Thai Die

by Monica Ferris

  But: “What kind of a car is this?” he asked, surprising her.

  “It’s a 1911 Stanley Steamer,” said Lars, glancing around at it. Even with its top down, the car was taller than he was. The brass surround of its bolt-upright windshield and large headlights gleamed in the failing light, and its green finish was without flaw. Its big wheels had wooden spokes, painted yellow. A startling touch was a big brass dragon resting on the right front fender, mouth agape. Betsy considered running behind the car—she was sure it was bulletproof. Could doing that get her enough time to pull her cell phone out and dial 911?

  Oh, wait. Her cell phone was in her car; she’d dropped it when Joe had opened her car door.

  Joe said wistfully, “I wish this weren’t happening. I wish we were meeting here as friends. Then I might talk with you about this car. Instead, things are about to get a little tricky.”

  White-faced Doris took a step backward, trying to put the fender with the dragon on it between herself and Joe, but he took two steps sideways and one step closer so she remained within range of his gun.

  “Don’t move, sir!” he said to Phil, who had been about to put himself between Doris and Joe. Phil hunched his shoulders and balled his fists but obeyed. “Oh, you haven’t been protecting her by your silence, you know,” said Joe. “I know she’s Doris Valentine. If she had just done what was asked of her, we’d all be just fine.” His voice was weighty with anger and unmade threats.

  Betsy said quickly, “Joe, I’ve left phone messages all over the place, saying you’re the murderer they’re looking for. What good will it do for you to kill us?”

  He sneered, “Oh, I’m sure you’d like to convince me of that. But what if you can’t?” He pointed the gun at her. “In fact, what if I start off by—”

  And suddenly there came an enormous rushing sound. A warm thick fog billowed forward and outward, doubling in sound and size as it did. It clogged the air, engulfing first Joe, then the rest of them. It was warm . . . Oh! Not fog, Betsy realized. Steam. Blinded, she put her hand out and found the smooth side of the car. And that was when she heard a loud, shrill scream, louder than any human throat should produce. She could feel the metal vibrate under the racket.

  “Down! Down!” shouted Lars, barely audible over the scream, and Betsy immediately fell on her face. Was the car going to explode?

  A shot was fired. The scream was silenced. Had the screamer been human after all?

  Then sounds of struggle could be heard: feet scraping, blows being struck, grunts. The steam seemed to roil and Betsy thought she could see figures struggling in it. “Grab his other arm!” Phil shouted. “Ow! Let go!” There was a heavy thud—a body falling?—and more grunting. Then she heard a metallic clatter and slide, and the gun suddenly bumped up against Betsy’s side. Joe’s gun. Betsy concealed it with an arm.

  “Gimme your hand!” That was Lars. “Gimme your hand!”

  She heard the scraping of feet. The sound of a punch landing, a man’s cry of pain. A curse, more grunts and struggling, a sharp, cracking punch, then a panting voice—Joe’s: “Stop it! Stop it! All right! All right, I quit!”

  A small scraping sound of metal closing on metal—Handcuffs, thought Betsy—then Lars calling, “Shut that valve off!”

  The rushing noise diminished and finally stopped. The steam rolled upward, thinning as it went. In seconds the air was clear.

  “What the hell was that?” demanded a rumpled Joe from on his knees, his fine coat pulled crookedly on his body, the effect underlined by his arms pulled behind his back. A bruise was forming on one cheekbone. He was getting up, roughly helped by Lars and Phil. The coats of all three were marred with clean and dirty snow.

  “Just letting off a little steam,” said Lars, pulling Joe the rest of the way to his feet. “Good work, Phil. And that was well done, Doris!”

  Betsy, climbing slowly to her feet, said, “Was that you?”

  Doris, speaking for the first time, said modestly, “I just opened the steam relief valves and blew the whistle.”

  “That’s my girl!” said Phil, grinning at her. She looked at him then, and matched his grin with one of her own.

  Just then, a very strange sound, a kind of eerie howl, started coming from the car.

