by Thomas Perry
She put on one of the phone’s earbuds so she could hear what they were saying.
The older man was apparently the leader of the intruders from Virginia. He began to pace in front of Ed, who seemed to interpret the pacing as a prelude to something unpleasant and physical.
“I swear, Mr. Caine,” Ed said, “all you would have had to do was call me up and ask, if you wanted to talk in person. I’ve always agreed to that. I would have come to you in Virginia.”
Hearing him speak made Elle’s stomach sink. She had detected in the voice a false friendliness that didn’t work, because there was a weakness in it. She could see that the man he’d called Mr. Caine had heard the same notes and was savoring them.
“Then you’re getting what you want, Ed,” said Mr. Caine. “This is it. This is your face-to-face meeting. Maybe you think it was too dramatic to show up here with more men than you have—better men—and remind you how easy it is for me to walk in and push you around. Is that what you think?”
“No,” Ed said. “This is mostly your company. You could have done that any day. I always knew that. I was just telling you that you never had to. I had everything in control, and I was going to tell you everything as soon as it was final.”
“All right,” said Mr. Caine. “This is your chance. Start at the beginning and tell me everything that happened.”
“Sure. I want to. I’m just saying you don’t have to keep me tied to a chair.”
“That will depend on what you tell me. Start now.”
27
Elle heard a radio voice that must be coming from the communications room. She turned off her phone to listen. “This is Car Seven, come in HQ.” There was no response. She assumed the person who should be answering was Hernandez, who was tied up in the kitchen. “This is Car Seven. Car Seven calling HQ.” Still there was no answer. Finally, Elle heard heavy boots coming at a trot. After a moment a male voice said, “Give location, Car Seven.”
“We’re done with the stop in West L.A. It was a false alarm. We’re driving west on Santa Monica Boulevard.”
“Then come in to headquarters now. There’s an important meeting.”
“We didn’t hear anything about a meeting.”
“You will when you get here.”
“Where’s Flora?”
“In the ladie’s room. Get here as soon as you can. HQ out.”
Elle heard the man leaving the communications room, and he didn’t seem to be coming her way, so she returned to the website that received her recordings. The voice she heard was Ed’s.
“We always assumed there must be a limit, but we didn’t know where the line was going to be drawn, so we tested. People weren’t very protective of their privacy, and we got better at our pitches. Nobody can ever have too much security. We sold people more and more small cameras and bugs, added transponders to their wives’ and kids’ cars. In a year or so we started going back to customers we already had and updating their systems. The richer people, the ones with things to protect—coin collections, serious jewelry, antiques, art collections, important musical instruments—all had lots of insurance, but they didn’t want to get robbed in the first place. The insurance companies wouldn’t even insure a lot of that stuff without high-end alarm and electronic surveillance equipment. They inspected the houses and told the customers what they had to have. Whatever it was, we supplied it. When we could we talked people into more protection than the guidelines recommended, and the insurance inspectors were delighted.
“We started the next phase almost accidentally, just using the links we had installed to check our equipment. Do the camera feeds work in somebody’s hallway? Turn them on in the middle of the night when the customers are asleep and see if we get a clear image. We started doing that for whole sectors, and we began to pick up things—conversations. People said and did things that they didn’t want known. We came to know it, and we had recordings. I’m not saying that we switched from security to blackmail. We kept up with the parts of the business we always had.
“We put most of the spy equipment in the richest people’s houses because they could pay for it. When we did, we could do a better job of protection. We caught burglars, a lot of them. We started to get more and more business from the people in places like Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, San Marino, Malibu.”
Mr. Caine interrupted. “You’re stalling. I know all this. I invented some of it. I want to know how those three people got killed in that house in Beverly Hills.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Caine,” Ed said. “I was coming to that. The first one of those people I came across was the woman named Anne Mannon. Her husband owns two restaurants, one in Beverly Hills and one in Malibu. One look and you knew she was a special woman—beautiful, with light blond hair like kids have. She was lively, interested in things, and smart. Her husband was away at the restaurants from early morning to late night, six days a week, and maybe half-time on the seventh.”
“So what?”
“She had to spend most of her time without him. She had a lot of friends from her various interests. She was out most of each day at other people’s fancy houses, museums, charity offices, places like that. She was never alone. The kids got taken to school by a driver. As soon as they were gone she would be out to breakfast at someplace like the Beverly Hills Hotel with friends. She was on the boards of a lot of civic organizations, so there were meetings. She had a whole duplicate life.”
Mr. Caine watched him, his own face expressionless, not yet showing him whether he was doing well or sinking. “So what?”
“There were men, sometimes at her house in the afternoon when the husband and kids weren’t likely to show up. One of them was named Jeffrey Semple. He worked at the art museum, the big one on Wilshire Boulevard by the tar pits. And as I said, she was smart too. Some days, after the sex, they talked a lot about all kinds of things.
