Desire Calls

by Caridad Piñeiro

  “Busy at work?”

  “Actually, no. I’m on modified assignment right now.”

  The hesitancy and distress in the agent’s voice was apparent despite the barrier of the menu. Ramona put hers down and examined Diana’s face. She was about to question her further when a handsome young waiter arrived and placed a large basket of garlic bread in the middle of the table. There was no denying the garlicy aroma that wafted toward them.

  Diana pointed at the bread. “That’s part of the reason why I don’t come here as often.”

  Garlic and vampires. Apparently horror movie lore wasn’t that far off the money. “So what’s the other part?”

  “At first work, but now mainly my involvement with Ryder,” Diana said, and snagged a piece of garlic bread from the basket.

  Ramona didn’t want to get into the whole relationship-with-a-vampire topic. “So you’re on modified assignment. What does that mean?”

  Diana chewed a bite of bread slowly, almost thoughtfully, before she finally said, “It basically means I screwed up and I’m on desk duty. Security clearance checks and that kind of thing.”

  The waiter came over and, with a wink at Diana, said, “The usual, bella?”

  “The usual.”

  Ramona placed her order for the chicken parmigiana and immediately resumed the conversation. “How are you working—”

  “On your case? Unofficially. At some point I may have to turn this over to the FBI Art Crime Team, but not until you and your mami are safe,” Diana said.

  Ramona hesitated, unsure of what to say. Van Winter was a powerful man with many high-level connections. “How can you be certain?”

  Diana leaned her forearms on the table and shifted closer. “I can’t be sure, but I also can’t arrange for protective custody until I have more information.”

  “What do you need besides the fingerprints?”

  The waiter came over with their plates. There was silence for a few minutes as they sampled their meals, and then Diana commenced her explanation. “I did some searches to see if anything unusual was going on with our friend. He filed a police report about a week after the paintings were moved to the auction house.”

  “What for?” Ramona asked, and twirled her fork in her pasta.

  She had the fork halfway to her mouth when Diana said, “He claimed that a Luis Rodriguez stole several small objet d’art from his penthouse.”

  “I met Luis when I was working on the paintings. He was a hardworking family man.”

  Diana nodded and ate a piece of a large prawn from her plate of garlic-infused scampi. “No priors, but his bank account had an unusual deposit a few days after the police report was filed. A very large deposit.”

  “I don’t believe it. Can’t you question him?” She recalled the gentle man who had been a servant in van Winter’s apartment. Luis had always made sure she was comfortable and would sometimes share a coffee break with her, telling her about his family. In some ways, he had reminded her of her own father, with his softly accented English and work-rough hands.

  Diana laid her fork down, picked up her water and took a large sip. When she put the glass down she said, “I can’t. He’s dead. Killed by a hit-and-run driver on his way home from a dishwashing job. Apparently van Winter fired him the same day he filed the police report.”

  Ramona’s stomach immediately twisted with anguish. The food on her plate was half-eaten and would stay that way. Her appetite had fled.

  “It was a black sedan, wasn’t it?”

  Diana curtly nodded. “Only witness was another dishwasher from the restaurant. They finished late, stepped outside and headed home in different directions.”

  “A black sedan came speeding out of nowhere and ran him down. If it hadn’t been for Diego the other night, that might have happened to me,” Ramona murmured numbly.

  “I’ll walk you home after this,” Diana told her. “And once the sun isn’t as strong, Ryder will swing by.”

  “That’s not necessary. Actually, I might get kind of creeped out knowing Ryder was hanging from my rafters or something,” she said, dragging a reluctant smile from the other woman.

  “Ryder doesn’t hang like a bat. I’m not sure if any of the vamps I’m acquainted with do, including Diego. He’s hurting, you know.”

  “He’s made himself quite clear and—”

  Diana slashed a hand through the air. “Forget the vamp thing. It’s a man thing. They will never admit to weakness.”

  Diego and weak? Not two words she would string together in the same sentence. Regardless of whether or not he actually had a weakness for her, Ramona could not allow herself any vulnerability around him.

  “I’ve got other things to deal with now.”

  “Like my getting your prints. Best we do that back at your apartment. If van Winter is watching, this should look like two friends having lunch.”

  Ramona glanced around, but didn’t notice anyone familiar. Then again, she hadn’t noticed any of van Winter’s goons in the last week, even though he clearly had his eyes and ears tuned to her goings-on.

  “Agreed,” she said, wondering just how much of what was left of her life van Winter was going to steal with his deception.

  Chapter 18

  T he two deliverymen carefully transferred the crate with Ramona’s painting onto a hand truck and grabbed their toolboxes. Diego followed them as they walked up to the door of Alicia Tipton’s Upper West Side apartment building, where the doorman greeted them with familiarity and opened the door. Inside, a security guard likewise recognized the two men and efficiently checked off their names from a list.

