The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (10 page)

“What the hell were you doing with my girlfriend at her place this afternoon?”

“Susan? Your girlfriend?” I stammered. “I bought two of her paintings yesterday. She invited me to lunch, that’s all.” I was certainly not going to mention those melting brown eyes or the lingering kiss Susan had given me on my departure. I stepped back from the doorway, recalling some karate moves. Luisa was, unfortunately, a total physical coward, so it was no good expecting help from her.

But Nell didn’t raise her fists, only her voice. “This is Claudie’s way of getting back at me,” she said. “I know it. She wanted Susan for herself, and when she couldn’t get her, she recruited you.”

“Listen, sit down,” I said. “Have a glass of water. There’s been some terrible misunderstanding. Luisa and I are translating a book, and I thought a flower painting would be a nice present for her. I bought one for Claudie too because she’s been so hospitable. Do you think Claudie would have sent me to your gallery on purpose? If you’re not on good terms why would she want to give you business?”

For a couple of seconds Nell, considering this, didn’t say anything. Then she looked into the room and saw Susan’s two framed watercolors propped up against the mantel. Before we could stop her, she’d lifted them up, one after the other, and smashed them, glass and all, on the sharp back of a metal lamp. The delicate pinks and yellows of the hibiscus and plumeria were ripped to shreds.

“You’ll get a refund check in the morning,” Nell said, and slammed the door as she left.

I was speechless, but Luisa seemed almost admiring. “That kind of passion is common in Uruguay,” she said. “You don’t see it much in the United States. All those anger management classes.”

“She’s crazy,” I said.

“No,” said Luisa. “She’s jealous.”

The sorceresses of Greek mythology—Hecate, Circe—knew well the narcotic, stimulant, and deadly effects of this plant, and Linnaus gave it the Latin name
Atropa
after the Greek Goddess of the Underworld Atropos, who cut the thread of life.

—Dietrich Frohne

I SLEPT ON MY
suspicions overnight and the next morning took Claudie off for a walk along the beach. “Is there any possibility,” I said point-blank, “that Nell murdered Donna Hazlitt?”

Claudie’s hair blew in a straight line back from her forehead. She didn’t say, of course not; she said, “Not the Nell I know. But then, she didn’t turn out to be the Nell I knew in the end.”

“I don’t have a good reason to be suspicious of Nell,” I admitted. “I just am. But tell me why you think she might be involved in this in any way.”

“That phone call with Mrs. Hazlitt. You remember I said she started in the middle talking about this painting. I’m embarrassed to say I just assumed that she was probably senile and that she somehow thought we’d already met. But afterwards it occurred to me that maybe she really had talked to someone about the painting before.”

“And that someone might have been Nell?”

“Our old business cards have both the gallery number and my home number. I kept the house; Nell took the gallery. If Mrs. Hazlitt used the old business card, she might have called Nell the first time, and then tried the home number the second and gotten me.”

“But why would Nell kill her to get the painting? Did she want the painting that badly? She must realize she can’t sell the painting now; you’d know.”

“I’m afraid,” said Claudie, staring at the flat blue sea, “that she might have done it for Susan.”

So the tangled story came out. How Susan had appeared in their lives, first claiming to be in love with Claudie, and then when Claudie told her she would leave Nell, saying that she was happy to share. How that sharing turned into Nell falling in love with Susan, violently in love, and leaving Claudie.

“Susan doesn’t really seem like such a femme fatale,” I said conservatively, though I remembered the eager touch of her lips on mine.

“She’s not at all,” said Claudie. “She’s more like a puppy dog that you think you’re playing with and all of sudden you realize has wrapped the leash around your legs so you can’t move.”

She shook her black hair. “And I wasn’t even in love with her the way Nell is. Nell is absolutely obsessed with her.”

I thought of Susan telling me how her girlfriend, soon to be ex-girlfriend, had misrepresented herself.

“So you think Nell wanted to give her the painting to show her how much she cares? Or to ensure their financial future?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Cassandra. I lie awake at night, wishing the whole thing had never happened. That poor old woman; she was so excited about her discovery.”

“Have you told the police?”

“They don’t even believe in the painting; why should they believe that Mrs. Hazlitt was murdered because of it?”