  Joe staggered backward in alarm, stumbling over the heaps of frozen snow that lined the drive, pulling Lars along with him.

  “Get back here, you jerk, it’s all right!” said Lars, dragging Joe forward again. To the others he explained, “The old car sings when she’s building a head of steam. Or rebuilding one.”

  “Shouldn’t take long,” said Doris. Still standing on the running board, she leaned over the door to look inside. “There’s still about three hundred p.s.i. in the boiler.”

  “That damned old contraption ought to be against the law,” grumbled Joe, embarrassed.

  “Why, Joe, I thought you just loved antiques!” said Lars.

  Phil hustled over to help Doris off the running board. He reached out with a gloved hand and caressed the Stanley’s flat fender. “Thank God for this old contraption!” he said loudly, in his deaf old man’s voice. Then with the same hand, he patted Doris on the shoulder. “And God bless my brilliant, quick-thinking honey!” he added, only a little less loudly.

  “Amen,” said Betsy to herself, and sat down hard on the running board.

  Twenty-four

  AT the police station, Joe was read his Miranda rights. He stared at the uniformed police officer reciting them, eyebrows raised, and when the officer concluded, “Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?” he nodded. “Do you wish to waive your rights and answer questions at this time?”

  A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “Considering the circumstances of my arrest, I don’t think it matters, does it? So yes, of course I’ll waive . . . No, hold on. Maybe . . . maybe I’d better not. I think I ought to at least talk to a lawyer.”

  He was shown to a phone and, since he had no idea whom to call, was permitted to select a name from the phone book. He chose the biggest ad for a criminal defense attorney in the yellow pages, dialed the number, and got an answering service. He was served a lukewarm cup of black coffee while he waited for an attorney to call him back.

  Betsy, meanwhile, sat with Doris and Phil in the lobby of the police station under the cool eye of the watch sergeant behind his desk. It had been nearly an hour since they had arrived, and no one had spoken to them other than to ask them to sit down and be patient. Betsy was starting to feel hungry and was thinking of asking the sergeant if they could send out for something when Mike Malloy strode in.

  His thin mouth was reduced to a mere line, his eyes were narrow under brows drawn together. He was white with anger, making the freckles strewn across his nose and cheeks look as dark as currents.

  She felt a stab of alarm. What was he angry about? Who was he mad at?

  She stood and received another shock as his cold blue eyes slammed into her.

  “You,” he said, pointing at her. “Follow me.” He turned and walked away, confident she would obey.

  She did, down one corridor, then another. In front of a door in the hall stood Lars, who had somewhere along the way gotten into uniform. When he saw them coming, he straightened into something like attention and reached for the doorknob.

  But Mike waved dismissively at him and turned to the other door, which led into his small office. Betsy followed.

  She’d been here before, had seen its two metal desks pushed head to head, its twin posture chairs behind them, the identical hard chairs pulled up beside them. Mike pulled off his overcoat and hung it on a wood and brushed-metal coatrack in the far corner. He turned and sat at the neater of the two desks and gestured for Betsy to sit down.

  Betsy wanted to know if Carmen had been released. She wondered if Mike knew that Joe Brown was the real murderer. Had anyone told him of their recent adventure in the Larson front yard?

  But there is a time to speak and a time to keep silent.
Betsy felt this was the latter. She sat and bit her tongue.

  “First of all,” said Mike in a thin, hard voice, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when Dr. Brown decided to prove your theory that he was a murderer. I’m very grateful that I’m not standing out at the end of Weekend Lane counting bodies and collecting evidence. It seems you—all of you, Lars, Ms. Valentine, Mr. Galvin, and yourself—behaved with great courage. You did a very stupid thing going out there, but the four of you brought down a dangerous man using nothing more lethal than a steam-powered automobile.”

  Betsy felt her lips begin to tremble and pulled them into a smile. “Thank you, Mike. But I wasn’t brave—Doris was the brave one. I couldn’t think of anything but running away. I was so . . . so scared . . .” To her dismay, she began to cry.

