Capriccio (15 page)

“Home, James.” I closed my eyes against the sun and distraction of traffic to think.

CHAPTER 11

It wasn’t easy to get rid of Sean when we drove into the parking garage of the apartment building.

“There are all kinds of things we should be doing,” he insisted, not knowing that what I planned to do was follow him and try to find out who and what he was.

“You’re right. I haven’t washed my hair in days. Since I gave the housekeeper a few days off, I should haul out the vacuum and clean up the apartment, too.”

He was amazed at my sudden descent into domesticity. “I mean about finding the violin.”

“Bitwell said he’d call the police. I’ll probably be hearing from them soon, and it’s my uncle I’m
looking for. Apparently you have other priorities.”

Angry that he’d finally slipped up on some detail, Sean let off a string of oaths, containing in their midst the notion that the violin would lead to Victor—all we had to do was find the del Gesù. “If we did a little brainstorming, we’d come up with something.”

“It’s not in the apartment, and it wasn’t in his car. He must have stashed it in a locker, too.”

“Then we’ll look for the key,” he decided, and smiled triumphantly. “How long will all this cleaning up take you?”

“A couple of hours.”

“I’ll go through his pockets while you work.”

“He doesn’t have two hours worth of pockets.”

We both knew that if there were a locker key, it was in the suit Victor wore, but I didn’t want to make him too suspicious, and I didn’t want to lose track of him entirely, either. If he left now he’d be on his way before I could get up to Bloor Street and grab a cab to follow him. I’d have to postpone the cleaning up, but I’d let him come up and we’d go through my uncle’s pockets.

“All right. We left half a pot of coffee. We might as well finish it.”

I turned on the coffee, but we didn’t get around to drinking it. There was no key in Victor’s pockets, and just as Sean was offering to wield the vacuum while I washed my hair, Eleanor Strathroy landed in on us. She looked distinctly alarmed to see a strange man with me.

Eleanor is a black-eyed, black-haired, usually black-gowned and I suspected black-hearted little woman of extreme elegance. She must be in the vicinity of fifty, but she could pass for ten years younger, except for the eyes. The figure is well under control, the skin oiled to a youthful bloom, but the eyes lack the luster of youth. Her pupils are two sharp little pinpricks of black. One of her major concerns in life is guarding her face and figure. I usually met her with Victor and didn’t think I’d be comfortable alone with her. As far as she was concerned, we two women were alone.

She hardly looked at Sean when I introduced him as a friend from the States. Friends who wore faded jeans and boots during a working day were invisible. The black dress she wore today was linen, severely tailored with a white, pointed collar. Joan Crawford would have looked right at home in it. She wore jet black earrings and beads and a Cartier tank watch.

“Would you like some coffee, Eleanor? I’ve just heated some up,” I offered.

“Slow poison,” she said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. “Cassie, where have you been at this hour of the morning? Ronald dropped in on his way to the office and was worried sick when you weren’t here. Since he called me, I’ve been phoning and phoning. I finally decided to come over and see if you were all right.”

“I’ve only been gone an hour!”

“You didn’t call yesterday. You said you’d keep in touch,” she accused.

“I said I’d let you know if I learned anything.”

“You haven’t heard from Victor then?” she asked, her eyes imploring me to give good news. I was suddenly taken with the idea that she intended to marry my uncle. I’d always thought of their relationship as a light, lascivious friendship, but she looked genuinely worried.

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“He’s dead. He must be dead,” she sighed, tears springing to her eyes as she rifled in her black Gucci bag for a handkerchief. I was surprised to see a plain old Kleenex clutched in her fingers when they came out.

I tried to calm her, though I was a basket of nerves myself. “There’s no reason to think that, Eleanor. I spoke to Dr. Bitwell this morning. You know Dr. Bitwell, from the conservatory.”

She frowned, shaking her head. “I don’t believe I do.”

“You met him here.” Her memory wasn’t too good for old tweed jackets with patched elbows. A symphony conductor, an artist or an opera singer she would have recalled with ease. Bitwell was only known to a handful of experts, so she had forgotten him.

“Of course, Bitwell,” she said vaguely.

I revived her memory and related the story of Victor and the Stradivarius.

“That’s shocking!” she exclaimed. “But if Etherington knew the thing was a Stradivarius, and stolen to boot, he must have known Victor would produce it in public at the first opportunity, so why . . ."

