Who Killed Mona Lisa?

by Carole Elizabeth Buggé

  Wally shook his head. “You’ve got me there. Poor Rufus—the DA is breathing down his neck, the local reporters are hounding him, and now the national press has got wind of the story. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. I don’t know what his strategy is; he’s not sharing everything with me.”

  “Well, I know what my strategy is!” Meredith said from her chair.

  “Oh?” Claire said. “What is it?”

  “Oh, you’ll see,” Meredith replied with a mysterious smile. At that moment Claire remembered that she had been planning to send Meredith back to Connecticut, but the onset of her illness had prevented her from bringing up the subject. She sighed and took another bite of toast. She would deal with it later, when she was feeling up to it. She did not look forward to the inevitable scene that would come when she told Meredith she had to leave.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” Claire said to Wally. “I overheard an interesting conversation the other day, and I meant to tell you about it.”

  Meredith leaned forward. “Yeah? What?” she said eagerly.

  Claire went on to describe the day she had stood outside the little dining room listening to a conversation between Frank and Max.

  “At least I think it was Frank and Max,” she said. “They were speaking German, but I was able to understand most of it. Max said something like ‘All right, I’m evil, but you’re evil too.’ And then Frank said, ‘I know, but what can I do?’”

  “Wow,” Meredith commented. “That’s wild.”

  “What do you think they were talking about?” Wally asked.

  “I don’t know; I came by in the middle of it. Strange choice of words, though, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, and why were they speaking German, of all things? I thought for some reason that Wilson’s people were Irish. I mean, he looks so Irish.”

  “I know.” Claire shook her head. “It just doesn’t add up.”

  “Or maybe it does,” Meredith suggested, “but we don’t have all the information yet.”

  “It’s hardly the kind of thing we could tell Detective Hornblower,” Claire remarked. “I mean, how stupid would that sound? Excuse me, but I couldn’t help eavesdropping on a conversation in German—something about being evil. Thought you might like to know.”

  Wally shook his head. “I don’t know . . . you’d be surprised what’s useful in an investigation. I remember once I was working this case down at the Fulton Fish Market . . . everybody figures it was a mob hit, but I kept looking for something else because it just didn’t feel right to me. It felt like a copycat mob hit—someone trying to make it look like a mob hit. But something just wasn’t right . . . I mean, the victim was part Italian but he didn’t run with wise guys.”

  “Mobsters,” Meredith whispered to Claire.

  “I know what they are,” she answered. “So what did you do?”

  “Well, the case finally broke on a pair of Gucci shoes.”

  “Gucci shoes?”

  “It turns out the killer saw that he had to walk through a muddy lot to get away, so he traded shoes with the victim so he couldn’t be traced from his shoes.”

  “Wow,” said Meredith.

  “Except that the victim was cheaply dressed, and his body turns up with eight-hundred-dollar shoes on his feet. So when this fish-market guy shows up with expensive shoes that don’t match the rest of his clothes, all we had to do to narrow the list of suspects was to find out who liked fancy clothes. Turns out the killer, idiot that he was, always wore Guccis. Nothing else, only Guccis.”

  “Wow,” said Meredith, her eyes shining. “Why did Mr. Gucci kill the guy?”

  Wally shrugged. “Oldest motive in the world. Jealous husband. He thought of everything—gloves, untraceable gun, so there were no prints, but he forgot about the shoes. So, you see, the strangest things can give people away.”

  “Guess so,” Meredith said. “That’s pretty strange, all right.”

  “Want some more juice?” Wally asked, seeing that Claire had finished hers.

  “Yes, please,” she replied, handing him the glass.

  “Be right back,” he said, and left the room.

  “He’s cool”—Meredith sighed when he had gone—“even if he is old.”

  “How old do you think he is?” said Claire.

  Meredith shrugged. “Oh, I dunno—at least forty.” She bent down and retrieved the manila folder from the floor where she had placed it.

  “What have you got there?” said Claire.

