Another Day, Another Dali

by Sandra Orchard

  A rubbernecker crawling by from the opposite direction flicked his cigarette out his window.

  “Idiot.” I jumped out of the car to ensure it wouldn’t spark the leaking gasoline.

  Flames licked the ground.

  “Tanner, get her out of there. It’s going to blow!” I waved to the people on the bus. “Get off the bus! Off the bus!” I raced around the car to give Tanner a hand with the trapped female driver.

  He pulled out his Leatherman knife and sliced the seat belt at its base. “I got her. Go!”

  I raced to the bus and steered escaping passengers toward a nearby parking lot.

  The lady’s car exploded in a fireball.

  “Tanner!”

  “You’re, like, a magnet for trouble,” my old high school friend Matt Speers said, sidling up to me next to the convenience store I’d chosen for a semblance of cover as I watched the tow truck load my blackened, crumpled car.

  “Is that what they teach you to say in police school to cheer someone up?”

  He chuckled. “No, I thought it up all by myself.”

  Manufacturing a smile, I wrapped my arms around my aching ribs. Airbags didn’t feel so pillowy when they exploded into your chest. I shifted my focus from my car to Tanner talking animatedly on his cell phone as an EMT wrapped gauze around the burn on his arm. He’d insisted on being the last person they attended to, saying he’d had worse sunburns, but that hadn’t stopped tough guy from wincing as the gauze hit his skin.

  Thankfully, no one was seriously injured. They transported the other driver to the hospital because she was in shock, but she hadn’t appeared to have any injuries.

  Tanner pocketed his phone, thanked the EMT, and then joined Matt and me. “XYZ Inc. reported the car as stolen a few minutes before I phoned 911 to report the hit-and-run on a federal agent. Police found its burned-out remains ten minutes ago behind an abandoned factory in North Riverfront.”

  “And let me guess. No one saw the driver?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Do you think the car was stolen?”

  “Not a chance. XYZ Inc. is one of Dmitri’s holding companies. He’s got to be behind the attack.”

  “Or someone wants you to think he is,” Matt interjected.

  “What did the police learn about Saturday’s shooter?” I asked.

  “Nothing helpful,” Tanner said. “Every witness disagreed on the make, model, and color of the gunman’s vehicle, and no one saw the gunman.”

  “You think you were the shooter’s target too?” Matt asked.

  I gave him my best duh? look.

  He shrugged. “Ramming your car is a big step down from a drive-by shooting, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think. For all we know, the guy with the cigarette was in on it.”

  “Bad guys are only that coordinated in the movies. But trust me, there are plenty of screw-looses who’d flick a cigarette without thinking.”

  “Or to see if they could cause chaos.”

  “That too.” Matt looked from Tanner to me. “If you don’t need me to give you a lift home, I’ve got to get back to work.”

  The accident reconstruction team was still taking photographs and measurements on the pavement, even though the last of the vehicles had been towed.

  “I’ll take her home,” Tanner said, then cocked his head at me. “Is that your phone chirping?”

  “Oh, with all this traffic noise, it didn’t register.” I dug it out of my purse. “Six missed messages.” All from Nate. I thumbed through them.

  Is everything okay? Did you get called out? Just heard about a traffic accident. Please tell me that wasn’t you. Serena, I’m getting really worried. Praying you just got sidetracked and your phone’s lost its charge.

  “Your aunt?” Tanner asked.

  “Nate. He drove Aunt Martha home from Capone’s in her car, and I said I’d give him a ride back to the apartment.” I glanced at my watch. “Over an hour ago.”

  “We can swing by and pick him up.”

  I tapped in Sorry for the delay. On my way now.

  On the drive to my parents’, I caught Tanner up on why Aunt Martha had been at Capone’s and about Detective Richards’s investigation and on what we found in Capone’s apartment—the evidence that had been destroyed.

  At the mention of the photograph of my grandfather’s painting, he reached across the console and squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry.”

