6
Randy grinned as our eyes met across the hallway outside the ladies’ lounge on the second floor of the MAC. “We meet again.” He extended his hand, and my breath lodged in my throat.
Was he talking about last night? Or back at the table?
“Your Aunt Martha tells me you’re a friend of my brother, Nate.”
“Ah—” I forced the lump from my throat. “Yes.”
His grin widened as his fingers closed around mine. “He’s been holding out on me.”
Aunt Martha beamed at me, apparently forgetting that her favorite pick for me had been out with another woman last night. “Randy didn’t realize we were related.”
Randy’s thumb lingered over an abrasion on the side of my hand that I must’ve gotten during the takedown. “You and Nate dating?”
“Just friends.”
Aunt Martha rolled her eyes. “Only because she’s as gun-shy as your brother.”
I shot her the evil eye. She made it sound like I was afraid of commitment, when I was just being practical. What kind of guy wanted to put up with the hours I kept?
Randy chuckled, and I couldn’t help but wonder if, unlike me, Nate really was gun-shy. And why.
Movement at the dining room’s entrance seemed to catch Randy’s eye, and he excused himself.
“What are you doing here? Following me?” I asked Aunt Martha, realizing too late that if I was wrong and her luncheon date had been entirely innocent, her antenna would shoot up now. After all, I wouldn’t be worried about being spied on if I wasn’t up to something I didn’t want her to know about.
“Pfft.” She waved off the accusation. “I was here before you.” Only she didn’t meet my gaze, and her hand was fluttering again. “You know if you keep taking every chap’s interest for granted, one day you’re going to find they’ve all gone shopping elsewhere.”
Oh yeah, she was definitely deflecting. That was my mother’s line, not my happily single-all-her-life Aunt Martha’s line.
“Okay, so you were following Nana to find out why she wanted to see me?”
“Nonsense! Your mum already told me that. She wanted your opinion on some art.”
I searched her eyes, certain she was playing me. And not minding, really. But Nana would be livid if I spilled anything about Gladys’s misfortune to Aunt Martha. “So you’ll be heading home now?”
“Not yet. I wanted to nip to a friend’s first.” She gave me a hug. “I won’t keep you from your lunch date any longer. Wouldn’t want to get you in your grandmother’s bad books.”
By the time I returned to the table, Pete was gone.
Nana clapped her knife and fork on her plate a tad too deliberately. “What kept you so long?”
“Sorry, couldn’t be helped. Pete gone back to work?”
“Yes,” Gladys chirped, appearing much more at ease than she had before I left. “He said to tell you bye.”
“Well, then, what do you say we head to your house so I can get the full story on your missing painting?” I tucked my tote bag sporting the Degas under my arm. “I just need to stop by headquarters to drop this off and then I’ll meet you there.”
Gladys lived in the affluent Central West End, northeast of Forest Park—the neighborhood at one time or another of such famous families as the Johnsons of Johnson & Johnson, Tennessee Williams, and poet T. S. Eliot. Gladys’s home was built just before the World’s Fair of 1904, if I remembered correctly. It had been an opulent place in the colonial revival style, but it fell into disrepair following the Great Depression and cost the Hoffemeiers a fortune to return to its old glory when they bought it for a steal in the early 1950s.
When I pulled into the driveway, my foot almost slipped from the brake at the sight of an unexpected couple—Nate and Aunt Martha—emerging from the house next to Gladys’s. My car jolted to a stop behind Nana’s BMW as my internal radar went on hyperalert. And . . . what was that wooden contraption Nate was carrying?
Curiosity warred with the certainty that it was no coincidence the friend Aunt Martha happened to be visiting this afternoon was Gladys’s next-door neighbor. Except she usually asked me straight out about my cases before she started snooping.
I spared a quick glance at Gladys’s front window to make sure she wasn’t watching for me, then scooted across the driveway. “What’s with the spinning wheel?”
Nate stumbled down a step, then caught himself. “Don’t ask me. I’m just the hired muscle.”
“Ooh, isn’t it wonderful?” Aunt Martha raved. “I overheard Ida at the hairdresser’s complaining about having to dust this old thing, so I told her I knew someone who could make good use of it. You know Theresa down the hall from you? She’s been spinning cat fur for years using a little hand spinner. She’s going to love this.”
“Who’s Ida?”
“The Kresges’ housekeeper.” Aunt Martha motioned to a woman standing in the home’s doorway. “Ida, this is the great-niece I was telling you about who works for the FBI.”
The slim, gray-haired fifty-something-year-old nodded. “I imagine you’re here to investigate Mrs. Hoffemeier’s missing Dali painting? Ruby told me Gladys’s friend had an in with the FBI.”
