Blue Molly (Danny Logan Mystery #5) (5 page)

“You, too. Maybe we see each other again.”

I smiled. “You never know. We’ll be on our way now. You fellas have a nice day.”

I took hold of Toni by the arm and marched her to the side and around these guys. She started to protest, but I squeezed a little harder, and she took the hint.

As we left, I could feel the glare from Laskin and the others, drilling into my back as we walked away.

“Danny!” Toni whispered as we crossed Main, still not looking back.

“Keep walking.”

“We’ve got to find out who that guy is.”

“We know who he is. He’s Pavel Laskin. Keep walking.”

“No, not just his name. We need to find out who he is . . . what he does.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that. I’ve got a feeling we haven’t seen the last of him.”

* * * *

Just as we reached the Sylvia Lyon Gallery, a tall man in a dark suit that screamed “Lawyer!” walked out. He smiled and held the door for us. We thanked him and stepped inside, where we stopped to look around. The impressive layout, the soothing spa music, and the beautiful pictures on display had the immediate effect of causing the tension from our little introduction to Pavel Laskin to quickly ebb away. The gallery floors were shiny maple and the interior walls bright white, the exterior all glass. High-intensity lighting from somewhere in the fifteen-foot-tall ceiling accented colorful paintings that were featured at regular intervals along the wall. Partial walls, maybe ten feet high, were built at forty-five-degree angles to the back of the gallery, where they jutted out and created little alcoves for other paintings to be displayed. Pedestals were built into the ends of the alcove walls and featured a variety of sculptures.

“Wow,” Toni said. She has a real understanding for art, far beyond my simple capacity to appreciate. Somehow, she’d managed to squeeze a few art classes into her law, societies, and justice degree from U-Dub. Between the two of us, hers was by far the more educated eye. For me, I usually just liked those pieces with the most vivid colors.

Toni immediately walked over to a large black-and-white photograph of a woman’s face with water flowing across it, as if she were standing under a shower or a waterfall. “Will you look at that,” she said.

I looked. “Nice photograph.”

She kept her eyes on the picture, but shook her head. “It’s not a photograph. It’s a drawing.”

I leaned forward. “Get out of here. What? You mean a drawing, like with pencils?” I examined the piece more closely and decided Toni had to be mistaken—something that didn’t happen very often. This was no pencil sketch.

I was still trying to convince myself when I heard footsteps behind us. “Hi, y’all!” We turned and saw a short, very cute young woman with shoulder-length auburn hair walking toward us. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” she said, nodding toward
Splash
. Her voice rang with a deep Southern twang.

“Pencil?” Toni asked.

The woman smiled. “Yeah—good eye! Most people think it’s a photograph. Sylvia Lyon drew that in 2010. She’s one of the most well-respected hyperrealists in the world today.”

I leaned forward and examined the . . . drawing. It still looked like a photograph to me, even knowing for certain that wasn’t the case. “Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing. Looks just like a photograph—but even more . . . more . . . more HD.”

“Exactly!” the woman said with delight. “You got it! That’s hyperrealism in a nutshell.”

“Must take her forever,” I said, still trying to process what I was seeing.

“Yeah. Three months or so on average for a drawing this size. Nowadays, she does only two or three new drawings each year.”

“I had no idea people could do things like this. It’s unbelievable.” I shook my head. I lowered my voice. “If you don’t mind saying, what’s something like this run?”

She smiled and leaned toward me. “Y’all don’t have to whisper,” she said, her voice low like mine. “We actually
sell
these things here. It’s our business.” She straightened up and laughed. “Actually though, this particular drawing sold some time ago and isn’t for sale. It’s on loan to us here for another four months. In fact, as of this morning when I checked, there are no Sylvia Lyon original drawings for sale anywhere in the world. I keep track. But we do sell authorized serigraphs here, signed by Sylvia. And originals, too, from time to time. But just not right now. To answer your question, though, the last Sylvia Lyon original sold in New York just after New Year’s somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand. But it was smaller than this one.”

I spun back to the drawing. “No way,” I said quietly. I turned back to her.

She smiled broadly and nodded her head. “Yep.”

“Maybe you should pick up some pencils on the way home,” Toni said.

