by Hailey Lind
“So—you admit you’re a thief!” I said, feeling triumphant.
Michael looked at me disdainfully. “Usually I’m a solo act,” he said, “but I thought it would be good for me to work with people. Annie, please stop twitching like that—there’s a bathroom over there.” He nodded toward an intricately carved door next to the black-lacquer screen. Well, what do you know.
I used the facilities and afterward was able to think more clearly. I had no reason to believe Michael, but I did. He had been as shocked as I to find Joanne’s body, and, so far at least, he had been violent only in self-defense. Plus, he owed me money, so I thought I would give him the benefit of the doubt.
“So what’s the deal with Edward?” I asked as I emerged from the bathroom.
Michael was engrossed in opening a wall safe.
“Don’t you need a stethoscope or something to hear the tumblers fall?” I whispered, drawing upon my vast knowledge of Mission: Impossible.
“Not if you find the combination in the Rolodex.”
“You’re kidding. Edward filed the combination in his Rolodex?”
Michael looked at me. “Does Edward seem like he could keep a long series of numbers in his head? I found it under ‘C’ for ‘Combination.’ He’d also programmed Harlan’s and Anton’s numbers into his speed dial until I pointed out the error of his ways. What a moron.”
So much for the brotherhood of thieves.
“Why did you get involved with him if he’s such a moron?”
“Anton’s an old friend,” Michael answered while riffling through the safe’s contents. “Harlan Coombs got Anton into this Internet trading thing. When tech stocks crashed last year, they lost most of their money, but Harlan convinced our dear naïve Anton to invest more, thinking the market would turn around.”
“But Anton doesn’t know squat about anything except art,” I said.
“Which may be why he lost almost all his life savings. He’d been wanting to buy a condo in Boca and retire, and Harlan assured him he’d make a bundle, fast. Anyway, Harlan started borrowing against drawings that didn’t belong to him and had Anton make forgeries. The plan was for Harlan to sell the originals and he and Anton would share the proceeds. But Harlan put most of the money back into Internet trading, leaving Anton high and dry. Now Harlan owes big bucks to some real bad guys—loan sharks as well as the art dealers he and Anton were duping. Some of those dealers are mean SOBs, too. Don’t let the bow ties fool you.”
“But where does The Magi fit in? And Edward?”
“The Magi was the magic bullet that would solve their problems. I owed Anton a favor from an incident in Ireland a few years ago. He introduced me to Harlan, who said he had a private New York buyer lined up.”
“So Harlan had Anton paint a fake Magi . . .”
“. . . and I switched it with the Brock’s real one. The idea was a simple trade and sale, the forgery for the original. I would be paid a hefty fee, Anton could rebuild his nest egg, Harlan would get the loan sharks off his back, and that would be the end of the story. Unfortunately, Harlan brought in Edward as our inside man.” Michael wiped a large hand over his face and sighed. “As you may have noticed, Edward is not exactly a criminal mastermind.”
“Hmm,” I murmured, unable to offer the X-man the sympathy he so obviously felt he deserved.
“I made the switch easily enough, but then Edward panicked,” he continued, leafing through a pile of documents he’d pulled from the safe. “It seems Ernst Pettigrew was raising questions about The Magi’s authenticity. That was bad enough, but then you showed up and confirmed that it was a fake. Then Dupont was killed, Ernst disappeared, and Edward was petrified that our scheme would be uncovered. So he insisted Harlan return the original Magi, and I made the switch again—at no small risk to my own neck, I might add. Then you came along, again, and told everyone that one was a fake, too.”
He looked at me as though this were somehow my fault.
“It is a fake.”
“Yeah, well, I’d like to know what happened to the original. Because the one Harlan sold the guy in New York was a fake, too. I’m assuming that Harlan was double-crossing us all and that he sold the original Magi to yet another buyer, or has it hidden in a safe place. But there’s a part of me that’s starting to wonder if there ever was an original.”
