The Big Score Read online

  “At last,” said Christian, a glass in hand, his uncombed dark hair falling over his brow. “I shall forebear from reference to the prodigal.”

  Matthias set his luggage down carefully on the parquet floor of the foyer, which badly needed polishing.

  “You weren’t at the airport,” he said.

  “Didn’t you get my message, big brother? I asked them to page you. Thought I did, anyway. Couldn’t possibly drive. Not in this incandescent sunlight. Grandmother of hangovers. Terrible night. Well, wonderful night, but a terrible morning. Just now getting well.”

  There was tomato juice in the expensive crystal glass—and a lot of something else.

  For a moment, Christian looked as if he might actually give his returning brother a hug, but he thought better of it, perhaps fearing he might spill the precious fluid in his glass. Matthias followed him into the gloomy living room, glancing at the paintings and fixtures and surprised to find them still there. Except for a favorite nude he had painted and a couple of prints, the contents of the house came mostly from old family holdings, to which Christian could make some claim.

  Drawn drapes kept the room dark, but for a thin shaft of light slashing across the carpet from between the curtains. Matthias took a seat on the couch out of its reach, lighting his pipe and puffing on it deeply. Christian slumped into a large armchair opposite. Time and drink had not ruined his attractiveness. Rather, they seemed to have enhanced him, making him look worldly, wiser, more masculine. His dark hair was a striking anomoly. No one else in the family had it. He made jokes about being a bastard. It forestalled gossip implying more seriously the same thing.

  “Drink, big brother?”

  “Some coffee, later.”

  “Still off the sauce, Matthias? After all you’ve been through?”

  “You might try giving it a rest yourself sometime.”

  “Instant coffee’s all I have,” said Christian, retreating from the subject. “Have to make it yourself, I’m afraid. Except for the cleaning woman, haven’t any help.”

  A part-time cleaning woman is all Matthias and his wife had ever employed, though he suspected she would have been delighted to have live-in servants to wait upon her.

  “You’ve no companion?”

  “Not in residence. They get in the way of my work. You stopped in New York, to see your ex-wife?”

  “I saw her briefly. It wasn’t a very successful reunion.”

  “Hillary’s still living in Westchester?”

  Matthias nodded. “It’s all she ever wanted. Her new husband’s an advertising man. He likes that life.”

  “Advertising. How middle class.”

  Unlike Matthias, Christian clung to the notion that he was an aristocrat. Snobbery was part of his image of that.

  “At least he earns a living, which is more than I’ve been able to say,” said Matthias.

  “But, art, big brother. You’ve had art.”

  “I’ve sold three paintings this year. For two thousand dollars each.”

  “Not bad, big brother.”

  “They were nudes—big blondes, à la Veronese—for an Arab. For his yacht.”

  “Paint some more. We could use the money.”

  Christian looked into his glass as if something important were hidden in the tomato juice. Then he drank, keeping his eyes from his brother.

  “Have you actually picked up a brush since I left?” Matthias asked.

  “Actually have, big brother. Done a portrait or two, and a few other things. Still some Lake Shore Drive ladies who like my work.”

  He actually dared use this word, though the “work” these ladies liked had little to do with Christian’s painting. They paid him retainers for “sittings” that sometimes lasted for weeks and months, though they were seldom dissatisfied.

  “Just how much money could we use?” Matthias said.

  Christian took a very deep breath and then sighed. “The Curland family is close to stony broke, big brother. Do you want all the gory details now, or can we wait until tonight? We’re having dinner at the Lake Forest house. Annelise will be there. She’ll tell you everything, rest assured.”

  “Tonight.”

  “Mother died four days ago, Matthias.”

  “I came as soon as I was able.”

  “You could have stopped in New York on the way back to France.”

  There was a painting of their mother over the fireplace—a brilliant portrait, managing to depict her in all her beauty, elegance, and dignity, without masking the meanness and madness. Christian had done it when he was only twenty-two, still a student at the Chicago Art Institute, where his paintings had been the centerpieces of annual student shows.

