10.6.2000
Chapter Four,
in which the
thief's identity
is revealed
This is the fourth and last chapter of
The Baby Hope Theft,
a four-part interactive mystery on projo.com and in the pages of The Sunday Journal. The previous parts can still be read online at www.projo.com/specials/babyhope
The story so far: Newport socialite Claire Benson Spencer has hired a father-and-daughter detective team, Nick and Nancy Nolan of Foster, to find the Baby Hope Diamond, apparently stolen during a small dinner party at Mrs. Spencer's home, Bon Soir.
The potential suspects include Chips Morton, second of Mrs. Spencer's three husbands; her son, filmmaker Charles D. Baxter III, whom Nancy previously had a fling with (a fact her father doesn't know); Charlie's girlfriend, Trinity Rep actress -- and glass collector -- Gloria Rodriguez; Congressman Richard Lombardo, R-R.I.; Lucy Hamilton, Mrs. Spencer's dear friend; Ted O'Hara, her butler; Helen Washington, her personal secretary; and restaurateur Alex Frost, who was invited to the dinner party and then "uninvited."
Nick and Nancy have interviewed Gloria and Charlie at Gloria's Pascoag home, and Lucy Hamilton at her lavish place on Providence's East Side. They've learned about a mortgage the congressman holds on Gloria's house and seen him racing away from their own home in Foster -- just after someone trashed their garden, leaving vegetables in a pattern that spelled out, "Give up HOPE." Meanwhile, Helen made a mysterious phone call asking to speak to the detectives -- and now appears to be thrashing about in the water at Waterplace Park, where she was to have met them.
This chapter is written by Karen Antonio DeQuattro of Westport, Mass.,
in the voice of Nancy Nolan.
By KAREN ANTONIO
DeQUATTRO
It was indeed Helen Washington who was pulled from the water. The man on the bridge was still carrying on, his tirade at this point directed at the officers who'd arrived on the scene. Dad and I both glanced over at a gray Mercedes haphazardly parked on the sidewalk near Cafe Nuovo.
"Chips Morton?" I suggested, recalling the small fleet of gray Mercedeses in the driveway of Bon Soir. I had no doubt that Chips still had access to his ex-wife's many resources.
Dad nodded. "That'd be my guess. Although I'm more than a little disturbed to think that he drove here all the way from Newport in his condition.
"I'll see what I can find out over there." He tipped his head toward the bridge, where Chips appeared to be settling down. "You go do your feminine-comforting thing with Ms. Washington."
Helen Washington was wrapped in a blanket and sitting on a park bench with a female police officer when I reached her.
"Thank you," she said as the officer rose and left. I took the space the officer had vacated.
"Helen, what happened?"
"I never will understand what Mrs. Spencer sees in that man," she said, her eyes cast downward.
"You mean Chips Morton," I said.
Helen nodded. "Some kind of bizarre codependency, I suppose. I just don't see how she's supposed to get on with her life with him always harassing her."
"How did he end up here?" I asked.
"He followed me, I guess. He knows how I feel about him, and he was angry with me today."
"Angry with you? Why?"
Helen bit her lip. "I don't always tell Mrs. Spencer when he calls. I don't see the point in upsetting her when he's just, well, drunk and looking for money or sympathy or whatever.
"He started in at nine o'clock this morning, calling repeatedly. I made excuses, told him Mrs. Spencer had meetings on the East Side and would be gone all day. He showed up at the house just as I was leaving to come here to meet you.
"Ted heard us arguing and came outside. He occupied Chips just long enough for me to get into my car and drive away. I never imagined he would follow me."
"But he did," I stated, encouraging Helen to continue.
Helen nodded. "I'd just sat down at the cafe over there when I saw him pull right up onto the sidewalk in one of Mrs. Spencer's cars. I got up and went to confront him. I thought at the very least I should get the car keys away from him.
"He met me on the bridge. He was so drunk, I'm amazed he made it here alive. He started yelling, accusing me of keeping him from Claire. He thought I was meeting her here. He demanded to know where she was. Then he grabbed at my coat. I backed away and fell."
"Why do you suppose he grabbed at your coat?" I asked. I hadn't yet heard anything that indicated Chips Morton was an aggressive person.
Helen Washington looked down and shook her head. "I haven't a clue. In any event, he startled me, enough to make me fall, though I don't think that was what he intended to happen. I explained to that officer that it was an accident. I won't be pressing charges."
