Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  JOHN FARRIS

  __________

  John Farris began writing fiction in high school. At 22, while he was studying at the University of Missouri, his first major novel, Harrison High, was published; it became a bestseller. He has worked in many genres—suspense, horror, mystery—while transcending each through the power of his writing. The New York Times noted his talent for “masterfully devious plotting” while reviewing The Captors. All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By was cited in an essay published in Horror: 100 Best Books, which concluded, “The field’s most powerful individual voice . . . when John Farris is on high-burn, no one can match the skill with which he puts words together.” In the 1990s he turned exclusively to thrillers, publishing Dragonfly, Soon She Will Be Gone, Solar Eclipse, and Sacrifice, of which Richard Matheson wrote, “John Farris has once again elevated the terror genre into the realm of literature.” Commenting on Dragonfly, Ed Gorman said, “Dragonfly has style, heart, cunning, terror, irony, suspense, and genuine surprise—and an absolutely fearless look into the souls of people very much like you and me.” And Publishers Weekly concluded, “(he writes with) a keen knowledge of human nature and a wicked sense of humor.” John Farris received the 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association. His latest novel is Phantom Nights.

  THE RANSOME WOMEN

  John Farris

  ONE

  Echo Halloran first became aware of the Woman in Black during a visit to the Highbridge Museum of Art in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Echo and her boss were dealing that day with the chief curator of the Highbridge, a man named Charles Carwood. The Highbridge was in the process of deacquisitioning, as they say in the trade, a number of paintings, mostly by twentieth-century artists whose stock had remained stable in the fickle art world. The Highbridge was in difficulty with the IRS and Carwood was looking for around thirty million for a group of Representationalists.

  Echo’s boss was Stefan Konine, director of Gilbard’s, the New York auction house. Stefan was a big man, florid as a poached salmon, who lied about his age and played the hayburners for recreation. He wore J. Dege & Sons suits with the aplomb of royalty. He wasn’t much interested in Representationalists and preferred to let Echo, who had done her thesis at NYU on the Boquillas School, carry the ball while the paintings were reverently brought, one by one, to their attention in the seventh floor conference room. The weather outside was blue and clear. Through a nice spread of windows the view to the south included the Charles River.

  Echo had worked for Konine for a little over a year. They had established an almost familial rapport. Echo kept busy with her laptop on questions of provenance while Stefan sipped Chablis and regarded each painting with the same dyspeptic expression, as if he were trying to digest a bowling ball he’d had for lunch. His mind was mostly on the Trifecta he had working at Belmont, but he was alert to the nuances of each glance Echo sent his way. They were a team. They knew each other’s signals.

  Carwood said, “And we have this exquisite David Herrera from the Oppenheim estate, probably the outstanding piece of David’s Big Bend Cycle.”

  Echo smiled as two museum assistants wheeled in the oversize canvas. She was drinking 7-Up, not Chablis.

  The painting was in the style of Georgia O’Keeffe during her Santa Fe incarnation. Echo looked down at her laptop screen, hit a few keys, looked up again. It was a long stare, as if she were trying to see all the way to the Big Bend country of Texas. After a couple of minutes Stefan raised a spikey eyebrow. Carwood fidgeted on his settee. His eyes were on Echo. He had done some staring himself, from the moment Echo was introduced to him.

  There are beauties who stop traffic and there are beauties who grow obsessively in the hearts of the susceptible; Echo Halloran was one of those. She had a full mane of wraparound dark hair. Her eyes were large and round and dark as polished buckeyes, deeply flecked with gold. Spright as a genie, endowed with a wealth of breeding and self-esteem, she viewed the world with an intensity of favor that piqued the wonder of strangers.

  When she cleared her throat Carwood started nervously. Stefan looked lazily at his protegee, with the beginning of a wise smile. He sensed an intrigue.

  Carwood said, “Perhaps you’d care to have a closer look, Miss Halloran? The light from the windows—”

  “The light is fine.” Echo settled back in her seat. She closed her eyes and touched the center of her forehead with two fingers. “I’ve seen enough. I’m very sorry, Mr. Carwood. But that canvas isn’t David Herrera’s work.”

