Murder is an Art

by Bill Crider

  After staring at it for a second or two, he said, “What can you tell me about this, Ms. Willis?”

  Amy patted her hair, shifted in the chair, and finally said, “I don’t know what to tell you about it.”

  Dean Naylor smiled. “Why don’t you just tell us how it slipped by you?”

  Amy looked at Sally, who wished that she could help. But there was nothing she could do. Amy was on her own.

  “It was all in order,” Amy said, sounding as if she didn’t believe it for a minute. Her right leg was crossed over her left, and her left foot was beating out a jazzy rhythm on the carpet.

  “But five thousand dollars?” Naylor said.

  Amy tried to smooth her hair. It didn’t work. Sally could sympathize.

  “I’ve already explained all this to Dr. Good,” Amy said. “And then I talked to Mr. Wistrom.”

  Wistrom was the school’s business manager. Sally wondered why he wasn’t there.

  “Mr. Wistrom says that he didn’t know a thing about this,” Fieldstone said.

  Ah-ha, Sally thought. Keep your distance. Maintain plausible deniability. Not a bad strategy. Well, since Wistrom was out of it, she might as well give everyone a little surprise.

  “The police know,” Sally announced, and Amy nearly jumped out of her chair. She turned startlingly pale, and Sally thought she might faint. Even Naylor looked stunned.

  Fieldstone was the only one of them able to speak. “Who told them?” he asked, although it was clear from the way he looked at Sally that he already had a good idea of the answer.

  So Sally confessed.

  “I did, when they were questioning me about Tammi Thompson’s murder. I thought there might be some connection, so it seemed like the right thing to do.”

  At the mention of Tammi Thompson’s death, Amy got even paler, though Sally wouldn’t have thought it was possible.

  Naylor was agitated. He obviously didn’t agree that telling the police was the right thing to do.

  “What did they think about it?” he asked.

  “They seemed to think it explains a lot. To them, it means that Ralph Thompson was blackmailing Val.”

  “Why would he kill someone who was providing him with money?” Naylor asked.

  Sally smiled. “That’s a very good question.”

  “But I’m sure Weems had an answer,” Fieldstone said.

  “Oh, yes. They think that Tammi didn’t know about the blackmail when she complained to the school about Val.”

  “Ah,” Naylor said. “So her husband killed her because she spoiled his little scheme.”

  “That’s close enough,” Sally said. “But why did he kill Val?”

  “Because Val had offended his sense of honor,” Fieldstone replied.

  Sally felt as if she had fallen down a rabbit hole or wandered through the looking glass. Blackmailers and killers were honorable? Well, it wasn’t that far removed from what Weems thought, but it still didn’t make sense to her.

  Amy, however, was nodding vigorously as if it were a brilliant deduction. Sally wondered if everyone needed a short course in logic.

  “Back to this purchase order,” Fieldstone said, rattling the paper to get everyone’s attention. “Ms. Willis tells me that these signatures are forged.”

  “I can only speak for mine,” Sally said, though she was certain the others were forged as well.

  “That’s not my signature,” Naylor said, not even glancing at the paper.

  “Nor mine,” Fieldstone said. “Yet Ms. Willis didn’t notice that. She simply had a check cut for Ralph Thompson’s shop.”

  “I didn’t cut the check,” Amy said, sliding from one side of the chair to the other.

  “But you sent the order through.”

  Amy sniffled loudly and brushed at her eyes with the back of her hand. Naylor pulled a sparkling white handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her.

  Leave it to Naylor to carry a handkerchief, Sally thought.

  Amy took the handkerchief and dried her eyes. Then she started twisting it in her hands. Sally watched as it got smaller and smaller.

  “Yes,” Amy said at last. “I sent it through. That’s my job. All the required signatures were there, and I thought that was good enough.”

  “How did Hurley ever think he could get away with it?” Fieldstone asked no one in particular. “He must have known we’d find out what he’d done.”

