by April Hill
“Being irresponsible, and being a screw-up, as you describe it.”
“If I’m such a jerk, why do you keep me around?” I demanded.
“Because I don’t think that you are a jerk, or an irresponsible screw up, either. And because I love you,” he said simply.
That stopped me dead. He had never used those exact words before.
“Why?” I asked sharply. “And I want a list, not a bunch of generalizations.”
He thought for a moment. “Okay. Whether you believe it or not, you’re a good person. You care deeply about all the right issues, and even about people when you don’t think they’ll notice. You’re bright, and funny. You’re talented, compassionate–”
“Sorry,” I cut in, “but that’s not me you’re describing. It may be what you want me to be, but it’s sure as hell not–”
Now, it was Matt’s turn to interrupt. “It’s who you are when you’re not trying to be the toughest kid on the block. It’s who you are when you stop acting a smartass and let yourself be vulnerable. When you allow yourself to ask for help when you need it. It’s the woman I fell in love with—the woman who’s been hiding out for too long, now.”
Since I was trying really hard not to cry, I did what I always do when I’m trying not to look vulnerable, as Matt had just described it. I made a smartass crack.
“Is that it? The complete list? There’s no other reason you can come up with for wanting me around?”
Matt grinned. “I have a low tolerance for boredom?”
* * * *
We didn’t talk much the rest of the way to Oceanside—to Simon Yarnell’s place. I just stared out the window and thought about everything that Matt had said—about me, and about us. Asking myself if all of what he had said was true. Self-analysis is something I usually try to avoid, though, so I didn’t get very far before giving up. Besides, I’ve always found that problem with hearing nice things about yourself is that you have to live up to them.
The Yarnell “estate” was huge—something on the order of Luxembourg, if Luxembourg had been perched on a hill overlooking the Pacific, and surrounded by an eight-foot high wrought-iron fence. Matt had told me that Yarnell kept his seventy-five foot yacht, the “Pamela Ann,” at Newport, and his four ex-wives in splendor pretty much all over the world. The privileged class, enjoying its privileges to the hilt. Matt had called ahead and made an appointment to see Yarnell on the pretext of interviewing several of Yarnell’s employees (like the sumo wrestler) about a robbery several months earlier, from his high-rise head office building on Wilshire Boulevard.
I was a very good girl for the first hour. I sat in the car with the engine running and the air conditioning on high, listening to the radio. Maybe the LAPD doesn’t keep its unmarked cars in the best of repair, though, because it wasn’t long before the engine began to overheat. I turned it off, opened all the windows and the passenger side door to catch a breeze. A half an hour later, and I needed a bathroom—badly. Mr. Yarnell had some lovely shrubbery, of course, but ducking behind one of his meticulously manicured bushes didn’t seem polite, so I crossed my legs and tried to think about something else.
Twenty minutes later, I was in agony. Where the hell was Matt? I held out for another five minutes, then got out and started walking briskly around the driveway. I knew if Matt found me out of the car I was in trouble, but jeez! He hadn’t told me that he was going to be inside forever! I was in the process of choosing whether to go behind the trio of topiary deer, or the perfectly sculpted holly bushes, when a woman stepped out onto the granite steps and called to me.
“Excuse me, dear,” she inquired, with a vaguely English accent. “May I help you?”
I didn’t have the guts to ask for the location of the nearest Porta-Potty, but she solved my problem by glancing over at the car and apparently putting two and two together.
“Oh! Are you waiting for the police detective, then?”
Oh, God, lady, don’t call him, I screamed inside my head. I’ll just hold it.
“Wouldn’t you prefer to come inside and wait?” she asked. “It’s terribly hot out here, today. Perhaps you’d like to use the ladies’ room, as well?”
Five minutes later, I was washing my hands in the lavish white marble bathroom, comfortable again. When I exited the bathroom, the smiling maid or whoever she was brought me a tall glass of iced tea and directed me to a large, cool room just off the equally lavish marble entranceway. I was going to pay for this, of course, but for the moment, it was worth the price.
