Dusted (A Maid in LA Mystery)

by Jacobs, Holly

  I’ll make it a point to be, I texted Cal back.

  “Oooh, Mom’s got a boyfriend,” Eli crooned.

  “Maybe it was Hunter,” I said.

  “Nah, you don’t get all gooey eyed when Hunter texts. Plus, our oldest brother wouldn’t be caught dead up before ten on a Sunday morning. The only reason I’m up this early is a certain director who seems to think the cast needs an extra few hours of rehearsal today.” Eli nodded at Miles, who grunted and sat down to orange juice and yogurt.

  I listened to them snipe and banter their way through breakfasts, then I cleaned the kitchen when they went to get ready for practice.

  After they left, I headed for the gallery.

  It wasn’t that far as the crow flies, but here in LA even crow flying distances could take a long time. But seriously, this was Sunday afternoon. Where did all these people come from?

  I finally found the gallery. It was in a small brick storefront with tinted windows and a tinted glass door. The bell rang as I walked in. And I was immediately surrounded by what I assumed was art.

  To my untrained eye, the painting immediately to my right looked like something one of the boys might have done in kindergarten. It was all color and squiggles. I had no idea what it was supposed to be.

  A woman in shoes so high I wondered how on earth she could possibly stand in them came out from somewhere the back. I was sure the shoes had a name attached to them. Some big designer’s name. They were the kind of shoes that needed no introduction in certain circles.

  In my particular circle, I could easily identify Crocs, but that was about it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like shoes. But I can’t imagine spending a fortune on a pair.

  Ms. Designer Shoes looked at me as if she were pondering what someone in khaki pants and boat shoes could possibly want in the gallery. “May I help you?”

  “I’m just browsing,” I said. I moved closer to the piece of kindergarten art and pretended to study it. Really, it did look like something Eli did for me once. It was probably still in his school folder. Maybe he was an art prodigy and I’d just never noticed?

  The art lady’s nose rose to an impressive height. It was so high that if we were outside in the rain, she’d drown. “Are you looking for something specific?”

  “Maybe,” I said. I couldn’t help but think of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. If this were a clothing boutique not an art gallery, and if I were twenty years younger and ten pounds lighter—okay, probably more than ten pounds—this would be just how she felt.

  Ms. Snooty-Nose obviously didn’t feel I belonged in the gallery.

  I pulled out Mr. Magee’s acting lessons and imagined I was Pretty Woman-ized. I imagined I had a charge card that had no limit in my wallet. That I was dressed in khaki’s just to avoid being noticed. I imagined my driver was down the block, sitting in my limo.

  “Looks can be deceiving because from the outside your gallery certainly underwhelms. But we both know better than to judge a book by its cover, especially here in Hollywood. Why, just last week, Leo came into the cafeteria in costume and in character. You’d have never known him.” Just enough name-dropping, I thought. Then I added, “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to look around. You never know when something will strike my fancy.”

  I guess my acting lessons, which had never really paid off in a steady stream of acting gigs, were finally paying off. I mean, I had done some acting. I was a dead body once and almost the face (or teeth) of a national toothpaste campaign.

  Ms. Designer Shoes gave me an assessing look and then led me into the gallery.

  “This is Jolly Master’s Ode to Sunset. He’s a new up and coming talent…”

  She droned on about the new up and coming talent, but I was stuck on the fact that someone actually named a male child Jolly. Heck, I wouldn’t name a girl Jolly. I wouldn’t even name a dog Jolly.

  Maybe it was my feeling that Jolly might be a kindred spirit to all three Mac children—a family where terrible names ran amuck—that made me take a closer look. I wanted to like his work. Alas, good old Jolly’s oil on canvas looked like a blob of orange over a line of grey. That was it.

  The only thing that impressed me about it was that the orange blob matched the color of my gown for Tiny’s wedding.

  “…and he’s someone I recommend getting in on the ground-floor. He’s got a long career ahead of him, and these early pieces’ value should only increase in the coming years.”

