Cutwork (3 page)

He nodded and wrote that down. “Did you go in to see if he was still alive?”

She looked horrified. “No, of course not! He looked dead—he
was
dead. There was so much blood, he must have been dead. But I must’ve screamed because two people came running. I think one of them went in. I felt—ill, so I went back to my booth and sat down.” She nodded at his notebook to encourage him to write. He made a brief note to find those two people who came when Irene must have screamed. Satisfied, she went on, “And someone must have called 911, because pretty soon there was a police car, and an ambulance, and the fire truck came, too; it had been on the grounds, it’s the new pumper. Or maybe the fire truck came first, I don’t remember. And I wasn’t looking, I’d gone back to my booth to sit down, and my heart was going at a terrific pace, quite frightening. A squad car came, then Jill, and last those people who are taking pictures. And now you. I wonder why Betsy Devonshire is not here. I mean, she’s here, she was working in the information booth earlier this morning. But she’s not
here.
”

Mike said firmly, “Ms. Devonshire has no business at the scene of a crime.”

Irene stared at him. “But she can help you, I’m sure she can. She’s so very clever about murder. You know that, Sergeant Malloy.”

Mike found a patient smile somewhere. “How about you let the professionals have a go at it first, okay? Then if we need to talk to her, we will. Now, did you see anyone running away from this tent?”

“No. All I saw was the body. And the blood. There seems to be a great deal of blood, doesn’t there?” She wrinkled her nose.

“Yes,” said Mike, trying not to grimace back. “That’s all I have to ask you right now, but would you mind waiting here for a while, in case I have more questions later?”

“I can’t, I have to go back to my booth. People are moving around again, with more arriving now the rain’s stopped. Shopping. Shop
lifting.
I’m across the row, up three booths, easy to find. Number forty-nine.” She nodded her head toward a tent up the way and started off.

“Wait! Do you know, uh . . .” He checked his notebook. “Deb Hart?”

A voice behind him said, “I’m Deb Hart.”

Mike turned around to see a sturdy woman with her hair pulled back tightly from her face, which was innocent of makeup and carefully blank of expression. She was wearing a loose-fitting blue denim dress under a clear plastic raincoat whose snap fastenings were all undone. “Are you in charge of this shindig?” Mike asked.

“Yes. Unfortunately.” Her blue eyes were intelligent and steady. “Mr. McFey was a very talented artist, and it is a terrible thing that he should be murdered here.”

“Did you know him personally?”

“No. Well, I talked with him yesterday after he was set up, but only briefly. He hadn’t been to many of these fairs, and this was his first time here. He won an award from us for his work, but I wasn’t his judge.” She looked around toward the tent, and Mike saw her dark blond hair was in a very long braid down her back.

“But you’re sure the body in there is his. McFey’s.”

Her head came back. “Yes.”

“Do you know where he’s from?”

“He’s from around here, Golden Valley or Hopkins, I can’t remember. Or Minnetonka?” She frowned, a little disturbed that she couldn’t remember.

“Do you know how to spell ‘McFey’?”

“Yes,” she said and did so.

“Is there next of kin to be notified?”

“Yes, a wife. He gave a separate phone number and address for her, out in Maple Grove, so maybe they’re divorced; but he listed her as the person to be notified in case of accident. I haven’t made the call yet.”

“That’s all right, we’ll take care of it.”

“Thank you.” Ms. Hart was relieved about that.

“Have you had a problem with stealing here?”

“Once in a while. Someone will take a piece, something small enough to fit in a purse or pocket, or up a sleeve, and walk away.”

“I was thinking of the money. Stealing from the cash boxes.”

“Oh. Well, no, not for several years. The fair is pretty well attended so it’s hard to do something like that and not be seen. Artists tend to put the cash box somewhere hard to reach, so other customers notice when someone tries to get at it. Is that what happened here? A robbery?”

“We don’t know yet. I understand there’s an emptied cash box in the tent.”

“Booth.”

“What?”

“Booth. These aren’t tents, they’re booths.”

