Pursued by Shadows (22 page)

“Lots of things to do,” said Jane. “And I expect Harriet does as well. So we're off. Unless there's something new?”

“That depends on your definition of new,” said Sanders. “Smithson's funeral is in forty minutes and they've closed the case.”

“That was quick,” said Harriet.

“Well—Dean told you that he killed Beaumont, and he had no real alibi for the probable time of the murder, so the official word was that there wasn't any point in flogging a dead horse, so to speak. It's been filed.”

“You disagree?” asked Jane.

“Not exactly. Let's just say that there are a hell of a lot of questions dangling out there, but I guess with Smithson dead, we'll never know the answers anyway.”

Sanders drove to the funeral home at something more than his usual city speed and abandoned the car on a set of diagonal yellow lines in the lot. The chapel was not quite half-filled when he slipped in behind the chief mourners as unobtrusively as possible and positioned himself at the very back. The service was a quasi-religious one, like those weddings where vague spirits of peace and goodwill are called down from some newfound Mount Olympus to speed the bride and groom on their way. It might have been better, thought John, considering what the man had been doing when he died, to omit any discussion of his life and character; as it was, the eulogy was phrased with such excessive delicacy that it suggested that the deity who cared to clasp Dean Smithson to his bosom would be a strange one indeed. He was to be cremated; there would be no sorry procession out to the cemetery to mar the beauty of the June morning. John wasn't quite sure why he had taken the trouble to come to the service, now that the case was closed, except that he had a feeling of incompleteness, of dissatisfaction over his role. And watching words being spoken over the coffin of the perpetrator hadn't helped at all. Sanders edged his way out before the ceremony ended, planting himself, from habit, beside a cedar hedge to observe the rest of the mourners. Nina, chalky-faced against the black of her suit, walked down the chapel steps supported by Christopher. John was considering that impassive expression, wondering if it grew from a superhuman strength of will or an unnatural indifference to her firstborn's fate, when a hand grasped his arm. Turning, he saw that he had been captured by a tiny woman, pale and dark-haired, with black circles under her swollen, reddened eyes. “Are you the police officer in charge of this case?” she asked in a soft voice. “The murder they're saying Dean committed? Someone told me you were.”

The coffee shop was almost empty at that time in the morning, and John shepherded his new witness into a booth at the back, ordering as he went by the counter. She cradled a cup of coffee in her hands as though they were so cold that nothing could warm them ever again and stared into the table. Sanders waited for her to gather herself together.

“Thanks for listening to me,” she said, in a low voice. “I thought I'd say that now, because you might not want to hear what I have to say.” She gave him a very slight, watery smile. “My name is Susan Pappas. I was engaged to Dean—” Her voice broke and she went back to staring at the table. “We were going to get married this summer if we could.”

“If you could?”

“Well—Dean worked for his mother and she treated him like a little kid—you know, paid his bills and gave him room and board and an allowance. You can't get married on that and he never had the training to do anything else. She's filthy rich, but her husband left all his money to her and not a cent to the kids unless she remarried. I wanted him to quit the gallery and just get any kind of job he could and work himself up—I mean, I've got a good job and we could have managed—but I guess if you've grown up with money it's hard.” She stopped to catch a breath. “He wanted to start a business of his own. He didn't have any capital, you see, but he had this thing going that he was really excited about—”

“Do you know what it was?”

Susan Pappas frowned at the interruption. “No—he never said. But he was sure he could raise the money if everything went according to plan. It may not have been exactly legit,” she said, “but it didn't have anything to do with killing that artist.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

By this point, tears were streaming down her face, but she simply brushed them aside with an impatient hand. “Because the night that he was killed, Dean was with me. All night. We were at my parents' cottage on Lake Simcoe. We cooked hamburgers on the barbecue and rented a movie and spent the night together.”

“Could he have left and come back?”

She shook her head emphatically. “No. It's so quiet up there that a car starting sounds like a bomb going off. And Dean had left his car parked right under the bedroom window. He couldn't have taken it without my hearing it. And that night I didn't sleep very well. I kept waking up and seeing him there and trying not to disturb him. Because I knew he had to get up very early.”

