Dutch Blue Error

by William G. Tapply

  I turned right and began to climb Mt. Vernon Street, marveling as I always did at the evidence of the high-density canine population on the Hill. I watched a couple of cops clap a Denver boot on a green Mercedes and then grin and shrug their shoulders at a guy in a neatly trimmed white beard and three-piece suit who hustled out of one of the narrow brick buildings to argue with them.

  I found the address Deborah Martinelli had given me. It was quarter of ten. I sat on the front steps to wait for her, figuring that if she was anything like her old man, she’d arrive on the dot of ten. But before I finished a cigarette, a red Karmann Ghia pulled up and she stepped out.

  At first I didn’t recognize her. In my mind’s eye I still saw an angry woman in a black shift, her face pale and her mouth a bitter slit. This Deborah wore jeans and running shoes and a bright yellow sweatshirt. Her dark hair fell in soft waves, framing a perfect oval face. She wore pale pink lip gloss and a touch of eye shadow.

  And that mouth even attempted a smile when she saw me waiting for her, although her eyes did not participate. It was the cautious smile of someone who understands that the reasons for smiling are transitory at best, while the sadnesses keep coming back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, a little breathlessly. “Am I late? I hope you haven’t been waiting long. The damn traffic on Storrow-Drive—and there’s construction around Fresh Pond, you know…”

  “Just got here,” I said, standing up.

  She held out her hand. “Thank you for coming.” The smile faded. She climbed the steps ahead of me and fumbled with some keys. “I haven’t been back here since that night,” she said. “I haven’t exactly been looking forward to it.” The door pushed open. “Well, come on in.”

  We stepped into a tiled foyer, beyond which I saw a large, airy kitchen. Copper cookware and rush baskets and potted ferns festooned the big beams that intersected on the ceiling. Butcher-block counters, dark-stained cabinets, three shelves of cookbooks, tall stools, and every electrical gadget and machine imaginable. On one wall was a huge open fireplace. At the rear of the room, morning sunlight streamed through double French doors, in front of which stood a round oak table. It was right out of Better Homes and Gardens, and I told Deborah Martinelli so.

  “He had the whole house done over when he bought it. Gutted the whole thing down to the beams and brick walls. He loved it here. There are four floors, one room to a floor. This one, the kitchen. Next one up is the living room. Then the library, as he called it. And the top floor was his bedroom.”

  “Where…?”

  “Where did I find him?” She exhaled a long breath. “In the library. On the floor.” She touched my arm. “Come on. We came for that stamp. We’ve got to go upstairs.”

  The stairway was one of those steep, iron-corkscrew affairs. I followed her up, more aware than I wanted to be of her jeans stretching across her rump and the way her sweatshirt rode up over her belt to reveal a peek at the flesh of her narrow waist.

  The living room on the second floor had been decorated in muted shades of white and beige, which set off the several brightly colored paintings and lithographs that hung on the walls. The room was dominated by an enormous fireplace against one wall and an abstract painting bigger than a king-sized bed hanging opposite it. The furniture had been arranged so that it focused on a soldered iron sculpture of a woman engaged in some sort of physical contortion. It looked like a bowling trophy that had gone through a garbage disposal and then been buried in the ground for a few years.

  “His objets d’art,” she remarked with a wave of her hand as she led me to the next staircase, this one a wide, wooden affair. “He had no particular love for them. Called them a hedge against inflation. Do you like them?”

  “I’m a Norman Rockwell fan, myself.”

  “Umm,” she said, meaning, I gathered, “That figures.”

  I followed her up the stairs. When she got to the top, I heard her gasp and I held out my hands in a reflex as she lurched back against me. “Jesus,” she whispered.

  I moved beside her. My hand remained on her waist. She stood rigidly and stared into the room. It lay in shambles. Books had been swept from their shelves, furniture was overturned, lamps knocked over, and broken glass lay scattered on the carpet. But that wasn’t what caused her reaction. On the yellow rug near the fireplace I saw a large, brown stain, and I knew instantly what it was. It was Francis Shaughnessey’s blood.

