The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Read online

  “Listen, sit down,” I said. “Have a glass of water. There’s been some terrible misunderstanding. Luisa and I are translating a book, and I thought a flower painting would be a nice present for her. I bought one for Claudie too because she’s been so hospitable. Do you think Claudie would have sent me to your gallery on purpose? If you’re not on good terms why would she want to give you business?”

  For a couple of seconds Nell, considering this, didn’t say anything. Then she looked into the room and saw Susan’s two framed watercolors propped up against the mantel. Before we could stop her, she’d lifted them up, one after the other, and smashed them, glass and all, on the sharp back of a metal lamp. The delicate pinks and yellows of the hibiscus and plumeria were ripped to shreds.

  “You’ll get a refund check in the morning,” Nell said, and slammed the door as she left.

  I was speechless, but Luisa seemed almost admiring. “That kind of passion is common in Uruguay,” she said. “You don’t see it much in the United States. All those anger management classes.”

  “She’s crazy,” I said.

  “No,” said Luisa. “She’s jealous.”

  III.

  The sorceresses of Greek mythology—Hecate, Circe—knew well the narcotic, stimulant, and deadly effects of this plant, and Linnaus gave it the Latin name Atropa after the Greek Goddess of the Underworld Atropos, who cut the thread of life.

  —Dietrich Frohne

  I SLEPT ON MY suspicions overnight and the next morning took Claudie off for a walk along the beach. “Is there any possibility,” I said point-blank, “that Nell murdered Donna Hazlitt?”

  Claudie’s hair blew in a straight line back from her forehead. She didn’t say, of course not; she said, “Not the Nell I know. But then, she didn’t turn out to be the Nell I knew in the end.”

  “I don’t have a good reason to be suspicious of Nell,” I admitted. “I just am. But tell me why you think she might be involved in this in any way.”

  “That phone call with Mrs. Hazlitt. You remember I said she started in the middle talking about this painting. I’m embarrassed to say I just assumed that she was probably senile and that she somehow thought we’d already met. But afterwards it occurred to me that maybe she really had talked to someone about the painting before.”

  “And that someone might have been Nell?”

  “Our old business cards have both the gallery number and my home number. I kept the house; Nell took the gallery. If Mrs. Hazlitt used the old business card, she might have called Nell the first time, and then tried the home number the second and gotten me.”

  “But why would Nell kill her to get the painting? Did she want the painting that badly? She must realize she can’t sell the painting now; you’d know.”

  “I’m afraid,” said Claudie, staring at the flat blue sea, “that she might have done it for Susan.”

  So the tangled story came out. How Susan had appeared in their lives, first claiming to be in love with Claudie, and then when Claudie told her she would leave Nell, saying that she was happy to share. How that sharing turned into Nell falling in love with Susan, violently in love, and leaving Claudie.

  “Susan doesn’t really seem like such a femme fatale,” I said conservatively, though I remembered the eager touch of her lips on mine.

  “She’s not at all,” said Claudie. “She’s more like a puppy dog that you think you’re playing with and all of sudden you realize has wrapped the leash around your legs so you can’t move.”

  She shook her black hair. “And I wasn’t even in love with her the way Nell is. Nell is absolutely obsessed with her.”

  I thought of Susan telling me how her girlfriend, soon to be ex-girlfriend, had misrepresented herself.

  “So you think Nell wanted to give her the painting to show her how much she cares? Or to ensure their financial future?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Cassandra. I lie awake at night, wishing the whole thing had never happened. That poor old woman; she was so excited about her discovery.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “They don’t even believe in the painting; why should they believe that Mrs. Hazlitt was murdered because of it?”

  I decided to take Susan up on her invitation to drop by “anytime,” but I made sure her car wasn’t in the drive first. The little house was locked, but that was no problem for a credit-card carrier like myself. I slipped a card between door and jamb and was inside in a second. It was the middle of the afternoon and I assumed she was at work. I hoped I wouldn’t be there long.

