The Odd Job (18 page)

“All right, you nagging female. I’m on my way.”

To everybody’s surprise, notably his own, Jem made the distance from Pinckney Street to Tulip in fourteen minutes and thirty-two seconds. Charles could have done it in six, but he fussed over tubby little Jeremy Kelling as if the old goat had been Paavo Nurmi.

“You’ve made remarkable time, sir, if I may venture to say so. Can I offer you some refreshment?”

“You can, indeed. No barbarities this time around, I trust?”

Back when they were newly acquainted, Sarah’s new butler had committed the faux pas of putting a pickled onion in Jeremy Kelling’s martini, and Jem had never let him forget it. Tonight Charles was making no mistake.

“Oh, no, sir. No olive, no onion, no twist, no ice. Just the well-chilled gin in the well-chilled glass and the cork from the vermouth bottle waved slowly three times over the top, if memory serves me correctly.”

“Bang on target, Charles. You’ve come a long way under my tutelage. Now then, Sarah, what’s this business you want to show me?”

“I’m not just sure. There’s a letter along with the photograph. I meant to read it before dinner, but I fell asleep. It might be a good idea to give you some background on what’s been happening, if you can spare the time to listen.”

Ensconced in one of the comfortable brown leather library armchairs that Alexander Kelling’s grandfather had bought cheap at a house sale, his martini glass traveling happily from hand to mouth and back again, Jeremy Kelling was quite willing to let Sarah catch him up on the incidents that had taken place since Dolores Agnew Tawne had been found dead among the peacocks.

“So, Sarah, am I to understand that at approximately the time when somebody was murdering Mrs. Tawne with a hatpin, you were playing tag along the road to Boston with a carful of hoodlums?”

“Not a carful, Uncle Jem, only two. At the time, I took them for a couple of young imbeciles merely out for what they perceived as a bit of fun. As to just when Dolores’s body showed up in the palazzo’s courtyard, I don’t know. It was half past five or thereabouts when Vieuxchamp called here looking for Brooks. The museum closes at five, so I suppose they’d have found her shortly after closing time. My own feeling is that she may have been killed earlier than that and her body hidden until the crowd and most of the guards had gone and the coast was clear except for Vieuxchamp and Melanson, who’d stayed to lock up.”

“Only two of them, in that big place?”

“That’s right. The museum has a new head of trustees who’s cracking down on what he sees as unnecessary overtime pay among the staff. I don’t even know if they still have a night watchman, come to think of it. Though they’d be pretty crazy not to, wouldn’t they?”

“No crazier than the rest of what I’m hearing. And the hatpin was found in Mrs. Tawne’s neck?”

“No, quite the opposite. The medical examiner hadn’t been able to determine what she’d died from until Monday, when a messenger dropped off an envelope with that hideous old hatpin inside. As it turned out, there was still blood on the pin that matched Dolores’s.”

“Coffee, moddom?”

Now that they had a caller, Charles couldn’t resist laying on a touch of pomp and circumstance. To humor him, Sarah took one of the tiny, translucent demitasse cups and sipped at the odd-tasting concoction that was in it, trying not to wince.

“But what I want to show you, Uncle Jem, is a photograph I took from another box that Dolores had a key to, which had been rented under the name LaVonne LaVerne back in 1967. I’d found the key in Dolores’s bottom dresser drawer, along with some clippings that seemed to have a connection with the photograph. There was nothing in the LaVerne box except a few more photographs of the same kind, a handwritten letter that I brought with me from the bank but haven’t read yet, and six more hatpins like the one that killed Dolores. What’s particularly interesting is that, while the box rent was paid faithfully on the dot all these years, the box itself had never once been opened from the time it was shut until I unlocked it this afternoon. Charles, would you bring me my handbag?”

“
Con placer,
señora.” Charles darted from the room and came back with the bag, self-satisfied as a spaniel retrieving a stick. “Anything else?”

“Yes, give Uncle Jem a hand with that photograph. It’s been curled up so long that it snaps back. What do you think, Uncle Jem?”

“Don’t rush me. Is there a magnifying glass available, Charles?”

“Coming right up, sir.”