  “I thought someone would’ve cleaned it up. Dumb, huh?” She stepped away from me. “What a goddam mess,” she said.

  “Is this the way you found it?”

  “Yes. I think so. I didn’t study it.” She turned to face me, a little smile betraying her emotions. “You don’t analyze things too carefully, you know, when you find your father lying dead on the floor. You scream maybe once, and then you remember nobody’s going to hear you, so you kneel down beside the body and you realize that it’s hopeless and that he’s really dead, so you call the police and go downstairs and make a cup of tea and wait for them. And then you answer a lot of questions and let them take you to the station so they can ask you a lot more questions. And then you tell them you’re okay, you’re fine, and they drive you back to your car and you drive home. And then you wait for yourself to start crying.”

  “Look.” I reached to touch her.

  “Forget it. I’ll go get the stamp.”

  She disappeared up the last flight of stairs to the bedroom on the fourth floor. I wandered around Francis Shaughnessey’s library. I visualized the police experts going through it, vacuuming here and there for bits of lint or dirt or hair, dusting for fingerprints, taking photographs, formulating hypotheses. And concluding that it had been the work of a drug-crazed burglar.

  They hadn’t known about the Dutch Blue Error.

  She was gone for a long time. When she finally returned, she said, “Let’s go downstairs to the kitchen. I’ll make us some tea.”

  I followed her back down the two flights of stairs and sat at the kitchen table by the French doors, through which I looked out over a tiny garden surrounded by high brick walls grown over with vines. A little fieldstone path wound among some perennial plantings and shrubs. There was one metal chair and a chaise longue and a gas grill. I had my balcony overlooking the harbor. Shaughnessey had his own little island of solitude.

  Beside the latch on one of the doors I noticed that a pane of glass was missing. Tiny shards still stuck out of the frame. This was how the murderer had broken in, I guessed.

  Deborah brought me a big mug of tea. “Microwave ovens are marvelous,” she said. “Boil water in an instant.”

  It wasn’t tea at all, but some exotic herbal concoction. No caffeine. Still, it was delicious.

  She sat across from me. “It wasn’t there,” she said, her gray eyes staring at me.

  “The stamp?”

  “Yes. He kept it in his strongbox. Hidden in the bedroom. The strongbox was still locked, everything else was there, all in order. But the stamp is gone.”

  “He must’ve kept it somewhere else.”

  “No. He kept it in the strongbox.”

  “A safe deposit box, maybe. Maybe after he saw us that time with the stamp he didn’t put it back.”

  She shook her head. “No. I told you. He’d have put it back in his strongbox.”

  “Then it was stolen.”

  “The strongbox wasn’t touched.” She brushed her hair away from her face with a quick, nervous motion of her hand.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. For Christ’s sake, don’t interrogate me.”

  I lit a Winston and pondered this information. Francis Shaughnessey had been murdered in his home. He owned a stamp worth a quarter of a million dollars. He kept it in his home. It was missing. It hardly seemed likely that those facts were unrelated.

  “Don’t smoke in here,” she said.

  “You kidding?”

  “I hardly ever kid. Take it outside, if you have to smoke.” I shrugged. She wa
sn’t kidding. I stood and unlatched the glass-paned door.

  “This,” I said, pointing to the missing panel of glass, “must be where the alleged perpetrator made his entry.”

  “You’re talking like a policeman,” she said. “Which is almost as bad as talking like a lawyer. I’ve had enough of both.” Her eyes softened. “Yes. That’s what they seem to think. That’s how he got in.”

  “He would’ve had to climb the walls around the garden, then.”

  She shrugged. “Take the cigarette outside, will you?”

  I went out and sat on the chaise. It was a pleasant, quiet spot. The morning sun streamed in over the high, ivy covered walls. Several of the shrubs had been pruned and trained in the Japanese bonsai manner, each a miniature work of art set in a garden of white pebbles and artfully located rocks. Clusters of deep red and rust-colored mums provided strategic spots of color. Fragrant thyme grew among the stones of the walk.

