A Butterfly in Flame (11 page)

Chapter Twenty-five

Commotion wastes enormous amounts of time unless what one is after is a circus. The crowd was gathered around the beached corpse the way crowds have been gathering since the dawn of time, when anything edible, having lost the ability to defend itself, crosses from one eco-system into another. Add cell phones to the mix and the crowd grows fast.

Not until half an hour after he joined the group did state cops in a cruiser show up, sirens screaming—joined shortly by black unmarked vans holding technical folks and detectives. By this time Fred was in almost to mid-thigh and Rodney Somerfest’s body, with each new wave, pirouetted on the points of its buttocks. The speedboats of harbor patrol and coast guard were slower, but were coming over the horizon by the time Fred was free to wade up the beach.

Caroline, holding steady, had evidently maintained the wall of protective silence demanded by President pro-tem Harmony, so that the Agenda in the boardroom could be followed in the magnificence of its fore-ordained sequence.

“Don’t leave town,” somebody yelled at Fred as he squelched through the crowd. He more or less recognized half the people as his students though others among the extras were well beyond student age.

Fred, moving faster, waved an assenting arm. Given the wind, the rain, and the Atlantic Ocean he had been standing in, he was wet through. He paused only to retrieve his loafers, and the stack of student papers he had handed to Milan, who had appeared from somewhere as he stepped into the drink. Milan had found a plastic bag somewhere.

“I reckon the boss knows,” Milan said.

Fred nodded. “Gotta change.”

Last night’s garments were dank, if not still dripping. The Stillton Inn would have a dryer.

***

Even a robe. “I’ll get one from the honeymoon suite,” the woman at the desk said, looking Fred over with disfavor where he dripped on the rubber mat provided for that purpose inside the front door. She was well aware of the activities near the lighthouse, although ignorant of specifics, and, once Fred had explained his condition, she was happy to trade his information for access to the dryer. Her first coherent question had been, “How many bodies?”

Mrs. Halper instructed—the desk sign gave her this identity—“Leave your loafers there on the mat. I’ll stuff them with paper and we’ll see. I’ll find you something. I’ll bring the robe to your room and wait while you get your things together.” He’d had the presence of mind to leave his loafers on the beach when he waded in—upside down, but the crowd had kicked them upright and they’d filled with rain. At least they had not washed out to sea.

“Maybe a cup of tea?” Fred suggested. He’d been five minutes standing at the door, satisfying the top layer of Mrs. Halper’s curiosity.

“Kettle in your room. Tea bag. Should be. Sugar. Coffee. Creamer. For the morning.”

Fred plodded upstairs barefoot trailed by drops of disapproving water, and accompanied by the overnight bag into which he’d stuffed the damp clothes from last night, in a garbage bag, as well as something to read from Morgan Flower’s desk, in case the pile of student papers palled.

By the time Mrs. Halper’s knock came, Fred had changed to a towel and could exchange the full garbage bag for a pink terry-cloth robe, lacking in size, that said
HIS
on it. Mrs. Halper handed the robe over doubtfully. “I couldn’t find
HERS,
” she said. “It’s a joke we had. For the honeymoon suite. To break the ice in case the ice wasn’t already broken long before. My husband thought of it, God bless him, he’s been gone fifteen years.
HIS
on the girl’s robe and
HERS
on the man’s. So they get the idea. He was a big man like you.” She held out a pair of white canvas shoes, much used. “I’ll want them back. They don’t look like much, but he was wearing them when…” she didn’t finish, but continued standing in the doorway. Was she angling for an invitation to come in?

Fred made the exchange.

“You think they killed him,” Mrs. Halper said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“Well, no, I didn’t say that. It does look suspicious, the man being naked.” Fred couldn’t shrug. He’d lose the towel.

“Also, too, that head wound,” Mrs. Halper added. “Not that I liked the man. He wanted to buy the inn.”

Fred said, “I’d ask you in for tea, but I’m too old school. It makes sense, I guess, if the academy wants to expand.”