Dad returned to join us. "Chips Morton is in custody. DWI." He looked at Helen, who'd begun to dry but was a mess just the same. "I know you wanted to speak to us in confidence, but this hardly seems the time or place. Could Nancy drive you back to Newport?"
Helen paused and glanced at her watch. "I suppose. Mrs. Spencer won't be in. She should be leaving right about now for an evening out with that congressman." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "What a mess this has all become."
Dad and I both noted the way she said, "that congressman." Lucy Hamilton was apparently not alone in her negative opinion of Lombardo.
"Nancy," Dad said, "if you don't mind, I'm going to take your car. I have an errand to run, then I'll meet you at Bon Soir."
I raised an eyebrow at my father, whose "errands" usually consist of chasing down hunches, and whose hunches are usually right on the money. Dad smiled, took my car keys, and jogged off in one direction while Helen and I went in the other.
* * *
It was nearly 6:30 when my father arrived at Bon Soir. I was in the kitchen with an odd impromptu dinner party.
Charlie and Gloria had arrived just as Helen and I pulled into the drive. Ted, the butler -- who was, as far as I was concerned, the only person who definitely didn't do it -- looked so confused as he opened the door I almost laughed. Then Charlie brushed past me into the drawing room and I remembered that, among those other aspects of the current situation that could fall into the not-a-laughing-matter category, there was the secret that he and I shared -- and I still wasn't even sure if he remembered me.
Helen had managed to slip upstairs without explanation, leaving all eyes on me in the silence of the drawing room. It was Ted to the rescue with the suggestion of sandwiches in the kitchen. Gathered on barstools around a massive counter, I told the greatly abbreviated version of what had occurred in Waterplace Park.
Dad sniffed as he entered the room.
"Lox," he said with a frown. "As if driving in the Marlboro lady's vehicle of torture for the last two hours wasn't bad enough."
I let that dig slide, although I would have liked to comment. No matter how awful my father considered the smell of cigarettes to be, it couldn't have been as bad as the rather distinct odor of the Providence River that I'd endured on the drive to Newport in Helen Washington's tiny Escort.
Dad scanned the room with practiced nonchalance. I knew he was dying to ask just how we'd all ended up in the same place. "Nancy, if you don't mind, I'll need you to come with me for a moment."
I excused myself, hoping my sigh of relief wasn't audible. Dad led me down a hallway to the opposite wing of the house. Helen was waiting in the library. Dad closed the door behind us.
"There was something you needed to tell us," Dad said to Helen. "Go ahead."
Helen took a deep breath. "The night of the dinner party. I left the table . . . to . . ."
". . . answer the call?" Dad finished for her. I could tell he was still amused by all these people unable to admit they used the bathroom.
Helen nodded. "Mr. Lombardo had left the table a short time before, presumably for the same reason. Only as I was going down the hall, I saw him coming from upstairs. I don't think he saw me. In fact, I'm sure he didn't. He paused at the bottom of the stairs to check his teeth in the mirror."
"Why didn't you mention this before?" I asked. "Why not say something to Mrs. Spencer."
"I thought it would be best to speak to you. I wasn't even sure Mrs. Spencer would believe me. She's so enamored of that congressman."
"But why the wait?" Dad asked. "And why the secrecy?"
"Mr. Lombardo is a very important, influential man," Helen said slowly. "I didn't take it lightly, pointing a finger in his direction."
"Is there anything else?" Dad asked. I thought he was rushing Helen, and had half a mind to say so, but I thought twice and stayed silent. Helen shook her head and Dad walked her to the door, asking that he and I be left alone for a few minutes.
* * *
"Well?" I asked when the door closed behind Helen. "What was the 'errand' this afternoon?"
"Remember Ben Wallace?"
I nodded, trying to figure where Dad was going with this one. Ben had been an attorney in a large real estate practice in downtown Providence in the '80s. He'd helped expose corruption in his firm, and had granted my father interviews when he was covering the story for The Journal. Dad and Ben had become friends in the process and stayed in touch over the years. Ben had since given up his law practice and now worked as a real estate title examiner.
"I had Ben take a look at that mortgage you found," Dad said, "the one Lombardo holds on Gloria Rodriguez's house. I met him while you were driving back here with Helen and he gave me a copy. The mortgage is in the amount of $18,000, and it's due and payable on October 10, 1999."
"October 10, 1999," I repeated. "Isn't that the date Charlie made his contribution to Lombardo's campaign?"
