Art and Arsenic (Veronica Margreve Mysteries Book 2)

by Valerie Murmel

  Finally, when the dark spots in front of my eyes seemed to be doing the tango to the accompaniment of the ringing in my ears, I heard a male voice out of the darkness.

  “Hey, hey, what is this? You a person? You alive in there?”

  The voice sounded familiar.

  “I’m down here. Please help me! Unhook this grate please!”

  “What, what are you saying?”

  “This grate – it latches. Unhook it please and help me climb out!”

  I felt some motion overhead, then my waving leg struck something. I realized that someone was bending over me.

  “Here it is, here it is.” Someone’s hands shook the grate.

  “Wait, I’ll let go.”

  I dropped my body down, fought light-headedness for what felt like the time to fall to the center of the earth, and then released my grip on the metal bars.

  “Try now, un-latch the grate please!”

  Motion and noise above.

  “I think I got it.”

  With a jarring metal noise, the grate slid out. A hand reached down into the hole.

  “Thank you!”

  I grabbed it, and jumped up and braced my legs on one of the sides.

  “Ready? I’m going to try to walk up the side with my legs. Can you lift me slowly please?”

  “OK, OK”.

  After about five small steps from me and two good tugs from him, I was above ground from the waist up. I let go, put both hands on the pavement, and my rescuer pulled on my jacket and then my belt to get the rest of me out.

  Then I was completely out, half-laying on the wet pavement, breathing hard. I turned around to thank my benefactor. It was the same homeless guy to whom I gave my half a sandwich earlier. I saw his little dog sitting in the entrance way of the brick building a couple of feet away.

  “Thank you, thank you so much!”

  “He found you”. He indicated the dog. “Oh, I know you! You’re the lady who gave me the sandwich! How’d you get in there?”

  “Yes, that’s me. Not sure how I ended up in there. Thank you for getting me out.”

  I got up and brushed myself off.

  “Did you see the guy I was with this evening? In his fifties, wearing glasses, a black coat, a light cashmere sweater and black pants? He had a black umbrella. He might be somewhere around here.”

  “I think I saw him going that way. Wait, lady, you’re not going to go after him yourself? That’s dangerous!” I started running in the direction indicated, as much as my high heels allowed. My new friend, limping, went after me with his dog.

  I ran in the rain towards the dancing glow of a flashlight ahead. The beam of light was emanating from Johnson and Martin, moving into the maze of the cobble streets and narrow alleys around Pioneer Square. Turning a corner, I heard shouting and saw two figures in a narrow alley next to several overflowing trash containers. As I got closer, I saw that it was Andrew and Christopher. They were both breathing heavily. They were surrounded by the police, with lights directed on their faces and guns at the ready.

  “What’s going on?” asked Johnson.

  “He attacked me, tried to hit me on the head with something, tried to knock me out! I fought back!” said Christopher.

  Everyone’s eyes went to Andrew. In the bright light of police flashlights I could see that there was mud across his coat, which was open, and his cashmere sweater, visible underneath, looked dirty in the front.

  He shook his head. “No, that’s not true. I want my lawyer.”

  Christopher threw out an accusing hand towards Andrew, and policemen’s guns followed the sudden moment.

  “I… I think he tried to kill me! And I think he killed Fred Nordqvist!”

  “Slow down. What happened?” asked Detective Johnson.

  “I... I was coming out of that building there, and I felt someone attack me from behind and throw me on the ground. I dropped my bag and fell, and somehow managed to kick him back or something… He kept trying to hit my head on the pavement. I think he stabbed me with his umbrella!” Christopher wiped his dirtied face with a dirty sleeve.

  “I did not attack you. I was talking to you, and you attacked me. I want my lawyer,” repeated Andrew, breathing heavily.

  “OK, let’s go back to the station. I’ll get the statements from both of you”, Johnson said. The police herded Andrew and Christopher away, one of the officers making sure to pick up Andrew's black umbrella laying by the Dumpster, and the big paper shopping bag Christopher said he dropped in the fight.

