The Odd Job (12 page)

“Not at all, that’s what I’m here for.”

Redfern was all set for a long, fatherly chat, but Sarah was not about to oblige him. She skated over the bare facts as fast as she decently could, then picked up her gloves, handbag, and borrowed stole. “I’ll bring you the will when I find it. Thanks for your help.”

Once outside the building, she could see the wind puffing up dust and debris from the pavement; she hugged Theonia’s stole around her and decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take time out for some shopping. Her silk suit was too light, this deep-crimson stole too eye-catching. What she needed was a seasonable outfit as different as possible from what she had on without being freakish. In fact, the duller might be the better.

T
AKING TIME OUT FOR
a change of wardrobe before Sarah picked up the keys from Harris and pushed on to Ipswich Street would make no difference to the dead woman now. If there was anything to certain theories held by some of Theonia’s former colleagues in the transcendental line, Dolores must be busy dusting off the astral plane by now and having the time of her transmigrated life. Since nobody had ever been able to tell Sarah for sure what would happen to the liberated spirit once the bar had been crossed, she was content to hope for the best and turn her attention to more mundane affairs.

A mannequin in a window on Newbury Street caught her eye; it displayed a warm-looking green jacket and a kilt that was mostly green and blue with a thin red stripe. Sarah hadn’t bought anything green in ages, she stepped inside and started browsing through the racks. She decided against the green; the businesslike young woman who left the shop half an hour later was soberly but tastefully clad in a darkish-gray flannel jacket and skirt and a lighter-gray silk shirt. Her light-brown hair was mostly hidden beneath a gray felt fedora with a black grosgrain band such as Kelling ladies had been wearing since the days of the Gibson girl, whether anybody else was wearing them or not. Her pearl earrings were small but genuine. She wore black kid gloves and low-heeled black pumps, she carried a black handbag that could have been her grandmother’s and a paper shopping bag that bore the name of the fairly exclusive boutique she had just patronized.

Anybody looking inside the bag might have glimpsed a fuzzy mass of crimson mohair and possibly a flash of blue silk, but nobody did because pink tissue in multiple layers had been so neatly tucked in on top. The bearer might have been executive secretary to somebody important, or a rising young member of the bar. A more discerning eye would have spied a dedicated young matron of the so-called leisured class on her way to organize something respectable and meritorious.

Sarah Kelling Bittersohn had affairs of her own to organize, she’d better get cracking now that she’d taken on the appropriate protective coloration. There were still Dolores’s keys to be picked up, and the original will to be found. She hadn’t even thought about a funeral, except in passing; she hoped to goodness Dolores had left instructions as to what sort of send-off she wanted.

It would have made sense, Sarah thought, to ask Mr. Redfern to show her his copy of the will while she was in his office; but he always made such a pother over everything. He’d have insisted on reading the whole document aloud to her with a running commentary in tedious legalese at every whereas and whyfor; she’d have been ready to fly into fits before he got to the parts that mattered.

Her shopping bag was bulky but not heavy. Rather than take a taxi and get caught up in traffic, she cut across Boylston and legged it for police headquarters. Nobody paid any attention to a small woman in dull, sensible clothes, dull, sensible shoes, and a face-hiding hat. She ducked pedestrians, dodged traffic, and made good time to the station. Lieutenant Harris was not in but he had left an envelope at the desk for her. He’d also instructed a uniformed policeman to drive Mrs. Bittersohn to the Fenway Studio Building and stay with her while she made her search of the late Mrs. Tawne’s apartment.

That was good news to Sarah; she hadn’t relished the thought of having to ransack a murdered woman’s premises all by herself. Officer Drummond, as he turned out to be, stowed her shopping bag in the back seat of the police car and suggested that she sit up front with him because he’d had to rush an injured dog to the Angell Memorial after a car smash and hadn’t had time yet to brush the hairs off the backseat upholstery. That said, he left her alone and concentrated on his driving while she delved into the lieutenant’s envelope.

