by Hailey Lind
My heart leapt in my chest when I was attacked by an animatronic mop that turned out to be a small dog, one of those cosseted pets whose hair care products alone would more than cover my rent. There was something deeply disquieting about an animal whose personal hygiene received more attention than my own.
Small, white, and very fluffy, with an upturned tail that fanned the air vigorously, it stared at me with bright eyes while wheezing through its smooshed nose. It bounced around, delighted to make my acquaintance. It wasn’t much of a watchdog, but I supposed I wasn’t in a position to complain about that. A set of dog tags on the jeweled collar—I had a sneaking suspicion those were real diamonds, too—indicated it was up to date on its shots and was named Miss Mopsy. How original of the Culpeppers.
I had always found dogs hard to resist, and gave Miss Mopsy a quick belly rub before resuming my search. The pooch wouldn’t leave me in peace, though, and tried to instigate a game of tug-of-war with a Hermès scarf she dragged out from under the bed.
The Culpeppers’ bedroom was large, about twenty-five by thirty feet. At its center was a hideous four-poster festooned with exquisitely embroidered brocade draperies. If I’d known anything about sewing—and I did not—I would have guessed that the drapes had been handmade in a French convent by nuns who had clearly had a lot to repent. The bed itself was covered in acres of melting pink satin and about forty froufrou pillows in hues of pink, beige, and cream. The whole thing looked like the sort of altar to lovemaking that would be more at home in a Poconos honeymoon resort than in uptight, old-money Belvedere. I craned my neck upward. Nope, no mirrored ceiling. I had caught a glimpse of Mr. Culpepper in the family photos downstairs, and it was disconcerting to imagine him and the desiccated missus getting down and dirty behind the delicate brocade.
There were a few paintings on the walls, but not the one I wanted. I was about to leave when Miss Mopsy trotted down a passageway that led off the bedroom. I followed.
The hall opened onto a second large room, apparently Camilla Culpepper’s office or private sitting room, which was decorated with English rose wallpaper. A green-and-cream striped loveseat sat under a bank of windows, and in the far corner was an untidy walnut desk. In terms of sheer messiness it was not in the same league as my desk at home, but it did indicate that, unlike the one I’d seen downstairs, this desk was actually used.
And hanging above the fireplace was one recently stolen Caravaggio.
I peered closely. Correction: one recently stolen ersatz Caravaggio. Damned if Anton hadn’t painted this one, too. If my artistic memory served—and it almost always did—this was not the forgery Ernst had shown me in the vault. The small chest of frankincense in King Melchior’s arms, which had been wide open in that painting, was nearly shut in this one. I dragged a chair over to the hearth and climbed on it to double-check, but there was no doubt in my mind.
Maybe Michael was right and there was no original Magi.
The good news was I could call off the search. The bad news was I had to find my way back to the exercise room without being spotted. I climbed off the chair while Miss Mopsy danced about at my feet, as if this were all some elaborate game for her entertainment. Just as I was replacing the chair, I heard someone enter the bedroom. I froze. This time there were no large canvases, no velvet curtains, no lacquer screens to hide behind. It was just me and Miss Mopsy, right out there in the open.
I looked at the dog, she looked at me, and I did the only thing that occurred to me: I crawled into the kneehole of the desk and curled into a ball. Miss Mopsy joined me. I hoped that whoever it was did not come in here, sit down, and get to work, because talking my way out of this one would be tricky.
There was a rustle of clothing as someone entered the room. I squeezed my eyes shut, although I was not sure why I kept thinking that depriving myself of one of my five senses would help me out of these situations. It must have worked, though, because the desk creaked and I realized that the intruder was sitting on it, probably doing that hip-on-the-desk, foot-on-the-floor sit-stand that I did all the time, even though it made my thighs look huge. I heard the telephone being dialed.
“It’s Emily,” a woman said. “I know, but we need to talk. Yes, now. Yes, well, the only reason I agreed to any of this was that I was to be paid a percentage, remember? Having a massage. Well, there is some risk to me, there’s always a risk.”
