Thai Die (24 page)

THE door sounded a few minutes later, and Betsy turned to see Sharon Morton coming in. “Is Goddy home from Florida?” Sharon asked.

“Yes, he came back yesterday, but he’s not due to start working in the shop until tomorrow. Sharon, I’m so glad you came back.”

“Well, when I turned and saw you coming up the sidewalk, I knew you’d put an end to the nonsense going on in the shop.”

Betsy smiled. “Is there something I can show you?”

“No, I just wanted to tell Goddy about the chicken quilt he helped me with.” Last year, Sharon had decided to make a quilt using the large quantity of chicken-themed fabric she’d been collecting. To make it special, she had done a number of needlepoint, counted cross-stitch, and punch-needle squares for it, too. All selected with Godwin’s enthusiastic help.

“Is it finished?” asked Betsy.

“Yes, but I didn’t do it.” Sharon continued in a rush, “You know, people will tell you quilting is easy, but it isn’t. I couldn’t get the cloth cutting right, and when I did, I couldn’t figure out how to piece it. Mama finally told me about this woman in town, Karen Kerner, who will make a quilt for people like me who find they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. Karen came over yesterday to show me the top—and it’s
gorgeous
! And her prices are so reasonable! Not that this still isn’t going to be the most expensive blanket I’ve ever owned.” She laughed. “I was going to put it on my bed, but now I think I’ll hang it on the wall.” She paused for a breath, then, eyes apologetic—she was quite a talker, after all—she let it out without saying anything more.

“I’m sure it’s beautiful,” said Betsy. “And I’m sure Goddy is going to want to see it, no matter how it was finished.”

Sharon said, in a much calmer tone, “Anyway, could you tell Godwin? I was ashamed to tell him I sent it out to be done. But it’s so beautiful, he’ll take one look and know it’s not a beginner’s work. Meanwhile, I wanted to see the new canvas work Goddy is doing—hey, wow, there it is, all finished!” Canvas work was like counted cross-stitch, except it was worked on even-weave canvas rather than Aida fabric. What Sharon was pointing at was Godwin’s recently finished model of Crystal Irises from Nancy’s Needle. It featured a single stem of two purple irises surrounded by patterns of lattice, herringbone, smyrna, and other well-known needlepoint stitches. The stitches, though, were not done in the usual wool but instead with finer flosses that allowed the canvas to show through. The effect was of exquisite lace.

“It’s even prettier than the picture he showed me! Look how the light changes on the stitches when you walk past it!” The pattern was only twelve dollars, and the eighteen-count canvas wasn’t expensive, but Sharon needed the floss, too: five skeins of Caron Watercolors, one of DMC pearl cotton, and five of Rainbow Gallery threads. Betsy was pleased to give Sharon a new project, Sharon was excited at the prospect, and Betsy’s bottom line was content. Sharon paid for the project and left smiling.

Betsy was just composing the next line on her ad when the phone rang. “Hello, Crewel World, Betsy speaking, how may I help you?”

“Malloy here. What’s up?”

“Hi, Mike. What did you find out about Lena Olson?”

“I don’t know why I’m surprised anymore at the things you know or find out.”

“It
was
murder!”

“A couple of broken fingernails indicate a struggle, and a heck of a knock on the head probably means she was unconscious when she was put behind the wheel of her car in the garage.”

“Oh my. Do the police have any idea who did it?”

“Well, the husband has a solid alibi, and so does the son. So it’s person or persons unknown.”

Betsy groaned. “Mike, this person must be found!”

“Now, we don’t know that Lena’s murderer is the same person who killed Oscar Fitzwilliam.”

Betsy would have objected to that but hesitated. After all, assigning guilt in advance could lead to serious miscarriages of justice. “Okay, you’re right. By the way, I have some new information about that burglary in my apartment building. Remember you said it was a search? I know what she was after.”

“ ‘She’?”

“Yes, the burglar was the woman who was killed at the March Hare in St. Peter. Wendy Applegate.”

“You know that for a fact.”

“Yes. Well, I’m pretty sure, anyway. And listen, you need to call a Dr. Edyth Booker, the textile curator at the Minneapolis Art Institute. She has the piece of silk that Wendy Applegate was after.”

