Doing what I always did when confronted with difficult situations, I thought of what my father would have done. He once told me that the trick to outwitting sarcastic people was to ignore their tone and deal only with their content. I wondered if that strategy would work with Martha. It was a better tactic than hitting her, which was the only other approach I could think of.
“I hope you’ll find it bright enough, Martha. Will you tell me if you don’t?” I said, feigning concern. “And I’m so pleased you find the space charming.” I smiled, a hundred-watter this time, and looked toward the next person in line. “May I help you?” I asked. Out of the corner of my eye, I observed Martha’s lips thinning. I was pleased that she seemed disappointed that she hadn’t gotten a rise out of me.
At ten, when we opened the doors and the early birds had been taken care of, I left Gretchen to handle things and thought about what to do next.
I wanted to stay and observe the evil Martha at work, and I wanted to return to the tag sale and make certain that Eric had everything under control. I also wanted to see how Alverez and his team were making out. As I weighed my options, I decided that since observing Martha would only irritate me, and Eric would call for help if he needed it, I would head to the front where Alverez had set up shop.
I found him looking over his notes not far from the stack of crates. A technician wearing khakis, a sweater vest, and latex gloves was leaning over an empty crate, looking for I couldn’t imagine what. Earlier, Eric had confirmed that no crates were missing.
“Hey,” I said as I approached. “Any news?”
“Not yet,” Alverez answered, looking up from his notebook. “You said the noise came from somewhere near the crates, right?”
“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure. Noise reverberates.”
“Yeah. Regardless, it’d be a pretty good place for someone to hide, so we figured we’d start here.”
I went into the front office and checked the voice-mail system, scanned through some mail, bills mostly, and reviewed the list of auction bidders. I hadn’t been there more than three or four minutes when the technician called in an excited tone, “Chief, look at this.”
If Alverez replied, I didn’t hear it. I swung out of the chair and was no more than a step behind him as he joined the technician, who stood partially hidden by the stacks of crates, in the far corner of the warehouse.
“There,” the technician said, gesturing toward a crate midway up in the last row. He’d removed the back panel so it stood open to our view. I was able to see a long, white cardboard tube. “All the other crates were empty,” he added.
“What is it?” Alverez asked.
The technician shrugged. Alverez looked at me. “Josie? Any ideas?”
I shook my head. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“Let’s take a look, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, and immediately wondered if I should have agreed to let him look.
Alverez slipped on latex gloves and reached into the crate to extract the tube. I watched as he used a fingertip as a lever on the top plastic cover. It came off easily. He reached inside and pulled, freeing a rolled-up canvas.
The technician moved closer, but I backed away until my shoulders pressed into the concrete wall. Holding the canvas by its edge, Alverez gave it a little shake, and it unfurled smoothly. A vivid and evocative painting of three girls sitting in the sun under a tree playing with a cat was revealed.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered. I stood frozen in disbelief.
The Renoir had been found.
That explained why someone had entered my warehouse. But it raised other questions. Why would someone searching for the multimillion-dollar painting go to the trouble of sneaking into my warehouse and then leave without it? Or, more ominously, had the person entered not to take it away but to leave it behind? Why? I shivered, as much from mounting confusion and fear as from the cold concrete wall behind me.
CHAPTER SEVEN
B
y the time Max joined me in the Rocky Point police station interrogation room, it was nearly eleven and I’d made a decision. I was going to try to find out for myself what was going on.
“No charges have been filed,” Max said by way of greeting as he pulled out a chair and sat.
“That’s good news,” I acknowledged.
“Alverez will be in soon. He’s going to ask you questions about the painting. Before he gets here, I need to know the truth. All the truth. Do you have any knowledge of how the painting got into your warehouse?”
“No.”
“Do you have any ideas about why someone would have placed it there?”
“No.”
“Have you ever seen it before, anywhere?”
“No, never.”
“Okay, then.” He stopped, smiled, and reached across the table to pat my hand. “Josie, you’ll be okay. We’ll figure this out.”
