A Palette for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “Hello again, Mrs. Fletcher,” Cramer said.

  I stood. “I was just leaving, Chief.”

  Bob Forbes stood, too. “Any word on who did this, Chief Cramer?”

  “Not yet, but we’ll get to the bottom of it, Mr. Forbes. I’m afraid you’re going to have to identify your daughter’s body. I know, I know. It’s a brutal thing to go through. But it must be done.”

  “I’ll go,” Bob Forbes said. “You stay here, Mary, with Mrs. Fletcher. If you don’t mind staying a little longer,” he said to me.

  “Of course I’ll stay,” I said.

  But Mary Forbes got up, took her husband’s hand, and looked up into his eyes. “We’ll go together,” she said.

  Deputy Gloria Watson and I were alone in the room.

  “Have the police been to Ms. Forbes’s house yet?” I asked.

  “Yes. We sent a squad immediately. They’ve secured it. Detectives are there now going through her things.”

  “Where did she live?”

  Watson opened a file folder and read Jo Ann’s address.

  “When will her parents be allowed to go there to gather her belongings?”

  “Up to the chief. Whenever the detectives are finished.”

  “I’d like to go there.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes. Do you think Chief Cramer would allow me?”

  “It’s up to him.”

  “And Mr. and Mrs. Forbes.”

  “Ask them.”

  The return of Bob and Mary Forbes and Chief Cramer was wrenching. Mary sobbed, and her husband, tears running down his cheeks, tried to comfort her. I liked these folks. They were decent and caring, and strong. Good people, like many of my friends and neighbors back in Cabot Cove.

  Eventually, without anyone saying anything, they regained their composure and asked if they could go to their daughter’s house. Chief Cramer went to his office, returned minutes later to say, “The detectives have finished up there. We can go now if you’d like.”

  I was poised to ask whether I could accompany them, but Bob Forbes saved me the question. “Would you like to come with us, Mrs. Fletcher? Jessica?”

  “Yes.”

  Chief Cramer and his deputy, Gloria Watson, transported Bob and Mary Forbes in his marked car. Fred Mayer and I followed by Mayer’s taxi.

  Jo Ann Forbes had lived in a pretty pale green house a few blocks from one of the bays. It was a small home, but obviously well kept. The postage-stamp patch of lawn in front was manicured, a virtual putting green. The paint was fresh, as were flowers in window boxes and in hanging baskets.

  We stood just inside yellow crime-scene tape that had been strung. A uniformed officer stood at the front door.

  “Had you been here before?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Jo Ann’s father answered. “Right after Jo Ann took the job at Dan’s Papers and moved to the Hamptons. We helped her get settled.”

  “And we visited two weeks ago,” said Mary Forbes. “We had such fun.”

  “Let’s go in,” Cramer said, sensing that to stand there talking about the deceased girl would only generate more sorrow and tears.

  The inside was as pristine as the outside. The wood floors glistened with polish. Starched white curtains fluttered in a breeze through open windows. The furniture was old, and comfortable. Everything was as neat as a pin. I wasn’t surprised.

  “My detectives didn’t find anything they felt would help shed light on what happened,” Chief Cramer said. “Feel free to go where you want.”

  Jo Ann’s parents stood in the middle of the living room, as though unsure what to do and which direction to take. I felt it best to leave them alone, and slowly wandered into the kitchen. Clean dishes were in a dish drainer on the sink. A large bird feeder just outside a window was doing a landslide business.

  I peeked into a small room that served as a pantry. A door from it led to the backyard. Mr. and Mrs. Forbes joined me.

  “Everything’s so neat,” I said.

  “That’s the way she was,” said her father.

  I left them and went up a narrow set of stairs to the second floor, where two bedrooms were located. One had been turned into an office. I stepped into it and perused what was on her desk. Nothing caught my eye. I sat and opened the right-hand drawer, which had been configured to accommodate hanging files. They were segregated into three sections, each using different-color folders. Those in front were red; the middle section was yellow; the section to the back of the drawer contained green folders. Jo Ann Forbes, among other attributes, was a highly organized young lady.

