A Butterfly in Flame (16 page)

Chapter Forty

“He’s a missing person,” Detective Seymour said. Seymour was a burly fellow, seasoned and less sleepy than he seemed, who was used to being disregarded while he took advantage of it, and until it was too late. He sat across from Fred, and over a plate of poached eggs and hash. His poised fork considered and plunged into the yolk of the left hand egg while Seymour, apparently oblivious of the choice his fork had made, continued.

“By missing person I mean this,” Seymour continued. “Morgan Flower is a genuinely missing person. Meaning I do not believe that he exists. His car, or what is said to be his car, is registered to Benjamin Star.” The fork with its bite of egg found an appropriate aperture in Detective Seymour’s face.

“I’m just having the coffee,” Fred said.

“My eloquent pause invites you to make a relevant comment,” Seymour said. “Relevant, that is, to my inquiry.”

“What jurisdiction?” Fred asked.

“Then my next question—tell me about Benjamin Star.”

Fred said, “I am completely in the dark. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Detective Seymour was in plain clothes, which translated as a light-colored tweed sport coat that probably fit him five years back, and khakis. His mien was utterly morose. His fork pointed again at his plate as he said, “This is yesterday’s dinner. I was too tired last night to do anything but sleep. Then I couldn’t do that.”

“I’m not telling you your business, which you know and I don’t,” Fred said. “In your place, I’d ask the academy’s office for his personnel file. Academic records, letters of recommendation, previous history. The drill.”

“President Harmony first said that laws of confidentiality prevented her from sharing, failing the warrant that we’ve applied for, don’t worry. Then when she was convinced that she might be proved in error, she and her lawyer, she went for it and discovered the file is missing too.”

“Really,” Fred said.

“Mislaid or stolen by the former registrar,” Seymour said. “That’s the claim. For spite, President Harmony suggested. Woman named Lillian Krasic.”

“Don’t know her,” Fred said.

“She denies it. Lillian does,” Seymour went on.

“You have his address on the car registration,” Fred said.

Seymour removed yolk from his upper lip with an inadequate paper napkin.

“Which you are apparently reserving,” Fred said. “You’ll also have his bank. Look at the cancelled checks. Hell, you know how to do this.”

Detective Seymour took another forkful of hash and eggs and shoved the plate aside. He reached for his coffee. “Tell me this,” he said. “They paying you in cash?”

“I’m here for a week, helping out,” Fred said. “I’m not being paid.”

“In other words, yes,” Seymour concluded. “It’s great. As soon as the government controls everything, everyone lies. I’m not going to report you to the IRS. I’ve got better things to do than catch jerks cheating on their taxes. Never mind. And don’t try to convince me. Moving along…”

Fred said, “I’m new to the academic world. In fact it’s not my field at all. I’d have said it’s unusual for a faculty member to be paid in cash. Unusual to the point of irregular.”

“President Harmony’s term was ‘informal,’” Seymour said.

“Are they all…?” Fred started

“Benjamin Star is the only one,” Seymour said. “Supposedly. Where I come from, cash transactions, especially regular cash transactions, look like trouble. Common, maybe; but for a place like this, yes, I think your word ‘irregular’ fits. Can you think of any reason for the practice that would not embarrass, say, Saint Theresa?”

Fred spread his hands.

“At least they didn’t pretend the guy was a volunteer for the last year and a half,” Seymour said.

“Truth is a tricky currency,” Fred remarked. “So is falsehood. It’s not my business, except as a citizen, it’s a matter of public interest: We are assuming the possibility that Rodney Somerfest was murdered?”

“I’m Homicide,” Seymour said. “Next question. You say the board’s lawyer, Counselor Baum, invited you to come here and teach for a week?”

“I said nothing about it.”

“It’s in my notes. Do you deny it?”

“Not at all,” Fred said.

“That’s also irregular. Why did you agree?”

“It was a good time to get away from the man I work for. Who pays me anyway. Also, I was intrigued.”

“Anything else you’d like to tell me about Morgan Flower, né Benjamin Star?” Seymour said.

“His taste in clothes and mine don’t coincide. It doesn’t matter. We’re not the same size,” Fred said.