“Where’d Dr. Booker get it from?”

“Me. I brought it to her. Doris brought it back from Thailand wrapped around that statue of the Buddha. She thought it was a rag and threw it away. I rescued it because the embroidery on it looked interesting. But it didn’t look like anything I’d seen before, so I didn’t want to mess with it until I knew what it was. I finally got a flying appointment with Dr. Booker, but she was—what’s that cop word for people behaving suspiciously?”

“You mean ‘hinky’?”

“Yes, that’s the word. She was astonished when she first saw it, but tried to pretend she wasn’t.”

“So what the heck is it?”

“One of the oldest surviving pieces of silk embroidery in the world, an important piece of Chinese history.”

“Holy cow!” Mike didn’t say cow but one of its products.

“Back in the eighties, archaeologists excavated a tomb dating to the second century BC. A woman named Xiu was buried there, covered in layers of silk. Because of the way the tomb was sealed, the silk was almost perfectly preserved.”

There was a pause, probably so Mike could write some of this down. “All right, all right, this is too much detail to get over the phone. I want to talk to you about this. Can you come over to the station?”

“No, I’m alone in the shop.”

“Then I’ll come there—and I may bring some people with me, all right?”

“Yes, of course. Mike, will you do me a favor? Bring me something from Pizza Hut, please. I had to fire my help and I haven’t had lunch.”

“Who do you think I am, the pizza delivery guy?”

“All right, then, soup and a bread stick from Antiquity Rose.”

Mike growled, but when he came by forty-five minutes later, he had a covered foam bowl that gave off wonderful smells and, in a pocket, one of Antiquity Rose’s fat, foot-long bread sticks.

With him was a woman, tall and slim, with the most penetrating gray-green eyes Betsy had ever seen. The women nodded politely at Betsy when Mike introduced her as a detective on the St. Paul Police Department. She brought a cardboard box a little bigger than a shoebox to the checkout desk. Inside were layers of Bubble Wrap, and under that the carved stone statue of Buddha. She set it on the desk and stepped back.

“Do you recognize this?” she asked in a quiet voice.

“Why, yes,” said Betsy. “It’s the statue Doris Valentine brought back from Thailand. Did Mr. Fitzwilliam find it after all?”

“Mr. Fitzwilliam?” she said, and Betsy felt again the detective’s eyes on her.

“Eddie Fitzwilliam, the Fitzwilliam’s Antiques owner’s son. I asked him to call and tell me if he found it.” The look was still there and Betsy found herself confessing, “And if he found out anything when he went over the books. And he did, he said there was money coming in that the books didn’t account for. So I think that means his father was involved in the illegal import of artifacts.”

The detective merely nodded. “You’re sure about this statue?” she asked.

“It looks exactly like the one Doris brought from over there.”

“Thank you,” she said. She wrapped it up again, neither rushing nor lingering in her movements, said good-bye and thank you to Mike, and left.

“Wow,” said Betsy, looking at the closed door to her shop after she’d gone through it.

“Yeah,” said Mike, blowing a silent, admiring, envious whistle. “She walks into an interrogation room, gives a perp that look, and suddenly he just can’t stop talking. She was the only one who wanted to come along, and you can see that’s because she had her own agenda.”

“Where did she get the statue?”

“It was found in a search of Wendy Applegate’s house.”

“Why didn’t she say that?”

“Why should she? She never gives out information unless she has to, and besides, she doesn’t approve of amateur sleuths.” He said it as if he himself had never been guilty of this miscalculation.

Betsy sat down at the library table to eat her soup, gesturing at him to join her. “Business is slow this time of day,” she said, “so probably we won’t be interrupted.”

He got out his notebook and clicked out the point on his pen. “What made you decide that piece of silk was important enough that a textile expert at the art institute should have a look at it?” he asked.

“I didn’t think it was important. It was a beautiful piece of embroidery, but it was dirty and frayed, and I wanted to know how to clean and repair it. I couldn’t find anything like it on the Internet, and with Goddy on vacation I’ve been too busy to keep looking. So when this man called—his name is Joe Brown and he’s a member of the board—about increasing my pledge of support to the institute, I parlayed that into a brief interview with the textile curator there. After the money I gave them last year, I figured they owed me five minutes of their time. All I was hoping for was that someone would give me a time period and a country to focus my research on, and a hint on how to clean it without further damaging it. What’s interesting was her reaction.”

