Statue of Limitations Page 21

  “Why is that?”

  “He was the only one who stayed in the area. Shortly after I married Herman, my parents retired to Florida. And the Keatings, who were originally from New York, moved back home when the professor got a job offer from Columbia University. So you see, it was Fisher Senior who had the time and opportunity to remove the statue from Doubloon Island and hide it somewhere else—or maybe it was Fisher Junior. Either way, the Webbfingerses stole it from the rest of us. Then along came the hurricane, presenting the perfect opportunity for them to claim that the maquette of David was lost.”

  “Where do you think he hid it?”

  Herman’s guffaws might have put the cows off milking all the way up in Wisconsin.

  Estelle and I waited patiently for a lull. “He didn’t hide it,” she said, her words as staccato as gunshots. “It was right there in the middle of a flower bed when we drove up.”

  I breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Well, at least I can tell concrete from marble.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to be funny, Mrs. Washburn?”

  “No, not at all. As you know, I decorated this room. I remember seeing the statue and thinking it was compressed marble. I certainly didn’t think it was concrete—which the police report says it is.” Oops, perhaps I’d gone too far.

  “No, it was real, and just like Daddy described. Fisher claims it just showed one morning, out of the clear blue. He says he called me first, and then the Keatings. He asked us to come down to Charleston, but under assumed last names. He said he and Marina had just built a B and B, and we could stay here until we figured out what was going on. But then no sooner do we get here than Marina gets killed and the statue goes missing.”

  “Why the assumed names?”

  “He said Marina had just registered their first guests, a very suspicious couple—walk-ins from the street. Fisher had a hunch they were undercover cops working for the Italians.”

  “You mean John and Belinda from Calamari?”

  “Fisher always did have a good imagination. He was a lot of fun to play with as a child.”

  “Just one thing escapes me,” I said. “Why did the Webbfingerses open a B and B in the first place? It’s not like they needed the money—or did they?”

  “Let me answer that,” Herman Hanson, a.k.a. Zimmerman, said with zeal.

  “Please. Be my guest.”

  “The woman was a slut—sorry, little lady, but that’s the best way I can put it. The whole thing was her idea. Thought it would give her extra opportunities to fool around.”

  Estelle frowned. “That’s what Fisher says, dear. We don’t know that for sure. Maybe he was lonely and felt the need for company.” She turned to me. “Besides, there is a difference between needing money and wanting more. That’s the thing about money—everyone wants more.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. The more one has, the more one spends. Money, like water, has the ability to insinuate itself into every void and crack it encounters, creating new desires, which in turn become new needs. Some people wonder how the fabulously rich can suddenly find themselves in dire financial straits. I think it’s a miracle that even more of them don’t declare bankruptcy.

  “Okay, officer,” I said, speaking to my bosoms one last time, “I think that covers it. Are there any questions you want me to ask them?”

  The Zimmermans waited anxiously for a moment, until Herman used his brain. Alas, it was something I’d forgotten to do.

  “Hey little lady, you’re not even wired.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “The heck you say. You’re pretending to wait for an answer, but you’re not wearing an earpiece.”

  “Yes, I am. It’s very tiny.”

  Estelle stood and approached me, while I tried to be absorbed by my overstuffed chair. She towered over me.

  “Get out” she said, in a tone that one of her royal ancestors might have used to banish a subject who’d fallen from grace.

  It was time to go anyway, now that I knew who had killed Marina Webbfingers.

  29

  “Abby, at least wait until I get there.”

  “I’ll be fine, Toy. Harriet Spanky let me in, and I’d be willing to bet my shop—even the one up in Charlotte—that the so-called Zimmermans were watching me through their window.”

  “Where’s the creep now?”

  “He’s taking a call in the den. I’m in the living room, which, by the way, is absolutely stunning. You didn’t tell me the walls were covered with silk damask. That shade of peach is just what I’ve been looking for. I wonder if Fisher remembers who did the work and where they got the material.”