“Oh, Sir, in the life room!” Susan’s voice—Susan herself, from the Stillton Inn; his student, entering at a run. “It’s Meeker.”

Chairs clattered as people rose, as if Susan was entering with the warning of an approaching tsunami. Bee huffed into the room from behind the counter.

“He’s fallen or, I don’t know what.” Susan waved her cell phone. “I can’t hear.”

“We’ll take the cruiser,” Seymour said. “Fred, you show me where.”

***

Students milled around Stillton Hall, their excited chattering clouding the damp air, and refused to go inside, where the news had to be bad. The cell phones were out in force, carrying worried fragments and conjectures. The cruiser’s siren might have conveyed a brief hope that whatever was wrong inside would now be made right, until it became clear that the siren belonged not to an ambulance, but to a cruiser.

Inside, in Stillton B, only Meg Harrison had stood by the fallen man. “I opened up at quarter to eight,” she said. “Milan should have done it. Meeker was here, like this. He had no business…He doesn’t respond. I’ve tried…”

Tom Meeker’s body lay on the paint-splattered cement floor, dressed as he had been yesterday afternoon, his round face looking more questions than it would now have time for. The thing in his throat had not produced enough blood to justify so much death. There was no reason to check for pulse, but you do that anyway. The model’s stand was again beneath the trap, and a few horses lay almost randomly around, as if they had toppled all at once.

“A struggle,” Seymour said. “All those students out front, I want them inside until I can talk with them.”

“Looks like one of our scalpels,” Meg said. “We use them the next studio over, for clay. For fine work.”

“Get the students inside. Get them in that studio next door, then. Don’t let them touch anything,” Seymour said. He pulled the cell phone out of the holster on his hip.

Chapter Forty-one

Fred said, “You’ll be busy a while. For now, I can help, or get out of your way. Your call. “We’ll talk later. Whenever you say.”

“Later,” Seymour said, re-holstering. “I’ve got to secure the scene. I have work to do. Go ahead, do whatever you volunteers do.”

“Officer?” Rick Murphy.

“Don’t touch anything, kid.” Seymour. To Meg Harrison, “You teach here, don’t you? Do me a favor. Get all of those kids next door, in that big classroom.”

“Studio.”

“Whatever,” Seymour said.

Rick Murphy persisted, “Officer, you should know this.”

“Be fast.”

“Him and this guy were fighting yesterday,” Rick said. “Everyone knows it.”

Meg broke in, “Fred broke up a fight between two students. Meeker and…”

“The dead man and who else?” Seymour demanded.

“Another student. Peter Quarrier,” Fred said. “Just so you know, Peter was with me two evenings ago. Fish and chips and a beer in my room at the Stillton Inn.”

“This man Fred,” Rick Murphy said, trembling with the enormity of witness, “was here last night. He was cleaning up something.”

“We’ll take everyone’s statements later.”

Rick Murphy insisted, “This is important. You’re letting him get away.”

Seymour, moving the other occupants of the room toward the door by herding them before him as he moved, with his arms spread, paused, exasperated. “Was the body present at the time?” he demanded.

Fred kept his peace.

“I came to clean. I’m the one cleans the building.”

“And my question is, you cleaned
around
the body? You left all these chairs or whatever they are upside down like this?

“Of course not.”

“So I take your statement later.”

“My name is Rick Murphy.”

“Sure. Everyone wants to get on TV. Everyone, out! I want to talk to Peter Quarrier.”

***

In Meg Harrison’s studio no class was forming. The model, already robed—that is to say, already naked, and robed in readiness to strip for the first session—an older woman, corpulent, with big flat dirty feet—was standing smoking next to the platform where she was to have spent the best part of her day reclining, if Fred’s interpretation was correct of the shapes under wrap on the modeling stands that had been circled in preparation for the day’s work. The intended problem being, no doubt, for the students to discover bone and muscle that provided coherence to the assembled flesh.

Among the gathered students, many were Fred’s, first year,
Intro to Lit.
There was Bill Wamp also, a faculty colleague.

Fred assumed a commanding position on the model’s platform, next to the disappointed model, who had likely driven an hour to get here from some urban center.

“Whether we work or not, you get paid for the day, Bella,” Meg called. “At the moment it’s all kinda iffy.”