  I started through the front red files. They seemed to be reserved for personal matters: papers regarding her 1994 Mazda automobile, health insurance, investments, taxes for the previous year, credit-card receipts, personal receipts.

  The yellow files in the middle held folders marked “Research.” Jo Ann obviously had clipped items from newspapers and magazines that she felt might be grist for future stories under her byline. There were also numerous scraps of paper on which she’d noted her reactions to the clippings, as well as independent story ideas that had occurred to her.

  The rear section of the drawer, with its green files, was the repository for Jo Ann’s files on stories she was working on for Dan’s Papers, along with other files containing material relating to potential stories based upon information she’d gathered in the Hamptons. One hanging file folder tab immediately caught my eye: LEOPOLD, JOSHUA.

  I was in the process of pulling out that folder when Chief Cramer and Deputy Watson entered the room. “Find anything interesting, Mrs. Fletcher?” Cramer asked.

  “Not really. She was so well organized. I was just perusing some of her files.”

  “And?”

  “She kept this file on the artist, Joshua Leopold. I was just about to see what was in it.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Forbes came up the stairs and joined us. Seeing them reminded me that I was overstepping my bounds, poking through their deceased daughters’s papers and files. I asked them directly if they minded my doing that.

  “Not at all,” Bob Forbes replied. “Jo Ann told us during our last phone conversation that she had tremendous faith in you. So do we. Please feel free to look at anything you’d like.”

  “Thank you,” I said. My admiration for them grew with each passing minute.

  Deputy Watson went with the Forbeses to Jo Ann’s bedroom. Chief Cramer pulled up a chair next to me as I opened the folder marked LEOPOLD, JOSHUA, and began reviewing what was in it, handing each sheet to the chief as I finished reading it. We’d gone through a half-dozen sheets of paper when I started reading the seventh, and let out a small, involuntary grunt.

  Cramer said, “Find something, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  I finished reading, then handed it to him. “I find this fascinating,” I said.

  He frowned as he read. When he was through, he handed the paper back, saying, “I see what you mean.”

  The paper, page one of three, contained Jo Ann’s notes on what she’d uncovered about Leopold’s career, his output—which, according to her, was prodigious—and some observations on his sudden death a year ago, allegedly because of a heart attack.

  There were two additional pages, extensions of the first page, which I read and gave to Chief Cramer.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So, Mrs. Fletcher, give me your read on these pages.”

  “I want to read them again. I wonder—” I looked to a comer where there was a small photocopy machine. “Mind if I make a copy?” I asked.

  “Not if you make two.”

  I copied the three pages and replaced the originals in the file. “I have a suggestion,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That we both read these pages, then get together for some joint analysis of them.”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  “Just as long as we make sense out of these pieces of paper.”

  “
Need a ride back to Scott’s Inn?”

  “No, thanks. I have Mr. Mayer for the day. For the week, as a matter of fact.”

  Cramer smiled. “A nice old fella,” he said. “But keep him away from restaurants and bars. He’s been known to down a few.”

  “And drive a cab?”

  “Seldom at the same time. When do you want to get together again?”

  “Tomorrow? In the morning? Say ten?”

  “I’ll come to you this time, Mrs. Fletcher. Scott’s Inn at ten.”

  Chpter Eighteen

  “Hungry now?” Fred Mayer asked after I’d climbed into the backseat of his taxi.

  “Yes, but it’s too late for lunch. I’ll be having dinner soon.” It suddenly dawned on me that he hadn’t had lunch, either, and I asked if he’d like to stop for something.

  “Snuck a sandwich while you were inside,” he replied.

  “Good. Mr. Mayer, do you remember back a year ago when a young artist named Joshua Leopold died?”

  “Sure do. I drove lots of folks to his studio, where he died.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Still an artist’s studio, I think. Different artists, though.”

  “Can we go there?”

  “On our way.”