There was silence for a few minutes.
“I don’t like it, Harlan, I don’t like it one single bit. Uh-huh. No. Where? When? Are you crazy? Why did you put them there?” Emily sighed. “All right, fine. Yes, I said I’d be there. I’ve got to go. ’Bye.”
Harlan? With Emily? I could hardly wait to tell Michael. Not only had I found the painting but I had a lead on Harlan. I cocked my head at Miss Mopsy and she cocked hers at me. Damn, I was good! I was a natural for this sleuthing thing! I was—
“What are you doing here?”
Miss Mopsy barked. Or sneezed. It was hard to tell the difference.
I looked up to see Emily crouched down, staring at me as I sat curled under the desk. “Well, I, um . . .”
So maybe I had a bit to learn before getting my detective wings.
Emily stepped back, and Miss Mopsy and I unfolded ourselves from our hidey-hole. By the time I was upright Emily was fretting, big time.
“What did you hear?” she demanded.
Like, duh, Emily. As if I could have missed anything you said. I was all of two feet away. However, I decided not to point this out. Emily, for her part, began pacing and wringing her hands, something I had always assumed was purely a convention of bad community theater.
“I knew something like this would happen. I knew it,” she muttered. “I knew I shouldn’t get involved.” She stopped pacing and shot me a look chock-full of disdain. “I knew you weren’t a massage therapist.”
“Why’d you let me in, then?” I said belligerently. I wasn’t the one betraying my boss, after all. Emily lived in an interesting moral universe.
“Who are you? What do you want?” she demanded.
I decided to come clean. Sort of.
I shrugged in a you’re-not-going-to-believe-how-silly-this-is kind of way. “Emily, you’re right,” I said, my face perfectly straight. “I’m not a massage therapist. I’m a special agent for the California Fine Arts Commission. I don’t want to get you or anybody else into trouble, but we received an anonymous tip last week and I am duty-bound to investigate. I’m afraid the commission has reason to believe that Mrs. Culpepper might have been sold a fake Caravaggio.”
A long time ago Grandfather told me that if you were going to lie, make it a whopper. For some reason, he said, people were more likely to believe a lie if it was so outrageous that it had to be true. And Grandfather should know.
“The California Fine Arts . . .” Emily repeated. “What are you talking about? There’s no such thing.” Apparently she was the exception to Grandfather’s little rule.
Miss Mopsy, bored, barked to get my attention, whereupon Emily scowled and kicked her. Yelping, Miss Mopsy dashed back under the desk.
Now I was pissed. If I lived to be a thousand I would never understand what made some people pick on defenseless creatures. I’d learned a few things in the past couple of days about how to intimidate people, and without thinking I put that knowledge to good use. I grabbed Emily hard by the upper arm, slammed her against the wall, and leaned in close. “Don’t you ever, ever hurt that little dog again, you understand me?”
Emily was turning an unattractive shade of green, which I assumed meant she was not used to this sort of treatment. She nodded.
Letting her go, I stepped back, rearranged my disheveled clothing, and continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. “I can see now that this painting is not the original. That’s fine. I’m not about to tell anybody. What I do need is information.”
“What kind of information?” she asked weakly, rubbing her arm.
“Where’s Harlan
Coombs?”
Emily shook her expensively coiffed head. “I can’t help you.”
“Protecting him, are you? You do realize, Emily, that the last woman who tried to protect poor Harlan wound up dead?” So I stretched the facts a bit. Something about this woman got me in touch with my inner bitch. “Plus, a janitor who got in the way ended up dead, too,” I added. “And a curator disappeared that same night.”
“You’re wrong,” Emily said shakily. “The curator shot the janitor.”
“Who told you that? Harlan? Oh, yeah, he’s to be trusted. You need to get a better class of friends, Emily. Because on top of everything else, no one on this job, no one, has gotten any money from dear old Harlan for those fakes he’s been peddling.” I pictured myself in an old Perry Mason episode. Just what did the defendant have to say about that, ladies and gentlemen? “Oh, and by the way,” I said, “did you know about Harlan’s affair with Quiana?”
