Stained Glass (25 page)

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Authors: Ralph McInerny

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: Stained Glass
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Madeline found it difficult to write in Susan's studio and had switched to the kitchen table, a table now in use as Amy Gorman ate her breakfast.
“Have you eaten?” Amy asked, forking scrambled eggs into her mouth. She had made toast, which she loaded with butter and strawberry jam.
“All I'm going to.”
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
“What do you do, skip lunch?”
Amy licked her lips and looked hungrily at the piece of toast she had picked up. “You're kidding.”
“Is lunch the second most important meal of the day?”
“Are you on a fast or something?”
Madeline smiled. She felt awful wishing that Amy would finish and go off to work so Madeline could plunk down her computer on the kitchen table and get going. She was just a guest, but then so was Amy, two refugees. Things were popping out in her galaxy, though, and she was anxious to get at them.
Finally Amy was done. She took her dishes to the sink and rinsed them before putting them into the dishwasher. “When I get old I'm going to sleep the day away like Susan.”
“She's up half the night.”
Amy turned. “Was he here last night?” Amy herself had gone yawning off to bed before nine.
“Who?”
“Adonis. The beautiful one. Haven't you met him yet?”
“I guess not.”
“Susan treats him as if he were a mere mortal.”
“She's never mentioned a man to me.”
“That's what I mean.”
After Amy left, Madeline got ready to go to work. The newspaper lay on the counter. It had been ignored by Amy, and Madeline resisted distractions at this point of the day. Mornings were her most productive times. She settled down, brought up her manuscript on the screen, and soon was plinking away at the keyboard. What is more absorbing than writing fiction? Madeline seemed to drift out of the present, losing all sense of time except that measured by the oddly crimson sun that circled the planet Photon. It was eleven o'clock Earth time when Susan came yawning into the kitchen and broke the spell. Madeline saved her text and closed the top of her computer. “I'll get out of your way.”
“Did you see Amy this morning?”
“I watched her eat.”
Susan laughed. “She really packs it away, doesn't she? I think her tapeworm has a tapeworm. She says she never gains weight.” Susan tightened the belt of her robe.
“She asked if I've met your boyfriend.”
Susan looked blank, then made a face. “Fulvio? He's a protégé of my aunt's. When he was here the other day, you were napping, or you would have met him.”
“Amy seems gaga over him.”
“I know. His looks are his cross. He told me he has considered going to a plastic surgeon to get an ugly face.”
“What does he do?”
Susan thought about it. “I don't know. He's between ships, I guess. Want to see what he looks like?”
“Sure.”
“Come on.” Susan led the way to her studio, holding a cup of coffee out before her as if it were a divining rod. She went to an easel and threw back the cloth.
“Oh my God,” Madeline cried. “That's him.”
“That's my line.”
“Susan, he's the one I'm hiding from.”
“Fulvio? You've got to be kidding.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Not much more than my aunt told me. He likes to talk about my family, don't ask me why.”
Madeline dropped the subject. She was a guest here, and she shouldn't be commenting on Susan's friends, but she had a strong urge to leave this house, go somewhere else. She remembered the way the reporter had spoken; she remembered Mintz with his air gun. Maybe it was safe to go home now.
They went back to the kitchen, where Susan ate standing up, just toast, juice, and coffee. She opened the newspaper. “My God,” she cried.
“What is it?”
“Fulvio! He's being sought by the police.”
Madeline jumped up and stood beside Susan, mouthing the words as she read. Tetzel? That was her reporter.
“Why do they call him Charles Ruskin?” Susan asked.
“That's his name.”
“He told me he was Fulvio. My Aunt Margaret calls him Fulvio. That amateur sketch could be anybody. Madeline, it's some awful mistake.”
Madeline said nothing. In the story, Charles Ruskin was tied to all the dreadful events of recent days—Bobby Newman, Madeline's editor in Kenosha—but the heart of the story was the fact that Charles Ruskin was the last man to have seen Carl Borloff alive. Susan read it all with her mouth hanging open. She turned from the paper with determination on her face. “I'm calling Margaret.”
Madeline listened to Susan summarize the story in the
Tribune
. “Don't you read the local paper? Well, you ought to. Margaret, have Amos Cadbury do something. You and I know Fulvio couldn't have done these things.”
Hanging up the phone, she said to Amy, “She will. Amos Cadbury can do anything.” She paused. “Well, almost anything.”
Susan went off to shower and, as she put it, to get undressed for work, meaning the jeans and sweatshirt she wore in the studio. Madeline got set up again on the kitchen table, opened the text on her monitor, and stared at the words. That's all they seemed now, words. When she had written them they had been a pure medium that carried forward her story. Now they were clumps of letters, lines, bah.
She went up to the studio to find Susan just sitting on a stool. She had a cigarette in one hand and her lighter in the other, and she might have been Lot's wife for all the animation she showed.
“I can't work.”
“Neither can I.”
“Madeline, it has to be some horrible mistake.”
“I hope so.”
The doorbell rang, and Susan went to answer. At the sound of her scream, Madeline dashed to the front hall. A startled young man, impossibly good-looking, much more so than his pictures, stared at Susan. Susan had stopped screaming and was now laughing. “They
let you go,” she cried. “I knew they would. Did Amos Cadbury take care of it?”
