A Butterfly in Flame (22 page)

Chapter Fifty-seven

Eight o’clock. It was well past the right time for a quiet drink and a look at the paper. Or, better, less solitary, well past the right time to prop himself in an out-of-the-way corner of Molly’s kitchen, if he could find such a thing, and talk through the mutual day, as interrupted by Terry, and sometimes Sam, while Molly threw supper together.

Sam was inclined to keep himself to himself.

The rain had let up. The fog horn had stopped, leaving a persistent stain in the eardrums. Main Street was filled with salt air and a dingy grayness. Gulls fought over scraps in the gutters, and screamed with the quick succession of triumph, frustration, and envy.

The human population, taking advantage of the unexpected clemency of the weather, was, much of it, outside in the chilly air. Bee’s Beehive was loud with customers, some of whom had stepped onto the sidewalk with sandwiches. The Stillton Café was packed inside, and customers came through the doors with sodas or take-out.

There was Arthur Tikrit, walking downhill away from the promontory that housed his workplace. He failed to see Fred’s wave. Small town like this that was mostly academy people anyway, an instructor would quickly learn a way to ignore the impediments of unnecessary greetings. It would be like trying to live an actor’s life in the streets of Hollywood. “Hey, do you know who
you
are?”

Outside the painting studio building a cruiser idled. Students, ignoring it, like bait fish in the presence of a sated shark, smoked in front of the building’s entrance—but being careful what they smoked. That was Steve, wasn’t it? Fred’s student. Also a sometimes cook at the Stillton Café?

“Steve,” Fred greeted him.

“It’s big news. Have you heard? They’re trying to keep it secret,” Steve said. He dropped his filtered butt and stamped it into the wet grass. “Fred, you remember Carla?” he said, including the woman smoking beside him. Another of Fred’s students? Yes, from the
Writing About Your Problems
class. Third row back if you could call them rows.

“Sure. Sorry. Carla. It takes me a while.”

“What did you think?” Carla asked.

“It’s terrible. Tom Meeker, Peter…”

“I mean my writing. Describe the campus. What I did, mine was the one from the point of view of a cat.”

Fred told her, “I’m embarrassed. What with everything going on, I haven’t got to them.”

“You’re going to like it. It’s different.”

“What news?” Fred asked Steve. “There’s been so much bad news.”

“So,” Carla said. Steve had a hand on her rump. Otherwise, the floor was hers. “You think you’re going to have to keep looking at everything from six inches above the ground, which is a real bore, cats looking
down
the way they do. I’ve tried it. But then the cat jumps up on something, and keeps climbing. You’re going to love it.”

“You’re both painters?” Fred asked.

Carla’s “No” accentuated Steve’s “Yes.” Carla, shaking her head vigorously, was going on, “Graphic Design. But they let me visit.” She leaned against the hand.

“Anyway, everyone’s working tonight,” Steve said. “I’m taking a break. It’s like, well, it would be…”

“A person you know,” Carla said. “Presumed innocent and all. But you never think. I mean people you know, you don’t think one’s going to be killed, and another one’s the killer.”

“You never know,” Steve said. “Then there’s this next thing…”

“What we found out, which everyone now knows,” Carla explained, “except you being new around here: Meg Harrison, that’s our teacher—she’s got a surprise visiting artist going to show up for the first-year crit.”

“God, I still remember,” Steve said. “First year. Life size. El nudo. I’ll never forget it. In fact I still have it, somewhere.”

“Worse for the guys,” Carla said, giving Steve a maternal tickle at the waist line. “You guys, you’re so cute. One, Lambert, he’s gone, no way would he take off his boxers.

“Like, in a self-portrait, everyone’s going to lie anyway, yes? It’s human nature.”

“It’s obvious,” Steve agreed. “The fat guy gets thinner—or
really
fat, like it’s on purpose. Everyone knows.”

“But the guys’ dongs,” Carla said, giggling. “First year, most of them have never been seen by a girl, not naked. Not, you know,
there.
What do they do? It’s not supposed to be a contest, but with guys, it’s always a contest.”

“It’s fun to watch them now,” Steve said. “But I have to admit, I was the same.”

“‘Measure it’ is Harrison’s motto. Measure everything. Everything’s a signpost, a milestone, and that’s
all
it is. The nipple to the navel? Boston to Chelmsford. The point of the shoulder to the elbow. The knee to the groin.”

“Ouch!” Steve said.

“That’s what she’d say. Measure the knee to the groin, and all the guys are doubling up. It’s like she doesn’t notice.”

