Rigby’s eye was untutored, but the old man’s talent and skill were easy to discern. The paintings on his walls ranged from seascapes to portraits to what Rigby took for abstractions, though they might have been ordinary household objects looked at from odd angles for all he could tell. He didn’t want to ask the old fellow, who was reading the L.A. Times at his dinner table, studiously ignoring him as he made the circuit of the living and dining room walls. Despite the variousness of their subject matter, they were all clearly by the same assured hand.
“Who’s the lady?” he asked of a portrait of a full-lipped, sultry-eyed woman, her blond hair pulled into a bun and holding a cigarette between her fingers. The vivid orange of the burning end of it had caught his eye before the woman’s face, but there was a melancholy, soulful quality to her that struck him as deeply erotic.
“That’s my late wife,” he said, eyes still on the paper.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. She went nuts not long after I painted it. Found Jesus and spent the rest of her life making me miserable.”
He couldn’t think of an appropriate verbal response, so he nodded and moved down the wall to a painting of a cow standing in a field and looking with what seemed to Rigby pure hatred at the viewer. “That’s an angry-looking cow.”
“He’s a steer. You’d be angry too.”
“So you’ve always been a painter?”
He set his paper down on the table and folded it up. “I’ve done a lot of other things. Worked as a commercial artist, worked in cartoons for a while, painting backgrounds. Fred Flintstone’s house, shit like that. Now that I’m retired, all I do is paint my own stuff.”
“You’re good at it.”
“How do you know?”
“They look good to me.”
“That and two dollars will get me a cup of coffee.”
Rigby sat down across from the old man at the long oak table in the dining room. “Mr. Seghers, I wonder if you’d entertain a proposition.”
“Might as well call me Will. The boy says you want to commission a picture. Portrait? You and the missus, maybe?”
“Not exactly. It’s more of a copy of an existing picture.”
Seghers raised an eyebrow. “A copy.”
“You’ve been in the Ventura art scene for a long time, is what Keith says.”
“Grew up in a house on Poli, right down the street from where Keith lives now. Apart from the war and a few years after it I’ve spent my whole life around here.”
“So I guess you’re familiar with a Russian painter, worked in Ojai, name of Kushik?”
His face went from curious to borderline threatening with remarkable speed, and looking at the thick, ropy tendons of his big hands, Rigby had to remind himself that the man was past ninety. “What about Kushik?”
“So you knew him?”
“I studied with him. We ended up on unfriendly terms.”
“Unfriendly how?”
“Doesn’t matter. I didn’t speak to him from 1953 until the day he died.”
“Is that so?”
“Fine painter, rotten human being.”
“Right. Here’s the thing. I have a client, an elderly client who’s not really in possession of his faculties.” He was struck with a sudden awareness of the need for tact. “I’m an attorney, I don’t know if Keith mentioned that.”
“He did, but I would have known anyway. You talk like one.”
“This client, he’s got an original Kushik.”
“Good for him, that’s worth a lot of scratch these days.”
“Thing is, he wants to give it away. To his old prep school in the Midwest, wants to show he made something of himself when they didn’t think he ever would. Of course every teacher and principal he ever had is six feet in the ground.”
Seghers drummed his fingers on the chair’s frame. “Seems to me it’s his right to do that if it pleases him.”
“Thing is, he doesn’t remember he promised to give the thing away. It means the world to him, it was a gift to his late wife from Kushik’s widow.”
Seghers paused for a moment and finally took a seat. He leaned across the table. “Mr. Rigby, you don’t appear to me to be a stupid man.”
“Thanks.”
“Do I look simple to you, then? Senile, maybe?”
“No, sir, you seem to be in remarkable shape for a man of, a man of your, uh, years.”
He squinted at Rigby in a manner that suggested the younger man was about to be ejected, by force if necessary. “Then why don’t you cut the shit and tell me what you’re really up to.”
“How’s that?”
“You’re full of beans. If you wanted to spare his tender feelings you could delay the gift until after he croaked.”
Rigby cursed himself for underestimating him and not having a better story. “The transfer was scheduled for this year, the school’s got some kind of ceremony planned.”
“Mr. Rigby, I’m going to give you one more chance before I throw your ass out onto my lawn. You’re asking me to be a party to a criminal enterprise, but you won’t let on the nature of that enterprise, in fact you deny that any criminality is involved. Now I’m not involved yet, but I know there’s some monkey business going on involving a phony Kushik. If you want me involved, level with me.”
