The next morning Rannie shambled out of bed and found Tim by the hall closet, stowing the sleeping bag and deflated air mattress in the front hall closet. His head swiveled toward her. “Jesus, you look like hell.”
“Good morning to you, too.” Rannie croaked. She felt like hell. It hurt to move her eyes, which burned in the same way they used to after pulling all-nighters at Yale. Yet she must have fallen asleep at some point or at least dozed off because she had jolted awake, the memory of the previous night walloping her with full force.
“You just missed Nate. He went to meet friends.”
“He didn’t see you putting away that stuff!” she exclaimed.
“Relax. I waited till he was gone. I saw him for all of two seconds. But I made sure to have a big satisfied smile on my face.”
“Go ahead. Make fun.”
“It’s just not many mothers try to fool their sons into thinking they’re doing the dirty deed. I made coffee.”
Those were the magic words. Rannie plopped on the couch. Her glasses were still on the night table, but for now remaining unfocused seemed preferable. In some way it kept what she wasn’t ready to think about at bay. When Tim returned with coffee as well as toast, he glanced at the jumbled Scrabble tiles on the coffee table. “FRANTIC HOE ORGY???”
Rannie, squinting, reassembled the letters into FOR GERY ANTIOCH and explained. “He—or she—since it could be Gery for Geraldine, is the only other person besides Larry who gets an acknowledgment in Portrait of a Lady. I hoped scrambling the letters might reveal a name, a clue, a something.”
They sipped and munched in silence, Tim scanning stories in the Sunday paper, Rannie allowing the caffeine to do its job. Then they each repaired to separate bathrooms to shower, Rannie finishing in record time because it was simply too unnerving knowing that directly on the other side of the tiled stall, with no more than a few inches separating them, an identical shower head, circa 1970, was fitfully spitting water down on a stark naked Tim.
She got dressed, donned glasses, and returned to the living room feeling as if she almost qualified for membership in the human race. “I know what you said last night, about the semen on Ret, but can I tell you my female murderer theory anyway?”
“Shoot.”
“Barbara Gaines. Bibi.” Rannie wasn’t positive he’d immediately connect the name with the woman he knew from AA meetings. And if he did, she half expected a dismissive retort, something on the order of “No way, Rannie.” Instead he put down the newspaper and waited for more.
“It’s nothing concrete. Just a feeling. I told you I think Ret was blackmailing somebody. What if it was Bibi?”
“Why?”
“I’m not there yet. . . . Will you tell me this? Has she been in AA long?”
“I’ve seen her around for years.”
Rannie needed a more specific time frame. “Longer than three years?”
“Way longer.”
If what Daisy said was true, about Bibi’s shenanigans at the one-hundredth birthday party, that meant Bibi was having “slips” while in the program.
Tim was frowning now and looked uncomfortable. He never discussed anybody in AA by name—it was always the generic “a person in the program”—yet Rannie could tell from his expression that something else was bothering him, something besides breaking AA confidentiality. She backtracked to what he’d said before about “seeing Bibi around for years.” For Tim, showing up at meetings wasn’t necessarily the same thing as truly being in AA, which involved a steadfast daily commitment to the program and its principles. Without ever naming who, he’d occasionally dismiss certain people in AA as being uncommitted. A few had to attend, a stipulation of probation. Others constantly fell off the wagon.
“Is Bibi serious about the program?”
“I’ve been known to be wrong. But no. I don’t think so.”
“She used to be a very serious drug addict.”
“Rannie, there are no unserious drug addicts. That’d be a what do you call it? Oxymoron.”
“Two points for you.”
“Don’t be condescending.” Then Tim said, “The thing is, Barbara Gaines’s problems with drinking and drugs were no secret. I heard her qualify once and remember her saying that Vanity Fair or one of those magazines wrote all about her. So Ret Sullivan couldn’t threaten Barbara with what was already very stale news.”
“Okay. I get that.”
“Then what’s the motive?”
“I told you. I’m not there yet.”
“And are you thinking she also murdered Ellen Donahoe and Larry Katz?”
“Not sure,” Rannie said lamely.
“So you’re without motive. What about opportunity?”