  Diego walked up next and handed the man his business card. The security guard scrutinized it, but said, “Picture ID?”

  “He’s with us, Louie. Wants to make sure we hang this painting just so for Mrs. Tipton,” one deliveryman said.

  At that the guard waved them on, and they walked to the freight elevator.

  “I guess they know you here,” Diego said as he scrutinized the men. Both were from the same transport company that had picked up the paintings from van Winter’s Midtown penthouse.

  “Mrs. Tipton has to approve everyone who comes and goes. We’re the regulars for anything coming here.”

  “So you handled the auction house delivery for the van Winter sale?” he inquired, trying not to appear too nosy. The freight elevator slowly clanged its way to the penthouse. Through the gated door, he could count each level as it passed before them.

  “Not everyone is bonded for the really expensive stuff, so we get to do all that work,” one said, and from the corner of his eye, Diego noted how the thin man puffed his chest out with pride.

  “Makes for nice tips, too,” his brawnier friend interjected.

  “Heard van Winter is a cheap old bastard,” Diego said, and half turned so he could fully gauge their reactions.

  “Stiffed us on our last pickup. Said we hadn’t done any work, since his staff had packed up the paintings,” Mr. Brawny replied with some annoyance.

  The thin man screwed up his face, reminding Diego of a ferret. With an annoyed huff he said, “As if Luis could do as good a job as us.”

  Luis Rodriguez. The dead thief, Diego thought, recalling Diana’s report from the night before. His de
ath and supposed theft had made him the most likely candidate to be involved in switching the paintings. Now Diego had confirmed that. But it still didn’t prove that Luis had done the switch, only that he had crated the paintings. Possibly the copies.

  Diego played dumb. “Luis is…”

  “Handyman. Manservant. You name it. He’s at van Winter’s beck and call,” Ferret Face replied.

  Diego judged from the man’s use of the present tense that he was unaware of Luis’s death. “Not anymore. I heard that one of van Winter’s people was killed in a hit-and-run. I think that was the guy.”

  “Poor bastard. He’d just survived prostate cancer,” Mr. Brawny said, shaking his head and mumbling again more softly, “Poor Luis.”

  “Yeah, and his youngest just starting college,” his partner added.

  A pattern seemed to be emerging, Diego thought. First Ramona, now Luis. Ill people in desperate straits. It only added to the possibility that Luis had switched the paintings, and made it more likely that van Winter had ordered the “accident.”

  As the elevator shuddered to a stop, Diego recalled the near hit-and-run Ramona had experienced. Van Winter clearly had no qualms about tying up loose ends.

  The police report against Luis further insulated van Winter from any connection to the switch. What had he planned to do to implicate Ramona? Diego wondered as the brawny deliveryman shoved open the gate while his colleague threw the switch to open the exterior door.

  The elevator opened onto a back hallway, and once they’d hauled out the hand truck and crate, the two men, well familiar with the layout of the floor, moved their burden to a door at one end and pushed a button. From the intercom came a tinny voice asking for identification. After they gave their names and Diego’s, the door unlocked with a loud buzz.

  Inside, the Tipton butler met them and led them to Alicia’s private art gallery. At a pad by the door, he punched in a series of numbers to allow them entry. Within the room, walls and shelves were lined with an eclectic mix of art, including one of Ramona’s earlier works that Diego had sold the heiress. The large room had been split in half by a partition whose pristine surface suggested it was new or had just been cleaned. Judging by the size of the wall, this was where Ramona’s large canvas was to be hung.

  As the men wheeled the hand truck toward that space, Alicia herself floated in wearing an exquisite charcoal-grey chiffon lounging garment that billowed about, adorning her fit, sixty-year-old body. She smiled and waved at the two deliverymen and then approached Diego, hugging him as she said, “I’m so glad you were able to personally oversee this.”

  The embrace lasted a little longer than was comfortable, until Diego managed to gently put some space between them. “My pleasure, Alicia. After all, as a lover of all things beautiful, how could I not come see you and your wonderful gallery?”

  “Feel free to look around. Maybe you can stay for a late lunch?” Alicia asked, a hopeful tone in her voice.

  Summoning all the skills that had made him one of Spain’s more welcomed courtiers, he picked up her perfectly groomed hand, bent over it and dropped a kiss on the back. “It would be my pleasure.”

  With a girlish titter and a blush across her surgically enhanced cheekbones, she exited the room in another flourish of fabric. The scent of her expensive perfume lingered, as if to nag him about his deception.

  As he faced the two deliverymen, their amused and sly glances annoyed him. He tamped down that emotion, having more important things to do. He might have distanced himself from Ramona, but his five-hundred-year-old promise to be a better man nagged at him to finish what he had begun, namely, proving her innocence.

