Yet Greg Marcus was a professional who didn’t jump blindly to conclusions. And I had no reasonable alternative to suggest. Picking up Harmon would shed light on the smuggling operation, if not on the murders.
I said, “I’m just tired. It’s been a rough week.”
“Shall I drop you at your place?”
“Please. And let me know how you make out with Harmon.”
“You’re entitled to a full report. I’ll call you this evening no matter what happens.”
On the way home, I leaned my head back against the seat, fighting depression. Not only was the case completely out of my hands now, but also I feared the truth of the murders had somehow eluded both Greg and me.
24
At home, I ate lunch, washed my hair, and sat out on the fire escape to dry it. The alley was quiet, since it was a school day. Warm sun played on my shoulders, and in the distance a transistor radio trilled carefree Latin tunes. I watched a woman hang laundry on the back porch across the way. She had a great many diapers and worked with tired, heavy motions. Seeing her reminded me I had forgotten to return my mother’s phone call. I went inside and dialed San Diego.
As usual, the McCone household was in a state of minor crisis. I listened patiently as my mother explained how my older brother John had been arrested for his outstanding traffic tickets. On top of that, he had lost his housepainting job, and my father, in a rare show of rigidity left over from his days as a U.S. Navy Chief, had refused to let John’s wife, Karen, and the three kids stay with them until the storm blew over. All was well now, my mother having exercised her usual calming influence, and four extra people weren’t really a strain, the kids being small.
“Still, it’s very hard on your father and me,” my mother concluded, “the way your brothers cannot get along with the police.”
To cheer her I said, “Well, I get along with the police. I kissed a homicide lieutenant last night.”
“Oh, Sharon,” my mother sighed, “you’re not mixed up in a murder, are you?”
“No, ma,” I lied.
“Oh. Is he nice-looking?”
“Yes, ma.”
“Are you going to see him again?”
I was sorry I’d mentioned it. “Probably.”
“Well, just don’t you go getting pregnant.” Next to arrest, pregnancy was my mother’s chief worry; it was my two younger sisters’ specialty.
“Mother! Have I ever gotten pregnant?”
“No, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.”
Much as I loved my family, it was a conversation like this that made me glad I lived over five hundred miles away from them.
By four that afternoon, I was pacing around my apartment, deep in gloomy frustration. The conviction that I had missed a crucial fact about Joan’s murder nagged me, along with mounting boredom. At four thirty I left a message for Greg with my answering service: I would be at the Salem Street shop restoring order; at least it was useful work. Before I left, I checked the .38 that was still in my bag. No sense in being careless.
Putting the shop back together proved too much for me, though. After several feeble attempts, I gave up and sat down on the settee next to Clothilde. I stared at the headless dummy through the growing dusk. All dressed up in red sequins with no place to go, she seemed to radiate sympathy for my own purposelessness.
“Damn it, Clothilde, I know the answer to my question is right here in the shop! Trouble is, I haven’t figured out the question yet.”
Clothilde had no comment for me.
“Harmon is probably guilty of arson and of blackmailing his way into a smuggling scheme, but he’s not going to crack and confess these murders, because he didn’t do them. I’ve overlooked the most important piece in the puzzle.”
The shop echoed with silence.
“And Greg. Greg has been on the wrong track all along. First he focused on Charlie, and now he’s just as singleminded about Harmon. I think he’s deliberately ignored something, but I don’t know what or why.”
Clothilde seemed bored with my company.
I got up and wandered over to Bruno, patting his head. “I wonder what’ll happen to you, Bruno, now that Joan isn’t around to defend you.”
The dog’s glassy eyes watched me.
“There’s a single thread running through everything that’s happened this week, but I can’t pick it out.”
Again the silence, deepening around me.
I understood how Joan could have become slightly unbalanced, spending her days in this dark shop with its echoes of the past. No wonder she talked to Clothilde and Bruno and the little boy in a sailor suit, trying to coax life out of them. I went down the aisle to Edwin of the Iron Shoes, alone in his gloomy corner.