She paused, and Sanders composed his features into an expression of relaxed, friendly interest. Under that rapid, jerky delivery he could feel the solid bedrock of hostility. At the moment he was her ally against Nina; if he put one foot wrong, he would lose her. “Why is that?” he murmured at last.

“Someone called the night before, that's why, telling him he was supposed to fly out the next morning to pick up a consignment. And that meant making a lot of arrangements. He had this friend with a four-seater plane that he used to charter when they had pickups in awkward locations. Anyway, I drove him to the airport at five in the morning. And he got on that plane. I saw him. And I saw it take off.”

“In whose car?”

“His. We had driven up to the lake in his car, and after I got him on the plane I took it over to the Smithsons' and just left it in their driveway and walked over to the bus. No one saw me as far as I know—it was pretty early in the morning.”

“Do you know where was he going?”

She shrugged. “Somewhere in upstate New York, I think.”

“Do you know who called him?”

“I assumed it was his mother—but I don't know. He never said.”

She was slowing down. “Did his mother have your phone number at the cottage?” he prompted.

“She didn't need it. He had one of those phones he could have his calls forwarded on, you know. So you just dialed his number and you got him wherever he was.”

“When did she—or whoever it was—call?”

Susan Pappas frowned. “I was outside, looking after the grill, and Dean had gone in to get us drinks when the phone rang. So I guess that would have been around nine or so. We had dinner late.”

“Miss Pappas,” he said, casting about for a way of phrasing the question so that it didn't amount to an accusation that she was lying, “when we questioned your fiancé, he said he spent the evening alone at home. Why, when he had a perfectly good alibi, didn't he use it?”

Her entire face contracted. “It was his mother. She hated me. I'm not rich enough, or beautiful enough, or important enough for one of her sons.” She spat the words out. “We decided that as long as he wasn't in real trouble we'd just pretend he hadn't been with me. He wasn't ready to break with her until he had his money.”

“Why come forward now, then?” he asked quietly.

“No one accused him of killing anybody until now. Otherwise I would have come forward.” She looked up at him, tears muddying her makeup. “Someone killed that painter, and his mother is going around blaming it on Dean. His
mother
. Dean wasn't perfect. He had a temper but he wasn't like that. He wouldn't have murdered anyone. Not deliberately.”

His new witness's flow of information seemed about to bog down in acrimony and Sanders adopted a brisker, businesslike tone. “Can you prove that you and Dean were up at Lake Simcoe that particular night?”

“Sure.” She opened up her large bag, and began to haul slips of paper out of a catch-all compartment. “I brought everything with me in case you wanted to see it. Here's the receipt for the video rental,” she said, dropping a slip on the table, “with the date on it—see, May 26—and the kid might remember us too, and Lew at the grocery store will remember we were in. There's the grocery receipt. And we bought gas up there. I charged it on my card.” Two more slips fluttered down on top of the first. “And some of the neighbours might have seen us. There were a few people up there. I've written down their names and addresses. And you can check with Al—he's the pilot. His name and address are on the sheet as well.” She placed a sheet of notepaper on top of the receipts and looked straight at him. “We were there. You might not want to believe me, but we were. And that means that someone is sitting back and laughing while you guys dump all the shit on Dean.”

“May I take these?” asked Sanders.

“That's why I brought them,” said the efficient Miss Pappas. “And I have photocopies of them in here, too. I'd like you to sign the back of the photocopy saying you got all three receipts.”

He took out his pen, checked the receipts against the sheet, and signed. “Thank you,” he said, not at all sure that he meant it.

“The thing is, my dear, that it is absolutely worthless to you,” said Nina. In twenty-four hours she had changed from chalk-white to delicately shell-pink of cheek and was back at the gallery, apparently unmoved by the fact that she had seen her eldest son cremated the day before. “Without provenance and authentication you won't be able to sell it at a flea market for more than five bucks. Framed. Whereas I have someone to authenticate it. He'll provide all the documentation necessary for a major sale.”

“Did Guy forge it?”

“My God, what a question to ask. Really, Jane. Are you suggesting that I would—”

“I'm not suggesting anything. But as documents go it's pretty dubious no matter how you look at it. Either it's real, and stolen, or it's fake, and you're trying to pass it off.”