What a nice guy, I thought. “Thanks, Max. I sure hope so.” I paused. “Do you remember how you said we should wait to hire a private detective?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Do you think it’s time yet?”
“No, not yet. If and when you’re charged with something—that would be the time to think about it. But we may not need to even then.”
“You’re talking about gathering evidence. I’m talking about figuring out what’s going on.”
“I understand your impatience, Josie. But it’s a bad idea. It implies that you’re worried.”
“So what? What bad outcomes could possibly result if people think I’m worried? Why wouldn’t my efforts create the perception that I’m serious about learning the truth?”
Max paused, thinking, I guessed, how best to express concerns that were, to him, self-evident. “You’ll signal fear, and once the world gets a whiff of it, you’re done for. You’ll look desperate.” He shook his head. “Let the experts do their work. The police are doing a thorough job.”
I sighed. “I don’t get it, Max. It’s as if we, and the police, are a step behind all the time.”
“I know it’s hard, Josie, but you need to trust in the system. Everything in its time.”
A gentle rat-a-tat-tat on the door was followed by part of Alverez’s face. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” Max said, apparently confident that our conversation was over, that he had succeeded in bringing me around to his point of view.
He was wrong. Max might think we needed to stay passive until I was charged with something, but I didn’t. I was no longer willing to wait. And I didn’t understand why he was. His explanation seemed to me utterly lame. Bad strategy or not, I was going to act.
As Alverez got situated and hooked up his tape recorder, he asked, “You okay?”
I brushed hair out of my eyes. “Yeah.”
He nodded and started the recorder, gave the time and place, and read me my rights for the second time. While he recited the words, I looked at him. His face seemed composed of more angles than curves. His eyes were recessed under a forceful brow, his nose was straight, his cheekbones looked sculpted, and his chin was strong and determined looking. Only the pock-marks, scars from long-ago acne, perhaps, were rounded. They weren’t deep, and mostly, they were camouflaged by his five o’clock shadow. I bet he was the kind of guy who looked as if he always needed a shave.
When he finished stating the Miranda warning, he slid the written version across the table, and once again, I read it and signed my name, indicating that I understood my rights.
“So tell me what you know about the Renoir,” he said.
“Nothing.”
“You’ve never seen or heard of it?”
“Only what you know about.”
“Has anyone else talked to you about it?”
“No.”
“So all you know is what I told you?”
“Right. I have never touched it. Period.”
Alverez nodded. “Any ideas about how it got there?”
I shook my head. “No clue.”
“Change of subject,” Alverez said. “Have you had time to look through the warehouse and offices and see if anything is missing
?
”
“No, I haven’t looked everywhere. I haven’t had time. I mean, I looked at the auction site, and I’m sure I, or Sasha, who supervised the setup, would have noticed if something was missing. But just looking around won’t necessarily help. A lot of my goods are small and grouped in lots.” I shook my head and gave a palms-up gesture, indicating that it was hopeless. “There’s just too much for me to notice it all right now.”
“How do you control inventory?”
“We use a bar-coding inventory-control system. I’ll be able to tell you tomorrow if any of the items scheduled to be part of the tag sale are missing.”
“Bar codes?” Alverez asked. “What are you, Wal-Mart?”
I shook my head a little, and smiled. “I wish. The software’s cheap nowadays, and easy to use.”
“You’ll let me know as soon as you verify your inventory. All right?”
“Sure.”
“And take stock of office equipment, computers, and so on.”
“All right.”
“Do you have a safe?”
“Yes.”
“Have you looked?”
“No, not yet.”
“What’s in it?”
“Some estate jewelry. I don’t sell fine jewelry to the public.”
“None?”
“Some costume pieces. That’s it.”
“How come?”
“It’s too hard to appraise and too easy to steal.”
“What do you do with the good stuff?”
“I wholesale it to a specialist in New York.”
“How does that work?”
