Murder with Strings Attached

by Mark Reutlinger

  ****

  To say this was an unexpected development would be somewhat of an understatement. It was about the worst combination of circumstances I could have imagined. Maybe even beyond my imagination.

  Strangely, it flashed through my mind that at least we knew for sure who had shot Donny Martin—Benny. And at least I hadn’t crushed a priceless Guarneri. Small comforts now.

  Benny, surprisingly, didn’t look particularly angry. In fact, he had something of a smirk on his face, as if to say, “Look what I found. I’ll probably get a nice bonus from the boss.” To me, that smirk was far more terrifying than had he simply been angry. Either way I didn’t give us much chance of survival.

  Benny stepped around us, his smirk having become more of a grin. He was clearly enjoying himself. He gestured toward the door and said, “That way.” We obeyed, stepping over the wreckage of the ersatz Guarneri and backing up in the direction of the door.

  Then an unexpected thing happened: Benny, perhaps enjoying himself too much, didn’t look where he was going and tripped over the tangle of wood and wire we had left on the floor. He pitched forward with a loud scream and fell heavily to the floor. As his hand hit the hard floor, his gun was propelled several feet in our direction. Aaron and I both scrambled for it, Aaron winning the contest and picking it up.

  So there we were, gun in hand and trained on Benny. I couldn’t believe our luck.

  Aaron was ecstatic. “We may not have the violin,” he said to me, “but we can clear you with the police. I’ll bet anything this is the gun that killed Martin and Fred Ballard.”

  Before I could respond, we were interrupted by a voice behind us.

  “I’ll take that bet.”

  Chapter 32

  We both turned around, slowly. We didn’t really want to see what was there but had no choice.

  What was there was Marianne, only this time she was not smiling. And the weapon she was holding in her hand, despite its small size, looked more than capable of doing lethal damage. I assume she was carrying it in one of those under-bra holsters I’ve read about, because she hadn’t any suspicious bulges on her svelte figure last I saw her.

  “I don’t know who took out Ballard,” she said, “but this little baby sent off that chiseler Martin when he tried to blackmail Mr. Sanders, and it’ll do the same for you two if you make one false move.”

  Maybe it was my imagination, but Marianne’s voice seemed to have lost that soft sweetness it had when we came in.

  Marianne’s revelation, or confession, had caught me totally by surprise. It also made that little weapon she was pointing at us seem as threatening as if it were an assault rifle. As inconspicuously as possible, given the state of my nerves, I brought my right hand over to my left wrist and pressed what I hoped was the record button on my new watch. Marianne saw me and said, “Hey, keep your hands where I can see them!”

  “Sorry.” Now I needed a reprise of Marianne’s admission.

  I managed to say, shakily, “You mean you…you shot Martin?”

  “Had to. I went up there to get the violin, ready to pay what Mr. Sanders promised. The little bastard said he didn’t have it, that his roommate Ballard had taken it and disappeared. Then he had the balls to demand I give him the money anyway or he’d expose Mr. Sanders’, uh, methods. You might say I then made an executive decision.”

  She smiled. It wasn’t pretty.

  Benny, who had by now recovered his composure and his pistol, made his way over to Marianne’s side.

  “What d’ya think these two were up to?” he asked.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” Marianne said. “It looks like theft, but that doesn’t explain their knowing about Martin and Ballard.”

  She pointed her pistol in my direction and said, “Okay Frances, or whatever your real name is, what the hell’s going on here? Who sent you, and what’s your connection to Donny Martin?”

  When I didn’t immediately respond, having nothing helpful to say (helpful to me, at least), Benny piped up:

  “I bet I can get an answer out of her.” He almost sounded hopeful that she would let him try.

  You can bet that sent the wrong message to my bladder.

  “Never mind,” Marianne said. “It’s not our decision what to do with them, it’s Mr. Sanders’. He’ll be home pretty soon, so we’ve just got to keep ’em on ice until he gets here and tells us what to do.” It was clear Marianne was in command regarding things that took place within the four walls of Chez Sanders, because Benny didn’t protest. And certainly neither Aaron nor I was going to argue with Marianne’s decision.

