Art of Evil

by Bancroft, Blair

  “Billie”—prickles surged up my spine—“are you saying it might not be suicide?”

  “Don’t know,” he mumbled, putting his foot to the pedal. The electric golf cart moved silently forward. “Just seems a strange time to check out . . . tuition all paid and classes barely begun.”

  “But he was hanged with his own bedsheet, right?” I asked.

  “Doubt anybody’s checked on that. Y’know, Rory,” Billie added, “you’re the only person I know would’ve said ‘hanged’ instead of ‘hung’. You Yankees are just so perfect when you talk . . . like some damn news anchor on TV.”

  “Sorry.” Only later would I wonder if he’d thrown out a deliberate red herring.

  “And you ask a lotta questions. You some kind of cop, Rory?”

  “I’m a tram driver,” I told him as he pulled up at the Main Tram Stop, where George was patiently waiting with Tram 3, fully loaded with passengers for the Casa Bellissima.

  Billie volunteered to take George back to his car, I slipped into George’s seat, and we were off. Rory Travis and six passengers on their way to view Richard and Opal Bellman’s mansion on Sarasota Bay.

  Usually, my volunteer job at the Bellman did exactly what it was supposed to do—keep me from thinking about how badly I had messed up my life. For a few hours I could lose myself in being a tour guide, in driving my specified route, smiling, answering questions—at which I had improved considerably in the last two months—while enjoying the Bellman’s precious peace and quiet.

  But, today, every time I made the circle in front of the Casa Bellissima, I saw yellow tape circling one of the huge banyan trees. Yet all was quiet, the breeze barely stirring the rope-like roots dangling from a tangled multitude of branches. As the student’s body had dangled, only hours earlier. Now there was only a single patrol car, as unobtrusively parked among the other cars nearby as it was possible for a clearly marked police car to be. Keeping watch until the M.E.’s report came back? Very likely.

  There was a time when I could not have passed by, could not have ignored the tragedy that happened here this morning. But six months ago I’d taken a fall from a third floor fire escape, shattering my body and shattering my life. I was grounded, big time. Fit only to drive round and round and round the grounds of an art museum, a peaceful oasis in a world set to the pace of its senior citizens.

  And yet something inside me had begun to stir, quivering faintly to life. Prickles skittered up my spine. Bitter memories, or premonition of disasters to come? Was I about to lose my refuge? Was this beautiful day—filled with happy visitors, lush greenery, colorful flowers, exotic trees, and sun sparkling off the slight chop in the bay—merely the calm before the storm?

  Though I hate to admit it, I sometimes have a feel for these things. As it turned out, this September—instead of the usual hurricane scares—Chaos, Hell, and the Devil were bearing down on the Richard and Opal Bellman Museum of Art (not necessarily in that order). Our days of paradisiacal serenity were numbered.

  Chapter 2

  As it happened, the Devil came first. Although inactivity had turned my mind so sluggish it took me a while to put a name to the threat. Oh, I knew he was dangerous. How could I not when he appeared in my tram out of nowhere, accompanied by a blaze of lightning, an all-enveloping explosion of thunder, and the acrid smell of air rent asunder by an electrical charge?

  But I get ahead of myself.

  It was late afternoon. I was returning empty from the Casa Bellissima, after letting off three visitors for the final tour of the day. Although the rainy season was dwindling to a close, I’d been hearing rumbles for the past half hour. As the first drops began to spatter onto the lower half of my semi-open windshield, I pulled up under the multi-trunked shelter of a great banyan and readied my tram for the storm. First, I folded up the top half of my windshield and fastened it in place. I hated to lose the air, but being soaked to the skin is surprisingly chilling, even when the temperature is ninety-five. Then I began to unsnap and roll down the plastic side curtains. If you’re having trouble visualizing this process, think of Tram 3 as an elongated golf cart, with three bench seats facing front (including the driver’s) and one bench seat at the back, facing to the rear. The front three seats have plastic curtains on each side that roll down; the back seat, a curtain that encloses the whole rear end. Then each panel fastens to the one next to it with a heavy duty plastic zipper, with pull tabs both inside and out. In the other trams at the museum, the driver and passengers end up as snug as bugs in a rug. In Tram 3—my tram—fastening the front panels to the windshield is iffy. Even my best efforts never stayed in place more than five minutes, allowing the front panels on both sides to flap in the wind like the wings of some gigantic prehistoric bird, beating against the insistent storm. It also meant that, no matter how meticulous my efforts, I usually got soaked. Which is why I carry two terry towels and a roll of paper towels in the trunk of my car.

