A Deceptive Clarity (20 page)

"Are you kidding? I hate this kind of picture. Look at it.

He's holding a knife and fork, he's got an apron on. I mean, the implication is that he's gonna eat himself—or at least another chicken—and he's laughing like crazy. It's horrible. You're telling me that doesn't bother you?"

"Harry," I said, "you're weird."

But not so weird that he didn't order half a sauteed chicken.

I wasn't very hungry, and asked for a small chicken salad.

"Oh, by the way," he said, when the waitress had brought apple juice for him and a glass of Mosel for me, "speaking of pictures ..." He unfolded a poorly photocopied sheet with four photographs on it: two men, each photographed from front and side, with names and numbers beneath. "Would these possibly be friends of yours?"

They were like faces from a nightmare. No-neck, the gorilla man and his sidekick Skull-face. "You got them!" I cried. "The guys from the storage room! Harry—"

"Ah," he said with satisfaction, "good. But don't get too excited. We don't have them; we just know who they are."
 

"Who?"

He took back the sheet and spread it out on the table in front of him, smoothing down the creases. "Just a couple of particularly nasty rent-a-thugs. The
Polizei
has records a mile long on them. They call the one with the forty-inch neck the Beast."

"Gee, I wonder why that is," I said, remembering with a shudder how it felt to be lobbed six feet into a concrete wall.

"Got a little more news for you, Chris," he said, watching me over the rim of his glass. "We also know the guys who killed van Cortlandt—that is, the ones who walked him through those bars that night."

I slowly put down my wine. "Why didn't you tell me that before? Who are they?"

He smiled and tapped the sheet.

My eyes widened. "The same ones? How did you find all this out?"

"Wasn't too hard. I got a dozen possible matches to your Photofit and took them to Frankfurt yesterday. Then I spent last night with a couple of
Polizei,
showing the pictures to people in the bars around the Paradies. Three people positively identified them as the guys who were hauling him around from bar to bar, more or less holding him up between them."

I turned the sheet around and looked hard at the pictures. The men who'd killed Peter. "Why did they do it?" I asked dully.

"Well, how the hell am I supposed to know that? Somebody hired them, I guess."

"And somebody hired them to rob the storage room?"
 

"I think so."

"And that's all you know?"

"Hey, look, Chris, I'm not Superman," he said testily. "Don't worry, we'll find these guys."

"Hey, Harry, I'm sorry, you've done a terrific job. It's just ... well, even if we know who they are, we don't really know anything more than we did before, do we?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say that. We
know
the murder and the break-in are connected now. We didn't know that before."

"That's true. You don't suppose—you don't think Peter somehow found out that the robbery was planned, and they killed him to keep him quiet?"

He didn't seem impressed with the idea. "Possible, but what happened to your forgery theory?"

I shook my head. "I don't know."

We sipped our drinks thoughtfully until the waitress came back with our dinners.

"Aahh," Harry breathed, "that smells great. He tore off a wing and went to work on it—quite carnivorously, I thought. "Now," he said, licking at his thumb, "you want to tell me what that was about with Gadney?"

"What what was about?"

"Your burning interest in logistics."

"I wanted to see if he'd admit to being alone with the open crates," I said, and went over the conclusions I'd reached in Florence, while Harry nodded and made steady progress on his chicken.

"OK," he said, "so you're saying, (a) either the forgery is one of the three paintings from Hallstatt—in which case probably nobody connected with the show had anything to do with it—or (b) it's from Bolzano's Florence collection—in which case somebody in the show
has
to be involved. And you figure it's
b
?"

"No, I figure it's
a
, but I didn't think it would hurt to talk to Egad. Did what he said sound right to you, by the way? About the bills of lading and the travel orders?"

"It sounds possible."

"Well, I'll check around and see."

"I'll
check around." He wiped his fingers on a napkin and reached for another. "You really think that little guy's mixed up in this thing?"
 

"That little guy" was an inch taller and at least ten pounds heavier than Harry.

"No, but if the fake is from Florence—which I doubt— and not from Hallstatt, either he's involved with it, or Flittner is, or Robey is. One of them has to be."

"No, I don't see it that way."