Dad nodded. "In the amount of $18,000. There's no record of Lombardo discharging Gloria's mortgage, but then again, there's no reason to assume Charlie intended to pay off the mortgage."
"It's quite a coincidence, but how would funds intended to pay off a mortgage end up as a campaign contribution?" I was genuinely confused.
"A mistake." The voice was Charlie's, and there was no mistaking the sarcasm in his tone. I hadn't heard the library door open, but there was Charlie in the doorway. "The congressman's a lucky man, though. These mistakes somehow always work in his favor."
"What do you mean by 'mistake'?" my dad asked Charlie, but Charlie's eyes were focused on me.
"I remember you, you know," he said, and I felt my face get hot. I was painfully aware of my father's presence in the room. "I'm sorry for how things ended, I really am. I know the kind of reputation I've got, and I can just imagine what you thought, but I didn't mean for it just to be a fling. I thought there might really be something between us, but then Gloria -- she needed me . . . "
Briefly, I forgot about my father. "You mean you were already seeing Gloria when we -- "
"No," Charlie said, shaking his head. "She and I had just met, and she was dating Richard, or something like that. Then she called me, out of the blue. She was so shaken up. Things just snowballed from there."
I glanced at my dad, who at this point appeared to be catching on. I tried to ignore the hurt in his eyes, but it was plain and unavoidable. I'd never kept something from him before, not in the course of an investigation.
"Why was Gloria shaken up?" Dad asked Charlie, dedicated to the task at hand.
"It's a condition she has," Charlie explained. "Social anxiety disorder."
* * *
Involuntarily, a laugh escaped my lips. I put a hand quickly to mouth, surprising even myself with my complete lack of tact. "I'm sorry. I just -- social anxiety disorder? She's an actress, for chrissakes."
"I know," Charlie said, "I had to have it explained to me, too. The Gloria Rodriguez you see onstage isn't the real Gloria. She literally becomes whatever character she's playing. The audience doesn't bother her because she doesn't have to interact with them. She has a script, she plays a role. She's perfectly comfortable -- unless something is out of place."
"Like the curtain, or mismatched shoes," I said, thinking aloud. Gloria's remote residence and her meticulously arranged collection of blue glass began to make sense.
Charlie seemed to realize I'd done my homework. "She couldn't take it," he said, "Richard dragging her to all those fundraisers, showing her off and then leaving her to fend for herself with people she didn't know. The thing was, she couldn't break it off with him, either."
"Why not?" Dad asked.
"They had an agreement, of sorts. Gloria had bills to pay -- medical bills from a hospital stay -- "
"For the anxiety disorder?" Dad interrupted, and Charlie nodded.
"She was already maxed out with her house. Richard promised to pay the medical bills, if Gloria would let him parade her around during election year.
"He did pay some of the bills, but then it got to be too much for Gloria. She tried to break things off with him. She called me. I'm still not sure if what she wanted was my money or my influence on Richard, but we ended up negotiating sort of a trade."
"Your mother for Gloria," Dad said. It sounded so tasteless, especially the way my father said it.
"I guess you could say that," Charlie agreed reluctantly. "And Richard paid off the bills, but held that second mortgage on Gloria's house.
"I didn't know about that until it was signed, notarized and recorded. I was furious, but there was Richard, slyly insisting he was just looking out for his interests. He never took any payments from Gloria. He just used it as leverage, to ensure that I would continue to include him in my mother's social circle.
"When the mortgage came due, I told him I'd pay it. I wanted him to issue a discharge so that we could all just be rid of him."
"But instead you got a letter thanking you for you generous campaign contribution," I ventured.
"Yeah," Charlie said, tightening his hands into fists. "And my hands are tied, because if I try to touch him now, while he's got everything to lose, he'll leak what he knows about Gloria's hospitalization. That would kill her."
"You really care about her," I said. It was a statement, and a hollow and misplaced one at that.
"You think Lombardo stole the Baby Hope?" Dad asked Charlie.
"He's as good a suspect as any," Charlie said. "The guy's a bottom-feeder. I don't know how he'd get into the safe, but anything's possible. The way he's been hounding my mother to wear her jewels lately . . ." his voice trailed off.
"One more thing," Dad said, "What do you think of Alex Frost?"
"Alex Frost?" Charlie looked as puzzled as I was at the sudden change of subject. "Alex Frost is a great guy. In truth, I'd love to see him get together with Mom, but that's just one more thing Richard keeps standing in the way of."
