I shrugged, and, under the desk, out of sight, crossed my fingers. “The painting has blood on it. She knows it, and doesn’t care. I do. Think of me as a variation of Robin Hood.”
“How so?”
“I won’t let the rich get richer from thievery.”
“And yet, here you are-”
“I’m not rich, and I don’t suppose you are either.”
He snorted. “Hardly. People think we’re all rich.”
“They don’t know our costs.”
“Exactly.”
“Still,” I said, smiling, “it’s a living.”
He smiled back, but as he was about to comment, the phone rang, as arranged. Hattie, one of the police officers, was calling from upstairs.
“Hello,” I answered, “Prescott’s. May I help you?”
Hattie, pretending to be Sasha, asked me if it was all right to come over and do some work.
“When?”
“In an hour.”
I looked away from Barney, the better to maintain my part of the pretence. “Sure. That’s not a problem. How long do you think you’ll be here?”
Hattie faltered. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Okay,” I responded to the nonexistent answer. “Ten or ten-thirty? That’s fine. I tell you what, I’ll leave the alarm off tonight, okay? Tomorrow we can get Fred set up with a key and the code to the alarm.”
“Okay,” she said.
“See you in the morning!” I said brightly, and hung up. To Barney, I said, “Sorry about that.”
“No problem,” he said, his eyes remote and calculating. “I was about to leave anyway. I’ll call you tomorrow, all right?” He stood up, and headed for the door.
“By noon, okay?”
“What happens at noon?” he asked.
“I find another buyer.”
He looked at me, maybe to assess my veracity. I perceived agitation and anxiety in his demeanor, and it frightened me. I struggled to control an urge to back away from him, shifting my focus instead to watching as he evaluated his options and framed his response.
“Well, then,” he said, “I’ll do my best to get back to you by then.”
We shook hands, and I watched as he drove away.
Alverez’s plan had worked exactly as he’d expected. My work was done, and I felt the pressure subside.
I’d helped, it had been easy and straightforward, and it was over, so now I could relax.
I sensed, more than heard, Alverez approach. When I turned I saw that he was grinning. He reached out and squeezed my shoulder.
“Way to go, Josie,” he said.
I smiled back. “It was pretty easy,” I said.
Max came in, the worry lines gone. “How did it go?” he asked.
“Perfect,” Alverez said. “Now, git. Both of you. Out of here.”
It was a weird feeling to leave my warehouse in the hands of the police. I didn’t know what Alverez expected would happen. He wouldn’t say.
But assuming that Barney would break in and try to steal the painting, well, it was frightening to think about, and while I was glad I wouldn’t be there on-site, I knew that I’d be spending an anxious and sleepless night.
Max and I said our good-byes as I drove him to his car.
“I confess that I’m relieved our part is over,” he said. “I don’t think I’d make a very good spy.”
I laughed. “But you’d do a great job planning what the actual spies should do.”
He smiled, and sighed deeply. “I guess,” he acknowledged, stretching as best he could in the confined space. “But you, I think you might have to change careers.”
“Thanks,” I said, pleased at the compliment. “I admit it-I think I have a knack for deception.”
Max chuckled. “It doesn’t sound good when you put it that way, does it?”
“No, not at all. Luckily, I’m my mother’s daughter. Honest to the core.”
He patted my shoulder as I pulled up behind his car. “Good. Talent or no talent, stay that way.”
I nodded and tucked my hair behind my ears. “I promise.” He opened the door and started to slide out. “Max?” I asked. He turned toward me. “What now? What do you think will happen?”
He paused, his hand gripping the doorframe. “I think Alverez will get him. What do you think?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. But I’m a little scared.” I shivered. “To tell you the truth, I thought Barney looked a little bit like a cornered rat.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
As expected, I spent a restless night.
