by Susan Daitch
“There’s a difference between something that’s sold as original and in the style of…And three,” Ashby went on, “I’m the curator of European art at Claiborne’s. I would be an obvious suspect.”
“My point exactly. You are an obvious suspect, but somehow all the shit has landed on me.”
“Stella, I thought you and I were friends. I covered for you.”
“No, Jack. It was the other way around. I never needed covering, except that I work at night, and Fieldston didn’t really care as long as reports came in on time. You were the one who needed to have things swept under the rug. Even more so now. What do you do when the original turns up?”
“Hasn’t happened yet, and I doubt it will in my lifetime. Art theft, however valuable, isn’t a high police priority except in Italy. I don’t live in Italy.”
“I’ve noticed. I don’t live in Rome, either, but I’m going to have to go to Garfield with this, Jack. You do understand that?” About the recording on his computer, I didn’t want to be the person who cackled pruriently, dancing around a bonfire, over someone’s sexual exhibitionism. Yes, it was more damning evidence than a sideline in the painting business, but laughing at a man with his pants down, even when a murder was involved…But if I could avoid hitting Send, if only for a few hours, I would.
“Remember the faded Gauguin?”
“What about it?”
“The seller wanted it completely restored. You refused.”
“That meant painting the mouth red again, the sky turquoise, to make it look like it did when it was new, in 1870. No honest conservator does that anymore.”
“I know, I know.” He waved his hand in the air. “To restore, to add color to an original, even if it’s faded and in bad condition, is, professionally speaking, akin to lying. But Fieldston thought your leave-it-alone attitude was just a front for laziness. Like it or not, Claiborne’s had been known for its restoration department. We lost business because of you. You kept your job because of me. You owe me.”
“I’m not going to go to jail for you, Jack. What was with the costumes, then?” I walked into his closet and pulled out the doublet. “That’s the kind of thing you did at night. You knew Sandro. You lied to the police.”
“I had my reasons. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Okay, Jack. I’m really dumb. Try explaining it to me.”
Once again, he began playing with his phone. I knocked it out of his hand. Falling to the floor, an object out of order, in his distress it distracted him and I needed him to stay focused. I’m not sure why I did what I did, but I kicked him hard in the stomach. I was sick to death of his phony accent, his trips to Venice and Miami, his way of looking past people, of letting others clean up after him, of always and forever passing the buck. He doubled over, clutching his midsection. He’d always thought deep down that I came from thug stock. I told him I didn’t work for him anymore, and I needed answers. Quickly.
“I did cancel on Moonelli. But only after I met him. I didn’t kill him or steal Las Meninas.”
“But you had planned out a drama that involved using the painting as a backdrop. You gave him the security code because you thought I’d be gone by that hour.”
“Sandro was five-ten,” according to his craigslist post, had large hands and feet. None of his physical description was true, but people rarely describe themselves with a hundred-percent accuracy.” He sighed, and I had to urge him to go on. “However, Sandro was considerably smaller than the measurements he gave. His head shot raised no suspicions. Even in person, he looked like a man before he took his clothes off. I turned the lights down very low, asked him to put on the costume. Some body parts, as you can imagine, aren’t easily added on. Some guys are into that, but I’m not one of them.” He paused and straightened a pillow. “When I discovered that Sandro was originally Sandra, I had my own private Crying Game. That wasn’t what I was looking for. Okay, he was short, but I was into him before he took his clothes off. I felt duped, cheated, and I told him in no uncertain terms to piss off and never contact me again. I was so angry I stormed out of the building. Also, there was something uncanny about Sandro. He was so calm, as if he knew a lot more than I did, which now seems to be true, though he couldn’t have known that he was about to die.”
“You were afraid of him?”
“Yes, I was.”
“But why didn’t you tell the police? Why did you make it worse for me?”
