The Palace Guard

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “That’s it in a nutshell, Mrs. Kelling. Of course I don’t keep the originals here all the time I’m working on them. What I do is take pictures and make sketches and careful notes, then I work mostly from those. Since I have my own keys to the palazzo, I can always run over during off-hours and make a comparison if I have to. When the time comes to make a substitution, sometimes I do that, sometimes he does. If it’s a really important one like the Titian, we do it together.”

  “And that’s all there is to it?”

  “Well, not quite.” Dolores actually simpered. “After the job is done, we meet back here and have a little private celebration. I fix us a nice snack, Mr. Palmerston brings a bottle of champagne, and we drink a toast to the success of our enterprise. Then he delivers a brief address about how future generations will be grateful to us for preserving their priceless heritage from the ravages of time and so on. Of course there’s nobody but me to hear the speeches, more’s the pity. I’ve suggested making tape recordings to put in the vault with the paintings, but he won’t hear of it. True greatness and true modesty go hand in hand, as I’ve often told him.”

  That was too much for Brooks Kelling. “True horsefeathers,” he snorted. “That old goat’s been pulling the wool over your eyes for thirty-two years and you’re too damned infatuated to admit it.”

  “I’ll thank you to explain that remark, Brooks Kelling,” said Mrs. Tawne dangerously.

  Bittersohn intervened. “Perhaps this will explain better than Kelling can.” He showed her Bill Jones’s list, now tattered from much handling. “If you’ll check over this listing, Mrs. Tawne, you’ll see where, when, and for approximately how much money each one of the originals you copied was sold.”

  Dolores stared at the paper. “But—but this is crazy! They’re all in the vault.”

  “The vault you’ve never seen and don’t know where to look for? I’m afraid that vault exists only in C. Edwald Palmerston’s imagination, Mrs. Tawne.”

  “In other words, Dolores,” said Brooks cruelly, “you’ve been led up the garden path.”

  “I don’t believe you. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t! Mr. Palmerston is a fine, noble, philanthropic gentleman.”

  “Like hell he is.”

  “And besides”—the woman’s anguished bewilderment was pathetic—“why would he do such a dreadful thing to me?”

  “For money,” Bittersohn told her.

  “Mr. Palmerston doesn’t need money. He’s a rich man. He gives lavishly to worthy causes.”

  “He certainly does, and it’s never cost him a cent. One might add that Mr. Palmerston has other expensive philanthropies.”

  “Such as?”

  “Women, mostly.”

  “Women? Oh, no. Not Mr. Palmerston.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t know the man as well as you think you do, Mrs. Tawne. He’s kept you slaving for thirty-two years in order to support a series of expensive lady friends.”

  “Who for instance?” Dolores had fight in her still. “If you mean that Ouspenska trollop—”

  “She was one, yes. When she was young and beautiful, of course. That’s how he likes them. Doesn’t he, Mrs. Kelling?”

  Bittersohn gave Sarah a surreptitious poke. With downcast eyes, she followed his cue.

  “You must remember, Mrs. Tawne, that I’d led a very sheltered life. I simply didn’t understand what he was leading up to until—well, how could any silly young girl have resisted? Orchids every day, lavish dinners, jewels, sables, weekend flights to Monte Carlo—”

  “You’re lying,” said Dolores faintly. “This is all some insane joke.”

  “Mrs. Tawne, does a betrayed woman lie about such things?” Sarah covered her face with her hands.

  “How—how many others—?”

  Sarah shrugged wearily. “I couldn’t say. I doubt whether he could, either.”

  “And all of them—orchids, jewels, sables, trips to Monte Carlo?”

  “Lately I believe it’s been Tahiti.”

  “Tahiti? And me painting my guts out for a bottle of cheap champagne once or twice a year?”

  Dolores Tawne turned brick red, then chalk white. She sank back in her chair and stared blindly at the paint-stained floor of her studio. “You’re right, Brooks,” she said. “I’m nothing but a damned old fool.”

  Chapter 25

  DOLORES WOULD HAVE CONFRONTED Palmerston in curlers and kimono if Brooks hadn’t told her to act her age and get some clothes on. She was still fuming like a volcano about to erupt when she led the charge up C. Edwald’s elegant brownstone steps.