I had been sitting in a tall brocade wing chair sipping my tea for several minutes before I noticed the pictures at the far end of the long room. Maybe a dozen beautifully framed paintings grouped around glass shelves full of small porcelain figures. Something about one of the smaller paintings caught my eye, and I wandered over to take a closer look. Most of the artwork was in ornate gilt frames, with brass gallery light just above, and tiny brass title plates on the lower rims of their frames. There was a really good Albrecht Durer etching, a dainty Renoir oil of a little girl, two large pieces signed by a French impressionist I didn’t recognize, and a Corot landscape.
I was leaning closer to study the Corot when the door opened. I whirled around, spilling most of my iced tea on the burnished parquet floor, and saw Matt walking into the room, accompanied by a distinguished looking older man with white hair and a neatly-trimmed white beard. When he got closer, I noticed his eyes, small, beady eyes—like a shark. There was no doubt about it. Simon Yarnell looked like what he was—a very important rich person, and a predator. And standing right behind Matt was Roy Phelps—looking like a heavily armored tank.
Matt covered the moment really well. He took my elbow and introduced me to Simon Yarnell as his investigative assistant—in training. I liked that.
Matt smiled. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long, Miss Parker.”
I said something vacuous, and then, “You have some wonderful pieces here, Mr. Yarnell. The paintings, I mean.”
Yarnell looked at me for a long moment, judging me, I suppose. “Do you know art, Miss Parker?”
“Not as well as you do, of course, but I try.” My time was slipping away, and I had to do something before I left this room. “Come and look at this one, Lieutenant,” I chirped, brushing back my hair. “Isn’t it stunning?” I pulled Matt closer to me, so that we were both standing directly in front of the Corot landscape, hopefully obscuring Yarnell’s view. It didn’t matter, though, because at that moment, he turned away briefly to speak to the helpful maid, who had just come into the room carrying a pitcher of iced tea. I screwed up my courage, took a deep breath, and raked the bobby pin I had taken from my hair across the lower corner of the canvas, gouging out an inch long strip of paint. I could feel Matt’s arm jerk with shock, but he didn’t say anything.
After that, we thanked Mr. Yarnell, thanked the maid for showing us out, and walked back to the car. My knees were trembling so badly I was afraid they’d buckle.
We were barely in the car before Matt started yelling at me.
“Jesus!” he shouted. “I can’t believe you just did that! That hunk of canvas you tore off is probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars!”
“More like thirty,” I said smugly. “Minus the four hundred dollar frame, of course.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Matt hissed. “I swear to God, if one of those guards in there comes after us, I’m going to shove you out the damned window and tell them I’ve never seen you before in my life! You must be out of your mind!”
“Have you ever heard of David Stein?” I asked sweetly.
“Yeah. I know two of them. One retired from Homicide last year, and the other works out of Narcotics, in the valley. Why?”
“The David Stein I’m talking about was one of the best art forgers in the world.”
“And?”
“Stein always said that he could walk through any of the great museums in the world, and find fakes.”
/> “Museums have experts for that. Why was this guy any better at recognizing fakes than their experts?”
“Very simple. He recognized the ones he’d painted himself.”
Matt stared. “Are you telling me that you…?”
I nodded. “Yeah. At least, I’m pretty sure. But, I must be better than I thought. It took me a couple of minutes to decide for sure.” I opened my fist and inspected the paint chip again. “If Gabe wasn’t dead already, I’d kill the slimy bastard, myself.”.
Matt nodded at the paint chip. “What are you going to do with it?”
I shrugged. “Me? Nothing. How the hell would I know what to do with it? Don’t you have some kind of CSI team for this kind of stuff? Forensics or something?”
Matt began to lose his cool, just a little. “Don’t I have a CSI team? Who do you think I am, the damned governor? I can’t just walk in and demand some expensive test on your say-so. I wouldn’t even know what to call it, and besides, it wouldn’t be admissible.”
“Why not?”
