Murder at the Mendel

by Gail Bowen

  “But at least they have you, dear,” I said. “I’m sure Stuart would have broken into a million pieces if you hadn’t been there to make a home for Taylor and for him. You didn’t see him in those first weeks after Sally left. He was like a ghost walker. She was the centre of his life …”

  Nina’s face was impassive. “She’s always the centre of everybody’s life, isn’t she? Right from the beginning …”

  But she didn’t finish the sentence. Stuart Lachlan had come into the conservatory.

  “Look, there he is at the door. Doesn’t he look fine?” she said.

  Stu did, indeed, look fine. As I’d told Nina, his suffering after Sally left had been so intense it seemed to mark him physically. But tonight he looked better – tentative, like a man coming back from a long illness, but immaculate again, as he was in the days when he and Sally were together.

  He was a handsome man in his late forties, dark-eyed, dark-haired, with the taut body of a swimmer who never misses a day doing laps. He was wearing a dinner jacket and a surprising and beautiful tie and cummerbund of flowered silk. When he leaned over to kiss me, his cheek was smooth, and he smelled of expensive aftershave.

  “Merry Christmas, Jo. With everything else that’s been going on, the birthday of the Prince of Peace seems to have been lost in the shuffle. But it’s good to be able to wish you joy in person. Your coming here to teach was the second best thing to happen this year.”

  “I don’t have to ask you what the first was. Nina’s obviously taking wonderful care of you. You look great, Stu, truly.”

  “Well, the tie and the cummerbund are Nina’s gift. Cosmopolitan and unorthodox, like me, she says.” He laughed, but he looked at me eagerly, waiting for his compliment.

  I smiled past him at Nina, the shameless flatterer. “She’s right, as usual. Do you have time to sit with us for a minute?”

  “No, I’m afraid it’s time for me to make my little talk and get this opening underway. I just came in to get Nina.” Then, flawlessly mannered as always, he offered an arm to each of us. “And of course to escort you, Jo.”

  It had been a long time since I’d needed an escort, but when we walked into the foyer, I was glad Stuart was there for Nina. The picketers had come through the door. They couldn’t have been there long because nothing was happening. They had the punchy look of game show contestants who’ve won the big prize but aren’t sure how to get offstage. The people in evening dress were eying them warily, but everything was calm. Then the TV cameras came inside, and the temperature rose. Someone pushed someone else, and little brush fires of violence seemed to break out all over the room. A woman in an exquisite lace evening gown grabbed a picket sign from a young man and threw it to the floor and stomped on it. The young man bent to pull the sign out from under her and knocked her off balance. When she fell, a man who seemed to be her husband took a swing at the young picketer. Then another man swung at the husband and connected. I heard the unmistakable dull crunch of fist hitting bone, and the husband was down. Then the police were all around and it was over.

  The lady in lace and her husband were escorted to a police car; the protesters were shepherded outside, and the TV crews started to pack up. Stuart stood beside me, frozen, like a man in shock. Nina tightened her grip on his arm and said in her soft, compelling voice, “Stuart, it’s up to you to put things right here; you can still set the tone for the evening. Now go talk to those TV people before they go. Put things in perspective for them. Then give one of those witty talks you give, and show the board you’re in charge.”

  It was as if someone had flicked a switch in him. He squared his shoulders, straightened his beautiful tie and headed for the cameras.

  Nina and I stood together and watched. The show was worth watching. Stu moved into the bright lights at the front of the foyer with the élan of a model in an ad for expensive Scotch, and the speech he made was impressive, full of references to the civilizing power of art, a gallery’s need always to go for the best whenever the best presents itself, a director’s obligation to exercise his professional judgement and the community’s obligation to support that judgement.

  Stuart’s face was flushed with the joy that comes when you know that, at a significant moment in your life, you’re putting the words together right, that what you’re feeling and what you’re saying are one and the same. And the icing on the cake was that there were cameras grinding away, recording everything for posterity – or at least for the ten o’clock news.