  A pretty young maid in a sexy negligee answered the doorbell, and that capped the climax. Aflame with righteous ire, Mrs. Tawne steamed to the attack with Max and Brooks at her heels and the maid trailing behind wringing her hands and bleating questions to which none of them paid any attention.

  Sarah missed the first part of the confrontation because Bittersohn had commanded her to find a telephone and get hold of Fitzpatrick and Fitzgibbon. When she reached the scene of battle, easily located by the stridencies in which Dolores Tawne’s voice led all the rest, Palmerston was sitting up in bed, prudishly clutching an eiderdown to his chin with one hand and groping for his teeth and eyeglasses with the other, gummily and ineffectually trying to defend himself.

  “But, Mrs. Tawne,” he mumbled, “my motives were wholly humanitarian.”

  “Humanitarian my backside!” shrieked his enraged dupe. “Buying sable coats for that little tramp right there, I don’t doubt.”

  The maid burst into loud sobs. “It’s only m-muskrat.”

  “There, see!”

  “Now, Dolores—”

  “Don’t you Dolores me! I’ve never been one of your fancy pieces and you can’t try to make out I have. Just because I don’t paint my face and wear dresses cut down to my b-belly-button—” She, too, started to cry.

  Bittersohn put her gently aside. “You might as well come clean, Palmerston. The police are on their way here. Lydia Ouspenska has survived the dose of arsenic and Nembutal you put in her stomach capsule. She’s awake and talking. Mrs. Tawne’s going to spill all she knows about your faked painting racket, and we already have Bill Jones’s testimony about how and when and where you got rid of the paintings, so I daresay one or two of the fences will be willing to finger you in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Perhaps Mrs. Tawne can also tell us about an unfinished Murillo that turned up in Ouspenska’s studio all of a sudden last night.”

  “Is that where it went?” gasped Dolores. “He sent Nick Fieringer to get it last night. I couldn’t imagine why. I warned Nick to be awfully careful about the wet paint. I hope he was.”

  “He was,” said Bittersohn. “Too bad you were so conscientious, Mrs. Tawne, or we might have got along a little faster. As to why the painting was moved, I expect it was an attempt to make the countess look like the person who’d been painting the fakes. She was supposed to die, you see. Palmerston thought, no doubt, that she was already dead by then and wouldn’t be able to correct the misapprehension. You told him her Russian roulette joke, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I told him. And he’d have robbed me of the credit for thirty-two years’ work to save his own rotten skin?”

  “Why not? He’d robbed just about everything else there was to rob by then, and things were getting a bit warm around the Madam’s. He had to get out from under somehow, didn’t he? Otherwise the world might lose one of its real philanthropists. By the way, Palmerston, Nick Fieringer will be talking, too. He’s already explained how you got him to hire Dr. Aguinaldo Ruy Lopez, whom your man Kelling here had the pleasure of seeing safely to jail about an hour ago. Fieringer can tell the police about that Murillo and the phial of arsenic you got him to plant in Ouspenska’s bureau drawer.”

  Palmerston’s lips twitched and Bittersohn noticed. “I see. You planted the arsenic yourself that night you took Lydia home from Mrs. Kelling’s. That’s a minor detail. We know you gave Jimmy Agnew money Sat
urday night so that he’d get drunk and be absent from work on Sunday and you’d have an easier chance to hide in that sedan chair on the balcony without being noticed. You must have been rather upset with your faithful friend and confidante Mrs. Tawne for being able to produce a substitute guard at such short notice, but you went ahead and you were lucky. You’d arranged with Brown to get Witherspoon on the balcony somehow so that you could nip out and shove him over the railing. You anticipated a hue and cry, and you ordered Brown to fake an assault and attempted robbery in the chapel so that attention would be drawn away from the Grand Salon and you could make a getaway. The next day you killed Brown to shut him up by putting paint remover and a pinch of rat poison in his whiskey bottle.”

  “I deny everything!” shouted Palmerston.

  “And a fat lot of good that’s going to do you,” said Brooks Kelling. “You remembered to wipe your fingerprints off the paint thinner bottle, but you forgot about the rat poison and I found it under my workbench.”

