Murder at the Gardner Read online

  Flower ladies, Titus called them in mild contempt, but he was well aware of their value to the museum. And he was grateful for the magnificent floral effects his head gardener had produced in the courtyard, where blue cinerarias were blazing now among trees of yellow jasmine, pots of arum lilies and pale narcissus, where throughout the year the garden burst into magnificent bloom with extravagant displays of lilies and orchids, cyclamen and azaleas.

  “It’s always so peaceful here,” the flower ladies would say to one another, failing to notice the scenes of the Passion on the wall behind them, or the tragic marble head of Apollo beside the jar of Easter lilies, or the slave in the claws of a lion, above the container of sweet-smelling jasmine.

  This morning the naked boy on Pesellino’s panel painting, the cruel youth called Love, was sharpening his arrows for Titus Moon, and he was busy among the benefactors as well, drawing his bow and taking careful aim.

  His new victims were Beryl Bodkin, the wife of an impossible husband, and Fenton Hepplewhite, the husband of an impossible wife. Somehow these two unhappy people, crushed as they were in the grip of their wretched marriages, had stumbled upon one another in a nook between a Roman sarcophagus and a flowering jade tree. John Bodkin, the impossible husband, was absent at the moment because he was attending the trustees’ meeting upstairs, and Madeline Hepplewhite, the impossible wife, had abandoned her husband in order to barge all over the galleries with one of the flower ladies. Thus Beryl Bodkin and Fenton Hepplewhite suddenly found themselves alone together.

  Beryl and Fenton had never before exchanged a personal word. The noisy locomotives to which they were attached had always dominated their encounters with huge noises of CHUFFA-CHUFFA-CHUFF and furious whistle blasts. Towed along in the rear, they had never been shunted onto the same railway siding. Now, stunned, they greeted one another and began to talk, stuttering in their excitement, fearful of the return of Madeline or John.

  For the moment they were safe from interruption. The meeting of the trustees had only just begun, upstairs in the Dutch Room, and Madeline Hepplewhite was at this moment dragging her friend, one of the new benefactors, through all the galleries on the upper floors.

  In the absence of his wife, Fenton Hepplewhite expanded like a paper flower in water. His bowed shoulders straightened, his nervous laughter sobered, his sinews loosened their rigid grip on his bones. And Beryl’s eager face was bright. She was finding all sorts of things to say; she was astonished at the things that were in her, waiting to be said.

  It was a Monday, and therefore the museum was closed to ordinary visitors. “I’m sorry,” said the guard to Madeline Hepplewhite as she charged past him up the stairs. “The galleries aren’t open today.”

  Madeline continued to sail upward. “I am one of the principal benefactors of this museum,” she said, grasping the arm of her nervous friend, urging her along. “I think I have a right to go anywhere I please.”

  What could he do? He couldn’t engage in physical combat with a benefactor. Swiftly the guard checked in at the watch desk, asking to be replaced at his post, then galloped up the stairs two at a time to follow Madeline Hepplewhite wherever she went.

  Madeline was eager to play a proprietary role, to show off her treasures, her Velásquez, her Rubens, her Fra Angelico. “We’ll just take a little whirlwind tour,” she said to her friend, Viva Mae Biggy.

  But the tour went on and on, exhausting the energy of the new benefactor, who wasn’t really very much interested in art. By the time they reached the third floor, Viva Mae’s eyes were glazed, she was glutted with masterpieces, she could absorb no more.

  But in the Veronese Room she perked up. In the middle of the floor stood a solid object that was neither a painting nor a piece of sculpture.

  “Oh, look at the sedan chair,” she said, summoning a last spark of interest. “Imagine being carried around in that thing!”

  “Muddy streets,” explained Madeline Hepplewhite. “Filth everywhere. No standards of hygiene. Raw sewage running in the gutter.”

  “Oh, ugh,” said Viva Mae, and then she gave a soft shriek. “Oh, Madeline, there’s someone in it. Look, there’s a man inside.”

  “Good heavens.” Madeline moved forward and stared courageously into the sedan chair, mindful of her reputation as a fearless woman who had once climbed a tree at a garden party. “So there is.”

