“Notoriety? You flatter me, Wes, you devil. But I gotta ask you to vamoose.”
“Just a couple of questions.”
“Sorry, but we’ve got to set up.” I turned on my thousand-watt smile, cursing him silently. “You, my friend, are in the way of business.”
“Are you tossing me out?” he asked, raising his eyebrows, trying to look tough.
My smile firmly in place, I shook my head, and said, “Sadly, yes. You can leave this way.” I took his elbow and guided him to the wire mesh gate, which had been latched but unlocked since seven-thirty in the morning so staff could get in. I figured that’s how he’d entered.
He took it in good spirits, play-shooting me as he left, and said, “You won this one. Next one’s mine.”
I kept smiling but didn’t respond, pleased that I had chased him away without offending him. Since I wanted good publicity for my business, I couldn’t see how pissing off a reporter would help my cause.
When I got to the auction hall, about nine, I was greeted by a flood of increasingly impatient preview attendees waiting to register and complaints from Gretchen that the laptop wasn’t working.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It won’t let me open the spreadsheet software,” she explained.
I restarted the computer, but the problem persisted. “Is it working on your desktop?”
“Yes,” she answered. “And I have a backup on CD.”
“Okay, then. We’ll deal with it later. It’s more important to get people signed in.”
Shutting the laptop down and slipping it under the table, I grabbed a printed copy of the registration list that Gretchen, showing prescient judgment, had produced earlier that morning, and began to help with the process. The doors would open promptly at ten, and it was a courtesy Prescott’s was known for that early arrivals got processed before the doors officially opened.
Fourth in line was Martha Troudeaux, the lazy and bitchy researcher who was married to Epps’s pet appraiser, Barney. I greeted her politely, but without warmth.
“You’re to be congratulated on winning the Wilson estate,” Martha said, sounding patronizing and insincere.
“Thanks, Martha,” I said, finding her name on the list. “How are you and Barney doing?”
“Good. Barney will be here later. Have you added better lighting to your charming little room?”
Every sentence was an insult, from implying that Barney couldn’t be bothered to schedule an early viewing to making my company sound rinky-dink, and she did it with slippery precision. The auction wasn’t until tomorrow, so it didn’t matter when Barney arrived, but her tone implied that it did. My auction hall wasn’t small or poorly lit, but her words suggested otherwise.
Doing what I always did when confronted with difficult situations, I thought of what my father would have done. He once told me that the trick to outwitting sarcastic people was to ignore their tone and deal only with their content. I wondered if that strategy would work with Martha. It was a better tactic than hitting her, which was the only other approach I could think of.
“I hope you’ll find it bright enough, Martha. Will you tell me if you don’t?” I said, feigning concern. “And I’m so pleased you find the space charming.” I smiled, a hundred-watter this time, and looked toward the next person in line. “May I help you?” I asked. Out of the corner of my eye, I observed Martha’s lips thinning. I was pleased that she seemed disappointed that she hadn’t gotten a rise out of me.
At ten, when we opened the doors and the early birds had been taken care of, I left Gretchen to handle things and thought about what to do next.
I wanted to stay and observe the evil Martha at work, and I wanted to return to the tag sale and make certain that Eric had everything under control. I also wanted to see how Alverez and his team were making out. As I weighed my options, I decided that since observing Martha would only irritate me, and Eric would call for help if he needed it, I would head to the front where Alverez had set up shop.
I found him looking over his notes not far from the stack of crates. A technician wearing khakis, a sweater vest, and latex gloves was leaning over an empty crate, looking for I couldn’t imagine what. Earlier, Eric had confirmed that no crates were missing.
“Hey,” I said as I approached. “Any news?”
“Not yet,” Alverez answered, looking up from his notebook. “You said the noise came from somewhere near the crates, right?”
“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure. Noise reverberates.”
“Yeah. Regardless, it’d be a pretty good place for someone to hide, so we figured we’d start here.”
I went into the front office and checked the voice-mail system, scanned through some mail, bills mostly, and reviewed the list of auction bidders. I hadn’t been there more than three or four minutes when the technician called in an excited tone, “Chief, look at this.”
If Alverez replied, I didn’t hear it. I swung out of the chair and was no more than a step behind him as he joined the technician, who stood partially hidden by the stacks of crates, in the far corner of the warehouse.
“There,” the technician said, gesturing toward a crate midway up in the last row. He’d removed the back panel so it stood open to our view. I was able to see a long, white cardboard tube. “All the other crates were empty,” he added.
“What is it?” Alverez asked.
The technician shrugged. Alverez looked at me. “Josie? Any ideas?”
I shook my head. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“Let’s take a look, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, and immediately wondered if I should have agreed to let him look.
Alverez slipped on latex gloves and reached into the crate to extract the tube. I watched as he used a fingertip as a lever on the top plastic cover. It came off easily. He reached inside and pulled, freeing a rolled-up canvas.
The technician moved closer, but I backed away until my shoulders pressed into the concrete wall. Holding the canvas by its edge, Alverez gave it a little shake, and it unfurled smoothly. A vivid and evocative painting of three girls sitting in the sun under a tree playing with a cat was revealed.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered. I stood frozen in disbelief.
The Renoir had been found.
That explained why someone had entered my warehouse. But it raised other questions. Why would someone searching for the multimillion-dollar painting go to the trouble of sneaking into my warehouse and then leave without it? Or, more ominously, had the person entered not to take it away but to leave it behind? Why? I shivered, as much from mounting confusion and fear as from the cold concrete wall behind me.
CHAPTER SEVEN
By the time Max joined me in the Rocky Point police station interrogation room, it was nearly eleven and I’d made a decision. I was going to try to find out for myself what was going on.
“No charges have been filed,” Max said by way of greeting as he pulled out a chair and sat.
“That’s good news,” I acknowledged.
“Alverez will be in soon. He’s going to ask you questions about the painting. Before he gets here, I need to know the truth. All the truth. Do you have any knowledge of how the painting got into your warehouse?”
“No.”
“Do you have any ideas about why someone would have placed it there?”
“No.”
“Have you ever seen it before, anywhere?”
“No, never.”
“Okay, then.” He stopped, smiled, and reached across the table to pat my hand. “Josie, you’ll be okay. We’ll figure this out.”
What a nice guy, I thought. “Thanks, Max. I sure hope so.” I paused. “Do you remember how you said we should wait to hire a private detective?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Do you think it’s time yet?”
“No, not yet. If and when you’re charged with something-that would be the time to think about it. But we may not need to even then.”
“You’re talking about gathering evidence. I’m talking about figuring out what’s going on.”