Murder at the Mendel

by Gail Bowen

  “Let’s take it into the light and see what you think,” she said.

  The picture took my breath away. Part of it, I guess, was seeing a piece of art that had a six-figure value casually propped against my kitchen wall, but the real impact came from the subject matter.

  The scene was a tea party in the clearing down by the water at the Loves’ summer cottage. The picture was suffused with summer light, that soft incandescence that comes when heat turns rain to mist. In the foreground there was a round table covered with a snowy cloth. On either side of the table was a wooden chair painted dark green. Nina Love was in one of the chairs. The eyelet sundress she was wearing was the colour of new ferns, and her skin was translucent. The light seemed to come through her flesh the way it comes through fine china. She was in profile, and the dark curve of her hair seemed to balance exactly the pale line of her features: yin and yang. Across the table from her sat a girl of fifteen, very tanned in a two-piece bathing suit that did nothing to hide a soft layer of baby fat. The girl’s braided hair was bleached fair by the sun. Her expression as she watched Nina’s graceful hands tilt the Limoges teapot was rapt – and familiar. The girl’s face was my own thirty-two years before, and it glowed with admiration and love.

  The woman and the girl bending toward one another over the luminous white cloth seemed enclosed in a private world. In the distance beyond them, the lake, blue as cobalt, lapped the shore.

  There were other figures in the picture, and I knew them, too. Under the water, enclosed in a kind of bubble, were a man and a young girl. I could recognize the slope of Desmond Love’s shoulders and the sweep of his daughter’s blond hair as she bent over the fantastic sand castle they were building together in their little world under the waves.

  Sally had been watching my face. Finally she said laconically, “Well?”

  “It’s incredible. I don’t know what to say. The colours are wonderful – they seem to shimmer. And the way you’ve remembered us – not just the way we looked, but the way those days felt endless and hot …”

  “And innocent,” said Sally.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “and innocent. Sal, no one’s ever given me a gift like this. I don’t know what to say.”

  She smiled and made a gesture of dismissal.

  “Does it have a title?” I asked.

  “Perfect Circles,” Sally said.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s right, isn’t it. You and Des in one circle and then Nina and me. God, I’d forgotten how I idolized her. It must have been awful for her to have this fat little girl hanging on her all the time.”

  “She loved it,” said Sally. “She loved your need.” And then she looked at me oddly. “I’m not being fair. Nina loved you, Jo. She still does. The one good thing I’ve ever been able to say about my mother is that she loves you.”

  “And you, Sal, if you’d let her.”

  For an answer she shrugged. “Anyway, if you ever decide to take up art, don’t paint over this one. It’s the only picture I ever did of Nina. She’s so beautiful I can almost forgive her. Anyway, those were good summers.”

  “I can close my eyes still and see you and Des coming down the hill from the cottage with all the stuff you used to make your sand castles: shovels and trowels and spatulas and palette knives and sprinklers to keep the sand moist, and things to use as moulds and shapers. It always looked like you were going to work.”

  Sally smiled sadly. “We were. Des was a wonderful teacher. He was a wonderful artist. He was a wonderful father …” Her voice broke.

  I looked up, surprised. “Hey, can I buy you a beer?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  I went to the fridge and pulled out a cold Tuborg.

  Sally checked the label carefully. “This one’s okay. I won’t spaz out on you.” She snapped the cap off and held the bottle toward me. “To old times.”

  “To old times,” I said.

  For a while we were both silent. Then I said, “That picture brings so much back. You know, a couple of weeks ago Mieka asked me what happened between us, and when I tried to tell her, I thought I didn’t really understand it myself.”

  “You were Nina’s friend,” she said simply.

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “You were the one who went away. After Des died and you went away to New York to that art school, you vanished from my life.”

  “Is that what Nina told you?” Sally shook her head in disbelief. “Jo, there was no art school. I never went to any school after I left Bishop Lambeth’s.”

