Quinn Checks In (Liam Quinn 1)

by Thomson, Lh

  As long as the person waiting wasn’t me; she looked up from her computer and shook her head gently. “Mr. Guglioni’s going to be very busy today, Mr… “

  “Quinn.” I gave her my brightest, warmest smile, but I might as well have been flirting with a traffic cone.

  “Yeeesss, well Mr. Quinn, I’m sorry but Mr. Guglioni is a very busy man generally, and without an appointment…”

  “I’ve left a few messages here for Mr. Guglioni’s client, Carl Hecht. Is there a chance you could ensure he gets my number?”

  She didn’t even look up this time. “We are glad you stopped by Mr. Quinn, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t be more help.”

  That was about as friendly as I’d expected.

  On the way back down to street level in the elevator, I thought about the robbery again. The biggest problem was the possibility that no one there that day was involved and that whomever planned it was outside the local arts community. Something like that would mean relying on criminal contacts, which was always hazardous but especially so to a guy on parole. Art robberies weren’t unheard of, after all, and it wasn’t always an appreciator pulling the strings; plenty of people were just in it for the money, and the Vermeer had been an easy target.

  But I couldn’t help that nagging feeling that there was something off about the execution of the whole thing, about the absence of interest in other paintings, or in robbing the patrons, who had who-knows-how-much access to cash and credit.

  It was like Dibartolo had noted: there was some sleight-of-hand going on. For one, there was still that other picture they’d messed with -- I was going to need some help with that, as I wasn’t familiar with the work. And then there was the question of who the two guys were who stopped by my apartment building. If all of that wasn’t a good enough excuse for missing Ma’s Sunday dinner, I didn’t know what would be.

  Actually, I did: absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing was a good enough excuse for missing Ma’s Sunday dinner.

  When it came to the murky motivations of the kind of bad guys I sometimes ran into, it didn’t hurt to have spent more than three years in the pen – if for no other reason than the fact that it gave me a chance to make some decent contacts. One of those was Danny Saint, a frizzy-haired former pitcher in the Phillies farm system who’d gotten caught trying to smuggle eight pounds of weed into Washington State during the offseason from Canada. We’d actually known each other as young kids, then lost touch when he moved.

  After a few years inside, he’d become as adept at short cons and grifting as anyone you’d want to meet, and he was usually hanging around a corner somewhere downtown. If not, he was hustling pool at O’Connor’s or one of the other two-bit dives that were just close enough to his turf to save the soles of his shoes.

  On this occasion, it was a Three Card Monte table just off Washington Square.

  Three Card Monte is a con, but many people to this day think it’s a legitimate game, because the operator uses a shill – a confederate in the crowd who “wins” the odd hand. Danny knew enough other local hustlers to get a new one to stop by every few hours in exchange for that hand, so that it looked like different people winning.

  The first time some fool in the crowd put up more than a ten spot, Danny would palm away the real hole card and replace it, so that the player had no chance of winning. Palming involves bending the card just slightly enough to grip it in the palm when all of the operator’s fingers are together. Danny learned his technique from Blackstone’s Card Tricks and Secrets of Magic, an old textbook on the arts by the greatest magician of the early part of the century, Harry Blackstone. Danny was also a hell of a crooked dealer, another one we could blame on old Harry.

  Judging by the speed of his hands and the big smile on his face, he was having a good day, a steady patter keeping the half-dozen onlookers entertained, taking a moment out of their shopping to feel a little dangerous.

  “Yes! We have a winner,” he said, handing ten dollars over to a large Afro-American man in a pale blue round-neck windbreaker. The man held up the bill ceremoniously then kissed it, getting a couple of happy claps from the other onlookers.

  I’d seen him somewhere before but couldn’t place…

  TV. I’d seen him in a local mattress commercial. I wasn’t allowed to paint when I got out of the can as a part of my conditions and I’m not ashamed to admit I got a little addicted to TV.

