A Place of Hiding (72 page)

And if the amount to be wired was more than nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, what happened then? Lynley had inquired.

Oh, then Vallera & Son had to report the amount to the Feds.

And what did the Feds do?

Got interested when they got around to getting interested. If your name was Gotti they got interested pronto. If you were Joe Schmo Recently in the Dough, it might take them longer.

“It was all quite illuminating,” Lynley had said to St. James at the conclusion of his report. “Mr. Vallera might have gone on indefinitely because he seemed to be delighted to have a call from Scotland.”

St. James chuckled. “But he didn't go on?”

“Apparently Mr. Vallera Senior came on the scene. There was some background noise suggesting someone's displeasure and the line went dead shortly thereafter.”

“You're owed, Tommy,” St. James said.

“Not by Mr. Vallera Senior, I hope.”

Now in his hotel room, St. James contemplated his next move. Without getting one agency or another of the United States government involved, he reached the ineluctable conclusion that he was on his own, that he would have to ferret out more facts in one way or another and use those facts to smoke out Guy Brouard's killer. He considered several ways of going at the problem, made his decision, and descended to the lobby.

There he inquired about using the hotel's computer. The receptionist, to whom he had not endeared himself earlier by having her track him round the island, didn't meet his request with unbridled enthusiasm. She drew her lower lip in under her protruding upper teeth and informed him she would have to check with Mr. Alyar, the hotel's manager. “We don't usually give residents access . . . People generally bring their own. You don't have a laptop?” She didn't add “
or
a mobile?” but the implication was there.
Get with it
her expression told him just before she went in search of Mr. Alyar.

St. James cooled his heels in the lobby for nearly ten minutes before a barrel-shaped man in a double-breasted suit approached him from beyond a door that led into the inner reaches of the hotel. He introduced himself as Mr. Alyar—Felix Alyar, he said—and asked if he could be of help.

St. James explained his request more fully. He handed over his business card as he spoke, and he offered DCI Le Gallez's name in an effort to seem as legitimate a part of the ongoing investigation as possible.

With far more good grace than the receptionist had possessed, Mr. Alyar agreed to allow St. James access to the hotel's computer system. He welcomed him behind the reception counter and into a business office behind it. There, two additional employees of the establishment sat at work at terminals and a third fed documents into a fax machine.

Felix Alyar directed St. James to a third terminal and said to the faxer, “Penelope, this gentleman will be using your station,” before he left “with the hotel's compliments” and a smile that bordered on the flagrantly insincere. St. James thanked him and made short work of accessing the Internet.

He began with the
International Herald Tribune,
logging on to their Web site, where he discovered that any story over two weeks old could be accessed only from the site at which the story itself had originated. He was unsurprised, considering the nature of what he was looking for and the limited scope of the paper. So he went on to
USA Today,
but there the news had to cover too wide an area and was thus confined to the Big Story in nearly every case: governmental issues, international incidents, sensational murders, bold heroics.

His next choice was the
New York Times,
where he typed in
PIETER DE HOOCH
first and, when that brought him nothing,
ST. BARBARA
second. But here again, he achieved no useful result, and he began to doubt the hypothesis he'd developed upon first hearing about Vallera & Son of Jackson Heights, New York, and upon then hearing the exact nature of Vallera & Son's business.

The only option left, considering what he knew, was the
Los Angeles Times,
so he moved on to that broadsheet's Web site and began a search of their archives. As before, he entered the time period he'd been using all along—the last twelve months—and he followed that with the name Pieter de Hooch. In less than five seconds, the monitor's screen altered and a list of relevant articles appeared, five of them on one page and an indication that more followed.

He chose the first article and waited as the computer downloaded it. What appeared first on the screen was the headline
A Dad Remembers.

St. James scanned the article. Phrases leaped out at him as if rendered in a script bolder than the rest. It was when he saw the words
decorated World War II veteran
that he slowed down his reading of the story. This covered a long-ago, heretofore unheard of triple-transplant operation—heart, lungs, and kidneys—that had been performed at one St. Clare's Hospital in Santa Ana, California. The recipient had been a fifteen-year-old boy called Jerry Ferguson. His father, Stuart, was the decorated veteran mentioned in the article.