Jeremy Kelling had always possessed almost eerily keen eyesight, but presbyopia was finally beginning to catch up with him. While Charles wrestled with the stiff, glossy paper, Jem hauled a pair of Ben Franklin-style spectacles out of his waistcoat pocket, gave them a wrathful glare, stuck them on his nose, and picked up the magnifying glass in a properly Sherlockian grip. Charles, having managed to subdue the photograph, held it out for him to see. Jem threw down the magnifying glass, whipped off the Franklin specs, and snatched the photograph from Charles’s hands.

“Great balls of fire, it’s the Wicked Widows! How in the name of Lucifer did your Mrs. Tawne get hold of this?”

“Don’t ask me, but there it is,” said Sarah. “She might simply have been taking care of the safe deposit key for somebody else.”

“Then she’d been sitting on a keg of dynamite for the past quarter of a century and more, whether she knew it or not.”

“What do you mean? How could she?”

“Good question. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a Happening. That’s with a capital
H
.”

“I know, oddly enough. Alexander took me to one when I was still wearing white knee socks and Mary Janes. There was some kind of street fair in the Back Bay and they’d advertised a Happening. I don’t remember much about it except that we hung around awhile waiting for the Happening to happen but all that happened was some people wandering around in pink overalls dragging ladders and trash cans. So Alexander bought me some popcorn and we went to ride on the swanboats, which was much nicer.”

“I’m sure it was. I must say I’m surprised at Alexander’s having taken the risk, though he probably hadn’t realized there might be any. Dear fellow, of course, but hardly safe out without a keeper, thanks to that poisonous mother of his. Anyway, there were seven of them, always dressed as you see them here in this photo, which I’m surprised ever got taken. The Widows didn’t care for having their pictures snapped while they were performing, if such it can be called.”

“What did they do?”

“They appeared. Whether they did it for pay or just for kicks nobody ever seemed to know. They showed up at one of the Esplanade concerts in the Hatch Shell one peaceful summer evening and set off a riot. They slithered onstage at the Wilbur during a presentation of
Macbeth
and took the curtain calls themselves. And brought down the house, to the actors’ chagrin. There was a terrible scene right onstage that spread out into the audience. People got hurt, the police had to be called, and when the dust had settled, the Wicked Widows were nowhere to be found, as was ever the case.”

Jem was enjoying himself. “I mentioned Happenings because those were where the Wicked Widows really shone. There was quite a fad for such non-events during the hippie years. If the shindig Alexander took you to had caught the Widows’ fancy, that dull little business with the trash cans would have turned into something resembling a saturnalian orgy.”

Jem picked up the magnifying glass again and studied the photograph inch by inch. “Those veils they wore played the very devil; nobody could tell which of them was anyone. And that includes your friends on the force, who had in fact to be called out in force on a number of occasions I personally can recall and no doubt on even more that I missed. One never knew when, where, or whether the Widows might appear, or how they managed to get away with what they did. And they never got caught. Nobody ever laid a hand on them. Not once. It was almost as if they were evil spirits instead of ordinary flesh and blood. Gad, I must be drunk. Is there any more coffee, Charles?”

“Certainly, sir.
Uno momento
.”

Charles took away the empty martini glass with Jem gazing wistfully after it and spent a few minutes in the kitchen warming up the coffee while Jem rambled on about the Widows and Sarah studied each face as best she could through the hindering veils.

“Uncle Jem!”

“Hunh?”

“Were you asleep? I’m sorry. But look at those faces again.”

“What for? They all look alike to me. These stupid glasses—”

“It’s not your glasses, this is what I want you to see. The reason those Widows look the same is that they are the same: And they’re all exactly like the Mona Lisa.”

“H
AND ME THAT GLASS
again, Charles.”

Having fiddled with the table lamp beside his chair until it threw light on the photograph from the optimum angle, Jeremy Kelling tried Brooks’s magnifying glass at various armlengths and at last found one to suit him. “Sarah, I hate to say so, but I believe you’re dead right about those masks. I only wish they showed up better. What we ought to do is take this photo to a photographer and have it enlarged to two or three times its present size. Then we’d really be able to see something. What a shame Brooks isn’t here; he’d know how to do the work and we shouldn’t have to pay him.”

