Lorraine finished dressing, made the bed, vacuumed the living room and even plumped up the soft cushions, a small smile playing on her lips as she did the chores at top speed. She wished Rosie could see her now — she wouldn’t believe it! Being loved, even if just for two days, had made her domesticated! Lorraine crossed to the window to see if Jake and Tiger were on their way back, and seeing them both coming up the street below, she opened the window and called down. Jake looked up and waved, while Tiger almost pulled him off his feet. He unclipped the dog’s lead, still looking up at Lorraine. ‘I’m going to be late, I’ll call you.’
She was disappointed — she had wanted him to see how she had cleaned the house. Then suddenly she felt stupid, and a dark spiral of emotions started rushing through her mind. Why hadn’t he mentioned their marriage? Why hadn’t he come back to kiss her goodbye? Would she see him again? Tiger scratched at the front door, and Lorraine let him in. He went straight to his bowl, and began to gobble his food noisily. ‘Hey, you! I just washed that floor!’
It was while she was driving into the office, accelerating along Rose Avenue, that she began to run through the case. The light at Walgrave and Rose was broken, blinking a steady red that permitted one car at a time to cross the intersection. Seeing the line of vehicles jammed bumper to bumper, Lorraine looked at the memos she’d scrawled to herself. Why had Harry Nathan been killed? Somehow she didn’t think it was to stop the porn tapes being released — if someone was desperate enough to kill him for that reason, they would have ensured that they knew where the tapes were. But if that were the case, the suspects were Cindy, Kendall and Raymond Vallance, with Kendall and Vallance having the most to lose by the tapes becoming public. However, Lorraine thought, Nathan’s involvement in a multi-million-dollar art fraud seemed a much more likely motive for his murder. It was almost impossible that he had been killed by one of the victims of the scam — or of his other blackmailing activities: the tight security at the house would have kept strangers out. No. Nathan had been killed by someone who knew him well, which meant his wives or his friends. Yet again Kendall seemed the most likely killer — especially since what was probably her jeep had been seen near Nathan’s house on the day he died. Against that, though, she had given a convincing appearance of not having known that she had been ripped off in the scam until weeks later when Cindy died. The phone tapes indicated that she had been on warm terms with her ex-husband.
At last it was Lorraine’s turn to cross the intersection and she speeded up along Airport and Centinela to make up the lost time, but the ten-minute delay meant that she hit another major jam on Pico Boulevard. Lorraine turned back to her notes, and considered other reasons why anyone might have wanted Harry Nathan dead.
Assuming that no one else had had any inkling that the paintings weren’t genuine, Nathan had been perceived as a rich man; perhaps he, and the women, had been killed for his money by the person who would eventually inherit it — Sonja Nathan. Lorraine had never established who had made the telephone call to her office on the morning of Nathan’s murder, which lent a shred of support to that hypothesis. It had certainly been a woman, she thought — though perhaps Raymond Vallance could have imitated a woman’s voice.
The traffic was at a dead stop. Lorraine tapped her teeth with her pen, and continued to think about Sonja Nathan. If she was primarily motivated by financial greed, why had she let Nathan rip her off so spectacularly after their divorce? She had surrendered the gallery she had built up, her only means of earning a living — and which a court would almost certainly have awarded to her — because, Vallance had said, she was too proud to soil her hands. But soiling one’s hands with petty squabbles over money might be a very different matter to Sonja Nathan from soiling them with an enemy’s blood.
The impatient driver behind blasted Lorraine with his horn. She indicated in the mirror that there was nothing she could do, and glanced back at her notes, where she had written the words paintings, new partner. Had it been Nathan’s own idea to sell the paintings without Kendall’s knowledge, or had he been working with someone else? Someone who had decided to cut him permanently out of the picture — and out of the proceeds of the sale — just as ruthlessly as he had cut out his second ex-wife?
Lorraine ignored another toot from the driver behind her, and went back to her notes. Any new accomplice in the fraud would still have to be someone in Nathan’s circle of intimates, or they could not have got past the security — or known that Nathan would have to be killed outside, away from the recording devices in the house. That brought her back to Vallance and Sonja again: Sonja was the one with the specialist knowledge of the art world but Vallance was the one most desperate about the porn tapes...
Lorraine felt that she was going round in circles, but at last the traffic began to move. She put away her notes.
When she got to the office Decker was at his desk, calling galleries and auction houses. ‘I still haven’t turned up any gallery selling the paintings on the list, but there’s hundreds of ’em,’ he said.
Lorraine told him to concentrate next on private dealers: they were more likely to have buyers who did not necessarily want their purchases made public. She also asked him to check out known buyers from Japan and the former Soviet republics, especially the latter, who had a lot of illegal dollars to spend, and not to forget the buyers on record as having purchased art works from Kendall Nathan’s gallery.
‘I’m compiling a list from the papers Feinstein gave you, but it’d be better if I could get access to the gallery books,’ Decker said.
‘I doubt if sales like this went into any official ledger, but there might be a record of them at the Nathan house.’
‘Good thinking — you want me to go there?’
‘No, I’m going to go out there myself and try to get Feinstein’s art expert to confirm whether those paintings are real or fakes before we go any further,’ Lorraine said. ‘I’ll call Jose now.’ She dialled the Nathan house, and Jose said she could come straight over — he and Juana would be there, and they wanted to speak to her in any case: they had been given a formal letter from Feinstein terminating their employment. ‘We have to leave the property by the end of this week,’ he said angrily. They still had not been paid any back salary. Next call was to Feinstein. When she told him that she thought Nathan had been keeping the original canvases at his own house, he agreed readily to call the man who had authenticated the paintings for him. Within two minutes he was back on the line and said that Wendell Dulane would join her at Nathan’s house in half an hour.
‘Okay, Decker, I’ll be out until lunchtime, possibly,’ Lorraine said, picking up her purse.
‘Don’t you even want a cup of coffee, dear?’ he said in his best mom voice.
We had breakfast.’ She couldn’t resist using the plural, and Decker laughed.
Jose opened the door when Lorraine arrived at Harry Nathan’s house, but she said she would wait outside in the sun for Dulane to show up. Within a few minutes someone buzzed at the gate and a low-slung sports car drew up on the gravel. An elegant individual, dressed in a green linen suit, got out and introduced himself as Wendell Dulane.