I was, in fact, so dazzled it was the day of the Gala before I thought about shoes. I burst into Aunt Hy’s room. “I can’t go,” I wailed. “I can’t wear a Schiaparelli with sneakers!”
We stared at each other. Clearly, neither of us had remembered my wearing heels was out of the question. “You must have flats somewhere, Rory,” said my aunt in the perfectly reasonable tone of an adult dealing with a forgetful five-year-old.
I hadn’t worn flats since my first date, an interminable evening with the height-challenged son of one of my parents’ good friends. “Loafers,” I offered, “but they’re not much of an improvement on sneakers.” I pictured arriving at the Museum in my rose silk Schiaparelli and black suede loafers. I cringed. “It’s a good thing Martin is escorting you,” I told Aunt Hy. “You don’t need me at all.”
“Aurora,” she declared, “I would not be going to this affair if it were not for you. You have hidden yourself away too long. I am dragging my old bones to this event so you may meet some of Sarasota’s finest. It is important.”
Obviously, compliance was the only response. But how would we manage?
My aunt picked up the phone. “This is Hyacinth Van Horne,” she announced as she requested a connection to Guest Services. Far below, the perfectly ordered service mechanisms of the Ritz-Carlton hummed into action. By the time Aunt Hy’s old friend (and Bellman Board member) Martin Longstreet picked us up in a chauffeur-driven white limo, a pair of shiny white satin slippers (a perfect fit, of course) had arrived at our door. And, eschewing my Florida routine of once-over-lightly with pressed powder, I had dug out the works—foundation, loose powder, rouge, eye shadows, eyeliner, mascara. The effect was startling. I remembered this woman, I thought as I looked in the mirror. Someone I used to know up North.
But when I added the necklace Aunt Hy insisted I borrow—a choker of pink diamonds which, instead of providing cover, would draw every eye to my startling décolletage—I realized I could have skipped the rouge, for my cheeks now matched my rose-colored gown. Well, hell! Going for broke, I squirted on some of Aunt Hy’s three-hundred-an-ounce perfume from her antique millefiore perfume bottle and declared myself ready for the Gala.
And, yes, thoughts of Cinderella kept flitting through my twenty-first century head. Driving a tram had not prepared me for the rarified world I now was entering. Almost, I left my spanking new cane at home. But common sense prevailed. Imagine the damage to the Schiaparelli if I measured my length on the Bellman sidewalk or fell into the soup at supper on the loggia.
No trams tonight. For tonight, the Bellman had hired six trolley cars. Delightfully vintage, even if they ran on wheels instead of rails. Our limo driver maneuvered so skillfully we found ourselves with only a few feet to walk between limo and trolley. Martin—darling Martin—provided a firm hand to help Aunt Hy, and then myself, aboard.
Martin Longstreet, like Hyacinth Van Horne, was one of those whose age was impossible to estimate. More than seventy, probably less than ninety, although Florida boasted a surprising number of spry nonagenarians. He was slimly elegant, a man who had probably lost breadth, rather than gained it, through the years. He was still good-looking. Women must have panted after him in his younger days. From his general aura of savior faire to his cultured voice and impeccable manners, he gave every indication of being born into old money. Exactly the escort I would expect Aunt Hy to choose. Martin’s costume for the evening was a tux, with tails and white tie. As classic and timeless now as it was in the twenties or when Beau Brummel revolutionized men’s wear more than a hundred years before that.
I pressed my nose to the trolley’s glass and gaped. I had driven these same roads over ten weeks now, and it was as if I had never seen them before. Great banks of spotlights on rolling wheels, lit the shell and cement driveway down which Richard and Opal Bellman’s guests had once been driven to the Casa Bellissima. On our right, lights from neighboring houses and the Honors College peeked through a heavy growth of greenery. To the left were the deeply shadowed Bellman grounds, with only a faint glow rising from the courtyard where we would enjoy supper after our tour of the Casa, for the Art Museum’s original windows had been stuccoed over many years since. Not a smidgin of light leaked from the galleries.