Rannie shot him a dirty look. Tim was making her feel like the student who comes to class totally unprepared and gets hammered by the teacher when Rannie had always been exactly the opposite, one of those obnoxious, smarty-pants kids whose hand was perpetually raised, bouncing in her seat, “Ooh, ooh. Call on me! I know the answer!”
A chorus of dings on her cell phone alerted Rannie to several e-mails that had popped up from S&S old-timers. News of Larry’s death—“suicide,” all the messages called it—was circulating. Ellen’s assistant, Dina, had contacted Rannie too. “You think Larry was overcome with grief? He and Ellen never seemed a big thing, but if he was in love with her, it’s so tragic.”
Dina had punctuated the end of the e-mail with a teary-eyed emoticon. Rannie let out a groan—Larry deserved better than email-ese—and leaned back against the couch. Then something else occurred to her and made her groan again. “And what am I supposed to do now with the manuscript I copyedited for Larry?”
“Send it back with a bill. You finished the job and are owed the money.”
“Yeah, but send it to whom? Larry?”
“Yes. It’ll get to the right person.” Tim was growing impatient. He stood. “I should get to the bar. Come on. You can drop the manuscript at UPS on the way.”
“You’re serious about this buddy system?” Serious seemed to be the word of the day.
At the Offbeat, Rannie made herself useful. She swabbed down the hexagonal tiled floor, laid out table settings, and corrected a misspelling on the chalkboard, which had advertised “dally specials.”
Tim treated her to an early lunch—a decent chopped salad with chicken and a Diet Coke that he hosed up at the bar. That was where they ate. Although badly scarred, the bar was made of mahogany, had a brass foot rail, and faced an enormous gilt-framed mirror. Rannie caught their reflection in it; they looked buddy-buddy without giving off that “couples” vibe, not like Bibi and her art restorer guy.
Afterward while Tim caught up with paperwork, Rannie took some orders to help out the sole waiter, a retired cop whose customers had to endure a lot of corny banter. She could spot cops now, guys in windbreakers and khakis who, an hour from now, would be in uniform at the precinct two blocks away. Were any of them Tim’s sources? The only way to find out would be to try some tough-waitressy banter of her own. . . . “So, big fella, got anything to spill on the Ret Sullivan case? That poor dame sure caught a raw deal.”
By two forty-five the place was empty again; Rannie had pocketed almost thirty-five dollars. Cops were generous tippers. By three, Tim’s car, almost as if it were holding its breath, squeezed into a tiny space within twenty feet of the Dolores Court.
Rannie shook her head. “You can wipe that self-satisfied smile off; the title is yours for keeps. Grand Poobah of Parking.”
Nate was home, en route from the kitchen to his room with a plate of microwavable mac and cheese. Rannie and Tim resumed their former places on the living room sofa, and Rannie began tackling the Sunday crossword while Tim, legs stretched out on the coffee table, one sweat-socked foot rubbing against the other, skimmed the copy of the Sunday Daily News that he’d brought from the bar.
“Help me out here,” Rannie asked. “The clue is ‘Native New Englander?’ There’s a question mark, which means the answer’s got a little spin, a pun or something. . . . Like it could be the name of a Native American tribe. It’s long. Nine letters.”
Rannie glanced up and realized Tim hadn’t been listening to her. His eyes were fastened on the Scrabble tiles.
“What?”
“I don’t even know what made me look again.” He leaned over and nudged the R and G tiles closer to each other.
“Oh!” She clutched his arm, which sent all the tiles scattering. It didn’t matter. She’d seen the same thing he had.
FORGERY ANTIOCH
“A forged will? Maybe Charlotte Cummings’s will?” Tim said.
Rannie shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” The photocopied manuscript for Portrait of a Lady still lay stacked on the console behind the sofa. Rannie reached for it and read aloud the complete acknowledgment. “ ‘For Gery Antioch. I have come to appreciate how artful you are.’ I think Ret chose the word ‘artful’ very purposefully. I think she was referring to an art forgery.”
