“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You killed them, Chris, to keep them quiet. Miki knew from the beginning about the scheme to forge and sell art under Leopold’s name. She was his representative until you and your greedy friends took that away from her. You couldn’t blame her for being angry and threatening to blow the whistle.”
He looked as though he might lunge at me. But he stayed where he was and glared.
“Jo Ann Forbes, good journalist that she was, was piecing together everything, and that got her killed, too. What did you do, Chris, have Hans Muller lure her to his cottage with the promise of giving her information? Mr. Muller may not have been the most sterling of characters—providing the poison for you to kill Josh Leopold and Miki Dorsey wasn’t a very nice thing to do—but he didn’t have the guts to kill anyone himself. And he didn’t have to, because you were there to take care of it.”
Turi looked around the room. Mr. Scott had disappeared. Wally Peckham looked at Chris with her usual noncommittal expression.
I continued: “And then Muller had to go because he couldn’t take the heat of being the prime suspect in Jo Ann Forbes’s murder. He was a weak man, wasn’t he, Chris?”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” Turi said.
“You came here to kill again, didn’t you?” I said. “This time I was to be the victim.”
He moved toward the front door. As he did, sirens and flashing lights erupted from the street. Joe Scott reappeared, saying to me, “I thought we could use the police here, Mrs. Fletcher.”
Chief Hopeful Cramer, who led four uniformed officers through the door, went directly to Wally Peckham. “Nice job, Wally,” he said, grinning. A small smile came from her.
My puzzled expression prompted him to add, “Ms. Peckham has been a valuable help in breaking this art forgery ring.”
She shrugged.
“I’m afraid there’s a lot of explaining to be done,” I said.
“Happy to do it,” said the chief, “now that this is over.”
“But it isn’t,” I said. “Maurice St. James and Carlton Wells are cleaning out the gallery of forged Leopold paintings.”
“No they’re not. Those paintings are being loaded into police vehicles as we speak, along with St. James and Wells.”
Chris Turi looked like a cornered animal. I pointed to him and said, “He’s your murderer, Chief, with plenty of accomplices.”
“I figured that, Mrs. Fletcher, after the results came back on the cigarette butt found next to Muller’s body, and you explained to me the significance of it.” He said to his officers, “Arrest him.”
Turi broke for the door, but was grabbed, his arms brought behind his back and cuffs slapped on his wrists.
If looks could kill, I was dead. Turi glared at me, daggers flying from his eyes. I said, “You should have gotten the message, Chris.”
“What message?”
“That smoking can be hazardous to your health.”
As they led Turi away, I asked Wally Peckham, “What time is it?”
“Quarter of twelve,” she said.
“Excuse us,” I said, pulling her in the direction of the stairs. We went to my room and checked the answering machine. No message.
“He said he’d call again at midnight?” Wally asked.
“Yes. You certainly succeeded in getting the word out that there was a serious buyer for my sketch of the male model.”
“Not hard in the Hamptons. Tell one person and everybody knows.”
At precisely midnight, the newly installed phone rang. Wally and I looked at each other. “Answer it,” she said.
“Hello?”
“Jess?”
“Vaughan?”
“Hope I didn’t wake you.”
My laugh was involuntary and loud. “No, Vaughan, you didn’t wake me. As a matter of fact, I was sitting here by the phone waiting for a call.”
“At this hour?” He realized he was calling at “this hour” and laughed. “I take it you want me to get off.”
“If you don’t mind. I’ll call you back.”
But there was no call. Not by twelve-fifteen. Not by twelve-thirty.
We went downstairs where Joe Scott handed me a note left by Police Chief Cramer, asking me to call him first thing in the morning.
I walked to the porch with Wally Peckham. We stood silently, each deep in our own thoughts. I broke the silence. “You were working for the police?”
“Yup.”
“From before I even met you?”
“Yup.”
“I wish I’d known.”
“Better you didn’t. Chief Cramer and I discussed letting you in on it once you started uncovering things. We agreed it was better not to.”
“Why?”
“For one thing, it might have jeopardized my situation.”
“I wouldn’t have said anything.”