Now that caught my attention. The reappearance of the long-lost Caravaggio had been little short of miraculous. Had it been a fake all along?
“Who authenticated The Magi in the first place?” I asked.
Michael frowned. “It hardly matters now. What’s important is that Harlan skipped town without paying me or Anton.”
“It matters a lot,” I insisted. “If there’s no genuine Caravaggio, then two lives have been lost and a lot of people have been hurt over forgeries. Whoever originally ‘authenticated’ the painting from Anton might have been in on this whole thing.”
“Aha!” he said, ignoring me and holding up a piece of yellow paper. “A bill of sale to a Camilla Culpepper, of Belvedere and the Cayman Islands. Maybe she’s got the damned original.” He shoved the paper into his jacket pocket and glanced at his watch. “Time to vamoose. Edward’s secretary will be back any second. The woman’s as regular as a machine.”
“Hold on. Why would a criminal issue a bill of sale?”
Michael shooed me out of the inner office, closing the door behind us. “We can talk more in the car, Annie. Right now we have to move. If I’m not mistaken, you ratted me out to the SFPD.”
“Ratted you out?” I now recalled why I’d been so angry with the X-man: the motel bill, the abandonment, the lies. “ ‘Ratting you out’ implies that we are working together, which we most certainly are not, and that I owe you some kind of loyalty, which I most certainly do not. I—”
“Yeah, whatever,” Michael said as he opened the door to the hallway. “Yell at me later, Annie. Right now let’s go.”
“I’ll leave after you,” I said, deciding that the less time spent with Michael, the better. I had more pressing items on my agenda today, such as getting back to my studio and salvaging what I could from yesterday’s arson disaster.
“I think you should come with me,” he said. “We need to talk.”
“No. I want nothing to do with you, or your thieving friends. I—”
Someone was coming toward us.
Michael stepped into the hallway, saying, “. . . catch up with him later. Oh, good. It’s Sylvia. Sylvia, would you tell Edward I was looking for him? I wanted to introduce him to my cousin, who’s visiting from Wisconsin and just loves art! Sylvia, this is my cousin Susie. Susie-Q, say hi to Sylvia.”
Susie-Q choked out a garbled greeting.
In her sixties, gray-haired, plump, with pronounced frown lines, Sylvia looked as if she played bridge with “the girls” every Saturday, brought tuna noodle casseroles topped with crushed potato chips to church functions every Sunday, and spent the rest of the week making life hell for everyone else. In short, she looked like she was born to work at the Brock. I could only imagine what she thought of Edward, Michael, and Michael’s cousin from Wisconsin, Susie-Q. Sylvia glared suspiciously at Michael, who stood his ground, smiling brightly. She said she would give Edward the message. She did not sound pleased about it.
Michael steered me out the door and into the hallway, his hand gripping my upper arm. I tried pulling away, but he held on tighter and muttered through clenched teeth, “Just keep quiet until we get outside. Then we’ll discuss this.”
Dragging me down the hall, Michael used a key to open a door marked MAINTENANCE. Behind it was a passageway lined with archival drawers as well as the large pipes and air ducts required for an operation the size of the Brock. I remembered getting lost in these corridors after the whoopee cushion incident. Michael hustled us through the twists and turns without hesitation, finally taking a sharp right in order to tap a code into the keypad next to a fire exit. He opened it cautiously, peering about to see if the coa
st was clear.
We left the building and I blinked in the late-morning sunshine. The fresh air felt wonderful after the stuffiness of the museum, but I wished Michael would slow down—I needed to get in better shape if I was going to run around like this. He continued in a half jog over a landscaped hillock and out onto the street, where he broke into a full run, dragging me behind him the length of a city block, then ducking into an alleyway where the red Jeep was hidden behind a Dumpster. Michael unlocked the doors and we jumped in, winded. Well, I was winded; he was just breathing a little fast. I wanted to yell at him but my brain had ordered all available oxygen to report to my lungs, stat. Michael fired up the engine and we took off, away from the Brock and toward the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Where-are-we-going?” I puffed.