  “Ah . . . papers,” Meredith answered.

  “What kind of papers?”

  “Restaurant checks,” she replied, holding them aloft.

  “Who gave you those?”

  “Nobody. I took them.”

  “Meredith, that’s stealing!”

  Meredith shrugged. “I just borrowed them. I’m going to put them back.”

  “That’s not the kind of thing you do without permission from the hotel staff.”

  Meredith rolled her eyes and sighed her most exasperated sigh. “Must I remind you that one of the hotel staff could very well be the murderer?”

  “That may be, but still, you shouldn’t have taken them.”

  “And how else am I going to find out if the handwriting on the letters is a match for anyone on the staff?”

  “Meredith, why don’t you leave that to the police?”

  Meredith snorted. “Look who’s talking—little Miss I-Just-Couldn’t-Help-Overhearing-the-Conversation! You’ve been snooping around eavesdropping on people.”

  Claire had to admit the girl had her there. She had the unpleasant thought that the situation had become a competition between her and Meredith, each of them trying to outdo the other.

  “Besides,” Meredith continued, “Detective Hornblower doesn’t see the letters as ‘a worthwhile lead at this time.’ I think that’s how he put it. Boy, am I going to put him straight!” She threw herself down on Claire’s bed with such force that the whole bed shuddered and the bedsprings groaned in protest.

  “All right,” Claire conceded, taking a bite of home fries. “Where did you find them, anyway?”

  “In the front-hall desk. You know, where we checked in. There’s a stack of used checks in the cabinet.” She began leafing through the checks. “Let’s see…what I want first is to see if any of those are a match to Mona Callahan’s handwriting.”

  Claire looked over her shoulder. The server’s initials appeared on the top right-hand corner of every check—“PH” must be Philippe, “OK” for Otis Knox, and “MC” for Mona Callahan.

  “There’s one of Mona’s,” she said, pointing to it.

  “I can see that. Now all I have to do is see if it fits one of these letters…‘lamb chop, spring salad, tarte aux pommes,’” she read. “Well, we know this diner had lamb chops and…isn’t that a fancy word for apple pie?” she asked, squinting at the page.

  “Not exactly,” Claire replied. “A tarte is—”

  “Whatever,” Meredith said impatiently. “So, what can you pick up that’s unusual about her handwriting?” She examined the check, holding it close to her face.

  “Meredith, why don’t you wear your glasses?” Claire said, wiping the last of the egg yolk from her plate with a piece of toast.

  Meredith shuddered. “Ugh. One of these days I’ll just have that laser surgery,” she said. “My dad can afford it. If he can afford my stepmother’s coke habit, he can afford that.”

  “I thought she had given it up.”

  Meredith shrugged. “Once an addict, always an addict . . . you know how it is.”

  Claire studied the check. “I don’t know if this is unusual, but it does seem to be idiosyncratic,” she remarked, pointing. “See how she makes her l’s with a single, detached loop at the beginning of words, as in ‘lamb chop,’ but in the middle of the word she connects it to the other letters. See—there in ‘spring salad’?”

  Meredith peered at the paper. “Yeah, you’re right! Let’s see if we can match this
to any of the handwriting in these letters.”

  She went eagerly to the bedside table and fished out a stack of letters from the drawer. Spreading them out on the bed, she pulled up a chair and began going through them one by one. “Hmm, let’s see . . . nope, none of these,” she concluded, laying aside a small pile. She looked at Claire. “You want to help?”

  “Sure. Give me a few.”

  When Wally returned to the room with Claire’s orange juice, he found the two of them surrounded by stacks of letters, deeply engaged in studying the handwriting on each one. He stopped in the doorway and shook his head. “I leave you two alone for a few minutes and look what happens.”

  “Shh—we’re working,” Meredith answered without looking up.

  “What’s this all about?” Wally put the glass of juice down on the bedside table.

