“I’m a dab hand with chicken vindaloo,” Jenny returned. “Let’s go.”
*
At the condo Hilary was happy to play sous-chef to Jenny, who, as usual, knew what she was doing. More than once Mark noted Hilary glancing with speculative wistfulness at Jenny’s capable hands; he suspected she was drawing a parallel between cooking and sex. Remembering the manuals he and Karen had once worked through, he decided she wasn’t far wrong.
They ate the resulting delicious meal outside on the patio. While Mark and Hilary washed up, Jenny cornered Minnie with the broom and sent her flying out the door with dire warnings to avoid Osborne and Graymalkin’s well-developed hunting instincts.
Later, they sat nursing glasses of wine while Mark played his guitar. The cottonwood peeking over the fence rustled its leaves in harmony with songs dating from medieval madrigals to Billy Joel. In contrast to yesterday’s dramatic evening, today’s sunshine faded almost imperceptibly into cool, fresh night. At last Mark was playing by touch only, and in the darkness he could no longer differentiate between the women sitting at the table. He put his guitar away and offered to take Jenny home. Hilary said she would go along.
Other than a tiny pinpoint of light by the excavation which was its police guard’s cigarette, Osborne and its grounds were pitch black. Mark turned the van into the driveway, stopped beside the attendant patrol car, and waved to its occupant. “I didn’t put on the lights, did I?” said Jenny. “Graymalkin will be right narked.”
“Look!” exclaimed Hilary. Mark spun toward the house. In the gap between the closed curtains in the windows of the dining room a light glimmered. He closed his eyes, clearing his head of wine-infused cobwebs—no, this wasn’t the night after the reception when he and Hilary had seen lights in the windows—he wasn’t a lonely little boy having nightmares. He opened his eyes. The light was gone. But they all had seen it. He reached for the flashlight in his glove compartment.
As one, Mark, Jenny, and Hilary piled out of the car and hurried toward the house. The glowing cigarette winked out and footsteps crunched behind them. A crackle of static came from inside the patrol car.
Jenny turned her key in the lock of the front door. It was already open. Like a soldier hearing “Charge!” she drew herself up and pushed the door open. Mark inhaled, his chest full of cottonwood fluff, and wished his flashlight would transform itself into a broadsword. Hilary laid a cold hand on his free arm.
They stepped from the murmur of the wind in the oak trees into utter silence. The beam of light glinted on the grandfather clock’s metal entrails strewn across the floor. The faintest suggestion of perfume hung on the air. At the top of the stairs something moved…. Mark jerked. The light stuttered. Graymalkin bounded down the steps, her tail like a bottle brush, her eyes glinting an eerie phosphorescence.
Mark swallowed his heart back down into his chest. Hilary’s nails were digging into his arm. In the depths of the house the piano trilled, an off-key run of notes like a derisive laugh. They turned toward the music room. Behind them someone groaned. The light ricocheted up the stairs, across the ceiling, down the walls; vases, feathers, paintings gyrated wildly in its beam. Crimson rosettes trailed across the dirty planks of the floor into the parlor. “Blood,” said Hilary hoarsely.
Jenny stepped into the parlor. “Who’s there?”
Mark’s foot kicked something—a broken flashlight—and sent it rolling into the shadows. A human shape huddled against the fireplace. “Help me, please….” The voice was barely a breath.
Into the light leaped the silver hair and pallid, distorted, face of Nicholas Vasarian. His shirt front and the hand that clutched it glistened red. Hilary’s hands flew to her mouth, choking down a cry.
Jenny fell to her knees, ripped off her blouse, and pressed it against Vasarian’s chest. “Who did this to you?”
The floor heaved beneath Mark’s feet. He braced himself against the door frame. Vasarian? But he was the murderer!
Another trill sounded from the piano. The harsh rasp of Vasarian’s breath was louder. Footsteps clunked up the veranda. “Hey, y’all all right in there?”
Hilary released Mark’s hand, peeled off her sweater, and draped it over Jenny’s naked shoulders. Mark turned toward the door, his voice grating. “Call an ambulance.”
“A woman,” gasped Vasarian. “It was a woman….” His head lolled against the marble of the fireplace.
