A Fatal Frame of Mind p-4

by William Rabkin

  “That’s wonderful,” Lassiter said. “Maybe I need to talk to some ignorant people for a while. Spencer?”

  “Should I tell you who did it, or wait until we’ve got all the suspects together?” Shawn said.

  “Are you actually going to pretend you know who committed this terrible crime?” Lassiter said.

  “Not yet,” Shawn said. “But I never know when the spirits are going to speak to me. Or what they’re going to say. Right now they’re so busy telling me how good I look in a tuxedo, they don’t seem to have time for anything else.”

  “Just get out of here, Spencer, and let the grown-ups do our jobs,” Lassiter said. “I promise you we’ll bring you back when it’s playtime.”

  Shawn turned hopefully to O’Hara. “It’s always playtime for me,” he said. “Want to come?”

  “Not now, Shawn,” she said. “You and Gus run along.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” Shawn said. “Gus?”

  But Gus was still staring down at the body on the floor. And then he followed the professor’s eyes back to the painting. A long-haired woman stood in the center of the picture, her arms outstretched. Behind her were a couple of knights in armor. She faced what must have been a throne, although it was seen only from behind. And leaning against that throne was a sword.

  A long, wide sword.

  Just like the one sticking out of Filkins’ body.

  Chapter Seven

  In his long career on the force, Carlton Lassiter had sat across interrogation room tables from hundreds of junkies, winos, and meth-heads, and he knew all the tells. The constant fidgeting, the eyeballs shooting to the exit door, the beads of sweat appearing at the hairline: all these were signs that the interview subject cared only about getting out of the room to get his next fix as fast as possible.

  But Lassiter knew Langston Kitteredge wasn’t a junkie, and he wasn’t jonesing for a dime bag or a dollar bottle. What he wanted-what he kept claiming he needed-was to see that painting again.

  Lassiter had explained over and over again that the crime scene techs were scouring the gallery for forensic evidence, and that as soon as they were through he would personally drive the professor back to the museum and they could look at the picture together. Every time he said this, Kitteredge settled down and started back in on his story. But before more than a couple of minutes had passed, he’d start fidgeting again.

  At first Lassiter had been pleased at the professor’s eagerness to cooperate. Once everyone in the gallery had realized that there seemed to be some kind of connection between the painting hanging on the museum’s wall and the body lying on its floor, the detective knew he needed a little background information on the picture.

  Since the museum’s executive director seemed to be slipping into a state of shock, Lassiter sent him off with the paramedics, who had arrived to make sure none of the museum patrons were similarly suffering, and turned to the only other person in the place who claimed to have a clue about the painting.

  Kitteredge seemed happy to be asked. At least, he did until Lassiter made it clear that the conversation would have to take place at the police station. The professor would wait for him there while he finished up with the crime scene.

  It was another hour before Lassiter was able to turn the museum gallery over to the techs and race back to the station to talk to Kitteredge. In that time he’d learned a few details about the crime that made it look even more puzzling than he had originally imagined. For one thing, the sword sticking out of the victim’s chest was not the murder weapon. His throat had been slit with a much smaller blade, and only when he was dead had the killer used the sword. That explained why there had been so much blood on the floor, but it raised several questions of its own. Like why use a knife when you have a sword?

  Even questions that should have had easy answers turned out not to. The sword was, as Kitteredge had said, part of the museum’s collection, but while the museum staff were busily reviewing their records, no one could seem to figure out exactly where the weapon had been before tonight, or who might have moved it, or when. And while a major art museum is usually as well surveilled as any public institution short of an international airport, all the security cameras in this gallery had been turned toward the walls. When Lassiter asked when and why this had been done, he learned it had been earlier in the day, on the specific instructions of the victim.

  The crime scene techs were scouring the gallery, but there was almost no chance they would turn up any usable forensics. Between the removal of the last exhibit and the installation of the new one, dozens of workers had tramped through the room, all dripping DNA wherever they went. The only hope was to find something on the sword, but that seemed to be as clean as on the day it was forged.

  That made this interview with Kitteredge even more crucial than Lassiter had originally thought. Lassiter had asked the professor to take a little time to think through the most important information about the painting and consider any way in which it might inspire a killer. When he got back to the station, Lassiter asked the professor if he’d had any thoughts on the subject.

  That was five hours earlier.

  He hadn’t asked another question since. He hadn’t had a chance.

  Kitteredge started off with the story of the painting’s acquisition by the museum. Before he began, he said it wouldn’t take much time, as he’d written out a brief version to deliver to the patrons at tonight’s event. And it might not have, if he’d been able to stick to a single point. But early in the proceedings he’d realized he had to clarify one tiny bit of information about the nature of the art market in nineteenth-century England before he could adequately explain how odd it was that this particular picture came to be held by a private owner without ever having been publicly exhibited. And as soon as he started down that path, he discovered that Lassiter did not have a complete understanding of the place of the Royal Academy of the Arts in relation to the marketplace, and that in turn led him to a parenthetical disquisition on the question of George III’s historical role as patron of the arts. And the only interruptions in the lecture came when Kitteredge suggested again that it would really help if they could continue their conversation while looking at the picture.

