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“That’s very insightful, Freddy.” I stuck a forefinger on my chin and felt the divot, or cliff, or whatever. It was deeper than when I was younger. “I’m here about last night. For the insurance company. Interview the staff when they get in. Atkins here?”

“Ernest Borgnine. He also had a cliff chin.”

“I thought you worked nights, Freddy?”

“Rotation. I go back on night shift Thursday.”

“Atkins here?”

“Should be leaving soon. Might catch him. You know his office, right?”

“Right.” I moved past him toward the coat check near the entrance to the administration part of the museum. On the way I saw the signs for the new Lee J. Rosenburg Wing.

Get this: A new wing doesn’t always mean a new wing. It can, but for Lee J. Rosenburg, a powerhouse on the museum board of directors, it meant an existing wing named after him with some of his bragging rights on display. He had an impressive collection of Mondrian paintings. You know them when you see them. Large squares of color on white backgrounds divided by dark lines. Most of the paintings have very literal names like
Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue
, nonrepresentational stuff from the early 1900s Mondrian called “neoplasticism.”

I hadn’t seen the Lee J. Rosenburg Wing yet, so I made a detour to check out the Mondrians. Pretty impressive seeing a bunch of them together like that. I know a lot of people may feel that this stuff isn’t art, it’s just squares of color, anybody could do it. Let them try. Then again, a Mondrian would be a boatload easier to forge than Mona Lisa’s smile.

Like I said, I had a degree in art history, Brooklyn College, but I started out as an art student. I wanted to paint. As a freshman, I took my little easel around the piers in Red Hook painting industrial decay against the sky. I soon realized, though, that I didn’t have an eye for capturing what I saw in my mind. That may not make a lot of sense until you try painting yourself. It’s aesthetics. I didn’t have much. Just the same, I wanted to spend my life around art.

Anyway, I was impressed by the Mondrians they had put together for Lee—most were his. They hadn’t named a wing after him because he was such a nice guy, either. The whole flying saucer makeover of the museum was a fiasco, way over budget and behind schedule, and he was bearing down on Sheila McCracken, the museum’s director, to resign. She got wind of his scheme and hatched the plan to name a wing of the museum after him to make him play nice. It worked, but she was really close to getting the axe, and as a result having panic attacks. How do I know all this? I was dating Sheila at the time.

I turned and set course for the administration area.

You can see how lax museum security can be, even when a museum had been robbed. A door after hours shouldn’t be left unlocked like that even if it is convenient and you have one geeze in dentures there to make sure nobody takes a billion dollars in art. I should not have been permitted to walk the museum after hours without an escort, and the doors to the administration wing should have been locked at all times.

Atkins was the head of security. I found his office and walked in. Nothing special. Just a white office, with a desk and a lamp and a visitor chair and some inspirational posters on the wall about safety and security. His computer was on; Atkins was out. Someone with less scruples than me could have rummaged his computer for security codes, guard schedules and names, where they lived—all kinds of things that could be useful if you wanted to jack paintings.

Atkins came in the door behind me. He bounced a couple feet in the air. “Shit!”

“Atkins, calm down, it’s me, Tommy.”

“Tommy! I mean, shit, you about scared me to death, big guy like you hiding in my office.” Atkins had a very neat mustache, with wax or some shit on it, and very pink lips for a man. It’s not his fault he had pink lips, he didn’t wear lipstick or anything, but still, his lips were more pink than most men would want.

“Sorry if I scared you. I’m here about last night. To interview the night shift.”

“Well, for one thing, your beard is missing. You’re supposed to have a beard. And mustache. All that hair on your face is gone.”

“I cut it off.”

“I didn’t recognize you. And you have a…” He couldn’t think of the word and pointed at his chin.

I pointed at mine.

“I have Kirk Douglas’s chin. So I’m here about last night. For the insurer. To interview the night shift. Guards and kitchen staff.”