Car salesman Stuart Ferguson—for so he was—had apparently spent the remainder of his days seeking ways to repay St. Clare's for having saved his boy's life. A charity hospital whose policy it was to turn away no one, St. Clare's had required no payment for what had amounted to a hospital bill well over two hundred thousand dollars. A car salesman with four children had little hope of amassing that kind of money, so upon his death Stuart Ferguson had willed St. Clare's the only thing of potential value that he possessed: a painting.

“We had no idea . . .” his widow was quoted as saying. “Stu certainly never knew . . . He got it during the war, he said . . . A souvenir . . . That's all I ever learned about it.”

“I just thought it was some old picture,” Jerry Ferguson commented after the painting had been evaluated by experts at the Getty Museum. “Dad and Mom had it in their bedroom. You know, I never thought much about it.”

Thus, it seemed that the delighted Sisters of Mercy, who ran St. Clare's Hospital on a shoestring budget and spent most of their time raising the funds just to keep it afloat, had found themselves the recipients of a priceless work of art. A photograph accompanying the story featured the adult Jerry Ferguson and his mother presenting Pieter de Hooch's painting of St. Barbara to a dour-looking Sister Monica Casey, who, at the time of presentation, had absolutely no idea what she was laying her pious hands upon.

When later asked if they had regrets about parting with something so valuable, Ferguson's mother and son said, “It gave us a surprise to think of what was hanging in the house all those years” and “Heck, it was what Dad wanted and that's good enough for me.” For her part, Sister Monica Casey admitted to “heart flutters aplenty” and she explained that they would sell the de Hooch at auction once they had it properly cleaned and restored. In the meantime, she'd told the newspaper reporter, the Sisters of Mercy would keep the de Hooch “some place quite safe.”

But not safe enough, St. James thought. That fact had put the ball in motion.

He clicked on the succeeding stories and he felt little surprise at the manner in which events had unfolded in Santa Ana, California. He read them quickly—for that was all the time it took to ascertain how Pieter de Hooch's
St. Barbara
had made the journey from St. Clare's Hospital to Guy Brouard's home—and he printed up the relevant ones.

He gathered them together with a paper clip. He went upstairs.

 

Deborah made tea as China alternately picked up the telephone receiver and dropped it back into its cradle, sometimes punching in a few numbers, sometimes not even getting that far. On their walk back to the Queen Margaret Apartments, she had finally decided to phone her mother. She had to be informed what was going on with Cherokee, China said. But now that she faced the Moment of Truth, as she called it, she couldn't quite bring herself to do it. So she'd punch in the numbers for the international line. She'd punch in the number one for the United States. She'd even get as far as punching in the area code for Orange, California. But then she'd lose her nerve.

As Deborah measured out the tea, China explained her hesitation. This turned out to be the child of her superstition. “It's like I'll jinx things for him if I call.”

Deborah recalled her using this expression before. Think you'll do well on a photographic assignment or perhaps an exam and you'd fail completely, having jinxed yourself in advance. Say that you expect a phone call from your boyfriend and you'd jinx the possibility of his calling. Remark upon the ease with which traffic was flowing on one of California's massive motorways, and you were sure to hit an accident and a four-mile tailback in the next ten minutes. Deborah had named this kind of skewed thinking “The Law of Chinaland,” and she had grown quite used to being careful not to jinx a situation while she lived with China in Santa Barbara.

She said, “How would it jinx things, though?”

“I don't know for sure. It just feels like that. Like I'll call her and tell her what's going on, and she'll come over, and then everything will just get worse.”

“But that seems to violate the basic law of Chinaland,” Deborah observed. “At least the way I remember it.” She set the electric kettle to boil.

At Deborah's use of the old term, China smiled, it seemed in spite of herself. “How?” she asked.

“Well, as I recall how things work in Chinaland, you aim for the direct opposite of what you truly want. You don't let Fate know what you have in mind so that Fate can't get in there and cock things up. You go round the back way. You sneak up on what you want.”