Seghers would have made a good lawyer. Rigby thought about it for a moment. After the Billy Knox debacle it might be good to be involved with someone smarter than himself rather than stupider. “I want to give the school the copy and keep the real thing. My client has no idea what it’s worth.”
Seghers shook his head. It made him look tired. “Not a chance in hell that’ll work.”
“Uh-huh. What makes you say that?”
“A real Kushik hits the market in a few years’ time. It seems to be identical to one donated to this man’s alma mater. The experts convene. Kushik never painted the same subject twice. The question of provenance comes up, the fake is exposed, questions get asked. You haven’t thought this out. Now, why don’t we start over.”
At five-thirty in the morning when his phone started vibrating on the nightstand, Rigby was already awake, turning over in his mind all the complications inherent in the merging of his old plan and Seghers’s newer, more complicated one. He glanced at the screen:
*I WANT MY 5 GEE BITCH I KNOW WERE YOU *&LIVE
It was from the same number in the 805. Rigby stared at the message with incredulity at the notion that that skinny little fucker Knox had the audacity to threaten his home and family. His lack of anxiety came from a sure knowledge that he was in a better position to do his newly minted enemy harm than the reverse. Ernie Norwin, the boozy dolt who’d suggested the fuckwit for the job, had laid out the whole situation for Rigby: the girlfriend in Moorpark, the occasional troubles with the law, the reckless bravery and relative trustworthiness. Ernie didn’t know the nature of the job, but he still owed Rigby six hundred and fifty for getting his pay ungarnished on a child support beef, and he was grateful for any way of taking off pressure.
“There’s his apartment,” Ernie had said, scrawling a nearly unreadable address onto a cocktail napkin, on which he had already doodled a pair of breasts as well as a pretty decent rendering of a thick-veined penis about to enter a very hairy vagina. “If he’s not there, he’s in Moorpark with Magda.”
It occurred to Rigby now that maybe he owed Ernie Norwin a broken jaw as well. But better to forget about that unsettled score, at least until Knox had been dealt with properly.
He wasn’t going to get back to sleep, so he got up and showered. Once he was dressed, he went to the kitchen to make some coffee and was startled to find both his daughters sitting at the kitchen table, eating cereal and reading the Ventura County edition of the Times.
“What are you girls doing up at this hour?”
They glanced at one another, and then Fiona said, “What are you doing up at this hour? We’re always up by five-thirty. You’re usually still sleeping when we go to school.”
“Why so early?”
“It’s the only way we have time to read the paper.”
“You’re eleven years old.”
“Almost twelve,” Isolde said.
“So if you’re eleven you shouldn’t be informed?” Fiona said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Who’s the secretary of the Treasury?” Fiona asked.
“How should I know?”
Once again the girls exchanged glances, not bothering to hide their smirks. He filled the coffee maker with water and popped a pod into place, then hit the on button.
“I guess this happens to everybody eventually. You wake up one morning and your kids know more than you do,” he said. Neither of them contradicted him, and before his coffee was ready, they were both engrossed in the paper again.
By six-thirty, Rigby was standing on Stony Flynn’s doorstep on the outskirts of Ojai. Stony had made it known from the outset that he didn’t approve of Rigby’s direct involvement in the purchase of the purloined coke. “Not your world, brah,” he’d said. “No offense, but you’re a slick, legit guy, you’re dealing with people unlike yourself. Put up the money and let someone else do the messy parts.” Rigby planned to avoid the subject altogether if possible.
Stony opened the door, fully dressed in denim overalls over a yellow T-shirt with a hidden logo, and Rigby suspected that he hadn’t been to bed yet. “Yo,” he said, opening the door to let Rigby cross the threshold. “Have a seat.”
Rigby sat down on a plain wooden chair next to a round table.
“You want some coffee?”
“If it’s made, I wouldn’t mind.”
Stony nodded and limped into the kitchen, past a worn-out curtain made of old bedsheets, and hollered back into the living room. “You didn’t see a polydactyl cat outside, did you?”
“A what?”
“Cat with thumbs, basically.”
“No.” An overwhelming feline odor hung over the little house, an overflowing litter box sat in the corner, and all over the room were mounds of laundry, though it was impossible to tell which mounds were clean and which were dirty. Rigby had been surprised one day a month earlier when Stony’s wife showed up in her blue scrubs after a shift at the animal hospital; he’d assumed that only a single man could live like that.