“What we learned was that she and a close woman friend of hers had been working with Semple to pull a scam. They had bought up a bunch of paintings by three dead artists that Semple knew about who were pretty good but not super famous. Semple was going to get paintings by the three of them into the permanent collection of the museum and help them get a lot more famous.”
Elle heard car noises coming from beyond the wall beside her. She took out her earbuds again and listened. The side wall of the ladies’ room, she realized, faced toward the road and away from the parking lot. She wondered if what she was hearing was another of the patrol cars arriving. She listened for a few seconds, but the one car was the end of it. She listened to the phone again. It was still Ed’s voice.
“Jeffrey Semple was an expert, and he had never done anything that was even questionable in his whole career. He was one of a few male friends she saw at meetings and parties and had sex with once in a while. To him she was a miracle, the love of his life. And she was a woman who wasn’t above noticing that she could control him if she wanted to.
“So things went on this way. Anne and her friend Valerie Teason bought twenty-five paintings by these three painters through their friend the dealer Nicholas Kavanagh and then bought three more in a secret sale. They planned that, once the three painters got better known and more expensive, they would have Kavanagh sell the paintings.”
“How much did they expect to make on the sale?”
“They had no way to know, but when they talked on the recordings we made in their houses, they always used the term ‘millions.’ Meaning each painting, not all together. Part of the game was that they would wait until they could sell one for a lot of money, and each one after that would be more, building the going rate as they went along. So the tenth one might be many times as much as the first.”
“They expected this curator to just slip the paintings into the collection?”
“No. What they did was take advantage of one of the ways the museum acquires things. They were both on the board. In April every year there’s an event called the Collectors Committee Gala. The Collectors Comm
ittee is a bunch of rich people who each give around sixty grand for an invitation. Most of them also donate bigger money besides that. It’s a fund-raising event. That year the committee was eighty-seven couples. During the gala weekend each year the museum’s curators show them about a dozen to fifteen artworks that the curators have approved. The committee members vote on each work to determine if it should be bought and added to the museum’s permanent collection. It’s a yes or no, so the committee can’t vote something into the museum that’s just crap.”
Elle heard the entrance door swing open, and instantly there was a commotion at that end of the building. She turned off the sound and pocketed her phone, then pressed her ear to the door. She heard, “Freeze! You heard me. Down on the floor!”
There was another male voice. “In case you haven’t made up your mind, you should know I’m behind you. That’s better. Down. Put your hands behind you.”
There were more footsteps as the two who had been ambushed and captured were taken away. It sounded as though they went into a room about halfway down the hall. She turned up the phone again to hear Ed.
“Albert Stolkos’s Crimson Twinge, Aaron Wilbertson’s Mississippi Canyon, and Sarah Prestmantle’s Caligulan Fantasy. Most of the nominated works got bought, including those three, so they were on the way to being better known.
“I don’t know if the two women lobbied the eighty-seven couples for those paintings or if lobbying was necessary. These women probably knew a lot of the eighty-seven couples socially or through things like the philharmonic or some charity. There was probably some ‘I’ll vote for yours if you vote for mine’ going on. But Semple was a big deal, so maybe he was all it took. And from the conversations we recorded, I know that the two women had paid for the three paintings and donated them anonymously. It was a yes-or-no deal with no reason to say no.”
Caine said, “Did their scam work?”
“So far it’s worked fine. I checked about two months ago to see if they’d sold any of the twenty-five paintings yet. They hadn’t, but a couple of others were sold by people in other parts of the country, and they were worth about ten times what they were once. They’ve gone from thousands and tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. They may keep going up, or they may go back where they started, now that Semple and the women are dead.”
“Why are they?”
“It’s a complicated story,” said Ed. “When we watched the scheme work its way through its steps, we realized that it really might make these women a million a painting over a few years’ time. So we—”
Elle heard a lot of heavy footsteps in the hallway outside the women’s locker room. People were coming. She turned off her phone as she took her first step toward the lockers.
She opened the door of one of the lockers that had no name on its tape just as she heard the door of the bathroom squeak open. She pivoted inside the locker and silently pulled it shut.
These lockers were the kind she’d had at her junior high school. The handle was on the outside and slid up and down. It was attached to a sliding piece of steel inside the door that had two holes in it to fit over two rounded hook shapes. When someone slammed the locker, the slide would go up and the hooks would engage. To open the door from the inside she could simply lift the slide a half inch and push.
She knew these lockers well, because she was small—just the kind of girl that boys liked to put into lockers and close the door on. For her the door was just as easy to open from inside as outside. As soon as the “damsel in captivity” act got tiresome to her, she would shift to the “I can’t breathe” act or pretend to be having a seizure. If the boy opened the locker she would jump out at him. If he ran off to get a teacher she would just open the door and disappear before he and the teacher got back.
She was inside, and the room was pitch-dark again. She could hear through the half dozen horizontal slits at face level. She slowly pulled her R9 pistol out of the belly band and held it. If the locker opened, somebody was going to die.