  “Come on. You were thirteen. You had to go school. That was the whole reason Nina let you move down there with Izaak Levin.”

  Sally roared. “Trust Nina to obey the letter if not the spirit of the truth. I guess I was at a school of the arts, except there was only one teacher, Izaak, and one pupil – me.”

  “What did you do?”

  She took a long swallow of her Tuborg and set the bottle down in front of her.

  “Well, the first year after Des died, I was pretty wrecked so we travelled most of the time – just drove around the U.S.A. in Izaak’s shiny yellow convertible, seeing the sights, staying in motels.”

  “Sal, I don’t believe a word of this. Why would a famous man like Izaak give up a year of his life to drive a thirteen-year-old girl around?”

  She gave me a mocking smile.

  “Sally, no. I know you said that you slept with him but … God, you were still a child. That’s a pathology.”

  “Not such a child, Jo. It was a fair exchange. He got to have sex to his heart’s content with a hot, young girl, and I got to see the U.S.A. in his Chevrolet. It worked out.”

  “How did you live?”

  “Well, Izaak didn’t have to work in burger joints to support us. He had quite a reputation in those days, and every so often he’d just sit down and make some phone calls. Then he’d go to some junior college or ladies’ group, talk about art, pick up his cheque and we’d move along. He tried to make it interesting for me. You know, Vermont when the leaves changed and warm places in the winter. Once he did a class in San Luis Obispo for a month or so.” She smiled at the memory. “Oh, Jo, we stayed at this motel that had fantasy rooms – a real fifties place – the court of Louis, jungle land, the wild west, that kind of thing.” She shook her head and smiled. “Anyway, after a year we went to New York and Izaak wrote and went on TV and taught a bit, and I began to make art.

  “I painted and we went to galleries and we fucked, and that was my school of the arts.” She laughed. “Not a bad preparation, when you get right down to it, I guess. Anyway, that went on till I was about twenty. Things were getting ugly in the States – Johnson, Vietnam, all that stuff. Izaak said he’d stuck it out through McCarthy, but he’d had enough. We came to Saskatchewan for the Summer Art Colony at Emma Lake and we never went back.”

  “Sally, I’m incredulous. Where was Nina in all of this?”

  She stood up. “Recovering from the tragic death of her husband,” she said coldly. “Look, Jo, I’ve got to motor. I’m glad you like the painting.”

  I put my coat and boots on and followed her out to her car. I wanted the closeness to continue a little longer. As we walked down the driveway, our breath rose in ice fog around us. At the curb, the Porsche gleamed white in the moonlight, but as we got close to it, I noticed there was something wrong with the way it was positioned. It didn’t take long to discover why. Someone had slashed the tires. Sally and I went around and checked them out. They had all been attacked, and whoever had done the slashing had done it over and over again. I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach, and it didn’t have anything to do with the weather.

  “Sal, let’s go back in and call the police,” I said.

  She looked into the heavens. “Full moon tonight – Looney-Tunes time. The cops are going to be busy chasing down people whose eyeteeth have started to grow. They won’t get to us for hours.” She hugged herself against the cold. “So, Jo, it looks like you’re going to have to ask m
e for a sleepover.”

  “Done,” I said. And we trudged through the snow to the warmth of the house.

  CHAPTER

  8

  On the tenth of January I finished my class on populist politics and the Saskatchewan election of ‘82 and walked across campus to my office in the arts building. From habit, I slowed up in front of the room where English 250 met. Mieka had been taking that class before Christmas, and it had always given me a nice feeling to walk by and see her sitting at her desk by the window, chewing the end of her pen, looking thoughtful. The desk by the window was empty now; Mieka hadn’t come back to university after the break. During the hours in which she should have been learning about Alice Munro and Sinclair Ross, she was stripping woodwork at the Old Court House and talking to suppliers. Her decision didn’t please me much.

  When I walked through my office door, the phone was ringing. It was Sally, and what she had to say didn’t please me much, either.

  “Jo, do you have any free time this afternoon?” She was silent for a beat. “There’s news.”

