The Hours of the Virgin (19 page)

“You're too modest. You went to jail that time that TV news reader's son was killed; something about protecting a client. And you were right in the middle of it when Timothy Marianne got shot in his own auto plant. You made the papers a few other times.”

“You didn't. I kept checking the obituaries.”

“Where is my wife?”

The washed-out eyes left me for the first time, went to Gordon Strangeways. On the way they took in the P38 resting on the seat of the scooter. “I don't know,” he said. “I thought you might.”

“What does that mean?”

“We were supposed to meet in Louisiana last week. I rented a bungalow, but she never showed up. After three days I came back here. I thought she'd lost interest.”

“You damned liar.” The London polish had begun to flake off the Mossel Bay.

“On the flight back I started to wonder if something had happened to her. That's the real reason I called you this morning. You asked about her before I could work around to it.” He nodded toward the Walther. “Is that what you used?”

A second's silence plunked into the void. Then Strangeways reached for the gun. North's right hand moved in his coat pocket. I stepped between the chaise and the scooter, blocking Strangeways' reach.

“No shooting in here,” I said. “Too much glass. You might hit a picketer and then we'll all have the feminists on our necks.”

A little of the tension drained out after that. North's topcoat smoothed out. Strangeways fell back against the cushions. I picked up the P38. The topcoat moved again. I was sure now he was right-handed.

“Is this the only gun you own?” I asked Strangeways.

“The guards have an arsenal in the hall closet.”

“Locked up?”

“No. They'll need quick access in the event of a siege.”

“Uh-huh.” I put the semiautomatic in my coat pocket. Kept my hand there.

North looked amused. “Pompous old eunuch. America's czar of sex, dead from the waist down. How long did you think you could keep Laurel a prisoner?”

“She's always been free to come and go. Perhaps you killed her to prevent her from coming back.”

“Let's find out if she's dead first.” I strolled out of the line of fire, circling to North's left. Now he'd have to turn to start something. “Louisiana's an odd choice for a tryst. Why not Florida? That's where most of Michigan goes when the snow flies.”

“It's home to her,” North said. “I guess she thought she'd feel more comfortable there. Also Strangeways would buy the excuse. If he got suspicious and checked the roaming charges on her cell phone they would check out.”

“Apparently the last twenty years didn't make a dent in your hormones. Your tastes are more expensive, though. That why you threw in with Boyette?”

“You don't give a damn about Boyette. Ten years after Leopold was killed I was still getting a greeting card on the anniversary of his death, without a return address or a signature. Why'd you stop?”

“Postage went up. Why'd you kill him? The worst he could have done was put you on the wrong side of a sloppy divorce. It wasn't like you had far to fall. That computer records job didn't pay anything.”

“If you have to ask
why
, you should ask yourself
if
. I didn't kill him.”

I wanted another smoke, but I'd never gotten the knack of lighting up one-handed. The European gun felt odd in my palm. I missed my comfortable Smith & Wesson. It was in my glove compartment again, a hundred yards and a thousand miles away. “I've thought about it,” I said. “A lot. Up until Dale your case history reads like an insurance pamphlet. It starts to get gaudy around age thirty-one. No more home at five-twenty. Mysterious withdrawals from your savings account: fifty here, ninety there, then fifty again. Always one or the other. The dates slide around but they jibe with your late nights. It's all in the record of your divorce proceedings.”

“You read it.” He nodded. “You would.”

“I couldn't put it down. You went from an insurance pamphlet to a bestseller. A pavement princess like Star LaJoie would have been forty bucks a turn tops, maybe eighty for all night. The extra ten would have paid for the room. Nothing new there, the song was around a long time before they invented lyrics. Not for you, though. A gray statistic of a man sees his first streak of scarlet. He's nervous, but that's part of the thrill. Then he finds out he's being tailed.”

“I'm going to spoil the ending for you,” he said. “He lays off and goes home like a good statistic. He winds up getting divorced anyway; it's not that kind of an ending. But he doesn't kill anyone. Sorry, Walker. It's not exactly blockbuster material.”

