The Nightingale Before Christmas (19 page)

I went downstairs and was just stepping into Sarah's study when my phone rang.

“Hello,” I said, as I stepped into the hall to avoid bothering Sarah if I needed to have a conversation with whoever was calling.

“He doesn't exist.”

I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at the screen, which said only
BLOCKED.

“Who doesn't exist?” I said into the phone.

“Spottiswood.”

It had to be Boomer calling.

“He has to exist,” I said. “I practically stumbled over his dead body two nights ago.”

“Whoever the stiff was, he wasn't born Spottiswood,” Boomer said.

Okay, that made sense. I'd always thought Clay's name was a little too good to be true.

“He showed up in Tappahannock five years ago,” Boomer went on. “Here in Caerphilly two years ago. That's it.”

“You tried all the variant spellings for Claiborne and Spottiswood?”

“Couple dozen. No dice. And the guy's not even filing income tax under any of those misspellings.”

“What did you do, hack the IRS's databases?” I exclaimed.

Silence.

“Forget I asked,” I said. “Are you sure you checked every—never mind. Stupid question.”

“Sorry,” Boomer said. “If you get any other data—anything at all—I can keep trying.”

“If I had any more information, I'd have given it to you,” I said.

A soft voice from somewhere above my head spoke up.

“Clay Smith.”

I looked up. Ivy was peering down over the railing from the upper hall.

“Hang on a sec,” I said to Boomer. I took a few steps up toward Ivy.

“Clay Smith?” I said. “Claiborne Spottiswood is really Clay Smith.”

She nodded.

“I heard that,” Boomer said. “Clay Smith. What an unusual name. Won't be easy.”

“Anything else you know about him?” I asked Ivy. Boomer was doing me a favor, so I decided to ignore his sarcastic tone.

“Tell your … investigator to look in New York City, fifteen to twenty years ago,” she said. “He'll find the stories. It was in all the papers.”

I relayed this to Boomer.

“I'll call you,” he said.

I hung up and put away my phone. Ivy's head disappeared. I climbed the rest of the way up to the second-floor landing. She had gone back to painting one of her murals.

“It's Andersen's ‘The Emperor's New Clothes,' you know,” she said, without looking up from her work. “He's wearing the magic clothes the phony tailors have pretended to make for him—the clothes that are invisible to anyone unfit for his position.”

“Nice,” I said. Her mural showed a cobblestone street running along the length of the wall, lined on each side with townspeople in colorful medieval garb. Bits of snow flecked the cobblestones and covered the steep roofs of the buildings, so odds were the poor emperor would end his procession not only mortally embarrassed but probably also suffering from frostbite.

“So you knew Clay back then, in New York?” I asked, as I watched her carefully dabbing paint onto the cobblestones down which the emperor was strolling.

“Knew
of
him,” she said, without looking up. “I doubt if he would've remembered me. He was an up-and-coming painter on the New York scene, and I was … not.”

“Painter? As in fine art?”

“Oh, yes.” She nodded absently, and hitched herself a little to the left, to reach more cobblestones. “He really was very good. A brilliant painter, and it didn't hurt that he was handsome and articulate and … larger than life.”

“What happened?”

“What happened.” She sighed. “Fame happened. He signed with a big gallery, and they started selling his paintings for a lot of money. But he was spending the money faster than he could paint. There might have been drugs involved. Or maybe he just went a little crazy. And unfortunately, he began to blame his financial problems on the owner of the gallery that represented him. Claimed the guy was a cheat.”

“Blaming the gallery owner for his own mistakes?” I suggested.

“Oh, no. He was definitely right,” she said, with a fleeting smile. “The gallery owner was cheating a lot of people. It came out at the trial.”

“Clay took him to court?”

“No, Clay shot him.”

“Shot him?”

