Painted Ladies (11 page)

“Everyone in the place watched you come in,” I said.

She smiled.

“I’m used to it,” she said. “And I want a martini.”

“Anything,” I said.

“If only that were true,” she said.

She ordered a Grey Goose martini on the rocks with a twist.

“What are you drinking?” she asked.

“Iced tea,” I said.

“For a superhero,” Rita said, “you are certainly a candy-ass drinker.”

“I’m so ashamed,” I said. “What’s Morton Lloyd look like?”

“Haven’t you seen him?” Rita said.

“Once,” I said. “Tall, kind of heavy. Black hair combed back, lotta gel, kind of a wedge-shaped face, big mustache with some gray in it. Maybe fifty-five.”

“That would be Mort,” Rita said.

“Okay,” I said. “Same guy I met at the Hammond Museum. Not the same guy driving the car.”

The martini arrived. Rita drank some.

“Nothing like vodka and vermouth to knit up the raveled sleeve of care,” she said. “What car?”

“A car registered to Lloyd,” I said.

“But he wasn’t driving it?”

“No,” I said.

“I talked with him,” Rita said. “Says he barely knows Prince. Says Prince came to him through a regular client; said he feared being slandered by Walford University, and if he were, he’d want to sue them, and he wanted to know that Mort would represent him.”

“Lloyd recommended him to the museum to negotiate the return of the painting,” I said.

“Really?” Rita said. “Perhaps Mort was not being entirely open and honest with me.”

“I’m shocked,” I said.

The waiter came for our orders, we gave them, and Rita asked for another martini.

“Mort says he brushed Prince off,” Rita said. “Says if they slander him, he should give Mort a call.”

“Whatever the truth, it scared Walford off,” I said.

“And if somebody checked on him,” Rita said, “he had consulted Lloyd, and Lloyd had, sort of, agreed to represent him.”

“Yep,” I said. “Who was the client who sent Prince to Lloyd?”

“He said it was something called the Herzberg Foundation. Mort was evasive as to what it was. All I could get was that it was something to do with the Holocaust. And it might have been earlier than I thought. He was vague on that, too. I frankly don’t think he wanted to tell me anything,” Rita said, and smiled. “But you know how I can be.”

“I do,” I said. “He is their legal counsel?”

“Yes,” Rita said. “He seems happy with that. I gather he’s on retainer.”

“Is he a stand-up guy?” I said.

“Mort? Stand-up. Yes,” Rita said. “I’d say he is. But that would be true only if he were standing up for Mort.”

I nodded.

“The two guys who ambushed me both had an Auschwitz ID number tattooed on their arm,” I said.

“My God, Auschwitz was sixty years ago,” Rita said.

“More,” I said.

“I don’t do math,” Rita said. “I’m a girl.”

“And the world is a better place for it,” I said.

“Of course it is,” Rita said. “How old were these guys?”

“Late thirties,” I said. “They both had the same number.”

“So it’s, like, symbolic,” Rita said.

“Or something,” I said. “Now I see a guy visiting Prince’s old girlfriend, and he’s driving a car registered to a lawyer who represents some kind of Holocaust foundation.”

“Convoluted,” Rita said.

“It is,” I said.

“But you can’t ignore it,” Rita said.

“No, I can’t.”

“Is it a real serial number,” Rita said. “The tattoo?”

“It looks right,” I said. “You know, the right amount of numbers and such.”

“Maybe it can be traced.”

“Quirk’s working on that,” I said.

“You ID’d the two guys who tried to kill you?”

“Not yet.”

“You got any physical evidence linking the attempt on you to the Prince killing?”

“No.”

“But you know it is,” Rita said.

“Yes,” I said. “You were a prosecutor. You know when you know.”

“I remember,” Rita said.

“Prince was Jewish,” I said. “His real name, according to his wife, was Ascher Prinz. His father was in a concentration camp.”

“Which one?”

“His wife doesn’t know,” I said. “They all sound the same.”

“The concentration camps all sound the same?”

“What she told me,” I said. “She’s a poet.”

“The hell she is,” Rita said.

“She’s writing an epic poem, she says, about how her husband’s death has impacted her.”