  “Sis, you’re there to tie up a few loose ends, not to engage in a fashion powwow.”

  “But that’s my plan of attack. I’ll ask a few casual questions and then—I’ve got to go. He’s coming back.”

  I barely had time to slip my oversize phone back into my purse. In fact I was fumbling with the zipper when Fisher Junior strode into the room.

  “Sorry about that, Mrs. Washburn. That was my rector who called. Apparently his secretary lost the list of hymns I’d requested for Marina’s service. He needed them now, or it would be too late to include them in the service leaflet. I chose ‘Be Still My Soul’ and ‘Amazing Grace.’”

  “They’re beautiful hymns,” I said. But I felt like a first-class heel. What if I was wrong about Fisher? What if Fisher wasn’t guilty of his wife’s murder? One thing for sure, I was going to skip the silly decorating questions.

  “I’m glad you like the hymns. They were Marina’s favorites.” He glanced at the French ormolu clock on the white painted mantel. “I don’t have a lot of time, Mrs. Washburn. How can I help you?”

  “By telling me the truth. Were you and the woman who calls herself Estelle Zimmerman childhood sweethearts?”

  I’ll give the man credit for having remarkable composure. Other then fixing his colorless eyes on mine, I could detect no reaction.

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  “It is?”

  He gestured to a Louis XV fauteuil. The chair was upholstered in a floral needlepoint, which contained small touches of peach that tied it to the walls beautifully. I was grateful for the chance to sit. My knees were knocking like the pistons of my very first car, one that leaked oil so badly our neighbors complained to the city that I was ruining their street.

  “Mrs. Washburn,” my host said calmly, “I was hoping you’d have that conversation with the Simonsons.”

  “You were?”

  “I thought it would save me time. Plus, I thought it might be useful to get your take on them. Have you spoken with the Keatings as well?”

  “You were involved with Irena, too?”

  “Involved? Certainly not romantically. But I did know her. Whenever the Three Musketeers met—and it was usually here—they brought their families. The Thomases, by the way, are legitimate guests and have nothing to do with the Three Musketeers. If they seem a little odd to you, it’s because they’re having an affair. He’s from Chicago and she’s from St. Louis. He was quite up front about it to me—wanted to know if I would be discreet. I told him it wasn’t any of my business. Anyway, you do know about the Three Musketeers, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” With the wind taken out of my sails, I was with nothing but a bunch of sagging cloth. It seemed to have wrapped around my tongue.

  “Do they think I’m guilty of my wife’s murder?”

  I yanked my lingua loose enough to form some simple words. “I haven’t spoken to the Keatings about it, just the Simonsons. They didn’t accuse you, but I don’t think they’ve eliminated you from their list of suspects.”

  “Is that what you have, Mrs. Washburn? A list of suspects?”

  “Well, I know my friend, Wynnell Crawford, didn’t do it. Therefore, it had to be someone else.”

  “And I’m at the top of your list, am I? Allow me to try and guess why. Let’s see”—he rested his chin on a closed fist and pretended t
o think—“ah, yes, my motive would have been the ultimate payback to a cheating wife. How’s that? Do I pass detecting class?”

  “I can do without your sarcasm, Mr. Fisher. And yes, I can see how a philandering wife could provoke someone into committing murder.”

  “But don’t you think murder is going too far? If I really wanted to punish her, I would have drugged her and had someone tattoo a scarlet A on her forehead. Think how that would go over in Charleston.”

  I had to admit that a scarlet A would take the prize. Death is a onetime thing, then it’s over, but even with the advent of lasers, some tattoos are almost impossible to obliterate. At the very least, the experience can be painful.

  “And what about the statue?” he said, not giving me time to answer. “It goes missing for sixteen years, and then suddenly shows up in our garden. Do you think I would have risked drawing attention to myself by committing murder? Not to mention the fact that it happened the very day I had guests coming into town.”

  “Why did you call others? If the maquette just showed up, like you claim, why didn’t you and Marina keep mum about it?”