  Alas, searching for a flower painting in a studio full of flower paintings was harder than it looked. Over and over I thought, Yes! Then, No…There were copies of O’Keefe paintings, sketches, and watercolors in great piles. Over and over the same creamy white flowers, close-up angel’s trumpets, or jimson weed—or belladonna or Kikania-Haole—whatever you wanted to call it.

  After two hours, I had to give up on finding the painting. But I had found something more important perhaps: a scrap of paper in a book called Poisonous Plants by Dietrich Frohne, marking an entry on “Datura.” According to the book, this is the botanical name of the Jimson Weed in the United States, the Thorn Apple in Britain, the Kikania-Haole in Hawaii. It is a member of the nightshade family, which also includes red peppers, potatoes, and belladonna, to which the jimson weed is closely related. The book also noted that datura seeds had long been used in India for suicide and murder and that criminals had used extracts of the seeds to knock out railway passengers and rob them. The term “Jimson” came from Jamestown, where the weed had led to a mass poisoning in 1676, which effectively wiped out the colony. Taken orally, the datura seeds cause great thirst and a terrible flushing of the skin. They cause the person who ingests them to thrash around and pick randomly at imaginary objects in the air. Further hallucinations follow; then coma and death.

  Of course datura is not all bad. For example, atropine comes from the belladonna plant and is useful in dilating the pupil of the eye.

  Susan could easily have answered the phone at the gallery and gone to Mrs. Hazlitt’s house. She, not Nell, knew the poisonous effects of plants. She, not Nell, would have known how to recognize an O’Keefe painting. She, not Nell, had a financial motive. She wanted to paint full-time.

  I left Susan’s house with the book under my arm and went straight to the police station.

  A year later, months after the trial was finally over and Susan Waterman acquitted for lack of more than circumstantial evidence, I got a letter from Claudie.

  By that time I was in Indonesia, staying with my old friend Jacqueline Opal, who had suddenly and enthusiastically taken up a spot in an all-women’s gamelan orchestra and was spending all her time bonging away on melodious drums. I had more or less forgotten about my Hawaiian trip (and was avoiding letters from Luisa that quibbled about adverb placement in the proofs of her novel), but Claudie’s opening brought it all back:

  “They apprehended her at the Honolulu Airport, trying to smuggle out the O’Keefe painting. She confessed everything. How she’d answered the phone at the gallery and talked with Mrs. Hazlitt that first time. The next day when she called Mrs. Hazlitt, she realized the woman had already gotten in touch with me. She raced over to her house that night, frantic that I’d get the painting and she wouldn’t. That’s when she found out about her eye condition and saw the bottle of atropine in the medicine cabinet. She knew something about atropine because she’d just gotten over an eye infection herself, and her doctor had told her that atropine was poisonous. She made up some story about having heard about echinacea and got Mrs. Hazlitt to offer her some and to take her dose at the same time, from the wrong bottle. She didn’t realize it would be such a horrible death, but then, she wasn’t there to see it. She had managed to persuade Mrs. Hazlitt to let her take the painting that night. That’s why there was no sign of breaking and entering.

  “Susan doesn’t really blame you, Cassandra, for making her go through the
trial and everything. The important thing, she says, is that Nell was caught. Nell says she needed the money because her gallery was failing without me. As usual, she blames everyone else but herself—me for making her business fail, Susan for wanting to break up with her. Nell wanted Susan to be accused of murder so that she would turn back to Nell for support!

  “We don’t care now. Susan came to live with me last month, and this time I think it’s going to work. She’s quit her job and I’m supporting her. It’s so important for her to paint full-time. As for the O’Keefe painting—oh, it’s lovely, an earlier version of Belladonna—Hana (Two Jimson Weeds). One of the flowers has a visible green center. The other has its core hidden, so that your eye is drawn deeper and deeper inside.

  “The next time you come to Hawaii you’ll have to be sure and see it.”

  An Expatriate Death

  IT WASN’T THE FIRST thing I was supposed to notice about the charming colonial Mexican town of San Andreas, but I did, at the beginning and ever after. When I look back on the whole experience, it’s the memory of the high stucco walls and the glass shards embedded in them that comes too readily to mind.

