Painted Ladies s-39

by Robert B. Parker

  “So you want to go?” I said.

  “No,” Susan said. “What I want to know is why you do?”

  “Remember you got Prince’s Ph.D. dissertation and read it?” I said.

  “I do. An act of breathtaking self-sacrifice, may I say.”

  “We learned a lot from that,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I thought I might learn something from her poetry,” I said.

  Susan was silent for a moment.

  Then she said, “You might. One of the predictable things about the kind of poets you are nearly certain to hear is that their poetry will be about the angst of being them. It will be hideous, but she might actually reveal something useful in the process.”

  “I’m gonna go,” I said.

  “You’ll have to brave it without me,” she said. “I get enough interior angst every day, fifty minutes an hour.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Not that I don’t admire your fortitude,” Susan said.

  I admired it myself. The event started at seven; I was there at quarter of. The room was barren, with cement walls painted yellow. It looked like it should have been swept more recently than it had been. There were about fifty folding chairs and maybe fifteen people, grouped around a maple table with a lectern on it. The lighting was overhead and harsh. The room was too hot.

  I took off my coat and sat. If anyone noticed the gun on my hip, they didn’t react. They were too deeply involved, I assumed, in the life of the imagination. They were generally not deeply involved in elegance. At seven, a heavy woman in an ankle-length dress walked in and stood at the lectern and welcomed us to the Evening of Verse. She announced that at the end of the evening, the poems read tonight would be for sale at the back of the room for five dollars.

  Then a guy came out and read a detailed description of a series of homosexual acts. In the rhyme scheme, “foreskin” was rhymed with “more sin.” And “between us” with “penis.”

  The next reader was a skinny woman with her hair in a tight bun who wrote about masturbation, then came a guy with a very long braid, who read something. But I couldn’t tell what it was about. Sadly, Rosalind Wellington was near the end of the program, and I might have left before she came on if Susan hadn’t admired my fortitude. So I stuck it out. When she came on, she was all in black, wearing a hat with a veil.

  “ ‘So Little Left Behind,’ ” she intoned.” ‘An Ode to My Late Husband.’ ”

  She looked down at the papers on the lectern and began to read in what she must have thought was a dramatic monotone.

  My husband went loudly into the eternal night.

  No time to rage, or set things right.

  No legacy, though one was promised.

  A legacy quite odd,

  Two painted ladies like a god.

  One true as starlight,

  The other one a fraud.

  The starlight lady hidden,

  The fraud in public view.

  As I who’ve come unbidden

  Stand exposed to you.

  Perhaps I am the found voice

  Of his eternal funk.

  Perhaps it’s time to simply be,

  And put my plaint away.

  I guess he didn’t love me.

  Maybe all the rest is bunk.

  She dropped her head to indicate she was finished, and stood that way for a moment, before she raised her eyes and began her second poem. The evening eventually ended. I remembered a line from Swinburne: “even the weariest river, winds somewhere safe to sea.” I got up and bought a copy of the poems, which appeared to have been run off on a computer and bound in gray cardboard.

  At home I had a large drink and sat at my kitchen counter and drank my drink and looked at her first poem.

  Two painted ladies.

  If I asked her about it, she’d give me a lot of grad-school razzmatazz about meaning and beauty. I wondered how she’d deal with a Middlesex County prosecutor.

  57

  We gathered in Kate Quaggliosi’s office. Rosalind, me, Healy, and Belson as an interested observer. Rosalind immediately latched onto Kate, the other woman in a room with several men. My guess was that whatever her off-duty gender, in here she wasn’t a woman, she was a prosecutor.

  “My home was burglarized,” she said.

  “You report it to the Walford police?” Kate said.

  “Yes.”

  “They take anything?”

  “No, but I feel dreadfully invaded.”

  “Who would have done such a thing?” Healy said.

  I looked at Healy. His face was expressionless.

  “I’ve lost my husband,” she said to Kate. “I am still very fragile.”

  Kate nodded and held up a copy of the painted-ladies poem.

  “Walford cops are your best bet,” she said. “Could you explain to me what this poem means, with particular attention to the two painted ladies?”

  “I do not explain my poetry,” Rosalind said. “A poem should not mean but simply be.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Kate said, “in English departments all across this great land. I’m sure it was true for Mr. McLeish, when he said it. Or something like it. But this is a homicide investigation, and in this arena it is not so.”

  Rosalind stared at her as if she’d uttered blasphemy.

  “Something like it?” Rosalind said.

  “If I remember my modern poetry seminar at BC,” Kate said, “it was, ‘A poem should not mean/But be.’”

  “Oh, no,” Rosalind said. “I’m sure Archie used the word ‘simply.’”

  “Sure,” Kate said. “So what about these painted ladies?”

  Rosalind looked as if she was disappointed in Kate. She glanced at me. I tried to look encouraging. She looked at Healy. He remained as expressionless as gray paint.

  “I’m an artist,” Rosalind said. “I do not cast my language before swine.”

  “And I’m an AD,” Kate said. “And I might put your ass in jail.”

