Murder in Primary Colors

  Chapter 14

  Pansy McMillan stood with both hands on her cane and eyed Detective Sergeant Hjelmer Ryquist with disapproval. "What do you mean, you can't tell us whether this contraption is like the one that killed those poor people?" She sounded for all the world like she was telling him for the last time to pick up his room.

  Chris cringed inwardly. Ryquist seemed to be immune, however, and ignored her.

  "Hjelmer, we've been very cooperative and I think we are entitled to know whether this little experiment was worth our time." Pansy stood her ground while Ryquist and Bill the technician conferred over a stack of notes. "Hjelmer," she said again, this time more sweetly. Chris grabbed her elbow and tried to start her toward the door. She might as well have been trying to drag the door to Pansy.

  It was obvious that Pansy was going nowhere, so Chris gave up and sat back down on a folding chair. Ryquist sent the technician on an errand and finally turned to face the two women. Drew and Ted fidgeted in the background.

  "Yeah, Pansy, I think this is the kind of thing that did the job. There probably were two different weapons because there were two different sized bearings used, but both of them probably looked like this gadget here."

  "So who does that incriminate?"

  "You don't give up, do you?" the policeman said with a chuckle. Pansy's charm rays were at it again.

  "What about Randall?" Pansy asked eagerly, recognizing a breach in his policeman's demeanor. "Does he have an alibi?"

  "This alibi thing is really overrated," Ryquist responded. "Almost no one can account for their whereabouts easily if you just ask them where they were, say, last Thursday night. Where were you, Pansy?"

  "Well, I was at Chris's house, of course, but then my knee is limiting my options right now."

  He pursued his point. "Can you prove you were there?"

  "My daughter can vouch for me, can't you, Te... ah, Chris?"

  Chris shook her head. "You know, I can't remember last Thursday night. What did we do?"

  "See what I mean?" Hjelmer said shrugging. "Alibis are hard because innocent people don't think they'll need to remember where they were or what they were doing or who they saw. They just go on about their business. Unless they did something unusual, they're likely to have to think about it a lot. Then, most folks don't have corroboration."

  "So does that mean the Randalls don't have alibis?" Pansy persisted.

  "The night Page was killed, Randall was at the Little Walk Casino playing blackjack until about one in the morning. He says he and his wife got down there about six and ate in the buffet. Takes fifty minutes to get there from Camford so the latest he could have left town was around five. He says he paid cash for his dinner and took his wife home to their cabin. So no one can swear he was at the casino until he bellied up to the blackjack table. We checked the casino security video. He played his first hand at nine-twenty. He'd have had time, if he's lying about when he left Camford or what he did after he dropped his wife off." Hjelmer shrugged.

  "What about the sculptor? Is Randall a possible for that one?" Pansy was clearly prepared to go through the whole list of suspects and Hjelmer would have no peace unless she could be deflected.

  "We still haven't nailed that down entirely. He says he was at his cabin with his wife that night and she confirms it."

  "Anyone else we should be looking at?" Pansy continued.

  Ryquist put his hands on his hips. "What's this 'we' stuff, Tonto? You just relax and let us do the job, Pansy."

  Chris had heard enough. "Mother, we have to let Hjelmer get on with his work and we need to do some Christmas shopping." Shopping was the one entertainment Chris thought might be more compelling than murder for her mother. She was wrong.

  Pansy was unrelenting. "Chris told me about all the nasty little practical jokes Bjornson pulled on his fellow teachers. There must be a slew of suspects in his case. Is there someone who had it in for both of them?"

  Ryquist drew a deep breath and looked at Chris who shrugged and made an "I give up" gesture.

  Behind him Drew and Ted made throat noises like they wanted to be a part of this conversation. Drew said, "Mr. Ryquist, are you thinking someone needed to have special skills to make one of these things? 'Cause Ted and I talked about it, and almost anyone could have seen what he was doing in the sculpture studio. He wasn't secretive about it at all. Stuff was all over the place when we were there, and he was kind of in and out when he was looking for a tool or something. Somebody could even have taken one of those pipes he was making for the Desert Fountain and I'm not sure he'd notice right away."

  "Yeah," Ted Olsen said. "It was a bodacious mess in there. Sure different when you see the stuff in the studio instead of the museum."

  Ryquist contemplated the two young men for a moment. "Good point," he said at last. "Makes for a pretty big field."

  "So who's in the clear? Maybe that's the place to start," Pansy said eagerly. "What about Chris? Could she have done it?"

  "Mother!" Chris was aghast.

  "Gramma!" Drew looked momentarily terrified.

  "Your mom's in the clear, Drew," Ryquist assured him between chuckles.

  "I wasn't suggesting you did it, Teensy. I just meant we have to start narrowing the field somewhere. She couldn't have done it, right?"

  "We checked her out, Pansy. She's got a neighbor vouching for her at the time Page got it and she was with you when Bjornson was done."

  Chris sat upright. "A neighbor?"

  "Yeah, old guy says he saw you take Walter for a walk. He's sure of the time because he kind'a keeps tabs on you."

  "Old guy. You mean Mr. Twingley?"

  "Yep, he thinks Walter's cute and you're wonderful. So he keeps his eye out for your comings and goings."

  "Oh, good lord."

  "I'd say he's got the hots for you, Doc."

  "I know, I know. He's been making passes at me since we moved in."

  "Told me he wished he was fifty years younger," Ryquist added with a twinkle.

