There was not much to search—a bedroom, two small closets, a filthy bathroom thick with unbearable stench.
No sign of the frames.
“I don’t know, Nuala—” I began.
“The bathroom, Dermot Michael! Let’s go back there!”
We went back. Tissue in hand Nuala turned on the light. No more than forty watts.
“Behind the shower curtain, Dermot Michael. I know they’re there!”
With my elbow I pushed back the curtain and peered into the dingy shower stall.
Sure enough! Two frames! On the back of the one closest to me was the stamp I had seen earlier in the day: “Wayne and Julia Armacost Gallery.”
There was nothing in them. They seemed brand-new, never used.
So she had been right.
“What do we now?”
“I’ll just run out and get Joannie.”
“Who’s Joannie?”
“The officer who guards me at night. Aren’t we great pals?”
She bounded up the steps and out the doorway, making enough noise to wake up the dead, should there be any such in the building—as there well might have been.
Using the tissue she had given me as she raced out, I pushed open the buttons on the ledge of both the outside door and the door at the head of the stairwell, so that Nuala and her “pal” could get back in.
Actually there were two “pals,” Joannie and Bert, two young cops, the former African-American, the latter Asian, probably Thai.
Nuala introduced them both to me as if we were at a formal ball. Bert, she told me, was the one who watched me often at nights.
She showed them the Armacost frames.
“What do you think we ought to do?” I asked.
“Someone should call the cops,” Joannie said with a chuckle.
She removed a pair of latex gloves from her purse and picked up a phone which rested precariously at the edge of a broken chair.
“Dial tone,” Joannie said with a nod of approval.
She punched in some numbers.
“Captain Culhane, please,” she said, mimicking the voice of a dowager who might have lived in the Edgewater Beach Apartments before they closed. “All right, Commander Culhane, if that’s what you call him … . I am sorry. I have some important information about the Armacost robbery. I must talk to Commander Culhane. If you don’t put me through to him, I will be unable to provide the information.”
She winked at us.
“Ah, yes, Commander Culhane, listen carefully as I will not repeat this information. You should send some of your officers to apartment B-R—that’s Basement Right—at 1413 West Hollywood. In the shower stall of the apartment you will find two frames from the Armacost Gallery. Nice to talk to you, Commander.”
She hung up and giggled softly.
“We all better get out of here. If I know John Culhane, and I do, he’ll be here himself in ten minutes.”
“At the most,” Bert agreed.
Joanie wiped off the door handles, put the safety locks back on, and led us out of the apartment.
“You’re going to take this darling girl home, aren’t you now, young man?” she demanded of me, in a mock Irish brogue.
“You bet.”
“I didn’t think you’d use a place like this for a tryst, Dermot.”
“Tryst, is it now?” I replied. “Woman you gotta be out of your frigging mind!”
We hurried back to the Benz, Nuala holding on to my hand for dear life.
At the car we encountered three of the young local dubious characters, all with their baseball caps on backwards in the prescribed manner, inspecting the car with considerable interest. They looked up at us suspiciously but did not back off.
I didn’t need this new aggravation. I grabbed one of them by the neck and lifted him off the ground.
“You fucking bastards, get the fuck out of here or I’ll kill all three of you.”
I threw the terrified kid to the ground. The other two turned tail and ran. The guy on the ground scrambled to his feet and sped away after them.
“Dermot, you’re a desperate man!”
Her teeth were chattering despite the humid night air.
“I should have run after the other two guys and knocked their heads together.”
With difficulty, I maneuvered the Benz out of the cramped parking spot, turned left at the next street, and headed back to the Drive.
“I was terrified out of me frigging life, Derm,” herself informed me after we turned on to the Drive, “from the time we went into that courtyard and until just now when we entered this brilliant road of yours.”
“And look at the lights of the city, Nuala,” I said, extending my arm round her holding her tight.
She was still trembling.
“Aren’t they glorious, like flights of angels bringing us home.”
“Nice metaphor.”
“Dermot, if there’s one thing I can’t stand in a woman, it’s nagging. I was a terrible nag back there in that smelly place. I’m sorry. I’ll try to never do it again. I promise. If I even say a single word that sounds like nagging, you’ll remind me of my promise?”
“Woman, I will!”
“Promise?”
“Promise to make you keep your promise?”
“Yes.”
“OK, I promise.”
She sighed happily.
“You’re the bravest and kindest and sweetest man in all the world, Dermot Michael Coyne.”
“Have you just found that out? And you might add tiredest, too.”
“Most tired,” she corrected me.
We both laughed, confident that we had solved much of the mystery, and confident, too, that we were picking up some of the preliminary skills required for a sustained relationship.
“There’s four conspiracies, Dermot,” she said later as I cruised down Fullerton towards Southport.
“Four?”
“The Art Heist gang, the Armacost Gallery, Billy Hernon and his crowd, who were playing their own game, and Mr. O’Hara.”
“That’s right. There are four. And just like the Camp Douglas conspiracies, they almost ran out of control and created a conspiracy that never was.”