Nonetheless, I spotted a raccoon and thought I caught a glimpse of the Museum Cat as he did his duty, prowling the grounds for rodents less armored than the armadillos who were seldom seen, but left deep holes in the ground as their sharp noses dug for food. (I had been assured that the rattlesnakes that once plagued the grounds were long gone.) The armadillos, by the way, seemed particularly fond of the grass around Lygia and the Bull. Perhaps the tramp of so many visitors’ feet around the scandalous sculpture softened the ground and made for easy access to the grubs and worms below.
As we approached the bay, darkness vanished. The Casa Bellissima had been transformed into a fairyland of lights and beautiful people. A veritable rainbow prism of color shimmered through each tall stained glass window. Across the water, lights from the houses and condos on Pelican Key penetrated the faint mist rising from the cooling bay and added to the breathtaking loveliness of the setting, which managed to be both sylvan and aquatic. If Aunt Hy had tolerated my excuses . . . if she had allowed me to stay home . . .
What if I had missed all this?
I’d been in The House before, of course. Twice as a child visiting Aunt Hy and once shortly after joining the tram service. Richard Bellman had included an elevator in his original plans, so I had not had to entrust myself to the narrow winding marble staircase, more attractive than functional. But seeing the Casa Bellissima in daylight with a group of tourists and seeing its treasures shimmering at night in company with people dressed in the clothing of the Casa’s heyday were two entirely different things. It was a land of enchantment.
Since even two-hundred-dollar-a-plate guests were not allowed to wander alone through the Casa’s treasures, we were promptly herded into a carefully counted group of twenty, and then we were off, viewing the home of Richard and Opal Bellman as guests might have seen it seventy-five years earlier.
I hesitate to admit it, but I’d made a surreptitious shopping excursion the day before. If my sneakers didn’t fit the Schiaparelli, neither did my ineffably common aluminum cane. I now possessed a folding cane, decorated with painted flowers, mostly lavender, and topped by a vaguely Egyptian cat of carved ivory. (I had also indulged in a walking stick of curled sassafras, a luxury to which I intended to graduate as soon as possible.) For tonight, the flowers would do quite well. They blended rather nicely with my gown’s hand-painted petals.
I leaned hard on the cane, as I stared up at the twenty-two coffered ceiling panels in the Bellman ballroom. Each octagonal gilded frame featured a colorful painting by Willy Pogany, depicting dancers from around the world in native costume. When I lowered my head, taking a moment to rest my neck, I glanced casually about the room. Martin, I noticed, was not gazing at the gilded coffers. He was smiling down at Aunt Hy as if he could think of no place he would rather be.
Abruptly, I studied the toes of my white satin flats. Calling on all the Travis pride, I repelled a rush of tears. We hadn’t even been engaged, Eric and I, just beginning—perhaps too cold-bloodedly—to discuss what marriage would do to our professional partnership.
That was, of course, before I’d managed to get him killed.
Somehow I was swept along with the group as it moved into the Bellman’s primary public room—a central Great Room whose ceiling towered thirty or forty feet above, with a second floor gallery on three sides. Its exquisite furnishings were too much to take in all at once. To name the most obvious: outlined against the background of a seventeenth century tapestry was a crystal chandelier from the old Waldorf-Astoria (purchased by Richard Bellman when the famed hotel was replaced by the Empire State building). The pecky cypress beams and ceiling (forty feet up and illuminated by a skylight, were hand-painted by Robert Webb (every inch recently cleaned by a judiciou
s application of bread dough).
There was one item in the Casa still awaiting renovation. On the far end of the “courtyard” room was an Aeolian organ console. Though now resting in air-conditioned storage, more than two thousand pipes had once been hidden inside the Casa’s walls, providing Richard Bellman with a twenties version of Surround Sound. It’s said that in the organ’s heyday its music traveled all the way across the bay to Pelican Key. (Alas, the Museum was going to have to dig up some more millions before it could be repaired.) One of the docents emphasized this problem on each of her tours by telling her groups that the Bellman was in need of “organ donors.”
“Look at those chairs,” I whispered to Aunt Hy. “Did you ever see such exquisite needlepoint?”
“Well, of course, my dear. Two of those seats are mine.”
