Now the Widow was literally chest-to-chest with Harris. He’d be unable to get his gun free of its underarm holster without having to wrestle her for it. Now she was pressing even tighter against him, raising her black-gloved right hand above her head, fishing for the weapon she expected to find there. That was when Sarah shoved the cartwheel hat, wig and all, down over the Mona Lisa mask, grabbed two handfuls of the black mourning veil and crossed them at the back of the Widow’s neck, cutting off a howl the likes of which she hoped never to hear again.
“Shut up, Miss LaVerne, or I’ll strangle you. Lieutenant, get that mask off her.”
Sarah kicked contemptuously at the object which had fallen clear of the wig, a slim blade of polished steel about seven inches long, blunt all around and set into a sphere of black plastic about the size of a golf ball. “Was this the best you could do in lieu of a hatpin, Miss LaVerne? Handcuff her, Lieutenant, and tie her legs with this veil so she can’t try to run off. Just to put your mind at ease, Miss LaVerne, we have all seven of your hatpins, the six that Dolores had kept in the bank and the one you’d already used to kill off the rest of the Widows and goodness knows how many others before poor Dolores inadvertently crossed you up about that safe deposit box she’d been paying your rent on all those years. I’m afraid this is the end of the Wicked Widows, Miss LaVerne.”
Chapter 24
MOST EMBARRASSINGLY, THE LAST of the LaVonne LaVernes was also Mrs. Elwyn Fleesom Turbot. And crazy as a coot, which came as no surprise to Sarah Kelling Bittersohn. Once Lala got it through her head that she’d been duly trapped and put out of commission, she began to talk. She talked all the way in the police van, at the station, in the lockup. There was no stopping her short of a bullet or a hatpin.
Sarah didn’t get to hear much of Lala’s ramblings firsthand. However, Lieutenant Harris was kind enough to stop by the Tulip Street house when at last he could get away from that human talking-machine to take a statement from Sarah and a well-earned drink from Charles.
“That Mrs. Turbot’s really something else, I can tell you. The Wicked Widows thing was all her doing. She’d got bored with her husband of the moment—she’s a lot older than she looks, in case you hadn’t noticed—and talked a few of her girlfriends, who must have been as crazy as she is, into getting an act together. She could talk anybody into anything, it seems; she was like a witch or something. I don’t know how many poor slobs she married. I figured it as seven verifiables, five probables, about twenty possibles, and the rest doubtful. Some of them survived the marriages, I don’t know how many didn’t. There seem to have been a disproportionate number of suicides that will have to be checked out, not that it’s going to help the poor guys now.”
“What about the twins?” Sarah asked him.
“Oh, Mrs. Turbot’s pretty bitter about that pair. They’re her own sons and they’ve done her wrong. They stole her hatpin and brought it to your husband’s office because they were afraid she intended to kill their stepfather with it and keep them from inheriting his cattle, of which they seem to be quite fond. They didn’t seem to be showing any qualms about having tried to run you down, Mrs. Bittersohn, but their mother’s furious with you for having been so discourteous as to survive after they’d gone to the bother of running your obituary in the paper. Somehow or other, Mrs. Turbot’s decided this mess was all your fault. She made a big scene in the van about the jewels you and Dolores Tawne allegedly stole from her.”
“How so, Lieutenant?”
“This one’s straight off the wall. It seems that when she was a young girl, back in the early fifties, she’d heard her father talking about this man Turbot who’d inherited a lot of valuable stickpins. He kept them in some hiding place where nobody ever got to see them, so I don’t know what good they’d be to him, but there they were and she wanted them, sight unseen. His people were pretty well-heeled and he stood to inherit the family business, so it looked like a good deal all around to—Laura, was it?”
“Could be,” said Sarah. “I’ve only heard her called Lala. Charles, please cut Lieutenant Harris another sandwich or two and make some coffee. He’s had a hard day.”
