Statue of Limitations Read online

  I stood as well. “Thanks for your time.”

  “No problem. Just remember what I said. Judgment Day is coming, and them that ain’t ready…”

  I let the rest of her sermon go in one ear and out the other. Nodding my head and murmuring “Yes” every few seconds seemed to speed things along. I have no idea what I might have agreed to, but when Harriet finally left, she appeared quite pleased with herself.

  Obviously, it had been a productive encounter for me as well. I started to call Toy on my cell phone with my big news, but changed my mind before pressing the Send button. This was going to be too much fun to share.

  Fisher Webbfingers’s car was in the garage when I returned, and all three rentals cars were parked along the street. I headed straight for the Hansons’ a.k.a. Zimmermans’ suite.

  “We’re busy,” Estelle called out in answer to my knock. I paid close attention to her accent. One thing was for sure, whoever she really was, either she had not been raised in the South or had one heck of a voice coach. Her R could have cut through three-inch plywood.

  “It’s me, Abigail. Your tour guide for the day.”

  There followed a period of mumbling and rumbling, after which Herman came to the door. But he did not open it.

  “We’ve decided not to go out today, little lady. Estee, here, isn’t feeling so good.”

  “No problemo,” I said, with true tour guide vivacity. “May I come in for a minute?”

  “That wouldn’t be such a good idea, ma’am, seeing as how it might be catchy.”

  “Don’t worry about me, dear, I’ve had all my shots.”

  “Well, I was hoping not to have to say this—you being a lady and all—but I’m not dressed.”

  “I don’t mind. Besides, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” It had to be the chocolate speaking.

  There was more mumbling than rumbling this time. Although I couldn’t hear what she said, it was clear that my flip comment had rubbed Estelle’s fur the wrong way.

  “Ma’am,” Herman said, while his wife’s gums were still flapping, “maybe you better leave.”

  “Not until I’ve spoken to at least one of you. This isn’t about sightseeing—it’s about a vandalized yearbook at the College of Charleston.”

  The door opened immediately. “Come in,” Herman said.

  He was fully dressed, by the way, except he wasn’t wearing shoes or socks. Estelle was wearing a pale pink linen shift and pink Gucci leather shoes. A matching handbag lay on the freshly made bed.

  I entered saying a silent prayer of thanksgiving for the man who invented air-conditioning. Without this invention the South would never have attracted the economic growth for which it is now known.

  Herman motioned to an overstuffed chair that I had had recovered in Brunschwig & Fils fabric. The vibrant fruit colors gave a touch of pizzazz to an otherwise muted decor. It was one of my favorite pieces, and one I had yet to enjoy.

  “Thank you very much,” I said, but getting seated was no easy task. When it was time for me to leave, I would have to use a rope and rappel down.

  Estelle sat on the bed beside her purse, as if to guard it, and Herman chose the desk chair, a rather frail Biedermeier. I was about to suggest that we switch, but Estelle spoke up.

  “I had every right to take that picture, Mrs. Washburn. If you let me explain, I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  “That’s why I’m here. Explain away!”

  She glanced at her husband and then back at me. “Perhaps I didn’t mention that I attended the College of Charleston.” She waited for my reaction, but I wisely refrained from making any sarcastic remarks. “Well,” she said, when it was clear I wasn’t there to play games, “I had a terrible case of acne when I was growing up. Persisted far too long, into college even. Makeup wasn’t enough to cover it. In fact, it just made things worse. You should have heard the names the kids called me throughout high school. Pizza Face, Hamburger Girl—anyway, the day they took the yearbook pictures, I planned to be absent, but my roommate told the dorm representative, and—well, to make a long story short, I got pressured into having it taken.”

  “My Estee’s got a smooth face now,” Herman felt compelled to interject. “Dermabrasion, it’s called. See? Her face is as smooth as custard. Cost me a pretty penny, but it was worth it.”

  I tried not to stare. Her skin was actually fairly smooth. Maybe only the slightest hint of scars. Just why the plastic surgeon hadn’t touched the bags beneath her eyes was a whole other story.