  “If I go back,” Matthias said. “I have some doubts.”

  “What?” Christian was so startled he spilled some of his drink.

  “Mother’s dying—my having to come home like this—I took it as something of a message, a sign. I think I’ve been wasting my time. I wanted to prove something to myself. It wasn’t what I had in mind, but I did.”

  “You’re going to stay on here in Chicago?”

  “It’s the last thing I want to do. But Cannes, Paris. Probablement, c’est finis. Rien de plus de la peinture.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Pretty sure. Sure enough.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Son of a bloody bitch.” They looked at each other for a long moment without speaking. Then Christian downed the rest of his drink and set down his glass. His hand shook slightly as he did so.

  “Annelise didn’t think you were ever coming back,” he said. “Not even for Mother’s funeral.”

  Annelise was their sister. She raised giant schnauzers in Barrington, in Lake County.

  “When is it?”

  “Tomorrow morning. In Lake Forest. She was cremated. We’re to scatter the ashes in the lake. If you haven’t a dark suit, you can borrow one of mine.”

  Zany Rawlings was not a chump. His old Chicago cop friends in the Area Six burglary detail had told him he was taking a chump job when he’d quit the department five years short of twenty-year retirement to hire on as police chief of Grand Pier, but he could smell the sour grapes when they said it. His pay was barely half what he made as a detective in the city, but his wife ran a beach shop that brought in a lot of money in the summer, and the job was as good as retirement. Crime in the old resort ran to fights on the beach, drunk and disorderlies in the town’s five bars and two Bohemian restaurants, the occasional burglary of an unoccupied summer house, and speeding on the highway that led out to the interstate. They’d only once had a problem with drugs, and that had involved a marijuana ring, some college dropouts who’d turned a pastime into a business. Zany and the local district attorney had thoroughly shut it down.

  Zany had six good men and two even more capable women working on his three-car force, leaving him plenty of time for reading, fishing, messing with his home computer, and swapping lies with the old-timers on the outsize pier from which the town derived its name. His daughter was finishing college and his son already had. His wife was happy running her souvenir, newspaper, and beach supplies store. Life was good.

  At least, it had been until the sailboat with the dead girl in it had turned up that morning. Zany had been sitting in his kitchen, drinking coffee and reading a new Sara Paretsky mystery when his sergeant had rung up from the harbor. Unfortunately, Zany had just finished breakfast.

  When he’d first joined the Chicago cops, they’d tried to call him Cowboy Rawlings. His first name was Zane, like the western novelist Zane Grey, and, except for his four years at the university in Laramie, he’d spent the first twenty-three years of his life in and around Meade, Wyoming. But “cowboy” didn’t fit. He’d ridden a horse only twice in his life, disliking it more the second time than the first. His jobs as a young man back home had included work as a reporter on the weekly newspaper, as a dynamiter in the nearby strip mine
s, and as a cop—acting chief of the Meade police force for three months when he was the only policeman on the payroll. He’d even spent a night in the town jail once, after too enthusiastic a payday carouse.

  They’d stuck the name Zany on him when they could think of nothing more appropriate. He was six foot four inches tall and wore clothes that always seemed somehow too small for him, his belt line always sagging below his large belly. He had a beard and a habit of rapidly blinking his pale-blue eyes whenever he was doing serious thinking. The effect was magnified by his glasses, which gave him the look of an eccentric professor. He read books constantly and could work magic with computers. For all his intelligence, he had been a careless and forgetful cop. He’d frequently misplaced his service revolver, and once had inadvertently killed an electric typewriter getting his gun out of a desk drawer.

  Like many who had grown up surrounded by mountains and arid plains, he passionately loved the water. Lake Michigan, to him, was one of God’s most magnificent creations.

  Now it had betrayed him.