He came back into the living room and set two mugs down on the bare, scarred wood of the table, then sat across from Rigby. The big man was splendidly hirsute; he shaved every day above his jawline, but it had been years since razor or scissors had touched a hair below it, and the locks flowing from his throat were luxuriant and curly.
“How’d your operation go?”
“Fine.”
He nodded, hard and only once. “Good.”
They sat for a minute in silence, and finally Rigby gave in and spoke first. “I need a gun.”
Stony held his gaze for an uncomfortably long moment, and Rigby had to concentrate hard in order not to avert his eyes. “Operation went good, you said.”
“This is something else.”
“Uh-huh.” His expression didn’t change, and he didn’t inquire further, just sat there staring at Rigby.
“So, obviously, one that won’t get traced back to you.”
“I’ve got one that’ll do you. Three hundred dollars. Best I can do.”
“Kind of steep, isn’t it?”
“Not when you consider the amount of risk I’m taking personally.”
“Didn’t I just ask for a gun can’t be traced back to you?”
“You did, and this one can’t, at the moment. Once you’ve used it, though, there’s a trail leads back to me.”
“You don’t think I’d give you up if I got caught, do you?”
“I don’t have any basis to judge. You seem like a smart man, and you helped me out on a couple of occasions, so I owe you. But I’ll tell you once again, you’re a well-educated, well-off man, a lawyer, and this kind of shit is not where your expertise lies.”
Rigby had been prepared to pay five hundred. He opened his wallet and pulled out three Benjamins. Stony leaned across the table, nodding once with a grunt that might have been an acknowledgment that a deal had been struck, or might have been an expression of the exertion of leaning.
Then he stood and headed for the kitchen. “I’ll go fetch it, then. But I still advise against it. You bring this gun back to me unfired, and I’ll give you your money back.”
“How will you know if I’ve fired it or not?”
Stony turned to face him. “I’ll look in your eyes,” he said before disappearing through the vertical bedsheets.
Rigby sat in his poor dead buddy Britt’s Denali on a side street perpendicular to a darkened Moorpark street, with a nice view of the row of dingy apartments above the frilly dresses and spangled party favors in the quinceañera supply place beneath them. It was 11 p.m., the store and its neighbors all closed for the night, and if the other apartments were occupied they showed no sign of it. There wasn’t much in the way of foot traffic, either, the orange streetlights glowing on empty pavement and the occasional passing sedan.
He didn’t feel in the least agitated, not even with the gun holstered underneath his sport jacket, not knowing whether or not he’d be called upon to use it. By eleven-thirty, though, he was bored, and he lacked the patience to sit there all night until Knox and his girlfriend came home from whatever glue-sniffing donkey show they were at.
Beth still used Britt’s Denali for certain tasks calling for its hauling capability, which made Rigby feel a little weird in the same way that fucking her in Britt’s bedroom did—why not trade the thing in and get another one that hadn’t belonged to a dead person? It was the same reason he got the heebie-jeebies around people wearing vintage clothing. Paula came home once from an estate sale with a fifties-era dress she thought he’d find sexy, and the thought still made him shudder. “The person who used to wear that is dead,” he said. “Of course she is, it was an estate sale. Don’t you want to fuck me in it?” she’d asked, puzzled and hurt. Jesus, Paula.
Now, though, he’d found an upside to Beth’s continued use of the SUV. On the seat was a big plastic bag containing various sorts of office supplies, leftover tools of whichever volunteer job she’d been working that afternoon.
He put the Denali into gear and drove around to the alley behind the apartments. Already wearing latex gloves because of the gun, he climbed up the fire escape to the second story and tried the door. It was locked, but its paint was flaking and the wood around the knob looked ready to crumble, so he took a step back and put his shoulder into it. There came a satisfying, promising crack, and he stepped back and shoved again, harder. This time it gave, sending splinters of rotten wood into the dark hallway.
He couldn’t find a light switch, but the streetlight outside was sufficiently bright for him to see the name schuller written in punch-out tape underneath the letter b on one of the doors. That would be Ms. Magda Schuller, Knox’s girlfriend. Underneath it, he put one of Beth’s Post-its, with a message printed in Magic Marker:
i found you