Chapter 6
Before Chris had been at the office more than an hour the following Monday, ramping up preparations for the Gala Unveiling had taken over her life. The beleaguered staff of the Public Relations Office might still be engaged in damage control, but the murder seemed to have slipped into a poor second in the competition for the university administration's attention. For once they were throwing themselves into an arts event. Chris later reflected that the intensity of their interest in this project was directly proportional to their inability to control events related to the murder. The president, the provost and the dean had something important to do that prevented their concentrating too long or too hard on who killed Elizabeth Page.
When Drew stopped by the office in the afternoon that day to report that Ted Olsen had delivered the plans for an electro-magnetic gun to the police department, Chris had only a moment to consider the implications before she had to dash to another meeting. As Drew walked with her toward the administration building, she insisted, "Promise me you two won't build one of those things, Drew."
Drew grimaced, but promised, and they parted at an intersection where President Grover Wilmot (1897-1901) sat rigid on his plinth. A filthy Santa Claus hat drooped over one of his bronze eyes and he glared out at the world with the other, clearly offended by the impertinence. Chris chuckled for the first and last time that day.
If she expected anyone at the meeting to bring up the subject of murder, she was disappointed. The provost only grunted when she told him that Rachael Jacobsen was assuming responsibility for the museum's daily operations for the moment. Dean Lorraine Campbell-McFee, when given the same information said, "Good, good... we'll deal with it later," and returned to perusing the list of RSVPs. The president's main concern seemed to be that no one do or say anything to offend Howard Randall by any means, intentional or inadvertent. Chris wondered whether the donor would think it appropriate to have a grand party in his honor when there was an unsolved murder in their midst, but she swallowed the impulse to bring it up.
"Randall and his wife will be here the Friday before the Gala," the president announced as the meeting was drawing to a close. "He says they have a cabin down at Little Walk that he hasn't seen in years and they plan to stay there, but what if packrats have moved in? I think we should make the gesture to put them up at the Camford Inn. If he turns us down, so be it."
So Randall is keeping in touch by some means, Chris thought. She wondered whether the Camford police knew as much as the administration did about his whereabouts. She'd have to ask Ryquist.
Later that day Antonia Westphall stuck her head in Chris's door and said in what passed for a whisper, "Have they been talking to you, Chris? The police?" The little art historian was infamous for one distinguishing characteristic: her voice. In spite of her size, under five feet, she possessed a resonant alto that could be heard over the babble of dozens of undergraduates with minimal effort on her part. No one ignored her when she opened her mouth.
"Off and on, Antonia." Chris waved her in. "Shut the door, please."
When she had perched on the edge of the visitor's chair, Antonia said, "Well, I just don't know what more I can tell them. I mean, it was fixed. You fixed the catalog fiasco, Chris. I was angry, of course. Who wouldn't be? But, Dios mio, I wouldn't kill anybody! Well, maybe Fidel if I got the chance, but no one else." She made wrinkles in her skirt with nervous fingers. "Why do they keep coming back to me?"
"Maybe they're checking to see if your story is consistent or if you remember something more." Chris immediately regretted saying anything.
Antonia's eyes got very round. "Madre de Dios! Have I changed my story?"
"No, no, that's not what I meant. I meant they might need to make sure they understand exactly what you've said. You know how easy it is to misinterpret things." Like right now, for example.
"I went home after the opening. That's all I did. My downstairs neighbors were gone so they can't say when I came in. I don't know when they got home, but the police have been talking to them too. I don't have an alibi!"
Chris thought maybe only the students in the soundproof practice rooms in the music wing failed to hear Antonia's lament.
"Antonia, I am so sorry you're upset this way. What can I do?"
Antonia looked out the window for a beat. "Nothing," she said at last in the lowest decibels that passed her lips since Chris had known her.
"If you weren't out and about that night, the police won't be able to find anyone who can say you were, right? Tell them the truth and you'll be fine."
"I'm not sure what the truth is anymore. I've been over it so many times in my own mind. Maybe I went for a walk. Maybe I forgot going to a movie. I just don't know anymore." She rose a little shakily and reached for a tissue on Chris's desk. "I just don't know anymore." She left.
Chris looked after her colleague for a moment. Will life ever get back to normal? When the phone rang ten minutes later and it was her dean, Chris expected to be brought back to the everyday realities of campus life. Instead she found that the police also had visited Lorraine Campbell-McFee.