It had to involve the Cummings collection. Rannie decided to rule out the famous altarpiece. Ret’s clue was Forgery Antioch. Even if Antioch turned out to be yet another scrambled word, Rannie felt sure it would bear no connection to the altarpiece. Why would Ret keep such major art world news a secret, buried in a cryptic book acknowledgment? She would have gone public as soon as her agent had secured a whopper of a deal—The Counterfeit Masterpiece—with Simon & Schuster. Yet not once had Ellen hinted about any other book from Ret.
“What’s going on in that twisted mind of yours?”
“Shhh. I’m thinking.” No, it was more reasonable that the forgery involved one of Silas’s lesser paintings. The one purchased from the convent? Acknowledging the crime within a book acknowledgment seemed like a sadistic wink, an in-joke that only Ret and the forger would understand.
“Is there a St. Antioch?” she asked Tim.
“Not that I ever heard of.”
“I’m calling the convent,” Rannie said. The 914 Westchester number was long erased from her phone log, so she suffered through the prompts from the digitized voice and then punched in the numbers. But her hand had started trembling so badly, she misdialed twice. On the third try, she got through, only to hear another recorded voice saying that because Sunday was a day of prayer and silence for the sisters, to please call back on Monday.
“What about your mother? Might she know?”
According to Tim, Mama Butler was a font of religious trivia, crushing all competition in the annual Catholic Jeopardy Tournament held at her parish church.
Tim didn’t answer. His own cell had started moaning. “Hey! How are you, man?” he said, nodding, and then a sudden clap to his forehead. “Good you called . . . No, it’s fine. I’m there.” He stood. “Rannie, I promised I’d lead a three thirty meeting down in the Village. I gotta go.”
“Now? Right when we have a lead!” Still, abiding by the buddy system, she tossed the magazine and got up.
“No. You can’t come. It’s a closed meeting, strictly for us alkies.”
“Swell. That means I stay locked in your car till the meeting’s over?”
“No. You can stay here. But think of it like house arrest, Rannie. I mean it.” He checked his watch. “I should be back no later than six. I’ll take you and Nate for Chinese.” Tim got his parka. At the front door, he turned. “Promise to stay put?”
Rannie crossed her heart.
First order of business: Google “St. Antioch.” She didn’t remember seeing a St. Antioch painting in the Cummings mansion, but that didn’t mean one didn’t exist. The search results showed numerous sites for a St. Ignatius of Antioch, martyred at the Colosseum in Rome by hungry leopards whose favorite dish was Early Christian Tartare. Ignatius’s end met the required yuck factor common to all the paintings Silas owned. Rannie searched Google Images for paintings of Ignatius of Antioch. None belonged to Silas Cummings.
Bummer.
The setback necessitated the consumption of a perfect PB&J, and while confirming to herself yet again that Planet Earth offered no finer source of nourishment, Rannie considered whether she might be coming at the question of FORGERY ANTIOCH from the wrong starting point. What she needed was a checklist of all the paintings that Silas owned.
Back online, Rannie located a catalog of the Cummings collection, publication date 1976. By Rannie’s calculation, the year postdated the visit from the Cummingses to the Sisters of Mercy. Whatever painting Silas had purchased from the nuns should be listed in the catalog.
A short preface written by a Met Museum curator in Northern Late Renaissance Art waxed eloquent on what Rannie already knew: the gem in the collection was the Crucifixion altarpiece by the Master of the Agony. Upon the death of Charlotte Cummings, it would become part of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum, as would the rest of Silas’s paintings, everything to be exhibited together in one gallery.
Rannie skipped past more stuff on the altarpiece and began scrolling more slowly through small-sized reproductions of martyred saints until—glory be!—she found her.
St. Margaret of Antioch. Ret had been born Kathleen Margaret Sullivan. The painting depicted a young girl in the clutches of not one but two Roman soldiers. Rannie recognized it. The St. Margaret painting had been partially visible in one of the photographs Larry had taken of the hearth, the dupes of which were in Grieg’s possession now. Ret had seen the photo too.
The accompanying text explained that Margaret, an early convert to Christianity, had hailed from Antioch—present-day Turkey—and had been “grotesquely tortured.” In addition to being strangled, she’d been plunged in boiling oil, beaten with clubs, and raked from head to toe with red-hot iron combs. Rannie enlarged the image. One of the soldiers had a club in hand while the second soldier had Margaret’s head wrenched back by the hair, a great fistful of it in each of his hands.
