I drove out to Walford and set up outside Missy Minor’s dorm. It was not yet eleven. Many college students avoided classes that early in the day. Some, as I recall, avoided them altogether. But in most cases, they were just beginning to surface in the hour before lunch.
At about one-thirty in the afternoon, Missy Minor came out, ready to face the day. She was wearing her fleece-lined coat again. Very tight black jeans again, though not perhaps the same ones. The jeans were tucked into Uggs today. On her head was a white knit cap with a big white ball on top. The cap was pulled down carefully over her ears, allowing her blonde hair to frame her face. Warm yet fashionable. She was carrying no books as she cut across campus, with me discreetly behind her. She went into the library and up to the big reading room on the second floor. Missy went straight across the big room and sat down at an otherwise empty table across from a guy in a navy peacoat.
With my hands in my pockets and my head down, I went to the back end of the reading room, where there was a newspaper rack, got a New York Times, opened it up, and sat in a chair behind it, and peeked around.
The guy in the peacoat didn’t look like a student. No shame to it. I didn’t, either. And maybe he was an older student. He looked to be in his middle forties, with a flat, expressionless face and short blond hair. There was something about him that reminded me of the kind of guy I sometimes did business with. But it was an intangible something, and for all I knew, he could be a scholar of the eighteenth-century English novel.
As I watched, they leaned across the table toward each other and talked with their faces very close. It looked romantic, but they didn’t touch. They talked intensely. She with animation. He was nearly motionless, except that he tapped his forefinger on the tabletop. They spoke for maybe fifteen minutes. Then she leaned back a little, as if she was going to stand. He put his right hand on her forearm and held her there.
They spoke for several more minutes. He was doing most of the talking. She was nodding. And she appeared to be pressing a little against the restraint of his hand. When he let her go, she stood and walked away. From where I sat, I couldn’t read her expression. The man watched her walk across the reading room and out into the corridor and down the stairs. When she was out of sight, he sat quietly for a time, looking at nothing, slowly rubbing his chin with the back of his hand.
I stayed where I was behind my newspaper and waited. After a while he stopped rubbing his chin, and stood and walked out of the reading room. I gave him a minute and then put my newspaper back in its rack and strolled out after him. He was at the bottom of the stairs when I reached the top. I let him cross the big lobby to the front door before I started down. He had no reason to think he was being followed, so he had no reason to do anything tricky. And, of course, he was being tailed by an ace. I went down after him.
On the broad front steps of the library, I paused and took in some fresh air. Libraries always made me feel as if I’d been indoors too long. I saw my man across the street, heading toward a parking lot. I strolled after him. He got into a Toyota 4Runner and backed out. I recorded his license number in my steel-trap memory, and as soon as he was out of sight took out a little notepad and wrote it down. Just in time, before I forgot it.
31
The 4Runner was registered to Morton Lloyd with a Chestnut Hill address. Morton Lloyd was also the name of the lawyer that Prince had threatened Walford University with. And he was also the lawyer who represented the Hammond Museum, and it was through his recommendation that Prince got the job of negotiating the return of the painting. Seemed unlikely that there would be two Morton Lloyds in the same case.
I was meeting Rita Fiore for lunch at Locke-Ober, and was already seated when she came into the dining room wearing heels that told me she hadn’t walked over from her office. The skirt of her gray suit was about mid-thigh, and everything fit her well. Her dark red hair was long and thick. Almost all the men in the place looked at her as she came in. Those who didn’t probably had a hormonal problem. I stood when she reached the table, and she gave me a kiss.
“Everyone in the place watched you come in,” I said.
She smiled.
“I’m used to it,” she said. “And I want a martini.”
“Anything,” I said.
“If only that were true,” she said.
She ordered a Grey Goose martini on the rocks with a twist.
“What are you drinking?” she asked.
“Iced tea,” I said.
“For a superhero,” Rita said, “you are certainly a candy-ass drinker.”
“I’m so ashamed,” I said. “What’s Morton Lloyd look like?”
“Haven’t you seen him?” Rita said.
“Once,” I said. “Tall, kind of heavy. Black hair combed back, lotta gel, kind of a wedge-shaped face, big mustache with some gray in it. Maybe fifty-five.”
“That would be Mort,” Rita said.
“Okay,” I said. “Same guy I met at the Hammond Museum. Not the same guy driving the car.”
The martini arrived. Rita drank some.
“Nothing like vodka and vermouth to knit up the raveled sleeve of care,” she said. “What car?”
“A car registered to Lloyd,” I said.
“But he wasn’t driving it?”
“No,” I said.
“I talked with him,” Rita said. “Says he barely knows Prince. Says Prince came to him through a regular client; said he feared being slandered by Walford University, and if he were, he’d want to sue them, and he wanted to know that Mort would represent him.”
“Lloyd recommended him to the museum to negotiate the return of the painting,” I said.
“Really?” Rita said. “Perhaps Mort was not being entirely open and honest with me.”
“I’m shocked,” I said.
The waiter came for our orders, we gave them, and Rita asked for another martini.
“Mort says he brushed Prince off,” Rita said. “Says if they slander him, he should give Mort a call.”
“Whatever the truth, it scared Walford off,” I said.
“And if somebody checked on him,” Rita said, “he had consulted Lloyd, and Lloyd had, sort of, agreed to represent him.”
“Yep,” I said. “Who was the client who sent Prince to Lloyd?”
“He said it was something called the Herzberg Foundation. Mort was evasive as to what it was. All I could get was that it was something to do with the Holocaust. And it might have been earlier than I thought. He was vague on that, too. I frankly don’t think he wanted to tell me anything,” Rita said, and smiled. “But you know how I can be.”
“I do,” I said. “He is their legal counsel?”
“Yes,” Rita said. “He seems happy with that. I gather he’s on retainer.”
“Is he a stand-up guy?” I said.
“Mort? Stand-up. Yes,” Rita said. “I’d say he is. But that would be true only if he were standing up for Mort.”
I nodded.
“The two guys who ambushed me both had an Auschwitz ID number tattooed on their arm,” I said.
“My God, Auschwitz was sixty years ago,” Rita said.
“More,” I said.
“I don’t do math,” Rita said. “I’m a girl.”
“And the world is a better place for it,” I said.
“Of course it is,” Rita said. “How old were these guys?”
“Late thirties,” I said. “They both had the same number.”
“So it’s, like, symbolic,” Rita said.
“Or something,” I said. “Now I see a guy visiting Prince’s old girlfriend, and he’s driving a car registered to a lawyer who represents some kind of Holocaust foundation.”
“Convoluted,” Rita said.
“It is,” I said.
“But you can’t ignore it,” Rita said.
“No, I can’t.”
“Is it a real serial number,” Rita said. “The tattoo?”