I slept some, I guessed, but the hours I stayed in bed were filled with upsetting and confusing dreams, and I awoke jittery and tense. Lying there, tired but unable to sleep, I thought about Alverez and wondered if his plan had worked, and if so, whether he was still questioning his suspect or whether he’d called it a night. I could picture him sitting in interrogation room two, struggling to stay awake, but I could also imagine that he was home, asleep, and it got me wondering what his home was like. Was it a rental, like mine? Was it furnished with heavy, masculine pieces, like an Adirondack lodge?
One thought led to another and at about 4:30 in the morning, I gave up trying to sleep, and went downstairs. Wrapped in my soft pink robe, I made coffee, and with a cup in hand, I curled up in the window seat in my kitchen and looked out over the meadow. I saw nothing. Thick clouds completely obscured the sky, and the darkness seemed absolute.
Determined to shift my focus from thinking to doing, I scrambled eggs, had a second cup of coffee, and just before 6:00, decided to go to work. Wearing black jeans and a cherry red sweater, I stepped outside in the dim light of another cloudy spring morning, took a deep breath of wintry-cold dawn air, and started the car. I shivered, chilled, as I used the small plastic scraper to rid the windshield and side windows of hoarfrost.
Three miles down the road I glanced at my cell phone and realized that I’d missed a call. Punching buttons, I saw that it had come from Alverez while I was in the shower. “Damn,” I said aloud.
I pulled over to the side of the road and listened to the cryptic message. “Josie,” Alverez said, sounding energized, “I’m sorry to call so early, but I’m going back into the interrogation room after grabbing a little sleep, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to talk next. I just wanted to thank you again, and to let you know that the plan worked. We got her.”
I dialed back, but got his voice mail. “Damn,” I said again. I didn’t want to leave a message. I wanted to talk to him.
I called the station house. Whoever answered the phone said that Alverez wasn’t available and couldn’t venture a guess as to when he might be able to call me back. I hung up and tapped the steering wheel, frustrated and impatient for news. Impulsively, I called Max, and, after apologizing for disturbing him so early, I recapped Alverez’s message and my failure to reach him.
“‘Her’?” Max asked. “Are you certain he said ‘her’?”
“Yes, absolutely. It sounds like he’s arrested someone, doesn’t it?” I asked.
“Or, at least, that he’s got a suspect in custody,” Max agreed. “Who do you think it is?”
“I haven’t got a clue,” I said. “I was a hundred percent sure it was Barney.”
After a short pause, Max asked, “Didn’t Barney tell you that Andi had hired him?”
“Andi!” I exclaimed. “That’s right, he did tell me that. Wow! And Barney could have called Andi to tell her about the Matisse. But wait a second, Max. Even if he did so, and even if she decided to come steal it, there’s no way she could have gotten here that quickly.”
“What do you mean? It’s only a ten-minute drive from the Sheraton. Isn’t that where she and her mother are staying?”
“Mrs. Cabot told me she was going back to Chestnut Hill yesterday, and I assumed that Andi would go home to New York at the same time… but you’re right, it’s strictly an assumption on my part. Maybe Andi did stay longer, to work with Barney, or to start the lawsui
t to try and break her grandfather’s will.”
“If it was Andi that Alverez caught in your warehouse, think about what that means. It implies that she stole the Renoir and that she killed her grandfather. Stealing the Renoir, maybe. But killing her grandfather? That stretches credibility!”
“Not if she was all drugged up.”
“True,” he acknowledged, sounding sad.
Responding to his tone, I said, “It’s so horrible to think about, isn’t it?”
“More than horrible. Unnecessary, too, since she’s due to inherit half of his estate.”
“But I wonder if she knew it at the time? She wasn’t close to her grandfather, that’s for sure,” I said.
“True. But still.”
“Yeah. She’s pretty volatile.”
“Maybe she’s mentally ill, you know, bipolar or split personality or something,” Max suggested.
I recalled her constant surliness, her occasional explosive temper, and the rapid mood swing I’d witnessed on Mr. Grant’s porch. One minute she’d been a shrew, the next, cajoling and plaintive.
