Savages

10

Sunday mornings are quiet times in my household. We’re not churchgoers, but that doesn’t mean, no matter what the hard-core religious right would have you believe, that we lack spirituality or traditional family values. Organized religion is fine for some people; for others it’s restrictive and unnecessary. There’s a wryly funny and sage comment in an Agatha Christie film I saw once that pretty much sums up my position, and Kerry’s. One of the characters in the film tells Miss Marple that an odd young man of her acquaintance was once arrested for exposing himself in St. Paul’s Cathedral. After a thoughtful moment, Miss Marple replies, “Well, we all worship in our own way.”

I got up first and cooked breakfast, and Emily and I spent some quality time together, talking about this and that, things that matter to eleven-year-old girls and their doting adoptive fathers, while Kerry had her breakfast in bed and read everything in the Sunday paper except the ads. She doesn’t share my anti-news philosophy. Her attitude is the generally accepted one that the better informed you are, the better able you are to cope. We’ve had any number of discussions on the subject, my stance being the generally unaccepted one that the better informed you are, the more frustrated and crazy you’re liable to become. Unless you’re a dedicated activist, there’s damn little you can do about such matters as global terrorism, indefensible wars on foreign soil and escalating body counts, widespread political corruption, drug-related gang violence, and all the other insanities that make up the daily news. Cast your vote, contribute to appropriate causes, raise your public voice now and then, try to make a difference in small, work-related ways, and hope for the best-that’s about it. You don’t need daily details of barbarism and polarized op-ed columns and strings of depressing statistics to do any of those things. One man’s opinion. We all worship in our own way and we all get through the best way we can.

Emily and I cleaned up the kitchen, after which she went into her room to commune with her iPod and I shut myself inside Kerry’s office to find out if Celeste Ogden was available. After Tamara’s call last night, and her report on what she’d found in Nancy Mathias’s diary, I agreed that we were justified in pursuing an investigation. Up to a point. Cases like this, as I’d tried to tell Mrs. Ogden on Friday, are tricky. Unless you turn up incontrovertible evidence that a crime has been committed, there’s only so much you can do. We’d take it one step at a time, see what developed. If nothing did, we’d bow out whether the client liked it or not.

Might as well notify her right away. Sundays are quiet days, family days, but there’s no hard-and-fast rule that says you can’t sneak in a little business now and then.

Celeste Ogden answered the phone herself. She wasn’t surprised to hear from me on a Sunday morning, and all she said when I told her we were going ahead was, “Now you understand what kind of man he is, why I believe he was responsible for Nancy’s death.” She hadn’t expected anything less from me.

“I understand why you have suspicions, yes.”

“He killed her,” she said. “Whether it was his hand that pushed her down those stairs or not.”

“If he did it may or may not be provable, no matter what our investigation turns up. There’s nothing specific among her effects or in her diary to suggest foul play, or even a motive for foul play.”

“You’re capable of reading between the lines, just as I am.”

I didn’t see any purpose in telling her that I hadn’t gone through the diary discs myself. I said, “A few questions, Mrs. Ogden.”

“Of course.”

I consulted the notes I’d made during Tamara’s call. “The diary entry dated August 23. Your sister was so upset about something she couldn’t write about it. Any idea what it was?”

“No. Something to do with him, no doubt.”

“Two days later she wrote that she told her husband about it. An affair or brief sexual encounter, possibly?”

“Nancy? Lord, no. Never.”

“Why so positive?”

“Her morals would never have allowed an extramarital affair. My sister was the most moral person I’ve ever known. She was still a virgin, and proud of the fact, when she married John Ring at age twenty-four.”

I took the opinion with a few grains of salt. People change as they get older; so do their morals. If Nancy Mathias’s closed-off life and coldly controlling husband had become intolerable enough, it was entirely possible that she’d turned to another man for comfort and understanding.

“What do you think she was afraid to go through alone at D’s?”