“So have you, Mrs. Bittersohn.” Harris reached for a sandwich. “Thanks, Charles. So anyway, the girl never forgot about the stickpins but she never happened to run across the man who had them. That didn’t slow her down any, she married two or three or four different guys and organized her Wicked Widows troupe to relieve the monotony. That was how she got involved with Mrs. Tawne. Thinking ahead, she got her to rent a safe deposit box to be held in LaVonne LaVerne’s name until such time as she’d need it to hold all those fabulous stickpins she was going to wheedle out of Turbot after she’d got her hooks into him.”
“So she just kept on marrying and tossing out the rejects until the big fish came along, is that it?” Jeremy Kelling asked.
“That’s it in a nutshell, Mr. Kelling. As you can imagine, she had to be out of the country pretty often on account of her peculiar hobby, but eventually she came back and who should she run into at some charity ball or somewhere but Mr. and Mrs. Elwyn Turbot. So she made sure this was the Turbot with the stickpins and sharpened her own trusty hatpin. Two months later, Turbot was a widower. That was kind of a poignant moment,” Harris reflected. “There we all were in the van, her babbling on like a brook and him not saying a word for most of the ride. But when she got to the late Mrs. Turbot, the poor guy lost it. ‘You killed Agnes?’ he bellowed. ‘Damn it, Lala, I liked Agnes!’ ”
Chapter 25
WHETHER THE TWINS WHO had been so effectively brainwashed by their mother could ever be turned into normal human beings had developed into a subject for warm public debate by a covey of psychiatrists. Whether Lala Turbot had ever been or wanted to be anything but a serial killer of a peculiarly seductive type was not even debatable; she had regressed to a howling madwoman, treatable only by heavy sedation and physical restraints.
The death certificates on the six other LaVonne LaVernes that Sarah had suggested Lieutenant Harris look up early in the game were also public property by now and giving the media a prolonged Walpurgisnacht such as the old Hub of the Universe had not experienced since the panic over the Boston Strangler back in the early fifties. Sarah was not interested, she had more important matters on her mind.
Max was home from Argentina, in fine fettle and in time to see the hillside at Ireson’s Landing ablaze with autumn color; to hold his wife and his son in his arms again; to show Sarah the rescued Watteaus and get her somewhat expurgated report on the doings at the Wilkins Museum. Brooks, Theonia, and Jesse were back from a tour that had proved to be both informative and lucrative. Jesse had demonstrated himself able and eager to take some of the traveling off Max’s shoulders and give him more time with his family.
Miriam and Ira, home from the lake, were revving up for Mike’s wedding. Ira’s present to the bride and groom would be a 1956 Ford Thunderbird, magnificently restored by his own hands; Miriam’s, a wonderful set of high-tech cookware and a file of her own recipes to get the newlyweds off on the right foot, foodwise. The Rivkin and Bittersohn grandparents were clubbing together with Sarah and Max to complete the renovations that had been started some time ago on Sarah’s Victorian carriage house. The newlyweds would be at liberty to use the place year-round until such time as they might choose to live elsewhere; which they probably wouldn’t because, as Mother Bittersohn sensibly pointed out, why should they?
Having brought back the missing Watteaus, Max Bittersohn had naively expected this to be the end of his connection with the Wilkins. Instead, he found a shambles. The museum’s chatelaine had been murdered and its just-elected chairman of trustees forced to resign because of his marital ties to her murderess. Titian’s original, unequivocally genuine, Rape of Lucrece had been discovered, at the suggestion of Mrs. Sarah Kelling Bittersohn, hidden in Turbot’s barn behind a meretricious parody of a farmyard hoedown painted on century-old boards that had deserved better treatment. Turbot w
as trying to claim that he’d only been storing Lucrece as a favor to a friend, but skepticism was rife.
Turbot ran into another snag when Max came up with a detailed monograph on the Turbot stickpin collection, published privately forty-six years ago and bearing a sad little penciled-in postscript giving the date on which the stickpins had been found missing. The great-uncle from whom Turbot claimed to have inherited them was by now long dead; there seemed to be no proof that young Elwyn had actually robbed his own great-grandfather but neither was there anything to show that he hadn’t. Max foresaw a family wrangle on the scale of the Eustace Diamonds; he was glad he didn’t have to get mixed up in it.