“For himself,” Mrs. Halper corrected him. “And he wanted it hush hush. I can’t stay. The phone. People want a room now. I’m all there is. Or rooms. Reporters and that. Come down in an hour, your clothes will be dry. Or. No. I’ll send someone up with them. I have to call someone anyway, give me a hand. People will start coming. There’s the phone. It’s what they do.” She shouldered the garbage bag and took possession of the stairs.

***

The best he could do was to leave a message on the machine at Molly’s mother’s apartment. “Add Rodney Somerfest to the list. I don’t know how he spells it. Correction. Spelled it. Past tense. He’s been killed. So he goes at the top of the list. Former director of the place. Oh. This is Fred. You have the number.”

***

Then a hot shower and a cup of mournfully indifferent tea in the foam cup provided.

He had turned up the heat in the room, and stretched out on the bed to think.

***

“God, Mister, I didn’t know,” the girl said, shocked, behind an armload of clothing, in the open doorway. Fred, springing upright at the click of hardware, had lost the towel. Even drained of its natural color, he knew that face.

“It’s Fred,” Fred said. He picked up the towel again and applied it.

“She didn’t say…I mean I just thought…”

“It’s OK, Susan,” Fred said. The student’s name had surfaced. First-year student. Missy Tutunjian’s roommate. Susan Muller. “Sorry,” Fred went on. “I couldn’t do much with the robe. Put the stuff on the bed, would you, Susan? I don’t want to lose the towel again.”

“Hell, I don’t care. I see guys naked. We have to. It’s all those scars.”

“Accidents when I was younger,” Fred explained. “I’m more careful now.”

“You sure woke up out of that bed fast,” Susan said. “Like you were ready to shoot me.”

Chapter Twenty-six

Telephone.

“Yes?”

“If you’ll pay me back, if you want, I’ll bring fish and chips.”

Peter’s voice.

“And a six pack if you’ll join me,” Fred said. “Fish and chips for both of us sounds good. If you’re hungry. I’m kinda stuck here. My treat, obviously.”

“Twenty minutes.”

The canvas shoes of the late Mr. Halper fit as if Fred had been breaking them in for the past five years. It was good, on the whole, to be dressed and dry. It went with the general sense of ignorance. Peter’s entrance, with paper bags that crackled and steamed with the smell of fish and frying oil, was equally welcome.

“Tell me about Rodney Somerfest,” Fred demanded, wasting no time as they unpacked dinner and arranged it and themselves. Peter, sitting on the foot of the bed, left Fred with the table, chair, and access to the phone.

“They took their photos, bagged him, and carried him off. I heard to Rockport for a start.”

“I don’t care about that. Where was he living since he left? You’d found an address?”

“Rockport. Rented room. I guess he liked the coast after all, though he never stopped complaining about it.”

“Where was he from? Wife? Family? Who was he friendly with? What did they can him for?”

Peter lifted a big hunk of fish in his fingers, broke off a piece to eat, and studied the possible arrangement of Fred’s questions while he licked his fingers.

“Concord, New Hampshire. He’s been in cars. Somerfest Subaru. Then was working for a graduate degree in education, maybe from Suffolk? When they hired him. No wife or family I ever heard about.”

“No ring on the finger. That doesn’t mean much,” Fred said.

“That crack on the head—I can’t think of an accident that would do that, can you?”

“You don’t buy boating accident?”

“Oh, please.”

“Which brings us to the final question,” Fred said, letting it hang while he opened a beer.

“I got Bud. That OK?” Peter asked.

“They’re all from the same place. The final question?”

“Why they fired him? I don’t have an answer. See, and I’ve heard President Liz say this a hundred times, the director serves at the pleasure of the board. At a certain point in time, the board stopped being pleased.”

“And paid him off, you told me. How much?”

“What I heard is, a year’s salary. I don’t know.”

“There’ll be a record. Board minutes…”

“I’ve looked. Sure, they keep minutes, but they always go into executive session. That means they don’t write down what anyone says or what they do. The secretary of the board types out a thing five lines long that says date, place, time, these people met, they went into executive session. Then they adjourned.”