  Not every house in San Andreas has that kind of outer walls, of course—the Indian houses don’t have them, nor those of most of the Mexicans. The walls were designed mainly to protect the white expatriates, the wealthy ones—those who had moved to San Andreas because it was so picturesque. You had to admit that the broken glass stuck along the tops of the walls was probably more picturesque than barbed wire.

  Eleanor Harrington, the woman who was renting me and Lucy her house for a week, had glass-embedded walls, but she was so used to them that she didn’t bother to comment as she unlocked the heavy wooden outer door and led us through a patio brimming with bright pots of flowering succulents. Eleanor Harrington was in her early fifties and had pinkish-blond hair, bouffant with thin bangs, milky blue eyes, and a face that was paler than her neck and arms. She wore a cotton embroidered smock, sleeveless and low-necked, over her stretch pants, and her tanned arms were ringed up to the elbow with wide silver bracelets. She’d lived in San Andreas for thirty years, she told us, and had bought this old colonial mansion and had it restored inside and out.

  “I really shouldn’t be charging you rent at all,” she said with the nervous laugh that women often use when they discuss money. “It’s really more of a favor to me to have someone here while I go off to see my son in Houston. It’s something I do every year, not that I enjoy it much—his wife, you see…But I try never to leave my house unattended; it wouldn’t be safe.”

  In spite of us doing her a favor, she was quick enough to take the check that Lucy held out. “Splendid,” she said. “What luck that Georgia mentioned you were looking for a place.” She glanced at Lucy, and said, “And did she tell me you were a doctor, Ms. Hernandez?”

  “Yes,” said Lucy.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll enjoy yourself enormously here,” said Eleanor. “It’s meant so much to me to be in San Andreas as long as I have. Of course it’s changed a great deal, not always for the better, but it’s always had a feeling of home to me. There’s so much to do culturally. You must look at our little English-language newspaper and see what’s going on. There are performances, readings; perhaps you might take a yoga class one day, or even Spanish. You, of course, speak Spanish, Ms. Hernandez…where did your parents come from?”

  Not smiling back, Lucy said, “San Francisco. San Francisco, California.”

  Lucy had just spent three months on the Mexican border to Guatemala, working in a refugee camp in a clinic there for mothers and babies. She was on her way back to her job in Oakland, but hearing that I was also planning to pass through Mexico to a conference in Costa Rica, had persuaded me to take a brief holiday with her. An acquaintance of hers, a painter, had raved about San Andreas, and had, in the end, come up with a place for us to rent.

  Although I had known Lucy for many years and saw her as frequently as I could, I was struck by the change in her. Her light brown skin was matte and dusty-looking, and her hair, which she usually kept very short, was dry and bushy. She was painfully thin as well.

  “I’m just tired,” she said, after Eleanor had driven off in her red Toyota for the airport in Mexico City and we were left alone in the living room of the house, with its terra-cotta tiled floor, bright cotton rugs, and shuttered windows. There were weavings on the couches and embroideries on the walls, along with black pottery and the well-known Oaxacan wooden carvings of dogs and other animals, fancifully painted. Some of Eleanor’s own sculptures stood among the folk art; they were bronze figures, in the manner of Degas, of Indians, particularly women, often seated, as if at the marketplace.

  “We’ll put these away while we’re here,” said Lucy. It was not a question.

  And then she went upstairs for a nap although it was only ten in the morning.

  I let myself out the locked street door (“Always remember to lock up,” were Eleanor’s parting words) and went for a walk. Although I’d been in Mexico City a number of times and had explored the southern parts of the country around Oaxaca and the Yucatan, I’d never been in any of the old colonial cities that had been built by the Spanish in the silver-mining days of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were cobbled streets, pastel- and white-painted buildings with thick walls and inner courtyards dripping with brilliant bougainvillea. There were numerous jewelry, crafts, and clothes shops, clearly catering to tourists and expatriates. You saw them in their shorts and T-shirts, their straw hats and sunglasses, in husband-and-wife couples, alone or in small groups, tan and well-fed, taking up the sidewalks as they passed.