  "Oh my god!" Chris glanced at her son, flushed crimson and looked at the floor.

  Her mother looked at her speculatively. "This Mr. Twingley rich?"

  Chris stood. "That's it. We're out of here. Come on, Mom, if you don't want to walk home or have to take a cab."

  Hjelmer Ryquist was struggling unsuccessfully to keep his face arranged. Drew was nearly the same color as his mother. Chris headed for the door with Pansy trailing reluctantly in her wake.

  "Hjelmer, if we think of anything pertinent, we'll call you right away," Pansy said over her shoulder.

  Ryquist finally burst out laughing. They went up the steps to the main floor slowly in deference to Pansy's knee, and echoes of Ryquist's good humor followed them most of the way.

  When they got home late that afternoon after dropping Drew and Ted off and shopping for last minute Christmas gifts, Chris was acutely conscious of being watched, or so she supposed, as she got out of the car and unloaded packages. Pansy made her way up the back steps and Chris followed, trying not to look next door where she was sure octogenarian Horace Twingley was lusting after her through the lace curtains on his kitchen windows.

  "Teensy, we should have a Christmas party—a birthday party for you actually—and invite the neighbors," Pansy began.

  Chris held up a hand and shook her head vehemently. "Mother, don't even think about it. He's eighty if he's a day and I am not having a birthday party, period."

  "Well, you only have one birthday a year, and how long has it been since I've been here on your birthday? We should do something. Nothing big and fancy, just a few people in...." She trailed off when she caught the look on Chris's face. "Well, if you're going to be a poop about it." She huffed dramatically and limped off to her room.

  That won't be the last of it, Chris thought. Birthdays were sacred for Pansy. Since Chris's was on Christmas Eve, her mother had always found a way to create a party, usually sometime between Christmas and New Year's Day, to compensat
e for the lack of special attention her daughter could expect on the actual day. She was reminded of her fifth birthday, shortly after her parents' divorce and a move to a different state. Pansy had rounded up ten five year olds, not one of whom Chris knew. It had been a great party in spite of that, noisy and high spirited. Chris still retained one image of its aftermath after all these years: Pansy flopped on the couch, holding paper plates and scraps of birthday wrapping in each hand, sound asleep.

  No, this will come up again. Chris could only hope to control the form the party would take and insure that neighbors to whom she'd never said more than "hello" were spared the need to participate. She made hot chocolate, poured two mugs, added a shot of Bailey's to each and set out to make amends.

  Peace offering delivered and accepted, she curled up in her favorite chair to sip the warm brew. The fat folders of clippings she'd received from Rachael Jacobsen were on the table next to her, and she began leafing through them. Articles cut from art periodicals and reviews of shows from the New York Times demonstrated Elizabeth Page's eclectic interest in most aspects of the art scene in the city. They were in no particular order that Chris could discern, so she began to lay them out on the floor around her to make useful piles. She placed anything of interest to one of the other two teachers of art history in discrete piles, things that interested her in another, and things of marginal interest to anyone in a discard pile.

  When she started on the third and last file, the discard pile was by far the largest. Most of the clippings came from the years before Elizabeth arrived at Midstate. The newspaper reviews were the bulk of the rejects, as their shelf life was long gone. Amazingly, Chris observed, there were very few glowing reviews that presaged actual success for longer than eighteen months.

  She was about to place a review of a performance art exhibition in the discard pile when she noticed something. Yellow highlighter marked a fragment of a paragraph on the back. She checked the front again. Two lines—March 10, 1997 and below that NY Times—were hand written at the top. She turned it over again and reread the marked paragraph.

  Colin McCarty, 42, lead in Back to Basics at the Stuyvesant Repertory Theater, was detained for questioning after the third act curtain regarding his relationship with a 17 year old boy following a complaint filed by the boy's parents. McCarty maintained his innocence as he was led off by police. The parents, who refused to be identified in order to protect their son, said McCarty had carried on an illicit relationship with the boy for the past four months. The relationship had been discovered by accident when—

  At this point the article was cut off. The original point of the cutting clearly had been the review on the other side.

  Chris put the cutting down and sighed. "Oh, dear." In all probability nothing came of it, she decided. As far as she knew, in thirty years McCarty had never been missing from Midstate except when he was on sabbatical.

  "If he'd been convicted he'd surely have spent time in jail," she said aloud. Walter raised his head and looked at her out of the corner of one eye. She rubbed him with her foot. "I think it's best to assume that there was nothing to it, don't you, Walter?"

  Walter sighed heavily and squirmed into a tighter ball. He was snoring in less than a minute.

  Maybe it isn't even the same person, Chris thought, though the highlighter applied to McCarty's name in the cutting left little doubt that Elizabeth Page was confident she knew the man in question.

  She reread the clipping. Was Page holding this over McCarty's head to get him to help with her plan to get the museum out of the division? She was reminded of what seemed like a testy exchange she'd witnessed from afar between the two of them early in fall semester. Does this have something to do with what they were arguing about?

  Chris tried to return to perusing the clippings but she wasn't very attentive. Finally she paper clipped the piles to be kept and returned them to the folders, then went through the throw-away pile one last time to make she wasn't missing anything. She told herself she was looking for things of artistic importance, though in reality she was looking for more about the incident reported in the clipping now resting on her coffee table. In the end she found nothing more and went to bed knowing that on Monday she would have to look closely at Colin McCarty's file.