“I don’t know. Some sort of crisis, obviously. Nancy was very dependent-I believe I told you that. She couldn’t bear to be alone, particularly during any sort of crisis. When John, her first husband, died she surrounded herself with people for weeks afterward.”

“Do you know her husband’s assistant, the man named Drax?”

“Anthony Drax. I met him at the funeral.”

“What do you think of him?”

“He’s a perfect complement to his employer. Brilliant, charming, ambitious, and bereft of any decent human feelings. No doubt that’s why he was hired.”

“ ‘D’ might stand for Drax,” I said.

“I don’t see how it could. Nancy didn’t care for the man any more than I did. She made that plain enough.”

“Do any of her friends or acquaintances have names that start with ‘D’?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Her reference to doing something drastic,” I said. “Was she capable of divorcing Mathias?”

“If she were driven to it. Divorce or legal separation-yes, that’s possible. She made an appointment with her attorney three days before her death, but she didn’t keep it. I know because I called him.”

“She didn’t tell him what she wanted to see him about?”

“Apparently not. He said she sounded upset on the phone.”

“You told me there was no prenuptial agreement. Did Nancy keep any assets in her own name when she and Mathias were married, assets he would’ve lost out on in a community property divorce?”

“John’s stocks and bonds. She felt that the portfolio should remain in her name, in honor of his memory.”

“Did Mathias object?”

“She said he didn’t.”

“How much does the portfolio amount to?”

“I don’t know exactly. Several hundred thousand dollars.”

“Are any of the bonds the bearer type?”

“Yes. I thought of that, too.”

Motive there, if Mathias needed a large sum of money in a hurry and had access to those bearer bonds and had been cashing them on the sly.

She said, “There are other possibilities besides financial gain, you know. A divorce or separation would have been an embarrassment to him, a blow to his ego. And a professional distraction.”

“People don’t commit murder because they’re embarrassed or distracted.”

“Don’t they? You don’t know him as I do. That man is capable of anything to further his own ends.”

I let that pass. “One of the things that stands out among your sister’s records is the ten-thousand-dollar check to T. R. Quentin. Do you know who that is?”

“An artist she admired, evidently. Someone I’ve never met.”

“So the check could be for the purchase of some of his paintings.”

“It could be, I suppose.”

“Was your sister in the habit of spending large sums on artworks?”

“She bought paintings now and then-she loved art, even though she had little enough talent herself-but not at inflated prices.”

“Ten thousand is a lot of money for a woman in distress to spend on paintings.”

“Not necessarily. Nancy was capable of extravagance when she was upset or depressed. After John died, she spent thousands on new furniture-an attempt to deflect her grief.”

“Have you talked to T. R. Quentin?”

“No. Nor should you bother. He’s not the person you need to concern yourself with.”

Don’t tell me how to conduct an investigation, lady, I thought. But I didn’t say it. She wasn’t somebody you could argue with, and she was hurting underneath all that quiet rage and hatred; why make the professional relationship any more difficult for either of us?

Before I ended the call I asked her for the name and address of her sister’s attorney and for the address of the cleaning woman, Philomena Ruiz.

When I opened the office door, Kerry was just coming out of the bedroom in her robe and slippers, a page from the pink section of the Sunday paper in one hand. “There you are,” she said. “What do you think I found in the Events listing?”

“What?”

“The Brookline Gallery downtown is sponsoring a show by a local artist that just opened yesterday. Guess who the artist is.”

“T. R. Quentin?”

“None other.”

“Brookline’s one of the better galleries, isn’t it? He must be pretty well-known.”

“She,” Kerry said. “T.R. stands for Theodora Rose, it says here.”

“Well, there goes an idea.”

“That Nancy Mathias and T. R. Quentin were having an affair and the ten-thousand-dollar check was a loan or a blackmail payoff?”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been hanging around me too long. Your mind is getting to be as devious as mine.”

“It’s still a possibility, if Theodora Rose is a lesbian and Nancy was bisexual.”