  “We could call the police,” Benny offered meekly. He didn’t relish waiting around when action of some kind seemed called for.

  Marianne shook her head. “I told you we’ll wait for Mr. Sanders. You know he doesn’t like dealing with the police and having them snooping around here. Remember that time someone stole one of the cars?”

  “Oh yeah, I remember,” Benny said, rolling his eyes a bit. “He wouldn’t let you call the police or nothin’. I had t’ go out lookin’ for the damn car myself. Took me two days to find it and those assholes who stole it.” Suddenly he smiled, in a menacing sort of way. “Bet they wished the police had found ’em first.”

  I didn’t want to think about why the car thieves might have preferred the police.

  More to herself than any of us, Marianne added, “Besides, they can connect us, including Mr. Sanders, with Martin’s little, uh, accident. We wouldn’t want the police hearing about that, would we?”

  “So what do we do with ’em while we wait for Mr. Sanders?” Benny asked.

  Marianne gave this some thought before replying, “Let’s lock ’em here in the gallery. It hasn’t any windows, and the door locks tight, so they’ll be sure to still be there when Mr. Sanders gets back. Meanwhile, I’ll see if I can get hold of him on his cell phone, so this won’t be a surprise to him when he gets home.

  “He doesn’t like surprises.”

  ****

  Benny made a quick check for weapons, patting Aaron’s pockets. There was only one small pocket in my tight-fitting maid’s uniform, from which he extracted my small cell phone, which I had brought along in a belt-and-suspenders spirit. Now only the suspenders were left. He found no suspicious bulges; fortunately, he refrained from patting down those that were obviously anatomical. He did, however, take the car keys out of Aaron’s pocket.

  “Should I take their watches?” Benny asked Marianne.

  “Why, you need a watch?” Marianne replied in a sarcastic tone. “They wanna know the time, it’s fine with me.”

  “When did you say you expect the boss home?” Benny asked.

  “Come to think of it, he said he’d be a little late today, maybe about seven.”

  “That must be why he had me come on home with the car, said he’d take a cab home. But that’s okay. They’ll keep.”

  Then his face sort of lit up and he said to Marianne, “I got an idea. Go get those handcuffs I won playin’ poker last year. They’re in the top drawer of that chest in the shop. We may finally have a use for ’em.”

  “Good idea.” And she went out the front door, returning a few minutes later with a pair of very official-looking handcuffs. Benny must have been playing poker with a policeman or private detective. I guessed if things like deeds and bonds and even houses could end up as stakes in poker games, as I knew all had at one time or another, why not a pair of handcuffs?

  Marianne left Benny to his task, muttering almost to herself as she left the gallery, “Too bad. Best damn cleaning job we’ve had.” I guess I was flattered.

  Benny looked around the gallery for a place to anchor his prisoners. He finally settled on one right there by the door, a very heavy bronze sculpture in the shape of some Greek god or other. He put one cuff on my wrist, passed the other through the cable that secured the sculpture to its base, and closed that cuff on Aaron’s wrist.

  As Benny was about to leave, I just ha
d to ask a question that had been bugging me since we learned that Marianne, not Benny or any other man, was the one who killed Martin.

  “Benny,” I said, “would you mind clearing up just one thing for me: Who the hell is BJD?”

  Benny paused and scratched his head. “BJD . . . oh yeah, BJD. How dʼya know about him?”

  “It’s a long story. Who is he?”

  “Oh, he’s Marianne’s fiancé. She used to wear his ring ’round her neck, you know, on a chain, like some women do? Apparently the chain broke somewhere an’ she lost the ring. Has no idea where. Real upset, she was. You shoulda heard the language.” He actually chuckled. “She c’n swear better’n I can.”

  “She certainly leads a busy life.ˮ I refrained from revealing where Marianne had lost her ring, seeing no benefit and a possible downside if I did. Dire as our circumstances were, I was pleased that little mystery—who dropped the ring and how it ended up next to Martin’s body—was cleared up. Marianne probably broke the chain when she extracted her lethal little weapon from her bodice in order to shoot Martin. I could understand how she might’ve been distracted under the circumstances.

