Painted Ladies (10 page)

Which I did.

I
sat with Healy and Kate Quaggliosi in a small meeting room at the Middlesex DA’s office in Woburn. Kate was wearing a tailored gray suit and a white shirt with a little black lady tie at half-mast.

“You dress good for a prosecutor,” I said.

“My husband’s in private practice,” she said.

“Money well spent,” I said.

She looked at Healy.

“How about you, Captain,” she said. “You think I look good?”

“Cat’s ass,” Healy said.

She smiled.

“Gee, thanks,” she said. “Here’s what we’ve got on the victim. Ashton Prince . . .”

I put my hand up.

“You wish to speak?” she said.

“Real name is Ascher Prinz,” I said. “According to his wife, he changed it because he was ashamed of being Jewish.”

“ ‘Ashamed’?” she said.

“That’s what Rosalind told me,” I said.

“Rosalind,” Kate said.

“I had a drink with her yesterday,” I said.

“Well, aren’t you just slick,” Kate said.

“I’ve got an advantage,” I said. “I’m allowed to get them drunk.”

“Was that hard to do?” Kate said.

“Would have been hard not to,” I said.

“Anything else you want to share,” Kate said.

“His father was in a concentration camp,” I said.

“Which one?” Healy said.

“She doesn’t remember,” I said. “They all sound the same to her.”

“Jesus,” Healy said.

“Should I know something that I don’t know now?” Kate said.

“Last week a couple of fellas set up to ambush Spenser when he came into his office. They each had the same death camp number tattooed on their arm.”

“They were that old?”

“No,” I said.

“So . . . where are they now?”

“Dead,” Healy said. “They were overmatched.”

“ ‘Overmatched’?” Kate said, and looked at me. “You killed them?”

“I did,” I said.

Kate stared at me.

“I’ll be damned,” she said.

“Tough, but oh so gentle,” I said.

“And you think it’s connected to our case?” Kate said.

“I do,” I said.

She looked at Healy.

“Captain?” she said.

“We can’t assume that it’s not,” Healy said.

“No,” Kate said. “Tell me what you know.”

We told her.

“Who’s working it from Boston,” she said.

“Frank Belson,” I said.

“I know Belson,” she said.

“Everybody should,” I said.

“Anybody chasing down those serial numbers?” Kate said.

“Boston Homicide,” I said.

“Us, too,” Healy said.

“Any luck?” Kate said.

“Not so far,” Healy said.

She looked at me.

“Haven’t heard,” I said.

“You think it’s possible that there are still records?”

“They’d have kept records,” I said.

“I’ll see what this office can do,” she said. “Any ID on the two shooters?”

“Nope,” Healy said. “They’re not in the system. One of them had shoes made in Holland. The Uzi was Israeli.”

“That’s what you have?”

“That’s what Boston was able to give us,” Healy said.

“You have a theory as to what triggered it?” Kate said to me.

“Last two people I talked with before they came after me were the Minor women. Missy and Winifred.”

“So they might be worth our attention,” Kate said.

“Might,” I said.

“We’ve pretty well emptied it out for you,” Healy said. “You got anything we don’t know?”

“Sure, but it’s not worth much,” Kate said. “Parents’ names, birthplace, education, career history. That kind of crap.”

“Can we have it?” I said.

“Sure,” she said.

She pushed a couple of blue folders toward us.

“Enjoy,” she said.

I
was alone in my apartment. The door was locked. It was very quiet. I was lying on the bed, sipping some Black Bush on the rocks and reading the files on Ashton Prince that Kate Quaggliosi had given me. The file was boring. But I loved the silence.

Ashton Prince had been born forty-eight years ago in Queens, New York, and attended public school there. He had majored in art at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and graduated in 1982. He’d gone on to acquire a Ph.D. in art history from Boston University. No mention of his parents. No mention of Ascher Prinz. He’d been a teaching fellow for a couple of years at BU while he was getting his degree. He taught art history for a couple of years at Bridge-water State College before he moved on to Walford as an assistant professor. He settled in at Walford. His specialty was seventeenth-century low-country realism, and he had written some essays for academic journals, and a book about the Nazi confiscation of art during World War Two. The book was published by Taft University Press and was titled
Aesthetics and Greed in the Second Great War.
He had spent a sabbatical year in Amsterdam. He was a tenured full professor when he died. Married to Rosalind Wellington for fifteen years. No children.