“Even more devious than mine. I doubt it. But then you never know.”

“I wonder,” Kerry said, “if artists spend their Sundays at galleries where their show has just opened.”

“What, you think I should I go down to the Brookline today?”

“Why don’t we both go? Emily, too. We haven’t been to an art gallery in quite a while.”

“All right with me, if you’re sure that’s how you want to spend a Sunday afternoon.”

“What I want,” she said, “and what I need, is to start doing the things I enjoy, feeling normal again.”

Amen to that.

The Brookline Gallery, Purveyors of Fine Art, was on Post Street, off Union Square. Fronting the sidewalk was a broad bay window, inside of which a single large oil painting was displayed on an easel. In the

window itself, a placard lettered in gilt-edged black: PRESENTING THE IMPRESSIONIST VISIONS OF T. R. QUENTIN.

“That’s one of her visions in the window,” Kerry said.

I looked at it before we went inside. Riotous swirls and whorls and globs and blobs of rainbow colors-yellow, red, blue, purple dominating-intermingled with solid black geometric designs of varying sizes. A gold plaque on the base of the frame gave its title as Searches. It didn’t do much for me; if I looked at it too long and in the wrong frame of mind I’d probably want to retitle it Searches and Seizures.

Emily said, “I like it. Don’t you, Mom?”

“Yes, it’s interesting.”

“Dad?”

“Personally I prefer pulp covers.”

Kerry said, “Lowbrow,” and we went on inside.

The Brookline’s interior was set up along the lines of a museum. One large room, two smaller ones, lots of open space, long walls and short ells built in and created by movable partitions, benches for restful viewing of the artworks on display. There must have been more than fifty paintings of varying sizes-acrylic, oil, watercolor-plus a handful of tapestries. At the entrance to one of the smaller rooms, a duplicate of the window placard was propped on an easel to let you know that that was where the Quentin pieces were exhibited. Kerry and I went in there. Something else caught Emily’s eye and she went scooting off by herself to check it out. In some ways she was your typical eleven-year-old; in others she was a full-fledged adult. Most kids would have balked at a Sunday afternoon visit to an art galley. Emily relished it.

The Quentin room was occupied by two women, one elderly and overly dressed, the other younger and fashionably attired. Customer and gallery employee, from the snatches of conversation I overheard. Kerry and I took a look at the dozen or so paintings in there. All were similar to the one in the front window, some with broader, sweeping brushstrokes, others done in colors that were more or less bright. Each had varying numbers of solid black squares, rectangles, oblongs, triangles, trapezoids. On the bottom corners of their frames small, discreetly placed price tags said that they could be had for from $750 for the smallest to $5,000 for the largest. Kerry didn’t think the prices were out of line, given the value placed on quality contemporary art these days. Nice money if you could get it. Or if you had it to spend.

“Kandinsky,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“Her major influence. Wassily Kandinsky, one of the Blue Riders.”

“If you say so.”

“The Blue Riders were a group of artists in Munich in the early twentieth century. Specializing in nonobjective, free-form abstracts.”

I nodded and said, “Uh-huh,” and the two women finished their conversation and the younger one came over to where we were.

“Aren’t these wonderful?” she said, smiling. “Ms. Quentin is such a talented artist. We feel privileged to have her exhibiting with us.”

“Wonderful,” I agreed. “Very colorful. Would Ms. Quentin happen to be here today, by any chance?”

“As a matter of fact, she is. In the office with a customer at the moment. Would you like a word with her?”

“Whenever it’s convenient.”

“Please wait. She should be available shortly.”

We waited about five minutes. The woman who came bustling in alone was on the backside of forty, all smiles and rouged cheeks, wearing an outfit as multihued as her paintings; slim and trim and poised in her movements, projecting an air of cheerful self-confidence. The only jarring note was dark red hair combed or uncombed, take your pick, in spiky juts and tangles. Kerry told me later that the haircut was fashionable among young people, both men and women, these days. My response to that was, “Why?”