  He smiled, and I found myself both surprised and relieved. “You have a good head on your shoulders, Mrs. Washburn. I like that. But you see, the statue wasn’t put in my wife’s flower bed by fairies. Someone put it there, and we didn’t know who. It seemed like the wise thing to do was to call for backup. More importantly, the maquette belongs to all of us—the descendants of the Three Musketeers.”

  “But that’s where you’re wrong; it belongs to whomever your fathers stole it from. For your information, Mr. Webbfingers, there is no such thing as a statute of limitations on stolen property.”

  The watery eyes seemed to freeze into glittering disks. “Says who?”

  “Call your lawyer if you don’t believe me. Better yet, call one of those legal hotlines that answer questions from anonymous callers.”

  “Like I said, I have things to do. Please see yourself out, Mrs. Washburn.”

  He turned and walked from the room. A moment later I heard the side door slam and then the engine of his car. The squeal of tires confirmed the fact that Fisher Webbfingers was in a hurry to go somewhere.

  I settled back into the fauteuil. What if I’d been way off base and a man with something to hide wouldn’t have left a proven snoop alone in the house? Unless it was a trap. But how obvious was that? At least as obvious as leaving a petite pair of shoes—

  “Mrs. Washburn,” a voice said, breaking through my reverie.

  I sat bolt straight. “Harriet?”

  The elderly maid was standing in the pillared doorway of the living room. In her gnarled hand the ugly black barrel of a handgun bobbed menacingly.

  Once, in my single days, I took a self-defense class. The instructor said that the single most important lesson we could learn was never, ever, get into a car with your assailant. If you do, he said, you surrender all control. He also stressed the fact that handguns are frequently inaccurate, and that a moving target is difficult even for an expert marksman to hit.

  He made us chant the word “run” like a mantra.

  That was all well and good from a theoretical standpoint. But when faced with a real gun, I found that my legs had apparently not been paying attention during class. Try as I might, I couldn’t get them to move until Harriet pressed the muzzle against my left temple and threatened to blow my copulating brains out.

  My Judas legs betrayed me by obeying her command to walk beside her into the kitchen. There they gave out. I guess I can’t blame them, because the rest of me almost fainted when I saw the enormous man wielding a crowbar just inside the back door.

  The giant, who was dressed in faded bib overalls, was both barefoot and shirtless. Sweat streamed over rolls of blubber, disappearing into crevices and then appearing again, all while creating ribbons of white against a dirt gray background. He had no noticeable neck, but his head made up for this flaw by being twice as wide as it should have been. His bloated cheeks resembled a pair of volleyballs, and it took me a second to notice that he was smiling. From what I could see, he had exactly three teeth.

  “This is my baby boy Nolan,” Harriet said, just as proud as if she was introducing the Prince of Wales.

  “Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Nolan said, and thumped the crowbar against the callused palm of his hand.

  I had nothing to say,

  “Mama, I don’t think she likes me.”

  “She likes you just fine, son.” The gun pressed harder against my skull. “Don’t you, Mrs. Washburn?”

  “Yes ma’am,” I heard my Benedict Arnold mouth say. “Pleased to meet you, Nolan.”

  “That’s better. You see, Mrs. Washburn, my Nolan here has taken quite a shine to you over the last couple of days.”

  Nolan revealed a fourth tooth.

  “I don’t see how,” I said. “We’ve never met.”

  “I seen you, ma’am. I says to myself, ‘Nolan, you gotta admire a woman who can drive fast like that and not get rattled.’”

  “So that was you driving the blue pickup!”

  His grin widened—there were no more teeth—as he balanced on the outer sides of his feet. A twelve-year-old schoolboy with a crush is what came to mind.

  “She ain’t a pretty sight, Mrs. Washburn, but she got her a whole lot of power. Just you wait and see.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “He means that you’ll be taking a little ride,” Harriet said.

