The Cheshire Cat's Eye

by Marcia Muller

  “Until after he’d pushed me around.”

  Dettman stuffed another cookie into his mouth. “Right,” he mumbled, spraying crumbs.

  “Will Raymond follow your orders and forget about French’s plan?”

  Dettman looked surprised. “Sure. Why would he bother? Raymond works for money, not for kicks.”

  I didn’t know whether I should be glad of that or not.

  I stood up. “Put the lamp back in the carton, please.”

  He complied.

  “Now carry it to the door.”

  He did, walking inches in front of the muzzle of my gun. I unlocked the car door. “Now set it down inside.”

  As he set it down, I stepped around him, pocketing the gun so no one on the street could see it. “Don’t forget the second condition of our deal, Dettman. Tell Raymond to leave me alone.”

  The former city supervisor looked beaten and broken. “I said I would, didn’t I? Just get yourself and that goddamn lamp out of my sight.”

  I was only too glad to do so.

  As I drove away, my accelerator foot began to tremble and I had to pull back to the curb. I leaned on the steering wheel, my head on my arms, trying to control the attack of nerves.

  The confrontation with Dettman had been a risk – a bigger risk than I’d wanted to admit when I went in there. And, although again I hadn’t acknowledged it to myself at the time, during our entire conversation I’d been straining to hear Raymond’s returning footsteps, steeling to defend myself against the two men.

  Well, I thought, raising my head and smiling faintly, I pulled it off. Sharon McCone, ex-cheerleader and homecoming princess, can get tough when she wants to.

  Secretly I wondered if I would have come on so strong had Dettman not been such a pushover.

  My tremors conquered, I set off on Mission Street to look again for Bob Keefer. He could provide a vital link in the chain.

  The pickup still stood in the driveway, tennis shoes with rips in the toes protruding from under it. I stopped alongside and called out the carpenter’s name. A muffled voice greeted me.

  I explained who I was. A more prolonged mumble answered, and then blue-jeaned legs emerged, followed by a torso and a head. Keefer had curly black hair, a stubbled chin, and vague eyes. Drugs, I decided. Downers, or maybe grass.

  “My aunt gave me your card,” Keefer said, raking his fingers through his unruly curls. “You got a job for me?”

  “No.” I took out the Photostat of my private investigator’s license and flashed it at him. It wasn’t a police badge, but it was damned official looking, and I didn’t think Keefer would question it.

  He stared, swallowed, and glanced around furtively.

  “Where can we talk?” I asked.

  Keefer was silent. I followed his gaze to the window of his aunt’s house, where a curtain moved slightly.

  “You want to go to Ed’s Place?” I suggested.

  “Shit, no!” he exclaimed. “I got friends there. You think I want them to know about this?”

  Clearly, he had something on his conscience. “Where, then?”

  He motioned at the pickup. “In there. It don’t run, but it’s private.”

  I climbed into the passenger seat, and Keefer got behind the wheel. The upholstery was ripped, and beer cans littered the floor.

  Keefer lit a cigarette. “So what’s the beef?”

  “It begins with a Tiffany lamp and a gentleman named Larry French.”

  He drew on the cigarette with elaborate nonchalance. “I never heard of them.”

  I leaned toward him. “Item number one: You sold the lamp to a Salem Street junk dealer in October. There’s a receipt to prove it. Item number two: French came to see you today and took you for a spin in his Porsche.”

  “You’re nuts, lady.”

  “There are witnesses. Did French bother to tell you item number three?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The lamp is a key piece of evidence in a murder case.”

  His lips twitched and he gripped the steering wheel. “Murder?”

  “Yes. Now talk?” McCone gets tough again.

  “I…Oh, Jesus! What murder? What’re you talking about?”

  “Three years ago, a man named Richard Wintringham was killed during a burglary. The lamp was one of the things taken. Let’s hear where you got it, as well as the other stuff.”

  “Wintringham?” His jaw went slack. “I worked for a David Wintringham, but I never heard of this Richard guy.”

  “He was David’s father.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” He was silent for a moment. “The way it was, I was working on this job, tearing out a lot of shit in an old house that had been converted to apartments.”

  “Where?”

  “On Steiner Street. Wintringham and Associates was the general on the job.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m ripping out the sheetrock from around an old fireplace that was walled up, and I look in there, and there’s all this stuff. A lamp, a clock, bottles, a lot of shit that looked like it might be worth something.”

  “So you took it.”

  “No way!” He drew himself up indignantly. “I don’t take chances like that. I got a reputation to protect in the trade. Nope, what I did was box it up and drag it over to one of the partners, Larry French. He wasn’t interested in it, told me I could have it if I wanted. So I threw it in the truck and about a month later, I was short on cash on account of Wintringham running out of money and laying me off. So I sold it to a couple of places on Salem Street. And that’s that.”