  This time, I had left it too late. The rain increased from infrequent blobs to a downpour so fast that I was at least half-soaked before I crawled back behind the wheel and attempted to coax the plastic at my left to adhere to the sticky loops along the edge of the windshield. The thunder changed from rumbles to sharp cracks. Ready at last to offer shelter to our visitors, I scanned the road, the rose garden, and the lawn in front of the Casa. Not a single soul in sight. (I swear it.) But it was definitely time to remember what my mama told me about sheltering under trees in a thunderstorm. My right foot pressed the pedal. Obediently, Tram 3 rolled silently forward.

  Lightning struck—not my banyan, thank God, but one close by, or perhaps one of the tall slash pines not far away. The thunder was a physical blow, rolling over me with the inevitability of a freight train on a downhill run. My foot came off the gas, my hair stood on end. Not just my arms. I could feel my scalp prickle. The smell was . . . well, maybe sulphurous isn’t the word, but, looking back, it seems appropriate.

  A body—lithe and solid—slid onto the seat beside me. “Good timing,” said a voice that echoed oddly inside the close confines of my eight-passenger plastic-coated tent. “Thanks.”

  Unfortunately, at that moment all my horrors came back in a rush of Act First, Ask Questions Later. But the apparition grabbed my arm before my hand could chop him in the throat. Quite calmly, he reattached my hand to the steering wheel, closing my fingers around the black plastic wheelcover. “Sorry I startled you,” he apologized. Then, more softly: “Interesting reaction.”

  He appeared out of thin air and wondered why I was startled! Had I been stunned by the lightning? Suffered a lapse of time? Where had he come from? I’d swear he hadn’t even unzipped the curtain.

  Okay, so tram drivers don’t usually assault their passengers with karate chops.

  “I beg your pardon,” I mumbled, keeping my eyes straight forward, as if fascinated by the deluge waterfalling down the windshield. “I thought I was alone out here.”

  “No problem,” he rumbled in a baritone so intimate my stomach executed what must have been its tenth somersault in the last sixty seconds. “But you might want to pull out from under this tree.”

  I hated him. He’d materialized out of nowhere, a lean dark wraith, with flashing eyes, radiating danger signals from every pore. He’d manhandled me, thrusting me back behind the wheel as easily as if I were a child of nine instead of . . .

  Truthfully, a child of nine might have managed the whole thing better.

  And now he was telling me how to drive my tram. I put my foot on the pedal and crept forward until we were in a relatively open space. I shifted my right foot over to the parking brake and pushed hard. I could feel his eyes following my foot, noticing I had not used my left. Well, damn him, anyway. Since I already hated him, what was one more sin to chalk up against him?

  “Josh Thomas,” he said. A hand appeared before me. I glanced down, pointedly ignoring his offering. And then it hit me. I was a tram driver, the front line of the museum’s phalanx of meeters and
greeters. No matter how odd this man’s sudden appearance in the front seat of my tram, he was a visitor. My entire job—perhaps even more important than transportation—was being gracious and friendly to visitors.

  I unglued my hand from the wheel. His grasp was exactly what I feared. It pulled me in, skin to skin, as if declaring it would never let me go. It insisted I look up. Look at. Lose myself in eyes so black and opaque, they were like those black holes astronomers study, places where every bit of matter is swallowed up, and nothing ever comes out.

  The face matched. Black hair that might have had a bit of curl but was currently hanging in sodden strands, one or two drooping down far enough to dangle over his well-arched black brows. He could have been any age from thirty to forty. He had an angular face, with a Roman nose, a slash of a mouth, skin as pale as mine. A creature of the night, perhaps? Venturing out only as the museum approached its closing hour?

  Perhaps from that place beneath the statue of David that Richard Bellman had once intended to be his crypt?

  You’re past invalid, Rory, my girl. Try breakdown. Two bricks shy of a load. Certifiable.

