Thai Die

by Monica Ferris

  But even this accumulation of expertise and experience couldn’t keep up with demand, and by two in the afternoon they were all feeling frazzled.

  When the phone rang, Betsy, hoping someone else would get it, let it ring six times before grabbing the receiver. “Crewel World, Betsy speaking, how may I help you?” she said all in a rush.

  “Miss Devonshire?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m calling on behalf of the Minneapolis Art Institute.”

  Oh God, a fund-raiser! “I’m very sorry, but I can’t talk right now. I’m at work, and we’re very busy.”

  “On a Saturday? Oh, of course, you’re the one who owns that little shop in Excelsior! Oh, I am sorry! I don’t suppose you remember me, I’m Joe Brown, I’m on the board of directors of the institute.”

  Betsy summoned a vague image of a tall man in a black felt hat. “Oh, yes, I think I do remember meeting you.”

  “But please don’t spend another second chatting with me—I’ll call you back some other time. Good-bye.”

  Well, that was a pleasant surprise, Betsy thought as she replaced the phone on its charger. Normally, getting rid of people out to raise money was like peeling wallpaper with your fingernails. Maybe the rules were different when it was a member of the board calling. Betsy had raised her pledge to the institute considerably in the past two years. Maybe that warranted a higher class of money-grubber.

  “Hey, Betsy, how come you have the green Paternayan yarn on sale but not the pink?” asked a customer, and she dismissed Joe Brown to plunge back into the fray.

  With all that was going on, Phil Galvin and Doris Valentine went unnoticed for a minute after they entered the shop. Godwin saw the scared look on their faces and wove his way through a mass of shoppers. “What’s up, what’s the matter?” he asked.

  “It’s Dorie’s apartment!” Phil said in his loud old-man’s voice—he was a little deaf.

  Heads turned toward him and he said, “We’re fine, we’re fine!” Shoppers turned back to their search for the perfect bargain.

  Doris spoke more quietly, though her voice was trembling. “We just went up to my apartment,” she told Godwin, “and someone’s been in there. The place is a wreck. I want to phone the police.”

  Doris lived in an apartment on the second floor of the building, and Betsy was her landlord. “Haven’t you got a cell phone?” Godwin asked, a little surprised.

  “They don’t have a volume control that goes high enough for me,” said Phil in a hoarse whisper.

  Doris said, “And I can’t figure them out. And we couldn’t call from up there; the advice I’ve always heard is not to stay in a place where a burglar’s been at work.”

  Phil said, “We were wondering if we could . . .” He looked around at the seething crowd in the shop and finished, “But I guess not.”

  Godwin said, “Here, let’s step outside, away from all these people.”

  They did, and Godwin dialed 911 on his cell. “There’s been a burglary at Two Hundred South Lake Street in Excelsior, in an upstairs apartment.” He explained that he was not the renter, Doris Valentine was, and that she would be waiting at the bottom of the stairs for the police to arrive.

  “I’m going back in to tell Betsy,” he said upon disconnecting. “Stay with her, Phil.”

  “Oh, yes, don’t worry about that,” said Phil, putting an arm around her shoulder. “Come on, Dorie, let’s get you in out of the cold.”

  They’re so sweet together, Godwin thought. He went to tell Betsy what had happened. “Are they all right?” was her first question. Reassured, she then asked, “When did this happen?”

  Godwin stared at her briefly, then smiled. “I bet it didn’t happen in broad daylight. I bet it happened last night. When she wasn’t there.”

  Betsy stared at him for a moment, then smiled back. “That’s cute!”

  “Let’s not ask them, because then they’d have to lie, and it’d be cruel to do that to them.”

  “Well, the police are going to ask Doris why she wasn’t at home,” Betsy pointed out.

  “Fine. Let her lie to them. But don’t you ask her, and I won’t, either.”

  “All right.” She looked over Godwin’s shoulder. “Yes, Mr. Woodward, what can I do for you?” Gary Woodward was a high-schooler who was both Betsy’s computer expert and a superb knitter. He loved exotic yarns but could only buy them on sale.

