“There was a baggie with crack residue in his pants pockets, but no drugs in his system,” Walters said. “They knew what they were doing. Knew where the cameras were.”
“So it was a setup.”
“That’s right.”
He rocked back in his swivel chair, hands gripping the arms, studying Hunter. “I don’t see a lot of similarity between what happened with Eddie and what you’re investigating,” he said. She knew he’d probably spent a little time looking up Susan Champlain.
“Except both deaths seem to be something they aren’t,” Hunter said.
He tilted his head to one side thoughtfully and showed a slow crescent of smile.
“The thing about that neighborhood,” he said, “was that it came to represent something to Eddie. That was a place Eddie’d climbed out of. He’d gone on. Started his own business, raised a family. We used to talk about it. In his mind, that was a place that didn’t exist anymore. That’s how he’d come to think about it. You can’t choose where you’re born, but you can choose where you live your life. He did.”
“So he was dumped there to make a point.”
“That’s right.”
Someone had put Eddie Charles back in the neighborhood he’d escaped from, the place he’d risen above. Nullifying the rest of his life, in a sense.
“Who would want to make that point?” Hunter asked.
He showed her his right palm. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“I’d like to help answer it.”
The crescent smile emerged and quickly faded. “If it was easy to do, we’d’ve done it months ago, believe me. It was meant that way, not to be figured out. It was meant to send a message. To make a point.”
He reached up to tack the clipping back onto his bulletin board and sat down again.
“You knew Eddie Charles a long time, I understand.”
“Twenty-five years.” The chair creaked when he rocked back. “His story was nothing unusual when I met him. Same story you hear a million times on the streets. Raised by a single mother, picked on growing up. Bumped into drugs for the first time when he was thirteen or fourteen. For a while, drugs gave him what he didn’t have. An internal life,” he said, with a strange, drawn-out emphasis.
“It’s a cliché,” Walters went on. “But being a cliché doesn’t stop it from happening. You try to warn these kids, tell them exactly what’s going to happen to them and they all think, Nope, not me. And two years later, they’ve become the cliché.”
He sighed and leaned forward.
“Eddie had four or five arrests before he was eighteen. He made several attempts to straighten himself out and get clean in his twenties. Of course, that doesn’t often take.”
“But it did with Eddie.”
“No, ma’am. Not for a while. Not until he got older and recognized how much of his life he’d lost, how many doors’d closed that were never going to open again. You get older, people stop giving you chances, stop looking at you in ways you want them to look at you. Eddie went past that point and his choices narrowed down to two: he could die, he could live.”
“And he decided to live.”
“Well, no,” he said. “I don’t think I’d use the word decided. He got scared into it finally; and when he did, he turned his life around. But what was different about Eddie was that once he crossed that bridge, he never went back. Never. How did he do it? He got involved with better people, joined the church. And then he met a young lady, Maureen, who saved his life. Gave him a family. Helped him start his business.”
“So this isn’t something he would have ever gone back to.”
“No, ma’am, that’s what I’m telling you.”
“What happened, then?”
He rubbed a hand down his narrow face, feeling the contours of his bones. “What happened was, Eddie walked into a hole. He stepped into something he couldn’t get out of. Drugs was one hole, but there’s other kinds of holes you can step into.”
“What happened, exactly?” Hunter asked. “What was the hole, in this case?”
He winced and seemed to close up a little, leaning to one side. “The exact details of what happened with Eddie, I couldn’t tell you. And I’m not going to speculate. All’s I can say is that he must’ve met up with the wrong people. Or the wrong person.”
Hunter asked, “Did what happen to him involve organized crime?”
He flicked out his left hand dismissively. “I couldn’t tell you that. Although—” He paused and went on. “Eddie was an electrician. A very good one. He had a lot of clients. One of them was a fellow named Dante Patello. You may’ve heard about him. Or his father, Anthony. And also a fellow named John Luigi. So I guess you could say that put him on the fringes of it. But, no, I don’t think those people were the ones who betrayed Eddie.”
“Someone betrayed him.”
“Yes, that’s right, someone betrayed him.”
“Who do you think it was?”
“My business isn’t to think,” he said, smiling at her. “It’s to solve cases or shut up. In this instance, I’ll take the second option.”
“Did it have anything to do with stolen art, what happened to Eddie?”
“May have.” The look on his face became more nuanced. “Are you asking me that or do you know that?”
“I’m asking.”
“Then my answer is, I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you. I’ve heard that. But I can’t tell you if it’s true or not.”
For the first time, he sounded disingenuous.
“When did you last hear from Eddie?”
“Three days,” he said. His eyes turned back to the bulletin board; Hunter looked at the crooked clipping: Eddie’s face beaming. “Three days before they found him,” he said. “My feeling is . . . someone got the wrong idea about Eddie, and they planted a story about him that wasn’t true. Not the Patello family, though, someone else. But that’s all speculation on my part. I’m not going to talk about something I don’t really know.”
“Do you know anyone else who might talk about it?”
“I’d have to think about that.”
