The Bubble Gum Thief (2 page)

A white business card stood at the front of a box of Chewey’s Cinnamon Gum. Crosby had just opened the box the day before. Now one pack was missing. Crosby laughed. The hooded sweatshirt, the glasses, the gloves, even the Biggie-Gulp-cup ploy...all for a pack of gum. He picked up the white card.

THIS IS MY FIRST CRIME.
MY NEXT WILL BE BIGGER.

He turned the card over. A stick of Chewey’s gum, still in the foil wrapper, was stuck to the back of the card, held in place by a small piece of Scotch tape. Crosby tore the stick of gum off the card, unwrapped the foil, and folded the gum into his mouth. He balled up the foil and tossed it into the trash. The card, he figured, would make for a good story at school, so he stuffed it into his wallet.

Crosby looked at his watch. It was only two forty. He still had three and a half hours to kill. Suzi’s party would be over by then. Cursing his father, he walked around the counter and put on his sweater, then picked up the issue of
Sports Illustrated
and sat down behind the register. Flipping through the magazine, Crosby found the cover story. It began, “On March 6, 1972, Lucille O’Neal gave birth to a seven-pound eleven-ounce baby boy.”

Sometimes big things start small, Crosby figured.

January 1—Washington, DC

Dagny Gray’s 2006 Prius was outfitted with the Option 5 package, which included Bluetooth phone integration, a line in to the stereo for her iPod, and a built-in GPS navigational system that currently showed a street map of Georgetown and a little red triangle that wasn’t moving. The little red triangle was Dagny’s car, and it wasn’t moving because traffic doesn’t move in Washington, DC—people just sit in their cars and wait for the earth to turn.

When the earth finally turned, Dagny saw something she’d never seen in Georgetown—an empty parking space on M Street. She flipped on her turn signal and pulled just ahead of the space. A man in a silver BMW ignored the gesture and pulled up behind her. Dagny honked, but the Beamer didn’t budge—the man just crossed his arms and smiled smugly, waiting to claim the space. If he’d wanted to block her entry, he should have pulled closer. Dagny sized up her clearance. If she angled it just right, she’d have an inch or two to spare on each side. She threw her Prius into reverse and floored the accelerator, turned the wheel hard to the right, then just as quickly to the left. In one swift, fluid motion,
she slid into the space. Even better, she’d come close enough to give the BMW driver a deserved scare.

Dagny’s satisfaction faded as she watched the noblesse filtering into Zegman’s Gallery. Though she could hold her own among the effete and well heeled, she preferred the warm embrace of a good book and a well-worn couch, or the iPod-assisted solitude of a long run on the Mount Vernon Trail, or the torturous agony of her Arabic study, or a rusty nail embedded in her foot. But she’d promised Julia Bremmer she’d come, and Julia was her last close friend. She’d lost other friendships to geography or dereliction. Julia’s friendship was worth saving.

Besides, she had promised herself that this would be the year she’d learn to have fun, even if it was no fun at all.

Dagny was thinking about this promise when her phone rang. She didn’t have to check the display to know that Julia was canceling their plans.

“TRO,” Julia said. This meant temporary restraining order—and that Julia was stuck working on one. She was an associate at Baxter Wallace, one of the top litigation firms in town. Baxter Wallace was originally Baxter, Wallace, and McCallister, but McCallister got the shaft when some marketing consultants decided that the firm’s name was too long. It didn’t matter to McCallister, or to Baxter or Wallace, for that matter; all three of them were long dead.

“Blow it off.”

“I can’t. Not this year.” Julia was up for partner—more precisely, non-equity partner, which, like nonalcoholic beer, doesn’t taste very good and is no substitute for the real thing. “I’m sorry, Dag.”

“It’s okay, Jules. I didn’t want to go anyway.”

Julia’s voice rose. “No, no, no. Dag, you should still go in.”

“I don’t—”

“You
have
to.”

