the warmth it brought.

  Vic began gathering up the ledgers. “I went to your office to make sure you didn’t leave without letting me out, so you could set the alarm.” He went to the small safe, twisted the dial and deposited everything inside.

  “Why do you do that?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Lock the records up. They’re just papers, after all.”

  “They may be just papers, but they have to be kept in a fireproof place.” He returned to the desk and sat, the melancholy look even more pronounced.

  “You’ll miss him, won’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes. I will. We were together a long time, almost twenty years. Frank was the closest thing to a friend I had.” He must have caught my skeptical expression. “I know, you don’t think Frank was capable of friendship. Well, in a lot of ways he wasn’t. But we had good times. Some damned good times.”

  “How’d you meet him?”

  “At the Hernandez Foundation.” He named an organization that gave grants to Spanish-American cultural projects. “Frank was director there. It was a good job for a kid barely out of college. He hired me as his accountant. We’d travel all over the state, checking out projects we were thinking of funding. I had this old Lincoln Continental. God, could we make time in that car! San Diego to Bakersfield to San Francisco in one day. Those were some times.” His eyes sobered. “Of course I needed something to keep my mind off my daughter.”

  It was the first time he’d ever mentioned family to me. “Why?”

  “She was sick. A rare kidney disease. She…”He passed a hand over his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  That probably meant the girl had died. “When Frank left the Hernandez Foundation, you went with him?”

  “Yes. Then he opened the art gallery in Old Town. He knew his art, you know. And he was good at finding sources for it. We’d bring it up from South America, Mexico. He knew who to buy from, and he could strike a hard bargain. That was before all this business about national treasures.”

  In recent years the governments south of the border had come to realize their art treasures are not in unlimited supply and placed restrictions on their export. In Mexico, for instance, items above five thousand dollars in value cannot be removed from the country without permission of the government. Although these restrictions originally took the form of gentlemen’s agreements between countries, more and more of them are now being written into law. It was a move of which I approved, even if it did make acquisitions more difficult. “Was La Galena very successful?” I asked. I remembered it as being small but chic.

  Vic nodded.

  “Why’d Frank give it up, then?”

  “To found this museum, of course.”

  That wasn’t exactly how it had happened. Carlos Bautista and several of his wealthy cronies had come up with the idea and hired Frank to implement it. He, in turn, had hired me. “I always pictured Frank as very fond of money, and we all know he wasn’t making that much here. I’m surprised he would give up a lucrative business.”

  Vic waved one hand. “That was one of the stipulations that went with the job, so there wouldn’t be a conflict of interest. And there was the prestige of the directorship. Frank never could resist a chance to better his standing in the community.”

  Was there a touch of bitterness in Vic’s voice?

  “Also,” he added, “he’d invested his profits from La Galena wisely. He really didn’t need a big salary.”

  I supposed it made sense. If anyone would be privy to the workings of Frank’s mind, it would be Vic.

  “This morning,” I said, “you mentioned that Frank was involved with a woman other than Rosa.”

  Vic shook his head. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t say.”

  “Vic, it might be important.”

  He looked surprised. “To what?”

  “To finding out who killed him.”

  “Oh, no. I don’t think so.”

  “Won’t you tell me?”

  “Elena, there are some things I can’t talk about.”

  I was silent for a moment. “They suspect me, you know.”

  “That’s silly. You wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  “But you told them what I said to Frank, that someone ought to kill him. Why did you do that, Vic?”

  “Elena, I’m sorry. But I thought it would be better not to cover it up. I mean, someone would have told, and they might not have put it in so favorable a light.”

  I didn’t consider his mention of it especially favorable, but I held my tongue. “Now that I’ve been named acting director, it looks even worse to the police.”

  “Nonsense. You were the logical choice for the job. And don’t worry about the police; they’ll find the real killer, a
nd then we can get on with our business. What do you bet they offer you the director’s job?”

  I shrugged. Right now, it didn’t really matter.

  “Don’t look down your nose at it. It’s a plum for someone your age.”

  “Maybe.” I was thinking about my new duties and all the things I had to do before the opening. I would need to rely heavily on Vic in the next few days. Perhaps he should have Frank’s keys to the museum. But something kept me from mentioning it. For now, I’d keep both sets.

  I stood up, yawning. “I’d better be getting home. And you should, too. We’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”

  Vic stood up. He got his jacket and followed me out. The mist was still sheeting across the lawn. I set the alarm, and Vic and I walked through the fog to our cars.

  seven

  I didn’t go home, of course. Instead I drove across town to the district near Santa Barbara City College, where Tony lived. It wasn’t exactly a rundown area, but it was filled with fast-food stands, health food stores, and other businesses catering to students. Even at this hour and in this fog, young people wandered along the sidewalks and congregated on street corners. It hadn’t been so many years since I’d been a student myself, but now I felt out of place among so many fresh faces. I wondered why Tony had chosen to live here, then remembered Susana was in her first year at the college. Tony’s street was all apartments, complex after complex, all of them with floodlit facades and pretentious names. Tony’s was called the Lanai, a stucco building with a Hawaiian motif, built around a central court with a swimming pool. A chandelier shaped liked the head of a tiki god hung on a chain in the arched entryway. In the courtyard the imitation Hawaiian torchlights were dimmed by the mist. I stood by the pool, studying the second tier of apartments where Tony lived. They were all dark except the middle one. I moved closer and spotted the number-207. It was Tony’s.

  Half-past midnight was not a good time to go calling. But, then, Tony had been unavailable all day. I could say I needed to talk to him about the situation at the museum. And the lateness of the hour might catch him off guard. I started for the wrought iron stairway, then paused when I heard car doors slam and footsteps coming from the street.