Making it Write, page 12
Tizzy came down a few moments later, and joined me just as Theo came in with a tray. ‘I’ve upped my game,’ he said, pointing out the metal shaker. ‘I’ve switched to a martini. There’s Tizzy’s sherry and I brought a glass of sparkling water for you.’ He asked if I wanted him to add a touch of sherry to my drink, but I declined since I had noticed I could feel even the small amount of alcohol in the drink. I caught a whiff of his martini. So odd, I couldn’t manage even a taste of the cocktail, but I loved the smell of gin.
Theo took a sip of the martini and set it on a coaster. ‘After the reception, I got curious about what gave an artist’s painting value. It turns out who owns some of the art matters. It helps if someone famous has an artist’s work in their collection. That Sophia woman is a celebrity of sorts, and it appears she introduced his art to a huge number of people. It’s interesting that her boyfriend owns an art gallery,’ Theo said.
‘What’s your point?’ Tizzy said.
‘It’s not exactly a point,’ he began. ‘I was just thinking that the painting that put Michael Angel in the spotlight happened to belong to her. And then I started thinking: what if it was a plan? We know they found the painting at the art fair, and probably bought it really cheap. What if they figured out they could make him a sensation by plastering the picture all over her YouTube channel, and maybe her boyfriend bought a few more paintings on the cheap and planned that when they made Michael into an art star, he could sell them for a big profit at his gallery?’
‘That’s a lot of supposing,’ Tizzy said. She turned to me. ‘You probably are beginning to figure this out about Theo,’ Tizzy said, giving her husband’s arm an affectionate squeeze. ‘He’s always thinking about whatever crosses his path and looking for information. I’m surprised he hasn’t worn out the Internet with his endless researches.’
‘You can’t wear out the Internet,’ he said with a surprised smile. He turned to me. ‘Tizzy’s always joking that Alexa or Siri is going to say “you again” one of these days. I just wondered how Michael Angel got where he is. I was curious about Sophia as well, and so I researched influencers. It’s all about them sharing their lives with the public. They need to have something that makes them stand out. Sophia seems to have a certain amount of charisma, but the draw is her relationship with the Scottish terrier. She has made him into her co-star on her show. When she first started doing the YouTube thing, she would let the dog size up potential dates. If he let out a low growl, it was his way of saying “lose this one”. Apparently, one time she didn’t listen and the guy turned out to be a super creep. It was all put out there for the world to see and she gathered a lot of followers.
‘She must have realized she couldn’t sustain that, or maybe when she met the guy who owns the art gallery, he wasn’t so happy about it. She changed everything except the dog. Now her channel follows her turning something trashy into a treasure sort of thing. I wonder what the deal is on all that merch with The Scotty in the Sleeping Garden on it that she sells from her website.’
Tizzy gracefully stepped in. ‘Theo, the plan was to give Veronica information she could use in what she’s writing.’
‘So sorry,’ he said, holding his hands in a prayer-like posture and bowing his head. ‘I get carried away. You know how it is – one thing leads to another. I meant to see what I could find out about the woman who died, but I got detoured,’ he said. ‘I forgot to mention that Sophia has a sponsor. Sukey’s Super Stick. It’s some kind of super-glue she uses to fix the stuff she finds.’
‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘I was going through her notes and talking to people who knew her. I already talked to Michael Angel.’ I thought back on how unpleasant our encounter had been. ‘He didn’t give me much since he’s against what I’m doing. I got some nice stuff from the school where she worked.’ I turned to Tizzy. ‘And maybe a lead on some work for me.’ Tizzy knew the school because her boss’s daughter went there.
‘That would be wonderful,’ she said, and then wanted to know what the place looked like. After my description, the conversation went off on a tangent, with Theo looking for examples of Italianate Revival architecture, which led to us talking about a mansion on Michigan Avenue downtown in that style, which had been turned into offices and a restaurant with a puppet theater.
