CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

 

I left Alyse to her cigarette break, but before I could cross the street to talk to Stefan, I got a call from Matt.

"I've got a lead," he said. "Where are you?"

"Outside Monograms."

"Perfect. I'll meet you at the museum in ten minutes. There's someone we need to talk to, but she won't be there for long."

Ten minutes was just enough time to get to the museum. Talking to Stefan would have to wait, yet again. I was going to feel like a total idiot later if it turned out that Stefan had, in fact, killed Tremain and I'd missed all these opportunities to get him to confess.

Matt's battered old truck was parked in front of the museum. Inside, the woman at the ticket desk recognized me and sent me upstairs to Gil's office.

Matt was slouched in one of the visitor chairs inside the private office, but instead of the statuesque, dark-skinned, and cheerful Gil behind the desk, there was a petite, blonde, and irritated woman. I had to remind myself that the rude woman was Gil's only ally on the board of directors.

Matt stood. "This is Keely Fairchild. She's an appraiser. And Keely, this is Nancy Grant."

"We've met in passing." I sat on the edge of the remaining chair.

"Are you keeping me here about an appraisal?" Nancy asked Matt. "I thought you wanted to do an interview of some sort. I'm running late for an important meeting with the rest of the board."

I didn't want to be here any more than Nancy Grant did, but Matt seemed to have something in mind. He'd said that people tended to underestimate him, and I didn't want to make the same mistake.

"I would never waste your time with something as trivial as a five-figure valuation of a museum acquisition," Matt said smoothly. "Instead, I had a few questions about your husband and his colleagues."

Nancy smiled, although it didn't register beyond her lips. "My husband is a great man. I'm always happy to talk about him."

"Nancy's married to an extremely popular legislator," Matt explained to me. "He knows pretty much everyone in the state government. I'm guessing you know them too."

"I do my best to know my husband's friends." The surface humility failed to cover her smugness.

"And they all know you and your work here at the museum," he said. "I bet they would come to you if they had a question about antiques."

"Of course."

He handed her his smartphone. "Have any of these people asked you about quilts recently?"

Nancy shook her head without glancing at the screen. She put her hands flat on the desk, preparing to stand. "I don't have time for this."

"From what I've read, you do have an incredibly busy schedule," Matt said. "Not just here but also standing in at community events for your husband."

Nancy relaxed her hands. "I probably put in more miles driving from one end of this district to the other than he does. Every single afternoon this week I've attended at least one event for him. Monday's was the craziest. I went straight from here to the opposite end of the district to attend a memorial service. It was an honor to be there, of course, but it took four hours, including the commute."

"I promise this won't take four hours," Matt said, giving her a smile that looked fake to me but that Nancy seemed mesmerized by.

Nancy tore her gaze from Matt's face and scrolled down the list, shaking her head. "I know a lot of these people, but the only time we've discussed anything about the museum was when I encouraged them to make a donation."

"Thanks anyway." Matt took his phone back, disappointment obvious on his face. "What about Randall Tremain? What do you know about him?"

The hands on the desk tensed again. "He's a local antiques dealer, known for his impeccable eye for antique quilts."

"That's not what I've heard," Matt said. "Keely tells me his eye was considerably less than impeccable."

Even Matt's smile couldn't distract Nancy this time. "She's wrong."

"So you've seen his inventory?" Matt asked.

"Not personally."

"Why not? I would think that with your role on the museum's board, you'd have a personal interest in the local antique shops."

"I let the museum do most of the collecting. I have a few nice quilts myself, but I bought them in New York. Not from Tremain. I've never even met the man."

"I'd love to see your collection sometime." He sounded as genuine and eager as he'd been when he'd tried to wrangle a tour of my bank vault. Either he'd been faking it both times, or he truly wanted to see Nancy's quilt. Which was odd, since he didn't seem to know much about antique quilts.

Nancy stood, her head rising barely higher than it had been while seated on the chair that usually accommodated Gil's long legs. "I really need to get to the board meeting. They can't start without me."

A collector who didn't want to show off her collection struck me as odd. Now I wanted to see Nancy's quilts too. I dug into my messenger bag for a business card. "If you ever need your quilts appraised, you can call me."

Nancy ignored the offered card. "I'd never buy something that valuable without having it appraised first. My husband is a wealthy man, but I would never waste his money."

Was Nancy always this abrasive with her husband's constituents, or had we just caught her on a bad week? I dropped the card on Gil's desk.

