Painted Ladies (14 page)

Then he said, “Yeah.”

I
put my spare weaponry in a duffel bag and hauled it down the stairs to Belson’s car, which was double-parked in front of my house.

“No suitcase?” Belson said.

“I keep stuff at Susan’s,” I said.

We got in. There was no sign of a tail.

“So you got a theory about what they don’t want you to find?”

“‘Theory’ is too strong,” I said. “More like a guess.”

“Guess is better than nothing,” Belson said.

We turned right onto Berkeley Street and stopped for the light at Beacon.

“There’s an operation called the Herzberg Foundation, to which Lloyd, the lawyer who recommended Prince to the Hammond Museum, is a legal counsel. The Frans Hermenszoon painting,
Lady with a Finch,
which was stolen from the Hammond Museum, whose attorney is Morton Lloyd, was owned at one point by a Dutch Jewish family named Herzberg.”

The light changed. We crossed Beacon and went out onto Storrow Drive westbound.

“In 1940,” I said, “after the Nazis conquered the Netherlands, the Herzbergs were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz, where all but the youngest son died. The great art collection of the Herzberg family was confiscated by the Nazis, including
Lady with a Finch.
The son was liberated in 1945 by the Russians, and disappeared.”

“Dutch, Jewish, Holocaust, Herzberg,” Belson said. “And artwork.”

“So far,” I said.

“You talk with Lloyd yet?”

“No, but Rita Fiore has.”

“Good-looking redhead?” Belson said. “Used to be a prosecutor in Norfolk County?”

“Yep.”

“She talk to him before or after they tried to hit you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Find out,” Belson said.

“I will,” I said.

The river was on our right; no one was on it or in it. No sculls training for the Head of the Charles Regatta. No college crews readying for the season. No ducks, no geese, no loons, no cormorants, no seagulls, no sailboats, no canoes, no kayaks, just the gray water, looking cold, with ice formed along the riverbanks, where the current wasn’t as strong.

“You want me to talk to Lloyd?” Belson said. “The more we’re in it, the more it defuses their reasons to kill you.”

“And the more we lose that connection,” I said.

“We’ll lose it altogether, they scrag you,” Belson said.

“I’ll try to prevent that,” I said.

“And you’ll talk to Lloyd?” Belson said.

“Both,” I said.

W
hen Susan came up from the office, I was sitting on the couch with Pearl, drinking scotch and soda with a lot of ice. Susan kept some for me. She wouldn’t drink it.

“How nice,” she said when she saw me.

“What’s for eats?” I said.

“You’re in luck,” she said. “I had friends over the other night. There’s cheese and fruit, and adorable little dinner rolls, and, I think, some cold chicken left, too. And Iron Horse champagne.”

“Zowie,” I said. “How adorable, exactly, are the dinner rolls.”

“You’ll see,” she said. “Mind if I unwind with a little wine before I set the table?”

“I was hoping you would,” I said.

Susan got some pinot grigio and brought it to the couch and sat on the side of me where Pearl was not.

“There’s a police car parked outside,” Susan said.

“Cambridge?” I sat.

“There was a Cambridge one,” Susan said. “Now it’s a state police cruiser.”

“Healy,” I said.

“You’ll explain,” she said.

“I will.”

We each sipped our drink.

Then she said, “So it is not just unbridled lust that brings you here.”

“Well, that, too,” I said.

“But there’s something else,” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“Unbridled lust I’m used to,” Susan said. “Tell me about the something else.”

She listened quietly while I did. People had tried to kill me before. She wasn’t exactly used to it, but she knew it was part of the package. But it wasn’t anything she liked.

When I got through, she put her wineglass on the coffee table and put her arms around me and pressed her face into my neck. I put my arm around her. Finally she took in a deep breath and let it out and sat back.

She smiled at me.

“Just because you’re a fugitive doesn’t mean you can lie in bed with me and watch basketball all night,” she said. “I hate basketball. One of the many reasons we don’t live together is that I don’t like to watch what you like, and vice versa.”

