The Odd Job (21 page)

She must have needed the sleep, she didn’t wake up until the phone by her bedside rang and she heard Charles saying good morning to Miriam Rivkin. She broke in, still not quite awake.

“Hello, Miriam. Is Davy all right?”

“Yes, he’s fine. What’s the matter, Sarah? You sound like the morning after the night before.”

“Oh, I had a stupid accident yesterday. I fell on the curb in Kenmore Square and gave my knee a whack. It was hurting, so I took some aspirin and I’m still groggy from it.”

“What were you doing in Kenmore Square?”

“Looking for a place to eat. I told you that I’m the executrix of Dolores Tawne’s will, didn’t I?”

“Yes, and you were pretty sore about it.”

“I still am. Are you expecting company today?”

“Not that I know of,” said Miriam. “Why?”

“Because I’m in a jam and I need some help. Is Ira there?”

“Right here drinking his orange juice. Ira, Sarah has a problem.”

“Okay, so what did they pinch you for?” That was Ira, six foot three and chipper as a chipmunk.

“Nothing, yet,” Sarah replied. “I need a car. Not for long, I hope. I don’t want to go through a rental agency, I don’t want anything new or showy, and I don’t want to use my own car because it might be recognized.”

“That all? How soon do you need it?”

“Sometime today if that’s possible. What I’d love to do is spend a little time at the lake and try to get my head straight. I’ll have to disguise myself one way or another, so don’t be surprised if some old crone with a limp and a false mustache hobbles in.”

“We’re never surprised. How were you planning to get here?”

“Good question. Charles might be able to borrow his friend’s car. If not, I’ll ride the T as far as I can and call you or Miriam to pick me up. Will you be around all day, Ira?”

“Depends on how soon I can steal you a car. We have one at the shop getting an overhaul that the owner won’t need for a while because he’s gone on a cruise; I’ll see if it’s ready to roll. Anyway, either Miriam or I will be here with Davy. Want me to put him on?”

“No, just tell him Mummy will be coming later. I have some things to do before I can leave.”

“Got the directions all right?”

“Oh yes, I can find you. I might even stay the night if you and Miriam have room for me.”

“We always have room for you, you know that,” said Ira. “Then we’ll see you when you get here.”

Charles must have been waiting outside the door. Sarah had barely hung up the phone before he made a proper Jeevesian entrance with a tea service for one and a note on the tray.

“Lieutenant Harris is desirous to speak with you, moddom. That’s his number on the note. Shall I dial it for you?”

“No, give me time to drink my tea. Is Uncle Jem up yet?”

“Oddly enough, yes, and in fine fettle.”

“Good. Don’t either of you go anywhere, we need to talk. I’ll be down when I’ve finished with Harris.”

“Roger. Temporarily over and out. May I take your order for pancakes à la Charles, or would you prefer fried salami and eggs?”

“You and Jem have what you please, I’ll boil myself an egg when I come down. Dismissed, Charles.”

Harris’s voice, when she got around to returning his call, was courteous with the kind of exasperated forbearance that afflicts busy policemen who have been kept waiting longer than they consider reasonable. The lieutenant had gone over the report that Officer Drummond had filed yesterday and wondered if Mrs. Bittersohn would mind answering a few questions.

Sarah poured her second cup of tea and braced herself for the long haul, but it wasn’t so bad. Drummond’s report had been concise and accurate. There was little she could add and less to amend, except when she offered to read Dolores’s account of her involvement with the Wicked Widows. Harris seemed not to find it relevant.

“Okay, Mrs. Bittersohn, I don’t think we need to spend much time on that angle. Anything else you want to talk about? You have no idea where Mrs. Tawne got all those fancy stickpins?”

“Would you settle for a wild guess?”

“I’ll take whatever I can get.”

“All right, then. As you of course know, Dolores Tawne made perfect copies of the more important paintings in the Wilkins Collection. She thought she was doing them as a way of preserving the originals, in fact they were being used to cover up a long run of piracy during which the originals were sold for large sums, though probably less than they’d have brought on the open market. Since the looting was uncovered and the originals gradually being returned to the museum, Dolores had been getting her copies back with no strings attached. She’d had a terribly raw deal, you know, and this was the least she deserved.”