Matt stood. "Thanks for seeing us."

"Always happy to speak to the press." This time, it was obvious that Nancy's smile was fake. She was halfway around the desk before adding as an afterthought, "We're always happy to speak to local businesswomen too."

"Of course," I said, although Nancy was already out of earshot, the rapid tapping of her high heels echoing down the corridor.

"Sorry," Matt said. "I thought she'd want to help and might know something useful. It was the best lead I'd run into. What was going on between you two anyway? I thought you'd get more out of her than I could, drawing on your common love of quilts."

"I doubt we've got anything in common. Still, it was worth talking to her, if only to confirm that she doesn't have any leads for us. I had to come here anyway to deliver the written appraisal on Stefan's quilt." I rummaged in my bag. "I'll just leave it here for Gil and save myself a trip later on."

"Gil must be part of the meeting that Nancy's going to."

"I'd love to be the proverbial fly on the wall at this one," I said. "I bet it's got something to do with Tremain, either his murder or his business practices."

"The directors meet down the hall on the other side of the staircase," Matt said. "Unfortunately, I don't think we could hear anything from outside the conference room. The museum kept the building's original solid doors when they renovated."

"No point in sticking around here then." I dropped the appraisal report in the center of Gil's desk and followed Matt out through the waiting room and into the hallway. "From what Gil's told me about past meetings, this one could go on for hours. I still need to finish up my speech for tomorrow. I'll check in with Gil first thing in the morning."

"I'll keep digging around the newsrooms for more leads," Matt said. "There must be some statehouse-beat reporters I haven't hit up yet."

 

*   *   *

 

I was grateful for Matt's offer of a ride home. Even though it was only a ten-minute walk, I needed every available second to finish my speech for tomorrow.

When he pulled into my driveway, Lindsay's car was already there, idling in what had once been a drive-through lane when my house was a bank and was now a carport. Matt parked next to it, and Lindsay emerged to run around the car and help her grandmother out. Despite all of Lindsay's considerable muscle development from her weight lifting and bell ringing, she sagged a little when Dee leaned on her. They both had to be exhausted after a long day overseeing the final quilt show preparations.

Matt took Lindsay's place, supporting Dee along the path while I went to unlock the door. Retaining the bank's ADA-compliant entrance was proving to have been a wise decision. Dee might not have been able to navigate a set of stairs comfortably today, and she'd have been too stubborn to admit it.

I whispered to Lindsay, "Why didn't you take Dee straight home? She's exhausted."

"She wouldn't go. Not until she checked to see if there was anything more she could do to get Emma out of jail."

"I can hear you, and I'm fine," Dee said as she approached the closest thing I had to a throne: the pair of wingback chairs in the living room. "The quilt show prep is as done as it can be. Not as well as if Emma had been there, but she'll fix it in the morning."

I dropped my messenger bag on the kitchen peninsula. "Emma may not be released by then."

"Nonsense," Dee said. "Just tell me how I can help."

It was never a good idea, as a lawyer or as an appraiser, to let a client's expectations get out of hand, but I just didn't have the heart right now to tell Dee that we'd reached a dead end, at least in terms of doing anything tonight. I looked at Matt, hoping he had a better answer than I did.

"Keely's got it under control," Matt lied with an impeccably straight face.

"I need to speak with you a moment," I told him, nodding toward the front door. "In my office."

"I finally get to see the vault?"

I waited until we'd gone through what used to be the ATM lobby to my office space, well out of Dee's hearing, before saying, "I'm going to lock you in the vault if you don't behave. You know I can't do anything to help Emma before tomorrow morning. I'm going to be lucky if I can help her attorney get her out before she's sentenced for a murder she didn't commit."

"I've got confidence in you."

"Since when?"

"Since my one big lead fizzled." Matt sighed. "Look, I know you don't trust me, and it doesn't help that Stefan keeps hinting at some deep, dark secret in my past, and I didn't want to get into it yet, but our best shot at getting Emma out of jail is if we work together. How about if I level with you, and then you can stop doubting everything I say?"

I'd never found it easy to trust. My natural tendency to question everything had been reinforced by my legal training. Still, Matt was right that we could do more for Emma as allies than as enemies. I leaned against the wall next to the window and prepared to at least hear him out. "It's worth a try. I'm listening."

He gave me a wry smile. "Always the lawyer, with the weasel words and no commitment. But it's a start, I suppose. It's not that big a deal, really. Remember how I said Dee and Emma were supportive a few years ago when I was going through a tough time?"