  “Do you have anything by Mark Kirchoff?” I asked as casually as I could manage.

  She smiled. “We do. He’s known for painting nature scenes.” She led me to the north corner of the gallery. Okay, so I have no sense of direction, it could have been the southern corner, or northwestern one. It simply felt north to me.

  She pointed with flourish to two black blobs in a bunch of green stripes. “This is Muskrat Love.”

  If I were naming this particular painting, I’d have gone with truth in advertising and simply called it black blobs in green stripes.

  Whatever happened to boats on the water? Or nice woodland paintings where the trees looked like trees?

  “Interesting,” I said. “I like his use of color and those brush strokes. I like it.” My Google search paid off, and Ms. Designer Shoes nodded approvingly.

  Turns out Mark Kirchoff wasn’t one of the gallery’s up and coming artists. He was a well-established artist and the price of this particular painting was a lot of money. I mean, a lot.

  A lot of dollars for a bunch of colored lines.

  I felt sick. If they thought someone from Mac’Cleaners stole an original Kirchoff painting, it would be a major crime. I thought that the cost of stolen items affected the charges and potential jail time. I’d have to ask Cal. No, I couldn’t ask him. He’d told me to stay out of it.

  “Thank you. I’ll be back,” I said and hurried toward the door. I was going to be sick. I knew it.

  “Here, take my card,” Ms. Designer Shoes said.

  Miriam Foster, it read.

  “Thank you, Miriam.” I purposefully used her first name to establish that I was the top dog, despite my khakis and boat shoes. “I’ll be in touch soon.”

  I’d barely shut the door when my phone buzzed in my purse. I stood in front of the tinted windows and looked at it. I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

  “This is Robert Williams. You’re Dick’s friend?”

  “Yes. I need some help with—”

  He interrupted. “I know. Dick called to vouch for you. He filled me in on everything but the name.”

  “Could we meet sometime soon?” I asked. “I’ll explain it all to you.”

  “No. There’s no need. Dick told me enough, and I’m in Iceland right now.”

  “Oh, hang up and e-mail me. I can’t imagine how much the long distance is costing you.”

  He laughed and there was a hint of an adult laughing at a child’s innocence in it. “Yeah, don’t worry. It doesn’t cost me anything. I’m calling…” He paused, and switched whatever he was going to say to, “I’m calling you over the Internet.”

  He spoke slowly, as if speaking to a child.

  “Oh,” I said, hoping I sounded like I knew what he was talking about. “So could you do a check on Theresa Maxwell?”

  “Give me your e-mail.”

  I did and he hung up abruptly.

  Weird.

  There was definitely a chance this man had spent more time with his computer than was healthy for him. He had no people skills.

  I looked back through the tinted window of the gallery. I’d set everything in motion that I could.

  I headed home to write some more and tackle the laundry.

  When you have teen boys in the house, the cupboards are always bare and there’s always laundry to be done.

  Always.

  I was still doing laundry on Monday while I waited for Cal to come over and take me out to dinner. He hadn’t made it over Sunday night.

  Murder could be h
ard on a relationship.

  The dryer buzzed, so I went back, grabbed the basket of clothes and rather than fold them at the dryer, I went back to the living room and sat on the couch.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Come in,” I called.

  It was Tiny, not Cal. She came in and shut the door behind herself as she exclaimed, “It’s worse.”

  “What’s worse?” I asked as I set down the t-shirt I’d been folding.

  “Theresa’s forgery. It’s much worse than we imagined.” She walked back to my kitchen and I followed. She opened the fridge and pulled out my box of wine.

  Yes, I drink boxed wine. I could only imagine Miriam, Ms. Haughty-Art-Gallery, Designer-Shoes Lady’s turned up nose if she discovered my secret.

  Here’s the thing, I am the only adult in the house and I rarely drink more than a glass of wine with a meal. So the box works well for me. I know that true wine connoisseurs would turn up their noses to it, but thankfully I’m not friends with any wine connoisseurs and this particular friend didn’t seem to mind the box.