  “That’s not the way I heard it,” Mike said. He leaned sideways to open a bottom drawer and lift out a box of Kleenex, which he handed to her.

  She didn’t allow the storm to last long; she knew there was a lot of official paperwork to do and didn’t want to slow up the process and keep them here all night.

  She blew her nose one last time and said, “I’m all right now. What did you want to talk to me about?”

  There came a tap on the door, which opened just a few inches. Lars was on the other side. “You goin’ to be long?” he asked.

  “I hope not. Is someone talking to Ms. Valentine and Mr. Galvin?”

  “Yeah, Sergeant Windemere just got here.” Windemere was Mike’s partner, the occupant of the other desk.

  “Fine,” said Mike, nodding. He was pulling a yellow legal pad from the center drawer and apparently didn’t notice that Lars had carelessly pulled the door to without checking to see that it latched.

  He wrote something at the top of the blank page and said to Betsy, “Tell me about Joe Brown.”

  “He’s a murderer, Mike,” said Betsy. “He killed Lena Olson and he tried to kill Carmen, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the one who murdered poor Oscar Fitzwilliam, instead of Wendy. You check those fingerprints on the shells in the revolver—I’ll bet they’re his.”

  “How did you come to this conclusion?”

  “I started by thinking he might be the collector.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “Someone told me he was an expert in Asian art, that he already has a collection of very old and fine artifacts. Nobody else I know who was involved in this mess has those credentials. Plus, Wendy and Lena were amateurs, and probably Mr. Fitzwilliam was an amateur, too, so this was likely a local operation. That meant the buyer—the collector—was local. And he kept turning up, calling me every couple of days about raising my pledge to the art institute.”

  Mike stopped writing. “So?”

  “Well, it’s not time for the pledge drive to start. I didn’t realize that at first, it wasn’t until today that I called and found out the drive isn’t scheduled for another ten days. What he was really after was to know if I knew anything about Doris and the silk.” She smiled. “Funny thing, I actually told him about this old silk rag I found the second or third time he called. I started to describe it to him but got interrupted. And since I didn’t know what it was, my partial description was so far off he didn’t recognize it.”

  She stopped her narrative to ask, “Have you seen it, Mike?”

  He shook his head. “No. I’ve seen that photograph of it you obtained. I don’t think it’s particularly Chinese-looking, but I’m certainly no expert. Funny-looking animals, especially the bird. If you had described it so he recognized it, and he said he wanted it, what would you have done?”

  Betsy had to think about that. “I’d have said no. But he couldn’t have tried to buy it from me, not without hinting that it was something special. He had no claim to it otherwise.”

  “So the only way to have gotten it from you would have been to steal it. And you’d have ended up dead like Fitzwilliam, because he’d’ve had to kill you to keep you from telling anyone he was asking about it.”

  Betsy felt her mouth go dry. She swallowed hard and said, “That’s a very ugly thought.”

  Mike sighed, made another note, and asked, “Now, you say you didn’t ask about the fund drive until today. What made you suspect him earlier?”

  “I called him to ask him to get an appointment for me with an expert in textiles at the art institute, which he very kindly did. So, naturally, after I saw Dr. Booker, I told him next time he called that the silk I found wasn’t a variant on a contemporary design but an important silk artifact from the Han Dynasty. And he was terrifically impressed, of course. He asked me if I knew what a privilege it was to hold a piece of Mashan silk in my hands. But I never specified Mashan to him, so how did he know?”

  Mike wrote that down. “Nice catch,” he murmured.

  “Thank you. Mike, why did you turn off your cell phone?”

  “You mean earlier today? Because I was helping handle an arrest. Why didn’t you phone the police station in Wayzata?”

  “I did. But I didn’t know the names of the investigators over there, so I think the person I talked to only pretended to write down my message that they were arresting the wrong person.”

  “You were a little excited by then, probably?”

  Betsy felt herself blush. “Yes, probably. I may have shouted at her—the person who took the call.”

  “Uh-huh. Next time, don’t shout. So let’s get into the events of this afternoon. Why did you go over to the Larson place?”