I nodded.

"I wasn't always an arts reporter." He glanced out the front window, as if hoping for an interruption. "A lot of people get the wrong idea about me. I started out as a fashion model, see, and everyone treats me differently if they know about that first. They usually assume that all models are brainless, vain, and superficial."

So that was why he downplayed his good looks. If he did something with his unruly hair and wore more flattering clothes, he would definitely be right at home on the pages of a fashion magazine.

I could understand why he was so reluctant to talk about his past, and I appreciated his willingness to share it with me now. Maybe we could work together after all. And I might just agree to show him the bank vault if he called me after this whole mess with Tremain was over. "I never thought you were any of those things."

"Just a con artist like Tremain," he said with a touch of unexpected bitterness.

Matt seemed so accepting of Stefan's criticism of him that his apparent need for my approval surprised me. I could honestly say I didn't care about his old career or the fact that he'd given it up for a less lucrative one, but I was still a little concerned about his current job and what that said about his trustworthiness. "A lot of reporters these days are, if not exactly scammers, at least manipulators."

"Not me," he said, more serious than I'd ever seen him before. "I don't need to manufacture stories or embellish them. I like my work, but it's not the only thing I care about, and I don't really depend on it for my financial well-being. Stefan's right that if I wanted to go back to my old work right now, I could earn more in a week or two than in five years of reporting. I'll be too old in a few years, when I hit forty, but right now I could still get some solid bookings. I still do events for charity occasionally, and I could use those contacts to get some paying gigs."

It didn't sound like he was bragging. If anything, I had the impression he was downplaying how easy it would be to go back to his old line of work. If I were him, I'd have really resented Stefan's insistence that he was wasting his talents. I'd heard enough of that sort of criticism from colleagues who didn't know about my syncope and kept digging for explanations for why I'd quit my old firm. I hadn't wanted to admit my weakness, much like Matt hadn't wanted to risk being negatively stereotyped.

"The only thing I don't understand is why you let Stefan keep giving you such a hard time about your decision."

"We've known each other for years, ever since we took some summer photography classes together when we were kids," Matt said. "He was the one who first noticed how much the camera loves me, and he convinced me to go out for my first audition. He hates making mistakes, so he can't accept that it wasn't the right career for me. I can't entirely blame him. Quitting doesn't look like a rational decision. I gave up a financially rewarding career when I was at my very peak, with no prospects for any other kind of work. Dee and Emma understood though. I met them at their quilt show when I was trying to see if anyone would be interested in my thoughts on the local arts scene. They told me I should do whatever I was passionate about. And I wasn't passionate about my old work. Especially after—"

Matt's eyes suddenly flicked toward the window, and his eyebrows furrowed. "You've got a visitor."

I turned to look, and when I didn't recognize the car, I did what I always did, ducking back out of the visitor's line of sight. "Some of the bank's customers forget that the branch closed. There's a little sign out front telling them where the nearest open branch is. Just ignore them, and they'll go away."

"I don't think so." He continued looking out the window until a car door slammed. "It's not a bank customer. It's Gil Torres."

I headed back through the ATM lobby to let Gil inside.

She greeted me with, "They fired me."

"That's crazy! Why would they do something like that?"

Gil couldn't seem to find the words to explain. She was probably in shock. If she were going to sing anything right now, it would probably be "Day Is Done."

"Never mind." I opened the door between the ATM lobby and my living room. "Come inside and tell me what happened. Tell all of us. Matt Viera is here, and so are Dee and her granddaughter. If anyone can help you, they can."

As I stepped inside, I said, "Gil needs our help. She's been fired."

Lindsay jumped up from where she'd been kneeling next to her grandmother and went into the kitchen to grab a collection of sodas and carry them out to the coffee table.

Dee patted the wingback chair next to hers. "Come sit with me."

Matt made himself at home on the sofa, and I joined him there while Lindsay leaned against the back of Dee's chair.

Once Gil was settled, Dee reached over and took her hand. "They're not going to get away with this. Keely won't let them."

Another expectation I couldn't meet. So much for following doctor's orders and living a quiet, stress-free life. As soon as the quilt show was behind me, I was going to have to get serious about relaxing.

"I'm sorry to be a bother." Gil chose a can of orange soda but couldn't seem to find the energy to pop the top. Lindsay took it from Gil, opened it, and handed it back.