  Tears burned my eyes at the warmth in his voice, his touch. But I managed to hold it together. Forced out a chuckle even. Nana would be proud. “We may have lost the ledger, but I snapped a picture of the photograph of Granddad’s painting. That’s something. It’s one more piece of the puzzle, and one way or another, I’ll figure out how it fits.”

  19

  The next morning, Harold was still giving me the cold shoulder for reaming him out for breaking into his bag of cat food and spilling it all over the counter and floor.

  “Look, I’m sorry I yelled at you. I had a rough day, okay? It’s not like I remembered to feed myself supper either.” Cupping my hand, I brushed what was still scattered on the counter into his bowl and plopped it on the floor beside his water dish.

  He sniffed at it and stalked back to the bedroom.

  “You’re the one who left it out all night to get stale,” I called after him.

  I downed a protein shake and left for my morning run. The sky was already a light blue, but the sun hadn’t peeked above the trees bordering Forest Park yet. My apartment building was just off Skinker Boulevard, west of the park, so even moving a little slower thanks to last night’s accident, I’d reach its relative serenity within a few minutes.

  I paused to adjust the ankle holster I’d worn under my loose-legged track pants. I didn’t usually carry a gun for my morning runs, but with Tanner’s friends still on the prowl, I wasn’t taking any chances. I scanned the street. No sign of anyone watching me. I skipped my usual entrance to the park anyway and turned in onto the road farther up. The smell of autumn was in the air, and it didn’t take long for the steady rhythm of my pounding feet to lull me into a better mood.

  I’d spent half the night reliving finding Capone’s dead body and the car crash, and the other half rehashing my conversation with Nana. The evidence may have been blown up, but I still had the photos I’d snapped. If I could track down the owners of the original paintings, I could potentially come up with a lot of leads. Nana might not be happy if the police started sniffing around, but I’d come too far to give up now. In the long run, when Granddad’s murderer was behind bars, she’d thank me.

  A vehicle slowed behind me.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Didn’t recognize the silver Ford Escape and picked up my pace. I was about forty-five seconds away from the next path that cut through the woods.

  The whir of a window motor reached my ears above the purr of the engine.

  I broke into a sprint, turned onto the path, and ten feet in, ducked behind a tree and palmed my gun.

  “Serena, it’s me!” Tanner called.

  I shoved my gun back in the holster and stalked out of the trees. “What are you trying to do? Give me a heart attack? Where’s your Bronco?”

  “At work. This is yours. One of the SWAT guys is picking me up at your place in ten minutes. We’ve got another training exercise scheduled.”

  “They’re giving me an SUV?”

  “I advised Benton it might be safer until we nail Dmitri. One more attempt and Benton’s going to be tempted to transfer you to Alaska.”

  I laughed.

  Tanner didn’t.

  “You’re serious?”

  “We’re talking the Russian mob, Serena. Dmitri’s got too many henchmen on his payroll for us to have eyes on all of them 24/7. You shouldn’t be running out here by yourself. Get in.”

  I did, but only because he needed to get back to my apartment to catch his ride. “Where are you off to today?”

  “The shoot house. We’re p
racticing CQB.”

  CQB was close quarter battle. “Fun.”

  He grinned. “It’s starting to get same old, same old, but the captain promised a surprise or two today.”

  I spent the morning at headquarters, tabulating the paintings I’d snapped photos of from Capone’s file and trying to track down their owners. I managed to get hold of one woman in University City who said, “When I read in the newspaper about that theft where someone swapped out the painting they stole with a forgery, I told my husband I thought someone had swapped out our O’Keeffe too.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That I was daft.”

  “Do you mind if I come and take a look at it?”

  “You come right on over. There’s nothing I’d love more than to make him eat his words.”

  “I have a few other stops to make first. Is later this afternoon okay?”

  “Perfect.”

  I stopped by Gladys’s first to test the paint on her forged Dali.