  Tiny poured herself a glass and sat down.

  I sat next to her. “Don’t say Theresa’s forgery. She didn’t forge anything, or have anything to do with it. That computer geek, Robert, told me he couldn’t find anything suspicious about her online—no offshore bank accounts or questionable banking activity—and then he assured me if there were anything, he’d have found it. He’s that good. Well, according to him he is. Seriously, the man has no people skills, though Dick says he has all kinds of computer skills. At least—”

  “Quincy,” Tiny said sharply. “That cop buddy of Cal’s—”

  “Mickey,” I supplied.

  “Yes. He stopped at the office right after you left. He said he’s canvased our client list. Two other couples have discovered forgeries in their art collection.” She gulped her glass of wine and poured another.

  I grabbed a glass and helped myself as well. “Are they all Theresa’s customers?”

  Tiny nodded. “Her regulars. You know she works in Hollywood Hills a lot.”

  “Oh.” The meaning of that sank in. This was not good news. “It all ties back to us.”

  Tiny gulped her wine. “Yes, it all ties back to us. Mac’Cleaners has keys and security codes to all the homes in question, and we also would have access to the clients’ schedules. We’d know when the houses would be vacant.”

  “Oh.

  “Quincy, stop saying oh.” Tiny’s voice rose and octave. “What are we going to do? I’m getting married in a few weeks, and now we might lose our business. No paper’s picked up on the theft yet, but if they do? I mean if word gets out that our clients’ homes are being pilfered?”

  I smiled a bit at Tiny’s use of the word pilfered. It was an innocent sounding word. Then I remembered what the paintings at the gallery were going for and my smile faded. “If that happens, it’s all over.”

  “Yes.” Tiny poured herself more wine.

  I was tempted to simply lift the wine box and open the nozzle right into my mouth. “So what homes?”

  “The Giffords, the Grahams, and the Neilsons.”

  “I think I’ve been to those houses when I’ve filled in for Theresa, but I don’t think I met any of them.” Tiny and I had both filled in for Theresa. She was not a reliable employee by any stretch of the imagination.

  “The Giffords have been clients for years. The Grahams and Neilsons came on as their referrals last year when we ran that promotion.”

  “And they all had a painting that was replaced with a forgery?” I asked.

  “No, worse.” Tiny took a fortifying sip. “Not a painting. The Giffords had three paintings, the Grahams had four and the Neilsons just had one.”

  “Well, fu…boogers.”

  “Yeah.”

  We both drained our glasses. I poured us each another.

  “Quincy, I know that Cal told you to stay out of this, and I know that I told you to stay out of this but I don’t think you can stay out of it. We have to find out who really stole the paintings and replaced them with forgeries, or else Mac’Cleaners reputation is going to take a nosedive. And this is a business where reputation is everything.”

  “Okay, so lets figure out what we know. I’ll start a file and we’ll pull out my white-board and start to put all the information on it so we can see all the pieces. And we will figure it out,” I promised Tiny.

  “We have to,” she said.

  I nodded.

  I was no longer simply checking into Theresa to make sure we were in the clear, I was all out investigating in order to save my business.

  For a long time I’d felt I was an actress whose day job was owner of a cleaning service.

  Suddenly I realized that I was a business owner first and foremost, and the only part of me that still felt like an actress was the private investigator part. I’d need all the acting skills Mr. Magee had taught me in order to figure this all out.

  Chapter Three

  Tiny helped me pull out the white-board I’d used when I was investigating Mr. Banning’s murder. Since Hunter was away at college, we set it up in his room.

  She tried to help, but I really wanted some quiet to see if I could find any connections, so I sent her out to find Sal on the premise of getting his opinion on what we should do. We really could use his legal advice, but mainly I knew that Tiny needed to see Sal. Her fiancé would find a way to calm her down.