  Godwin smiled at Gary and went to help Mrs. Anderson pick two shades of maroon yarn for a sweater she wanted to knit.

  In a very few minutes a squad car, lights flashing, pulled in to the curb in front of a fireplug. A police officer climbed out and went into the center door of the building, where a staircase led up to the second floor. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and for an instant Betsy wondered if he was her good friend Lars Larson. Then she remembered that Lars had been promoted to sergeant and was pretty much working a desk nowadays. He didn’t like it, but with a pregnant wife and a toddler already in the household, he couldn’t afford to remain just another officer on patrol.

  “What’s going on?” asked Gary.

  “I don’t know,” Betsy said falsely, as others turned to see what he was talking about. No need to slow the sale while curious customers crowded the front windows to stare. “Do you want all four of those skeins?”

  A few minutes later, a dark sedan drove past the big front window of Crewel World and turned into the driveway leading to a small parking lot behind the building. A minute after that, a man crossed in front of the shop. He was slim under his lined raincoat, and his thin mouth was pulled a bit sideways. Betsy recognized Sergeant Mike Malloy, one of Excelsior’s two police investigators. He didn’t even glance into the shop but went through the door that led upstairs.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes later, she saw he was back out front. He paced slowly up and down the sidewalk, his breath smoking in the cold air, obviously waiting for someone. It took a while, but finally he raised one arm to signal a big brown van that pulled up beside some of the cars parked at the curb.

  Along the length of the van were two horizontal stripes of blue and gold over a thin red line. Above the stripes the word SHERIFF was printed in gold letters, and below it, in smaller letters, HENNEPIN COUNTY. Inside the van rode an investigative team authorized to assist at crime scenes with technology smaller departments could not afford. Three people climbed out of the front seat—two women and a man—and Mike moved to greet them. They all wore the heavy brown jackets and gray trousers of the sheriff’s department. As they spoke familiarly with Malloy, they opened the back of the van and the man went in to retrieve a video camera and several heavy cases. Mike gestured at the center door, and they all followed him into the hallway that led upstairs.

  Betsy sat down at the big old desk that served as a checkout counter. So Mike thought that what happened in Doris’s apartment was more than a simple burglary. She wanted badly to go up for a look—and it was even possible she had a right to, since she owned the building. On the other hand, Mike would be annoyed. And it wasn’t as if the shop could spare her. She sighed and turned around to sell Gerry Schmidt a counted canvas pattern of three ornamental teapots. Gerry was the only customer in several hours who wasn’t buying yarn.

  But the next customer wasn’t a knitter, either. She was Lena Olson, and she was here to pick up a large canvas that Betsy had special-ordered for her. It was by Nikki Lee, and it was a sensitive, hand-painted rendition of Kaguya-hime, Japanese goddess of the moon, rendered in delicate pastels. It was two feet wide by three feet high, and the mere sight of it brought several customers over to exclaim over its size and beauty. Lena was going to work it in silk, a costly fiber which would bring the cost of stitching this project to well over $1,000. Those customers who realized this whispered the information to some of the others, and the crowd around the desk grew large.

  Betsy and Lena ignored them and went over the silks Betsy had selected for her—a service she offered to all her customers. Lena made
only one change, from a pure pink to something with a hint of apricot in it, a color that matched her hair.

  Then Lena got out her checkbook with only a tiny sigh. Betsy sighed, too, as subtly as she could—a sale isn’t made until payment is rendered—then smiled with deep sincerity as she put the check in the drawer. But she could not resist trying to add to her profit. “I hope you will bring it back when you’ve worked it, so my finisher can do a really special job for you.”

  “I will—but it’s going to take me a while.” She held up a paper bag bulging with silks and watched anxiously as Betsy rolled the canvas up and taped three of strips of paper around it to hold it closed.

  “This is going to be a fantastic heirloom piece,” said Betsy, covering the roll with a layer of thin green florist’s plastic and taping that in place. “Now if you get stuck for a stitch or anything, I want you to bring it in to Godwin. I had to hold him back when he saw it so the drool wouldn’t get all over it. If you had backed out of buying it, I think he was prepared to sell his car to get it for himself.”