  “If it’s all the same, I’d rather not. I get motion sickness when I’m that high off the ground. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t own an SUV.”

  Harriet cackled like a hen who’d just laid her first egg. “If you get motion sickness, then you ain’t gonna like what we’ve got planned for you.”

  “And what would that be?”

  Nolan’s massive face looked about to dissolve, like the head of a snowman in a winter rain. “Mama. Do we hafta?”

  “Have to what?” I demanded.

  “Kill you,” Harriet said. “And the answer is yes.”

  30

  There were two of them and a gun, versus me and my mouth. They won. While Nolan, who may have been crying as much as sweating, held me in his viselike grip, Harriet bound my wrists and ankles with duct tape. Mercifully, they didn’t tape my mouth. Perhaps they decided that I was too entertaining to mute. Either that or Nolan was hopeful that he and I would exchange sweet nothings during my last minutes on earth.

  When they were through trussing me like a turkey, Harriet slipped a cloth sack over my head. Then without as much as a grunt, Nolan swung me over his should like bag of laundry and carried me to his truck, where I was propped up in the middle of the seat. Mother and son took their places on either side.

  “What happens if we get stopped by the police?” I asked as we sped along at what I guessed to be twice the speed limit.

  “Ain’t none of your concern,” Harriet snapped.

  “You know that some of the guests must have seen me being carried out.”

  “What they seen was a bag of laundry.”

  “You’ll never get with away with it.”

  “Shut up, Mrs. Washburn.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t. It’s not in my nature.”

  “Mama,” Nolan wheezed, “ain’t she just the spunkiest thing?”

  Harriet snorted. “Baby Boy, I warned you not to get attached to her. You start thinking about all them things we’re gonna buy with the statue money.”

  Baby Boy? Baby Huey was more like it. But one thing was becoming rapidly clear: there would be no use in trying to pit mother against son. Experts say that kidnapping victims stand a better chance if they can humanize themselves in the eyes of their captors. It appeared that I had a good start with Nolan.

  I wiggled closer to the big guy, snuggling up against the wet rolls of fat. Although Nolan’s body odor was so strong I thought I might retch, I made sure that the length of my thigh pressed
into his.

  “Do you like to travel, Nolan?”

  “Don’t know. Ain’t never been nowhere—excepting for Florence.”

  “Florence, Italy?”

  “They got one of them over there, too?”

  “So you mean Florence, South Carolina. That’s a lovely city as well. You know, Nolan, I was thinking—”

  Harriet yanked me in her direction. The woman was remarkably strong for her age, I’ll give her that.

  “I thought I told you to shut up.”

  “I was just making polite conversation.”

  “You ain’t fooling me, Mrs. Washburn. I know what you’re up to, and it ain’t gonna work. Nolan don’t even breathe without I say so.”

  For a nanosecond I thought about pressing the flesh with Harriet. But it was my tongue that had gotten me into this jam, so it would be my tongue that got me out again.

  “That isn’t a real statue, Harriet. It’s just a model.”

  “I’m not stupid, Mrs. Washburn. I already know that.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s what they call a maquette. Mrs. Webbfingers told me all about it.”

  I gasped, sucking in a mouthful of filthy sack, which I promptly spit out. “Then you must know about the Three Musketeers.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I sure do. I told you I been working for this family a long time, didn’t I? Knowed them guests, too, the ones who changed their names. Funny, but I don’t think they recognized me.” She chortled. “But it ain’t no surprise, me being just the maid. Rich folks can look at you all day, but they don’t see you.”

  “That’s because they’re snobs.”

  “Don’t you be agreeing with me none, Mrs. Timberlake. Baby Boy might fall for your games, but not me.”

  The truck halted at a stoplight. It occurred to me to hop up and down as much as I could, or at least wiggle like a worm about to be impaled on a hook. There aren’t too many laundry bags that can do that on their own. Surely someone would spot me and report the strange phenomenon to the police. In the end it was the pressure of the gun barrel, this time against my gut, that stopped me.