Aunt Hy did needlepoint? I thought of the needlework pillows adorning her condo and was once again struck dumb by my tunnel vision, my inability to see what was right under my nose. Aunt Hy had been one of the devoted women who had reproduced the needlework for Casa chairs too far gone to be repaired. And yet, I had never seen her at work. Were her eyes failing, along with her sharp and sophisticated wit?
Aunt Hy poked me in the ribs. I turned my attention back to our tour guide, who was frowning at me. “If you will come along into the Breakfast Room,” she said. “Right this way.” Our group began to snake forward. I was passing the organ console, almost out of the Great Room, when the second round of Chaos struck.
A scream. A tremendous cracking sound echoed through the house. More screams. All from behind me. A wail. A sob. Shouts. The pounding of heavy male feet.
I ducked behind the organ console, bypassing the red plush ropes that kept visitors out of the Great Room, and kept right on going, the firehorse racing toward the smell of smoke. I skidded through a sea of plaster chips littering the floor’s black and white marble diamonds and dropped to my knees beside a torso—no arms, no legs, no head—bulging beneath a crumpled layer of white satin.
For a few moments I was all cop. Cool and analytical. Although the torso was artfully arrayed in a full-length evening gown, there was no mistaking it for human. Real bodies didn’t separate into sections—a leg coming to rest in front of the fireplace fender, an arm draped, rather gracefully, against a tall electric torchère of white ceramic. Another leg had skidded beneath a marquetry card table; the second arm—in multiple pieces—was crushed beneath the torso.
The mannequin’s gown had once been beautiful, possibly even vintage, but it was now marred by great splashes of red. I estimated three or four bottles of nail polish had been needed to create these shiny splashes of brighter-than-blood red. The supposed wound? I looked around, spotted the head where it had come to rest against the back of a burgundy velvet sofa, lolling drunkenly against the passementerie. A gaping wound had been painted, rather carelessly, against the pale skin tones of the mannequin’s neck. The idiotic thought ran through my mind that it was fortunate all that brilliant red polish was dry before our plaster lady took her plunge. Otherwise, the clean-up job would have been a bitch.
I looked up, up, up, to the tiny black wrought iron balcony two stories above. Although that floor was not currently on display to the public, I had been up there many years ago with Aunt Hy. It was a huge game room, with fast access to the Casa’s tower. From the tower, sixty feet high, an intrepid miscreant might, with the right equipment, be able to make a fast getaway—
And then it hit me. Female—fallen from a great height. Shattered. Destroyed. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—
Nausea rose in my throat. Eyes closed, I slumped into a sitting position. I shook.
I knew excitement swirled around me, never quite touching as a pair of black satin-striped trousers stood next to me, protecting me, the authoritative voice above the legs snapping out orders. Martin. Dear old Martin. The crowd was quiet now, perhaps indicative of our modern age which has become all-too-immured to violence. Even the people who had broken off their tour of the second floor bedrooms, charging onto the gallery or down the precipitous pink marble stairs, were once again turning toward their guides, moving along, doing as they told.
“Get this mess cleaned up. Fast.” Martin’s orders to the phalanx of security guards who now surrounded the “body” left no room for argument.
It also brought me out of my blue funk with a snap. “But shouldn’t we—”
“No,” Martin barked. “If we move fast, only the few people here now will know it happened. That leaves six hundred or so who can enjoy their evening in peace.” In spite of his pragmatism, Martin Longstreet’s faded blue eyes held a glitter I had never seen before. Evidently, as a Bellman Board member, he considered this vulgar disruption of the festivities a personal affront.
I suggested a call to Detective Parrish. Martin didn’t bother to reply. The guards were already moving off down the hall to the kitchen with various body parts tucked under their arms.
“Excuse me, miss,” said a younger man I didn’t recognize as he bent to pick up the torso, still clad in the limp red-spattered white satin gown. With surprising delicacy, he carried out the remains, held in his arms, almost as if she were a real person, felled by a sudden bout of faintness.
We were so civilized at the Bellman. Why, then, were such bad things happening?