  The big man in the sedan chair was asleep. He lay cuddled on his side, his hands under his chin, his long knees drawn up.

  Imperiously Madeline summoned the guard. “How, may I ask, did he get in here? What on earth has happened to the security of this institution?”

  The guard too peered into the sedan chair. “Oh, no, not again,” he said. “That’s Tom Duck.”

  “What do you mean, again?” said Madeline Hepplewhite. “Do you mean this sort of thing has happened before? Who in the world is Tom Duck?”

  “He’s just this old bum. He’s a friend of Titus Moon’s. He keeps coming in off the street. He likes it here, that’s the trouble. I don’t know how he does it, but he gets in somehow. I’ll call the watch desk. You ladies better get back to your reception.”

  “Well, all right,” said Madeline. “But I’m really quite shocked. To think something like this could happen in an institution devoted to the protection of so many valuable things. I mean, Viva Mae was really quite frightened.” Madeline frowned at the guard, regarding him as the visible representative of the establishment at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “I really am beginning to doubt whether this museum cares for what it has. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t change my will.”

  At last, to the guard’s relief, Madeline and Viva Mae rejoined the rest of the benefactors, who were now touring the greenhouses. Thrusting her way along the narrow greenhouse aisle, Madeline looked for her husband Fenton. She couldn’t find him anywhere. Where had he gone? At last she discovered him deep in conversation with Beryl Bodkin, the two of them sheltered by a gigantic rubber plant.

  Shrewdly she guessed at the damage done in her absence. Swiftly she swept him out of danger.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IN THE DUTCH ROOM, the trustees sat on two sides of the long Tuscan table, with director Titus Moon at one end and Homer Kelly at the other. Around them hung some of the most famous paintings in the museum—three Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a Rubens, a pair of Holbeins, a Dürer. Even the illumination in the lofty chamber was Dutch. It fell on the table as if it were slanting from seventeenth-century windows, modeling in light and shade a gathering of solid men and women of Amsterdam. Above their sober clothing their faces glowed, and the air around them was dark and shimmering. Their names might have been Hoogstraten or Droochsloot or Schimmelpenninck.

  But the seven trustees were not Dutch. Most of them were Bostonian. Their names were John Bodkin, Fulton Hillside, Preston Carver, Shackleton Bowditch, Peggy Foley, Edward Fallfold, and Catherine Rule. Edward Fallfold was a Virginian, and Peggy Foley had the pleasing blunt features of a middle-aged woman of Irish descent. But the rest were Anglo-Saxon Yankees with narrow faces that betrayed their inner convictions. Recognizing the tragic nature of earthly existence, they worked hard against the night that was coming, smiled with all their might, and saved leftover pieces of string. In repose, their features relaxed into melancholy. Their smiles, therefore, were triumphs of will. Their speech was a whiffle of whee-whahs.

  Sitting together around the Tuscan table in their seven chairs, they were a study in the two ways Bostonians grow old—

  1)

  they turn ever more pinched and shriveled, like plump fruit shrinking and withering;

  2)

  they become ever more heroic and splendid like ancient trees.

  Chairman John Bodkin was tending in the direction of the former, although he still had many years to go.

  Carver and Hillside were too young to display either tendency. Their cheeks were round, their faces unformed and bland.

  Catherine Rule was one of the latter.
And Shackleton Bowditch, too, was a monument, grand and spreading like a white ash tree, even though his ancestry was not altogether pure. One of Shackleton’s grandfathers had been an explorer, a seeker after rare Tibetan shrubs, and he had come home to Boston with a wife from a very different gene pool. Thus there was an unexpected streak of impish fancy in Shackleton Bowditch, a breadth of outlook, an insistence on querying the very foundation stones upon which Bodkin, Hillside, and Carver so staunchly stood.

  As trustees, all of them were new. In the last five years, the board had turned over completely. The seven competent men who had managed the affairs of the museum for so many years had vanished one by one, resigning or dying of old age. Their successors had been chosen a little hastily, although in the opinion of Titus Moon, the best among them were perhaps the most bizarre.