  “I wanted to talk to you, I was hoping you were still there. But when I got arrived, no one was there at all.” Betsy described what happened next in as calm a voice as she could manage.

  When she finished, Mike said, “And you think you behaved badly? I agree Doris Valentine is the heroine here—she deserves a medal—but you were in there swinging, and never lost your head.”

  “If you could have seen me running up the drive, screaming my head off—”

  “That was exactly the right thing to do at that point. Yes, he shot at you—and missed, which is what happens ninety percent of the time. Don’t believe what you see in movies or on TV; even cops are lousy shots at anything more than four or five yards. If someone pulls a handgun on you, run. And scream. Maybe someone will hear you and call the police.”

  Betsy nodded. “Jill told me that once. And not to go with someone who gets into your car. Get out and run. Good thing I remembered that.”

  “Yes, because if you’d gone off with him, you’d’ve been a long time gone.”

  There came that gentle tapping on the door again. Betsy turned. The door swung halfway open and Lars stuck his grinning face in.

  “There’s someone wants to talk to you,” he said.

  “Who?” asked Mike.

  “Dr. Joseph Brown. He’s in the room across the hall. It seems I accidentally left your door open and then I accidentally left his open, too.” He nodded sideways. “He’s right across the hall. I guess he overheard you two in here and realizes he’s cooked.”

  “Hasn’t he lawyered up?” asked Mike.

  “He called one,” said Lars, “but he asked if he could call back and cancel.”

  “Did you let him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, don’t. Let the lawyer get here so Doctor Joe can tell him in person. And call me when he arrives, I want at least three witnesses.”

  MIKE asked Betsy to sit tight and went out to speak to the attorney when he arrived. The man wore a face famous from television ads. He was calm, sincere, deep-voiced, and, after several minutes talking with Joe in front of witnesses and several more alone, convinced. He shrugged, bestowed business cards on anyone who’d take one, and went home.

  But Joe was convinced, too. Given the Miranda warning yet again, he waved it off saying, “I could hardly be more busted than I already am, right? So never mind, never mind. Ask me anything you want.”

  “Who shot Oscar Fitzwilliam?” asked Mike at once. They had gone into the polic
e station’s tiny interrogation room, a bare, spare place with a small wooden table and two hard wooden chairs, all bolted to the floor.

  “I did. It was an accident, really. Wendy went to get the silk and he said he didn’t get it from the courier, Doris. Wendy believed him, but I didn’t. She brought the carved stone Buddha away with her as proof that Doris had come in. This was the fifth or sixth item Oscar had handled for us, but far and away the most costly, and I thought he was getting greedy. I went down to put the fear of God in him, and while I was waving the gun under his nose, it went off. I didn’t mean to kill him. I searched the place but couldn’t find the silk. And now I know he wasn’t trying to steal it from me, I’m . . . sorry it happened.”

  His confession was being watched by several people, investigators from Wayzata and St. Paul—and Betsy, too. They were in Mike’s office, gathered around his desk, looking at a television monitor. A tiny, discreet camera in an upper corner of the interrogation room broadcast a picture of Joe sitting upright in his chair, a pose somewhat at odds with his relaxed tone of voice. The picture was in poor-quality black-and-white, and the microphone hidden with it could have been replaced by two tin cans connected with string and gained somewhat in fidelity.

  Joe burst out, “Nobody was supposed to get hurt! What we were doing was illegal, of course, but not dangerous or even, to my mind, wrong. Museums routinely acquire more things than they can display. Most of their beautiful artifacts are hidden away, did you know that? Only a fraction is on display at any given time, so people who might appreciate them never get to see them. My way, at least one person, a person who could care for them as well as any museum, who would lay loving hands on them, admire them. And it wasn’t like I was depriving the world of them forever. I had a codicil added to my will that these things I had to keep hidden were to be brought out and given—given—to the art institute.”

  “I’m sure the art institute will be very grateful to learn its gifts from you came over the dead bodies of citizens of the greater Twin Cities area,” said Mike dryly.