The image of Ret’s corpse, two hanks of hair tied to rungs on the bedstead, would stay with Rannie for the rest of her life. Now it made gruesome sense, sort of. But why bother replicating a martyrdom, as if Ret’s murder was a copycat crime, only a millennium later?
Rannie minimized the reproduction and read that Silas Cummings had purchased the painting of St. Margaret of Antioch in 1973 from the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Pound Ridge, New York.
Yes! Yes! Yes! A match. No doubt St. Margaret was little Kathleen Margaret’s name saint. This was the painting that had fascinated a morbid little orphaned girl. Rannie stared at the computer screen, stunned by this eureka moment. Had Ret tried to buy the painting? Was this the “important piece of art” she boasted about owning but kept hidden in her bedroom? If Ret had tried to purchase the painting, it seemed reasonable that she might contact Bibi Gaines.
The big stumbling block, of course, was Silas’s will, which forbade the sale of any paintings. Rannie imagined a conversation between Ret and Bibi going something like this:
Ret: For very personal reasons, I want to buy the St. Margaret of Antioch painting.
Bibi: I’d love to help you out. The museum doesn’t even want it but I’m afraid my hands are tied.
Ret: I am willing to pay very handsomely for it.
No, that wasn’t Ret-speak at all. Rannie revised Ret’s line.
Ret: Look, would a million dollars—half for you, half for the museum—change anybody’s mind?
Bibi: Hmmm. Let me see what I can do and I’ll get back to you.
Bibi Gaines was a charming and persuasive person. Nevertheless, the Metropolitan Museum would never agree to breach the terms of Silas’s will and let her sell St. Margaret. Therefore, she needed to get creative.
Forgery struck Rannie as a reasonable option. Ret unknowingly bought a counterfeit. Ret was housebound, so what were the chances of her showing up at the museum and seeing the original displayed with all Silas’s other martyred saints?
However, Larry’s photo, the one with the painting partially revealed, had tipped off Ret to the fact that she’d been cheated, duped, screwed over royally. After that, getting even with Bibi would be easy-peasy: all Ret needed to do was call the cops, maybe insist on breaking the story to the media herself, and then be the star witness at Bibi’s trial.
Rannie couldn’t remember when she’d felt so pleased with herself. She looked around for her cell to call Grieg, then stopped. Something didn’t compute. Think like Tim, she commanded herself. Then it hit her, like a safe falling on an oblivious cartoon victim. If Ret had followed this last scenario, she’d still be alive and Bibi would have been under arrest. And another thing—notifying the authorities immediately constituted the right thing to do; justice would have prevailed. Yet according to Sister Dorothy, Ret had been wrestling with her conscience over something she’d done, something sinful, morally wrong.
Maybe it was time for Rannie to resurrect extortion as the motive for Ret’s murder.
Ret: The painting you sold me is a copy, you twat.
Bibi: Excuse me. How dare you accuse me of—
Ret: Stop right there. I have proof. A photo of the real St. Margaret still hanging at Grammy’s. So here’s the deal. I keep my trap shut, but it’s gonna cost you.
So Grand Larceny Bibi. Extortion Ret . . . Rannie knew what Harriet Bookman would have to say about two wrongs. Furthermore, in Bibi’s case, one wrong led to an even worse one—premeditated murder.
It was Bibi! It was Bibi! She killed Ret and stole the forgery. Rannie jumped up. “Go, me!” she cried and did a spazzy victory dance in the living room just as Nate appeared, with tennis equipment, and headed to the front door. He shielded his face with the racket. “Stop, Ma! You’re hurting my eyes!” he cried and without breaking stride slammed the door behind him.
Rannie called Grieg and waited for the beep. Now she had a motive for Ret’s murder. Of course, she still had no earthly idea why Ellen and Larry had ended up just as dead as Ret, but first things first.
When Grieg called back a few minutes later, Rannie tried hard to keep the giddiness out of her voice.
“This is all very complicated sounding, Ms. Bookman,” he said at one point when she paused to take a breath. “I’m not following how Gery Antioch is really a Catholic saint named Margaret.”