"I just thought you should know that they are starting to ask a lot of questions about how and why the museum ended up in the Division of Fine Arts. Apparently the board members have been sharing what they knew about Elizabeth's fight for autonomy."
"I guess I'll have to explain my part in it to Ryquist."
"Luckily you didn't have much part in it. I just thought you should know." The dean rang off.
Chris stared out her window, reviewing what she knew first hand or had heard through the grapevine about the politics of placing the museum in her jurisdiction when she was first hired. Elizabeth Page had operated autonomously from the time she was hired. By the end of the second year her budget over-runs were beginning to push the president and the provost past annoyed toward thoughts of firing her. When Chris was hired they simply moved the problem to the Division of Fine Arts and waited to see how the new director would deal with it.
Chris vividly remembered her first encounter with Page. It had happened within Chris's first week as director of the Division of Fine Arts. When the museum director walked in and sat in the visitor's chair she was elegantly dressed and graceful in her movements. She seemed poised and very attractive. Then she opened her mouth.
Elizabeth Page saw no reason to keep her displeasure with the turn of events from her new boss. She made it very clear that she saw the move as tying a dead weight onto the soaring ambitions of her museum. It was, she announced, a short sighted and bureaucratic maneuver that she would continue to fight every way she could.
The dean and other administrators had warned Chris about Director Page. Still, Chris had been startled by the snide superiority and unabashed disdain Page lavished on her before Chris had even said a word. It was clear that Elizabeth Page was smarting from defeat.
Chris kept her temper despite a great temptation to do otherwise. She listened to the tirade and let Page come to a defiant halt.
"Finished?"
Page nodded.
Chris took a breath. "As long as the arrangement exists in its present form you will abide by the rules of the Division. That means you no longer have sole control of the museum budget or the exhibition schedule. You will report to me as director of the Division of Fine Arts. You will not try to make 'end runs' unless you're prepared to accept the consequence of having even less control over the affairs of the museum than you currently enjoy. If that is unacceptable, you are certainly free to seek a remedy with the upper administrators, but as they are the very folks who devised this new arrangement, they are unlikely to be sympathetic at present. For that reason, I think you'd be well advised to control your remarks until the arrangement has time to play itself out over the course of the academic year."
Since that confrontation, the passage of five years had tempered their interactions and, although the relationship was never an easy one, the university seemed pleased that the museu
m no longer overran its budget. The Art Department enjoyed participating in the development of the exhibition schedule and felt well served by the arrangement. Now Chris would have to explain all that to a non-academic who was looking for a motive for murder. She sighed.
The net was being cast far and wide. On Tuesday Chris heard from Charlie that one of his buddies in the registrar's office had heard a very interesting tidbit from a secretary in the president's office. The police had interviewed that august personage about the politics of the museum's presence in the Division of Fine Arts. How information traveled on a university campus was a mystery worthy of a sociology dissertation at the very least.
Richard Bjornson was spending a good bit of time with the police. He still hadn't built an E-M gun for them, but he and Colin McCarty had been interviewed several times about their interaction after the opening. Bjornson maintained he still didn't remember much and McCarty's version of events was thus unsubstantiated. No one had been eliminated as a suspect so far.
By Friday of the second week following the murder, even the Camford Times was finding it difficult to say anything new about it. The police were making no progress, at least none that was visible to the press, and hints about inefficiencies in the department were starting to find their way into the editorial mix.
At breakfast Pansy lowered the paper with a sigh. "It's a shame they haven't found out who did it yet, but based on what Hjelmer told us, they aren't just sitting around like this article implies." She sniffed. "I think people are too quick to judge, don't you, Teensy?"
The reversion to Chris's childhood nickname, out of favor for at least thirty years, made her frown briefly. "I guess so." She resumed reading the business section.
"I wonder whether that young man will be on time this afternoon," Pansy continued, unconscious of any gap in her train of thought. It took Chris a minute to catch up.
"You mean the physical therapist? I'm sure he'll be here as promised unless he doesn't know this part of town and ends up on the north side."
Camford's founding fathers had played a particularly bad joke on later generations by naming streets on either side of the railroad line for members of their own families and neglecting to use north or south designations to clarify things. Politics combined with familial pride created a stalemate in place to this day. One learned eventually that Eleanor Avenue and Elynor Avenue were on different sides of town, but it was a struggle. Camfordites had taken to saying "Eleanor EA" and "Elynor Y" when giving their addresses. Eventually, as if by osmosis, one caught on.
