Murder Mystery #3 Last one and the toughest.
"fancy meeting you here," said my friend Nick Gardino, homicide inspector with the San Francisco police.
Though I was sitting on a plush velvet sofa at one end of Octavia Prendergast's vast living room, I felt uncomfortable. "I didn't think I'd see you tonight either. I expected a gourmet dinner, interesting company and a chance to talk art. Not murder."
I was the last of her guests to be questioned. The others -- all of them now murder suspects -- were huddled in her library, awaiting permission to leave. Gardino's pen was poised over a notebook on his knee. On the Louis XIV coffee table, a cassette recorder was running.
"So tell me, Jess -- why did Mrs. Prendergast invite a private investigator to her little party?"
"She doesn't know I'm a P.I.," I said. "She bought one of my paintings last week at the Greenstone Gallery and decided that makes me her prot‚g‚."
"That seascape on the far wall?" Nick nodded toward the painting.
"I didn't think you knew my style so well." I couldn't make myself look at the painting. Directly beneath it on the Persian carpet was the spot where the body had lain. The odor of blood still hung in the air.
"Poor Moller. What a terrible way to go."
"Yeah. A knife in the gut is never fun." Nick sighed. "At least we don't have to wonder if the butler did it."
"No -- not when the butler is the victim," I agreed.
He shifted his position on the spindly chair. "OK, Jess, describe what happened here. Start with the moment you arrived."
When I rang the doorbell of Octavia Prendergast's Pacific Heights mansion, I'd had no inkling that the evening would end in murder. Moller, an elderly gent in butler's attire, led me into the high-ceilinged living room. An expanse of glass revealed a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge. The other three walls were covered with paintings, ranging from works by old masters to my seascape. Mrs. Prendergast was wearing a silver gown that matched her elaborately swept-up hair. "Jess!" the elderly widow exclaimed as she saw me. "So glad you could come! Everyone, meet Jess Randolph, one of my best-ever artist discoveries."
She drew me, blushing, to the center of the room, where a group was gathered around a waist-high marble column. On top of this pedestal stood a lustrous bronze Venus. Small, elegantly detailed and almost 500 years old, it was an Italian Renaissance treasure by the virtuoso of sculpture, Alessandro Palladini. This was a farewell party, with the Venus as guest of honor. Tomorrow, in a grand ceremony, Mrs. Prendergast would be donating it to the San Francisco Museum of Arts and Culture.
The other guests murmured greetings. I'd met only one of them before tonight -- Anthony Lopez, another painter from the Greenstone show. Mrs. Prendergast, a woman of eclectic tastes, had bought one of his paintings too. Anthony's work ran heavily to black and brown -- a reflection of his grim mood. He had never caught on in the art world in the way he'd hoped. Now he was pushing middle age and deeply in debt. "The starving artist number's getting old, Jess," Anthony confessed. "If something doesn't break for me soon financially, I'm hanging up my palette knife."
"For you, that would be like giving up breathing," I said.
"You're right. Well, don't worry. I've got some ideas that could turn things around for me." He had refused to elaborate, and I chalked it up to wishful thinking.
I was delighted to meet another guest -- Professor Lee Calhoun, an idol from my college days. Originally from Texas, he settled in Florence many years ago and became one of the world's foremost authorities on Italian art. His book, "The Flowering of the Renaissance," was required reading for art students everywhere.
I was surprised that such a towering figure in the art world was in fact such a small man. Another shock was his thick brown hair and bristly red mustache, since he had to be ancient by now.
Mrs. Prendergast made a point of showing the professor my painting.
"This is Jess' work. Isn't it exquisite?"
"Molto bello. Very beautiful." The professor gave both English and Italian words a pronounced Texas twang. "Ms. Randolph, you are as fine an artist as Gauguin when he painted "Sunflowers."
Anthony, hovering nearby, chuckled. "That's quite a compliment."
"Yes," I agreed. "I can't believe my ears."
But Mrs. Prendergast's other guests were the reason Anthony and I were included in the dinner party. She wanted to hook us up with two distinguished art collectors.
Morley Barcroft and General Roswell Hamilton each claimed to have the best private art collection in Northern California. Notorious rivals, they competed fiercely to buy works of favored artists, bidding up prices in the process. Anthony whispered to me that they both had begged to purchase the Venus. No telling which of them was more distraught when Mrs. Prendergast decided it would go to the museum.
General Hamilton was tall, with the bearing you'd expect of an ex-military man. The buzz in the art world was that he was really a CIA operative, code name Hambone, who made the money he spent on art through clandestine drugs-and-arms deals.