“I realize it’s a little confusing.”
“What about coming down to the precinct?”
“I can’t. Not now.” Breaking her promise to stay put was not an option. “Maybe later this evening. What if I e-mail you now? It’ll be much clearer in an e-mail.” The written word was her stock-in-trade, after all. Suddenly Rannie remembered a piece of evidence that she hadn’t factored in. The semen on Ret’s body. Rannie couldn’t let on that she knew about it or how. So she added, “I know it must be hard to envision a woman committing the crime, but please consider what I’m telling you.”
“Sure. E-mail me, Ms. Bookman. I’ll read it.”
Suddenly Rannie replayed a day years ago when she’d walked into Ellen’s office as Ellen was ending a phone conversation with an unpublished writer, a friend of a friend. “Sure. E-mail me your manuscript. I’ll take a look at it,” Ellen promised, all the while rolling her eyes at Rannie and making the “let’s wrap it up” roll with her free hand.
Grieg was taking Rannie no more seriously.
Undaunted, Rannie grabbed a legal pad and scribbled down the facts—okay, maybe not “facts” exactly but “likely suppositions,” which she listed in a semilogical order. Then she started typing the e-mail. She stopped once, hit Save and returned to the site with the Cummings art catalog. The painting of St. Margaret of Antioch measured thirty-six by forty-one inches. In her mind’s eye, the Hallmark Madonna that had hung on Ret’s bedroom wall was smaller. Then returning to her e-mail, Rannie added, “I believe that after killing Ret, Barbara Gaines took the counterfeit St. Margaret and replaced it with the painting of a Madonna and Child that I saw on the day of the murder. If the Madonna is removed, my hunch is that the rectangle of cleaner wall paint will measure thirty-six by forty-one inches, the dimensions of the St. Margaret picture.”
Rannie was still not finished typing when the landline rang. Rannie hit Save again and answered the phone.
It was Olivia.
“Sweetie, Nate’s not here. I’ll tell him you called,” said Rannie, unable to disguise the impatience in her voice.
Olivia, however, did not disengage so easily. “Actually I was calling you, Ms. Bookman. I’m hoping I left a black silk reticule at your house.”
A reticule? Was Olivia going through a Jane Austen fashion phase? Olivia said it might be in the den.
It was. Harriet had “tidied up” before leaving yesterday and, perhaps thinking the purse was Alice’s, had hung it from a hook on the back of the closet door.
“Yeah, it’s here. Nate’ll bring it to school tomorrow.”
“Um . . . could you do me one more favor and see if there’s a Bloomie’s charge card in it?”
Rannie pulled open the purse’s drawstrings while keeping the phone cradled in her neck. “Yup, it’s here. Also a piece of paper with an address and phone number.” Rannie read it to Olivia.
“Oh, that’s Mrs. Gaines’s address. I don’t need it. As long as the card’s there. Thanks!”
After they hung up, Rannie was still holding the crumpled piece of paper with Olivia’s round, surprisingly childish-looking print. A sickening little shiver wiggled up her spine.
Bibi Gaines’s address was 69 East Sixty-Ninth Street. Same as Ret’s.
Now Rannie could graft opportunity onto motive. Tenants’ spare keys were kept, according to the handyman, in the basement of the building. Bibi could have stolen the set to Ret’s apartment, slipped in and after killing Ret and switching the artwork, returned the keys to the basement. There would be nothing alarming about images of Bibi Gaines on security cameras. She was a resident.
When she calmed down after some more self-congratulatory victory dancing, Rannie debated whether to call Grieg right away or finish the e-mail with this astounding bit of late-breaking news.
She decided to finish her manifesto. Back on the sofa, she flexed her fingers and was about to resume typing when, to her mortification, she saw the long chunk of her message, which stopped abruptly in midsentence, had not been saved but sent to Grieg.
Rannie called and cringed waiting for the beep. “Me again! Rannie Bookman,” she began. “I have critical information for you. Please call.”
Grieg was dutiful, you had to give him that. “It’s Grieg.”
“Th-thanks for calling,” Rannie stuttered. “Listen, I accidentally sent you an e-mail before I was finished.”