  Amy said, “That’s what I wanted … want to know. After I’d thought about it for a while, I knew there had to be a mistake. I just waited too long to figure that out.”

  She started crying again, snuffling into the remains of Naylor’s handkerchief.

  “I think this has gone on long enough,” Sally said. “Amy made a mistake, and she realizes it. There’s no need to humiliate her.”

  “We weren’t trying to humiliate her,” Naylor said, as if surprised that anyone would suggest such a thing. “We were just trying to find out what happened.”

  “Well,” Sally said, “now you know.”

  “Yes,” Fieldstone said. “A mistake. A five-thousand-dollar mistake. This isn’t going to look good to the Board.”

  “Please,” Amy said, her voice cracking. “Please, don’t fire me. I’m a single mother. If I lose my job, I don’t know what I’ll do!”

  Sally knew enough about Amy’s situation to know that Amy’s former husband would have taken custody of their six-year-old son in a heartbeat, but she didn’t say anything. There was no need to give Fieldstone more of an advantage than he already had.

  Instead, she said, “Val’s the one who defrauded the college, and there’s nothing you can do to him. Besides, I’m sure the school has insurance.”

  “That’s true,” Naylor said. “But we can’t just overlook something like this.”

  “You’ve overlooked other things,” Sally said, taking a chance. “Right now, you’re overlooking the fact that there’s a painting missing from the art gallery.”

  Naylor and Fieldstone exchanged glances. Amy was crying too hard to notice, but Sally did. Naylor put his hand on Amy’s shoulder.

  “There’s no need to cry,” he said. “This will all be taken care of. We’ll have to put a note in your personnel file, of course, and if anything like it happens again, then termination will certainly be an option. But for now, why don’t you just take the rest of the day off and come in tomorrow for a fresh start?”

  Amy had wadded the handkerchief into a knot about the size of a golf ball. She started to unfold it and smooth it on her thighs. Her shoulders still shook with sobbing.

  “Are you s-sure that would be a-all right?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Naylor said. “And keep the handkerchief. You might need it again.”

  Amy stood up, passing the damp handkerchief from hand to hand. Then she wiped her face with it and said, “Thank you. I’ll be more careful in the future.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Fieldstone said, standing.

  Naylor stood, too, and patted Amy on the shoulder as he guided her to the door. When she was gone, both men sat back down and looked at Sally.

  “We won’t be discussing the painting anymore,” Fieldstone said. “Chief Desmond is on the job, and anything we say about it might jeopardize his investigation. You shouldn’t have brought it up in front of Ms. Willis.”

  Desmond hadn’t sounded to Sally as if he was doing any heavy investigation.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What I don’t understand is how Ms. Willis could have made such a mistake,” Naylor said. “She’s usually the most conscientious person in the Business Office. Nothing gets by her.”

  “I know,” Fieldstone said. He put the P.O. back into the desk drawer. “That’s probably why she’s so upset. It’s the first mistake she’s ever made.”

  “I’m sure she’s made errors before,” Naylor said. “It’s just that she’s been able to deal with them before they came to our attention.”

  “Yes. Well, it
’s too bad she wasn’t able to do that this time. The Board won’t be happy, and I’m sure the newspaper will have a field day.”

  “If anyone there finds out,” Naylor said.

  “Yes,” Fieldstone said. He smiled slightly. He was good at keeping secrets, and Naylor was even better. “There’s that. The reporter who does the articles on our board meetings is pretty nosy, however. She always asks a lot of questions.”

  Both men looked at Sally.

  “I had to tell the police,” she said. “I thought it might have something to do with Tammi Thompson’s death. But I don’t have to tell anyone else.”

  “Good,” Fieldstone said. “Of course, it’s a matter of public record. It might even show up in the police report, though I doubt it. Still, anyone could find out about the purchase order by looking in the right place.”

  “Purchase order?” Naylor said.

  “What purchase order?” Sally said.

  Fieldstone smiled.

  28

  Jack Neville spent most of the day playing Minesweeper. He’d managed to achieve his best time ever at the expert level, but he didn’t feel any elation.