He was pulling back from her, Hunter sensed. She opened her folder, then, and laid out Susan Champlain’s cell phone pictures, side by side on his desk.
Calvin Walters leaned forward. He looked closely at the images, lifting them up one at a time.
“Could that be him?” Hunter asked, standing beside him.
Walters didn’t answer right away. He picked up one of the three again and held it inches from his eyes. Then he set it down, and pointed a yellowed fingernail at something. It was the photo Susan had taken from beside the house. “You see that? That tower there?”
“Okay.”
“That’s Revel,” he said.
Hunter moved in and looked closer. She didn’t know what he was saying. “What’s Revel?”
“Casino hotel. That’s where the NFL player knocked his wife unconscious in the elevator.”
“Oh.” She looked again. “You’re saying this is Atlantic City?”
“That’s right. Revel was the tallest building in A.C. Still is, I guess. Although it shut down a couple of years after they opened. Which tells you something about Atlantic City.”
He turned the picture over, looking for some kind of ID. So the house wasn’t in the Philadelphia suburbs, as Susan had said; it was on the New Jersey coast. Luke was right about that. The Rembrandt, then, had been in Atlantic City.
Walters slid his chair to the side and hit some computer keys, as if he were alone in the office. A minute later, a photo came on the screen.
It was Eddie Charles, wearing what appeared to be the same jacket as the man in Susan Champlain’s photo, an aqua Member’s Only, which looked a size or two small.
“That’s him,” he said. “Eddie did
business down there. Him and his wife. Mo. Rented an apartment there. Not in A.C., but in Margate. Although I couldn’t tell you whose house this is.”
“Do you know who the other man is?”
“Nope.”
He leaned back and was watching her again, she realized.
“Tell me about your case,” he said.
Seated again, Hunter told him who Susan Champlain was, and how she had died. She told him how she’d been led to Helen Bradbury while pursuing leads about Susan’s death and then what Bradbury had told her about Eddie Charles. Calvin Walters listened intently, his right ear cocked as if it helped him to hear better. She didn’t say anything about Kepler or Belasco. Or the Rembrandt painting.
“I’m told there was a moral issue involved in what happened to Eddie,” Hunter said. “A moral story.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, showing his smile. He’d had this discussion before. “And that was the funny part about how Eddie ended up, and the part I still don’t understand: his daughter says he saw the whole thing coming before it happened. Saw it as clearly as a train coming his way on a cloudless afternoon. It was that certain, to the point where there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Eddie told her exactly what was going to happen. And a week later, it’d happened. He was dead.”
He pushed the images together and gave them back to Hunter.
“But, the thing of it is,” he said, “Eddie didn’t do anything wrong. All he did was he fell into a hole. And it wasn’t a hole he dug. And therein lies your moral issue.”
“I’d like to talk with her,” Hunter said. “The daughter.”
He nodded. “Who else’ve you talked with about Eddie?”
“No one yet, other than Helen Bradbury.”
“She’s something, isn’t she?”
“I was going to talk with the son,” Hunter said. “I have an address for him in the city.”
“Cyril? Cyril won’t talk to you. The daughter probably won’t, either. But she might. Thelma knows the whole story. More of it than I do. But the thing of it is, even if she were to tell you anything, what good do you think it would do now? It’s not going to do Eddie any good.”
“Except it might clear things up for his family. It might clear his reputation,” Hunter said.
“It might.”
He rocked back and forth very slightly, considering that. “I did a little background check on you, by the way,” he said.
“And—?”
He shrugged and slapped his hands on the arms of the chair. “Do you have a card for me?” he said. Not in a dismissive way; in a way that meant he wanted a number, to call her back. Hunter pulled a business card from her pocket and handed it to him.
He got up, then, rubbing his hands on his hips, and began to walk her down the narrow hallway to the front door of the storefront police station.
“And if you do talk to Cyril,” he said, “don’t mention that you talked with me. If you don’t mind.”
“No. I won’t.”
“All right. Just be careful,” he said, shaking her hand. There it was again. Outside, he looked up and down the street as if someone might be watching them. Hunter walked back to her car.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Kepler arrived early, choosing a table in the shade on the back deck at Cap’N Vic’s Grille. The place smelled of fried onions and river water, the ceiling fans spinning warm air, the sun making dozens of bright creases on the water.
He watched a young couple industriously eating a late breakfast across the deck, not speaking, heads down, each staring at a separate section of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Married a while. In two days, they’d be reading about the miracle. Kepler could feel a shift, the faint rumble of what was coming.
Being a deal maker has a shelf life, and for Kepler, this would be it. He’d structured the Rembrandt deal more carefully than his others, and with extra precautions. When it was over, Kepler would retire into the life he’d been shaping in his imagination for years—a life of traveling, visiting great museums, reading good books, living with his passions.
Still, there was some unfamiliar apprehension this time, the feeling that all of his precautions carried their own vulnerabilities. Part of that was Belasco, he realized.