The girl laughed and held out her hand. “That’s right. If they’re any good, we’ll put ’em up here in the gallery.” She laughed and then said, “I’m Libby Black, and I’ll bet you two must be Danny Logan and Antoinette Blair.”

I nodded. “Everybody seems to know us this morning.”

A quizzical look appeared on her face for an instant, then vanished. “Oh. Sylvia told me you’d be coming by. They’re expecting you. Fact, they’re waiting for you in the display room. C’mon, just follow me.”

Libby led us to the end of the gallery, where a doorway opened up to a room partitioned separately from the main area. Inside, Mike and Sylvia sat in two of the four comfortable-looking swivel chairs. A colorful painting hung on the wall at the head of the room, spotlighted by high-intensity lights shining from various directions. I got a better look at Sylvia today than I had last night, and realized that she was a very pretty, refined woman when she wasn’t yelling at thugs in a dimly lit bar. She was younger than Mike, perhaps in her midforties. She wore a striped dress, and her dark hair was swept into an elegant side bun.

Mike stood up to shake my hand when he saw us enter. He wore pressed blue jeans and a crisp light-blue oxford. His eye, along with the rest of the left side of his face, was swollen and colored a deep, dark purple. “So—did you see him?”

“Do you mean the lawyer in the dark suit, or the huge Russian with the menacing gang?”

He looked at me through his good eye. “I didn’t know about the Russians. I was talking about the lawyer. He’s the guy who’s been bringing the offers.” He slid me the lawyer’s card, a Mr. Jeffrey R. Drake, Esq. “You ever heard of him?”

I shook my head. “No. First time I’ve ever seen him is just as we were coming in. He held the door for us.” I nodded toward him. “How’s the eye?”

He shook his head. “It’s good. It looks like hell, but it doesn’t feel all that bad. Kind of warm, actually.”

“Looks pretty sexy, if you ask me,” Toni said.

Sylvia smiled. “There—see?” she said to Mike. She turned back to us. “That’s what I’ve been telling him.”

Mike beckoned us to sit, so we took the empty chairs at the table. He looked over at Libby, still standing in the doorway. “I take it you’ve met Libby?”

I nodded. “We have. Couldn’t help but notice her accent.”

“Pride of Jellico, Tennessee,” Libby said, smiling broadly.

“Why don’t you go ahead and sit in with us, Libby,” Mike said. “Grab that seat by the door so you can see anyone walk in, but if it’s at all possible, I’d like you to be here. You need to know what’s going on around here.”

Libby nodded. “Okay.”

Mike turned back to us. “Thanks for meeting with us so quickly. Quite a day yesterday.”

I nodded. “It was indeed.”

Like a true businessman, he got right to the point. “Have you considered what I asked last night? Do you think there’s anything you could do for us?”

Toni nodded. “We have. We talked it over last night and this morning, and yes, we do think we can help. The goal, of course, is to ultimately stop the harassment so that you can operate your building and your tenants can operate their businesses in peace, but, yeah, we think we can help with that.”

Mike and Sylvia both nodded, looking relieved. “Good,” Mike said. “How would you go about doing that?”

I gave them a quick rundown of our thoughts. “We think that a three-pronged approach would probably be the best. First, we’d take a look at this anonymous bidder. Right off the bat, we can definitely stop this Jeffrey R. Drake character from bothering you. That’ll just take a letter from an attorney. As a matter of fact, my dad’s the senior partner at Logan and Associates, the oldest law firm in the city. He’s taking us to the symphony tonight, and we could speak to him about it if you’d like.”

Mike nodded. “That’d be great. I should probably talk to him.”

“Good. I’ll set it up.”

“Keep in mind, though,” Toni said. “Stopping the lawyer won’t necessarily stop the outfit that he represents—they could always just hire another lawyer to do their bidding. So at the same time we’re telling Mr. Drake to stand down, we’ll also be digging in and trying to find out who the underlying anonymous bidder is.”

Mike nodded, and I continued. “Second thing, we’d want to identify the guys vandalizing your building and harassing your tenants. That needs to stop right away.”

“The Russians,” Sylvia said.