“No one would believe I had nothing to do with the theft and the demise of Mr. Moonelli. And, even if they did, I would lose my job and never work in this town or any other again. Claiborne’s kept the theft out of the news for seventy-two hours, hoping to avoid the scandal that would have marked the end of a one-hundred-year-old auction house and provoked an international incident. Fieldston can do things like that. He knows people, and there was no body. The event stayed out of the news. So far, it had only been forty-eight hours. Even when Moonelli washed up, even then, Las Meninas was kept out of it. I supposed the thinking, on their part, was: What’s one more dead cross-gendered body? Who cares? Fieldston played the odds the painting would be found quickly, assuming that the thieves couldn’t possibly sell it; the picture was far too well known. I don’t know where the painting is, but I do know there was a body, and I have to make you the fall guy.”
“Fall girl, Jack. Fall girl.”
“I can pay you.” He looked past me, as if he were paying a cold-storage fee for a fur coat. “I’m talking about a six-figure package.”
“What can I do with any payment from inside women’s correctional?” I half believed him. Theft on that scale, and murder, too, was too vulgar for a man like Ashby to contemplate. But then who hired the Dagbents, and how did they get into the building and into my studio?
“I’m sure your father, in his line of work, knows excellent lawyers.”
It was the second time in maybe twenty-four hours that some guy had made those kinds of assumptions about the scrap-metal business. My mother, in frustration, had sometimes called it the crap-metal business, but the myth that goodfellas lurked between the cash box and the chain-link fence was just that, and was becoming a problem in ways that would have made my father consider actually using the equipment on certain humans.
“Yes, we have Saul Goodman on call when a body turns up under the payloader, between flattened stolen cars.”
“Cash, Stella. I have it right here. And I’ll throw in the Hopper. It’s in the style of Hopper, after his stripper painting, but not an exact copy. You can sell it for millions. No one will ever know.”
“Thanks anyway, Jack.” I turned to take a last look at the Orientalist room, the Moroccan lamps and the carpets from Tabriz. “I’ll let myself out.” For the second time in forty-eight hours, I left a large pile of money on the table.
The cleaning lady didn’t even look at me as I walked past all those paintings.
Chapter 18
They couldn’t find her family because she was estranged from them. Mine was the last call in Marnie’s phone, so the hospital called me. At first the nurse in charge of the floor wouldn’t let me in to see her. I looked like hell, so I can’t say I blamed her, and I probably still smelled like cherry syrup and blood, though in a hospital there’s plenty of the latter to go around. Two policewomen stood a few feet away talking to a doctor. The floor smelled of almond-scented industrial disinfectant, white shoe polish, and the faint odor of penicillin kept too long in those brown plastic bottles—that sour, pungent smell. Marnie had once remarked that the island of floating plastic garbage in the ocean that’s said to be the size of Texas, must be ninety percent pill bottles.
“Who are you?” The nurse put her hand on my arm to prevent me from going into the room.
“Talia Sleeter, Marnie’s cousin. Look, the hospital called me. I drove all night up from Baltimore.” I knew enough about Marnie’s family to sound convincing. I was angry, but with the police in the corridor I didn’t want to raise my voice.
Marnie was in a coma. Her eyes were sealed shut, swollen and bruised. Tubes were threaded everywhere that a tube could possibly go.
It was easy to appear in shock. I was. The nurses, the hospital corridors, the patients in beds on either side of Marnie receded as if melting into the horizon.
I wanted to rewind the clock so that none of this would ever have happened. I’d have gone home early, unseduced by the mystery of being alone with Las Meninas in the middle of the night, never found Sandro Moonelli’s body, never studied conservation but stuck with chemistry, never broke up with Carter, never even met him, never ran over Jeannette Bender, never left Providence. Ever. This all led back to me. I was certain of it.
I whispered scenes to Marnie that I thought she’d find comforting. The feeling of coming indoors out of a freezing Chicago wind and wrapping your hands around a cup of hot chocolate laced with rum, ginger, and black pepper. The sounds of cicadas on a summer night. Going to see the Pacific Ocean, one of the first things she or I did when we traveled to the West Coast.
