Death in Detail

by Andrew Stanek

  Death in Detail

  by Andrew Stanek

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  --Andrew Stanek

  More Felix Green Mysteries

  •Death By Nostalgia

  • Murder on Wheels

  •Death in Detail

  •Shell Game

  •Vanquished

  •Heartbreak

  •The Murder Next Door

  •Vanishing Act

  •Domino Effect

  •Payment in Full

  •Falling Problem

  •Murderer’s Dilemma

  •Killer’s Quartet

  •Great Circle

  •This Murder I Made

  Chapter 1

  “The maids are stealing,” the old woman announced. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Oh, Aunt Agatha,” Stephanie sighed. She fluffed one of Agatha’s pillows absent-mindedly and carefully placed it on the sofa. Her aunt peered at it with one suspicious eye. It seemed to pass her scrutiny, and after a small nod, Agatha lowered herself onto the cushion with the help of her cane.

  Agatha was a formidable woman by any standard. Though she stood no more than five feet tall, her hair was a hardened steel-gray that spoke to a lifetime of confrontation and belligerence. Her mouth was eternally twisted into an inscrutable thin-lipped expression that could have made a regiment of soldiers turn and run the other way. She wore thin spectacles with little magnification, and her eyes, gray as her hair, were forever narrow and shrewd, darting this way and that. A thick oak cane with a heavy brass foot on one end could almost always be found between her gnarled, aged hands, tapping impatiently against the floor as she peered around the room for potential targets. The intimidating first impression she gave was totally true to her character, unfortunately for those who had to tolerate her presence on a day to day basis.

  Stephanie, on the other hand, was a rather unassuming girl. Her sleek, black hair fell styleless behind her, and she had a soft and reassuring voice that moved her aunt to prefer her company.

  “I am sure they are stealing,” Agatha repeated, peering around at the mantlepiece opposite from the sofa. “Where is my antique clock? You know, it was a gift to my Great Uncle Horace from the Duke of Baden. These silly girls can’t appreciate it for its history. They’re probably down to the pawn shop to sell it to some foreigner for the price of a loaf of bread.”

  It was, perhaps, a lesser miracle that Stephanie knew exactly which clock her aunt was referring to. There were a dozen clocks in this room alone that might have been a gift to her Great Uncle Horace from the Duke of Baden. In fact, if Stephanie had to guess, she’d say there were very few antiques that the room did not hold. Aunt Agatha’s living room was decorated in a style that would not have been out of place in a French Palace, shortly before the revolutionaries arrived to carry the aristos who dwelled within off to the cold embrace of the guillotine. Archaic trinkets littered the room, from the spattering of antique clocks on the mantlepiece to the heraldic crest above the fire to the sets of gold-rimmed china stacked high in a handcarved cabinet. The room didn’t have television or even a radio. The only modern convenience that marked it as having existed in a century later than the nineteenth was electric lighting, and this Agatha regarded with great mistrust and suspicion.

  Stephanie reached up and began to sift through the small, hand-sized clocks on the mantlepiece, finally locating one with silver detailing and a jade base.

  “Do you mean this one, Aunt Agatha?” Stephanie asked. “It’s right here.”

  She surrendered the clock to her Aunt, who unnecessarily whipped out her thin spectacles, fiddling briefly with the golden chain before placing them firmly on her wrinkled nose. The effect did not make her look any less intimidating. On the contrary, she now looked as if she were ready to pass sentence on the worst of criminals. Her cane tapped impatiently against the Persian rug as she gestured for Stephanie to hold it out for her to see. Agatha examined the small clock from several angles before nodding slowly.

  “That is Great-Uncle Horace’s clock,” she declared at long last. “But it is not in its proper place. These silly girls must have mislaid it.” Agatha replaced her spectacles. “I still know that they steal. I counted the forks in the dining room, yesterday. They’re sterling silver, you know, presents to your Great-Uncle Horace from the Emperor of Mexico.”

