Treasure of Saint-Lazare (9 page)

“It’s a good start,” Eddie responded. “I’ve spent the morning with the police detective, and he’s now certain Roy was murdered. He’s given me the name of the only witness, and I’ll try to interview him this afternoon.”

“So both of us are making progress. Maybe you can come back soon. I’ll send you more information by e-mail as I receive it. And how are you getting along with your old friend Jen?”

Damn, he thought. Margaux told her. There was an edge hidden in her question, but he decided to ignore it. “She’s fine. She’s at her gallery and I’m about to search her house. Then I’m going to see the witness.”

“My father wants me to stay with your mother tonight, which is probably a good idea, although I have no idea why he doesn’t do it himself. Call me anytime before midnight or so. I’ll probably be on the terrace looking at the tower and enjoying some of Margaux’s Chablis.”

Eddie put the phone slowly back into his pocket as he replayed the call in his mind. The relationship between her family and his went back before either of them had been born. Their ten-year age difference had meant they were never childhood buddies, but they had clicked in 2003 and lived together for a few months before Eddie realized he still could not commit to another woman. Desperately unhappy, she had left him for a fellow Sorbonne professor only to learn a year after their marriage that he was a gambler who had lost all of his money and a great deal of hers. She had been divorced more than a year and they had run into each other several times since but he’d never sensed any rekindling of her romantic feelings for him. At least until today, when he’d heard a definite warmth under the factual presentation about the painting. It was a mystery to him, but a welcome one.

Eddie went further into the house to look for places Roy might have hidden more information about his search for the painting. He was certain Roy had more documents than just the letter Jen had found — he had spent more than 50 years chasing his evanescent dream, so his records might be bulky.

He looked first for hidden compartments inside closets or above the ceiling. More than once Artie and Roy had located them behind wall panels or above loose boards in the ceiling of old German houses. But after an hour of knocking on walls he came up empty and concluded that Roy must have hidden the files as he had hidden the letter to Artie, somewhere safe that he knew Jen could, with work, discover. The most likely choice was a bank vault, where the papers would be protected from fire as well as theft, and he suspected the Germans had come to the same conclusion so had tried to kidnap Roy rather than burgle his house. Or maybe after burgling his house and coming up empty.

He
looked for an entrance to the basement before he realized that almost no Florida homes have basements. The water table is too high and they would be wet all the time. “Dumb of me,” he muttered.

When in doubt go for the simplest explanation, he thought, and papers are usually kept in offices. He returned to look closely at the bedroom Roy had turned into a study and office, with a simple wooden desk and an easy chair with a reading light next to it. A table on the other side held an old Macintosh computer and a small laser printer. He’d look into the computer later but he didn’t expect to find anything there, it would be too obvious. If anything came through the computer he would have printed it and kept it somewhere safe. Jen had told him Roy was an old-fashioned man who considered the computer a fancy electric typewriter, nothing more.

A bookcase was built solidly into the entire 15-foot wall behind Roy’s desk. The shelves were permanent, not adjustable, and made of inch-thick oak. One shelf at a time, Eddie removed each book, flipped through it for secret cavities, examined the wall behind it, and replaced it. After an hour he was almost half finished. As he replaced the second volume of the Oxford English Dictionary on the lowest shelf it caught briefly on something. Puzzled, he removed it again and under the shelf above it he felt a small flat object firmly attached with tape. He worried a corner of the tape loose, then pulled the entire piece off and held in his hand a large round-headed brass key marked “Do Not Duplicate.” It was unmistakably the key to a bank safety-deposit box.

As he finished replacing the other books he heard Jen’s key turn in the lock. When she appeared in the study door as he held the key out to her.

“Did Roy have a bank box?” he asked.

“Just the one that contained his will. Its key didn’t look like that one, though. It was shorter, and the head was a different shape.”

“Then this may be where his files are hidden. All we have to do is match it to a bank. That could be like finding a needle in a haystack — I’ve never seen a town this size with so many banks.”

“It might not even be in Sarasota. He liked to drive out to different small towns from time to time, and I’d go with him when I could. We would usually stop for lunch, and sometimes he’d leave me waiting in the restaurant while he ran an errand or took a walk. I learned after the first time to take a book whenever we made one of these excursions.”