Dad nodded slowly, and I began to get a feeling for what was going on inside his head.
Just then, we heard a commotion down the hall.
* * *
Dad, Charlie and I left the library and walked to the drawing room, where Mrs. Spencer and Richard Lombardo had joined Helen and Gloria. Ted stood uncomfortably in the doorway.
"My goodness," said Mrs. Spencer, "It appears to be a good thing we came back after all."
"Claire forgot our theater tickets," Richard explained. He turned to Mrs. Spencer with a toothy smile. "I swear, Claire, what doesn't go missing at your house?"
Nobody laughed.
"Forget the theater," Dad said, addressing Mrs. Spencer. "All the action's right here."
He turned to Lombardo. "By the way, I couldn't help but notice you were out our way the other day."
"Couldn't help but notice," Lombardo spat. "I thought it was rather rude of you to go out when I'd come all the way to your house, at her request." I blinked, realizing Lombardo had just indicated me. "I'm happy to help in any way I can, of course, but the common courtesy -- "
"But I didn't -- " I began, but Dad stopped me with a look.
"Mrs. Spencer, I know where you can find your diamond," he said. All eyes were now on my father. "It is in Congressman Lombardo's house, most likely somewhere in his home office."
Mrs. Spencer's jaw dropped. Lombardo began sputtering in protest. Dad put up a hand.
"If I could finish," he said. "Richard Lombardo, lowlife bottom-feeder though he may be, is not the thief."
Eyebrows were raised, breaths held -- I loved it when my dad came into the home stretch. I folded m arms across my chest and smiled, waiting.
* * *
"It was Helen Washington who took the diamond from the safe," Dad said, not missing a beat as the color drained from Helen's face, "but she was not motivated by personal gain. Helen was concerned for you, Mrs. Spencer.
"A person in her position sees and hears things that others simply assume she does not. She could see the way Richard was using you, and she may well have suspected that he was manipulating Charlie and Gloria as well.
"Worse, along came Alex Frost, a genuine person with genuine interest in you, but you repeatedly passed him over in favor of Richard. My guess is that Lucy Hamilton shared her own concerns with Helen, and they worked out a plan together.
"It most likely was Lucy who planted the diamond in Richard's home office. She and Richard have both supported several of the same charitable organizations, and I can see her easily convincing a housekeeper to let her into Richard's home office, maybe to leave some fundraising documents with a personal note. Easier still if she knew that Richard would be all the way out in Foster, responding to a call that Helen made, pretending to be Nancy.
"Helen was at our house in Foster that day too, ruining a perfectly good sauce with a feeble attempt at thickening the plot."
"Wait," Charlie interrupted, turning to Helen. "I don't understand. Why such drastic means to get Richard out of my mother's life? You must have known this would ruin him."
Helen had that godawful deer-in-headlights look. I'd seen it before, working with my father.
"May I?" Dad asked, saving her. "Think of how your mother handled this, Charlie. Did she call the police? Of course not, and Helen knew she wouldn't. Helen knew your mother would call me, I'd find the diamond and return it to her quietly. The public would never know, but Richard would be forever banned from Newport society -- and from your mother's life."
"I thought it was Chips Morton you considered such a negative influence in Mrs. Spencer's life," Ted commented to Helen.
I smiled at that one. "Negative maybe, but Chips is no threat. At least his feelings for Mrs. Spencer are genuine -- when he's sober, anyway."
"How did you figure it out?" Helen whispered.
"The direct-deposit," Dad stated simply, then continued in response to the quizzical looks around him.
"The dinner party ended at 11:30. Sometime shortly thereafter, Mrs. Spencer discovered that the diamond was missing, requested that Helen find my unlisted phone number, called me and explained her predicament, and still managed to have my fee in my deposit account by 12:13 a.m.
"Remarkable timing, unless someone was expecting the diamond would go missing, ensured that Mrs. Spencer discovered the theft immediately, and had my number ready and waiting. Let me guess, Mrs. Spencer: Helen urged you to put your necklace in the safe right after dinner?"
Claire Benson Spencer nodded. "But how did you get the combination?" she asked Helen.
"I watched Charlie," Helen explained. "He had the combination written on a piece of paper."
Mrs. Spencer's eyes went to her son.
"Ah, the tangled web we weave," Dad said as he faced me.
I couldn't help but think there was a message I was supposed to be getting, loud and clear.
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