  Stephanie sighed. She was reasonably certain that there was no Emperor of Mexico, but she was wise enough to her Aunt’s nature not to try to argue the point. Moreover, she had no desire to spend the remainder of her day counting forks and plates to square them against her aunt’s vague recollection of how many she’d had in the past.

  “Don’t you sneer at me, girl,” Agatha snapped. “I can see what you’re thinking!” With surprising speed for a woman of her age, Agatha rose from the couch on her cane. Standing tall at a full height of about four feet, eleven inches, she hobbled slowly towards her niece. “You think I’ve gone mad, don’t you? You think I’m making up stories for attention. You don’t think the maids are stealing, and you don’t think your Great-Great-Uncle Horace ever met the Emperor of Mexico, do you? Well, he did. Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian - an Austrian Hapsburg - gave that set of silver to Horace - including those forks, to try to make friends with the United States when he was Emperor of Mexico. Well, Horace didn’t fall for any of those tricks. He’d come there to do a job, and he told those rotten French they’d better get out of Mexico-”

  “Yes, yes, alright, Aunt Agatha,” Stephanie said soothingly. “Why don’t you sit back down and I’ll get you something nice to drink?”

  “Don’t you start patronizing me, girl,” Agatha barked, tapping her cane between Stephanie’s feet. “You think I’ve gone batty. You don’t think the maids are stealing at all. Well, what about the portrait of my father? The maids have taken that as well.”

  “They didn’t take the portrait of grandpa, Aunt Agatha. It’s still hanging in the hallway.”

  “I want to go see it,” Agatha demanded. She hooked her hand around Stephanie’s arm, and, wielding her cane in her other hand, trotted out into the hallway. They paused before a large picture of a handsome man with Stephanie’s straight, dark hair and a large mustache that would have been considered distinguished about a hundred years ago. In the portrait, the man was standing unnaturally straight, holding a cane very similar to Agatha’s, his chin tilted slightly up. The combined effect was that the man in the portrait looked as though he thought he was better than the viewer, whoever that might be, staring down his nose and mustache at the plebeians lurking just beyond the reaches of the frame. The caption, written into a gold plate beneath the frame, read, “Sebastian Virgil Bellinger.”

  Agatha again placed her spectacles over the bridge of her nose and peered, shrew-like, at the portrait, examining every detail with her omniscient gray eyes.

  “Good, it’s still here,” she observed at last. “They haven’t taken it.”

  “Of course they haven’t taken it, Aunt Agatha,” Stephanie said with a long-suffering sigh. “It’s much too large to steal.”

  “Much too large to steal? Don’t be silly girl. It’s just a matter of taking it off the wall and walking out the door with it. Who’s going to stop them? Me?”

  Stephanie eyed Agatha’s cane and thought her aunt quite capable of stopping a potential thief with will alone, though her hard-won wisdom prevented her from saying so.

  “And the picture of your grandfather and Teddy Roosevelt is still here too,” Agatha commented, staring at a nearby gold-framed black-and-white photograph. “Good.”

  Despite herself, Stephanie could not
stop a small, frustrated noise rising from her throat.

  “Don’t you scoff at me, girl,” Agatha said, waving her cane at her niece. “That’s a very valuable picture. Besides, your grandfather thought very highly of Teddy Roosevelt. He was a Harvard man, you know.”

  “He was also President of the United States, Aunt Agatha.”

  “That as well, of course,” said Agatha with a wave of her free hand. “But one must take these things in perspective. He was only President because of the Czechoslovakians.”

  Stephanie mutely followed her aunt out of the hallway and back into the living room. Agatha apparently now able to move around quite unaided (in fact, Stephanie was beginning to suspect she was perfectly mobile, but enjoyed leaning on others), tramped back to her sofa and sat down on her couch. She peered at the clock that had been given to Great Uncle Horace by the Duke of Baden and announced, “Its time for my pills.”