  When I was alone, I pulled up records of the three clients in question and posted a map of Hollywood Hills on the white-board. I put red stars on the three homes in question. Other than being in the same general area of LA, they weren’t particularly close to one another. I checked our files and they had different security companies, but they all had security systems in place.

  Could that mean anything?

  According to Dick, a good mystery needed some red herrings…clues that would throw the detective off. I could understand how as a writer red herrings were a good thing, but as a maid playing at being a detective, it was hard to tell what was important and what was a red herring.

  When Mr. Banning was murdered, I called on my lifelong love of television cop dramas to help me solve the case. I asked myself what The Closer’s Brenda Leigh Johnson would do? I so loved her soft Southern toughness. Or what Captain Raydor, who took on the starring role of the spinoff, Major Crimes, would do. I could call on countless Law & Orders and CSI’s, but I was afraid I was more like Psych. A pretend psychic detective and his pal solving crimes with a lot of comedy. My life didn’t seem like a comedy to me, but I knew that a maid solving mysteries would probably be pitched as a comedy in Hollywood.

  When I tried to find Mr. Banning’s murderer, I’d looked at his family. They didn’t do it, but checking them out did eventually lead me in the right direction.

  There was no family connection here, at least not that I could see. There were three unconnected families who’d had their artwork stolen and replaced with forgeries. Competent forgeries, but none of them had been good enough to fool the experts once they were looking at them.

  Three families who all had security for their home, but there was no connection with security systems that I could see.

  I checked our files. None of the families had work connections either.

  So what I had was three families whose only connection that I could find was they’d had paintings stolen and replaced with forgeries without their being the wiser. And they all used Mac’Cleaners. More specifically, Theresa.

  I called Tiny and she emailed me pictures of the paintings that had been stolen. She contacted Mickey Roman who was investigating the forgeries and said it took dropping Cal’s name to get copies of the pictures the families in question had used for insurance purposes.

  I printed them out and put them on my white-board.

  Now, here’s the thing, I like art when you could look at it and tell what it was supposed to be.

  A boat.

  A wave.


  A farmhouse.

  A person.

  The striking commonality between the stolen art in question was there was no way to tell exactly what it was without looking at the artwork’s title. There were Kirchoffs and the paintings that weren’t his, could have been. They were dots, lines, and squiggles more than anything else.

  Kirchoff’s Texas Bluebonnets, for instance. It was blobs of blue paint on a green slash.

  I was so not destined to be an artist, or to collect art. At least not this kind of art.

  With Mr. Banning’s murder, my service industry contacts helped me investigate. My only art connection was that snooty high-heeled lady at the art gallery. Miriam was not much of a connection especially when she thought I was not up to snuff.

  I sat on Hunter’s bed and stared at the board.

  Abstract art, that’s what the insurance forms read.

  If by abstract they meant art a kindergartener might bring home, then yes.

  Maybe that’s why someone was able to replace it?

  Unless you were an expert, it probably looked like slashes of color, sometimes dots of color. It certainly didn’t look like a boat, a wave, a farmhouse, or a person.

  “Quincy?”

  Oh, no. I knew that gravelly bellow. I hurried out of Hunter’s room and shut the door firmly behind me before I hurried toward the front door.

  “The door was open,” he said as he stood in the foyer.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Dinner?” he half asked, half stated. “I wasn’t sure if the boys were home, so I brought three pizzas. I figured that was enough for you and I to share one, and then there was one each for them.”

  He stared down the hall. “Quincy, what were you doing in Hunter’s room?”

  “I missed my son and was just taking some time to sit in there. It comforts me.”

  He nodded, walked into the kitchen, set the pizza down and then—before I could stop him—he turned around sharply and went back down the hall.

  “Cal, stop. Hunter would be very offended if he finds out you’re invading his privacy.

  Cal opened Hunter’s door. “Aha.”

  “Aha? Seriously, Cal? Next you’ll be saying By Jove, and tut tut.”