Allyn Allyn - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, No. 1. Whole No. 821, January 2010

“But surely someone would have seen them?”

“At the motel?” Conlan shook his head. “Guy was in the back watching television, only comes out if you ring. And the only surveillance cameras are in the car park and they were vandalised a week ago.” He paused. “Besides, we have evidence that puts your husband at the scene of the crime. Part of his credit card was found near the body, covered in his fingerprints. So unless you can think how else it might have got there...”

I closed my eyes. It was now or never. Either I kept quiet and let Derek be charged with murder, or I owned up, risked being convicted myself, and watched him and Donna swan off with a million pounds.

Outside, a man shouted and banged the side of the truck and slowly it began to move away.

“Well, Mrs. Lester?”

I took a deep breath. “I wish I could, Inspector,” I said, as Derek’s one hope of reprieve was carted off to the local landfill. “But I really can’t imagine.”

At that moment Conlan’s mobile rang. “Excuse me,” he said, and went briefly into the hall. He came back looking smug and sat down opposite me.

“So you really don’t know how the credit card got there,” he said, leaning forward across the table.

I frowned. “How could I?”

“Your husband suggested you might have put it there.”

“Me?” I laughed. “How on earth would I get his credit card?”

“It was an old one, ran out some time ago. While he was still living here.”

“Then I assure you it would have long gone,” I said. “Along with everything else. Though you’re welcome to look around...” I went to stand up.

“I don’t think that will be necessary, Mrs. Lester.” Conlan smiled. He turned to Thorpe. “That was HQ. It seems our Mrs. Chant wants to make a deal.”

“Deal?” I asked, though I knew full well what he meant.

“It means she’s willing to spill the beans in the hope of a more lenient sentence. It’s as good as a confession.” He climbed to his feet. “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Lester. I know what a shock this must be.”

You don’t know half, I thought, as I followed them into the hall.

At the front door Conlan paused. “It’s funny,” he said, “I doubt your husband even knew that card was in his pocket. But that’s often how it goes. One little mistake, one moment of carelessness... Unlucky for him, of course. Without that they might have got away with it.” He stepped outside, glanced up at the house. “Still, at least you don’t need to worry about this place anymore. I don’t think your husband will be in a position to force a sale for quite a long time.”

“There is that, I suppose,” I said, and closed the door before they could see me smiling.

Copyright © 201 °Caroline Benton

A longtime resident of Berkeley, California, Melanie Lawrence reads manuscripts for a living by day and works on suspense fiction at night. A former magazine editor, she is also a book reviewer whose pieces have run in the San Francisco Chronicle and the East Bay Express. Her stories for EQMM, like this one set in the world of art, always seem to have a haunting quality. It’s unusual for a short story to have a dedication, but she asked that this one carry the following: To Frank and Donna .

Bulgarians.

She hated the days immediately following a good review. No sooner had some newspaper published the words “brilliant new retrospective” than the museum was full of gawkers, barging in front of serious viewers, mouthing foolish phrases about the paintings — superb paintings, some of them, worthy of stillness and respectful silence. If Ursula had her way, there’d be a regulation against talking in art museums.

And this time it was worse. Oskar Elif had been showing his work to mounting acclaim since he was twenty-four, but had seldom exhibited outside Europe, and certainly not to this extent. Already, on a chilly Monday morning, the fifth-floor galleries swarmed and buzzed. This was the noisiest bunch since the big Rothko show. Ursula cursed, a hushed malediction in her mother tongue — Elif’s as well — as a young person bumped into her without so much as an apology. The inevitable black leather jacket, of course, and a tousled helmet of hair, tinted plum. Not that she herself had been any more courteous in her student days, cutting into lines, shouldering her way through knots of people to capture the best view of a painting. Lithe and light-footed she’d been back then, in her tight white T-shirts and platform boots. Now she was just another woman of a certain age and no longer lithe, a drab old bird in the navy blazer and beige polyester trousers that all the museum’s guards had to wear.

Break time. Ursula nodded to her colleague in the next room and headed upstairs to the catwalk. The great transparent dome had trapped so much winter sunlight that the entire top floor was warm as summer, especially along the narrow catwalk that ran directly beneath the dome and spanned the museum’s core, the imposing, icy-white circular stairwell. An installation was still in progress here; no mouthy art lovers breached the quiet.

From habit, she kept her head bent, imagining herself on a bridge across a mountain pass, shivering with a touch of vertigo, but exhilarated, too. She could see straight through the silvery steel mesh to the spiraling lower stories of the museum, one after another, as if discerning them through fog, while all around her floated sunny air and curving walls of white plaster and glass. A parachutist must feel like this, she thought, or a plant in a greenhouse. Sometimes a painting could deliver her into this state. Weightless. Endless.

That evening, when all these people were gone, she would have another good long look at Tidal Marsh. Estuary as well. And North Sea. Just for a treat.

Ursula had trained herself over the years to approach an exhibit slowly, patiently. Not for her now the aesthetic greed of her youth, which she had mistaken for talent. As a senior guard, she could choose her work assignments, and she did so with care, one room per week, the better to edge her body and mind closer and closer to a selected canvas, the better to know it, let it under her skin. A kind of calculated spontaneity, that was the way to learn a painting. Thus, on the staff’s preview day, she’d skimmed through “Oskar Elif: 30 Years of Painting,” silent and excited, eyes sliding from one masterpiece to another, automatically memorizing media and styles, but not really seeing anything.

No longer passionate about the genre, she chose the early gestural abstracts for week one. They were technically admirable but dismal, gray. Week two’s pick, the still lifes, were a different matter. Painted from photographs — “photography is the path to reality,” said Elif’s first published treatise on painting — they haunted the memory like images from a dream: a window ledge, whitened by frost; wooden candlesticks and a dish of oranges; a ring of silver keys. Almost, she wished she had saved that room for last.

Until she contemplated the waterscapes. She remembered the North Sea of her youth; she had never thought anyone could really paint it. And the pond series, each slightly more abstract than the last, gradually pared down to luminous shapes and chill layers of color. The man could paint water . He could probably paint air. Well, in a few days she would find out. Landscapes were next week.

Ursula awoke in a good humor that Monday, relishing her morning eggs and dark pumpernickel toast, slathered today with an extra spoon of raspberry preserves. An extra cup of espresso, too, dripping golden foam. She even French-braided her hair, stroked mascara through her lashes. Silly, perhaps, to dress up for a roomful of paint and canvas and blithering idiots, but why not? There was little enough respect shown great art in her adopted country, except for the money it would fetch.