  I retrieved my hand, returned it to the safety of the steering wheel.

  “Tram Drivers Anonymous?” he taunted.

  “Rory Travis,” I muttered. Good manners had been drummed into me since childhood, yet I struggled with a strong desire to say, “Damn the Deluge,” and run for my life. I was not so far gone from the world I had once known that I didn’t recognize Fatal Attraction when it was sitting next to me, hip to hip. This man, however, was dangerous to more than my fragile heart. I recognized the type. He might be wearing casual clothes—black T-shirt, black jeans, sneakers so white they looked as if they just came out of the box. There wasn’t even room for—

  Look again, Rory. Those aren’t jeans. My eyes strayed where they probably shouldn’t have. My mysterious stranger was wearing full-cut trousers, not jeans. Of course. Where else would he put the gun? A .22, maybe even a .32, could hide behind those pleats with no difficulty at all.

  Take my word for it. His was a type that never went anywhere without one.

  “Well, Rory Travis, how long do these storms usually last?”

  I’d nearly killed him, and he was making mundane tourist conversation. The whole scene was surreal.

  Not that I would have finished that chop. I wasn’t that far gone. But since he’d countered my blow by moving as swiftly as the lightning that brought him, he had no way of knowing I would have pulled the chop before it landed. Yet, here he was, blandly talking about the weather.

  “The worst should be over soon,” I replied, matching him cool for cool. “Then I’ll do a pick-up at the Circus Museum and take everyone to the main tram stop. I’m afraid you’ll have to make a run for the parking lot.” Casual Visitor Reply Number One Thousand and One.

  But casual indifference was all that would save me. I was sitting shoulder to shoulder with the living embodiment of a Black Hole . . . caught in an awareness so strong, it blotted out the world around us, as if we were the last survivors in some primeval jungle . . .

  “Do you drive every day?”

  What? “Twice a week.” My reply was so wooden I might as well have been a robot.

  “Volunteer?”

  “Yes.”

  “How often do you get soaked?”

  The man was trying, I had to admit. At this moment his manners were considerably better than mine.

  “Not too often,” I told him. “Usually the storm doesn’t come on quite so hard or so fast, but it does rain nearly every afternoon from June through September.”

  “Maybe I should come back when the weather is better.”

  “By mid-October it’s beautiful,” I offered, then winced, certain my words sounded more like an invitation than casual conversation.

  “I came late today, not realizing there was so much to see,” Josh Thomas admitted, as if he were just another tourist.

  Which he wasn’t. Josh Thomas was Fate. Like the inexorable statue stalking toward Don Giovanni, sealing his doom.

  “So next time I’m in town, I’ll be back.”

  Polite conversation? Incipient flirtation? Threat? My intuition failed me. The deluge had dwindled to a steady rain. Wishing I had the luxury of windshield wipers, I put my foot on the pedal and drove east toward the Circus Museum. Beside me, my mystery man, rebuffed by my lack of response, turned silent.

  Betty, the Security guard, must have been peeking out the door watching for my delayed arrival, for she promptly shooed a full complement of six visitors out the door. There was a great rustling of zippers up, zippers down, and then we were squelching down the bumpy asphalt, turning off onto the crushed shell road that became more pock-marked with each day’s rain. Giant stalks of bamboo (no pandas) could be glimpsed through the rain-streaked plastic to our left. Up onto smooth asphalt and a straight run back to the Art Museum.

  The rain was still coming down pretty hard. Taking pity on my passengers, I daringly departed from my route, making my way up the sidewalk to the front of the museum. Where I was now faced with the problem of how to turn around without backing onto the grass. Sigh. Not even my mystery man could have done it. Unless, of course, he had Powers. Inwardly, I scoffed, while quivers shot up my spine. Josh Thomas was dark, wet, well-spoken, and well-mannered. Josh Thomas, I assured myself, was human.

  Really. Wasn’t that a very solid, if wet, thigh tucked up against mine? Obviously, I had been an invalid too long. My brains had gone missing in some Stephen King fantasy.

  My passengers, uttering grateful thanks, piled out of the tram and scurried out the front gate toward the parking lot across the street. Josh Thomas remained.