“Did he have a favorite?”

“Not really. Victor Coulson might know. He has clients in a lot of the little towns around Sarasota, and he did all of Roy’s legal work. Mine, too. He did the paperwork when I bought the gallery and he helps me out from time to time.”

“Then he’ll be our first stop tomorrow. Meanwhile I have a lot of ground to cover today. See you tonight. Think of a nice place for dinner.”

Eddie walked across the street to verify that the restaurant was closed, then walked back to his rented Ford and set a GPS course through downtown and out North Washington to a short street not far from Martin Luther King.

The number of small wooden churches surprised him. Most of them represented Pentecostal denominations he had never seen in France, much less Paris, where the churches were built long ago in massive cut stone and many are no longer used for their original purpose. The vacant lots and convenience stores seemed full of idle black men, the young ones standing in small groups, the older sitting around tables playing cards and dominoes.

These are working churches, he told himself, whereas ours are tourist destinations. But these unemployed boys and men don’t look particularly dangerous, just dispirited and poor.

He passed his turn and continued another dozen blocks to explore the neighborhood. He made a U-turn through the parking lot of a grocery store, then back
tracked and turned right onto the narrow street where Thom said Arturo’s home would be found, passing the warehouse of an air conditioning company, the razor wire atop its fence glittering in the sun. A block further, almost at the entrance of a chocolate-colored concrete-block apartment complex, he spotted Arturo’s house number to his right. Behind a sagging and rusted chain-link fence stood a neat white cottage with blue shutters, painted during the last couple of years. Most of the houses on the block were neatly kept, although one across the street stood abandoned and boarded up. The plywood covering a window was pulled half off, which meant it was now a refuge for the homeless or a drug house. Lawns were beginning to green as the June rains broke the drought that settled in every winter.

He parked the car and pushed open the gates. A dog barked as he knocked on the door, and in a minute a young woman came to the door carrying a baby girl.

“Excuse me for disturbing you, madam,” Eddie said, “but I’m looking for Arturo Ruiz. He was a witness to an auto accident a couple of weeks ago where a friend of mine was killed, and the police said it would be OK if I talk to him.”

“He’s at work now, mister,” she replied after a few seconds of thought. Eddie heard a Caribbean accent.

“His restaurant is closed today, so I thought I might find him at home,” Eddie replied, keeping his voice level and friendly.

“Mondays he works for Labor Force. With a new baby we need everything we can get, and the restaurant doesn’t pay that much.”

“When do you expect him to be home?”

“Pretty soon,” she said. “He gets off at 3 and it’s almost that now. You can wait if you want, but I’m not supposed to let anybody in the house.”

“I’ll just sit out here if that’s OK.”

Eddie went to his car for a Sarasota guidebook he had bought at the Tampa airport. Then he found an old and deteriorating garden bench in a little shade on the side of the house and sat down to read.

He looked up as he heard the gate open. “My wife called and told me you wanted to talk about poor Mr. Castor,” said a slim young man as he came through and closed it behind him. “I’ve already told the police everything I know.” The sound of the Caribbean was there, too, but less pronounced. Eddie suspected they had been in the United States since they were children.

“That’s what Detective Anderson told me, but Roy Castor was a very old friend of my father’s and I thought I should do everything I can to help his daughter find out exactly what happened. Can you take a few minutes to talk to me?”

“Sure. Come inside and let me wash up, then we can talk.” Eddie offered his hand and Arturo shook it.

Arturo introduced him to Lil — “Her real name is something long and very Jamaican, so here she goes by Lil” — and their daughter Sophie, a bright-eyed one-year-old with pigtails and pink ribbons who sat in a playpen happily fitting together colored alphabet blocks. A small black-and-white dog sat contentedly at Lil’s feet, licking its chops. It put its head on its forepaws and closed its eyes.

In a few minutes Arturo came back into the living room wearing different clothes and a blue baseball cap instead of the yellow one he’d worn when he arrived. Eddie explained his father’s long relationship with Roy Castor and how Jen had found the letter and brought it to him.

