The Odd Job (16 page)

“This way, then. Here, you hold the first box while I take out the other one, that’s so I’ll have no chance to pull a switch on you. You may be wondering why I’m not getting written permission to open the LaVerne box, but since it’s never been opened once in all this time and the key was presumably in Mrs. Tawne’s possession, and since you’re now the executrix, it’s for you to say. It’s quite possible, you know, that there never was a LaVonne LaVerne in the first place. We get some weird things happening here; people dying intestate and leaving boxes full of false teeth, glass eyes, stock certificates issued by companies that went bust half a century ago. We never know.”

Mrs. Fortune had been getting the second box out as she spoke. She motioned for Sarah to follow her to a row of cubicles along the fourth wall, opened the door to one of them, and switched on an overhead light. “Please don’t take too much time, we close on the dot of three. Be sure to hook the door from the inside.”

She placed the LaVerne box on the shelf that served for a desk, backed out of the cubicle, and left Sarah to herself. It was like being shut up in a piano crate, there was barely room for a single wooden chair drawn up to the shelf. Sarah dutifully secured the outdated hook-and-eye fastening and opened the box that had been rented to Dolores Tawne.

Good, here were the bankbooks, two of them. One showed a total of just under fifteen thousand dollars, the other only a few hundred. Judging from the many small deposits and withdrawals, the latter must have been Dolores’s method of handling her weekly expenses; the former, then, must be her life’s savings. There had been withdrawals from the larger account also, though none recently. That biggest and latest one must have been her payment for Jimmy’s funeral. Even in death he’d sponged on his sister. In life, how many of her hard-earned dollars had been poured unthinkingly down her brother’s always-ready throat?

At least there was enough here to settle Dolores’s small estate. Sarah put the two bankbooks in her handbag and lifted off a tan-colored silk scarf with a blue paint stain in one corner that had been laid over whatever else was in the box. She might have known Dolores would leave everything in perfect order, but why had Dolores gone to the bother of wrapping all her bits and pieces in Christmas paper, and tying them up with narrow red satin ribbon?

There were a fair number of these little packages, roughly five to six inches long, not more than two or three inches wide. Curious, Sarah slipped the wrapping off one of the packets. What she found was a purple velvet-covered jeweler’s case, somewhat rubbed but still in excellent condition; she opened it and gasped.

The era of the beaux and belles, the macaroni, the nonpareil, and latterly the railroad tycoon was over. No man these days wore a great, flamboyant gem in his cravat or on the bosom of his boiled dress shirt; but somebody didn’t seem to care. Sarah opened another of the elegant little cases, and another, wishing she had time to see them all. Some of the stickpins were relatively modest, if diamonds of only two or three carats in elaborate gold settings could be considered so; others were splendid enough to make a rajah sigh with envy.

Sarah knew what she was seeing, and it scared her stiff. There was no way Dolores Tawne could have come by this collection honestly. How in heaven’s name had that handmaid to molting peacocks and housemaid to Madam Wilkins’s hideous majolica managed to pull off a crime of this magnitude? And what was the position of the executrix with a court order that gave her full responsibility for the estate of Dolores Agnew Tawne?

If only Max were here! But he wasn’t, and Mrs. Fortune must be having kitten fits outside the cubicle and the LaVerne box hadn’t even been opened. Halfway excited, halfway dreading what she might find, Sarah raised the lid that had lain shut for thirty years.

What Sarah found was hardly anything at all, just a yellowed letter-size envelope stuffed with handwritten pages that she mustn’t take time to scan, a half dozen or so black-and-white eight-by-ten photographs that had been rolled up for so long that they’d have to be wrestled apart and flattened under a heavy weight before one could get a proper look at them, and, of all things neither bright nor beautiful, six long, sharp, businesslike steel hatpins.

Each of them was much like the others, each had for an ornament a round knob the size of a glass marble, covered with tiny jet beads. All their steel shanks were darkened by time, or by something. All the pins were in better repair than the one that Sarah had turned over to Lieutenant Harris, but none was anything special to look at. Thirty years’ worth of box rent for this? Paid by Dolores Tawne of her own free will? Preposterous! Paid by someone else? By whom?

