Darned if You Do

by Monica Ferris

  “Have you ever gone to one of their auctions?”

  “No. I’m on their mailing list,” he admitted, “but I’m on a lot of auction mailing lists. Why are you asking?”

  “Because the picture Emily showed us on Monday came from an auction list at House of Schwales. Only it didn’t come up at the actual auction.”

  “Was it pre-sold?”

  “Apparently not. I just talked with their head auctioneer, and he admitted—inadvertently—that the needle cases were indeed part of a group that included the cinnabar box and mice ball, and that they were stolen in advance of the auction.”

  “That’s a lot to admit ‘inadvertently.’”

  “You had to be there,” she said, then laughed at herself when she realized that her entire conversation with the auctioneer had been over the phone. She hadn’t been there, either! “I’m satisfied that Schwales had them, that they disappeared, and I know they took them down from their post-auction list.”

  “Hmm. Interesting. I wonder if they’re having a problem with items disappearing.”

  “Is that a common thing, that thieves will steal things at a pre-auction display?”

  “I don’t know if it’s common, but it is an ongoing problem at some auction houses.”

  “I wonder who to ask if it’s a problem at Schwales? Or Luther Auctions,” added Betsy, remembering the steel needle cases that did not get auctioned there.

  “I believe there is a chapter covering that subject in that book I offered you, Art Crime. Which you should get back to soon, or the library will get on our case. Meanwhile, perhaps Mr. Schwales will be more forthcoming.”

  “He’s out of town, and the man I talked with denies that the needle cases were taken. But I’m sure he’s lying. They were pictured on the pre-auction list, they weren’t sold at the auction, and he didn’t volunteer that they were pre-sold. I’m quite sure they were stolen, even though he denied it.”

  “What explanation did he offer?”

  “None. He hung up on me.”

  “You seem to be having a problem with that lately. So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know—wait, yes I do. There’s some big web site that lists stolen works of art. I remember coming across it some while back when I was looking up some Asian needlework. I’ll see if these pieces are on it.”

  “Maybe you should also call the Minneapolis Police Department, see if Mr. Schwales reported the theft.”

  “Good idea.”

  The items were not on the international listing of stolen art—but Betsy quickly noticed that the items that were listed were extremely valuable and often famous, and the lot Emily had discovered in Tom Riordan’s house was neither.

  She next phoned the police department and was transferred to the records section. When she inquired into a report of the theft—she had the approximate date and the location—the woman who searched the files had no record of it.

  So Betsy asked to be transferred to someone who investigated thefts. She waited patiently on the phone until she heard a gruff male voice say, “Kennedy.”

  “Mr. Kennedy, my name is Betsy Devonshire, and I’m looking into a theft from an auction house.”

  “What was taken?”

  “A carved box made of cinnabar, three carved-ivory needle cases and a ball-shaped carving of white mice with red eyes, all antique Chinese, all in one lot.”

  “What auction house?”

  When Betsy gave him the name Schwales and its address, he said, “Have you talked to the Edina police department?”

  “No, because this is really about the murder of Thomas Riordan, who was killed at HCMC.”

  “Maybe the person you should be talking to is the lead investigator handling that case.”

  “You mean Mike Malloy?”

  “No, I mean Sid Halloran. Like you said, Riordan was murdered in Minneapolis, so it’s our case. I can transfer you, if you like.”

  “No, but give me the number. I’ll talk to Edina first.”

  “Sure.” He did, and she wrote it down, then looked up the number for Edina’s police department and dialed it.

  But Edina didn’t have a record of a theft from Schwales Auction House, either. Evidently—no, obviously, Schwales hadn’t reported it. What did that mean? Why hadn’t Schwales reported it?

  Betsy dialed Halloran’s number.

  “Halloran,” said someone—a female someone.

  “Oh!” said Betsy, startled.

  “You were looking for someone else?” asked Halloran.

  “No, I guess not. Mr. Kennedy said Sid Halloran in Homicide and I just assumed . . .”

  “Incorrectly, as it happens,” said Halloran, but she sounded amused.

  “Sometimes I forget this custom of giving girls boys’ names. I think I’m older than I think—I mean—”

  “Let’s just say you’re having a hard day and try again.”

  “Thank you.” Choosing her words carefully to allay any suspicion she was an idle rumormonger, Betsy went over the details of the missing Chinese box and its contents, giving the location and approximate date of the theft—and that the owner of the auction house denied anything was taken.

  “So if he says nothing was taken, why do you think it was?”

  “Because someone showed me a screen-save of one of the needle cases. The photograph was on the House of Schwales web site. Now it’s been wiped completely. And this same person actually found the box and handled the needle cases and the white-mice ball while helping clear out a junker’s house. Only they’ve disappeared again. And the junker has been murdered.”

  “Oh, you’re talking about Thomas Riordan?”

  “Yes. I understand you’re the lead investigator.”

  “And you think this House of Schwales theft—alleged theft—is wound up in the Riordan homicide somehow.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your role in all this?”