“Fake the bastard out,” China murmured.

“Right.” Deborah took mugs from the cupboard. “In this particular case, it seems to me that you have to ring your mum. You have no choice. If you ring her and insist that she come to Guernsey—”

“She doesn't even have a passport, Debs.”

“Which is all the better. It will cause enormous trouble for her to get here.”

“Not to mention the expense.”

“Mmmm. Yes. That practically guarantees success.” Deborah leaned against the work top. “She must get a passport quickly. That means a trip to . . . where?”

“Los Angeles. Federal Building. Off the San Diego Freeway.”

“Past the airport?”

“Way past. Past Santa Monica even.”

“Wonderful. All that ghastly traffic. All that difficulty. So she must go there first and get her passport. She must make all her travel arrangements. She must fly to London and then to Guernsey. And having gone to all that trouble—herself in a state of tearing anxiety—”

“She gets here to find that it's all been resolved.”

“Probably one hour before she arrives.” Deborah smiled. “And
voilà.
The Law of Chinaland in action. All that trouble and all that expense. For nothing, as things turn out.” Behind her, the kettle clicked off. She poured water into a stout green teapot, took that to the table, and gestured for China to join her there. “But if you don't ring her . . .”

China left the phone and came into the kitchen. Deborah waited for her to conclude the thought. Instead of doing so, however, China sat and fingered one of the tea mugs, turning it slowly between her palms. She said, “I gave up that kind of thinking a while back. It was always only a game anyway. But it stopped working. Or maybe I stopped working. I don't know.” She pushed the mug to one side. “It started with Matt. Did I ever tell you? When we were teenagers. I walk past his house and if I don't look to see if he's in the garage or mowing the lawn for his mom or something, if I don't even
think
about him when I pass by, he'll be there. But if I look or if I think about him—even think his name—then he won't be. It always worked. So I went on with it. If I act indifferent, he'll be interested in me. If I don't want to date him, he'll want to date me. If I think he'll never even want to kiss me goodnight, he'll do it. He'll have to. He'll be desperate to. At one level I always knew that wasn't how things really work in the world—thinking and saying the exact opposite of what you truly want—but once I started seeing the world that way—playing that game—I just kept going. It ended up with: Plan out a life with Matt and it'll never happen. Forge ahead on my own, and there he'll be, panting to hook up permanently.”

Deborah poured the tea and gently eased a mug back over to China. She said, “I'm sorry how things turned out. I know how you felt about him. What you wanted. Hoped for. Expected. Whatever.”

“Yeah. Whatever. That's the word, all right.” The sugar stood in a dispenser in the centre of the table. China upended this so that the white granules poured like snowfall into her cup. When it looked to Deborah as if the brew would be completely undrinkable, China finished with the dispenser.

“I wish it had worked out the way you wanted,” Deborah said. “But perhaps it still will.”

“The way your life worked out? No. I'm not like you. I don't land on my feet. I never have. I never will.”

“You don't know—”

“I ended it with one man, Deborah,” China cut in impatiently. “Believe me, okay? In my case there wasn't another man—crippled or not—just waiting for things to go bust so he could step in and take over where the other left off.”

Deborah flinched from the sting behind her old friend's words. “Is that how you see my life . . . how things turned out? Is that . . . China, that's not fair.”

“Isn't it? There I was, struggling with Matt from the get-go. On again, off again. Great sex one day, big break-up the next. Get back together with the promise it'll be ‘different this time.' Fall into bed and screw our brains out. Break up three weeks later over something really stupid: He says he'll be there at eight and he doesn't show up till eleven-thirty and he doesn't bother to call and let me know he'll be late and I can't
deal
with it a second longer so I say that's it, get out, that's it, I've had it. Then ten days later, he calls. He says, Look, baby, give me another chance, I need you. And I believe him because I'm so incredibly stupid or desperate, and we begin the process all over again. And all the time, there you are with a fucking duke, of all things—or
whatever
he was. And when he's out of the picture permanently, ten minutes later Simon steps in. Like I said. You always land on your feet.”