'to use a couple of kids enamored of you to get your own daughter hot and bothered-it was a rotten idea, and I think deep down Vicky knew it was.' Melissa shook her head. She seemed highly disturbed by her story, a sign to janek that it was probably true. 'But once she got the notion into her head, she couldn't let it go. I don't know what happened exactly, except that there was a formal dance and she chose that occasion to sic the boys on to Bev. The whole thing went sour, as it was bound to do. First, there were two of them, which was crazy on its face. And second, the MacDonaids were just a pair of horny kids, not to mantic at all. they made some kind of crude, clumsy pass, Bev got hysterical (at least that's what the boys reported to Vicky; Bev apparently never said a word), and the end result was just the opposite of what Vicky intended. Instead of learning what sex was about and how great it could be, Bev discovered it was horrible and never wanted to engage in it again.
'When Vicky told me what she'd done, she was practically in tears. She'd botched it, she admitted, and now she didn't know how to make things right. Even now I can remember her words: 'I didn't want her to be a goddamn wallflower, Lisa. Now I'm afraid that's what she's going to be.'' That was what Melissa wanted Janek to know. She probably wouldn't have thought of it if Millie Cannaday hadn't mentioned that the MacDonalds had been murdered and their sex organs glued up by Beverly's patient. Then, when Millie mentioned the wallflower signature, the pieces just fell together in Melissa's mind. As he listened, Janek couldn't help feeling sickened by the tale even as he was exhilarated by the knowledge that he had finally found a motive for a least one set of Wallflower killings. He thanked Melissa, paid the breakfast check, and went out to walk the cold, windy streets of Cleveland Heights.
He wandered aimlessly. The story haunted him. Everything about it rang true-except for Victoria Archer's tears. He could give no credence to her regrets. On the basis of everything he'd learned about the woman, he believed she probably did want Beverly to be a wallflower, and that was the real reason she'd set her daughter up.
Monika would understand, Janek thought. She would analyze it clearly.
She'd say that although Victoria may have thought she was sorry about the outcome, deep down in her subconscious she was pleased by it. Very pleased.
So Beverly had sent Diana Proctor out to kill and glue the MacDonalds in revenge for what they'd done to her after a dance years before. And the two toothbrushes Diana had brought back as trophies to be offered up to the image of Victoria on the wall-were they the symbols of the brothers' sex organs, sources of their mutual offense?
It was vile and sick, Janek thought, and also totally wrong. For, even if one believed in revenge, it was not the MacDonalds who deserved to be glued. It was Marna. That, Janek thought, was the ultimate irony in the whole grotesque and monstrous affair- that Beverly, the avenging wallflower, should have offered up trophies to the very woman who caused her to become a wallflower in the first place.
Janek made his way down to the University Circle area, then phoned Aaron at the motel. While he waited to be picked up, he was struck by a powerful idea. He pulled back from it; it seemed too perfect. Then he slowly brought it out again, rotated it, examined it, looked at it from every side. Perhaps, he thought, there was a way to break Beverly, induce her to confess.
There they were, two Manhattan cops in a strange Midwestern city, looking for a picture painted by an artist who had died seven years before.
'How do we find it? We go classic, Frank,' Aaron said. And that's just what he did.
Although it was a textbook example of investigative work, later Janek would marvel at the elegance and speed with which Aaron brought it off.
He went straight to the Cuyahoga County Courthouse, where, after some mild flirting with one of the clerks, he obtained the estate file for Peter Aretzsky. Aretzsky's sole heir and executrix turned out to be one and the same person, his sister, a Mrs. Nadia Malkiewicz, who, as it happened, was conveniently listed in the Cleveland telephone directory. Aaron called her. Yes, she was Peter Aretzsky's sister. Yes, she had inherited all his unsold work. Yes, she had the big picture of Victoria Archer. Yes, she would be willing to show it to the detectives. When they would like to see it? Now?
Fine, they could come right over. The entire process took Aaron just one and threequarters hours.