“Couldn’t take the chance.”
“Was there a second reason?”
“Yup.”
“And?”
“Chief Cramer felt you were doing so well, he didn’t want to discourage you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I want to get back to the house. It’s past my bedtime.”
“What about Anne?”
“The chief was sending cops to pick her up. I’ll be fine. You?”
“Fine.”
I called Vaughan the minute I returned to my room. We talked briefly. I wasn’t up to telling him about the evening’s events, so just said I was tired and needed some sleep. We agreed to meet for breakfast at nine.
“Incredible,” he said after we’d enjoyed breakfast, and I’d told him everything. “I had no idea you were so up to your neck in this thing.”
“Well, Vaughan, I was, but it’s over. I’m glad it is.”
I’d called Chief Cramer before leaving Scott’s Inn to meet Vaughan, and made an appointment to see him that morning.
“Mind if I tag along?” Vaughan asked.
“Not at all.”
The chief was in an expansive mood when we arrived. He told us he’d been investigating the forged art ring for almost a year, and had recruited Wally Peckham after she came to him with what she knew of the St. James—Muller—Blaine Dorsey—Chris Turi—Carlton Wells enterprise. She was an insider in the group house, which made her invaluable.
He took us into a conference room where more than two hundred paintings confiscated from Maurice St. James’s gallery the night before were propped against the walls. I recognized some from having been shown them in St. James’s framing room.
One immediately caught Vaughan’s eye. It was the painting Hans Muller had taken from his house the night of the dinner party. “He had it all along,” he said, holding up the painting for us to see, and explaining to Cramer that the work belonged to him.
“I’ll have to keep it for a while, Vaughan. It’s evidence.”
“I understand,” Vaughan said.
“There’s one piece I won’t have to keep, however,” said the chief.
“Which is?” I asked.
“This.”
He pulled from behind a framed canvas my missing sketch of the nude male model. “I believe this belongs to you, Mrs. Fletcher,” he said, handing it to me.
“Yes. It’s my sketch.”
“Let me see,” Vaughan said, reaching.
I withheld it from him. “No,” I said. “No one sees this except me.” I told Cramer of having had Waldine Peckham put out the word that someone wanted to buy the sketch, no questions asked. “Where did you find it?” I asked.
“In St. James’s gallery, along with everything else. Carlton Wells said it was his. Looks like your teacher stole your work.”
“I’m just glad to have it back without any more people seeing it.”
“By the way, Mrs. Fletcher, I told you there was an influential person pressing behind the scenes for me to cooperate with you and your theories.”
“That’s right. You did.”
“Go ahead and shake his hand,” he said, nodding at Vaughan Buckley.
“You? I thought you didn’t like my getting involved.”
“I don’t. Then again, I knew there’s no way to dissuade you once you’ve set your mind to it. Besides, it will make a good plot for your next best-seller.”
The next morning I stood next to my luggage on the porch of Scott’s Inn. With me were Vaughan and Olga Buckley. A cadre of press was kept at a distance by two patrolmen assigned the task by their chief. Fred Mayer leaned against his taxi, the rear door open.
“Sure we can’t convince you to stay longer?” Olga asked.
“I’d love to, Olga, but it’s time for me to get back home.”
“Any more art lessons on the horizon?” Vaughan asked.
“No. It’s back to my word processor, not my easel. I’m a writer, not a painter.
”
“Can’t say that I’m disappointed to hear that, Jess,” said Vaughan. “That’s where you belong, in front of a word processor. Leave the painting to Michelangelo and Renoir and Caravaggio.”
“I will. Thanks for everything. I’ll be in touch.”
I got into Mayer’s aging taxi. Once the doors were closed, I said, “All set?”
“Certainly am. The missus is thrilled. Calls it a second honeymoon.”
I smiled. “Make it whatever you want it to be. Are you sure I’ll like Gurney’s Inn?”
“Never heard anybody say they didn’t, Mrs. Fletcher.” We picked up Mayer’s wife, Carol, a lovely, kind woman, and headed east to Montauk, Long Island. My deal with her husband was simple: I wanted three days of total and secluded relaxation in some luxurious resort in the Hamptons. In return for his silence about my destination and for driving me there, I would foot the bill for a three-day vacation for him and his wife. He chose Gurney’s Inn, and I didn’t debate his choice. He hadn’t steered me wrong yet.
