The Bernini Bust

11

As far as Argyll was concerned, lunch epitomised why he preferred the company of detective Joe Morelli to that of someone like Samuel Thanet. The latter would have opted for some tastefully constituted French affair, all candles, expensive wine list and a somewhat unctuous atmosphere, but Morelli, coming from a very different background, had a very different notion of food. He took Argyll and Flavia to a run-down shack called Leo’s Place.

It looked a bit like a truck stop, and most of the clientele were as big as their trucks. The sort of people who, if they had ever heard of cholesterol, dedicated their lives to ingesting as much of the stuff as possible. Not a candle in sight, except when the power failed. A wine list commendable in its brevity, waiters who neither introduced themselves nor sneered at you during the entire meal, and some of the best food Flavia had ever tasted. Oysters and ribs, washed down with martinis, perhaps make up America’s greatest contribution to western civilisation. Martinis certainly do. Argyll’s enthusiasm made Morelli warm to him a little. Not many people drank martinis anymore, he said gloomily. Country was going to hell.

While Argyll dug his beak into a second and beamed happily, Flavia ate and questioned. What were the police going to do now?

‘Looks as though we’re going to arrest Barclay and Anne Moresby, I guess,’ he said.

‘But will you manage to convict them?’

‘I hope so. Of course, I would prefer to wait a bit…’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m not convinced we have enough. Persuading a jury is going to require more work. But those above me are getting alarmed. They want something to hand to the press. Did you know we live in a pressocracy in this country?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Pressocracy. Everything is run by, and organised for the convenience of, the press. Television, rather. They need an arrest to keep interest up, so I’m put under pressure to give them one.’

‘Hmm. So, what’s the line? Ooh. How nice. More oysters.’

Morelli leant back in his chair, wiped his mouth daintily with his napkin and reeled off his reasoning. And very good it was too, to Flavia’s way of thinking. Motive was simple; Moresby probably knew his wife was having an affair, and was not the sort of person to take that lying down. He’d got through five wives already, and could easily go on to number six. Combined with setting up the trust for the museum, Anne Moresby’s financial future was crumbling before her very eyes.

‘Now we know that Anne Moresby herself could not have killed him, if your Alfredo is telling the truth and she was in her car heading home at the time. But she must have talked it over with Barclay and given him her gun. The opportunity came when Moresby summoned Barclay to see him in Thanet’s office. He went over and was told that a) he was fired and b) Anne Moresby was out as well. Barclay was within a heartbeat of getting his hands on billions – he only had to wait for Moresby to drop dead, then he could marry the grieving widow, and it’s party time. What does he do? You could never talk a man like Moresby round when his mind was made up, so it was now or never. So Barclay shoots the old man, and runs back to say that when he got there he discovered the murder. No trust – and Barclay must have been one of the very few to know that the papers had not in fact been signed – so Anne Moresby inherits the lot. Success.’

There was a pause as Argyll finished off the oysters and Flavia looked uncomfortable.

‘What’s the matter?’ Morelli asked.

‘Quite a lot of things,’ she said reluctantly.

‘Such as?’

‘The camera, for one thing. That was knocked out sometime before. Before anybody could possibly have known Moresby might go to Thanet’s office. So your notion of a sudden decision on Barclay’s part doesn’t hold up.’

‘If I remember correctly,’ Argyll added uncertainly, ‘people at the party reckoned there was only about five minutes between Barclay getting his phone call and rushing back.’

‘That’s very approximate. It was actually eight minutes.’

‘Well. The point is,’ Argyll said, taking over for once, ‘that it was a busy few minutes, in your account. To walk over, have an argument, shoot Moresby, plan to do something about di Souza – why? for heaven’s sake – steal the bust – why again? – run back and raise the alarm. I mean, is that really possible? I suppose it could be done, but only if it was rehearsed. Quite apart from the fact that Langton was outside the museum most of the time and should have seen all this coming and going, and I don’t see how either Anne Moresby or Barclay slipped off to shoot Hector and dump his body. And on top of that…’

‘Yeah, OK. I got the point.’ Morelli shifted uneasily in his seat as he mentally visualised a defence lawyer in court saying the same thing, with the jury nodding sagely in agreement.

