The Odd Job (14 page)

Sarah herself was more an illustrator than a painter. Even so, she had a fairly clear idea as to how an overpainting could be removed without hurting the original painting underneath. She wouldn’t mind trying the process on one of those freshly grounded canvases, but was she entitled to do so? For whatever it might or might not be worth, everything in this studio was now the property of the Wilkins Museum. Even though the executrix appeared to be stuck with the actual labor of removing what the museum didn’t want, it would be the board of trustees who must first make the decisions about what to keep and what to throw away.

The thought that she, as the sole executrix, and Turbot, as the trustee best placed to give her the hardest time possible, might be obliged to work together was enough to make the blood run cold. Mr. Redfern had said he’d be willing to handle the details; she could ask when she took him the original will whether there wasn’t some way that everything could be funneled through him. As far as Sarah could see, it was much ado about nothing anyway; the sooner they got on with the probate, the better for her.

Not much better, most likely. She put the will in her handbag, heaved a sigh, and began going through the dresser drawers to make sure she hadn’t missed anything that might be of value, then putting everything back so that Mr. Turbot couldn’t accuse her of malfeasance. She didn’t relish the thought of having to take up the question of Dolores’s tired old nightgowns and undies with the head of trustees. Maybe Turbot would consider the subject beneath him and stay home to commune with his polled Herefords. One could always hope.

It was easy to see that Dolores had been a member of the “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” school. Most of her things were well-worn, some of them patched or darned, but nothing was actually in tatters. Sarah assumed the hopeless cases had been used up as paint rags or for housecleaning. She saw nothing unusual in that, she’d had plenty of wearing out and making do during the lean years.

She kept on lifting and stacking, finding small oddments such as a black lace-and-satin sachet, what was left of a half-pint of brandy, which wasn’t much; a stash of arty brass and copper jewelry that had been carefully tucked away inside a pair of bright-pink bed socks. Why Dolores would have worried about any burglar’s coveting such stuff was beyond Sarah’s comprehension, but beauty was ever in the eye of the beholder and at least the brass and copper handicraft hadn’t clashed and clanked any louder than Lala Turbot’s bangles.

A brittle cardboard gift box covered with Santa Clauses must have been sitting in this same drawer for a good many years. It held a cheap brown plastic handbag, never used. Sarah thought cynically that the bag must have been a present from Dolores’s late brother at some bygone yuletide when Jimmy Agnew hadn’t quite managed to drink up all his money. She opened the bag on general principles, pulled out the wad of crumpled paper that Dolores had never bothered to discard, and found a tiny brown envelope that contained a safe-deposit key.

“Well,” she crowed, “this is interesting.”

Officer Drummond had been standing in the doorway gazing past her at the unopened package of chocolate marshmallow coconut puffs. Now he focused on the open dresser drawer. “Found something, have you?”

“Yes, a safe deposit key.” Sarah showed it to him. “Is there a branch of the High Street Bank around here anywhere? I remember Dolores mentioning once when I happened to have my checkbook out that she and I used the same bank, though not the same branch. Where is hers?”

“Right in Kenmore Square. She wouldn’t have had much more than a ten-minute walk from here unless her corns were bothering her.”

Sarah couldn’t tell whether or not Drummond was trying to be funny but she smiled anyway. Not much to be done now, there was only the bottom drawer to check. Apparently this was where Dolores had kept the stuff that would have gone into her desk, if she’d had one. There wasn’t much in it except a shoe box full of receipted bills, a scrapbook almost too big for the drawer, and a number of clippings out of old Boston newspapers.

Sarah recognized the scrapbook. Dolores had shown it to her that first afternoon when she’d come here to tea and been strong-armed into eating her first and so far her only chocolate marshmallow coconut puff. Here were all the presidents of Amalgamated Industries, over a hundred years of them, from the founder to the great-grandson who’d been in office when Dolores had finished the set. In the front of the scrapbook was a glossy eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photograph of the artist having her hand shaken by a large man who bore a regrettably perfect likeness to the portrait that she had apparently just completed. Dolores herself wore the smug and self-satisfied expression that Sarah and Max had often seen on those occasions when she hadn’t been raging at poor Melanson or Vieuxchamp or one of those other museum guards whom she’d contrived to make her serfs.

