Evil Season

Read Evil Season for Free Online

Book: Read Evil Season for Free Online
Authors: Michael Benson
lawsuit. She only knew Wishart as a coworker and knew nothing of her personal life.
    â€œShe was a very pleasant woman,” Marsha Fottler told DeNiro. Fottler served with the victim on the city’s arts council, and wrote the “Shop Talk” column for Sarasota Magazine, where she once plugged Wishart’s gallery.
    Fottler got to know Wishart through working on committees with her, such as Smart Talk, the Sarasota Arts Council, and the Sarasota/Manatee Breast Cancer Committee.
    â€œThe gallery was the joy of her life,” Fottler added. The thing that bothered Fottler the most was that the gallery became the place of Wishart’s worst and final agony. She died horribly in the place she loved the most.
    DeNiro interviewed a Sarasota artist named Linda Salomon whose work was exhibited at the Provenance. She said she had a fifty-fifty deal with the gallery. Anything that sold, she got half, and Wishart got half. Sadly, she said, her opening was supposed to be that night (January 22).
    A preview of Salomon’s show was in the December 2003 issue of Sarasota Magazine . There was a photo of Salomon and her animal dolls and a pull quote saying how Salomon’s friends teased her because she became attached to her dolls and didn’t want to part with them.
    Salomon told DeNiro that she last saw Wishart on January 8, and last received an e-mail from her on January 14. She’d always gotten along with Wishart, but she had heard verbal arguments between the victim and employees of the nearby A Step Above Gallery.
    A Step Above Gallery was DeNiro’s next stop. No one there remembered an argument, but Lois Ross, the owner’s wife, said she last saw Wishart on Friday afternoon, talking with a man outside the Provenance, a man dressed nicely but not in a suit. The sighting was either at one o’clock in the afternoon, when Ross was on her way to an appointment, or at four o’clock, when she was returning.
    A woman named Margaret Pennington had gone into the Provenance around noon on the day of the murder to admire Linda Salomon’s animal dolls. Wishart was very pleasant and introduced herself. No sign of trouble. She couldn’t remember what Wishart was wearing. “I was looking at her red hair most of the time,” Pennington said.
    DeNiro made a list of all of the callers on Joyce Wishart’s caller ID, both home and at the gallery. One by one, he tracked them down, looking for suspects. He found the chapters of Joyce Wishart’s life—old friends, neighbors, her dentist—but not a clue regarding her death.
    On the victim’s caller ID was Elaine Fox, who knew Wishart in Ohio, where they worked together at Chemlawn, and in Florida after both moved to Sarasota. Fox and her husband were the first to move south. Wishart came to visit, loved it, and she migrated as well. Fox told police that the last boyfriend of Wishart’s she remembered was a guy from Denver. She didn’t know his name, but she thought he worked for a government nonprofit group and had a daughter in St. Petersburg. Fox said she was under the impression that Wishart broke up with this man before she herself moved to Florida, maybe 1998. Fox said Wishart was the type of person who could make people angry, but not to the point of creating enemies. Wishart was kind of a “know-it-all,” Fox said, and could degrade people “without even knowing it.”
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    Michelle Andersen, a coworker of Vicki Krone’s, had worked at Admiral Travel for thirteen years, a workplace with little turnover. Many of the employees had been there for that long, and longer. In comparison, Joyce Wishart had only been in Sarasota for a couple of years and was still a relative newcomer.
    Andersen admitted to not being a close friend of the victim’s. Which wasn’t to say that Andersen and Wishart weren’t friendly. They greeted each other, “Hi, how are ya?”
    Of course, Palm

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