I explained that Etherington had checked this and been assured by my uncle that he didn’t mean to produce the Strad immediately. “But Etherington’s had plenty of time to leave the country by now,” I concluded, “and still no Victor.”

As Sean had been totally ignored during our talk, I looked a question at him.

“It seems logical,” he said slowly. “On the other hand, he took payment in Canadian currency. You wouldn’t think he’d run off to a foreign country with a case full of Canadian bills. It’d be a problem to get them exchanged. A bank might ask questions, and if he used the black market, he’d lose a good percentage. It would make more sense to deposit the money in a bank—or better, a couple of banks—and arrange a transfer, or travelers’ checks. That’d take a little while. I imagine all Etherington wanted was enough time to get that money into a more convenient form, but when Victor headed straight to Bitwell, he was afraid he wouldn’t have time to do it.”

Any lingering doubt that Sean was a dumb hick had to be forgotten. My doubts had come back when he offered to vacuum. He was quicker than Eleanor and me together to pick up on these fine points. I don’t claim to be a financial genius, but Eleanor is no slouch.

“But surely in a country the size of Canada this Etherington could have hidden out somewhere,” she said doubtfully. “He certainly had no shortage of money.”

“He wouldn’t know whether Victor kept track of the serial numbers. He might have,” Sean suggested. Sean was rapidly rising from dumb hick to policeman. Or could it be all his detective reading that made him think of marked bills? “Even if the bills weren’t marked, the serial numbers might have been listed.”

“So complicated,” Eleanor mused.

“Of course another possibility is that Etherington was just a go-between for someone else. His instructions might have been to follow Victor and see where he went,” Sean explained.

“Or his instructions might have been to steal the violin back once he got the money,” I threw in. “Maybe it wasn’t the plan for anyone else ever to see the violin, but my uncle got away from them somehow. Victor’s no fool. He wouldn’t meet Etherington in a dark alley at night. He’d arrange the sale for a public place, in daylight.”

“How do you know the violin was stolen?” Eleanor asked, looking from Sean to me as she spoke.

“Dr. Bitwell recognized it. It was stolen from a Contessa near Cremona in Italy,” I explained.

Eleanor looked as though I’d just announced the end of the world. She struggled for breath, then shrieked, “Surely not Contessa Carpani’s Stradivarius!”

Sean’s head slued around so hard I thought he’d give himself a whiplash. “Do you know her?” he barked.

“I met her—oh, a couple of years ago! It was the summer I met Victor, but I didn’t meet him at the Contessa’s villa. I met him in Milan. My sister, Signora Crispi, is acquainted with the Contessa. We were invited to dinner at the Villa Carpani. I was sorry Victor had already left; he would have loved a chance to see the violin.”

“This was when your husband was alive, was it?” Sean asked. “Since you said ‘we’ were invited.”

“No, no, Harold has been dead longer. Ronald and I were visiting the Crispis. I believe I will have a cup of that coffee, Cassie. Black, no sugar.” I got it, and she took a sustaining sip while the color seeped back into her face.

“I suppose you told Victor all about the violin—the unusual ornamentation on the front. Grapes and leaves, inlaid in ebony,” Sean said.

He was fishing to see if Victor knew he was buying a stolen violin, but as he didn’t look at me, he missed my glare.

“Did it have grapes on it? So long ago,” she said, waving her hand. “I really don’t remember. I may have told him.”

Sean’s frustration was obvious, but no matter how many times be repeated the question, Eleanor couldn’t remember describing the violin to Victor. She didn’t know much about violins. She had only bothered to have a look at it because it was a Stradivarius. She liked famous names.

“Where did the contessa keep it?” he asked.

“In the music room at her villa. No particular precautions were taken. Of course the villa is full of treasures, and the house has an alarm system, to say nothing of the staff of servants. You’ll find it was one of them who took it. It’s odd Audrey didn’t tell me of the Contessa’s loss. When did it happen?”

“Around New Year’s,” I told her.

“Who’s Audrey, your sister?” Sean asked.

Eleanor sipped more coffee and nodded. A frown creased her well-tended brow but not for long. She reached and smoothed away its last traces with her fingers. “I was out of town at New Year’s; that would explain my not hearing about the contessa’s loss. Ron and I were skiing at Mont Tremblant. I must be running along to an appointment now. I just popped in to see that you’re all right, Cassie.”

