Never Trust A Lady

by Kathleen Creighton

  “I can’t be sure. All I know is, three days ago somebody killed a shopkeeper in Marseilles-”

  “Marseilles? France?”

  “-by the name of Loizeau. And I have very good reason to believe that whoever did it was at that auction yesterday.”

  Jane said nothing, just listened to the words he’d spoken in a tone of such flat certainty, playing them over and over in her head to the accompaniment of the steady thumping of her heart. Funny, she mused, how unbelievable things become quite believable when they are actually happening to you.

  Presently she took a breath and said, “Well. Since you’re fairly sure now that it wasn’t me, and since we have the painting right here, don’t you think perhaps we should examine it?”

  She felt minute air currents, stirred by his almost silent amusement. “We?”

  “It is,” she stiffly reminded him, “still my painting. You’re welcome to remove this… whatever it is that’s supposed to be inside, but I intend to make sure it doesn’t get damaged in the process.”

  He snorted and muttered, “Damaged…” Then, grudgingly, “Well, okay, here-hold the light.”

  He switched on the flashlight and gave it to her, sending shadows leaping over the mounds of shrouded household belongings and across the ceiling of the van. Jane trained the doughnut of yellow light on Tom’s chest and held it steady while he lifted his arms and swiveled his upper body in order to reach the package he’d placed on top of the appliances behind him. As he did so, the brown leather jacket he was wearing pulled up and bunched across his shoulders, leaving a gap between its bottom edge and the top of his trousers. She made an involuntary hiccuping noise. The beam of light wobbled.

  “You have a gun,” she said.

  “You bet,” Hawk responded with a muffled grunt. He said nothing more while he lifted down the package containing the painting and placed it flat across his knees. Then he looked for her across the thin stream of light, and his lips quirked sideways in a smile. “What did you expect?”

  He could barely make out her features in the reflected glow of the beam she’d pinned to his chest In the deep shadows, her eyes seemed as unfathomable and mysterious as the sea by moonlight. So when she spoke, it was odd to hear her voice sound so normal, as everyday-normal as a housewife discussing roses with the gardener.

  “I’m kind of glad, actually. I mean, if there are killers around… What kind is it?”

  He had to hand it to her, she was nothing if not resilient. “A Walther 9-millimeter.” he said as he took it from its nest, double-checked the safety and placed it on top of the brown-paper parcel across his knees. She skewered it with the light beam but made no move to touch it.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know very much about guns,” she said after a moment. “Real ones, anyway. This one certainly looks, uh, effective. Mine, by the way-” and from the sound of her voice, she had to be saying this with an absolutely straight face “-happens to be a genuine Roy Rogers six-shooter revolver. It fires real caps.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Hawk in a strangled voice, “you brought it with you?”

  “You bet. What did you expect? It’s right there in my tote bag.”

  Laughter bumped around inside his chest, wanting out. He clamped down on it, made an exasperated hissing noise instead and returned his pistol to its resting place at the small of his back. “Just do us both a favor and leave it there, okay?” he muttered, adding a few choice words and “get us both killed,” under his breath.

  There was no response from Jane, no sound or movement at all. He paused with his fingers under the taped edges of the painting’s paper wrappings to glance over at her, wondering about her sudden stillness, and saw that her head appeared to be tilted slightly, as if she heard voices.

  “What?” he asked, oddly unnerved. Her shadowed eyes seemed to be staring right through him.

  Her voice came from a distance, with an odd lilt to it. “How did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “How did you know I was standing there, in the light, with the gun? I remember you said you saw the other guy running out of my room with the painting. But that was after he’d knocked me down. So, how could you know?”

  Hawk silently indulged in his favorite cussword and added every other vile phrase he could think of, for good measure. Aloud he had to content himself with, “Hell, I don’t know, put two and two together, I guess. Wasn’t exactly hard-the damn gun was on the floor and so were you.”

