Capriccio (7 page)

“I won’t phone that one in to the newspapers either then.” We drove on a while in silence; not a comfortable silence, but an edgy one. After about a mile, Sean got over his pique and spoke. Having failed to spot water, he said, “Must be good hunting in those woods.”

"I wouldn’t know. I don’t believe in killing innocent, helpless animals to eat,” I answered grandly.

“Vegetarian, are you?”

Being caught in a tight corner, I hastily reviewed our past acquaintance and remembered I hadn’t eaten any meat in his presence. “Of course.”

“Do you know where the musk for that expensive perfume you’re dowsed in comes from?” he asked.

“I don’t want to know! I wear leather shoes, and I know where leather comes from. That doesn’t mean I approve of senseless killing of helpless animals. Furthermore, one doesn’t dowse herself in French perfume. It’s dabbed on. Let’s talk about something less gross.”

“Tell me something,” Sean said, without removing his eyes from the road. “Are we having a fight?”

“No, Sean,” I told him sweetly. “When we’re having a fight, you won’t have to ask.”

He gave a begrudging chuckle that started in the pit of his stomach and rumbled up his chest, out his lips. “Do you fight with Ronald?” he asked.

“Certainly not. Ronald is a gentleman. He always does what I want.” Talk about a whopper! Ronald was the epitome of selfishness.

“Sounds like a wimp to me. You won’t forget to tell me when I have to make a turn, will you? That’s a question, not a command.”

We were soon climbing a county road that curved between high rock cliffs, with modern homes perched precariously here and there. Victor’s was one of them, reached by a road that wheeled around the rear of the rocks. Some of the occupants lived here year round, which necessitated a good road.

Victor hadn’t had the cottage built himself, but picked it up at a bargain price at an estate sale. Victor wouldn’t have chosen a modern slab of cedar with walls of glass, but I noticed that despite his alleged love of old things, Sean was enamored of the place. Mostly he loved the site and the view, I thought. He took a long, appreciative look around, inhaled the fresh spring aroma of new grass and pines before we went to the door. We had already observed, of course, that there was no car parked outside and no lights on within.

“This was dumb. Really dumb,” I said. “Victor couldn’t be here, or his car would be gone from the parking garage.”

“He’d have hired a car,” Sean countered. “But if he did, I don’t see any sign of it. Let’s go in.

“More dumbness. We didn’t bring the keys!”

“You forgot the key?” he asked, delighted at my lapse.

“I hope you enjoyed the drive. That’s all we’re going to get out of this venture.”

“Hold your horses. I’ll be right back.” He went to the car, and came back carrying a small piece of hardware from the glove compartment.

While he pried the rear door open, very easily, and with no appreciable damage, I wondered if all hired cars came supplied with this criminal piece of hardware. “Lucky that was in the glove compartment,” I said, making no effort to hide my suspicion.

“Lucky? I put it there. I thought you might forget the key. I’m a hardware man, remember? Your uncle should install dead bolts,” he said, while he finished his breaking and entering job.

There was nothing remarkable to note in the kitchen. The cedar cabinet doors were ajar—that’s all. Sean went to the cupboard and pointed out that the doors had magnets to hold them shut. “Funny they were all hanging open,” he said.

He lifted, up a few cans. “Victor doesn’t share your vegetarian taste. Tinned ham, salmon, chicken soup.”

I ignored his taunt. “Nobody’s been here. There’s no sign of eating or dirty dishes.”

We went into the living room that stretched along the front of the cottage, with a glass front giving a breathtaking view of treetops and patchwork-quilt farms in the valley below. No damage had been done here, nothing was taken, but things were awry. Not quite helter-skelter, but the furniture was out of place. A pine chest against one wall had been opened and not closed. Victor and I had been here on the May 24th weekend, a long weekend in Canada, to celebrate the Queen’s birthday. We hadn’t been back since, and we hadn’t left it like this.

“Let’s have a gander at the bedrooms,” Sean suggested.

The three bedrooms were all in a row at the rear of the cottage. They were slightly disarranged too. The closet doors hung open, the bedspreads had been pulled up onto the beds, as though someone had lifted them to look beneath and not bothered to return them. Some boxes had been taken down from the high closet shelves and placed on the floor.

