Framed in Lace Page 4

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  It was Halloween eve. Detective Mike Malloy was proud to know Halloween means All Hallows Eve (though he could not for twenty dollars have told anyone what All Hallows was). Therefore, he considered, the term Halloween eve redundant, so he corrected it in his head to the day before Halloween.

  Appropriate to the season, he was about to meet a scientist in his laboratory, which he pictured with stone walls, gurgling test tubes, spirals of glass filled with colored liquids, and a couple of those things like old-fashioned TV antennas making thin crackles of lightning between their rods.

  He knew it wouldn’t be like that, not really, but it was kind of disappointing to find it was a kitchen-size room, very clean, with microscopes and a personal computer. It did smell funny, which was something, but the scientist wasn’t there.

  Malloy was directed by a student in a stained lab coat to an upper floor and a small, cluttered office. It wasn’t a cubicle, but a real office, with walls that went to the ceiling, and a door that shut. Which Malloy did.

  The man behind the desk wasn’t a disappointment to Malloy’s Halloween-colored imagination. Dr. Ambling had the fluffy gray hair and thick glasses of every mad scientist from every movie the detective had seen as a kid. “Ah have examined the fabric you-all sent to me,” Dr. Ambling drawled—not in a thick German accent. Texas, thought Malloy, amused.

  Ambling picked up two sheets of glass held together by strips of gray tape on the corners. Between the glass were four pieces of thin green fabric, three very small, the fourth roughly triangular in shape, about two and a half inches on a side. All the pieces were frayed, and there were fine threads knotted and tangled along two sides of the triangle. “The material is silk, partially edged with silk threads that may have been lace. The lace, if it is lace, was probably made by hand, and it was attached to the rest of the fabric after it was finished.” He put the glass down on a low stack of books and consulted a sheet of paper occupying a cleared space on his desk just large enough to hold it.

  Mike had found a tiny, flattish, filthy, slimy thing during a search of the raised boat. A forensics expert from the state crime lab had identified it as fabric and recommended Dr. Ambling as the person to further identify it. Mike still wasn’t sure if it was important, but the first thing a detective learns is not to assume something is unimportant just because it doesn’t fit a theory you’ve been too quick to form.

  “Ah,” said Ambling, finding his place. “It is impossible to tell what color the fabric was originally,” he continued. “The green color is from being pressed under something made of copper or a copper alloy.” He looked up at Malloy through thick lenses. “Did you find it under a piece of pipe?”

  “No, it was in a puddle of muddy water. But they cleared away a lot of rubble before they raised the boat and more after they got it to the surface, before they found the skeleton. We don’t know where on the boat it was hidden originally.”

  “It was under a piece of rubble that was, or contained, some copper or brass or bronze—copper and its alloys are a good preservative of fibers. But they turn things green.” He went back to the report. “Judging by the shape of the surviving pieces, the fabric was wadded rather than folded and only partly covered by the metal. The biggest piece is the only one with the edging on it.”

  “So what do you think, was it a dress? Or was it something smaller?” asked Malloy.

  The man shrugged. “The fabric seems thin for a dress, but I don’t know much about clothing from the forties. A handkerchief seems more likely, but I wouldn’t testify to that as fact. It could be a fragment of sleeve, though you should check to see if lace edging was fashionable on sleeves in 1949. On the other hand, my mother used to crochet lace edgings onto her handkerchiefs. Very fine, very delicate work. That’s what this made me think of. But it’s only a guess; the fibers have been so stretched and pulled from the pressure of whatever was holding it down all those years, I can’t see what the pattern might have been.”

  “Could it just be string from the fabric? Maybe it frayed a lot, from the motion of the water or something.” Malloy bent over the glass for a closer look.

  Ambling reached for a pencil, which he used as a pointer. “No, the fibers here and here are thicker and coarser than the rest of the fabric. And here and here and here, see? These look like knots. So not fraying, and not fringe, but trim of some sort, of a thicker fiber than the fabric, and attached to it—see, here and here. I’m quite sure these strands were formed into a pattern with deliberation. Could be crochet, but that’s only a guess.”