“Not this statistic. This one bought a gun. It went off three times. One would have been enough for a professional at that range, or two if his aim was off. Three is a nervous finger on an unfamiliar trigger. Just the kind of messy job a computer programmer might make.”

He smiled dustily. “There's a saying in the computer field: A theory is just a wet dream with numbers.”

“Gentlemen. What has this to do with my wife?”

We looked at Strangeways. I think we'd both forgotten he was there. He'd used the time to touch up the bare spots in his breeding. He was sitting up with his hands folded in his lap and no expression at all behind his glasses.

I said, “It's an indirect link. Every other crime gets easier once you've committed the granddaddy and gotten away with it. Forgery and fraud, for two. Ruddy at the DIA caught North going through the files of wealthy patrons. That clicks with what Boyette was up to. Once he was nailed, he lost his best customer in the DIA, but there were plenty of gullible private collectors in those files who would buy the manuscripts North faked if Boyette confirmed them. Boyette probably figured the board of directors did him a favor when they chose not to go public with the scandal.”

“But I knew about it,” Strangeways said. “It was common gossip in the trade.”

“Boyette probably found that out the hard way. That's where the Hours of the Virgin came in. Back a little.” I looked at North. “The fakes had to be good enough to survive a first glance. Boyette could give you pointers and show you examples, but you'd need time to become intimate with the real thing. That's why he got you the hands-on job here. Only he got caught before either of you could get rich, and his credibility as an expert was blown. That ended his usefulness. But there you were, still gainfully employed at the museum, with a stack of forgeries under your arm and a drawer full of suckers to unload them on.”

“A lot of good they'd do me without someone to authenticate them.”

“It eliminated some buyers, no doubt, and probably lowered your asking price,” I said. “There would still be collectors who would actually be intrigued by the missing pedigrees.”

“Provenances,” Strangeways corrected.

I waved my free hand, even as I found the Walther's safety catch with the other and thumbed it off. “They would suspect they were being offered stolen goods, and you wouldn't say anything to discourage that suspicion. A lot of upright people come down with rickets of the ethics when they smell a bargain. As long as you had the manuscripts and the greed of your customers, you didn't need Boyette. It didn't even matter when you were discovered and dismissed. You'd put together enough of a list to get started.

“That didn't sit well with Boyette,” I went on. “He'd lost his reputation, and he didn't have the manuscripts, except one page of the Hours, which he might have been carrying around as a sample. Probably there never were any other pages. He couldn't sell it; everyone in the collecting world knew he was a crook. When he found out you were peddling the stock without him, using his know-how and his scheme, he decided to shake you down. Jump right in anywhere if I get the order wrong.”

“Go ahead. This story is even more entertaining than the one about Leopold.” As he spoke, North turned my way a couple of inches. I tightened my grip on the P38.

“He set up a meet,” I said. “Maybe he sweetened the offer with the first page of the Hours, so you'd have a complete set when you cut him in on the action. I like it that you were the one who suggested the exchange take place at the Tomcat Theater. It appealed to your hormones as well as your sense of irony. You'd know it was owned by your former temporary employer. You'd give him his cut, he'd give you the page and the promise not to tip off the cops.”

I gave Strangeways the corner of my eye. “This is where I get to your wife. Somebody had to let Boyette know what sort of man he was dealing with. Somebody had to scare him enough to bring me in as his bodyguard with a trumped-up story about a museum theft and a ransom drop. I don't know why it had to be me or how Boyette connects to the man who set me up for it, but I know who was the one person who knew North and Boyette both, and was intimate enough with North to have heard him boast about what a big bad killer he was.”

“Laurel.” Strangeways' tone was barely a whisper. “My God.”

“She played you both,” I told North. “She warned Boyette about you, but she helped you out too. You had to have been watching when I entered the theater behind Boyette. You recognized me, put two and two together, and sent her in to distract me while you made your play. That was a smart choice. I never even saw you come in. Tell me, if Boyette had hired anyone else, would you have tried to kill him?”