Dagny hadn’t seen it coming, but this excursion was a setup. “I’m not in dating shape.”

“You’re never in dating shape. Maybe you need to date to get in shape. Plus, your resolution—”

“I don’t think I used the word resolution,” Dagny protested.

“Just go,” Julia said, before hanging up.

Dagny tucked the phone back in her purse. No matter what it was called—“resolution” or “promise”—Dagny had vowed to change her life, and she couldn’t give up on the first day, especially after such a strong start. That morning, she’d picked through the boxes in her basement to find the hair dryer she hadn’t used since her last move. After her shower, she’d brushed her long black hair straight instead of tying it in the usual ponytail. Her cheeks were powdered with the slightest blush, while her eyelashes carried the unfamiliar weight of mascara. And under her new red leather swing coat, she wore her favorite black dress. It was padded in all the right places.

Dagny waited for the traffic to wane before climbing out of the car. She walked to the front of the gallery and peered through the windows, eyeing the suits and gowns inside. Some of the women towered over their dates. Dagny’s eyes followed their bodies down to their feet and saw that they were uniformly elevated by two- or three-inch heels. She looked down at her own sneakers and shrugged. At five nine, she was plenty tall, and the sneakers were black and almost looked like dress shoes. If she looked out of place, so be it. She never wore heels—not anymore.

Dagny opened the gallery door and stepped into the vestibule. A sign on the interior door announced the name of the show:
A Georgetown Collection
. Dagny picked a program off a nearby table and began flipping through its pages. A couple walked through the entry door, passed Dagny, and continued through the second door into the gallery. They moved effortlessly, gliding through in mere seconds. Dagny wondered how they did it.

Someone had left a copy of the day’s
Washington Post
next to the programs. Dagny scanned the front page. The president was urging Congress to enact tougher penalties for white-collar criminals. A young black kid had been shot and killed at a New Year’s Eve concert at the 11:30 Club. Trouble in the Middle East. It was the same news every day. Dagny glanced at her watch—5:26 p.m.—took a deep breath, and walked into the gallery.

In the main room, a densely packed mob sipped cocktails and chattered away about their latest successes. Dagny heard snippets of conversation, things like, “I read his piece in
The New Republic
” and, “How old do you think
she
is?” Two long lines snaked through the crowd, leading to cash bars on each side of the room. A woman in a tuxedo vest carried a tray of appetizers—something wrapped in prosciutto—and normally dignified socialites stumbled over each other to grab them before they were gone. Dagny looked for an avenue of escape. Because even the most devoted cognoscenti of art care more about wine and cheese than paint and canvas, the exhibition room to the right was nearly empty, so she went there.

Dagny knew a little about art. She could tell a Monet from a Manet, and a Titian from a Tintoretto. But with a million dollars and the lives of a thousand screaming babies on the line, she couldn’t have distinguished most of the dreck on the gallery walls from the thirty-dollar paintings hawked at starving-artist sales in Holiday Inn conference rooms. The first three paintings were impressionistic landscapes, remarkable only for their absolute irrelevance. If there was anything interesting to say about water lilies, Dagny was pretty sure it had been said a hundred years earlier. A black canvas with a red square in the middle had been titled
Red Canvas with a Black Square in the Middle
, presumably to convey the artist’s witty and elevated sense of irony. The title didn’t make her laugh, but the painting’s $1,200 price tag did.

One painting put the others to shame. In it, a man stood at the edge of a cliff, overlooking a city. The city was painted like a dark, violent storm, with thick, swirling strokes, like Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
. But the man was rendered in a realistic, even romantic, style. He was strong and athletic, and his features were fine and distinct. He wore a suit and tie, and held his jacket casually over his shoulder, untroubled by the chaos below.