  “Oh, my dear” Carwood said, drawing a pained breath as if he were trying to decide whether a tantrum or a seizure was called for,

  “you must be extremely careful about making potentially actionable judgments—”

  “I am,” Echo said, and opened her eyes wide, “always careful. It’s a fake. And not the first fake Herrera I’ve seen. Give me a couple of hours and I’ll tell you which of his students painted it, and when.”

  Carwood attempted to appeal to Stefan, who held up a cautionary finger.

  “But that will cost you a thousand dollars for Miss Halloran’s time and expertise. A thousand dollars an hour. I would advise you to pay it. She’s very good. As for the lot you’ve shown us today—” Stefan got to his feet with a nod of good cheer. “Thank you for considering Gilbard’s. I’m afraid our schedule is unusually crowded for the fall season. Why don’t you try Sotheby’s?”

  For a man of his bulk, Stefan did a good job of imitating a capering circus bear in the elevator going down to the lobby of the Highbridge.

  “Now, Stefan,” Echo said serenely.

  “But I loved seeing dear old Carwood go into the crapper.”

  “I didn’t realize he was another of your old enemies.”

  “Enemy? I don’t hold Charles in such high regard. He’s simply a pompous ass. If he were mugged for his wits, he would only impoverish the thief. So tell me, who perpetrated the fraud?”

  “Not sure. Either Fimmel or Arzate. Anyway, you can’t get a fake Herrera past me.”

  “I’m sure it helps to have a photographic memory.”

  Echo grinned.

  “Perhaps you should be doing my job.”

  “Now, Stefan.” Echo reached out to press the second-floor button.

  “Some day you will have my job. But you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”

  Echo grinned again. The elevator stopped on two.

  “What are you doing? Aren’t we leaving?”

  “In a little while.” Echo stepped off the elevator and beckoned to Stefan. “This way.”

  “What? Where are you dragging me to? I’m desperate to have a smoke and find out how My Little Margie placed in the fourth.”

  Echo looked at her new watch, a twenty-second birthday present from her fiancé that she knew had cost far more than either of them should have been spending on presents.

  “There’s time. I want to see the Ransome they’ve borrowed for their show of twentieth-century portraitists.”

  “Oh, dear God!” But he got off the elevator with Echo. “I detest Ransome! Such transparent theatrics. I’ve seen better art on a sailor’s ass.”

  “Really, Stefan?”

  “Although not all that recently, I’m sorry to say.”

  The gallery in which the exhibition was being mounted was temporarily closed to the public, but they wore badges allowing them access to any part of the Highbridge. Echo ignored frowns from a couple of dithering functionaries and went straight to the portrait by Ransome that was already in place and lighted.

  The subject was a seated nude, blond, Godiva hair. Ransome’s style was impressionistic, his canvas flooded with light. The young woman was casually posed, like a Degas girl taking a backstage break, her face partly averted. Stefan had his usual attitude of near-suicidal disdain. But he found it hard to look away. Great artists were hypnotists with a brush.

  “I suppose we must give him credit for his excellent eye for beauty.”

>   “It’s marvelous,” Echo said softly.

  “As Delacroix said, ‘One never paints violently enough.’ We must also give Ransome credit for doing violence to his canvases. And I must have an Armagnac, if the bar downstairs is open. Echo?”

  “I’m coming,” she said, hands folded like an acolyte’s in front of her as she gazed up at the painting with a faintly worshipful smile.

  Stefan shrugged when she failed to budge. “I don’t wish to impose on your infatuation. Suppose you join me in the limo in twenty minutes?”

  “Sure,” Echo murmured.

  Absorbed in her study of John Leland Ransome’s technique, Echo didn’t immediately pay attention to that little barb at the back of her neck that told her she was being closely observed by someone.

  When she turned she saw a woman standing twenty feet away ignoring the Ransome on the wall, staring instead at Echo.