She took his hand and led him into the living room. This was a time for celebration, she decided. “Wine,” she cried, and dashed away and came back with a bottle of merlot. “This is Australian,” she said. “No cork. Just twist off the cap.” She handed the bottle to Fulvio.
“A small point of order, Susan. I don't know what the hell you're talking about.”
He uncapped the wine and began filling glasses. Susan glared at him, then went to the kitchen for the newspaper. She dropped it in his lap. “There you are. Read all about it.”
He read. He worked his lips. He made noises. He kept on reading. Finally he looked at Susan. “That's not me.”
“What did I tell you, Madeline?” Susan said triumphantly.
“I mean it's not a picture of me.”
“You just said that.”
“Not quite.” He lifted his wine and stared at the glass like a scientist in a lab. “It's my brother, Charles.”
After Margaret's call, Cy Horvath and Agnes Lamb, accompanied by representatives of the Barrington homicide bureau, arrested Charles Ruskin at the home of Susan Devere. Both Susan and Amy Gorman had to be subdued by officers as the arrest was made.
The subject himself was strangely composed. “I'm not Charles Ruskin. My name is Fulvio Menotti.”
The cards and ID in his wallet bore this out. They took him in for questioning anyway, ignoring the wariness of their Barrington counterparts. Fulvio Menotti was the spitting image of the man sketched by Louellen, and that was good enough for Cy. Nonetheless, they were faced with the difficulty of understanding how someone named Fulvio Menotti had been calling himself Charles Ruskin.
“Two names are not two people,” Cy said.
Maxwell came in and was taken to view the suspect through a one-way mirror. “That's the man I saw with the reporter and the skinny little hooker, the alleged suicide. He's the guy that went into Borloff's building and somehow disappeared by the time Cy and I got to the apartment. Ask the reporter from the
Tribune
.”
Rebecca Farmer couldn't believe that the source of her great story was now being held for questioning in the death of Carl Borloff and maybe others as well. She stared openmouthed at him through the one-way mirror.
Agnes said, “Is he the man?”
Rebecca gave her a stricken look.
“Yes or no?”
Her “yes” was almost inaudible. Agnes led her away.
Returned from Peoria, an apparently cold-sober Tetzel was all over the place, going from Cy's office to Agnes's, taking notes like crazy, trying not to grin like an idiot. He had the pressroom all to himself now.
If they had their man, though, there were weird complications. In Borloff's apartment a plastic bag was found, containing the box cutter that proved to have been the weapon used on poor Bobby Newman.
Maxwell said, “I think that's the bag he was carrying when he entered the building.”
The T-shirt found on the waterbed in Bobby Newman's studio told another story when Rebecca broke down and related her visit there with the suspect. So they held him now on suspicion of having killed Borloff.
“I can't believe he killed anyone,” Rebecca said to Agnes.
A murder charge could not be just a matter of belief. Maxwell's identification and Rebecca's reluctant corroboration were something, but hard evidence was needed.
Miss Pageant, the Kenosha librarian, came down and added her testimony. “That's him, the silent partner.”
To that extent, everything looked good, but Jacuzzi the prosecutor posed the puzzling question. “Why? What's the motive, Cy?”
The search for a motive now became the primary task. Agnes went back to Susan Devere.
“He didn't do it. I don't care what you say. You heard him, he's not Charles Ruskin. That's his brother. Ask Amy Gorman.”
“That's what he said,” Amy admitted, but she no longer seemed to share Susan's conviction that some horrible miscarriage of justice was under way.
Neither Susan nor Amy knew where the suspect lived.
“Didn't you even wonder, Susan?”
“He's a sailor. My aunt met him on a freighter.”
If a member of the merchant marine, he had to belong to the union. Cy checked on that and was given an address for Fulvio Menotti. It was a room in a one-star hotel on Dirksen, taken by the month. The clerk listened to their request, then said they had to talk to the manager. The manager's name was Solomon, a tall fellow with a large head on which remnants of hair were carefully distributed. His eyebrows were luxuriant, and his belly hung over his belt. “Let me see your warrant.”
“You want a warrant?” Cy asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Then I'm glad I brought one.”
The elevator was the size of a confessional—Cy's analogy; Agnes let it go—and they rocked up the shaft to the third floor. At the door of number seven, Solomon asked to see the warrant again. He read it as if he were looking for a loophole. He gave it back to Cy and, as he unlocked the door, said, “He was such a nice guy.”
Solomon was the first male who had spoken kindly of the suspect.
Menteur was more typical. “I wouldn't buy a used car from that sonofabitch. A real pretty boy.”
“You bought a story,” Cy had told him.
“We didn't pay him!” Menteur paused, chewing gum furiously. “We did buy a pig in a poke.”
Solomon went ahead of them into the Spartan room. The single bed was neatly made; there was a duffle bag lying on the baggage stand under the window. The bathroom was spick-and-span. The rope was looped over a hook in the closet. Cy fed it into a plastic evidence bag. He didn't have to say “Kenosha.” There was nothing else significant in the room except the business card of Margaret Devere Ward stuck in the frame of the mirror. That went into another ziplock bag.
“When did you last see him?”
Solomon wasn't sure. Downstairs, the clerk wasn't sure. They had a photograph of the suspect with them, and both men looked at it. The clerk looked to Solomon for a cue, but the manager smoothed his eyebrows and nodded.
The rope proved to match the length cut from it to choke J. J. Rudolph. Even Jacuzzi was impressed. Now it was Agnes who began having doubts. She told Cy she would talk to Margaret Devere Ward.
“We've got enough identifications.”
“Another can't hurt.”
 