He said nothing. He was facing me full on now. The right side of his coat hung six inches higher than the left. Mine did too, by now.

“You missed,” I said, “but I went to the floor like any ambushee with brains, and the place emptied. Boyette was one of the last out, having had to run all the way from the front row, and you were waiting for him. You marched him to his car at gunpoint and got in the back and told him to drive. He didn't drive far. You directed him to O'Hair Park and capped him when he stopped.”

“He's dead?”

I couldn't read him. All that time with just an electronic gizmo for company had dulled the impulses between his face and his brain.

“What rot! Laurel may be capable of infidelity, but not accessory to murder.”

I didn't look at Strangeways. “Anyone's capable given the right circumstances. Let's say these weren't them; she didn't know murder was what North had in mind. Even when you know his history, it's hard to accept him as a desperate character when you're face-to-face.”

“You didn't seem to have any trouble.” North limped his injured tongue around the inside of his mouth, tasting blood.

“I've had plenty of practice. Anyway, that's why she ran when you shot at me. Or why you killed her. Beautiful women make great witnesses. Especially if you're unlucky enough to draw an all-male jury.”

For a long time after I finished, the room was silent. Even the leaves on the plants hung motionless, totally enervated. Then from somewhere in the room came a low bubbling, like thick liquid coming to a sluggish boil. Earl North was chuckling.

“It's a great yarn,” he said. “There are only three things wrong with it. I didn't kill Boyette and I didn't kill Laurel, to start. And I didn't fake the Hours of the Virgin. If Boyette's dead, it isn't because he tried to hold me up. It's because he had the Hours, the real thing. Or knew where he could get it.”

The liquid chuckle turned into a cough, deep and racking. He took his hands out of his pockets. I raised the Walther. He unscrewed the cap from a portable inhaler, brought it to his mouth, and pumped it twice. He took a deep breath and let it out with a rattling sigh.

I flipped the P38's safety catch back on and laid the pistol on the seat of the scooter. I felt as played-out as the flora. I couldn't tell whether it was relief or disappointment.

21

I took off my coat then and draped it over the scooter's handlebars. My skin felt dank under my clothes. I thought about having that cigarette but my lips were too dry. I looked at our host. “Can a man get a drink around here, or is that just for the shrubbery?”

He groped a hand under the cushions and came up with a cordless telephone. “Ben? Bring the cart.” He punched out.

“Ben's the butler?” I said. “I thought he was security.”

“He does most of the things I can't do for myself, including serve drinks and turn away bullets. He's been with me since Little Rock. Before that he was the subject of a feature in the first issue of
After Six
I edited. He fought Sugar Ray Robinson just before Robinson retired and coached the U.S. boxing team in the 1976 Olympics. I hired him away from the finest security firm in the country. If I were to stop trusting him I would give up entirely.”

Ben entered in shirtsleeves, pushing a jingling cart on rubber wheels. I asked for Scotch and soda, Strangeways a glass of water, which he used to chase a pill he took from a prescription bottle standing among a forest of them on the shelf below the bottles and siphon. North wanted nothing. Ben served us and left. The Scotch tasted like smoked heather. I didn't know what kind of fighter the guard had been, but he was wasted in anything but a bartender's coat.

“The Hours of the Virgin is too risky to fake,” North said. “Boyette and I specialized in lesser rarities; manuscripts valuable enough to justify the time and expense, but not so interesting they might attract attention from outside. I'd just as soon copy
The Last Supper
as the Hours.”

“You admit to the scheme?” Strangeways was becoming interested despite himself. He had the collector's bug.

“I admit to forgery. It's not illegal unless you try to sell a copy as the real thing, and you'll have to prove that. I missed my calling when I became an accountant. Programming fifteenth-century-style monastic lettering into my hard drive, even the thousand little irregularities needed to make it look like hand work, was comparatively easy. Getting the printer to feed through the right kind of paper was the hard part. I had to redesign the machine from the ground up, and of course I didn't use the real thing or the rollers would have eaten it. Then there was staining and aging, which required certain dyes and acids and a conventional oven.”