Rainbow's End

by Martha Grimes

  Jury looked over the edge of the paper and glared at the telephone that refused to offer up its secrets, its hidden messages, its trapped voices. He closed his eyes and Lady Cray’s turquoise sculpture swam before them. Not unusual for that part of the country, turquoise and silver. Last year, the windows of Harrods had been done up with stuff from the American West: fringed jackets, boots, Indian blankets, silver jewelry and belts. He looked down at the picture of Chief Inspector Gordon Rush in the newspaper and thought he looked decent, intelligent, approachable, even with a touch of humility, the way his head was bent that way.

  There was no denying that all three of these women had apparently been in or near Santa Fe at the same time. And you might put the deaths of the two older women down to some sort of heart thing, but the younger one? That seemed very unlikely. Macalvie was right; the Wiltshire police should be running tests for poison—but what kind? Well, there was little to connect the three dead women except for a thread or two. But he had to agree if you pulled a thread it often unraveled a lot of material.

  Again, he looked over at the telephone, thinking that if she didn’t call, he would have to stop over in Stratford-upon-Avon. Not an unpleasant prospect. He smiled, remembering the first time he had ever seen Jenny Kennington. Her anxiety had made her irritable, truculent, unforthcoming, even somewhat rude. These were postures Jenny would never strike in her own interests, but only in the interests of others, in this case the stray cat Tom. Jenny seemed so resolutely packed inside her own body, so there. He recalled what Gertrude Stein had said about Los Angeles: there’s no there there. With Jenny, it was the opposite. She was so there; she was so very much there. And where in hell was she?

  Then through these drowsy reflections came the unfamiliar strain of piano music: not “music” precisely, but bunched notes. He might not have recognized them as piano notes, had he not known that in the flat overhead, the vacant one, was an old grand piano. Jury sat up suddenly, staring at his ceiling. There had always been that piano ever since the three of them—Jury, Mrs. Wassermann, Carole-anne—had lived here. No one knew where it had come from and it was the only piece of furniture up there. Not even Mr. Moshegeiian knew the origins of the piano; he could not remember any of his tenants having one. Jury remembered his saying, with his little purse of a mouth opening and shutting on a laugh, that perhaps it would attract “an artiste.”

  Plink. Keys on the high end of the scale. Plink. Slightly lower. Plunk, plunk. Silence. Perhaps Mr. Moshegeiian had sent someone over to clean and air the place. Since when? Jury scratched his head. Moshegeiian never did anything; he left it up to Carole-anne. But Carole-anne’s virtuosity was exercised only in interviewing prospective tenants (for all the good it did them). Clanging pipes, dripping faucets, creaking boards, falling plaster—these were not in Carole-anne’s provenance, their course not decided by crashing stars or colliding planets. Pipes and plaster were Jury’s job.

  Plink. Plunk plunk plink. He kept looking upward. It was as if a child might patiently be trying to teach himself a tune. He left his flat and climbed the stairs to the first floor (each flat taking up one entire floor, which seemed spacious until one realized how narrow the terraced house was). He stood outside the door for a moment, listening. He heard nothing. He knocked, lightly. No answer. He knocked again. No answer, again. Jury scratched his head again in perfect cartoon rendition of a puzzled man. He listened, ear close to the door.

  A mystery.

  • • •

  “PIANO MUSIC?” Mrs. Wassermann looked at him curiously. Then she looked down at his feet. “You’ve forgotten your shoes, Mr. Jury.”

  As if only crazy shoeless people heard piano music. “I went upstairs and knocked. Nobody answered and the music stopped.”

  She was twisting her intertwined, chubby fingers, and seriously considering this problem. “Do you think it’s the dog?”

  Jury blinked. “Well, no, I actually didn’t think that. I still don’t.” Sarcasm fell wide around Mrs. Wassermann. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mrs. Wassermann.”

  “The dog in the first-floor flat.” As if that were adequate, she turned toward her kitchen. Jury trailed after her as she said, “I’m just taking my nut-and-ginger cookies out of the oven, Mr. Jury. Your favorite. Come and have some.”