Chris got to the office a few minutes late, diverted only a little by a trip to Lotta Latte. She was thinking pleasant thoughts about the coming weekend when Charlie announced that she was to call Detective Sergeant Hjelmer Ryquist ASAP. Her pleasant thoughts evaporated instantly.
"How you doing, Doc?" Ryquist's baritone boomed cheerfully over the line. "Say, I've got a couple of quick things to discuss with you so I wonder when you're gonna be free today. I'll even buy you a cappuccino, if you've got the time."
They arranged to meet at Lotta Latte at three-thirty. That left the bulk of the day for Chris to stew about what fresh horrors might be coming her way.
When they were seated in the museum coffee shop at the appointed hour Ryquist began talking without being prompted. "Talked to Page's brother last night finally." He paused. "He doesn't sound all that broken up as it happens."
"Maybe they weren't close." Chris sipped her double skinny latte.
"That's an understatement. According to him, the first time Page came back to Oklahoma since she was nineteen was for her mother's funeral in '03. He says she looked down her nose at everybody and left without saying goodbye. He hasn't seen her since."
"Well at least she was consistent," Chris replied. "I wouldn't like to think she was Miss Charm everywhere but here. What does her brother do for a living?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Elizabeth was a bit of social climber. I'm just curious."
"That's why we couldn't find him for so long. He's an over-the-road truck driver. A real bubba by his own description. He said the whole situation was summed up for him by the fact that Elizabeth went ballistic every time he called her by the family nickname."
"And that was...."
"Lizzie."
Chris's mouth fell open. Slender, blond Elizabeth—elegantly coifed and accessorized—Chris had never even thought of calling her anything but Elizabeth. Even Beth, Liz and Betsy all reeked of a familiarity that was clearly unwelcome, but Lizzie? That was so far from logical that she almost choked. She thought of her own detested nickname. "Family names are a pain sometimes, but they don't usually cause a total rift."
"I'm thinking it was sort of symbolic." Ryquist scratched his ear.
"You're probably right, Hjelmer. So what can I help you with?" Chris had been hoping to leave school early today to meet her mother's physical therapist and check on Pansy's progress. It would be good to move this conversation along.
"Well, here's the thing. We found her lawyer and he coughed up her will. She would have left half of her estate to her mother, but since that lady's dead everything goes to the art museum."
"Generous of her," Chris said, surprised. "Did she have much of an estate?"
"What would you expect, Doc?" Ryquist watched her speculatively.
Chris shrugged. "I don't know. The university provides some life insurance and she qualified for teachers' retirement. She didn't own her apartment. I'd be surprised if it was much."
"It was almost two million," Ryquist said.
"Wow!" Chris gasped. "Where'd she get that kind of money?"
"I was hoping you'd help fill me in there."
'"Me? I have no idea. What form is the money in? Did she play the market or something?"
"Mostly mutual funds, some bonds. And a summer place in the Adirondacks worth almost half a mil."
"Some summer place!"
"Told her lawyer it was a gift to her from someone in New York." Ryquist swirled the dregs of his coffee and took the last swallow. "He said she complained about the property taxes every year, but she wouldn't consider selling it."
"This makes you suspicious for some reason, Hjelmer. Why? She had a life before she came here." Chris put her cup down and concentrated on Ryquist's broad face.
"Just wondering if she was the type to blackmail someone, Doc. You think she'd do that?"
Chris went slack jawed again. She finally shook her head. "I have no idea. Two weeks ago I'd have said the idea was preposterous. A lot's happened to convince me I don't know much about anything anymore."
"Would you say it's totally out of the realm of possibility?"
Chris thought about it. Beautiful, ruthless Elizabeth Page. "No, I guess I wouldn't."
Chris arrived home too late to meet the physical therapist. Pansy was back in her wheelchair when she walked in.
Chris threw herself on the couch. "How did your session go, Mother?"
"Tom says I'm on schedule. He made me do some terribly painful things but he says I can start using the walker more and the chair less. He showed me how to get up and down stairs. Won't be long and you can have your office back."