“I don't think Clay meant to kill him,” Ivy said. “Unfortunately, the fact that the man was cheating him only made Clay's motive look that much stronger. He was drunk at the time, and the gun belonged to the gallery owner, so a lot of people thought he should have gotten off with self-defense or justifiable homicide. Of course, other people thought he was lucky to have gotten off with manslaughter.”

“So he went to prison?”

She nodded.

“For how long?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Not life. Though however long it was, young as we were, I'm sure it seemed like a lifetime to him when they sentenced him. I suppose it must have been ten or fifteen years, since he's out now.”

I stood and watched her paint for a while, mulling over what she'd said. And watching her paint. She was working on the emperor now. Most of his body was hidden by the onlookers lining both sides of the cobblestone street, but you could tell he was wearing nothing. And, in a sly touch, while most of the onlookers were cheering happily, every so often you'd spot one who couldn't quite keep up the pretense.

“Did you tell the chief about this?” I asked after a while.

“I expect he already knows by now,” she said. “Clay's fingerprints would be on file, wouldn't they?”

“Probably,” I said. “And if my investigator's right and he's not paying taxes under Spottiswood, he probably has paperwork at the house with his real name on it. The chief would have seen that by now.”

“Yes,” she said. “So I didn't think I needed to tell the chief. But if you think he needs to know, you can tell him. I don't mind.”

As I watched, she was putting the finishing touches on the emperor's face. He looked a lot like Clay.

 

Chapter 16

I slipped away and left Ivy to work in peace. I stepped into Violet's bedroom. She was sitting on the floor, working on something.

“How's it coming?” I asked.

“Oh, just fine,” she said. “I decided the shelves needed a little something.”

I'd been thinking that for several days now, but then I knew better than to second-guess the designers. The twelve-foot back wall of Violet's bedroom had two windows, each fitted with a pink-cushioned window seat, and the rest of the wall was given over to shelves. I'd have called them bookshelves, but up till now Violet had only decorated them with a small assortment of pastel ornaments. A white vase containing dried flowers. A pink-and-lavender child's jewelry box. The overflow of pink, white, and lavender stuffed animals from the bed. A white ceramic lamb. A pink ceramic cat.

It all looked a little sparse to me, but I assumed it was the look she was aiming for. And at least she'd put up a few token holiday decorations. Nothing impressive—a few feet of silver tinsel garland, a few silver filigree balls. But at least she'd done something.

And I was delighted to see that she'd brought in books. Several tall stacks of books. From force of habit, I tilted my head to read the titles on the books.

A battered copy of
The Wind in the Willows
. A biography of Adlai Stevenson. A 1957 organic chemistry textbook. A lot of what I recognized as bestsellers from the forties and fifties.

“Oh, they're not interesting books,” she said. “I just went down to the thrift store and bought a bunch that were the right size.”

I glanced over and saw what she was working on. She was taking the dust jackets off the books and cutting new dust jackets out of pink, lavender, or white paper.

She was piling the dust jackets carelessly in the corner of the room.

I wasn't exactly a rabid bibliophile, but this bothered me.

“You're not using the dust jackets?” I asked.

“Oh, no.” She wrinkled her nose slightly. “They're just so … gaudy. The books themselves are better, but the colors are all wrong for my room. This will be so much nicer, don't you think?”

Nicer as long as you had no particular desire to read any of the books. With her system,
Robinson Crusoe
and
The Life Cycle of the Dermestid Beetle
looked pretty much the same.

“Hey, could you save the covers for me?” I asked. “I have a project I could really use them for.”

“Happy to,” she said. “I was just going to throw them away.”

“Great! Just stack them neatly in this box, and let me know when you've got a stack big enough that you want me to haul it away.”

“No problem,” she said. “You can take those now.”

I set one of the boxes the books had come out of where it would be handy. Then I gathered up the twenty or so covers she'd already discarded, stacked them loosely, and carried them down via the back stairs, waving at the Quilt Ladies as I passed.

“You heard about the photographer at ten tomorrow?” I stopped to say.

“We'll be ready!” Vicky sang out.