“No damage, just a quick search,” he said. His voice was flat, not surprised.

I looked around at the boxes and dressers. “Someone was here all right, but I don’t see anything missing.”

We wandered back to the living room. The expensive hi-fi equipment, the TV, the binoculars—all the things a thief would have taken were still in place.

“What do you make of it?” I asked him, as I didn’t know what to make of it myself. “The locks weren’t tampered with. It must have been Victor himself. Oh I know
you
got in without any trouble, but not everybody’s a hardware expert.”

“Face it, Cassie, whoever was here and in the apartment too was looking for something—something he thought was hidden. If it had been your uncle, he’d have known where he put the thing, wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, I guess he would.” I walked all around the room, looking for clues. In movies, the crook is kind enough to leave behind a match flap, a handkerchief with an initial, a cuff link or a cigarette butt. The shiny ashtrays were unmarred by a single ash. There was none of that repulsive lingering odor of stale cigar smoke either, which was pretty good confirmation that Victor hadn’t been here. Or Betty Friske, for that matter. She chain smoked cigarettes. It would have taken several minutes to search the place. I’d never seen her without a cigarette, even on the elevator.

“Could you break into my apartment with that little gizmo you used to get in here?” I asked. This unsettling thought sent a little shiver up my spine.

“No, not with that dead bolt. Whoever got in there had the key for sure.”

“Well, only Victor had the key, as far as I know.”

“Yeah,
had.
Maybe the breaker-in got it from him,” he suggested, turning my shiver into a full-fledged shudder.

After the first gulp of fright, I returned to my senses. “He must be a very friendly sort of kidnapper, if you’re back on that track. What he actually took was Victor’s cigars.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe there was something else in that humidor. But it’s not big enough . .

“No, he’d have searched the apartment first. The very fact that someone has been here makes it pretty clear he didn’t find what he was after at the apartment. But what did you mean—it’s not big enough? The humidor is big enough for money or jewels or an important paper.”

Sean was flushing uneasily. Why? “What I mean is,” he explained, “we kind of thought it was a bigger thing the guy was looking for. You remember we talked about it last night. Little places weren’t searched. It was under beds, in closets, behind sofas that he looked, in both cases. The canisters in the kitchen, for instance—he didn’t touch them. I don’t know whether you noticed, but the small drawers weren’t opened either. The desk drawers were all neatly closed.”

“You still think it was his violin they were after? Victor had it with him at the Casa Loma. If that’s all the man wanted, he’d have got it when he got my uncle. He wouldn’t still be searching for it.”

I was looking around the room as we had this discussion. It was then it first occurred to me that Sean was very sharp to have noticed the size of places that had been searched. It might have occurred to me eventually, but he came out with it not a minute after we saw the state of the apartment the night before. Almost as if he knew the violin was what the man was after, or as if he’d been trained in this kind of work.

I turned and examined him while he looked around. He

looked kind of ragged around the edges for a policeman. A

private detective, possibly? “Are you some kind of cop?” I

asked.

His reaction struck me as overdone. “Me?” he asked, his eyes stretched wide, forehead crinkled like a washboard. “I’m a hardware salesman. Plains of Nebraska, remember?”

“Where in Nebraska?” If he said Omaha, which was the only city I could think of, I’d give my suspicions more thought.

“North Platte,” he said, without a second’s hesitation.

“Where’s that?”

“In the southwest, on the Platte River. You must have heard of North Platte!” he said. His injured accent sounded very genuine.

“Sure, I’ve heard of it.” But I’d get out the atlas as soon as I got home and check its location all the same. And I still found it fishy that he’d memorized the apartment phone number, too, in the midst of the confusion last night.

“What made you think I was a cop?” he asked, deciding to be flattered at the imputation. At least I hadn’t accused him of being on the other side of the law. That possibility hadn’t occurred to me at the time. That came quite a bit later.

“You pick up on things so quickly.”

As I studied his face, a smile peeped out, showing his overlapped teeth. "I love this kind of stuff,” he admitted sheepishly. “I watch all the detective shows on TV. Read MacDonald, Hammett, Chandler. It’s a real treat for me, being able to horn in on this case. I even thought of being a private eye, but there wasn’t much call for it in North Platte.”