‘And there’s something else,’ Flavia went on, disregarding the American’s baleful look in her effort to refocus attention on the matter which concerned her. ‘If the theft of the bust was planned in advance, it would have to have been by someone who knew where it was. At the time the camera was knocked out only Thanet and Langton knew that.’

‘And Streeter, of course,’ Argyll chipped in. ‘As security man. Didn’t you say he was out of sight when the murder took place?’

‘Can’t we keep this goddamned bust out of it for a while?’ Morelli asked a little plaintively. Much of what they had said had passed through his own mind in the past hour or so, but he’d decided that the only way of proceeding was to tackle the two elements of the events separately.

‘It’s a very big thing to forget. I think I’d leave Anne Moresby alone for a bit, if I were you.’

‘Hmm. That’s going to go down well with my superiors. They’ll crucify me.’

‘You’ll be saving them from a nasty mistake.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Can’t you tell them you’re on the verge of getting hundred per cent proof evidence?’

‘We’re not.’

‘No, but we could try a little harder. I think we should go and visit Mr Streeter.’

To say that Robert Streeter lived in a small, white-washed house in a quiet, palm-lined street would say nothing about his accommodation. There was scarcely a single house in the whole area which wasn’t white-washed and almost no streets that weren’t quiet and lined with palm trees. Not in the respectable bits, anyway. The expert would have noticed a few details that might have indicated something about his way of life. The absence of a basketball hoop on the garage indicated that he had no adolescent children in the house; the lack of a manicured patch of lawn out front suggested he was no gardener and that his more fastidious neighbours, who snipped – or had someone snip – each blade of grass as it poked its well-watered head above two-eighths of an inch, might have regarded this as a sign of rampant bohemianism. But apart from that there was almost nothing to indicate the character of the occupant, and neither Flavia nor Argyll would have picked up the signs even had they been present.

Streeter took a long time to answer the doorbell, and appeared in a bad mood when he finally opened the door. This, they assumed, was because he’d been having an afternoon siesta, but in that they were wrong as well. Despite living in a Mediterranean climate custom-built for afternoon siestas, Californians don’t waste their time in this fashion. Besides, he was much too engrossed in an earnest, not to say frantic, discussion with Langton when the doorbell went to have much peace of mind left over for such frivolities.

Indeed, he and Langton had just got around to the central issue. Streeter, who was thoroughly upset about the performance of his camera system and feeling that, as a security expert, he ought to do a little amateur investigation of his own, had just popped the question. In fact, as Morelli’s tireless investigators had realised, he had been trotting around interrogating just about everybody in the museum with varying degrees of subtlety. As had everybody else. Neither he, nor anybody else had much to show for the effort, but it made them all feel a lot better. Besides, nobody was much in the mood for real work.

Streeter’s own investigation had left him feeling a little vulnerable. Having laboured so tirelessly to secure his position, he had this impression that recent events threatened to undermine it all. He had been thinking and plotting furiously and the general aim was now clear; that is, to make sure he was on the right side of whoever it was that emerged triumphant at the end. In order to achieve this, he had to know who was responsible. And strong suspicions were forming rapidly. In the course of several sleepless nights in the past week, he had constructed innumerable nightmarish scenarios, all of which ended in unemployment – and some where the outcome was much worse.

So, with a good deal more directness than was his custom, he set about Langton when the latter flew back from Rome. Had it occurred to the Englishman, he asked, who stood to benefit from the death of Arthur Moresby? And who were the only people who could have killed him?

Not perhaps the most sophisticated way of approaching a potential witness who had demonstrated, in Rome at least, his complete unwillingness to answer questions. Langton, a man who had spent much of his time travelling the world and negotiating the purchase of pictures, was much too self-possessed to be caught out answering questions gratuitously.