“You’ve given this a lot of attention,” Fred observed.

“You mean, which you’re not saying, for a
student,
” Peter filled in. “It’s true. I’m telling you. I have an investment in this place. Plus I think most of the teachers and the program are pretty good. We don’t deserve to have the whole thing thrown away by a bunch of clowns.

“I started here fresh out of the Marines. I couldn’t draw for shit. Still, I was older, and I knew my way around. That gives me a jump on a lot of these guys. I did my interview with Bill Wamp. He saw potential. I don’t know what. Beyond, I wanted to paint and I didn’t want any part of the city. After I started taking the classes, pretty soon something seemed off. I began looking around.

“They brought Rodney in halfway through last year.”

“Before that?”

“Before that, my first year, it was like it is today. Acting director. Chairman of the board.”

“Liz Harmony again?”

“No. He resigned. A name I don’t remember.”

“Where do they get the money for all this? A year’s salary payoff for a guy who isn’t working? Who hasn’t worked even a year?”

“They threw him out and all of a sudden hired this security team.”

“Where does the money come from?”

“They keep that really tight,” Peter said. “I can’t get a line on it. It would be easier to find out everyone’s sexual preference.”

“Less interesting, I imagine,” Fred said.

“Just so it’s not an issue. I was married when I started here. She was from around here, is partly why. That’s over. I’m gay.”

Fred ate a fry, and another. “Right,” he said. “It’s not my business.”

“My partner’s in Portland, Oregon. Also a vet. You’re looking at things? You might want to know. This saves you time.”

“And Rodney Somerfest. Single. Which way did the wind blow for him, do you know? What was the scuttlebutt?”

“Students this age, aside from thinking they can paint a masterpiece with a lighthouse in it, which nobody can, not even Hopper, for God’s sake, it’s just a lighthouse, all they can mostly talk about is sex.” Peter ate fish.

“Of course, people can fool you,” Fred pointed out.

“All the time. Not bad, the fish and chips, do you agree? Steve, at the Stillton Café. My point is, if there was a sex issue with Rodney, inside or outside the shop, with a student, teacher, hell, I never heard, and I would have.”

“Between Morgan Flower and that student?”

“Oh, sure. Missy. She couldn’t…”

“Let’s talk about Missy Tutunjian.”

“Didn’t you want to know about Lillian Krasic?”

“Who?”

“Who ran the desk until they canned her. She’s right here.”

“Right where?”

“They send her monthly check here, to the Stillton Inn.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

By ten-thirty the rain had thinned to a light mist. Peter Quarrier had left. “Homework. Color theory. Tikrit’s a bitch.” He’d taken the time to annotate his map, which he’d left rolled on Fred’s table.

Fred studied it until he had the layout in his head. The academy’s classroom and administration buildings were highlighted in yellow—a total of seven, of which he’d been inside only two.

“Milan locks them all at night. But you can get in,” Peter said. “There’s ways. Most all of them. I’ll show you…some other time.”

“They’ll do me a tour when I’m ready,” Fred said. “The reason I gave that assignment—if you’ve got problems, and who doesn’t, don’t make them worse by rolling around in them until you stink all over. Get over them. Move it along. Writing about your problems—that’s just horseshit. It made me mad. That girl Emma…”

“She’s already taking your advice,” Peter said. “Moving along. If Tom Meeker would leave her be. Him she does not need. Listen, she’s a friend of mine. If there’s something she wants to tell you, she’ll tell you. Otherwise, her business is…”

“Gotcha,” Fred said, seeing him out. Reading between the lines, the student was simply working out a healthy derangement. The repeated FUCK YOUs had been so regular and balanced that even if it were Fred’s longer term job to be concerned for her, there was no reason for it.

How much of Stillton could be asleep by eleven o’clock? The streets were almost deserted, most of the buildings dark. It made sense, of course, that Stillton proper would be mostly owned and occupied by summer residents. Except for earnest masochists, or poets, if there was a difference, it was a purely miserable place for winter or this early in the spring.