  Beyond the garden walls on all sides rose four- and five-story buildings. Each of them, I imagined, opened onto a similar little island.

  After a few minutes, Deborah came out and sat in the chair. She handed me my mug of tea. “You forgot this. I warmed it up for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You trying to be nice to me?”

  “My mind must have been wandering. It won’t happen again.”

  “See that it doesn’t,” I said.

  She shrugged. “So what now?”

  “I don’t know. Be nice if we could come up with the stamp.”

  She nodded. “It would. Somehow I’m going to have to pay Philip off.”

  “He wants alimony?”

  “Not alimony. Philip and I pooled our savings to start up my business. Ten thousand dollars four years ago, plus some bank loans. It was a one-person real estate office in Concord then. Well, me and a part-time secretary. Philip never had a thing to do with it except for that initial investment. Now I’ve got seven other women working for me—four brokers, one salesperson waiting to take her broker’s exam, a full time secretary, and an accountant. We own the office building we’re in. And I’m negotiating to set up a branch in Littleton and another in Acton.” She looked sharply at me. “I want to buy out Philip, it’s not that. But he won’t accept his original share. He wants what he thinks is his share of the worth of the business. Half. Take the past couple of years, our projections, our investments—we’re computerized for MLS, very up-to-date—he figures that comes to a bit over two hundred thousand. Not bad for a five-K investment four years ago, eh?”

  “Not bad indeed.”

  “So his lawyer is putting on the pressure. My business is not very liquid. My capital is tied up. You can’t grow with a lot of liquid capital lying around. I have a big debt to manage, and don’t want to take on another big one to buy out Philip.”

  “Well, now you have your father’s estate.”

  She looked sharply at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I spread out my hands. “Only that now you should be able to take care of Philip.”

  “Exactly what are you implying?” Her silver eyes snapped.

  “I’m not implying anything,” I said. “Just pointing out the obvious. Hell, this house alone…”

  “This house, Mr. Coyne, is heavily mortgaged. My father ran up big bills with the decorators. Beacon Hill townhouses don’t move easily these days. The city’s reevaluating. Taxes are skyrocketing. Don’t you try to tell me I’m better off now that my father is dead.”

  The idea was startling to me, and her eyes, while they were staring intently into mine, seemed to twinkle in ironic amusement, as if the joke were on me. I made a show of looking for a discreet place to flick the long ash that had gathered at the end of my cigarette. I found a patch of bare dirt behind a white rock. When I looked back at Deborah she was smiling.

  “Well, anyway,” I said casually, “I hope you’re getting good legal advice.”

  “My, you are an ambulance chaser, now, aren’t you?”

  “Like I told you, you can’t afford me. I don’t want your business.”

  She waved her hand. “A joke. I don’t even trust lawyers.”

  “Me neither,” I said. “But I would like to buy that stamp for my client.”

  “If I can find it, you can buy it,” she said.

  I took my cigarette butt back into the kitchen, stuck it under the faucet to make sure it was out, and tossed it into the fireplace. Deborah latched the French doors behind her.

  “Aren’t you afraid someone else will break in?” I said.

  She flapped her hands. “My father said this was perfectly safe. No one could get in, he said. The walls outside are too high. And the back is completely surrounded by buildings. It’s a whole maze of walled gardens out there. Someone would have to come from someone else’s garden, over the walls, to get in through here.”

  “Someone did,” I observed.

  She nodded. “So it seems.” She smiled ironically. “He loved these French doors.”

  She stood there, staring out the doors, lifting the hair off the nape of her neck with both hands. Without looking at me she said, “He thought he was so safe. And then someone smashes in his skull.”

  “What,” I said softly, “did he get hit with, do you know?”

  She turned to face me. Her smile was both wistful and ironic. “‘The Dreamer.’ A piece of sculpture. It happened to be the one thing my father kept because he liked it. It was created for him by an artist he knew. It was pieces of scrap iron welded together. That’s why he kept it in his library. The things he cared about he kept there. The police have it now.”

  “‘The Dreamer,’” I repeated.

