by Stuart Woods
“Are you going to Philadelphia?” Stone asked.
“I want to, but not if I’m unwelcome.”
Joan buzzed. “Mr. Elton Hills again.”
Stone picked up the phone. “Yes, Mr. Hills?”
“Who the hell is Bruce Willard?”
“He’s a retired army officer who lives in Washington. He was your son’s closest friend. He’s in my office now, and he’d like to come to Philadelphia for the funeral.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“As I said, he was your son’s closest friend. Would you like his phone number?”
“Yes.”
Stone covered the phone. “Your number.”
Bruce gave him his cell number, and Stone gave it to Elton Hills. “May he expect to hear from you?”
“Let me speak to him.”
Stone handed the phone to Bruce. “He wants to talk.”
“Hello, Mr. Hills. This is Bruce Willard.” He listened, then made writing motions to Stone, who pushed over a pad and pen. “Yes, sir, I’ve got that. I’ll come on Sunday morning. Noon should be fine. Thank you, sir, and please accept my condolences. Evan was a fine man.” He handed the phone back to Stone. “He hung up.”
“He invited you?”
“To lunch on Sunday. He said the service would be at graveside and private, just him and me.”
“Perhaps you’d better take a copy of the Sunday Times with you. He said he didn’t hear much news. I’ll send him a fax, warning him that it’s coming.”
Carla got back to Stone’s house in the early evening, as he was watching the news. She flopped down on the sofa and requested a martini.
Stone poured the drink. “Is all well?” he asked.
“We closed. All is well.”
“Did you find out who called your publisher?”
“Harley David. The meeting was at his house, remember?”
“I remember.”
“I added the phone call at the end of the story. It made a good coda.” She opened her large bag and withdrew an envelope. “Here’s a proof of the piece. Guard it with your life.”
Stone opened the envelope, took out some newsprint, and spread it on his desk. “Wow!” he said. “This is impressive.”
“It got more column inches than any investigative piece I’ve ever worked on. There’ll be a lead editorial on the subject, too, but I haven’t seen that yet.” She took a smaller envelope from her bag and handed it to him. “This is Evan Hills’s obit.”
“Do you mind if I send all this to his father? He won’t receive it until Saturday morning.”
“Do you know his father?”
“No, but I spoke to him on the phone this morning. He didn’t know his son was dead.”
“The old man has a reputation for being reclusive. How did he take the news?”
“Hard to say. Calmly, not to say coldly. He invited Bruce down to lunch on Sunday. The two of them will bury Evan that afternoon.”
“No funeral for a sitting congressman?”
“Apparently not. Once Washington has seen your piece, I doubt if there’ll be a memorial service at the National Cathedral, either.”
“Not unless the Democrats arrange it.”
“I suppose that, once your story breaks, there’ll be a lot of questions about how Hills died.”
“And a lot of inferences drawn, too, I imagine. Have you heard anything from the police about that?”
“No, I haven’t talked to Dino today. The news last night said they had found the offending SUV in New Jersey and that it had been wiped clean of fingerprints.”
“I saw that on the AP website,” she said. “It was owned by a D.C. security firm.”
“Integral Security. Do you know anything about them?”
“Not a thing.”
“Have you ever heard of a man called Creed Harker?”
“A lobbyist, I think,” Carla said. “I’ve seen him in the Capitol building. Creepy-looking guy.”
“Bruce said he saw Harker in the Four Seasons dining room when you two were having lunch.”
“He didn’t mention it.”
“Bruce thought he was followed to and from your lunch. That’s why he’s here. He got scared, rented a car, and ran.”
“Is he still here?”
“No, he got the shuttle back to D.C. this afternoon, said he had to pack a suit for the funeral on Sunday.”
“I liked him. I hope nobody hurts him.”
“Oh, damn it, I forgot to give him back his gun.”
“Gun?”
“He arrived here packing. I put it in my safe. I’ll send it to him.”
“You can send guns?”
“Sure, just as you can send anything else.”
“I hope he doesn’t need it.”
“So do I.”
The phone rang, and Stone picked it up. “Hello?”
“It’s Dino. Dinner?”
“Are you batching it again?”
“About every other night.”
“Mind if I bring a friend?”
“As long as she’s beautiful.”
“Never fear.”
“The Writing Room at eight? I’ll book.”
“Right.” Stone hung up. “That was my friend the cop. He’s invited us to dinner.”
“I’m game, but I want a shower and a change of clothes.”
“Go do that. I’ll watch the news.”
They arrived on time at the Writing Room, and Dino was already there. Stone introduced Carla. “Does she qualify?”
“Sure, she does,” Dino said, holding her chair.
“Stone, you didn’t tell me your cop friend was the police commissioner.”
“We go way back,” Stone said.
“We were partners about two hundred years ago,” Dino said. “I taught him everything.”
“Hah!” Stone ejected.