  The lie made him squirm, like having an itchy spot he couldn’t reach. He wished he knew why he so hated the idea of her ever finding out that he was the one who’d put her on the floor. It had seemed like the best strategy at the time, and a whole lot more reliable and a lot less painful than slugging her in the jaw. Now, though, remembering the feel of her body struggling, pinned under his knee, and her pulse surging against his fingers…it made him feel sick to think about it.

  So, Hawkins, you’d rather have been kneeling in her blood the way you did Loizeau’s, and feeling for a pulse that wasn’t there?

  Angry with himself for allowing those doubts, and annoyed with her for raising them in the first place, he snarled, “You want to watch this, or not? Put the damn light where my hands are!”

  “I do,” she replied evenly, “and I am.” Something in the way she said it made him feel pretty certain she hadn’t bought his explanation for what had taken place last night in her room. Not for a minute. That was the trouble with nice women who were also people’s mothers, he thought gloomily. They were too damn hard to lie to.

  The masking tape was loose-the painting had already been unwrapped once-so the brown-paper wrappings came apart. easily. Hawk quickly folded and laid them aside. He barely glanced at the painting itself, having seen it the night before, but once more turned it facedown across his thighs. It was as he remembered, heavy pinkish-brown paper covering the entire back of the painting, apparently glued to the frame. He hitched himself up and dug in his pants pocket for his knife. He heard her make a small ambiguous sound as he slid the tip of the pocketknife under the edge of the brown-paper backing. When he had it loosened on three sides, he folded the knife and slipped it back in his pocket. He could feel his heart beating. Hell, he could hear it. He wondered if she could, too.

  Oh so carefully, he lifted the paper and folded it back. Under it was a pale rectangle of canvas.

  “Lemme see that light,” he said gruffly, snatching it from Jane’s outstretched hand.

  Then all he could hear was the harsh sound of his own breathing as he bent over the painting and examined every inch of brown paper, every square millimeter of canvas, every sliver and grain of wooden frame. Nothing. He’d expected-hoped-to find a computer disk; unable to accept the truth, he searched now for…something-anything-a slip of paper, a code word, a number. He felt with his fingertips for the slightest irregularity, took out his pocketknife again and probed the wooden frame for hollow places. He peeled off the framer’s label and searched it for some kind of clue, a microdot. Anything.

  Finally, ice-cold and light-headed. he raised his eyes and the flashlight beam to Jane’s face and croaked, “Where is it?”

  Her eyes blinked at him, silvery and unfocused in the light. One hand fluttered into the path of the beam like a large pale moth, trying to shield her eyes from the glare. He grabbed it, imprisoning her wrist.

  “Dammit, where is it?” His teeth were clenched so tightly he thought his skull would split “When did you find it? Last night? You…took it out…you must have put it somewhere. Tell me, damn you!”

  He couldn’t hear anything but the roaring in his ears, but he could see her shaking her head, see her lips forming the word, “No, no, no…”

  ‘It was the terror. in her eyes that got to him, finally. He let go of her hand, throwing it away from him, almost, that small act of violence the only ember he allowed to escape the firestorm raging inside him. Utterly defeated, he leaned his head back against the washing machine and
switched off the flashlight.

  And now, in the darkness, he could hear her whispering, “I didn’t take anything, I swear. If you’ll just think a minute…”

  He shook his head, not wanting to hear anything she had to say, primarily because he knew she was right. She hadn’t taken anything out of the painting. How could she have? The backing had been glued on, and it obviously hadn’t been tampered with. He’d had to remove it with a knife. But he didn’t want to hear her, because then he’d have to face the alternative. He’d have to think about the unthinkable. Accept the unacceptable.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice dull and flat. “I was out of line.”

  There was no answer, no sound at all from Jane. He could feel her hurt withdrawal, like a dog he’d just kicked.

  He closed his eyes and tried to force his brain to grapple with this new turn of events, but he suddenly felt overwhelmed, exhausted. He’d been following this trail for days now, with little or no sleep, a trail he’d first picked up in Jarek Singh’s ransacked apartment on the outskirts of Cairo. Noticing that slight discoloration on Singh’s wall-that had been his first break. After that, tracking the missing painting to the antiques dealer in Marseilles had been easy. Finding Loizeau dead had been a setback, but then he’d managed to lift the information about the auction from the blotter. Rathskeller’s Lot #187-March 22. He knew he wasn’t mistaken about that. Yesterday-that was the twenty-second, Rathskeller’s auction in Arlington. Virginia.