“She’s a mechanic,” Steve said.

“When you’re eighteen, you think about groins a lot, and you don’t necessarily want everyone else in the world thinking about yours. Especially the guys,” Carla said. “Skinny dongs, fat dongs, short dongs, long dongs, dongs that hang sideways, who isn’t circumcised, who is, are the balls tight or loose…

“‘We don’t care if you don’t look like Michelangelo’s
David’
she told Lambert one time. Still, you’d be surprised how many guys come out looking like Michelangelo’s
David.
Which he isn’t that well hung in my opinion anyway, though symmetrical and all.
You
didn’t,” Carla told Steve, digging again at his belly.

“And we all know the guys, when they get together, are pretending they’ll serve her right, get their revenge, do themself with a hard-on, like she’s never heard of a hard-on, or seen one or…”

“What’s the ‘Meeker Method’?” Fred asked. “That was Tom Meeker, right? I happened to overhear…”

Carla, her laugh cut short by the tragedy that couldn’t keep her from chuckling again, explained, “Tom Meeker. What he did, he figured a system with two mirrors, so all you got in his drawing was the backside. Ever since then Hag Harrison has to expressly forbid the Meeker Method, which everyone in the class used to call Meeker’s Moon.”

“That clears that up,” Fred said.

Steve said, “Knowing this crowd, they’ll call that gesture the Meeker Memorial now. No disrespect.”

“Who’s the surprise?” Fred asked.

“Anyway, Meeker did the assignment, to the letter of the law, and she couldn’t deny it. Also she couldn’t flunk Lambert. He told her he’d sue. Sexual harassment, he said. The boxers had stripes. ‘Who’s going to know?’ we said. ‘Lie.’ But he wouldn’t,” Carla said, giggling. “Last I heard he’s pumping gas.”

“Basil Houel,” Steve said. “He’s a painter. Big time. He went here.”

Chapter Fifty-eight

Steve explained, “The way it always goes when they have these visiting artists, they do the crit, probably in the morning. Sorry. A crit—critique—the first-year students have to come early, and their drawings are already pinned up when the big shot rolls in. Basil Houel’s work—you can almost touch it it’s so real.”

“He does trash,” Carla said. “Who’d want to touch it? It isn’t for me.”

“But the
way
he does it,” Steve said. “Anyway, so he spends the morning in Stillton Hall with the kids, and he and Harrison talk about the drawings, and what works and what doesn’t and all, and that passage from the buttocks to the breast, and then they have lunch somewhere. They come back and he’ll spend the afternoon in the third- and fourth-year painters’ studios, looking at our work. It could be…”

“So everyone’s cleaning up,” Fred said.

“Time goes on. Life goes on. It could be big. This guy, he’s connected. Big-time gallery. Acacia. Everything.”

“Good luck,” Fred said. Steve was lighting another cigarette. “I’ll be on my way.”

“If he has time, and if he’s not too much of a freaking art snob, he might stick his nose in the designers’ studios too,” Carla said. “Steve. Later.” She planted a kiss on his cheek, blowing smoke along with it.

***

When Fred had passed the lighted window of the end studio, where Emma worked, the blind had been drawn. The day had long since darkened into dusk and then some, not to mention clouds and drizzle.

Inside, the studio building bustled. Students worked while their radios worked against them, and against each other, or against those who sported earphones with iPods. Emma’s door was closed. Fred knocked.

Emma’s visitor was stout, clean cut and clean shaven, wearing khakis, a button-down blue shirt whose neck protruded from a heavy gray sweatshirt without identification or motto. The haircut was military; the look, stricken.

“They won’t say where he is,” Emma said.

Fred held out his hand. “I’m Fred.”

“Aldo,” The young man said.

“Peter’s friend,” Emma said.

“You got here fast,” Fred said.

Aldo nodded grimly.

“You’ve seen Seymour? The detective?” Fred asked.

Aldo, shaking his head, “Not yet. I just got here. Don’t know how, but I’m here. I have Seymour’s number to call. If Seymour wants to talk, he tells me where Peter is first, and he waits while I line up a lawyer. Peter’s house is taped off. His studio…

“He never called me,” Aldo said. “They must have taken his phone.”

“What would they want with his phone?” Emma asked.

“Quick way to see who he’s been talking to, where he’s been. The cops…” Fred started.

“He always carries his phone,” Aldo said.

“Not now. The cops will have it,” Fred said. “They get anything they want.”