  “I have to pick up Angus’s skates over on Main Street – the sharpener’s near the Broadway Café. I can meet you there in fifteen minutes.”

  “The Broadway’ll be fine. I’m at Izaak’s now just around the corner.”

  “Sal, is the news good?”

  When she answered, she sounded infinitely weary. “Is it ever?” she asked.

  It was a grey, sleety day, and the only parking place I could find was three blocks from the restaurant. By the time I walked through the front door, I was chilled to the bone and apprehensive, but the Broadway Café was a welcoming place for the cold and the lonely. It looked the way I imagined the café looked in Hemingway’s story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: a shining counter with stools down one side of the room; dark wooden booths upholstered in wine-coloured leather down the other. The walls were covered with mirrors and blowups of pictures of old movie stars. Sally was sitting in a back booth under a palely tinted Fred Astaire.

  When she saw me, she smiled wanly. “They found my gun,” she said without preamble. “Some kids were tobogganing down by the river and they found a gun and took it to the police. They say it’s the one that did the murders.”

  The waitress came over and poured coffee for us. When she left, I turned to Sally.

  “Okay, start at the beginning.”

  Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and she ran her hands through it in a gesture of frustration. “Tell me where the beginning is, Jo, because I don’t know any more. Do you know how often I’ve been down to the cop shop? But until this morning I thought it was all going to go away. It seemed as if everything was in limbo. Nothing got better, but nothing got worse, either. Well, now something has gotten worse. And, Jo, nothing’s gotten better: the police haven’t found the tape that was in the video camera at the gallery the night Clea was killed. They haven’t even got a sniff about who it was Kyle chased down the river bank. And I still don’t have an alibi.”

  “Have the police stopped looking for the man in the ski mask?” I asked.

  “Mary Ross McCourt says they haven’t, but now that they’ve got the gun, I wonder how hard they’re going to look. There are just too many pieces falling into place.”

  Sally took a sip of coffee and closed her eyes. She looked exhausted.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Just great,” she said. “I’ve got the police breathing down my neck from nine to five, and when they go off duty, the merry pranksters are in there cranking up the action.”

  “Oh, no, I thought that would be over by now,” I said.

  “Well, you thought wrong,” she said flatly. “It’s still, as they say, a happening thing. Most of it’s just head games: eggs frozen on the windshield in the morning, sugar in the gas tank, lipstick love letters on the windows of my studio. But it’s getting to me. I’m giving up. Tomorrow, I’m moving into an apartment in the Park Towers, you know the ones, downtown by the Bessborough. Stu has a friend in the penthouse who’s in Florida for the winter. This guy likes to think of himself as a patron of the arts, so he didn’t mind me using his place.”

  “Probably gets off on the idea of the notorious Sally Love sleeping in his bed,” I said.

  For the first time that afternoon she laughed. “Probably. But it’s nice, and there’s a swimming pool for Taylor when she visits. Anyway, I should give you my number there.” She wrote it down on a napkin and handed it to me with a sigh. “God, I wish this was all over. But it will be soon. And when I can get working again, I’ll be okay. Good old Stu found me some studio space at the university. I’ve already moved my stuff in.”

  “Sounds like Stu’s turned chivalrous now that you’re a lady in distress.”

  “Well, it might be something a little less – is the word altruistic? – anyway, a little more selfish than chivalry. Stu’s got this book on my art coming out in the spring, and I think he’s worried I’m not going to like it. He’s already puffing out his chest and talking about how art thrives on diverse critical approaches …”

  “Which means?” I asked.

  “Which means that what he’s written is a crock and he’s terrified I’m going to blow the whistle on him.”

  “But you wouldn’t,” I said.

  “Jo, this is serious. It isn’t personal. It’s not about me. It’s about what I do. If it’s stupid, I’ll have to say so.”

  “Well,” I said, “for everyone’s sake, let’s hope it isn’t stupid.”