The students being clustered in small groups, talking with concern—the dead man was one of them after all, and not of an age to die—Fred had to make some noise to get attention.

“For the ones of you who are my students in this morning’s class, we can’t do class today, obviously. I don’t even have my books. I just…Two days ago, I know some of you got the idea that I was making fun of Emily Dickinson. A poet who makes up lines everyone can remember—she’s always going to be mocked.

“The only thing I want to say. She was in this world to make art. You are here to make art. Tom Meeker was here to make art. Art lasts, and it outlasts us. After we’re gone, art keeps us going. So, despite what the lines might seem to say, some lines of Emily Dickinson’s are in my mind. They come back often. If I had made these lines, I would be proud.

“Accept no phony consolation. See you next week. Or, well, maybe not—but you be here.”

He climbed down from his perch. Bella dropped her cigarette stub on the floor and stifled it with a flat bare foot.

Bill Wamp was next to the swinging doors into the corridor. Fred, on his way out, paused. “Peter Quarrier is one of yours, yes? Someone should get the word to him. Do you know where to find him?”

“Peter’s third year. So he’s Meg’s. He’ll be mine next year. If he’s still here. It doesn’t look good though, does it?”

“You know his work?”

“We all know everyone’s work. Once they’re in second year, they have their work reviewed by the entire faculty. So we know all the students’ work. And the faculty’s teaching methods too, by necessity, from seeing their students.”

“Even Morgan Flower?” Fred asked.

“Even Morgan Flower what?”

“If the whole faculty meets for student reviews, does that include Morgan Flower?”

“What would he contribute?” Bill Wamp asked, genuinely perplexed.

“I’m going back to the Stillton Inn,” Fred said. “If anyone wants me. I’ll leave word at the desk if I have to go out.”

“You’re not hanging around here?”

“Gotta catch up with my bowels,” Fred explained. “Men’s room here—seems to me, in the vicinity of a crime scene, we ought to try not to contaminate anything.”

***

Main Street. Opposite the Stillton Inn. There was no mistaking Clay’s silver Lexus. He thought it made him inconspicuous.

Susan was behind the desk. Missy Tutunjian’s roommate. His student. She blurted, “I figured, what with Meeker and all and everything…please don’t…”

“Forget it,” Fred assured her. “You guessed right. All bets are off. And Mrs. Halper needs you.”

“They all cleared off last night. There was nothing to see or do. Nobody to talk to. Somebody started the rumor the big story is Rockport. But they’ll come back now again. Because Meeker. Even though nobody liked him. Whatever he’d do, nobody liked him. It was pitiful in a way. He’s a joker, Meeker. Never knows when to stop. Already the phone. And there’s one…” She turned and reached into the set of cubby holes behind her, pulled out a slip of paper. “A Mr. Degas,” she said. “Didn’t need a room. He’s waiting in yours. Says he’s…” she looked up, worried, as she handed the paper over, “Is that OK? He really insisted.”

“I know him,” Fred said.

“I asked was he any relation, but he ran upstairs and didn’t answer before I could explain I meant was he related to the painter. He looks…he looks like he ought to be related to
somebody
big.”

Chapter Forty-two

When Fred opened the door, Clayton paused in mid-pace, expectant. He’d dressed to match the Lexus. The suit was as gray as Prince Albert’s most dismal dream. The necktie, however, was almost Sonia Delaunay—so out of character it might have been intended as a disguise.

“Show it to me,” Clay demanded, his lean limbs frozen in anticipation as if the springs had seized up.

Fred closed the door, crossed the small room and sat on the table. If Clay wanted to sit, he’d be glad of the single chair. Because of something someone had said to him in early childhood, maybe, Clay was unlikely to sit on the bed. Fred said, “The quickest answer is also the most candid. It’s short. So listen carefully.
Impossible.
”

Clay said, “I can almost smell it. You know my instincts. Surely we can talk freely here. Where is it? The butterfly…”

“The butterfly’s in a drawer. It looked like trash where it was. I don’t want…”

“Of course. Never mind. I did not wish to pry.”

“I’ll show it to you,” Fred said.

“No, no, never mind,” Clay said. “It’s of no interest beyond corroboration. Such bagatelles, if charming, were not well advised in terms of the artist’s oeuvre as a whole. You say ‘impossible’?” he challenged.