"There's Jessick, you mean? I don't think so. He wasn't cleared to get near the paintings. Flittner, Robey, and Gadney are the only ones with the access and the knowledge. It's got to be one of them."

"No, it could have been
all
of them. Or any two."

I put down the Mosel and thought about that. "A conspiracy? That's pretty—"

"Or van Cortlandt."

"Peter?
Are you serious? My God, Harry, he was murdered!"

"Yeah, well," he mumbled into his beard, "I was figuring that any involvement would have been before he died, you know?"

"That's not what I meant. There's no way Peter would have had anything to do with something crooked. And if he did, why would he tell me about it?"

"Hey, calm down, Chris; don't get excited. Eat your salad."

"I
am
calm, damn it!"

"All I'm doing," he said, searching sadly in the debris on his plate for any shreds he might have missed, "is thinking out loud, building possibilities from what you told me, you know? And it's possible—
possible
—that van Cortlandt was involved in something shady, and that he wound up getting killed on account of it."

"Yes, I know, but—"

"There are some other possibilities too. Anne Greene, for instance."

"Anne? You're out of your mind! She didn't know anything about it. And she's the one who kept trying to tell everybody Peter was murdered right from the beginning."

"Look, you said—and it's a good point—that the people who had access and knowledge are our best bets. Now, she's got both, right? Stop being so subjective, for Christ's sake.
Whoever's
guilty, you can bet there's someone, somewhere, who thinks he's a wonderful person." He cocked his head and scratched raspily at the hair on his cheek. "Well, maybe not Flittner."

"I understand what you're saying, and you're right. But Anne—well, hell, I had access and knowledge, too, for that matter. What about me?"

Harry licked grease from his pinky and nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah, then there's you."

"Not likely," I said, in a tone implying that of course he was being playful. "I just got here last week."

"And how do I know this forgery business didn't get set up last week?"

"Because Peter told me about it the very first day I was here, for one thing."

"Yeah, so you say."

"So I ... Why the hell would—"

Harry threw back his head and chortled. "Hey, relax, will you? You're not on my list of suspects, OK? Neither is Anne. I just enjoy seeing the veins stand out on your neck, that's all, but I don't want you to have a stroke. Loosen up; don't be so intense. I'm on your side, you know."

Intense, again.
 
What was this? When did I become so intense? "That's nice to know, but how come you're being generous enough to exclude me?"

"Intuition. Also the fact that you almost got yourself killed in the storage room. But mostly intuition."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence." I took a long sip of the Mosel. "I'd like to help any way I can, Harry."

"Good; find that fake. And there's one thing you can tell me that might help a lot. Do you have van Cortlandt's appointment calendar?"

"It isn't on the desk in Room 2100?"

"No, but Jessick's sure he had one. Blue, he thinks."

"I haven't seen it, but I'll have a look. I have a few of Peter's files in my room."

"That's fine. Well, I don't know about you, but I'm bushed. Let's figure out how we split the check. Your salad was ten marks, right? My chicken was only nine, so ..."

* * *

The night had turned a dry, bitter cold, and on the walk back to Tempelhof Harry humped along with hunched shoulders, buried in his parka like a turtle, so that nothing below his eyes showed over his collar. And everything above was hidden by a thick knit cap, so he seemed to be peering warily out of the slit of a big, soft tank.

"Oh, by the way, Chris," he said from deep in the coat as we waited to cross the eight-lane Tempelhofer Damm, "did Flittner ever come up in your conversations with van Cortlandt?"

"No."

"How he got along with him, that kind of thing?"

"Harry, maybe if you'd just trust me and come out and tell me why you're so interested in Flittner I'd be able to help you. Since we're on the same side, it'd be nice to know just what the hell is going on."

He had to swivel the whole thickly encased upper half of his body to look at me. I think I heard him laugh, or he might have grunted; the sound was lost somewhere in the depths of the coat. "You know, you've got a point. All right, did you know that he's not on leave from the National Gallery—that he was canned?"

"Canned? Why?"

"Bad PR, lousy attitude, uncooperative behavior—all those curmudgeonly leanings you told me about. Come on, the light's changed."