Hilary looked at Mark, her eyes damp and deep. He tried to hold the flashlight steady. He tried to look back at her with some measure of confidence. He could do neither.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Stop the world, Hilary thought. I want to get off. The orange chairs in the police waiting room were bobbing up and down like horses on a carousel, carrying her round and round, sweeping her past the same staring faces over and over again…. Closing her eyes, she forced her mind to steady.
She opened her eyes. Beside her Mark’s jaw and chin were honed so keenly they could cut stone. She laced her fingers with his, and his scowl moderated. He’d been scared last night. That was nothing to be ashamed of. Neither was it something he wanted her to mention to him.
Mark, Hilary, and Jenny had followed a squad of police officers through Osborne house as through a carnival tunnel of horrors, expecting something awful to jump out at them. Nothing had. Despite the contemptuous laugh of the piano when they’d first stepped into the house, by the time they searched the place no one was there. And they’d found no knives, only Jenny’s nursery monitor smashed to bits in the turret room. Hilary was ready to believe the ghosts of Arthur and Vicky were conspiring to kill half the people involved with the artifacts and drive the other half crazy.
Later, in bed, she’d tucked the covers back around Mark every time his hallucinatory mutters and gestures had thrust them away. She’d thought of waking him and making love to him; maybe that would calm him. But she couldn’t offer him a harmony she had yet to find herself.
Mark shifted uncomfortably in his plastic chair. “Do you think you still have a job?”
“All Bradshaw said was to come back ‘after everything is settled’, that since I’d packed the artifacts there wasn’t anything else for me to do. Which is baloney—Nathan had a list of things as long as your arm he needed me to do. Leslie said she’d throw her body across the fakes, if necessary. I’d rather she threw the killer across the room.”
“Bradshaw’s upset about the publicity,” Mark assured her. “Of course, he hasn’t seen anything yet—wait until the word gets out about the fakes.”
The door marked “Homicide” opened. Today it was Zapata who beckoned them inside. “How many reporters were at Osborne this morning?” she asked.
“About twice as many as were outside the condo and the Lloyd,” Mark answered.
“We’ll never get a fair trial here,” lamented Zapata. “We’ll have to change the venue to Beijing and learn Chinese.”
Hilary expected Mark to make some caustic comment about needing a defendant first, but his face simply creased into its scowl.
Yeager was waiting in the same interview room as yesterday, video at the ready. “The hospital says we can visit Vasarian in about an hour,” he informed Zapata. “That should give us just enough time to run over Sharon’s interview.”
“I take it both Travis and Sharon have an alibi for last night?” Hilary asked. “You didn’t have them here, by any chance?”
“No, unfortunately,” replied Zapata. She waved Mark and Hilary into chairs and settled herself at the head of the table. “All we can charge Travis with is assault. And the lawyer’s arguing he’s the one with bruises on him, not Hilary, so we shouldn’t charge him with anything.”
“That’s a load of bull,” said Mark.
Hilary folded her hands in her lap. “Yeah,” she said. “I go out of my way looking for men to attack.”
Zapata made a dismissive gesture with the video remote. “Travis’s alibi for Nathan’s murder is airtight; several hundred
people saw him arguing with the judges at the cutting horse contest. And we have him on instant replay. What we don’t have is enough evidence to charge him with trying to gas y’all, and since nobody actually attacked Jenny at all….” Zapata’s scowl was almost as fierce as Mark’s. “Dolores bailed him out yesterday afternoon, and we had no reason to hold Sharon. Supposedly they and Kenneth were all watching a movie in Dolores’s media room last night.”
“We’re not quite sure what to make of your theories about the workshop,” Yeager concluded, “but after you showed us those rings last night…. Yeah, well, why not a thirty-year-old art scam? I’d believe anything by now. Let us know what you hear from France.”
Zapata aimed the remote. The TV screen flickered. “At least Vasarian is out of action. Maybe he murdered Nathan and now one of the Coburgs has gone for him.”
“Murder’s catching,” said Hilary.
“Chain reaction,” Mark said.