  His momentary better mood dissipated, Benny turned off the lights, closed and locked the door, and left Aaron and me alone in the gallery.

  We were in what was doubtless the world’s most elegant prison.

  Chapter 33

  It was pitch dark. (Kind of like a closet I’d been in recently.) Fortunately, the light switch was within my reach and, after a few tries, I found the switch that lit only the corners of the ceiling, enough light to see but not enough to show under the door. Better that our jailers thought we were sitting in the dark, contemplating our sins.

  Aaron was the first to speak, in a low and very unhappy voice.

  “I’m really sorry, Flo. I guess this wouldn’t’ve happened if you’d been on your own.”

  “Shh! I’m the one who should apologize. If I’m so professional, why didn’t I watch where I was going? Anyway, it’s too late for that. The fact is that we may be in much better shape than you think, or than we could’ve hoped for.”

  “Whattaya mean? It looks pretty hopeless to me.”

  “Listen. Remember me checking the side of the house when we arrived?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I noticed an inconspicuous door in the middle of the outside wall that didn’t show up on the plan Rafael sent us, right about where the gallery would be. That means there may be a way out from the gallery that’s not apparent from the inside, or there’s another room Rafael didn’t know about. We cleaned the entire house and didn’t come across such a room. I’m hoping that means there’s some hidden connection between the gallery and outside, perhaps for bringing in large objects.”

  “Or stolen objects,” Aaron said. “Or maybe it’s just a storage closet.”

  I preferred not to consider that possibility.

  “So how do we get to this escape hatch?’ Aaron asked. “It obviously doesn’t open into this room.”

  “Maybe it does,” I said. “While I was making the rounds of the treasures here, I was also looking for some evidence of a concealed opening in what would be the outside wall,” indicating with a nod of my head the far wall. “I think I found one.”

  Aaron looked over at the far wall, which I’m sure looked pretty solid to him, and nodded, but he still didn’t look very happy. “Okay, so let’s say there’s a door there. Even if there were some way to get through it, how are we going to do it now, with these?” He looked down at the handcuffs, which appeared pretty solid.

  “We’re going to get through it the same way we’re going to get out of these damn handcuffs, by using these.” Turning away modestly (a seemingly unnecessary gesture considering the recent past), I extracted from inside the low-cut blouse of my uniform and between my breasts the small locksmith tools I used to enter strange houses. Turning back to Aaron, I said, “Luckily, those two didn’t bother to check for hidden stuff like this. Pretty careless of them, but they probably aren’t used to frisking prisoners.”

  Aaron looked more than a little relieved to see the tools. He laughed and asked, “The benefits of cleavage. What else have you got hidden in there?” I just smiled, and a few minutes later we were both free of the cuffs, rubbing our wrists where the metal had bruised them.

  “Okay so far,” Aaron said. “Now if I understand, you’re going to find this hidden door, open it with your doohickey there, and we leave by the back door you saw. Sounds like the plot of a Nancy Drew mystery.”

  I was intrigued. “How do you know about Nancy Drew? I thought only us girls read her.”

  “My sister. Had the whole set, I think. Read a few to me. Lots of hidden rooms and stairways and such.”

  “Well good, just call me Nancy and watch me solve the Mystery of the Purloined Violin.”

  Unfortunately, my little joke served as a painful reminder to Aaron that even if we succeeded in saving our skins, we would have failed in our original mission, finding and recovering his violin.

  “I’m really sorry about that,” I told him. “I did the best I could.”

  “Not your fault,” he said. “You warned me there was a good chance we’d fail, and I can see now that without you, that chance of failure would’ve been more like a hundred percent.”

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t disagree, so I left it there.

  ****

  We moved slowly around to the other side of the gallery and the middle of the far wall, where I had seen the concealed door.

  “How will you find it, much less open it, in this light?” Aaron asked. The soft ceiling illumination was far too dim for close work.

