recommend a criminal attorney and we can all talk tomorrow, at the jail.”
“No-no-no,” Anderson said. “Look, my relationship with Leslie…continued…to some extent.”
“To some extent?” Smith asked. “What does that mean?”
“I was…” She bit her lip, looked away from them, then said, “I was actually more interested in Jane.”
“In Jane? Did you have a physical relationship with Jane?” Lucas asked.
“Well…yes. Why would I want to fuck a great big huge fat guy?”
Lucas had no answer for that; but he had more questions for Jane Widdler.
HE TURNED to the quilts, taking notes as Anderson answered the questions. She believed the quilts were genuine. They’d been spotted by Marilyn Coombs, she said, who took them to the Widdlers for confirmation and evaluation.
The Widdlers, in turn, had sent them away for laboratory tests, and confirmed with the tests, and other biographical information about Armstrong, that the quilts were genuine. The Widdlers then put together an investment package in which the quilts would be sold to private investors who would donate them to museums, getting both a tax write-off and a reputation for generosity.
“We have reason to believe that the quilts are faked—that the curses were, in any case. That the primary buyers paid only a fraction of what they said they paid, and took an illegal tax write-off after the donations,” Lucas said.
“I don’t know about any of that,” Anderson said. “I was the contact between the Widdlers and Mrs. Donaldson. I brought her attention to the quilts, but she made her own decisions and her own deals. I never handled money.”
“You told me that you didn’t know Mrs. Bucher,” Lucas said.
She shrugged. “I didn’t. I knew who she was, but I didn’t know her.”
“And you still…maintain that position?”
“It’s the truth,” she said.
“You didn’t go there with Leslie Widdler and kill Mrs. Bucher and her maid?”
“Of course not! That’s crazy!”
He asked her about Toms: never heard of him, she said. She’d never been to Des Moines in her life, not even passing through.
“Were you with Leslie Widdler last night?” Smith asked.
“No. I was out until about eight, then I was here,” she said.
“You didn’t speak to him, didn’t ride around with him…”
“No. No. I didn’t speak to him or see him or anything.”
THEY PUSHED ALL the other points, but Anderson wouldn’t budge. She hadn’t dealt in antiques with either Leslie or Jane Widdler. She had no knowledge of what happened with the Armstrong quilts, after Donaldson, other than the usual art-world reports, gossip, and hearsay. She could prove, she thought, that on the Friday night that the Buchers were killed, she’d been out late with three other women friends, at a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, where she’d not only drunk a little too much, but remembered that there’d been a birthday party in an upper loft area of the restaurant that had turned raucous, and that she was sure people would remember.
WHEN THEY were done, Anderson said, “Now I have a question. I have the feeling that Jane Widdler has been telling you things that aren’t true. I mean, if Jane and Leslie were killing these people, I don’t know why Jane would try to drag me into it. Is she trying to do that?”
“Maybe,” Lucas said.
“Do you think they could kill people?” Smith asked.
Anderson turned her face down, thinking, glanced sideways at Ramford, then said, “You know, Jane…has always struck me as greedy. Not really a bad person, but terribly greedy. She wants all this stuff. Diamonds, watches, cars, Hermès this and Tiffany that and Manolo Blahnik something else. She might kill for money—it’d have to be money—but…I don’t know.”
Her mouth moved some more, without words, and they all sat and waited, and she went on:
“Leslie, I think Leslie might kill. For the pleasure in it. And money. In college, we had this small-college football team. Football didn’t mean anything, really. You’d go and wave your little pennant or wear your mum and nobody cared if you won or lost. A lot of people made fun of football players…but Leslie liked to hurt people. He’d talk about stepping on people’s hands with his cleats. Like, if one of the runner-guys did too well, they’d get him down and then Leslie would ‘accidentally’ step on his hand and break it. He claimed he did it several times. Word got around that he could be dangerous.”
Smith said, “Huh,” and Lucas asked, “Anything heavier than that? That you heard of? Did you get any bad vibrations from Leslie when Mrs. Donaldson was killed?”