Rogues Gallery (7 page)

“Oh, well, it was just a thought. I'm no detective. At any rate, I'm quite sure Beryl didn't know that man, Mr. Calder.”

When Mac's cell phone burst out with its
Ride of the Valkyries
ringtone, it seemed like a reprieve.

“Yes? When? Where? We shall be right there. Thank you for calling.”

He disconnected and returned the phone to his sport coat pocket. “That was Oscar. One of his officers found Scrappy Smith.”

I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. “Dead?”

“On the contrary, old boy. It is Scrappy's good fortune and ours that he is still alive and apparently as pugnacious as ever. I suspect that we are not far from a solution to the murder of Thurston Calder.”

XI

Scrappy had changed jackets, but his clothier appeared to be the same - the St. Vincent de Paul store. With his beard growing out he looked closer to seventy than sixty this evening, but I still wouldn't want him to hit me - which he looked like he wanted to do.

“He's been staying at the presidential suite in the Harridan,” Oscar said, naming one of Erin's two elegant old hostelries. “He paid cash in advance.”

“Where did you get that kind of money?” I blurted out.

“From the ATM machine, moron,” Scrappy retorted. “Where does anybody get cash these days? What century are you living in?”

“Naturally,” said Oscar, “I was a bit suspicious. It's never been entirely clear to me how Scrappy makes a living.”

“I'm retired, Barney.”

“Well, that could be,” the chief allowed. “But the fact is, I was suspicious. So I ran his prints. It turns out our friend here is actually Mr. Reginald Fortesque III, who disappeared from upstate, the Canton area, about five years ago.”

“And what heinous crime did he commit that caused him to pull this vanishing act?” Mac rumbled.

“I won the damned Ohio lottery,” Scrappy said gloomily. “Sixteen and a half million dollars.”

“Scrappy Smith,” homeless and belligerent, was actually a millionaire?
We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

“I know it sounds like a crock, but it's actually true,” Oscar said. “I checked.”

“If you didn't do anything wrong,” I said to Scrappy, “then why use the phony moniker?”

“It's my pen name, not that it's any of your business.”

“Pen name?” Mac perked up. “What do you write?”

“Graffiti.”

Oscar poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot behind his desk before offering the caffeinated concoction all around. We declined. “Let's take this from the top. Explain yourself, Mr. Fortesque.”

“I don't have to explain myself to you or to anybody else.” He pointed at himself. “I'm a free man, see? I always have been, always will be.”

“You're as free as any other witness in a murder investigation. You want to call in a lawyer?”

Knowing Oscar, I'm sure he only asked because he was confident of the answer.

“Hell, no, I don't want a lawyer! I hate lawyers.”

“Then talk.”

“Oh, all right, all right. Crap! It's like this: Do you know what happens when you win big in the lottery? Your name and your mug are all over the newspapers and TV for days. All of a sudden you got friends you never knew you had, relatives you never even suspected. And they all want something from you. You'd be amazed at how many jackpot winners are bankrupt a few years later. You can look it up. The dumbest thing I ever did was buy that lottery ticket. I was perfectly happy as a barber.”

Maybe that's why his haircut looked self-administered.

“So you left Canton and changed your name,” I said. “Why didn't you just give the money away to charity?”

“That's one of the easiest ways to go bankrupt! Happens all the time, believe me. So, you see, I'm stuck. I don't want the money, but I'm afraid to get rid of it. So I keep it; I just don't use it. But I think maybe I've been making a mistake. I kind of like the Harridan.”

Better than the homeless shelter or Oscar's lockup? There's a surprise.

“I believe that brings us up to date on your life story,” Mac said. “However, there is still the matter of Thurston Calder's murder.”

“I had nothing to do with that!”

“Oh, yeah?” Oscar said. “We think you might have been arguing with Justin Bird, creating a big hullabaloo that got everybody's attention, right when somebody was shoving a corkscrew into Calder's brain by way of his eye. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think?”

Reginald J. Fortesque III just shrugged.

