A Butterfly in Flame (25 page)

Chapter Sixty-six

Fred climbed into the car. Rain beat down on the roof.

“Two hours last night with Meeker’s parents. I got nothing. Any uniform these days, they think, Good, I can get grief counseling. Shit, can’t they let a man do his job? I get a week off at Easter. St. Thomas. With the wife. I’ll sleep then, I guess,” Seymour grumbled, putting the car into slow motion. “Fat chance. She’ll want to go dancing. Then up in the morning early to look for shells. It’s a vacation, she’ll say. Not a rest cure.”

Seymour pulled into a lane that seemed quiet, and mostly vacant, down near the working edge of the water where boats were upended and lobster traps moldered in side yards.

“You picked Harmony up,” Fred said finally, after they had spent enough time looking at the slow action at sea.

“Where you think you get off I do not have a clue,” Seymour said. “It’s not the wild west. It’s not the flaming movies, Buddy. Nobody appointed you a special deputy, running around like you are, making arrests. Who the fuck do you think you are? How did you know where Flower was? How long did you know it, and why didn’t you tell me? I can put you away, you know. Material witness.”

“I visited with the guy until you people arrested him,” Fred countered. “I put together where he had to be, and checked it out. As for the deputy thing—I could never keep track of a hat.”

“And you’re just trying to help. Trouble-shooter. Concerned citizen.”

“Still, I notice you did pick him up,” Fred said. “Despite what seems a certain impatience with me. And as I say, I also notice you picked her up. Not my business, obviously, but did she…?”

“I have seen pointless outrage in my time,” Seymour said. “But she just about beats all. We’re keeping it very quiet. Not because you suggested it, Fred. Because that’s what we do. We’ll have to let her call her attorney. In due course. But on occasion the red tape develops an unfortunate snarl that turns into a tangle that turns into a knot.

“Don’t mind me. I’m stalling, shooting the breeze until you feel you have something relevant to say.”

“I’m comfortable,” Fred said. “Hell, sitting in here, I’m even dry.”

“Just coincidence, you figuring out where Morgan Flower was holed up?”

“I couldn’t get Harmony to say anything about the guy, so I figured she was hiding something. Amateurs,” Fred said. “They don’t like leaving anything to chance. Amateurs working together, they don’t like either one to be out of sight very long. So he had to be where she could keep track of him. That was my guess, and it panned out.

“Neither one knows you’ve picked up the other, I imagine.”

“Why tell them anything?” Seymour said. “You’re right about Flower. I owe you this much. Put a bottle where he can see it, and not touch it, he talks. He lies, sure. His lies are more coherent than hers are but still, when you get enough lies, they start falling together and making a pattern. Match her lies against his, you start getting a story. Plus there’s what’s going to be his prints on the tarp in the trunk of his car they thought they’d washed all the blood off. Assholes. Amateurs, yes, you got that right.

“My techs can move fast. Meanwhile we’re telling the lawyers, the press, the rest of them—these things take time. And you know and I know the blood is going to be from this former director, this Rodney Somerfest.
Why
I don’t know.
Why,
I don’t care either. That’s for the folks in the DA’s office to figure out. We get the facts. They make up the stories. They love stories.

“All we do, we tell them what we found. Flower was in Harmony’s bed in Boston. Fact. Tarp was in his car, where we found what are going to be Flower’s prints, and I think Harmony’s, and blood from that place in Somerfest’s head where one of them hit him. Fact. Fact. Fact. What he was hit with we may find out, but I doubt it. It’ll be in the drink, where they put
him,
like a couple of morons, before they checked the tide tables and Flower crouched down in the back seat of her car while she drove him back to her place in Boston. That’s all speculation, but we’ll get there.

“Moving on. I like you, but that won’t stop me locking you the fuck up. Whether you knew where he was or guessed where he was, you should have told me, not gone in like your own SWAT team. Do me a favor. Maybe I’ll cool down. What he said to you, which you may have to stand up in court and swear to it, and I want a signed statement, also on tape…” Seymour took a little black gadget out of his suit coat pocket, flicked a switch, and told it, “Fred Taylor, witness,” ran through the date and time and circumstances and place, “when you confronted Morgan Flower with the fact of Rodney Somerfest’s death, what did he say?”

Fred’s answer was clean and clear. “Morgan Flower said, ‘He threatened us.’”

Seymour flicked off the switch, put the box back in his pocket and said, “There. OK. Fact.” He grinned. “Thanks. The prosecution might not be able to use it. But when the other side objects that it’s hearsay or some damned thing, and the judge throws it out, the jury is gonna remember it anyway.”

Fred said, “I think hearsay…”

“I don’t give a shit about hearsay,” Seymour said. The rain was letting up. Seagulls flew at the edge of the water but had no effect on its action. “Hearsay today and gone tomorrow. Harmony wants to lay Somerfest off on this student, Peter Quarrier.”

