“But you’re afraid she did, aren’t you?” Zapata asked.
“She was getting it on with him, and he wasn’t—he wasn’t even one of us, you know. Then the day before he died he had the nerve to tell her he didn’t want her any more. Tough, I told her—there’s plenty more of what she has to offer sashaying along Hemphill Street.”
“This conversation was in your car outside the Lloyd on Tuesday? That’s when she scratched you?”
“Yeah.” The lawyer made a futile shushing gesture. Travis referred him back to Dolores. “The Coburgs and all their artsy-fartsy social stuff. Vasarian and his highfalutin manners. They can stuff it, all of them.”
The digitized picture gave Travis’s image a hard, crisp edge it didn’t have in real life. An edge of fear; the man was terrified. Yeah, Mark thought, if I’d married into Jack the Ripper’s family I’d be terrified, too. He blinked, retracting his attention from the video to the room. The same room, except this one smelled. The image on the video was like a ghost.
Hilary was biting her lip. Her fingers were icy and seemed so brittle he was afraid he’d break them if he squeezed.
“Why did Nathan tell Sharon he wanted to end the relationship?” asked Zapata’s recorded voice.
“Strangest thing you ever heard. He was obsessed with that old German stuff. Sharon said he and Vasarian were always looking at it. So she made some joke, told Sikora the two of them looked like pirates plotting over a buried treasure. And he turned around and told her to beat it.”
Travis looked as baffled as a schoolboy facing a calculus test. Zapata froze the image on the screen. “Did you catch that implication? That Sikora and Vasarian were working together?”
“That would explain Sikora’s murder,” said Yeager. “You often see criminals falling out between themselves.”
“No,” stated Hilary. “You can’t convince me that Nathan was working with Vasarian. He stumbled onto the scam. He was smart, he noticed things, but he wasn’t dishonest.”
“We found him with the figure in his pocket,” said Zapata.
“And with Felicia’s sweater. And with Pamela’s photo—as well as a lot of other ones.”
Mark remembered the darkness of the parlor, Nathan’s outstretched hand, the drift of papers and photographs across the floor. He heard the slow ticking of the clock, measuring out a man’s life. Or a woman’s. “Hilary’s right. Maybe Nathan was playing along with Vasarian, so he could stop the scam. He couldn’t have been in on it.”
Zapata looked skeptically at Yeager. Yeager looked doubtfully back. The door opened, and a uniformed sergeant said, “I have Mrs. Ward in Interview Room Three. I also have two more lawyers and Mrs. Coburg chewing the carpet outside.”
“Try throwing a bucket of water on them,” Yeager suggested.
With a short, sharp laugh, Zapata said, “Be right there.”
On the screen Travis slouched like a barfly just before closing, his expression morose, lacking only an empty glass to address. “Sharon’s not so bad. She can’t help being a little bitch, it’s her family that’s got her all tore up. She kept saying that as soon as Vasarian took all that old junk away, and if Hilary would just go away, too, everything would be all right. I’d like everything to be all right.”
Zapata stopped the videotape and set it to rewind. “That’s it, so far. You’ll notice he admitted to the assault but not to the attempted murder. As for Nathan’s murder, I don’t know whether he’d throw his wife to the wolves in order to save himself. And surely even Travis isn’t stupid enough to call attention to himself by attacking Hilary, if he did kill Nathan.”
“Unless he wants us to think that,” said Yeager.
“He never really said anything about the artifacts, did he? Just that Sharon wanted to get rid of them.” Mark shook his head. “But then, Travis has a perfectly good motive for murdering Nathan without knowing a thing about the fakes. Maybe Sharon will admit to being scared of Hilary blowing the whistle on the scam.”
“Don’t hold your breath.” Zapata massaged her sinuses. Her face had aged a year for every day since the murder, Mark estimated. His own sharp tongue had goaded her too many times.
Yeager’s glance at Zapata was soft enough, edged with just enough frustration, to make Mark believe Hilary’s estimate of their relationship. Some men just had to pursue risky hobbies. Zapata did have an unattainable air that, he knew only too well, could drive a man crazy.
“I want to see the ivory Jesus before I leave,” said Hilary, her voice as smooth as the velvet sheath of a sword.