I spent the three days in a cottage overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The resort offered a dazzling array of spa services—aerobic beach walks, a daily cardiovascular fitness class, and such exotic therapies as “marinotherapeutic” treatments (using seawater and seaweed), “thalasso” therapy in which powerful underwater jets massage the body, and “Dead Sea Salt Glow,” dead skin cells washed away in salt baths. I avoided the spa meals, opting instead to take all my meals in a lovely on-site restaurant, the Sea Grill, right on the beach.
Most of the time I painted. I set up the easel just outside my door and tried to capture the stunning beauty of the ocean. Fred Mayer had stopped in an art supply shop on the way to Gurney’s, where I stocked up on everything I needed. The only thing I couldn’t buy, of course, was artistic talent. But I wasn’t about to be deterred by that. I would do my best.
It was one of the nicest three-day respites I’d ever experienced.
Four days later I was home in Cabot Cove. My friends, Dr. Seth Hazlitt and Sheriff Mort Metzger, threw me a welcome-home party at my home a week later. One of the guests was a local artist, John Leito, who was developing a solid reputation in galleries beyond Cabot Cove.
“Interesting work,” he said, referring to a seascape I’d just had framed, and had hung the day of the party. “It’s not signed.”
“Just one of many unsung artists,” I said. “I think it’s a view of the ocean from a resort in Montauk. That’s on Long Island, on the far eastern end. It appealed to me.”
“The best reason for buying art,” he said.
He also paused at the other new painting hanging in my home.
“Now, that really interests me,” he said. “So bold, so free. It reminds me of—” He clicked his fingers as he tried to come up with the name. “Ah, Leopold. Joshua Leopold. Died young.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I bought it at a garage sale in the Hamptons for five dollars. Probably worth exactly that.”
“Unless it’s a Leopold.”
“Unlikely. But if it is, I won’t sell it. It has a certain nostalgic value to me. More lasagna, John? Better get it before Mort and Seth finish it off.”
VOYAGE TO MYSTERIOUS SCOTLAND!
Murder, She Wrote:
The Highland Fling Murders
by Jessica Fletcher
and Donald Bain
Now available from Signet.
“I’ll take you to a special place where I know you’ll catch fish,” Rufus Innes, our
gillie,
Scottish for fishing guide, said. “Wouldn’t want to return you to George Sutherland without a few fat trout in your creel.”
We got back in the truck and headed west, I think, entering a low range of hills that gradually rose in elevation until we were granted a stunning view of Wick, the surrounding countryside and coastline, and Sutherland Castle standing lonely and forbidding. Innes stopped to allow us to drink in the view.
“It’s so beautiful,” I said.
“Of God’s making,” Innes said.
“Is there a stream up here?” Ken asked.
“Oh, yes, there certainly is. A gem. I don’t take many clients up here. None of the guides do. We try to keep it to ourselves.”
“That sounds wise,” I said.
“But for two ’a George’s guests, I’ll make an exception.”
“Much appreciated,” Ken said. “Where’s this stream? Looks like we might get rained out before long.”
We looked up into what had been a pristine blue sky, with more of the same in the forecast. An ominous line of black clouds, twisting thousands of feet into the air, approached from the west.
“Weather here is changeable,” said Innes. “Very changeable.”
“So we’ve noticed,” Ken said.
After another fifteen minutes of driving along a road so narrow the bushes on both sides scraped the truck, we came to the bank of a raging river about twenty feet wide, cascading down from the hills and picking up speed as it roared through the brush-laden gully. The wind had now picked up; sudden gusts sent my hair flying.
“Running pretty fast,” Ken observed. “Tough wading.”
“Maybe we can do what Mr. Innes does, Ken, fish from the bank.”
“No,” Ken said, getting ready to enter the stream. “See that pool over there? I can smell fish in there.”
“Might be,” Innes said, “but too far to reach from here in this wind.”