“Let me be more blunt than the chief,” Mac said. “Did someone ask, bribe, cajole, intimidate, coerce, or otherwise induce you to start a fight with the bartender?”

Scrappy jumped up. “I don't know what half those words mean, but I know my rights. There wasn't any damned fight - I was just defending my rights and nobody told me to do it.”

Life, liberty, and a free glass of wine...

Mac sighed. “Well, it was a thought.”

“I've got my own thought on this caper,” Scrappy said, sitting down again.

“Like what?” Oscar's broad face was full of skepticism.

“I think the murder was what they call performance art. Somebody was making a statement. Maybe it was a feminist thing. ‘Art in the Blood' was an all-woman show, you know.”

I didn't want to think about that, so I found my mind wandering instead to the first time I saw Scrappy that night at the gallery. He was talking to somebody ... the man I later learned was Thurston Calder.

“What did you and Calder talk about at the opening?” I asked.

“Oh, he was raving about some paintings of flowers. He was full of crap, though. They were okay, but not the hot stuff he claimed. I spend enough time at the Shinkle to know better.”

“Those are Lillian Peacock's paintings,” Mac said. “Jeff and I saw Calder later talking to Mrs. Peacock about them. He was commenting on the brushstrokes ... the brushstrokes! Hell and damnation, I have been a fool! Scrappy, are you absolutely sure his comments about those paintings were so admiring?”

“I heard what I heard! He was gaga over them. What difference does it make?”

“All the difference in the world, I am sorry to say.” Mac stood up. “I know who killed Thurston Calder and why.”

XII

Mac was in a grumpy mood, hardly saying a word to Oscar and me, all the way to the house on Lindner Street. He muttered something about “perspective,” but I didn't catch it and he wouldn't repeat it.

Evening had closed in and the front porch light of the Peacock house was on. Mac rang the bell. I had a moment of déjà vu as Beryl Peacock opened the door and Mac said we were there to see her grandmother.

“She went to bed early,” Beryl said with a hint of exasperation. “Can't this wait until tomorrow?”

“I am afraid not,” Mac said. “We are concerned about Mrs. Peacock. Please wake her up.”

Beryl went upstairs, something in Mac's tone prompting her to take the steps two at a time. Two minutes later, she was back, a frantic look on her face.

“Something's wrong! I can't wake her.”

While Oscar and Mac charged up the stairs, I whipped out my phone and called 911.

“You expected this, didn't you?” I said to Mac as we sat at St. Hildegard of Bingen Hospital waiting for word on Lillian Peacock's condition. The early betting was that she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills.

“I expected something.”

“You don't mean that Beryl - ”

He looked at me as if I had three heads. “Certainly not. Mrs. Peacock tried to kill herself - just as surely as she stabbed Thurston Calder to death.”

Maybe you saw that coming, but I was a mile behind. Even now I didn't get it, and neither did Oscar. “She killed Calder?” the chief said. “How do you figure that?”

“It all came together for me when Scrappy insisted that Calder was so enthusiastic about her paintings. You will recall that she had told us exactly the opposite. She lied, and it was a lie too small to be insignificant.”

“That's it?” I said. “That's all you've got? That wasn't a real lie; she was just being modest.”

“No, Jefferson. She was quite adamant, well beyond the traditional protestations of modesty. She did not want us to know that the normally negative Calder was quite taken by her paintings. And no, that is not all I have.”

“Wait a minute,” Oscar protested. “Are you saying she killed the man because he
liked her paintings? Hell's bells!”

“Not because he
liked
them Oscar, but because he
recognized
them. Jefferson and I overheard Calder saying the brushstrokes reminded him of something. I am quite sure they reminded him of her earlier work.”

Before he could say more, an even paler than usual Beryl Peacock came into the waiting room.

“Grandma's conscious,” she said. “I told her that you were here and she asked me to send you in. But she wants me to stay out here. What the hell is going on?”

“I am sorry, Beryl,” Mac said. “That is not for us to say. I assume that your grandmother will want to speak with you in a few minutes.”

Lillian Peacock's face was almost as white as her hair and the sheets of the hospital bed. Her blue eyes looked about a hundred years old, and sad. She didn't waste time.