  Catherine Rule and Peggy Foley were the first women to serve on the board of trustees. Some of the male members who had voted for them had lived to regret it. Oh, Catherine Rule was all right, although she was often stubborn about coming around to a sensible way of thinking. Catherine was the Conservator of Textiles, an international authority on the repair of tapestries. She was seventy years old. She knew everything there was to know about the collection.

  Peggy Foley was something else again. A wealthy widow, Peggy had only a skimpy understanding of art history. She could pronounce the names of Botticelli and Rembrandt, but she muffed a lot of the others, like Teepolo, Goordi and Velsquaze. Fortunately Peggy was sharp as a tack about money. “Pick your people right the first time,” her husband had told her before he died, “then give ’em a free hand. Hang in there, Peggy, back ’em up.” “But how will I know the right ones from the wrong ones?” Peggy had wanted to know. “I trust you, Peg. You’ll know what to do. You’ve got a good eye for a crook or a bimbo.”

  Six of the trustees often voted according to a pattern, with Bodkin, Hillside, and Carver on one side, cautious and statesmanlike, and Bowditch, Rule, and Foley on the other, impulsive and adventurous. The swing vote was usually Fallfold’s.

  Edward Fallfold was the only highly trained scholar among the trustees. His doctor’s degree in art history had led to a life of learning. Fallfold had made a name for himself by writing scholarly articles and books, although this pursuit did little more than pay for his skimpy living quarters and keep him in well-tailored gray suits, immaculate shirts, and silken ties. In the past, he had held several teaching posts in local colleges, but he had lost them rapidly through flagrant attentions to one or another of the young men in his classes.

  His failure to win the directorship of the Gardner Museum had been a bitter blow, but Fallfold had kept his disappointment to himself. His presence among the other trustees was genial and urbane, although somehow he failed to make intimate friends of any of the others. It was his own fault. Edward Fallfold knew only two ways of relating to his fellow men and women, either with indifference or with passion. The passion flared up suddenly and had a natural life span of four or five months. The indifference was constant, masked by an amusing manner and a glance that engaged the eyes of another human being for only an instant, then flitted away to rest on some inanimate object. Fallfold was given to puns and jocular remarks, and he had been known to flirt with Preston Carver. (Carver had recoiled.) Fallfold’s views on controversial subjects were mildly sardonic. His vote was unpredictable.

  Titus Moon himself, although he was the director of the museum, had no vote at all. But since Titus provided the agenda for the meetings, his proposals were usually the substance of the discussion.

  In this setting, among these people, Homer Kelly felt out-of-place and seedy. This morning he had dressed with particular care, but with his wife away, he had overlooked a couple of small details. His shirt was badly rumpled and his tie was spotted with miscellaneous filth.

  It didn’t matter. Homer knew that his usefulness to the trustees lay not in some false air of respectability, nor in the fact that he taught a course in American literature at Harvard. What Titus Moon had cared about was Homer’s reputation as a former lieutenant-detective with the district attorney of Middlesex County. This ancient connection was still getting Homer mixed up with crimes of a bourgeois and upper-middle-class nature. Here he was again, called in to hear some tale of woe in a scene of hushed intellectual pretension. While Fulton Hillside read the minutes of the last meeting, Homer gazed about him, longing for an honest felon, some low-down degenerate, some totally uneducated fink.

  “Why me?” he had said to Titus Moon. “Why pick an aesthetic moron to help you out with your little problem, whatever it is? Surely there exists some mincing policeman who dotes on art?”

  But Moon had said it didn’t matter whether Homer knew one painter from another. The important thing was his nose for the identification of criminals. Homer was famous for his nose. “Our own security chief is a good man,” Titus had said, “and he’s done all he can, but without any result so far. We’ll call in the police, of course, if we have to, but first we want to try to nip this thing in the bud without a lot of publicity.”

  The business meeting was over. It was time to explain to Homer Kelly the ticklish troubles afflicting the museum. Shackleton Bowditch began it. Shackleton was a Harvard Fellow, an acquaintance of Homer’s from the old days of the bombing at Memorial Hall. “You see, Homer,” said Shackleton, “it’s these strange things that have been happening. That’s why we’ve called you in.”