We introduced ourselves. Were Kerry and I prospective buyers? No, we weren’t. That put a crimp in her smile, and when I told her I was employed by Nancy Mathias’s sister, it morphed all the way into a sad downturn. She didn’t ask what I did for Celeste Ogden and I didn’t volunteer the information. She said, “I was so sorry to read about Mrs. Mathias’s death. A terrible tragedy.”

Mrs. Mathias, not Nancy. “You didn’t know her well?”

“No, hardly at all. I wish I had.”

“I understand she bought some of your paintings shortly before her accident.”

“Actually, no, she didn’t.”

“But she did pay you a large sum of money. Ten thousand dollars.”

“ ‘Pay’ isn’t the right word. It was a gift, you see.”

“Oh? Pretty substantial gift.”

T. R. Quentin’s eyes brightened; the smile threatened to reestablish itself. “It absolutely floored me. It was like… I don’t know, winning a lottery prize. Manna from heaven.”

“How did it come about?”

“She called me one day at my studio. Out of the blue. Said she was a great admirer of my work and if we could meet, I’d find it well worth my time. Naturally I thought she intended to buy one of my paintings. So I invited her to come to the studio.”

“You’d never had any contact with her before?”

“None. She was a complete stranger.”

“Did she take you up on the invitation?”

“The following afternoon. She didn’t stay long, not more than twenty minutes. She had another appointment in the city, she said.”

“She happen to mention who the appointment was with?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“And she only stayed twenty minutes?”

“About that. We had coffee; she looked at my finished work; she asked a few discreet questions about my financial situation and my future goals. And then she wrote out that check. Well, I nearly fainted when I saw the amount. Every struggling artist dreams of a patron like Mrs. Mathias, but to have one actually appear, all of a sudden like that… well, I’m still in the pinch-me stage.”

“Did you ask her why she was giving you such a large amount?”

“Of course. She said it was the least she could do to help an artist who was going to be famous someday.” Color came into the woman’s cheeks, all but making the spots of rouge disappear, but it wasn’t the modest or humble type of blush. Nancy Mathias was not the only one who believed the “famous” prediction. “I offered to let her take any of my finished paintings she liked, more than one, but she refused. She simply shook my hand and wished me good fortune and walked out of my life as suddenly as she came into it.”

“Why did she refuse the offer, if she liked your work so much?”

“I don’t know. All she said was that she wouldn’t be able to enjoy the paintings.”

“Those her exact words?”

“I think it was something like, ‘I won’t be able to enjoy them where I’m going. Let others have the pleasure and the rewards.’ ”

“She didn’t indicate where it was she’d be going?”

“No, she didn’t. I thought it might be that she was planning to move to another state or another country-you know, change and downsize her life. But that’s just my impression.”

“How did she seem to you that day?”

“Seem? I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Her demeanor, her state of mind. Was she happy, sad?”

“Well… not happy. And not exactly sad. Preoccupied, as if she had other things weighing on her mind.”

“And you never saw her again?”

“No. I tried to call her the next day to thank her again-her phone number was on the check-but her machine picked up. I left a message, but she didn’t return the call. So naturally I didn’t bother her again.”

Naturally. She’d gotten all the golden eggs out of the goose that she was going to and had the intellect to know when to back off. Or maybe I was just being cynical. Give her the benefit of the doubt.

Kerry and I collected Emily and went on out to Post Street. “I saw a really cool painting in there,” the kid said. “It looks like a photograph of a stained-glass window, the kind with light shining through it, but it’s not; it was done with oils. It’d look great on our living room wall.”

“Would it?” Kerry said. “How much is it?”

“Only twenty-five hundred dollars.”

Only twenty-five hundred. Only. If my two ladies had their way, we’d be in hock up to our eyebrows and I’d be confronted with modern culture every time I walked into the condo. My idea of eye candy in the home? Pulp magazines and their lurid four-color covers, any day.