  Palmerston at last managed to get his teeth in, and bared them ferociously at the substitute guard. “Kelling,” he snarled, “you’re fired.”

  Fitzpatrick and Fitzgibbon had now arrived. They took a bit of convincing before they would consent to carry so august a personage as C. Edwald Palmerston off to be booked for grand larceny, murder, attempted murder, and betrayal of the public trust, but Bittersohn convinced them.

  What with one thing and another it was almost dawn by the time Sarah, Max, and Brooks got back to Tulip. Street. Since Brooks had reasonable qualms about disturbing his own landlady at such an hour, Sarah offered him the hospitality of the library couch. They were all three very late getting up. Only Mrs. Sorpende was left at the breakfast table by the time they appeared. She deserved an explanation and she got one.

  “I can’t get over it,” Sarah mused when the outlines had been filled in. “When I think of all the times Palmerston upstaged Great-uncle Frederick with those huge donations to the Home for Delinquent Dowagers and so forth!”

  “Not to mention the sables and orchids he lavished on you,” drawled Brooks. He was basking like a happy tomcat in the worshipful glances of Mrs. Sorpende, who had a penchant for swashbuckling heroes of high romance.

  “I did tell horrible lies, didn’t I? But it seemed the quickest way to make her face the truth, and he really is an awful old letch. Leila Lackridge always said so, though I couldn’t believe it at the time. Poor Dolores, I suppose she was in love with him. The police won’t do anything awful to her, will they?”

  “What’s to do? We can testify that she was duped, and she’s turning state’s evidence, of course. Anyway, she’s sure as hell going to get all the publicity her heart could desire out of the trial,” Max answered.

  “I should think so! This must be one of the biggest art swindles ever hatched. I wonder if the other trustees are going to do anything about trying to get the originals back?”

  “I’ll tell you later. I’ve been asked to attend an emergency meeting at the Madam’s this afternoon.”

  “Oh.” Sarah sounded deflated.

  Bittersohn glanced at her curiously. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, really. It’s just that they must be planning to offer you the job and—well, you know I have no car any more and I was planning to spend quite a lot of time this summer out at Ireson’s Landing. Knowing you have family there I was rather hoping to hitch a ride with you now and then, but if you’re going to be traveling all summer—”

  “Oh, I doubt if I’ll be going anywhere yet awhile. A thing like this will take time to organize, you know. I’m sure we can work something out.”

  He smiled and Sarah turned a becoming shade of rose. They would no doubt be able to work something out.

  “I wonder if they plan to close the museum?” said Mrs. Sorpende.

  “They’d be smarter to keep it open and charge admission to finance the recovery,” Brooks replied. “The fakes will no doubt be a bigger drawing card than the originals, at least until the publicity dies down. It’s strange to think none of this would have happened if Palmerston hadn’t got the wind up about Witherspoon’s noticing his sweetheart had changed. Nobody else was taking poor old Joe seriously.”

  “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,” said Mrs. Sorpende, who read Bartlett’s Quotations a lot.

  “That’s it exactly,” Bittersohn agreed. “Palmerston’s curse was his imagination. Odd, isn’t it? To look at him you’d think he hadn’t a thought in his head beyond the Dow Jones averages, but dreaming up that fantasy about the vault and keeping Mrs. Tawne convinced of its reality all these years took downright genius, of a sort.”

  “Those champagne toasts and the speeches,” sighed Sarah. “I do feel for that woman. To me that was almost the worst thing he did, keeping poor old Dolores’s nose to the grindstone so that he could play the shining philanthropist and at the same time throw away fortunes on a series of women who didn’t give two pins for him. He’s no better than a—” Sarah was still too proper a Bostonian to say precisely what Palmerston was no better than.

  “Anyway, Brooks, now that you’re out of a job you can move in here and help Mrs. Sorpende run the boarding house while I’m out at Ireson’s farming. Mr. Lomax and I are going to plant a huge garden and grow enough provisions to last us all next winter. Mrs. Sorpende, you will quit that silly job in the tearoom and take over for me here, won’t you?”