He glanced at me. “You all right?”
“Just-peachy-keen. So, is this another—” I gasped. “—kidnapping?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What I mean is—” Breathe, Annie, breathe. I was starting to find my rhythm. “—You’re taking me away from the Brock and out of the city against my will.”
Michael snorted. “Don’t be so melodramatic. It’s not against your will.”
“Yes it is.”
“Do you see a gun anywhere? Did you call for help when we were in the museum or on the street? Have I threatened you in any way?”
“Just stop the damned Jeep,” I commanded.
So he did. Right in the middle of a four-lane thorough-fare.
“Not here!”
Michael shook his head. “I really don’t know what you want from me sometimes,” he said, gunning the engine.
“What I want is my money back, you big jerk. You abandoned me in Napa and then stuck me with the cost of the motel room.”
“Ah, so that’s what this is all about. What’s that saying about a woman scorned? ‘Hell hath no fu—’ Oomph!”
I hit him. In the gut. Now he was the one with the breathing problem.
“That’s not the reaction of a woman scorned, asshole,” I snarled. “That’s the reaction of a woman stranded hours from home, with no ID, no cash, no idea where her truck is, and a huge motel bill. Plus a hangover.”
I was beginning to regret not having called the cops down on his admittedly handsome head when I had the chance. I ignored a stunning view of the Golden Gate Bridge in favor of glaring at him.
His lips twitched. “The hangover wasn’t my fault, Annie. So, how’d you talk your way out of it?”
“None of your beeswax.” Funny how, when one acted like a child, one spoke like one, too. “But it cost me more than four hundred dollars to get back home. You owe me.”
The Jeep had started to wind through the Marin hills as Michael looked at me in astonishment. “Four hundred dollars! For what? What did you do, switch to the penthouse suite after I left?”
“The motel room was forty-five. It cost me sixty for the ride to Yountville, the search for the truck, and the understanding of the motel manager.”
“I hope he was very understanding, at that rate.”
“Plus another ten for the curry and the naan.”
“Curry and what?”
“Naan. And seventy-five for the tow to the service station, then two hundred forty for the repair.”
He looked shocked. “What tow? What repair?”
I sighed. “Once I finally found the truck, it wouldn’t start. I had to have it towed, and the garage replaced the distributor cap, or spark plugs, or something. It cost two hundred and forty dollars.”
“Jesus, Annie, don’t you know anything about cars? The distributor cap was sitting just to the side of the heads. All you had to do was snap it back on.”
I experienced a moment of horrifying clarity. “You mean you disabled my truck? You are the lowest-down, lyingest piece of—” Furious, I fished around in my fanny pack and pulled out my cell phone, determined to call a certain friend of mine in the SFPD. Then I remembered that its battery was dead.
Michael, not knowing that, leaned over and snatched it out of my hand. “Calm down, Annie,” he said in that infuriatingly even voice before tossing the phone out the window.
“I don’t believe you did that!” I said, outraged, as I watched the phone bounce on the pavement and be smashed under the tires of the car behind us.
Michael snorted again.
I slumped in my seat and crossed my arms over my chest. “I want my four hundred dollars. Plus a new cell phone.”
“Look,” Michael said, his tone utterly sincere, “let’s make a deal. First, no hitting.”
“That goes both ways, you know.”
“I have never hit you,” Michael said, clearly appalled.
“No arm grabbing, then.”
“Deal. Second, you help me figure this out, and I’ll pay you much more than four hundred dollars plus a cell phone. I have an idea where The Magi might be. Possibly even the real one this time. And that might well lead us to Harlan, and the stolen sketches.”
I mulled that over. I figured there had to be a catch somewhere, but I just didn’t see it. The money was enticing, but it was more than that. Two people had been killed because of The Magi, Anton and Ernst had disappeared, and I wanted some answers. Besides, who was I kidding? I wasn’t about to bring the cops down on Michael’s head. He reminded me too much of my grandfather.