In a moment she could see a bit. Somebody had turned on a flashlight. The two women came into the room and then a man carrying a small automatic weapon like an Uzi or a Skorpion.
She recognized Shar’s voice. “You don’t have to come in with us. You guys have all the weapons and phones, and there aren’t any windows we can use to escape. You could wait outside.”
“Just go,” he said. “You said you had to go, so do it. Close the door to the stall, and I’ll keep my distance.”
Hernandez hurried into one of the stalls as though she was afraid he’d change his mind. Elle heard her pee. Elle supposed Hernandez had been in special distress, because she never seemed to take anything in but coffee. After a few seconds, Shar went into the other stall.
Suddenly Elle heard the distinctive sound of a locker’s slide moving up and the door swinging open. The man aimed his flashlight into one of the lockers, and Elle used her thumb to disengage the safety on her pistol.
Shar called out, “What are you trying to find in my locker?”
“Guns,” he said.
“Knock yourself out.”
He looked in the other locker, which must have belonged to Hernandez. One toilet was flushed and then the other. The two women emerged from the stalls, went to the sinks, and washed their hands. Elle couldn’t see them through the slits in her locker door, but she could tell that the man had stopped walking about two paces behind them. She heard the ladies’ room door open with a squeak and swing back and forth once before silence returned.
Elle lifted the slide in her locker door, opened it, and came out. She sat on the nearest bench and turned on her phone again, put in her earbud, and then tapped her finger on the website.
She heard Ed still talking. “Anne said, ‘You have recordings?’ and Shar said, ‘Enough of them. I think we could get your husband to kill you.’
“I told her I knew that she and her friend Valerie were going to make a lot of money on what they’d already done—started to make the twenty-five paintings they owned much more valuable. I said that was history, and they could keep it. All she and her friends had to do was find three other painters and do the same for us.”
“What did she say?”
“What anybody would say—‘I can’t do that. It’s impossible to do it more than once. It was a onetime opportunity that’s gone. Trying again will get us all sent to prison.’”
“Was it true?”
“No. I don’t think it was even illegal. I said, ‘Just try. Not trying will lose you your husband, your kids. Your husband is an old-fashioned guy with international connections, and he runs the businesses. What you think you’d get in a divorce will disappear.’ The two women finally agreed.
“It was just like a stock market pump-and-dump scheme. You buy something, you run the price up, and then you sell. Only it wasn’t against the law. I told her we wanted it done once, and then as long as there was absolute secrecy we’d leave them alone forever.”
“And they bought that?”
“They had no choice but to try. They found the paintings for us, and we bought thirty—ten by each artist.”
“So what went wrong?”
“Them. At some point they decided to cheat.”
28
“I was planning to work the night shift that night, so I was at home trying to get some sleep. I always sleep with my phone next to my head. It rang and it was Shar. She had called to tell me that something unexpected was happening. The two women were double-crossing us. She and McNulty had found out completely by accident.”
“What was the accident?”
“They weren’t spying on Anne or Valerie. They were just checking the reception and clarity of the cameras and bugs in the security system at the house of another customer of ours.”
“Which one?”
“Nick Kavanagh. I told you a little about him. He was the gallery owner who bought the paintings for the two women. They were all part of the same bunch of people who went t
o each other’s parties, ate at Mannon’s two restaurants, sent their kids to the same schools, lived in the same parts of town. Kavanagh’s gallery was near the Design Center. He was rich, originally from a career in finance in New York.
“It used to be that if you went to New York you’d run into these assholes who were in finance and making huge salaries. Now they collect huge fortunes while they’re in their thirties and get out of that business, so you meet them here. They’re usually investing in a music company or trying to get into the movie business. But in Kavanagh’s case the money and the connections gave him a leg up on the art gallery business. He knew a lot of rich people who had art collections. He also knew a lot of people who wanted to be out every night, and gallery openings were good for that. So he made a lot of money running the gallery too. You know when you buy a painting at a show in a gallery what the standard commission for the gallery is?”
“No.”
“Fifty percent. Half of the purchase price goes to the gallery. It takes a real idiot not to make money, but plenty of them don’t. He did. When Shar and McNulty called in and told me the two women were at Kavanagh’s house in the afternoon looking at paintings, it occurred to me what they must be doing. They had used up Jeffrey Semple, so they were in the process of replacing him with Nick Kavanagh.”
“Just like that?”
“He wasn’t a stranger. He was part of the same social scene they were in. He had already handled their anonymous purchase of the first twenty-eight paintings. He had bought the paintings for Nemesis too. We were even more anonymous, because he thought he was buying for the women again. He might not have the historical knowledge of a guy like Jeffrey Semple, but he must have had taste and a sense of which paintings were better than people knew. They had already trusted him and he hadn’t let them down. All they had to do was get him really committed to them.”