  “So a woman’s handkerchief, right?” said Malloy. “I mean, a man wouldn’t have a silk handkerchief, would he?”

  “My grandfather carried a silk handkerchief every day of his adult life. But not with lace edging, of course. For that, you’d have to go back to the eighteenth century .”

  “Hmmm. So a woman’s handkerchief, or part of a dress. The sleeve you say? Why not the collar? That would be more likely to have lace trim.”

  “A collar would be doubled over, and this was hemmed, not doubled.”

  “Okay, I get that. This lace edging, is it silk, too?”

  Ambling nodded. “Yes.”

  “So this was an expensive article, right?”

  “Possibly, but not necessarily. You have to consider the era. Handmade at this time meant homemade, and in the forties and fifties, only poor people wore homemade clothes. Of course, silk is another matter, as is lace. Poor people didn’t make their clothes of silk.”

  Mike picked up the glass and held it to the ceiling light. “No initials or anything,” he said. “So I guess even if we identify her, we’ll never know for sure if the skeleton was the person who owned this.”

  “Jill, you crochet and do stuff like that, don’t you?”

  Jill, coming out of the duty room, turned to see Mike Malloy with something flat in his hands. “No, sorry, I don’t do crochet,” she said politely. “But I do needlepoint, if that’s any help.” Malloy, she knew, wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but he was her senior in rank, so she tried to treat him with respect.

  He, on the other hand, knew she was very bright and suspected she was ambitious. But he couldn’t bad-mouth her the way he could male officers with ambitions to his rank and job, not in this era of hair-trigger harassment suits, so he tried to treat her with respect.

  With both of them behaving contrary to their beliefs, they tended to talk like actors in a poorly written play.

  “Can I show you something?” he asked, approaching with the object held out awkwardly.

  “What is it?” asked Jill, not reaching for it.

  “A textile expert from the university says it maybe was part of a dress or a handkerchief. It’s got homemade lace edging, he says. I want to know what you think. This expert guesses it’s crochet.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Jill took the glass sandwich with both hands, careful to hold it at the edges. She lifted it so the ceiling fluorescents could shine through it. “Hard to say,” she said after a few moments. “Actually,” she added, lowering the glass and handing it back, “I’m not an expert on lace. But I know where to ask for experts. Want me to bring you their names?”

  “Are they in town?”

  “Probably. All I have to do—or you can do it yourself—is go to Crewel World and ask for Godwin. He knows just about everyone in the area who does things with fibers.”

  “Yeah, I should have thought of that myself.”

  Malloy being self-deprecating was unusual, so Jill’s stiffness thawed a little. “Say, is this connected to that skeleton we found on the old Hopkins?” Jill had just been part of the crowd control aspect of the crime scene, she had no role in the investigation. But she was curious.

  “How’d you know?”

  Jill smiled. “Well, that thing you showed me is the color of algae.”

  “As a matter of fact, it’s that color because it was under a piece of copper for fifty years—and okay, at the bottom of
the lake, on board the Hopkins.”

  Jill bloomed a little bit over being right and Malloy smiled, but not unkindly. She asked, “Was it near the skeleton?”

  “Not really. The skeleton was near the stem, the fabric was found more amidships, near where the engine used to be. But with all the tumbling it might’ve got while those divers were removing rubble, it could’ve started out anywhere.”

  “Amidships?”

  Malloy’s prickliness appeared. “Yes, and deck and gunwale and ladder and so forth. What of it?”

  “Oh. Nothing, I guess. I thought you picked up that word talking to the divers, but I guess it’s for real with you. What, you were in the navy?”

  His small eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

  Jill shrugged. “Hey, no reason. It’s just that the current owner of Crewel World is also a navy vet.”

  “That woman who thinks she’s a detective?”

  Jill wanted to remind him that Betsy had been the one who came up with the solution to Malloy’s last case, and so was, in fact, able to detect. But she bit her tongue and then said, “You remember Betsy Devonshire, then. I’m sure she’ll help if she can, do whatever you want.”