“Can’t wait,” Rita said.

I was having a lobster club sandwich. Rita had a big plate of wienerschnitzel and a glass of wine. How she could drink two martinis and a glass of Riesling and eat a large plate of fried veal for lunch was a puzzle to me.

“How can you eat and drink like that,” I said, “and continue to look like you do.”

She smiled.

“Sex burns a lot of calories,” she said.

“Wow,” I said.

She smiled.

“I’ll help you with this any way I can. I’m a good lawyer, for a girl.”

“ ‘For a girl,’ ”I said. “When you were prosecuting in Norfolk, them defense lawyers used to call you Rita Shark.”

“They were referring to my sleek and sinuous grace,” she said. “But I mean it. I don’t like people trying to kill you. If I can help, I will. We have some pretty good resources at Cone, Oakes.”

“And you’re one of them,” I said.

She cut off a smallish bite of wienerschnitzel and chewed and swallowed and smiled at me again.

“I know,” she said.

A
fter lunch, Rita went back to work, and I went to see Quirk. Belson was with him in his office.

“Got an ID on your two assailants,” Quirk said.

“And they are?” I said.

“Two Dutch nationals,” Quirk said. “Mercenaries. What’s the names, Frank?”

“One’s Joost. The other one’s Van Meer,” Belson said. “You care which is which?”

“Not right now,” I said.

“Joost is thirty-four, Van Meer is thirty-five. They weren’t in our system, so we tried Interpol and there they were.”

“You dig that up?” I said to Belson.

“Yep.”

“Frank Belson,” I said, “international detective.”

“Long-distance phone caller,” Belson said.

“And you’re still a sergeant?”

“They don’t promote you for doing a good job,” Belson said. “They promote you for scoring on the lieutenant’s test.”

“So take the test,” I said.

“He won’t,” Quirk said.

“No?” I said.

“I am what I am, and if that’s good, I should be promoted. I’m not taking no fucking test,” Belson said.

Quirk grinned.

“Frank’s a great cop,” Quirk said. “But nobody’s arguing he ain’t a hard-on.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone argue that,” I said.

“You want to hear about these two guys you killed?” Belson said. “Or you and the captain want to keep having fun?”

“Joost and Van Meer,” I said. “Tell me.”

“Served in the Royal Dutch Army. Airborne brigade. Fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“There were Dutch troops in Iraq and Afghanistan?”

“What am I,” Belson said, “
Meet the Fucking Press
? That’s what Interpol told me.”

“Learn something every day,” I said.

“Probably not in your case,” Belson said. “They got out, served with the Israeli army, some kind of commando unit. Maybe covert ops. Got out of that and started a private security agency, Joost and Van Meer. Then they went off Interpol’s radar.”

“Why is Interpol interested?” I said.

“They’re wanted for questioning in the murder of some French guy, owned an art gallery,” Belson said with no expression.

“Art,” I said.

“Yep,” Belson said.

“What do the French cops tell you?” I said.

“Guy had their name on an appointment calendar for the day he was killed.”

“Not much,” I said.

“Enough to want to interview them,” Belson said.

“True,” I said. “Anybody got any thoughts about the tattoos?”

“Nobody knows anything about that,” Belson said.

“Puts us in good company,” I said.

“We’re talking with folks at the Holocaust Museum in D.C.,” Quirk said.

“Progress?”

“They’re trying to run down an outfit in Germany. Supposed to have everything about the Third Reich.”

“Is that hard to do?” I said.

“Apparently,” Quirk said. “And it’s not just a matter of locating the stuff. It’s getting access to it with somebody fluent in German.”

“American embassy?”

“I’m sure mine would be the first call they’d take,” Quirk said.

“We got art, and Dutch stuff, and Jewish stuff, and German stuff, and Holocaust stuff, and a guy got killed on Route Two, and a guy got killed in France,” I said. “We figure this out, I’ll get promoted to lieutenant.”

“Maybe not,” Quirk said.

“Not if you don’t take the freakin’ test,” Belson said.

Quirk smiled.

“Excellent point, Frank,” he said.