The mannequin, as always, stared at the wall.
“Poor Edwin,” I said. “You don’t have anything to look at any more. What a comedown after the Bellini. Did you know it was a masterpiece, or hasn’t your critical eye developed that much yet?”
Edwin looked away disdainfully, preferring a blank wall to my conversation.
“Edwin, it’s dumb to stare at an empty wall. Why don’t you turn around?”
Silence.
“Sharon McCone, you are going insane!” I exclaimed loudly. To Edwin I added, “It’s not your fault you’re unfriendly. You couldn’t turn around if you wanted to. After all, Charlie nailed you to the floor.”
I smiled, remembering Joan’s sales gimmick. How long had she been playing her artful, much-rehearsed role with Edwin? For over two years, since the fall before her grandson, Christopher, died.
With a pang of regret, I remembered Joan looking keenly at me and asking, “Are you an art lover by any chance?” And then she had taken the same flight of fancy with Cara Ingalls, a woman surely not given to make-believe. Joan’s dream world had been captivating to even the least imaginative people, though. And knowing, as I did now, that she had been a crook still could not stunt my delight in the dead woman’s fantasies.
Like the fantasy of Edwin as an art lover.
A sales gimmick.
The sales gimmick had been conceived two years ago, in the fall, at a time when Joan had needed a great deal more money than the shop could bring in.
Are you an art lover by any chance?
Ben Harmon had planned to set Joan up in a new shop, and presumably they would have smuggled in more and more artworks. Would Edwin have been nailed down facing a wall there, too?
An art lover.
The first time I’d seen Edwin, he was looking at a painting of shepherds in a field.
A sales gimmick.
I began to tremble.
“Edwin,” I whispered. “Edwin, why didn’t you tell me?”
What else goes with a Madonna, a child, and three wise men?
Shepherds. Shepherds in a field with their flock.
And what had Paula said about art collectors?
Some of them got their kicks from the solitary enjoyment of forbidden masterpieces.
I rushed down the aisle to the phone by the cash register. When I lifted the receiver, though, there was no dial tone. Of course, the phone had been disconnected. Flipping off the little light on the counter, I picked up my bag and started across the dark room toward the front door.
Halfway there I stopped, listening to approaching footsteps in the street. I barely had time to dive behind the counter when a key turned in the lock.
25
The front door shut, and footsteps crossed the shop directly to Edwin.
I slipped my hand into my bag and grasped my gun, as the footsteps came back and went into the workroom.
I took the gun out and crept forward on my hands and knees until I reached the wall and ran my left hand up to the light switch. As I stood up, I snapped it on.
In the dim light, Cara Ingalls crouched on the workroom floor, holding a torch on a stack of framed and unframed canvasses. She looked up in shock, her face taking on a cornered expression. She wore all black, even to a lit
tle hat that shaded her face, the perfect burglar’s ensemble.
“You won’t find the Bellini there, Cara.” I held the gun on her. “Put the flashlight down and get up.”
She remained on her knees, tightening her grip on the light until her knuckles went white.
“I don’t know what you mean. I’m inspecting the property. I’m going to buy it, you know.”
“The police have both panels of the altarpiece. They want the one you have, too.”
“What altarpiece? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her yellow eyes darted from side to side.
“The one you bought from van Osten and his Italian partner. Did you provide him contacts with other collectors? How much of a cut of the profits did you get?”
“You know so much, you tell me.”
“Not as much as Ben Harmon got, I bet.”
“Harmon!” She spat out the name. “What do you know about Harmon?”
“I know he was part of the smuggling operation. How did he catch on to it?”
“You know too goddamned much. The cheap bastard caught on because of Joan’s ridiculous behavior with that mannequin, what’s-his-name?”
“Edwin.”
“Edwin.” She snorted. “Joan had to use a melodramatic way of identifying the collectors when they came in for their paintings. Harmon saw Joan was hipped on Edwin but only at certain times.”
