Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

  I returned to the site and pondered as the sun set. Since my visit there was later in the year than the date of the picture, the sun set further south than it had in Ottilie’s landscape: at almost at the exact center of the picture plane. But it had been a clear week for that sodden part of Maine, and it was a similar sunset to the one she had painted, pale purple infusing the gray sky, mauve and pale magenta streaking it all.

  It was almost dark and I was hungry and decided to leave the spot and thus escape the ferocity of the local mosquitoes when I couldn’t help but notice a new streak of color in the sky, opposite to where I sat. It was very thin, quite fugitive really, but unusually colored, almost cantaloupe in hue. And once I stared, directly in front of it was its cause: a tiny speck of silver outlining the fuselage of a jet plane. Could that be what Ottilie had been pointing to at the time of her death? Not the island, but the jet? And had she painted not the date of the crime, as I’d thought, but perhaps a date connected to that jet’s flight?

  I grabbed my photo of her landscape and there it was, the same streak, same color, although the sky around it in her painting was, naturally, far brighter. I checked my watch: 8:36. It must be a transatlantic jet from New York or Boston, flying to Europe. I knew from my own flights that all North Atlantic jets crossed the ocean substantially north to take advantage of the curvature of the earth, making for a shorter-than-direct flight. They usually crossed somewhere near Fundy or Halifax, Canada.

  When I returned home, I checked with an airline travel agent. The flight I’d probably seen, she assured me, was the American Airlines 4:15 departure, flight number 414, from Logan Field in Boston, headed to Heathrow Airport, outside of London.

  Now all I needed was a passenger manifest for that particular day’s flight. This was more difficult, perhaps the most difficult part of my investigation. But in the end, and with me having to pay a bit for it, not impossible to obtain. After weeks, and through stratagems too tedious to go into, I finally did get it. I then compared the names of all the passengers on the jet that day to those on the lists prepared by Susan Vight.

  The name jumped out at me. Alexandra Fairchild, of 20 Bethune Street, in Greenwich Village, New York.

  Now all I had to do was to link her to Donald Horace Scott.

  *

  There are three leading incentives for people to commit murder, human nature being, if anything, consistent: for love (or out of jealousy), for money, and for revenge. Anything else is usually pathological, and thus far less easily understood. I assumed that one of those three standard reasons would do for Alexandra Fairchild. Since she was presumably Scott’s lover, love seemed to be only partly right—although he might have cheated on her, or tried to ditch her, which would make the third incentive, revenge, a good motive. But there was always the second, and strongest one—money.

  I went to Bethune Street one afternoon and was surprised not to find the name Fairchild listed among the five tenants of the building. I rang the bell of the lowest floor, the one belonging to one Helena Preston. When this elderly, and as it luckily turned out, garrulous, woman answered in person, I said I was a friend of Donald Horace Scott and was looking for him. Didn’t Miss Fairchild live in the building? Hers was the last address Scott had given me, a few years ago.

  Helena Preston sized me up, then liking what she saw, or at least not hating what she saw, and bursting with news, although it was already fairly old news to her, she invited me inside for a cup of tea, where she gently broke the news to me about Donald’s death. She added that Alexandra Fairchild had moved out of the Village flat a year ago.

  “She was very broken up about poor Donald’s death. And in such mysterious circumstances too. Poor dear,” the woman commiserated.

  I composed myself in such a way to show that while I was grieved I was even more curious. Little by little and without a great deal of my probing, she let out this information. First, her surprise that Donald had given me this particular address, as he’d never “officially” lived there. Second, her own belief that Alexandra had thrown over Scott less than three months before his disappearance. And third, that Miss Fairchild had come into “a lot of money,” probably, Preston hypothecized, from a legacy, some nine months after Scott’s death.

  Money it was, then. More than likely an insurance policy Scott had taken out with Alexandra as beneficiary. The banal, alas, is all too often the right answer.

  “She was away when it happened,” Helena Preston said, nodding upward, to where I suppose Fairchild had lived. “She was in England at the time. She’d gone there looking for work. Doubt she needs to do that any more, lucky thing.”

  That clinched it for me. Alexandra had told the old snoop that she’d gone away two days before Scott’s death, whereas I knew that her air reservations shown me that she’d gone away two days after: more than enough time to have murdered Scott in Maine and then driven or flown down to Boston to make flight 414.

