by Nora Roberts
“A couple dozen Italian shoes. Several Armani suits. A few bottles of Dom Perignon and silk underwear in a rainbow of colors.”
“So, DiCarlo likes the finer things.”
“I also found a checkbook with a balance of a little over seven thousand, a porcelain Madonna and several dozen framed family photos.”
“He saves his money, hasn’t forgotten his religious roots and appreciates his family. So far he doesn’t sound like a cold-blooded murderer.”
“And Ted Bundy had a pretty face and a nice smile.” He turned on Lexington and headed downtown. “I also found some letterhead from E. F., Incorporated, based in LA with a branch here in Manhattan, a lot of paperwork from the same and about a dozen messages on his phone machine from Mama, cousin Alphonso, Aunt Sophia and some bimbo named Bambi.”
“Why, because a woman is named Bambi, do you assume she’s a bimbo?”
“My mistake.” He snuck through an amber light. “Just because she called DiCarlo Tony-kins, giggled and left a message in squealing baby talk is no reason for me to assume she’s a bimbo.”
“That’s better.”
“What I didn’t find was an address book, a passport or any cash. Given that, and the fact that his messages were unanswered, no one in the building has seen him for more than a week and his mail hasn’t been picked up, leads me to believe he hasn’t been around in a while.”
“That’s a reasonable deduction. Do you think he’s still in Philadelphia?”
She said it lightly, but he caught the undertone of worry. “It’s a possibility. No one’s going to bother your family, Dora. There’s no reason to.”
“I think you’re right. If he’s there, he’s waiting for me to come back.” She grimaced. “Cheerful thought.”
“He won’t get near you. That’s a promise.”
Jed fought his way from Manhattan to Brooklyn Heights, fueled on cigarettes and the not entirely unpleasant sensation of jousting in traffic. By the time he found Franklin Flowers’s address, he had fit together the pieces he had so far, jumbled them and let them reassemble. He slipped smoothly into a parking spot.
“Looks like you’re in on this one, Conroy.” He leaned toward her, ducking his head to get a better look at the storefront through her window.
F. FLOWERS
WE BUY AND SELL
“Who doesn’t?” he wondered. “Don’t forget, Conroy—”
“I know. You’ll do the talking.”
They entered the shop. It was hardly bigger than the average living room and crammed with merchandise ranging from ratty teddy bears to pole lamps. Though it was deserted, Jed heard a voice coming from the back room behind a beaded curtain. As the sign on the counter instructed, he rang a brass bell that had once graced the front desk of a small-time bawdy house in the Bronx.
“One moment, please.” The voice was male, the words delivered like a song.
Flowers was as good as his word. Before Dora could finish her survey of a group of Avon bottles, he came through the curtain with a rattle of beads and a puff of fragrant smoke.
He was a big man, perhaps six-four, gone soft in the middle. Like his teddy bears, he had a round, homely face that radiated sweetness. His hair was parted nearly at his ear to allow him to comb strands of thin blond hair over a wide bald spot. Between two thick fingers he held a slim brown cigarette.
“Good morning!” Again he sang, like a kindergarten teacher reciting the ABCs. “No, no.” Clucking his tongue, he glanced toward a row of ticking clocks. “It’s afternoon already. Where does the time go? I never seem to be able to keep up. The world seems to move too quickly for me. And what may I do for you?”
Since Dora was busy admiring the jovial giant, she had no trouble letting Jed take the lead.
“Mr. Flowers?”
“Yes, I’m Frank Flowers, and this is my own little place.” He drew delicately on his cigarette, exhaled through lips pursed as if for a kiss. “As you can see, we buy and sell almost anything. What can I interest you in today?”
“Do you know Sherman Porter?”
Flowers’s jolly expression disintegrated. “Poor Sherman. I received word just two days ago. Tragic. The world we live in so often appalls me. Shot down like a dog at his own desk.” He shuddered. “Hideous. Simply hideous.”
“You sent a shipment to him,” Jed continued when Flowers took time to sigh and smoke. “It arrived in Virginia on the twenty-first of December.”
“Oh yes.” Flowers smiled sadly. “Who would have guessed it would be the last time Sherman and I would do business together? Fate is such a cruel and capricious mistress. Nearly six years. We were associates and, I like to think, friends.”
Jed pulled out the papers he’d taken from Helen’s file. “There seems to be a question about the shipment.”
“Really?” Flowers shuffled grief aside and frowned over the idea. “I find that odd. Helen never mentioned it—of course, it’s understandable under the tragic circumstances, I suppose. But she certainly could have phoned me with any problem rather than sending you to New York.”
“We had other business here,” Jed said smoothly. “You purchased the merchandise from an estate sale?”
“A small one, yes, in the Catskills. Such air, such scenery. I picked up several minor gems. Several of the larger pieces I sold to other clients. It was impractical to ship heavy furniture to Virginia when I have outlets much closer to home.”