Mrs. Malkiewicz, a widow, lived in Ohio City, a historical section on the west side of Cleveland which, after years of neglect, was in the midst of heavy gentrification. As Janek and Aaron drove in, they could hear the sound of sawing and hammering around the neighborhood. they saw Dumpsters on the street filled with the entrails of houses being gutted for renovation.
The MaiMewicz residence was the worst-looking house on its block, a narrow wood frame structure with peeling siding and an unshoveled path leading to a badly disintegrating front porch.
Nadia MaMewicz looked as miserable as her house. A pale, drawn white-haired woman in a cheap, shapeless housedress, she had a bitter, puckered mouth and the beginnings of a mustache on her upper lip. Her greeting, too, was a good deal less effusive than Aaron expected after talking with her on the phone. Janek understood her transformation.
A shrewd look in the old lady's eyes told him she saw them as vultures looking to pounce upon her late brother's work.
He also quickly understood something else: Mrs. Malkiewicz had contempt for said work. There were no original Aretzsky paintings displayed on her parlor walls, although there were pictures of another sort, including a large black velvet banner bearing a cloying reproduction of da Vinci's The Last Supper.
'Yuk! That woman!' was Mrs. Malkiewicz's reaction when Aaron asked her about Victoria Archer.
'She ruined my brother's life, not that he had much of one. A failure and a drunkard was what he was! What's Worse, tell me, than a failed drunken painter? Slapping paint on burlap all day long-is that any kind of life? My late husband, bless him, was a hardworking man. Fortyfive years sweating it out on the flats. And what did he have to show for it when they laid him off Nothing! Not even his promised pension. 'Sorry, we're bankrupt,' the company said. So that's what you get in this great United States of America… they listened to her bitter gripes for half an hour before they could get her to escort them to the basement, where the treasure trove of art was stored.
The paintings, Janek could see at once, were being kept under appalling conditions. Forty or fifty canvases were piled, unevenly against a rough stone cellar wall. Moisture oozed along the floor, and an old oil-burning forced-air furnace roared on the other side of the room.
When they began to pull the pictures out-the one of Victoria, being the largest, was at the bottom of the stack-he saw that many of the frames were warped and that there were mouse droppings in between.
Still, Janek found the work impressive. No matter that Peter Aretzsky had lived a miserable life, his drawing was authoritative and his palette was vibrant. When, finally, they pulled out the big portrait and set it up, Janek could tell at once that it was the artist's masterpiece.
Melissa Walters had been right: Aretzsky had put great feeling into it.
His sense of his subject leaped off the canvas and struck the viewer hard. But it was not the painter's hatred that Janek felt so much, nor his bitterness and disillusionment. Although Victoria was harshly chafacterized, Aretzsky showed a good deal more of her than mere cruelty. It was, Janek thought, a portrait of an extremely unhappy woman, a woman ravaged by a vast and insupportable inner pain. Yes, she was mean, yes, she was selfish-the glare in her eyes and the set of her mouth made that clear enough. But what Aretzsky showed was a victim, a real human being in distress. And although Janek understood why Victoria had hated this picture and had wished to see it destroyed, he also understood how very wrong she'd been. Compared with the painting he had seen in Beverly's bedroom, the painting that had haunted his dreams, this was a mature work of art. That first portrait was a poster. This second one was a truly tragic image. As Janek continued to gaze at the picture, many things became clear. He understood why Beverly had coveted the first picture and built her bedroom altar around it. It was a portrait of her mother as Beverly needed to remember her, while the second picture was too complex to inspire adoration. The Victoria Archer in the second picture was a woman who could make a wallflower of her own daughter. It was that true a likeness, Janek thought.
Later, upstairs, he and Aaron tried to strike a deal with Mrs.
Malkiewicz, but the old lady wouldn't bargain. She acknowledged she'd been unable to sell a single one of her brother's canvases and admitted freely that he and Aaron were the first people to come around and express an interest in his work. Still, she held firm. Her price was nonnegotiable. Ten-thousand-dollars-take-it-or-leave-it.
Not a penny less.
Why? they asked her. She couldn't explain it. She just knew the picture was valuable and she wasn't going to