  24

  I finished taking stock of my physical state. My jeans were torn at one knee, and the knee underneath was skinned, bruised and swelling. My hands, protected by the leather gloves, did not get cut – but my palms hurt from hanging off the rusty metal grate. After trying to run in my high heels, my feet were sore – and tomorrow, I was sure, my arms and abs were going to hurt like hell. But I was alive and in one piece. And the murderer was apprehended without doing much more damage.

  After climbing out of the hole and chasing after Andrew and Christopher, I had spent the last couple of hours giving a statement to Detective Johnson, while my rescuer was interviewed by Martins.

  “What was that about?” My new friend, Pete, asked, after watching me assess the damage. “All that running around and chasing?”

  We were sitting at a small Mediterranean cafe a block from the place of my mis-adventure, in the early hours of Friday morning. I bought Pete a lamb wrap, and myself was eating a baba ganouji — it had been a while since the muffuletta, our night-time adventure had been exhausting, the adrenaline had worn off, and we needed to replenish the calories. The little dog was sitting under the chair and getting morsels that Pete was tearing off and passing down to him. On closer inspection, he looked like some sort of a Chihuahua mix. The dog’s name was Mikey, I had learned, and he had been with Pete for about three years now.

  I chewed in silence, looking at the old sign on the side of the building across the road, illuminated by the street light, advertising “Rooms 25c”, as I tried to figure out what had actually occurred and why, and how to explain everything that transpired.

  “So this is what happened.” I took a drink out of my water glass. “This guy, Christopher, inherited a house, some paintings and some wine from his uncle, out in Walla Walla. The paintings were stuff that his uncle painted himself, in the style of a famous 19th-century British landscapist.” I learned that Calvin Willembauer was the author of the works, from Detective Johnson – apparently one of the landscapes contained a tiny signature, covered up by the frame.

  “Talented dude, that uncle.”

  I nodded. “Christopher wanted to sell them as 19th-century originals.”

  “So they’d be worth more, like antiques?” Pete said, between bites. His black eyes were shining.

  “Exactly. So he decided to sell them through a young gallery because he thought that a newer gallery might not discover that they were fake – or might be more likely to take a chance on some dicey-looking art. Andrew, a specialist in 19th-century art, saw them. He knew that they were fake, of course. But he thought that they were decent enough to pass for the originals. So the gallery owner, Fred, decided to take them on consignment, and have a big show at the gallery for them. They had made up a contract saying that the entire collection of Christopher’s uncle had to be sold through Fred’s gallery.”

  I sipped my water.

  “So they sold a bunch of these fake painting, two years ago. Everyone made money on that first sale. A rival art dealer, Linda, suspected something, but she couldn’t prove it.”

  I took a bite and chewed my food. In explaining things to Pete, I felt pieces of the puzzle falling into place for me.

  “Separately, Christopher was selling his uncle’s wine collection, which included some rare wines.”

  “Lucky guy to get all that stuff, huh?” Pete passed another morsel down to his dog.

  “Yeah – except he wasn’t content with his luck. To m
ake that gravy train last longer, he was also faking some of the wine he was selling, like buying cheap wine and putting it in old bottles, putting fake labels on it and stuff. Fred found out the truth and was blackmailing him over it, threatening to expose the counterfeit wines. That would have gotten FBI involved, and Christopher would have gone to jail for it. So he had to continue selling his uncles’ paintings through Fred's gallery. And this past week was supposed to be the opening of the sale for the second batch of fake pictures that Christopher inherited from his uncle, still pretending that they were that British artist's works. There was a reception Friday, lots of people, some nice wine and stuff.”

  I took another bite and chewed. Pete fed a piece of lamb to Mikey, who swallowed it and ran his tongue over his lips.

  “So Christopher poisoned Fred with arsenic.”

  “No way!” Pete’s eyes got huge.

  “Yeah, he did. Put a bit into his drink.”