"No hurry, Mom. What shall I get us for dinner?" Chris winced inwardly at the thought of the state of her refrigerator. She brightened considerably when Pansy said, "I'll give you a list for the store. You buy and I'll cook." At least one thing was looking up.
Friday, December tenth arrived at long last. Chris taught her last class for the semester, spending most of the hour answering questions about the final exam scheduled for the following Wednesday. When she closed and locked the classroom door it felt like a great weight had been lifted. Back in her office she told Charlie to expect her when he saw her, and she walked through a light snowfall to the museum to get to work on her most important mission for the day: hanging the Picasso.
The debates about where to hang the painting had been long and arduous. The president wanted to put
it behind the docent's desk in the interest of security. The Alumni Association's director, Harrison Foy, expressed his desire to hang it in their own building. Both suggestions were nixed but only after rigorous debate. When Chris asked Rachael Jacobsen whether she knew where Elizabeth had intended to hang it, she was surprised to learn that she did.
"We had the security company come check it out, Chris. They gave us this remote sensor, so it will be hooked into the system without having to rewire anything. Elizabeth said she was concerned about vandalism so this should be a great place." They stood at the railing of the mezzanine looking across six feet of open space to a blank wall. This was one of the imaginative openings the architect had built into the plan to create the illusion that the second floor floated. Since the main floor was the exhibition space for rotating shows and the mezzanine housed the permanent collection, having the painting visible from the mezzanine was appropriate. The fact that viewers would look at it across the space that opened to the main floor twelve feet below meant their most valuable object by far would be safe from most disasters.
"People won't be able to get right up on it, Rachael. That's both a good and a bad thing." Theft would be difficult, which should please their insurer and Chris shared Elizabeth's apparent concern about vandalism. Some disgruntled student would have to write rude things in ballpoint somewhere else unless he got a twelve-foot ladder. "It's just that I like to look at stuff up close and personal."
Rachael chuckled. "Well, you'll have to be satisfied with what you can see before we hang it, I guess."
They descended to the storeroom to unpack the painting. When Chris and Hjelmer Ryquist had checked to see that theft of the painting hadn't been the motive in Elizabeth's murder they'd replaced only a third of the screws holding the lid in place. Chris and Rachael got it off fairly quickly as a result and Picasso's Still Life with Pipe and Wine Bottle, 1914, once again lay face up in the unflattering fluorescent light.
Chris sent Rachael off to find one more pair of hands. She enlisted student assistant Binty Buchanan and while the two women lifted the painting out with great care, he slid the crate out from underneath.
When they had laid the painting flat on the table and stowed the crate, the three of them looked it over carefully. Chris warned Binty not to touch the surface. The three of them nearly knocked heads as they peered at it.
"So what's it supposed to be?" Binty asked.
Chris pointed to the distorted form at the right of center. "There's the wine bottle. You took the survey of art history, right?"
Binty nodded, then shrugged. "Never did get Picasso," he said a little sheepishly. "But I guess somebody must like this stuff 'cause I hear it's worth mega-bucks." He continued to stare at it. "It's kind'a weird," he said at last, then left to return to his other tasks while Rachael went to supervise the delivery of the scissor-lift that they would need for the hanging.
Chris had a much better developed sense of history than did a twenty-year-old college student. Although she wasn't fond of the Synthetic Cubist style, it was a Picasso after all. She inspected it closely. Forms like the table top, the wine bottle and the pipe were identifiable, though distorted, and the colors were certainly brighter than those he'd used in the earlier Analytical Cubist style. The introduction of collage elements had been a revolution at the time. She walked around the painting, put on white cotton gloves and took a soft cloth out of a box of rags.
She wiped and dusted the frame carefully down one vertical side and was working across the bottom when she stopped to look more closely at the collaged areas. What was happening in the world the day he glued these patches of newspaper into place? Did he do this work before or after June 28, 1914, and the start of the First World War?
Moving to the side she looked at the painting upside down to scan an exposed patch of newspaper, readable through a transparent reddish glaze of paint. Her French had not completely deserted her, she was glad to realize. There was something about farmers being angry with the government. Some things never change, she thought as she turned her attention to another scrap, also upside down when the painting was viewed normally. This one caused her to step back and take a deep breath.
She approached it again and moved the painting a bit for better light. Was what she thought she had seen really there? It was. In a sentence visible through a thin ochre glaze appeared the names Reagan and Thatcher.