She had a string of penny-colored South American nuts around her neck, and silver rings pierced both the lobes and rims of her ears, and probably other parts of her body, unseen, but not unsuspected.
Given her dress and carriage, her face would normally be as unclouded as a drink of water, Lucas thought, her wa smooth and round and uninflected by daily trials. Today she carried two horizontal worry lines on her forehead, and another vertically between her guileless eyes. She sat down, perched on the edge of Lucas's visitor's chair, and said, “Captain Davenport?”
“Uh, no,” Lucas said. “I'm more like a special agent; but you can call me Lucas.”
She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Could I call you mister? You're quite a bit older than I am.”
“Whatever you want,” Lucas said, trying not to grit his teeth.
She picked up on that. “I want us both to be comfortable and I think appropriate concepts of life status contribute to comfort,” she said.
“What can I do for you? You are…?”
“Gabriella Coombs. Ruffe Ignace at the Star Tribune said I should talk to you; he's the one who told me that you're a captain. He said that you were into the higher levels of strategy on the Bucher case, and that you provide intellectual guidance for the city police.”
“I try,” Lucas said modestly, picked up a pen and scrawled, Get Ruffe, on a notepad.
“So…”
“My mother, Lucy Coombs, two fifty-seven…” She stopped, looked around the room, as if to spot the TV cameras. Then, “Do you want to record this?”
“Maybe later,” Lucas said. “Just give me the gist of it now.”
“My mom didn't hear from Grandma the night before last. Grandma had a little stroke a few months ago and they talk every night,” Coombs said. “So anyway, she stopped by Grandma's place the morning before last, to see what was up, and found her at the bottom of the stairs. Dead as a doornail. The cops say it looks like she fell down the stairs and hit her head on one of those big balls on the banister post.
You know the kind I mean?”
“Yup.”
“Well, I don't believe it. She was murdered.”
Lucas had a theory about intelligence: there was critical intelligence, and there was silly intelligence. Most people tended toward one or the other, although everybody carried at least a little of both. Einstein was a critical intelligence in physics; with women, it was silly.
Cops ran into silly intelligences all the time-true believers without facts, who looked at a cocaine bust and saw fascism, or, when somebody got killed in a back-alley gunfight, reflexively referred to the cops as murderers. It wasn't that they were stupid-they were often wise in the ways of public relations. They were simply silly. Gabriella Coombs…
“I think the medical examiner could probably tell us one way or the other, Miss Coombs,” Lucas said.
“No, probably not,” Coombs said, genially contradicting him. “Everybody, including the medical examiner, is influenced by environmental and social factors. The medical examiner's version of science, and figuring out what happened, is mostly a social construct, which is why all the crime-scene television shows are such a load of crap.”
“Anyway.” He was being patient, and let it show.
“Anyway the police tell the medical examiner that it looks like a fall,” she said.
“The medical examiner doesn't find anything that says it wasn't a fall, so he rules it a fall. That's the end of the case. Nobody's curious about it.”
Lucas doodled a fly line with a hook, with little pencil scratches for the fly's body, around the Get Ruffe.
“You know, a person like yourself,” he said. “… have you studied psychology at all?”
She nodded. “I majored in it for three quarters.”
He was not surprised. “You know what Freud said about cigars?”
“That sometimes they're just cigars? Frankly, Mr. Davenport, your point is so simple that it's moronic.”
He thought, Hmm, she's got teeth.
She asked, “Are you going to listen to what I have to say, or are you going to perform amateur psychoanalysis?”
“Say it,” Lucas said.
She did: “My grandmother was killed by a blow to the head that fractured her skull. Last Friday or Saturday, Constance Bucher and Sugar-Rayette Peebles died the same way. Grandma and Connie were friends. They were in the same quilt group; or, at least, they had been. A story in the Star Tribune said that Mrs. Bucher's murder might have been a cover-up for a robbery. When Grandma died, I was supposed to inherit a valuable music box that her grandmother-my great-great-grandmother-brought over from the Old Country. From Switzerland.”
“It's missing?” Lucas asked, sitting up, listening now.
“We couldn't find it,” Coombs said. “It used to be in a built-in bookshelf with glass doors. The police wouldn't let us look everywhere, and she could have moved it, but it's been in that bookcase since she bought the house. Everything else seems to be there, but the music box is gone.”
“Do you have a description?” Lucas asked. “Was it insured?”
“Wait a minute, I'm not done,” Coombs said, holding up an index finger. Lucas noticed that all her fingers, including her thumbs, had rings, and some had two or three.
“There was another woman, also rich, and old, in Chippewa Falls. That's in Wisconsin.”
“I know,” Lucas said. “I've been there.”
Her eyes narrowed. “To drink beer, I bet.”
“No. It was for a police function,” Lucas lied. He'd gone on a brewery tour.
She was suspicious, but continued: “Sometimes Grandma and Connie Bucher would go over to this other lady's house for quilt group. They weren't in the same quilt groups, but the two groups intersected. Anyway, this other woman-her name was Donaldson- was shot to death in her kitchen. She was an antique collector. Grandma said the killers were never caught. This was four years ago.”
Lucas stared at her for a moment, then asked, “Is your grandma's house open? Have the St. Paul police finished with it?”
“No. We're not allowed in yet. They took us through to see if there was anything unusual, or disturbed, other than the blood spot on the carpet. But see, the deal always was, when Grandma died, her son and daughter would divide up everything equally, but since I was the only granddaughter, I got the music box. It was like, a woman-thing.
I looked for it when the police took us through, and it was missing.”
Lucas did a drum tap with his pencil. “How'd you get down here?”
She blinked a couple of times, and then said, “I may look edgy to you, Mr. Davenport, but I do own a car.”
“All right.” Lucas picked up the phone, said to Carol, “Get me the number of the guy who's investigating the death of a woman named Coombs, which is spelled…”
He looked at Coombs and she nodded and said, “C-O-O-M-B-S.”
“… In St. Paul. I'll be on my cell.” He dropped the phone on the hook, took his new Italian leather shoulder rig out of a desk drawer, put it on, took his jacket off the file cabinet, slipped into it. “You can meet me at your grandma's house or you can ride with me. If you ride with me, you can give me some more detail.”
“I'll ride with you,” she said. “That'll also save gasoline.”
As they headed out of the office, Carol called after them, “Hey, wait. I've got Jerry Wilson on his cell phone.”
Lucas went back and took the phone. “I'd like to take a look at the Coombs place, if you're done with it. I've got her granddaughter over here, she thinks maybe something else is going on… uh-huh. Just a minute.” He looked at Coombs. “Have you got a key?”
She nodded.
Back to the phone: “She's got a key. Yeah, yeah, I'll call you.”
He hung up and said, “We're in.”
Coombs had parked on the street. She got a bag and a bottle of Summer Sunrise Herbal Tea from her salt-rotted Chevy Cavalier and carried it over to the Porsche. The Porsche, she said, as she buckled in, was a “nice little car,” and asked if he'd ever driven a Corolla, “which is sorta like this. My girlfriend has one.”