  Seeing Val lying dead on the floor of his office had been bad enough, but there was something even worse about discovering the body of one of the college’s students in the dusty back end of the Thompsons’ craft store. He was still very upset.

  And now Jack was going to have to go to Val’s funeral. He hated funerals. He couldn’t think of a single good thing about them. He didn’t like the music, he didn’t like the platitudes, he didn’t like the flowers, and he didn’t like trying to comfort the mourners because he never knew what to say to them.

  In Val’s case, of course, there wouldn’t be much of a problem with mourners. Val didn’t have many close friends on the faculty, unless you counted the women he’d dated, and there were plenty of those. Jack wasn’t sure any of them would be mourning, however. Val had been a love-’em-and-leave-’em sort of guy.

  And Val didn’t have a family. He’d never married, he had no brothers or sisters, and his parents had died years earlier.

  But, mourners or not, all the other trappings of the funeral would be there, and Jack would have preferred to avoid them. Thank goodness he hadn’t been asked to be one of the pallbearers, as several other faculty members had been.

  Since he didn’t have any official functions to perform, he didn’t even have to go to the funeral, he told himself. But attendance was pretty much expected of the faculty, so he would grit his teeth and go. Besides, he wanted to talk to Sally about a new theory he’d developed. It seemed quite logical to him, and it explained a lot of different things.

  Of course, he’d developed the theory while playing Minesweeper, so it might not hang together. And his earlier theory hadn’t seemed very inspired when he’d told Sally about it. That’s why he needed to discuss the new one with her, to put it to the test.

  Or that’s what he tried to tell himself. He knew there was more to it than that. In fact, he’d probably developed the theory just so he’d have an excuse to talk to her. If he’d really thought it was the solution to the murders, he would have told the police.

  Wouldn’t he? He wasn’t sure.

  He looked at his watch. It was almost time to leave for the funeral.

  But he could probably work in one more game of Minesweeper.

  * * *

  Jack talked himself out of the game, and feeling virtuous and proud of himself, he got to the church a little early. It wasn’t crowded when he arrived, but he sat in the back row anyway. Val was in the open casket down at the front, and Jack didn’t want to sit any closer than he had to.

  A. B. D. Johnson was already seated, silently fulminating a couple of rows in front of Jack. A. B. D.’s head nodded slowly from side to side as if A. B. D. were keeping time with the anguished sound of the organ.

  Not far from A. B. D. sat Coy Webster in a suit that looked as if it had been packed away in a trunk for about seven years and brought out fifteen minutes before Coy put it on. Coy looked a little as if he’d been kept in a trunk himself.

  Just in front of them sat Amy Willis, whose wild hair exploded from her head in all directions. Jack caught a glimpse of a yellow pencil sticking in it. Amy wasn’t nodding her head so much as twitching her whole body. As Jack watched, he became certain that the trembling wasn’t voluntary. Amy was always nervous, but maybe funerals made her even more jittery than usual.

  Then Jack spotted Sally Good sitting about five rows in front of him. She was alone, and Jack wondered if she would mind having company—specifically, his company—even if it wasn’t exactly comforting her that he had in mind.

  Telling himself that it was really shameful to have such thoughts at a funeral, he got up and moved.

  Sally smiled at him when he sat down, and he immediately felt better. Maybe the funeral wouldn’t be so bad after all, even though the organ was mourning its tortuous way through a particularly lugubrious hymn.

  “Was Val a regular churchgoer?” Jack whispered, just loud enough to be heard above the sound of the organ.

  “I don’t know,” Sally whispered back. “But somehow I doubt it.”

  Jack doubted it, too.

  “I’d like to talk to you after the service,” Jack said. “I have an idea about Tammi and Val.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s kind of complicated. Are you going to the cemetery?”

  “No.”

  “We can talk in the hall, then.”

  Sally nodded. “All right.”