“Time for me to be shoving off, too,” Sean said. “I’ll call you around noon, Cassie. Can I drop you somewhere, Mrs. Strathroy?”

I was glad to be rid of him, but a little surprised at his offer to give Eleanor a lift. Eleanor was more than shocked; she was offended. “I have my car,” she said haughtily. “Ronald will call you, dear.” She gave me a frosty peck on the cheek, and allowed Sean to hold the front door and lead her to the elevator. I had a feeling she wouldn’t exchange a word with him all the way down, and that Sean would chat away despite her silence. He’d obviously gone with her to see what else he could discover about the Contessa Carpani. What he was trying to find out was whether Victor knew he was buying a stolen violin, or maybe whether he’d arranged to steal it himself. I knew Victor hadn’t been in Italy around the New Year; he was playing a series of concerts in New York at the time.

My plan was to follow Sean, and as soon as the elevator door closed, I grabbed my purse and hurried out to take the next one down. If he took his car, he’d have to go to the service elevator, so I might follow him as he drove out, if I had the luck to catch a cab immediately. I waited impatiently, watching the numbers change as the elevator came up. It stopped at floor seventeen, the door opened, and a short man of swarthy complexion got out. With my nerves already jumping, I felt frightened by the way he stared at me, but he just brushed past without saying anything. The door was gliding shut behind me when I recognized him—or his suit. Surely that was the same rumpled blue polyester suit, shiny as plastic, and the same man inside it, who had been at the Casa Loma the day my uncle disappeared!

Panic grew inside me as the elevator went quietly down. I punched the button, and got out at floor fifteen, not knowing what I was going to do, but knowing I couldn’t let this chance pass. I had to do something. I’d go back up to the seventeenth floor and at least spy on the man, see where he was going. Could he possibly be going anywhere else but to my apartment? I used the stairs, as the elevator had already left, and besides I wanted to sneak up quietly on the man in the blue suit.

The stairs were blocked off by the required fire-safe door. I opened the door an inch and peeked down the hall, toward Victor’s apartment. The man was there all right, but it wasn’t Victor’s door he was at. It was Betty Friske’s, and she was just letting him in.

A million questions spewed into my head, foremost among them the usual one—what should I do? What could
I do? I could wait for the man to come out and follow him, or I could follow Sean if I moved fast. The little swarthy man was a peripheral figure in my mystery, so I opted to follow Sean and took the elevator from floor sixteen. I stood in front of the apartment building, looking up and down for the silver Monte Carlo. I didn’t see it, but before long I spotted Sean on foot, dodging along at a fast clip but always making sure to stay behind another pedestrian. He was tailing somebody!

I fell in behind him, doing the same thing. Before long, I realized it was Eleanor he was following. Her black dress and his big hat made them easy to see. Now why in hell was he doing this? At times he did behave like a boy, playing detective. Eleanor trotted briskly along to the Hazelton Lanes Mall. When she went into a shop, Sean strolled along a bit and waited. I waited still farther behind him. Eleanor’s “appointment” was just a shopping spree. She went from store to store for nearly an hour, and Sean dogged her every step. When she left, she went back to the parking garage at our apartment building, and Sean followed her.

I followed him by cab when his rented Monte Carlo nosed around the corner, hot on the trail of Eleanor’s aged but still shiny Lincoln. She went to Ronald’s office on Bay Street. I got out a block later and doubled back. I thought Sean would show up sooner or later, but I’d lost him. Maybe he spotted me following him. Since I wasn’t the least interested in Eleanor’s itinerary, I took a taxi home, as nervous as ever when the elevator door pulled open at floor seventeen. There was no little blue-suited man there waiting for me. Still with Betty Friske, getting his face bruised, no doubt.

If he was, they were being quiet about it. Not a sound came through the adjoining wall. A little later, Betty’s door opened and she came out alone, dressed up for a day touring the stores or beauty parlors. The peacock blue suit looked hideous with her orange hair. She looked like a cheap actress or high class waitress. She didn’t look as if she belonged in our building at all. What could the little man have to do with Betty? And more importantly, had he been with Sean at the Casa Loma, as I had first thought that day that now seemed so long ago?