  “I’m trying to help Valentina Shipp clear herself. I’m strictly an amateur—”

  “Hold on, hold on,” interrupted Halloran. “Do you own a needlework store?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And does Sergeant Malloy know you?”

  “Yes, he does.”

  Halloran began to laugh. “I might’ve known you’d turn up! Malloy mentioned your name!”

  “I hope he wasn’t too cruel about me.”

  “Not entirely. So you’re the needleworking sleuth. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Thank you. About House of Schwales—”

  “Yes, what you’ve told me is very interesting. But the fact that Mr. Riordan never visited the auction house would seem to indicate he is not the original thief.”

  “Oh, I agree. But I wonder if the thief didn’t somehow wander into Riordan’s sphere of activity and Tom took the cinnabar box from him. Tom was pretty clever—they found a mailbag with undelivered mail in it in his house.”

  “Yeah, Mike told me about that. How did Riordan manage that?”

  “I asked him that—I visited him in the hospital. He became evasive, said he found it abandoned in the rain and took it home for safekeeping, then ‘forgot’ to turn it in. That was back in 1996—I know that, because the post office delivered the mail they found in the bag and I happened to get something delivered to my shop.”

  “What was delivered to your shop?”

  “A lace-edged handkerchief. It came from a woman in Atlanta who wanted the shop to carry the pattern. Unfortunately, when I tried to contact her, I discovered she had died some years ago.”

  “That’s sad, but not connected with this case, except peripherally, right?”

  “True.”

  “So how did you get involved?”

  “As I said, via Valentina Shipp, who came to me to help her round up volunteers to cle
an out Tom’s house. She says you and Sergeant Malloy are building a case against her and she’s asked me to help clear her.”

  “And you agreed to do that.”

  “Yes.”

  “So how are you doing?”

  “Not very well. I have interviewed a man named Chester Teesdale, who stole a rifle—more actually took back a rifle Mr. Riordan had stolen from him some years back, which theft caused a very serious rift between Teesdale and his father. I am also taking another look at a report that appeared in our local weekly about other pieces of mail delivered from that bag. I’m hoping to find something of interest there.”

  “Send me a copy, okay?”

  “All right, but I can tell you from their account of my receiving the handkerchief, their attention to accuracy is somewhat lacking.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  OVER supper that evening, Betsy said to Connor, “Valentina is going to be arrested and charged with murder.”

  “Is there anything you can do?”

  “Other than find out who really murdered Tom Riordan? No.”

  Connor cut a bite off his ham steak—he ate the British way, by using his fork in his left hand to hold the meat down while he cut it with the knife in his right hand, then putting the bite in his mouth without changing hands. Betsy remembered her father eating the same way. Her mother had thought it uncivilized. But there was something inefficient, even silly, about cutting meat on one’s plate, putting the knife down, transferring the fork to the right hand, and then putting the meat into one’s mouth. So lately she’d been doing it Connor’s way.

  Then he put down knife and fork and said, “Maybe we’re missing something. Maybe we’re not seeing someone else as a suspect.”

  “Someone like who? Or whom?”

  “Well, me, for one. I was alone in the house, remember? I came down the front stairs while the others came down the back and out into the backyard.”

  “What about Georgie?”

  “Well, yes. She must have come down the front stairs ahead of me. But she went on through the dining room and, I assume, through the kitchen and out the back door.”

  “You’re sure she was the only one to come down the front stairs?”

  “Well, I heard the others go down the back, sounding like a herd of horses.”

  “Why would she come down a different way?”

  “Does it matter? Or maybe she did come down the back with the others. And, for some reason she walked around the outside of the house and back in the front door.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  Connor shrugged. “I have no idea. In fact, maybe she came down the back stairs, then, instead of going outside, she came into the living room to pick up something.”

  “Like what?”

  The two fell silent while they tried to think of something that needed picking up.

  Betsy said, “You’re absolutely sure it was Georgie Pickering you saw.”

  “It was a woman wearing loose-fitting khaki trousers, a blue sweatshirt, and a yellow headscarf tied that clever way women have so the ends go to the back of their heads and tie under their hair. Look, she came upstairs along with everyone else to see the mailbag I had found, and she looked at the jewelry Phil had found and knocked us all over by declaring it genuine. I think I would have noticed if she and one of the other women were wearing the same clothing—and they weren’t.”

  “She couldn’t have come back in to take the box, though,” Betsy said, “because she didn’t know about the box until Emily told her about it over lunch.”

  Connor said, “That’s right. I remember Emily started to tell us about it and Georgie said, ‘Show it to me,’ or words to that effect, as we were going back in.”

  “So it appears that nobody but Emily knew about it before lunch.”

  “That’s right.”

  Betsy sighed and pushed the fingers of one hand into her hair. “As Goddy says, it’s too many for me.”

  That night she dreamed that every man in town looked like Connor. She wasn’t surprised at this—dreams are like that—but in her dream, she was anxious to find the real Connor. Her test was to ask for a hug, because she would know the real one by his strong, warm arms around her. But all the hugs were so frail she could barely feel them.