  Not that Lassiter was sitting quietly during this entire peroration. One of the skills necessary to detective was the ability to steer any conversation toward his desired goals, and Lassiter had always prided himself on his technique in this area.

  But steering Kitteredge had roughly the same effect as nudging a supertanker with a stick. He barely seemed to notice the interruption, except occasionally to say he’d get to that point in just a moment.

  After a long tour through the politics of the art world in eighteenth-century England, Kitteredge finally returned to the general period of the painting’s conception. Since he still had another hundred and fifty years to go before the painting would make its appearance on the wall of the Santa Barbara Art Museum, Lassiter excused himself to use the bathroom, grab another cup of coffee, and bang his head against the wall until the pain on the outside began to even out the throbbing that came from within.

  He’d stayed out of the interrogation room for as long as he could possibly justify, and then kept away a little longer. He checked through phone messages on his desk, and when he couldn’t find any that needed answering in the middle of the night, he checked several other detectives’ desks.

  Now he was out of excuses. He’d given the obvious one away to his partner when he told her to look into the victim’s life, see if she could come up with any plausible motives for murder, and check his movements for the past couple of days. There were financial records to dig through; relatives, friends, and possibly lovers to contact; enemies to sniff out and track down. They’d have to interview all of the curator’s colleagues at the museum, and at other museums in case there was interinstitution rivalry. It seemed ludicrous to think that someone who had spent his entire life looking at pretty pic
tures could have the gumption to commit a murder like this, but if the new acquisition was as significant as Kitteredge believed, was it impossible to consider that a competitor might have thought that Filkins had crossed some ethical line in snagging it and felt a need for revenge?

  Of course, this was work that could easily occupy two detectives full time, and he was burning to jump onto the more useful parts of the investigation. But he needed to finish up with Kitteredge first, even if that meant spending the rest of his natural life span stuck in the interrogation room.

  Lassiter took a deep breath and was attempting to brace himself for the onslaught of useless knowledge when the door to the observation room swung open and Detective O’Hara put her head out. He could see Shawn and Gus sitting behind her, smirking at his failure.

  “Are you almost done, Carlton?” she said. “There’s a lot of work to do on this case, and we don’t have all night for chitchat with the prof.”

  “If you think you can do it faster, be my guest,” Lassiter said.

  “Not after you’ve spent all this time building rapport with the man,” O’Hara said. “Now get moving. There’s a murderer out there, and we’ve got to stop him before he kills again.”

  Chapter Eight

  For the past five hours there had been nothing for

  Shawn and Gus to do besides listen to Kitteredge expatiate on a series of subjects, each of which managed to be less interesting to Shawn than the one before. At least, Gus kept telling Shawn there was nothing else for them to do.

  For his part, Shawn could think of plenty of other things. They could go home and go to bed, for instance. Or they could swing by the Bijoux and see if C. Thomas Howell’s appearance fee at the festival included sweeping up after the show. Or, as Shawn suggested after a particularly riveting aside detailing the chemical composition of oil paint and how it had remained remarkably unchanged over several centuries-unless it had changed equally remarkably over that same period, Shawn thought he’d dozed off somewhere in the middle of this passage-they could throw themselves off Santa Barbara Pier and see if they washed up in Japan before Kitteredge finished talking.

  When Lassiter stepped out to take his break, Shawn was ready to drag Gus out of the observation room even if it meant clubbing him over the head with a chair first. But his mood changed when he saw the detective heading back into interrogation. Lassie looked so defeated, so close to cracking, that Shawn knew whatever happened next was going to be good.

  Shawn pulled his chair up to the glass next to Gus’ and lowered the volume on the speakers as O’Hara stepped out to start making calls to museums on the East Coast, which would be opening for business about now.

  “Don’t tell me you’re finally going to admit this is interesting,” Gus said.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t,” Shawn said. “But maybe it will be in a minute. I think Lassiter got his gun during the break.”

  A look of concern flashed over Gus’ face, but he quickly dismissed the thought. “You just watch,” he said. “Professor K is going to tie this entire case up in the next couple of minutes.”

  “Professor K couldn’t tie his shoelaces without explaining the entire history of footwear,” Shawn said. “He hasn’t even begun to talk about the last century, let alone the current one.”

  “That’s his genius,” Gus said. “He talk and he talks, throwing out more fascinating facts than you think any one man could ever hope to know. And then, just when you think you’re going to float forever on an aimless sea of knowledge, he comes up with the one tiny piece of information that pulls it all together. It’s kind of like what you do in your summations.”

  “Except that my summations are never longer, duller, and more pretentious than The Matrix Revolutions,” Shawn said. “In fact, until tonight I didn’t think anything could be.”

  “Pretentious?” Gus was astonished. “Professor K doesn’t have to pretend anything. He’s the real deal. Everything he says is valid and important.”

