Buy Back (18 page)

She opened one eye. “The conservators?”

“Some of them work here, right? They don’t make a lot of money. They may want to make more.”

“If you want the records of the conservators, you should have bothered Atkins.”

“What I want is your help. It could be a conservator, but I have reason to believe it is someone higher than that. Someone in administration.”

Sheila squinted at me. “Are you here to suggest someone on my staff helped steal those paintings?”

“That’s kind of where I’m going with this.”

There was an outside chance Ms. French actually worked at the museum, though I didn’t necessarily think so. If I pressured Sheila and her staff, it was possible I might squeeze out some indication of who was involved. Possibly even Sheila herself. That fit a buy-back scenario. So I was basically rocking the soda machine to see what dropped down.

“May I ask what evidence you have?”

“The investigation and all information pertaining to it is the sole property of my client, United Southern Assurance. They pay for the information. They can provide that for you if you wish.”

“So you’re saying I need to call Max to get you to tell me?” She growled and closed her eyes again.

“Sheila, I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass, really.”

Her eyes looked at me sideways, what I think they call askance, which means those green irises didn’t trust me, and may have resented me.

I continued. “If I told you what I know, it might taint the investigation.”

“Taint? Is that one of your Scrabble words?”

I shook my head. “It’s only five points, and even on a triple word play, that’s only fifteen points, and there’s no
s
or anything to tag it on another word. You know how I play. Most of my moves are at least twenty points.”

“What do you want from me, Tommy? I have a small staff, and everybody on that staff I trust implicitly.”

“Who do you got?”

“I’ve got an administrative assistant, a quality assurance administrator, two project administrators, a special events coordinator, publicity people, publications … about fifteen in all. You want their names and résumés, is that it?” She looked at her watch. A Cartier.

“Sure. Can I come get them tomorrow?”

“No. The less I have to deal with you or see you or have the chance of running into you the better. Call my assistant, and we’ll send a messenger.”

“I may need to question your staff. That OK?”

Her fingers drummed on the desk edge. “I’d rather you ran a short list by me first. We’re a team here at the Whitbread, and I don’t want rampant suspicions going around. We have jobs to do, a museum to run.”

“That’s a deal. Well, thanks.” I climbed out of my sling chair, and at the door I turned. Her back was to me, and she was flipping through a date book in front of the window. I took out my phone like I was checking a message. “Sheila?”

“Hmm?” She turned.

“How much would you say those paintings are worth?”

“We estimate the replacement value at a million three. If we don’t get them back, Max will try to shortchange us, probably give us point eight.” She turned, her eyes squinty. “Didn’t Max give you a figure for their recovery?”

“He did. By the way, I like the Postimpressionists on the walls in here. Nobody has a problem with you hanging them on your walls?”

I could almost hear her jaw tighten.

“The office and its walls belong to the museum. That art is from museum storage. Makes no difference if they’re stored on my walls. It’s all the museum.”

I smiled. “Well, looks nice, Sheila. I’ll be in touch.”

I walked out the door, and made sure to take the turns in the hallway wide to avoid spooking Atkins.

Back outside I buttoned my overcoat. The wind was up chasing leaves off the trees and making things colder than they should have been.

At the subway entrance I made a call.

“Max.”

“Tommy.”

“I just got through with McCracken.”

“McCracken? Why?”

“Because. I think she’s involved.”

“How?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Sounds slim, Tommy.”

“We’ll see. But if she trips and I flip her, who knows who may drop out of the setup.”

“You know who took them?”

“I do.”

“Who?”

“My job is to recover the goodies.”

“Who?”

“Doesn’t matter, they don’t have it anymore.”

“Who?”

“McCracken says the paintings are worth a million three, and that she hoped to get at least point eight from USA. A recovery fee of fifty is thin spaghetti. You’ll have to do better.”

I hung up on him. Was that reckless? Maybe a little, but I was getting a head of steam up. I needed to push everybody connected to this to make sure I could pay the pink monkey and not get killed. If nothing else, Max was an asshole at the sushi place, and deserved a shove.

I dialed Blaise.

