Frenzy

Qui

“Learn anything useful about the sisters?” he asked.

Lido gave his weary shrug again. His inebriated ma

“Don’t give me a lotta crap, Jerry. I get enough of that with the menagerie I have to contend with here.”

“Every one a Sherlock,” Lido said. “Speaking of which—Weaver.”

Qui

“The same. While I was doing my research, I came across her tech footprints.”

“Meaning?”

“She’d recently visited several of the sites I explored.”

“Doing her own exploring?”

“Looked that way. No surprise. She belongs to Renz.” Lido raised his eyebrows. “She has to be pretty good on a computer, judging by what I saw.”

“Weaver has multiple talents.”

“That’s what I hear, but who really knows?”

Qui

Qui

“This is Winston Castle,” said the voice on the phone. It was well enunciated and deep. Castle’s BBC voice. “There’s been a development that might be of interest to you.”

“Try me,” Qui

“That woman called me again, about ten o’clock last night,” Castle said. “Identified herself as Ida Tucker again and said she was a distant relative of my wife.”

“Is she?”

“Maria isn’t sure.”

Qui

“She wanted to negotiate some more on that Michelangelo bust, Bellezza.”

Qui

“Not just the missing art, but the letters she claimed are with it, the ones Henry Tucker wrote on his deathbed, just before he succumbed to wounds he’d suffered at Dunkirk. She wanted me to come to someplace called Green Forest, Ohio, and examine and purchase the letters. I asked her to simply mail me copies, but of course she wouldn’t do that. What’s valuable—in her mind, anyway—is what the letters contain, as well as their authenticity.”

That made sense to Qui

“Because I’m curious. And so are you, eh, my friend?”

Qui

“We’re both afflicted with that dread disease, curiosity,” Castle said. “The one that killed the cat. And there’s something else. This time when we talked, Ida Tucker seemed especially interested in whether the police had found any letters among the contents of Andria Bell’s luggage, or in the hotel suite where the murders took place.”

“And what did you tell her?” Qui

He could almost see Castle’s devilish dark smile over the phone. “I told her nothing, of course. She was so curious, I thought I’d leave her that way. Knowing you’d understand.”

“Oh, I do,” Qui

Qui

Qui

There was one other drinker besides Lido in the lounge, an absolutely ravished looking gray-haired woman in her sixties. She had an expensive-looking choppy hairdo, and without the wrinkles in her clothes she would have been stylishly and crisply dressed, as if for finance and business. There was a sadness about her bearing that was almost tangible. She made Qui

Lido was slouched in a cramped wooden booth near the opposite end of the bar. At least he’d had sense enough to stay away from the woman. Though he was glancing in her direction.

“That’s how you’re going to wind up,” Qui

Lido squinted at the woman and brought her into focus. “Oh, her. I happen to know she’s eighty-seven.”

“Like we are,” Qui

“She’s a gin drinker,” Lido said.

“I’ve seen you drink gin.”

“I’ve seen you try to keep up.”

“Not one right after the other in slow-motion suicide.”

“She was probably beautiful once,” Lido said, still staring at the woman. “I can perceive that in her still.”

“You’re begi

The bartender came out from behind the bar and stood over the booth. These weren’t free, these seats on the sidelines while the world slid past outside.

Qui

“I need to ask you something more,” Qui

Lido gave him a mushy grin. “I didn’t think you followed me here to assess the female presence and possibilities.”

“Not that female,” Qui

A certain gleam appeared in Lido’s bloodshot eyes. A sharpness that Qui

In a voice not at all slurred, he said, “Let me tell you about Ida Tucker.”

“And the rest of her family. The whole mess of a maze of them.”

Lido smiled. Sipped. “I took it back to Henry Tucker, a British soldier who died in an English hospital after escaping the German advance at Dunkirk.” Lido fixed a bleary eye on Qui

“I figured,” Qui

“Henry had a brother, Edward. Edward had a wife, Ida. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Henry, at the time of his death, was having a hot affair with an English nurse named Betsy Douglass. Betsy had a sister, Willa, living in Ohio and married to a Mark Kingdom.”

“Okay,” Qui

“I’ll give you a printout later,” Lido said. He continued. “For medical reasons, Willa and Mark couldn’t have children—he’d been injured in the merchant marines—and they adopted two wards of the state: Robert and Winston. That’s where the two families intersect, in the breeding grounds of Ohio. Winston died in childhood.”

“Wait a minute,” Qui

“Not yet,” Lido said. “He’s actually Robert Kingdom, Jr. He’s something of an Anglophile.”

“I’ll say.”

“Still, he’s married to Mariella Lopez, a Mexican immigrant.”

“Maria? Are you kidding me? I assumed she was Italian.”

“She is Italian. Her last name was Righetti until she married a Mexican mathematician named Lopez. He died five years ago.”

“Don’t tell me his boat blew up.”

“No, he was struck by lightning. A year later, Mariella migrated to the U.S. and married Winston Castle. Whose name was Kingdom, Jr. then.”