  And this painting-his hands curled, gripping the wooden frame with sudden fury-dammit, this painting was Lot #187. He’d made no mistake about that, either. So where had he gone wrong? He’d lost the trail somewhere, but he couldn’t for the life of him think where. Where, dammit?

  A small sound broke his tenuous concentration, collapsing his careful progression of thoughts like a pebble tossed into a house of cards. Jane, clearing her throat. Though her voice was still rusty with uncertainty when she said, “Hmm…Tom? Can I ask…can you tell me what it is, exactly, that you’re looking for?”

  He shifted irritably, resenting the hell out of her at that moment, just wanting to be left to his own misery. But he owed her something for the way he’d treated her, grabbing her like that, scaring her to death. He really did regret that-more than he liked to think about-but it was too late to take it back now.

  So he tried to soften his tone, and managed a grudging gruffness when he replied, “I’m not exactly sure. Computer disk, probably. Maybe just an access code. I don’t know. Just that it was supposed to be in this painting, Lot #187… What? Did you say something?”

  He switched on the flashlight. Her face seemed to float in the light, disembodied and pale as the moon, the tips of her fingers barely touching her lips.

  “I just thought of something,” she said, still hesitant at first. but gaining confidence as she went on. “I don’t know if it’s important, or if it makes any sense, but, well, I’m not exactly sure that painting was supposed to be number 187.”

  “What do you mean?” He felt a stillness, as though even his heart and all his body functions had paused to listen to her answer.

  “When I first saw it, when I marked it down in my catalog, you know, so I’d know which one to bid on… I don’t remember now what the number was, but I’m absolutely certain it wasn’t 187.” She hesitated, waiting for him to comment. But he didn’t trust himself to speak, and she went on in a nervous rush, sensing the tension in him, perhaps, the words tumbling from her like pebbles before an avalanche.

  “I think there must have been some kind of mix-up-my friend Connie said it happens sometimes-anyway. I wasn’t expecting it to come up in the bidding until later, and I was just about to go to the snack bar to get something to drink. If Connie hadn’t spotted it just in time, and told me about it, I’d have missed bidding for it.”

  “Whoa,” he croaked. “Back up a minute. Some kind of mix-up? Like what, exactly? You mean, a switch?” His heart had resumed beating, hard and fast. Alarm bells were clanging inside his head. A switch. Jeez Louise, one of the oldest tricks in the book.

  “Well,” Jane said, “it seemed like it would be easy to do. In the catalog, all the paintings were listed the same-just, Oil Painting. Framed, or something like that-and then the lot number. So I guess if-”

  “And the lot number-how was it attached to the painting? Some kind of tag, sticker, what?”

  “A sticker-on the bottom edge of the frame. It was pretty small. I remember I had to-”

  “I don’t remember any sticker. Here. Take this.” He thrust the light into her hands and began to turn the painting over, turning it upside down and around, even though he’d already been over the damn thing with a fine-tooth comb and knew perfectly well there’d been no sticker on it, large or small.

  “It was there last night.” Her voice was breathless, as if his agitation was contagious. “I’m sure of it. Maybe it fell off. Check the wrappings.” The light beam danced, alighting like a butterfly on the brown paper he’d folded and set to one side.

  And a moment later came a satisfied, “There it is.” Her hand darted into the light to pluck from the sea of brown a white rectangle of paper half the size of a postage stamp. “See? I knew it had to be here.” She handed it to him, saying, “No wonder it fell off. It’s not sticky at all. That’s probably what happened, don’t you think? Maybe it happened to more than one item, and the auction employees just stuck them back on as best they could, figuring no one would notice.”

  Hawk grunted. “Yeah, right.” He was squinting at the sticker, holding it between the nails of his thumb and forefinger. “Hey, let me see that pistol you bought-you did mean it when you said you have it with you?”