  “Handwriting analysis,” Claire answered, holding up a handful of letters. They were written on anything and everything: postcards, notebook paper, doilies, even the backs of coasters.

  “No, you go on ahead.” Wally flicked a stray piece of paper from the bed so he could sit down. “Well, I’m glad to see you did so well with your breakfast,” he commented, setting aside the breakfast tray.

  “Mmm,” Claire replied, not really listening. She was studying the letter in front of her. It was on plain notebook paper, a letter she remembered reading before, but now she was struck by how similar the handwriting was to Mona Callahan’s.

  What would he do if I broke it off with him? What would he do? I don’t know, and that frightens me. Do you ever really know someone, know what they are capable of when they feel they have run out of options?

  “Look at this,” she said, handing it to Meredith. “Doesn’t this look like Mona’s handwriting?”

  Meredith seized the paper and peered at it, her nose close to the page. “Yes!” she cried after a moment. “Look at the two ways she makes her l’s.” She handed the letter to Wally. “Look—I think we’ve found a clue!”

  Wally studied it and then handed it back. “I wonder who she’s talking about?”

  “It’s too bad there’s no date on it.” Meredith sighed, then perked up immediately. “I know! I’ll start by finding out how long Mona had been working here.”

  “About two years,” said Claire.

  Meredith stared at her. “How do you know?”

  “Her brother told me. We were just talking at breakfast one day and he mentioned it had been about two years.”

  “Geez,” said Meredith. “I’ll have to start getting up earlier.” She looked at Wally. “Are you going to show this to Detective Hornblower?”

  Wally nodded. “I think I should. He’ll probably want to go through the rest of the letters. Are there letters in the other rooms, too?”

  Meredith shrugged. “Far as we know.”

  “Look, here’s another one in the same handwriting!” Claire said, pulling a letter from the pile.

  Again and again I ask myself why I am doing this, and I arrive at the conclusion that I seem to be powerless to resist . . . why this is I don’t know; there is a dark pull in the man which keeps me coming back, like a hopeless charmed rabbit frozen in front of the swaying snake who is about to devour it.

  “Yeah,” Meredith said. “He sounds scary. Wonder who it is?”

  “Well, she and Philippe had something going, apparently,” Wally pointed out.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t sound much like Philippe, does it?” said Meredith.

  “Not really,” said Claire, “but maybe there’s a side to him only she saw.”

  No one said anything for a few moments; they were all thinking about Robert, Claire supposed. No one had seen that side of Robert until it was almost too late—including, most disastrously, herself.

  “So that means she was involved with someone else,” Wally mused.

  “Or it could even be about her brother,” Claire pointed out.

  “E-yew,” said Meredith. “That’s gross!”

  “No, I didn’t mean anything sexual, but we’re just assuming that it’s about a boyfriend. What if she had a sort of dark, neurotic relationship with Chris?”

  “I don’t know,” Wally observed. “It sounds pretty sexual to me.”

  “Well, the point is, we shouldn’t rule anything out,” said Claire.

  “True,” said Meredith. “Remember, once you have eliminated the impossible—”

  “Then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” Claire and Wally finished for her in unison.

  Meredith frowned. “Boy, are you two getting annoying.”

  Claire laughed. “Meredith, how often have I heard you say that?”

  Meredith crossed her arms and plunked herself down in the brocade armchair. “Well, that’s no excuse to be rude!”

  Wally smiled. “If that’s your idea of rude, my girl, you have a rude awakening coming!”

  Wally’s occasional attempts at wordplay were sometimes closer to the mark than that one, but Claire smiled anyway. Meredith grimaced. “Oh, man! Did someone fart?”

  “Meredith!” said Claire. “That’s unnecessary vulgarity.”

  Meredith rolled her eyes. “Oh, sorry; next time I’ll make sure it’s necessary vulgarity!”

  “All right, all right,” Wally interjected. “I’m going to take these letters down to Detective Hornblower.”

  “He’s downstairs?” Meredith cried, jumping up from her chair.