  “Oh”—she glanced toward the street as I explained the reason for my visit—“Pete usually stops in on Tuesday afternoons.”

  “It won’t take long,” I assured.

  After one last glance up the street, she motioned me inside. “Your grandmother told me you’d tracked down the forger.”

  “Maybe. My plan is to compare the composition of the paints in your copy to the paints in his studio to see if they match.” Assuming they hadn’t all been removed and burned up with the police van.

  “You can do that?” She led me into the room with the Dali.

  “Yes, it’s pretty impressive what we can find out with technology these days.” I lifted the Dali off the wall and laid it on a side table for easier testing.

  Gladys paced the room as I worked, glancing out the window every half minute or so.

  The data for the blue color on Gladys’s painting matched that in the painting Tyrone had sold Aunt Martha. My heart ticked up a notch. I didn’t want Tyrone to be an accomplice. The two lived in the same town, so they both could’ve merely bought the same paint brand and batch. I wrote a memo on my notepad to remind myself to ask Tyrone where he bought his paint.

  At the sound of a car pulling into the driveway, Gladys flapped her arms like a frightened bird. “Oh dear, could you put that gadget away now? I still haven’t told Pete about the painting being swapped.”

  “I think it’s time you do, don’t you? Your daughter and son-in-law know—your housekeeper and your neighbors’ housekeeper too. How do you think he’ll feel if he finds out about it from someone else?”

  Gladys wrung her hands as Pete’s hello boomed through the hall. The housekeeper must’ve bustled out to welcome him, because he said, “Whose SUV is that in the driveway?”

  Gladys popped her head out the door before Ruby could answer. “Hi, Pete. Look who dropped by to say hello.”

  Pete stepped into view, and his head cocked as his gaze drifted from the Dali on the table to the gadget in my hand. His gaze lifted to mine and locked.

  Nope, he wasn’t buying the dropped by line. Not for a second.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Gladys clung to the pearls at her neck and worked them in her hands like a stress ball. “What do you mean?” she squeaked.

  “Hey, Pete.” I set down the paint tester and flipped to the page in my notebook where I’d noted details of the art theft-swap Detective Richards was investigating. “I’m glad I ran into you again. Are you familiar with the Stanfords’ place in Westmoreland?”

  “The Stanfords’ place?” Pete repeated, clearly hedging. “It’s a little outside an FBI agent’s price range, I’d think.”

  “So you are familiar with it?”

  His eye twitched. “I’ve shown it to a client or two, sure. Why?” He was dressed in crisply pressed black slacks and a tailored polo shirt, apparently not on police duty today.

  “Are you aware a painting was stolen from the premises? Or more precisely, swapped out for a fake?”

  He planted a hand on the back of the upholstered chair nearest the door and shifted his weight to a more casual stance that might’ve been believable if it didn’t appear so stiff. “You scored that case? I thought the theft squad had it.”

  “I’m consulting.”

  Gladys gasped. “There have been other thefts like mine?”

  “What do you mean like yours?” Pete’s stance reverted to ramrod-straight. “You were robbed and didn’t tell me?”

  “Burglarized,” I corrected, which earned me a glare that had me thinking Pete might be innocent after all. Or a stellar actor.

  “When did this happen?” he bellowed.

  Gladys fielded his questions, apologizing after every other sentence for keeping him in the dark, and not once did Pete suggest she move out of her home as she’d feared. When he turned his questions to me, I answered without apology and fired back with a few of my own. His surprise about the theft seemed genuine, but I still had the distinct sense he was withholding something important.

  “What do you know about your hit-and-run driver?” he suddenly asked.

  “That has nothing to do with this case.”

  “Weren’t you at the scene of that murdered artist not long before?”

  My gaze dropped to the Dali lying on the table in front of me. Its dreamlike depictions of a place that held sinister secrets seemed to morph into something all too real. I wasn’t sure how much to make of Pete’s knowledge of my whereabouts yesterday.