As to the Wilkins Museum’s staff, if such it could be called, Vieuxchamp had proven himself a broken reed. The guards whom Dolores had picked were no more capable than he. The only member who knew what to do and how to do it was the self-effacing veteran whom Vieuxchamp and his satellites had scornfully dubbed Milky.
Joseph Melanson had weathered his false arrest and his heart attack, he’d come out of the hospital not quite a new man but certainly a more interesting one. His close brush with death and the concerned support he’d been given had created a fresh incentive to live. With nobody bullying him, his old friend Brooks lending moral support, and the beauteous Theonia cooing at him over the teacups, Melanson was able to overcome his shyness and reel off anecdotes always interesting, often funny, sometimes even a tad risqué about the museum where he’d been for so long a part of the woodwork.
That was all changed now. The enfeebled board of trustees had voted unanimously to give their ablest and most respected employee the position Mr. Fitzroy had held. Now he was Mr. Melanson to everybody except the egregious Vieuxchamp, who called him Joseph to his face and followed him around trying to persuade the other guards that Vieuxchamp was still really the man in charge, which didn’t fool them a bit.
Still, the Wilkins lacked a head of trustees. Max Bittersohn was offered the position, or any other position that he might consent to take, but declined. A museum whose exhibits had been acquired almost a century ago and had to be kept exactly where Madam Wilkins had put them offered no enticement to a man in the prime of life with a zest for action. What this museum needed was a curator in the simplest sense of the word, somebody to take full charge over what was already there. Since this can of worms had been handed to Sarah at the beginning, it was only fitting that she should be the one to put the lid on, and she did.
“We’re off the hook, Max! I’ve asked her, and she’s willing.”
“Who’s willing to what?”
“Aunt Bodie, of course. She’s the ideal head of trustees. She was a docent at the Museum of Fine Arts for years and years, she’s chaired a zillion committees and fund drives. She’ll have the Wilkins whipped into shape in a matter of months, she’ll keep it running like a trainman’s watch. She’ll organize a Friends of the Madam’s group, give teas for all the society editors, and spearhead a drive that will put the palazzo back in the black in no time flat. You’ll see.”
Max was unconvinced. “That’s a long commute every day for a woman who still drives a beige-and-gray 1946 Daimler.”
“It won’t be a commute at all. She’s planning to sell that great ark of a house which neither of her children nor her children’s children will ever want to live in, and move into the palazzo.”
“Huh?”
“Like everyone else, you forget about the apartment Madam Wilkins kept for herself on the top floor. It’s never been shown to the public and doesn’t count as part of the museum, so she can just move in and do as she pleases. Within reason, of course, but Aunt Bodie is never unreasonable. There’s a tiny elevator that goes all the way from the cellar to the penthouse, which is another thing nobody remembers; Aunt Bodie’s going to have it put back in running order.”
“Great, she can give rides at a buck a time for the good of the cause. What sort of shape is the apartment in, or shouldn’t I ask?”
“Not too bad. Dolores used to see that it was cleaned every so often. The plumbing’s a disaster, that antique Boston fine-thread tubing which hadn’t been changed since the palazzo was built is in a state of total collapse, of course—the zinc in the brass alloy rots away and the whole system falls apart if you so much as look at it—but she’s planning to install copper tubing all through at her own expense. If Madam Wilkins’s ghost drops by to register a protest, she won’t get far with Aunt Bodie.”
“That I can believe,” said Max. “What about the heat and lights? She’s not going to electrify the place, is she?”
“Oh no, she’d never do that. She claims she doesn’t mind a bit reading by gaslight and keeping the apartment warm with gas logs and coal fires. That will mean heating the whole building enough to keep the pipes from freezing, but Aunt Bodie will underwrite the costs until the museum is solvent again. She’s filthy rich, you know, though she doesn’t look it.”
“So all’s well that ends well.”