  The woman was dressed all in black, which seemed to Echo both obsessive and oppressive in high summer. But it was elegant, tasteful couture. She wasn’t wearing jewelry. She was, perhaps, excessively made up, but striking nonetheless. Mature, but Echo couldn’t guess her age. Her features were immobile, masklike. The directness of her gaze, a burning in her eyes, gave Echo a couple of bad moments. She knew a pickup line was coming. She’d averaged three of these encounters a week since puberty.

  But the stare went on, and the woman said nothing. It had the effect of getting Echo’s Irish up.

  “Excuse me,” Echo said. “Have we met?” Her expression read, Whatever you ‘re thinking, forget it, Queenie.

  Not so much as a startled blink. After a few more seconds the woman looked rather deliberately from Echo to the Ransome painting on the wall. She studied that for a short time, then turned and walked away as if Echo no longer existed, heels clicking on the gallery floor.

  Echo’s shoulders twitched in a spidery spasm. She glanced at a portly museum guard who also was eyeing the woman in black.

  “Who is that?”

  The guard shrugged. “Beats me. She’s been around since noon. I think she’s from the gallery in New York.” He looked up at the Ransome portrait. “His gallery. You know how fussy these painters get about their placement in shows.”

  “Uh-huh. Doesn’t she talk?”

  “Not to me,” the guard said.

  The limousine Stefan had hired for the day was parked in a taxi zone outside the Highbridge. Stefan was leaning on the limo getting track updates on his BlackBerry. There was a Racing Form lying on the trunk.

  He put away his BlackBerry with a surly expression when Echo approached. My Little Margie must have finished out of the money.

  “So the spell is finally broken. I suppose we could have arranged for a cot to be moved in for the night.”

  “Thanks for being so patient with me, Stefan.”

  They lingered on the sidewalk, enjoying balmy weather. New York had been a stewpot when they’d left that morning.

  “It’s all hype, you know,” Stefan said, looking up at the gold and glass façade of the Cesar Pelli-designed building. “The Ransomes of the art world excel at manipulation. The scarcity of his work only makes it more desirable to the Vulturati.”

  “No, I think it’s the quality that’s rare, Stefan. Courbet, Bonnard, he shares their sense of. . . call it a divine melancholy.”

  “ ‘Divine melancholy’ Nicely put. I must remember to filch that one for my Art News column. Where are we having dinner tonight? You did remember to make reservations? Echo?”

  Echo was looking past him at the Woman in Black, who had walked out of the museum and was headed for a taxi.

  Stefan turned. “Who, or what, is that?”

  “I don’t know. I saw her in the gallery. Caught her staring at me.” Uncanny, Echo thought, how much she resembled the black queen on Echo’s chessboard at home.

  “Apparently, from her lack of interest now, you rebuffed her.”

  Echo shook her head. “No. Actually she never said a word. Dinner? Stefan, I’m sorry. You’re set at Legal’s with the Bronwyns for eight-thirty. But I have to get back to New York. I thought I told you. Engagement party tonight. Peter’s sister.”

  “Which sister? There seems to be a multitude.”

  “Siobhan. The last one to go.”

  “Not that huge, clumsy girl with the awful bangs?”

  “Hush. She’s really very sweet.”

  “Now that Peter has earned his gold shield, am I correct to assume the next engagement party will be yours?”

  “Yes. As soon as we all recover from this one.”

  Stefan looked deeply aggrieved. “Echo, have you any idea what child-bearing will do to your lovely complexion?”

  Echo looked at her watch and smiled apologetically.

  “I can just make the four o’clock Acela.”

  “Well, then. Get in.”

  Echo was preoccupied with answering e-mail during their short trip up Memorial Drive and across the river to Boston’s North Station. She didn’t notice that the taxi the Woman in Black had claimed was behind them all the way.

  Hi Mom

  Busy day. I had to hustle but I made the four o’clock train. I’ll probably go straight to Queens from the station so won’t be home until after midnight.

  Scored points with the boss today; tell you all about it at breakfast. Called Uncle Rory at the Home, but the Sister on his floor told me he probably wouldn’t know who I was . . .