“I bet,” Fred said. “I could use one of those boxes.”

“Nice gadget. It broadcasts too. In case you want to overpower me, take the box and toss it out to the nearest of those goddamned seagulls which are going to follow us all the way to St. Thomas. There’s a simultaneous record at headquarters.”

“That could be trouble if you forget the off switch,” Fred said.

“Also,” Seymour said, “say there’s a couple of you working the same project, but on opposite ends of the block, your partner can pick it up, like a walkie talkie.”

“And it texts?”

“Too complicated. Too expensive. Anyway, why you’re here, in addition to this…” Seymour patted the pocket with its black box, “you’re a wild card, and I can’t see what you want. Don’t tell me again what you want or what you’re doing. I’ve got enough lies from Flower and that wind-up random shitstorm Harmony, who is as much fun as seven mothers-in-law locked into one burlap sack. But whatever you’re up to, so far, you’re helping. Maybe you just lucked out, like you say. I don’t believe it. But, hey, we’ve got Morgan Flower and enough
out
of Morgan Flower to hold President Royal Highness Harmony for a while.

“To answer your question, we picked her up early and quiet. Nobody knows.”

“Did you happen to locate Somerfest’s clothes?” Fred asked.

“Amateurs manufacturing evidence,” Seymour said. “You never know. Don’t tell me my business, do you mind? I will forget these positive feelings. Listen, we’ve been on this five hours. We’ll find Somerfest’s clothes or we won’t. If we do, the prosecution makes it part of the story that convicts these assholes. If we don’t, the prosecution makes
that
part of the story that convicts these assholes.

“We do facts. That’s as far as we go. It’s the stories that get the convictions.”

“So, all the academy knows is, Liz Harmony has disappeared,” Fred confirmed.

“Right.”

“I should probably let you know. Now you’ve got Harmony where s
he
won’t hear it. I might have started the rumor that Morgan Flower was picked up.”

“Might have,” Seymour grumbled.

“Couldn’t be helped,” Fred said. “Means to an end.”

“What end?”

“I’ll keep in touch,” Fred promised. He opened the cruiser’s door.

“There’s an empty bunk in the cell where we’ve got Harmony. Don’t rock the fucking boat,” Seymour warned.

Chapter Sixty-seven

Outside Stillton Hall the yellow crime scene tape had been rolled away. In a more urban art school, it would already be incorporated into one of those amalgams of found objects that strive to make easy comment on the day by suggesting irony. Wrap it around a hamburger. Wrap it around the first communion photo. Or it might otherwise serve for a prank.

Nine o’clock. Fred’s classroom, Stillton B, was empty. The action was in Stillton A, or in the corridor outside the classrooms where students conferred as they messed with their lockers.

“Morning,” Fred told those who might catch his eye—but he was not familiar enough to have earned conversation.

“No signatures!” Meg’s raised voice came from Stillton A. “I told you no signatures. If I see even the ghost of a signature, the drawing comes down. Cut it off if it’s there.”

She came into the corridor through the swinging doors at the moment Fred reached them. “Give ’em a minute,” she said. “The idea is, today, we look at the work independently of knowing who made it. That way, though everyone knows, everyone says what they want to without being responsible for hurting anyone’s feelings. It works, to a degree.”

“Basil Houel’s arrived?”

“He’ll make an entrance in half an hour or so.”

“Entrance, hell! I saw him with Phil Oumaloff a while ago. If they come in together, it’s already a whole grand opera.”

“Phil has him this afternoon,” Meg said. “Touring the studios. Phil’s a blowhard, and I wouldn’t hang his work in my motel if I had a motel, but a lot of what he says is useful for students. No, our deal is, Phil stays out of the crit of the first-year drawings. He’ll get his chance later, at the end-of-the-year review.”

She yelled out, “We’re coming in. Don’t be standing next to your own drawings. Who made them is irrelevant. That’s what we’re pretending.”

She whispered, “Like shit!” and led the way through the swinging doors.

Enough wall space had been found and cleared for all twenty-six life-sized drawings. The figure modeling works in progress had all been jammed together at one side. The students had gathered in the center of the room, where the model’s platform gave many of them a place to sit. Marci sat there, in a green jumpsuit, looking across the room at a drawing of a naked young woman holding a push broom, the brush upraised, as if saluting the author of the work-study program. The idea was a good one if she had found a more competent draughtsman to execute it.

“Fred’s not going to say anything,” Meg told the room.

Fred looked past the students at the collected drawings. It was a touching display, if a little unnerving. There was Randy—was that Randy? He was drawn on brown wrapping paper, with charcoal and white chalk for the highlights. Emphatically circumcised.

Meg’s own work—those symmetrical figures looking stunned— had these been inspired in part by the yearly experience of seeing her own students confronting themselves in the buff, and seeing how little romance is really involved in the facts of the human body, without the cooperation of miles and miles of interlocking stories, hopes and dismays?