  Once Danny saw me, he realized something was up. “Okay, folks, I know when I’m beat. I’ve lost enough money today, so I’m going to pack it up now for lunch. Always here, always around, best card game in town.”

  The crowd dispersed. He started packing his game up. “I had to move soon anyway. But could you have waited until I wasn’t working Liam? Geez.”

  “Sorry Danny. Kind of a big case, which always means working against the clock.”

  “What do you need?” Danny owed me many, many favors from inside the joint, not the least of which was protecting his delicate virtue from the gangs.

  “There was a gallery knocked over a few days ago, along Chestnut.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I heard about that. They got some fancy painting or something.”

  “Something like that, yeah. Listen,” I said, talking low. “I need you to put the word out, see what you can find out about it. Aside from the fancy one, the Vermeer, they may have stolen another one, a more modern painting, and replaced it with a fake. I don’t know about that bit for sure yet, but it’s worth asking.”

  “Okay, you got it man. Hey… you want to help me get my game going again? I could use a new shill if you’re looking for lunch money.”

  I shook my head. “We’re both on parole, Danny. I’m not even supposed to talk to you, remember?”

  I’ll never quite understand why Danny didn’t have as acute a sense of either morality or the fear of getting caught as most folks. But that stuff didn’t faze him at all. “Poor impulse control,” is what the prison shrinks called it. They blamed it on the fact that he didn’t get much attention as a kid, which made him feel insecure. He beat that two ways: by impressing people with his fastball and with his good nature. He didn’t have the former anymore, so he had to rely on the latter. Of course, while he was good naturedly telling you a joke, he was also good naturedly removing your wallet from your back pocket.

  “And yet here you are,” he said, nodding knowingly. He riffled though the deck. “Are you sure, Liam? This beats the hell out of working for a living.”

  “Or trying to throw a breaking ball?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, especially that.” In Danny’s one spring training call up, the big leaguers had teed off on his curve ball like it wasn’t even moving. He’d joked that so many of his breaking balls went over the fence, they saw more of Florida than he did.

  I smiled, but said no. “Besides, you seem to have enough friends helping you out already. Didn’t I see that guy in a mattress commercial?”

  The young grifter nodded, smiling with his tongue sticking out a little, absolutely pleased with himself. “My latest idea: there are thousands of out-of-work actors who don’t mind stopping by for a quick ten spot. They get some practice and a free lunch, and I get a much broader cast.”

  “Don’t you worry about someone turning you in? The more who know, right?”

  “Nah,” he waved a hand absentmindedly. “Division of labor.”

  “You’re a regular Henry Ford, Danny.”

  He looked puzzled. “The guy from Raiders? Han Solo?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I meant. You’re like Han Solo.”

  He liked that, trying to squint coolly, like a bad guy – which Danny just wasn’t, no matter how hard he tried. “Bitchin’,” he said.

  Han Solo couldn’t have put it better himself.

  The issue of the second painting, on the other hand, was going to take someone a lot smoother than Danny and a lot more legitimate. What I knew about it so far didn’t seem to make any sense, and Danny was never big on se
nse.

  But if you added smart, passionate, funny and beautiful to the mix, you pretty much had Nora Garcia de Soria. She’d sounded eager to meet me at the DeGoey Gallery, as we hadn’t talked in some time.

  I met Nora in junior high school, and fell in love with her on first sight.

  Most guys did.

  Her coppery-auburn-red hair cascaded down in light ringlets, and her skin was as smooth as a laconic clarinet solo, cocoa brown under burning green eyes. A lithe five-foot eight inches, narrow-waisted and broad hipped, she walked with poise and purpose. When she sashayed into a room, the women stopped talking and the men began mentally reassessing their life choices.

  We’d been “buddies” since the eighth grade. And yeah, that’s as agonizing sometimes as it sounds. On the up side, my going to jail hadn’t even slowed her down. She’d visited regularly; in fact, we talked more often back then that we did now.