  I spent the next week checking insurance policies. There are about a dozen insurance companies of any size in the area. I thought surely Scott would have bought a policy from one. I wasn’t wrong. Calling—in another disguise, as a lawyer for James L. Horace, who I claimed was Donald Horace Scott’s younger, half brother—I soon found the company that had sold Scott insurance. It was for a payout of a whopping three-quarters of a million dollars. And the beneficiary was—you guessed it—Alexandra Fairchild, whom they now listed as living at the posh address of 920 Fifth Avenue, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

  This was the last piece of information I collected, and subsequently brought to Detective Compson at the Homicide Division of the New York Police Department. He looked me over very carefully after I was done explaining what I’d discovered. The procedure had lasted about two hours, with him all but grilling me, questioning every step I’d taken, every bit of logic I’d followed.

  “That’s a lot of work. Why bother?” he asked.

  “Who else is going to bother?” I asked back. Then, to soften the sarcasm, I added, “I’ve known Ottilie Chase since she was sixteen years old, longer than anyone else you talked to. I knew she wouldn’t commit suicide, no matter how depressed and anxious she might have become. And also I took her death personally.”

  Compson said that what I had provided was circumstantial evidence, if quite good circumstantial evidence. Even so, he would need time to prepare a scheme to do a more solid, a more “prosecutable job” were the words he used, connecting Alexandra Fairchild to the two murders. However, the fact that Fairchild was a known acquaintance of Ottilie Chase’s (a fact I’d really not been aware of) would help my case. He might pretend he was asking questions about Ottilie’s life, then he’d try to catch her out in some discrepancy. He was certain he could end up bringing her down to the station house and grilling her until he’d entrapped her or gotten a confession from her about Donald Horace Scott. He thought that would naturally lead to the landscape and to Ottilie’s death. He was so busy planning out these varied stratagems, he didn’t even thank me when I finally left his office.

  *

  My work was almost complete. It lacked one more finishing touch, much the way an artist—I could picture Ottilie herself doing it—will stand back and view what appears to be a finished painting for a long time, almost as though gloating over her triumph, then suddenly dash forward and instantly add in a line here, a dab there, a tiny crosshatching somewhere else, and only then be sure that the work is finally done.

  Because Ottilie’s aged mother had not yet arrived in Manhattan to dispose of her daughter’s possessions—the body had been shipped to Oregon for burial but nothing else had gone there—I suspected that Ottilie’s studio was probably still intact, and, I supposed, probably not much touched, besides whatever desultory searching the police might have done. In short, it ought to have been just as it was when she had put down her paintbrushes and palette, cleaned her hands and face, removed her working smock, and cabbed uptown to her triumph—and her demise.

&n
bsp; I phoned Anthony Eldridge and told him I’d been talking with Detective Compson, who had reopened the case as a homicide investigation. I told Tony that a break was imminent in finding Ottilie’s murderer. I needed to get into her studio to check one final clue. Had the studio been sealed by the police? And if so, did he still have his key?

  It had not been sealed, Eldridge told me. When he and Ottilie were still together, he’d signed a new lease for the studio drawn up in both of their names, and it was now, legally, in his name. He planned to hold on to it until Ottilie’s family had emptied the place. then he’d release it back to the landlord. As for getting the key, yes, he’d loan it to me. Did he want me to join him?

  “Sure. Do you really want to go there again?” I asked, fairly certain of his answer.

  “I don’t ever want to step into that place again.”

  So we agreed that he would messenger the key over to my home. It arrived an hour later. I waited for dark before I set off for West 27th Street.

  The building contained dozens of working lofts with a plastic belt factory occupying the lowest floor. This being New York City, two keys were needed to get into the building, a third to open and operate the elevator, and a fourth for the studio itself.

  Once inside, I breathed a sigh of relief, then put on one dim light—I didn’t want neighbors to know anyone was present tonight. Even by that small amount of illumination, it was easy to find what I was looking for. What I suspected—expected was more like it. It was sufficiently completed for me to recognize it, although evidently not finished enough to be exhibited. And it appeared to be Ottilie Chase’s very last hauntingly eerie landscape, since it was still sitting on an easel in the middle of the studio with a drop cloth over it and the surrounding area strewn about with several tossed-down instruments of her labor. Perhaps she’d stopped work to get dressed and go to her vernissage, I mused.