As she’d expected, Dolores Tawne’s keys were inside, identified as hers by a cardboard tag on a string. A note written on lined yellow paper with a ballpoint told Sarah what she’d already surmised. According to the medical examiner’s report, the hatpin which Mrs. Bittersohn had brought in was indeed the murder weapon. Whose hand had wielded it was not known and perhaps never would be; a beaded hatpin in a bad state was not the optimum object on which to hunt for fingerprints. As for Mrs. Tawne’s effects, Harris had made a preliminary examination without finding anything that looked to him like a clue. There was a will, but he hadn’t found any bankbooks in her handbag or in the apartment. He hoped Mrs. Bittersohn would have better luck.

Sarah hoped so too. It was considerate of the lieutenant to have provided her with an escort; although she couldn’t help thinking he’d have been remiss not to, considering what had happened yesterday at the office. Maybe she and Officer Drummond ought to stop at the Little Building after they got through at the studio and check the office for further signs of unauthorized entry or potentially lethal souvenirs. Then again, maybe they oughtn’t. She’d have to think it over. But first things first, and here they were turning into Ipswich Street. She tried not to wish they weren’t.

As a young member of an old family, Sarah had on more than one occasion been stuck with the task of sorting over the effects of a dead relative for proper disposal. There’d been her mother, who’d died early and slowly of cancer; her father, who’d died before he’d known what ailed him; her gentle, handsome, self-sacrificing first husband and his blind, deaf, imperious mother, who’d died together in the wreck of a 1920 Milburn electric runabout. Those had been the hard ones. There had been other deaths, but always people she’d known well. How was she going to feel when she got upstairs about rummaging through a studio in which she’d set foot only three other times, and those before she’d married Max?

The first time around, Sarah had more or less invited herself to tea. A man she’d known and detested had shown up and Lydia Ouspenska had walked off with Dolores’s tea cakes wrapped up in one of Dolores’s napkins. The other visits had taken place unannounced, two nights in a row. Both nights, Dolores had answered the door in a plissé kimono, a headful of old-fashioned metal crimpers, and a raging temper.

Each time, the studio had been in next-to-perfect order. What would it look like now, with policemen’s footprints in the dust on the floor and nobody bothering to wipe them up? Sarah remembered a line from
The Mayor of Casterbridge
: “And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened, and things a’ didn’t wish seen, anybody will see; and her little wishes and ways will be all as nothing.”

Dolores had had her wishes and ways, she’d voiced them often enough. How could nursing the peacocks and dusting Madam Wilkins’s bibelots have led to a hatpin through the neck in the flower-filled courtyard of the museum that had been her great and perhaps her only love?

The will that Harris had turned up and not stopped to read might possibly give some kind of clue. Harris’s note had said only that he’d found one in Mrs. Tawne’s top dresser drawer, glanced through it, and left it for the executrix to deal with. As was right and proper, but Sarah wondered why Dolores had left so important a document—important to herself, at any rate—in so easily accessible a place. It wasn’t as if she’d lived like a hermit when she was not at the museum. She’d entertained a member of the board of directors to tea on a number of occasions that Sarah knew about; her brother would no doubt have been a frequent visitor, and so had Lydia Ouspenska during the years when she’d occupied the studio underneath Dolores’s and scraped out a precarious living by painting antique Byzantine icons.

Lydia would not have been above snooping, nor would she have refrained from broadcasting anything that caught her interest to anybody who’d stop to listen. Max’s friend Bill Jones, for instance; Bill always liked to know things. Sarah had no idea where Bill was sleeping these days, but he’d often shared Lydia’s bed before she’d deserted la vie bohème in favor of steady employment, a comfortable home with congenial people, and three square meals a day. Not that Bill would have passed on any gossip about either Lydia or Dolores except possibly to Max Bittersohn or Brooks Kelling, but there it was.

If only Max would come home! Or Brooks or Theonia, or even Jesse. The city had taken her summer away; Sarah had been back here only since Sunday afternoon and she was sick of it already. Why couldn’t she simply dump this job on somebody else, stop at the Rivkins’ hired cottage to watch Davy commune with his friend the minnow, drive home to Ireson’s Landing and let Anne teach her how to bed out chrysanthemums? Sarah wanted her husband. She wanted her child, she wanted her house, she wanted her own life. But she must not take what she wanted until she’d earned it; because that was how she’d been reared. And it served her right for not having the intestinal fortitude to squirm free of the Puritan ethic.