He looked up, surprised to see that a waitress was standing beside the table. A little blond with big teeth, her skin flaking from sunburn.
“Bring us a pitcher of ice water, please,” Kepler said. Her eyes quickly went to the empty place across from where he was sitting. “And a bowl of chips with crab dip.”
She smiled at him and walked away without saying anything. Occasionally, Kepler enjoyed places like this, far from the poseurs of the art world. He enjoyed sitting at a bar and striking up a conversation, inventing his identity as he went. It was easy to convince a stranger you were someone else; he’d been doing it all his life. It was a form of recreation to him, unchaining his own burdensome past, and giving in to the lure of the ordinary. He craved the big deals, but when he was in them he sometimes craved ordinary life just as much.
Officially, Nick Champlain was in Iowa now. The funeral was today. Weber had arranged for a man to carry his ticket and his passport, to check in to a hotel in Cedar Rapids under his name. Vaguely a look-alike, if anyone was watching.
Unofficially, Champlain was here. Kepler gave him directions from the freeway when he called: “You see Exit 12? . . . Not yet? You keep going, you take exit 12 . . . Turn right off the ramp, okay, then get in your right-hand lane . . . until the light . . . no, that’s Glenbrook . . . You see Glenbrook? . . . Okay, and turn right toward the water. Last lot . . . Good . . . now, park . . . no, I’m looking at you . . . Come across the street and join me on the deck for a drink of water.”
He lifted his hand slightly to wave. Champlain wore a ball cap, loose jeans, a T-shirt, two days’ growth of beard. A disguise, in effect, although he still walked and grinned like a cocky Philadelphia businessman. This was their penultimate meeting, Kepler expected, although Champlain didn’t know that; he probably didn’t even know what that meant.
Kepler poured water for both of them as Champlain sat at the table.
“You look like you’re ready for a Phillies game,” Kepler said.
Champlain displayed his winning smile. “I am. I just wish they were playing better.”
“We’re ready, though?”
“Sure.” His expression sobered quickly.
“You told me these people are set to go,” Kepler asked, after the niceties. “Anytime?”
“That’s right.”
“My client says he needs to move it up another couple days. He wants to go tomorrow. Can we make that happen?”
Champlain breathed out through his nostrils.
“He’d like to do the whole deal in a day,” Kepler said, speaking more softly now. “Rosa sells it to you in the morning, you sell it to me in the afternoon.”
Champlain continued to breathe through his nose.
“Yes? No?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Let’s talk about the numbers, then. One more time.”
Champlain nodded.
“I deposit another five hundred into Rosa’s account overnight,” Kepler said. “That means he’s sitting on a rock.”
“Right.” A million dollars down.
“Which will set the first phase in motion in the morning.”
“Right.”
“Then you pick it up from there.”
The first part of the plan was between Champlain and Vincent Rosa. Kepler’s only role would be to wire the remaining payment, four million dollars, to Rosa’s Bermuda account, and cover the rest of Champlain’s fees, $500,000. The second part of the plan would transfer the painting from Champlain to Kepler, at a cost of two million dollars, plus the million already paid.
“We do this right, we both go home tomorrow and enjoy the rest of our lives,” Kepler said. “And then, you’re still interested, we can talk, in another four or five weeks, about the other deal.”
“Of course I’ll be interested.”
“Good.”
Catnip. Kepler had dangled this from the start—the idea of a second, larger deal. The other prize from the Gardner theft had been Vermeer’s The Concert, one of only thirty-four Vermeer paintings in existence. The Vermeer exchange would be more complicated; but it had also passed through the Rosa family before finding a temporary home with a collector in the South of France. The collector died in 2006, and the painting had again come under the control of the Rosas. Kepler had told Champlain he had a buyer willing to pay $25 million for it. Which meant Champlain could probably more than double what he was making this time as an intermediary to the Rosas. That’s what Kepler told him.
When he finished talking about the deal, Kepler began to talk about art, the natural drift of his thinking process. He’d been to Amsterdam in the spring, he said, and told Nick what it had felt like to stand again in front of Rembrandt’s magnificent Night Watch, which took up most of an entire wall at the Rijksmuseum. “It’s his most famous painting, you know, but it’s misnamed, because it’s actually set in the daytime. Not Rembrandt’s title, obviously.”
Champlain subtly adjusted his facial expression several times to indicate his interest. Kepler liked that.
“Rembrandt always had a soft spot for the criminal class, did you know that? For people like the Rosas and Luigi.”
“Van Gogh called him a magician, I read,” Champlain stated.
“Well, yes, that’s right.” Kepler smiled, pleasantly surprised by this. Nicholas had prepared this time; he’d spent a few minutes reading a Wikipedia entry, probably, about Rembrandt van Rijn. Brownie points. “You know, there’s a painting called Self Portrait as Zeuxis Laughing,” Kepler told him. “It’s in Cologne. You have to see it someday. A very heroic painting, from the last years of his life. The laugh—it’s quite stunning, words can’t describe it. It’s the most remarkable laugh you’ll ever see in a painting.”
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