S
usan and Pearl came for breakfast on Saturday morning. “Hurry up,” Susan said. “Eat something quick. Otto and his mom are in town, and they’re going to meet us for a playdate.”

“What time?” I said.

“Eleven,” Susan said. “She e-mailed me. Isn’t that great? Said we should meet by the little bridge in the Public Garden.”

“I don’t think we have to hurry much,” I said. “It’s eight-thirty. You want coffee.”

“Yes, but let’s not dawdle over it.”

Pearl had gone directly to the couch and assumed her normal position. Which was prone. She looked to me as though she would be content to dawdle the whole day. Despite her excitement, Susan was able to eat some homemade corn bread with blackberry jam and drink a cup of coffee. I had the same thing, only more, plus some orange juice. Susan checked her watch every couple of minutes. Otherwise, she was very civilized. Susan in a hurry can be something of a tempest.

“How,” she said quietly, looking fully at me, the way she does, “is your case coming about the murder and the stolen picture.”

“It gives me a headache,” I said.

“Do they know who the men were that tried to kill you?”

“Couple of Dutch mercenaries,” I said. “Joost and Van Meer.”

“Do you know why they wanted to kill you?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, they probably wanted to kill me because they’d been employed to. But who employed them and why?” I shook my head.

She sipped her coffee and looked at her watch.

“Is there any way I can help,” she said.

“Actually, yeah, maybe,” I said. “I need to talk with an expert in seventeenth-century low-country art, somebody got no stake in this case.”

“I don’t know anyone like that at this minute,” Susan said. “But I have a Ph.D. from Harvard.”

“So you’ll find somebody.”

“Of course.”

She checked her watch. According to the clock on my stove, it was five minutes to ten. Actually, the clock, being digital, like they almost all are, read nine-fifty-six. But I was pretty loyal to the old ways, and I translated and rounded off, just as I had in the happy years before digital. On the couch, Pearl was snoring calmly.

Susan put her coffee cup on my counter.

“I think I’ll get her started,” Susan said.

“Good idea,” I said. “How long you think it’ll take you to get there?”

“Oh, I don’t know, five minutes maybe?”

“Which will make it approximately ten o’clock,” I said.

“Yes, but I don’t want to be late.”

“You’re always late,” I said.

“Not on Pearl’s second date,” Susan said. “What kind of a mother would I be?”

She was playing, and we both knew she was. And we both knew also that she wasn’t altogether and entirely playing. We cleaned up the breakfast, put the dishes in the washer, and headed over to the Public Garden. It was ten-fifteen.

A
t eleven-oh-three Susan and I were leaning on the railing of the bridge over the frozen pond where late the sweet swan boats plied. Pearl was snuffling through the vestigial snow at the Arlington Street end of the bridge, alert for a discarded doughnut. No one would, of course, discard a doughnut, so I knew her search was aimless. Still, I liked to let her cultivate her hunting impulse. I didn’t want to impose our realistic limits on the soar of her imagination.

“‘To strive,’” I said to Susan, “‘to seek . . . and not to yield.’ ”

“Of course,” Susan said.

Pearl stopped suddenly and lifted her head. She did an olfactory scan of the air, head lifted, short tail out straight, body motionless and rigid, one forepaw raised. Then she put the forepaw down carefully, posed like that for another few seconds, and exploded on a dead run toward Boylston Street. Coming like a tidal wave through the gate from Boylston Street was Otto. They met in exuberant collision somewhere near the far end of the frozen swan boat pond. Otto bowled Pearl over and then tripped over her and fell down, too, and they rolled on the ground, mock fighting, with their tails wagging ferociously. Otto’s mother was there, with a good-sized man, who turned out to be Otto’s father. Otto’s father had a definite New York City look about him.

Both dogs got their feet under them and faced each other with their back ends elevated, front paws extended, chests near the ground, growling lasciviously, and head faking at each other. Then suddenly they straightened and began to dash in widening gyres about the Public Garden as pedestrians dodged and some cringed. Susan and I and Otto’s mom and dad stood watching like chaperones at a freshman dance.

“They’re adorable,” Otto’s mother said.

“Absolutely,” Pearl’s mother said.