Except that Dolores Agnew Tawne was dead. Sarah didn’t quite know how she felt about Dolores, even after the soul-searching she’d done at odd moments when she’d got the chance. There was no question that Dolores would have taken an awful beating from the media if it had ever leaked out that she’d been the master forger who’d made the Wilkins a laughingstock, and also a confederate of the Wicked Widows. And it would have leaked out; Lala LaVonne LaVerne would have seen to that if she hadn’t gone too far around the bend. Why were there always willing victims waiting around for the torturer to show up? Sarah decided not to think about that.
“You know, Max, I had to search Dolores’s studio. One thing I couldn’t understand was what she’d done with so many of the copies you’d given back to her, until Joseph Melanson enlightened me. It turns out that he owns quite a big house in West Roxbury that he inherited from his mother. From some things he said and a few more that he didn’t say, I gathered that Mrs. Melanson must have been something special in the blood-sucking line, which may explain why he hid out in the back rooms at the Wilkins all those years. Anyway, Dolores got the bright idea that Joseph should turn his house over to her and refurbish it as a museum where the paintings she’d done for the Wilkins could be permanently on display.”
“And what was he supposed to do then? Rent a houseboat?”
“Good question. I don’t think she gave much thought to that part of the program. Anyway, Joseph had sense enough not to go for it, but he did hang some of the paintings in his living room to shut her up for the time being. His own idea is that the paintings might be used to teach art appreciation in schools, taking them around a few at a time, giving the teachers information that they could pass on to the pupils in an interesting way, then letting the pictures hang in the classrooms for a while so that the children could get a feeling for real painting instead of stupid television. I think he ought to get together with Aunt Bodie and talk it over, don’t you?”
“Sure.” Max gathered his wife into his arms. “So you didn’t even miss me. Good going, fischele. What are you planning to do for an encore?”
Sarah told him. Max was none too happy, but he acquiesced.
Autumn went out in a blaze of glory, the wilted chrysanthemums in the Wilkins’s courtyard made way for the holly and the ivy and pots of poinsettia red, pink, and white. Then came the New Year and time to close the museum for its annual three-month shutdown, during which period everything that needed to be done would have been done skimpily or not at all if Boadicea Kelling hadn’t been right there wielding a duster with the best of them. After the drab walls had been repainted in their original vibrant colors, the rotten draperies replaced by new fabrics woven to order in the same patterns and shades that Madam Wilkins had picked out, the dulled gilding burnished anew by the skilled hands of Lydia Ouspenska, and all things made as bright and beautiful as they had first been gazed upon by the awestruck guests at Madam Wilkins’s opening party, there was to be a gala reopening that would kick off a fund drive such as
the Madam had never dreamed of but would surely have applauded.
The work was done and, thanks to Boadicea’s formidable powers of persuasion, done on time. Now there were only the fresh plants from the Madam’s greenhouse to be set into the redug and replenished flower beds. On the Monday before the Sunday that was to be the grand reopening day, a small group of persons associated in their various ways with the Wilkins Museum gathered at the corner of the courtyard that had been Dolores Tawne’s favorite spot.
As they stood around on the mosaic walks, accompanied by a few of Dolores’s old friends the peacocks, one of the trustees who had known her the longest delivered a short eulogy and said a little prayer. Then Sarah Kelling Bittersohn stepped forward and opened a small rosewood casket borrowed from one of the exhibits. Reverently and a bit tearfully, she spilled out the contents onto the fertile soil and stepped back. As the gardeners raked what was mortal of their late associate into the place where she had asked to be let lie, Brooks Kelling affixed a small brass plaque to the courtyard wall behind them. It read simply:
DOLORES AGNEW TAWNE
1933–1994
A gifted artist, a dedicated worker, and a staunch friend of the Wilkins Museum
There be of them that have left a name behind them.
And that was that. As they walked away, Max asked his wife, “Where did you get the quote?”
“It’s from the Apocrypha via Bartlett’s,” Sarah told him. “I’m not altogether sure what it means, but it seemed to fit the purpose. Did I mention that Aunt Bodie’s invited us to tea in her aerie? It’s just as well the Madam can’t be here, she never did get on with the Kellings. But then neither did lots of other people. Come on, darling, I think the Wilkins owe me a cup of tea.”
The Odd Job Page 25