Gil just stared at it without drinking. "I don't know what to do. They didn't even let me pack up my desk. I'm supposed to go back tomorrow to do it under supervision of a board member."

"Don't worry," Dee said. "Keely will go with you in the morning before the quilt show opens."

"Keely may not want to have anything to do with the museum after she hears the rest of the news," Gil said. "They also voted not to acquire any quilts for at least six months, until the publicity over Tremain's frauds dies down."

"Stefan will be disappointed," I said, "but I'm more concerned about you right now. What happened?"

"I don't know exactly." Gil's head was bent, and her beautiful voice kept cracking. "They told me they were holding an emergency meeting, and they wanted me there. They asked me a few questions about the Tremain situation, and then without any warning, Nancy told me I was fired. No explanation, nothing."

"They can't do that," Dee said. "You deserve an explanation, at least."

"It's not that simple, legally," I said. "I can refer Gil to a specialist in employment law if she wants."

Matt spoke up. "I've been through a few employment-contract squabbles myself, and Keely's right. Gil's going to need a specialist. I bet this was a political move, and it's not going to be fixed easily. We already know that someone's been pressuring everyone involved about Tremain to whitewash his reputation. This could be part of it."

Gil nodded. "That makes sense. They asked me what I knew about Tremain's business practices. It almost sounded like they'd been prepared with specific questions to ask me."

Identifying the board members who had succumbed to the pressure might lead to the politician connected to Tremain and possibly even to the killer. "Do you know who spearheaded this?"

"No idea. I thought the board was happy with how I'd been doing my job. I hadn't heard a single complaint, and they seemed enthusiastic about expanding the quilt collection. I don't even know what the actual vote was, so I don't know if it was close or unanimous." Gil looked up with the glimmer of a smile. "No, wait. I do know one person who disagreed with the decision to fire me. Nancy Grant caught up to me afterwards. She tried to save my job, but there was too much pressure on the other board members for even her to counterbalance. It figures. The one time she couldn't get her way with the board, and it had to be when they voted to fire me."

"We won't let them do this to you," Dee said, pushing herself up from her chair with renewed energy. "Come on, Lindsay. We need to let the guild know about this. If the board members think they were pressured before, it's nothing to how they'll feel once the local quilters start calling them."

Dee's determination was contagious, and Gil finally began to drink her soda. I could stop worrying that Gil's emotional shock might transition into physical shock.

"We just need to know the names and numbers of the board members," Dee said.

"I don't have the full contact information with me," Gil said. "It's all back in my office."

"I can get it," Lindsay said. "It's the sort of thing I do for my job. I bet most of the information is on the museum's website."

"I'm not sure how current the information there is," Gil said. "A revamp was at the top of my priorities, but not until after the quilt show. You could check with Nancy Grant, though, for updates. She's going to be taking over as the interim director until they can find a permanent replacement."

"They won't need a replacement," Dee said firmly. "They've got you. Come on now, Lindsay. We've got work to do."

It was amazing the way Dee had changed from the exhausted, frail old woman she'd appeared to be when Matt had escorted her in from the car a few minutes ago. Now that she had a mission, she looked ten years younger and as fresh as if she hadn't already spent eight hours at the school, preparing for the quilt show. Still, a close look revealed the lingering exhaustion and sadness around Dee's eyes. She wouldn't be completely back to her usual imperious self until Emma was released from custody.

Gil tossed back the rest of the can of soda. The sugar from the earlier sips seemed to have reinvigorated her too. "I'd better get going. My dogs don't care if I'm employed or not—they just want their evening walk."

"I've got to be at the quilt show tomorrow morning by 11:30," I said, "but I can meet you at the museum when it opens at 10:00 to retrieve your belongings."

"I'll see you then." Gil strode out, looking more like her usual self, although I wouldn't be completely reassured until I heard her singing something cheerful.

Matt lingered until everyone else was gone. "I'll work on rallying the rest of the arts community behind Gil. This may actually give us some more leads on Tremain's killer. I didn't think to ask if anyone on the client list had ties to the museum."

"Good idea."

"What about you? Anything else you can do?"

I glanced longingly at my laptop and the notes for my speech. It could wait a little longer. If Dee could go out and rally her troops, then I could do a little more investigating. It was only a few minutes before 6:00, almost an hour before Stefan's gallery's closing time. "If you can give me a ride, I've got some questions for Stefan that might shed some light on what happened to Tremain. I never got the chance earlier."

"Let's go, then. I want to hit the newsrooms before the day shift leaves."