  Lena laughed. “I’ve been wanting this for a long time—no way was I going to back out! I can’t wait to get started. But thank Godwin for the offer to help, I’ll probably take him up on it.”

  Lena left amid a murmur of congratulations only slightly tinged by envy. Then the watchers rejoined the rest of the shoppers.

  In about half an hour, Mike came down, followed by Phil and Doris. Phil was looking angry, Doris distraught. “I’m taking her home with me,” Phil announced, and marched off with her.

  “Good idea,” said Betsy, and watched them go. Poor Doris, she thought, wondering if the burglar had taken all her lovely souvenirs. And poor Phil, too.

  “I want to talk to you,” Mike said.

  “All right. But I don’t think I can tell you anything much. Do you want to talk in Doris’s apartment?”

  “No, the sheriff’s department is still working the scene. Let’s just go into the back hall.”

  “All right. I can get you a cup of coffee as we go through.”

  “Thanks.” She and Mike threaded their way through the maze of customers and display racks to the back of the shop. This was where counted cross-stitch patterns and supplies were displayed, and there were far fewer people there. Through another door they went into a small back room where Betsy kept stock that needed frequent replenishing and where a coffee urn and tea kettle stayed warm. They paused briefly while she filled a cup with coffee, black, for Mike, then went through yet another door into a back hall.

  There, she turned and found him looking at her with chilly blue eyes. In the past several years, he had gone from active dislike of Betsy’s sleuthing efforts to wary admiration. But no admiration was visible now; Mike was seeing her as a possible witness, maybe even a hostile one.

  He asked, “When did you see Ms. Valentine last?”

  “Yesterday, Friday. She came in to tell me she’d delivered a stone statue of the Buddha to an antiques shop in St. Paul.”

  “Did she say she had any trouble with the owner of the store?”

  “No. She said he examined the statue very carefully, because she had opened the box it came in and showed it to us and he was afraid that it might have been damaged. But he saw it was fine, and then he thanked her for bringing it all that way from Thailand to America.”

  “Anything else?”

  Betsy thought. “Well, she said the person who was going to buy the statue might have been waiting for it, because when she got back to her own car a woman got out of a Hummer parked in front of the shop and went in. She thought the woman might have been waiting for her to leave.” She raised a questioning eyebrow at Malloy. “What’s this about, Mike?”

  “How long has Ms. Valentine lived in that apartment?”

  “Nearly six years.”

  “Any trouble with her?”

  “None. She’s very quiet, pays her rent on time, doesn’t give loud parties, doesn’t break things. Plus she’s nice, a little shy but sweet.”

  “Does she normally go off without telling anyone where she’s going?”

  “No, at least not for more than an overnight trip somewhere. She has a cat—oh!”

  “What?”

  “Is the cat all right? She was looking so upset when she came down just now . . .”

  “He’s fine. He was hiding in the back of her bedroom closet. Not a mark on him.”

  “That’s good.” Betsy smiled. “I suppose I shouldn’t have worried—she named him Waldo because he can be very hard to find.”

  “The deputies are very good seekers.” Was his thin mouth tweaking because he was amused? Or was he trying not to show annoyance? He finished making a note, then asked, “Who was closest to her, family or friend? Besides Mr. Galvin, that is.”

  Betsy had to think about that. “Well, I guess her best friend is Carmen Diamond. I don’t know Carmen very well. Shelly does—they’re both schoolteachers, and they both have dogs. Carmen’s not a stitcher, so I think I’ve maybe talked to her twice.”

  “Do you have her address or phone number?”

  “No, but Shelly does.”

  Mike made a note. “Who else?”

  Betsy named Shelly, Emily, Bershada, and Alice, of the Monday Bunch, and gave Mike their phone numbers.

  “Is there anything that strikes you as odd about her? Could she be a secret drunk? Does she light bonfires in the park and dance naked around them?”

  Betsy smiled. “I really don’t think so.”

  “Yet she ups and goes to Thailand all by herself.”