  He gave the girl’s body only the most cursory visual examination, quickly stepping back to let the ambulance attendants remove it. His sergeant, George Hejmal, had taken a whole roll of photographs, and Zany could examine those later, when he was at more distance from a meal.

  The boat that had come so far to reach his shore was named Hillary. There were six bullet holes in it. Two had gone through the girl’s back, exiting from her lower chest and digging into the flooring of the cabin. Two others had struck the bulkhead to the right of the doorway. The remaining two had gone through the cabin roof. The angle of every one of them made it clear they’d been fired obliquely from above, as if from a bridge; another, higher boat; or even a low-flying aircraft. His men had been able to dig out most of them, including the two that had killed the girl. They were .38 specials, the same caliber that had been standard police issue until big departments like Chicago’s had begun using 15-shot, 9mm automatics.

  The painting that had fallen out of her clothes interested Zany even more. Something that had escaped the notice of his patrolmen had been immediately obvious to him. The bloodstains and bullet holes that so marred the unrolled canvas were mirror duplicates of those on the body. There was a dented crease near the bottom of the painting that coincided with the waistline of her shorts. She had apparently had it wrapped around her beneath her blouse when she had been shot.

  He had Hejmal take a number of photos of the painting as well, front and back, then put it in his safe upon returning to his office. Zany knew a little about art. He had gone to see a Frederic Remington exhibition at the Art Institute shortly after moving to the city and had gone back on days off regularly after that. He had seen a number of works done in the peculiar style of the bloody painting in the boat. European mostly, done before World War I, or in the 1920s.

  Zany called the county prosecutor, Douglas Moran, and then the Michigan State Police investigations unit, making it as clear as possible that he was simply following standard procedure in informing them of the crime, but was definitely not inviting them to come in and take over the investigation. He could have turned primary jurisdiction over to them, of course, and returned to his reading and fishing. But the county prosecutor—a man who loved publicity so much he had once posed for news photographers helping Zany’s people shoo late-night neckers off the beach—would never have permitted that. Local authority would enforce the local laws—those concerning homicide as well as moral turpitude.

  The State Police detectives would be a good hour getting to Grand Pier. Prosecutor Moran was there in minutes and was about to start rummaging about the boat until Zany suggested that he would be the best man to deal with the reporters who would descend upon the scene shortly. Moran readily agreed. Zany gave him enough information to provide a sound bite for the local television, then went back to his office, and to serious work.

  The boat was easy to trace, requiring only a phone call to the Chicago police marine unit. It was registered under the name of a Dr. Richard Meyerson, who said he hadn’t used it since the previous weekend and didn’t understand why it wasn’t still in its slip in Chicago’s Burnham Harbor. He seemed genuinely astonished to hear that it was now at Grand Pier, Michigan, and was stunned speechless when Zany told him about the murdered girl. When asked to come out to Grand Pier as soon as possible, he became quite indignant, complaining he was an oral surgeon very busy with patients. He had done nothing wrong, and demanded that the boat be brought back to him at once. After Zany threatened to send Chicago police to pick him up—a rather farfetched prospect, actually—the dentist reluctantly agreed to come out that afternoon.

  He arrived a little after three. He made a positive identification of the boat but, during questioning by Zany and two men from the State Police, said he knew nothing about any girl and was exceedingly upset when Zany made him come with them to the hospital to look at the body. Not many bullet holes in molars.

  After the State Police investigators completed the examination they’d insisted upon, making the search for fingerprints that Zany had neglected to do, Zany also made the dentist look carefully through the boat to see if anything had been taken—or added. There was nothing new, and very little out of place. All that was missing was gasoline. He said that, as usual, he had refilled the boat’s tank before tying it up for the week. Now it was bone dry.

  The dentist said he knew nothing about the painting, and showed little interest in it. He demanded to know who would repair the bullet damage to the boat, and was furious when Zany told him it would have to be impounded for the time being as evidence.