“Anything new on the Hills hit-and-run?” Stone asked.
“I expect you heard we found the car.”
“Yep. Anything in it?”
“Clean as a hound’s tooth—not even a registration, let alone a print. I’m told it smelled of Windex.”
“So the driver’s conscience is not clear.”
“Nope.”
“I wonder if the owner’s is.”
“It’s a small security firm, Integral Security, based in McLean, Virginia.”
“Across the Potomac from D.C.,” Carla said. “Lot of retired intelligence and military types live there.”
“Not a big firm,” Dino said, “only five cars registered to them, four Range Rovers and a Mercedes S-type.”
“Sounds like a fairly elegant outfit,” Carla said. “Are you investigating them further?”
“Not yet,” Dino said. “Their car may well have been stolen, who knows? If we get anything contradictory about that, we’ll take another look. Stone, do you know how Evan Hills traveled from D.C. to New York?”
“He didn’t say,” Stone replied. “I assume the shuttle or the train. His friend rented a car and drove up—he thought it was safer,” Stone said. “I wonder if Evan did the same.”
Dino stepped away from the table and made a call, then came back. “What friend?” he asked.
Stone explained about Bruce Willard. Then they had dinner, and the subject changed. They were on coffee when Dino’s phone rang, and he answered. He listened, mostly, then hung up.
“Evan Hills drove his own car, a Cadillac CSX, to New York. His hotel said it was parked at a garage a couple of blocks away. A team is on the way over there now with a flatbed. We’ll take it in and have a look at it.”
Carla’s cell rang, and she listened. “Any idea how they got it?” She hung up. “Four of the congressmen at the meeting have issued statements denying they were
there: the Speaker, Thomas Rhea; Robin Ringler, Texas; Nikki Seybold, Ohio; and Gail Barley, Arizona.”
“How could they have found out about the story?” Stone asked.
“Who knows?”
“It’s a shame we don’t have photographs,” Stone said.
The following morning Stone called Elton Hills and left a message: “Mr. Hills, it’s Stone Barrington. I’m faxing you two stories that will run in Sunday’s New York Times. One of them is Evan’s obituary, the other is a very important story about a meeting he attended. I thought you should know about it in advance, since it may result in your getting some calls from the media for comment.” He asked Joan to cut the big spread into manageable pieces and fax everything.
Dino called. “We pulled in Evan Hills’s Cadillac last night and found that the car had been broken into at the garage.”
“Was anything stolen?”
“No idea. The registration, an insurance card, and the owner’s manuals are all that’s there. No prints, either. Smelled of Windex.”
“So are you going to treat his death as a homicide?”
“We’ve never treated it any other way.”
“Have you still got his iPhone?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Check for photographs on it, will you?”
“Okay.”
“When you’re done with it, you can release it to me. The car, too.”
“Okay. I liked your journalist friend.”
“I thought you would.”
“But she’s based in Washington, right?”
“Right.”
“So now you’ve got two girlfriends in D.C. and none up here.”
“That’s a depressing way to put it. Carla gets up here fairly often, it seems.”
“Speaking of girlfriends, what do you hear from Dolce?”
“Not a thing, and I hope that continues.”
“I had a call from Mary Ann this morning . . .”
“No kidding? That’s a first, isn’t it?”
“I guess so. She had some information about Eduardo’s art collection.”
Joan buzzed Stone, and he put Dino on hold. “Mary Ann Bianchi on two for you.”
“Tell Dino I’ll call him back.” He pressed the second button. “Good morning, Mary Ann.”
“Good morning, Stone,” she said. “I had a very interesting phone call from Dolce this morning. I had told her about the forgeries, and she had a look at the paintings.”
“Did she confirm that they are forged?”
“Just the opposite. She said that when she was a girl, studying painting, she copied eight of them as an exercise, and she took large-format, Kodachrome photographs of them to work from. She compared the color transparencies to the paintings, and she says that they are all genuine.”
“That’s very interesting. Why do you think the appraisers thought they were forgeries?”
“I talked to the chief appraiser: their opinion was based entirely on the little check marks pressed into the frames. In the absence of the check marks, they would have authenticated all the paintings.”
“And that’s because Charles Magnussen told Raoul Pitt that the check marks meant he had forged them?”
“Yes.”
“And that was their only basis?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll look further into this,” Stone said. He hung up and got into his coat; he told Joan to tell Dino he would call him later.
“How long will you be out?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll call you if it’s more than a couple of hours.”
Stone took a cab up to West Fifty-seventh Street and the Pitt Gallery, and asked at the front desk for Raoul. He was soon seated in the gallery owner’s office.
“You know, Stone, don’t you, that the audit of my gallery and storerooms has been completed and that none of the pictures bear the check marks?” Pitt asked.
“Yes, I know,” Stone said. “I’ve come about something else.”
“How can I help?”