  Mrs. Wassermann always assumed everything was Jury’s favorite. “Why is there a dog in the first-floor flat?” He didn’t want to ask why it was playing the piano. The dog itself was enough to contend with.

  She stopped and turned. “You mean Carole-anne didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what? That she let the flat above me to a dog?”

  Mrs. Wassermann, who seldom laughed, did now as she bent down to open the door of the oven. “It belongs to the new tenant, of course. He moved in this morning while you were at work.”

  Jury was stunned. Then he was mildly furious. “What new tenant? I talked to her not two hours ago. She didn’t say anything to me about letting—”

  Mrs. Wassermann stood there with her big red oven mitts on, shaking her head. “I told her she should wait until you returned. ‘Wait until Mr. Jury returns, Carole-anne,’ I told her.” She raised the red mitts toward the kitchen ceiling as if enjoining either God or the dog to hear her pleas. Then, her stagy bit over, she bent to slide the cookie sheet out of the oven. “But Carole-anne said it would be perfectly all right, since he was your idea in the first place.”

  “My idea? Mine? Mrs. Wassermann, I don’t know what in hell—excuse me—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He said this slowly and evenly, as if calm would restore the Islington house to its former three-person occupancy. Sans dog.

  “Well, it’s very strange. He’s your friend. That’s what she said. ‘Stanley’s a friend of the super.’ ”

  “I don’t know one living soul named Stanley.”

  Now Mrs. Wassermann looked very upset. “You don’t? But Carole-anne stood right there. . . . ” Sadly she shook her head. “Why would she lie about that?”

  Oh, ha. “What’s he like? I mean besides being extremely good-looking, somewhere in his mid-twenties, early thirties, very available, and—colorful, let’s say?” “Flash git” would be nearer. And he’d just managed to get rid of Randy Tyrone, too. That flat had stood vacant for years with Lord only knew how many people turned away by Carole-anne because they didn’t meet the Palutski standards.

  “So you do know him!” Mrs. Wassermann held out a plate of cookies.

  Absently, Jury took a cookie, shaking his head. “I’m merely listing the credentials. Does this Stanley shill in Piccadilly or Oxford Street with his performing dog?”

  Inwardly, he fumed. Bloody dog upstairs. To say nothing of bloody Stanley. Jury muttered under his breath as Mrs. Wassermann poured him a glass of milk.

  “Now, now, Mr. Jury. It is definitely not like you to lose patience. Your patience is your most lovable quality.” She patted his arm and held out his glass of milk.

  He drank. “I don’t get it. Why’d she say he’s my friend?”

  “Because it is you who introduced them.”

  “Me? Look, Carole-anne’s gone round the twist, or something. She’s been doing too much star gazing. I think we should be worried about her.” Jury held out his glass for a refill and munched his cookie.

  “We’ve never had a dog before.”

  This did not strike Jury as being of primary importance. They’d never had a Stanley before, either. “What kind of dog?” What a stupid question.

  “Labrador. Stanley says he’ll be a good guard dog for all of us.”

  Oh, hell, people that wanted in always said that. “When somebody breaks in, he runs them off with Mozart? Or maybe he tells us, ‘Now, if you hear Adagio in G Minor, it means they’ve got guns’?”

  Mrs. Wassermann sighed. “You’re not taking this very well. I told Carole-anne you’d be upset. I said, ‘Carole-anne, dear, Mr. Jury—’ ”

  “Okay, o-kay. What’s this guy do for a liv
ing? I mean besides shill?”

  “He plays gags. I’m out of milk.” Mrs. Wassermann was peering in her fridge.

  Jury stopped in the act of picking up the cookie plate. “He plays gags?” He thought he was going quietly insane, right here in Mrs. Wassermann’s kitchen.

  “But that’s all right. The dog will be down in a moment. It’s nearly one.” She was rinsing out the pint bottle.

  Was he actually having this conversation? Or had he fallen asleep upstairs and dreamed it? He clutched the plate of cookies, as if its concreteness would lend him strength.

  There was a knock at the door. A sort of knock, anyway.