  Zany had the man make out an official statement detailing where he had been the night before—dinner at Eli’s, poker with buddies. Then he sent him on his unhappy way back to the city.

  After the State Police detectives finally left, pointedly asking Zany to keep them informed of every development, he called Chicago police headquarters at 11th and State to see if they had any missing persons matching the girl’s description—they didn’t—and to ask if they’d mind checking out the dentist’s statement. He sent Hejmal up to St. Joseph to get the photographs developed and printed overnight.

  After that, he didn’t know what to do—except think. He had a couple of beers while he did that, sitting on the screened-in porch of his house on the bluff, staring at the lake.

  After lunch, a shower, and a long nap to dispel his remaining jet lag, Matthias went for a walk through the Gold Coast, his old neighborhood, hoping the remembered sights would help shake off some of the sadness that had been clinging to him for days. He was pleased at least to find so many of the old houses still surviving and the Edwardian atmosphere of the genteel district little diminished. There were some new high-rises encroaching here and there, but not near enough to his house to matter.

  His stroll took him down Lake Shore Drive, his spirits refreshed by the lake breeze and the sweeping view south to the Drake Hotel and the new, tall buildings along Michigan Avenue beyond. There was no such prospect in New York City. To fully appreciate the towers of Manhattan, one had to stand in a cemetery near the East River in Queens, and even then they seemed a jumble.

  When he’d lived in Chicago, he’d often taken this walk in the evening with his wife—and, discreetly, with another woman. She was still in the city. The thought troubled him, and he tried to put it out of his mind.

  His brother stayed away all afternoon, returning with only time enough to change for dinner. Matthias drove, as Christian had apparently continued drinking through the afternoon, and even now had brought along a vodka martini for the car—a Jaguar sedan. They took the Edens Expressway because they were late, though Matthias would have preferred the slower route up Sheridan Road, which wound along the lake through the North Shore suburbs. He didn’t mind being late.

  “Rather a nice car, for a family going stony broke,” he said.

  “It’s not mine. It belongs to a client.”

  “Client?
”

  “A woman whose portrait I’m painting.” There was a clink of ice in Christian’s glass. “Winnetka lady. Very pretty.”

  “And over forty, no doubt.”

  “Over fifty, actually. A lady in full bloom.”

  The prospect of more such conversation made Matthias now feel like hurrying. He moved their speed up to ten miles an hour over the limit and kept it there, threading the long car through the evening traffic. Expressways were easy after the roads he’d driven in France, roads like Monaco’s Moyen Corniche, the cliff road where Grace Kelly had died on a hairpin turn.

  Matthias had left a woman back there on the Côte d’Azur. She was named Marie-Claire, and she was married to someone else. Matthias had lived with her for eight months, until her husband had returned from an extended stay in Asia. He still saw her from time to time. He was very fond of her, though she drank too much.

  He shouldn’t hector Christian about his “clients.”

  “Was it bad, at the end? When Mother died?”

  “Not for her, I don’t suppose. She’d been dying ever since the stroke, inch by inch. The doctor called it a blessing.”

  “Did you have to have her cremated?”

  “That was her wish—after her legs were amputated. Loss of circulation after the stroke, don’t you know. Gangrene. Nasty business, all of it.”

  Christian sipped from his drink again. Matthias wondered if his brother was always this way now, or if he was just responding to the dreadful stress of family loss and grief and the return of his old rival, big brother Matthias.

  “All right,” Matthias said. “Tell me how bad it is. I don’t want to wait for Annelise.”

  “The money.”

  “The lack of it.”

  “Well, big brother, Father is truly on his ass. He’s gone through everything. He took out two mortgages on the Lake Forest house and is behind on the payments. If it weren’t such a monstrous thing to sell, the mortgage holder, whoever it is, would be foreclosing now. The house on Astor is still unencumbered, but it’s badly in need of repairs, and I think a new furnace. Froze a bit last winter.”