“How much do you know?” she asked Mac.

“I know the following,” he said. “Your real name is LaDonna McQueen. You were once an urban terrorist. You have been a fugitive from justice for more than forty years. And five days ago you murdered Thurston Calder to keep that secret.”

She turned her head away from Mac and looked at the ceiling. “I'm not LaDonna McQueen, but I used to be. She was a woman who fell in love with the wrong man and the wrong cause. She died a long time ago, when I came here with Beryl's father and got the job in the flower shop. Who would look for LaDonna McQueen in Erin, Ohio? I told people I was a widow, and that was close enough. My lover was caught, went to prison. Maybe he was the lucky one. He did his time and moved on while I was still looking behind me all the time. Last I heard he owned a health food store in Kansas.”

Her voice faded away.

“Eventually, however, you forgot about being on the run,” Mac said. “You became comfortable in Erin.”

“That's right. Oh, I got really scared a few years back when Calder's book came out - scared and proud both. But when nobody outside of an elite artsy crowd paid it any attention, I thought I was really home free, that nobody cared any more. And then Calder came to Erin. If I'd known that was going to happen I never would have let Beryl talk me into exhibiting the oils and watercolors I'd been doing for my own enjoyment.

“Calder recognized my technique. He didn't think right then in the gallery that it was actually my work, just a similar style. I knew he would figure it out someday, though. I panicked. I picked up that corkscrew when I saw that nobody was looking. And as soon as Calder wasn't talking to someone, I asked him to come with me to that little alcove.”

She closed her eyes. “Then I did what I'd learned how to do years ago, in a manual, but I'd never done before. I did it for Beryl, you know. I mean, I didn't want her to ever know who I had been, before I became who I am.”

XIII

“I honestly think she was more upset about facing Beryl than about being arrested,” I told Kate and Lynda later that night in Mac's study. “That's why she tried to kill herself.”

Beryl had turned out to be more resilient than her grandmother expected, however. She'd already hired Erica Slade to mount Lillian's defense. Erin's most prominent criminal defense lawyer, who is also not coincidentally the county prosecutor's ex-wife, was probably in Oscar's face right now despite the lateness of the hour.

Mac, standing at his bar, tapped himself a beer. “Doubtless you have realized that one of Thurston Calder's books held the solution to his murder after all - that one.” He nodded toward
LaDonna McQueen:
Her Violent Life and Vigorous Art
, still sitting on the coffee table where Kate had left it on Sunday. “It was right there when Lillian came earlier this evening. I believe that was the impetus for her suicide attempt: She saw the book and became convinced that someone else would eventually expose her identity.”

Lynda sipped her Manhattan. “Did you really figure out the whole thing just from Calder admiring Lillian's painting and from knowing about his LaDonna McQueen book?”

“There were a few other indications,” Mac said. “For example, Lillian told another lie. She said that she had never been trained as an artist. In fact, in an effort to distance herself as far as possible from her background as an art teacher, she overreached and claimed that she had never so much as watched an art instruction program on television. And yet, in describing her own deficiencies she talked in terms of perspective and composition. Those may not necessarily be art-school graduate terms, but they do indicate a level of knowledge she earnestly wished us to believe she did not have.”

“She also ‘found' the body,” I pointed out, “and Mac and I saw her near the bar when Calder was looking at her paintings, which wasn't long before Scrappy threw his temper tantrum because the corkscrew was missing.”
No flies on me ... now.

“It still seems like quite a stretch to me,” Kate said with a yawn. “I think you just got lucky.”

Mac quaffed the last of his second mug of beer. “Let us say, rather, that I made an intuitive leap that took me to the correct solution on what may seem to be thin evidence. I make such leaps all the time when I am writing a mystery novel, connecting characters and incidents in ways that I never foresaw in the plotting stages. I never know where it comes from. Perhaps intuition involved in the solution of a mystery is actually deduction carried on at the subconscious level. For example, my subconscious may have taken a cue from the story of Scrappy Smith, another person who came to our community under false colors.