  I thought of the fireplace in the Stick-style house on Steiner. “Which house was this in?”

  “Beige stucco one, two doors down from Wintringham’s. Fireplace is in the front room.”

  “You seem pretty definite about that.”

  “I should be. Today…” He stopped.

  “Today what?”

  “Nothing.” He crushed out his cigarette and reached for another. “That’s the story.”

  “Not quite. What did French want today?”

  “French? I haven’t seen him in months.”

  “Shall I get your aunt out here to verify that you went off with him? Or the bartender at Ed’s?”

  “Jesus!” He glanced at the window of the house. The curtain was still pulled out of place. “Lady, I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “French, he paid me.” A crafty glint came into his vague eyes. “I got to make repairs on the truck, you see, and after that there’s the rent. I’m behind. Now, if you would help me out on the rent…”

  I sighed. “How much do you owe?”

  “Three months. That’s only a hundred and fifty altogether. It’s a cheap room.”

  “I’ll give you one month’s worth now. If the information leads to Wintringham’s killer, you’ll get the rest.” Thank God I had cashed a check recently.

  “I don’t know.” Keefer frowned. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “You don’t. But it’s either me or talk to Homicide. They’ll hold you until you talk for free.”

  “Bitch!”

  “Name-calling won’t get you the fifty dollars. Talking will.”

  “You promise the rest later?”

  “If the information helps me.”

  “Okay. French gave me five hundred, but every little bit helps.” He sighed with great resignation. “Okay. He came here this morning and asked about the lamp. I told him what I did with it. Then he said he was just checking, to see how truthful I was. He already knew what happened to the stuff, and he showed me one of the bottles to prove it. He wanted to know exactly where and how I’d found the stuff – he didn’t ask for the details before, thought it was in a corner of the basement or maybe the attic of that house.”

  “So you told him about the fireplace.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then what?”

  “He took me over there in his Porsche – man, that’s one tasty car �
�� and had me show him the fireplace and how the stuff was setting inside.”

  “And?”

  “And he gave me the five hundred bucks to forget I’d ever heard of it. He said he might have a job for me when something came up.” Keefer’s mouth drooped. “I don’t suppose he will, if you nail him for murder, huh?”

  “Probably not.” But I doubted French was a murderer. Something close, but not a killer.

  “Shit!” Keefer struck the steering with his open palm. “Nothing ever goes right for me.”

  “You got French’s five hundred. And you rent will be taken care of.”

  “Yeah, but I still won’t have a job. And I’ll probably end up in court putting the finger on French. Shit! I got no luck.”

  I wasn’t about to debate the point. “How was the stuff arranged in the fireplace, Bob?”

  “Careful, like it was a little room in a dollhouse. The lamp was in the middle, with the clock on one side and a silver thing on the other. And the bottles were lined up in front. I remember thinking at the time that somebody had been real gentle with them, like maybe they wanted to keep them safe.”

  I frowned. French? That definitely ruled him out. He wouldn’t care. He’d been willing to give them away to a workman. And Charmaine had said he’d had no conception of the Cheshire Cat’s Eye’s worth.

  “Yeah,” Keefer mused, “I remember thinking it was strange, why anybody would take so much trouble.”

  21.

  Why, indeed?

  I turned the question over in my mind as I wrestled with the front-door lock of my apartment building, lugging the Cheshire Cat’s Eye under my arm.

  Why secrete objects away so carefully, rather than destroy or dispose of them?

  I entered the apartment building. The lobby was pitch black. As the door shut behind me, a burly figure loomed out from under the stairs.

  I flattened against the wall and reached for my gun.

  The figure kept coming. I clicked off the safety.

  A flashlight came on. The figure advanced on me, carrying a package of light bulbs.

  I laughed weakly in relief. Tim O’Riley, my kindly, beer-guzzling building manager, looked quizzically at me. “Oh, it’s you. What the hell’s so funny?”

  I slipped the gun back in my bag. “Nothing. You startled me, that’s all. I thought you were a mugger.”

  “Gee, thanks. Hold this, will you?” He extended the flashlight.

  I trained it on the wall sconce as Tim screwed in the bulb. The light came on, illuminating the faded turquoise carpet and the little bed of plastic geraniums the owner had planted to beautify the otherwise undistinguished lobby.

  “One of the tenants has been stealing the bulbs.” Tim took the flashlight from me and went over to the empty sconce.

  “Between that and your cat using those fake flowers for a litter box, I’ve got my work cut out for me. Of course,” he added, “the cat shows good sense. What kind of person would put in a thing like that anyway?”