Emily reached out a trembling hand to grab the arm of an upholstered chair and eased herself into it. She was even worse at this cloak-and-dagger stuff than I was.
On the other hand, she hadn’t screamed when she’d found me.
“He’s not with Quiana!” she gasped.
“Are you sure?” I asked her. “Because that’s not what I hear. She’s about ready to spill everything, too. I’ve already met with her. Twice.”
I decided the bad cop had done her job. Maybe it was time for the good cop to come out and play. Hitching my right hip on the desk, I planted my left foot on the floor and leaned forward to project sincerity. “Look, you’re not in too deep yet, Emily,” I said soothingly. “The Culpeppers don’t know that their painting isn’t genuine, and as far as I’m concerned there’s no reason for them to find out.” Why should I care if people willing to buy stolen masterpieces were ripped off? Served them right.
“Harlan has put a lot of people in danger and stolen a lot of money,” I continued, assuming an air of confidentiality. “He might very well be a murderer. Believe me, you don’t want to be associated with him. Tell me how I can find Harlan, Emily, and then you can step out of this mess entirely.”
I wasn’t sure what Emily was focusing on, but it wasn’t me. Suddenly, she drew herself up, looked me in the eye, and snapped, “I don’t know where he is. All I have is a phone number that he e-mailed me. It’s probably a pay phone or something.”
“Give it to me anyway,” I said, handing her a pad of paper and a pen. “You say he e-mails you? Better add his e-mail address. Now, tell me this: weren’t you supposed to meet him somewhere to get your money?”
The greenish hue washed over her again as she handed me the notepad. “I was just supposed to arrange to switch the Culpeppers’ Caravaggio for a fake. But—”
“You think they once had the real one? Harlan made a change?”
“That Polish guy came and switched it. He’s been working with Harlan. But now Harlan needs help, because he left some drawings at the Brock.”
I stared at her. “Why would he have left them there? How’s he going to get them back?”
“They’re having some big event on Saturday and he’s going to be there. He wants me there, too.”
“That’s crazy,” I replied without thinking.
“That’s what I said,” she whined. First Edward, now Emily. I had to wonder about Harlan’s taste in coconspirators. “He said he had a disguise and that with the party and all, everyone would be distracted and he’d be able to retrieve them. He wanted to make sure I’d be there with Mrs. Culpepper, although I’m not sure why.”
I wasn’t sure why either, unless he needed someone to fall apart under pressure and start spewing her guts.
And speaking of guts, it would take a lot of them for Harlan to return to the Brock, disguise or no, and mingle with the best and the brightest of the City’s art scene, a significant percentage of whom he had recently ripped off.
“So what happened to the real Carav—” I began.
“Emily?”
I recognized Camilla Culpepper’s voice. Emily and I froze.
For once I was ready. “Oh, Mrs. Culpepper! You know, I simply adore dogs,” I gushed as she appeared. I scooped Miss Mopsy up and gave her a squeeze. She burped. “And my poor Snookie went to live with the puppy angels just last month, boo-hoo. I got to talking about him with Emily here and I started to cry, I felt so sad. Then Emily said, did I want to see the cutest dog alive, and I said, did I ever, so we came up here and I have to say that Mopsy Wopsy is just adorable! I mean, could you just die?”
Camilla didn’t look convinced, so I continued.
“And then I wanted to show Emily some acupressure points as a way of saying thank you, so I did, but I forgot to check for medical conditions first—I’m still learning, you know—and it turns out that the poor girl is prone to migraines, so the last thing I should have tried was the ching-li zone, because that could bring up bad chi, and then she began to feel a little faint.”
I ended.
