City of Ghosts (A Miranda Corbie Mystery) (38 page)

She ground the Chesterfield out in the ashtray, head aching and muscles tired, visions of a smiling O’Meara and Tehachapi prison snapping her eyelids open.

Sacramento was just five hours away. The
City of San Francisco
was due in Ogden about an hour later.

If the killer had decided to wait—to not drop a nickel in the phone booth and dial the Reno police—the porter was bound to discover the body when they switched trains in Ogden. The latest they’d find Jasper was seven-thirty this morning.

Not much goddamn time, but maybe … maybe enough.

Miranda frowned, squinting at the last lines she’d written in the notebook.

Who is Cheney and what is his position?

Why run after Edmund’s murder?

Is Jasper complicit?

Scott: Why do they need me if they already know about Cheney and smuggled art? Sacrificial sheep?

First question seemed obvious. Best place to hide a hot painting is in a warehouse of paintings. Cheney worked for the exhibition, and given the time line—Jasper’s trip to Switzerland, his sale of the
Mercury and Argus
copy to Heinsicker—what, a year ago, the secretary had said?—they’d used the Fair as a cloak and shield, an easy way to transport and store paintings until Jasper could get them to his buyers. She nodded, adding
storage
next to Cheney’s name.

Selling Heinsicker the phony
Mercury and Argus
was probably a preliminary test of the artist, to see if they could really pull it off, and she could see Jasper’s cynical smile when his overbearing department chair thanked him for his generosity. Heinsicker—like most buyers—wouldn’t think twice about buying looted artwork, especially if the price was right. He’d been fooled … Miguel had passed the final exam.

She tapped the pencil on her notepad impatiently. How had Wardon come across the boy, discovered his talent, and how—most importantly—had he fallen under the dealer’s control?

He exploits the lad’s innocence and I could teach him so much …

Had Jasper been speaking as a would-be mentor—or a lover? She wrote
MIGUEL?
in the margin of the notebook.

Miguel’s talent and Jasper’s chemistry made it possible for the ring to sell stolen paintings
twice.
Count Lestang and his Nazi cohorts smuggle an original painting—nothing too famous, nothing too noteworthy—out of occupied Europe, particularly a newly conquered and fertile territory like Poland—while Wardon and Jasper unload a copy of it to no-questions-asked buyers.

Concoct a story about a family escaping the Nazis and needing money, little Jacob’s ship to America, a bargain and helping refugees in the process, why the painting’s been in the family collection for years … and fat men with fat bank accounts wipe the spittle on their lips, handkerchief starched, can’t see a goddamn provenance with greed in their eyes, Berkeley to Chicago, Los Angeles to New York, glory in good taste and a European collection to rival Frick’s, bought at bargain-basement prices from a connoisseur of impeccable reputation.

Some were private collectors, like Sterling Clark in Chicago, some were Nazis and Reds, Jasper’s connections, but all of them shoved hands out, wallets open, depending on oil paint and ancient canvas, a dead man’s eye and the stroke of a brush, art to own, art to possess, like a country or a woman and for the same fucking reason, so they could prop up their manhood, inflated by power and money and prestige, owning beauty, displaying it, hoarding it, raping it in private, again and again and again …

Miranda wiped her forehead, right hand shaking.

If the forged painting was more modern, Jasper’s beloved
entartete Kunst
—like the Kirchner Wardon mentioned at the Picasso exhibit—the professor could sell the fake to different discerning buyers, ones who didn’t toe the official Nazi party line on art but were scavenging for bargains the Nazis had devalued. Easier to duplicate the modern pieces, too, no thorny issues of fractured lines and hardened oil paint, no yellow veneer of the antique.

Duplicating the old masters—the traditional landscape and portrait paintings in oil like the seventeenth-century French
Mercury Slaying Argus—
would pose much more formidable challenges. Jasper must have developed a process—something cooked up in his lab—to replicate the look and texture of centuries-old oil paint. Hell, even laypeople knew you could swipe an old oil painting with alcohol to make sure it was really old—just like scratching glass with a diamond. Maybe he’d been secretly working on this for years, hoping for opportunity, and Hitler and the United States State Department had finally given it to him.