Dolores had let herself be gulled once, but that was for what she’d been led to believe was a grand and noble purpose; not to mention the side benefits to her personally: the wide scope she’d been given in exercising her phenomenal skills as a copyist and the gratification to her never-sated ego of hearing thousands of visitors over the years swoon over what they took to be a genuine Duccio, a Botticelli, a Rembrandt, a Manet, even a Sargent; but was in fact a genuine Dolores Tawne every time.

The more Sarah thought about those fabulous stickpins, the less she could picture Dolores stealing them. Was it possible that the woman had been feather-headed enough to fall for another fairy tale? Had she let herself be manipulated into guarding stolen goods for that unconscionable rogue who was no doubt even now trying again to wangle a release from jail on the theory that money talked even louder than lawyers?

Dolores, never one to look before she leaped, could easily have failed to realize until it was too late that once more she’d let herself in for something too hot to handle. She’d have been afraid to keep what wasn’t hers, but even more afraid that she’d be laying herself open to another charge of complicity if she tried to turn the stickpins over to the police. Just leaving them in her safe deposit box would have seemed the only sane and sensible thing to do. Notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, Dolores had always prided herself on being sane and sensible.

As to this LaVerne box, Sarah didn’t know what to think. Dolores had had so little for herself, why would she have gone on paying rent on it year after year? Unless she’d made some kind of promise that she’d felt bound to keep; Dolores had always perceived herself as essentially a noble soul. She’d nobly nagged her poor soak of a brother until he’d put an end to her eternal badgering by walking in front of a Huntington Avenue streetcar. She’d nobly kept silent during all those years when she’d been painting her guts out—her own words, spoken in bitterness on the night of revelation—for an occasional pat on the head and a bottle of cheap champagne. Perhaps she’d kept guard over that enigmatic little key in the name of nobility, but what was there to be noble about in this pitiful handful of shabby relics?

After a brief struggle, Sarah managed to separate one of the curled-up photographs from the roll and hold it down on the shelf. It showed what she supposed to be a line of chorus girls, seven of them, all wearing low-cut black evening gowns with flaring fishtail flounces of stiffened tulle, black cartwheel hats anchored almost vertically to one side of the head, and black mourning veils that obscured their features but were thrown nonchalantly back over their shoulders to reveal most but not quite all of their frontal elevations.

Sarah recognized the chorines at once. She’d seen newspaper clippings of these same photos this morning in Dolores’s bottom drawer. She was wishing she’d brought the clippings along to read after dinner when Mrs. Fortune played a sharp tattoo on the cubicle door.

“Finished, Mrs. Bittersohn? It’s two minutes to closing time.”

“I’m coming.”

Once Sarah let go of the photograph, it coiled itself back into a tight roll. She thrust it and the envelope that she hadn’t got to open into her handbag, locked the two boxes, and unhooked the door. The stickpins left her a bit qualmish, but they’d be as safe here as anywhere until she could get hold of Max and find out what to do about them.

“Here you are, Mrs. Fortune. I’ve locked them both. I’ll have to come back when there’s more time.”

Mrs. Fortune seemed less than enthralled by the prospect, she made quick work of tucking the two boxes away in their respective niches. “You’d better hurry. Go straight ahead as far as you can, then take a right. There’ll be a security guard on duty.”

Officer Drummond, who hadn’t said a word since they’d entered the vault, offered a supporting arm; Sarah took it gladly and walked as fast as she could. By the time they got past the guard and out the door, her scraped knee was bleeding again.

Drummond noticed. “You okay, Mrs. Bittersohn? I’d be glad to bring the cruiser around, but I sure don’t want to leave you standing here by yourself. Maybe the security guard—”

Sarah Kelling had not been brought up to expect pampering. What if the blood of her forefathers did flow a little too freely just now? The plastic-covered patch was seeping again but she could deal with it when they got to the cruiser; she’d swiped a few tissues from Mrs. Fortune’s desk before they’d gone into the vault. And she didn’t feel a bit guilty. There had, after all, been more than a touch of the freebooter in some of those early Kellings. Also in some of the later Kellings, but they’d called their privateering by a less pejorative name.