  The central square, the zocalo, however, was predominantly Mexican. It had newspaper vendors and people with small carts offering fresh fruit and nuts and candy. On the benches sat men reading papers or in conversation. The arcades on three sides of the square were packed with more vendors, selling the tackier forms of tourist souvenirs—sombreros, T-shirts, and tin jewelry. On the fourth side of the square was a church with a pinkish baroque facade.

  I picked up a copy of the Mexico City newspaper, La Jornada, as well as the small English-language weekly produced in San Andreas, and chose a cafe down a side street from the zocalo to have a coffee. Unlike some of the other restaurants I’d seen while strolling around, this one didn’t have big signs in Gringlish advertising margaritas and super-big enchiladas. The few tables were arranged around a fountain in a small courtyard. There were plenty of plants, a parrot, a simple menu.

  After I’d read La Jornada, I turned to the San Andreas paper. It had a chatty local tone, much like any small-town newspaper. The comings and goings of prominent San Andreans were noted, including the departure of Eleanor for Houston. There were a couple of art reviews of recent shows, a discussion of some traffic problems in a certain part of town, and mentions of many upcoming events. Eleanor had been right: There was a lot going on here, from yoga classes, to dance workshops, to readings. San Andreas was one of the Mexican towns where people came to learn Spanish. It had at least half a dozen language schools. Over the years a large expatriate community of mostly Americans, but also some Europeans, had built up. Some were older people who’d retired where their social security and pension dollars went a lot further, but many were artists and writers or would-be artists and writers.

  I’m an expatriate myself, but I had never lived any place where sizable numbers of expats of the same nationality gathered together. It had always seemed to me that that would defeat the point, which is to leave your country behind.

  I was just about to get up and leave when I noticed my name in the paper. For just a second, I thought that it was another comings and goings tidbit, as in Eleanor leaves and Cassandra and Lucy sublet her place. But then I saw that it was embedded in a small piece about a mystery writer, Colin Michaels, who was giving a reading tonight at the local arts center, El Centro Artistico.

  “Long-time San Andreas resident Colin Michael
s will read from his new mystery, The Cassandra Caper. Featuring his intrepid private investigator, Paul Roger, this new book opens with the dead body of a woman, Cassandra Reilly, washed up on a beach in Baja California. Cassandra was a go-go dancer in the 1970s who had fallen on hard times, and it’s up to Paul Roger to find the murderer in this exciting new thriller. Colin Michaels has written ten previous novels with Paul Roger.”

  “Lucy!” I said, when I got back to the house. “Somebody’s trying to kill me!”

  “What?” She had gotten up from her nap but hadn’t progressed much further than a prone position on the sofa. It was as if the muscles and tendons that had been holding her upright had suddenly collapsed, all at once. She was reading an Agatha Christie mystery, in Spanish.

  I handed her the local paper, and she read the short notice and began to laugh.

  “A go-go dancer, hmm? Of course it’s just a coincidence. Reilly’s a common name.”

  “But Cassandra’s not! Why do you think I chose it? No, the man must have somehow picked it up from one of the books I’ve translated. Those Gloria de los Angeles novels are everywhere.”

  “Well, you can’t do anything now,” Lucy said. “His novel’s been published.”

  “I’ll sue! I’ll figure something out. I’ll go to his reading and heckle him at least.”

  It was a useful ruse, anyway, to get Lucy out of the house.

  We ate dinner before the reading at a small restaurant I’d noticed near Eleanor’s house. We had salads and enchiladas verdes and Tecate beer. Lucy said she could get more authentic food in San Francisco’s Mission District, but she ate it. It gave her small comfort to speak Spanish with the waiter.

  “I really don’t feel I should be here,” she said. “It was more wrenching than I imagined to leave the camp. I’d gotten so attached to the people. Cassandra, some of them have been living there for almost ten years, and they have no idea when they’ll be able to get back to their villages in Guatemala. The conditions they’re living in are tolerable, but that’s about all. Just by living in the camps, they’re losing their culture.”