  “Right here.”

  He could hear her scuffing around in the dark. A moment later, the silver Colt revolver poked into the puddle of light. He gave her a look as he took it from her, wondering if she knew she’d handed it to him butt-first and carefully, as if it was a real gun, and loaded. Strange woman.

  The lot-number sticker was still on the butt end of the pistol, right where he remembered seeing it when he’d picked it up from the floor in her hotel room last night. It was stuck on good, so good he had to scratch with his fingernail to peel up one corner. So good there was no way in hell one could have come unstuck by accident.

  Wishing to God he had a pair of tweezers, he tore off a piece of the brown wrapping paper and dropped the numbered sticker onto the middle of it, then folded it into a credit card-size packet and tucked it carefully away in his wallet. If he ever got out of this damn truck, he’d see that the boys at Quantico got a look at it. Who knows, maybe they’d get lucky, turn up a print, although in reality the chances of that were pretty slim.

  No, his best bet was going to be to backtrack to that auction house, try to pick up the buyer of the other painting. The original number 187. Unless the guy had pulled a multiple switch, in which case he’d have to track down every one of those damn paintings. He was going to have to call in help, of course, but even so, the odds were, by the time they got to it, the key to Jarek Singh’s computer files would be long gone on its way to the highest bidder, in another sort of auction altogether. The thought of that happening chilled him to his very bones.

  “Any chance of you remembering that other number?” he asked without much hope. He felt very tired.

  Jane made a small sound, either a sigh or a stifled yawn. “Probably not. I have a terrible memory for numbers. But I could look it up in my catalog for you, if you like.”

  Hawk, whose last remaining hopes had collapsed with her first sentence, didn’t know whether to strangle or kiss her. Well, to be truthful, he did know. And it was surprising the hell out of him, the way that notion kept popping into his mind.

  “That would be nice,” he said with polite irony. Then he added, as she instantly began digging in her tote bag again, “I didn’t mean now. No point in it. Why don’t you wait until we’ve got some light?”

  “
Oh-okay.” She paused, her hands and the flashlight draped over her tote bag, to say thoughtfully, “So, I guess whoever bought the other painting, the one with my number on it…must have this disk, or whatever. Is that what you think?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Jane was silent, chewing her lip, her shadowed, unreadable gaze directed away from him, staring at nothing. But something about her seemed to radiate tension; Hawk’s own heightened senses picked it up, like the subtle vibrations of electricity near power lines. A tiny chill of warning crept across his skin, the way it always did when he knew someone was lying to him. But he thought, No, not Jane. And ignored the sensation, putting it down to nerves, frustration, his own general antsyness.

  “If we could just get out of this damn truck!” The vehemence in her voice as she spoke his own desire out loud surprised him; she’d seemed so unflappable up till now.

  “Yeah, well, nothing we can do until they stop,” he reminded her. “Meanwhile, why don’t you turn that thing off, save the batteries? Try and get some sleep.”

  She made a funny, high sound, like a laugh-as in, “Are you kidding?” But she didn’t say a word about being hungry, or thirsty, or wanting to use a bathroom, or any number of other things she must have been in need of. He knew he sure was-all of the above.

  The light went out. A few moments of silence ticked by, filled with the rhythmic thrumming of the truck’s tires on pavement. And then she began to sing softly, huskily, “‘Hello, darkness. my old friend…”’

  It had been one of Jen’s favorite songs. She’d loved Simon and Garfunkel.

  What the hell’s going on? Hawk’s heart was pounding. Who the hell was this Carlysle woman, anyway? And why was it every time she opened her mouth, one way or another she seemed to say something that made him feel as if he’d been punched in the gut?

  I sure didn’t count on this, he thought as he stared into the blackness above his head.

  And then he wasn’t certain what he meant by that. Because he hadn’t counted on a lot of things. He hadn’t counted on Jane Carlysle, for one, and the way he kept seeing her face in his mind, and thinking about how good it would feel to touch her. To make love to her, yes, but also, and much more incomprehensibly, just to hold her, and go to sleep with her wrapped in his arms.