 
Margaret Devere Ward was the kind of white woman that made Agnes want to check to make sure that Lincoln had actually issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Tall, patrician, a woman who seemingly hadn't had a doubt in twenty years. So she was surprised at her graciousness.
“Please sit down. You're here about Fulvio Menotti, I suppose.”
“What can you tell me about him? Your niece said you met him on a boat.”
“That's right. It was a very long voyage, and from the very first moment I met him, he struck me as someone special. Imagine my surprise when I learned that he was a grandson of Angelo Menotti.”
“He looked you up when he came to Fox River?”
“At my suggestion. I wanted to introduce him to my mother. She is a lifelong admirer of Angelo Menotti, and I was sure she'd want to meet him.”
“Did you introduce him to her?”
Margaret smiled. “Only recently, and got chased out of the room. My mother wanted to be alone with him. They talked for over an hour.”
“And?”
“That was it. I had already introduced him to Susan. I was certain that she would be impressed to find that I had such bohemian friends, and he that I had such a niece.”
“We arrested him at her house.”
“Poor Susan.”
“Did he ever call himself Charles Ruskin?”
“That was his little joke, I suppose. Of course you know who Ruskin is.”
“No, I don't.”
“One of the most perceptive art critics who ever lived.”
“That was the joke?”
“He adopted the name when I asked him to inquire about Carl Borloff.”
“Inquire?”
“Our family foundation had long supported Borloff's art magazine,
Sacred Art.
At my mother's insistence. Now she wanted to give him an enormous amount of money to produce a book of reproductions of Menotti's stained glass windows. Menotti again. My mother's obsession. Susan was strongly opposed, as was my brother, James. When he suggested to Amos Cadbury that a private investigator should be engaged, I told him I already had done that. When I mentioned to Fulvio my misgivings about Borloff, he said he would look into it for me.”
“Amos Cadbury engaged an investigator named Maxwell.”
“I didn't know that.”
“Did Charles Ruskin report to you about Borloff?”
“He told me he would write up a full report when he was finished.”
“How did you get in touch with him?”
“He came here. We talked on the phone.”
“Do you have his number?”
She thought. “He always called me.”
“There should be a record of incoming calls on your phone.”
There was. Agnes jotted down the numbers from which her investigator had called Margaret Devere Ward. There were several, but one occurred often.
Mrs. Ward came with Agnes through the outer office. She extended her hand. “I can't believe that I was such a bad judge of character.”
 
 
Agnes got an address for the frequent number, expecting it would be the hotel on Dirksen. When it wasn't, she tried the other numbers, but they were all public phones. The address she had gotten for the number from which Ruskin had usually called was in Skokie, and Agnes thought of calling Cy before going there. He wasn't in, so she left a message, telling him what she had learned and where she was going.
The address was a house in a neighborhood of little houses whose owners had a strong sense of property—well-kept lawns and shrubbery and a flag flapping at every door but Fulvio's. She got out of the car and had started for the house when she was hailed from the next yard.
“Anything wrong, Officer?”
He was a thin rail of a man, barefoot, playing water over a flower bed from the hose he held. Agnes talked to him over the hedge.
“Just routine.”
“He's not home.”
“Fulvio Menotti?”
“Is that his name?”
“Didn't he use that name?”
“He's not very friendly.”
“How do you know he's not home?”
“He usually leaves his car in the driveway.”
“Well, I'll check it out anyway.”
“What's he done?”
“We hope he can help us in an investigation.”
“Lots of luck.”
Agnes rang the front doorbell without result, then went around to the back, following a little walk beside the drive that led to the garage farther back. She stretched and ran her fingers along the ledge above the back door. Nothing, She looked down at the mat on which she stood. She stepped back and lifted it, and there was a key.
She hesitated, then put the key in the lock and turned. The door stuck when she pushed on it but then opened. Agnes went inside. She looked around the kitchen, which had an unused look. Why would Fulvio Menotti have a room on Dirksen in Fox River and a house in Skokie? She went through the kitchen and dining room toward the living room, whose blinds were closed.
There was a sound behind her, and too late she tried to get out her weapon. Something landed on her head, sending shooting stars through her brain, and then she was falling, falling, falling.

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