The private investigator is an eccentric fat man who lives on a dilapidated houseboat in Edgewater, New Jersey. Despite Marty’s initial hesitation, he’s retained Red Hammond for nearly three months now. Red is an old war buddy of one of the partners and the law firm uses him from time to time. “A nutty slob who gets results” is how Marty was sold on Red’s credentials. Since discovering the painting’s theft, Marty has gone through the usual insurance and police channels, but he’s been frustrated by the slow-grinding gears of bureaucracy and paperwork. They’ve failed to come up with a single solid lead and he’s glad he had the foresight to take matters into his own hands. His insurance policy against the insurance company was hiring his own investigator. Earlier today, Red called him at the office after months of digging to tell him he’d uncovered something.
Marty takes the ferry across to Edgewater, a fishing enclave that’s also home to a few pioneer commuters. It’s his second time coming across the Hudson by boat to New Jersey and he’s struck by what a sensational view these people have of Midtown. Manhattan looks like some ziggurat empire from out on the water, the towers flushed gold and pink in the dying hours of sunlight, a place of burial vaults and conquests. On the other side of the deck—he thinks it’s starboard—he can see the Palisades running above Edgewater. They lend this sleepy little fishing town some scale, a sense of grandeur borrowed from nature. New Jersey always surprises him, a state known for its turnpikes that should be known for its coastlines and bayside hamlets. He looks down at the darkening waters, letting the wake of the ferry churn his thoughts. Why can’t Red Hammond have a dingy office with a coffee-stained desk and venetian blinds like every other working private detective? He could have insisted that Red make the trek into the city, but Marty’s colleagues had warned him that inviting Red Hammond into the office was never a good idea—one time he showed up eating a hot dog and sweating through his shirt in the middle of December.
The ferry ride, as picturesque as it is, only emphasizes Marty’s dogged pursuit of a painting he thinks might have been poisoning his life for some time. Since discovering it was gone, Rachel has emerged from her depression to join a small but active social club, Gretchen rebounded after their near-dalliance, and he’s been promoted at work. And yet the thought of sleeping under the fake for months riles him in a way that feels intensely personal. A stranger very likely stood on his king-size mattress to remove a painting that’s been in his family for over three hundred years. Oblivious, he’d hunkered down like a fool every night, the wrong girl standing at the birch tree as he drifted off.
From the dock, he walks along a weedy trail that leads upriver to the listing pier where Red moors his houseboat, a converted tugboat with a rusting smokestack. Marty is still in his suit, carrying his briefcase, feeling absurd as he walks up the rotting gangplank. Red is in the stern, loading up a little runabout. On their first meeting, Red motored across the Hudson to pick him up at a Midtown yacht club, the big man jackknifing his small wooden boat from the stern while stockbroking yachtsmen looked on with mocking curiosity. Red is jocular, long-winded, and enormous. He wears plaid shirts as big as picnic blankets.
Red turns from the stern and squints toward Marty in the falling light. “I’ve got a bucket of minnows and a cooler of beer for us to share.”
“I’m not dressed for fishing.”
“No matter. I’ve got overalls hanging in the bridge. On a hook to the left of the door. You go snug into those and we’ll be off. I’ve got mucho revelaciones for you.”
Marty resigns himself to being held hostage in the boat and goes to change. This is the cost of doing business with a man who’s spent decades following cheating spouses and thieving employees. All that solitude and suspicion has made him immune to social cues, to the look of disinterest and mild annoyance that Marty can feel on his own face.
When Marty climbs into the runabout Red admonishes him to stay low. They cast off and motor downriver toward the Narrows and the Staten Island marshes. At Marty’s feet there’s a cooler, a few rods, a pair of giant tongs, a canister of gasoline. Marty looks back over Red’s silhouette to see the city lights firing up above the darkening river. They hug the western shoreline, pass the Statue of Liberty at a distance, and motor into the Jersey Flats, where there’s a graveyard of boat hulks, old ferryboats, and tugs lying half-submerged.
Red says, “Most New Yorkers don’t remember the rivers are even here.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Marty says cautiously. “Although on a bad day you can smell the sewage outlays as a strong reminder.”
“If you ask me, Marty de Groot, the contamination of both rivers is greatly exaggerated. I eat whatever I catch. Some of the best clam beds and eel breeding grounds a grown man could want.” Red picks up a rod and baits its hook. “These hulks are the perfect place for eels to breed.”
“You couldn’t pay me enough to eat an eel or fish from this river.”
“Eels scavenge at night,” Red says. “Bottom feeders looking for dead fish.”
“So what did you find out?”
Red breaks open the cooler and hands Marty a can of Rheingold. The metal rim smells like fish and iodine. Red opens his own can and sips it meditatively, ignoring Marty’s question.
“The Germans from Staten Island come out here in December and take home buckets of eels. And then there’s the rivermen from up my way, around Edgewater, who still go clamming, even though most of the beds are condemned. There’s even a Shellfish Protector who carries a .38 revolver on his patrols like a small-town constable. I’m not making any of this up.”
“I believe you.”
“Every now and again some family living in a marsh shanty eats a toxic cherrystone and it’s Old Testament food poisoning.”
Marty sips his beer, feigning patience. “Tell me about the painting. You found a trail?”
Red hands Marty a baited rod and insists that he cast off. The river plinks and laps at the sides of the wooden skiff.
