The Palace Guard (19 page)

“How did she seem to you? Was she in her usual spirits?” asked Fitzpatrick.

“She was feeling the effects of her usual spirits if that’s what you mean. Any woman her age who goes out every night till all hours and drinks with riffraff has only herself to blame, as I’ve told her time and again.”

“In other words she had a hangover?”

“You could call it that.”

“Would you say she was seriously depressed?”

“She’s always depressed, always whining and wailing about getting old and losing her looks. A decent woman shouldn’t have to worry about anything except being clean and covered.” Dolores hitched the shapeless kimono more closely around her barrellike form.

“Has she ever mentioned suicide in your hearing?”

“Not more than once every five minutes. Downright wickedness I call it, making jokes about a thing like that.”

“What sort of jokes?”

“Oh, Russian roulette. She was claiming the other day she’s invented a new version. She’s going to fill one of her stomach capsules with poison and—look here, I have a right to know why you’re asking me this stuff.”

Fitzgibbon told her. “Because Countess Ouspenska is in the hospital with arsenic poisoning and we’d like to know how she got it.”

“Oh, my God! Then I’m responsible.”

“Why?”

“Because”—Dolores rubbed her square, red palm across her square, red face—“I didn’t think she meant it. I thought it was just more of her foolishness. I should have stopped it.”

“How could you?”

“I don’t know. Taken away the capsules, maybe.” Dolores collapsed into a chair. “I just don’t know.”

“Now, take it easy, Mrs. Tawne,” said Fitzpatrick, who was a kind man. “You can’t blame yourself if somebody else decides to pull a half-wit stunt like that. Do you remember exactly what she told you?”

“As nearly as I can recall, she said she was going to take the medicine out of one of her digestive capsules—she has awful stomach trouble on account of the way she eats, or doesn’t eat. Well, anyway, she said she’d fill the capsule with poison and mix it in with the rest. That way she’d never know when she was taking the poison. It would be more fun to be surprised. That’s what she said, more fun. I told her to stop acting so silly and she laughed at me.” Dolores began to cry.

Sarah slipped an arm around the beefy shoulders. “Now, Mrs. Tawne, please don’t take it to heart so. She may still come out of it all right. The doctors are doing all they can. Why don’t you make yourself a nice cup of tea and go back to bed?”

“Sure,” said Fitzgibbon, “we’ll clear out and let you sleep. Is there any way we can get into Countess Ouspenska’s studio, do you know?”

“Just open the door, most likely. She forgets to lock up more often than not. It’s the second door from this on the right.”

As Dolores had predicted, the door was unlocked. They filed in. Bittersohn found a light switch and achieved a feeble glow from a twenty-watt amber bulb.

“Jeez,” said Fitzgibbon, “this place looks like a rummage sale. She must be some kind of a nut all right.”

“She’s an artist,” said Sarah. For some reason she felt duty-bound to stick up for the countess.

“Yeah? Where would she keep the pills, I wonder?”

“They could be anywhere.” Sarah looked around at the maze of furniture and bric-a-brac. “I should think by her bed or over the sink. There’s a little back room and a sort of kitchenette through here at the back.”

The group picked their way through the confusion and found the bed. In calm repose on its grimy pillows lay the curly head of Bill Jones.

“Bill,” shouted Fitzpatrick, “what are you doing here?”

The artist flung off the covers and sat up. He was attired only in a pair of lavender satin shorts. “Oh, hi, Fitz. Hi, Sarah. Hi, Max. What gives?”

“You a friend of this Ouspenska woman, Bill?” In view of the lavender shorts, Fitzpatrick’s question seemed redundant.

“Su-ure. Lydia’s an old pal of mine. Some of the boys wanted to use the pad tonight and I wasn’t going to be needing it myself,” he added with the barest flicker of a glance at Sarah, “so I sacked out here. Hey, how come the delegation? Is Lydia okay?”

“She’s down at the Mass General with a bellyful of arsenic.”

“No-o-o!”

“Has she ever said anything to you about playing Russian roulette with her stomach pills?”

“Su-ure, but hey, you mean she wasn’t putting me on?”

“That remains to be seen. Can you think of any way she might have got hold of some arsenic?”

“Pal, the cats she hangs out with could get hold of a hydrogen bomb.”

“Yeah? Well, I guess that more or less ties it. Cover up, Bill, you’ll catch cold. Just for the record, you don’t happen to know where she keeps the pills, do you?”

“Right over there.”