Nice to see someone was optimistic. They did seem to be working frantically on something. A quilt in Christmassy fabrics of red and green, with a lot of gold metallic tracery on them. But whether or not the room looked exactly as they wanted it to, it should look fine in the photographs.

Down in the garage I found a box for the discarded covers.

“I don't know why I care,” I muttered. There probably weren't any valuable books in there. Chances were, people who cared about dust jackets would turn up their noses at Violet's book collection.

But it bothered me, so if possible, I'd try to reunite them at the end of the show house.

Of course, there was always the chance she'd sell the books back to the thrift shop without the covers at the end of the show. Maybe I should talk her into donating them to the library, for the tax break. She'd probably go for that. And I could give our head librarian a heads-up that the dust jackets would be arriving separately.

Back into the house. Eustace had now put one or two dishes, vases, or bits of glassware on every shelf in his ever-so-many cabinets. I paused to watch him for a minute or two. He was now standing and studying the effect, pausing every once in a while to switch a couple of items, or adjust one a few millimeters in one direction or another.

“It's just not right,” he said. “It's too much of a muchness. What else can I put in these wretched cabinets?”

“Well,” I said. “In my kitchen, a lot of that space would be given over to food. Teas, spices, canned goods. But I don't suppose you want that gaudy modern supermarket look.”

Eustace's face froze for a moment, then he beamed.

“You're a genius! Yes! Decorative tea caddies! Elegant spice jars! And perhaps a few vintage grocery items! I must go shopping!”

He grabbed up his coat, hat, and scarf and dashed toward the garage, presumably heading for the back door there.

“A genius,” I murmured. “I like that.”

In the great room, Mother was rearranging the logs in the fireplace into a more pleasing configuration while Tomás and Mateo dabbed little bits of gold on things.

In the dining room, Linda had assembled several dozen pieces of wooden or plastic fruit and was painting them all gold. Another theme. I should probably refrain from pointing out what happened to King Midas.

I grabbed my coat and hat from the coat closet. I didn't have to take off for the rehearsal for fifteen minutes or so, but with all the designers focused on something, now seemed a good time to make my escape.

“You heading out?” Randall appeared from the basement.

“Family stuff. Are you—”

My phone rang. It was Stanley Denton

“Remember that so-called charity you asked me to check out?” he said. “Designers of the Future?”

“So-called? What have you found out about it?”

“Not a whole lot, but enough to be very suspicious.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Let me put you on speaker so Randall Shiffley can hear.”

“Okay.”

“Hey, Stanley,” Randall said. “What's up?”

“Meg had me look into the charity Clay Spottiswood designated to receive the proceeds if he won the contest,” Stanley said.

Randall looked puzzled and glanced at me.

“Because I'd never heard of it, and someone told me Clay had founded it, and it didn't seem in character for him,” I explained.

“Good instincts,” Stanley said. “I can't quite prove it yet, but I have reason to believe it was pretty much a sham. I haven't been able to put my hands on any paperwork about the organization—”

“You think maybe there isn't any?” I asked.

“Good possibility,” Stanley said.

“Didn't I give you the form he gave me?” Randall asked.

“You did,” Stanley said. “But it's a forgery. The tax-exempt number on it belongs to the Vietnam Veterans of America.”

“He's scum,” Randall muttered.

“I talked to one of Clay's clients,” Stanley went on. “A very wealthy man who doesn't want his name attached to any of this, but I believe him. Clay hit him up for a donation to his charity but he never did produce any paperwork. Nothing like a business plan or a budget. Only thing he could remember was Clay bragging about what a low salary he was going to pay himself for running the show, but my source didn't really think fifty thousand was such a bargain rate for an outfit that had no assets and no real hope of acquiring any.”

“So Clay was trying to con us into putting half the show house proceeds into his own pocket,” Randall said. “Meg, you're allowed to say ‘I told you so' now.”

“Did she predict Clay would try to pull something like that?”