Berlin traffic lights do not encourage dawdling. We jogged quickly across the broad street and onto the Platz der Luftbrücke, dark except for the spotlit monument. "I suppose," Harry went on, "you didn't know that Robey's dumping him too, effective the end of the month, for pretty much the same reasons."

"I didn't have any idea. Poor guy. Does he know?"

"Yeah, Robey told him a couple of weeks ago."

"Hm. So why did you want to know if Peter—"

"Because he's the one who talked Robey into getting rid of him—according to Robey. Let me ask you: Would van Cortlandt do something like that? Go to Robey and ask him to get rid of somebody else?"

"If he thought the paintings were being endangered or the show was being compromised, yes. Definitely. He'd consider it a matter of honor." I turned to look at him. "Are you saying you think Earl might have killed him—arranged to have him killed—out of … what, revenge?"

"I don't think anything yet. I'm trying to get my facts in order. Here's the funny part: Robey says van Cortlandt told him he'd had a couple of tough talks with Flittner about it."

"That sounds like Peter. He'd want to be aboveboard. What's funny about it?"

"What's funny is that when I asked Flittner about it, he said he didn't know what I was talking about; Peter never talked to him about his behavior or anything else."

"So somebody is lying."

"Right. And Flittner's got a pretty good reason. With me poking around asking questions, he's probably scared to admit he had any reason for hating van Cortlandt."

"Which makes him worried, but not necessarily guilty. Earl's pretty paranoid at the best of times."

"That's right," Harry said.
 
"I never said he was guilty."

Once in the lobby at Columbia House, Harry woofed and stamped his feet as if we'd been trudging in three feet of snow. "Sheesh, it's freezing outside! Brr." He began unraveling himself from gloves, hat, scarf, and coat, emerging like an undersize moth from its cocoon. "I gotta get some wool socks."

"Harry, I was thinking. It's pretty natural for people's guard to be up with you questioning them—"

"I don't
question
them; I'm pretty subtle."

"Yeah, you really had Egad fooled."

He laughed. "You didn't do any better. He's madder at you than at me."

"That's true, but with me, anything about the show is a legitimate concern. I might get people mad, but I'm not going to make them suspicious. I thought maybe I might do a little ... well, talking to people—"

"Forget it," he said firmly. "Here's the deal: You leave the investigation to me, and I'll leave the forgery to you."

"Look, I didn't mean I was going to confront Earl about Peter. I could do it indirectiy. Maybe if I got a little more information from Robey—"

He sighed. "Let's go sit down for a couple of minutes."

We went to the same grouping of chairs that Peter and I had sat in when I'd first arrived in Berlin. Harry heaped his peeled-off garments on the chair next to him, and sighed again. "Flittner's not the only one I've got questions about."

"Who else? Not Mark?"

"Yeah, Mark."

"What questions?"

"Two of them. Why he went to Frankfurt with van Cortlandt the day van Cortlandt got killed—"

"What?" I exclaimed, then lowered my voice at Harry's wince. "But—Peter would have mentioned it. He went alone; I'm sure of it."

"Not exactly. Robey was on the same plane, sitting twenty rows behind him, in the smoking section."

"Well .. . why? What did he say?"

"That's my other question: Why won't he admit he went?"

"He out-and-out denied it?"

"No, I wouldn't say that. Didn't I tell you I'm subtle? I just gave him about ten different chances to mention it— you know, 'Been to Frankfurt lately?'—that kind of stuff. He wouldn't bite."

"Then how do you know he went?"

"High-class police work, pal. I checked the passenger list of van Cortlandt's plane to see if anything turned up. Robey's name did."

"Wow, I don't have any idea what to make of that. When did he come back, do you know?"

"Not till just before that staff meeting. Two days and three nights in Frankfurt, right when van Cortlandt bought it, and it slipped his mind. Funny, huh?"

I sagged back against the soft chair and thought about all this. "Yes, it's funny. Earl's such a miserable character I don't have any trouble imagining him as a murderer. But I like Mark. I don't like to think ... hey, that gives him a reason for lying, doesn't it? About whether Peter really talked to Earl, I mean. He could have been trying to throw you off, to invent a motive for Earl's killing him." I suddenly knew what Anne had meant about feeling as if she were in a movie.