Zapata looked up, registering her suspicion with a certain cynical humor. “Sure. Frank, take them down to the evidence room.”
Mark and Hilary went out the door and turned right, following Yeager. Zapata grimaced like a bullfighter stepping into the arena and turned left, toward the penetrating tones of Dolores Coburg’s voice.
“Haven’t you people ever heard of habeas corpus? I want to talk to the Chief!”
The door shut, cutting off her tirade. Yeager said, “I almost feel sorry for Ward. Imagine having that for a mother-in-law.”
“Imagine having her for a mother,” rejoined Hilary. “It’s hard to blame Sharon for turning to Nathan for comfort. Maybe he felt sorry for her. That might not be enough to excuse adultery, but I’m not going to pass judgment on him any more than he would’ve passed judgment on me.”
“Sharon could have killed Nathan,” Mark offered. “A woman scorned and all that.”
Yeager said, “Sharon was terrified the morning after the murder. She could’ve done it. She could’ve known who did, and why. Or she could simply have been afraid murder’s catching.”
“Murder’s catching, all right,” Mark growled.
They rode an elevator to the basement, went through a grille, and checked in with a police guard. In minutes Hilary was holding the wooden box Mark had last seen at Osborne, when Vasarian had unmasked Jenny.
She pulled a silk scarf from her purse and, using it to keep her fingers from smudging the ancient ivory, turned the figure around in its bed. Her touch was gentle and inquisitive, her eyes narrowed with intelligent query. Maybe it was blasphemous to fantasize those well-trained fingers and those bright eyes touching him instead, but Mark went ahead and imagined it.
“It’s all right,” Hilary pronounced.
Yeager screwed the lid down again. “Is there any market for this kind of thing?”
“You have to know how to find a buyer. You have to have connections. Like the ones an international art expert would have.”
Mark offered Hilary his arm and walked her soberly out of the building and into the diesel-scented air of the city. The downtown sidewalks were bustling with a lunch-hour crowd. The sun reflected harshly off the new glass buildings but warmed the bricks and stone of the old structures. Hilary and Mark grabbed a sandwich and soft drink at a cafeteria, then drove back to Osborne. They didn’t talk about the murder, the artifacts, or the assaults. Energy expended hardly equaled answers found, Mark reflected bitterly.
Hilary dropped him off at Osborne and continued down York Boulevard toward the Lloyd. A couple of workmens’ vans were parked beside Osborne’s veranda, Mark saw, keeping company with Kenneth’s Lexus. The students were returning from lunch, and Preston and Jenny were putting the finishing touches on the block and tackle rigged over the ruins of the garage and its macabre contents. “Sorry to take so long,” he called.
“Did they get a confession out of Ward?” asked Jenny.
“He admitted to attacking Hilary last night. Says he didn’t try to kill us last week, though.”
“What did you expect him to say?” Preston asked. He checked the settings on the camera, handed it to Amy, then beckoned to a couple of the more heavily built boys. “Okay, gang, here we go.”
Two students had not returned to work this morning; one had called in with some excuse about illness in the family and the other simply hadn’t shown up. The others spent a lot of time glancing ove
r their shoulders, but gamely went on working. Now they gathered around as the two boys and Preston hauled on the rope. With a slow sucking noise the charred and blistered beam rose from the mud. Amy snapped picture after picture.
Mark stood poised in the pit, guiding the beam away from the bones. There was the skeleton’s right hand, not crushed as badly as he’d expected. Jenny ducked the swinging beam and knelt over the bones like a priest genuflecting before a bishop.
Mark managed to get the beam over the edge of the pit and into the students’ grasp before he turned to look. Beneath Jenny’s dental pick two of the fractured finger bones were oddly lumpy. “What is it?” he asked.
“He’s wearing a couple of rings. On his right hand, as he would if he were left-handed. A motive for murder, do you think?”
“Theft? But only the ceramics were reported stolen.”
For a few moments Jenny worked at the rings. Then suddenly she stretched out full length in the damp dirt, her face only inches from the skeletal hand. “Look!”