He added, “It’s possible that there is some pretty valuable stuff involved — a very old painting and maybe some gold. But frankly I’m not interested in those. I’m just interested in knowing about my father and wrapping up the loose ends, mainly for the sake of Roy’s daughter Jen, who lives here, and my mother.”

Arturo nodded and looked at Lil, who smiled. “Family’s the most important thing,” she said.

Eddie then asked Arturo to recount all the events that he saw or heard. “I know it’s boring for you, but going through a story from start to finish sometimes helps find facts that weren’t obvious the first time.”

“Sure,” he told Eddie, “I was walking back to the restaurant after I’d been to the bank when I heard a shout behind me. I turned around just in time to see that car hit Mr. Castor. I knew he was dead when his head hit the curb.”

“Did you hear him say anything?” Eddie asked.

“Not after he was hit, but just before. I didn’t know what to make of it at first. But as I think about it, I’m sure somebody shouted ‘You!’”

“’You!’ That doesn’t sound quite right. That sounds more like he recognized someone he didn’t expect to see.”

“That’s what I think now. Do you think I should call the detective?”

“Not quite yet. Would you mind going over the whole sequence once again?”

“Sure. I walked to the bank on Main Street on my break. I usually go after work because it’s a pretty long walk to make in a 15-minute break, but we needed the money and my boss said I could have a few extra minutes if I needed them. Lil had to pay a couple of bills.”

Lil had moved across the room to an armchair, covered with an old blue blanket that either Sophie or the dog had been abusing. She looked up and said, “Yeah. The phone was about to get cut off.”

“Anyway, I was moving as fast as I could. I must have passed Mr. Castor just before I crossed Ringling. I was moving pretty fast, so by the time the car hit him I was more than halfway down the block. I heard the shout, then I turned around.”

“How fast was the car moving, do you think?”

“Pretty slow. I guess he had just turned the corner and hadn’t speeded up much because he wasn’t moving fast at all when he hit the old man. When he passed me he really speeded up.”

“Can you describe the man who was driving?”

The tinted passenger window was rolled up so the view wasn’t good, but Arturo had the impression that the driver was around 40 years old, with light hair, wearing a brown jacket. “I thought the jacket was weird because it was almost 90 degrees out, but maybe he was cold in the air conditioning. And he was short. He could barely see over the steering wheel.”

“Did you see anyone else other than Mr. Castor? I’m trying to figure out who shouted. For instance, was there anyone nearby on the sidewalk?”

Arturo paused and glanced at his wife. “I think there must have been because I heard someone running away. But I didn’t see them.”

“Did you tell Detective Anderson about that? It might be important.”

“No, sir, I didn’t.” Arturo’s tone had changed. He was no longer confident.

Lil interrupted. “You need to tell Mr. Grant everything you know. It’s not fair to let those men get away if you can help catch them.”

Arturo turned to Eddie. “She’s right, but I can’t take chances with my job. They’re hard to get this year — I was out of work for three months and we got into debt. Lil did need money for the phone bill, but when Mr. Castor was killed I was making a payment to a man we owe. He was looking the other way over my shoulder and saw the whole thing.”

“Why didn’t he wait for the police?”

“He don’t talk to the police if he can help it. He’s been known to sell some things that aren’t completely legal, know what I mean? But he’s not really a bad guy. I think he’ll talk to you if you explain things to him the way you did to me.”

He gave Eddie the name Deus Lewis. “We call him D because nobody on the street knows what Deus means. He’s about 25, nearly as tall as you are, but skinny, and really black. He has short hair but he usually wears a cap, and in weather like this he’ll be wearing a muscle shirt to show off. He’s a strong guy and wants everyone to know it.”

“Where can I find him?”

“Not far. Go down to MLK and Osprey. There’s a grocery store there where he usually hangs out. He should be there this time of day.”

“OK. Why don’t you let me tell Detective Anderson what you saw? I’m sure he’ll have to talk to you again, but it might help if I approach him first, particularly if I can get some information from Deus.” Arturo nodded as Eddie left.

The GPS told him MLK and Osprey was only three or four blocks away, so he slowed down to get a feel for the neighborhood. Everywhere he looked there were black men sitting on benches and standing on the street corners. Some of them were clustered in the timeless tradition of old men everywhere.