“I don’t think it’s all over yet.”
I walked her up the steps to her apartment, insisted on inspecting it to make sure there was no one lurking in the shadows, and gently kissed her good night.
“Aren’t you the friggin’ genius, Nuala Holmes?”
“Dermot, I love you more than anything else in the world.”
The words slipped out of my mouth before I could stop them.
“And I love you, Nuala, with all my heart and soul.”
I figured, as I collapsed into bed at the John Hancock Center, that we were playing under the old rules again. That would involve certain problems, but I was so proud of me woman and meself that I didn’t mind.
14
THE 6:00 A.M. news on WFMT, the Chicago Fine Arts Station, reported that there had been another gallery robbery during the night, at the Grenada Gallery just down Superior Street from the Armacost Gallery. This time, however, the alarms worked. Nonetheless, the criminals removed several valuable works of art from the gallery before the police arrived.
The gallery, the persnickety announcer informed us, was only two blocks away from the Chicago Avenue police station.
Oh, boy, I thought, this is going to really stir up trouble.
I forced myself down to the pool to limber up for the day. I would need a long weekend at Grand Beach, hopefully with Nuala present, to recover from this whole mess of conspiracies, past and present.
Though I was at the coffee shop of the Ritz promptly at 7:30, Nuala and the Caseys were chatting amiably at a table. She was, I could tell, acting the sweet young immigrant child this morning, one of her more authentic personae, though all of them were authentic in some fashion.
She was wearing a light summer dress with a floral print. Perhaps she had observed that he
r female colleagues dressed for the heat these days instead of for professional image. The thin dress clung to her figure in several appropriate ways. The bra beneath it must also be pretty thin because one could observe the slight hint of nipples beneath the dress. Lascivious thoughts swirled around in my head. Do women dress this way, I wondered, without realizing it, or do they do it deliberately?
I figured that the answer to that was pretty obvious.
“You look lovely this morning, Nuala Anne,” I said, kissing her cheek.
“Sure, and aren’t you the sweetest boy in all the world?”
“Maybe.”
We talked for a few moments while we ordered and the waitress delivered raisin bran and English muffins and dry toast and fruit salad and three pots of tea.
“I talked to my good friend Commander John Culhane of Area Six this morning,” Mike, whom Nuala had completely captivated, began the serious part of the conversation.
“Ah,” Nuala said, feigning indifference to this information.
“He tells me that an anonymous caller last night told him that there were two unused frames from the Armacost Gallery in a basement apartment on West Hollywood.”
“Isn’t that interesting,” Nuala said.
“It was the apartment of your good friend Billy Hernon, judging by the papers scattered around. They have a warrant out for his arrest.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said as I slopped raspberries over my two packages of raisin bran and drenched them both with cream, “He’s a dangerous man.”
Nuala and I pretended as best we could to be surprised by this development.
He was not deceived for a moment. Naturally not. After all, it was a couple of his part-time employess who had helped us.
“I told you to be careful,” he said with a frown.
“Dermot is a very careful man,” Nuala said fervently.
“But sweet,” Annie Casey added with a wink.
“Very sweet,” I agreed.
“I also have here”—he reached into a small briefcase on the floor next to his chair—“a copy of the revised plans for the Armacost Gallery.”
He placed the plans on the table and turned over three pages.
“This revision was made after they decided to save the old basement. You’ll note that the coal cellar was preserved. It’s a fairly large room, extending several feet out of the building and under the sidewalk towards Superior Street. There was probably a coal slide fairly close to the street.”
“Interesting,” I murmured. “It’s sealed now?”
“It would appear so. The only entrance seems to be the one from the basement. Observe, by the way, that there’s a design for a safe in this diagram.”
“Isn’t there now?” herself agreed. “I suppose your commander man realizes that the new security unit worked last night?”
“Yes, he did. I think I can say that he has a pretty clear picture of what went on at the Armacost Gallery that night. Incidentally, Nuala, I presumed your permission to tell him about these plans and share them with him.”
“It was an eejit scheme altogether,” Nuala observed. “How could they have trusted a gobshite like Billy Hernon?”
“Why did he tip the police that you and your immigrants were the thieves?”
“Because he’s an evil man who loves to hurt people,” Nuala replied. “I suppose that he had wrecked the apartment where he hid the frames?”
“I understand that he did,” Mike said without batting an eye.
Had Nuala come close to suggesting that we were in the apartment? Neither she nor Mike seemed to care.
“Why did he hide the frames instead of destroying them?” I asked, as Mike put the plans for the gallery back in his briefcase.
“He’ll come back to blackmail the Armacosts and collect more money from them,” Nuala replied. “He’s a nasty man, Mr. Casey, a nasty man altogether. He enjoys nothing more than watching people suffer.”
“He’s also a stupid man,” I added, “or he wouldn’t have involved you and your pals.”
Nuala nodded solemnly.
“I wonder if you both would have lunch with the Commander today? He’s very eager to meet you. With your permission, Dermot, I’ll reserve us a room at the Berghof at noon.”
“He won’t arrest me again, will he?”