“Isn’t it awful?” a voice said from behind. Dagny turned toward the man who said it. First, she noticed that he was tall. Then she noticed his navy-blue Brooks Brothers suit and black wing-tip shoes. These were standard issue for a lawyer or a lobbyist, though the curl of his hair in the back suggested he was neither. Sky-blue eyes and a soft smile. Cleft chin and a square jaw. He was more handsome than beautiful. “Absolutely awful,” he continued in a deep, soothing voice. “Glorious man and the savage society. It’s sloppy and indulgent. The artist must be a real egoist. Probably insufferable.”

“I don’t know,” Dagny said. “You seem okay to me.”

He smiled. “That obvious?”

She figured that he was in his early forties—not
too
old, considering she was rapidly approaching thirty-five. No ring, of course. Julia had made that mistake once before. She wondered if he was divorced. If so, then why did the marriage fail? If not, what was wrong with him? His hands were manicured, but there was still some dirt under his nails. She noticed a small scar above his left eyebrow. His lips were full and chapped. He had a swimmer’s build—she liked that. “I’m Dagny Gray.” She stuck out her hand and he shook it.

“Cool name. Very Myrna Loy. I’m Michael Brodsky,” he replied. “But you can call me Mike.”

“I would have anyway.”

He smiled at this, which Dagny liked.

“You don’t really look like an artist,” she continued.

He laughed. “Why not?”

“The suit, for starters.”

“You’d expect a horizontal black-and-white striped shirt, beret. Palette in hand?”

“I was thinking more thrift-store chic.” As she said it, a man wearing a corduroy jacket, ripped jeans, and black-rimmed glasses walked by. They both laughed.

“Please tell me that you’re Julia’s friend,” Dagny said.

“I am.”

“Thank God.”

He smiled, then surveyed the room and sighed. “You wanna ditch this? Get a cup a coffee? Maybe sit down and talk? I can’t stand these gallery crowds.”

“Yes.” She was surprised by how quickly she had answered.

He took her arm and led her to the door. As they stepped into the cold, their breath made a cloud in the air. She shivered, and he put his arm around her. If another man had done this, she would have recoiled. But it felt natural, and warm, and right.

They crossed the street, ducked into Dean & DeLuca, and headed for a table in the corner. Mike pulled Dagny’s chair out for her and asked, “What can I get you?”

“Decaf. Black.”

“No mocha-something-or-other?” he asked, smiling.

“Never.” She watched him walk to the counter and wondered if he knew how hard she was trying.

He returned a few moments later with two cups of coffee and a couple of pieces of chocolate. “Try this,” he said, setting one of the pieces in front of her. “It’s incredible.”

The three-quarter-inch cube before her was expertly molded and beautifully accented with a raspberry squiggle across the top and deep, ornate grooves on the sides. It probably cost eight dollars. And it was probably delicious. It was also 90 calories, half of them from fat. Don’t blow this, she told herself. She’d just run an
extra half mile the next day. She lifted the chocolate to her mouth and took a tiny quarter bite. If this was going to be her treat, she was going to make it last.

“It’s delicious,” she said, and it was.

“So how do you know Julia?”

“She’s my best friend. We went to law school together. What about you?

“She and her husband commissioned a painting.”

Julia hadn’t mentioned this. “More romantic heroism versus the savage society?”

He laughed. “Something like that. A portrait of her father, actually.”

“He’s an amazing man, and she adores him. I think you’re the right artist for the job.”

“Thank you,” he said, consuming his chocolate in one bite. Dagny bit off the next quarter from her piece. “I have to ask,” he said. “When I came up to you at the gallery, how did you—”

“Your picture was in the program,” she said.

“You remember all the faces in the program?”

“Just yours.”

He smiled. “What else do you remember?”

“I remember that you teach art history at Georgetown. That you specialize in the Italian Renaissance, but you wrote a book about the Flemish painter Hans Memling. You won the Mare Warrington Award in 2003, though I don’t know who she is. Your middle initial is A.” Dagny took another bite of the chocolate, leaving only a quarter. It was disappearing too quickly.

He nodded. “You remember all that?”

“I’m amazing,” she joked. “But I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about your work. It’s...”

“Yes?”