The rings were gold and garnet, in Victorian style. They were identical to the one Jenny had already found in the excavation—and to the one Arthur had given Pamela. “Damn!” Mark exclaimed. “Arthur must have had copies of Felicia’s ring made.”
The front of Jenny’s shirt and jeans was glazed with mud. She was so pale, her peaches-and-cream complexion looked more like blueberries and skim milk. “Or did he make them himself?” she whispered, with a keen glance toward the hovering students.
Mark sat down in the dirt. His mouth, he realized, was hanging so far open that his jawbone was almost resting on his chest. Yanking it shut, he signaled to Amy. “Those are enough pictures, thanks.”
“No problem.” The girl replaced the lens cap and took the camera over to the tool shed.
“Arthur was very possessive of his workshop,” Mark said quietly to Jenny. “He hired workers who conveniently couldn’t speak English and who didn’t live here. He had equipment you wouldn’t find in an auto body shop—those engraving tools, for example.”
“The sweater,” said Jenny. “Art-F. Did that mean Arthur and Felicia? Or did it mean art fakes?”
Synapses fired in Mark’s brain, snapping together like puzzle pieces. “Good God, Jenny, that could be the connection between Felicia and the artifacts! She found out Arthur was merrily copying his collections and—and what? Threatened to tell? Tried to blackmail him? Burned the place down herself in a fit of righteous indignation? Or was she simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, out there gathering rosebuds while murder was happening in here?”
“And Nicholas-bloody-Vasarian has been working with them all along!” stated Jenny, eyes blazing. “They would’ve needed a way of getting the copies onto the market, with certification that they were genuine. No wonder the Coburgs had no more financial problems after Dolores took matters in hand.”
“Was it her idea?” Mark asked. “Sorry, Jenny, but she could hardly have been doing it behind Arthur’s back.”
“Arthur likely killed this man if not Felicia as well. That’s all right, Mark, I already knew my father was a proper bounder.” The blaze in her eyes flickered and went out, leaving them slightly gray, as though coated with ashes. She looked away, the tendons in her jaw twitching. Mark would have patted her shoulder, but that tensile strength he so admired in her didn’t invite sympathy.
The boys rolled the beam into a patch of debris and coiled the ropes. The other students, evidently disappointed that the removal of the beam hadn’t exposed any pieces of eight or crown jewels, drifted away. Preston got out his drawing board and positioned himself on the edge of the pit. “Are those rings?” he asked.
“Yes.” Jenny cleared her throat. “I don’t have to tell you to record everything very carefully. The police will want copies.”
“If they want some really nice drawings,” Preston replied, “ask Hilary to go over them.”
“Hilary,” said Mark. Jenny looked at him. “I’ll ask Hilary to wait for us at the museum tonight. She can follow Vasarian’s trail. After what Travis said about him and Nathan today, I’m almost convinced he’s the murderer.” Quickly he summarized Travis’s taped testimony.
Jenny’s grim expression wouldn’t have been out of place at Scotland Yard. “Let’s have a go at him, by all means. If for no other reason than to exonerate Nathan.”
Mark went into the kitchen and called Hilary, asking her to wait for Jenny and him at the Lloyd after five. “Sure,” she replied. “I’ll finish packing the artifacts.” The forgeries, Mark corrected silently.
Graymalkin was a furry pillow on the bed. From the front of the house came various thuds and crashes as Kenneth’s workmen dismantled the place; no doubt the Coburgs also knew about the ivory bits found on the rat. Mark envisioned Kenneth himself leaning negligently against the banister as clouds of dust eddied around him. Eddy. Jack the Ripper. Arthur. Good for Jenny, moving the old icebox against the door.
Mark loped breathlessly back out to the dig and uncovered some smashed clay molds, assorted metallurgical tools, and an array of broken chemical bottles while Jenny worked over the skeleton. He left early, cleaned up, and returned to Osborne to pick Jenny up just as the five p.m. news teams began their scrimmage with the police defensive line.
The evening was clear and warm. The branches of the sycamores outside the Lloyd were thick with rustling green leaves. Even though the Museum offices were closed, the exhibit galleries were still open, and Mark and Jenny had to skirt a senior citizens’ tour group just inside the door. She did not look at the portrait of Arthur planted forthrightly on the far side of the atrium, maintaining in death the prominence he had fought so hard to achieve in life.