  “You look very nice,” I said.

  “Oh, but I didn’t then. Believe me. For years I regretted having that picture taken. Nobody forced me, of course, I just wasn’t strong enough to resist pressure. Then there comes a point in life when you say ‘screw it’—pardon my French, Mrs. Washburn, but I’m sure you know what I mean.”

  I did. Last year I gave up panty hose for Lent. My legs aren’t perfect, but neither are they hideous. Why should I feel obligated to encase them in plastic, as if they were giant hot dogs? But still, this newfound freedom to express myself did not extend to the destruction of someone else’s property.

  “But Mrs. Zimmerman, the yearbooks don’t belong to you.”

  “My likeness does. So, what are you going to do, Mrs. Washburn, turn me in?”

  Herman lurched to his feet, knocking over the Biedermeier. “Little lady, I can’t let you do anything that’s going to get my Estee in trouble.”

  I was pretty sure that the big guy was too much of a gentleman to do me any physical harm. Besides, if that was his intent, he could have turned me into pâté in the length of time it took me to get out of the chair. My best defensive move was to snuggle back into the down-filled cushions, making myself even more inconspicuous than ever.

  “I’m not going to turn her in—not if she can tell me why she cut out pictures other than her own.”

  Herman froze. With one arm extended and one foot just leaving the ground, he reminded me of the game “statues” that we used to play when we were children. Estelle had gone rigid as well. Had it not been for the bags beneath her eyes, one might have surmised she’d been the recent recipient of beaucoup Botox injections. C.J. refers to this as the Lot’s Wife Syndrome. She also, bless her heart, believes that Shelby and Gastonia, North Carolina, are the Sodom and Gomorrah mentioned in the Bible. But that’s a whole different story as well.

  At any rate, Estelle sprang to life first. “Okay, so maybe I cut an extra page or two out of that dang book. I fail to see what this has to do with you. Are you just a nosy woman with too much time on her hands? Is that it, Mrs. Washburn? Come up to Wisconsin and we’ll show you how real American women spend their days.”

  It was the moment of truth. It was not, however, my place to confront the suspects, no matter how convincing the evidence. Besides, I had only one piece of what was undoubtedly a very complex puzzle. One wrong word out of me and Herman would undoubtedly whack me over the head with the Biedermeier and throw both me and the chair into the harbor. What a waste of a perfectly fine piece of furniture.

  Alas, there are times when I just can’t hold my tongue. “It’s my business because Wynnell Crawford is my best friend. I’m not about to let her take the rap for you.”

  Herman’s body thawed enough to let him pick up the fallen chair, which he did, but he did not sit. “Let me get this straight, little lady. You think we killed Mrs. Webbfingers?”

  “Did you? Oh, and just so you know—I’m wired.”

  Estelle blinked rapidly, the Botox phase well behind her. “We didn’t kill anyone, Mrs. Washburn. And it was never part of our plan.”

  Herman cringed. “Estee—”

  “No, Herman, it’s time we came clean. We can’t be indicted for a crime we never got the chance to commit.”

  Herman’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times but no sound came out. Finally he turned to me. His eyes said everything.

  “She’s right,” I said. “If you didn’t commit a crime
, and haven’t been covering up for one, there really is no reason to worry. Now the yearbooks—that’s another story. I’m afraid that’s between you and the College of Charleston. But you’re going to have to tell them what you did. Is that understood?”

  They nodded.

  “So,” I said, waving my hand like a grand poobah on her overstuffed throne, “who would like to go first?”

  “It’s mostly my story,” Estee said. “I should be the one to tell it.”

  I made a show of looking down the front of my sundress, supposedly at a microphone. What I saw was a pair of rather nice but otherwise unremarkable breasts, and a very pretty bra from Victoria’s Secret.

  “Speak nice and loud,” I said. “And take it from the beginning.”

  28

  “I was born and raised right here in Charleston. My parents owned a candy store across from the Market—actually a whole string of gourmet chocolate shops up and down the East Coast. Rosenkrantz and Sons, they were called—even though there was no son, and our family name was Simonson. Did you ever hear of these chocolate stores?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry.”

