‘You want to die, it’s your choice.’
He smiled suddenly, showing even white teeth, but his eyes were hunted, and he couldn’t keep still, wandering around the room dragging out one canvas after another. Now that she had seen him, Lorraine wondered if the man in the paintings was himself, but he didn’t have the same high cheekbones — his face was flatter and plainer than his brother’s.
‘I’m interested in that one,’ Lorraine said, tossing the cigarette out of the window.
Nick whipped round to look at the painting she had pulled out of the stack.
‘How much?’ she asked, uncomfortable. She couldn’t seem to get centred around Nathan — he was so off-beam that he unnerved her.
‘Five thousand dollars,’ he snapped, as if challenging her, but she didn’t flinch.
‘I’ll take it,’ she said calmly, and he beamed, picking the piece up to admire it himself. Then he started to drag out canvases at an alarming rate, laying them around the room. He babbled to her, asking about her gallery, if she was looking for a one-man show, or intended displaying a number of artists’ work together.
‘How did you find me?’ he said, so intent on finding work to show to her that he didn’t appear interested in her reply.
‘Raymond Vallance suggested I call you,’ she said, and saw him stiffen.
‘He’s dead,’ he said, staring at her.
‘I know, he committed suicide.’
She was wondering how in the hell she could start to question him — the reason she had come — but knew that she had to tread carefully. From what she had seen of his work, Nathan did not have the technical virtuosity to imitate better artists, and he seemed so mentally unstable that he would be too dangerous to have in on any scam — but she had come all this way to interview him and she intended to do so.
Lorraine took out her cheque book and started writing. ‘Do you show your work mainly in Santa Fe?’ she said, pretending to make conversation but paving the way for the real question she wanted to ask.
‘I guess,’ Nathan said. ‘I’ve shown in California too.’
‘Did you work with your brother’s gallery?’ Lorraine said casually.
Nick eyed her suspiciously. ‘How do you know my brother had a gallery?’ he asked.
‘Oh, just contacts,’ Lorraine said airily. ‘I know a lot of people in the art world — I’ve come across Kendall too. It must have been very useful, having a gallery in the family, so to speak.’
Nick said nothing for a while. Then, ‘I had a few pieces in there.’
‘Did you ever live in Los Angeles?’
‘No. I just stayed at his place a few times.’
Lorraine finished writing the cheque with a flourish and Nathan slowly relaxed. ‘I hated LA,’ he said. ‘Full of fucking phoneys. They wouldn’t know art if it walked up and bit them in the face.’
‘That’s a pity. I’m sure Kendall could have promoted your work.’
He sneered, ‘The only person Kendall ever promoted was herself, money-grubbing bitch. My brother wanted more of my work, but she wouldn’t have it.’
‘Her gallery was successful, though,’ Lorraine said.
‘Bullshit! Filled with crap, wallpaper paintings.’
‘Yes, some of those paintings look as though just about anyone could do them,’ Lorraine said innocently. ‘I’m sure you could do stuff in exactly the same style if you wanted to.’
‘You bet I could,’ Nick said. ‘If I wanted to.’
‘It must be a great temptation,’ Lorraine said, flattering him, ‘I mean, for a real artist, if money’s tight, to know you could make a lot more just by imitating someone who happens to be flavour of the month.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘sometimes I’ve worked in a particular way because that was what a buyer wanted — that’s the difference between working to a commission and working for yourself.’
‘You haven’t ever copied, say, a specific painting?’ Lorraine went on.
‘What? You mean an exact copy of a named work?’ Nick said. ‘Absolutely not — that’s forgery, in case you hadn’t heard.’
‘But it must be quite a temptation,’ Lorraine persisted.
‘Not to me,’ Nick said. ‘I couldn’t do it if I tried — it’s a specific skill, and besides, my own work’s too strong.’
‘You don’t know anyone connected with your brother who maybe... wouldn’t have quite the same scruples?’ she asked. She tore out the cheque and laid it on the table.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘Someone who’s got five thousand dollars on the table for you, but I need you to answer a few questions.’ He shook his head, and kept on shaking it. ‘I’m a private investigator.’ She flipped him her card, but he didn’t take it. ‘I’ve been hired by your brother’s lawyer, Mr Feinstein. Do you know him?’ Nick glared at her, his arms wrapped around his body. ‘I’ve been hired to trace assets missing from your brother’s estate.’ This elicited a flicker of interest. ‘Paintings.’
‘What?’
She’d hooked him. ‘Either there’s a mountain of valuable art concealed somewhere, or there’s several million dollars hidden in an undetected account.’ She took the list of missing paintings from her briefcase, and passed it to him. ‘These are the works I’m looking for.’
He took a long time reading the list, then let the paper drop onto the table. ‘I wouldn’t pay a hundred bucks for any one of those assholes’ pictures.’
‘Maybe you wouldn’t, but other people did — or at least they thought they did. Various buyers at Gallery One viewed an original, got it authenticated, but then someone copied it, and it was the copy that was hung on their walls.’
‘Well,’ Nick said, ‘it was nothing to do with me. Nice scam, though — I wish the bastard had cut me in on it.’
Lorraine studied him. Her gut feeling was that he was telling the truth. ‘You don’t know of anyone Harry could have been working with?’ she asked.
‘Well, Kendall’s a pretty obvious candidate, isn’t she?’ he said. ‘She would have dug up her grandmother’s grave if she thought there was a nickel in it.’
‘She was certainly involved in setting up the initial part of the operation with Harry, but he switched the paintings again to cut her out. I was just wondering if that was all his idea, or if someone else was pulling the strings.’
‘They must have been,’ Nick said. ‘Harry was never like that.’ Unexpectedly, he started to weep uncontrollably, rubbing at his eye sockets while Lorraine watched in fascinated horror at this sudden switch of mood. The crying jag ended as suddenly as it had begun. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘My brother was better-looking than me, better at everything. He was a hard act to follow, and all my life, until he died, I was kind of following... I still can’t believe he’s dead.’
‘Kendall’s dead, too, now, did you know?’ Lorraine said.
‘Yeah,’ he replied. He was obviously not interested in discussing Kendall’s death so Lorraine changed tack.
‘What does Alison do?’
He smiled, and stretched out his arms. ‘She’s a dancer, but dancing’s a hard world, almost as hard as painting.’ Then he asked, ‘You know Sonja?’
‘I’ve met her.’
‘She sent you here, didn’t she?’ he demanded.
‘No, I told you, it was Raymond Vallance.’
He shrieked with laughter again, mouth wide open. ‘That old queen! He clung to his past glories like a falling climber.’
‘At least he had some to cling to,’ Lorraine said quietly, but her sarcasm was lost on Nathan, who gave another loud hoot of laughter.
‘He was in love with my brother, everybody was in love with him. Everybody always thought he was something special, and you know something, I did too. It wasn’t until he was dead that I realized he was a loser.’