Theo had a guilty look and typed something into the laptop he’d brought out. ‘Here’s something about Maeve …’ he said, and we all leaned over the screen to read.
The article was from several years ago and detailed a confrontation between Maeve and Michael’s first wife at a gallery event. Rina Wolinski had apparently thrown a glass of champagne in Maeve’s face and said that she was Michael’s real muse and inspiration and that Maeve was just collecting the gravy.
‘I’m glad the ex didn’t make an appearance at the reception we went to,’ Tizzy said.
‘Maybe that explains why Maeve wasn’t there. She was afraid of a repeat performance.’
‘Do you think the ending of the memoir she alluded to had anything to do with his first wife?’ Theo asked.
Wow, Tizzy really had told him everything, even about the missing ending.
FIFTEEN
It was dark when I went home. It had been a fun evening with all the talking and conjecturing. It was nice to feel that I had some allies in helping with Maeve’s memoir. We’d ended up ordering a pizza and moved off talking about Maeve. Theo had gotten into doing research about the 1893 World’s Fair, which had been held in the area. I didn’t know that the first Ferris wheel had been just a few blocks from where we were, or that a remnant had been found buried in the ground. His research was in support of Tizzy’s time-travel novel. It was sweet the way he wanted to help her.
As I started up the outside stairs to the front porch of my building, I sensed someone suddenly come up behind me, making me feel uneasy. I rushed up the last few steps and positioned my key between my fingers as an impromptu weapon to poke an assailant. Just as I got to the door to the outer vestibule, I turned with the key showing.
‘You?’ I said in surprise as I recognized Detective Jankowski.
He looked down at my hand with the key pointed toward him. ‘How about you stand down with the key,’ he said. I couldn’t tell if he really felt threatened or amused. Either way, I lowered my hand.
‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ I said. Yes, it was a cliché, but it didn’t count because I was being sarcastic.
‘If you recall, I did say that I might need to talk to you again since you were the person to find the victim.’ He left it hanging to imply that it somehow made me a suspicious person. ‘And there have been some new developments,’ he said.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Like what?’ He gave me a tired look.
‘It doesn’t work that way. I get information, not give it.’ It didn’t matter because I knew what the development was. He’d just confirmed what I thought about Maeve being dead before she went down the stairs, which changed it from an accident to murder. Technically, since he didn’t actually say those words, it probably didn’t count as actual confirmation, but to me it was. It was probably not a good thing for me, since now he was looking for a killer. I knew that sometimes killers tried to act as if they’d found the body as a way to cover what they did. From what I’d heard, they usually tried to have a witness with them when they ‘found the body’, but Jankowski probably looked at that as only a sometime detail.
He gestured for me to proceed through the door. As we got inside the outer vestibule, he glanced through the glass door to the stairway and I heard him let out a tired-sounding sigh. ‘How about we go to the coffee shop on the corner?’
I knew there was the possibility that his suggestion was just based on his not wanting to climb the stairs, but it also could be his way of making it seem more relaxed so that I’d be more likely to say things that might not be in my best interest. And since I could get up and leave, anything I said could and would be used against me without him having to warn me first. I wondered if he knew that I knew that.
It was already late and the coffee shop was empty. He led the way to a back booth and took the seat that gave him a view of the door and the whole place. A typical cop move. A man had just brought out a pail and mop and started cleaning the floor as the waitress came with menus. She recognized me and gave Jankowski the once-over. Did she think it was a date?
He told me to order food if I wanted, complimentary of Chicago PD, and told her he’d just have coffee. I declined the food and watched amused as he checked the metal cream pitcher on the table to make sure it was full.
The waitress dropped off the coffee and I could tell by the smell that it had been sitting in the pot for a long time. It didn’t matter to Jankowski because he dumped so much cream in it that the cup almost overflowed. As far as I was concerned, my cup was just a prop. I took one sip and set the cup down, not expecting to lift it again. And I was right, the coffee had that thick bitter taste it got from sitting on a heater for too long.
