by K R Hill
“Drop me at my car, would ya? I need to drive my normal-person car.”
Ted threw the lug wrench into the street. “You mother-fucker. I pick you up and my car gets beaten to hell and shot up, and now it ain’t good enough for you to drive in?”
“I got to go back to that basement and get rid of those paintings.”
“Whoa, you can’t go back there. There’s a body in there. If you take those paintings, that’s interfering with a criminal investigation.” Ted leaned forward and slapped his thighs.
“I know.”
“Dalton, you could do time for that. You don’t have to help that woman.”
“Look, those paintings are going to make headlines, and it’s all going to be linked to her husband. That’s a hard spotlight to bear.”
Ted sat on the curb and picked up the lug wrench. He looked one way and then the other, and then up at Dalton. “Either you go in there with a full body suit and a hairnet and something dragging behind you that doesn’t leave one single fragment of a footprint, or you go the other direction and drive a herd of elephants through that basement and make it impossible for investigators to find any clue, any piece of evidence.”
Dalton held up his cell phone and shook it at. “That gives me an idea. Why don’t you head back to the office and try not to shoot Nick? I’ll get back as quick as I can.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I want to make sure they get into the right hands.”
Dalton called Uber and got a ride to his car. On the way, he thought about his plan. All he had to do was drive out to the basement in San Pedro and grab a couple paintings. But these weren’t any paintings. There wasn’t a king or billionaire anywhere who wouldn’t give a lot and go out of his way to own one.
But first he had a little research to do. After twenty minutes on a library computer, he had written down the phone numbers he needed, come back in his car, and headed up the 405 N. and down the 110 into the South Bay, straight into San Pedro.
It was easy enough to get back into the house, and down into the basement and remove the paintings. He shoved them into the trunk of his car as though he had bought them at some secondhand store. But there was something that troubled him about that basement. Ever since he’d first set foot in there, a little detail was nagging at him: something that his subconscious had seen but hadn’t registered with his conscious mind yet. He knew it was there, something out of place, something that didn’t fit, and the thought kept popping up in his head again and again.
The small hustle he had arranged to get the paintings into the proper hands was another matter. Soon he was heading up the 710 freeway, making his way to Pasadena and then into San Marino. Once he got into San Marino, he pulled into the nearest Home Depot and arranged for one of the migrant workers to help him out.
He pulled into a spot in the parking lot of the Huntington Museum and called for an Uber driver to pick up his helper. Then he dialed the number for the director of the museum.
When the man answered, he said, “Dr. Rosenthal, I’m sending a man up right now who is carrying with him two paintings that I am turning over to your museum.”
“This is a most unusual call. How did you get my number?” said the voice on the other end.
“The first painting is Five Dancing Women, by Edgar Degas. I have contacted the representatives of Baron Herzog’s estate. The Nazis took the painting from him during World War II.”
There was a silence at the other end. After a moment, a man came back on and cleared his throat. “If this is some sort of a joke—”
“Dr. Rosenthal, this is not a joke, Sir. If you prefer, I can just as easily bring them to the Getty.”
“No, you don’t have to do that. I will come out and take a look. What is the second painting?”
“It’s a Van Gogh, painted in 1888, Painter on the Road to Tarascon.”
“Oh, my God. They need to be preserved with special lighting, humidity control. I am coming.”
“I’ve also notified the Los Angeles Times that these paintings have been found and are presently being held by your museum until they can be given over to the proper owners.”
Dalton paid the worker a hundred bucks, put him in the Uber Prius with the paintings, and sent him up to the museum. He was pulling out of the museum parking lot when he heard his phone and looked down at the little rinky-dink screen of the throwaway cell. He pulled out of traffic and parked, and read the text: Ted shot. Memorial Hospital. Be there soon.
The moment he read that text, he started thinking about the times he was in the jungle on some mission in Central America with Ted. He remembered their days in high school, when he thought he was going to die during football practice, his legs so weak they were shaking from running bleachers and the coach shouting at them to get their asses back up there and keep going. It was always Ted who jumped out in front of the whole team and broke out the Ted dance. It was that dance that made everyone laugh and not think so much about their pain. And Ted was the only one that he trusted to look after Jax.
He knew that now was the perfect time to spin the tables on the Israelis and the Italians. Ted would be happy about it.
Back at the property in San Pedro, Dalton parked the car a couple blocks away from the fountain house and found a nice bench where you could sit and watch the whole thing go down. Then he got on his cell phone, contacted the commander, and asked for his help investigating what looked like a warehouse that Mr. Devonshire had kept hidden. He made it clear that whatever the Italians found belonged to his client. He tried to be forceful enough to make it sound real and made the commander stay on the phone and ask a lot of questions that he didn’t need the answers to just to make him feel better about getting the information. At the end of the conversation, Dalton told him the address of the house with the fountain.
The instant he hung up, he dialed the Israeli crew. And then he sat back and watched. It would’ve been nice, he thought, with a big thing of popcorn, sitting on the park bench munching away as the crews converged on the house. Two vehicles pulled up, and men ran about here and there and got in each other’s face and shouted. Moments later, four or five of them disappeared into the house.
