Rogues Gallery (6 page)

“That would be never, but your ace reporter might get this on her own if she does a little digging.” I was thinking of Maggie Barton, the pink-haired septuagenarian on the St. Benignus beat. “It's about the reason Calder was forced to leave the Warhol Art Institute, and it had nothing to do with his book. There's some juicy St. Benignus campus politics involved, too.”

I gave it to her more or less chronologically, taking her through my day with Dante Peter O'Neill, Lesley Saylor-Mackie, and Rosalie Hawthorne, just as I had earlier with Mac. She immediately saw the embarrassment to St. Benignus in Calder's background - and especially to Ralph - but she was more interested in the implications for the murder.

“So maybe Calder tried to put the moves on some young babe at the gallery,” Lynda said. “She stabbed him in self-defense, and then panicked and ran when she realized she'd killed him.”

“And she just happened to have stolen the corkscrew and had it on her when he got aggressive?”

“Oh, yeah, the corkscrew.” Undaunted, Lynda thought a moment. “Okay, maybe it wasn't self-defense. But it still could have been a jilted lover or a jealous husband who killed him with malice aforethought. Or even an angry parent if he preferred student-age females. What did Mac say when you told him this?”

“Pretty much the same thing, but he used bigger words. He's going to pass the info on to Oscar as something to keep in mind when he circles back on the people who were at the gallery on Saturday.”

Lynda held up her freshly carved jack-o'-lantern for me to admire, which I did. The smile looked deliciously evil, like Ralph Pendergast laying somebody off.

“It sounds like Rosalie Hawthorne was very forgiving of her friend Calder's romantic peccadilloes,” Lynda said.

Before I could say that was part of Rosalie's pretention to open-mindedness, my cell started playing “You're So Vain.” It was my new ringtone for Sebastian McCabe.

“I hope this is good news,” I told Lynda as I picked up the phone.

It wasn't.

“I just received a call from Oscar,” Mac said. “He and his men have been looking for Scrappy Smith all day in his usual haunts - the public library, the art museum, every bar in town. No one has seen him. It seems that he has disappeared.”

IX

That was on Monday. By Wednesday, with Scrappy still missing, Mac had taken to muttering darkly that perhaps Scrappy was the hoary old cliché of the Man Who Knew Too Much and had to be eliminated. In other words, maybe he'd actually seen something and tried to blackmail the killer, who responded with extreme prejudice. That began to seem more and more likely as the days passed and Scrappy didn't turn up.

Oscar's official line was that the investigation was moving forward, but I didn't see how. The only thing new was the coroner's autopsy report, which confirmed that the corkscrew had been jabbed through Calder's eye in an upward motion that carried it into his brain.

“If the killer was jabbing upward, then he must have been shorter than Calder,” I told Mac with some excitement. That would narrow the suspect list considerably because Calder was only of medium height.

“By no means, old boy,” Mac said, “although it may indicate that the killer knew what he or she was doing. Going through the eye socket, an upward thrust is necessary to reach the brain no matter the height of the attacker. A downward stroke would only damage the eye and sinus cavity.”

I bet he Googled that.

Life went on and the murder became background noise. Maggie Barton wrote a follow-up story about the search continuing for a new art department head in the wake of the murder, accompanied by a brief “murder investigation continues” sidebar by young Johanna Rawls, and then dropped it. For a couple of days I was tied up on a crisis involving the St. Benignus La Crosse coach. One night, while on a road trip to Boston, he had too much to drink. So he called a cab - good move. But he got into a fight with the driver - bad move. On that story I was dealing with ESPN and
The Boston Globe
as well as Maggie, who is easily the most energetic septuagenarian I know. Even that skydiving accident hadn't kept her down for long.

I'd just hung up after a conversation with Maggie, in fact, when I received a text message from Mac:

Meet me ASAP at Shinkle.

Grinding my teeth at Mac's assumption that I was always at his beck and call, which especially irritated me because it was true, I told Popcorn where I was going on the way out of my office.