  With a wave of his hand, he instructed the two men to uncrate the work. While they did so, he sought out the masterpiece that Alicia had purchased from van Winter. Though Diego searched the exterior walls of the room, it was nowhere to be seen, so he walked around the partition and there it was, on the opposite side all by itself. Ironic, he thought. Two works by Ramona back-to-back.

  Snagging his cell phone from his belt, he quickly snapped off a few pictures, which might help someone undertake a detailed analysis of the brushstrokes and proportions of the various figures in the work. Quite complicated methods had been devised for rating aspects of paintings, based on the discovery that artists tended to be predictable with certain details, such as the ratios of facial elements.

  Bending, he sought out the signature in the bottom right-hand corner—a signature Ramona claimed she hadn’t done. Getting as close as his camera phone would allow, he shot a photo or two before turning on the small light and snapping another few. No sense passing up the opportunity, since he might not get this chance again for a long time, if ever.

  With that done, he e-mailed the photos to Diana, hoping she could tap her resources to begin the analysis of the masterpiece. He hoped it would confirm their suspicions that it was a copy, and that the signatures might provide some way to clear Ramona’s name.

  When his phone beeped, confirming receipt of the e-mails by Diana, he stepped around the partition and once again turned his attention to the deliverymen. They had unpacked the canvas and cleared away the crate to give themselves ample room to work.

  Alicia had selected his favorite piece—the one that had led to his first kiss with Ramona. The one that when he closed his eyes for a vampire’s version of slumber, played in his brain, reminding him of her passion. Of their passion, captured on the canvas for all the world to see.

  There was only one thing better—the real deal.

  He forced that thought away, considering how to hang the piece on the wall. He wasn’t sure whether Alicia would want to put another work beside it, much as she had done on all the other walls save one—the one with what might possibly be a multimillion-dollar fake, if Ramona was right.

  But then again, why else would van Winter be threatening her if she wasn’t right?

  Alicia returned at that moment and seemed to note his dilemma.

  “It should hang alone, don’t you think? All that ardor and hopefulness is singular.”

  Her words caught him off guard. He had seen the fervor of the lovers in the painting, but hopefulness? Glancing at the image once again, he was assailed by a flurry of memories. Of the first time he had met a much shyer Ramona, in her last year of art school. Of how she’d grown into the mature, poised woman who could create such wondrously moving art.

  Unbidden came the vision of her beneath him, her eyes betraying her emotions as he made love to her. He saw, too, her last look of the other night, filled with love and so much more. Maybe there was hopefulness in the painting, hope as Alicia had so perceptively noted.

  “It should hang alone,” he confirmed.

  The word from Melissa that morning was good. The new medicines had stabilized Ramona’s cell counts, although keeping to the altered drug regimen was key to maintaining that stability. With the extra time, they might find a bone marrow donor and risk a transplant.

  She was supposed to meet Diana again for lunch, at a place close to the hospital this time—a Mexican restaurant on Second Avenue. The agent apparently had some news. Good news, Ramona hoped, as the elevator deposited her in the hospital lobby and she exited onto York.

  Getting her bearings, she realized she had to head downtown a few blocks b
efore cutting west to Second. A few steps into the crosswalk, she saw a white delivery van come squealing around the corner right at her. Ramona immediately stepped back toward the safety of the curb, but bumped into someone right behind her. Someone big and muscular who covered her mouth with his hand and slipped a tree trunk of an arm around her waist.

  The panel door of the van slid open violently as the truck screeched to a halt before them. The man tossed her inside and then followed her. She kicked at him, but her sneakers made little impact.

  He pulled the door closed and the van sped on, sending her rolling across the metal floor even as she continued to shove ineffectively at the large man. A second later, he’d covered her body with his, the way he might go after a fumbled football. The weight of him drove the air from her lungs, not that screaming would have done much good.

  She swatted at his head, and for the first time realized that she knew him. He was one of van Winter’s bodyguards. Before she could do anything else, a strange lethargy entered her body. Numbness immediately followed, then black circles danced before her eyes.

  Struggling to focus, she thought she saw a needle in the man’s hand, pulling back from her, but then her vision faded and she lost her hold on consciousness.

  Chapter 19

  D iego paced as Diana filled him in on what had happened just a few hours earlier.

  Ryder sat beside her, along with Melissa Danvers and her husband, Sebastian. Diana obviously felt Ramona’s absence was important enough to call this meeting at Ryder’s apartment.

  “Ramona was supposed to meet me at one o’clock for lunch. Right after her appointment with Melissa.”

  “One of my assistants, Sara Martinez, remembers seeing Ramona get on the elevator at around twelve-thirty,” Melissa added.

  “Time enough to get to the restaurant on foot. After waiting for half an hour, I tried calling her, but there was no answer,” Diana said. “After that I raced to the hospital.”