Susan Muller had managed some advanced shading on one knee. The other had been wiped away.

Students drank coffee, or Coke, or whatever else they were drinking.

“Here he is,” someone said, and Randy himself, in the flesh, came in with a high pile of pastry boxes. These went to the model’s platform, and the students got busy.

Susan Muller, the three-dimensional one, was conferring with Missy Tutunjian in a corner near where the stands had been placed with their draped figures—the works Fred had seen in progress last Tuesday, between his own classes. Fred’s eyes swept the room, looking either for a recognizable rendition of Missy Tutunjian, or for the drawing that loudly proclaimed, “I am a sculptor.”

“That’s Arthur Geekas,” Fred remarked. The surprise came not from his recognition of his student’s face and posture in the drawing, but from the fact that he recalled the student’s name. Arthur Geekas.
Intro to Lit.

“I’ll be back,” Fred told Meg. “It’s interesting.”

Fred sidled along the empty corridor and looked through the glass panels of the swing doors and into his classroom, Stillton B. The man in the blue greatcoat and fisherman’s cap was in there, standing under the high trap door, and looking upwards.

“Upstaged by donuts,” Fred remarked as he entered the room.

Basil Houel stared at him dumbly. Fred eased closer. “You came back,” he said. “But you’re too late. I have it.” Basil Houel kept staring but edged sideways.

“No quick moves,” Fred instructed. “Whatever else you are, you’re a damned blamed fool to stay in town.”

“What are you?” Houel started. “Get out of my way.” His outrage was severely marred by indecision.

“The issue is more what you are,” Fred said. “And whether they can make a case it was premeditated. You stopped in the other night to check your stash.”

“What do you mean, you have it?” Houel said.

“The thing was too big to move by yourself and you wouldn’t share. Someday, you figured, you’d get hold of it. All for yourself. Meanwhile it’s masked by one of your careful renditions of trash.”

“We can’t talk here, or now. You have a deal in mind, obviously,” Houel sneered. “Like you might wonder—and I know—what is this thing?”

“Fred said, “There’s nothing you might say that I want to hear. Listen to me. You are boxed in, Houel. The scalpel came in handy, yes? You thought you needed it to get through the dried paint on the trap? Stay where you are.”

The man’s features, skinny and sallow under the cap, had winced in a signal of contemplated quick emergency action. His spindly shoulders tensed. Fred grabbed the painter’s right arm, hauled it behind his back and up.

“I have nothing to say,” Houel mumbled, changing tacks, as if he had been practicing the line but missed his cue until the prompter shouted.

“What did you do, stop in once or twice a year to make sure it’s safe, until you could figure a way to smuggle it out?” Fred said. “Skinny guy like yourself, it wouldn’t be easy. Might as well try to shift five or six dead men on your own. Or is Phil Oumaloff in this with you?

“Not that I care. How did you get up there?

“Then the next plan—it was all going to be yours somehow once you became Basil Houel, the director of this two-bit academy.”

“Nobody had a clue,” Basil Houel whispered. “It could be worth a million dollars. We’ll go partners. Let go.” His plunge forward was half-hearted.

“It was my student you killed,” Fred said. “You’ve known that mural was up there since fat Phil Oumaloff, your mentor, sent you up to the garret and you reported back whatever you did report. You were dumb enough then, but you’ve had time since, years, to figure it out.”

“It’s not true,” Basil Houel tried. “Listen, I’ve got a buyer…”

Fred nodded. “Of course. Not interested. Not relevant. You’re out of it now. You want to concentrate not on financial gain, which is no longer an option, but on getting prepared to be put away for life. Either you surprised Tom Meeker or he surprised you. However the conversation went, you should start rehearsing. Because you were spotted in town that night. By Oumaloff? By Meg? Wait a minute. Phil’s in it with you? Or he isn’t. I don’t care. However it happened, and so you’re here this morning, the honored guest. You spent the night with him.”

“Phil Oumaloff will be my alibi,” Houel said. The fight had gone out of him, to be replaced by inept guile, insufficiently rehearsed.

“Your prints are on that scalpel. Be thinking about that,” Fred said. “Don’t talk any more. Your alibis or your excuses or your claims of justified self-defense. I just don’t want to hear it. I don’t have the time or the patience. There’s a studio full of students excited that a slick son of a bitch like yourself makes time to review their work. I’m staying beside you while you do it. That’s an obligation you have undertaken, and since it will prolong your illusion of freedom, let’s go do it. You’ve got till noon to be the distinguished guest. After that, I’m busy, so I’ll turn you over to the boys in blue. They’ll love the uniform coat you prance around in. I’ll be watching your hands all the time, Basil. The room’s full of knives. You know that.

“Also—let’s go—your paintings are as cruel as they are trivial and cynical. If a jury could understand paintings, you’d be screwed, buddy.”