Nina picked up a water biscuit from the plate on her desk, broke it into quarters, and nibbled on one. She put it down, half-eaten, broke a corner off a square of cheese, and began to nibble on that. Then she looked up again, with a smile partially hidden by her golden hair, and took a deep breath. “Jane, dear, there are other reasons for secrecy. As you should know. The map was owned by a prominent Spanish family; I have no idea how they got it—it could well have been stolen, but after a few hundred years, who cares? They needed cash, and they didn't want anyone to know they were selling off national treasures. They got in touch with a gallery in London, who mentioned it to Guy who mentioned it to me and I paid them an honest thirty thousand pounds for the map.”

“That's damned cheap, even for you, Nina,” said Jane steadily.

“Not really,” she said confidently. “They couldn't sell on the open market. I had to promise them secrecy, so that ran me into more problems. It meant hiring an expert to authenticate it and he expects a hefty fee. I gave Guy and the gallery a commission in advance of the sale.”

“Why?”

“It was a very complicated deal. Too complicated to explain. Jane, my dear, I am out a lot of cash so far, and I want to make it clear that I own that map. I don't particularly want to go to the police, but I will if I have to.” Nina favoured her with a shark-like smile.

Irritably, Jane stood up and began wandering around the office. Nina's honey-sweet lies grated on her nerves. “What was Dean up to?” She turned her back to avoid the frown of puzzled candor she knew her question would elicit and began to study a wall covered with framed photographs of Nina posed with her better known artists. There, in the upper right-hand quadrant of the collection, Guy's boyish grin flashed out at her from an unfamiliar setting. He was standing on the pavement in front of a large window, one arm around Nina and the other around Christopher. Just behind Guy's right ear, a man with a smile that haunted her nightmares was resting his left hand possessively on Guy's shoulder. Her gut twisted in fear and a light sweat broke out on her forehead. Suddenly she realized that Nina had been speaking, and was waiting for her response. “Sorry, Nina. You were saying?”

“I said Dean was trying to get the map back. For me. Then he must have figured he could make a pretty packet on it for himself and his bedraggled little girlfriend. Have you met her?”

Jane shook her head. “Where was this picture taken?” she asked and shivered. She pitched her voice low, to disguise its trembling. “The one with you, Guy, and Christopher standing in front of some store. It looks sort of like—”

Nina left her desk and stood directly behind Jane. “It's a gallery in London,” said Nina, sounding surprised. “DeVilliers and Hardy.” She paused. “I owned a part-interest in it at one time. Didn't Guy ever take you there?” Without a pause, she answered her own question. “Silly—I don't suppose he would, would he? We had no connection with the place by the time you were in London. That picture is impossibly ancient.”

“And who's that person clutching Guy like he's afraid he'll run away?” she went on, with an awful attempt at an amused laugh.

“Edward? He ran the place,” said Nina, placing her own hand lightly on Jane's shoulder. “And may run it still, for all I know. Slightly rough around the edges but knows his stuff. It used to be one of those family firms drowning in its own disorganization and stupidity, and Edward turned it into a gold mine. Unfortunately he doesn't give it the kind of image I like to be connected with. Have you met him?” she asked suddenly.

Once again, the disinfectant smell of the cheerless coffee bar assailed Jane's nostrils. The face across the table, with its razor, its mocking laughter, its callous indifference to death flashed back into her head and she jumped like a startled pony.

Nina moved closer. “My dear,” she said, taking her by the hand, “you are positively shaking from stress and exhaustion. I can feel it. There's only so much the human frame can take at once, you know. Sit down and I'll get you some coffee.”

“I can't find her,” said Amos. His voice was calm, but his fingernails drummed against the telephone receiver in agitation. “She was supposed to meet me outside Holt Renfrew on Bloor Street. Then we were going for lunch. I waited for a few minutes and then called the place where she was supposed to be. I was going to walk over and meet her. She wasn't there. She didn't go to any of the places where she said she'd be.”

“Where was that?” asked Harriet.

“She was going to the gallery to talk to Nina and then to the lawyer. Both close by. I called both of them. Neither one saw her. She has simply disappeared. Nina suggested”—his face drained of colour, except for a few freckles that stood out on his forehead, and his hair burned against the pallor—“Nina suggested that Jane has a long history of simply walking out on people—men, her parents, you.”