“It’s more fundamental than that,” I said. “I like the TV off; you like it on.”

She nodded.

“You won’t let them kill you,” she said.

“I will not,” I said.

“I believe you,” she said. “You never have.”

I got up and made another drink. And poured some more wine for Susan.

When I sat back down, I put my arm around her, and she rested her head against my shoulder. Pearl looked vaguely annoyed.

“Hey,” I said to Pearl. “Did I give you a big look when you were flirting your brains out with Otto?”

Pearl remained unabashed. She lapped her muzzle a couple of times and continued the look as she settled back down and put her chin on my thigh.

“You know what struck me when you were telling your story?” Susan said.

I shook my head.

“They are obviously dangerous people. They tried to kill you twice now, and they killed the poor super, just because he was inconvenient.”

“He was a witness,” I said.

“I mean, they could have blown up the whole building.”

“Could,” I said.

“Killers do things like that,” Susan said. “These people seem quite contained.”

“They are very professional,” I said. “On the other hand, so am I.”

“I’m counting on it,” Susan said. “And they did seem quite careful to make the explosive charge small and very local, so it would kill only you.”

“Also true,” I said.

“They’ll kill,” she said. “But not carelessly.”

“If they need to,” I said.

“You’re like that,” she said. “You’ve killed people.”

“When I’ve had to,” I said.

“And you’re careful,” she said.

“I am,” I said.

“They probably think they have to,” Susan said.

“In a good cause?” I said.

“Maybe,” Susan said.

“Hitler probably thought that he was acting in a good cause.”

“And he was wrong,” Susan said. “I’m just saying there’s some reason, perhaps, to think they may be acting on behalf of a cause they believe in.”

“Instead of just greed, or hatred.”

“There may be much of that, but maybe they are able to sort of camouflage those impulses with the colors of a high-minded cause.”

“Like a foundation or something?” I said. “Say the Herzberg Foundation?”

“Maybe,” Susan said.

“For a Harvard Ph.D., you’re pretty smart,” I said.

She nodded and sipped from her wineglass.

“You and I,” she said, “have something few people ever get. And we’ve worked our asses off to get it.”

“I know.”

“I couldn’t bear it if they killed you,” she said.

I grinned at her.

“Me, either,” I said.

T
here was a big farmer porch on the front of the house that Ashton Prince had shared with Rosalind Wellington. There was a big tree in the front yard. If it had leaves, I might have known what kind it was. But in winter, with snow on all the limbs and no birds singing, I knew only that it was a tree and would probably have offered swell shade for the porch in summer.

It was a cold morning, and spitting snow. I ate in my car with the engine running and the heater on. The exhaust vapors would have alerted me or anyone like me to the presence of someone in the car. But Rosalind was not anyone like me, and was so self-absorbed that I thought it possible that she was never really alert to anything.

She came out her front door about nine-thirty wearing a striped multicolored knit cap pulled down over her ears and a bulky black quilted coat that reached her ankles. She paid neither my exhaust vapors nor me any heed at all, and strode off toward the college six blocks away.

When she was gone I took a small gym bag of tools and went to her front door. She hadn’t locked it with a key when she came out, so if it was locked, it would be a spring bolt and not a deadbolt. I took out a little flashlight and looked at the door latch. The door didn’t close snugly, and I could see the tongue of the spring bolt. Made duck soup look difficult. I took a small putty knife with a flexible blade from my gym bag and slid it into the opening. It took me less than a minute to lever the bolt back and open the door. I put my flashlight and putty knife back in the gym bag, zipped it up, and put it down just inside the front door. I took my jacket off and hung it on the inside doorknob. Spenser, King of the Burglars. B&E our specialty.