“Yo, Tomsy. You want that hardware?”

“Not yet. What I need is another follow. Whitbread Museum, woman in a white pantsuit works there, red hair, green eyes. I took a picture of her with my phone, I’ll e-mail it to you. Has a set of hips and tits on her. Museum director, name is Sheila McCracken. Need a twenty-four report on her starting as soon as you can. She’s at the museum now, probably leave the building at five.”

“We can cover. You want photos this time, in advance, if anything interesting happens?”

“Yes. That was good work last time.”

“We take pride in our work. Peace out.”

I trotted down the steps into the subway, which was still warm from summer. It takes a long time for the concrete bunkers down there to cool off. August is not only hot, but the train air conditioners ramp up the ovenlike effect.

I stared down the dark tunnel, and before long I could see a white light flickering in the distance.

The light at the end of the tunnel.

The headlight of an approaching train.

FROM THE SUBWAY EXIT AT
Carroll Street I circled away from Smith Street so I could approach my place from an unexpected angle, not from the usual way a guy would come from the subway. I didn’t see anything screwy outside my place, so I went up the steps to my building and carefully entered the foyer. Through the glass I could see another note on my door. No, it wasn’t another note from the catnapper. It was from Frank and Kootie. It said:

My phone told me I had an hour to make that appointment.

From my closet I dug out a garment bag. I put another two suits into the bag, plus socks, underwear, and toiletries.

I needed to steer clear of my place for a few days. Too dangerous. That punk shooter had a knack for finding me around the neighborhood at will. Had to mix it up.

My phone buzzed, and I saw it was Walter, from Vegas.

“Hi, Walter.”

“She’s been arrested.”

“I seen the mug shot. Where?”

“Miami. She was staying with friends there. If you want to call them friends. Seems they were growing pot in their basement. Like a whole forest of it, under all these lamps.”

“She make bail?”

“Don’t know, sweetie. Didn’t call me. She knows I wouldn’t lend her any more money anyway.”

“Glad she had sense not to call me. Can you get word to her to call this asshole Gustav? He keeps leaving notes on my front door saying he’s going to kill the cats if she doesn’t call him.”

“That is outrageous. The part about the cats, I mean, and about calling Gustav. He’s insane, as you can see.”

“What’s his deal?”

“He loves her. What else.”

“He rich?”

“He’s connected. Russian or from Kazakhstan or some ungodly place. Was new here in town but knew her when she was a kid. Went after Yvette like a bird dog. Real wiseguys only use show girls as playthings. This one wanted to play house. A romantic streak as wide as the strip and twice as long. Figures he’d go after the cats. Used to send her cases of food for them, drop by with toys. Well, it was obvious he thought the way to her heart was through the cats, you know.”

“Lovesick, huh? Poor guy doesn’t know what he’s in for with Yvette. I almost feel sorry for him. Except the notes I find every day disrupt my flow of positive energy. I have a lot on my plate here at the moment and can’t have this dope poking around making trouble.”

He sighed. “I’ll see what I can do about letting her know about the catnapping, Tommy.”

“Thanks, Walter. Keep me informed, will you? How’s the show going? You making all the Vegas boys lovesick?”

Walter chuckled. “I still turn a few heads, if not all. Ciao, Big Tommy.”

Nice guy, Walter. I made a note in my head to send him some flowers. He’d appreciate a gesture like that.

I dialed a car service. Yeah, I know the tiki bar is around the corner, but I needed rolling shelter to jump into when I left myplace. Blue Diamond—why not? Maybe I’d luck out and get Ms. French’s driver. I’d have him drive me up to the Slope and back down. That would give me a chance to see if I was being followed.

Then I put on my trench coat and picked up my hat. It was kind of white around the band from my sweat, from chasing the punk shooter. Then I noticed a spot on the crown. I held it up to the light. The light shone through. It wasn’t a spot. It was a bullet hole. The kid’s wild shot just went through the hat, missing my brain by an inch.

Standing over the open toilet, I cut the hat into little pieces with shears and flushed each piece. When I was done destroying my new hat, my cell rang. The car was out front.