  “Jail?” Rosalind said.

  “Jail,” Kate said.

  “For writing a poem?”

  “For obstructing justice by refusing to divulge information needed in the investigation of your husband’s death,” Kate said.

  Healy stood.

  “You want me to arrest her?” he said to Kate.

  Kate looked at Rosalind.

  “Your choice,” she said.

  Had I been Rosalind, I’d have brought a lawyer with me. I suspected that Kate and Healy were on shaky legal ground, and a lawyer might have made that point. But Rosalind didn’t have a lawyer, and that was all to the good. She got scared.

  “I didn’t . . .” she said. “I wasn’t . . . I’ll tell you anything you wish.”

  Healy sat back down and crossed his legs.

  “Excellent,” Kate said. “Did the reference to painted ladies have anything to do with the Hermenszoon painting that is missing?”

  Two bright red smudges appeared on Rosalind’s cheek-bones. She was taking in a lot of air. She seemed to be gathering herself. Kate waited. Healy and I watched.

  “He cheated on me compulsively,” Rosalind said. “He said he was addicted to sex.”

  “Lot of that going around,” Kate said.

  “I’m not sure he loved me at all,” Rosalind said. “Though he said he did, and I stayed with him, because all my other choices were worse.”

  She breathed for a moment.

  “But we used to talk, we’d known each other a long time, and it was, at worst, like a long habit, you know.”

  It was interesting how, as she got to talking about matters of personal substance, all the phony-accent artistic gobbledygook with which she’d plastered herself over went away. She seemed, for the moment, almost real.

  “He always said he’d make it up to me,” she said. “He always said he was going to make a lot of money, and we could live as we deserved to.”

  “How was he going to do that?” Kate s
aid.

  “He said he was going to swap the paintings.”

  “Which paintings.”

  “He had a good copy of Lady with a Finch,” she said. “He was going to replace the real one with it. Then he’d have the original painting, and make some money, too.”

  “And he was the identifying expert,” I said.

  “So where is either of these paintings?” Kate said.

  “The fraud,” Rosalind said, “as in the poem, is on view in my home. As am I.”

  “You’re a fraud, too?” Kate said.

  “I was faithful to my husband,” she said. “He was unfaithful to me. I was one half of a fraudulent relationship.”

  “I’d say that made him a fraud,” Kate said.

  Rosalind shrugged. She was slipping back into her poetic persona.

  “It’s a metaphor,” she said.

  “I have a question,” I said.

  She nodded at me without much warmth.

  “How do you know the one in your house is a fake?”

  “Well, it certainly isn’t the original,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Why, we couldn’t . . .” She paused. “Ashton told me it was.”

  “We could get somebody over there from the Hammond,” Healy said.

  “Their expert was Prince,” I said.

  “Someplace,” Healy said.

  “Guy in New York,” I said.

  “Gimme a name and address,” Kate said. “We’ll see if we can arrange it.”

  Rosalind stood.

  “I wish to go now,” she said.

  “Sure,” Kate said. “Just so long as I can find you when I want you.”

  “I’ll be at home,” she said.

  “I can have someone drive you home,” Kate said.

  Rosalind shook her head.

  “No,” she said, and left.

  “Show us,” Kate said. “She don’t need no stinking ride.”

  “I think there’s more to get from her,” Healy said.

  “I do, too,” Kate said. “But we pretty well used her up today. We’ll have a few more rounds with her.”

  “Yeah,” Healy said. “Telling the truth exhausted her.”

  “She’s not used to it,” I said. “She’s been pretending all her life.”

  “You saw the painting,” Healy said. “What do you think?”

  “Looks good to me,” I said. “But I don’t count.”

  “How’d you get to see it?” Kate said.

  “He B-and-E’d her house,” Healy said.

  “I never heard that,” Kate said.

  58

  Susan took power yoga in a gym in Wellesley on Saturday mornings. I normally went with her and lifted some weights, and when she was though we’d go to breakfast. This morning I’d picked her up at nine-ten and we headed out the Mass Pike.

  “People pick the damnedest ways to confess,” I said.

  “If they need to,” Susan said.

  “Rosalind confesses in her public poetry,” I said. “Prince confesses in his doctoral dissertation.”

  “You should read mine,” Susan said.

  “Maybe I ought to.”

  “Be the first human to do so,” Susan said. “Do you have any theory on how this swindle was supposed to work?”

  “I’ve been dwelling on that,” I said.

  “Wow,” Susan said. “Dwelling.”

  “For instance, I’m wondering how long this scheme has been incubating. He had to know for quite a while that Lady with a Finch was at the Hammond.”

  “And his father had, at one time, had possession of it,” Susan said.

  “And perhaps some claim on it,” I said. “Or a claim that someone like Prince could persuade himself of. And he had a connection to the other claimants.”

  “The Herzberg family,” Susan said.

  “Which appears to consist primarily of Ariel Herzberg,” I said. “And the family business seems to be finding art taken during the Holocaust and returning it to its rightful owner.”

  “So do you have a theory?” Susan said.