“Is that your ‘critical information’?”
“No. No. Of course not. Five minutes ago, I learned that Barbara Gaines and Ret Sullivan live in the same building. Well, lived in Ret’s case. Barbara Gaines could have stolen spare keys and let herself into—”
“Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Slow down. Tell me the address.”
Rannie did.
There were a few moments of silence. Rannie could hear the clacking of computer keys. Then it stopped and he said, sounding weary and exasperated, “No, Ms. Bookman, Barbara Gaines doesn’t live there. Her address is 302 East Seventy-Third Street.”
“That’s impossible!”
“Tell that to the New York White Pages. I looked up Barbara Gaines . . . ‘B’ as in ‘Bravo,’ ‘A’ as in ‘Apple,’ ‘R’ as in ‘Rocket.’ . . .” Grieg insisted on going through the whole mishegoss of spelling out the entire name. “What made you think she lived at 69 East Sixty-Ninth Street?”
Rannie wanted to cry. No way was she revealing her source was a teenage girl with a TCB tat on her tush. “I realize I have zero credibility with you now but I’m still sending the rest of the e-mail and I sincerely hope you read it.”
Rannie wrapped up the manifesto, peppered with so many “possiblys” and “might haves” that if Grieg bothered wading through it, she tried not to picture him with eyes crossed, twirling a finger around his ear. Cuckoo bird. Cuckoo bird.
Rannie stared at the phone number that Olivia had written down and—what did she have to lose?—dialed it. An anonymous digitized voice answered. In frustration, Rannie flung her cell on the sofa, abandoned the computer, and felt so disheartened that even completing the Sunday crossword within an hour—“Wampanoag” fit for “Native New Englander?”—didn’t lift her spirits.
The landline rang. Olivia again?
No.
“Hello, my name’s Fred Rumson. I’m calling from Chaps. Is this Nathan Lorimer’s mother?”
“Yes. Is Nate okay?” Rannie’s breathing turned shallow, her heart rate jumped.
“He’ll be fine. But he got whacked pretty hard with a racket. Right in the face. Got knocked out cold. My son and I were hitting balls in the next court. I waited till the EMTs came. They took him to Roosevelt Hospital.”
“Who is this?” Warning flares went up. Someone—Bibi—was trying to get Rannie out of the house to waylay her.
“Fred Rumson. My son goes to Chaps.”
“How’d you get this number?”
“A girl knew your son’s name. And the security guard had a school directory.”
“What girl? I want to speak with her.”
“I have no idea who.” The man sounded put out now. “Listen. I stuck around till the ambulance came because I thought if it was my kid . . .”
Were my kid, not was my kid . . .
“ . . . I’d want a grown-up around.”
Rannie needed verification. “Can I speak to your son? Or the security guard?”
“What! Look, lady, I was trying to be nice. I don’t know what your problem is. Your son should be at Roosevelt any minute. Sorry I disturbed you.”
The line went dead.
Oh God, what to do? She tried Nate, although he never answered once he saw her number on the cell screen. “Nate, please, please. If you’re there, pick up.” When he didn’t, Rannie flew to her room and dumped out the night table drawer. In the Chaps directory, yes, there was the listing. Frederick and Clea Rumson, parents of Gabriel, a ninth grader. No answer at their number. Or Olivia’s or Ben’s.
Rannie tried Tim. She tried Chaps’s main number, which predictably on a Sunday went straight to voice mail. She tried Roosevelt Hospital and was shunted from one clueless person to another. In desperation, she tried Nate again. “PICK UP THE GODDAMNED PHONE, NATE!” Even before hearing the first word of his automated reply, Rannie hurled the phone at the wall, a pathetic girlie throw. The cell landed with a plop on her pillow.
Okay. Decision Time. In her head, she knew this was a trap and if she left, she was going to fall—splat!—right into it. But her heart wasn’t so sure. What if Nate was hurt badly? A head injury? What if they needed to operate and she wasn’t there to give permission?
She grabbed her fleece hoodie and tried to weigh consequences. In the end, her Nike-clad feet made the decision for her. She was powerless to stop them. She found herself propelled out the door to the landing, where her finger pressed the elevator button.