“That’s right, that’s what Sergeant Cross called it, too.” He nodded and repeated, “Booth, then. There’s an empty cash box in there.”

“Oh. No one told me that. Interesting.” Ms. Hart looked thoughtful. “And stupid, really.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because nobody brings cash boxes in with yesterday’s receipts still in them, of course. And the fair was just getting under way today when this happened. There would have only been starting-up money in Mr. McFey’s box, just what he needed to make change.”

“How much would that be?”

“Not more than forty or fifty dollars, I’d say. How incredibly, incredibly stupid if a very fine artist is dead because somebody needed to steal fifty dollars.”

Mike wrote some of that down while she waited, but at last she said, “I—I’d like to go back to my other duties now, if that’s all right.” She wasn’t looking at him anymore, but he could see that was because she was trying not to show how sad and angry she was.

“Yes, all right. How can I get back in touch with you, if I have more questions?”

“Look for my staff, people carrying walkie-talkies, I’ve got one, too.” She touched a big pocket on the skirt of her dress that was bulging heavily. “And I’m carrying a cell phone as well.” She gave him the number, then turned and walked away, her sandals squishing a bit in the sodden turf.

Mike reviewed his notes. Okay, the dead man was Robert McFey, one of the artists selling his stuff here at the fair. His throat had been cut, probably by one of his own carving knives. His money box had been emptied, which probably meant this was about robbery. On the other hand, this guy wasn’t selling gold jewelry like the guy up the way, and had maybe fifty dollars, max, in cash, so why pick on him?

Maybe because not many people were around when the robber was looking for a mark. Or maybe because the robber was an amateur. Mike didn’t like amateur murderers for the same reason he didn’t like amateur sleuths: They don’t play by the rules. Like here. Only an amateur would go after a man in a place crowded with people, and so unprepared he had to borrow the murder weapon from his victim.

Of course, it was possible the victim was out of his tent—booth—for a while and came back in time to surprise someone getting into his cash box.

Poor schnook, with the accent on poor. After all, selling wood statues out of a tent, that wasn’t any way to get rich. Harmless guy, probably, without an enemy in the world, who didn’t deserve to die like this.

Which might mean this would be difficult to solve. Such a dumb amateur as this murderer could be hard to find, because he was so far off the pattern most perps followed.

Truth be told, Mike preferred his victims also to be criminals. Dope dealers, for example. Pimps. Burglars. Loan sharks. The kind of pro with obvious enemies—and friends and associates who didn’t know what loyalty meant—all of them willing to drop a dime on the perp.

(Funny how slang sometimes got stuck in a time warp, he considered. Snitches still dropped a dime on people, even though pay phone prices had long since gone trotting past fifty cents in the Twin Cities.)

Of course, amateurs were sometimes careless about leaving clues behind and, once confronted, tended to blurt out incriminating details. So maybe this would be one of those times.

It would have to be crazy Irene who found the body. Her bright but careless embroidery—to Mike, any decorative stitchery was by definition embroidery—had been pronounced Important Art, which only confirmed Mike’s opinion that the smoke in her chimney didn’t go all the way up. Most artists were at least a little crazy, weren’t they? She hadn’t helped her case by asserting that he ought to send for Miss Nemesis.

Deb Hart, Mike knew, owned an art supply store that catered to artists, but she wasn’t one herself. Also, she had run the art fair since it began twenty years ago, and both the store and the show did well, so it all went to show, right?
Not
an artist,
not
crazy.

She had said this McFey fellow was from one of the Minneapolis suburbs. He had written that down, gratefully certain there weren’t many Robert McFeys in the phone book. Now, if he’d been Robert Larson, that would have made his life miserable. The Twin Cities was lousy with Larsons.

About then, Sergeant Cross came back and said the police photographers had finished making their record of the scene on film and tape. Mike thanked her and walked slowly along the table, looking into the white tent. Booth.