  “Oh, that. She and Carmen Diamond were supposed to go together, and when Carmen had to back out, we were kind of surprised that she decided to go alone. But she said she’d always wanted to spend some money foolishly, have an adventure, go someplace exotic. And she needed some kind of surgery, something elective, and she’d heard the hospitals in Thailand were far less expensive than here but just as good. Her surgery went well, and she had a marvelous time. She sent us an e-mail almost every day she was over there, telling us what she’d seen and done, and we loved hearing about her adventures. And she came home with some wonderful souvenirs.”

  “What kind of elective surgery?”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  Mike just looked at her, and Betsy said, “I don’t know what it was, Mike—but she came home looking awfully good. Very rested.” She smiled at him, eyebrows raised.

  Mike smiled back. Once upon a time, when a movie star had a face-lift, the euphemism often used to describe the improvement was, “she looks very rested.” He flipped back a couple of pages in his notebook to read something. “Now, tell me about this statue she brought home from Bangkok.”

  “She brought two. One was a bronze of an elephant-headed god named Ganesha.” She stopped to look inquiringly at him.

  “Yes,” he said nodding, “it was on the floor in her living room.”

  “Ah. The other was that statue of the Buddha.”

  “What does the Buddha statue look like?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “Yes, but you tell me, too.”

  “Well, it’s about this high.” Betsy held out her left hand, her right hand hovering about seven inches above it. “Some kind of light-colored stone, fairly heavy. It wasn’t the fat, bald, Chinese kind, but slim, and standing up, not sitting. If Doris hadn’t told us it was a statue of the Buddha we never would have guessed it.”

  “We?”

  “The Monday Bunch, the people who come in on Monday afternoons to stitch. She brought in her suitcase full of souvenirs on Wednesday, and we had a special meeting to see them. We saw the box the Buddha was in, and made her open it.”

  Mike nodded. “Go on.”

  She described the statue. “Doris said it is an ancient form of the Buddha, but that the statue is a modern copy.”

  “Is it possible the statue is really old?”

  “I don’t know. She said it wasn’t—that is, the person who a
sked her to bring it here told her that. I saw no reason to disbelieve it. Mike, what’s the problem here?”

  “Didn’t you hear about Mr. Fitzwilliam on the news?”

  “No, I must’ve missed it. What about him?”

  “Fitzwilliam was found in his St. Paul antiques store around noon on Friday, dead. Murdered. And his store was trashed about as thoroughly as Ms. Valentine’s apartment.”

  “No! Oh my goodness, that’s dreadful! That’s . . . that’s horrible! Oh, and you think this burglary is related to . . . But how can that be? She took the statue over there! Why would they come to her apartment? What are they looking for?”

  Instead of replying, Mike asked, “Did you know that Ms. Valentine bought a gun?”

  “No, she didn’t. Phil bought it for her. I didn’t know anything about it until Phil mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. But that can’t be significant, since she didn’t buy it for herself. Is it missing?”

  “No,” he said. “It was up there, in her bedroom.”

  “Was Mr. Fitzwilliam shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “With Doris’s gun?”

  “Probably not. Though we’re waiting for the complete autopsy results, he was shot with a small-caliber gun, probably a twenty-two or twenty-five, and the Valentine gun is a thirty-eight.”

  “So her gun wasn’t taken?”

  “No, it was found on the floor of her bedroom. Ms. Valentine said she kept it inside a pillowcase.”

  “So what is missing from up there?”

  “Ms. Valentine says a piece of handwoven silk brocade, a ruby necklace and earrings, and a silver ring, all bought in Thailand. And her laptop.”

  Betsy said, “That sounds pretty much like a burglary to me.”

  “Well, the stone statue of the Buddha she says she took to St. Paul wasn’t found in the Fitzwilliam store. And it isn’t in her apartment, either.”

  “You think she didn’t take it over there? And that it was taken from her apartment?”

  “What do you think?” He narrowed his eyes, reluctant to admit he really wanted her opinion.

  “Of course she took it over there. The way she talked about going over there, the story she told of his reaction, it was all too complicated to be anything but the truth.”