Martin signaled two guards who had just come bursting through the door, evidently summoned by walkie-talkie. With stalwart hands on each side, I was soon back on my feet, if not without some embarrassment. The guards’ ears were pink. They must have had a good look, back and front, as they bent over to help me to my feet.
As Martin and I went in search of Aunt Hy, we passed some of the on-site security guards returning with push broom, dust pan, and brushes. A few more moments, and the Casa would be Bellissima once again. I could only hope the mannequin’s remains were not going to end up in the nearest dumpster. I suspected Detective Ken Parrish was going to have a fit. Though not on a par with the student’s death, the shattered mannequin was far worse than the effigy of a jaunty Roman soldier driving a Biga.
And had to be unrelated. No way would Billie ever play such a sick joke. Nor did this crudely painted mannequin bear any resemblance to the finely sculpted Roman warrior.
So . . .
My eyes widened as I glanced down. I tweaked the silk framing my cleavage. Each side of the deep V promptly slithered back into place, leaving me as shamelessly exposed as before. A last ferocious scowl straight down to where Aunt Hy’s pink diamonds pointed the way, and I reverted to the cop who insisted, in spite of debilitating weakness in body and soul, that she wasn’t quite down for the count.
Since the day Tim Mundell allegedly hanged himself . . . since the day Josh Thomas slid into my tram in the midst of a towering thunderstorm, a pall had shadowed the Bellman. Disturbing the serenity. Sending out growing ripples of unease that had now spread to the world of the Bellman’s primary supporters, the ones with the money to attend events like tonight’s Gala.
Not good.
And not Billie. Who just wanted the museum to recognize his talent.
Yet a student was found hanging from a Bellman banyan, a bloody “body” tossed at the feet of Sarasota’s wealthiest patrons of the arts . . .
I could almost hear Richard Bellman’s roar of anger. See the defiant shake of his fist. “Not at my Museum!”
I was angry too. I made a promise to Bellman’s remains, buried only a stone’s throw from the Casa Bellisma. A vow from a cripple, maybe, but I was coming alive, catching a whiff of the good old days when I thought myself infallible. Discovering some of what I used to be still lingered.
Darkness was descending on the land I’d learned to love. And I was going to do my best to scatter the ghosts, and maybe a few of my own along with them.
Chapter 6
Martin and I found Aunt Hy in the Gift Shop (once the Bellman kitchen), listening raptly to the words of a lady of uncertain years and consider
able girth who, beneath her shaggy salt and pepper hair and moon-round face, had somehow managed to pour herself into a royal purple twenties chemise with a double layer of foot-long black fringe. It would seem, however, that her powers of observation were superior to her taste in clothes.
“I saw him, I tell you,” she declared. “No one will listen to me. The guide hissed at me to be still. Can you imagine anything so rude? I saw him do it, and nobody wants to hear about it.”
“My niece will,” Aunt Hy promptly assured her. “Ah, here you are, child! Come, Rory, I have been keeping this dear lady here just for you. I was sure you would wish to speak with her.”
I did. But how Aunt Hy could possibly know my analytical instincts, dormant now for so long, had suddenly been aroused I could not guess.
Purple Chemise, her grievance bottled up for too long, burst into a spate of words. “We had just come into the living room. I’ve been through the house twice before, you see, so I wasn’t listening to the guide, just looking around at the things I’d missed. Something moved, way up high, above the second floor gallery. There was this . . . creature.” Her voice dropped to a whisper; she glanced around the kitchen, as if suddenly fearful the creature might pop out of one of the massive cupboards. “He was like the Phantom of the Opera,” she confided. “Or maybe Zorro.” Big black cape, the kind that swirls.”
Purple Chemise had a lively imagination. “Top hat?” I inquired faintly, struggling to hide my incredulity.
“Oh, no, dear. One of those flat things—like Mexicans in an old movie..”
“Zorro,” Martin murmured in my ear. I couldn’t look at him. I was afraid we might set each other off into whoops. “Mask?” he inquired with perfect poker face.
“Oh my, yes,” said Purple Chemise. “The kind that covers just the eyes.”
“Zorro,” said Aunt Hy, nodding in satisfaction, evidently pleased that the description was dovetailing so nicely into place.
Art of Evil Page 6