“I know how you feel. There isn’t much opportunity to be a Sybarite in Maine. I kind of enjoy mysteries myself, but I wish somebody other than Victor were involved in this one. Well, what would Philip Marlowe do next? Bash somebody on the head, I expect.”

“It’s old Phil who gets bashed around. Our best bet is to get back to the apartment. There’s not much to be done here. Somebody came and looked around. I wonder if he got what he was looking for,” he added, rubbing his chin.

"If the apartment has been ransacked again, we’ll know he didn’t find what he was after here.”

It was time to give some serious consideration to the possibility Victor hadn’t kidnapped himself. This wasn’t one of his publicity stunts. I had been quite sure we’d find him here, playing his own records or his violin. My nose had been ready for the assault of stale cigar smoke; I even found myself missing it. I was lonesome for Victor and worried sick. “Let’s go,” I said. My voice was husky.

“I’ve scared you with my talk of break-ins and kidnapping. There’s one reassuring thing in it,” he pointed out. He put his hands on my arms, just the way Ronald had that morning, but his hands felt kinder, warmer. His nails, I noticed, were cut off flat and short with scissors. He had a half moon scar on his right knuckle. A hammer would make a little mark like that. Ronald’s nails were manicured.

“The cigars,” he said, “that looks as if he’s alive all right. And whoever’s got him, they’re bighearted enough to care for his comfort. He can’t be tied up either, or he wouldn’t be able to smoke them. He’s just being kept locked up somewhere till the guy gets what he’s after.”

“But what
is
he after? And maybe the man took the cigars for himself. Maybe he smokes, too.” I looked up from Sean’s hands to his eyes, grave with sympathy. “None of it makes any sense. Victor had his violin with him, so that’s not what they’re looking for. He doesn’t own a fortune—a violinist doesn’t make as much money as you might think. He has alimony payments, and between this cottage and his apartment in Toronto, he doesn’t have a bulging bank account.”

Sean heard me out patiently. About midway through my speech, he dropped his hands. “I don’t know, but whoever’s got him sure as hell isn’t keeping him locked up for no reason. He must have something that’s pretty valuable.”

“His talent is his most valuable possession, and no one can steal that.”

I cudgeled my brain all the way home, hardly noticing the stunning scenery. What did Victor have that was worth stealing? The capriccio he’d written for me (maybe for me)? That wasn’t very likely. He wasn’t much of a composer. And if he’d meant to perform it in public, he’d have copyrighted it first. He wasn’t a rank amateur. He traveled internationally, which drew forth the specter of spying. A formula, a microdot film? No, thieves wouldn’t look under beds for that. Some sort of new computer secret in the form of software? When I suggested this to Sean, he gave a disbelieving stare.

“I think we can rule out international espionage,” he said very firmly.

Hunger pangs assailed me as we drove home. I could hear Sean’s stomach complaining, too, and looked hopefully at the McDonald’s signs. I was already salivating and totaling up the calories in a Big Mac and fries. He noticed the second time I craned my neck around to gaze longingly at the golden arches.

“Keep your eyes peeled for a health food joint,” he said. “I could go for a Big Mac right about now myself.” It must have been ESP.

I could hardly remember how I’d talked myself into this vegetarian corner. Oh yes, it was his comment about hunting.

“Don’t let me keep you from eating. I can have some fries and a milk shake.” But it was a cheeseburger I craved, with the cheese melting in an orange river over the beef.

Sean pulled in at the next McDonald’s, and proved to be a perfect gentleman after all. He brought me a Big Mac, and insisted I eat it, just this once. “You need protein to keep up your strength,” he ordered quite severely.

I was so pleased with him that I told him what Betty Friske had said. “He might have given her a key!” Sean exclaimed.

“He might, but what worries me is why she wants to see him. She threatened him, Sean. What could she be going to the police about? I know perfectly well Victor didn’t steal anything or something like that.”

“How old is she?” he asked.

“The shady side of thirty-five, I’d say, but well preserved. Why?”

“Leave her to me. I have a way with older women.”

“Older women go for that macho line, do they?” It was petty of me. “The balding head probably helps.”