  “I think the job is about to quit me in any case. The venture has not been a success. Yes, I should be delighted to assist you in any way I can. You know that, dear Mrs. Kelling.”

  “And what would I do?” said Brooks.

  “You’d pay a thumping big rent, for one thing, which I’m sure you can well afford. And you’d do all the odd jobs Alexander used to do: putting new washers in the faucets, touching up the paint, doing something about that leak around the skylight, fixing window blinds so they’ll roll. I hadn’t realized how much tinkering it takes to hold an old house together. Everything’s falling apart and I can’t afford to keep calling in repairmen. We need you, Brooks.”

  “Yes, but how would Theonia feel about having me around? After all, I did help catch Palmerston and”—he shot a piercing glance from under his neat gray eyebrows—“he was mighty gallant to her.”

  Mrs. Sorpende caught a drip from the spigot of the coffee urn in a coin silver spoon. “I find myself quite without sympathy for Mr. Palmerston,” she replied in her queenliest manner, “not only because of his dastardly wrongdoing but because of his offensive conduct toward me personally.”

  “Why? What did he do?”

  “On the way back from the museum in his ill-gotten limousine, he made what I shall only describe as an improper suggestion.”

  “The infernal rotter,” cried Brooks. “Why didn’t you tell me, Theonia? I’d have dealt with him.”

  Mrs. Sorpende turned on her cavalier a gaze so tender that he almost swallowed his coffee cup. While he was choking and stammering, Mariposa came in with the morning paper.

  “Hey, get a load of this,” she shouted merrily.

  They all crowded together to read. The lead story was on Palmerston’s arrest, but there was another front page headline, MORE DRAMA AT THE MADAM’S. A group photo showed two uniformed policemen, Lupe, Bengo, the watchman who’d been locked in the washroom, and Brooks smack in the middle looking like the cat that had virtuously refrained from swallowing the canary.

  Sarah began to read aloud. “‘Through the alertness and daring of museum guard Alexander B. Kelling’—why, Brooks, I’d forgotten your first name is Alexander.”

  “Of course it is. About every fourth male child born into the Kelling family since Hector was a pup has had Alexander stuck on to him somewhere. That’s why I never use it. Why are you goggling at me like that?”

  “I was just thinking that if I—make a change—and you get married, then there’ll still be a Mrs. Alexander Kelling running this house.”

  “Well
, yes, if I ever manage to land myself a wife.”

  “Cousin Theonia said she’d be glad to help out. Didn’t you, Cousin Theonia?”

  A smile of ineffable sweetness crept over the stately countenance. For a long moment Theonia Sorpende sat perfectly still, the silver teaspoon poised in midair. Then in her most dulcet tone, she spoke. “As you know, Cousin Sarah, my one great joy in life is to be of service to you and your loved ones.”

  “Damn it, Theonia,” sputtered Brooks, “she’s not asking you to darn a tablecloth. Don’t I represent anything more to you than another odd job?”

  Like a carrier pigeon flying home to its loft, a dimpled white hand fluttered into the eager grasp of Alexander Brooks Kelling. “Shall I tell you,” cooed Theonia Sorpende, “what you mean to me?”

  Sarah rose and beckoned Max and Mariposa out of the dining room. As they departed, a joyous drumming as of wings beating on a hollow log came to their ears. It was the mating ritual of the ruffed grouse. Cousin Brooks was proposing.

  At the time of writing, the Fenway Studios still exists in its originally intended form, as an ideal place for artists to work.

  For the sake not only of those dedicated people who are trying to preserve the building as it should be, but for all the artists who have toiled there over the years to enrich Boston’s cultural heritage, this writer fervently hopes the Fenway Studios’ unique aesthetic and architectural value will be recognized and cherished.

  The two tenants described in this story are, of course, imaginary. So is the Madam’s palazzo, as nobody in real life was ever foolhardy enough to try to outshine the incomparable Mrs. Jack. There isn’t even a Tulip Street on the hill. Sarah Kelling, her boarders, her friends, and her foes have nowhere to exist except in the author’s imagination. No resemblance to any actual person or event is intended, and any coincidence would be inadvertent.

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