  The studio in which artist Joshua Leopold had worked, and died, was typical of so many other small buildings in the Hamptons. It was close to the town dock, where I’d ended up after my garage sale expedition. Its white clapboard was stained with black and green streaks; scraggly grass grew in clumps along a front walk of cracked and chipped flagstone.

  There was a small sign next to the door, too small to read from the cab. “Back in a minute,” I said, exiting and going to the door.

  The crude sign read W-T STUDIOS. I’d just read it when the door opened, and a young woman faced me. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  She startled me: “No. Ah, yes. This is an artist’s studio, isn’t it?”

  She smiled sweetly. “Yes it is. Want to come in?”

  “Thank you.” I looked back at Fred Mayer, who appeared to be dozing behind the wheel.

  The building consisted of one large room, which had been partitioned into four areas. The two spaces to the rear had easels. Paintings in various stages of completion were tacked up everywhere.

  The space to my left was obviously occupied by a sculptor. To the right, a potter’s tools were evident.

  “Are things here for sale?” I asked. “Or is it just a working space?”

  “Both. Look around. I was just putting up a fresh pot of coffee. Like some?”

  “That would be lovely, thank you.”

  She attended to a coffeemaker in what I judged was her space—she was the sculptor—and I browsed, eventually ending up in one of the artist’s spaces at the back of the room. I looked at the paintings pinned up to the wall, crude watercolor renderings of naked men and women.

  I moved to the other space. Remarkable, I thought. These recently rendered works looked like they’d come from the brush and palette of Joshua Leopold. And one, of a nude young woman, looked strangely like Miki Dorsey. Not the face. Everything in the painting was too obscured by energetic brush strokes and slashes of vivid color from a palette knife. But it was the pose that captured my attention. Within the abstraction was a young woman seated on a stool, her head hung down low between her knees. It could have been Miki. What reality the artist had injected into the work showed a body structured very much like I remembered her body to be.

  “How do you take it?”

  I turned. The young woman was standing just behind me. “Your coffee,” she said.

  “Black will be fine.”

  She handed me a steaming mug.

  “Who are these artists?” I asked, taking a sip.

  “Chris and Carlton. They’re not here, but should be back in about an hour.”

  “Chris Turi and Carlton Wells?”

  She laughed. “I see you know your art, and artists. Have you met them before?”

  “No. Maybe in passing. But I certainly know their work.”

  “That’s always nice for an artist to hear. Well, I have to get back to something I’m working on. Make yourself at home.” She extended her hand. “I’m Debbie Lane.”

  I shook her hand and mumbled my name.

  “Fletcher, you say?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Give a yell if you need anything.”

  Carlton Wells, my instructor, and Chris Turi sharing a studio. Well, well.

  Both had had an intimate relationship with Miki Dorsey.

  Everyone I talked to, it seemed, considered Wells to be a swine of sorts.

  Chris Turi had showed no remorse over Miki’s death.

  What was going on here?

  I lingered in Chris Turi’s space. As I did, the similarity of his painting style to Joshua Leopold became more striking. I was about to leave when my eye went to a small table on which jars of paint stood. Among them was an open package of cigarettes. I glanced back to see if Debbie Lane was looking. She wasn’t; she was focused on a small piece of marble being transformed into some sort of figure.

  I picked up the pack, pulled out a cigarette, and examined it closely. I wasn’t sure, but it appeared to me to be similar to the butt I’d picked up just outside where Miki Dorsey died, and from beside the tree in the garden behind Scott’s Inn. I put the cigarette in the pocket of the light teal windbreaker I wore and emerged from Turi’s space.

  “Ms. Lane, is this the studio where Joshua Leopold died?” I asked, coming abreast of her working space.

  She looked up. “Yes, it is.”

  “What a tragedy that was,” I said. “So talented, and so young.”

  “Sure was. I didn’t know him. I just started renting this space a month ago from Chris and Carlton. It’s my first season out here in the Hamptons.”

  “Oh? Where are you from?”

  “The city. Do you live here year-round?”

