Painted Ladies (17 page)

I followed with a right uppercut, which would have ended it, but he leaned away from it and it missed. My right side was exposed, and Kurt hammered a solid left hook into my ribs. I turned with the punch so I was at right angles to him and came around with my right elbow and hit him in the temple. He staggered again, and I heard his breath exhale in a kind of snort. I had him if I was quick. I went with the flow and followed the right elbow with the left forearm, then a left back fist and a right cross. All in rhythm. Everything was loose now and warm and moving as it should. I hit him with a left hook to the body, right hook to the body. He stumbled backward. I stayed on him. Left to the body, right to the body. His hands dropped. Left hook to the head. Right hook to the head. His hands were hanging at his sides now. It was like hitting the heavy bag. I jabbed him again in the face, and then turned my hip and brought the right uppercut that had missed before. He was too far gone to slip it this time, and it caught him square. He took another step backward. His legs gave out. And he sat suddenly on the floor, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

My hands hurt.

I looked at Ariel Herzberg.

“You think they’ll put my statue outside the Museum of Fine Arts?” I said.

“Kurt is good,” Ariel said. “Which means you’re very good.”

“Keep it in mind,” I said.

“It is a temporary triumph,” he said. “Enjoy it while you can.”

I walked to his desk and took hold of his nose and sort of shook his head for him.

“So far, I like my chances better than yours,” I said.

And I left.

W
e hadn’t had a big, serious snowstorm all winter. It had snowed moderately, and often, and it was doing it again. The cumulative effect of moderate and often was pretty much the same as big, serious. The snow was steady but not dense, and the flakes were small. But it was enough to cover up the compacted dirty snow that had preceded it, and for a little while the city would look clean again.

I walked up Berkeley Street wearing my plaid longshoreman’s cap and a fleece-lined leather jacket. Because I had the jacket zipped up, and people were seeking to do me ill, I had taken my gun off my belt and put it in my side pocket. I also looked around a lot. At Columbus I turned right and went in the big arched door of Shawmut Insurance Company and rode up in the black iron elevator to see Winifred Minor.

She was in the same office I’d seen her in before. The door was open. I knocked on the outer edge of the door opening and stepped in. She looked up at me and saw who it was and stiffened and looked at me some more without speaking. I sat down.

“Hi,” I said.

She continued to look at me silently.

“You never finished your lunch,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“How ’bout that snow?” I said.

Silence.

“If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait a minute,” I said.

She looked down at her desk.

“Everybody talks about the weather,” I said. “But nobody does anything about it.”

She looked up from her desk.

“All right,” she said. “Enough. I’ll talk to you. What do you want?”

“Thank God,” I said. “I was almost down to singing ‘Stormy Weather.’”

She almost smiled.

“At least I escaped that,” she said. “What do you want?”

“Know a man named Ariel Herzberg?” I said.

“No.”

“Your daughter does,” I said.

“So?”

“I saw him visiting her at Walford last week,” I said.

“So?”

“He’s killed two people that I know of, and tried twice, so far, to kill me.”

She kept looking at me, and her breathing became harder, as if she was short of breath.

“If she’s involved with a man like that . . .” I said.

“Who did he kill,” Winifred asked.

Her voice was raspy.

“He killed Ashton Prince,” I said. “And the superintendent in my building. Super’s name was Francisco Cabrera.”

“Was that part of the attempt to kill you?”

“Yes.”

“Did the super interrupt them?” she said.

“No,” I said. “They interrupted him. Apparently they rang the bell. When he answered, they put a gun on him and forced him to open my door. Then they took him to the cellar and shot him in the head.”

“Did Ariel do this himself?”

“Probably not,” I said. “He probably had people do it for him.”

“And you’ve seen her with him?”

“Missy,” I said. “Yes.”

“And you assume they’re involved.”

“They were people who knew each other,” I said.

“Is there anything I could say . . . or do . . . to make you leave this alone?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You have an office just down the street,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Let’s go there to talk,” she said.

“Okay.”

I
’d given her some coffee, and she was sitting in a client chair with her legs crossed, sipping it. Her knees were good-looking. She looked past me for a time, out my window, where the small snowflakes fell. They were well spaced and in no great hurry. She didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry herself. That was okay. She hadn’t come here to drink coffee and look at the snow.

I was behind my desk. In my Aeron chair. With the right-hand top drawer of my desk open, and a cup of fresh coffee in my hand. I drank some. And looked at her knees. And waited.

After a little while she shifted her gaze from the snowfall to me.

“When I was with the Bureau,” she said, “before Missy was born, I was young, single, and ferocious. I was going to prove something. I was going to be the best goddamned agent since Melvin Purvis.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Seems kind of, what? Pathetic, now all this time later. What we know about the Bureau. What we know about the government. What we know about . . .” She shrugged. “What we know about everything.”

“We all gotta forgive ourselves our youth,” I said.

“But it was kind of pathetic,” she said. “Doesn’t it sound pathetic?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Some.”

She looked relieved, as if I’d complimented her.

“I was in Chicago,” she said. “And we were working on a case involving art theft from a private collector in Evanston.”

“Where Northwestern is,” I said. Just to let her know I was alert.

“Yuh. There were several of us on it; the guy they were stolen from was connected in D.C. I was the only female, and I outworked all of them. We always had a lot of money to pay for information. Local cops resented us for that.”

“They never had enough,” I said.

“No. I got a lead from a snitch, I don’t even remember the details. They may have tried to recruit him for something. He told me about a gang of art thieves that he said had something to do with the World War Two prisons or something, and how a lot of Jews got killed.”

She paused and drank some coffee and smiled very slightly.