I wanted to ask her what her last memory was, and which bar she’d been in. A battered Dagbent, Judge Roy Bean—she would have recognized their faces before whatever happened happened. If someone had put something in her drink, she might not even have seen the fast-moving hand that opened and shut in a nanosecond. Had the hand touched the glass at all? Possibly. But those prints, traces of DNA, might as well be on Comet Holmes. All those cells and molecules were long gone.
If something had been put in her drink. What would white lead taste like? Was this possible, or was it just the usual date-rape drug? A policewoman—her badge read “Angelica Lake”—looked in and asked who I was.
“Talia Sleeter, cousin,” I repeated.
“We’re questioning people who were at the bar, as well as her friends.”
“Thank you, Officer. Good to know. I was in Baltimore. I got here as soon as I could.”
Some of Marnie’s things were on a table by her bed. I stood, slid my hand behind my back, so I could grab Marnie’s keys from her bag on the bedside table, hoping to do it without knocking anything over. The woman in the bed next to hers was conscious, but her head was pinned in a contraption that made it difficult for her to rotate her head and see my fingers creep into the zippered compartment where I knew Marnie kept her keys. I was wrong. The woman couldn’t speak, but she made a screeching sound that emanated from the back of her throat.
A nurse came running. The keys slipped from my fingers and hit the floor. In the commotion I was able to bend down and pick them up, glancing upward at the wild-eyed patient trying to point at me.
Telling Officer Lake I’d get out of everyone’s way, while the hysterical woman was attended to, and that I’d be back in a few minutes, I ducked out of the room and left the hospital. I wanted to be beside my friend, but I was stuck, cursing Officer Lake, the nurses, the busybody in the head brace.
I sat on a bench in Prospect Park, which had been rimmed with brilliant aqua-stained bricks that had been soaked in rat poison. The turquoise coating was intended for the Norway rats that invade the park, so from mansions to apartment-block courtyards, from tennis courts to drum circles, there is this toxic border. I hadn’t listened to or watched any news since the heist, and I wondered if Claiborne’s had succeeded in keeping the theft out of the news. I took out my phone and did a search for Las Meninas. I should have looked it up even before the crate arrived at Claiborne’s, but I thought I knew that painting. The Velázquez was one of those pictures, like The Scream or van Gogh’s self-portrait, that are so iconographic, what’s to look up? I know the painting. Why would I even need to glance at Wikipedia? I was an expert. I did what I needed to do for a confirmed shipment from a confirmed museum. There was no requirement to look up the painting’s provenance or its general history.
So when I looked up Las Meninas I discovered that a painting had arrived at Claiborne’s last week, but it wasn’t the painting. The stamp on the back should have been a clue. Göring had a swastika stamped on the back of all the valuable paintings he looted during the Second World War, but the Velázquez wasn’t one of them. It had spent the war in relative safety in the Prado, in Madrid, therefore it had no Nazi stamp on the back. The painting had never left the Prado—not then, not now. The painting I’d been working on was a forgery. The identity of the person or persons who shipped the picture that had briefly occupied my studio had no connection to the Prado. Their identity was unknown.
I called up the file of Ashby and Moonelli and sent the recording to Garfield.
Chapter 19
Garfield playing dumb was a way of getting information, some of which he already knew. Las Meninas was a fake. The Prado verified that the original had never left Madrid. The museum’s computers had been hacked, so the emails and other communications sent to Claiborne’s appeared genuine, but they weren’t. Garfield couldn’t believe we had all been duped. To him, our gullibility served only to underscore the craptastic world of the grandees and their connoisseurship. And then there was the Ashby recording. He called me in within a few hours of receiving the file. Not an interrogation, “dear,” no need for a lawyer.
I expected a stark cell, a table, two chairs, fluorescent light overhead, hidden cameras, two-way mirror, like the set of a two-person play where antagonists face each other for three acts, turning occasionally to face the audience to explain some salient detail or opinion that needs to remain secret from the other actor. But our “chat” took place in his office, which was designed to look comfortable, if not homey—a setting that, Demetrius had warned me, coaxed confessions with an alarmingly high success rate. When I didn’t answer a question, Garfield looked pained, and I wanted to say, “What’s up with that?” But I refrained from the echo-chamber act, which would only irritate him more.