He blew two neat smoke rings. “You see, I most often act as an agent for dealers. This little place”—he gazed fondly around his shop, a doting parent at a slow-witted child—“it’s very dear to me, you see, but can hardly keep the wolf from the door. As I recall, I chose some very nice pieces for Sherman.” Flowers put out his cigarette in a marble ashtray. “I can’t imagine what problem there might be.”
“The painting,” Jed began.
“Painting?” Flowers frowned, set a fist on his hip. “I didn’t send a painting.”
“The abstract, signed E. Billingsly.”
“Abstract?” Tilting his head, Flowers giggled like a girl. “Oh, my dear, no. I would never touch an abstract. Too bizarre for my tastes. And they’re so hard to sell. No, I’m afraid there’s been some mistake.”
“Do you have a list of the inventory you shipped?”
“Naturally. I’m a bear for organization. An abstract painting, you say? No wonder Helen has a problem. I’ll be back in a jiff.”
He disappeared behind the curtains.
“Maybe he has a partner,” Dora whispered. “And his partner put the painting in the shipment. Or maybe—” She broke off when Flowers stepped back in, carrying two files, one in sunny yellow, the other in bright red.
“I color-code, you see.” Smiling, he set the files on the counter. “The yellow will be exactly what I purchased at the sale. He flipped open the folder. Inside were meticulously typed sheets listing merchandise, with descriptions. “Now that would have been . . . December twelve, I believe.” He flipped briskly through. “And here we are, in January already. The time passes too quickly. Here now.” Carefully placing the top pages facedown, he tapped a finger on the file. “Woodlow Estate, Catskills, December twelve. You can see this is the entire list, with the receipt attached. There’s no painting.”
Nor was there a china dog, Jed observed. Or a figurine matching the description of the one Tom Ashworth had died for.
“And this is one of my shipping files, specifically dealing with Sherman—God rest him. As you can see,” he said as he opened it, “the top shipment was the last shipment—packing slip attached. Not a painting in sight.” He grinned cheerfully. “It must have gotten mixed up with my things after uncrating. Sherman, bless him, was a teensy bit careless.”
“Yes,” Jed said. “I’m sure you’re right.”
“He’s wrong,” Dora stated as she pulled open the car door. “I saw the stockboy setting up that entire lot. It had just arrived.”
“Yeah.” Jed took out his keys, but he didn�
��t start the car. His eyes were opaque as he jiggled them restlessly in his hand.
“There was a painting. I bought the damn thing.”
“There was a painting,” Jed agreed. “There was a china dog and a lot of other things. None of which are listed on Flowers’s file. Not one item matches.”
“Maybe he was lying.” She looked back across the street and shook her head. “But I don’t think he was lying.”
“No, he wasn’t lying.” Shifting in his seat, Jed turned to her. “Tell me this, Conroy. If you were smuggling a Monet and several other illegal valuables, for your own use or for someone else’s, and you’d taken the time to conceal them, to make them look ordinary—”
“I wouldn’t have them shipped to auction,” she interrupted, her eyes darkening with inspiration. “I wouldn’t let them be purchased by people scattered all over the east coast.”
“Because then you’d have to go to the trouble, and take the risk, of getting them back again—when you’d had them in the first place.”
“So somebody messed up. DiCarlo?”
“Might be.”
“What else?” she demanded. “There’s a ‘what else’ in your eyes.”
“The packing slips. The one in Flowers’s file, and the one I lifted from Porter’s. They were both from Premium Shipping.” He started the car. “I’ve got some calls to make.”
Dora drank endless cups of coffee and toyed with a club sandwich, using her time in the small Brooklyn restaurant while Jed made his calls from the pay phone to think the puzzle through. Taking out her pad, she began to make notes and diagrams.
“Looks like the Monet’s genuine.” Jed sat down and pulled Dora’s plate to his side of the booth. “They’ll need to run tests to be a hundred percent, but my grandmother and her pal gave it thumbs up.”
“Who’s her pal?”
“A guy she knows. Used to be a curator at the Met.” He wolfed down a triangle of sandwich and signaled for coffee. “It also turns out that every name on the list, everybody who bought from the shipment, was hit during the period between the twenty-second of December and New Year’s.”
“Hit?” The blood drained out of her face. “You mean, they’re dead?”
“No.” Jed took her hand and gave it a solid squeeze. “Robbed. In each case, the piece they’d bought at the auction was taken. Sloppy jobs. From what Brent tells me they look like deliberately sloppy jobs. And there’s still no sign of DiCarlo. He’s some sort of vice president of the New York branch of E. F., Incorporated. He hasn’t shown for work since before Christmas. He did call in a few times, but not since the end of the year. His secretary and his staff claim not to know his whereabouts. His mother filed a missing-person’s report with the NYPD this morning.”