Sharon Coburg appeared on the video screen. The colors on this tape weren’t washed out; they were garish, like a colorized movie. Sharon was so thin, her red hair so frizzy, and her eyes so blank with make-up, that she bore a distinct resemblance to Little Orphan Annie. She sat with her hands tangled in her lap, shoulders hunched, face averted from the camera so that her expression was slightly skewed. The same solicitous jacket sleeve and white cuff as yesterday filled the edge of the screen.
“No,” said Sharon’s recorded voice. “Travis didn’t try to kill Mark and Hilary. He can’t help being a jerk. Most men are jerks—look at my brother, he’s just like our dad. Travis wouldn’t try to kill anyone. He gets along too well with horses to be a murderer.”
Hilary smiled; Sharon’s reasoning was oddly charming. But judging by the angle of Mark’s brows, he thought her ridiculously naive.
“Would Travis kill to protect you?” Zapata’s voice asked.
Sharon crouched even more defensively. “I didn’t kill Nathan.”
“He ended your affair the day before he was killed.”
“Yeah. He told me his conscience was bothering him.”
“Go on,” Yeager prodded from off camera.
Sharon’s expression was that of an armadillo caught in a sudden glare of headlights. “That’s all. There isn’t any more.”
“There isn’t?” Into the picture rolled a TV screen. It lit with a blurred version of the interview Mark and Hilary had seen yesterday.
Carousels within carousels. Hilary listened to Travis’s filtered voice without looking at the picture disappearing into itself like an M.C. Escher drawing. Mark groaned.
Sharon started to cry, very quietly, as though she were melting. Mascara streaked her cheeks. The white-cuffed hand offered her a handkerchief. She mopped, smearing the dark stripes into a mask. “Poor Travis, he’s always imagining plots and conspiracies. Poor Hilary—she doesn’t know he’s just a teddy bear inside.”
Not a good metaphor, Hilary thought bitterly.
“But why on earth would I be scared of a bookworm like her? Or of a nice refined gentleman like Vasarian? Maybe Nathan didn’t like me teasing him about the artifacts, but that’s not why he broke up with me. That’s too petty. He wasn’t petty. He was nice to me.”
Still she leaked tears. Hilary told herself that Sharon, too, had been raised to be ashamed of emotion. Beneath her protective coating of hostility, she was bloated with tears.
“Yes,” Sharon said, “I’d like to get away for a while, maybe go to a spa somewhere—my nerves are shot. I wish everything was over with. Don’t you?” She sniffed into the handkerchief.
“Oh yes,” Zapata told her, “I’d like everything to be over with.”
Yeager’s voice said, “So you and Travis were both at home last Thursday night? With your car?”
“We can’t have the only maroon BMW in the city.”
“No, but you have the only one with a Dia de los Muertos bone in it.”
“You don’t have to answer,” the lawyer said to Sharon. “Remember, your mother’s waiting outside.”
Sharon cried even harder, huddled so tensely that just looking at her made Hilary ache.
Zapata turned off the TV. “She sat here and cried for an hour. The lawyer was muttering about dehydration, and Dolores had stomped a path in the linoleum outside. I had to let her go. Is there anything y’all would like to add to what she said, especially after you found Vasarian last night?”
Mark and Hilary shared a blank look. “Sharon never admitted to knowing about the fakes?” asked Mark.
“Hell no,” Yeager answered. “I’m beginning to believe the artifacts mutated all by themselves.”
“Poor Sharon,” Hilary said. “She’s scared to death. She doesn’t know whom to trust….” It was a woman, Vasarian had told them. If Sharon was full of grief, she was also full of rage. Hilary remembered knitting needles flashing in her own hand, saw a knife glinting in the darkness of Osborne’s parlor, and shivered.
Zapata scooted back her chair. ”Sorry, but I don’t have much sympathy for Sharon. She knows a lot more than she’s letting on. If she’d talked, maybe we could have prevented the attack on Vasarian last night. Unless he fell on his own sword, Roman style.”
“There wasn’t any weapon at the scene,” said Yeager.
“How is he?” Mark asked.
“Let’s go see. Frank, call Jenny, tell her we’re on our way to the hospital. I’ll meet you at the Taco Take-out homicide as soon as I can.”
Yeager’s eyes met hers, wrestled a moment, and dropped. Zapata swept on down the hall. Hilary glanced bemusedly at Mark. He shrugged.
