I didn't make any headway on either my speech or identifying Tremain's killer that night, or even the next morning. I finally gave up and grabbed a yogurt to eat while I checked my e-mail. I learned that Lindsay had arranged a 9:30 appointment with Martha McDowell, the woman who'd told the Better Business Bureau she'd been scammed by Tremain to the tune of about $10,000. The woman hadn't wanted to talk to me initially, but Lindsay had gotten Matt to vouch for me. The end result was that Martha would only talk to me if Matt was also there. I was expecting him to be at my door in fifteen minutes to give me a ride to the meeting.
I jumped up and raced to change out of pajamas. My closet contained nothing but casual clothes that were too old and worn to wear to a business meeting and more of the conservative linen suits I used to wear during trials, where the goal was to keep from wearing anything that might potentially offend a jury member. I had a similar goal now: to reassure Martha that I was professional and nonthreatening so she would be willing to talk to me about Tremain. The pale linen jacket and matching pants ought to do the trick, even if it made me look a bit out of touch with fashion.
I had just finished running a brush through my hair and snagged my messenger bag when there was a knock on the front door. Apparently Matt was right on time.
And then the threatening words from yesterday echoed in my head. I know where you live. Don't make me visit you again.
I'd convinced my brain that the threat wasn't real, but apparently my adrenal glands hadn't gotten the message. Fighting down the nausea, I pulled back the curtains to make sure it really was Matt on my doorstep. Even with his back turned to me, I recognized him in his black cargo pants and a faded kelly-green sport shirt.
He knocked again.
I threw the strap of the messenger bag over my head and hoped that my nerves would settle down on the drive across town.
Outside, Matt walked with me to the passenger door of a ten-year-old Toyota pickup with mismatched quarter panels. "I always heard that lawyers were rolling in money, but I'd never met one who actually lived in a bank."
It was so tempting to join in with the flirting, but I wasn't convinced he was interested in anything more than a story, so I kept my response short and noncommittal. "Seemed like a good investment."
Once he was behind the wheel and we were on the way out of my driveway, he said, "What did you do with the vault?"
"That's between me and my contractor."
"And the building inspector," Matt said. "I could look it up at town hall, in the applications for building permits."
He just never gave up. I had to admire his persistence and easygoing manner, even if I didn't trust his motives. "I thought you were just an arts reporter, not an investigative journalist."
"You sound like Stefan. He underestimates me all the time."
Was it possible I really had misjudged Matt? Perhaps there was more to him than his appearance and the usual characteristics of someone in his career.
Matt pulled into the parking lot of a sprawling, gray-shingled, two-story building on Cliffside Drive, about halfway between the pier and the lighthouse. It had originally been a sardine cannery but now held a variety of small businesses, including our destination, an insurance agency.
Perhaps I had been assuming the worst about Matt. At the very least, it would be interesting to find out if I'd been wrong and he really was as charming and guileless as he appeared. It was time to find out. "I suppose architecture qualifies as art. If you really want to see the renovations of the bank building, I'll give you a tour. After the quilt show."
He waggled his eyebrows. "Are you inviting me over to see your etchings?"
I wasn't ready for that kind of commitment right now. Not with my health and my career both in an uncertain state. "Whatever I did with the vault, I did not put any etchings into it. Literal or euphemistic."
"Too bad. I like etchings." Matt parked at the far end of the lot outside the McDowell Insurance Agency. "Literal and euphemistic."
* * *
Inside the McDowell Insurance Agency, a clerk escorted Matt and me to a back office. A dark-haired, middle-aged woman stood behind the desk. She was wearing a simple pale-pink raw-silk dress and matching short-sleeved jacket, accessorized with trendy understated jewelry that might have come from one of the boutiques near Monograms.
"I'm Martha McDowell, and you must be Keely Fairchild. Matt has told me all about you."
"He does like to tell stories," I said.
As Martha returned to her seat behind the desk, she gestured toward the leather-upholstered chairs facing her. "I can't get involved in a murder investigation. I didn't mind admitting I was cheated when I thought it might stop Tremain from doing it again, but it's different now. It wouldn't be good for my reputation if people connected me with his murder."
It had to have been difficult for Martha to admit she'd been a victim, and I couldn't see any reason why she'd have made up the story. Too bad no one had listened to her. "For now, I'm just trying to understand how he carried out his scams."