  Mrs. Wassermann went to the door with the empty bottle and didn’t even bother checking the peephole before opening it. Obviously, the visitor was expected. And welcome. “Come in, come in and meet your new neighbor.”

  A dog of a beautiful caramel color entered. He was wearing a red bandanna round his neck.

  Jury looked at the dog. Where had he seen this dog before? Where?

  Mrs. Wassermann reached down, held out the bottle, and the Lab took it between his teeth.

  Where had he seen this dog with a bottle in his mouth—?

  “STONE!”

  “You see, I knew Carole-anne wasn’t lying.”

  “Is Stanley’s last name Keeler?”

  “See, you do know him. Carole-anne wouldn’t lie.”

  “Stan Keeler’s a professional musician.” Jury remembered Stan’s club, the only one he played in—the Nine-One-Nine, that small and smoky blues cellar where Jury had gone to question him about the case he’d been working on. Stan was an underground musician with a dedicated underground following. A great guitarist. “Stan plays guitar, Mrs. Wassermann.”

  “That’s what I said.” She waggled her finger at him.

  “You said he plays gags.”

  She nodded, happy that Jury seemed to be his old pleasant self once more.

  “Stan Keeler.” Jury bent down to give Stone’s back a good rub. Stan played gags and Stone played piano.

  FOURTEEN

  Jenny hadn’t been in the house on Ryland Street. He had been worried, decided perhaps he could ask Sam Lasko to keep an eye out. But then he had decided not to mention Jenny; it was absurd suspecting something had happened to her simply because she’d been out so much. She was starting up a business, after all.

  Sam Lasko paused and looked away, thought for a moment, shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what was in it. “You’d think with all the work on my desk Lincolnshire wouldn’t be asking me to keep an eye out.”

  Immersed in his own reflections, Jury almost thought he’d voiced them. “What?”

  “I said I’ve got too much to do without following somebody around for the cops in bloody Lincoln.”

  Jury didn’t know what he was talking about, except that Lasko wanted help. Jury’s help. “Look, I’m sorry, Sammy, but I just don’t have time to—”

  Paying no attention to what Jury didn’t have time for, Sammy opened a file, turned it so Jury could see it. While he talked, Jury recollected that case eight years ago in Stratford that Sammy had got him to investigate. Americans, too, in that one.

  “Are you listening?”

  “No.”

  Lasko looked so bereft that Jury felt irrationally guilty. “I’m on my way to Wiltshire, Sammy. I only stopped here to see a friend.”

  “Lady friend?”

  “Someone I’ve known for years. Anyway, I’m on my way to Wiltshire.”

  “Who in hell ever goes to Wiltshire?” Lasko never stepped more than a foot beyond the city limits of Stratford-upon-Avon unless a case demanded it. “You’re not talking about that American? The one they found at Old Sarum? You mean the Wiltshire police asked for help? Hard to believe.”

  “It’s pretty involved, Sam. No, they didn’t ask for help from us. And I’m sure they don’t want it, either.”

  Especially Chief Inspector Gordon Rush, he thought, sliding from Lasko’s desk.

  FIFTEEN

  “A Roman privy,” said Gordon Rush. “Helluva place to drop dead. Funny.” But he wasn’t amused.

  Jury was sliding a necklace over his fingers, one found among the dead Angela Hope’s effects: a semicircular silver pendant, like an upside-down crescent moon, studded with turquoise and with a turquoise bird inset on a bar. He turned from this to the file and the morgue shots, spread out before him. He pulled one of the photos closer. “You don’t think maybe she just slipped? If she was, say, trying to come down this worn grass above the garderobe?”

  “No. She would have clawed dirt, grabbed whatever she could to break the slide. She didn’t.” Rush held up his own hands, turned the palms.

  “Uh-huh. Then what—?”

  “Could’ve been pushed, could’ve been murdered before and brought there.” Rush shrugged. “A lot of things could’ve happened.”

  “No one saw anything?”

  “No one to see anything. What tourists there were had already left, and the ticket kiosk is out of visible range; I mean, the National Trust people who were selling tickets were inside.”