The photographs and cuttings which related to the Amalgamated Industries dynasty were all pasted in the scrapbook, along with some that testified to Dolores’s work for various other clients. The clippings that had been left loose in the drawer all dealt with one group of seven who called themselves the Wicked Widows. Presumably they were female, though one never knew. The photographs that went with the text showed them wearing black fishtail evening gowns that hugged their rumps but fanned out into great poufs of black tulle from mid-thigh down to the floor. Each widow sported a huge black cartwheel hat perched almost vertically on one side of the head, as Lydia Ouspenska wore hers.

Either the Wicked Widows had grown their hair long and dressed it high with combs and hairpins or else they’d worn wigs. Hats of such dimensions would have needed firm foundations to pin into and long hatpins to keep them sitting pretty. Long black widows’ veils were draped over their hats and faces but flung back over their shoulders to display as much cleavage as was feasible without letting it all hang out. Whether they’d sung, danced, or just stood around looking voluptuous and inscrutable was not made clear, at least not in the captions under the murky photographs. Glancing at her watch and feeling an emptiness in her stomach, Sarah decided it wasn’t fair to keep Officer Drummond away from his lunch. She could read this mass of yellowed newsprint later, and probably should; Dolores must have had some reason to save it.

The papers were dated from the mid-sixties. That Dolores could have been one of the Wicked Widows seemed preposterous. The Amalgamated Industries photographs of that same period showed the artist as a stocky, thick-legged matron with shoulders like a footballer’s and a face that wouldn’t rate a second look.
La vie bohème
would have been totally out of character for the Dolores Agnew Tawne whom Sarah had known, or thought she had. But did anybody ever really know anybody?

Bizarre things had gone on during the sixties and early seventies, at least some of Sarah’s relatives said they had. She herself had been too young and too cloistered to know much of anything about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and her parents would have been the last people on earth to tell her. The only memory of the period that stuck in her mind was of being taken by her father’s distant cousin and closest friend Alexander to a street fair over in the Back Bay where there was supposed to be a Happening.

They’d hung around for a while watching the crowd and wondering what was going to happen, but all they’d seen were people in overalls carrying garbage cans around, so Alexander had walked her back to the Public Gardens and treated her to a ride on the swanboats and a bag of popcorn to feed the ducks.

Before she was out of her teens, both her parents were dead and she’d been married to Alexander. The wedding hadn’t been much of a happening either, nor had the marriage. Sarah had truly loved Alexander and duly mourned him. When she thought of him nowadays, though, it was never as the careworn elderly husband who had tried too hard to be a buffer between her and his domineering mother, but always the young Apollo in gray flannels who’d taken his lonesome little cousin to ride on the swanboats.

Alexander had never written Sarah a letter; he’d never had occasion to do so because they’d never been apart long enough to justify the expense of a postage stamp. Still, she’d have liked to get one. Maybe Dolores would have liked to get mail also. If she had got mail, she hadn’t kept any. At least there were no letters in her bottom drawer, not even an empty envelope with her name and address written on it.

Unless Dolores had kept her personal correspondence in that safe deposit box. But why would she have bothered lugging it to the bank when there’d be nobody of her own to read the stuff once she was gone? Of course the poor soul hadn’t known she was going to die when she did. Sarah shuffled quickly through the clippings; not until the drawer was empty did she notice the bump.

It wasn’t much of a bump. Sometime or other, Dolores had lined her dresser drawers with brown wrapping paper, neatly and painstakingly, as she did everything, gluing the paper securely to the wood. Thus, when she’d wanted to poke a small, flat object under the lining, she’d had to cut a neat little slit to get it in. Typically of Dolores’s act-first-and-think-afterward approach, the small object bumped up and showed through the slit, so she’d tried to mend matters by pasting a neat patch over the bump. By now the patch had curled up and become more noticeable than the slit alone would have been; Sarah picked it off with her thumbnail and fished out the thing that had caused the bump. It was a safe deposit key, but not a match for the key that had already been found.