The Shinkle Museum of Art is a wonderful old brick and stone building on Front Street with turrets and towers. A nineteenth-century Cincinnati pork baron named Nicodemus Shinkle had built it as his twenty-room country home. Decades later, his great-granddaughter had created a foundation to which she had gifted the house for use as an art museum.

Mac was outside the museum, pacing and smoking a cigar.

“What's up?” I demanded.

“I have an idea.”
That's great! Or a disaster
.
It could go either way.
“This morning at home, looking at Calder's books and at the guest book from the opening, I suddenly saw a possible link between them: Adam Mendenhall - art museum - art fraud.”

Calder's last book had been about forgeries donated to a large number of art museums. And Adam Mendenhall, director of the Shinkle Museum of Art, had been among the gallery crowd on the night of the murder.

“So your theory - ”

“I do not have a theory, old boy, only a nascent idea. However, I must say that all along I have had the feeling that the solution to the murder was within our grasp. Perhaps we now stand on the verge of unveiling it. I thought you would be interested.”

In other words, he thinks I'm his Watson and he wanted me on hand to record another triumph of Sebastian McCabe. Well, he asked for it.

Mac knew Mendenhall through Kate, who was a docent at the Shinkle. He explained this to a skeptical receptionist at the front desk. After a brief phone conversation, she told us we could see the director right away. She pointed to his office down a hallway.

Mendenhall was a little younger than me, mid-thirties, about Mac's height of five-ten or so with longish brown hair. He was wearing a pink bow tie with matching suspenders and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. That made two too many bow ties in the room so far as I was concerned; I've seldom seen Mac wear any other kind of neckwear, although never pink. The energy that Mendenhall had brought to the Shinkle with his arrival three years ago was much on display as he came out from behind his white, kidney-shaped desk, pumped our hands, and asked what he could do for us.

“Perhaps nothing, Adam, but one has hopes,” said Mac. “I noticed that you were at the Looney Ladies Gallery on Saturday.”

Mendenhall's smiling face turned solemn. “I'll never forget it.”

“Had you met Thurston Calder before that night?”

“Why, yes. He was here on Friday, as a matter of fact. He came to look at our collection and he asked to see me.”

“And did he by any chance suggest that a work of art in your collection was fraudulent?”

The wide-eyed look of surprise on Mendenhall's boyish face would have done Roger Rabbit proud. “Wow, you really are a detective, Mac - and a magician! That's exactly what happened. Calder claimed the Andy Warhol in our Pop Art collection wasn't genuine. He wasn't particularly nice about it, either.”

What a surprise.

“And how did you react?” Mac asked.

“With great skepticism, as you might imagine. The piece is on loan from the Cleveland Art Museum, a fine institution. But I figured Calder should know something about Warhol since he wrote a book about him, so I called Cleveland right away. They said they'd send somebody down to look at it, but nobody's shown up yet. I guess we're not high on their priorities. Say, you don't think that had anything to do with his murder, do you?”

“Most probably not,” Mac said in a low voice.

As we walked down the front steps of the Shinkle a few minutes later, he told me what he'd been thinking: “Hiding an art fraud might be an excellent murder motive for Adam. According to his easily verifiable testimony, however, he did not try to hide the fraud - if there was one. Rather, he immediately alerted more competent authorities of the possible problem. Ergo, he had no motive.”

Mac seemed more ready to give up on his own theory than I was.

“Maybe Mendenhall's call to Cleveland alerted somebody else that Calder was a threat,” I said. “This could be about a lot more than one painting here in Erin. The guy that Calder wrote his last book about scammed a whole bunch of museums.”

“That is certainly a reasonable speculation, except for one flaw,” Mac said gloomily. “In that event surely Mendenhall would have been silenced as well as Calder. No, Jefferson, I am afraid my theory simply won't wash.” He stuck a cigar in his mouth and lit up.

Sebastian McCabe in defeat is not a pretty sight.

X

A couple of days a week Lynda and I manage to grab lunch together. Thursday was one of those days. We ducked into Beans & Books, the combination coffee house and used bookstore. It's the kind of place where the server asks if you need a menu. Most people say no.

“So what's new today in the world of spin and half-truths?” Lynda asked as we waited for a server.