  And then, in just the way that the hour of enchantment ends in fairy tales, the heavy glass doors of the gallery opened and Sally Love walked in. One of the news people spotted her and called out, “Sally’s here.” And that was that. The crowd turned; the cameras swung around to capture her image, and as quickly as they had begun, Stuart’s fifteen minutes of fame were over.

  There was always an element of the theatrical about Sally. Part of it, of course, was just that she was so physically striking. She was her father’s daughter in every way. She had Desmond Love’s talent for making art, and she had his looks – the blond hair that seemed to radiate a wild electric energy of its own, the eyes blue as a larkspur flower, the wide and generous mouth, the long-boned animal grace. And like Des, Sally was always the focal point of whatever room she found herself in. The picture always rearranged itself so that Sally was in the foreground, and that night all of us in the gallery foyer found ourselves suddenly peripheral, background figures in yet another portrait of Sally.

  She walked straight to where Stuart was standing with the microphone. She had just come back from New Mexico, and she was wearing a Navajo blanket coat that glowed with the colours of the desert: purple, turquoise, orange, blue. She slipped it off and handed it to Stu. He took it wordlessly. Suddenly he was redundant, no longer the champion of freedom of the arts, just a man holding his wife’s coat, waiting for his instructions.

  Sally was wearing an outfit a Navajo woman might have worn to dance in: soft boots of pale leather, an ankle-length red cotton skirt belted with silver and turquoise and a black velvet shirt open at the neck to show more silver and turquoise at her throat. Her heavy blond hair was parted in the centre and tied, just above each ear, in a butterfly-shaped knot, and she touched one of the butterflies as she leaned forward to kiss her husband’s cheek.

  “The traditional hairstyle of unmarried women,” she said huskily into the microphone. “With all the hassles this exhibit is causing Stu, I thought I’d better start looking for a new man.” Then she grinned wickedly. “Number one hundred and one.”

  There was a burst of nervous laughter. Sally leaned closer to the microphone. “You know, the people outside are having a great time: they’re singing hymns and throwing snowballs. Lots of fun. A couple of people even threw snowballs at me. I think they wanted me to stay out there with them. But I wanted to be in here with you. This is our night. We always say that one of the purposes of art is celebration. Well, let’s celebrate.” She turned and looked into her husband’s face. “Stu?”

  Despite himself, Stuart Lachlan smiled, and Sally seized the moment. She slid her arm through her husband’s and said, “The director and I are going to find a drink. Why don’t you guys join us?” And she led him smoothly out of the foyer toward the exhibition.

  Beside me, Nina smoothed the shimmering line of her dress. There was a flicker of anger in her face, but when she spoke, her words were mild.

  “Quite a performance,” she said.

  I had to agree. In the forty-five years since I’d tiptoed into Nina Love’s room to look at her new baby daughter, I’d seen many of Sally Love’s performances, but even by Sally’s standards, this had been a star turn.

  CHAPTER

  2

  It was a lovely party. This was a major show and the gallery had pulled out all the stops. As we walked among the paintings, two men from the caterers circulated carrying silver trays of tiny tourtieres, so hot the juices were bubbling through the top crust, and fluted pape
r cups holding crab-meat quiches shaped into perfect hearts. In the middle of the main gallery there was a serving table with a round of Cheddar as big as a wagon wheel and platters piled high with grapes and melon slices and strawberries. And there was a bar.

  I was watching the bartender grate nutmeg on top of a bowl of eggnog when I heard a familiar voice.

  “I know you like strong drink, Joanne. I’ll ask Tony to make a Christmas Comfort for you. It’s a drink that’s out of fashion now but you’ll like it.”