  With some relief that she was able to get away from the old woman, Stephanie hurried to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, where she found Agatha’s box of pills and retrieved it. As she turned to leave, she bumped headfirst into another young girl and struggled not to drop the box. The other girl fell to the floor under the force of the impact, dropping the brown paper sack that she’d been carrying.

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Lisa,” Stephanie mumbled as an apology as she set the box aside and helped the other girl to her feet.

  “No, no, it was my fault,” Lisa said, brushing herself off. Lisa was a girl no older than nineteen or twenty wearing an apron over a dress, short blond hair falling behind her. “Are you to give her her pills? Here.” Lisa handed over the brown paper sack. “I just finished refilling the old bat’s prescriptions.”

  “Don’t let her hear you say that,” Stephanie said sympathetically.

  “Remind her that she’s got company coming over tonight,” Lisa yelled as Stephanie retreated from the medicine cabinet.

  Stephanie quickly took out the plastic bottles inside the brown bag and carefully arranged them into their proper places inside the box - Aunt Agatha wanted everything to be arranged just so. Then she hurried to the living room and presented the box to her Aunt. She found the elderly woman standing before the antique chess set that eternally rested in the far corner of the room, slowly slotting the pieces into a starting configuration for a usual game. Stephanie knew, because Agatha had told her so many times before, that this chess set was among the family’s most prized possessions, and had been presented to their Great Uncle Horace by some ruler long since forgotten. The white pieces were carved from African ivory and the black from ebony heartwood of some exotic tree.

  “You took too long,” Agatha barked as she pushed a white pawn experimentally forward. Stephanie could not see why she had done this, as she was obviously not playing with anyone, but knew better than to ask.

  “I know why you took so long,” the old woman continued, snatching the box of pills from Stephanie’s hands and removing the necessary bottles. She began to carefully count the relevant pills and then swallowed them with a gulp of water from the crystal glass that always sat on a stand next to the sofa. “You think your old auntie has lost her mind,” Agatha continued. “You think I’ve gone soft in the head. I see how you look at me, how you cringe when you see me. You don’t want to be here at all, do you, girl? You’d much rather be out in the street, with your friends, wouldn’t you? Galavanting with other youths. With that boy, whatshisname, that you’re so fond of. He has blue eyes, doesn’t he?”

  A little pink came into Stephanie’s cheeks.

  “His name is Martin, and honestly Aunt Agatha, that’s none of your business.”

  “Isn’t it?” she answered, with what Stephanie was sure was a cackle.

  “Aunt Agatha, you shouldn’t be so - so - I don’t know. But you should be nicer to people. Remember, the whole family’s coming over tonight.”

  Agatha gave a low, rumbling chuckle. There was something slightly sinister about her chuckle. It seemed to fill the room, bouncing off the walls and echoing strangely.

  “Asked to remind me, weren’t you? You’d thought I’d forgotten. They’d thought I’d forgotten. Oh yes, I can see it in your eyes, girl. You might think she’s gone dotty with age but your Aunt Agatha always knows. Yes, I remembered that they were coming for dinner tonight. All of my fool brother’s mewling brats, hoping to ply me with my own wine and asking questions about their inheritances, acting just polite enough that I don’t write them out of the will-”

  “Aunt Agatha,” Stephanie said weakly. “That’s very - unkind. We are your family after all.”

  “Oh yes, yes, you’re family. If you weren’t family, my girl, I wouldn’t let you in the house. I wouldn’t let a single one of you sit at my table if you weren’t family. You aren’t good enough. None of you holds a candle to my father, or Great Uncle Horace. They were diplomats, leaders, captains of industry. You? You and your wretched cousins, you’re not fit to steal the paintings from my walls.”

  Stephanie trembled.

  “Really, Aunt Agatha, that is too much!”

  “Too much, is it? I think it’s just enough. Now come. Put these pills back and we must go to the kitchen. I want to count the forks.”