I shut the lights off and lay on the bed for a time in the near darkness, a little light coming in from the kitchen, even less coming in from the streetlights on Marlborough Street. I sipped a small sip of Black Bush. Irish whiskey was good for sipping carefully, alone, in silence. It was good for grief also, though I hadn’t needed it lately. I took my glass and walked to my front window and looked down at Marlborough Street. Every moment of intense happiness in my life had been spent with Susan. Whenever I saw her I felt a thrill of excitement. If she went out to get the paper off the front porch, I was thrilled when she came back in. And yet as I stood looking down at the motionless street below me, I loved the solitude. Susan and I shared many nights, but we didn’t live together. I’ve never known quite why. We tried it once, and it made us both unhappy. Maybe the thrill of seeing her was more intense because we didn’t share a roof. We were very different. What we had in common was that we loved each other. What was different was everything else. She could feel deeply and think deeply, but she tended to rely more on the thinking. I was probably inclined somewhat the other way.

“If one is a bit insecure, despite all appearances,” she had once said to me, “one tends to think ahead very carefully.”

“And if one is not?” I had said.

“Then,” she had said, “one tends to trust one’s feelings and plow ahead, assuming one can handle whatever results.”

“A nice balance would be good,” I had said.

“It would,” she had said. “And it would be rare.”

I smiled. Where did the covert insecurity come from? Her first marriage had been very bad. But that marriage was probably a function of insecurity, not a cause. The cause probably lingered back in Swampscott, in the Hirsch family dynamics. Whatever it was, it was then, and we were now, and the hell with it.

On Marlborough Street, a man turned the corner from Arlington Street, walking a brisk Scottie on a leash. Late for walking the dog. Maybe he had trouble lasting through the night.

My glass was empty. I went to the kitchen and got more ice and poured in more whiskey and sat in my armchair by the cold fireplace in the living room and took a small swallow. It eased into my capillaries and moved pleasantly along my nerve patterns.
I have taken more from whiskey than whiskey has ever taken from me.

There was a pattern here, someplace, in Prince’s death. It wasn’t clearly visible yet, but there was some kind of design in place that I couldn’t fully get. It had to do with the Holocaust, and Jewish, and Dutch, and art. But if I knew some of the ingredients, I still didn’t know the design, except that it might well be of darkness to appall. I was used to that. I’d spent most of my life looking around in dark places that were often appalling. But oddly, I was never really appalled. I looked where I needed to look to do what I did. And what was there was there. I’d done it too long to speculate much on why it was there. When I needed to, I could flatten out my emotional response until it was simply blank. I liked what I did, probably because I was good at it. And sometimes I won. Sometimes I slew the dragon and galloped away with the maiden. Sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes the dragon survived. Sometimes I lost the maiden. But so far the dragon hadn’t slain me . . . and I was never terminally appalled. And I was with Susan.

I smiled to myself and made a little self-congratulatory gesture with my whiskey glass.

“Sometimes solitary,” I said to no one. “But never alone.”

I celebrated that singular fact in the happy darkness until my glass was empty.

Then I went to bed.

I
n the morning, I stopped by the Boston Public Library on my way to work and picked up a copy of
Aesthetics and Greed in the Second Great War
and took it with me while I picked up two large coffees and a whole-wheat bagel and went up to my office.

I drank my coffee and ate my bagel, which was pretty good, and dipped into Prince’s book. Which was not pretty good. He was an academic. He never used a short word when a long one would do nearly as well. His prose style was so pretentious that it obscured his meaning. After the first page I could feel my head beginning to nod. I plugged through the first chapter, taking solace in my coffee and my bagel, and stopped. I didn’t want to solve his murder badly enough that I would read more than one chapter at a time. In chapter one, I learned that Germany had invaded the Netherlands in 1940.