  “But don’t think for a minute that we were part of the working class. My papa was the grandson of Danish immigrants—farmers, to be sure—but my mother’s mother was a Danish baroness. The Baroness Christina Rosenkrantz.”

  “Some kind of cousin to the Queen,” Herman said proudly.

  “A distant cousin through Christian IV. Anyway, although we couldn’t claim three hundred years of local history, my mother’s lineage was good enough for Charleston, and we moved in the best social circles—for a while at least. I grew up knowing Fisher Webbfingers. Was in this very house often as a guest.”

  “They even got engaged,” Herman said, still sounding proud.

  “Then one day while I was in college—I went to school right here, so my mother could keep an eye on me—I met a fellow student at the beach. He hadn’t put on any tanning lotion, and he was as red as a Maine lobster.”

  Herman grinned. “I still burn pretty bad.”

  “I offered to put Noxzema on his back, and then we got to talking, and the next thing I knew, I found myself breaking up with Fisher and marrying Herman.”

  “You should have seen the look on her parents’ face when I met them. Kind of like my cows, if you leave the milk pump on too long.”

  I pushed that image out of my mind. “Funny, Mr. Zimmerman, but your wife doesn’t have a trace of a Southern accent.”

  “She did when I met her. But all those years living up North finally got her talking regular most of the time.”

  Estelle nodded. “It comes back when I get excited. Or when I dream.”

  “This is all very interesting, Mrs. Zimmerman, but what does any of this have to do with Marina Webbfingers’s murder?”

  “You said to start at the beginning.”

  I tried to smile. “Please restart where it’s relevant.”

  “But you see, it’s all relevant. I would have never known Fisher and the others if my mother hadn’t had such an enviable pedigree, and if Fisher and I had married, then I most probably would have known the statue’s location all along.”

  Now we were cooking with gas. “What statue?”

  The pair of them gave me a pitying look. “Honestly, Mrs. Washburn,” Estelle said, “you’re the one who’s wasting time now.”

  “The maquette of David,” I mumbled. “I wasn’t sure you knew about it.”

  “Yes, the maquette. The one my father and the others stole from the wine cellar of a villa outside Florence.”

  I gasped with excitement. “The diamond necklace!”

  Estelle gave me a peeved look. “It’s not a necklace, it’s a prototype for a statue.”

  “I know what it is. You said your father and the others stole it?”

  “The villa was abandoned. It’s not like they had to hurt anyone to do it.”

  It was no time to give her a lecture on morality. “Did they know what they’d found? I mean its value? It is a maquette of the David statue, isn’t it?”

  Estelle’s eyes gleamed. Not only did their unexpected fire make her look years younger, but she was suddenly almost attractive.

  “Nick and Irena’s father—they’re brother and sister, as you undoubtedly know by now—taught art history at Columbia University in New York City. Professor Keating knew more about art than my daddy knew about candy. So the answer is yes, they had a pretty good idea of what it was they’d found.”

  “How did they get it back to the States?”

  Herman laughed. “This is the good part. Tell her, Estee.”

  “Daddy covered it with chocolate.”

  “Get out of town!”

  “It was only a thin layer, of course, but the guys saved up their rations and managed to barter until they had just enough. First Daddy covered the maquette in white wax—candles they’d borrowed from different churches—so that the chocolate wouldn’t stain the marble. Then the chocolate. He had to mix some wax in that to make it stick, but it had a nice chocolate aroma. It nearly drove them crazy, they used to say.”

  My cell phone rang. Suddenly the gleam left Estelle’s eyes and she looked as jumpy as a monkey on a barbed-wire fence. Herman bit his lower lip.

  “It’s my cell,” I said calmly, willing the machine to self-destruct. But it wouldn’t stop. “What is it?” I demanded on the fourth ring.

  “Abby, it’s me, Greg.”

  “Yes, officer. Everything is fine.”

  “Abby, what’s going on?”

