Four-Patch of Trouble (19 page)

I waited with Dee, although she seemed to have her distress under control, better than I did, in fact.

About fifteen minutes later, Lindsay ran up to hug her grandmother before turning to me. "I took a few minutes to finish the list of Tremain's clients before I left. You should have it in your e-mail. I sort of thought it might help to get Emma released from custody. I might not be able to do anything else for you while I'm helping my grandmother. I might even have to quit my job if Emma's not released by next week. I don't think Veronica would give me any more time off."

She was right about that. Regardless of how good the excuse was, Veronica was going to see a request for more time off as proof that Lindsay wasn't dedicated enough to her job.

Dee was poking Lindsay to get her attention, probably to claim she didn't need a babysitter, but Lindsay ignored her.

"You help Dee with the quilt show for now," I said, "and don't do anything about your job until you talk to me first."

Lindsay turned to see why Dee was trying to get her attention, and I headed outside to catch the trolley back to Main Street so I could get another look at Stefan's quilt.

I was trying not to dwell on things I couldn't control, like Emma's arrest, so I used the time on the short trolley ride to consider Dee's advice about my speech. What was it about quilts that had first appealed to me? I'd been going to quilt shows for at least ten years now. The first time had been at the suggestion of a friend who'd wanted to learn how to make her own quilts. I'd quickly found that I wasn't cut out for creating quilts, but I'd immediately been fascinated by the finished products, as art, as history, and as the focal point of a vibrant community of quilt makers and collectors.

Part of that fascination arose out of my awareness of how relatively fragile the quilts and their community were. Someone needed to protect them, and I was good at protecting my clients, so why not extend my reach to the quilt world? I'd started reading everything I could find on the history of quilts and then eventually began studying for certification as an appraiser. Knowledge was power, in both the courtroom and art/antiques collecting.

That could be the focus of my speech: how everyone in the audience could help to protect the art, history, and community of quilt making. It was certainly a timely topic. If I advised the audience to get appraisals before buying a quilt, the audience would practically finish the sentence for me: "Or else you could be cheated the way Tremain cheated his customers."

I finally had the core of my speech, I decided as I climbed down from the trolley a couple of blocks from Stefan's gallery.

Officer Fred Fields was looking in the window of the Cinnamon Sugar Bakery but carrying bags from the café down the street, Veggie-Tables. It didn't really seem like his kind of place. The food wasn't bad, but the service was mediocre, and it catered to the gluten-free vegan crowd, which Fred definitely wasn't a member of. He carried the bags at arm's length as if he was trying to avoid contamination, and his face was screwed up as if he'd just taken a bite of something dreadful and he was looking for somewhere to spit it out. Probably one of the gluten-free, dairy-free soy muffins. I'd had one a few weeks ago, and my expression had probably looked like his. I'd had the sense not to take more than one bite, but he'd probably gobbled the whole thing down before the flavor hit his taste buds.

"Hi, Fred. When did you start eating gluten-free?"

He swallowed, proving that he really was as brave as his uniform would suggest. "My wife makes me, at least once a week. She places the order, and I pick it up on the way home."

"I'm glad I ran into you. Did you know that an arrest warrant was issued for Emma Quinn?"

"I heard that a witness implicated her, but I didn't know they'd actually gotten the warrant or executed it."

"There's a witness to the murder?"

Fred set his bags down on the table outside the restaurant. "Not to the murder itself but to something that happened between Tremain and Emma. Some of the other antiques dealers in town were interviewed, and one of them remembered Emma having a heated argument with Tremain a few days before he was killed."

That didn't sound good, but there had to be an explanation. "Isn't that a little too convenient? Considering Tremain's business practices, his competitors must have wanted to shut him down, and that makes them suspects. So you've got one possible suspect blaming another one. And how did the witness even happen to see the argument?"

"There was a meeting of local vendors participating in the quilt show to go over the rules and regulations. Tremain and the witness were both there as vendors, and Emma was there to run the meeting."