“And each of those times, someone bought a painting on Edwin’s wall.”
Ingalls laughed bitterly. “Joan was a whimsical fool. Oliver felt it a small price to keep her happy, but he never should have permitted it. When Harmon got curious, he wormed the rest out of the old bitch.”
“And then?”
“Then he went to Oliver and put the squeeze on him. He wanted a cut, plus to expand the business with Joan in a bigger shop.”
“And while he was at it, he also wanted her land.”
Ingalls nodded. “And now I suppose you want something. How much will you cost me?”
I shook my head. “Like I said, the police have all of the altarpiece except the shepherd panel you picked up here last fall. I want to know how the smuggling operation fell apart.”
Her eyes glittered. “I can’t tell you anything about that.”
“Not about murdering Joan Albritton? And Oliver van Osten?”
Her face went pale; then her hand moved quickly and she hurled the flashlight at my head. As I ducked, Ingalls sprang at me, knocking me to the floor. My gun flew from my hand.
I pulled myself up against the wall, looking for the gun, but before I could find it, Ingalls was on me, a daggerlike knife in her hand. It was the one missing from the bone-handled set.
I froze with fear, my eyes on the sharp, double-edged blade as she brought it closer to my throat. I remembered the blood soaking into van Osten’s pale-yellow carpet. Cara Ingalls knew how to use this knife very, very well.
“You want to know about Albritton and van Osten, do you?” Her eyes were inches from mine, and the knife tip touched the hollow of my throat.
I forced down terror, knowing it would incite her. The lack of control that I had sensed the day before showed in her eyes now. Keeping my voice as level as I could, I said, “You didn’t really intend to kill Joan, did you?”
Cara Ingalls’s breath touched my face in hot little gasps as her amber eyes searched mine. Then, surprisingly, she dropped back a couple of inches, not off her guard but no longer touching me. The pressure of the knife decreased.
“I didn’t intend to kill anyone,” she was trembling. “Van Osten had raised the price on the remainder of the altarpiece. He knew the shepherd panel was no use to me without the others.”
“That wasn’t fair. Why did he do it?” I was leaning against the wall, my left leg curled under me, but it hurt too much to give me leverage. Ingalls crouched in front of me, her knife a deterrent to any movement. I couldn’t see my gun in the dim light.
“He knew I killed Albritton. He came in and found me with the body.” Her husky voice became shrill. My question had struck at Ingalls’s need for emotional attention, the same need she’d displayed the day before when she told me the story of her father canceling his life insurance. Probably, in her climb to the top, she’d taken no one as a confidante. As she had begun to break down under the pressure of murder and blackmail, I had appeared, a woman who, however, briefly, would listen to her.
I encouraged her need. “What happened with Albritton?”
She shuddered. “I came here to the shop on Monday night to persuade her to sell the remaining Bellinis and the land directly to me. Van Osten, acting for Harmon, had threatened to hold out on the last two panels unless I withdrew my bid for the land. Also, the smuggling operation was falling apart. Our Italian contact was having trouble getting the stolen paintings into the factory shipments. There was a four-month delay between the first and second panels for my altarpiece, for instance. I knew it was time to act. But then that stupid bitch told me she was pulling out of the scheme and didn’t owe me a thing. We argued, and she said a terrible thing to me. I saw the knives in the open cabinet and …”
Her voice faltered, and she almost lowered the knife. I began to straighten, and the blade came back up.
Quickly I asked, “What was it she said?”
A spasm, more violent than before, shook her. “She called me a vulture. She said I spent my life feasting off the remains of people I’d destroyed. She said I wasn’t human, that I was a sick, disgusting thing to her.”
I shivered, remembering Joan’s last words to Charlie Cornish: “You’re nothing to me now.” Her revulsion at Ingalls was probably an extension of her own self-hatred because of her cruelty to Charlie.
Watching me so closely, Ingalls softened. “Isn’t that the most awful thing to say to a person?”