With my bag, I made a straight line from the front door to the town car without getting shot. Moving targets make the worst ones. I slumped down, and the driver drove off.

“Driver?”

“Yes?”

“Did you work Sunday?”

“Sunday?”

“Yes. On Sunday did you happen to pick a woman up on Court Street, at Donut House?”

There was a chilly silence. “I no work Sunday. Or Monday. Thank God.”

My cell rang. It was Skip, my nephew. I’d almost forgotten I had asked him to look up Dunwoody Exports.

“What do you have for me, Skip?”

“The question is, Uncle Tommy, when will I get the thirty bucks?”

“I can’t exactly hand it to you over the phone, can I?”

“PayPal.”

“I don’t have PayPal.”

There was a snort on the other end.

“Skip, where are you now?”

“Headed to the subway.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“Polytech.”

“Wait for me at the corner of Jay at Tillary. I’ll be right there.”

I hung up and told the driver about the change of course.

In ten minutes I saw Skip on the corner. There was no missing him. Two things you can count on kids to do: have bad hair and worse clothes. His hair stuck out like he’d touched the third rail, and he and his drab clothes drooped under it. I waved him over to the car, and he got in back with me.

“You headed home, kid?” I handed him the thirty dollars.

He tucked the cash in his black jeans. “I get a drive home?”

“Most of the way.” I gave the driver new orders. “Don’t want your folks getting wise.”

“Wise?” Skip snorted. “They’re stupid.”

Like I said, I was probably once a smart-mouth kid. As an adult, though, you get sad watching a kid like this try so hard to be cool. There’s desperation in a jaded thirteen-year-old. Like Pop used to say, cool is as cool does, not how cool looks or acts.

“Let’s have the information.”

“I’ll e-mail it.” He started fooling with his phone.

“While you do, give me the highlights.”

“Dunwoody Exports is, like, a corporation licensed and bonded in New York to ship bulk artwork overseas. Know the big bargain-basement art sales you see, like, advertised on cable?”

“You mean like ‘Starving Artist Sale’ at the Rumsey Quality Inn?”

“Yeah. They buy bulk paintings from little galleries clearing their inventory of crap like Mom paints in the backyard and thinks she’s going to make, like, a million dollars.”

I knew what he was talking about. There were a lot of little amateur painters like his mom, my sister, Katie, out there. Discount galleries took their art on commission. When they couldn’t move the art, they would pay the artist five bucks and take five times that for themselves by dumping the paintings to outfits like Dunwoody. A huge amount of mostly crappy paintings found its way to the starving artist sales, including the one in Rumsey you see on TV. After those sales, companies like Dunwoody take what’s left and ship them overseas, mostly to Asia. Believe it or not, sometimes the better stuff will end up being copied over and over in oil paint by an Asian getting a buck an hour and shipped back here. You see these oil paintings in some of the giant wholesale outlets and odd lots. So one day Katie may see a forgery of one of her paintings in Statewide Wholesalers out at the mall. I kid you not.

“Is Dunwoody still in operation?”

“That’s, like, where this story gets interesting. There was, like, a legal action against them by some galleries who, like, hadn’t been paid, and the district attorney found out the company was actually owned by a construction company in Staten Island. The company was kind of bogus, connected to the mob and maybe shipping stolen art out of the country hidden among all the crappy art.”

I sat forward. “When did all this happen?”

“Like, a year ago?”

“Is that a question?”

“What?”

“When you said ‘Like, a year ago?’ it sounded like a question.”

“You must be high, Uncle Tommy?”

“Now is
that
a question? Because you said it exactly the same way as the other thing that you said.”

I was busting his shoes. I knew it wasn’t a question. Just sometimes the screwy way kids speak by ending every sentence like a question, coming up in tone at the end, rubs me the wrong way.

Skip rolled his eyes and snorted. “What
ever
. Yes, it was about a year ago. It’s all in the e-mail.”

“So what happened?”

My nephew shrugged. “It was, like, they couldn’t totally prove anything, so the grand jury didn’t hand down an indictment. Dunwoody stopped their art auctions, and Molly Lee vanished.”