Zapata’s unmarked car took off from the parking garage ahead of Mark’s van. By the time he lost her on Summit Avenue, she was weaving in and out of traffic with the maniacal skill of Luke Skywalker navigating the Death Star. They arrived at Harris Hospital to find her tapping her foot impatiently.
“You have friends in the Traffic Division, I take it?” Mark asked as he and Hilary hurried in the door behind her.
“Surgical floor,” Zapata announced, whisking them upstairs. “Vasarian has a deep stab wound in his chest and a couple of minor nicks. Punctured a lung, but if he’s as tough a bird as I think he is, he’ll live.”
A uniformed police officer was trying unsuccessfully to blend in with the nurses at their central station. Vasarian lay in a cold room scented with disinfectant. He was surrounded by blinking lights, beeping noises, and oscillating lines that looked the way Hilary’s spine felt. She approached the bed and said politely, “Mr. Vasarian? How are you feeling?”
His face was as still and pale as a death mask. But his life force had concentrated itself in his eyes; they were alert and devastatingly intelligent. “The doctors assure me,” he said in a somewhat thin but still cultured voice, “that I shall survive to fight again.”
“It was a fight, then?” asked Zapata.
“Good morning, Detective. No, I’m forced to admit I didn’t put up much of a fight at all. I turned around, there she was, and before I could express my surprise, she struck. I dimly remember voices from outside—I presume that it was your approach, Hilary and Mark, and Jenny too—that saved me from sharing poor Nathan’s fate.”
Mark looked skeptical, and yet he could hardly dispute Vasarian, who was his own best Exhibit A.
“You didn’t see her face?” Zapata asked.
“No, just a shape shining a flashlight in my eyes. Her strength was quite impressive.”
“A bowie knife can be quite impressive,” said Zapata.
The door opened with a thunk, and Jenny stepped into the room. Vasarian’s monitors quickened their beeps. She crossed the room and looked down at him, her hands clamped on her hips. “Here, what the bloody hell have you been on about all this time?”
Vasarian laughed. A strained laugh, considering the wound in his chest, but a laugh nonetheless.
Travis wasn’t the only one always seeing plots; it took Hilary’s mind perhaps two seconds to turn all her previous
theories inside out and visualize conspiracies complex enough to make Agatha Christie tear her hair out. Mark was staring at Jenny, his features compacted to granite. “Dr. Galliard….” Zapata began.
Jenny spun around. “Hilary’s instructor from Paris rang not half an hour ago. In 1973, again in 1974, and yet again in 1976, Vasarian advised the Louvre not to buy art objects offered by Arthur Coburg because they were forgeries. He did give his expertise on a reliquary in 1970, but has since then changed his mind.”
“That was the one that got my attention,” said Vasarian. “A beautiful piece, expertly made. Since Coburg was a well-known collector, I thought I should keep an eye on him. I hate to tell you how many museums and collectors around the world have Coburg forgeries in their inventories.” He nodded his head, a suggestion of a polite bow. “Detective Zapata, allow me introduce myself. Nicholas Vasarian, Fraud Squad, Interpol.”
It would take a stronger constitution than hers, Hilary thought giddily, to sneak up on Zapata like that; the woman looked like someone had just driven a nail into her forehead. Mark’s expression went from puzzlement to rage to hysteria, and he whooped with laughter. Jenny snarled, “You sod! Why didn’t you put me in the picture?”
“At the risk of stating the obvious, Dr. Galliard, because you are Arthur Coburg’s daughter. Because your mother had the figure from the Eleanor Cross. Because I thought you yourself had the body of the Cross.”
Hilary felt laughter bubbling up inside her, like spring water percolating through layers of fear and uncertainty. Mark stepped back and leaned against the door.
“The Cross is buried somewhere on the grounds,” said Jenny. “Gnawed by rats, perhaps rotting away….”
“Not necessarily,” Vasarian told her. “It’s somewhere it can easily be retrieved. I’ve seen a letter from Arthur dated a month before his death, offering the cross for sale through one of his usual shady dealers. That’s how I traced the Regensfeld artifacts. I went backwards to the Allied Art Commission and to you.”
Garden of Thorns Page 35