In the movies, when somebody searches a home, the place always looks like a model room in Bloomingdale’s furniture department. In the actual detective business, sometimes they don’t. Rosalind’s house was dusty. The living-room rug was threadbare, and the living-room furniture was inexpensive, and some of it sagged. There were dirty dishes in the sink. In the bedroom, the bed wasn’t made, and there were a lot of clothes on the floor.

I’d seen worse. I’d tossed a lot of homes.

I had already been there for a while when I came to what must have been Prince’s office. It had the feel of a place that had been closed up and silent for a while. The furniture needed help, and the room was dusty. But it was orderly. Prince’s desk was neat. To the right of his desk was a big painting of
Lady with a Finch
in a very ordinary-looking black frame. I walked over and looked at it. It had to be a copy, but even so, it was luminous. The tangibility of the lady and the bird was insistent.
The felt surface of life,
I thought.

On the desk, its top closed, was Prince’s laptop computer. I didn’t need to bother with it. Healy’s people would have gone through that and inventoried it after Prince’s death. I could get it from Healy. Besides, it was different from the one I had, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to make it go.

Prince’s calendar pad was open to the month he died, with entries for appointments he never kept scribbled in for dates well after his death. There was a sadness in the gap between the happy assumption that he’d be around to keep those appointments and the fact that he wasn’t.

I went through the calendar pad. I got nothing for my trouble. I understood what “pick up suit in a.m.” meant. But I didn’t care. There was a corkboard on the wall above Prince’s desk. There were various notes on it. Some were about scholarly stuff, names of articles, clippings from magazines I never heard of, and on the back of an envelope that had been torn in half was the name Herzberg. And a phone number. I put the note in my shirt pocket.

It took me another two hours to finish the house. Before I left I took one last slow walk through the place. Something kept poking at the edge of my awareness. I finished my final sweep of the house standing just inside the door of Prince’s office and slowly surveyed the room. One whole wall was books in a tired-looking bookcase. The window on the opposite wall looked out at the winter barren backyard. The Hermenszoon painting remained hanging on the wall, and then I realized what was bothering me. Except for the copy of
Lady with a Finch,
there were no paintings. In the home of a man who apparently had devoted his adult life to the study and appreciation of paintings, there was only one. The Hermenszoon copy was it.

It was hardly a eureka moment. But it was odd.

I
went back to my office and called the number I had found on Prince’s corkboard. A recording answered. A woman’s voice.

“This is the Herzberg Foundation. We can’t take your call, but please leave us a message at the sound of the tone.”

“Succinct,” I said aloud.

Nothing in my office responded.

I called the number every hour for the rest of the afternoon and got the same message. So, at twenty minutes to seven, I shut off the lights, locked up the office, and with my gun in hand, held inconspicuously against my thigh, went down to the alley where I parked. I stopped in the doorway. With my left hand I took out my car keys and, shielded in the doorway, reached out and started my car with the remote. The car did not explode. Encouraged, I walked down to it, got in, and drove to Cambridge.

When I got to Susan’s place and got past the five minutes of Pearl leaping up and lapping and chewing on one of her toys, I went on into the dining area, where Susan had the table set. Tablecloth, good china, nice crystal, a bouquet of flowers in the center, flanked by candles.

I kissed her.

“What’s for supper?” I said.

“I’ve ordered pizza,” she said.

“Pizza?”

“You love pizza,” Susan said.

“I do,” I said. “But the table’s set for duck à l’orange.”

“Doesn’t it look pretty?”

“Suze,” I said. “Pizza is normally eaten from the box, standing up, at the kitchen counter.”

“I got the flowers in the square,” she said. “I think it completes the table.”

“It certainly does,” I said.

The doorbell rang. Pearl barked.

Susan said, “Make us a drink. I’ll get the pizza.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said.

“There’s—Oh,” she said, “of course.”

The three of us went down to the front door, Pearl barking steadily. I had my gun out and stood just to the side, where I could see through the etched-glass window in the door.

It looked like a pizza delivery guy.

“Open the box,” I said to him. “I want a look.”