  I turned and found myself face to face with Hilda McCourt, a woman I had met the year before when a man who was dear to both of us had died violently. In the time since, our friendship had become one of the pleasures of my life. She was more than eighty years old and she looked every minute of it, but she always looked great. She was as slender as a high-school girl, and that night she was wearing an outfit a high-school girl would wear: a kind of combat suit made out of some shiny green fabric, very fashionable, and her hair dyed brilliant red was tied back with a swatch of the same material.

  “Well, Joanne?” she asked.

  “I trust you implicitly,” I said, smiling.

  “A Christmas Comfort for Mrs. Kilbourn, please, Tony, and another for me. He’s an old student,” she said as Tony went off to get the ingredients. He warmed a brandy snifter over a fondue pot he had bubbling on his worktable, filled the glass three-quarters full of Southern Comfort, added a slice of lemon and a little boiling water and then warmed the glass again.

  “Drink it quickly now, while it’s hot,” said Hilda.

  “There must be three ounces of liquor in that thing. I’ll be under the table.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Hilda said impatiently. “Just keep moving and eating.” When she shook her head, I noticed that she had tiny golden Christmas tree balls hanging from her earlobes. She took my arm and led me toward the pictures.

  “Now, what do you think of all this brouhaha about the fresco?” she asked.

  “I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m sure it’s extraordinary. Everything Sally does is extraordinary.”

  “I hear ambivalence in your voice.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I guess when you’ve had the kind of history Sally and I’ve had, it takes a while to get rid of the ambivalence.”

  Hilda raised her eyebrows. “A tale for another time?” she asked.

  I smiled. “For another time. Hey, speaking of tales, the one that’s unfolding here tonight’s pretty engrossing. Those people outside aren’t going to be satisfied until someone comes here with a brush and paints over Erotobiography. I wonder what the board’s going to do?”

  “I can answer that,” said Hilda. “The board is going to give Sally a splendid dinner to thank her for her generosity and they’re going to issue a statement of support for Stuart Lachlan and then they’re going to renew his contract for another five years.”

  “You sound very certain.”

  “I am very certain. I’m on the board. I’ve known most of the other members for years. They’re decent people and they’re reasonable. A lot of them are from the business community. They may not know a Picasso from a Pollock but they do understand art as investment. That fresco of Sally’s is going to be worth a million dollars in five years. The board won’t want to be remembered as the fools who threw a bucket of paint on a million dollars.” Suddenly, her face broke into a smile. “Here’s the artist now.”

  Sally slid her arm around my waist, but her attention was directed toward Hilda. “Miss McCourt, it’s wonderful to see you again. People tell me you’ve been my champion in all this.”

  Hilda McCourt beamed with pleasure. “I was happy to do it. It’s always a pleasure to nudge people into acting in a civilized way. They generally want to, you know.”

  Sally seemed surprised. “Do they?” she said. Then she shrugged. “If you say so. Anyway, besides thanking you, I wondered if you two would let me trail around with you for a while. There’s a picture here I want to see with Jo.”

  Hilda looked at her watch. “I think you and Joanne had better look without me. I still have choir practice to get to tonight. We’re doing Charpentier’s ‘Midnight Mass’ for Christmas. A bit of a warhorse, but a splendid piece, and I think the Southern Comfort has prepared my voice nicely.”

  Sally leaned forward and kissed Hilda’s cheek. “Thank you again for your heroic efforts. I know Erotobiography is troubling for some people.”

  “Oh, I’ve had lovers myself,” said Hilda McCourt. “Many of them,” and she turned and walked across the shining parquet of the gallery floor. Her step was as light as a young girl’s.

  I looked at Sally. “I’ll bet she has had lovers,” I said. “And I’ll bet she’d need a bigger wall than you have to mount her memoirs of them all.”

  “Right,” Sally said, and she laughed. But then there was an awkward moment. I had told Hilda McCourt that Sally and I had a history. Like many histories, ours had been scarred by wounded pride and estrangement. Since I’d come to Saskatoon in July to teach at the university, Sally and I had moved carefully to establish a friendship. After thirty years of separation, it hadn’t been easy, and Sally hadn’t made it easier when she had suddenly left her husband and child for an affair with a student in Santa Fe.