  Somehow, Stephanie managed to struggle through the rest of the day. She fled up to her room in the early evening and changed into a more acceptable dress, then guided her aunt down to the dinner table, where the maids had lain the table for them. It was like something out of history, with plates and silver placed just so, at exactly the right distance from one another, candelabras lining the table, with a huge golden chandelier dangling from the ceiling above. Agatha had groaned and protested about this and that all the way to the table, making desperately slow progress as she clung to her niece’s arm. By the time they arrived, there were already three familiar faces seated there. One was a tall young man with sandy red hair, the other, a shorter man, perhaps a little older than the red-head, with dark hair like Stephanie’s and a mild tan. Both men were wearing suits, and the red-haired man fiddled with his tie and stood as Agatha entered. Stephanie guessed that he was plucking up his courage to try to talk to them.

  “Hello, Aunt Agatha,” the red-haired man said, carefully pecking the old woman on the cheek before pulling Stephanie into a hug. “Stephanie. Good to see you.”

  “Henry,” Agatha said briskly. “It’s been a long time.” Her tone was not friendly.

  A very practiced observer and attendant of Aunt Agatha, such as Stephanie, would critically detect that Agatha had not said something like, “Henry, how good it is to see you,” precisely because she did not think it was good to see him. Aunt Agatha, Stephanie knew, was not predisposed to lying even to maintain social niceties, but neither was she so openly hostile that she would have said something more direct and truthful, like “Henry, how very nearly tolerable it is to see you.” Thus, she had chosen a ridiculous and banal statement of fact, revolving around how long it had been since they had seen each other, in the hopes that Henry would detect the subtext and realize that Agatha could have done quite a bit longer without seeing him.

  Henry, however, realized none of this and simply returned to his seat.

  “How have you been, Auntie?”

  “No better than I was when you last saw me,” she barked. “And Jasper,” she said abruptly, turning to the dark-haired man, who jumped. “Where have you been? Knowing you, you’ve probably been off stomping around some mud-filled backwater as yet undiscovered by the reaches of civilization.”

  Jasper looked a little taken aback by this as a greeting, but he recovered quickly and took it in good step.

  “Actually, Aunt Agatha, I’ve been in Asia. I visited Bhutan and India, but I was mostly recently in Nepal,” he said, smiling with a glimmer of charm at her. “It’s a very lovely country, one of the most scenic in the world. The Himayalas are really quite beautiful. In fact, you may have heard I climbed-”

  “Yes, yes, all very interes
ting,” Agatha said, loudly, cutting him off. “And Henry, how is whatever it is you do going?”

  Henry cleared his throat. “I work in Import/Export, Aunt Agatha, you know that very well.”

  “And have you been importing and exporting alright?”

  “Yes, Aunt Agatha, I have.”

  “Well good. That’s the talking out of the way, then,” she rubbed her gnarled hands together and rested her heavy cane against the table. “Sit down, girl. Don’t just loom over me like some sort of statue.”

  Stephanie jumped into the chair next to her Aunt as Agatha observed the still mostly empty dinner table.

  “We should get started with the food,” Agatha said.

  “Um... shouldn’t we wait for Diane and Chester?” Henry asked.

  “And you also invited Gloria,” Stephanie reminded Agatha, her voice small and timid.

  “It’s not like Gloria to be late,” Agatha said, “but if Diane and Chester aren’t here than we might as well eat without them.”

  “You were late too you know, Auntie,” Jasper said. Stephanie thought she heard his voice shake slightly as he said this.

  “Yes, but it’s not the same for me,” Agatha commented indifferently. “I couldn’t get down fast enough because your cousin wouldn’t help me with my necklace.” She gestured to the necklace draped around her wrinkled neck, composed of a length of substantial gold links, fastened to a large diamond in the center.

  “That’s not true, Aunt Agatha,” Stephanie protested quietly. “I did help you with the necklace.”