“So she’d been selling her copies, is that it?”

“She or somebody, I assume. When Officer Drummond and I went to her studio yesterday, I noticed that she’d hung a few of her copies, but those were only a small fraction of the ones she’d got back. I looked for the rest, but found only some old canvases that had been given a fresh ground but hadn’t been painted over.”

“Indicating that Mrs. Tawne was planning to paint some more fakes?”

“She wouldn’t have called them that. Dolores was remarkably gifted in her way, you know. Anyway, it did cross my mind just before you called that she may have been taken in by another snake-oil salesman who offered to market her work for her. Otherwise I can’t see where she’d been putting the copies that my husband had returned to her as soon as he’d got the originals back at the museum.”

“But where do the stickpins come in?”

“Right where they are. Unless I’m sadly mistaken, they’re stolen property that somebody had to find a safe hiding place for in a hurry. My guess is that they might have been offered ostensibly as surety for the paintings that her new agent was planning to market, along with others that she hadn’t yet got around to doing. When I visited her studio yesterday, it looked to me as if she’d been getting set to start working there again, which she hadn’t done since the grand fiasco seven years ago.”

The letter that Dolores had left in the LaVerne box was still on the bedside table. Sarah picked it up and read a snatch or two to Harris. “That’s the sort of person she was, you see. She’d believe almost anything, provided it put her in a good light.”

“Assuming you’re somewhere near the mark, Mrs. Bittersohn, would you have any idea who this new partner of hers might be?”

“No, not a glimmer. Which is particularly frustrating because she’d been planning to come here for tea Sunday at five; she might actually have been on her way out of the museum when she got stabbed.”

“How long before that had you invited her?”

“I didn’t invite her at all, she’d simply phoned and told Charles she was coming. She’d do that; I shouldn’t be surprised if she’d intended to tell me all about her wonderful new agent.”

“Let’s just hope she didn’t tell him about you,” Harris grunted. “You’re the sole executrix, right?”

“Yes.”

“Which means nobody except yourself can open that box with the stickpins in it, right?”

“Oh, my God! I hadn’t thought of that. You don’t suppose Dolores’s death had anything to do with my almost getting killed yesterday?”

“Never happened before, did it?”

“Not with a car. But even if they had succeeded in squashing me, they still wouldn’t have been able to open the box. Would they?”

“Might take a little organizing, but there’s always a missing heir available if you know where to look. Not to spoil your breakfast, Mrs. Bittersohn, but you might be well advised to join your husband in Argentina.”

“He’s probably on the way home by now. Anyway, a person with a list of relatives as long as mine can always find a hole to hide in.”

There was a pause so long that Sarah thought she’d been cut off. “Are you still there, Lieutenant Harris?”

“Uh—yes.”

“Then I just want to say that some thought should be given to Dolores’s involvement with the Wicked Widows. I know it’s been a long time, but the fact that she was still paying the rent on that LaVerne box suggests that she must have kept up some kind of connection with whichever of the troupe is left.”

“So?”

“So I want to know what became of them. My uncle Jeremy Kelling is staying here with me just now. He’s told me about a performance where the Widows did something abominable to one of the spectators, then melted quietly away while Uncle Jem and the friend he was with were yelling for the police and trying to force their way through the crowd. And surely you must know about the seven women all in black who murdered four policemen with their hatpins in the van that was supposed to be taking them to jail. That case has never been solved, has it?”

“Not to my knowledge. It doesn’t get talked about around the station. I guess we cops don’t like to advertise our failures any more than the rest of the world. Then what’s the bottom line, Mrs. Bittersohn?”

“Pins, I suppose. You saw the way Dolores Tawne was killed; doesn’t it suggest to you that at least one of the Wicked Widows is still alive and up to her old tricks? Or his. They might have been men in drag, for all I know. I brought one of the photographs from the LaVerne box back with me yesterday; it shows the seven Widows with black gloves clear up to their armpits, long fitted gowns with fishtails, those Mona Lisa masks that Dolores made for them, the widows’ veils, the cartwheel hats. There was really nothing exposed but the bosoms, which could easily have been false.”

“I know,” said Harris. “Did you see those clippings in Mrs. Tawne’s bottom drawer?”