Jasper’s artist could slap up a Frans Hals or a Pieter de Hooch, the original pillaged from Cracow or Amsterdam, and the professor could sell it here or even trade it back to the Nazis for more “degenerate art” and double his revenues. The Germans were always competing with one another anyway—the Reichstag didn’t know what the Wehrmacht was buying.

Miranda shook her head. Dug out a Butter Rum Life Saver and popped it in her mouth.

The cycle offered an almost endless supply of art for whatever market presented the most opportunity—and allowed Jasper, connoisseur and collector and would-be “savior,” to keep the paintings he most coveted for himself.

She crunched and swallowed the candy. No wonder the poor bastard was nervous.

He’d mentioned “competing interests” … maybe not just Nazis or Reds, but interested parties in art, competition for the fresh French carcass that would soon be picked clean.

Fuck.

What if one of his buyers discovered his purchase was a phony?

Huntington Jasper was passing fake information to the Nazis—according to his account, and she believed him—and probably fake paintings. The Reds, the Germans, his buyers in both trades, had more than one reason for wanting him eliminated.

So was he complicit in Edmund’s murder?

She frowned again. Didn’t make sense. The professor seemed genuinely afraid—deception was catching up to him—and genuinely fond of Edmund. But what motive—and whose motive?—was there for killing a queer escort? Was it a warning of some kind for Jasper, something engineered by—perhaps—the not-so-dull-witted Fritz?

Goddamn it. She frowned and circled the question.

Why do they need me if they know about Jasper’s connection to Cheney?

Yet another murder, the young agent who was originally sent out to check on Jasper. Grant Tompkins left a wife and children, and that bothered the professor, and the murder scared him. James had told her the truth about one thing: He hired her because she was expendable. Scott’s presence at the Fair proved they knew about Cheney and therefore knew about the art, but what they didn’t know is whether or not Jasper’s greed had led him to start coughing up real secrets to the enemy.

The professional agent had been killed in Chicago, but the backstreet P.I. might dig up the truth and turn one more trick, figure out if Jasper was cheating the government or just cheating—or so that bastard James had hoped.

Miranda lit a Chesterfield. Drew a heavy pencil line through the question and next to it wrote
pigeon.

Scott was probably sent by James to make sure that she didn’t blow the espionage trail by going after the smuggling ring.

Well, fuck that—and fuck him.

Jasper, Edmund, Grant Tompkins, and oh, incidentally, Lois Hart—all murdered, and all of them except for Tompkins shared a connection … her. Maybe Lois was slain by a different killer, but Edmund had been the socialite’s escort that night, and that was one goddamn coincidence too many.

She angrily crushed out the cigarette in the glass ashtray. She’d done her job for James: Jasper hadn’t turned, for predictably selfish reasons. Prolonging the world’s misery made for a fertile art market, and his little contributions to stringing along the Nazis must have assuaged his already minuscule sense of guilt. James, the lying sonofabitch, already owed her money and a ticket to England.

No, she’d do precisely what Scott had warned her against: go after the smuggling and forgery ring. Seemed to be the best—maybe the only—way to save herself from a murder rap.

The best lead she had was Wardon. Wardon, Jasper’s partner in criminality along with Cheney, Wardon, who had teased the professor with a remark about Kirchner at the Picasso show, Wardon, who kept a tight rein on the prodigy Miguel.

Miranda looked out the window. The powerful engine under her feet hummed a percussive, iron lullaby, and she stretched and yawned, and set her pencil down.

3:17
A.M
. Maybe she could sleep for a couple of hours before dawn and Sacramento.

She stretched out on her side, head by the window, listening to the moaning of the wooden rails, the howling of the wind.

Miranda didn’t dream for the next three hours.

Act Five

Art

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

—William Shakespeare
,
Sonnet 147

Thirty-three

Thud.

Miranda woke up with a start, grasping for the cigarette case in her pocket and the Baby Browning that wasn’t in it. Laughter and more banging in the corridor outside, someone falling against her door on the way to the buffet behind it.