“Maybe,” I acknowledged. A squirrel caught my eye as he dashed across the road and disappeared into the underbrush. I shrugged. “We have no way of knowing. You know what I mean… from everything you hear, drugs make some people act like they’re nuts whether they are or not.”
“I guess you’re right. And I guess it doesn’t matter, does it, whether she is actually mentally ill or not?”
“Not to us, maybe. But I bet Mrs. Cabot cares.”
I heard Max sigh. “Yeah.” After a pause, he asked, “Josie, does it make sense that Andi would sneak into your place and leave the Renoir? After killing her own grandfather to get it either because she’s insane or because she was high on drugs, wouldn’t she have kept it?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But if she’d learned about the Matisse and the Cezanne, and if she knew that I had been to the house the same morning and was considered to be a suspect, maybe she was willing to sacrifice the Renoir in an attempt to frame me. She’d still get millions from the other two paintings if she could get her hands on them, and if she did a good enough job with the setup, I’d be arrested and maybe even convicted, and she’d be completely off the hook.”
“Yeah,” he mused, “plus, once the investigation was over, and probate granted, the Cabots would get the painting back. It was a gambit… like in chess… you know?”
“Well, actually, no. I don’t know how to play chess.”
“A gambit,” Max explained, his voice animated, “is an opening move in which a player sacrifices a piece in order to secure a desirable position.”
“Wow. I see what you mean. You’re right. That’s exactly what she did. She sacrificed the Renoir-temporarily, at least-as a way of shifting suspicion onto me, which, to her, was a favorable position.” I looked out at the barren street, the leafless trees, and the empty, overgrown sidewalks. “Wait. Let’s not forget… ultimately, it didn’t work.”
“No, but she tried. As a strategy, I’ve heard worse.”
“Yeah.” I shivered again, chilled at the thought that a malevolent spirit strategized how to get me. I’d done nothing to deserve her antipathy, yet I was her chosen target. I felt tears begin to form, and my heart started to thump. I swallowed, trying to regain my composure. “Max,” I asked, as calmly as I could, “is it truly possible that someone would do something so… so… fiendish?”
“Yes,” he answered softly. “Yes, I think it is.”
“Do you think that Mrs. Cabot knows what Andi did?” I asked, glad to shift the conversation to less personal ground.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know, Josie. Actually, we don’t know that Andi did anything. We’re just speculating.”
“I suppose so. Regardless, I’d like to tell Mrs. Cabot that I found the paintings, but I don’t want to burden her if she’s, you know, overwhelmed because of Andi.”
Max paused. “I was just thinking about whether it’s prudent to reveal that they’ve been found. Let me put in a call to Alverez and ask him. Then, once we have an okay, why don’t you get in touch with her and see how she sounds? Use your judgment. You can always just tell her the bare facts, and, if she’s not in any shape to talk to you, discuss the details later.”
“That makes sense.”
“Just remember, stick to the facts. Don’t hypothesize. And don’t editorialize.”
I nodded and took a deep breath. “Yes, I can do that.”
“Are you kidding?” Max said. “I saw you in action last night. You can do anything.”
I smiled, surprised and pleased at the compliment.
I pulled into my parking lot and saw that Griff was on duty, guarding I don’t know what. He told me that I could go in, no problem, and that he’d be leaving in a minute. “We’ll be coming by pretty often,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Just to check.”
“Check on what?”
“A regular patrol, is all. You don’t need to worry.”
I got it. I wasn’t going to learn anything from him, even if he knew anything in the first place, which wasn’t by any means a given, so I thanked him, and went inside.
It was eerie. I walked through every area of the warehouse and couldn’t see a thing out of order, and yet, apparently, Alverez had caught a murderer within my walls only hours earlier. The cameras, microphones, and metal cabinet were gone. I felt unsettled. Ignoring the amorphous disquiet, I climbed the steps to my office, and began to work.