  * * *

  SHE told Connor about her dream the next morning. “What do you suppose it means?” she asked.

  “Maybe you just need a hug,” he said, and gave her a long, pleasant one.

  “Ummmm,” she said, comforted.

  Down in the shop she told the story of the dream and Connor’s terrific recommended treatment for the anxiety it produced in her.

  Godwin said, “I think a hug is better than a kiss probably seventy or eighty percent of the time.”

  Then after a while, he came back to the topic of the dream. “Maybe your unconscious is trying to tell you something. When I remember a dream, a lot of the time it means something is bothering me.”

  “What’s bothering me is that Valentina is going to be arrested. I don’t see how dreaming about a hug is related to that.”

  “Maybe it’s not the hug,” Godwin suggested. “Maybe it’s everyone looking like Connor, like his mother had a litter instead of just one baby.”

  Betsy smiled. “The only creature I know of who has a litter of identical babies is the armadillo.”

  “The armadillo has identical babies? Who told you that?”

  “Connor. He says they’re used in studies of leprosy.”

  “I’m not going to ask why, because I’m afraid you might tell me.”

  For some reason, Betsy’s memory of the dream lingered. She often had a dream in which her unconscious mind tried to tell her something. Sometimes it was relevant, more rarely it was useful. She had a persistent feeling that this one wasn’t about a scarcity of hugs from Connor.

  She was nearly asleep that night when it came to her and she sat bolt upright in bed.

  “What?” said Connor, who was a light sleeper.

  “Twins, that’s what it was about, twins!”

  “What about twins?” He was still trying to get his bearings after being awakened from a sound sleep.

  “The dream, it was about twins—I think you might be right, and I was wrong. Georgine and Grace are twins, maybe even identical twins. Georgine came into the shop the other day with the hood of her raincoat pulled up and I thought she was Grace.” She smiled down at him. “But you came close, didn’t you? You told me weeks ago that you thought there was only one of them, because they looked so much alike. And when I said no, then you said they might be twins.

  “What I’m still thinking about is, why? Why would identical twins dress so that they look two sizes apart and tell people they are years apart in age?”

  “Okay, why?”

  “I don’t know. I mean they sure didn’t know it would come in handy at the Riordan house, did they?”

  Connor sat up. “How did it come in handy?”

  “They both dressed as Georgie to get that cinnabar box out of the house.”

  “They did?”

  “They must have. Emily says she came down the back stairs with Georgie and out into the backyard and stayed with her the rest of the day. But you said you saw Georgie going into the dining room. No, you didn’t; you saw Gracie. Or, maybe you did see Georgie, and they switched off earlier, and Emily spent part of the day with Georgie and the rest of the day with Gracie.”

  “Without noticing it? That seems odd.”

  “I’ll talk to Emily tomorrow and see if I can get something that will let me know if that’s what actually happened.”

  “But why did they go to all that trouble to steal the cinnabar box?” asked Connor.

  “They didn’t steal it, they took it back.”

  “Then why the hole and corn
er? Why not just reclaim it?”

  Betsy stared at him. She had a history of leaping to unwarranted conclusions. Was this another instance? “I don’t know,” she confessed. Yet somehow she was sure she was on the right track.

  * * *

  BETSY called Emily the next morning. She was determined to step carefully because she did not want to plant a false memory or cause Emily to try to guess an answer she thought Betsy wanted.

  “I know I’m becoming a bore about this, but I’d like you to talk some more about finding that cinnabar box in Tom’s house.”

  “Oh, Betsy, it is a bore!” Emily replied. “I’m so over that little box! And the etui, too. I looked them up on the Internet and all of them—the box, the needle cases, and the etui—cost hundreds of dollars. I’m sorry I saw any of them in that awful old house!”

  “I know, it must be very frustrating to see something interesting mixed in with a lot of trash and then find out the something itself not only isn’t trash but costs a lot of money. You kind of wish you’d stuffed it quietly into your purse and said nothing about it.”

  “No, I wish I’d never seen it. If I hadn’t tripped over it in the first place . . .”

  “You said it was under some magazines. Wasn’t Georgie sorting those magazines? Why didn’t she see it?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said crossly. Then she thought about it. “There were four or five stacks of magazines. She was just sorting through the second stack when Connor shouted.”

  “And when he did, she dropped the magazines and rushed to see what he found,” said Betsy.

  “Yes—wait, no. She asked me who shouted, and from where. I said it sounded like Connor, and that it sounded like he was upstairs, in the back of the house.”

  “So she went through the kitchen to the back stairs.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “And you went up the same way.”

  “Well, first I tripped over the box, and looked at it, and put it on the table.”

  “Under a magazine.”

  Emily abruptly changed the subject. “Wasn’t that mailbag an amazing thing? I wonder how Tom got hold of it?”

  “The mailman probably put it down over on Lake Street, where there’s that big hill with steps going up to the houses. He must have had some packages to deliver to someone at the top and didn’t want to carry the heavy bag up with him. He put it down for a minute, and Tom came along and picked it up and kept going.”