Mike looked up from his notebook. “You mean her not telling you what she thought it was?”

Betsy stopped sipping soup to say, “
And
talking me into leaving it behind. I think she thought I’d brought it in to get confirmation that it was what it was and that my next goal was to sell it for big bucks.” She put on a hard expression. “I wish now I’d asked for it back.”

“I thought you said she had a guard outside her office ready to stop you.”

Betsy released her scowl with a sigh and resumed her meal. “Yeah, she did.”

“So did that article you found tell you how it got from an archaeological excavation in China to a needlework store in Minnesota?”

“It was stolen—twice. First, it was supposed to go to a museum in Hubei, China, but it was stolen en route. It wasn’t seen again until last year, when it turned up at an unadvertised auction in Hong Kong. It was stolen again when the buyer shipped it to Bangkok. There’s an American doing business in Bangkok, David Corvis—”

Mike lifted his pen, and Betsy paused, while he wrote the name down. She spelled it for him. Then he nodded at her to continue.

“I don’t know if he was the thief, but somehow he got hold of it and was trying to sneak it into the United States. He disguised it by making it look like an old rag he was using as packing material. Doris wasn’t supposed to open the box it was in, but it never occurred to Corvis that if she did, she’d throw the ‘rag’ away.”

“What do you know about this Corvis fellow?”

“According to Doris, he’s an ex-marine who manages a silk factory called Bright Works outside of Bangkok and owns a small export business in the city.”

Mike made another note. “This silk, for all that it’s rare and historic, does it have much value? I mean if you had managed to get it back, how much could you have sold it for?”

“It was sold in Hong Kong for twenty-five thousand, but the article said that was a low price because it didn’t have any provenance—you know, a record of ownership going back to the first owner. God knows what the real value is. That auction wasn’t a proper sale; I mean, whoever heard of an auction that isn’t advertised? But someone must’ve heard of it, if it got stolen again on arrival at the airport in Bangkok.”

“Unless whoever stole it just picked up a box or two at random,” said Mike, the voice of experience.

“Well, yes. I’m sure you know how to check robbery reports, even overseas, right?”

“Yes—and I will, too.”

“Good. I wonder who was supposed to buy it here, at this end?”

“Does it have provenance now?”

“I don’t know. The description on the Web site that lists stolen art has a photograph of it and says it’s one of a kind. I don’t think that gives it provenance, though. But I don’t think they’d need to know the name of the original thief or of the person who won the auction. Anyway, I’m not the person to answer your question. Would you like a cup of bad coffee? My newly fired employees were supposed to brew a fresh batch but didn’t.”

“Yes, thanks. Black.”

Mike, reviewing his notes, said, “So the art institute won’t confirm it’s what you say it is, but on the other hand, they won’t let us take it for evidence.”

Betsy, heading for the back of the shop where the coffee urn waited, said over her shoulder, “I don’t doubt that, Mike. It’s more than two thousand years old and it will give people new ways to think about the history of silk in China.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure some people will find that useful,” he muttered, as one whose job is not the study of Chinese silk but the capture of criminals. Betsy heard him and laughed.

When she came back with a delicate porcelain cup of coffee, she found him shuffling through a thin stack of papers.

“Oh, that’s the printout of what I found on the institute’s computer.” She put his coffee down near his left elbow and pointed to a fuzzy, black-and-white photograph on the top sheet. “That’s the silk,” she said. “They don’t have a color printer for visitors, so it’s not very useful. But on the next page is a detail photo that’s pretty good. The two pages after that are the article that will tell you about the silk and the tomb and all. Everything beneath that is the rest of the stolen art listing—I didn’t know how to prevent the printer from spitting out the entire thing.”

Mike said, “May I have these?”

“Sure.”

He set them aside and took a sip of coffee, nodding his approval, which told Betsy something about police department coffee. He asked, “Do you think those smugglers knew what they had a hold of?”