"I still can't believe I fell for his spiel," Martha said. "I'm not some naïve, sheltered person. I started my own business from scratch and built it into a successful company in a highly competitive industry. How could I have been so stupid?"
"We all have blind spots," I said.
"I always tell my clients to get their expensive collections appraised for insurance purposes. If I'd done that before I took possession of the quilt, Tremain wouldn't have been able to cheat me."
"Why didn't you get the appraisal?"
"I don't know," Martha said. "At first, I was just so in love with the quilt that I didn't really care what it was worth. I meant to get the appraisal eventually, but I couldn't find an appraiser I trusted. There were plenty of dealers offering to do it, but they seemed biased. Like they wanted to sell me a 'better' quilt, so they'd downplay mine. I wanted someone independent. It took a few months to stumble across the American Quilters Society and their certification program for appraisers, and then it was easy to find someone to do the job, but it was too late to get my money back."
"What did the appraiser tell you?"
"That it was a fake," Martha said. "And not even a very good one."
"I'm sorry."
"I'm not. At least not entirely. It is a beautiful quilt, even if I paid far too much for it." She pointed at the wall behind me. "You can see it for yourself."
I turned around and was startled to see a virtually exact replica of Stefan's four-patch quilt. The only significant differences were the omission of the embroidered signature and the humility block.
"Do you mind if I take a closer look at it?"
She waved her permission, and I stood and approached the quilt. It was definitely a fake. I could tell that much immediately. Tremain hadn't even bothered to make it good enough to pass a quick glance by a qualified appraiser. The overall design and size of the quilt matched Stefan's, but the colors were slightly off, and the style of the prints was much too modern.
I took a closer look and realized that not all of the prints were wrong. One of them was identical to one of the prints I'd seen in both Stefan's quilt and the museum's quilt from the turn of the twentieth century. Finding it in an obviously reproduction quilt made me question my opinion of Stefan's four-patch.
I picked up my messenger bag for my cotton gloves, only to remember I'd tossed them, wet and soapy, into the trash before leaving Monograms yesterday.
"Is there a problem?" Martha said.
"I forgot my gloves. I wanted to touch the fabric but didn't want to risk damaging it with oils from my skin."
"Go ahead," Martha said. "From what the appraiser told me, I think you could probably dunk the quilt into a pot of spaghetti sauce and then pour a gallon of melted chocolate on it without reducing its value."
"Thank you." I ran my hand over the suspect fabric, instantly confirming that it was a reproduction. Old fabric just felt different. Plus, my touch released a faint whiff of the chemicals used in the modern dyeing process. Any chemical odor residue would have dissipated from a quilt that was more than a few years old.
I had to wonder if I'd been premature in declaring that Stefan's quilt was definitely from the late 1800s. It looked like someone was making unauthorized reproductions, possibly from the museum's quilt. If Stefan's quilt was a reproduction, its maker could have simply chosen more appropriate colors than whoever made the quilt that Martha McDowell had purchased and washed them more thoroughly to remove the chemical odors and give the fabric an older, more brittle feel.
From over my shoulder, Matt said, "Is it my imagination, or does that look a lot like the quilt in Stefan's gallery?"
"It's virtually identical in design and layout. Too much so to be a coincidence."
Matt dug his phone out of one of his pants pockets and glanced at Martha. "Mind if I take a picture?"
"Go ahead," she said.
While Matt took his pictures, I asked Martha, "Why did you keep the quilt once you knew it was a fake?"
"I almost took it down and threw it away, but I'm glad I didn't," Martha said. "Now I look at it every morning when I come in and every night before I leave. I know it's a little perverse of me, but it's a good reminder not to rely on anything that's not in writing. Tremain must have assured me a dozen times that he guaranteed the provenance. He never put it in writing though, and when I confronted him with the appraisal, he had sudden amnesia. Swore he'd made it clear it was an 'as is' sale. Even showed me that's what the bill of sale says in the fine print at the bottom. I still can't believe what a fool I was."
"He was a good liar," Matt said. "You weren't the only one who trusted him."