It was just like all the others at the fair, square, the size of a kid’s bedroom, straight-sided, and so tall you could stand up in it, with metal bracing under its peaked ceiling that made it look like it went up easy, like opening an umbrella. A heck of a deal, he thought enviously, having camped for years in a low, slope-sided, rip-stop nylon tent that was hard to put up and easy to blow down. He looked back up the aisle. Not one tent—booth—had blown down in the storm just over. Heck of a deal.

On the table were wood statues, one of a lion about to take down an antelope that was very nice, very nice. And beside it was another one, of those little birds that chased and were chased by the waves on the seashore. Mike had seen those birds in movies and on television and once in person when he went to Atlantic City for a lawmen’s convention. The seashore was represented by a smooth, wavy piece of wood with the birds stuck on it by their wire legs. It had five birds, one with its beak driven like a nail halfway into the wooden seashore. Nice, but not as nice as the lion.

Beyond the lion, at the end of the table, was a little clear-plastic holder with a couple dozen business cards reading ROBERT MCFEY, ARTIST IN WOOD, with a post office box and an email address. Mike wrote that information down in his notebook.

Surrounding the holder were a dozen small carved pieces, some knocked over, that were different from the serious pieces. They were like from a cartoon. A wolf, a crow, a possum, and other little animals, all standing up and dressed in human clothes with human expressions on their faces. Comical, clever. Mike would have liked to pick one up for a closer look, but he had better get on with the more important piece of information waiting farther back in the tent. Booth.

That’s what the murder victim was now. A source of information. Mike braced himself with that thought and went for a look.

The dead man was thin, medium-height, with graying brown hair pulled into a pony tail and a graying light brown beard trimmed rather long. He was lying in an uncomfortable-looking position, halfway to face up, one foot across the other ankle. He had on a big, loose navy blue T-shirt with LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY printed in white letters on it, faded blue jeans, and an old pair of penny loafers that might have cost a lot when new. And his watch was a Rolex, though not the famous Oyster. Possibly significant that it hadn’t been stolen. But too bad it was not helpfully broken by his fall to record the time of death. Mike checked it against his own Timex: eleven twenty-three, right.

The man had very obviously died from a big cut that slanted crookedly across his throat. From it, his life’s blood had spilled onto a kind of floor on which he lay. He, or someone, had laid down the big square of plywood—no, two pieces of plywood, side by side, to make the floor, and there were a great many gory footprints made by the first responders anxious to save him. The floor didn’t cover all the inside of the tent; there was a border of grass around it that was widest at the back. A tipped-over director’s chair was surrounded by tiny pieces of wood—the chips mentioned on his T-shirt—and a partly finished cartoon animal was under the table. It looked like a shaggy dog, the kind whose ears tipped over at the ends, the kind who herded sheep, what breed was that? He couldn’t think, though he recalled that they made bad pets because they always had to have something to do. Oddly, the fur on the back of the dog looked like it had been braided. He frowned at that and then suddenly thought,
That’s supposed to be Deb Hart
. And he smiled, because it gave him an insight into her personality, or what the artist had thought of her personality. Then he looked at the lifeless hands of the clever man who had carved it and felt a stir of anger. The little carving knife he’d apparently been using had been taken and used on him, then left beside him on the plywood. It had a curved handle and a darkly clotted, not-long blade. But long enough.

Though Ms. Hart’s identification didn’t really count, legally, since she wasn’t a relative, Mike was satisfied that this was almost certainly Robert McFey, whose name appeared on the business cards, the man who had carved the statues on the table and on the shelves back here. That one on the bottom shelf, of the fox with its front feet on a log, that was another nice one. The look on its face was alarmed, as if it thought it heard dogs barking in the distance.

Mike bent forward. In front of the fox statue, on the plywood floor, was the cash box. It was of gray-enameled steel with a little key-operated lock on it. He’d seen them at outdoor sales before, where a cash register wasn’t necessary but you needed something to keep money in. The lid was open but the box was upside down. Mike took his pen out of his pocket and very carefully turned it over.

It was empty, of course. But the box had made a very nice protective cover for another footprint. Mike looked around but didn’t see that pattern anywhere else on the floor. There were some smears on the grass, but they were unreadable.