Dalton knew exactly how long it would take to find the basement hatch, how long it would take them to stomp around in the basement with their boots on, searching through every drawer, knocking things over, tainting every single footprint or hair or bit of evidence that any investigator could ever hope to find. After he waited the perfect amount of time, he dialed 911 and reported men with guns running about the house, speaking a foreign language, and carrying what looked to be explosives. His next call went to the fire department, and he reported seeing smoke coming up out of the roof.
Yes, Uri Dent had left a knife stuck in a piece of wood behind Sophie Devonshire’s house as a message to him. Now Dalton had returned the favor.
He wanted to stay and see the crews arrested, dragged away screaming about diplomatic immunity, but as sirens started to wail in the distance, Dalton got to his feet and walked to his car. He got lucky with traffic and made it to the hospital in record time.
***
At the hospital, he wound his way down one corridor and turned onto another. Nurses hurried past. Some of them carried clipboards and shuffled through the papers as they walked. One or two pushed electronic devices on carts. A couple of EMTs walked along pushing a gurney. Up ahead he saw Nick standing against the wall, his head tilted back, staring at the ceiling.
“What happened? Is he going to be okay?”
Nick looked at him. His shirt was smeared with blood. There was blood on his cheek.
“Oh, man. I heard the shots and tried to get down to him as quick as I could. He kept saying ‘Gregory.’”
“Is he going to live? That’s what I want to know.”
“The doctor is operating now.”
“Okay. You made a file on that guy, Thomas Trenton Gregory, right?”
“Yeah, it’s
back in the office.” Nick suddenly looked angry. “Look boss. If you’re going to go visit that Gregory bastard, I want to be there.”
“No Nick, I have to go underground for a while. I need you at the fort, okay?”
“That’s what my dad used to say when he’d go hunting.”
Dalton nodded. “Well, I am going hunting.”
He got half way down the corridor when he heard a woman asking for directions. The voice stopped him. He’d imagined it so many times, he didn’t know if he was actually hearing it now.
“Martin is the patient’s last name, Ted Martin.”
Jax was wrapped in a wool jacket that reached her thighs and black leather boots that nearly touched the bottom of the jacket. Her wavy blonde hair was pulled back in a baby-blue beanie that matched the big fluffy scarf wrapped around her neck. Her cheeks had a red tint to them.
The nurse she was trying to communicate with was speaking Spanish to an elderly couple and held up her hand to stop Jax. After she said goodbye to the couple, she spoke in English.
“Mr. Martin,” she said. “I believe he’s down the hall in room number six. He’s pretty heavily sedated. He just got out of surgery, but it looks like he’s going to be fine.”
Dalton turned to the wall. He wanted to walk back the way that he had come. He also wanted to reach out to Jax. He stepped one direction, then stopped and turned to go the other.
“Uncle, here, let me help you.” Nick put his arm around Dalton and led him down the hallway.
“She’s here.” Dalton looked over his shoulder and pointed once they reached the main lobby. “How’d she find out about Ted?”
Chapter 17
It was one of those rare overcast days in Los Angeles. A breeze moved the palms about and was just cool enough to make everyone remember winter. Flower trucks were still on the streets delivering white buckets of gladiolas and roses to the corner stands when Dalton rolled off the freeway and into the big city. A city truck was parked in the street beside a bus stop, and a worker in waders was pressure washing the bus-stop bench. A few homeless men had woken up and were shuffling along the sidewalk when he pulled into the parking garage underneath one of the downtown high-rises. He drove around beneath low concrete supports until he found a parking space. He hadn’t yet locked his car door when a security guard approached and asked the nature of his visit.
A blonde woman with her hair pulled up and her neckline pulled low met him at the elevator holding an iPad. He followed her down the corridor, past large conference rooms encased in glass, and into the office.
Sophie Devonshire looked very different here. Her hair was done up on top of her head. The tiny dress she was wearing said business, but made it clear that she was a shapely, attractive woman. She turned from the floor-to-ceiling windows that provided a breath-taking view of the city.
“Mr. Dalton, I’m so glad that you came down.” She waved to a leather chair.
Dalton walked over and sat down. “Mrs. Devonshire, Sophie, I have some unpleasant business that I need to discuss.”
“Okay. In that case, let me make sure that we have the room completely to ourselves.” She went to the door and pushed the stop out from beneath it. Once it swung to, she checked to see that it was locked, walked around behind her desk and pressed a button on the telephone. “Sadie, please see that I’m not disturbed for the next hour,” she said.
She hung up the phone and came back to her place beside Dalton.
“I got into your house in San Pedro,” he said. “How long has it been since you were in that house?”
Sophie Devonshire rubbed her hands together. “Oh, my goodness, I guess it’s been ages. I can’t remember the last time I was there with my husband. Years, I would say. Why?”
Dalton watched her face closely and noticed the movement of her eyes each time he asked her a question. “Your husband was definitely living in a secret life.”