  It was another of her uncanny sunsets, if rather everyday in its choice of location compared to many others: the north slope of Fort Tryon Park, in western upper Manhattan, not a hundred yards from the outbuildings of the Cloisters, that medieval stone fortress brought to America and rebuilt, stone by stone, to grace the New York palisades. As usual, Ottilie had gotten the look of the place perfectly: the eroded red-brick underpass, the cement block paved path leading from the museum, the usually hidden hollow between two large, untrimmed oak trees, the path that disappeared through the underbrush. She, of course, had the date correct: October 27, 1995, at 6:37 p.m., the exact time that—after stalking a young teenage student from a local Catholic high school as she dawdled her way home—I waylaid her, at that very spot, pulling her between those trees where I bound her, gagged her, raped and sodomized her before strangling her to death. I had then pushed some leaves over lovely Holly Caputo’s body, brushed the damp leaves off my clothing, and found my way to the Fort Tryon bus, back down to mid-Manhattan where I’d enjoyed a fish dinner at Howard Johnson’s on Times Square, then seen a quite bad action movie.

  Now, of course, seeing it, I had to wonder, naturally enough, if Ottilie was planning to mention the new painting to me after her show’s opening, at dinner. Perhaps not, perhaps she was planning to ask me up to her studio for a nightcap, and then she would just spring it on me. Despite what the others, including Tony, had told me, it still wasn’t all that clear to me how she herself deemed these revelations.

  Saddened and upset as she must be, I couldn’t help but also sense Ottilie’s innate mischief in catching someone out in wrongdoing. Especially an old pal like myself. She might have been plotting how she’d get me up to the studio while she waited for me at the gallery that night. (“You like these? I’ve got better ones. Want to see?”) But of course that was far too late, wasn’t it? Auburn and Susan had already sent out a few hundred postcards depicting that other, that beautifully incriminating, landscape: a virtual invitation, never mind incitation, for someone to come murder her.

  Naturally I destroyed the Fort Tryon Park landscape. I took it down off the easel, ripped it off the support she’d been using to paint it on. Once off, I cut it into fragments, which I placed in a small plastic bag I’d brought. Later on, in my apartment, I burned those fragments in the fireplace to ash as I sat listening to a Brahms string sextet. The second one, in G, with the lovely minuet? I’d just opened a fine, old armagnac I’d been saving up for just such a future celebratory occasion. The painting flamed quite prettily: all those tints and colors. Very autumnal.

  You see, most of us have our dirty little human secrets: some moment when temptation was simply too irresistible. And a person like Ottilie Chase who somehow or other stumbled onto those secrets without knowing what they were, perhaps without even wanting to know, but unable to stop herself from painting them…well, poor thing, she couldn’t be expected to live very long, could she? If Alexandra Fairchild hadn’t poisoned her, well, I might have had to do it at a later time myself. Or someone else.

  Who knows, perhaps even you might have had to do it.

  About the Author

  Felice Picano is the author of over twenty books, including the literary memoirs Ambidextrous, Men Who Loved Me, and A House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay as well as the best-selling novels Like People in History, Looking Glass Lives, The Lure, and Eyes. He is the founder of Sea Horse Press, one of the first gay publishing houses, which later merged with two other publishing houses to become the Gay Presses of New York. With Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Edmund White, and George Whitmore, he founded the Violet Quill Club to promote and increase the visibility of gay authors and their works. He has edited and written for The Advocate, Blueboy, Mandate, GaysWeek, and Christopher Street, and has been a culture reviewer for The Los Angeles Examiner, San Francisco Examiner, New York Native, Harvard Lesbian & Gay Review, and the Lambda Book Report. He has won the Ferro-Grumley Award for best gay novel (Like People in History) and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award for short story. He was a finalist for the Ernest Hemingway Award and has been nominated for five Lambda Literary Awards and two American Library Association Awards. He was recently named a Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer and one of OUT’s GLBT People of the Year. A native of New York, Felice Picano now lives in Los Angeles.

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