  I put my finger to my lips to summon silence, then I extracted an object about the size of a thin book of matches from behind the waistband of my short skirt. I squeezed the object between thumb and forefinger and a narrow beam of light shot from one edge. I then examined the center of the wall closely until I found the outline of the door I had noticed on my earlier perusal. A further inspection revealed a small keyhole hidden behind a painting of a lazy river with a grove of trees on its bank, probably by one of the French impressionists whose name I had no time to discover. I moved the painting to one side, sliding it along on the hangers behind it.

  “Hold this,” I whispered to Aaron, handing him the tiny flashlight, “so I can use both hands on this lock. And listen for anyone coming.”

  Aaron took the object as ordered, squeezing it and aiming it at the lock I had found. Meanwhile I selected one of the tools from my mini-pick kit and inserted it into the lock. I had no sooner begun to work the tool into position when Aaron whispered, “Someone’s coming!”

  “Quick, get back where we were!”

  I pulled the pick out of the lock, shoved the picture more or less back to center, and almost dove headfirst for the place by the door where we had been secured, pulling Aaron after me and flicking off the lights.

  Immediately came the sound of the door being unlocked, then opened. Marianne took a step into the gallery, reached over to the wall and turned on the main lights. She looked over at the two figures huddled around the Greek statue, apparently bereft and defeated.

  “Just making sure you folks are comfortable. I talked with Mr. Sanders, and he’s mad as hell about you two. I imagine you’re gonna wish you’d only end up in jail.” She smiled unpleasantly.

  Satisfied that we weren’t going anywhere carrying a thousand-pound sculpture, she turned out the light, locking the door behind her. She didn’t bother to turn off the low light I had turned on earlier, so there was still a bit of illumination in the room.

  As soon as I heard the click of the lock, I sprang up. I motioned to Aaron to follow and together we made our way back to the hidden door. “She probably won’t be back for at least a little while,” I whispered, “so let’s get this over with.” Once again I pushed the picture aside and began to work on the lock.

  As I worked, Aaron looked on with admiration. He
whispered, “Someday you’ll have to teach me how you do that.”

  I didn’t look up from my work, but I did whisper back, “Someday. Not today. Besides, I hope you aren’t planning to make a career of this sort of thing.”

  Five minutes and a good measure of muttered profanity later, I finally felt the lock’s cylinder surrender and turn. I stepped back. The door was unlocked, but how was I supposed to open it? I pushed against it, but it didn’t budge. Apparently it was intended to be opened outward, with the turned key itself the only available “handle” with which to pull it out.

  I didn’t have the key, of course. I stepped farther back and looked at the wall for a minute. All I needed was something attached to the door in the area of the lock (which would be opposite the side with the hinges) that could be pulled outward and bring the door with it. Meanwhile, Aaron held the flashlight and whispered, “Why are you staring at the wall and not trying to open the door?” I wasn’t staring; I was thinking.

  Then I saw a possible solution. I reached up and carefully took down the impressionist painting, which on closer inspection turned out to be by Manet, revealing behind it two heavy-duty picture hooks firmly attached to the wall just above the lock. In hanging the painting there in order to conceal the lock, it was possible Sanders had inadvertently provided us with just the handle we needed.

  I very gently set the painting on the floor, leaning against the wall. It was much heavier than I had expected and might well be worth as much as the Guarneri for all I knew. I then examined the picture hooks to decide whether they were up to the task I had in mind for them. Of this I was unsure. They would have to be pulled gently, to be sure they stayed in the wall.

  A second problem would be how to pull them at all. I tried to grip the hangers, but they slipped out of my fingers when I pulled on them. I stepped back and again studied the situation. Then I extracted two of the thin lock picks I had used earlier and gave one to Aaron, who by now had figured out the problem I was wrestling with. I whispered, “You’re stronger than I am. Take this and slip it sideways into the hook on the bottom of the hanger closest to the lock. I’ll go over to the edge of the door. If you can just get the door pulled out a half inch or so, maybe I can get it the rest of the way. But be careful not to pull the hanger out.”