  “That’s right,” said Preston Carver, rubbing his hands nervously and raising his eyebrows. Carver’s eyebrows were arched and round like crescent moons, giving his face an expression of perpetual surprise, as if the world were a dangerous and shocking place. “There have been a number of peculiar incidents.”

  “It’s that old tramp, for one thing,” said Fulton Hillside.

  “Oh, Tom Duck,” said John Bodkin angrily. “Somebody’s got to do something about Tom Duck.” Bodkin looked meaningfully at Titus Moon. “It’s disgraceful.”

  “Tom Duck?” said Homer.

  “Oh, Tom Duck’s not really part of the problem,” said Shackleton Bowditch. “He’s just an old guy who comes in here, turns up in the barn sleeping with the cats.”

  “He’s a friend of mine, I’m afraid,” explained Titus Moon to Homer. “An old alcoholic, ex-prizefighter. He’s perfectly harmless, but somehow he keeps getting into the museum and alarming people. He’s my responsibility. I’ll work on him again.”

  “Well, if Tom Duck’s not the problem,” said Homer patiently, “what is?”

  “The frogs,” said Catherine Rule, looking at him slyly.

  “Frogs?” Homer turned in astonishment to Miss Rule, who was sitting with her chair pulled away from the table, working on a piece of embroidery. At first glance, on being introduced to her at the beginning of the meeting, he had merely thought, old woman, but now he saw that she had fixed him with an extraordinary gaze. Her irises were yellow, her pupils black pinpoints. The right eye pierced him through, as if it knew his most terrible secrets and forgave them, while the left stared dreamily in another direction, contemplating wonders. Her dress was of crimson taffeta. It was a magnificent dress, a glorious dress. Even Homer in his oafish ignorance could recognize a great dress when he saw one, a dress that was surely at the height of contemporary fashion right now, and perhaps also at the dawn of time. Her face was lightly channeled with a thousand wrinkles, each seeming to express some distinctive attitude of mind, some cynical drollery. “The frogs in the courtyard pool,” said Catherine, smiling at him. “Someone put pollywogs in the pool, and they turned into frogs, and pretty soon they were hopping all over the floor.”

  Homer scribbled Frogs on his agenda sheet. “What else?”

  “The balloon,” giggled Peggy Foley. “Somebody tied a balloon to Bindo Whatsisname. It’s a bronze statue by Cellini, you know, the goldsmith.” She waved her hands excitedly. “Oh, it’s gorgeous, you’ve got to see it. But somebody tied a gas balloon to its ear. I mean, it was s
o funny!” Peggy cackled wildly, and her eyes rolled, and then her face fell. “Except that it was really just so terrible. I mean, we can’t let it happen again, no, no.”

  “So far it doesn’t sound very alarming,” said Homer, writing Balloon under Frogs. “Anything else?”

  Edward Fallfold cleared his throat and grinned at Titus. “There have been a good many much more damaging things.”

  “Much worse than frogs and balloons and Tom Duck,” said Fulton Hillside, his brown eyes round with dismay.

  “The pictures have been shifted,” whispered Preston Carver, arching his eyebrows, leaning forward and speaking in a whisper.

  “Shifted?” said Homer. “You mean, moved around from place to place?”

  “They change places in the night,” said Titus Moon. “The Crivelli and the portrait of Count Inghirami in the Raphael Room. The Botticelli and the School of Botticelli hanging across from it in the Long Gallery. The Rubens—” Titus gestured at the portrait of Thomas Howard on the wall—“was hanging upside down. And someone pasted a mustache on van Dyck’s Lady with a Rose.”

  “Funny,” said Homer grimly. “Ha, ha.”

  “I have to confess I found the blackboards rather amusing,” said Catherine Rule, looking up from her embroidery. “The first one turned up in the middle of the Early Italian Room, a blackboard on an easel. Someone had drawn a picture on it with chalk, a crude picture of a cat—you know, the way children draw a cat, two circles with whiskers and a curly tail.”

  “The next one appeared in the Titian Room,” said Peggy Foley eagerly, “right there in front of The Rape of Europa, with a lot of crazy scribbles on it, you know, like snarled-up yarn. And next day there was another one here in the Dutch Room with a gallows on it—you know, like when you play the game of hangman. I mean, it’s really getting scary.”