I nodded. It was awful, but not bad enough to kill her. In vain, I looked around for my gun. “And then van Osten walked in?”
“Yes. He’d come to collect the Madonna so I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on it until he’d forced me to withdraw my bid. He told me to get out of here and let him take care of things. It wasn’t until I got to my car that I realized I still had the knife in my hand. It was all covered with blood and sticky.” She made a disgusted face.
How unpleasant for you, I thought. Aloud I asked, “When did you hear from van Osten again?”
“The next day. He called me and raised the price of the Madonna.”
“And you went to his apartment last night to pay him?” My left leg didn’t hurt so much now, and I started to brace it against the wall. Ingalls was talking swiftly, uncontrollably. If I knew where my gun was, I could take her off guard.
“But he didn’t have the painting. He told me to forget it, said he’d even resorted to Ben Harmon’s arson tactics to get hold of it, but it was no use. Instead, he had this plan that we should ditch Harmon, that I should buy the land after all, and go in with him on a really big smuggling operation. With my contacts with collectors, he said we’d have it made. I knew what that meant; I’d be under his thumb for the rest of my life. I had to protect myself. I had to cover up …”
“So you used a knife.”
Her pupils were dilated, her eyes straining. “I didn’t mean to kill him!” She blinked hard for an instant.
But I had seen van Osten lying on the blood-soaked yellow carpet. And right now I also saw my gun, lying near the baseboard to the left. I braced my heel against the wall. Reflexively, Ingalls brought the knife up again.
“No way, Cara,” I said, cruelly. “No way.”
She looked shocked at my withdrawal of sympathy. “What do you mean, ‘no way’?”
“People who don’t plan to kill don’t take knives to their business meetings, especially knives they’ve killed with before.” As I said it, I pushed into her, knocking her backwards and grabbing at the knife. It sliced across the palm of my hand and blood spurted. Crying in pain, I fell on top of her and smashed the knife from her
grip. It clattered to the floor.
I forced her down and reached toward my gun. I couldn’t get to it and keep her down at the same time. She began to fight back and struggle for the knife. As we fought, the front door of the shop opened.
Greg Marcus’s voice called, “Sharon? Cara? Where are you?”
Ingalls threw me off and bolted toward the front room. I jumped up and went after her, screaming, “Stop her! She’s the murderer!”
As I chased Ingalls through the room I saw Greg by the door, his gun drawn. Why in hell didn’t he shoot?
I hurled myself at Ingalls, pulled her down, pinned her arm behind her back. She gave a cry that ended in a grunt and lay still. From the limpness of her body, I knew the fall had stunned her.
Panting, I looked up at Greg, who stood frozen.
“Do something, damn it!” I cried. “She killed both of them over the Bellini! She was part of the whole scheme!”
He gestured to a uniformed man who had come in behind him, then lowered his gun and stepped forward, reaching out a hand to help me up. He looked deeply shocked. “Are you all right?”
I looked down at our clasped hands. They were smeared with blood. I pulled mine away and brushed my hair back. More blood came off on my face. Greg snatched my hand from my hair and spread my fingers, palm up. He said in relief, “It’s only a small cut. It’s deep, but you’ll live. Otherwise, are you okay?”
Anger rose up, replacing my fear. “Yes, I’ll live, no thanks to you! Why didn’t you stop her?”
He shook his head and pulled me against him. After a few seconds he said, “Jesus, I’m sorry, Sharon! When I got the message you left with your answering service, I decided to put a man back on the shop. We hadn’t been able to pick up Frankie, and I didn’t want you here alone. Cara’s company car was outside. I thought it had something to do with the sale of the property …”
He broke off, and we hung on to one another for a minute. Then he released me, looking down at the prone figure of Cara Ingalls. She hadn’t moved. He said, “Get up, Cara.”
She raised her head, her face dull with shock. “Don’t, Greg.”
Edwin of the Iron Shoes Page 14
