Thai Die (26 page)

“Wendy’s husband is a hunter, too?” Betsy asked.

“Oh gosh, no. I don’t think Frank knows which end of a gun the bullet comes out of.”

“Okay, I think I understand all that. Now, when you three were in Thailand, did you meet a man named David Corvis?”

“Yes. Sergeant Malloy asked me about him, too. But I didn’t get to know him or anything, I only met him for about a minute. I saw him with Lena and Wendy in the lobby of our hotel one morning and came over for an introduction. He was planning a trip with them, up north to Chiang Mai, to see silk still being made by women working alone—you know, as individuals. They invited me to go, too, but I’d gotten a tour ticket for Coral Island, in the Sea of Thailand, that was right in the middle of their three-day junket.”

“So you didn’t go up north with Wendy and Lena.”

“No. They came back with some beautiful fabrics and about a hundred pictures. They were all excited.”

“Did you see Mr. Corvis again?”

“No, just that one time. They talked about what a great guy he was, but I don’t think they saw him again, either.”

“What did they say about him?”

“Nothing much, just that he was a soldier who came to Thailand after the Vietnam war and started working in a silk factory. They said he knew just about everything there was to know about silk.”

“It was interesting that he ran into Doris, though, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Sergeant Malloy was all interested in that, too. Do you think that’s important, that he knew Wendy and Lena and then Doris?”

“Yes, I think it’s very important. Carmen, I’m worried about Doris. Did you get Phil to tell you where he was taking her?”

“No. That is scary, isn’t it? I know Phil loves Doris and I’m sure he thinks he’s protecting her, but I really don’t think hiding her himself is a good idea, do you?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. There are so many places for him to take her, it’s impossible to figure out where they’ve gone. I’m concerned that there’s no way to get in touch with them when this is over, but on the other hand, if we don’t know where they are, it’s not likely the person after her knows, either.”

Betsy couldn’t think of anything else to ask, so she wished Carmen a good night and hung up.

Her head was too full of conjecture and confusion to focus on recording the day’s sales, so she clicked the program closed. Then she saw she was still logged on to the Internet—and that she already had a reply from Lillian.
His name is Ron Zommick, and he’s in Bangkok right now, so don’t phone him, e-mail him.
She gave Betsy the address, then continued:

 

Betsy thought,
Well then, when it’s tomorrow evening there, is it yesterday morning over here
? For a moment she pictured the globe of the earth, one half toward the sun, the globe turning so the leading edge of dawn was always moving west. Somewhere tomorrow had to start; that’s what the international date line was for. So no, if it was evening in Bangkok, it was the morning of the same day over here.

Betsy wrote a brief thanks to Lillian, then turned her attention to Mr. Zommick. She tried to think of a way to explain what she wanted without turning it into a very long story. Or scaring him off entirely. Finally she typed:

 

She wrote a much longer version, then rewrote it twice, read it over, sighed in dissatisfaction, and before she could change her mind entirely, pressed Send.

Twenty-one

BETSY shut down her computer and sat awhile, trying to make sense of what she knew—but there were gaps. She had too many questions and not enough answers. She thought some more, then decided she needed something to focus her mind. She thought about stitching the sneezing Dalmatian, but it would call for all her concentration. What she was after was something that would leave her free to think and reason and ponder.

She went into her stash of yarn for a ball of mauve wool and some number ten needles. Then she sat down in her most comfortable chair, turned on the standard lamp behind it, and began to cast on stitches. That XOXO scarf she’d been knitting in her imagination at the art institute library had lingered at the back of her mind. It should work up pretty fast—though to make it fun, it should be extra long as well as extra skinny. Perhaps she should make it as part of next year’s Valentine’s Day display: Sheepish Love and Kisses? No. Warm Love and Kisses? Better.

Meanwhile, as she had hoped, getting into the rhythm and repetitions of knitting settled her turbulent mind and allowed patterns to emerge.

She thought at first she didn’t have enough data on this case to make a guess at its solution. But then she thought perhaps the opposite was true: There was a superabundance of data. Could there be too much? Maybe the problem was that she had collected the data out of order.

She began to list the events as they had come to her, beginning with Doris’s return from Bangkok with the stone statue, and then tried sorting them into a chronology. First . . . well, first was the archaeological dig at the Han Dynasty site back in the 1980s that disclosed the embroidered silk. Then the immediate and subsequent thefts of that silk. Then . . . yes, Lena, Wendy, and Carmen’s trip to Thailand. Doris’s trip to Thailand . . . No, David Corvis’s turning up to meet Wendy and Lena, then connecting with Doris. Doris’s throwing the silk away and Betsy’s retrieving it. Doris’s taking the statue to Fitzwilliam in St. Paul. Fitzwilliam’s murder. The burglary of Doris’s apartment. The trip to St. Peter and the death of Wendy Applegate. Lena’s murder. The shooting at Carmen Diamond’s house.