  This was the first time we had been alone together since she’d come back from New Mexico, and she seemed tense, waiting, I guess, for my reaction. In my heart, I thought what she had done was wrong, but at forty-seven I didn’t rush to judgement with the old sureness any more. And I had learned the value of a friend. I turned to her and smiled.

  “Now, where’s this painting I can’t see without you?” I said.

  She looked relieved. “In Gallery II – right through that doorway.”

  The gallery was only yards away, but our progress was slow. People kept coming up to Sally, ostensibly to congratulate her, but really just to see her up close. She was as she always was with people, kind enough but absent. Not many of the clichés about artists were true of Sally, but one of them was: her work was the only reality for her.

  “So,” she said finally. “Here it is. On loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. What do you think?”

  It was a painting of three people at a round picnic table: two adolescent girls in bathing suits and a middle-aged man in an open-necked khaki shirt. The man was handsome in a world-weary Arthur Miller way, and he was wholly absorbed in his newspaper. The girls were wholly absorbed in him. As they looked at him, their faces were filled with pubescent longing.

  “Wow,” I said. “Izaak Levin and us. That last summer at the lake. The hours we spent in the boathouse writing those steamy stories about his lips pressing themselves against our waiting mouths and about how it would feel to have him –what was that phrase we loved – lower his tortured body onto ours. Even now, my hands get sweaty remembering it. All that unrequited lust.” I stepped closer to the painting. “It really is a wonderful painting, two young virgins looking for … What were we looking for, anyway?”

  “Someone to make us stop being virgins,” Sally said dryly. Then she shrugged. “And fame. Izaak was the toast of New York City in those days. Remember when he was a panelist on that TV show where they tried to guess people’s jobs?” Suddenly she smiled. “Izaak’s in Erotobiography, you know.”

  Amazingly, I felt a pang. It had been more than thirty years, but still, it had been Sally who won the prize. She’d been the one to live out the fantasy.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you which one’s his.” She grinned mischievously. “Actually, maybe you could get him to show you himself. He just walked in.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, but she wasn’t. There he was across the room. Thinner, greyer, but still immensely appealing, still unmistakably the man I dreamed of through the sultry days and starry nights of that summer.

  He came right over to us. Sally beamed, pleased with herself.

  “Izaak, here’s an old admirer,” she said. “The other girl in
the picture – Joanne Ellard, except now it’s Joanne Kilbourn.”

  Izaak Levin looked into my face. His expression was pleasant but bemused. It was apparent that the only memories he had of me were connected with a piece of art Sally had made. He gestured toward it. “I’ve enjoyed this picture many times over the years. It’s a pleasure to see that you’ve aged as gracefully as it has.”

  I could feel the blood rushing to my face. I stood there dumbly, looking down at my feet like a fifteen-year-old.

  “Has your life turned out happily?” he asked.

  “For the most part, very happily,” I said. My voice sounded strong and normal, so I continued. “It’s wonderful to see you again. Did you come up for the opening?”

  He looked surprised. “I live here. This has been my home since Sally and I came back in the sixties. Didn’t she ever mention it?”

  “Izaak’s my agent, among other things,” said Sally, and then she moved closer to him and touched his arm. “Incidentally, speaking of being my agent, I ran into these people in Santa Fe who bought The Blue Horses from you last summer. You’d better chase down the cheque because I never got it.”

  Her words seemed to knock Izaak Levin off base. He flushed and shook himself loose from her. “And the implication is …?” he asked acidly.

  “For God’s sake, Izaak, the implication is nothing. I don’t suspect you of financing a love nest in Miami. I’ve been travelling so much. I just thought the cheque must be stuck in a hotel mail slot somewhere. It’s no big deal. Just track it down, that’s all.” She grabbed my arm. “Come on, Jo, let’s go look at the filthy pictures.”