“Danny?”
“Who is Danny?” came deCostas’ voice. “Should I be jealous?”
Simone sighed. “I can’t talk right now.”
“Okay, I just want to see if you got my last message with the buildings?”
“I need to go.” Simone hung up with a tap of her earpiece.
“So you’re going to confront a murderer because you like her?” Caroline asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I guess so.” Simone shrugged.
“Alone?”
“She’s an old woman.”
“She’s killed once already. I’m coming, too.”
“Why?”
Caroline paused, thinking of a reason, then smiled. “So that if there is an underwater tunnel, a city representative will be on hand to figure out how to deal with it.” She folded her arms over her chest, chin up, proud of her reasoning.
“There’s not going to be a tunnel.”
“Other people seem to think there might be.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“You said she’s an old woman. And the EMTs aren’t going to smuggle your paintings without my say-so.” The EMTs had their eyes on Caroline, waiting for her approval. “Besides, I want to know why, too. I want to see how it ends.”
“Fine,” Simone said. “But we have to play this right. When we leave the building, look anxious, but don’t say anything. Just follow me.”
“Sure.” Caroline nodded at the EMTs, and they loaded the paintings onto the gurney. They barely fit, and the EMTs had to drape a cloth over Misty like she was a corpse to obscure them, but they were hidden. They rolled the gurney out carefully, wanting to impress the deputy mayor.
Simone called Peter.
“Please tell me there isn’t another dead body,” he said.
“No, just one that looks it. I need you to head to the rehab facility at Mercy Hospital. There’s an ambulance coming in; they have a whole lot of paintings you might be interested in.”
“Damnit Simone, if you found the painting, you need to tell me where you are. This is for the police.”
“I can’t, Peter. I’m giving you the paintings, and I’m hoping to get a confession by the end of the day.”
“Kluren is going to lock you up for tampering, you know.”
“She was going to do that anyway, sooner or later.”
“Tell me where you are.”
“I’ll see you later, Peter.” Simone hung up. The phone almost immediately rang; she waited for caller ID this time, and when it displayed Peter’s name, she ignored it. Then a message came in from Danny, with an address on the Lower East Side, a note that Lou owned the entire building, and a request to please stop bothering him while he was at work.
“Okay,” she said to Caroline. “Let’s go.”
When they left the building, Simone made a show of looking around to see if she’d been followed. If Dash was there, he was too good to be spotted, but she thought maybe she saw a pinstripe cuff on the pants of a silhouette draped in rags. She didn’t stare. She needed Dash to think she hadn’t seen him. Then she turned to Caroline and spoke, her voice soft, but carrying.
“Okay, do you want to get the police or some hired muscle to get the painting out of there?”
Caroline’s eyes widened for a moment, but she played along. “I have some family security. They’ll handle it.” She typed into her wristpiece for effect, to sell it. “I don’t want to stay here, though. Let’s go back to my place. I have some old maps there.” Simone nodded and led them to the nearest taxi-boat stand. She told the driver to go towards Caroline’s place but halfway there had him change direction, and head towards Lou’s place. Caroline was silent the whole ride, her hair whipping wildly around her in the wind and rain. It wasn’t a heavy rain yet, but the sky was dark, and it would be a real storm in a few hours. Simone hoped everything would be finished by then.
Lou was not a suspect she could have seen. She had figured it was Marina or the forger. But she’d believed Marina when she said she didn’t do it, and Misty didn’t have the presence of mind to kill someone. Lou had said she knew every piece in their inventory, but Trixie had said Henry found the painting in storage. So someone had lied. The painting was of Lou and her husband, so it would have been Lou’s—Reinel gave his paintings to his subjects—and Henry had stumbled on it and figured out what it was and what it was worth. Then he tried to steal it out from under Lou, and she tried to take it back. He’d probably been going to pick up the original painting from Misty when Lou caught up to him in the abandoned building, thinking he had the painting on him. Shot him… but the case had been empty. That was the scenario that made the most sense to Simone. But why shoot him over a painting? It was personal, clearly, but it was just an object. Simone just couldn’t see Lou pulling the trigger. It takes hardness to do that. Lou was hard, but hard in a way that endured, not in a way that killed. Killing was born out of desperation or madness. It was the act of a person worn down to a bloody shard. Lou was no shard. She was an old brick wall.
“This is it?” Caroline asked. She paid the cabbie, and they hopped out onto the bridge surrounding the building Danny had directed them to. It was one of the newer ones, built with Glassteel in place but not very tall. The architects hadn’t thought the water was going to get this high. It looked like four floors of mirror, shaped like an oval from above, flat on top. But it was in disrepair. The windows were still mirrored but stained with salt, and moss and fungus were creeping down from the roof, making it look older than it should have. There was only one bridge leading up to it, thin and old. The building was alone, overlooked, forgotten.
Simone and Caroline walked to the door. Inside was a glass-ceilinged stairwell, with dim light glancing through. A circular, transparent stairway rose out of the water. There was no lobby; just landings with doors, presumably to hallways with apartments.
“Not airtight,” Simone said, pointing at the waves.
“So which place is hers?” Caroline asked. Simone shrugged. They climbed up to the third floor, and Simone exited into a narrow hallway with tiled floors and a flickering overhead light. Simone knocked on the first door, which opened to her touch; inside was an abandoned apartment with a few pieces of broken furniture pushed into a corner, crept over with fungus like small, dying landscapes. The next few apartments were the same.
“No one else lives here,” Caroline said. Simone shrugged. They went back to the stairway and climbed to the top, their footsteps echoing on the glass. Above them, the sky became even darker, and rain began to pound heavily on the roof. Silence faded into the deep white noise of a storm.
The top floor had no hallway, only a small foyer with a door and the letters PH next to it. Simone tried the door. It was locked.
“This is it,” she said, kneeling down and taking lock picks from her pocket.
“Are you breaking the law in front of me?” Caroline asked.
“Turn around.” Simone picked the lock quickly, took out her gun, and pushed the door open. This apartment was furnished, if sparsely. There was a kitchen with a bowl in the sink, a bedroom with a made bed, and closets filled with clothes that looked like Lou’s. Lou didn’t seem to be at home, though.
“We should have tried the office, maybe,” Simone said, poking her head around.
“This shouldn’t be here,” Caroline said, pointing at a large column in the center of the apartment. It was big enough to be a bathroom, but it had no door.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s giant, and it serves no purpose. It’s not holding the building up.”
“So it’s decoration.”
“Taking up this much space? No. This is a hiding spot. Maybe a walk-in safe.” She put her ear to the column and rapped it with her hand. Simone chuckled.