I decided to take Susan up on her invitation to drop by “anytime,” but I made sure her car wasn’t in the drive first. The little house was locked, but that was no problem for a credit-card carrier like myself. I slipped a card between door and jamb and was inside in a second. It was the middle of the afternoon and I assumed she was at work. I hoped I wouldn’t be there long.

Alas, searching for a flower painting in a studio full of flower paintings was harder than it looked. Over and over I thought, Yes! Then, No…There were copies of O’Keefe paintings, sketches, and watercolors in great piles. Over and over the same creamy white flowers, close-up angel’s trumpets, or jimson weed—or belladonna or Kikania-Haole—whatever you wanted to call it.

After two hours, I had to give up on finding the painting. But I had found something more important perhaps: a scrap of paper in a book called
Poisonous Plants
by Dietrich Frohne, marking an entry on “Datura.” According to the book, this is the botanical name of the Jimson Weed in the United States, the Thorn Apple in Britain, the Kikania-Haole in Hawaii. It is a member of the nightshade family, which also includes red peppers, potatoes, and belladonna, to which the jimson weed is closely related. The book also noted that datura seeds had long been used in India for suicide and murder and that criminals had used extracts of the seeds to knock out railway passengers and rob them. The term “Jimson” came from Jamestown, where the weed had led to a mass poisoning in 1676, which effectively wiped out the colony. Taken orally, the datura seeds cause great thirst and a terrible flushing of the skin. They cause the person who ingests them to thrash around and pick randomly at imaginary objects in the air. Further hallucinations follow; then coma and death.

Of course datura is not all bad. For example, atropine comes from the belladonna plant and is useful in dilating the pupil of the eye.

Susan could easily have answered the phone at the gallery and gone to Mrs. Hazlitt’s house. She, not Nell, knew the poisonous effects of plants. She, not Nell, would have known how to recognize an O’Keefe painting. She, not Nell, had a financial motive. She wanted to paint full-time.

I left Susan’s house with the book under my arm and went straight to the police station.

A year later, months after the trial was finally over and Susan Waterman acquitted for lack of more than circumstantial evidence, I got a letter from Claudie.

By that time I was in Indonesia, staying with my old friend Jacqueline Opal, who had suddenly and enthusiastically taken up a spot in an all-women’s gamelan orchestra and was spending all her time bonging away on melodious drums. I had more or less forgotten about my Hawaiian trip (and was avoiding letters from Luisa that quibbled about adverb placement in the proofs of her novel), but Claudie’s opening brought it all back:

“They apprehended her at the Honolulu Airport, trying to smuggle out the O’Keefe painting. She confessed everything. How she’d answered the phone at the gallery and talked with Mrs. Hazlitt that first time. The next day when she called Mrs. Hazlitt, she realized the woman had already gotten in touch with me. She raced over to her house that night, frantic that I’d get the painting and she wouldn’t. That’s when she found out about her eye condition and saw the bottle of atropine in the medicine cabinet. She knew something about atropine because she’d just gotten over an eye infection herself, and her doctor had told her that atropine was poisonous. She made up some story about having heard about echinacea and got Mrs. Hazlitt to offer her some and to take her dose at the same time, from the wrong bottle. She didn’t realize it would be such a horrible death, but then, she wasn’t there to see it. She had managed to persuade Mrs. Hazlitt to let her take the painting that night. That’s why there was no sign of breaking and entering.

“Susan doesn’t really blame you, Cassandra, for making her go through the trial and everything. The important thing, she says, is that Nell was caught. Nell says she needed the money because her gallery was failing without me. As usual, she blames everyone else but herself—me for making her business fail, Susan for wanting to break up with her. Nell wanted Susan to be accused of murder so that she would turn back to Nell for support!

“We don’t care now. Susan came to live with me last month, and this time I think it’s going to work. She’s quit her job and I’m supporting her. It’s so important for her to paint full-time. As for the O’Keefe painting—oh, it’s lovely, an earlier version of
Belladonna
—
Hana (Two Jimson Weeds)
. One of the flowers has a visible green center. The other has its core hidden, so that your eye is drawn deeper and deeper inside.

“The next time you come to Hawaii you’ll have to be sure and see it.”