  “Right,” she said, standing up and pulling on her coat. “Let’s hope it isn’t stupid. And let’s hope that guy who was trying to give me a flat the night of the murder decides he’ll give me an alibi if I give him his tuque back, and let’s hope my terrorists get frostbite or writer’s cramp and leave me alone.” She shrugged. “Hey, let’s go crazy and wish for it all. Maybe for once life will work out.”

  I followed her toward the front of the restaurant. Halfway to the cash register Sally stopped and looked up at a picture on the wall. It was an old poster advertising The Misfits with Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift.

  “All dead,” said Sally.

  “But we remember them,” I said, “through their movies.”

  She gave me the old mocking Sally smile. “That doesn’t make them any less dead,” she said.

  I picked up Angus’s skates and headed to Ninth Street and my car. When I looked at the house I’d parked in front of, it seemed familiar. It was a pleasant unexceptional place: two-storey, white clapboard. With a start, I realized it was Izaak Levin’s house. I’d looked him up in the book after I saw him the night of Sally’s opening. I’d even driven by. I told myself I might need to know where he lived for future reference.

  There hadn’t been any need for future reference. When I’d spoken to him the morning after Sally’s opening, Izaak Levin had promised to call in the new year, and he had – twice. The first time, I had already arranged to have dinner with an old political friend. The second time Izaak called was after Sally had told me what had happened between them in the months after Des died. It took real restraint to keep from banging the receiver down and blowing out his eardrum.

  I was just about to pull away when Izaak’s front door opened and a woman in a black mink coat came hurrying out. She had her head down, but I knew the coat and I knew the woman. It was Nina Love. She didn’t see me. She turned and walked toward a car I recognized immediately as Stu’s Mercedes. I watched the licence plate as she drove up the street. ARTS 1 it said. So it wasn’t Stu’s car; it was the car that had belonged to Sally when she and Stu were together. His was the twin of this one, but his licence read ARTS 2. “Grounds enough for divorce in those licence plates alone,” Sally said blandly when she told me about them.

  There was no mistaking the car or the woman. I turned off the ignition and walked up the front path to Izaak Levin’s house. He answered the door almost immediately. It was apparent when he opened the door
that he had expected to see Nina again. He even looked past me, to see if she was still there.

  “She’s gone,” I said, “but I’m here. May I come in?”

  Without a word, he stood aside, and I walked past him. He was holding a manila envelope. It was sealed. When he saw me looking at the envelope, he shoved it into the drawer of a little table in the entrance hall. Not very trusting.

  “Well,” he said finally, “this is a welcome surprise. The last time we talked, I thought I discerned a chill. Come in and sit down. Can I get you something? A drink perhaps, or there’s fresh coffee.”

  “Coffee would be fine,” I said as I followed him into the living room. If I’d known what was waiting for me there, I would have chosen the drink. When I looked around Izaak Levin’s living room, I knew I was at an exhibition curated by an obsessive. I was standing in the middle of a gallery of Sally Love – of art made not by her, but about her. Sally in all her ages, all her moods, seen by different eyes, transmuted into art by a hundred pairs of hands working with differing techniques in different media.

  The walls were filled with paintings of her, and the floor was stacked with more. To get my bearings, I sat in the first chair I came to. Propped against the wall beside me, a sepia Sally, all halftones except for the brilliant red of her mouth, licked a sensuous upper lip; next to it, a pastel Sally’s virginal profile glowed in a spring garden; on the coffee table in front of me a ceramic Sally holding a cat sprawled on a rocker. Sally was everywhere in that room, and even I knew the art was wonderful. But the effect was not wonderful; it was eerie, like the rooms you see on TV after a psychopath has committed a crime.

  When Izaak came in from the kitchen carrying a tray with coffee and a bottle of brandy, I jumped.

  He smiled. “Maybe you should have a little of this in your coffee,” he said, holding up the bottle.

  “No, thanks,” I said, “I’m just a little overwhelmed by your collection. How did it come about?”