Читать книгу The Scarlet Macaw - S.P. Hozy - Страница 8

By the time Angela arrived from Germany, they had the results of Peter’s autopsy.

“Poisoned?” said Maris. “But that’s impossible.”

“Not Peter,” said Dinah. “Nobody would poison Peter.”

“Ridiculous,” said Angela. “There must be some mistake.”

In time the initial shock wore off, but not the astonishment. Who would want to poison Peter? And why? The investigation soon told them how it had been done. The poison was in Peter’s Campari — not just his glass of Campari, but the whole bottle. It was chloral hydrate, a depressant used in sleeping medications — usually harmless, but lethal in an overdose, especially when combined with another depressant, alcohol.

“I was so sure he was having a stroke,” said Maris.

“Of course you were,” said Dinah gently. “Why would it occur to you that Peter had been poisoned? I probably would have thought the same thing.”

“You are both too kind,” said Angela. “I would have thought he was playing a trick to get attention. I probably would have told him not to be stupid and then I would have ignored him.” She crossed her arms in a self-satisfied gesture that was meant to absolve her of any compassion for her ex-husband.

Dinah smiled nervously at her and Maris glared. Angela worked hard at being uncompromising, and Maris supposed it had served her well in the cutthroat world of art and antiquities. But on a personal level, Maris thought her unkindness was despicable because it was so deliberate. She worked just as hard at it as at the other disagreeable aspects of her personality.

“You know,” she began, “you could show an ounce of compassion, Angela. If not for Peter, then at least for me and Dinah. We loved him, even if you did not.”

“Sorry, sorry,” said Angela, in a way that showed she was not. “It’s just my way of showing grief: by burying my true feelings under a mountain of rock. Okay?”

Maris wanted to say, “No, it’s not okay,” but she didn’t — more for Dinah’s sake than for her own. She was more than willing to take on Angela, but the time and the place weren’t right. It was true, she knew, that people often behaved in uncharacteristic ways in the face of grief or shock, or the truly unexpected, like murder. There was something about a situation like this that brought out either the best or the worst in people.

And this had to be murder. Peter wouldn’t poison his own Campari. There were easier ways to commit suicide. Besides, he’d only have to put it in his own glass, not the whole bottle. What if Maris had decided to have a glass with him? Would she be lying on a slab in the morgue along with him, with a Y-shaped incision in her chest badly stitched together with thick black twine?

It was an ugly picture. She excused herself and went to the washroom to splash cold water on her face to try and expunge the mental image. When Peter’s lawyer had called to give them the results of the autopsy, they had been at the gallery trying to decide what to do. Should they re-open and conduct business as usual after a suitable period of mourning? Should they sell off the inventory and close up for good? What about relocating the gallery to Berlin where Angela spent most of her time when she wasn’t travelling? Maris and Dinah preferred the option of leaving the gallery open. Surprisingly, so did Angela. All three were amazed at how easy it had been to agree.

“Of course,” said Angela, “it means I’ll have to take a greater part in the day-to-day operations. Peter was the one in charge of all of that.” The prospect was clearly distasteful to her. Angela preferred the role of globetrotting procurer. She liked the hunt; it suited her predatory personality. Angela had instincts, Peter used to say. He knew where to send her, but it was Angela who knocked on doors and shook hands with people, and then got whatever she wanted from them. She and Peter had been a good team where the business was concerned; but the marriage had failed after eight years. Neither had remarried in the seven years since the divorce and the business had benefited from their redirected passion. The gallery was their love child.

“You know,” said Dinah tentatively, “I’ve been Peter’s right hand for the last five years. I know the customers. I know the books. I know how Peter liked things done.”

Angela stood up and straightened her black silk skirt. Then she adjusted the matching black silk jacket. Maris thought, She’s built like a boning knife: all precision, balance and sharpness. Her highly polished, red-painted fingernails were perfectly manicured. Her blonde hair had just enough platinum highlights to catch the sun but not so many to make it look like a dye job. She was forty-five, Peter’s age, but looked thirty-five. Nothing drooped, nothing sagged. Give it another five years and she’d be getting the eye job and the Botox injections, probably in Bangkok where she could disappear while the swelling went down and the scars healed.

Maris looked at her own hands, an artist’s hands with strong fingers and flat, spatulate fingertips. Paint thinner had left its mark on them, cracking them around the nails and roughing them up on the backs. No amount of Vaseline Intensive Care for Extra Dry Skin could undo the damage. She was almost forty and had been painting for half her life. I look forty, she thought, catching her reflection in the glass cabinet that held the gallery’s most precious pieces. I’m low-maintenance, she thought, glancing at Angela, and it shows. Her brown hair used to be shinier, used to be thicker. When did that happen? Her skin already had a web of fine lines around her eyes and her mouth. It was hard to avoid the sun in Singapore, and she’d been here nearly four years. Who cares? she thought. I’ll age gracefully. I will become an “original,” like my mother. I won’t cave in to the youth cult thing. I won’t turn myself into a Botox Barbie like Angela. Right, she thought. Blah, blah, blah.

“I can’t pay you any more than Peter was paying you,” Angela told Dinah, thinking she would nip in the bud any plans Dinah might have to take advantage of the void Peter’s death had left. Maris saw Dinah flinch, ever so slightly, her head jerking back about a centimetre as if a mosquito had grazed her skin.