The waitress came back and dropped off a couple of dishes of rice pudding on the house, explaining it was the end of the day and they never kept it over. Jankowski looked at it for a moment and then dove in. I loved their rice pudding, and under normal circumstances would have joined him, but his presence had killed my taste buds. I took a polite spoonful and it seemed like tasteless glue to me.
I really wanted to get to whatever he was going to ask. The tension was putting my stomach into a knot. I knew that I would be cautious about what I said, but even so I could say the wrong thing. Not talking wasn’t an option unless I said I wanted an attorney. Hah, like I could afford an attorney, anyway.
‘OK, what is it?’ I asked, not being able to take the suspense any longer. I saw his dark eyes narrow, not happy that I had tried to take control.
‘I wanted to ask you some more about your visit to Maeve Winslow,’ he said.
‘I’m just going to tell you the same thing again. She’d hired me to help her write her memoir and we were supposed to talk over the first section. When I got there, the front door opened on its own and I went inside.’ I noticed he was watching my face intently, lifting the coffee mug without looking at it.
‘You’re sure the door was unlocked?’ he asked, and I nodded. ‘Didn’t it seem strange to you that it just opened on its own?’ I thought about what I should say that wouldn’t stir things up. Best to keep it simple and just on what he’d asked. I would not bring up the first appointment and my encounter with Suzzanna. I’d already told him she wanted to keep what we were doing to be a surprise. After talking to Michael Angel and seeing his reaction to the project, I thought there was more to it. But that was all conjecture, and I didn’t want to share it with Jankowski, figuring he would accuse me of trying to play detective.
‘There was some confusion about which door to go to. She’d had me come to the back door before, probably because it was a more direct way to get to her private space.’ I reminded him that the back stairs ended right before the door leading to the third floor.
‘What made you go to the front door this time?’ he asked. I debated what to tell him, and then made something up that could have been the truth.
‘Her husband thought I was a cleaning lady when I went out the kitchen door. She didn’t give me any instructions the second time, and I didn’t want to be mistaken for a cleaning lady again.’ It sounded kind of lame when I said it, but he seemed OK with my reasoning.
‘And then what?’ he said. He took his eyes off me long enough to check his empty coffee mug and waved the waitress over. She poured the last of the pot into his mug.
I shrugged as I thought back over it. ‘I called hello a few times and, when there was no answer, went to look for her. I found her sprawled on steps in the kitchen. I called nine-one-one and they took over.’ I was aware that I’d condensed my going up to her attic room into ‘went to look for her’, thinking that the less I said, the better.
He looked down at his notes. ‘Last time we talked, you mentioned the memoir was a surprise for her husband. I notice you left that out this time.’ He let the words hang in the air while I tried to think of an explanation. Finally, I gave him a helpless shrug.
‘I guess I forgot.’
I couldn’t tell if he bought it or not. I had a feeling that he had an agenda in his questioning and wondered where he was headed.
‘Maybe there’s something else you forgot,’ he said leveling his gaze at me. ‘Like maybe you did meet with her and had words?’ he said. ‘About this writing job you have mentioned.’
‘No,’ I said, feeling uncomfortable.
‘My understanding is that she fired you and insisted on the check back.’ If he was looking for a reaction, he got it. I was shocked.
‘Who told you I was fired?’ I demanded.
He kept the stone-faced expression and I blathered on. ‘You must have misunderstood. Her husband told me to forget the project. She didn’t fire me.’ Then the pieces fell into place. ‘You think she fired me and I killed her when she asked for her check back?’
‘What about the check? Do you still have it?’ He’d done the detective trick of not answering my question and instead asking one of his own.
‘I already cashed it,’ I said.
‘You probably were depending on that money. Maybe you already spent some of it,’ he said. He nodded toward the exterior of my building, which was visible through the window of the coffee shop, and his meaning was clear, I had a big place. ‘When people are in a corner, they sometimes do things in the moment.’ He waited to see what I was going to say.