“If I help you out,” I said, “then you pay me the money and make sure Anton’s okay. I’m worried about him.”
“I think he already left town. He got wind of things going south long before I did.”
“What about Ernst?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly, with a shake of his head. “I have no idea what went down that night at the Brock. As far as I knew, Ernst had nothing to do with any of this.”
I pondered that for a minute.
“So where are we headed now? You’re saying Edward issued a bill of sale for a stolen painting?” To hell with the ethics of keeping company with thieves. I was looking for answers, and at least Michael had some suggestions.
“Not for the stolen painting, but for something referred to as an ‘anonymous sixteenth-century Italian oil painting. ’ And it wasn’t from Edward. It was from Harlan, and written out to Robert and Camilla Culpepper. It was with a bunch of other receipts, but dated the day after Harlan disappeared. It’s the timing that makes me suspicious. Plus, Harlan mentioned Culpepper a few times. The name rings a bell.”
“Mrs. Culpepper is on the Brock’s board of directors,” I said, glad to be able to contribute to the puzzle. “And rumor has it that she was having an affair with Harlan Coombs.”
“You’re kidding me,” Michael said, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. “She’s twenty years his senior. Then again, if she has enough money to buy stray Caravaggios . . .” He shrugged.
“One thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why would Coombs bother writing receipts for stolen merchandise?”
“I can think of two reasons. The Culpeppers need a paper trail in case questions arise about their ownership of the painting. With a receipt, they can claim they bought from a reputable dealer—which Harlan used to be—and were the victims of fraud.”
“And the other reason?”
“Harlan might be hoping to return to the legitimate world one day. He might be able to talk his way out of this mess—he’s really quite charming. In that case, he would have to claim his income for tax purposes.”
“Like he’s going to claim income from selling a stolen painting!”
Michael looked at me. “Don’t you know what most drug kingpins are taken down for? Tax fraud. Just like the Mafia guys. Here’s the kicker: if a drug dealer or a Mafioso claims his ill-gotten gains on his income tax return, the IRS isn’t allowed to turn him in.”
“You have got to be kidding.”
“Look it up. To the IRS, the only crime is hiding income. Harlan’s lifestyle is too extravagant to pretend he’s not well paid.
He needs invoices for everything.”
“That Chinatown dump didn’t seem particularly posh.”
“Honestly, Annie, are you that naïve? That wasn’t his home. It was more like an office. He dealt in forgery there. He didn’t want his ‘associates’ to be hanging around his home in Presidio Heights. Which, by the way, is worth a small fortune.”
“Dang,” I said. Something else occurred to me. “But if Harlan wrote the receipt, why did Edward have it?”
“Edward didn’t know he had it. I’ve been looking everywhere for some trace of Harlan, or at least some paperwork that would give me a lead on the real Magi—”
“Including my place?” I interrupted angrily, recalling a certain evil elf grinning up at me from my kitchen corner.
“Hmm. Maybe I should apologize for that.”
“You think?”
“Annie, listen. I had no way of knowing where you fit in. Things were falling apart and there you were, casting doubts on a painting I thought was real and showing up in places you had no business being. I thought you were involved. I didn’t realize until recently just how clueless you really were.”
“Well, gee, thank you very much.”
“I meant that in the most positive way imaginable.” He grinned at me. I scowled at him. “Anyway, it finally dawned on me that if I were Harlan and wanted to disappear, but wasn’t ready to destroy all my records, where better to hide them than among Edward’s stuff? Edward doesn’t do any actual work, so he would never find them. Plus, the likelihood that anyone would search Edward’s office was minimal, because of the museum’s security and because so far as anyone knew he wasn’t involved in the theft.”
“What exactly was Edward’s role in all of this?”
“All he was supposed to do was to shut off the motion detectors and get the combination so I could access the vault. He couldn’t even manage that.”
“Then how did you get in?”
“Naomi.”