"I did hear that Tremain hooked a bigger fish than me," Martha said. "It was just scuttlebutt, and I couldn't even tell you where I heard it, but the rumor is that someone with major political connections was scammed by Tremain too but was too embarrassed to report it. It's a little ironic if that's true, because I met Tremain through a political fundraising event he'd sponsored. It's part of why I trusted him. I figured if he had that kind of money and influence, he'd never risk it all on a single transaction that was pretty small compared to the money flowing at those fundraisers. Now I think he was robbing Peter to pay Paul, except that Peter and Paul were the same person. First he made a big donation to a politician's campaign, and then he scammed an even larger amount from the politician by selling him a fake quilt."
If that was true, it would explain why someone was so desperate to quash the fraud investigation, even going so far as to hire a thug to threaten me. "Any idea who the politician is?"
"No. I can't even remember who mentioned it. It may not even be true. People like to think the worst of politicians," Martha said. "All I know is that from now on, I'm going to stick to collecting things I know more about. And even then, I'll follow my own advice and get them appraised before I buy."
"If more people did that, it would put both the con artists and a lot of attorneys out of business." I dug into my bag for one of my new cards identifying me as a quilt appraiser and handed it to Martha. "On the plus side, it would be great for my new business."
* * *
"It looks like you've got the evidence Stefan never found," Matt said as he started the truck. "Martha's quilt proves that Tremain was copying Stefan's legitimate antiques."
"Don't get your hopes up yet. And I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't write about it or even mention it to Stefan until I'm sure. I'll need to compare the pictures of the two quilts, block by block."
"So where do we go from here?"
"I need to talk to Dee and Emma about my speech tomorrow, if you wouldn't mind dropping me off at the school."
Matt put the car in gear and headed out of the parking lot. "I meant, what's the next step in proving that Tremain was selling fakes?"
"Appraisals are always a bit more of an art than a science, but if I can reach a definite conclusion, my expert testimony would be admissible in court."
"What about Tremain's link to politicians?" Matt said. "Can you testify to that?"
"Hearsay is inadmissible. Even Martha couldn't testify to it. She said herself it was just a rumor."
"Good thing I don't have to worry about rules of evidence."
"Just defamation lawsuits."
"All part of the job." He looked remarkably unconcerned. "It might be worth spending a little time in my lawyer's office if I can uncover a link between fraudulent art and a politician."
"Good luck."
"Aren't you going to help?" Matt said. "I've been sharing my sources with you."
"Finding out who was in Tremain's pocket is not high on my priority list," I said. "I'm more concerned with keeping the prosecutor from moving against Dee and Emma before Monday. They're refusing to go see a criminal lawyer until the quilt show is over, so I'm trying to make sure Wolfe and the police have enough other leads to pursue that they won't settle for the easiest suspects."
"Wouldn't it be nice to add one more suspect? A powerful politician who'd been protecting Tremain?"
"All we know is that Tremain liked to mingle with powerful people. We can't prove any of them were scammed or that they were working behind the scenes to protect Tremain. It's just as likely that Tremain was never prosecuted simply because fraud is difficult to prove in court. Besides, a politician powerful enough to sway the prosecutor's office wouldn't have needed to kill Tremain to make him pay for what he'd done."
"You're taking all the fun out of a great conspiracy theory."
Even when he was whining, he managed to amuse me. "That's me. Dedicated puncturer of fantasies."
I was distracted by the sight of the electronic sign in front of the school. Underneath the dates of the quilt show was my name as the keynote speaker. I really needed to get my speech written. "In any event, proving Tremain's ties to a politician might make things worse for Dee and Emma. The politician could start pressuring the prosecutor's office to make an arrest to keep the spotlight off him."
"I'd never do anything to hurt Dee and Emma," Matt said, "but I'd still like to know if the rumor is true. I'll keep my snooping low-key, though."
"Lindsay is compiling a list of Tremain's special customers, and I'll let you know if any of them are politicians. Just don't make any waves. Wolfe is under enough pressure already, and we don't want him taking the easy way out by charging his first suspects."
"Somehow," Matt said, "I can't really feel sorry for the prosecutor's problems. Your friend Wolfe should have done his job all along, even when it wasn't easy. Especially when it wasn't easy. I do. I bet you do too."
"My job is easy." Or it would be, once I wrote my speech, got through the quilt show without passing out, and handed Dee and Emma off to an experienced criminal-defense lawyer.