  “Maybe Prince sought out the Herzbergs,” I said, “citing the historical relationship, and suggested that they steal the painting. He’d authenticate it; they’d get the ransom and split it with him. Maybe he agreed to authenticate a phony, which he could get, being as how it was in his home, so they could get the ransom, keep the original, and probably keep it in the rightful possession of the Herzberg family.”

  “And they agreed?” Susan said.

  “Say they did, and they stole it. And say that Prince wanted the ransom and the original painting. For whatever reason, including obsession. And he devised a way to swap them, he being the only one involved who could actually tell the real from the phony, and suppose they discovered his plan?” I said.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know; maybe I’ll never know. But Rosalind would not be my first choice of someone to share a mortal secret with.”

  “You think she might have blabbed?”

  “Or written a poem, or told someone in confidence.”

  “So they went ahead with the ransom plan, and then blew him up,” Susan said.

  “And the painting, maybe,” I said. “It at least casts doubt as to its whereabouts, and even its existence.”

  We were on Route 16 in Wellesley now. Susan was silent for a time as we drove in Saturday-morning traffic, past the handsome homes and the affluent shops.

  Then she said, “You know there is a note of obsession running through this story.”

  “Yep.”

  “I mean, the Herzberg Foundation has a laudable mission,” she said. “But two generations removed from the Holocaust, they end up killing people, and trying to kill you.”

  “They might argue that for a Jew, there is no removal from the Holocaust.”

  “They might,” Susan said. “I would understand that.”

  “And how would you respond?” I said.

  “No one may kill you,” Susan said. “For whatever reason.”

  “That seems a good standard,” I said.

  “You will have trouble,” Susan said, “proving all of this.”

  “Or any,” I said. “Best bet is still to lure him into coming after me, and catching him in the act.”

  “Having first prevented him from killing you,” Susan said.

  “That first,” I said. “But if we got him for attempted murder, we got something. Attempted murder carries pretty good time. Even if we never get him for Prince.”

  “Or the superintendent in your building.”

  “We’ll get him for something,” I said.

  “Unless he gets you,” Susan said.

  “No one has,” I said.

  “I know,” Susan said. “I know.”

  59

  The next morning while I was in my office with the desk drawer open and one eye on my office door, the phone rang. It was Belson.

  “Kate Quaggliosi called me, said there was a crime scene in Walford she thought I should see.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Rosalind,” he said. “Want to ride along?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Ten minutes,” Belson said. “Pick you up on Berkeley.”

  Which he did. We drove out Commonwealth Ave.

  “Scenic route?” I said.

  “No rush,” he said. “Route Thirty all the way. Any traffic problems, I’ll hit the siren.”

  “She dead?” I said.

  “That’s what they tell me,” Belson said.

  “Cause of death?” I said.

  “Gunshot.”

  “They shut her up,” I said.

  “Imagine so,” Belson said.

  The traffic was backed up at North Harvard Street in Brighton with cars trying to turn. Belson sounded the siren. The waters parted, and we drove on through.

  “Magic,” I said.

  “I always like that,” Belson said.

  When we got to Walford,
there were half a dozen Walford and state police cruisers, a crime scene truck, a vehicle from the Middlesex coroner’s office, and a couple of unmarked cars parked outside. There was also a considerable clump of civilians standing on the sidewalk, watching. A Walford cop stood at the front door, Belson showed him a badge, and the cop nodded and looked at my humble self.

  “He’s with me,” Belson said.

  “Go ahead,” the cop said.

  Inside, there were cops and photographers and Kate Quaggliosi. The Walford cops were trying to act as though a murder was nothing new to them. For the two state detectives, murder was nothing new. The ME squatted on the floor next to the body, and Kate Quaggliosi stood next to him, looking down.

  “Mind if we take a look,” Belson said to Kate.

  He was always very punctilious about whose investigation it was.

  “Be my guest,” Kate said.

  If the corpse bothered her, she didn’t show it.

  Belson and I sat on our haunches beside the ME.

  “Took a pretty good beating before she died,” Belson said.

  The ME nodded.

  “Two?” Belson said. “In the forehead?”

  “Yep,” the ME said. “One exit wound. The other one probably ricocheted around in the skull for a while.”

  “Close range?”

  “Very,” the ME said.

  “When?” Belson said.

  “Sometime last night,” the ME said.

  “Gee, thanks,” Kate Quaggliosi said. “I saw her late yesterday afternoon. And her Pilates trainer found her at nine this morning. I could tell it was last night.”

  “He asked,” the ME said. “We get her on the table, I’ll be able to tell you a lot more.”

  “She’s wearing the same clothes she had on at our meeting,” Kate said.

  “Probably makes it early evening,” the ME said. “Before she put on her jammies.”

  “Anything you want to ask, Spenser?” Kate said.

  “Her nose broken?” I said to the ME.

  “Looks like it,” he said. “Doesn’t it.”

  “They musta wanted her to tell them something she didn’t know,” I said.

  “Yes,” Kate said. “She’d have given it up quick enough if she could.”