I considered offering to show him the notes that Maeve had given me, as proof that I hadn’t been fired, but it might backfire. He could say that I still had them because I’d killed her rather than giving them back. I didn’t want to let on that I’d figured out that Maeve was dead before she went down the stairs. It’s the kind of information that the killer would know. I knew exactly where the story had come from. Michael Angel was determined to stop the project and must have thought that if I was being investigated, it would fall apart. There was another possibility: he was the one who killed Maeve and was trying to pin it on me.
I also knew if I was too vehement in denying it, it could make me look bad as well. I managed to keep my cool and simply told him that whoever had given him that information was wrong. He kept an inscrutable face throughout it all and I had no idea if he believed me or not.
It was a relief to finally go home, and nice to find Rocky waiting for me. He was acting more and more as I would have expected a dog to behave, and I loved it. While the cat cuddled and I stroked his back, I kept going over the meeting with Jankowski in my head. Now on top of worrying about creating a memoir out of thin air, I had to worry about being implicated in her death. Jankowski couldn’t really believe I had done it, could he? A bunch of questions floated through my mind. The first was, how did she die and the second was, how strong did someone have to be to drag her from somewhere else and launch her down the stairs?
The extra-strong coffee and the conversation with the detective – along with my thoughts afterward – left me tense all over. It would have been nice to call Ben and talk it over, but I talked myself out of it. Chamomile tea and crochet would have to suffice. I didn’t even want to think about the image of myself connected with that.
I was hardly in the best shape to deal with Caleb on Thursday morning, but he’d called me verging on hysteria. It was seven a.m. and, after the previous day, I had been planning to treat myself to a little extra sleep. I was already putting on the coffee while I talked to him.
‘It’s not working,’ Caleb said in a frustrated wail. ‘Still nothing. I saw she was inside when I brought the last note over. I tried hiding when I rang the bell so she wouldn’t know it was me, but she got one of those doorbells with a camera and I couldn’t evade it.’ He let out an unhappy sound, sounding hopeless with some anger. ‘We have to up the ante,’ he said.
I reminded him that we had an appointment and I’d planned to show him an idea I had. It had come from the art project I did with Maeve and wasn’t just for Caleb, but for any love-letter clients I got in the future. A handmade card could make the missives more appealing and, in his case, might be the thing that would push her to talk to him. I had already ordered one of the palettes with all the colors of ink and it had arrived the next day. It was still sitting waiting for its inaugural use. I told him about the art project and I heard rumbling at the other end.
‘Art project? I’m not an artist. It’ll make things worse,’ he said. I did a whole pitch on him that not only was it easy and something I was sure he could do, but it was more about the effort than the outcome. ‘I get it,’ he said, sounding calmer. ‘If she thinks I made a card for her, maybe she’ll melt the deep freeze.’
‘Yes, that’s it exactly,’ I said. As an afterthought, I asked him if his wife was afraid of him. He laughed at the absurdity of the thought.
‘I crunch numbers, not my muscles.’
We’d always met at his favorite doughnut shop, but I couldn’t picture him doing the artwork in public, so I suggested he come to my place. I had made it a point to try to keep my meetings with clients somewhere else, but I already knew him and I couldn’t imagine it being a problem. Once he agreed, he wanted to do it immediately, so we set up a time for that afternoon.
On the dot of two, the croaky bell went off, and I buzzed the security door to let him in. I walked out on the landing and looked over the railing as he came up. He seemed a little perturbed by all the flights and took a deep breath when he reached the top landing. ‘You probably save on a gym membership with all these stairs.’
He stopped in the entrance hall, waiting for instructions. I pointed him back to the dining room and led the way. ‘This is one of those railroad-car-style apartments,’ he said. ‘I like these old places, even if they don’t have amenities like elevators.’