“Yes, and I’d meant to go back for them after Officer Drummond and I had eaten our lunch, but you know what happened. I doubt if they can tell us as much as Uncle Jem can, anyway. I do wish, and this probably sounds crazy, that we could somehow find out whether there are still any LaVonne LaVernes around the Boston area. I have a hunch that we’d have more luck chasing down their death certificates. There were six hatpins in the LaVerne box and that seventh one you’re holding at the station is in bad condition, as you know. I shouldn’t be surprised if the wickedest of the Wicked Widows had used hers to kill the other six before she got around to Dolores Tawne.”

“For God’s sake! Why would she have done a thing like that?”

“Either to save her own skin or because she thought it would be fun to bury all her sister Widows under the same alias. She’d have to be totally insane, of course. Anyway, one has to start somewhere, and so far those pins are the best lead, as far as I can see. You understand that I’m interested on purely selfish grounds. Somebody is out to kill me and I don’t want to be killed.”

“But why pick you as a target?”

“I can only assume that it has something to do with Dolores Tawne’s murder and possibly with my having lunch on Sunday with the Wilkins’s new chairman of trustees. It was after I’d left the Turbots with my cousins and stopped at their house to pick up my own car that those two cutups in the gray Toyota began harassing me. They could have followed me from the Turbots’, though I can’t think why. When I got to Tulip Street, Charles told me Dolores had invited herself to tea, but she never turned up and we learned that she was dead. Whether she was killed to keep us from getting together sounds awfully far-fetched, but by now I’m prepared to believe just about anything.”

What was she spinning out this conversation for? Here it was, the jumping-off place. “And now I’m going to ring off and disappear. Either Charles, Uncle Jem, or his man Egbert will be here to take messages. One way or another, I’ll keep in touch. Au revoir, Lieutenant.”

“Just a second, Mrs. Bittersohn. There was a late bulletin on the car that tried to run you down. It was registered in the name of Dolores Agnew Tawne at the Fenway Studio Building on Ipswich Street.”

“But that’s absurd! Dolores never owned a car, she couldn’t even drive. At least she said she couldn’t, apparently I didn’t know her at all. And now I’m responsible as executrix for the car that almost killed me, is that it?”

“No, that’s one worry you can forget about. The car was found wrecked and set on fire in a South Boston parking lot at two twenty-four this morning. Au revoir, Mrs. Bittersohn.”

“I
’M SORRY THAT CALL
took so long,” Sarah half-apologized as she cracked open the two eggs that Charles had, after all, boiled for her. She was still in her robe because she didn’t know yet what to do about a disguise; but otherwise ready for action and hungry for her breakfast. “Toast, please, Uncle Jem. You’d better take Dolores Tawne’s will to Mr. Redfern at ten o’clock sharp. That’s when he usually gets to his office. Make it plain that you’re a very busy man. You can’t stay to chat with Miss Tremblay, you must have the will submitted for probate as soon as possible. Don’t forget to take the will with you, by the way. Charles, make sure he puts it in his inside pocket.”

“Yes, moddom,” replied the admirable Charles.

“Bah, humbug,” snarled Jeremy Kelling. “When did I ever forget anything?”

“No comment,” said Sarah. “If either Miss Tremblay or Mr. Redfern happens to bring up that obituary notice, just say you have an urgent appointment with some bigwig or other so you’ve got to rush off, which you then proceed to do. Have you got all that?”

“If you mean, ‘Do you understand what I am trying to say only I’m talking garbled English?’ the answer is in the affirmative,” Jem replied nastily. “Then I nip down to the stock exchange and corner the market in black-crepe armbands, right?”

“What a delightful idea, Uncle Jem! Save a band for me because one never knows, does one? Now, Charles, how are you going to make me unrecognizable? Is there anything in the house that we can use?”

“Good question. Do you have a definite self-image in mind or shall we just wing it?”

“Well, let’s see. I’m bound to look like a Kelling no matter what you do, so how about something along the lines of Great-Aunt Matilda? Since I’m limping anyway, I can use that gold-handled blackthorn cane she used to carry when her arthritis got bad.”

“The one that unscrews to hold a tot of brandy in the handle?”

“Why not? One never knows. As for clothes, that dark-gray flannel suit I just bought might do if we can antique it a little.”