As Betsy built a chronology of this complicated case, she looked for a pattern, a set of suspects. To her dismay, there didn’t seem to be either.

She knit and thought, but nothing else came to her, and at last she tucked her needles into the ball of yarn and went to bed.

 

 

 

THE next morning Betsy came home from water aerobics, ate a quick breakfast, and as usual, took a few minutes to sit at her computer. She noted on her calendar that she would have double the entries to make on her bookkeeping program that evening. Falling behind on record keeping, the most dreary of small business ownership tasks, was one sure recipe for disaster. She absolutely must make up for her failure of yesterday.

Then she wrote an e-mail to Foster Johns, who had acted as a construction contractor for her before. She asked if he would be available to draw up an estimate for the remodeling of two apartments on the second floor of her building at 200 Lake Street.

When she connected to the Internet to send it, she saw that she had a reply from Ron Zommick in Bangkok:

Betsy just sat staring at the screen. David Corvis, dead. The hair at the nape of her neck stood up.

What kind of murderer could reach halfway around the world? Because she did not for one instant think David Corvis was the victim of a careless teenaged car thief.

She clicked Reply, thanked Ron, and told him not to continue looking into David’s business. She would contact him again in a few days, she wrote. She logged off and went to pencil in her eyebrows.

This was far, far too big a case for an amateur like her, she reflected. She should have realized that when she found out what the silk was, and that it had been an object of immense value and rarity sought by international art thieves. Betsy’s forte was solving crimes committed by ordinary people, motivated by jealousy or hatred or a desire for revenge. When it was about money, it was the $10,000 left to Bertram by Aunt Kit who was dead under suspicious circumstances—not the sale of a unique piece of ancient embroidered silk. The workings of international smuggling rings were beyond her ken.

She needed to contact Carmen, warn her this was bigger than she’d dreamed, that an armed and dangerous husband might not be enough to protect her. And she needed to tell Doris the same thing. Plus tell Mike Malloy she was backing out of this case. The big problem? Doris was in hiding with Phil. And Betsy had no way of contacting either of them.

She reached for her phone and called Mike’s office number. It was before his office hours, so she left a message explaining that she was quitting the case and why. “If you want to talk to me, I’ll be in my shop all day.”

She went downstairs and opened the shop, then phoned the Diamond house. The phone was answered by Richard. “Yeah?” he growled.

“It’s me, Betsy Devonshire. I want to talk to both you and Carmen, if I may.”

“She’s not here!” Which Betsy was sure was a lie—but she didn’t blame him for telling it.

“I just found out that David Corvis is dead. I’m not able to work on a case with international connections, so I’m quitting. Please tell Carmen that someone from Immigration and Customs Enforcement will probably want to talk to her in the near future. This is federal government business now.”

“Right.” The phone was disconnected by a crash so loud Betsy would not have been surprised to learn Richard had blown it to flinders with his shotgun.

Godwin came in a few minutes late. “It’s so dim and gray out, I didn’t believe my alarm when it went off,” he explained. He looked around the place, decked for Easter in the colors of spring, with here and there the warmer colors of summer starting to show. “At least in here it feels like the sun is shining,” he said.

“Well, that’s good,” Betsy said. “That was the effect we were after, remember? I’m glad it makes it a little less painful for you to come back to work.”

“Can I ask you a question?” he said abruptly.

“Of course,” said Betsy, taken aback by his tone.

“Why didn’t you
call
me about
Doris
? Why didn’t you let me
know
?”

“Because you didn’t tell me where you were staying, remember? You said you wanted to get completely away from everything up here.”

“Oh. Yeah. Well . . .” He shook his head. “I would have come home if I’d known. Have you had any more ideas about who’s doing all this?”

“No. In fact, Goddy, I’m quitting. I can’t solve this one, it’s too big for me.”

“Too big? I don’t understand.”

“This is about international smuggling, possibly run by organized crime. That’s not at all the sort of crime I can solve. I’m just in the way. It’s too big even for Mike—even for the St. Paul police. This is the kind of crime that Immigration and Customs Enforcement will investigate. Considering that I had never even heard of ICE until yesterday, you can see how out of my depth I am.”

“Aw, now—” began Godwin, but he bit the scoffing off before it could begin. “You really think this is some big international crime?”

“I know it is. There was a man in Bangkok who got Doris to bring the stone Buddha back. He had earlier met Wendy and Lena over there, so he’s more than likely a part of the smuggling enterprise. And now he’s dead. A hit-and-run driver in a stolen car ran him over outside his export business in downtown Bangkok.”

Godwin stared at her, his mouth making a small O. “And you think—”

Betsy nodded. “Yes. This particular scam fell apart, the silk came into the wrong hands, and they’re covering their steps. Wendy killed the antiques shop owner and then was killed herself, and Lena was killed, and someone shot at Doris—twice, actually.”