  “And it was one of them that found her. What in hell was he doing on the site at five a.m.?”

  “Said he liked to go there, liked to walk early and see the sunrise. Anyway, she died ten hours prior to that. Probably around sunset, just about when they’d be shutting down. Around six.” Rush was in the act of lighting a cigarette.

  Jury picked up the necklace again.

  Rush watched him studying it. “She’s a silversmith. Was, I mean.”

  “Turquoise and silver is fairly common in the American Southwest.”

  “You, too?” Rush finally lit a cigarette with the lighter. The Zippo clicked three times like a tiny metal mouth.

  Jury raised his eyebrows. “Me, too?”

  “There’s a divisional commander in Exeter—name’s Macalvie—with a flea in his ear. I used to work under him. Mad Dog Macalvie, we called him.”

  Jury swallowed laughter. “What’s the flea?”

  “A connection between my lady and his—”

  Lord, but they were possessive as lovers, weren’t they? thought Jury.

  “—because there’s a Santa Fe address in his lady’s address book. Something to do with a place or a road called—” still flicking the lighter, Rush thumbed his memory as if it were a Rolodex—“Canyon Road. Angela Hope had a shop there.”

  The silver crescent swayed on the chain looped over Jury’s finger. He studied it. He said, “But it does seem damned coincidental.”

  Rush tossed the lighter on his desk. “ ‘Coincidental’ is precisely the word.”

  Jury took Lady Cray’s turquoise sculpture from his mackintosh pocket. “This was brought back by my lady—” he smiled briefly—“from New Mexico. Albuquerque, perhaps. Taos or Santa Fe, perhaps. Any tourist who’s found her way to Albuquerque would almost certainly go the extra fifty miles or so to Santa Fe. Or so I’m told.” Those windows in Harrods had been a real treat. Sensational, the Southwest looked. And the big attraction in the Southwest was Santa Fe.

  Rush picked up the turquoise block. “Who’s the little guy?” His finger tapped the silver flute player.

  “Kokepelli,” said Jury. “Some god or other. Indian, I expect. Could we assume, for the sake of argument—?”

  Rush put this down in a hurry. “I’m not known to do much for the sake of argument, Superintendent.” The smile was just slightly superior.

  Jury ignored him. “Frances Hamilton died in January, couple of weeks ago. The cause appeared to be heart trouble. Like Angela Hope. And she had been in New Mexico this past November. Probably in Santa Fe, although I haven’t verified that. The thing is, there was no reason then to question her death.”

  “So what’s changed?”

  A woman named Helen Hawes, Jury wanted to say. But if Rush knew he was here at Macalvie’s insistence, the man would clam up completely. Jury hated egos getting in the way of investigati
on. Macalvie, who was supposed to be consumed by ego, would have been far more interested in the connection between the women than in whether some other police force might be “interfering” in his investigation. “The question’s been raised whether she might have been poisoned.”

  Rush was turning the Zippo round and round in his hand. “Why’s that?”

  Was he being deliberately obtuse? “She apparently got quite ill before she died. The symptoms sounded much the same as the American woman’s.”

  “You’re exhuming the body, then?”

  “Possibly. Of course, you wouldn’t have that problem,” said Jury.

  “The symptoms of a coronary mimic those of a number of poisons. Nausea, vomiting. But since no one saw the effect of whatever it was, we can’t say what she went through. Were there convulsions? Coma? So it’s difficult to say whether the cause was natural or drug- or poison-induced.” Rush looked at him and turned the lighter.

  “You said a cousin flew here to identify the body.”

  “Dolores Schell. She just left. Two days ago.”

  “No closer family? Parents? Siblings?”

  “Siblings, yes. Or one. A younger sister. The cousin volunteered because she thought the sister would be too upset. And the kid’s so young.”

  Jury sat back. “How young?”

  Rush flicked his eyes over the papers before him. “Thirteen.” He flicked the top of the Zippo. “Name’s Mary.”

  Jury picked up the photo of Angela Hope, facedown on the ground. “Mary. What about relations? I mean, who’s going to take care of Mary? Her cousin?”