Toni nodded. “Exactly. We want to learn quite a bit more about them. Danny got a jump start with the introductions at the bar yesterday, and we just had another little meeting with them across the street on the way in. We may have even met their boss, a guy named Pavel Laskin. They definitely seemed to already know who we are, I guess from the police. Now, we have to find out more about them.”

“The good news is,” I added, “that if we’re able to link the offers for your building to the harassment you’ve had to put up with, then that starts to rise to the level of extortion. Extortion’s a crime that the police would probably be interested in. If we can put those pieces together, we should be able to get them to help.”

“Much more attractive to them than if it’s just a simple vandalism case,” Toni said.

Sylvia looked hopeful. “That would be wonderful. At least we could get back to work.”

“It would indeed,” Mike said.

“What I can’t figure out,” Sylvia said, “is why someone would be interested in our building in the first place. There are lots of buildings down here.”

I shrugged. “Nice lead-in. That’s actually the third element in our plan. We want to check your building itself. We need to know what it is that’s caused your building to suddenly become so desirable—we call it inductive reasoning, sort of working backward. At the same time we’re working forward by looking at the clues and trying to build them up to figure out who’s behind all this, we’re also trying to determine why someone might be interested in the first place. If we can figure that out, we can learn something about the characteristics of those who might be behind it. And knowing their characteristics can help lead to their identity. Although unlikely, it could be something as simple as you guys possibly underestimating the value. That happens. We recommend that you hire a good MAI appraiser. Or it could also be that there’s something unique about the place. We’d want to do a complete inspection, top to bottom. We can look at it from different perspectives, try to see its potential uses that might not show up on the appraiser’s ‘highest and best use’ analysis.”

“You mean something illegal?” Mike asked.

“Yeah, possibly.”

“Wow,” Mike said. “I’d have never considered that.” He thought for a second, then nodded and looked at Sylvia. “What do you think?”

Sylvia smiled. “I’m so relieved to finally find someone who’s going to be on our side, that I think it sounds great.”

Mike nodded. “Good. Me, too.” He turned to me. “This sounds fantastic, you two. When can you start?”

“Right away,” I said. I turned to Sylvia. “I understand from Toni that she went over our rates with you last night?”

She nodded. “She did. If it saves our building and gets us back to real work, it’s the bargain of the century.”

I smiled. “Well, if you start feeling guilty, we accept bonuses.”

“Danny!” Toni said.

“Just kidding. Truthfully, though, and more seriously, there
is
one last thing you need to keep in mind before you hire us.”

“What’s that?”

“When we go rooting about into a case like this, when there are a lot of unknowns, we try to be discreet and anonymous, at least for as long as we can. But based on the pretty visible altercation yesterday, and coupled with our bumping into at least some of the same guys today, I’d say the cat’s out of the bag already regarding us. And if you’re right and whoever it is that’s trying to buy your building has decided to up the ante and engage in a harassment campaign to drive you out—”

“Harassment that after yesterday now includes assault,” Toni said.

I nodded. “Exactly. If we start digging around into backgrounds trying to figure out who’s behind all this, whoever it is might see us doing it and, most likely, they won’t appreciate being exposed. They could get nasty with us, and maybe even with you. It might be a bit like poking a stick into a box that may or may not contain a hornets’ nest. You need to know this and be ready.”

Mike and Sylvia looked at each other and then Mike turned back to me. “What could they do?”

“I’m not saying they’re
going
to do anything. Civilized people wouldn’t. But then again, there is that,” I smiled and pointed to his eye. “And that guy looked like he was about to start swinging that pool cue. I guess the thing to ask is, where would they stop?”

“Not to mention that big guy we saw this morning,” Toni added. “He was a scary-looking guy.”

Mike nodded. “I think I might know who you’re talking about. I think I’ve seen him around here.”

Toni nodded. “He’s hard to forget.”

Mike considered this for a minute, then he took a deep breath and shrugged. “We’re running out of options. We could always just take the offer and move on.”

Sylvia looked at him and shook her head. “No, we cannot. I know that’s not what you want to do.”

He shrugged. She turned to me. “Mike’s trying to protect me. But it won’t work. I’m angry. I’m not willing to just cave in to these thugs. I say we stay and fight.”