“No, Nuala, he certainly will not.”
“You know where it is, Nuala?” I asked.
“Haven’t me colleagues told me?”
So it was settled. Nuala went off to work, Mike to his canvases and I to the East Bank Club for an intense morning workout.
John Culhane was a trim man of medium height with wavy brown hair, rimless glasses, and a solid, honest face. He looked more like a priest than one of the best cops in the city.
“I want to apologize to you, Ms. McGrail, for what happened to you in my district the other morning. I assure you that it was not my officers who were involved. The state’s attorney, as usual, did not observe the appropriate etiquette of informing us and asking for our cooperation. His behavior was deplorable.”
“Aye,” Nuala agreed, “He’s not a very nice man.”
“I wonder if you could explain to me how you were able to solve this puzzle.”
“Ah, sure, there was nothing to it at all, at all. I asked meself who would have been the informer—the false informer that is—who told the police. Sure, didn’t it have to be that gobshite Billy Hernon. That explained why the raid on the Armacost Gallery seemed so clumsy compared to the others. Then I says to meself, why would anyone hire Billy. Well, says I to meself, what if they want to pretend to be victims of them Art Heist fellas and wouldn’t they be wanting to make it seem that the thieves were carrying the Monets out of the gallery. So don’t I figure they wait inside for a driver and then rush out? Maybe someone is still in the gallery to make sure they don’t steal the real paintings. Or maybe they have already hidden them. You wouldn’t want your man to know where something valuable is hidden unless your’re a complete amadon.”
“I see,” said Commander Culhane, his eyes wide.
“So I says to your man”—she patted my arm—“look for a place where they might hide the paintings. And doesn’t he find it just like I knew he would?”
She was giving me credit for her discovery.
“Why did they want to arrange the theft? Did they need the money?”
“Doesn’t everyone need money? Maybe they wanted to collect the insurance money. Or maybe there was something funny about their paintings and they didn’t want others to find that out during your big exhibition at that Art Institute place.”
Culhane nodded solemnly.
He would be even more impressed when he later found out that Nuala had described perfectly the motive for the crime. The little imp had summarized the results of my excursion to the Art Institute without tipping her hand that she was doing anything more than guessing—or “theorizing.”
“Do you think both Wayne and Julia were involved?”
Like so many others, myself included, Commander Culhane stared at Nuala with wide eyes, hardly believing that Ms. Holmes was for real.
“I do not. I think she did it because she loves him desperately and wanted to protect him. Your man tells me that she deals with the insurance companies, and she arranged for the purchase of the two Monet things. She’ll probably, uh, take the fall for him. Love does strange things to people, Mr. Culhane.”
This was a new bit of “theorizing” to me.
“It sure does, Ms. McGrail … . Her fall is not likely to be a very long one. We’ll give her a chance to confess and then to plead. She may not have to do any time or no more than a couple of months. No one has been hurt by her scheme.”
“Except me pals.”
“That’s true,” he sighed. “However, their lawyers will get delays on the expulsions, and eventually things will work out. No one hates Irish illegals.”
“Their skins aren’t dark enough,” I said.
“Too true,” Culhane agreed. “It’s crazy, but it’s the way the country is just now.”
“We think we’re closing in on the Art Heist gang,” he continued. “We expect to arrest them soon. We’ll discover that they do not have the Monets, unless Ms. McGrail’s suppositions are completely wrong—which I do not for a moment believe possible. Then, armed with this diagram and the empty frames, we show up at the Armacost Gallery with search warrants which we have prepared beforehand.”
“You’ll be having someone watch the gallery so that they can’t slip the paintings out at night, won’t you, now?”
After a slight pause of surprise, the commander replied, “Of course. We certainly will … . Ms. McGrail, if you ever want to be a detective, would you please give me a ring?”
“Och, I’m too much of a coward to think of doing that. Isn’t it accounting that suits me perfect?”
“I very much doubt that.”
“I suppose,” I said in a characteristically Irish style of question asking, “that our friends out on the West Side are not happy about someone trespassing on their turf?”
“I don’t suppose they are,” the commander agreed in a typical Irish response to such a question.
So it was the Outfit who had tipped off the Chicago cops about the Art Heist gang.
We left the restaurant and went in our own direction. I walked with herself back to her office.
“I guess that’s that,” I said.
“I wish I thought so, Dermot Michael. They haven’t caught Billy Hernon yet.”
“True enough.”
“And wasn’t that woman a stupid gobshite to involve herself in such a foolish conspiracy? I wonder where she met him? Probably at some bar.”
“As we learned from reading about Camp Douglas, people can do very dumb things when they get caught up in conspiracies.”
“Well, thank God, I’m not a conniver or a schemer.”
“Certainly not!”
I kissed her briefly.
“Won’t I be calling you tonight, Derm?”
“Grand.”
I went back to my apartment and worked on a number of my stories. I would send a bunch off to my usual editor. Maybe I could even find a novel about a young man in love, a man caught between raw physical hunger and respect for the young woman.
Irish Lace Page 25