He reacted with a lightly amused smile. Yes, he replied indulgently. As far as he could see, only Anne Moresby benefited. And only three people could have killed him, that is, di Souza, who was with Moresby before the murder, David Barclay, summoned over at about the time it took place, and himself, sitting outside the museum and in a fine position to nip over and do the deed. But, he went on, unless someone connected Mrs Moresby’s motive with everybody else’s opportunity, there was not much chance of any progress. He did not presume to speak for the rest – although Hector di Souza’s own murder seemed to indicate a possible degree of innocence there, but he saw no connection with David Barclay. As for himself, Streeter’s own cameras picked him up sitting placidly outside the museum. Whatever else he might have done, he had not murdered Arthur Moresby. Or anyone else either, he added as an afterthought. Just in case someone might start worrying about loopholes.

It didn’t get him much further, Streeter thought as he walked to the door to answer the sudden peal of the bell. But if the more obvious suspects were knocked out, the police would start looking at alternatives. He was very aware – having checked himself – that he had, quite fortuitously, been in the toilet at about the time of the murder. For reasons of human dignity, there were no cameras in the toilets. A grave mistake, that. His movements were thus unaccounted for. Which left his final defence; it was just a pity it was such a dangerous weapon.

‘Sorry if we’ve come at a bad time,’ Flavia said brightly as the door swung open and she introduced herself.

If Langton was never caught on the hop, Streeter was. He mumbled something that sounded like not at all, do come in, and was indicating the way to the little plot of concrete out the back before it had properly dawned on him that he should have told both of them to go away because they had no authority to ask anybody questions.

‘Well, what a surprise,’ Flavia said as she saw Langton and started drawing exactly the sort of conclusions that Streeter so much feared. ‘I thought you were in Rome. You do get around, don’t you?’

Both she and Argyll sat themselves down and accepted the offer of a beer. It was a hot afternoon, and this knocked Argyll out of most of the conversation. While Flavia began round two of her battle with Langton, he concentrated on trying to get at a profoundly annoying itch five inches down from the top of his plaster cast.

Langton explained that, with such a crisis in full blossom, he naturally thought that his place was right here, in case he could be of any assistance.

‘So you come all this way to visit your old friend Mr Streeter to spend a quiet Saturday sitting in the garden,’ she observed. Langton nodded and said that was about it.

‘I’m very glad to see you. We have so much to discuss.’

If Langton was wary about what was coming next, he didn’t show it. Instead he just leant back on the chair with a look of complete indifference and waited for her to continue.

‘About the mysterious people who sold you the Bernini.’

Langton looked benignly at her and raised an eyebrow. ‘What about them?’ he asked calmly.

‘They don’t exist. The bust was stolen from Alberghi’s house at Bracciano, and transported across the Atlantic.’

‘I admit the family didn’t exist,’ he said with surprising readiness and an even more alarming smile. ‘More than that I couldn’t say.’

‘You knew it was stolen.’

‘On the contrary. I knew nothing of the sort.’

‘How did you hear about it?’

‘Simple enough. I was looking at some of di Souza’s other stuff and found it shrouded in a bedsheet. I made him an offer, there and then.’

‘Without checking what it was, without even getting permission from the museum?’

‘Of course I checked what it was afterwards. But I knew in my bones without really having to. And I asked Moresby if he wanted it.’

‘Not the museum.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because Moresby took all the real decisions. Just wanted to save time.’

‘And he wanted it?’

‘Obviously. He leapt at the chance.’

‘You knew he’d already bought it once. In 1951?’

‘Yes.’

‘From di Souza?’

‘That I didn’t know at the time,’ he said blandly. ‘All I knew was that for years Moresby had disliked art dealers. And as an example of their perfidiousness he used to say that he had once – only once – been cheated out of a Bernini by someone who had sold it to him, taken some money and then never delivered. Moresby felt he’d been made a fool of, and he didn’t like that. It was obvious he’d leap at the chance to get it.’

‘So you then got di Souza to ship it over. Why?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why were you both prepared to use the same man who had cheated Moresby all those years ago?’

‘He had the bust. Moresby wanted the bust in California, and there was no way we could have got export permission. Somebody not connected with the museum had to smuggle it. We made up a story about another owner to cover him, so he wouldn’t get into trouble. That’s why he was leaping around and looking so concerned and complaining about his good name. All an act.’

‘And you paid him?’

Langton smiled. ‘I’m sure that Detective Morelli has discovered that already. Yes. Two million dollars.’

