Raleigh bolted for the front door and switched on the driveway lights in time to see the cargo van stopped momentarily at the security gate until the electronic beam caused the gate to swing open wide.
“Hey!” Raleigh screamed. “Hey!” And he began running after the van, which sped through the gate and headed down the hill, followed by an old Volkswagen bug.
“Hey,” Raleigh said weakly as the gate closed with him inside.
Raleigh stood there staring at the left taillight of the VW bug, the right one having burned out. The little car chugged down toward the flatland, growing smaller, its one eye winking at Raleigh Dibble as it descended in the darkness.
Megan Burke had an epiphany as she followed her partner down from the Hollywood Hills after his shocking theft of the van. She thought of how she had told Jonas, “There are some things I won’t do.” But she was doing them. First the old woman’s TV and now this van. And she thought, I am a thief. I have become a common thief. My life is in ruins. Hollywood is killing me.
Nigel Wickland was standing in the foyer, looking forlorn and helpless, when Raleigh jogged back into the house.
Raleigh said to him, “Why did you leave the fucking keys in the van? Goddamn you, why didn’t you put them in your pocket?”
Nigel’s voice was a rasp when he said, “I told you I had left them in the van, you blockhead. Why didn’t you bring them in?”
“The keys were your responsibility, not mine, you fop,” Raleigh said. “Now what do we do? Now what?”
Nigel turned his back on Raleigh and walked back to the unfinished job. He stood under the floodlight, tall and gaunt, his white hair sparkling beneath the glow. Nigel Wickland had a dizzying moment when he felt like a doomed protagonist in a Shakespearean tragedy. And like Lear he screamed.
Raleigh’s shock and terror were pushing him into a kind of somnambulate state, but Nigel Wickland’s primal scream jolted him out of it. Raleigh froze in place, standing in the foyer watching Nigel Wickland collapse into himself and drop onto the floor on his knees. Then the gallery owner started to weep, and he reached for his inhaler and took two puffs, inhaling deeply and holding his breath until he had to exhale and weep some more.
Raleigh tiptoed past him to the butler’s pantry for a fresh tumbler. He threw in some ice cubes and filled it under the tap. When he returned to the foyer, he put it down beside his crime partner and said, “More Vichy water?”
Nigel wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his coveralls and said, “We’re finished, Raleigh. I think I shall shoot myself before going to the penitentiary. I’m too old for prison.”
For the first time the roles were reversed and Raleigh Dibble felt that it was up to him to salvage something from this catastrophe. But what?
He said, “Shouldn’t we call the police? The cops may get lucky and catch them before they get too far away.”
Nigel stopped weeping entirely and let out a scary laugh, shook his head, and said, “You are really the most benighted human being I have ever met.”
“It’s not too late,” Raleigh said. “The cops might get them.”
“It’s too late,” Nigel croaked. “Too fucking late.”
“Nigel!” Raleigh said desperately. “Even if they get the paintings they’ll probably just dump the van down on one of the boulevards and the police might get fingerprints or DNA or something, and locate them. And they might get the paintings back. I’m calling the police.”
Nigel got to his feet then and said, “If you touch that phone, I swear I will kill you.”
“But why not call them, goddamnit?”
“Because, you fucking fool,” Nigel said, “the last thing we want is for the police to arrest the miserable scum who stole my van!”
Raleigh’s mind was racing now as his panic grew. “But they might catch them before they dispose of the pictures and we could get them back and everything could be okay before Mrs. Brueger gets back from Tuscany and-”
Nigel interrupted, saying, “What do you suppose the police would do if they arrested the thieves and recovered the paintings?”
“They’d find out from the crooks where they stole them, and they’d come here and give them back.”
“Think,” Nigel said, “if that’s possible. They would not bring them here. They would impound the paintings as evidence. They would need the owner of the paintings to testify in court that they were taken from her home. And the owner of the stolen van, who happens to be your partner, would also have to testify how and where the vehicle was stolen.” His voice rose when he said, “So you see, Raleigh, it would all unravel like a filthy fucking ball of yarn that a terrier has dragged through a kennel full of dog shit!”
“You can still report the van as stolen,” Raleigh said, his mouth dusty dry, “if you say it was stolen from your gallery or someplace other than here.”
Nigel looked toward the garish floodlight, then at the poster-board counterfeit hanging on the wall, and then closed his eyes and said, “I’ve partnered with a madman. He is insane.” Nigel opened his eyes and said, “For the reason just explained in the Queen’s English, I cannot risk that the police might get lucky and arrest somebody. Because as soon as they make the vile cretin confess, it would all come right here to this house, where Leona Brueger would ask the police how it was that my van was stolen from her driveway on this lovely night. And then the cock-up would be plain even to the stupidest policeman. Even to Leona herself.”
“What will you say if the van turns up somewhere? Maybe it’ll be parked in a red zone and get impounded.”
“Then I shall be notified and will pay the impound fee and pick it up, saying that I lent it to my wayward nephew and look what he did with it. The best thing that could happen now is if the thieves get in a fiery crash and kill themselves and burn the goddamn paintings to ashes.” That made Nigel’s eyes well, and Raleigh thought he might start bawling again.
“And what’s going to happen to us if the thieves take the paintings to an art dealer here in town? Maybe to an auction house and try to sell them?”
“I believe that their provenance would be discovered soon enough,” Nigel said, looking like a man on a gallows. “And the police would be called in without hesitation, and whether or not they caught the thieves, they would end up here at this house, and through Leona Brueger the police would quickly discover the switch. In which case I might decide to test the aging ammunition in my pistol. I’m too old for prison.”
Raleigh sat trancelike while Nigel completed mounting the poster board into the frame belonging to Flowers on the Hillside. After that, he placed the framed poster board on the original hanger and said, “The work is finished and perhaps so are we.”
“I’m getting sick,” Raleigh said, and ran to the powder room off the foyer. When he returned, he was pale and beads of sweat had popped out on his upper lip and forehead. He wiped his mouth with a hand towel bearing the Brueger monogram.
He said, “Nigel, I’m desperate. I have one last idea. Please hear me out.”
Nigel was putting his tools away and folding the light stand and didn’t stop working when he said, “Go ahead. Impress me with your acuity.”
Raleigh said, “What if we take the framed poster-board pictures and get rid of them? Burn them up somewhere or break them into pieces and drop them in a Dumpster. And I drive you home and come back here and call the police and say that home-invading robbers got in through an unlocked side door and put a gun on me and stole the pictures.”
“Oh, that is brilliant!” Nigel said. “I’m sure they would believe a fucking domestic servant who has only been employed here for a matter of weeks. And who happens to have a prison record. Oh, yes, and I wonder what you would say when they asked you to submit to a lie detector? And in the hopefully unlikely event that they catch the thieves, it would make it ever so much easier to figure out what was going on here, especially after they were able to place my van at the crime scene. Oh, there would be such a jolly time at the station house when they brought you in handcuffed. Do you know what the joke would be for weeks to come?”