I
T WASN’T THE FIRST
thing I was supposed to notice about the charming colonial Mexican town of San Andreas, but I did, at the beginning and ever after. When I look back on the whole experience, it’s the memory of the high stucco walls and the glass shards embedded in them that comes too readily to mind.

Not every house in San Andreas has that kind of outer walls, of course—the Indian houses don’t have them, nor those of most of the Mexicans. The walls were designed mainly to protect the white expatriates, the wealthy ones—those who had moved to San Andreas because it was so picturesque. You had to admit that the broken glass stuck along the tops of the walls was probably more picturesque than barbed wire.

Eleanor Harrington, the woman who was renting me and Lucy her house for a week, had glass-embedded walls, but she was so used to them that she didn’t bother to comment as she unlocked the heavy wooden outer door and led us through a patio brimming with bright pots of flowering succulents. Eleanor Harrington was in her early fifties and had pinkish-blond hair, bouffant with thin bangs, milky blue eyes, and a face that was paler than her neck and arms. She wore a cotton embroidered smock, sleeveless and low-necked, over her stretch pants, and her tanned arms were ringed up to the elbow with wide silver bracelets. She’d lived in San Andreas for thirty years, she told us, and had bought this old colonial mansion and had it restored inside and out.

“I really shouldn’t be charging you rent at all,” she said with the nervous laugh that women often use when they discuss money. “It’s really more of a favor to me to have someone here while I go off to see my son in Houston. It’s something I do every year, not that I enjoy it much—his wife, you see…But I try never to leave my house unattended; it wouldn’t be safe.”

In spite of us doing her a favor, she was quick enough to take the check that Lucy held out. “Splendid,” she said. “What luck that Georgia mentioned you were looking for a place.” She glanced at Lucy, and said, “And did she tell me you were a doctor, Ms. Hernandez?”

“Yes,” said Lucy.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll enjoy yourself
enormously
here,” said Eleanor. “It’s meant so much to me to be in San Andreas as long as I have. Of course it’s changed a great deal, not always for the better, but it’s always had a feeling of home to me. There’s so much to do culturally. You must look at our little English-language newspaper and see what’s going on. There are performances, readings; perhaps you might take a yoga class one day, or even Spanish. You, of course, speak Spanish, Ms. Hernandez…where did your parents come from?”

Not smiling back, Lucy said, “San Francisco. San Francisco, California.”

Lucy had just spent three months on the Mexican border to Guatemala, working in a refugee camp in a clinic there for mothers and babies. She was on her way back to her job in Oakland, but hearing that I was also planning to pass through Mexico to a conference in Costa Rica, had persuaded me to take a brief holiday with her. An acquaintance of hers, a painter, had raved about San Andreas, and had, in the end, come up with a place for us to rent.

Although I had known Lucy for many years and saw her as frequently as I could, I was struck by the change in her. Her light brown skin was matte and dusty-looking, and her hair, which she usually kept very short, was dry and bushy. She was painfully thin as well.

“I’m just tired,” she said, after Eleanor had driven off in her red Toyota for the airport in Mexico City and we were left alone in the living room of the house, with its terra-cotta tiled floor, bright cotton rugs, and shuttered windows. There were weavings on the couches and embroideries on the walls, along with black pottery and the well-known Oaxacan wooden carvings of dogs and other animals, fancifully painted. Some of Eleanor’s own sculptures stood among the folk art; they were bronze figures, in the manner of Degas, of Indians, particularly women, often seated, as if at the marketplace.

“We’ll put these away while we’re here,” said Lucy. It was not a question.

And then she went upstairs for a nap although it was only ten in the morning.

I let myself out the locked street door (“Always remember to lock up,” were Eleanor’s parting words) and went for a walk. Although I’d been in Mexico City a number of times and had explored the southern parts of the country around Oaxaca and the Yucatan, I’d never been in any of the old colonial cities that had been built by the Spanish in the silver-mining days of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were cobbled streets, pastel- and white-painted buildings with thick walls and inner courtyards dripping with brilliant bougainvillea. There were numerous jewelry, crafts, and clothes shops, clearly catering to tourists and expatriates. You saw them in their shorts and T-shirts, their straw hats and sunglasses, in husband-and-wife couples, alone or in small groups, tan and well-fed, taking up the sidewalks as they passed.