“Aren’t you getting a little off on a tangent?” Max asked.
Alverez shrugged. “Until we know what’s going on, it’s hard to know what’s a tangent and what’s a clue.”
“True,” Max said, and waved a hand at me, gesturing that I could answer Alverez’s question.
“When I have something special, I call him, and he comes up. Sometimes he calls me and tells me he’s going to be in the area.”
“Then he stops by?”
“Right.”
“And?”
“And we go over the pieces and he pays me in cash. Which I declare as income on my tax return.”
“I’m sure you do,” Alverez said, smiling. “How do you know you can trust him?”
“I’ve known him for years and years. He’s reputable.” I shrugged. “Also, don’t forget that I know where the jewelry I’m selling came from, so I know which pieces are likely to prove valuable. Plus,” I added with a modest half smile, “while I’m not an expert, I know enough so it wouldn’t be all that easy to rook me.”
Alverez nodded. “When can you let me know if anything is missing from the safe?”
“Later today. When I get back there, I’ll look.”
“Another change of subject. What size shoes do you wear?”
“What?” I asked, unsure I’d heard correctly, as Max asked, “Why?”
Alverez paused, and Max added, “Come on. You know the drill. Connect it for us.”
Alverez nodded. “We might have some physical evidence. A partial on a footprint. I want to eliminate Josie as a suspect. So,” he said to me, “what size?”
“What size are the prints?” Max asked.
Alverez answered without hesitation. “Women’s nine narrow.”
I felt the weight of the world fall off my shoulders. Max leaned toward me and whispered, “What size do you wear?”
“Five,” I whispered back, smiling.
“This is good news,” he said, and patted my shoulder. “You can go ahead and answer.”
I sat up and looked at Alverez. “I wear size five. So I’m in the clear, right?”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Alverez answered, quelling my hopes. “It’s unclear what we’re looking at.”
“What do you mean?” Max asked.
“We know these prints were left by a size-nine narrow shoe. We don’t know the size of the foot wearing that shoe.” He shrugged. “Maybe Josie put her size-five foot into a size-nine shoe.”
I shivered.
“How certain of the size are you?”
Alverez paused, considering, perhaps, how much to reveal. “We found two partial footprints on the far side of the crates and a lot of others that are just a mishmash and useless. The technicians tell me they extrapolated data to calculate the foot size.”
“Still,” Max insisted, “it looks like Josie didn’t leave those footprints.”
“Probably not, so yes, it looks as if she’s out of it, except that we don’t yet know what ‘it’ she’s maybe out of. And maybe she did leave those footprints. We don’t know yet.”
Max started to argue the point, but Alverez stopped him by raising a palm, and said, “Come on, Max, you know how it goes. As far as I know at this point, those prints could be six months old and unrelated to anything and Josie could still be deep in it.” Turning to me, he asked, “With further elimination in mind, do you know what size shoes your female employees wear?”
I thought for a moment. “No, I can’t say I do. But nine is a fairly large size, and neither Gretchen nor Sasha is tall.”
“According to the tech guys, that doesn’t necessarily correlate. Some big women have small feet and vice versa.”
“Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”
“Do you have a theory as to how someone came to leave footprints?” Max asked.
“Everyone leaves footprints this time of year. It’s spring—mud.”
“And it was damp yesterday,” I said, remembering.
“Hard to tell how long they’ve been there.” Alverez shrugged.
“But you’re assuming that it’s related?” Max asked.
“We’re checking it out,” he answered. To me, he asked, “Who mops the floor?”
“A cleaning crew. I use an outside firm.”
“Which one?”
“Macon Cleaners.”
He made a note. “Do you know when they last mopped that section of the warehouse?”
“No, I don’t, actually.”
“I’ll check,” Alverez said.
“You said you only found partial prints. Are any of them good enough to use as evidence of anything besides shoe size?” Max asked.
“Maybe. We can trace the brand and model of the shoe from the markings and match it exactly through the tread patterns.”