  “So you have no problem hearing everything we say?”

  “Huh? Abby, are you in some kind of a jam?”

  “Absolutely not. They’re being very cooperative.”

  I swear I could feel Greg’s sigh. “Okay, I give up. Do what you have to do. Just be careful.”

  “Got that. Anything else, officer?”

  “Yes. I just called to say that I hate fighting, and I’m sorry for all the crap I gave you.”

  “Same here.”

  “And I love you, hon.”

  “Ditto.”

  I turned the phone off and did my best to present a grave face to the Zimmermans. “Now where were we? Oh yes, the chocolate-covered maquette. How did they get it through customs?”

  “Daddy, Fisher Webbfingers Senior, and Professor Keating called themselves the Three Musketeers. Anyway, it was the war, and they were GIs. The Three Musketeers had no trouble boarding their return ship. Stateside, they were questioned by immigration, but they had a story already concocted. Something about it being a cheap souvenir they’d picked up, sort of as a mascot. Turned out smuggling it into the country really was no problem at all.

  “The question was, what to do with it now that it was here? There was a lot of discussion—maybe even a few arguments—but in the end they decided that the best thing to do was to do nothing. They made a pact that they would wait fifty years, or until the statute of limitations on stolen property ran out. Then they, or their heirs, would sell it. ‘The big secret,’ they called it.”

  “But there is no such thing as a statute of limitations on theft,” I said, and then immediately wished I’d stuffed one of the Brunschwig & Fils–covered cushions down my gullet before speaking.

  I needn’t have worried. “Of course there is,” Estelle snapped. “They were all bright men. They wouldn’t have made such a silly mistake.”

  “My Estee knows everything,” Herman opined from the peanut gallery.

  “Then it’s my mistake,” I said, grateful for the second chance. “Please, go on.”

  Estelle flashed me a triumphant smile. “So anyway, the big secret became sort of a rite of passage. When I turned eighteen, Daddy told me about the statue and where to find it, should something happen to him before the fifty years were over. Fisher’s daddy did the same thing for Fisher Junior, and Professor Keating told both his kids on their eighteenth birthdays.”

  “And it was a good thing they
did,” Herman said, “because all three men died before the fifty years were over.”

  “But you kids—I mean the younger generation—knew its whereabouts, right?”

  “Not that it did any good in the end,” Estelle said, sounding a tad less victorious.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The Three Musketeers hid the statue in a hammock in Copahee Sound. Do you know what a hammock is, Mrs. Washburn?”

  “Yes. It’s higher ground, sort of like an island, that sticks out of the marshes. Hammocks usually have permanent trees on them—oaks, palms, whatever.”

  “You get a gold star, Mrs. Washburn. And as you probably know, there are hundreds of channels that cut through the marshes and dozens of hammocks to choose from. This particular hammock was exceptionally high, and like you said, a real island. In fact, a lot of fishermen referred to it as Doubloon Island, because a Spanish doubloon was said to have been found on it.” She shook her head, but her faux black locks, which had been heavily lacquered, remained in place. “But it didn’t stay that way. Hurricane Hugo did a heck of a job of reconfiguring the marshes. New channels were cut, old ones obliterated, and the hammocks—well, none of them looked the same after that.”

  “So the statue was lost?”

  “That’s the sixty thousand dollar question, isn’t it? But one thing for sure—the hammock was gone. At least it was unrecognizable after the storm. The Three Musketeers—all old men by then—combed the marshes around Copahee Sound. They followed every channel, slogged over every hammock, braving alligators, snakes, and clouds of mosquitoes. But no maquette. Finally they were forced to give up, but not before things had gone sour.”

  “Do tell.”

  “They started accusing each other of having stolen the statue at some point before Hurricane Hugo.”

  “No honor among thieves,” I whispered.

  Apparently Estelle had the hearing of a fox. “My daddy was no thief.”

  “But you just admitted that the three of them stole the maquette from an Italian villa.”

  “That was different. Besides, Daddy would have never stolen from the others. Professor Keating, either. It had to be Fisher Senior.”