By the time she and Drummond got to where he’d parked the police car, she was thoroughly fagged and a trifle woozy, but that didn’t matter. She’d be back at Tulip Street soon, God and the traffic willing. She climbed ungracefully into the passenger seat and examined the damage as best she could without shocking Officer Drummond’s sensibilities. It wasn’t so bad, actually. Her new skirt would have to be cleaned before she could wear it again, but the bloodstains around the hem didn’t show up so badly on this dark-gray flannel as they would have on her good blue silk. She mustn’t forget to take her shopping bag, she hoped nobody had had the gall to pinch Theonia’s mohair stole. She made a pad of Mrs. Fortune’s tissues and held it against her oozing knee; by the time they got to Tulip Street, the bleeding had pretty much stopped.

“You stay put, Mrs. Bittersohn, till I get out.”

Officer Drummond came around to her side, opened the door, and gallantly assisted her to the sidewalk. She couldn’t let him go without once more expressing her gratitude. “I don’t know how to thank you, Officer Drummond, as you surely must realize by now. I’m going to phone Lieutenant Harris as soon as I get inside and let him know how you risked your life to save mine. That maniac could have killed us both, you know.”

“The thought did cross my mind,” Drummond admitted, “but that was just part of my job. Want me to walk you up the stairs?”

“No, I’ll be fine, thank you. There’s my butler coming, he’ll help me in. I do hope we meet again under less hair-raising circumstances.”

“Don’t forget your shopping bag.”

He handed it over, there was no time for further demonstrations of gratitude. Like most of Beacon Hill, Tulip Street was inconveniently narrow for the volume of traffic that crawled up it each day. A single car double-parked for the minute or two that it took to let out a passenger could evoke a cacophony of honks and curses all the way back to Charles Street.

Even police cars were not immune, as several drivers were letting Officer Drummond know. He got back into his vehicle and broke the bottleneck by driving off with his siren howling. Charles bounded down the steps, relieved Sarah of her bags, and assisted her into the house as a good butler should, behaving as nothing more than an auxiliary mechanism constructed for the convenience of ladies in bloodstained skirts who were having trouble with their knees.

Sarah most gratefully allowed him to lower her into the nearest chair. “Thank you, Charles. I’m going to change as soon as I can get my legs back under me. Have we anything other than salami sandwiches for dinner?”

“Anticipating your query, I went down and bought us a barbecued chicken plus some veggies for a salad. There’s plenty of that good bread left. Would you care for an aperitif before you change? You look, if I may say so, as if you could use a wee dram of the mahster’s whiskey.”

“That’s very perceptive of you, Charles. I’m going to take a quick shower first, though. Give me fifteen minutes or so.”

Getting out of her clothes and washing the blood off her leg, not to mention the dust from Dolores’s studio and the general feeling of griminess, was an immense relief. The warm shower felt like a gift from the heavens. Sarah indulged herself in it for an extra few minutes regardless of the water bill, rubbed her fine, light-brown hair more or less dry, ran a comb through it, and poked at the natural waves that saved her so much in fuss, bother, and hairdressing fees. A clean nightgown, her all-concealing floor-length robe, a fresh gauze pad over the wounded knee and slippers on her feet were quite enough to cover the conventions as well as the wearer. Charles had been in too many backstage dressing rooms to go into a tizzy of disapproval over a housecoat at a potluck supper in her own house.

Sarah noted that Charles had put her whiskey and water on a small table beside one of the library armchairs. She collapsed into the chair and picked up her glass. This was just what the doctor would have ordered if one had been called upon for a professional opinion, she decided. And think of the fee she’d saved.

Sitting there easing her knee on a hassock and drinking her mild whiskey and water, Sarah felt as if this day had gone on forever. According to the clock on the mantelpiece it was a few minutes short of four in the afternoon. There was still time for a report to Lieutenant Harris; he ought to know what she and the invaluable Officer Drummond had been doing. When Charles came in to ask whether she’d like her drink refreshed, she shook her head.

“I’m still working on this one, thanks. What I want you to do is bring me Max’s portable phone and Lieutenant Harris’s extension number at police headquarters. It’s on the Rolodex. I don’t want to get up because my knee still hurts, as you must have noticed.”