The Body in Bodega Bay (5 page)

“Look, Tom,” Toby said again, “this is no time for us to sort this out. Some of my stuff is mixed up with his, as well. Let's put all that aside for now and just deal with Charlie's death.” That caused a heavy silence.

When Tom straightened himself up in the chair, he looked stricken. “You shouldn't be alone right now,” I said. “Do you have anyone to stay with?”

He bit his lip and then shook his head. “I'm all right. Annie's coming over.” I knew who he meant. Everybody in the Russian River Valley knows Annie, the lovable butterball of a gal who runs the Guerneville Tavern. She has a heart as wide as the river that runs by her bar. She's always there for those in trouble, and that was Tom tonight. He would be in good hands.

Soon enough, we were alone in the shop, looking at each other with fatigue and dismay. “He seems really broken up by Charlie's death,” I said.

“He's going to be a pain in the ass, is what it seems,” said Toby.

“There's more involved than just business for Tom. Did Charlie ever say anything to you about their relationship?”

“No. He kept his private life to himself, which was fine with me.”

“Didn't he say anything at all to you about Tom?”

“Nothing personal. I never said much to him about you, for that matter.”

“Oh? Don't men ever talk about their love life to their friends? Women do. All the time.”

“Men are different,” said Toby.

“No kidding,” I said. Why is it men get turned off whenever we want to talk about relationships? Doesn't the subject interest them? Toby once joked that his idea of hell was to be locked in a cell with a TV on twenty-four hours a day with nothing to watch but Oprah Winfrey.

“So what do you say about me?” Toby pursued.

“Hmm?”

“What do you say when you talk about me to your friends?”

“Relax. They're the ones who usually complain. I just say I'm lucky. I married a great guy.”

“Come on. What do you say?”

“No, it's true. I do feel lucky.” I puckered, and our lips met in a comfort kiss.

“So do I,” said Toby. Then a distinctively guilty expression clouded his face, and he looked toward his shoes. “But I have a confession to make.”

Uh-oh, I thought. What's coming?

“Tom isn't the only one who loaned Charlie money. I did too.”

“You did? How much?”

“I don't know. A few thousand.”

“You don't know? What do you mean, you don't know? I thought you were watching every penny around here.”

“I am. But I felt sorry for Charlie. Or not exactly that. The guy was just likable.”

“So likable that you tossed a wad of money at him and didn't even count it?”

“Don't fly off the handle. It didn't happen that way. It was an investment in our partnership. Charlie needed some cash for Morgan's auction, but he didn't have ready money. So I gave him access to the shop's account. I said he could charge up to five thousand dollars on it. Then we'd figure out how he'd pay me back after he resold the items, or maybe we'd go in together on the purchases. We left it sort of vague.”

“‘Unsettled' was the term Tom used,” I said. “I see what he meant.”

“You could say that. For now, the shop, my shop, was buying the items at Morgan's.”

A thought occurred to me. “Let me see that bill of sale again,” I said, returning to the file drawer in Charlie's desk, if indeed the desk was his. Sure enough, the bill was made out to the shop, a detail that hadn't registered with me before. “So that icon and whatever else Charlie may have bought belongs to you.”

“I suppose so. But Tom Keogh won't see it that way. Say, you don't think it really could be worth something, do you?”

“The icon? I wouldn't count on it.”

“After all, somebody went to the trouble of stealing it.” Toby raised his eyebrows, considering the prospect of a windfall. I'd seen that look on his face before, whenever he thought he was cadging a piece for his shop that he could turn around for a quick profit. When that happened, he usually was disappointed.

“Don't get carried away,” I said. “Remember
The Maltese Falcon
? What was that line in it about greediness and dreams?”

Toby made a sound between a snicker and a snort. “‘The stuff that dreams are made of,'” he quoted, with a rueful grin.

I
N EARLY MARCH
, daybreak sometimes starts with a streak of rose over the dark Bodega hills. As dawn swells, I like to be seated in the kitchen looking out at our deck, so I can watch the sky shift from orange to pink, with a hint of green, giving way to daylight blue. Sometimes I just sit, soaking in the view. Other days I'm grading papers or answering e-mails but looking up every minute to catch the kaleidoscope of color before it's washed out by the clear light of morning.

On this day, however, in the aftermath of Charlie's murder, I rose late and sat in the living room brooding over a hot mug of tea and following the white sun as it hovered in the distance over Tomales Bay. Toby was sleeping in. He heals best by sleep. I cure what ails me by keeping busy, and now I was sketching out the best possible day. I would make some calls and then get the kitchen ready for a comforting breakfast once Toby was up. He and I were going to spend all day together. We'd made the plan in our exhaustion the previous night. We'd get a soft start to the morning, and then he'd drive with me to Berkeley, to consult with Al Miller.

Before Toby was up, I put in a call to my sister, Angie. Since she lives on Cape Ann north of Boston, she can take a call when it's dawn in California. About then she's due for her midmorning coffee break at the coolest beauty salon in Gloucester, where she's made her way up from manicurist to top stylist in just three years. I texted her to call me when she was free from clients, and sure enough, she was back to me in five minutes.

“Hi, Angie, we're still on for your visit,” I assured her. “But I want to let you know we've had an awful thing happen here. Toby's business partner has been murdered, and I'm helping the sheriff's department look into some art that's missing.”