  The Acela was rolling quietly through a tunnel on its way out of the city. In her coach seat Echo, riding backwards, looked up from the laptop she’d spent too much time with today. Her vision was blurry, the back of her neck was stiff and she had a headache. She looked at her reflection in the window, which disappeared as the train emerged into bright sunlight. She winced and closed her laptop after sending the message to her mother, rummaged in her soft-leather shoulder bag for Advil and swallowed three with sips of designer water. Then she closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.

  When she looked up again she saw the Woman in Black, looking solemnly at her before she opened the vestibule door and disappeared in the direction of the club car.

  The look didn’t mean anything. The fact that they were on the same train didn’t mean anything either. Even so for a good part of the trip to New York, while Echo tried to nap, she couldn’t get the woman out of her mind.

  TWO

  After getting eight stitches to close the cut near his left eye at the hospital in Flatbush, Peter O’Neill’s partner Ray Scalla drove him to the 7-5 station house, where Pete retrieved his car and continued home to Bayside, Queens. By then he’d put in a twelve-hour day, but he had a couple of line-of-duty off days coming.

  The engagement party for his sister Siobhan was roaring along by the time he got to the three-story brick-and-shingle house on Compton Place, and he had to hunt for a parking space a block and a half away. Walked back to the house swapping smack with neighborhood kids on their bikes and skateboards. The left eye felt swollen. He needed an ice bag, but a cold beer would be the first order of business. Make it two beers.

  The O’Neill house was lit up to the roof line. Floodlights illuminated half a dozen guys playing a scuffling game of basketball in the driveway. Peter was related one way or another to all of them, and to everyone on the teeming porch.

  His brother Tommy, a freshman at Hofstra on a football scholarship, fished in a tub of cracked ice and pitched Pete a twelve-ounce Rolling Rock as he walked up to the stoop. Kids with Gameboys cluttered the steps. His sister Kathleen, just turned thirty, was barefoot on the front lawn, gently rocking to sleep an infant on her shoulder. She gave Pete a kiss and frowned at the patched eye.

  “So when’s number four due?”

  “You mean number five,” Kathleen said. “October ninth, Petey.”

  “Guess I got behind on the count when I was workin’ undercover.” Pete popped the tab top on the icy Rock and drank half of it while he watched some of the half-court action on the driveway.
He laughed. “Hey, Kath. Tell your old man to give up pasta or give up hoops.”

  Brother Tommy came down to the walk and put an arm around him. He was a linebacker, three inches taller than the five-eleven Peter but no wider in the shoulders. Big shoulders were a family hallmark, unfortunately for the women.

  One of the basketball players got stuffed driving for a layup, and they both laughed.

  “Hey, Vito!” Pete called. “Come on hard or keep it in your pants!” He finished off the beer and crushed the can. “Echo make it back from Boston?” he asked Tommy.

  “She’s inside. Nice shiner.”

  Pete said ruefully, “My collar give it to me.”

  “Too bad they don’t hand out Purple Hearts downtown.”

  “Yeah, but they’ll throw you a swell funeral,” Pete said, forgetting momentarily what a remark like that meant to the women in a family of cops. Kathleen set him straight with a stinging slap to the back of his head. Then she crossed herself.

  “God and Blessed Mother! Don’t you ever say that again, Petey!”

  ______

  Like the rest of the house, the kitchen was full of people helping themselves to beer and food. Peter gave his mom a kiss and looked at Echo, who was taking a pan of hors d’oeuvres out of the oven with insulated mittens. She was moist from the heat at her temples and under her eyes. She gave Pete, or the butterfly patches above his eye, a look and sat him down on a stool near the door to the back porch for a closer appraisal. Pete’s middle sister Jessie handed him a bulging hero.

  “Little bitty girl,” Pete said. “One of those wiry types, you know? She was on crank and I don’t know what else.”

  “Just missed your eye,” Echo said, tight-lipped.

  “Live and learn.” Peter bit into his sandwich.

  “You get a tetanus booster?”