There they were, two Manhattan cops in a strange Midwestern city, looking for a picture painted by an artist who had died seven years before.
"How do we find it? We go classic, Frank," Aaron said. And that's just what he did.
Although it was a textbook example of investigative work, later Janek would marvel at the elegance and speed with which Aaron brought it off.
He went straight to the Cuyahoga County Courthouse, where, after some mild flirting with one of the clerks, he obtained the estate file for Peter Aretzsky. Aretzsky's sole heir and executrix turned out to be one and the same person, his sister, a Mrs. Nadia Malkiewicz, who, as it happened, was conveniently listed in the Cleveland telephone directory. Aaron called her. Yes, she was Peter Aretzsky's sister. Yes, she had inherited all his unsold work. Yes, she had the big picture of Victoria Archer. Yes, she would be willing to show it to the detectives. When they would like to see it? Now?
Fine, they could come right over. The entire process took Aaron just one and threequarters hours.
Mrs. Malkiewicz, a widow, lived in Ohio City, a historical section on the west side of Cleveland which, after years of neglect, was in the midst of heavy gentrification. As Janek and Aaron drove in, they could hear the sound of sawing and hammering around the neighborhood. they saw Dumpsters on the street filled with the entrails of houses being gutted for renovation.
The MaiMewicz residence was the worst-looking house on its block, a narrow wood frame structure with peeling siding and an unshoveled path leading to a badly disintegrating front porch.
Nadia MaMewicz looked as miserable as her house. A pale, drawn white-haired woman in a cheap, shapeless housedress, she had a bitter, puckered mouth and the beginnings of a mustache on her upper lip. Her greeting, too, was a good deal less effusive than Aaron expected after talking with her on the phone. Janek understood her transformation.
A shrewd look in the old lady's eyes told him she saw them as vultures looking to pounce upon her late brother's work.
He also quickly understood something else: Mrs. Malkiewicz had contempt for said work. There were no original Aretzsky paintings displayed on her parlor walls, although there were pictures of another sort, including a large black velvet banner bearing a cloying reproduction of da Vinci's The Last Supper.
"Yuk! That woman!" was Mrs. Malkiewicz's reaction when Aaron asked her about Victoria Archer.
"She ruined my brother's life, not that he had much of one. A failure and a drunkard was what he was! What's Worse, tell me, than a failed drunken painter? Slapping paint on burlap all day long-is that any kind of life? My late husband, bless him, was a hardworking man. Fortyfive years sweating it out on the flats. And what did he have to show for it when they laid him off Nothing! Not even his promised pension. 'Sorry, we're bankrupt,' the company said. So that's what you get in this great United States of America… they listened to her bitter gripes for half an hour before they could get her to escort them to the basement, where the treasure trove of art was stored.
The paintings, Janek could see at once, were being kept under appalling conditions. Forty or fifty canvases were piled, unevenly against a rough stone cellar wall. Moisture oozed along the floor, and an old oil-burning forced-air furnace roared on the other side of the room.
When they began to pull the pictures out-the one of Victoria, being the largest, was at the bottom of the stack-he saw that many of the frames were warped and that there were mouse droppings in between.
Still, Janek found the work impressive. No matter that Peter Aretzsky had lived a miserable life, his drawing was authoritative and his palette was vibrant. When, finally, they pulled out the big portrait and set it up, Janek could tell at once that it was the artist's masterpiece.
Melissa Walters had been right: Aretzsky had put great feeling into it.
His sense of his subject leaped off the canvas and struck the viewer hard. But it was not the painter's hatred that Janek felt so much, nor his bitterness and disillusionment. Although Victoria was harshly chafacterized, Aretzsky showed a good deal more of her than mere cruelty. It was, Janek thought, a portrait of an extremely unhappy woman, a woman ravaged by a vast and insupportable inner pain. Yes, she was mean, yes, she was selfish-the glare in her eyes and the set of her mouth made that clear enough. But what Aretzsky showed was a victim, a real human being in distress. And although Janek understood why Victoria had hated this picture and had wished to see it destroyed, he also understood how very wrong she'd been. Compared with the painting he had seen in Beverly's bedroom, the painting that had haunted his dreams, this was a mature work of art. That first portrait was a poster. This second one was a truly tragic image. As Janek continued to gaze at the picture, many things became clear. He understood why Beverly had coveted the first picture and built her bedroom altar around it. It was a portrait of her mother as Beverly needed to remember her, while the second picture was too complex to inspire adoration. The Victoria Archer in the second picture was a woman who could make a wallflower of her own daughter. It was that true a likeness, Janek thought.
Later, upstairs, he and Aaron tried to strike a deal with Mrs.
Malkiewicz, but the old lady wouldn't bargain. She acknowledged she'd been unable to sell a single one of her brother's canvases and admitted freely that he and Aaron were the first people to come around and express an interest in his work. Still, she held firm. Her price was nonnegotiable. Ten-thousand-dollars-take-it-or-leave-it.
Not a penny less.
Why? they asked her. She couldn't explain it. She just knew the picture was valuable and she wasn't going to sell it cheap. But we're cops, they reminded her, civil servants; we don't have that kind of dough. Well, maybe not, she said. But ten thousand was still the price.
Janek understood even before Aaron that there was no point in further discussion. We'll think about it, he told Mrs. Malkiewicz politely. We'll let you know tomorrow.
Back in the car Aaron was explosive.
"You crazy, Frank? You'd even consider paying that? Screw her! And to hell with the picture!"
"Trouble is I want it," Janek said. He explained to Aaron his conviction that the reason Mrs. Malkiewicz set the price so high was that she didn't really want to sell.
"Sure she needs the money. And sure she acts like Aretzsky's pictures are shit. But the truth is she loved her brother, and his pictures are the only things of his she's got. to sell one off is to lose a part of him. Even if we agree to pay her price, I'm not sure she won't back out."
Aaron shrugged. "So what's the point?"
"The point is I need that goddamn picture. So I'll just have to get hold of the money, then handle her very carefully."
"Where're you going to get that kind of bread?"
"I think I know where I can raise it."
Aaron looked at him skeptically. "You're not thinking of Kit?"
"No, not KiL" Janek said. "I've got someone else in mind."
Back in the motel he dialed Stanton's office in New York. Mr.
Dorance was in a meeting, his secretary said. Could he get back to Janek later on? "No. Tell him it's an emergency." A minute later a breathless Stanton came on the line. "What's the matter, Frank? What's going on?" "I need ten thousand dollars." "Is this a joke? I'm kind of busy." "No joke, Stanton. I'm out in Cleveland. I'm on the trail of the person who put that girl up to all those killings, including Jess's.
I can't go into the details. It's a complicated case. The bottom line is that there's a painting out here I think I can use to put this person away. It'll cost me ten thousand dollars."
"'Think' you can use?"
"Yeah, well, it's a long shot. But it's the only thing I got going.
You said I should call you if I needed anything. I'm calling. This is what I need to catch Jess's killer."