  “Crazy stuff! Did he die?” I nodded. “Damn! And where d’you get mixed up in this? You a detective or something?”

  “Not really. I do computer investigations. Remember I said there was a rival gallery owner, Linda, the one who was suspicious? Well, she wanted to stop the sale – and she decided to do it by attacking their website. That brought me in, to fix it. And when Fred died – it made her the main suspect in his death with the police.”

  We all took another bite; Mikey, licking his chops, looked suitably impressed with my exploits.

  “Christopher lives in Walla Walla, and he was in town this week for the opening of the sale. He wanted to get rid of Andrew, but couldn’t really set the police on him without the whole thing about the fakes coming out. So Christopher was avoiding Andrew. Andrew kept calling him, spooked by Fred's death, but Christopher was ignoring his calls.” Johnson told me about the phone calls, and I remembered how I saw Christopher give Andrew the cold shoulder in the parking lot after Fred’s funeral. “But Andrew knew that Christopher planned to go to the First Thursday Art Walk in Pioneer Square.” I waved my hand in a circle to indicate that Pioneer Square was around us, and sipped my water.

  “I wanted to find out what happened, and started to suspect something. But I needed more evidence. Without much proof, the police were skeptical when I told them who I thought the killer was.” In fairness, that probably had something to do with me suggesting to them at various times that Dr. Bencham, or Monica Bencham, or Linda Raven, or Connie Nordqvist was the murderer. “I thought that if Andrew got a chance to talk to Christopher, something might happen. So I told Christopher I suspected Andrew, and asked him to help me prove that Andrew killed Fred. He went along with it.”

  “Nice guys, these art people!” Pete said.

  “He wanted to frame Andrew for the murder. That’s why he provoked the fight here. The idea was that after this attack, the police would think that Andrew was trying to kill Christopher, and that he also murdered Fred, and would stop searching for the real killer.”

  I finished my eggplant dish.

  “So Christopher came out of that building on the corner, and attacked Andrew. Tried to bash his head in, apparently, and made it look like one of…” I was about to say “homeless” people, but caught myself and looked for a different term “… the guys wanting to rob him, or being crazy, or something”. There had been tragic incidents in Pioneer Square, of people shot or stabbed to death by a mentally-unstable drifter, or a would-be robber.

  Pete turned back to look towards the spot where we came across Andrew and Christopher fighting. “That’s a good building”, he said appreciatively of the over-100 years old construction in the darkness. “It’s well-built, and it’s warm inside, if you have to sleep there.”

  He was obviously talking from experience.

  I realized that Pete probably spent a lot of time sleeping outside – and the weather was still cold and wet, and it got you all the way through to your skin.

  He looked back at me. “So what happened to you, how’d you end up underground?”

  “I slipped, I think. Running too fast in heels on a steep street. And I think Christopher saw me fall, and locked me in, so that I'd think that Andrew did it. Thank you again for getting me out. If it weren’t for you, I’d have missed all the main action tonight.”

  After a bit, he finished his food and got up to go. I yawned, and Mikey the dog yawned too.

  “Thank you again for helping me out today! Getting me out of that damn hole in the ground!”

  “No problem, lady, it’s OK”.

  “Do you… have a place to stay tonight?”

  “Yeah, lady, don’t worry, I’m OK.”

  Pete gathered his stuff and took his dog’s leash. Mikey looked at him adoringly. The dog really loved Pete. I thought of my little Bitty, previously a little homeless street cat, who was now living the life of a feline princess, with a soft sunny spot to sleep in and fancy meals (even if I did say so myself). She did love me, too.

  25

  “It’s been a long night.” Detective Johnson leaned back in his chair. Martins sat in the other flimsy plastic chair and looked at me silently.

  “Yes,” I agreed. It seemed best to agree to things for right now. I was tired. It was around 2 am on Friday morning. The street noise had died down; even the dance clubs were no longer booming. A few lonely figures were stumbling on their way in the square. I didn't know whether they had a place to go for the night, or were just looking for a dry and relatively urine-free doorway where to lay down their heads.