Having sublimated her snit, Sarah took Dolores’s keys out of Harris’s envelope and braced herself to enter the studio. She must forget that the murdered woman had eaten at her table on several occasions. But how could she not remember that last nighttime meeting when they’d rousted Dolores out of bed and Max had accidentally thrown the artist into ecstasy by mentioning what superb copies she’d made of the Wilkins’s greatest treasures; how she’d rushed in her nightgown and curlers to put on the teakettle and rushed back with a trayful of chocolate marshmallow coconut fluffs; and how Max had recoiled in horror when she’d urged him to eat one?

Dolores had been lifted to the heights and dashed to the nethermost pit. She’d climbed out and dusted herself off and picked up the pieces and got on with her job. She had, in her way, been an admirable person.

Like Miss Tremblay, Sarah thought. Admirable people did not always get the best seats in the house or the biggest slice of the loaf. Perhaps, in a way, it was not so bad that Dolores Agnew Tawne had been spared further humiliation. Sarah could not for the life of her see how Dolores could ever have worked in anything like harmony with the Wilkins’s new head of trustees.

Elwyn Fleesom Turbot had already made it plain that his was going to be the hand that cracked the whip. Dolores Agnew Tawne had appointed herself chief bullier ages ago. She’d known everything there was to know about the Wilkins. It had been her knowledge, her experience, her skill that had kept the museum going so well for so long, especially through the dark years that by now had shown signs of brightening. Turbot hadn’t a clue about running a museum, yet he had the power to call the shots. He’d have driven Dolores until she balked, then fired her for insubordination and incompetence.

The giving or withholding of pensions was, according to the museum’s charter, at the discretion of the board of trustees. Mr. Fitzroy had got one, and deserved it. An elderly, unattractive woman who’d threatened Turbot’s supremacy, as Dolores certainly would have, could have been turned out to beg on the streets and not one of the bemused old trustees would have ventured to question the big man’s judgment. But this was no time to sit and fume about what might have been. Officer Drummond was double-parking at the front door since there was no empty space at the curb.

“Why don’t you get out and wait for me inside, Mrs. Bittersohn? I’ll find a place to put the car.”

“I could go on up to the studio,” Sarah told him. “I know where it is.”

“I’d rather you waited for me in the lobby, if you don’t mind. My orders were to stick with you as much as possible. Here’s your shopping bag.”

Sarah couldn’t see why he hadn’t just locked it in the cruiser for the short time, she hoped, that they’d be here; but no doubt Officer Drummond knew best. She took the bag, hit the right key on the second try, and let herself into the lobby. About two minutes later, Drummond rapped on the door and called, “Mrs. Bittersohn?”

“That was quick,” she remarked.

The policeman shrugged. “Can’t arrest a cop on duty for a necessary parking violation. Where do we go?”

“Upstairs and to the right, as I recall.”

There was an elevator in the foyer, but Sarah didn’t bother with it. Her feet seemed to know the way well enough, they stopped at the door that displayed Dolores Agnew Tawne’s card in a tarnished brass holder. She sorted out the right key and let herself and Drummond in, half expecting to hear the thump of sensible shoes climbing the short flight of stairs from the studio up to the small balcony where they’d entered. Dolores would have invited them in and galloped back down to put on the kettle and get out the chocolate marshmallow coconut puffs, unless the policeman’s uniform put her off. If she’d been here.

Sarah knew that an arrangement had been worked out with the interim board of trustees that each of Dolores’s meticulous copies would be returned to her as soon as its original was back in the museum. There was no reason why Dolores shouldn’t have displayed her own paintings in her own studio, Sarah was surprised that the artist hadn’t hung more of them. By now she must have amassed an impressive collection.

Sarah was both amused and touched to see that Dolores had given pride of place to a full-figure portrait of one Ernestina Kelling, whose husband had been an attaché at the Court of St. James while John Adams was Minister Plenipotentiary, trying to form fresh diplomatic links between their former mother country and the by-then extant United States of America.

Why Ernestina, middle-aged, lantern-jawed, and tough as a minuteman’s boot, had elected to have herself portrayed by the fashionable Mr. Romney as Venus, complete with doves and roses, was anybody’s guess. Why Dolores Tawne had never caught on that the supposedly original portrait Madam Wilkins had bought for her palazzo had been even then no more than a pretty good copy of Romney’s less than first-rate work was a question to which not even Max Bittersohn had found an answer.