  Until recently. I hadn’t told her, but reassessing my life had included reconsidering our friendship. I just loved her too much; she wasn’t ever going to see it and I wasn’t going to feel worthy enough to tell her. But I was as conflicted as hell; love and passion were one side of the equation, but she really was my best friend as well.

  I was starting to think it would just be easier to move on – although if I’m honest about it, I hadn’t had a girlfriend since getting out of the stir, and the loneliness might have been setting in. I felt possessive, protective – and increasingly beneath her.

  Outside the gallery’s front doors, she was dressed stylishly in suit pants and a waist-tied short woolen coat. “Liam!” She hugged me. Then she punched me in the shoulder. “Where have you been? We’re supposed to be besties and I haven’t talked to you in three weeks.”

  “Yeah ... I had this case. Real nasty piece of work, a big biker…”

  “You said you were going to be working on something.”

  “He was pretending to be dead. Words were briefly exchanged. Things got a little heated.”

  “Heated?”

  “Inflated.”

  “Inflated?”

  “Conflicted. You know. Hey, he tried to hit me with a pool cue, okay?

  She rolled her eyes.

  “What?”

  “You’re so talented. Why aren’t you creating, painting, instead of brawling with lowlifes?”

  I looked sideways, momentarily embarrassed. “I have to pay the bills like anyone else.”

  “You know, I still have that drawing you did of me in high school.”

  I’d sketched her when she’d fallen asleep in chemistry class, using her crooked arm as a pillow and resting her head on her desk.

  “Long time ago.”

  She shrugged. “Not so much. I don’t feel old. You?”

  I smiled. “Not so much.”

  “But you still need to get a real job.”

  “I didn’t have that many options when I got out. Probably wouldn’t have been doing this without help from your dad.”

  “I guess being a cop was out of the question,” she said with a little giggle. You couldn’t be friends with Nora without taking a regular ribbing.

  I gave her a venomous squint. “All right, all right, you’ve had your fun picking on me for the day. Let me show you this painting.”

  Inside the gallery, Stephanie was preoccupied and the other staff were hiding somewhere in the back. Alison Pace was nowhere to be seen. Nora said, “I guess I’ll have to say hi to her some other time.”

  The painting was modern abstract, infused with an almost naïve stroke, like a child expressing nonsense but producing evocative imagery nonetheless, splashes of color that reminded the onlooker of a day outside. It was optimistic and still open enough to individual definition to not qualify as an impressionist.

  Nora smiled as soon as she saw it. “It’s a Dufresne. He’s a local artist who’s gathered a large following in the last few years. This is an early piece called “Autumn Mist” – I saw it last year at a private showing.”

  “He was here on the afternoon of the robbery,” I said. “Alison said he’d been trying to get more wall space. Look, do me a favor and take a really close look at the brushwork. I think it might be a really good copy.”

  “Sure.” She got in close, check out the texture of the strokes in the oil paint, examining the whorls from different angles, then peering at the signature. Then she pulled a small jeweler’s loop out of her pocket and took an even closer look. It’s not the easiest job, detecting a modern fake; unlike older works, which are often detected purely by using poor aging techniques or inappropriately dated tools, an authenticator looking at a modern piece has to rely almost exclusively on the artist’s personal technique: the amount of paint left in each whorl at the end of a brush stroke; the angles and perspectives used.

  “Well?”

  “Even with the lighting being less than optimal, I can tell you absolutely, positively 100% guaranteed, it’s the genuine article.”

  That blew my first theory. Why would the robber take it off the wall, inspect it, and put it back? “You’re that sure?”

  She punched me in the shoulder again.

  “Okay, okay, stupid question.”

  “Besides, don’t you think Dufresne would have spotted a forgery of his own work? And why would they leave a copy of one stolen painting behind, but not the other?”

  “It could be anything. Maybe they only had time for one. Maybe they couldn’t get someone good enough to handle the Vermeer. There are plenty of artists who don’t pay close enough attention to the small details. Any decent forger knows that.”