  The church began to fill up, and Jack didn’t say any more. President Fieldstone came in and sat near the front. Dean Naylor was with him. They both looked as solemn as Puritan divines at a witchcraft trial.

  Vera Vaughn walked down the aisle between Ellen Baldree and Jorge Rodriguez. Vera was dry-eyed, and Jack thought that some women certainly did look good in black, even if it wasn’t black leather. Ellen seemed vaguely unhappy, but she wasn’t openly grieving, though Jack knew that she’d dated Val for a while.

  Jorge looked stoic, which Jack didn’t find surprising. After all, Jorge was by all accounts no stranger to violent death. And he was being quite attentive to Vera, which Jack found interesting.

  Then the pallbearers came in, and the service began. It wasn’t as bad as Jack had feared. The minister obviously hadn’t known Val well, if at all, and no one from the college had volunteered to give a eulogy. As a result, the minister didn’t seem to think that a lengthy sermon was necessary. So the service was as short and unemotional as it was possible for a funeral to be. Even the hymns weren’t too dismal.

  When the service was over and people were filing out behind the casket, there were a few more tears than there had been earlier. People hadn’t been entirely unaffected by Val’s untimely passing. Ellen Baldree, in particular, was visibly upset.

  Jack couldn’t figure out why, since there hadn’t been anything said or done to bring out the tears. Maybe he was being too cynical. Maybe she had genuinely cared for Val, and the fact of his loss was just now sinking in.

  As soon as she reached the narthex, Ellen pushed through the crowd and headed for the restroom, followed closely by Vera Vaughn. Jorge stood back, staring after them, looking as perplexed as Jack felt.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” Sally said, leaving Jack to follow Ellen and Vera.

  “What happened?” Jack asked Jorge.

  Jorge shrugged. “I don’t know. She seemed fine until the very end of the service. Then she just broke down. Maybe it was the prayer.”

  Jack thought about it. He couldn’t recall anything in the prayer that was particularly upsetting.

  “Or maybe it was singing ‘Amazing Grace,’” Jorge said. “That one always gets to me.”

  It always got to Jack, too, but not in the way something had gotten to Ellen. He was tempted to boldly go where no man had gone before, into the women’s restroom, just to see what he could find out. But he decided that
it would be better to trust Sally for that.

  He hoped she wouldn’t be long.

  29

  Sally let the restroom door hiss shut behind her. Vera Vaughn was standing beside Ellen, who was at the sink, splashing cold water on her face.

  “Hello, Vera,” Sally said.

  Vera nodded. Her hair didn’t move, though it didn’t appear to have any kind of spray, gel, or mousse on it at all. It was just naturally lustrous, and Sally supposed that Vera made it stay in place by sheer willpower. Vera would be an easy person to hate.

  “Is Ellen all right?” Sally asked.

  Vera nodded again. This time, Sally thought she saw a single hair move. Not much, admittedly, but nevertheless it did move. It made Sally feel a little better about Vera. Not much, but a little.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Vera said. “Ellen is fine.”

  Ellen didn’t seem fine to Sally. She was looking in the mirror and crying. Tears and water dripped down her face, and her makeup was ruined.

  “I’ll get some paper towels,” Sally said.

  She went to the dispenser and pulled out about two feet of toweling. She was sure the church’s tithers could afford it. She handed it to Ellen, who reached back and took it without looking away from the mirror.

  When she had a firm grip on the toweling, Ellen wadded it up in her hands and started to rub her face, while Vera looked on in vague amusement.

  “I didn’t want to make a scene,” Ellen snuffled. “I tried not to break down.”

  “Women are conditioned to weep at funerals,” Vera said. “It’s cultural, and it’s a hard thing to overcome. You’ll notice that men never cry.”

  Sally didn’t think this was strictly true, and she noticed that Vera didn’t seem to be having any difficulty restraining her own tears.

  “It’s just that it’s so sad,” Ellen said.

  She looked down at the toweling in her hand. It was wet and covered with makeup, and after a little further wadding, she threw it in the trash can.