‘Moresby told Thanet four million.’

‘Two.’

‘And this was when?’

‘When what?’

‘When was he paid?’

‘On delivery. Moresby wasn’t taking any chances this time.’

‘And when did you see this bust and make him an offer?’

‘A few weeks back.’

‘When?’

‘Oh, lord, I don’t know. First week in May, perhaps. The whole deal was done very quickly. I assure you that I had not the slightest doubt about the fact that di Souza was the legitimate owner of that bust. If you can prove otherwise, I’m sure the museum will insist on sending it back to the rightful owners. And bear any other costs.

‘I’m sure it will be found,’ he went on. ‘Large busts like that don’t go missing for long.’

‘This one has already been missing for forty years.’

Langton shrugged and repeated that it would turn up.

Flavia thought it time to try another line of approach. Langton had nettled her badly back in Rome, and she was convinced that everything concerning this bust was crooked, and that he knew it. His calm confidence that they would never pin anything on him was spoiling her afternoon. Especially because, as far as she was concerned, he was probably right.

‘You disliked Thanet for taking your job and were hell-bent on sabotaging him and getting him out of the museum.’

She was proud of that. Hell-bent, that is. It was a word she’d picked up from a movie she’d watched on television while wide awake from jetlag at three o’clock in the morning. She’d tackled Argyll about its meaning later on. Langton, not impressed by her linguistic skill, at least seemed prepared to concede the general thrust of the statement.

‘Sabotaging is going too far. And it wasn’t personal. I just think he’s a dangerous person to have in a museum. You know.’

‘I don’t. From everything I’ve heard he sounds fairly meek and mild.’

‘In that case you don’t understand anything about museums. The Moresby was a nice museum, once. Small and friendly, despite Moresby’s awful presence hanging over it. He loathed arty types; he was always saying how they were thieves and swindlers. Then he brought in Thanet and these ideas for the big museum began to surface.’

‘So?’

‘A big museum isn’t just a big building and collection. The first thing you do is develop a big bureaucracy worthy of it. Steering committees, hanging committees, budget committees. Hierarchy, interference and plans. Thanet is making the museum about as much fun to work for as General Motors.’

‘And you weren’t happy.’

‘No. And it wasn’t working either. To start off, the collection was quirky, individual and interesting. Now it’s just like every other museum; a boring plod through the Great Schools of art, from Raphael to Renoir. The trouble is all the good pictures are already in museums. All Thanet can do is get the leftovers. The place is becoming an international joke.’

‘So why don’t you leave if you dislike it so much?’

‘Firstly, because the pay is OK. Secondly, because I like being the lone voice of sanity in the wilderness. Thirdly, because I like to think that at least I buy stuff worth having, most of the time. I haven’t given up hope yet.’

‘You may have to, if Mrs Moresby goes ahead and shuts the place down,’ she said.

Langton’s eyes narrowed as he listened. ‘When did she say this?’

Flavia told him.

‘Long time before we get to that point,’ he said. ‘A lot can change by the time lawyers have finished with it all.’

‘Is it true Anne Moresby was having an affair?’ she asked, this being, to her mind, one of the crucial questions.

Langton almost seemed to have been expecting the question, and he smiled slowly, a bit like a teacher when a particularly stupid pupil gets something right for once. Streeter seemed properly shocked and appalled by the very idea; he sucked in his breath in a most disapproving fashion.

‘Probably,’ Langton said. ‘I would, if I was married to someone as repulsive as Moresby. They virtually lived apart anyway, you know. But she would have to be discreet. The consequences would have been horrendous if old Moresby ever even suspected.’

‘He may well have done more than suspect.’

‘In that case she’s a very lucky woman. She’s a multi-billionaire, and she’s fortunate she’s not a penniless divorcee.’ He paused and considered awhile before making his next comment. ‘So lucky, in fact, that it makes you wonder.’

‘That fact,’ she said, ‘had occurred to us as well.’

‘But,’ he went on, half talking to himself, ‘she had an alibi. Which means she needed an accomplice. So, the big question is, who’s the lucky man?’

She shrugged. ‘Work it out for yourself, if you don’t know.’