“They said you were coming.” Atkins circled around me and jiggled his computer mouse around until his screen went dark. “The kitchen staff is down there now, but none of the same guards are working tonight as
last
night. Except Freddy. None of them saw anything anyway. The crooks just popped out of the kitchen, grabbed the three paintings right there in the hallway, and went back out through the kitchen. The camera covering that section of the museum is multidirectional, and the camera was looking the other direction during the thirty seconds that it took to lift the art. Bad luck.”

Not bad luck at all. It was the way I planned it, real cute. Atkins himself explained to me that the camera’s light blinks every sixty seconds. That tells the guards that the camera is working and not malfunctioning. It also means the camera—hidden inside a tinted dome—is looking in a particular direction. Every ten seconds it looks in another direction until after five views it comes back to the original position. In this case, when the light blinked, it was looking at the room with the three paintings I wanted. So I set it up so the goofballs looked around the corner with a dental mirror and waited for the green light to blink. Ten seconds later, they had fifty seconds to lift the goodies before the camera looked that way again.

“That is bad luck, Atkins.”

“What I’m telling you is none of the same guards are here tonight, and even if they were, they wouldn’t be able to tell you anything. I have one of the guards set up down in the control room to show you the surveillance tape of the kitchen staff being subdued, but the thieves obstructed the kitchen camera afterward, so we don’t have tape of them exiting with the paintings. Not that we need to see that—the paintings are gone.”

“Freddy was here last night.”

“Freddy? Oh, yes, well, he was down front, where we’re letting him finish out his career. I don’t know whether you noticed, buthe drinks.” He looked at his watch. It was one of those super watches that if it fell on your foot might bust more than one toe. “Gotta run. You know your way to the kitchen and the control room?”

“I do.”

We stepped out of his office, and he locked the office door.

“Be sure to give my best to Sheila,” I said. Sheila and I had a good time in the beginning of our relationship, but panic attacks aside, she had a temper that set dry grass ablaze. The staff lived in fear of her, which was why Atkins went a little pale when I mentioned her name and only nodded to indicate he would relay my message.

I went one way down the hall, and he went the other.

You’d think Atkins would have been a little agitated over what happened the night before in his museum, seeing as he’s head of security. Then again, I always figured him for a clock puncher. I was right. Like I said, art theft is business as usual to these people.

Anyhow, Atkins wasn’t going to be any help getting my paintings back. Neither were the guards, since they didn’t see anything, which was exactly the way I planned it. I have to say, investigating my own theft kind of sucked, since someone else ended up with the paintings.

I spent the next hour questioning the kitchen help. The answers were unsurprising. Huey and the other goofballs—believe it or not—did things right down the line. They said little, just things like:

“On the floor.”

“Face down.”

“Spread-eagle.”

“Hands behind your back.”

“Be smart, stay healthy, don’t move.”

The kitchen staff (the ones that spoke English) mentioned the leader seemed foreign, but none of them guessed French; mostly they said Middle Eastern or Russian. That’s probably because we don’t have a lot of French wandering around Brooklyn. A foreigner was a foreigner to these guys, who were just little brown food-service-prep guys from South America.

They also mentioned one guy was the muscle—Kootie. They had no description of Frank. They sure would have if he wasn’t wearing a ski mask, I can tell you. None of the South Americans mentioned anything about three other crooks who took the paintings from my goons. Not that they would have, since that happened out by the van and beyond the range of the security cameras.

After the interviews, I went to the control room and reviewed security camera recordings. I’d told my goofballs where to find the kitchen camera once they’d taped up the staff, and I watched the whole thing go down exactly as it was supposed to, right up to the point where Kootie stood on the counter and put tape on the camera lens. Even if he hadn’t, as Atkins said, the only thing we would have seen was them walking back through the kitchen with the paintings two minutes later.

Clockwork gig. It went down pretty much the way Huey described it. That didn’t tell me much about who took the paintings, but it did tell me something, at least by way of elimination. Huey was telling me the truth. At least up to a point.

I was heading toward the museum exit when I felt drawn to the Mondrians again, so I slipped once again into the Lee J. Rosenburg wing.