  Detective Johnson stirred black hot liquid in a plastic cup. “So, we were following you and Andrew this evening, and Christopher, as arranged. We saw that he tried to ambush Andrew and hit him over the head. That’s at least an assault charge in addition to the murder one. But explain to me how you figured out all of this.”

  I had my right elbow on the table, and was resting my head on it. I was too exhausted for table manners. My head seemed to want to lay itself down on the table and stay there for a millennium or two. My throat felt as if someone had used sandpaper on it, like you could do to age a fake painting.

  I nodded towards the small white cup with a plastic stirrer sticking out of it.

  “I recalled the coffee cup I saw in the trash in the office right before the party. You said that there was only one coffee cup found in the trash can. I remembered Christopher arriving at the party with a coffee cup in his hand, and then going to the back room and coming out without it. The logical thing to think was that he threw it out in the back. But where? As I said, there was already a coffee cup in the trash can, I noticed it when I dropped off my bag. It occurred to me that he must have switched them. You told me that there were no clear prints on the surface of the cup that you found, but some of Fred’s prints on the lid. So Christopher switched the cups – the one that Fred originally drank from, that contained the poison, and his own, and wiped his cup for prints, and then put the original lid back on. He must have taken Fred’s cup with him and disposed of it somewhere later on Friday night.”

  “Yes, the security footage from the time of the party shows him coming into the office and doing something near the trash can.” Detective Johnson said. “His back hid what his hands were doing from the camera.”

  “But it is clear on the video that he walked in with a coffee cup, right?”

  Detective Johnson nodded. “And there is earlier security footage of Fred throwing his cup out, too. And no-one else really came close to the trash can – you were nearby, but you didn’t throw anything in there or take anything out.

  “After your call, we followed the route that Christopher said he took to his hotel, and then searched in an increasing radius from that route, and found that the garbage from the beach parks hadn’t been collected yet.” My nose involuntarily scrunched up as I imagined the smell of the trash. Well, it was still plenty cold, and not a lot of people were using the beach parks, so maybe the garbage wasn’t full of smelly stuff just yet. “Looking for it was made easier since
we knew he had to have crushed the cup to hide it in his pocket during the rest of the party.” He eyed his own coffee cup with distaste. “Well, we found it. The liquid soaked through into the paper, and so the test found plenty of arsenic in it.”

  “He could probably have avoided all this trouble if he had just gone into the kitchen to rinse out the cup and then threw it out in the trash can in the gallery. Then you would have found two coffee cups there,” I suggested.

  “Maybe. But the party was going on, and people kept going back there to bring out more food or drinks, or to use the restroom. Someone probably would have seen him. Not to mention the video tape would have recorded it. It’d look strange to be washing a disposable coffee cup – that you got out of trash can – before throwing it back into the garbage.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” We sat in silence for a while. The yellow light of the cafe was hurting my eyes, and I closed them. With that, I heard only the sound of forks and chairs creaking. I counted my own heartbeats. I got to about twenty when Johnson asked:

  “How did you figure out that Domain Lefl… Lef… whatever, that fancy wine was fake?”

  “That might have been the key to the whole thing.” I kept my eyes closed. “When I was doing research on the wine, I saw that a case of it was sold at an auction in Nevada. And I was at the gallery when Pauline received a call from Vegas for Fred Nordqvist, saying that ‘he was right’ about something. She was puzzled about it, so I thought it was likely unrelated to art sales. I got curious, did a reverse lookup on the phone number, found out that it belongs to a company associated with the Nevada wine collector.

  “My friend Krista sent me some wine reviews about how this vintage was ‘supposed’ to taste. What I tasted was pleasant enough, but different from the descriptions. I was worried that the unusual taste might have been from arsenic, and Krista had checked into that. It could just be different people’s taste buds, but it got me thinking.” I opened my eyes slowly.