  Then again, both the hit-and-run and the murder had been big scenes for St. Louis PD. So it should be no surprise he’d heard about them.

  Pete closed the distance between us. “I heard that’s where the Lexus picked up your tail—outside Capone’s apartment.” Pete moved my purse off the end of the table and picked up my electronic gadget. “And you just said this test could prove he’s our forger.”

  “Your mother isn’t in any danger, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “How do you know? Do you know what kind of danger you’re in? Who’s after you?”

  I danced around his questions for a good fifteen minutes, being careful not to give away anything connected to Tanner’s investigation and still eventually managing to allay his concerns for his mother.

  Next I drove over to Truman Capone’s apartment building, where St. Louis PD said I’d find Detective Irwin, the man in charge of the homicide investigation. Two heavily armed officers stood guard at the front of the apartment building.

  I lifted the flap of my jacket with two fingers so they wouldn’t assume I was reaching for a gun as I revealed my badge. “Special Agent Serena Jones here to see Detective Irwin.”

  The officer repeated my request into his radio.

  “What does she want?” Irwin barked back.

  The officer looked to me for an answer.

  I reached for the radio. “May I?”

  He hesitated a moment, then handed it over.

  “Sir, this is Special Agent Jones. I’ve brought an electronic device that will enable us to test the composition of the paint in Capone’s studio and compare it to the forgeries swapped out in a couple of local art theft cases.”

  The detective used some colorful language to tell me what I could do with the device. Apparently, thanks to last night’s car explosion on the heels of the murder-scene evidence being rocket-launched into oblivion, the rumor mill was blaming me for the fallout. “This is a murder investigation. When I release the scene, you can do whatever you want with it—and not before.”

  “But I have—”

  “Are you hard of hearing? Just because they call you a special agent doesn’t give you special privileges. I don’t want you anywhere near my crime scene. You’ve done enough damage already.”

  “Fine.” If he didn’t want my copies of the paintings Capone almost certainly forged, it was his loss, not mine. I handed the radio back to the officer. “Have a good day, gentlemen.”

  I turned on my heels
and walked back to my car to the mutters of “First Bunch of Idiots”—the local police department’s term of endearment for FBI agents. Hopefully Detective Richards would be more cooperative.

  I circled back to police headquarters, where Detective Richards begrudgingly accompanied me to evidence lockup to sign out the Margaret Keane forgery and supervise my test.

  “What is this supposed to prove?” Richards asked.

  “Paint is made out of a mixture of basic elements. Some elements are distinctive to certain time periods or regions or commercial paints. If we find the same distinctive elements in Capone’s paint bottles”—when Irwin gets around to releasing the scene—“it will corroborate our theory he painted the forgery the thief swapped in.”

  “Him or anyone else who shopped at the same art store.”

  “Perhaps. But if there are elements in the paint that aren’t in Capone’s, we can be fairly certain he isn’t our forger.”

  “So what if Capone’s the forger? Dead men don’t talk.”

  By the time I stopped by the home of the woman I’d talked to on the phone this morning to test the O’Keeffe, and one look at the back confirmed it was a forgery, I suspected the test results weren’t going to tell me anything definitive, except that the forger made no attempt to use historically accurate paint. There were certain elements used in paints in Dali’s time that were no longer in use in O’Keeffe’s years. And sure enough there was virtually no difference in the results on the two forgeries.

  The Basquiat and the Keane were another story. Their results were very similar to each other but had notable differences to the Dali and the O’Keeffe, perhaps due to color choices. But a lawyer would argue that, since we know Tyrone, not Capone, painted the Basquiat-style painting, the similarity in results offered no proof Capone painted any of them.

  Since I was already in University City, I stopped by my parents’ to see how Aunt Martha was doing.

  “Detective Irwin is a twit,” Aunt Martha said after I gave her the lowdown on the tests and Irwin’s refusal to allow me on scene to test Capone’s. “But I know where you can go to test Capone’s paintings.”