Clay sat on the chair and put his hands on his knees. His socks, exposed, were revealed as a uniform pale green. No calf appeared. It wouldn’t.

Fred said, “By this time the building’s cordoned off and filled with techies. One of my students was killed there. Last night or early this morning.”

“Gracious!” Clay rose, dithered, and sat again.

“The next thing is for you to get back to Boston. If you are found to be here, you are likely to stay here.”

“I am incognito,” Clay protested.

“Your car is known by anyone in the art world locally. There are quarter-page photos of you in the
Globe,
the
New York Times,
whatever they have in New Haven.”

“I was powerless to prevent that. When the museum appointed me…”

“I said you would come to regret it. The point is, until this moment, although the interest of the press has been considerable, it has not been intense. That will change.
Student Killed in Life Room.
It’s catchy. Two deaths look like a trend. That’s catchy too. And if you are spotted here, and identified, it will be assumed that you are on the trail of treasure. Which you are.”

“My very point,” Clay broke in, exasperated. “Bierstadt is the point.”

“Your motive is not necessarily the prevailing motive,” Fred said. “In the great scheme of things. I need coffee. That has nothing to do with the fact that you came here on your own and I want you out of town.”

“I am not following. What does your wish for coffee…?”

“Exactly. Now, the reporters who left town last night, disappointed, are on their way back. You will be seen. When you are seen you will be recognized. When you are recognized it will not be assumed, it will be
known,
that somewhere in this town is a painting, or a collection of paintings, that is worth—let’s just say modestly—your attention.

“Until this morning I had assumed, or hoped, or imagined, that a total of two people knew about the mural, yourself and me. Already that’s in doubt, but I’m not sure. I don’t have time to go into it. There are several issues demanding my attention. One dead student and another I’d like to talk with before…My point is, once it is known that you are in town, the big fish start to take interest. And while I have often heard it said that nothing is healthier for the marketplace than competition…”

“I have
never
said that.” Clay had gone almost as green as his socks.

“Plus, once the people doing the stories get wind of a painting—it’s always a ‘masterpiece’ once they get started—worth what, if you sold it right, a good hundred million dollars and change?”

“Stop! Stop!” Clay said.

“You think this woman in Arkansas doesn’t have agents sniffing the breeze all the time for a chance like this? And you think Hiram Parks wouldn’t bid her up and up?

“You are known. I repeat. If you are seen here the water is instantly filled with bloody chum. Then the sharks circle in.”

“Show me at least the building,” Clayton begged.

“Again, impossible. Get out of town. Leave now. In fact, I’d say—that profile of yours, that white hair—take my car. Anyone who sees my car discounts the driver. Likewise, anyone who sees me in the Lexus is going to discount the Lexus.”

“At least describe…”

“The best I could do was to undo the first three feet or so of each roll, and even that was damned near impossible. Plateaus. Broad space. Clouds. A lot of pink rock and water. Chasm upon chasm. Cloud upon cloud. Now. Go. Here are my keys. Put gas in it, but not until you are well out of town.”

Clay eased his car keys off the ring and dropped them on the table.

“Put my jacket on over the suit,” Fred said. “I’ll pick up another one somewhere.”

“You think—the academy’s board has no suspicion?” Clay pleaded.

“They’re after more obvious game, in my opinion,” Fred said. “But I can’t read all the signs. Clay, while I’m dealing with you I can’t work with the matter at hand.”

“Is there a back way out?” Clay asked, finally catching on.

Fred pointed to the window and its wooden fire escape. “If you want to be noticed, that will do it for sure. Just walk out like anyone. Give my car three minutes to idle before you put it in gear. Damp weather…”

***

Susan Muller was on her way out when Fred, after waiting a decent interval, came downstairs, imperfectly dressed for the Stillton weather. “They’ve picked up Peter Quarrier,” she said. “They’ve taken him away somewhere. Nobody knows where.”

Too late, then.

“Let me buy you a coffee,” Fred said.

Susan was pulling a heavy blue sweater around her. It already glistened with mist. The same mist settled eagerly on her short red curls. She swung her canvas bag and strode swiftly. “I could use that,” she said.