Jane Cleland - Consigned to Death

Martha, the bitch-queen, that’s how I’d always thought of her. I shook my head, aghast to realize how right I’d been.

My phone began to vibrate, and I recognized Sasha’s cell phone number on the caller ID display.

“Excuse me,” I said to Alverez and Max, stood up and moved away, standing by the window with my back to the room, and answered. “Sasha?”

“Oh, Josie, I’m so sorry.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m afraid I overslept.”

“What? Overslept? You!”

“Yes, and then I was rushing to get in. Still, I should have called you sooner.”

“That’s okay. It’s just pretty unlike you.”

“Well, I was up pretty late…”

All at once I wondered if she’d spent the night with Fred. Wow. Hot doings in the ol’ town overnight.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “All that counts is that you’re okay.”

I turned off the phone, and stood up, a few tears of relief sliding down my cheeks. I swallowed twice, and in a moment, felt able to turn around.

“Is everything all right?” Alverez asked, standing up.

I nodded. “Absolutely.” I waved it aside. “All’s well.” I smiled, and rejoined the table.

The meeting with Murphy was brief. He was a small, chunky fellow in his late forties, very precise and pedantic. He wanted, he said, to meet us to explain the process, which he did in a monotone. I had trouble listening, and after a few minutes, didn’t bother to try. I knew Max would fill me in.

When he gathered his papers together and left, I asked Alverez, “Is he better in court than he is in a meeting?”

Alverez smiled. “Yeah, it’s amazing, actually. He’s a good prosecutor.”

I shook my head, and smiled back. “You’d never know it.”

“What kind of case do you have?” Max asked.

Alverez shrugged. “Mostly, it’s circumstantial, but it’s strong.”

“You have the footprint and what else?”

“We’ll be holding a news conference later today. Nothing I say should be discussed before then. I’m not saying there’s anything confidential. There’s not. Everything I’m telling you has already been turned over to the defense. Still, it’s important that it not be talked about idly. Agreed?”

Both Max and I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “Until when?”

“Until after our news conference.”

“Which is when?”

“Four. Why? Who are you planning on talking to?”

“You never know.” I smiled. “So… what else?”

After a pause, he said, “I accept your assurance that you won’t say anything to anyone until after we issue our official statement. That said, to answer your question, there was one set of prints at the Grant house that had been unidentified. We now know that they belong to Martha.”

The unidentified prints Wes had told me about. “Didn’t you compare them to her prints during the investigation?” I asked, surprised.

“No. Why would we? Barney was the dealer, not Martha. Until I started hearing about her personality from you and others, I never even thought of her.”

“That makes sense,” I acknowledged.

“Something that we kept quiet were two prints that we found on the tube the Renoir was stashed in. We knew that they matched the unidentified ones in the Grant house. Now we know they’re Martha’s.”

“That’s impressive,” Max said, nodding.

“Yeah. And there’s more. We’ve got the call from the Taffy Pull to Mr. Grant. And that call was followed by another one immediately afterwards to Barney’s cell phone. A clerk that was working at the store that day remembers Martha being on the phone. We’ve also got Josie’s testimony that Mr. Grant used a pencil to write appointments specifically so he could erase them if something changed, and that he made those corrections immediately. And Barney told Josie that Martha was their point person in their dealings with Mr. Grant. Put it all together, what it means is that, in fact, they didn’t change the nine o’clock appointment that had been scheduled for the day of the murder, and further, because of Barney’s alibi, we know that it was Martha who kept it. Barney lied. He said it had been changed to cover for her.”

“Did Barney admit the cover-up?” Max asked, sounding surprised.

Alverez’s lip curled, a look of contempt. “Barney folded like a cheap tent in a light breeze. He told us everything.”

“I can’t imagine it!” I said, shaking my head. “He implicated Martha? I thought he was devoted to her.”

Alverez shook his head. “As near as I can figure it, she was devoted to him, and he reaped the benefits.”

“That’s awful.” I shuddered.

Alverez shrugged. “People stay in relationships for lots of reasons having nothing to do with love. No one but them knows the truth of what they each got out of their marriage.”

“Still, it seems as if you have a lot of evidence,” I said.

“Yeah, but there are spousal-privilege issues relating to everything Barney told us.”

Max asked what Murphy, the person tasked with bringing the case to trial, thought of it.

Alverez shrugged. “He thinks it’s medium strong.”

“Do you know why she killed Mr. Grant?” I asked.

“Only she knows why. But I’ll tell you our theory of the case. Mr. Grant told Martha that he was going to hire you, and she killed him to get her hands on the Renoir. Plain and simple, they did it for the money. They’re in pretty bad financial shape, and they needed a big chunk of cash quickly.”

I nodded. “Do you know why they’re broke?”

“Barney, it seems, likes to place a bet or two.”

“Ah,” I exclaimed, nodding. “That would explain the money trouble. But I still don’t understand why, having killed to get the painting, Martha would sneak it into my place.”

“To frame you. She couldn’t understand why you hadn’t been arrested for the murder already, and she was savvy enough to know that without an arrest, eventually we might hit on her as a suspect.”

“She really wanted to frame me?” I was shocked, and turned to Max. “That’s what you thought.” To Alverez, I added, “Max thought it was a gambit. You know, a tactic where you give up something in order to achieve a good position, but that just seems so horrible, I can’t believe anyone would do such a thing.”

“Yeah. It’s pretty logical, though, when you look at it from her point of view. Efficient. You know, businesslike. She had a business problem and, to her, you were part of the solution.”

“Jeez!” I exclaimed. “Framing me was part of her business plan? That’s completely diabolical!”

“Wait a minute,” Max protested. “What about the Renoir? Didn’t sacrificing it defeat their purpose? If they’d succeeded in framing Josie, then what?”

“They hoped that Grant’s lawyer, Epps, would hire them to dispose of the estate. Since Epps knew only about the Renoir, and not about the Cezanne and the Matisse, they figured that if they could win the assignment, they’d be able to locate them, sell them privately, and with any luck, no one would even know the paintings had ever been in Mr. Grant’s possession.”

“But how did they know about the Cezanne and the Matisse?” I asked.

“Mr. Grant showed them his wife’s ledger. Barney told me so in one of my first interviews with him. He didn’t realize what he was revealing. He thought he was just describing their first meeting with Mr. Grant.”

“I wonder why Mr. Grant never showed the ledger to me?”

“Maybe he knew you were honest.”

I smiled. “Not with Epps calling me a shark.”

“It turns out that Epps didn’t call you anything at all until after Mr. Grant was killed. I gather it was Martha herself who planted the seeds of that slander. She was determined, it seems, to get rid of the competition-you-by hook or by crook.”