“Sorry about your hand.” Garfield sounded—emphasis on sounded—sincere. “That’s going to make your line of work difficult.”
“The doctors said it will heal completely, given time.”
“Yes, given time. I’ve heard that before. Your ex-boss has quite a temper, doesn’t he?” He was referring to Jack Ashby. I said nothing about Fieldston, who had regained consciousness but remembered nothing.
I shrugged. Ashby could be a snake, but I wouldn’t exactly say that he was prone to outbursts. He was more of the slow “I’ll get you,” or, “living well is the best revenge” variety.
The room was a light olive-green—no family pictures, but there were photographs of Garfield with Magic Johnson, the mayor, the police commissioner, Angelina Jolie on the set of something that must have been shot in the Nineteenth Precinct. In that photograph in particular, he made no effort to conceal the fact that he was enjoying himself. His office furniture had a hint of IKEA optimism, though it must have been standard city-issue, most of it. The plants were real. A little plastic Spider-Man figure climbed a spider plant, evidence that Garfield had a sense of humor buried somewhere. I picked it up and started playing with it.
Partly to delay my own interrogation, I started to ask him if there was anything he could do for Demetrius.
“I didn’t know you two were on such a close basis,” he said, taking the Spider-Man figure from my hand and replacing it on the plant. I should have kept my mouth shut. “Let me explain some things to you. We now know that you didn’t strangle Sandro Moonelli. The recording you recovered from Ashby’s computer is undergoing voice analysis, and it looks like your boss committed a crime passionnel.”
Garfield pronounced this phrase cream passio-nelley. He walked to his French-press coffeemaker—a gift from his wife, he explained, as if it needed an explanation—and offered me a cup, which I accepted.
“Also, it seems logical to assume that the paintings found in his apartment link him to the Velázquez business.” He proceeded to add another sugar to the contents of his 911 commemorative mug, shaking the packet as if gravity needed some assistance.
“
He should have known the real painting was alive and well in Madrid. That makes no sense.”
“But he didn’t, did he? He behaved as if the Las Meninas under his roof was the real thing, and, of course, it was in his interest to do so. I’m just looking at the facts here. It’s what I do. Speaking of which, you keep pointing to the Dagbent twins, but the recording indicates that Ashby strangled Moonelli.”
“The recording establishes that Ashby was in the room, but I think he left before the screaming started.”
“The Dagbents again?”
I nodded. Garfield’s expression became one of tolerance, the tolerance of a learned man in the presence of a fool.
“The Dagbents are phantoms. Dagwood Bumstead is more real. There’s just no hard physical evidence. You saw one in the rain. You got assaulted in a bakery. But we can’t even find their footprints. Svalbard claims he’s never heard of them.”
“Of course he’s going to say that.”
“If they’re illegal aliens, it’s not hard for them to exist in a kind of cash netherworld with an endless supply of disposable phones.”
“What about the death of Juni Svalbard?”
“Yes, that happened, that was real, but there was no conviction, and ever afterward they drop off the map. About them wanting to add some of your DNA to a banana-cream pie, I find that hard to swallow.”
I was facing a roadblock. I took a gulp of coffee. It was decent.
“This is what I think happened,” I said. I’d watched and listened to Ashby’s recording many times. After the picture went off, the sounds were slurred. Like killer-whale vocalizations, it seemed to me that they could be interpreted in a number of ways. If Garfield thought the actual meaning of the language was unambiguous, I disagreed. “Sandro took off his clothes; Ashby flipped and exited as quickly as possible. He didn’t like women’s bodies, even partial ones. After saying what needed to be said, he would have run. Ashby is not a nice person, but he would rush to the exit before he killed someone for having the wrong equipment.”