“Oh, comeon,” Corey burst out. “You can’t just rule yourself out as a suspect. Is everyone seriously letting her get away with this? This iscrazy.”
“I don’t know,” Todd said. “I think we should let her finish. Maybe at the end she’ll reveal that she was the killer all along and tell the sheriff to slap the cuffs on her and haul her away.” Todd, at least, seemed to be enjoying himself.
“Thank you, Todd,” Sherry said. “I promise that I do have a point to make with all of this. Everyone should have some more tea, if they want it. We’re just about to get into the complicated parts.”
Someone gave a very quiet groan. Others took her advice. Tea was poured. “My next suspect is probably unfamiliar to those of you who don’t live in Winesap,” Sherry said. “Jason Martinez works at the diner here in Winesap. He met Alan many years ago, when Alan was working as a public defender in Schenectady. Jason was accused of murder, and Alan mishandled the case so badly that Jason was sent to prison for several years for a crime that he didn’t commit.”
This caused a small, brief commotion as Alan’s family reacted. Alan really had done a good job of keeping it a secret: it was clear from their expressions that Alan’s sons were both dismayed by the news. Todd was craning around to look at Jason, who was still standing by the door. “I didn’t do it, though,” Jason said. He was looking very steadily right back at Sherry. “You know that I didn’t, Miss Pinkwhistle. I’m not a murderer. You know that.”
She flushed again but didn’t respond. She was going tofinish what she’d started no matter how guilty anyone tried to make her feel about it. “The motive, in this case, doesn’t have to be explained. Revenge. We also know that Jason lives only about a mile and a half from Alan’s house, so it wouldn’t have taken him very long to get there and back. His only alibi comes from his own wife. So far, he still seems like a viable suspect, until we come to the old lady who lives across the street, and her neighbor’s horrible Chihuahua.”
“A mysterious hound!” Todd stage-whispered. Charlotte made a noise that sounded very much like she was struggling not to laugh.
Sherry ignored them. “Mrs. Sherman is elderly, but her hearing is excellent, and she’s a very light sleeper. Her next-door neighbor has a small dog who frequently wakes her up by barking at pedestrians. On the night in question the dog didn’t bark. Jason couldn’t have left his house on foot that night, even if he’dwantedto choose the evening of his wife’s birthday to struggle through a blizzard on foot in order to get revenge on a man who had wronged him—though very seriously—many years ago. If Jason Martinez killed Alan, he must have driven there.”
“So?” Corey asked. “So he drove there, then.”
“Yes, that’s what I would have assumed,” Sherry said. “Until I got a chance to look at his truck. The Martinez family only owns one vehicle. I’d noticed over the past two weeks that I kept hearing what I first thought was a motorcycle driving through Winesap about half an hour after the diner closed. When I walked past Jason’s truck I checked to see if my hunch was right and saw that his muffler is missing. If it was missing on the night Alan was killed, his driving back and forth between ten thirty and midnight would have been more thanloud enough to disturb his insomniac neighbor, but she went to bed at nine that night and slept through until the morning. Jason, did you try to get that muffler repaired any time before Saturday?”
Jason’s entire body relaxed. He smiled, then stepped forward, pulled out a chair, and sat down at the table with everyone else. He even grabbed the nearest teapot and a cup. “Yeah,” he said. “It fell off on the highway a few weeks ago. I went to my guy on Route 20 about it, but he had to order a part, so I’ve just been driving around like that. You can call him and ask, he’ll have the records and everything.”
“Thank you, Jason,” Sherry said, and gave him a small smile. Then she said to the room, “It might not hold up in a court of law, but considering that we don’t have any other evidence to suggest that Jason was with Alan that night, on top of his wife insisting that he was home, I feel confident in crossing Jason off of my suspect list.”
“At this rate you’re going to run out of suspects,” Todd said. “Unless the surprise twist at the end is going to be that it was the butler who did it all along.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Sherry said pleasantly. “I still have a few suspects left to go through. Like you, for example.”
Todd raised his eyebrows. “Me?”
Sherry nodded, smiled politely, and continued, addressing the whole room again. “This is the point when this case gets complicated. There were other crimes being committed beyond the murder, and they involve three people, two of whom are in the room with us right now: Corey Thompson and Todd McCarthy. The third, Mr. Mike Kaminski, lives and works down in the city.”
“I’m not listening to this,” Corey said, and stood as if he wasplanning on storming out. Then his mother’s hand shot out and caught his wrist.
“I think that you should, Corey.”
Corey went very red and settled silently down into his seat again. Susan Thompson gave Sherry a short nod. “Go ahead, Sherry.”
Sherry’s throat felt oddly tight. “Thank you, Susan,” she managed, and swallowed. “I first started thinking that something strange might be going on when Alan told me about how incredibly well Corey had been doing at finding art for the shop. It just seemed unlikely that someone would be able to so consistently find pieces that would be snapped up for hundreds or thousands of dollars up here in little Winesap. It wasn’t quite strange enough to make a fuss over, though. Corey wasn’t bringing back any Van Goghs. Everything was just on this side of reasonable. That’s what I thought at first. That’s what Alan thought, too, until the day that he started getting suspicious.