Fred stopped at his car, picking out some innocent-looking hardware and a flashlight. Television lights flickered like a cut rate aurora back of the closed blinds of Meg Harrison’s bedroom window. Morgan Flower’s green Toyota sat against the curb, not many lengths from Fred’s vehicle.

The admissions building he’d seen. The contents of the desks and file cabinets, especially in Harmony’s office, might prove interesting—but irrelevant to whatever Clay was interested in, and therefore irrelevant. Clay, for all his weirdnesses and eccentricities—or perhaps, rather, taking advantage of his weirdnesses and eccentricities—had an extremely canny nose for finding what he wanted.

Information was all very well; but what Clay wanted was
things,
and the things he wanted were beautiful or astounding or outlandish or, sometimes, questionable, works of art. He could find them where nobody else could; sometimes even under the very noses of his competition.

Clay preferred, when he could, to get a painting for a song, although its true value if measured in the symbolic scale of money, might be that of the maidenhead of the princess of one of the advanced western countries. His Turner
Danae
was a case in point. A hundred knowledgeable dealers and collectors at a country auction had handled it and let it go by unchallenged simply because it was not packaged as a painting. In fact, long separated from its stretchers, the canvas had been packaged as a package—the stained and shameful wrapping that contained the stack of lost Turner erotic works that Clay alone had recognized.

Though he would pay good money when he had to. Peter Quarrier had brought up Edward Hopper. Clayton’s Hopper, a large oil of roofs in Truro reflecting the electric disquiet of a coming storm, had cost a pretty penny, although Fred could not name the sum. Clay had purchased it from a collector who knew what he was doing when it came to investing in art. The collector’s choice to become a Lloyds of London “Name,” however, had proved less happy, and he needed to be bailed out quickly by someone who wouldn’t tell his friends about it. Since Clay told nobody anything if he could help it, he was the perfect choice. Presumably he’d gotten a deal, but nothing to brag about.

The thumb-box size Gauguin, however, and the Gericault, were evidence of Clay at his most expert hunting prowess. The Gauguin came from a flea market in Avignon. Clay had picked it out of a mixed bag of fakes and shabby academic or tourist pieces. Signed
PGo,
it had simply been overlooked by everyone who didn’t know or remember that Gauguin was as happy to sign a picture that way as any other.

Not that Clay crowed about his acquisitions. He couldn’t do so without spilling information. But Fred knew most of the ins and outs of the acquisitions he had participated in. In the case of the Gauguin, he’d been summoned to France to carry it out, along with the bill of sale identifying it simply as
Personnes dans un jardin, bois, artiste inconnu, 16 x 24 cm., E27,50.
Clay had a wedding to get to, on Lago Maggiore, and he didn’t want the thing to muss his shirts.

Another element of his thinking might have been that, if the French customs agents had understood what Fred was carrying past them in plain sight, they would have exercised their rights, seized the painting as part of the cultural
patrimoine,
while reimbursing to the owner, as was also their right, the declared value—which Clay had insisted should be no other than the purchase price as represented on the bill of sale.

Fred, on the other hand, when he was not carrying something for his employer, preferred to travel light. In fact, it was the bargain he had made with the world, not to want ownership of much of anything. He loved a good painting—enough to leave it where it was.

Let Clay proclaim—truthfully, as far as Fred could see—that he was unmoved by the putative financial values embodied in his collection. In any case, those values fluctuated. The day’s fashions could lead to ludicrous prices for despicable pictures. Take Allen Funt and Alma-Tadema or, if someone stepped a toe into the crazy quilt intrigue of contemporary art, how account for the almost Goldman Sachs, empty and illusory bubble of success enjoyed by Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst? The success was real enough in financial terms (as long as one got out at the right time). But apart from intrigue, fashion, and backroom dealings, what connection could there possibly be between high prices and questionable artistic merit?

Fred let himself into the back entrance of a second building that resembled Stillton Hall but did not seem to have a name. They stood side by side.