Chapter 34
Once Bernie was inside the Westovers’ house, she paused to pick a sliver of wood out of her thigh, straighten her dress, and put on her sandal, which had somehow slipped off her foot. Then she looked around the kitchen. There were dishes piled in the sink, last night’s dinner dishes on the table, and a frying pan that needed to be washed sitting on the stove. Bernie was surprised. It certainly hadn’t been like this the last time she and Libby had been here.
She took a quick look around, opening and closing cabinet drawers, and peering in the pantry and the broom closet. She didn’t expect to find anything in those places, and she was correct. She didn’t. Next, she moved on to the living and dining rooms.
In contrast to the kitchen, they looked the same as they had last time. Neat, furnished in good taste, dominated by the pictures hanging on the walls. Once again, Bernie paused to study them, drawn in by their power. How wonderful to live with something like this, Bernie decided.
Odd that the house wasn’t alarmed, Bernie thought, as she moved on to the office, but, then again, it would take a special kind of thief to steal these paintings. It wasn’t as if you could hock them at the local pawn shop. In contrast to the kitchen, the office was spotless. “A place for everything and everything in its place” was the phrase that sprung into Bernie’s head.
An expensive oriental rug graced the floor, while three walls were covered with made-to-order, floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, all filled with art books. A large poster that featured a picture of the Westovers’ gallery hung on the fourth wall above the desk.
Bernie plunked herself down in the chair in front of the desk and studied the laptop sitting on top of it. It reminds me of a Cyclops with the screen as the giant eye, she thought as she tried the MacBook Air, but it was password-protected, which she had expected. After a couple of minutes futzing around, trying out various passwords, she gave up that mission as a waste of time and began leafing through the pile of papers on the desk. Most of them were junk mail, but about halfway down she came across a letter from the IRS. It was addressed to the Westovers. Never a good thing, Bernie thought, as she slid the letter out of its envelope and unfolded it.
“Oh dear,” she said out loud as she read the contents.
It was a request for an audit. The IRS was demanding tax records for the Westovers’ gallery for the past seven years. Bernie shuddered. This was her worst nightmare. She just hoped, for the Westovers’ sake, that their records were in better shape than A Little Taste of Heaven’s were. She and Libby really had to get their act together, Bernie decided, as she replaced the letter in the envelope and put it back in the pile where she’d found it. She and Libby kept saying they were going to get organized, but they never did. Their records were all over the place. Literally.
No more excuses, she vowed, as she started in on the desk drawers. The first two contained USB cables, takeout menus, a bottle of aspirin, a wrist guard, computer paper, stationery, staplers, scissors, and a large collection of pens and pencils. In other words, they looked like her and Libby’s desk drawers—full of miscellaneous stuff. The third drawer, however, proved to be more interesting. It contained a checkbook ledger and several checkbooks. Thank God, some people still did things the old-fashioned way, Bernie thought.
The first thing Bernie noticed when she took out the checkbooks was that there were two different accounts. Even though Bernie wasn’t good with figures—that was Libby’s area of expertise—as she went through the checkbooks and the ledger, it became readily apparent to her that the Westovers were keeping two separate sets of books. And, even worse, they were keeping them badly. Really badly, Bernie thought.
She frowned. At least, if you were going to do this kind of thing, do it well. This was like amateur night, although Bernie supposed that the Westovers could always burn the checkbooks and the ledger if necessary. She wondered if there was an accounting program on the laptop that they were using as well. That would be harder to get rid of. They’d have to destroy the laptop to do that.
Not that it really mattered, because if she could figure this out, it would take the IRS guy less than two seconds to do so as well. Bernie shuddered again. I wouldn’t want to be in their position, she thought as she took pictures of the two different sets of checkbooks with her phone, before putting everything back exactly where she’d found it. The IRS would not be amused if they saw what the Westovers were doing. They could do jail time for something like this. Then Bernie remembered what Clyde had said about the FBI having opened files on the Glassbergs and the Westovers. But had they closed them? Or were they still open? That was the question. And more to the point, how did this relate to Margo’s killing? Or did it?
Bernie was wondering what her father would say, if she told him, as she went upstairs and looked through the three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and the attic, but unlike in the office, there was nothing in any of the rooms that didn’t belong there. On her way out of the house, Bernie went by the hall closet and realized she hadn’t looked through it. I should, she thought. After all, it would only take another minute or two, and who knew? Maybe she’d find something else of interest in there as well.
Apparently not, Bernie decided when she looked inside. The first thing she saw were seven coats hanging on bentwire hangers. The coats looked old, the kind you put on to shovel snow or run out to get the paper or wore to walk the dog in the morning. Bernie quickly went through the coat pockets; there turned out to be nothing in them except old receipts, crumpled-up pieces of paper, and a few candy wrappers. Just garbage. Nevertheless, she stuffed the receipts in her pocket, then directed her attention toward the cartons. They were small packing cartons from Home Depot. She counted seven of them stacked on top of each other. They weren’t sealed.
The flaps were open, and their contents were visible. Bernie could make out a couple of old lamps, and about a dozen books in the first one and a hodgepodge of old computer equipment in the second. The third carton contained a tangle of hangers, while the fourth one was full of board games. Bernie decided the cartons looked as if they were full of stuff that had been moved, stuffed in the closet, and forgotten about. She opened the flaps of two more cartons and found more junk. So much for that, she thought.
“Time to go,” Bernie said to herself. She went to close the door, but when she started to push it closed, she realized she hadn’t restacked the cartons properly and one of them had toppled over. She righted it and was bending down to pick up a pack of felt-tip markers that had fallen out when she spotted two picture frames jammed into the back. She pulled them out.
“Wow,” she said. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. These were the two Eakinses, the ones the Glassbergs had been looking for, the ones that had disappeared from Margo’s house. What were they doing here? Had the Westovers stolen them? That was the reasonable explanation.
As Bernie looked at them again, she realized why the frames had looked familiar. She’d seen Gilda loading them into her vehicle when she and Libby had pulled up to the Peterson Gallery in Nyack. Bernie clicked her tongue against her teeth while she thought. Did this mean that Rebecca, the owner of the gallery, was involved in this mess? She’d said she didn’t know anything about the missing paintings. Had she been lying? It would be interesting to know.
Bernie was contemplating the possible ramifications of what she’d discovered when her cell rang. She took it out. It was her sister.
“Yes, Libby,” Bernie said, answering.
“The Westovers are coming up the block. I can see their car. You’d better get out of their house now.”
“Roger that,” Bernie said, and she clicked off. Time to put the Eakinses back where she’d found them, she thought, but then she had a better idea. A much better idea.
Bernie smiled. This was going to be fun. Lots and lots of fun. Not that her sister would think so.