“Why ask me? You're the one who works in the news business.”

And so forth.

“Hi, guys.” I looked up to see Beryl Peacock wiping an errant strand of strawberry blond hair off of her high forehead. She'd waited on me maybe fifty times while she was in college and since graduation, but somehow she was a different person now that I'd been in her house talking to her grandmother about the dead body she'd found. I asked Beryl how the older woman was doing.

Beryl shook her head. “I'm not sure she'll ever really be the same, Mr. Cody. She's not as old as she looks but she's kind of frail. And now she seems, I don't know, nervous all the time and kind of distant. I'm getting worried about what happens if I get a job out of town. My parents don't see her all that often and my grandfather died when Dad was little.”

“She's such a sweet lady,” Lynda said.

Beryl took our orders - Caffeine-Free Diet Coke and a low-fat tuna salad sandwich for me, Mountain Dew and a bowl of chili for Lynda.
No French fries with the chili?
She hadn't been married to me half a year yet and Lynda was already becoming a health-food fanatic by her standards.

She watched as Beryl hustled away with the order. “She's a cute kid.”

“Oh, really? I hadn't noticed.”

“You're married, Jeff, not dead. You noticed.”

Okay, I noticed.
“Is there a point to this?”

“Just that I bet Thurston Calder noticed, too.”

Within a few minutes Beryl brought us our drinks. “Here you go!”

“Thanks, Beryl,” Lynda said. “I've been wondering something. We've learned that Thurston Calder was quite a ladies' man. Did you happen to see him talking to any young women that night at the gallery?”

“No, I don't think so. I really wasn't looking at him. We never met.”

“So he didn't, for instance, come on to you?”

“Of course not!” Beryl fled.

“What do you think?” I asked Lynda.

“I really don't know. Maybe she was just embarrassed at being asked the question. But I'm still wondering.”

That evening after work, I barely had time to drop my briefcase on the floor and start wondering when Lynda would be home when the doorbell rang. I was startled to see Lillian Peacock standing at the door. She was wearing a blue housedress, about the same cornflower shade as her eyes and Beryl's. It contrasted nicely with her pure white hair.

“May I come in, Mr. Cody? I'd like to talk with you about the murder.”

“You'd be most welcome, Mrs. Peacock, but I think it would be a better idea if we go next door and see Professor McCabe. Whatever you have to say, I'm sure he'd like to hear it.”

Her eyebrows knitted together. “You live next door to your brother-in-law?”

That's when I realized it was time for Lynda and me to move out of Mac's carriage house that had been my bachelor pad. We needed our own place. I would still pedal my bicycle to work, though; that was a non-negotiable.

“It's just temporary,” I said hastily. “Let's go see Mac.”

A few minutes later we were sitting by a fire in the McCabe study.

Lillian Peacock sat primly with her hands folded on her lap. “I came to see Mr. Cody because I'm concerned about my granddaughter. You were asking Beryl some questions about Thurston Calder. Surely you can't suspect her of some involvement in that awful murder?”

She stared straight at me, blue eyes piercing. I wanted to fall through the floor.
Technically, Lynda was the one asking the questions. I just happened to be there.

Mac also looked at me, quizzically. I hadn't told him about our talk with Beryl because there wasn't much to tell.

“We've been asking a lot of people a lot of questions, Mrs. Peacock,” I said. “Mr. Calder had a reputation for pursuing young women. Lynda and I were trying to establish whether he brought that habit with him to Erin. If he did, that could be significant.”

“I see. So you suspect a crime of passion?”

“There certainly seems to have been some passion involved in the delivery of the blow,” Mac observed.

Lillian Peacock nodded. “I see that, but still...” Her eyes fell on the three Calder books that lay on the coffee table. “Mr. Calder wrote that book about art fraud. I read about that in
The Erin Observer
. Perhaps he became aware of something like that here in Erin.”

Miss Marple on the case!

A dark cloud passed over Mac's face as he recalled the fiasco in Adam Mendenhall's office. “I can assure you, Mrs. Peacock, that possibility has been explored to no avail.”