Barcroft, the heir to a mining fortune, turned out to be a drab middle-aged man with thinning hair and a sucking-on-lemons expression. His wife, Vicki, was a designer blonde at least a quarter-century his junior. Her slinky red dress had a neckline adorned with glittering jewels. She spent most of the cocktail hour flirting madly with Hamilton and the professor, which made her husband's face even more sour.
Anthony Lopez nudged me at one point. "Look at Ms. Bimbo," he said. "That's one marriage on the skids. I heard she's gonna dump Barcroft."
"Take the money and run?" I said.
"Money, art -- everything he's got. Poor guy was so smitten when he married her, he didn't bother with a pre-nup. Watch how she's snaring Hambone. He'll be her next marital victim."
Despite everyone's shared interest in art, the party wasn't going well. Hamilton and Barcroft were pointedly snubbing each other. Vicki Barcroft was gulping far too much of Mrs. Prendergast's excellent cabernet. Looking a bit desperate, our hostess tried to put the conversation on track by coaxing us to admire the Venus.
Hamilton obliged. "It's beautiful, of course. But I'm surprised you have it sitting out in the open with no security guard."
"Oh, we don't need a guard," she said. "None of you will steal the statue. Moller will watch over it while we're at dinner."
"Aren't you worried about that ring of international art thieves?" asked Anthony. "The Diavolo gang -- the Chronicle reported that they've moved into San Francisco. They're supposed to be masters of disguise and deception."
"Why would someone steal art?" Vicki wondered aloud. "Paintings and sculptures are one of a kind -- you can't fence them like jewels or televisions. And no respectable gallery would buy them. How would you make any money?" She was acting like a wide-eyed innocent, but there was a crafty look in her eyes.
Calhoun rubbed his reddish mustache. "Certain private collectors would pay huge sums for, say, a Palladini bronze, stolen or not. Present company excepted, of course." He nodded to Barcroft and Hamilton.
"But why own something you can't show off?" Vicki persisted.
Anthony's response sounded cynical. "You get the satisfaction of having all that beauty for your eyes alone. Plus knowing you've got it and the other guy doesn't."
"Oh, enough of this unpleasant talk," Mrs. Prendergast said. "Let's toast the Venus and go in to the dining room. Moller tells me dinner is ready."
It was a meal of ups and downs. Everyone but me found an excuse at some point to leave the table. Mrs. Prendergast made two trips to the kitchen to straighten out glitches in the service. Vicki Barcroft left to phone her baby-sitter. Anthony skipped the arugula salad to search out the powder room. Hamilton went out to the front porch after the roast lamb to indulge in a cigarette. Barcroft disappeared for five minutes without offering an explanation.
We were all assembled again and the kitchen staff was serving the chocolate praline torte when Professor Calhoun's beeper buzzed. "Dio mio!" he twanged when he checked the caller's number. "I have to return this call right away." Mrs. Prendergast directed him to the phone in the library.
A moment later a shriek resounded through the house. Professor Calhoun, red-faced, raced back to the table. "Quick! Call the polizia! My God, it's awful!"
"What's happened?" Hamilton demanded.
"The Venus is gone!" Calhoun gasped. "And the butler ... is dead." We all leapt to our feet and rushed to the living room. The pedestal on which the Venus had stood was empty. Moller lay on the floor, moaning and clutching his abdomen. Blood oozed through his fingers.
Vicki Garfield pushed the rest of us away. "I'm a nurse. I can help him." Moller mumbled something and she bent close to hear him. I dashed to the library to call 911. When I returned a moment later, Vicki was sobbing beside Moller's lifeless body.
Hamilton helped his rival's wife to her feet. "What did he say?"
Vicki's tears were ruining her makeup. "The oddest thing ... he said, 'It festers like the wound.'"
Mrs. Prendergast dabbed a handkerchief at her eyes. "I understand the wound part -- but it hardly had time to fester."
"The scary part is," said Anthony, "one of us must have killed him."
As I finished my story, Nick Gardino stood up from the spindly chair.
"OK, Jess, what's your best guess? Who stabbed Moller?"
"It's not a guess," I said. "The killer is ..."
Just then I was interrupted when a uniformed officer burst into the room. "Hey, Inspector, look what we found. Stashed in some bushes by the front door." The Venus, wrapped in plastic, was cradled in his arms. "Thank God," I said, as I took Nick's notebook from him and scribbled a name.
The cop replied, "Yeah. The knife was there too. All we need is the perpetrator."
Glancing at what I'd written, Nick nodded. "In the library. Let's go make an arrest."
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Who killed Moller the butler?
What was the significance of what Moller said as he died?
What first made Jess suspicious about the killer? |