Okay, I had no idea who Ruby was either, but if the neighbors’ housekeeper already knew about the theft, how did Gladys expect to keep the news from her son?
“Oh my,” Aunt Martha exclaimed, not fooling me for a second with her feigned surprise. “Was that the painting your grandmother—”
“We’d better not keep you,” Nate said, slamming the hatch on his old Land Rover, the spinning wheel now stowed in back.
I tossed him a silent thank-you and spun back toward Gladys’s driveway.
Nana and Gladys chose that moment to meander around the side of the house, apparently having been strolling in the garden. A tall man in a well-tailored, three-piece gray suit, carrying a small cardboard box under his arm, accompanied them.
“Guess that answers my question,” Aunt Martha said. “I thought that looked like Stella’s BMW in the driveway.” To her friend, she muttered, “Can you imagine why anyone in their right mind would spend so much on a car?” This from the woman who drove a powder-blue clunker that was older than I was.
The man in the suit kissed Gladys’s cheek, said something I couldn’t make out, then strode past me to a Bentley parked at the curb. He looked to be fortyish, half Gladys’s age, and wore a wedding band.
“My son-in-law,” Gladys said in response to the curious look that must’ve crossed my face. “Tasha asked him to stop by to pick up a tureen she needs to borrow for their dinner party.”
Or the family tag-teamed each other to keep an eye on their mother and the FBI agent that kept popping into her life.
“Hello, Stella,” Aunt Martha oozed in Nana’s direction. “It’s been too long.”
Yeah, we could thank Mom’s strategic timing of the obligatory monthly mother-in-law invitation for that, considering Nana was not one of Aunt Martha’s favorite people. Mom never complained in my hearing about her mother-in-law’s slights, but I suspected listening to Aunt Martha on top of it, harassing her about putting up with the woman, was more than she could handle.
“You should come to dinner tomorrow,” Aunt Martha went on in a saccharine voice.
Oh, I really didn’t like the sound of this. Now that she knew about the stolen painting, she’d clearly decided to sidestep me and go straight to the source for leads.
“I’m cooking shepherd’s pie. One of your favorites, isn’t it?”
I’m not sure if it was shock at the unprecedented friendly invitation or the pressure of so many pairs of eyes on her, but Nana accepted.
“Wonderful. We’ll see you then. You too, Serena.”
I forced a smile, mentally debating whether it’d be better to go and mitigate potential damage or to stay as far away as I could get.
Gladys led Nana and me to the front door. A middle-aged Latino woman greeted us, wearing the kind of dress-and-apron getup I hadn’t seen since Brady Bunch reruns. “I set the tea in the drawing room, ma’am,” she said.
“Thank you, Ruby.”
Ah, so that cleared up the who’s-Ruby mystery.
The foyer was massive, with high ceilings, Italian slate floors, dark, intricately carved moldings, and a stained-glass window that cast a colorful light show on the wall.
“The drawing room is this way.” Gladys led us to a formal room to the right of the foyer. The floors looked as if they’d been recently updated to a warm oak, but the marble fireplace, flanked by built-in bookshelves edged in the same ornate moldings that finished the windows, was exquisite and definitely original.
“Wasn’t the housekeeper implicated in that Westmoreland theft you investigated a few months back?” Nana asked conversationally.
Gladys gasped. “You can’t be suggesting my Ruby would . . .” Her voice cut out as if she couldn’t even bear to put it into words. “She’s been with me for twenty years.”
Nana, who had no illusions of the loyalty of the help, turned my way, her eyes widening ever so slightly as if to say, I wouldn’t cross her off the suspect list.
I walked to the fireplace to scrutinize the Salvador Dali water-paint-on-paper forgery that hung above it. “This is very good.” The jerkiness of the signature gave it away, but why would Gladys scrutinize the signature of something that had hung on her wall for years? “I’m not surprised you didn’t notice the switch.”
“Who knows how much longer it would have hung there undetected if I hadn’t brought in that appraiser?”
“Why did you bring him in?”
“Oh, uh,” Gladys spluttered, her gaze bouncing from Nana to the painting and back to me. “Uh, with Dali’s work becoming more valuable these days, I thought it might be worth listing it on the insurance policy.”
“It isn’t already listed on your policy?” The disbelief in Nana’s voice practically made the teacups rattle. “Dali’s work is selling at auction for over a hundred million.”
Gladys blanched, apparently just coming to terms with the magnitude of her loss. “It was only a few hundred dollars when we first bought it.”
“Do you still have the sales record?” I asked.
“Yes.” She handed me a file folder. “But the insurance company limits payment to a maximum of five hundred dollars for art that hasn’t been specifically appraised and listed. And that’s my deductible.”