“Because you stole the damned thing! We have things like the Fourth Amendment, and search and seizure laws, remember? I’d have to get a search warrant, and to do that, I’d have to have grounds, show reasonable cause, and…”
“Why does everything have to be complicated?” I asked sullenly.
“We call it the United States Constitution.”
“That sucks!”
“Yeah? Well take it up with the founding fathers. Buckle your seatbelt.”
I glanced down at the paint chip, again. “So I should just throw this away?”
“No. Hang onto it. I’d like to know why a serious collector like Yarnell has one of your crappy copies.”
“Thank so much for the kind words. Would you like…?”
Matt looked in the rear view mirror. “Not now, I wouldn’t. Our friend the sumo wrestler followed us out, and right now, he’s checking out our license plate.”
“Oh, God!” I yelped. “Do you think someone saw me take the chip?”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Phelps is obviously paid to watch things.”
“What are you going to do?” I slid down in the seat, afraid to look back.
“Go home, and see if he follows us.” Matt grinned. “Hey, lady, I’m clean. I’m just a cop down here doing his job. You’re the one that just disfigured a priceless masterpiece.”
“Or a thirty buck piece of crap,” I muttered.
After a few miles, Matt didn’t see Roy Phelps following us any more, so I relaxed a little, but when we got back to his place, Matt dumped me in a chair and gave me the famed “third degree.”
“Now, “ he said grimly, “I want to know what’s going on with this painting business, and I want it all.”
So I told him, starting with Corot.
“Who?”
“Jean–Baptiste Camille Corot,” I explained. “He died in 1875, and when he did, there was a sudden rage for anything he’d painted. The guy was a first-class jerk, evidently, because even before he died, there were fakes everywhere. He even signed a lot of them, sometimes as a favor for a student, maybe for money. Who knows, really? Anyway, there’s this old joke that says of the 3000 pictures Corot painted in his lifetime, 10,000 of them were in the United States. Gabe asked me if I could do a couple of ersatz Corots, and I said sure. I thought it would be fun. He’s easy to copy, kind of sketchy. The only hard part was getting the canvas, and Gabe took care of that. He had a connection outside Paris, somewhere, who bought old pictures and stripped the paint off. I did a little research on the colors of the period, how they were made, and bingo—a masterpiece. I did two of them, actually. The one in Yarnell’s library is the best one, though.”
“And you went along with this scheme of his?”
“Gabe told me he was selling—and I quote—‘high quality antique reproductions.’ I told him I could age the canvas with coffee or tea, or even mud, rather than wasting money on buying up old paintings, but he said no. That’s when I began to suspect what he was doing. He wanted everything too authentic, which told me he was planning to pass them off as real, and for big money.”
“So, you knew he was signing these fakes and selling them, and you didn’t turn him in?” Matt demanded. I noticed that he seemed to be getting a little exercised about all this, but dummy that I was, I still didn’t think much about it.
“Yeah, sure,” I replied, laughing. “Like I gave a shit if some moron in Brazil with too much money and no taste was willing to boost his ego by stuffing his villa with phony masterpieces he could never sell or even show to anyone? Besides, like I keep telling you, I never signed any of them. Gabe took them somewhere, placed them in galleries, and then planted the provenance.”
“Provenance?”
“Yeah, you know. The sales history and documentation that proves to buyers who don’t know better—or who don’t want to know better—that what they’re paying for is the real deal. The galleries are almost always in on it, of course, so everyone goes away happy.”
“That’s no excuse for fraud,” Matt growled. “And if you still don’t get how wrong it was, you haven’t learned a thing from everything from all this. I ought to paddle the tar out of you.”
I sighed. “Water under the bridge. I’m reformed now, and besides, there’s probably a statute of limitations. It happens all the time. Grow up, Matt. It’s not such a big deal.”
Three little words. That’s all they were. Three, simple, honest little words, out of my dishonest little mouth.