  “Yes, he’s down there with Ms. White from the district attorney’s office. They’re interviewing people again.”

  “Don’t they want to interview me?” Meredith said. “I might have something useful to tell them!”

  “Well, I guess they’ll let you know if they do,” Claire said, reaching for her robe.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” said Wally.

  “To take a shower. I feel much better today, only after all that sweating I could use a long, hot shower.”

  He picked up the breakfast tray. “Okay; I’ll take this downstairs and leave you to your shower. Come on,” he said to Meredith. “Let’s go see what’s happening downstairs.”

  “Okay!” she answered, hopping up and down a little as she followed him out.

  When they had gone, Claire smiled and breathed a little sigh of relief. She wished scientists could invent a method of channeling human energy; she was certain Meredith’s energy, if properly harnessed, was capable of running the Hoover Dam.

  Chapter 19

  In the shower, as she let the hot water slide over her body, enveloped in steam and warmth, Claire thought about the letter and what it might mean. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed that it really could be about anyone—not just a boyfriend or lover, but someone Mona worked with—even, say, Max, for example.

  She squeezed a generous amount of Lily of the Valley shampoo into the palm of her hand and rubbed it into her hair, massaging the skin of her scalp. Well, human nature was unpredictable; maybe even big, friendly Max had his dark side.

  After her shower, she dried her hair carefully, then pulled on some black leggings and a light blue cashmere sweater. Claire loved sweaters, and always welcomed cold weather as an opportunity to wear her collection of wool pullovers and cardigans. She still felt a little dizzy from her illness—giddy almost—but she was anxious to see what was going on downstairs.

  She arrived at the bottom of the staircase to find a general feeling of expectation in the air. She headed toward the sound of voices coming from the small dining room just the other side of the bar. The first person she saw in the hall was Richard, who inquired courteously how she was feeling.

  “Much better, thank you,” she answered. “What’s going on in there?” She indicated the dining room.

  He rolled his blue eyes. “Oh, nothing good, I’m sure, dear girl,” he answered, giving her arm a little squeeze. “You take care of yourself now. You still look a little pale, you know.”

  “Thanks,” she said as he went off t
oward the back stairs. She liked Richard. He always struck her as a little sad, a little bit lonely; even his immaculate grooming and expensive clothes seemed like an effort to disguise loneliness she found touching, perhaps because it reminded her of her father.

  The voices coming from the dining room grew louder. Claire took a few more steps toward the door. She recognized Rebecca White’s smooth cultivated voice.

  “Look, you’re not giving us much to go on, and my people in Cambridge are getting nervous. It’s an election year, you know, and—”

  “Don’t give me that election-year crap, Becky!” Detective Hornblower broke in, as agitated as Claire had ever heard him, his voice low but angry. “You know as well as I do that we can’t make an arrest without more evidence! Even with the rush order, you can’t get any conclusive results from DNA testing for at least two weeks. The guys at the crime lab have been working their tails off over this—”

  “Then give us something else,” she answered. “Anything. We’re not asking for a conviction; all we want is an arrest, for God’s sake!”

  “But what’s the sense in an arrest if we can’t get the charges to stick?” He sounded exasperated, at the end of his rope.

  “Well, so far this whole thing is making us look like a bunch of clowns. I mean, South Sudbury is to Boston as Podunk, Iowa, is to—Chicago, or something. But you wouldn’t know it for all the press this thing is getting. And now with this second death—”

  “Which we don’t know is a murder,” he pointed out. “The girl had a history of drug abuse.”

  “Yeah, right,” she muttered, “and I’m Tinker Bell. Give us something we can work with, Rufus, before the political vultures swoop down and destroy us all!”

  There was the sound of a chair scraping across the floor, and Claire jumped back from the door and quickly ducked around the corner, where she bumped into Max. It was sort of like bumping into a marshmallow wearing an apron.

  “Hey, where are you going so fast?” he said, grabbing her by the shoulders.