A bottle of immense yellow and green capsules was sitting in plain sight on the dresser. Fitzpatrick wrapped it carefully in a tissue and put it in a little box he took from his pocket. “Easy enough to take one of these things apart and reload it. The gelatin would take a little while to dissolve, especially on a full stomach, so she wouldn’t feel the effects right away. Arsenic doesn’t act all that fast anyway. That heavy meal she ate probably saved her life. Chances are it did upset her stomach so that she got rid of some of the poison before it had a chance to work. I suppose her idea was that the Nembutal would knock her out so she wouldn’t feel the pain when the arsenic began to work. We’ll have the lab check the rest of these out, just to give them something to do.”

“Say,” said Fitzgibbon, “how about if this guy here loaded those knockout drops himself? Maybe it’s a crime of passion or something.”

“Are you kidding? This is Pericles Jonubopoulos’s baby brother.”

“Oh. Hey, pal, no offense?”

“Forget it, pal,” said Bill magnanimously. “Hey, no kidding, is Lydia going to be okay? Should I go over to the hospital?”

“They wouldn’t let you see her,” Bittersohn told him. “Sarah and I couldn’t get into the room, either. She’s pretty sick, because she was in rough shape to start with, but the doctor thinks she has a fighting chance.”

“Then I might as well grab a little more sacktime. Night, Sarah. Night, Max. Night, Fitz. Night, pal.” The baby brother of Pericles Jonubopoulos smiled sweetly at them all, pulled the once white sheet up over his slim brown torso, and went back to sleep.

Sarah kept her lips buttoned until the two Fitzes had dropped her and Bittersohn off at Tulip Street. Then she exploded.

“How damnably convenient!”

“Isn’t it, though. I think I’ll go back and have another little chat with Bill.”

“Max, it’s so late.”

“I only hope it’s not too late. Damn it, Sarah, I’m scared.”

“Then let’s go and get it over with.”

“Maybe you’d rather I sent you alone. You could use your feminine wiles.” He slipped his arms around her and leaned his head on hers. “How come Bill calls you Sarah?”

“Think nothing of it. He knows I have a nice little thing going with Max Bittersohn. He said so to Mr. Hayre. Anyway, I haven’t a wile left in me
.
You don’t honestly believe Bill tried to murder Lydia Ouspenska?”

“How could I? He’s Pericles Jonubopoulos’s baby brother. I think Bill knows something. Bill likes knowing things. You’d better go in the house and get some sleep.”

“No, please, I want to stay with you. It’s too awful, people popping off all over the place and the police just saying tough luck and going away.”

“You can’t blame the police too much. They don’t know a possible connection exists between Lydia and the two guards at the Wilkins.”

“And you didn’t tell them because you want to do it all yourself.”

“I don’t particularly want to, but I have to now that Palmerston’s boxed me in. You know that. Let’s see if we can pick up a cab on Beacon, if you can walk that far.”

“I’m so tired now it doesn’t matter any more. Come on.” They walked a moment in silence, then Sarah remarked, “You know, whoever is doing these things must be awfully well informed. He’d have had to know about Witherspoon’s dizzy spells and Brown’s hidden bottle and Lydia’s new joke about her stomach pills, which I suppose doesn’t mean a thing, because Brown was Lupe’s uncle and Lupe is Bernie’s pal and Bernie is Lydia’s and Lydia is Dolores’s neighbor and everybody seems to be connected with everybody one way or another. Bernie could have put that stuff in Lydia’s capsule while they were together, couldn’t he?”

“Why not?”

“If he did, Mr. Fieringer put him up to it, right?”

“You might ask Nick,” said Bittersohn. “There he goes now.”

The hulking figure of the impresario was moving away from the studio building as they approached. They could see his yellow face clearly enough in the light over the steps. For once Nick wasn’t smiling. He paid no attention to them but turned the corner and walked up past the Catholic church.

“Going home, I expect,” said Bittersohn. “He has an apartment over on Hemenway Street. Come on.”

They went up to the third floor, tiptoed along the creaky wooden corridor that reeked pleasantly of linseed oil and turpentine, and pushed open the door of Lydia Ouspenska’s studio. Through the dark came Bill Jones’s sleepy voice.

“What’s the matter, Nick? Forget something?”

“N
ICK WENT ALONG,” SAID
Bittersohn. “It’s Sarah and Max. Mind if we come down for a second?”

“No-o.” There was the barest shade of irritation in the soft voice as Bill got up and switched on the lights so they wouldn’t break their necks on the stairs from the balcony. “I might as well have stayed for the game. There’s more action here tonight than in my own pad.”