Cool as a cucumber, and without a single word, Matt grabbed me around the waist and hauled me over his hip like the proverbial sack of flour. He walked right on into the bedroom with me kicking and squirming, grabbed two pillows, and piled them up on the end of the bed. I am not so dense that I couldn’t see what was on his mind, and I began trying to explain myself— rather feebly, for all the good it did. Before I had my first complete sentence out, I found myself face down across the stacked pillows, and Matt was stripping my pants off. I began to shriek immediately. This was unbelievable! Three times in twenty-four hours is simply not fair!
Mind you, I was not sitting (or lying) still, while being so unjustly manhandled. I was twisting frantically to escape, but Matt had blood in his eye, and he had no intention of letting me get away. I also knew, without any question at all, that this spanking was going to be spectacular, and exceed all my expectations. Holding me down with one palm between my shoulder blades, Matt reached into the drawer of the bedside table for the hairbrush, and I saw my doom writ large.
I have never been caned, at least not the way they presumably do in Singapore, nor bullwhipped, nor flogged a hundred strokes at the masthead with a cat of nine tails. Among the various implements that have been employed upon my tender behind, though, the absolute worst one, and the one capable of delivering the most memorable result, is the humongous wooden hairbrush that Matt was about to use—on me. From what I know of the thing’s vile history, it is manufactured by a group of evil forest trolls in Germany, and distributed by a quaint “country store” in Vermont. (One of its victims, an insightful lady blogger who has excellent reason to know its reputation, has dubbed this loathsome wooden implement “Vermin.”) Used with extreme care and restraint, it hurts like bloody hell, and leaves bright red ovals on the unfortunate buttocks of its helpless victims. At the moment, though, Matt wasn’t in the mood for extreme care or restraint. Matt was in the mood to make a point about honesty, and my cavalier attitude about right and wrong.
Seconds after he started, I abandoned my pride and began howling. I squirmed and bucked and tried to clench the cheeks of my butt, but nothing worked. Matt was obviously on a mission—to reform me. And then, I did something I’d never done before—not for real, anyway. I started to cry, with what even I recognized as genuine remorse.
I would like to tell you that Matt stopped instantly, took me in his arms, and comforted me. I would like to tell you that he apologized profusely fo
r his righteous zealousness, and that he rushed to find a pleasant emollient with which to soothe the scalded cheeks of my unhappy bottom. But he didn’t do any of these things. What he did was sit down on the bed, pull me across his knee, and deliver another trio of stunning swats to each cheek, with more energy that I would have thought he had left. By this time, I was pretty well howled out, but I managed to squeeze out a couple more before going entirely hoarse.
To the best of my recollection, I’ve never actually sat down on a barbecue grill, but that’s approximately what my bare ass felt like when Matt had finished. Oh, I know, I know. I’m always saying something like “my butt was on fire,” or something to that effect. I did not know, then, whereof I spoke. (In the future, I’ll try to be more precise, and not throw superlatives around quite so readily.)
Anyway, he stopped spanking, and when he let me up, I fell across the bed and continued to cry. Actually, I didn’t just cry. I bawled. I sobbed until the bed was soaked. I dissolved into helpless, hysterical weeping, while Matt sat on the edge the bed, saying nothing, and stroking my back. Finally, I settled into a string of exhausted hiccups and sniffles, and told him to go away, which he did.
It was probably close to an hour before I crawled out of bed and dragged myself to the bathroom. The swollen-faced, red-nosed creature that looked back at me from the mirror was not something you’d care to meet in a dark alley. I showered, brushed my teeth and combed my hair, then went back to the bedroom and dragged another of Carlotta’s awful old muumuus from one of my packed boxes. By the time I went into the living room, I felt vaguely human. Matt was sitting on the couch, with his feet on the coffee table. The TV was on, but he wasn’t watching it. He was looking past it, out the window. I sat down at the opposite end of the couch, with my legs tucked carefully under me to avoid contact with the couch. The nubby fabric of the cushions felt like coarse sandpaper on my rear end. For a few moments, neither of us said anything. I couldn’t think of a good opening. Finally, I just opened my mouth and spoke. What came out surprised me a little.
“I’m sorry.”