  “Yeah, I’d like that, so long as she doesn’t get enthusiastic and go charging around looking for clues.” Malloy sighed. “Still, thanks again for the suggestion, Jill.”

  When Jill took her coffee break at Crewel World a few hours later, she found that Malloy hadn’t been by yet. She described what Mike had shown her to Betsy and Godwin.

  “I’m surprised he’s letting us in, after the last time,” said Godwin.

  “Hey, slow down, he’s not letting you in,” said Jill. “He doesn’t want you to sleuth, he wants you to answer some questions about something he found on the Hopkins .”

  “What kind of lace do you think it is?” asked Betsy.

  “I don’t know that it’s lace at all. It didn’t look like anything but a tangle of threads to me. Mike said the textile expert thinks it might be crochet, though how he figured that, I don’t know. But like I told Mike, I bet there are some customers at Crewel World who can look at it and know whether the expert is right or not.”

  “Are there lace makers around here?” Betsy asked Godwin.

  “Heavens yes. Tatting and crocheting and even old-fashioned bobbin lace. Martha Winters used to make beautiful bobbin lace. And Lucy Watkins still does, and tatting besides. Patricia does gorgeous crochet work. There are probably others who do or know someone who does. And most of them are Crewel World customers, because hardly anyone who does one kind of needlework does only one kind. Even you, Miss Knit, have branched out into needlepoint. After all that complaining, I watched you do a beautiful row of mosaic this morning.”

  “Oh, all it took for that was learning how to interpret the illustrations in the book,” said Betsy. “But I couldn’t do it without the open book right there.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Godwin, “just like the rest of us. And tell Jill how you’ve expanded into counted cross-stitch.”

  “I’m still kind of only thinking about it.” Betsy continued to Jill, “Those big patterns Shelly does intimidate me, but The Stitchery catalog had some darling Christmas tree ornaments that looked about my speed, so I ordered a set.”

  “The little squares of animals wearing Santa Claus hats?” asked Jill.

  “Yes, aren’t they adorable? The set came over the weekend, but I haven’t had a chance yet to take a good look at it.”

  “You’ll like it. I’m working on my second set. I’ve decided to enclose one or two with some of my Christmas cards. And I’ll donate one to the tree.”

  “What tree?”

  Jill looked at Godwin, who shrugged back. Godwin said to Betsy, “Margot used to put up a little artificial tree, and her customers would make ornaments for it, and on Christmas Eve she’d take it to someone who otherwise wouldn’t have a tree.”

  Jill misinterpreted the look on Betsy’s face and said, “You don’t have to do it, too. I mean, for one thing you’re busy, and for another you don’t have Margot’s connections, so you won’t know who needs the tree.”

  “That’s not what’s bothering me,” said Betsy. “I feel so bad about all the things that won’t get done because she’s gone.”

  There was a little silence, then Godwin sighed noisily and asked, “What else did Sergeant Malloy say about the lace?”

  “Not much. He said it might be part of a dress or a handkerchief. It’s green, but that’s because whatever was holding it down was made of copper or bronze, like a section of pipe. It’s only about four inches’ worth, going around a corner, like maybe the corner of a handkerchief or a collar point. Silk, he says. The expert, not Mike. But really, it’s such a mess I don’t know if even someone who makes lace could tell Mike anything useful.”

  Malloy hesitated before opening the door. Betsy Devonshire was okay, he was pretty sure. He had a problem accepting women as equals, and his natural cop attitude toward civilians overlay that to make him appear a male chauvinist pig. Which he wasn’t, not really. But here, too, and not all that long ago, Ms. Devonshire had shown herself willing to interfere in a police investigation. So he’d have to step carefully around her, because he really wanted to use her as a resource. After all, the woman had been pretty clever coming up with the murderer of her sister. But he didn’t want her poking around again because that first time was undoubtedly just luck, and if she tried again, she’d probably only scare off or corrupt a witness. So he’d have to talk kind of careful to her.

  Malloy steeled himself and opened the door.