Charles put a fist to his mouth and performed one of the genteel semi-coughs that stage butlers are expected to emit when on the verge of communicating something crucial to the plot. “Poddon me, Mr. Jem, but I’ve assisted Mr. Brooks in the darkroom on numerous occasions. I could do the blowup for you, but it would take some time. As an alternate suggestion, we could pop down to the darkroom right now, put the existing print in the enlarger, and blow it up as big as it will go. That ought to give us a good look at the faces, just so we don’t leave the photo under the lamp long enough to fry the evidence. You did say, moddom, that you’d left some others in the LaVerne safe deposit box. Were they all alike?”

“I thought so,” Sarah replied, “but I didn’t get much chance to look at them because the bank was about to close and the keeper of the vault, or whatever she’s called, was dithering for Officer Drummond and me to get out. Let’s see what we get with the projector.”

What they got was all they needed. The Widows’ veils were still a hindrance but the enlargement was good enough to confirm what Sarah had expected to see. The seven faces were definitely masks, all of them exactly alike, all showing the eternally inscrutable Mona Lisa smile.

Having the photograph so much bigger and better-defined gave Sarah a further insight. These masks were too good; by no stretch of the imagination the kind of soft-rubber caricatures that might be found at a costumer’s or a joke shop. For masks of this quality one would have to model a prototype in clay, then cast it in plaster to provide a mold that could be lined with papier-mâché, and finally paint each mask like the original. The maker would have had to be an expert copyist with the skill and patience to produce seven exact likenesses. There seemed only one answer.

Had the masks been a labor of friendship or love, or had this been a matter of money earned by a portrait painter with a touch for a likeness, a slim pocketbook, and the ability to keep her mouth shut if she had to? Was this why Dolores had saved those clippings but refrained from pasting any of them in her scrapbook? Whose idea had it been for her to serve as custodian for LaVonne LaVerne, if there ever had been such a person? Why make such a to-do over a few pieces of evidence that didn’t seem particularly damning about seven persons, presumably but not certainly female, who’d got their exploits but not their names in the Boston papers not quite three decades ago?

“Uncle Jem,” she said after Charles had shut off the projector and led the way back upstairs to the library, “can you tell Charles and me a little more about the Wicked Widows? Were they really widows, do you think, or housewives working out their fantasies? Or just fans of Franz Lehár who’d got their facts twisted?”

“Many have wondered but nobody’s ever found out, so far as I know.” The quondam beau of Beacon Hill heaved a sigh of nostalgia for those joyously misspent days that would come no more. “It’s been a long time, Sarah. You must bear in mind that I was never one of that sophomoric coterie who got their jollies dashing around from one Happening to another in the occasionally fulfilled but more often vain hope that the Wicked Widows would put in one of their unannounced appearances. I did get to see the Widows a few times, though, and I have to say that I found them rather impressive.”

“Why impressive, Uncle Jem? What did they do?”

“Not much, when you come right down to it. They never uttered a sound, they merely exuded an atmosphere. They never broke out of their line, they were never in a hurry but always in motion, twining and twisting and swishing those fishtail skirts in perfect coordination, as though they were one big, black snake. At least that’s what they made me think of, and that’s how they could act if anybody got too close. They didn’t always perform on a stage or in a roped-off area; sometimes they’d be right in among the crowd, weaving in and out but never getting quite close enough to be touched. If anybody committed the folly of getting too close, all fourteen of those black-gloved hands would reach up to those great black hats and out would come the hatpins.”

“But surely they didn’t go around stabbing people.”

“Didn’t they, though? I personally witnessed one incident that I still wish I could forget. I don’t suppose I ever shall. It was at one of those block-party affairs that the Back Bay seemed to be rife with at that time. One could hardly turn around without falling over some wooden sawhorse with a bunch of balloons tied to it. Wouter Tolbathy was with me, I don’t know why we decided to join the festivities. I’m not sure we did decide, actually. I think we just found ourselves in the midst and paused to wonder why. We did have some thought of buying a large codfish and presenting it to Ed Ashbroom, I remember, but they didn’t have any for sale so Wouter decided to build him one with a swishy tail on it.”