“That’s Peter,” Aldo said, pointing to the self-portrait. It was still where Emma had placed it that morning.

“I’ve been thinking what he told me,” Emma said. “When he was here in the studio that last time. I talked to you, Fred, but I was just thinking about me. Me. How I’ll miss him if. But all the time me. Then Tom asked me, Do you want to know where Flower is, and I didn’t. Because Morgan Flower can’t go to hell too soon is my opinion. But now Tom is dead, and I don’t want to talk about hell, because Tom gave me a hard time and he’s dead now and so. But also, too, and I didn’t say this, Tom said, and he would do this, he’d been in the office. He listened in sometimes, or picked up things, and he had his own ways of getting into the buildings.

“Well, tell the truth, most of these buildings, anyone can.”

“Security around here, it’s a joke,” Aldo said. “Emma said that building, what is it? Stillton Hall where they found him, was locked? So what? Everyone knows how to get in. And once you’re in, the doors have these panic bars. Public buildings, you have to. Anyone who was with him, who killed him. It’s the easy solution, tab A in slot B, because they were fighting in a way, and kids heard a threat…” he gulped and went on. “Why Peter and Tom were in there together, who knows? If they were. That’s the story so far. But did anyone see them? Then, after Tom…is what they are saying…Peter opens the door and walks out after. Door locks behind him, everyone thinks, But the building was locked. Mystery of the locked room. But it’s not.”

“Did Tom mention anything else about the office, when he was here?” Fred asked Emma.

“I was maybe the last person that saw him,” Emma said, “except…”

Aldo had been standing. Now he sat on a metal stool. Emma, standing in front of the studio nude, in which the fruit had become garish, kept looking back and forth distractedly between the painting and her visitors.

“Peter believed there was dirty stuff going on,” Aldo said. “He’s older. He’s been around. The kind of guy Peter is, he sees something wrong, he won’t leave it be. And anyone can…I mean, we don’t think we can, but if there’s one thing you learn in the service, no matter what your mother taught you…”

“Basil Houel’s coming. Meanwhile, all I can think about is, poor Peter,” Emma said. “Also, poor Tom, of course. But Tom’s dead. There’s hope for Peter maybe.

“Peter has a paranoid streak,” Aldo said. “Anyone who’s been in the service does. If people are trying to kill you, you get used to running around thinking, Hey, people are trying to kill me.”

“Any hint what Tom found in the office?” Fred said. “They both worked in the office.”

“All Tom said,” Emma laid it out, “and he was laughing. That fucking Harmony. That fucking President Harmony!”

“Check in with Seymour,” Fred told Aldo. “These guys don’t like to wait. You have a place to sleep?”

“Emma’s fixed me up,” Aldo said.

Emma said, “I totally fucked that fruit.”

***

Peter’s map of the academy buildings was back at the Stillton Inn, but the campus was simple, the town small, and in any case the whole thing was pretty much in Fred’s head by now.

Clay’s Lexus would not look out of place parked in front of Liz Harmony’s presidential manse, so-called—even on the new sign that stood at the new-looking gate in the new-looking picket fence that made the whole thing, shingled cottage and all, look like Nantucket. Unlike most of the town’s buildings, this one was large enough, and enough set back, with a big enough yard, that its inhabitant could feel both important and somewhat protected by isolation.

No need, therefore, to close shades or curtains on the ground floor.

Car in the drive. BMW. Deep green. The windows lit. Phil Oumaloff holding forth, a glass goblet in one fist. President Harmony turning toward Oumaloff from a sideboard, the decanter in her hand, saw Fred through the window.

Chapter Fifty-nine

“I was told you had left,” Harmony said at the door. She had opened it and now stood in Fred’s way.

“My job’s not done,” Fred said. “You and I haven’t really talked.”

“I am with someone,” she whispered.

“I’ve got no secrets from Phil,” Fred assured her. “Whatever he’s drinking, though, I don’t want any. Water will do me fine.”

She yielded him enough space to allow him to enter, saying only, “I am prepared to have Security remove you.”

“If you want,” Fred said. “But for now they seem to be pretty busy buddying up to the real troopers. Ah, Phil.”

Oumaloff looked balefully at him over the rim of the glass goblet. President Liz had been interrupted before she was able to fill it.

“Never mind the water,” Fred said, sitting in a third of a chintz-covered sofa. Correction: Presidential Divan. “Phil, you were saying?”

“My visit does not concern you.”