I drafted an e-mail to Gretchen explaining my idea for Prescott’s Instant Appraisals, and asked her to contact Keith, the graphic designer we used on an as-needed basis to create a themed campaign for the booth itself, newspaper ads, and flyers that we could tuck into bags when we packed up items. It had occurred to me that if Barney was more or less broke, he wasn’t much of a competitive threat, but I decided to proceed with the instant appraisal idea anyway. As a strategy to get a leg up on good inventory and build traffic, I didn’t see how it could be beat. Plus, it sounded like fun.
I stretched and glanced at the computer clock. It wasn’t even 7:30 yet. I wondered where Alverez was, and what he was doing. I stood up and paced, sat down, and then, a minute later, stood up and paced again, this time in a different direction.
I sat down, determined to focus on tasks at hand. I turned to the computer. I’d told Sasha that I’d take care of researching the leather trunk, and I hoped that doing so might stop me from wasting time and energy on other, pointless thoughts.
It didn’t take long to find the information I needed. There were loads of comps. The trunk’s silky-soft leather was a sign of the quality of its construction, and its unusually large size and remarkable condition set it apart from similar pieces. I estimated that it would sell for between $1,750 and $2,000.
Eric arrived just as I was finishing writing it up. He called out a general hello, and I shouted back that I’d be right down.
“Hey, Eric,” I said as I hurried down the steps, “I feel like I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.”
“Yeah, if we stay this busy you’re going to have to schedule staff meetings so we see each other.”
“From your mouth to God’s ears!” I said, laughing. “Are you ready?”
“Yup. I just got to pick up the money and the paperwork.”
“I’ll get you the money. Just give me a minute.”
I went to the safe and counted out a dozen hundred-dollar bills. We’d need to replenish our cash reserves soon. Returning to the office, I handed the money to him. He was swift to insert the bills in the envelope containing the inventory and a receipt that Gretchen had prepared, but I stopped him.
“Count it, Eric.”
“Ah, Josie, I know you’re not going to screw me over.”
“Right. But everybody makes mistakes. Even me.”
“Nah. Don’t believe it.”
“I’m flattered, but indulge me. Always count
money, Eric. And always read papers before you sign them. I shouldn’t have to tell you this over and over again. When you accept money, you’re responsible. Take it seriously.”
“I do,” he said, almost, but not quite, whining.
“I know you do, theoretically. But I’m focused on practicality. Remember the old saying, ‘Trust, but verify’? Well, do that every time. Always… even with me, Eric. Trust, but verify.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, not quite casting his eyes heavenward, but acting as if he wanted to. He counted the bills, grinned, and said, “See, I knew it would be right.”
“This time.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
“Go,” I told him, shaking my head and smiling, “I’ll see you later. And don’t forget to count the damn ducks!”
Since all I wanted to do was talk to Alverez, everything I did felt like busywork. I wanted an update. I wanted to know the details about what was happening. Instead, I was in limbo, waiting and wondering. Curiosity and anxiety consumed me, and, as a result, I had trouble focusing.
Fred arrived as I was considering my options. Wearing a gray sweater vest and black jeans, he looked ready for whatever came his way, office work or rolling on the floor examining the bottoms of furniture.
“Is Sasha here?” he asked.
“Not yet. I’m sure she’ll be here any minute.”
He got settled at the spare desk, and I decided to go to the Grant house and do some appraisal work. Sasha would, I was certain, arrive soon to cover the office, and if not, well, we had voice mail. I told Fred not to worry about the phone, gave him my cell phone number, just in case, and asked him which room I should work on at the Grant house.
He consulted his notes, thought about it, and finally suggested that I start on a small room on the top floor that had been used, apparently, as a sewing room. I grabbed a notebook and my purse, and left.
Max called as I drove. “When I called before, I left a message for Alverez,” he explained, “asking whether it was all right for you to tell Mrs. Cabot that the paintings had been found. I just got a call back with his answer-yes. That’s it. No other information or news.”
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