“Officer Drummond, look at this. Why in the world do you suppose Mrs. Tawne was paying rent on two separate safe deposit boxes in the same bank?”

“Beats me.”

Drummond’s stomach chose that opportune moment to emit a growl too loud to be ignored. Sarah dumped the clippings, the scrapbook, and the boxful of receipted bills back in the drawer and jumped to her feet.

“I’m so sorry. We’d better get on over to Kenmore Square and have something to eat. I’ll keep these keys with me. I have to transfer whatever money she has in the bank to my own account as executrix, so we might as well open the boxes while we’re there.”

“W
ATCH IT!”

Miracles still happened. Half an inch closer, and Sarah Kelling Bittersohn would have been only a mass of pulp in the gutter. Officer Drummond’s hand was biting into her arm, he was dragging her up over the curb, scraping her knee on the concrete. She could feel him shaking, she must be shaking too. Thank God she still had a knee to bruise.

Once she was safe on the sidewalk, he helped her to stand and relaxed his grip a little. “That son of a bitch! He deliberately tried to run you down. And I didn’t even get his whole number. Seven-five something.”

“Seven-five-three-two KG.” Sarah had no idea how she knew that. She began to laugh, fighting hysteria. Her left leg was a mess, her nylon stocking one great run, her knee scraped raw, blood running down her shin. She opened the handbag that some kind passer-by had paused to salvage for her and rummaged out a handful of tissues. “What a nuisance, I’ll have to buy some panty hose. Don’t mind me, Officer Drummond, I’m babbling. Thank you. That sounds awfully feeble, doesn’t it.”

She must still be wobbly, Drummond was keeping a firm hold on her arm. “The car’s a gray Toyota, I got that much. There can’t be more than a thousand of them bombing through here every day. Seven-five-three-two KG, you said? I’d better call it in.”

He let go of her just long enough to snatch out notebook and pencil and jot down the figures. “Seven-five-three-two KG, right? Come on, Mrs. Bittersohn, let’s go in here and get you some coffee. You can sit down, and pull yourself together while I’m phoning the station.”

“Thank you.” That sounded relatively sane, Sarah said it again. She let the policeman steady her into the coffee shop, he nabbed a waiter who had been peering out from behind the potted plants in the window.

“Take care of this lady, will you? She just missed getting creamed by a hit-and-run driver. You saw what happened, didn’t you? I’ve got to make a report. Where’s the phone?”

“Right over there beside the bar. Sure, I saw it, a gray Toyota. The guy did it on purpose.”

“Are you sure it was a guy?”

“Well, yeah, I guess so. It might have been two guys, I didn’t get a good look. But the car was a gray Toyota, I know that, I’ve got one myself. You okay, miss? Can I get you something to drink?”

“Coffee, please. Black,” Sarah was amazed that she could get the words out, she felt as if she’d been stuffed and mounted like a hunter’s trophy.

“Coming right up. Sugar’s on the table.”

Sarah had a vague notion that she ought to put sugar in the coffee that the waiter was going to bring. She hated sugar in anything, but it was supposed to be good for something. Shock, that was it. She didn’t care, she didn’t feel up to the bother of stirring. She just sat there regardless of the pain that she was feeling in her knee now that she had time to realize she’d been hurt. It would be better to let the numbness take over.

The young waiter came back with a mug and set it in front of her, where she could smell the steam. She stared at the mug, not even trying to pick it up. It seemed outside the bounds of possibility that somebody in a gray Toyota had made a deliberate, calculated attempt to run her down. Yet it had happened. Officer Drummond had said so, the waiter had said so, surely they wouldn’t lie.

She tried flexing her fingers to see whether they still worked. Her hand made contact with the mug handle. She wondered what she should do next. There was something Officer Drummond ought to know about, it wasn’t until he’d finished putting in his report and come to sit at the table with her that she remembered what it was.

“I was just thinking, Officer Drummond. There might be something more to this … happening. I was driving into Boston from the north shore Sunday afternoon when two fellows in a gray Toyota started harassing me. You know, practically climbing my rear bumper, then cutting out and pulling around right in front of me when I tried to get away from them. That sort of nonsense.”