“I’m not sure what first made Alan think that something wasn’t right, but he definitely suspected that there was something strange going on in his shop. Before he died, he’d been clearly worried about something involving the business, he’d checked out a number of books on art appraisal and contemporary American artists from the library, and he’d been poring over the books for the shop. I think he was looking for inconsistencies between the pieces that were coming in, their provenance, and the prices that Corey was asking for them. And therewereinconsistencies. But what, exactly, was going on?”
She took a gulp of tea, partially to wet her dry mouth and partially so she could take a moment to get her thoughtstogether before she continued to speak. “As I said, there were three people involved, though it took me a while to establish a connection. I first noticed that something was off when Todd, Father Barry’s twin brother, arrived in town appearing to already know Corey Thompson, Alan’s son. They claimed that they’d met only very recently at a party and coincidentally bumped into each other again on the train up to Saratoga. I very quickly learned that this was a lie. They’ve known each other for at least six months, on what seems to have been fairly intimate terms. Why would they feel the need to lie about that? Both of them are single. Corey’s family have known that he’s gay since he was very young. There’s no obvious reason for them to want to downplay their connection unless they have something else to hide. I decided to dig into that.”
“Maybe I just value my privacy, Sherry,” Todd said. “I don’t like letting everyone on the planet know more than they need to know about my personal life.”
“Yes, I’d noticed that about you,” Sherry said. “Corey posts practically everything he does on the internet, but you keep things much more private. I did learn a few things about you, though. You have a very colorful criminal record, for such a young man. That one romance scam that got you in the papers was very clever. Cruel, but clever.”
Todd shrugged. “That was years ago,” he said. “I was young, broke, and stupid. I’ve grown up since then.”
“You’ve definitely gotten less stupid,” Sherry said. “From what I’ve seen. Anyway. While I was digging, I found something else interesting: you’ve known Mike Kaminski for many years. Mr. Kaminski,” she said to the room, “is an antiques dealer, and the man who seems to have purchased a largepercentage of the items that Corey brought into the shop. Alice, who works in the shop, mentioned to me that he was recently very annoyed when he learned that Alan had taken home one of the pictures in a set of small, realistic charcoal drawings of Western scenes that Mr. Kaminski had wanted to purchase. I didn’t think anything about that, really, until I looked into his shop and realized that nothing that he sells looked even remotely similar to small charcoal cowboy drawings. So why was he so desperate to purchase a full set of them?
“I looked into him some more and learned something interesting. Mr. Kaminski has a criminal past of his own. Specifically, many years ago he served eighteen months in prison for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. The police suspected him of involvement with a larger organization but couldn’t make the charges stick.”
She looked around the room. Corey was stiff in his chair, his eyes fixed rigidly on the table. Todd was relaxed, comfortable, still watching Sherry as if he was having a night at the theater.
“Here’s what I think happened,” Sherry said. “Todd met Corey some time ago. Maybe six months ago, maybe a year or more. He learned that Corey was a talented artist who wasn’t doing much with his skills and was living far, far beyond his means. He learned that Corey took frequent trips to the Caribbean on a wealthy friend’s yacht. He learned that Corey’s father ran a small antiques store up in Winesap, where Todd’s twin brother, Barry, just happened to be preparing to take over as the parish priest. Todd himself was unemployed, increasingly aware that relying on older ladies and gentlemen to pay for his incidentals was a way of life with an expirationdate, and looking for a new route to easy cash. He was friends with Mike Kaminski, who he knew still had connections in the drug trade. I suspect that Mr. Kaminski never stopped selling cocaine: as he got into the antiques and design business and started socializing with the people whose homes he helped to decorate, he merely restricted his sales to his own circles, and the police don’t pay much attention to what rich people and their pet artists do at parties. Todd, being in the same circles, would have been aware of this.
“Eventually Todd came up with a scheme: Mr. Kaminski would reach out to his contacts to find a source of cocaine in the Caribbean. Corey, with money he’d asked for from his father plus possibly a contribution from Todd, acquired the drugs on his next trip with his friend. At some point he would have also gotten very busy creating convincing-enough-looking framed works of art by moderately well-known dead artists that he would bring to his father’s shop, along with other works of art that he had purchased elsewhere and would be much more moderately priced. The fake pieces would then be purchased by Mr. Kaminski, who would distribute the drugs down in the city. The goal was to make pieces of art that an ordinary person wandering into an antiques store in Winesap would never consider purchasing for the marked price, but that could, plausibly, be sold for that much to enthusiasts or discerning resellers like Mr. Kaminski. They did it this way just in case Alan got curious or suspicious and started looking up the artists whose works he was supposedly selling: he’d find out that, yes, this artist existed, and that similar-looking works of theirs sold for a similar price. He’d be unlikely to pursue it any further after that. The whole thing fit together perfectly: the money coming to Corey would be launderedthrough the shop, and Mr. Kaminski had his own business to make everything look nice and reasonable on his end. Todd probably negotiated a cut from Corey’s share. The one thing that they didn’t think to factor in was the fact that Alan, who loved Westerns, would like one of his son’s charcoal drawings so much that he’d willingly pay the shop the massively inflated price to bring it home with him and hang it on his living room wall.”