  “It was an abstract, of course.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  She shivered. “Can we go now?”

  We walked out of the building. She locked the front door and offered me a ride in her Karmann Ghia. I declined. She climbed in and rolled down the window. “I do appreciate your coming,” she said, peering up at me.

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  “Sure,” she replied, nodding. “The pleasure of my company, and all that.”

  I grinned, and didn’t answer.

  “For someone who’s basically a bastard, you’re a relatively easy bastard to get on with,” she said.

  “You’re too kind.”

  I was standing beside the car, my hand resting on the ledge of the opened window. Deborah put her hand on top of mine. “You know, I feel a little better. It’s funny, but knowing that there’s a reason for this, that it wasn’t some random thing, a freak—it helps. Does that make any sense?”

  “Yes, I suppose it does. We’re assuming it was the stamp.”

  “That is what I assume,” she said firmly.

  I moved my hand away from hers. “Why don’t you hire someone to go in there and clean up?”

  She bent forward, fumbling with the ignition key. Then she started up the engine. She looked up at me. “I will. And I’ll call you if I find the stamp.”

  “Do that,” I said. I turned and started walking back to my office.

  I read recently that the island of Manhattan has twenty thousand restaurants. I figured out that a person who started at the age of twenty taking his dinner in a different restaurant every night of the week would be seventy-five by the time he went through all of them. By which time, of course, there would be several thousand new ones to try.

  I don’t have the figures to prove it, but I’d guess that a man would have the same problem sampling just the Italian restaurants in and around Boston. I tried it a few years ago and gave up. There are too many and too many of them are good.

  I settled on Marie’s, a little cellar five steps below street level just outside Kenmore Square. It’s the only place I need to know to appease my periodic cravings for pasta. Marie scribbles her daily offerings on a blackboard. She has twelve little tables with red and white checked tablecloths lined up along the brick walls. The smells when you w
alk in are enough to reduce Mahatma Gandhi himself to a slobbering glutton. You can’t get pizza there, or fancy veal entrees. Mainly pasta and sauces and breads and pastries and good beer and wine. Marie hires B. U. undergraduates to wait on tables. Her sons do most of the cooking nowadays, but Marie is always there to supervise and greet her “guests,” as she calls us.

  Leo Kirk and I met at Marie’s in the afternoon after I’d seen Deborah Martinelli. He had already eaten. I had a spinach linguini al dente with a light clam and squid sauce, and a bottle of Heineken’s. Kirk settled for a cannoli and a cup of espresso.

  He seemed singularly unimpressed with my revelation that Shaughnessey owned a priceless postage stamp. Nor did the fact that it appeared to be missing cause him to lift his eyebrows. “Not the sort of thing one keeps around the house,” he said.

  “The daughter said he kept it there.”

  Kirk shrugged. “We’ve got this one pretty well buttoned up.”

  “You’ve got a suspect?”

  He smiled at me. “No, we haven’t got a suspect. We’ve eliminated several. It boils down to what it always looked like.”

  “Routine B and E, huh?” I said. “Shaughnessey’s upstairs, the guy whacks him on the head, then tosses the place for pills and money.”

  “Yeah. Like that. Or maybe Shaughnessey comes home when the guy’s there. Either way.”

  Our waitress was leaning across the table next to us lining up the salt and pepper and cheese shakers. Kirk eyed her skirt as it rode up the back of her thighs.

  “Assume the guy was looking for the stamp,” I said.

  Kirk sipped his espresso and continued to study the waitress’s legs.

  “Either he found it, or he didn’t,” I persisted. “Doesn’t matter. Maybe he beat the shit out of Shaughnessey to get him to tell where it was.”

  “No sign of that,” said Kirk quickly. “Just the blows to the head.”

  “Blows?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “More than one?”

  “According to the M.E. there were three. Any one of them would’ve killed him. Hit with a statue. One of those abstract things that looks like an outboard motor mounted onto a Frisbee. Heavy. Big cast-iron base. Three whacks to the back of the head. And, yes, it was wiped clean of fingerprints.”