Leslie let them into the office wing and showed them the way to the conservator’s lab. So this was where Hilary worked; Mark looked curiously around, noting the brushes, paints, and potions interspersed with computers and microscopes that made up a space-age wizard’s chamber.
A strained but bravely smiling Hilary rose from her worktable and offered them a tour, concluding with the tidy boxes she’d prepared for the artifacts. Jenny contemplated the dazzling array of fakes as though she were eyeing a ripe red apple, attracted by its beauty but not knowing whether its flesh was sweet or wormy.
“Even down here, I feel as though someone’s watching me,” Hilary said. “It’s bad enough Travis broke into my home—but even here….” She stopped abruptly and leaned so close to the Bible cover that its gold misted with her breath. Taking a cloth, she wiped some microscopic speck from it.
Mark didn’t raise a hand to caress her; Jenny was conspicuous by her presence. Instead he offered Hilary another problem to solve, telling her about the rings on the skeleton’s hand and the anomalous tools in the garage workshop.
He could almost hear her mind ticking over. Her eyes blazed like Jenny’s, burning away her nervousness. “Of course—they’re such excellent copies they must have been made directly from the originals! All a skilled craftsman needs is the proper equipment, not a lab like this.”
“But if we’re to build a case against the Coburgs and Vasarian for forgery,” Jenny said, “over and beyond murder, for God’s sake, we need proof.”
“Could you trace Vasarian’s steps over the last thirty years or so?” asked Mark. “Maybe we could find some association with Arthur.”
“What we really need,” Hilary said, “is a list of the items Arthur sold from his collections, and whether Vasarian gave his expertise on any of them. Some must have been authentic, and he might have admitted some were copies. Help me put these away.”
They put the lids on the boxes, extinguishing the lure of the artifacts, and stored them away. Jenny’s backward glance as they left the lab was filled with both rue and rage.
In the library Hilary quickly cross-referenced mentions not only of Arthur Coburg’s collections, but of Vasarian himself, including several of his scholarly studies. One after another the green letters scrolled down the scre
en—paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and manuscripts; museums, universities, and private collectors; Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses; Rome, Paris, London, and Regensfeld. Nowhere was Vasarian specifically associated with Arthur Coburg.
“He was working for the Louvre in Paris in 1973,” Mark said, more out of weary stubbornness than hope. “Assuming Arthur’s workshop was going full blast then….”
“Right.” With a flourish Hilary printed out a list of artifacts that had passed through the Coburg collections. The humor in her smile was dark, but it was still humor. “Under the circumstances I think we’re entitled to take some liberties, don’t you?” She led them down the hall to a door imprinted “Director: Wesley Bradshaw” and slipped inside. Jenny and Mark, sharing a bemused smile, followed.
Hilary seated herself at Bradshaw’s desk and pulled his telephone across its polished, empty surface. She went through two operators before she reached one of her former instructors in Paris and launched into a voluble French apology for disturbing him so late at night.
Mark listened, enjoying the soft slurs in her voice and the way her lips shaped the unfamiliar words. “Merci mille fois. A demain,” she said at last, and hung up the phone.
Jenny’s grasp of the language was considerably better than Mark’s. She nodded firmly. “You gave him Osborne’s number? Well done.”
“Tomorrow,” Hilary told Mark, “M. LeMaire will look up the purchase records of the artifacts the Louvre bought from Arthur, to see if Vasarian ever gave an expertise—vouched for the authenticity—on any of them. It’s a long shot—and M. Le Maire thinks I’m completement fou to even ask—but it’s something. We have to do something. I’m tired of being the proverbial sitting duck.”
“Amen,” said Jenny.
“How about dinner?” Mark asked Hilary, trying for a jocular tone. “Now that we’ve finally pried Jenny out of Osborne.”
Jenny’s brows lofted irony across her forehead. “Do I detect plots against me?”
“For you,” Hilary said, laughing. “Come on over to my place. I was going to cook curried chicken last night and got rather distracted.”
Garden of Thorns Page 34
