And how could they have? It seemed impossible.
Forget that, then, I told myself. Concentrate on Frank and your knowledge of the people around him. Almost everybody, even the Mexican Mafia members, hated him; there seemed to be no shortage of possible suspects.
I began-feeling self-conscious and a little dramatic-to review them.
Jesse. I started with him for the same reason Lieutenant Kirk had started with me. Jesse had admitted to having had a violent quarrel with Frank. What had he said? “I offered to break his fat neck.” Jesse had as much of a temper as I did, if not more. But would his anger be translated into action if sufficiently pushed? I d never had occasion to test that.
Maria. She certainly had cause to hate her uncle by marriage. Normally she rode to and from work with Frank, but yesterday she had said she was walking home. Now that I thought of it, home was farther than the delicate Maria would normally deign to walk. Where else might she have gone? I’d need to find out.
Rosa De Palma. Her husband, according to Vic, had been seeing another woman. I didn’t know Rosa that well, but many women of my background accepted these affairs as part of their lot in life. Even so, didn’t resentment smolder under the surface? Couldn’t some event push the rejected wife over the edge? I needed to know more about Frank’s widow.
The unknown woman. I needed to find out whom Frank had been seeing.
Isabel. She could have been angry at the‘ cool reception given her
Tony. Now I came to a real puzzle. Where the devil was the Colombian? I’d tried to call him that afternoon, but there was no answer at his apartment. Had he been so sick he couldn’t answer the phone? If so, where was Susana? When Lieutenant Kirk had called late this afternoon, he’d indicated he also had had no luck when he’d gone to Tony’s apartment. Kirk had merely sounded irritated about it, but to me Tony’s unavailability was suspicious. Learning his whereabouts, I decided, should be my first priority.
Vic. I found it hard to suspect the big, sad man of anything. He’d been devoted to Frank. But then I thought of the look on his face when Frank had stalked out of the folk art gallery late yesterday afternoon. What did I know of Vic anyway? I would have to find out more…
A sudden rasping sound raised chills along my spine and made me lift my head. The sound stopped, then started again. With a nervous laugh, I recognized the scraping of the branches of the tall jacaranda tree that draped its lavender-blue flowers over the roof of the office wing. I got up and went to the window. The fog was in, blowing in sheets across the grounds. It was so thick it might have been fine, gray snow…
A shadow fell across the wall beside me. It was huge and unrecognizable and came from the doorway. I put my hand to my throat, but it did nothing to calm my racing pulse. Slowly I turned.
It was Vic.
“I’m sorry if I startled you. I didn’t want to say anything to make you jump out of your skin.” His homely face twisted in a grin. “I guess silence wasn’t the right approach either.”
“There is no right approach, not after a day like today.” I hugged my jacket closer around me and came away from the window. “This place is eerie at night, especially with the fog swirling around out there.”
“Come on in my office. I’ve got the quartz heater on. I’ll give you some brandy.”
It sounded good. I followed Vic across the hall. His office definitely looked cheery, the heater glowing and the curtains drawn. Ledgers and accounting sheets were spread all over the desk.
“I didn’t even know you were here,” I said, taking a seat in one of his comfortable old chairs. “What are you working on?”
He took a plastic cup from his desk drawer and filled it with brandy. From his high color, I guessed he’d had a fair amount of the stuff. “The accounts, what else? It occurred to me that the board would probably want to go over them, now that Frank’s…” He handed me the cup, his eyes melancholy. “At any rate, I wanted them to be as current as possible. With the opening coming up, I’ve gotten behind.”
“Haven’t we all.” I sipped brandy, welcoming the warmth it brought.
Vic began gathering up the ledgers. “I went to your office to make sure you didn’t leave without letting me out, so you could set the alarm.” He went to the small safe, twisted the dial and deposited everything inside.
“Why do you do that?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Lock the records up. They’re just papers, after all.”
“They may be just papers, but they have to be kept in a fireproof place.” He returned to the desk and sat, the melancholy look even more pronounced.
“You’ll miss him, won’t you?” I asked.
“Yes. I will. We were together a long time, almost twenty years. Frank was the closest thing to a friend I had.” He must have caught my skeptical expression. “I know, you don’t think Frank was capable of friendship. Well, in a lot of ways he wasn’t. But we had good times. Some damned good times.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“At the Hernandez Foundation.” He named an organization that gave grants to Spanish-American cultural projects. “Frank was director there. It was a good job for a kid barely out of college. He hired me as his accountant. We’d travel all over the state, checking out projects we were thinking of funding. I had this old Lincoln Continental. God, could we make time in that car! San Diego to Bakersfield to San Francisco in one day. Those were some times.” His eyes sobered. “Of course I needed something to keep my mind off my daughter.”
It was the first time he’d ever mentioned family to me. “Why?”
“She was sick. A rare kidney disease. She…”He passed a hand over his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
That probably meant the girl had died. “When Frank left the Hernandez Foundation, you went with him?”
“Yes. Then he opened the art gallery in Old Town. He knew his art, you know. And he was good at finding sources for it. We’d bring it up from South America, Mexico. He knew who to buy from, and he could strike a hard bargain. That was before all this business about national treasures.”
In recent years the governments south of the border had come to realize their art treasures are not in unlimited supply and placed restrictions on their export. In Mexico, for instance, items above five thousand dollars in value cannot be removed from the country without permission of the government. Although these restrictions originally took the form of gentlemen’s agreements between countries, more and more of them are now being written into law. It was a move of which I approved, even if it did make acquisitions more difficult. “Was La Galena very successful?” I asked. I remembered it as being small but chic.
Vic nodded.
“Why’d Frank give it up, then?”
“To found this museum, of course.”
That wasn’t exactly how it had happened. Carlos Bautista and several of his wealthy cronies had come up with the idea and hired Frank to implement it. He, in turn, had hired me. “I always pictured Frank as very fond of money, and we all know he wasn’t making that much here. I’m surprised he would give up a lucrative business.”
Vic waved one hand. “That was one of the stipulations that went with the job, so there wouldn’t be a conflict of interest. And there was the prestige of the directorship. Frank never could resist a chance to better his standing in the community.”
Was there a touch of bitterness in Vic’s voice?
“Also,” he added, “he’d invested his profits from La Galena wisely. He really didn’t need a big salary.”
I supposed it made sense. If anyone would be privy to the workings of Frank’s mind, it would be Vic.
“This morning,” I said, “you mentioned that Frank was involved with a woman other than Rosa.”
Vic shook his head. “I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Who is she?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t say.”
“Vic, it might be important.”
He looked surprised. “To what?”
“To finding out who killed him.”