  Shawn didn’t say anything. He reached over and flicked the volume back up again. Professor Kitteredge’s voice filled the small room. “You have to understand that according to the “Fifteen Discourses” that Reynolds delivered to students at the Royal Academy, the only way for a young artist to learn to create works of high moral and artistic worth was to copy the old masters and to sketch from-”

  Shawn flipped the volume down again. “Valid and important,” he said.

  But Gus was leaning forward in his chair, eyes lit up with excitement. “This is it,” he said. “Watch.”

  “Watch what?” Shawn said. “Is Lassiter finally going to use his nightstick?”

  “Kitteredge is about to make his point,” Gus said. “The one that’s going to tie this whole thing together. And probably even unmask the killer.”

  Shawn stared through the glass. All he saw was Kitteredge talking while Lassiter held his head in pain. “How do you know that?”

  “Didn’t you catch his tell?” Gus said.

  Shawn looked again and this time noticed that Kitteredge’s hand was fishing around in his left coat pocket. After a moment, he pulled out his old meerschaum and knocked it gently on the table.

  “You mean the pipe?” Shawn said.

  “Every time he makes a significant point, he takes that pipe out of his pocket,” Gus said. “In class, all the students knew they’d better write down whatever he was saying when it came out. Once he moves on to details, the pipe goes back into his pocket. I’m surprised you didn’t catch that.”

  Gus turned the volume back up to hear Kitteredge’s voice reaching a crescendo. “In fact, one of the core beliefs of the founding Pre-Raphaelite brothers was that everything Reynolds taught at the Royal Academy was corrupt. They believed that art had to draw its inspiration not from other artists but from truth, from nature, and from the beauty of the world.”

  Shawn stifled a yawn. “I did see him playing with the thing,” he said. “It just never occurred to me that any one of his endless sentences was supposed to be more important than any other. Of course now that I understand that the plebiscite brothers hated Reynolds Wrap, or whatever he just said, it all becomes clear.”

  “So much for the brilliant powers of observation,” Gus said.

  “Observation has nothing to do with it,” Shawn said. “It’s a matter of authorial discrimination. Simply spewing out every stray bit of information lying around is not a sign of wisdom.”

  “There is nothing stray about what Professor K is saying,” Gus said. “Something important is about to happen here and now.”

  “Wait. You mean something even more exciting than what we just heard?” Shawn said. “I have a hard time imagining what that could be.”

  Gus felt a momentary flash of pity for his partner. Shawn was so talented in so many areas, so brilliant about so many subjects, but he was also so completely blind to anything that didn’t fit into his narrow set of interests. He could, as he had attempted to prove earlier in the evening, spend hours discussing every aspect of the cinematic career of a former child star whose major claim to fame was that he’d managed to become a has-been without ever actually having been anything. But there was so much that simply never grabbed him, and he refused to put any effort into anything that wasn’t immediately appealing.

  And yet there was so much in life that offered rich, full rewards only after you’d put in a little work. Russian novels were like that, or so he’d heard. Expensive wine and smelly cheese-not that Gus had much of a taste for either type of delicacy. Foreign movies, if the critics were to be believed. And most of all, the study of art history.

  But this didn’t seem to be the time for Gus to give Shawn a lecture on the sophisticated pleasures of life. For one thing, Shawn had already sat through the longest lecture either of them had ever heard, and the experience didn’t seem to be inspiring him to study further.

  For another, this lecture was about to reach its climax. Gus moved his chair closer to the glass. “This is
it,” he said.

  “Yes, I can see Lassiter is about to fall over dead from boredom,” Shawn said. “I only hope I can hold out one second longer than him.”

  Again, Gus had to repress the desire to educate Shawn. “The pipe comes out whenever Kitteredge has a substantial point to make,” Gus said.

  “It’s amazing how much more interesting that is the second time you tell me about it,” Shawn said. “Oh, wait; it isn’t.”

  “That can happen easily a dozen times in a normal lecture,” Gus said. “But he’s got another tell, too. When he’s about to make his ultimate point, when he’s about to utter the words that will tie everything he’s said together and astonish you with his brilliance, only then does he bring out his lighter and light up.”

  “Which is good, because then Lassiter will have an excuse to throw him in jail forever,” Shawn said. “The no-smoking statutes here are tough.”

  “If you’ll apply your justly praised powers of observation, you’ll notice that Professor K’s hand is moving toward his right jacket pocket,” Gus said. “That means the lighter is about to come out. And that means-”

  “That he’s almost ready to stop talking?” Shawn said.

  “That he’s ready to make his point,” Gus said. “I think we should listen in, don’t you?”

  “Why don’t you listen in?” Shawn said. “You can take notes, and then in the morning you can write it all up in a big report. And then I can use that as a pillow in case we’re ever stuck in an observation room all night again.”

  Shawn dropped his chin to his chest and pretended to be falling asleep. Gus turned the volume back up.

  “… wasn’t afraid of the public’s opinion,” Kitteredge was saying. “He refused to exhibit at a new gallery opened by his friends simply because members of the Royal Academy had pictures there. To him, the only thing that mattered was the truth of the painting itself.”

  Shawn mumbled as if in sleep. “Oh, yeah, definitely worth waiting for.”