  “No. Just visiting. Do Chris Turi and Carlton Wells ever talk about Josh Leopold?”

  “No. I don’t think so. There’s a gallery in town that features his work.”

  “I know. I’ve been there. It’s owned by a gentleman named St. James. Maurice St. James.”

  “I don’t know who owns it. Do you want to leave a number where Chris or Carlton can reach you?”

  “That’s not necessary. Before I leave, I was hoping to catch up with some old friends. Hans Muller?”

  She laughed. “The big German guy with a terminal smoking habit? He comes in now and then. Was here just an hour or so ago. Talked to Chris about something.”

  “Sorry I missed him. Blaine Dorsey?”

  “Who?”

  “Nothing. Well, thanks so much for your time. You’ve been very gracious. I like your sculpture.”

  “Thanks. It’s all for sale.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  I opened the taxi’s door, waking Mayer. He shook himself and smiled. “Dozed off,” he said.

  “Good. A nap is always nice. Do you think we could park somewhere where we wouldn’t be seen by anyone in this building, but from where we could keep an eye on it?”

  His face mirrored his puzzlement.

  I said loudly, “Nothing nefarious, Mr. Mayer. I’m just hoping to catch a glimpse of someone who I’d rather not see me.”

  “I guess I could arrange that. Let’s see.” He surveyed the area. “How about over there? By the dock.”

  “Looks good to me.”

  We parked where he’d indicated. A few minutes later, I noticed his head drooping. “Go ahead, Mr. Mayer, fall asleep. I’ll let you know when it’s time to leave.”

  That time came a half hour later when Chris Turi pulled up in front of the studio, got out, and entered, followed by none other than Blaine Dorsey, Miki Dorsey’s father. The car was familiar to me: Anne Harris’s car, the one Turi had used to drive me to his house, and in which Anne had driven me back to Scott’s Inn.

  “
Wake up, Mr. Mayer.”

  I debated returning to the studio to see what another visit might result in. No, I decided. Another time. Besides, it was getting late, and I’d promised to be in touch with Vaughan Buckley regarding dinner that night.

  But as we approached the inn, I asked Mayer to stop in front of Maurice St. James’s gallery. It was a whim, pure and simple, but I had to do it.

  I went inside, the tiny bell announcing my arrival. St. James was behind the counter. He looked up, smiled, and approached. “Ah, Mrs. Fletcher. A pleasant surprise, twice in one day.”

  “Twice?”

  “We’re having dinner together this evening. With the Buckleys.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that,” I said. “But now that I am, I look doubly forward to it.”

  “May I do something for you?”

  “Perhaps. But only if you can keep a confidence.”

  He leered conspiratorially. “My middle name is discretion, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “That’s good to hear. I might be interested in doing what I said the first time I was here.”

  “Which was?”

  “To buy a large number of Joshua Leopold paintings from you.”

  His eyes widened, and he rubbed his hands together. “An excellent decision, Mrs. Fletcher. Leopold’s worth rises with each day. Any in particular?”

  “No. I’ll need time to carefully examine the lot, and I don’t have that time now. Perhaps tomorrow.”

  “Of course. I assure you I will offer you a very attractive price for them.”

  “I would certainly expect that. In the meantime, not a word to anyone. Certainly, not to the Buckleys at dinner.”

  He pressed his index finger to his lips. “They are sealed, Mrs. Fletcher. Rest assured.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I knew one thing for certain. If Vaughan and Olga kept taking me to fancy restaurants for dinner, I was in for a month of serious dieting and exercise when I got home.

  This night found us in a place called Nick and Toni‘s, a comfortable spot with an eclectic clientele. There were senior citizens, young families and babies, and a smattering of recognizable celebrities, including the singer Billy Joel (I didn’t recognize him because I didn’t know what he looked like, but Olga did the honors), New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato and a stunning woman I’d seen him with on C-SPAN, and who looked as though she’d be at home in Washington’s power corridors, and later, the wonderful actress and author Shirley MacLaine, to whom I was introduced at the end of the evening.