  “The same kind who would spray the ceilings with that sparkly paint.”

  “Yeah. Say, your phone’s been ringing off the hook for the last half hour. Guess you haven’t trained the cat to answer.”

  “Damn! The answering service is supposed to pick it up. Well, I’m here now.” I unlocked my door, mulling over the vagaries of my service. My friend Claudia owned it and gave me a break on the twenty-four-hour rate, which I very much appreciated. I did not, however, appreciate her succession of inept daytime and early-evening operators. The efficient Claudia preferred to take the late-night shift, when she could engage in protracted philosophical conversations with clients who could not sleep.

  I went down the long inner hall to the main room of my studio apartment. The building was nineteen-twenties vintage and shared some characteristics with Victorians: high-coved ceilings, nice hardwood floors, and softly angled bay windows which, unfortunately in this case, overlooked an alley.

  There, any resemblance between my apartment and Wintringham’s dream houses stopped. My furniture had clean, modern lines and well-grained light wood. The rugs were in earth tones and clear and bright accenting colors. The white walls were covered with my amateur efforts at photography in plain Plexiglas frames. My only concession to the past, in fact, was the quilts on the bed, which my grandmother had made.

  It was home, my refuge from the often-rough world I operated in, and I loved it.

  Now I removed the Cheshire Cat’s Eye from its box and set it on the bureau. Strangely, it did not look out of place among the modern objects. Maybe I should pick up a few good old pieces.

  I went to the kitchen and got a glass of wine from my other antique, the electrified icebox that was built into the wall. It was one of the less convenient features of the apartment, because it operated off a compressor in the basement. Tim was supposed to notify all the tenants on the day when he turned off the compressor so the iceboxes could defrost, but invariably I wasn’t home at the time. Over the years, I had gotten used to returning to have all my groceries wash out the icebox door at me.

  Returning to the main room, I sat cross-legged on the bed, staring at the Tiffany lamp. The eye held a mocking light. The teeth smirked at me.

  “Don’t look so smart,” I told it. “I’ll solve this one yet.”

  French. Larry French. He had once killed a man with his bare hands. He had had the Cheshire Cat’s Eye in his possession, according to Charmaine. He didn’t know enough about construction to take an accident properly.

  French had wanted to sabotage Wintringham’s restoration project, ostensibly to recoup his initial investment in what he saw as a sure disaster. What other reason could he have for ordering the arson? To cover up something? Destroy evidence? Evidence of what?

  And why had French paid Bob Keefer to keep silent about the objects in the fireplace if he hadn’t put them there? But if he had, why ask Keefer to show him how they were arranged? And would French have arranged them so carefully anyway? No. Who, then?

  David Wintringham would have. But would he have killed his own father? Hard to believe; the affection there seemed to have been genuine, if ambivalent.

  Paul Collins, then. But Wintringham had alibied him for the night of both murders. Would Wintringham do that for him, if his lover had killed his father? Doubtful. Besides, Collins didn’t care about Victorian antiques. Look at his kitchen. And what had he said to me? That in Dayton they had nice old houses, but they didn’t make such a fuss over them.

  Who would care about the objects? Charmaine.

  But what motive would she have for doing in old man Wintringham? Jake’s killing was clearly a coverup, but why Wintringham? There was no apparent reason, and certainly none to link Charmaine with it. And wouldn’t it take more strength than the tiny decorator possessed?

  Eleanor van Dyne. She was certainly strong enough, but ditto the lack of motive. But hadn’t Prince Albert said she had her reasons for keeping out of the controversy that swirled around the Cheshire Cat’s Eye? What were they? I’d have to find out.

  Prince Albert. After verifying his story about buying the lamp from Charlie Cornish, I was inclined to discount him. Unless there was something I didn’t know.

  Nick Dettman. The same.

  Johnny Hart. I didn’t want to believe ill of the restaurant proprietor. And that was dangerous.

  Raymond-the-Hit-Man. Merely a neighborhood thug.

  My big black-and-white cat, Watney, entered by the fire-escape window. He came up to have his ears scratched, then trotted off toward the kitchen and – what else – food.

  So back to French. Maybe he was the killer. He drank a good bit, which none of my other suspects seemed to do. While I had discounted him because of his capacity, it all depended on your definition of drunkenness. Jake’s may have been broader than mine.

  I didn’t like French for the killer, though. I could see him as a blackmailer. All his movements lately pointed that way. After all, he’d found a “better way to cut h
is losses.” To me, that suggested he knew who the murderer was and hoped to cash in on it.

  Yes, if I could get French to reveal that knowledge, the case would be solved. But I didn’t believe in making a grandstand play at the risk of blowing everything. It would be better to let the police handle him. It was time to take the facts to Greg.