She exhaled and blinked, nose wrinkling at the smell of scrambled eggs and bacon, waffles and syrup, while her stomach growled, almost as loud as the train starting to pull from the station, whistle loud and piercing.

Wristwatch read 8:31. Must be Berkeley.

Fuck, she’d overslept through Sacramento, dreamless and lulled to sleep by the lullaby of the rails,
chug-chug-chugalug, chug-chug-chugalug,
winding down through hills of gold, droning through the flat agricultural land and fruit orchards, farmers already awake for their midday snack, coaxing lettuce and tomatoes from parched brown soil.

Her head still ached from the concussion, still dizzy from sitting up. She reached for her bag and unwrapped the second-to-last Butter Rum Life Saver.

Couldn’t take a chance on the buffet or dining car, not until she’d heard about Jasper.

She crunched the candy, wishing it were bacon flavored, and snapped open the window shade, shielding her eyes.

They’d be in Oakland in just fifteen minutes, and she wasn’t prepared, not by a long shot, not prepared to be hauled away in handcuffs or sent to Napa State Insane Asylum, reading Ecclesiastes behind barred doors.

They’d switched trains at Ogden, the
City of San Francisco
changing to Union Pacific cars. That was an hour ago, and if the killer hadn’t called in a tip-off, the porter would walk in after increasingly loud knocks and discover one very dead passenger.

Goddamn it …

She stood up, fighting the pain in her head and legs. Squeezed the tap on the small water basin, cold drops on her face. Raised her eyes to the mirror.

No Club Moderne night, no kilowatt smile, more like Marjorie Main’s younger sister. Preview of Tehachapi, go in a girl and come out something other than a woman. She ran her hands under the water again and cupped her face, lightly slapping her cheeks.

No, not Miranda Corbie.

Like mother, like daughter, she’d run first.

She sank down heavy on the bed and lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. She needed a safe haven, someplace she could come and go without being traced, without being seen.

Miranda squinted at the sunlight starting to break through the clouds, glancing off the Bay, orange and red, like a New Year lantern …

Chinatown.

One quick ferry ride and she’d disappear, just like the opium and hooch from bootlegging days … and Lois Hart’s precious jade. Chung Hing Hotel, no questions asked, girls of all races and all prices, where Doyle and the other beat cops plied their lunch money.

She’d check the newspapers, fill her belly … then pay a visit to Mr. Hugo Wardon.

*   *   *

Check-in at the Chung Hing consisted of a passed fin and an illegible scrawl in a dusty registration book. The thin man with thin hair and a dirty collar showed her upstairs, one flight, to a room that stank of fermented rice and stale beer. She nodded, wrinkling her nose, handing him another five to forget they’d met.

The cot was clean enough, at least on the surface, no bedbugs visible. Her stomach growled, reminding her how hungry she was, and she lit a Chesterfield to cut the pain.

You’re a good soldier, Randy, a good soldier …

She crushed out the cigarette on the scarred wooden floor and shook herself loose, stood up and stretched, trying to get some vitality in her limbs. Goddamn it, Miranda, stay awake, stay alert …

Back downstairs, quiet except for a businessman making a social call to number 17. The man in the dirty collar took no notice of her when she pushed open the glass door and reentered Chinatown.

She passed Washington and Clay, staying behind crowds, keeping her head down. Hoped she wouldn’t spot No-Legs, couldn’t afford anyone putting the finger on her, too goddamn tired to know if she was being tailed.

The smell of eggs and bacon wafted from the Chop Stick Café, and Miranda found a counter stool facing away from the door. Ordered a cup of coffee, hotcakes, bacon, and eggs. The man in the wrinkled gray suit next to her left, leaving behind a paper. She stretched out a hand for it, heart in her throat.

Chronicle.
Nothing on page one, page two, page three …

Page seven.
BERKELEY PROFESSOR APPARENT SUICIDE ON STREAMLINER
. “The
City of San Francisco
streamliner has endured another tragedy, this time the death of a local chemistry professor from the University of California…”

She scanned it quickly, searching for her name, any reference to homicide.

“Authorities have made no official announcement and the investigation remains ongoing. Anyone with any information should immediately contact Southern Pacific.”