10

Fred said, “You paid Smykal cash?”

Clayton and Fred sat in the yard in folding chairs while Molly stood in her kitchen doorway in the yellow terry wrapper Fred had given her, holding her coffee mug, from which the steam had long since stopped rising.

Clay made an expression of distaste. “The man said cash was the only form of payment he would consider. He could find someone else if I was not interested. He gave me three hours. Bluff, of course. But I didn’t want him to try. I immediately cashed a check, came back, gave him cash, took the letter, as I thought, and arranged that you would pick up the painting an hour later.”

“Did Smykal understand what he was selling you?”

“He did and he didn’t. I told him enough to make my interest reasonable. Of course not. He knew basically what it was. He knew what he wanted for it.”

Clay was stalling.

“Look,” Fred said. “I have to know, is there anything to show you were in that apartment?”

“If Smykal made notes, he didn’t have my name. It’s obvious he wanted to keep our transaction secret. Let them look all they want for Arthur Arthurian.”

“How did you find the man?” Fred asked. “What’s the connection? How did you locate the painting of Conchita Hill there? From the mark on the wall, he’d had it a long time. It’s dangerous to keep secrets now, Clay. Can someone follow this project back to us?”

“There is a remote chance.”

Molly’s hiss of indrawn breath was clear as a kettle reaching the boil.

“I think not. I think it is remote enough,” Clayton said. He didn’t want Fred to learn his methods.

“Clay, there are times to play games, and games to be played, and games I don’t need and won’t play. I’m in this, too. Come off it.”

“Sarah Chatterjee at the Genealogical Society. She did the research under my guidance,” Clay said, smirking until he recalled the corpse. “Conchita Hill married Simon Goodson. In Baltimore. They had a daughter, Sarah, who married Franklin Arbuthnot. In Cleveland. Their daughter Annie married Henry Smykal. Senior. Of Somerville, Mass.,” Clayton recited from memory. He would have it all down on file cards as well, translated from Miss Chatterjee’s report. She’d have told him where everyone had gone to school, the names and numbers of offspring, and the rest.

At least Clay hadn’t discovered it himself, Fred thought.

“And Miss Chatterjee is…?” Molly asked.

“In Bengal for six months, visiting her mother,” Clay said. “That is our good fortune, I imagine.”

“Therefore the woman in the painting,” Molly said, counting on her fingers, “was Smykal’s great-grandma. In that nasty place.”

“I should probably tell you,” Fred said, “that I found Smykal’s body and concealed the fact.”

Clay looked at Fred, thinking. He stroked the Unitarian stripes on his necktie, settling them down. “I’m glad to hear that, Fred,” he said. “Therefore you had a chance to search for the letter.”

His look turned expectant.

Fred saw Molly start and open her mouth to say something, and then close it again, tight, saying it to herself through clenched teeth instead.

“It wasn’t to be found,” Fred said. “Not in the time I had.”

“A shame,” Clay said, still solicitous of number one. “I want that letter. It has to be somewhere. Between the time I saw it in his hand and when I brought the money to him, on Friday, he had three hours. Where did he put it? You don’t suppose you could go back now…” His voice trailed off in response to Fred’s snort of incredulity. “No, I suppose they have the apartment sealed or whatever it is they do.”

“If you gentlemen will excuse me,” Molly said, “I’ll get dressed.”

She slammed into the house.

*   *   *

Clayton was badly spooked. Fred had been right to tell him nothing. A murder happening near enough to the both of them for them to feel the wind of it—that was alarming. “A rude reminder of mortality,” Clay called it. They were sitting in the aluminum chairs, which Clay also found, it seemed, a rude reminder of mortality, to judge from the way he crossed his grasshopper legs and fidgeted.

They looked the situation over. In the course of twenty-four hours, it appeared, they might well have lost, simultaneously on two separate fronts, their advantage on the Heade and the hope of completing the provenance on the recumbent Conchita Hill.

As far as Smykal’s murder was concerned, what was their exposure? If either Clayton or Fred had been seen at Smykal’s apartment, it was by someone who did not know them.

“But can we keep out of it? Our fingerprints will be there,” Clay said. “I imagine there’s something in that business of fingerprints?”

“They have to compare them to something,” Fred said. “Fingerprints without reference mean nothing, like the exhibition history of a picture you can’t find. But we could volunteer, tell them we were in the apartment. If we don’t, we set a record that looks like guilty knowledge. If they’re going to find out anyway, it’s better we tell them now than they find out later.”

“How would that help me get that letter?” Clay asked. “I keep recalling the way he strove to rub my face in his photographs! Can I want my associates and friends to think of me in such a place? Still … how do we get the letter, with who knows what storms washing around the place? You have many skills, Fred. I am sure you can manage something. It’s too bad about Smykal—a tragedy from his point of view. But for us, as you keep pointing out, Fred, the important thing’s the Heade. He’s clever, and he has great power,” Clay said, standing and walking toward Molly’s back fence.

It took Fred a minute to understand. He realized that the Vermeer had filled Clayton’s horizon again; he was talking about Albert Finn.

“We know Finn’s in the game since he’s staying in town.” Clay looked at his watch. “I have a wedding in Manchester I must get to, Fred. I conclude we should be guided by your judgment, which you have described so vividly using the metaphor of lying in ambush in a swamp. We must lie low and still, saying nothing while we watch carefully ourselves. Let us not allow them to see the water shake.”

Fred agreed that they might as well keep silent at least until the auction was played out, acknowledging to himself what Clay did not seem to recognize, that any risk being undertaken according to this plan was primarily Fred’s.

In the meantime, Clay suggested that “since we are citizens, and if you can do so without risking the possibility of my painting’s being confiscated from me as evidence in a crime,” Fred might as well use his many skills to pluck the letter safe and well from this flaming disaster, without letting himself be noticed.

“And if I’m caught, say I don’t know you?” Fred shot at Clayton as he turned to go.

Clay pretended not to hear. Ever the gentleman, he said, walking out the side gate to the front of the house, “Please thank the lady Molly for her hospitality, and apologize for me again for my breaking into the tranquillity of your Sunday morning.

“I’ll understand if you don’t come in tomorrow,” he added. “Call. I may have an idea. You may also have something to tell me. I agree with your sage advice, though. Don’t lose track of our primary objective: the Heade. Whatever you do, don’t ruffle the surface.”

Clayton paused in thought, the idea struggling for completion. “What’s ruffled will not reflect,” he told Fred.