I reviewed the invoice. Her husband had bought the piece from a respectable dealer forty years ago, making the likelihood that it was a fake from the start slim. “Do you have any idea when the switch could have happened?”
“Oh yes, it couldn’t have been more than a month ago.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because my painting had a mar in the corner. I’d been explaining as much to the appraiser when I realized this one didn’t have it. You see, Peter took a Magic Marker to it as a child. But we caught him before he made more than a small mark, and we managed to shift the painting in the frame so no one would see it. But when I shifted it to show the appraiser . . . the mark wasn’t there.”
“But you’d seen the mark a month ago?”
“That’s right. Squirrels got into the chimney. My son tried to smoke them out, but only succeeded in smoking us out, so he called a pest control service.”
My mind flashed to the man outside my office at the drop-in center last night, and I glanced at Nana. “Who knew you were coming to see me last night?”
“Don’t interrupt Gladys when she’s speaking,” Nana scolded.
I bristled. “The man you tripped over at the drop-in center last night said he was from pest control.”
Nana’s eyes widened. “Oh.” Her gaze shifted to Gladys. “I was here when I called you at work, and when you said you couldn’t come, I decided to meet you at the center.”
“So Gladys knew. Anyone else?”
“The exterminator didn’t do it,” Gladys piped up. “I was explaining how I knew it was still here when he left. You see, the painting went askew from all the young man’s banging. I remember needing to shift it in the frame after he left to hide the mark again.”
“I’m surprised someone went to all the trouble of painting a forgery,” Nana chimed in, “when they could’ve simply replaced it with a print.”
“No prints were ever made of this piece. My husband was picky that way. He didn’t want something a thousand other people might one day have a poster of, hanging on their walls.”
“And it never left the premises?”
“No.”
“Then the thief must’ve taken a picture to give the forger and then returned a second time to make the switch, unless . . . Have you been on an extended vacation in the past month?”
“No, I’m never out of the house more than a few hours. I usually go to my sister’s in early September, but my arthritis has been acting up too much. I haven’t been away at all.”
“Did your pest control service make a second call?”
“No, he cleaned out the squirrel’s hoard of nuts, put some kind of guard on the top of the chimney, and I haven’t had any more problems.”
So if he photographed the painting, he would’ve needed an accomplice to make the switch. “Who else has been in this room in the last four weeks?”
“Well, your grandmother. The appraiser. My housekeeper. My daughter, Tasha, and her husband, Lucas. And of course, my Peter.”
Ruby brought in a plate of cookies, which prompted Gladys to pour the tea.
“Ruby,” Gladys called after the departing woman, “do you remember if anyone else has been over since the squirrel incident?”
Something in the flick of Ruby’s gaze suggested she’d thought of someone. “No, ma’am. Not other than your children.”
“Do you recall the exterminator’s name?” I asked Gladys.
“You’d have to ask Pete. No, wait.” Gladys plopped down the teapot. “You can’t ask him, because then he’ll wonder why you’re asking. Oh dear, maybe we should just forget about this.”
“Gladys,” my grandmother said in her listen-to-reason voice, “my granddaughter is not going to forget about this. You’ve had a very valuable painting stolen.”
Gladys stirred her tea a tad too vigorously. “It probably wasn’t valuable. Not with that Magic-Marker mark on it. The appraiser said that could reduce the value significantly.”
Nana’s snort came out as a refined, ladylike tsk. “He said that because insurance companies don’t want to pay you more than they have to, but who knows how high it could’ve gone at auction?”
Gladys twisted her wedding band. “I wish Frank were still alive. He’d know what to do.”
Nana patted her hand. “You’re doing the right thing now. Serena will find your painting.”
My heart should’ve soared at Nana’s surprising confidence, but all I could think about was how disappointed she’d be if I failed. As it was, I had to do some pretty fancy talking just to convince her to let me take the forgery into evidence in the hopes of finding a clue as to the forger. And so I could compare it to the forgeries we’d recovered from the drug bust, but I didn’t tell her that part.
Her housekeeper returned to collect the tea tray as Nana and I rose to leave. “I remembered there was another gentleman who visited,” she said to Gladys. “The one you hoped might buy Pete’s property, remember?”
Gladys spluttered again, her face going red this time. “No, no, he came before the exterminator. Remember? Mr. Fuhrman was the one who heard the squirrel in the chimney.”
Fuhrman? “The real estate mogul?” I jotted down the name, the whole scenario sounding even more suspicious, given the men’s connection.
“He’s an old family friend,” Gladys said quickly—too quickly.
Had Pete asked her for the plug? Or had it been her idea?
An uneasy feeling settled in my gut. If Pete’s side business wasn’t doing as well as Gladys seemed to want me to believe, her fears of being pushed from her home could stem from something even scarier—a fear that her son was her thief.