“Tell me, in as much detail as possible, about the meeting where Magnussen told you about the check marks.”
“His girlfriend, Greta Olafson, called me and told me Charles was dying, so I went to see him at New York Hospital. He was in a private room and obviously in pain.”
“Had he been sedated?”
“He said his pain was being managed, but he seemed perfectly lucid to me.”
“How did the subject of the check marks come up?”
“I raised the subject of his legacy. I told him that he would be remembered as more than a forger, that he was a brilliant painter. He laughed.”
“Why did he think that was funny?”
“I think he disagreed, and he appreciated the irony that he would be remembered more for his forgeries than his original work. Then he said he had done many forgeries in recent years, and he told me how he had marked them. He said, ‘Believe me when I tell you, it’s the forgeries that will make me immortal.’”
“Did you believe him?”
“I didn’t know whether to or not. He was getting tired, so I said my final goodbyes and left.”
“Do you know where his girlfriend is?”
“I believe she’s living downtown at Charles’s place. He bought a disused commercial building in SoHo twenty years ago. He lived and worked there.”
“Let’s go and see her,” Stone said.
“I’ll call her and see if she’s available.”
“Don’t call—let’s surprise her.”
“All right.”
They got a cab downtown and found the building. Raoul rang the bell, and a woman answered the unicom and buzzed them in. They went to the top floor in a freight elevator and stepped off that into a large living room, comfortably furnished. The walls were adorned with what Stone assumed were Magnussen’s original paintings, since he didn’t recognize any paintings by others.
They were greeted by a striking woman in her fifties with long, perfectly straight gray hair, and dressed entirely in black. Raoul introduced Stone to Greta Olafson. She seated them and asked a maid to bring them coffee.
“It’s a nice surprise to see you, Raoul,” she said. “Thank you for coming to Charles’s memorial service.”
“I’m glad I was there,” Raoul replied. “It was nice to hear Charles spoken well of.”
“He was a better man than most people knew,” she said. “He helped many struggling artists—gave them studio space in the building and, often, stipends.”
“That was good of him and perfectly in character for the man I knew.”
Coffee came, and the maid served them.
“Why have you come to see me?” Greta asked.
“There’s something I want to ask you about,” Raoul said. “The last time I saw Charles—when he was in the hospital—we had a brief conversation that puzzled me.”
“About what?”
“He said that he had pressed into the wood of some pictures he had restored a little check mark. He said . . .”
Greta began to laugh.
Stone and Raoul exchanged a glance and waited for her to stop, but she continued to laugh.
Finally, she got control of herself. “That,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, “was Charles’s little joke on the art world.”
“Joke?”
“When he restored a picture, he had this little dye, and he tapped on it, leaving the mark on the frame. It amused him to tell me about it.”
“Why did it amuse him?”
“I told you, it was his little joke. He didn’t tell me why it was funny.”
“I think I’m beginning to see,” Raoul said.
“Then please explain it to me,” she said.
“I think Charles wanted to make so
me waves in the art world after his death,” Raoul said. “He told me he placed the check marks on forgeries he had made when he accepted pictures for restoration.”
“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” Greta said. “After Charles got out of prison, he never did another forgery. I watched him work all the time. I would be working on a sculpture while he was cleaning and restoring the pictures that came to him. He never once copied one of them.”
“Well, his little joke worked, at least once. Stone, here, is the executor of Eduardo Bianchi’s estate, and the appraisers found twenty-four paintings with the check marks and, having heard the story, thought they were forgeries. It appears they are not.”
She began to laugh again. “I can hear him laughing with me,” she said. “He would have loved to see their faces when they examined the paintings. They must have thought Charles was an even better forger than he had once been!”
In the cab on the way back uptown, Raoul said, “I think I’ll have a word with an art critic at the Times I’m friendly with. I believe he will find Charles’s little joke to be newsworthy, if not amusing.”
“I don’t think the appraisers will find it amusing,” Stone said, “but I will take great pleasure in telling them about the joke.”
Stone called the head of the art appraisal team and broke the news about the check marks. He was met with silence.
“Hello?” he said finally.
“I’m still here,” the woman said. “I don’t believe you.”
“I’ve just met with Charles Magnussen’s longtime companion, Greta Olafson, and she assures me that, once Charles got out of prison, he never forged another painting. They worked in the same studio, so she would have known. Does that impress you at all?”
“I’m not sure,” the woman said.
“Well, you had better be impressed, because if you should lend credence to a rumor that the Bianchi collection contains forgeries, I will fall on you and your group from a great height, and no one will ever again purchase your services. Do you understand me?”
“Quite,” she said.
“And you may watch the New York Times for a thorough debunking of your position and an account of Charles Magnussen’s little joke on the art world.” He hung up and called Dino. “Call off the art squad,” he said.
“I thought I would hear you say that when you broke off our call. You had Mary Ann on the line, didn’t you?”