“Sorry, Bill. That’ll teach you to sack in with Plutonic women. How long did Nick stay?”

“Long enough to say good-bye. He was looking for Lydia.”

“Did you tell him about the Russian roulette?”

“Su-ure. Why not?”

“What does he think?”

Bill began to draw pictures in the air. “Nick says it just goes to show. Nobody ever knows anybody.”

“In other words he doesn’t believe it, either.”

“What can I say, Maxie? Everybody figured she was putting us on. You know Lydia. I mean as well as anybody can know anybody.”

“No, I don’t know her that well, but I know her. Damn it, Lydia was having a ball tonight. Wasn’t she, Sarah?”

“She certainly was and nobody can tell me for one moment that she ever thought seriously of suicide. And if she ever did, she wouldn’t pick anything quiet and messy and painful like arsenic. She’d get out in the middle of Boston Common and commit hara-kiri with the sword of Ivan the Terrible or something. And she’d wait till she’d collected a good, big audience around to stop her.”

“Yeah-h,” said Bill.

“Mind if we take a look around?” Bittersohn asked.

“Why should I? It’s not my pad. Oh, hey, maybe I should put on some pants or something?”

“Why don’t you just go back to bed?” Sarah suggested.

“No-o. I want to see Maxie detect something. How do you know when you find a clue, pal?”

“I crack my shins on it.” Bittersohn was holding up an unfinished canvas and trying to rub paint off his London-tailored trousers with a beautiful Irish linen handkerchief. “What do you think of this?”

Bill, in his lavender shorts and his tiny bare feet, picked his way around, over, and through a welter of stools, taborets, and umbrella stands to get a close look at the canvas. He scratched his jetty curls. “Looks to me like about two thirds of a Murillo.

“That’s what it is, pal. There’s one just like it at the Madam’s. About the only original left, or was as of Sunday as far as I could see. And apparently that one’s also slated for removal.”

“Yeah-h, but a Murillo? Who’s going to buy a hot Murillo?”

“There’s always a mark somewhere. Would you say this might be Lydia’s work?”

Bill squinted professionally at the canvas. “Lydia’s good, you know. Those icons of hers—you’ve rumbled the icons, of course?”

“Sarah did.”

“How about that? Like I was saying, those icons are real works of art. I mean, anybody buys one of those is getting something for his money even if it doesn’t happen to be what he thinks he’s getting. But this—” Bill snatched a tasseled silk shade off a dinky boudoir lamp and held the light closer to the painting. “Maxie, can you dig this? I mean, like this isn’t a bad job.” His free hand made darting motions at the canvas. “Slick. But Lydia’s an icon painter. You dig, Maxie?”

Even Sarah dug. Those rigidly stylized miniatures with their meticulous detailing were too different from this voluptuous, swirling candy-box prettiness. One would think some of the formality of the Byzantine technique must be reflected in whatever Lydia did.

“You thought the copies at the Wilkins were all done by the same hand,” Bittersohn prompted. “Would this be the one?”

Bill wiggled and squirmed and drew more pictures in the air, to the peril of his slippery satin undergarment. “That’s what bugs me. See, Maxie, if Lydia painted all those copies, that means she’s kept her mouth shut about them for over thirty years. I mean, can you see Lydia keeping a secret for over thirty minutes? She makes this big cloak-and-dagger deal about Jack Hayre, but how long did it take Sarah to find out?”

“I knew she was faking icons roughly half an hour after I’d met her for the first time and I knew Mr. Hayre was fencing them, or whatever you call it, as soon as I saw that one in his window yesterday,” Sarah replied. “I didn’t pry, either. Lydia showed me. She was proud of what she was doing. Well she might be, as far as workmanship is concerned. As to the icon,” there it was. I couldn’t miss, could I?”

“No-o-o.”

“So this isn’t a painting, it’s a frame,” said Bittersohn.

“Not bad, Maxie. That could be one answer.”

“Care to give me another?”

Bill shrugged and cast a longing glance toward the frowzy bed.

“All right, Bill, go get some rest. We’ll let ourselves out quietly when we’re through.”

Less than a minute later the baby brother of Pericles Jonubopoulos was fast asleep. Sarah and Max continued to rummage.

“Max, look!” Sarah hissed.

Nestled in Lydia’s top dresser drawer amid a tangle of wrinkled scarves, ruined panty hose, and odd gloves lay a small plastic phial with a warning label on the side. It had been full of a white powder. Now a quarter inch of the powder was gone.