  Inside the shop, Betsy and Godwin had been staring at the person standing so dark and still on the other side of the door. His head was on a level with the Open sign so they couldn’t see his face, but there was a sinister tension in the stillness of his pose. And one hand was hidden in the folds of his overcoat.

  Then the door went bing and it was Sergeant Mike Malloy. They were both so relieved that their greetings were especially warm, which made them grin at one another.

  Which puzzled Malloy, who started to frown suspiciously.

  “We thought you were a robber,” explained Betsy, still smiling. “You were standing there like you were trying to get up the nerve to come in and demand all our money.”

  Mike laughed and gestured dismissively. “Heck, this is too nice a town for something bad to happen to decent people twice in a row.”

  “Jill was here a little while ago,” said Godwin, eager to get down to business, “and she said you might come to ask us to help you with some needlework sample.”

  Malloy shrugged crookedly. “Well, what it is, I’m hoping you know someone who can tell me if I have an example of handmade lace here, and what kind it is.” What Malloy had hidden in the folds of his coat was the glass sandwich. It now had a double seal of tape and a tag with Evidence in big red letters.

  Betsy looked at it without touching it and shrugged. But Godwin took it and held it up to the ceiling just as Jill had, then over toward the front window, then close to his right eye. Frustrated, he said, “I’m sorry, it doesn’t look like anything to me.”

  “Perhaps one of your customers could help me. Officer Cross said that everyone in the area who does needlework comes here.”

  “From your mouth to His ear, amen,” said Betsy fervently and Malloy laughed again.

  “Still,” persisted Malloy, “is there anyone who comes here who is knowledgeable about handmade lace?”

  Betsy said, “There are a number of local women who make bobbin lace, do tatting, crochet, and make lace in other forms. The real question is, can they look at what you have there and make sense of it? I’m worried now that Godwin says it doesn’t look like anything to him, but he’s not a lace maker, so maybe someone else can help. If you like, I can ask customers to take a look at your sample—but wait, I guess you wouldn’t want to leave that here.”

  “I’m not allowed to leave it here.” Malloy lifted and dropped the
Evidence tag.

  “Oh, I see. So how about we arrange a meeting, and you can bring it, and we’ll see if someone can help.”

  “You’ll never get everyone to agree on a time,” said Godwin.

  “Including me,” said Malloy. “So how about I get a good picture of it, or maybe just a Xerox for a start. Then if it rings any chimes with someone, I can show the real thing to them.”

  “Yes, of course. Would it be all right if I taped up the photocopy? Or should I keep it in a drawer and just show it to select customers?”

  “I don’t see why you can’t post it. I’d appreciate hearing right away if someone thinks she can help. I’ll drop the copy off later today.”

  “All right,” said Betsy.

  After Malloy left, Godwin said, “You know, there are times when he seems almost human.”

  There’s no statute of limitations on murder, and occasionally something will crop up to crack an old case. Even in solved murders, someone convicted many years ago may persuade a judge to order a new trial or a DNA test that proves him innocent, or something will be discovered during another investigation that forces the police to start over. So when it’s a homicide case, the records are kept forever.

  But nobody can keep records of every crime. So when Malloy wanted reports of a missing woman in the summer of 1949, the missing person reports were long gone. He went first to the public library and searched microfilm copies of old newspaper files. And found nothing, which he thought was a little strange.

  Shrugging off his annoyance, he went to his first fall-back location, the Excelsior Historical Society, which consisted of three seniors, all women, who met on Tuesday mornings in the vault of City Hall.

  City Hall was in the basement of the volunteer fire department, a cramped space with five employees. The mayor was at his regular day job, so the highest executive present was the city comptroller. He smiled and nodded when Malloy stated his business, and Malloy lifted the flap that marked the entrance and made his way to the back of the room, where a large, thick, fireproof door let into a space almost as big as the main room. Three walls were lined with metal shelves stuffed to overflowing with wire baskets, accordion folders, boxes, and files, the official records of the City of Excelsior. The fourth wall was obscured by metal file cabinets and an old wooden map cabinet. Near these stood a scarred wooden table, at which the Excelsior Historical Society sat in session, surrounded by plats, deeds, and old tax records.