"What were they arguing about?"

"The witness didn't know. He couldn't hear what they were saying until the very end when they were both shouting. That's when Emma said there was nothing she wouldn't do to protect Dee and the quilt show."

"That hardly amounts to a clear threat of physical violence. She could have been referring to what she actually did, which was to organize a picket outside his shop. Perfectly legal exercise of free speech."

"There was more. Emma warned Tremain that she wasn't as nice and law abiding as the rest of the guild was, and she'd do whatever was necessary to stop him. He got a bit belligerent himself, and they engaged in a shoving match. Some reporter had to step in and separate them. I'm surprised it never made the newspaper."

I knew what had happened. Matt had quashed the story.

Irritation with Matt threatened to undo the calm I'd achieved during the ride on the trolley. Matt had known about the altercation, and he hadn't mentioned it. If I'd known, I could have explained it away before Wolfe jumped to another wrong conclusion. "I think I know the reporter. He's a friend of Dee and Emma."

"Enough of a friend to have killed Tremain for them? Or to lie about being with them at the time of the murder?"

"I don't know." Most of what I knew about him came from Dee and Emma, and I didn't even know them very well. They seemed like reasonably good judges of character, but it was part of a reporter's job to insinuate himself into the lives of his sources. If he'd been in pursuit of a story relating to Tremain or his political cronies, he could have been faking his friendship.

But why would he continue to claim to be their friend now, when the story had come to a literal dead end? Was he actually trying to get the elderly women arrested while pretending to be their friend? And if so, why would he care who was blamed for the murder? It couldn't have been to divert suspicion from himself. He didn't have any apparent motive to have killed Tremain.

Matt could have been protecting someone else. Stefan perhaps, if their bickering was a cover for their true feelings for each other. Men could be like that, insulting each other as a means of showing affection.

"I'm not sure about anything anymore."

"Me neither." Fred glared at the take-out bags as if that would make them disappear or be replaced by something from the Cinnamon Sugar Bakery. "I don't think Ohlsen is either. He just doesn't have anything to disprove with Wolfe's theory that Emma did it for Dee and then Dee lied to give Emma an alibi."

Now the arrest made sense, at least as a strategy, if not as a likely route to the truth. "I bet Ohlsen thinks that by breaking up the pair, he'll get one of them to confess and implicate the other. The problem is that neither of them killed Tremain, and they're probably both willing to go to jail to protect the other."

"I don't like it," Fred said. "People aren't going to be reassured if they think the wrong person was arrested, and no one will ever believe Emma killed anyone. That makes for a nervous public, and nervous people do stupid, dangerous things. Officers like me end up in the middle of all that stupidity, and there's nothing we can do to stop it."

"There is one thing you could do to help." I pulled my phone out of my pocket. "I've got a list of Tremain's clients, the ones who might have been cheated and angry enough to confront him. Could you take a quick look at the names and see if any of them are familiar to you?"

He glanced at the bags containing his dinner and apparently decided that having it sit around in the summer sun for a few more minutes couldn't make it taste any worse than it already did. "Sure."

I opened the list Lindsay had sent me and handed the phone to Fred. He scrolled through the names, pointing out the ones he recognized. "Member of town council. A local developer. I think this guy's on some state board. Retired clerk of courts. Hey, it's the police chief." After several more, he reached the end of the list and handed the phone back to me. "Don't know any of the others."

"Those are all pretty small fish, the police chief notwithstanding. I'd heard that Tremain mingled with big-name politicians. You didn't recognize anyone from the state legislature?"

"Could be some from other districts but not from this one."

"Thanks." I tucked the phone back into my pocket, keeping it close as I'd promised Lindsay. "It was a long shot anyway."

"Anything else you want to know, you can call me." Fred gingerly picked up the take-out bags. "I'm no detective, but I know this community. It's not going to be pretty if the prosecutor puts either Dee or Emma on trial for the murder."