We took some time going over the story, and I accomplished what I'd aimed to do—warning Angie that I might be less available than we'd planned, but making her feel as welcome as ever. It was true what I told her. Toby and I were in need of those special gifts she always brings with her, a light touch and a shot of joy. It makes me happy that Toby delights in Angie's zaniness as much as I do. You see, Angie, who is twelve years younger than I am, is a man-magnet. Since nursery school, she's been attracting the opposite sex and finding that delightful. Unfortunately, her enthusiasm isn't always matched by her discrimination. She's been passionately involved with fellow students, a musician, a writer, a magician, a fashion photographer, a lawyer, a yogi, two grocery store clerks, one of her teachers, and a few first-class swindlers. Each time she's convinced she's found her soul mate.

Last summer, we helped extricate her from a relationship with a bored barista who wanted her to lend him money for a cockeyed business scheme. His idea was to buy a camper and convert it into a van for hauling motorcycles from New England to Florida in the winter. His premise was that bikers would pay to ship their cycles so they wouldn't have to ride them down to Florida themselves—a dubious business plan, as Toby pointed out. There was supposed to be room left over in the camper for Angie and the boyfriend to travel with the motorcycles and thus benefit from a paid winter vacation. Of course, it didn't happen. Angie woke up and smelled the coffee, and the boyfriend's blend was bitter. So just before sinking her trust fund into the camper, she backed out, on her own accord. There may be some in my family who are more startled than amused by Angie's unpredictable antics, but Toby and I are in the fan club, and we were glad she was coming.

“You're going to bring your scissors, right? I haven't had a haircut since the last one you gave me.”

“My God, that was Thanksgiving!”

“I know, but I don't have much time for that sort of thing, and you're the only one I trust anyhow. Let's not even talk about how that diva in Santa Rosa scalped me last year.”

“Well, if you'd get your hair cut more than once every six months, the stylist wouldn't be so tempted to shear you like a sheep.”

She could talk. Born with bones, as my mother used to say. That means the rugged jaw and high cheekbones that characterize the Boston Brahmins and signal “class” in our area of New England. Plus skinny genes, smooth blond hair that can be styled any which way, and, let's face it, gloriously God-given beauty. I am five-five to her five-eleven (though her dating profile says five-nine), size 10 to her size 6, brunette to her blond, short-bobbed to her long-maned, and presentable-looking to her gorgeous. I can deal with that. She can't. She's always trying to make me over into her likeness, or maybe it's some idealized vision of her beloved older sister.

Anyhow, I realized we'd better change the subject before she started in on my list of chronic grooming errors. “You've rented a car with GPS, right?” I asked. “It's a winding road to get here, but it will be really pretty.”

“Yeah, the car has one and they're usually fine right up to ‘You have arrived at your destination.' What does your place look like?”

“It's the cedar-sided ranch house at the top of the hill, and there's nothing but pebbles and poppies in the front. Yellow ones.”

“Sounds nice. I'll call you when I leave the airport.” Only two days till the sisters would be reunited. It had been a long time since Thanksgiving.

I made a second call that morning, to Rose Cassini, the woman who had consigned the icon that Charlie bought at the auction. We were discussing a time to meet when Toby emerged from the bedroom. Eavesdropping on the call, he pointed to his chest to say that he was coming along. So I set our arrival for eleven the next day, allowing for Toby's slow mornings.

T
wo hours and six pieces of French toast later, we were on our way down the coast to meet with Al Miller. Al lives in a cozy Victorian on a crowded street in the Berkeley Hills. It was difficult, as usual, to find a parking space in his neighborhood, and once we did, it was a bit of a hike to his address. As we climbed the familiar wooden stairs to his front porch, I found my thoughts drifting back to my graduate school days. Al always invited his seminar students to his home, and I had happy memories of evenings sitting on his living room floor and joining in earnest debates fueled by generous amounts of wine and cheese. I was in his Giotto seminar, but he also taught a seminar on Russian icons, and though the subject itself wasn't a draw, he had a devoted following of graduate students who prized his irreverence and wit. I remember the laugh he got one day when he was lecturing on Michelangelo's statue of David. Michelangelo posed David in the nude, with a slingshot on his shoulder as he faces off against Goliath. But the great artist made a blunder, claimed Al, because why would David show up on the battlefield without his pants?

Al liked to shock us with his views on religion. He maintained that theology was a form of literary criticism, since its arguments were chiefly about works of fiction (the Bible, the Koran, and so on). And he was fond of saying that if you picked a group of kids at random hanging around a street corner, any one of them could have designed a kinder universe than the one we've got. Yes, Al enjoyed getting a rise out of us.

I once asked him why he had chosen to specialize in early Christian art, given his irreligious views. Would anyone, he replied, expect him to be an animist if he taught Aboriginal art? Half-seriously, he added that his field was less crowded than some others and so he felt he could make a mark in it. In fact, he was an excellent scholar. “But the real reason, Nora, is that religious art can be just as beautiful as other kinds of art, and beautiful is what art history is about. Everything else is secondary.” I've never forgotten that.

Still, he was an odd member of his field. Usually faculty gravitate toward subjects that are in sync with their beliefs. Most professors of medieval art I've known have been believers, while those who teach contemporary art have not. You might ask, what about folks like me, who teach Impressionism? Considering my colleagues, I'd say we're all over the map. As for myself, I had a traditional Catholic upbringing, but while I still attend the occasional Mass and sometimes even take communion, my views on religion are, well, flexible. Toby, now, is the real skeptic in the family. His parents are mainline Protestants, but he jokingly refers to himself as an “Orthodox Reprobate.”

Those were some of the stray thoughts running through my mind as Toby and I stood waiting on the porch for the doorbell to be answered. We weren't kept long. Al hadn't changed much in the years since I'd been his student. He was short, slim, and still dapper, with a full head of curly hair now gone silver and a trim white beard that reminded me of Civil War portraits. In class, he used to favor sports jackets and bow ties, but today he greeted us wearing khakis and a bulky hand-knit sweater. His wife, Irma, knitted.