AFTER SPENDING THE rest of the day at the gravelly beach in Tobermory, eating beaver tails and drinking a beer or two, we drove home, stopping for chips at a roadside fry wagon.
All the time, I was thinking about the counterfeit Thomson at the Grand Trunk Factory. Surely it would get discovered once an experienced curator found it. And since it was to be auctioned off, it had to be promoted online and in print literature. So, someone knowledgeable was bound to see it and call the gallery out, causing embarrassment and possible fraud charges.
But was it likely that someone would detect the fraud? Group of Seven paintings aren’t exactly rare items. Especially in Canada. Even more so in Ontario. My parents had one. What were the odds someone would identify this one as a fraud? And was it a fake? Or was the one in the Thomson Gallery the fake one?
But, if this was all a setup and the person wanted to make the gallery look bad, I’m sure that an actual murder made better headlines. The gallery was going to suffer from the death of a prominent art critic. But was that the plan? I hoped not. It was the most cynical and misanthropic way to put a place out of business.
“Hey, let’s force this place to close by killing someone,” I mumbled quietly.
Lacroix looked at me sideways. “Let’s do what?”
“I was just wondering why someone would kill that art critic.”
Lacroix shrugged. “Didn’t he give you a bad review that one time?”
I shrugged back. “Yeah, but what does killing him get me? I don’t get anything from his death, except trouble.”
Who would actually benefit from this? How about the big city Executive Director who liked breaking the rules and taking things in new directions? What would he gain by killing Neumann?
Lacroix dropped by the Division 3 police station to pick a few things up, and I left him there, opting to walk home. He bumped into Liebowitz on the way in, so to save face, he threatened me with jail if I left town. I replied that I hoped he wouldn’t get caught at a roadside sobriety stop, and smiled as Liebowitz grabbed his ear and dragged him inside.
But instead of going straight home, I figured it might be a good idea to grab some food while I was uptown. I couldn’t really decide on anything, and my mind kept going back to wondering about motives for murder.
As I passed a Persian restaurant and looked in at the window at falafels being made, my stomach started grumbling. It was getting dark out, so must have been after 6:00 p.m. I’d eaten nothing but junk food today, so some kind of healthy dish made of deep-fried chickpeas sounded delicious.
Suddenly I remembered Virgil and Mariyam Ahmed. I kept walking, thinking about something Virgil had said about obtaining a new building for his high-tech company. And didn’t Sanderson talk about trying to lure more high-tech companies to town? Possibilities swarmed through my head as I passed a pizzeria, and thought about Bruno Passi. Next door to the Italian joint was a Thai-Viet place that served a great Tom Yum soup, and I immediately thought of Peter Lorre—I mean Sonny Vuu. The two of them ran a rather predatory development group that bought up farmland at pennies on the dollar, held the land for years, then developed it and sold it off when prices skyrocketed. I bet they were in on this.
But aside from all that, I knew one thing. Uptown Waterloo had a lot of diverse restaurants. I idly wondered if there was a place that had Uyghur noodles. After much deliberation, I realized I was no closer to any conclusion over who might be behind this murder, nor what kind of food to buy for dinner. After walking around the corner on William St., I found myself in front of City Hall.
Could there be answers inside? Definitely yes.
Could there be food inside? Probably not.