It might not be pretty, but I had a feeling it would be colorful. The picket line outside Monograms earlier this week was nothing compared to the force Dee could bring to bear if the charges against Emma weren't dropped. I could picture it now: a combined occupation and quilting bee on the courthouse steps.

Despite the common perception of quilters as sweet, mild-mannered old biddies, I knew them for who they really were: strong, passionate women with enough persistence and determination to sew together thousands of pieces of fabric for a single bedcovering and then spend hundreds of additional hours hand quilting it. If they turned that same dedication toward protecting one of their own, Wolfe could kiss his political aspirations good-bye.

Following up on Tremain's list of clients would have to wait until after I finished appraising Stefan's quilt. Gil was expecting a report first thing tomorrow morning at the latest, and I still needed to double-check that the print in Stefan's quilt that matched one of the fabrics in Martha McDowell's quilt wasn't also a reproduction.

I got to the gallery shortly before 1:30. Across the street at Monograms, a strip of police tape still fluttered from the front door, caught in the frame. The interior of the shop was unlit, and the large temporary sign announcing that it was closed until Monday was still in the glass portion of the front door.

Stefan's gallery appeared to be almost as dark inside as Monograms was, but he had an
Open
sign on his door. I let myself inside and caught Stefan peering out his front window through a tiny opening in the heavy curtains.

Reluctantly, he tugged the curtains back in place and turned to greet me. "Do you have the appraisal report done already?"

"Not quite. I was hoping you'd let me take another look at the quilt. I've got some new information I need to check out." I didn't want to panic him unnecessarily, and I wasn't even prepared to tell him that Martha McDowell's quilt had probably been based on his, not until I'd compared the two of them more thoroughly. "I'll need another picture, the whole thing this time. I only took partials yesterday."

"Help me get it out of the back." Stefan led the way, sliding on the wood floors a little as his trouser hems got caught beneath his shoes. "Did you hear about what happened at Monograms last night?"

Judging by Stefan's eagerness to tell me about it, the news couldn't be good. I wasn't sure I could handle any more problems right now. "No. What?"

"Someone's got it in for Tremain, and it's not enough that he's dead. His shop was robbed last night. They stole one of his quilts right off the wall. Alyse stopped by Monograms this morning to get something for a long-time customer who couldn't wait until Monday, and the quilt was missing."

It had to have been the quilt on the back wall, or Alyse wouldn't have noticed. "Why would thieves take just one quilt?"

Stefan shrugged. "It was probably the only one that was worth stealing. I've seen the pieces he claimed were museum quality, and none of them was worth more than a few hundred bucks."

"How would the thieves know that? There were at least thirty quilts in the shop, and many of them were tagged with prices high enough to be worth stealing, even if they were lower than the one on the wall. Why not take them all?"

Stefan unlocked the back room. "Maybe they didn't have time to take more than one and got lucky with their choice."

"I don't believe in that much luck. Whoever took it had to have known a good bit about quilt values."

"Hey, don't look at me." Stefan put on gloves, and I picked up the pair Matt had worn yesterday. He picked up one side of the sheet the four-patch was lying on while I did the same thing with the opposite side.

Stefan continued, "Alyse already accused me of stealing it. She sent a cop over to harass me even. A young guy, a little too enthusiastic about his job. I told him what I'm telling you now—I wouldn't gain anything by stealing any of Tremain's quilts. It wouldn't be worth much without its provenance, and everyone knows I only sell fully documented artwork. I don't do shady deals like some people do, and I would never risk my reputation for a single sale."

I'd only been thinking aloud and hadn't meant to suggest Stefan had taken the quilt. Still, I could see why Alyse might have suspected him. Despite what Stefan claimed, he did have a motive. He could have taken the quilt, not to sell but more as payback for what Tremain had put Stefan through by copying quilts from his gallery. It was possible, but I didn't believe it. If Stefan had done it out of revenge, he would have done it while Tremain was alive. Stealing it now wouldn't be particularly satisfying, since Tremain was beyond any suffering Stefan could inflict on him.