Camilla looked at Miss Mopsy, who was staring up at me adoringly, and at Emily, who was still rather green, and must have decided that at least part of my ridiculous saga was true, because she laid a hand on Emily’s forehead and said, “Yes, dear, you do look terrible. Perhaps you should lie down for a few minutes. And you,” she said, turning her beady, makeup-encrusted eyes on me and reaching for her dog, “should not practice until you’re fully trained. I’m sure Bruno will be quite upset when he hears about this. And widdle Miss Mopsy Popsy Poo here would not wike it if her Emiwee was feewing sickle wickie, would she, Mopsy Popsy mumsy’s widdle wuzzie?”
Emily looked nauseated, and even I was given pause. I was as quick to indulge in doggie talk as the next fatuous dog lover, but I usually made sure there weren’t any witnesses.
Time to go.
Muttering something about seeing myself out, I hurried down two flights of stairs—and found the ground-floor exercise room empty. “Michael?” I called.
“I mean, Bruno?”
For one terrible moment I thought he had stranded me again. Then I reminded myself that he needed to know if I had found the Caravaggio.
“Bruno!”
“Dahling, do keep it down,” Camilla called from the top of the stairs. “Poor Emily is trying to rest. Bruno came up to the study earlier to tell you that he was leaving and that you should catch a ride with someone named Angela. Didn’t he see you?”
Michael had come up to the study? Had he, by any chance, overheard my little chat with Emily?
He had done it. He had gone and done it. He had stranded me.
Again.
I was going to murder the X-man the very next time I saw him.
Swear to God.
Chapter 12
The painter Ingres once said that he had no scruples when it came to copying Old Masters, and that he would look with pride upon being copied himself. More recently, Pablo Picasso declared that he would happily sign any fake shown to be worthy of his talent.
—Georges LeFleur, “What’s in a Name?” unfinished manuscript, Reflections of a World-Class Art Forger
An hour and a half later I stood on the deck of the Larkspur ferry, watching the island of Belvedere slide by. The ocean wind blew still more knots into my already snarled hair, which seemed a fitting metaphor for the day.
When I realized that the despicable Michael-Colin-Paddy-Bruno had stranded me yet again, I used the Culpeppers’ phone to call my friend Elizabeth. A writer and a former client, Elizabeth lived with her attorney husband, two adorable kids, and a sweet golden retriever in nearby Larkspur Landing. A small town on a finger of the bay, it had fabulous views, a ferry landing, and San Quentin Prison, an imposing structure that housed some of California’s worst felons on some of California’s best real estate.
Elizabeth picked me up in her gold Volvo station wagon, no questions asked, genuinely apologetic that she couldn’t drive me all the way into the city because Jason had a Little League game and Sarah had to eat b
y six in order to get to her violin recital on time. Not for the first time, I wondered what it would be like to live such a normal existence. It didn’t seem to be in the cards for me anytime soon.
From Larkspur Landing it was a straight shot across San Francisco Bay to Pier 41, from which I could catch a bus to the Brock, retrieve my truck, and head back to my ruined studio. With luck, I’d be there in an hour.
It was a gorgeous afternoon, sunny and mild, so I bought a cup of coffee at the canteen and climbed up to the forward deck, taking a seat on a bench. During commute hours the ferry was always packed, but at the moment it was just me and a few tourists murmuring among themselves as they gazed at the sights of San Francisco, Oakland and the East Bay hills, Marin, and Alcatraz. I used the time to reflect and to decompress.
What exactly had I thought I was doing, poking about a stranger’s home? Not to mention hiding under her desk with her dog and intimidating her secretary? The Magi wasn’t even my concern—I was supposed to be looking for Anthony Brazil’s and Albert Mason’s stolen drawings. I didn’t know what on earth had come over me. I seemed to make such lousy choices whenever Michael was around.
What I should be doing was salvaging what I could from my studio, assuming I still had a business to go back to. I had spent the past three years working my fingers to the bone trying to get True/Faux Studios off the ground, and just when I seemed to be on solid footing what did I do? I ignored it for days on end in favor of galloping around with an admitted art thief, breaking and entering, snooping, hitting a Hulk, being stranded, getting kidnapped, being hit by a Hulk, and having my studio torched. It would be the ultimate irony if I lost my business and had to fall back on a life of crime after all.
The thought made me want to cry.