There were two paintings of the bunch that sort of stood out from the rest. I stood in front of them, admiring the color and composition.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

I turned, and Sheila McCracken was in the exhibit entryway. Sheila’s name is Scottish, and she looks every inch of it. Dark mane of red hair, green eyes, wide jaw, slightly wider shoulders. Not a small woman. I don’t mean fat, but she had hips, and a sizable rack.

“Hi, Sheila.”

“You’re working for Max?”

I nodded.

“You’ve interviewed the staff?”

Nod. “Kitchen staff.”

“And Atkins?”

I nodded a third time.

“So you think you can wander around the museum after hours as you please?” Sheila smiled and winked with both eyes. That sounds friendly. It wasn’t.

“The Mondrians were on my way to the exit.” I gestured to the two paintings in front of me. “You afraid I might steal some?”

Her eyes went rapidly between me and the paintings. “You can’t wander around the museum unescorted. I’ll take you to the exit.”

I cocked my head at the two Mondrians and smiled. “You did a nice job with this wing, Sheel.”

“Tommy, don’t call me Sheel. I don’t like it.” Her voice boomed around the room. Based on our history, it didn’t surprise me she was getting so upset. “You’re leaving. Now.”

I shrugged and walked past her. “You look good, Sheila.”

She didn’t respond and didn’t have to. The sharp clack of her shoes on the polished floors behind me spoke volumes.
“Freddy!”

The rummy practically fell out of his chair. “Yes, Ms. McCracken.”

“You know Mr. Davin?” She waved a hand at me as I stopped in front of his security dais.

“I do.”

“Was he in the appointment book?”

“Appointment book?” He began fumbling with a register.

“Did he sign the appointment book?”

“I thought that since, you know, Tommy has been here before…” Freddy was frantically flipping pages in the book, knowing full well there was no appointment or signature.

I says, “Sheila, no need to bust Freddy’s shoes. I’m partly responsible.”

So she says,
“Irresponsible.”

“Freddy and I will play by the after-hour rules next time, won’t we, Freddy?”

“I can only hope there isn’t a next time.” She smiled and did that double wink thing before making tracks for the administration wing.

I looked at Freddy. “You can stop flipping pages, Freddy, she’s gone.”

He slapped the book shut and gripped his forehead. “I could go for a snort.”

“Take it easy, Freddy. If McCracken is conflicted or transitional, that doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“She’ll try to get me fired for this. I’m only still here because Atkins is a softie.”

I patted him on the shoulder. “Try cutting back on the booze a little, OK, and eat healthy. Baby carrots are good.”

It was ten o’clock by the time I walked out of the flying saucer. I called Maxie’s number, left a message telling him I had the essentials and would get back to him.

Time to head home. I was starving, tired, and deserving a cocktail. I hailed a town car; they aren’t supposed to pick up street fares, but will in Brooklyn because the yellow cabs are scarce.

I sank into the squishy leather seat, my mind spinning with everything I needed to do, with everything that had gone bad that day. It could get worse, I knew. The cats hadn’t been fed. They might have become hostile about that and acted out. You know, like by shredding the kitchen cabinets to get at their Cat Chow.

MY APARTMENT WASN’T LARGE, AND
the cats didn’t make it any larger. The abode was as big as it needed to be for a single guy, what they called a parlor floor in a brownstone on Degraw Street. Originally my four-story building was a single-family home, but the parlor had been walled off from the upper and lower floors. I used bookshelves to make a bedroom in front. The middle was where the couch and TV were. The back was where you found the kitchen. Pretty standard setup. In fact, you couldn’t really set it up any other way and make good use of the space. The kitchen was at one end, the entrance in the middle. Couldn’t move the kitchen, and wasn’t cool to have visitors enter your bedroom as soon as they came in the front door. I like black and gray modern-style furniture offset by colorful abstract art prints of artists like Hoffman. Indirect lighting was key, and a no-clutter rule was in effect. My deaf landlady lived downstairs with her poodle; my upstairs neighbors worked at night. I can play my Perez Prado mambo and Xavier Cugat cha-cha CD’s as loud as I want.