“I think we should discuss finances another time,” said Maris. “We’re all a little raw right now.”

“I have to go anyway,” said Angela. “I’m getting acupuncture treatments for these damn headaches.” Maris pictured Angela with a head full of long, thin needles, like a pincushion. It was perfect. She looked at Dinah, who was pursing her lips and staring off to the side. She knew that expression. It meant that Dinah was doing her detached thing so she wouldn’t laugh. Or cry.

After Angela left, Maris said to Dinah, “Are you back?”

Dinah nodded. “I just needed to zone out for a minute,” she said. “I was actually thinking about killing her.” Maris smiled. Dinah was probably the most gentle, least violent person she knew. The fact that she was small — maybe five feet tall — and slender — maybe ninety pounds — had nothing to do with it. Dinah was like a jasmine blossom. You walked by them every day without a second look. They were tiny and white and plain. But one day you might walk by when the wind was blowing a certain way and something would catch your attention. A subtle fragrance or a shiny leaf might get caught by the sun and you’d stop and take a second look. And you’d notice how beautiful it was, how essential. Because if all the jasmine disappeared from Asia, it would be a different place, bereft, less welcoming. And you’d be glad you stopped and took notice.

“So now what?” said Maris.

Dinah sighed. “I guess we try and pretend it’s business as usual.”

“I’m not keen on Angela being in charge.”

“Neither am I. But that’s the way it is. For now.” Dinah ran her fingers through her straight black hair. “I, for one, intend to….”

“What?” said Maris.

“I don’t know,” said Dinah. “I suddenly lost my train of thought.”

“Ah,” said Maris.

They had the funeral five days later. The police had released the body but said the case was still open. There were no clues other than the poisoned Campari and that wasn’t really a clue. It was just a fact. It didn’t lead anywhere. It would take a month to canvass all the pharmacies to find out who had purchased chloral hydrate in the past — what? Two weeks? Two months? — then it would take several weeks to track down and interview them all. The investigation was going to be long and slow. It would be about legwork rather than luck. Without any sworn enemies to step forward and confess, there wasn’t much to go on. A disgruntled client? They would check out the possibility, even though Dinah and Angela both denied such a person existed. But who knew? If they were dealing with a psychopath, it could be someone who was charming on the outside and seething with thoughts of revenge on the inside. Like Ted Bundy. And Peter’s clients were scattered all over the world. You didn’t have to live in Singapore to buy your art from Peter Stone Antiquities: You could go to Peter’s website and do your shopping online. It would be like trying to find a pedophile in cyberspace — a forty-year-old man masquerading as a teenager. It was just too easy to be invisible online.

They tried to keep the funeral simple and elegant, the way Peter would have wanted it, but a lot of people showed up because of the publicity and because of their morbid fascination with the way Peter had died. People who barely knew him tried to pretend they’d lost a dear friend. The ones who had lost a dear friend were offended and upset by the curiosity seekers, who thought that to be at the funeral of a victim of murder had some kind of status attached to it. Something they could dine out on for months. “It was a closed casket,” they’d say. “He must have been hideous,” they could tell an enthralled audience. “All purple and bloated. He was poisoned, after all. So dreadful. And he was such a lovely man. So smart and sensitive. I feel as if I’ve lost my best friend. I miss him terribly.” Cut to a series of faces with downcast eyes, nodding sadly and sympathetically. Murmurings of “You poor thing,” “I know, I know,” and “I feel the same way.”

Maris tried hard not to let anger interfere with her grief. Peter had been good to her, and had supported her and her art when she believed she had nothing to offer. She had come to Singapore when a gallery owner in Vancouver noticed that local Chinese people were buying her art. He recommended she contact Peter Stone in Singapore because he might be interested in carrying her work. She had emailed him some photographs of her paintings and he’d said, “Send me something. I’m interested.” She was thirty-five, single, with no real prospects in Canada. So she bought a plane ticket, packed a few of her paintings and a bunch of her drawings, and flew into her future.

She and Peter had become friends, even though they were as different as coffee and coconuts. Peter was meticulous, discerning, careful, and successful. She was impulsive, intuitive, messy, and success was not even in her vocabulary. She was an artist. He was a businessman. But he knew art when he saw it, and she aspired to create art. Their relationship was symbiotic. Peter began showing her paintings in his gallery, and people started buying them. In a way, she owed him everything. It wasn’t just the money she was able to make that allowed her to continue painting; it was the fact that Peter believed in her. He told her she was an artist and so she started to believe in herself.

Now what will I do? she thought. She knew what she wanted to do, but crawling into a hole and shutting out the world wouldn’t solve anything. Besides, it wasn’t fair to Dinah, who had lost much more than she had. Dinah had lost a brother — at least a half-brother — and her best friend. Maris felt as if she were starting all over again, only this time without Peter to pick her up when she fell down. She couldn’t imagine painting again. When she looked around, she felt tired rather than energized. Nothing inspired her. It’s temporary, she told herself. This is what grief can do. It fools you into thinking the world has ended, when it’s really just holding its breath for a while. Soon it will be time to exhale and start again.