“Now, now, Phil,” Liz Harmony soothed. She poured amber consolation from the decanter into Oumaloff’s glass before filling hers again, and sitting in a Queen Anne chair that matched the one Phil sat in, on the opposite side of a fireplace over which hung a painting of boats and rough seas made not long ago by an extremely distant admirer of Winslow Homer.

“Phil comes with a much-needed welcome piece of good news,” Liz Harmony said.

“Your work?” Fred asked, gesturing toward the painting over the fireplace. The oversized signature in the lower left corner made the guess child’s play.

Oumaloff nodded gravely. “When I retired, the board honored me by making this purchase. The painting is an
homage.
It would be beyond you. Unfortunately the academy has neither proper exhibition nor storage space. Otherwise, one of my dreams has been to assemble, by requiring each student to give—but you have other business. I no longer keep…”

“News as unexpected as it is sure to be good for morale. These terrible times and days. Phil learned that, although he seldom is in this area, a distinguished alumnus was…”

“Basil Houel,” Oumaloff rumbled. “You have heard of him, Mr. Taylor. I mentioned him to you myself.”

“He is to be our guest tomorrow,” Harmony broke in. “Guest critic. For a project the first-year students are doing, didn’t you say, Phil?”

Oumaloff nodded. “And there will also be time for him to visit the studios of the more advanced painters. At this time of the year, especially, when things often feel slack, it is often salutary…”

“On another subject,” Fred said, “there’s the Stillton Realty Trust. There’s Aram Tutunjian holding the mortgages on so much of the academy’s property. Abe Baum and Parker Stillton.”

“Aram Tutunjian is a good friend of the academy,” Harmony said quickly. “He asks us to find his daughter. Quickly. Discreetly. It is the least we can do.”

“Who told you I had left?” Fred demanded.

The question took her aback.

“Never mind. The girl Missy may be a fool. But she’s of age. If she wants to do something dumb with a man,” Fred said, “she won’t be blazing a trail into unexplored territory. When I was invited to get involved, there was a strong suggestion of foul play, or even of double suicide. I learned fast enough that was horse shit. What you really wanted from me I don’t care any more.

“Moving on. Here’s my question. Why did you fire Lillian Krasic?”

“Lillian Krasic retired. After long and honorable service,” Harmony claimed.

“She was forgetting things,” Phil Oumaloff chimed in. “I recall one occasion…”

“She was remembering things, more likely,” Fred said. “A bigger puzzle: You paid off Rodney Somerfest in cash. Where did the cash come from? What did he come back for?”

Liz Harmony looked away to concentrate on Oumaloff, and matters of greater importance. “I spoke with that nice detective. He promised to have the yellow tapes removed before Milan opens the building tomorrow. Perhaps not in the boy’s studio, though, he said. A tragedy. Did you know, one of the two boys, Tom, worked in my office.”

“Both of them did,” Fred said.

A mist of confusion crossed Elizabeth Harmony’s face. “Never mind, the detectives and the technicians will sort that out.” She leaned closer to Oumaloff to deliver herself of a confidential whisper, “The student they have arrested—I forget his name—is under suspicion also for the murder of my predecessor, Rodney Somerfest.”

Oumaloff said, “Because of tomorrow’s schedule, we will be pressed for time.”

“Bring him to my office first thing. We will have coffee,” Liz offered. “Eight o’clock. I will arrange—although the woman they sent, if she understands how to serve coffee properly, I will be astounded. She strikes me as a person who has been brought up in the culture of mugs.” Her facial expression was all at the same time tragic, annoyed, self-congratulatory, and trivial.

“I must see to my guest,” Oumaloff boasted. He stood, checked the emptiness of his goblet, and held out his hand to Liz Harmony. “I did warn you, Liz. For whatever reason, this man Taylor is determined to make trouble. As if the academy did not have trouble enough already. I told you, and as you have seen, he is starting rumors about this entity he is calling the Stillton Realty Trust.

“Since he palpably knows nothing of art—I have myself tested him—what is his game? Real estate? He stays at the Stillton Inn and demands information concerning Lillian Krasic! Is this not a trend?

“We have had our differences, Elizabeth, and no doubt we will continue to have them. Honorable opposition. All in the nature of things. No hard feelings. I will warn you again, and in his presence—do not put faith in this man.”

Phil Oumaloff’s exit was not attended by the applause he heard in his head.

When the door of the presidential manse had closed behind the aggrieved emeritus, Fred grimaced and confided, “That man’s seven kinds of fool, but he got it right that time. Do not put your faith in this man.”