“He told me all this like it was news. I don’t think he’d ever heard of the Holocaust and was only vaguely aware of World War Two.”

“Snitches don’t always have a broad historical perspective,” I said.

“Probably why they’re snitches,” she said. “Anyway, the tip was good. It led me to a guy who was apparently in the business of finding and liberating Jewish-owned art stolen by the Nazis.”

“Still?” I said.

“Well, we’re talking twenty years ago,” she said. “But yes, still.”

“Holocaust throws a long shadow,” I said. “Doesn’t it.”

“Yes. So I confront this guy, and he’s, like, unshakeable. Doesn’t deny. Doesn’t admit. And is so charming about it,” she said. “I spent a lot of time with him, working on him. But more and more I was spending it because I wanted to. I started looking forward to seeing him again. And I could tell, I thought, that he felt the same way.”

“Until one day . . .” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “In a room at the Park Hyatt near the water tower off Michigan Avenue.”

“I know where it is,” I said.

“It became our place,” she said. “We didn’t go there all the time. We couldn’t afford it. But on special dates. You know, our one-week anniversary. Our one-month anniversary . . .”

She stopped talking for a bit and looked through my window at the soft snow.

“Pathetic,” she said.

“No,” I said. “A run like that isn’t pathetic. It may be ill-advised. Might even be contrived. Might be cathexis and not love. But the feelings are real when you have them. And they are not valueless.”

“ ‘Cathexis’?”

“Libidinal energy,” I said. “Sorry. I’m in love with a shrink.”

“And it’s different than love?”

“The shrink I’m in love with says so.”

“I wonder how much shrinks know about love?” she said.

“Mine knows a lot,” I said. “But not, I think, because she’s a shrink. How soon did you get pregnant?”

“You know where this is going,” she said.

“I think so.”

“Maybe you and I are developing some cathexis?” she said.

“Absolutely,” I said. “But my shrink won’t let me.”

“I was pregnant the second month we were together,” she said.

“I assume the investigation had slowed during this period.”

“Worse,” she said. “I warned him what we had.”

“How’d he take to the pregnancy?” I said.

“He wanted me to abort,” she said.

“And?”

She shook her head.

“I had already sold out the Bureau for him,” she said. “I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t kill the baby for him.”

“How’d he take that?”

“He said there were things he had to do, and they didn’t include marriage and children.”

“He have numbers tattooed on his forearm?”

“Yes.”

“The baby was Missy?”

“Yes.”

“And the father was Ariel Herzberg,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

H
er eyes had filled with tears. I handed her a box of Kleenex and took her coffee cup and poured her some fresh coffee. I looked at my watch; it was two in the afternoon. Late enough in the day. I took a bottle of Irish whiskey from a drawer in my file cabinet and held it up. She stared blankly at it for a moment, then nodded. I poured some into the coffee and gave her back her cup.

“You had the baby alone,” I said.

She sipped her enhanced coffee.

“Yes,” she said. “I obviously couldn’t let the Bureau know what was going on. So I took a leave. My doctor, a lovely woman named Martha Weidhaus, contrived me a medical reason. I had the baby, hired a nanny, and went back to work.”

“Pressed for money?” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “Ariel would occasionally send some, for which I was grateful. But I could never count on it.”

“Did you see him?”

“No. After I got pregnant he disappeared.”

“What does Missy know about him?” I said.

“I told her he was dead,” Winifred said. “And she bought that, though she still wanted to know about him, what his name was, what he was like, what he worked at, how we had met. I created quite an admirable fictional character over the years.”

“Anyone ask you about that case you had in Chicago?”

“Often,” Winifred said. “It kept poking at me with its nose. Like a dog at suppertime. It’s one of the reasons I left, and took this job.”

“Plus better pay,” I said. “And no heavy lifting.”

She nodded.

“Missy is seeing Ariel. Does she know who he is?”

“Yes,” Winifred said. “He showed up one day when she was sixteen and introduced himself.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“It wasn’t the way to do it,” she said. “And I don’t know how much damage it did. But Ariel always wanted what he wanted and didn’t think much about damage . . . to others. She got a little hysterical at me for lying to her, at him for not being there, but he talked to her, and I watched her fall in love with him the way I did.”

“Why did he show up?”

“I don’t know,” Winifred said. “I never knew why he sent us money when he did. I never know why he does what he does. But I am almost certain it is finally in his own best interest, not someone else’s.”

“He hang around for a while?” I said.

“Yes, still does. He and I have not taken up again. I’m older and wiser. But he sees Missy regularly. I have warned her about him. But she is . . . She is infatuated with him . . . like I was. She wanted to be an art major. And she wanted to go to Walford. He got her in. ‘
No problem,
’ he said. ‘I have a friend there.’”

“Ashton Prince,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What do they do together?” I said.

She shook her head and drank some coffee.

“I don’t know,” she said. “They don’t . . . They exclude me.”

“That’ll fix you,” I said.

“For telling her he was dead?”

“Yeah.”

“I was trying to protect her,” Winifred said. “He’s not cruel, or even mean. But he’s entirely interested in himself, and what he wants.”

“Well,” I said. “I’m going to solve that problem for you.”

“You have enough evidence?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“But you will,” Winifred said.

“Sooner or later,” I said.

She stared at me for a while and nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “You will.”

She handed me her cup.

“Don’t bother with the coffee,” she said.

I poured some whiskey in the cup and gave it back to her. She sipped some.

“I’ll be as kind as I can be,” I said. “If she’s involved, I’ll try to keep her, and you, out of it.”

“Oh, God,” Winifred said. “It will kill her. I don’t know what to hope for.”