I couldn’t wait for chapter two to find out who won.

I checked out the length of the book and the approximate size of each chapter, and made a deal with myself that I’d read a chapter a day. More than that and I wouldn’t know what I had read, anyway.

It was ten in the morning. I had read a chapter, eaten a bagel, and drunk two cups of Guatemalan coffee, and the day stretched out ahead of me like an empty road. I invoked Spenser’s crime-stopper tip #5: When you have nothing else to do, follow someone.

I drove out to Walford and set up outside Missy Minor’s dorm. It was not yet eleven. Many college students avoided classes that early in the day. Some, as I recall, avoided them altogether. But in most cases, they were just beginning to surface in the hour before lunch.

At about one-thirty in the afternoon, Missy Minor came out, ready to face the day. She was wearing her fleece-lined coat again. Very tight black jeans again, though not perhaps the same ones. The jeans were tucked into Uggs today. On her head was a white knit cap with a big white ball on top. The cap was pulled down carefully over her ears, allowing her blonde hair to frame her face. Warm yet fashionable. She was carrying no books as she cut across campus, with me discreetly behind her. She went into the library and up to the big reading room on the second floor. Missy went straight across the big room and sat down at an otherwise empty table across from a guy in a navy peacoat.

With my hands in my pockets and my head down, I went to the back end of the reading room, where there was a newspaper rack, got a
New York Times,
opened it up, and sat in a chair behind it, and peeked around.

The guy in the peacoat didn’t look like a student. No shame to it. I didn’t, either. And maybe he was an older student. He looked to be in his middle forties, with a flat, expressionless face and short blond hair. There was something about him that reminded me of the kind of guy I sometimes did business with. But it was an intangible something, and for all I knew, he could be a scholar of the eighteenth-century English novel.

As I watched, they leaned across the table toward each other and talked with their faces very close. It looked romantic, but they didn’t touch. They talked intensely. She with animation. He was nearly motionless, except that he tapped his forefinger on the tabletop. They spoke for maybe fifteen minutes. Then she leaned back a little, as if she was going to stand. He put his right hand on her forearm and held her there.

They spoke for several more minutes. He was doing most of the talking. She was nodding. And she appeared to be pressing a little against the restraint of his hand. When he let her go, she stood and walked away. From where I sat, I couldn’t read her expression. The man watched her walk across the reading room and out into the corridor and down the stairs. When she was out of sight, he sat quietly for a time, looking at nothing, slowly rubbing his chin with the back of his hand.

I stayed where I was behind my newspaper and waited. After a while he stopped rubbing his chin, and stood and walked out of the reading room. I gave him a minute and then put my newspaper back in its rack and strolled out after him. He was at the bottom of the stairs when I reached the top. I let him cross the big lobby to the front door before I started down. He had no reason to think he was being followed, so he had no reason to do anything tricky. And, of course, he was being tailed by an ace. I went down after him.

On the broad front steps of the library, I paused and took in some fresh air. Libraries always made me feel as if I’d been indoors too long. I saw my man across the street, heading toward a parking lot. I strolled after him. He got into a Toyota 4Runner and backed out. I recorded his license number in my steel-trap memory, and as soon as he was out of sight took out a little notepad and wrote it down. Just in time, before I forgot it.

T
he 4Runner was registered to Morton Lloyd with a Chestnut Hill address. Morton Lloyd was also the name of the lawyer that Prince had threatened Walford University with. And he was also the lawyer who represented the Hammond Museum, and it was through his recommendation that Prince got the job of negotiating the return of the painting. Seemed unlikely that there would be two Morton Lloyds in the same case.

I was meeting Rita Fiore for lunch at Locke-Ober, and was already seated when she came into the dining room wearing heels that told me she hadn’t walked over from her office. The skirt of her gray suit was about mid-thigh, and everything fit her well. Her dark red hair was long and thick. Almost all the men in the place looked at her as she came in. Those who didn’t probably had a hormonal problem. I stood when she reached the table, and she gave me a kiss.