“Women? Did he have another woman?” Sophie’s face turned red, and she looked at the ceiling.
“No, I don’t believe he did. Your husband was involved in stolen art. It looks like he was a member of a black-market operation. Do you know anything about that?”
She drew back. “Jason, I need you lay it out for me, please. You are not talking about one or two stamps, right?”
Dalton repositioned himself on the chair. “No. I found paintings that went missing during World War II. The value of those paintings alone is well over twenty million dollars.”
Sophie Devonshire jumped to her feet and paced from the window to the door. She tried to speak several times, but no sound came from her throat.
“If either one of those paintings are exposed to the art world, it would be international news,” he said.
She stopped at the window and stood staring out over the city. “I know my husband loved art and beautiful things. He just couldn’t live his life without feeling the joy that art brought him. But this—”
“I’m sorry to say, there’s more.”
Sophie walked back to the chair, reached down and felt the arm, and remained standing as though lost in thought. “Tell me,” she said. “I’m ready for the rest of it. That’s what I paid you for.”
“Are you sure you want to hear this?”
She sat down in the chair and placed her hands on her knees, and looked at him. “I have to know. There’s no way around it. What did you find?”
Dalton shook his head yes, and wiped a finger across his lips as he looked at a decanter filled with an amber-colored liquid. “Is that whiskey?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, but not just whiskey. That’s eighteen-year-old bourbon. And this is the perfect time for it.” Sophie got up and pulled the top out; she poured a couple fingers of the liquid into two classes. Before she turned, she drank the contents of one of the glasses and refilled it.
“Did you burn yourself?” he asked and touched her arm, where a dark imperfection marred the skin.
She looked. “Oh, no, it’s a birth mark.”
Dalton threw back half the whiskey. It was so smooth, he wished he had drunk the other half at the same time.
“That’s good bourbon.” He set his glass down and looked at Mrs. Devonshire. “We found a body.”
Sophie jumped to her feet and tipped up and emptied her glass. She waved a hand through the air and said, “A body? You found a body at the house in San Pedro? A dead person? Oh, my God!”
“We also found about three million in cash, Swiss francs, Euros, and US dollars.”
“That’s death money. My God, I don’t want to touch that money. If those paintings are on a list of pieces that disappeared during World War II that means they were taken from Jewish families. That is horrible.” She pulled the pin from her hair, and it fell down her back. She shook it loose, drank the rest of her whiskey, kicked off her high heels, and dropped into the seat once more.
“You had no idea what was going on?”
“No idea. What am I going to do, Jason?”
“I made sure the paintings got to their proper owners. Otherwise, having a body there with the paintings would be a story way too intriguing for the media to pass up. It’s still going to blow up, but to a much smaller degree.”
Sophie stretched her legs. “Thank you. I think that will take a lot of pressure off the situation.”
“And you’re going to contact one of the best criminal attorneys in the country.”
Sophie picked up the decanter.
But Dalton stood up and took it out of her hand. “No,” he said. “You need to be thinking clearly. Right now, you can get out ahead of this. Contact your attorney, and he’ll begin the proceedings.”
Dalton stayed with her for about an hour more, talking her through it, getting her ready for the questioning, and the spotlight that was about to be shone on her life.
Chapter 18
They parked around behind the building with the other tenants’ cars and walked around on the sidewalk to the front entrance. Dalton reached int
o his pocket and took out his keys as they approached the landing.
“It smells like an Indian restaurant up here.”
“Is that curry?”
The instant Dalton opened the door and stepped into the office, the full smell of the cooking hit him.
“Oh, my friends,” called Mr. Singh with that Indian accent, as he rushed across the office.
“What are you doing here, Singh? Why are you making food in my office?”
The smile left Mr. Singh’s face as he shook a wooden spoon in the air. “It is only my rice cooker and wok. I am Indian. I have to have good food, not that crap you Americans eat, hamburgers and hotdogs. I would’ve been dead long ago had I not known from the first day I landed in this country that what you call ‘food’ is merely a formula to put you in an early grave. That is why I make curries, the best in the world, the way my mother taught me to make them.” He turned and walked to the rice cooker.
“Singh, you’re in my office. This isn’t your apartment. What are you doing here?”
Nick walked over to the cooking food. “How long before that stuff is done?”
“I know I told you I would go back to India. I was praying all the way to the airport. I must have prayed the same prayer hundreds of times, and then it came to me: Mr. Dalton, this isn’t just some artifact dug up in the desert somewhere. If the treasure of Solomon’s mines is as vast as everyone believes, it could change history. I want to be part of that.”
“Listen, a friend of mine was shot tonight. All I want to think about right now is finding this Gregory guy that shot him.”
“I would be doing the same you’re doing, Mr. Dalton. But you have to look at the bigger picture. Your friend was only one man. What you need to be doing, what the three of us need to be doing, is searching for Solomon’s Key.”
Nick picked up the wooden spoon and stirred the vegetables simmering in the wok. “If we find that artifact, all these bad guys will just disappear. And then we hit Costco and buy everything we ever wanted, right?”