Argyll looked up for a moment, temporarily distracted from his by now manic hunt. Then the itching gave another twinge and he resumed the assault, bashing the plaster, sticking little twigs and cocktail stirrers down the top until Streeter was looking at him with appalled fascination.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Preserving my sanity,’ he replied. ‘What you might call an itch hunt.’ He looked up for applause, but nobody seemed to be in the mood for little jokes. ‘You don’t have any knitting needles, do you?’ he asked helplessly. Streeter said there was not a single one in the house. Argyll looked pained until he offered to search the kitchen for something suitable. Half crazed with desire, Argyll hopped after him.

‘Do the police know about Anne Moresby’s lover?’ Streeter asked once they were out of earshot inside the house.

‘Seems so. Lots of extended shopping trips, weekends away. And Moresby knew, which provides a very good motive for murder. It’s the awkward business of proving it that seems to be slowing them all down. Very unlike Italy, you know. There the police could have simply arrested everyone and sat on them until they confessed. Pity about your camera,’ he said casually to Streeter as they searched. ‘It would have made life so much easier if it had been a bit more difficult to get at.’

Streeter seemed suddenly gloomy. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said.

‘I suppose it makes your job a bit less secure, doesn’t it?’

Streeter looked at him mournfully.

‘Just as well we can call on that microphone in Thanet’s office.’

‘What?’

‘A bug in Thanet’s office.’

‘Listen, I’ve already told…’

‘I know. But you’ve such a reputation for being a hi-tech snoop, who will believe that?’

‘Bugging offices is an offence, you know. The very idea…’

‘So if a murderer was suddenly told that a tape existed, I mean, they’d believe it. It might make them nervous. Just as they thought the coast was clear, all of a sudden a piece of evidence turns up. Not that anyone has heard what’s on it. Destroy that tape, and you’re safe, he might tell himself. Desperate circumstances make for desperate actions. Which might lead to a mistake. And you’d get full marks and thanks for co-operating with the police.’

At last the penny dropped. Argyll didn’t have a very high opinion of Streeter. A bit slow, he thought.

‘I see,’ he said.

‘My leg feels so much better now. I suppose we ought to go back outside. Flavia and I are meant to be having dinner with Detective Morelli and it’s time we were off. I’ll tell him about our little chat, if that’s all right by you.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Streeter. ‘Sure.’

‘Did Mr Streeter have all that much to say for himself?’ Flavia asked after they had extracted themselves, she’d levered Argyll into the car – she had rented a small but practical machine which was not designed for people with plaster casts – and they’d begun the lengthy process of crossing much of the city in search of Morelli’s house.

‘Oh, yes,’ he replied smugly. ‘He was a bit slow on the uptake. I had to drop so many heavy hints I thought he’d sink under the weight. But he got the idea eventually.’

‘And?’

‘We can go ahead and tell people that he was tapping Thanet’s office. Isn’t that nice? It’s a pity he wasn’t, but I suppose you can’t have everything.’

Flavia had assumed that the meatballs Detective Morelli had invited them to eat would be prepared by his wife. She was wrong. Morelli was proud of his meatballs. They found him in the kitchen with a pinny around his middle, though the air of domesticity would have been enhanced had he taken his gun off. A large bottle of Californian Chianti was on the kitchen table, the pasta was ready to go into the water, and the tomato sauce was approaching that pitch of absolute perfection which only true Italians can recognise.

‘What you think?’ he said, caressing his creations with a wooden spoon as though they were made of finest gold. Argyll poked his nose into the pot, gave a long sniff and nodded appreciatively. Morelli grunted and poured the wine. They settled down; the wine, the smell of cooking, the noise of the children, and the informality all combined to produce an atmosphere of easy relaxation. The only difficulty – for Argyll, if not Flavia – was in eating the vast portions that Morelli poured on to the plates. But after two years in Italy he was getting better at that, and knew how to prepare himself mentally before settling down to a long haul.

‘So what did you two do while I was plugging through my paperwork? Find your bust?’

Flavia provided a succinct summary of Langton’s remarks, which brought a frown from Morelli.

‘He’s changed. He never said anything about di Souza supplying that bust before. Why not?’