  Then I realized what I’d said, and we both stood there, awkwardly silent in the moment.

  “Sorry.”

  “I know what you meant. It’s all good.”

  “I’m sorry I ever even put you in that position.”

  “You were young and stupid, and the money was even stupider. I might have been dumb enough, too…”

  I interjected. “No. You’d have never done something that crazy.” I never tried to sugar-coat it for her. I’d met some bad guys and made bad, selfish decisions. There was no atonement for that, no turning back the clock. You can never undo a wrong; you can only try to do right from there on. You can never assume people will forget, you can only hope you earn their forgiveness.

  She turned her head and looked deeply into my eyes from just a few inches away. There was a softness in her gaze, even close and direct.

  “Don’t think you know everything about me, Liam. Everybody has their secrets … the things they’d may be like to tell someone else, but just can’t. We’ve all got them… right?”

  Didn’t I know it! I dropped my head reflexively, feeling ashamed.

  “So…” She took a deep breath, breaking the tension, “…how does this help you with the robbery investigation, exactly?”

  “I wish I knew. Listen,” I asked, “you doing anything tomorrow afternoon?”

  She thought about it. “I was going to work on the basement.” Nora had been renovating an old house just off the downtown core, a beautiful old A-frame with a lot that would’ve accommodated two entire walk-ups in Fishtown; she was intending to sell it for a quick profit.

  “I have to check out the soccer game at PPL Park in Chester. It’s work, technically, but they gave me great seats and it’s a great time.”

  She looked skeptical. “Soccer?” Nora didn’t care about any sport except the Eagles, ever since Randall Cunningham signed a ball cap for her as a kid.

  “I promise, you’ll love it. This isn’t like high school soccer, these guys play with grace, style, technique…”

  She was smiling oddly. I said, “What?” I thought I had food on my face or something.

  But Nora just shook her head. “I just love seeing you happy. It’s a good thing to see. Different.”

  And I couldn’t help but smile at that myself.

  I’d parked a couple of blocks away. I walked back to the car and was just unlocking the dri
ver’s-side door when a couple of heavy guys – in form and temperament – climbed out of the green sedan across the road. One got out of the front passenger seat and the other the back, both wearing the same tan trench coats Ricky had described.

  They both headed right towards me, and I contemplated jumping back in the beast and hitting the gas — assuming she’d start — until one of the two pushed his hand up in his pocket, as if concealing a gun.

  “We need to talk,” said the shorter one, a side of tough hide with chin stubble. The other one used the concealed gun to motion us towards the narrow alley nearby, which was squeezed between two multi-story brick buildings.

  Ten feet down the alley, the larger one moved to take the gun out of his pocket. Figuring he couldn’t pull the trigger with it halfway out, I took the advantage, pivoting quickly and hammering him with a quick roundhouse right shot to the jaw.

  There are generally two ways to take a guy down in the ring: you can nail him hard square on the chin, or you can slowly knock the wind out of him by hammering the body, until his legs are gone.

  He went down, groggy but not out. The second, smaller man squared up with me, hands up in a protective stance.

  “You made a mistake with that one sonny,” said the squat little thug.

  “You figure?” He had his back to the alley now, and we stopped circling.

  “Yeah. I was Golden Gloves,” he said.

  I smirked. “What, in 1952?”

  “Pretty funny. Won’t be laughing after I wipe the floor with you.”

  “Only thing you wiped up any time recently was gravy.”

  He threw a crisp jab, but he was slow and his reach was poor. I feinted left and watched it go by like a slow-motion intrusion.

  “That the best you got?” I dropped my right shoulder a little, so he thought the big punch was coming, and instead flicked a couple of sharp left-hand jabs out. The first hit him flush in the nose, which started to bleed, and the second one gave him a fat lip. He half-stepped backwards and shook his head, momentarily stunned.