  “I’ll look for you,” he said. “When I come back.”

  Was there the tiniest gleam of warmth in those unfathomable black eyes?

  I actually heard myself say, “I drive Tuesday and Friday afternoons.”

  “Arrivederci,” he murmured. For a moment I actually thought he was going to kiss my hand.

  Tram. Turn around. Get the hell off the lawn.

  But I sat there and peered through the scratched and dripping plastic, watching him lope toward the gate. In those baggy pants there was no way to tell if his cheeks rivaled David’s, but the upper body—his black T-shirt molded to his skin by the rain—might well have given Michelangelo’s version of the young Israelite a run for his money. Nice. Very nice. Even if he was nowhere near seventeen feet tall.

  Just before turning the corner outside the gate, he paused. Waved. My hand insisted on waving back. Afterwards, I held it up before me and glared. Traitor! I scolded my betraying digits. If there’s one thing you don’t need, it’s another man who carries a gun.

  I shifted into reverse, backed up over the shimmering green lawn and scooted back to the tram stop before I got caught by one of the Art Museum’s security guards, who were, fortunately, all sheltering from the storm.

  I lingered over putting my tram to bed that night. The other two drivers on my shift go home at five, leaving me to finish the last forty-five minutes on my own. The grounds behind the museum were deserted, just a long stretch of well-manicured grass, flanked by trees, with Sarasota Bay once again beginning to glimmer as the sun, low in the west, broke through the rapidly diminishing clouds. At the front of the Art Museum I knew people were pouring out, heading for the parking lot. On the south side, most of the security guards would also be heading out, along with the staff, docents, and gift shop attendants. But here all was quiet. Even the yellow crime scene tape on the banyan near the bay wasn’t visible from here.

  Yet Billie’s words nagged at me. Tuition all paid and classes barely begun.

  My awakening brain refused to give the problem up, maybe because Tim Mundell’s death had not been the only disturbance to the Bellman’s customary serenity. The sudden appearance of Josh Thomas at the Bellman was like dropping a tiger shark into a softly bubbling stream full of brook trout.

  Tim Mund
ell . . . Josh Thomas.

  No! I refused to listen to the insidious whispers in my head. I was done with all that. Washed up.

  I pocketed my tram key, pulled out the tram’s long electrical cord, and plugged it into the outlet. Then, instead of heading for my car, I unzipped a corner of the back flap and sat on the rear-facing seat, doing a darn good imitation of Rodin’s The Thinker.

  The whispers had a will of their own, sibilant and insistent. There had been something very odd about Josh Thomas. He would have been perfectly at home in New Haven, melting into the mafiosi without a ripple. He would also fit into the complex puzzles of the Middle East, Afghanistan, or Chechnya, anywhere men were dark, secretive, and lethally dangerous. Josh Thomas, international hit man? International spy? Arms dealer? Drug smuggler?

  Assassin?

  But where was the connection with young Tim Mundell? What possible association could there be between a computer geek from an Honors College and a man of international suavity laced with lethal undertones?

  Face it, Travis. If Josh Thomas had anything to do with Tim Mundell’s death, he’d have been long gone by afternoon. Not dodging raindrops while making eyes at a down-and-out tram driver.

  I’ll look for you. When I come back.

  The man was going to haunt me, and I hated that. Hated being helpless, my body frail, my mind in neutral, stubbornly refusing to get off its duff and create so much as one original thought. Josh Thomas, Josh Thomas, Josh Thomas. He’d been determinedly charming. To a rain-bedraggled female who had tried to take him out. My enfeebled brain circled round and round, with nothing happening beyond a vague speculation about how many other names my mystery man might have.

  And—finally—if one of them was Lucifer.

  At close to six I dragged myself up, re-zipped the plastic curtain and limped to my car. Or, rather, to Aunt Hy’s car. The family had breathed a collective sigh of relief when Aunt Hy turned over the keys to her 1993 gold Cadillac Seville (with twelve thousand miles). She’d once gone shopping at the Mall and taken a taxi home, her confusion gone unnoticed until her frantic call to the police the next day, reporting her car stolen. The county deputies, long accustomed to the vagaries of seniors, had been very understanding. Or so Mom told me.