‘He’s shedding his defences. The first line was that everything was legal and any impropriety was due to this anonymous seller. That was obviously nonsense, so now he’s blaming di Souza – who can’t answer back. The trouble is, it’s much more difficult to disprove. Might even be true, for all I know. But I’m not inclined to trust him all that much. Jonathan here thinks he’s putting a cloth in our eye.’

‘What?’

‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ she asked, slightly hurt and turning to Argyll for reassurance.

‘Close, but not quite. Pulling the wool over our eyes.’

‘Ah,’ she said, repeating it a couple of times to lodge it in her memory. ‘Right. Anyway, that’s what he thinks.’

‘So what about this bust?’

‘It exists, was owned by di Souza in the 1950s, was sold to Moresby, was confiscated before it reached him, and then was stolen from Alberghi’s house a few weeks back.’

‘And turned up here?’

She nodded. ‘A pretty convincing provenance, if you think about it, if a little unorthodox. The more we look, the more genuine it gets.’

Morelli chased the last trace of tomato sauce round the plate with a piece of bread, popped it into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully.

‘Have you asked the customs people at the airport if they examined the thing?’ Argyll asked.

‘’Course we have. And no they didn’t. No reason to. The Moresby is perfectly respectable; the case was sealed so tight that it would have taken ages to unpack. It was built like a tank; weighed in at around a hundredweight and it was all they could do to move it, let alone unpack and examine it. They reckon they’re overworked and understaffed. All they did was check the paperwork.’

‘So, the story seems to be that di Souza goes over to the office with Moresby. They inspect the bust, and for some reason or other the Spaniard leaves with it, and prepares to go straight back to Italy. Not a theft, obviously, as it must have been done with Moresby’s approval, as he wasn’t dead then. Why could that have happened? No matter. Barclay goes over after di Souza leaves. Argument with Moresby, pop. He comes out, raises the alarm.’

They refilled the glasses and thought about that for awhile, realising this was a seriously flawed explanation. So Morelli turned to his wife, Giulia, sitting placidly by his side, saying nothing but looking a little contemptuous of their mental meanderings. He always turned to her when there was a problem. She was so much better at them than he was.

‘It’s obvious,’ she said calmly as she gathered the plates and took them over to the sink. ‘Your Spaniard didn’t take it. The bust had already been stolen. If it was so heavy and there was no time to take it out after Moresby and di Souza went over to look at it, it must have been taken before.’

Well, of course. Silly of them not to have thought of it themselves. Unfortunately, there Giulia Morelli’s inspiration dried up. As she pointed out, she hardly knew all the details; so they were once more thrown back on their own, inferior, intellectual resources.

‘Can’t you swear her in as a deputy, or something?’ Argyll asked. ‘You do that here, don’t you?’

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘That went out with Jesse James. Besides, the police committee would start an inquiry if I gave my own wife a job. We’re on our own.’

‘Pity. We’ll have to do some work ourselves. This pâté sandwich. When was it stuck over the lens of the security camera?’

‘The camera picture stopped at about 8.30.’

‘Can we assume that was when the bust was stolen?’ Flavia persisted.

‘We can assume it. But we can’t prove it.’

‘What about the gun used to kill him? No fingerprints?’

‘As you’d expect, wiped clean. No hint of anything on it at all. But bought and registered to Anne Moresby.’

‘And still no witnesses to anything at all?’

‘No. Not that anyone is saying, anyway. But the way that all of them are manoeuvring and playing little games with each other, they may be just too busy to tell us everything they know.’

With all the sense of achievement of someone reaching the top of Everest, Argyll stuffed the last fragment of meatball in, swallowed and considered the state of his stomach awhile.

‘There is, of course, the problem of the date,’ he said, uncertain whether this little detail was going to win an appreciative audience.

‘What date?’

‘The date Mrs Moresby said she heard her husband and Langton talking about the bust. A couple of months back, she said.’

‘So?’

‘According to my calculations, if Langton saw it for the first time at di Souza’s, as he said, that was a couple of days after the robbery at the Alberghis’.’

‘So?’

‘That’s only about four weeks ago. I think someone’s fibbing.’