“So, he’s on the run.” Dora picked up her coffee and missed the flicker in Jed’s eyes. “Good. I hope he keeps running until he falls off a cliff. What do we do now?”
Jed moved his shoulders and chose another section of the sandwich. “If we can put enough evidence together to tie him to the murders in Philly and in Virginia, we can call in the Feds.”
“You don’t have to tell me you don’t want to do that. I’m beginning to read you, Captain.”
“I like to finish what I start.” Idly, he turned her notebook around so he could read it. A smile tugged at his mouth. “Playing Nancy Drew again?”
“You’re not wearing a badge, Skimmerhorn. I guess that makes you Joe Hardy.”
He let that pass. Her diagrams interested him. At the top she had Premium Shipping, with lines leading off right and left. At the end of one she’d written Porter. The tail of the other ended in a question mark. Below it was a list of the inventory Flowers claimed to have shipped. Shooting down from Porter were all the names of buyers from the auction and their purchases. Another line connected her name with Mrs. Lyle’s.
“What are you getting at here, Nancy?”
“It’s a theory.” Her spine stiffened at his tone. “I have two, actually. The first is that DiCarlo was double-crossed. Whoever he had handling the valuables pulled a fast one and shipped them to Virginia.”
“Motive?”
“I don’t know.” She huffed and snatched up her coffee. “Some disgruntled underling he hadn’t promoted, a woman scorned—or maybe just some hapless clerk who screwed up.”
“That might work if the disgruntled underling or the scorned woman had kept some of the loot. And even a hapless clerk would be hard-pressed to screw up by sending a shipment of merchandise to some dinky auction house in Virginia where it’s unlikely DiCarlo had any ties.”
“For all you know, DiCarlo might have been using Porter’s as a clearinghouse for smuggled merchandise for years.” She tossed her hair back and scowled at him. “I suppose you have a better theory?”
“Yeah, I got one. But let’s look behind door number two.” He was grinning now, enjoying himself. He tapped her diagram. “What have you got here?”
“I don’t have to take your superior amusement, Skimmerhorn.”
“Indulge me.” He lifted her hand, nipped at her knuckles. “Just for a minute.”
“Well, it’s obvious to me there were two shipments. The one from the estate sale, and the one with the smuggled goods. Since we agree that it would have been impossibly stupid for DiCarlo to have purposely shipped off his loot to Virginia where it would be offered for sale to the highest bidder, the logical conclusion is that the two shipments were mixed up.”
“Keep going,” he encouraged. “You’re about to earn a merit badge.”
“And since both packing slips originated from Premium, one could deduce that the mix-up happened there.”
“Nice going, Nancy.” Pleased with her, he pulled out his wallet and tossed bills on the table. “Let’s go check out Queens.”
“Wait a minute.” She caught up with him at the door.
“Are you saying you think I’m right?”
“I’m saying we should check it out.”
“Nope, not good enough.” She shifted her body to block the door. “Look me in the eye, Skimmerhorn, and say you think I’m right.”
“I think you’re right.”
She let out a whoop of triumph and yanked open the door herself. “Then what are we waiting for?”
“You know,” Dora said after they’d cooled their heels in Bill Tarkington’s office for fifteen minutes, “most of police work is really boring.”
“Thinking about giving it up, Conroy?”
She braced her elbow on the arm of her chair, cupped her chin in her hand. “Is this the sort of thing you did every day for all those years?”
He kept his back to her, watching the belts and the shipping clerks. “I couldn’t calculate the number of hours I spent waiting.”
She yawned, hugely. “I suppose it teaches you patience.”
“No. Not necessarily. You juggle enough hours of tedium with enough moments of terror, and it teaches you not to relax your guard.”
She could see his profile from where she sat. Only a part of him was in the room with her, she realized. Another part was somewhere he wouldn’t let her follow. “How do you handle the terror?”
“By recognizing it, by accepting it.”
“I can’t imagine you being afraid,” she murmured.
“I told you that you didn’t know me. I think this is our man now.”
Tarkington bounced up to the door, beaming his cheery smile. “Mr. Skimmerhorn?” He pumped Jed’s hand enthusiastically. “And Miss Conroy. I apologize for making you wait. How about some coffee? A doughnut. Maybe a nice danish.”
Before Jed could decline, Dora was beaming at Tarkington. “I’d love some coffee.”
“Just let me pour you a cup.” Happy to serve, Tarkington turned to fill three cups. Dora sent Jed a smug look.
“We know you’re busy, Mr. Tarkington. I hope we won’t keep you long.”
“Don’t you worry about it. Always got time for a customer, yes sir. Cream? Sugar?”<
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“Black,” Jed told him, and watched, slightly appalled, when Tarkington dropped a flood of sugar into one of the cups.