“On a particularly quiet night,” Red says, “you can hear the eels scraping against the hulls below.”
Marty stares at him with all the disdain he can muster. “This is not my idea of a night out.”
Red smiles coyly, looks at his rod, then begins: “As you know, we hit a dead end with the catering company. They hired extra help for the event and three of them worked under false names because they were immigrants without the necessary documents. These might have been the people who swapped out the painting and got the original out of the house, who knows. The Rent-a-Beats all checked out fine. A little commie and subversive, but fine nonetheless. Then I got this idea one night when I was out fishing … to research the frame of the fake and maybe work out where it was made and whatnot. So I study the Manhattan phone book and call around. I visit ten frame shops before it’s all over. Turns out there’s this Frenchman who runs a framing shop up on Lexington, in the Sixties, and his family’s being doing this for generations. Tells me that his family has frames in the Louvre and the Met, that he used to sell frames to Vanderbilts and Carnegies. Little old dandy in a three-piece suit and work apron. Cheese crumbs on his shirtfront. On the walls there’s every fancy frame you could imagine. I show him pictures of the forgery frame and he says it’s not one of his, but I can tell something’s not quite right. I have a sixth sense for evasion. So I get him talking about the family framing empire and he tells me about making his own gesso from gypsum that hails—that’s his word—from the white cliffs of Dover and he adds it to rabbit-skin glue. Pretty soon he’s making me a cup of tea and I flatter him into submission. As a solitary animal I know loneliness when I smell it and I’m warming up his engine with a kittenish purr. Before long, maybe into the second cup of tea, he confesses that he did build a frame for a regular customer who came in with a photograph of a frame like the one I showed him. He won’t give me the name, though, because he fancies himself a priest or shrink or attorney. Client privilege or some such. But I could tell it was personal, that these two had a rapport.”
Marty says, “That doesn’t really narrow it down.”
“I’m not finished with the story. But nothing’s biting here, so let’s take a little jaunt.”
Red pulls up the anchor and yanks the ripcord in the little outboard motor, which sputters to life. They head north again, angling back along the shoreline. Red opens a fresh beer and offers Marty one, but he refuses for fear of encouraging further digression. They cut across the current and Marty’s arms get wet from spindrift.
Marty says, “I have to get home to my wife.”
“Of course,” Red says, lowering the anchor again. “Now, I ask the old gentleman for a tour of his premises and he’s only too happy to oblige. He shows me his workroom with its antique chisels and pliers and he tells me how he does things. I learn about his little operation, how he numbers the jobs and keeps a logbook. The whole place is buried under dust, but he’s running a tight operation on paper. Handwritten receipts, dated entries in the log. Runs the place like a medieval monk. So eventually I’m able to get a peek in his logbook while he’s helping another customer and I go back to the months before the robbery. I flip the pages looking for reoccurring names but he’s got the handwriting of an epileptic nun. I can’t tell his g’s and j’s and s’s apart. I get a little irritated—I’ve spent two hours in there by this point—so I shove the whole logbook under my jacket and walk out of there while he’s in the back room.”
“That seems a little drastic.”
“I intend to mail it back when I’m all finished with it. Now, today I studied the log, combed the data, looked for patterns in the old man’s cursive. I seem to have found a lead. The same name appears five times in the ledger in the year before the theft. That makes me think an art dealer or restorer, maybe someone who works for a museum. These are not cheap frames and they’re mostly antiques. How many Flemish panels does one person have to frame in a single year? So I start cross-referencing the name Jergens with art dealers and restorers but hit another dead end. I call around and not a single one of them employs a Jergens. Then I notice that a few days after Jergens appears in the log there’s always another name, a certain Shipley from Brooklyn. Now I know there’s some fine houses in Brooklyn, but this framing shop seems very old New York to me. So there was something about Shipley that smelled like a clam left in the sun. And why was Shipley always coming within three days of Jergens? Then it came to me.”
“I have no idea what happens next.”
“Maybe Shipley is coming to study whatever Jergens brings in and uses it as an excuse to bring something of his own in. What if the old man tips Shipley off and he comes in to study Jergens’s paintings. What if they’re colluding, the Frenchman and the forger?”
“All this from the log entries? It seems like a stretch.”
“I’m thinking the Frenchman makes the frames for the forger in exchange for a cut of the profits. Probably none of it’s provable, but the logbook contains a list of client addresses. So I now have a solid location for Shipley.”
Red hands him a scrap of paper in the half-light with an address scrawled on it.
Red says, “I plan to stake out the apartment in Brooklyn. Since I’ll need to hire another person to work in shifts, I’ll require some extra money to cover expenses.”
There’s something about Red’s deductive reasoning that Marty doesn’t trust. He personally knows art collectors who have things reframed all the time, so the connection between Jergens and Shipley feels tenuous. There’s also his mounting superstition that losing the painting removed some great burden, that he’s better off without it, but then he’s thinking about his Dutch grandfather kneeling to say his prayers under the painting every night for decades and he flushes with anger. He says, “What are you expecting to find?”
“There’s always a tell. Certain people coming and going. The forger going out for meetings. We tail him until we find the hook beneath the bait.”
The word tail reminds Marty that he’s sitting in a dinghy on the Hudson with a 350-pound gumshoe. “You can have another two-fifty for surveillance. See what happens in a week and then report back.”
“Roger that,” says Red, smiling down at the river.