Dusted (4 page)

“Yes. He stopped at the office right after you left. He said he’s canvased our client list. Two other couples have discovered forgeries in their art collection.” She gulped her glass of wine and poured another.

I grabbed a glass and helped myself as well. “Are they all Theresa’s customers?”

Tiny nodded. “Her regulars. You know she works in Hollywood Hills a lot.”

“Oh.” The meaning of that sank in. This was not good news. “It all ties back to us.”

Tiny gulped her wine. “Yes, it all ties back to us. Mac’Cleaners has keys and security codes to all the homes in question, and we also would have access to the clients’ schedules. We’d know when the houses would be vacant.”

“Oh.

“Quincy, stop saying
oh
.” Tiny’s voice rose and octave. “What are we going to do? I’m getting married in a few weeks, and now we might lose our business. No paper’s picked up on the theft yet, but if they do? I mean if word gets out that our clients’ homes are being pilfered?”

I smiled a bit at Tiny’s use of the word pilfered. It was an innocent sounding word. Then I remembered what the paintings at the gallery were going for and my smile faded. “If that happens, it’s all over.”

“Yes.” Tiny poured herself more wine.

I was tempted to simply lift the wine box and open the nozzle right into my mouth. “So what homes?”

“The Giffords, the Grahams, and the Neilsons.”

“I think I’ve been to those houses when I’ve filled in for Theresa, but I don’t think I met any of them.” Tiny and I had both filled in for Theresa. She was not a reliable employee by any stretch of the imagination.

“The Giffords have been clients for years. The Grahams and Neilsons came on as their referrals last year when we ran that promotion.”

“And they all had a painting that was replaced with a forgery?” I asked.

“No, worse.” Tiny took a fortifying sip. “Not
a
painting. The Giffords had three paintings, the Grahams had four and the Neilsons just had one.”

“Well, fu…boogers.”

“Yeah.”

We both drained our glasses. I poured us each another.

“Quincy, I know that Cal told you to stay out of this, and I know that I told you to stay out of this but I don’t think you can stay out of it. We have to find out who really stole the paintings and replaced them with forgeries, or else Mac’Cleaners reputation is going to take a nosedive. And this is a business where reputation is everything.”

“Okay, so lets figure out what we know. I’ll start a file and we’ll pull out my white-board and start to put all the information on it so we can see all the pieces. And we will figure it out,” I promised Tiny.

“We have to,” she said.

I nodded.

I was no longer simply checking into Theresa to make sure we were in the clear, I was all out investigating in order to save my business.

For a long time I’d felt I was an actress whose day job was owner of a cleaning service.

Suddenly I realized that I was a business owner first and foremost, and the only part of me that still felt like an actress was the private investigator part. I’d need all the acting skills Mr. Magee had taught me in order to figure this all out.

Tiny helped me pull out the white-board I’d used when I was investigating Mr. Banning’s murder. Since Hunter was away at college, we set it up in his room.

She tried to help, but I really wanted some quiet to see if I could find any connections, so I sent her out to find Sal on the premise of getting his opinion on what we should do. We really could use his legal advice, but mainly I knew that Tiny needed to see Sal. Her fiancé would find a way to calm her down.

When I was alone, I pulled up records of the three clients in question and posted a map of Hollywood Hills on the white-board. I put red stars on the three homes in question. Other than being in the same general area of LA, they weren’t particularly close to one another. I checked our files and they had different security companies, but they all had security systems in place.

Could that mean anything?

According to Dick, a good mystery needed some red herrings…clues that would throw the detective off. I could understand how as a writer red herrings were a good thing, but as a maid playing at being a detective, it was hard to tell what was important and what was a red herring.

When Mr. Banning was murdered, I called on my lifelong love of television cop dramas to help me solve the case. I asked myself what
The Closer’s
Brenda Leigh Johnson would do? I so loved her soft Southern toughness. Or what Captain Raydor, who took on the starring role of the spinoff,
Major Crimes
, would do. I could call on countless
Law & Orders
and
CSI’s,
but I was afraid I was more like
Psych
. A pretend psychic detective and his pal solving crimes with a lot of comedy. My life didn’t seem like a comedy to me, but I knew that a maid solving mysteries would probably be pitched as a comedy in Hollywood.

When I tried to find Mr. Banning’s murderer, I’d looked at his family. They didn’t do it, but checking them out did eventually lead me in the right direction.

There was no family connection here, at least not that I could see. There were three unconnected families who’d had their artwork stolen and replaced with forgeries. Competent forgeries, but none of them had been good enough to fool the experts once they were looking at them.

Three families who all had security for their home, but there was no connection with security systems that I could see.

I checked our files. None of the families had work connections either.

So what I had was three families whose only connection that I could find was they’d had paintings stolen and replaced with forgeries without their being the wiser. And they all used Mac’Cleaners. More specifically, Theresa.

I called Tiny and she emailed me pictures of the paintings that had been stolen. She contacted Mickey Roman who was investigating the forgeries and said it took dropping Cal’s name to get copies of the pictures the families in question had used for insurance purposes.

I printed them out and put them on my white-board.

Now, here’s the thing, I like art when you could look at it and tell what it was supposed to be.

A boat.

A wave.

A farmhouse.

A person.

The striking commonality between the stolen art in question was there was no way to tell exactly what it was without looking at the artwork’s title. There were Kirchoffs and the paintings that weren’t his, could have been. They were dots, lines, and squiggles more than anything else.

Kirchoff’s
Texas Bluebonnets
, for instance. It was blobs of blue paint on a green slash.

I was so not destined to be an artist, or to collect art. At least not this kind of art.

With Mr. Banning’s murder, my service industry contacts helped me investigate. My only art connection was that snooty high-heeled lady at the art gallery. Miriam was not much of a connection especially when she thought I was not up to snuff.

I sat on Hunter’s bed and stared at the board.

Abstract art, that’s what the insurance forms read.

If by abstract they meant art a kindergartener might bring home, then yes.

Maybe that’s why someone was able to replace it?

Unless you were an expert, it probably looked like slashes of color, sometimes dots of color. It certainly didn’t look like a boat, a wave, a farmhouse, or a person.

“Quincy?”

Oh, no. I knew that gravelly bellow. I hurried out of Hunter’s room and shut the door firmly behind me before I hurried toward the front door.

“The door was open,” he said as he stood in the foyer.

“What are you doing here?”

“Dinner?” he half asked, half stated. “I wasn’t sure if the boys were home, so I brought three pizzas. I figured that was enough for you and I to share one, and then there was one each for them.”

He stared down the hall. “Quincy, what were you doing in Hunter’s room?”

“I missed my son and was just taking some time to sit in there. It comforts me.”

He nodded, walked into the kitchen, set the pizza down and then—before I could stop him—he turned around sharply and went back down the hall.

“Cal, stop. Hunter would be very offended if he finds out you’re invading his privacy.

Cal opened Hunter’s door. “Aha.”

“
Aha
? Seriously, Cal? Next you’ll be saying
By Jove
, and
tut tut
.”

“Quince, you’re not going to talk your way out of this. You’re investigating the forgeries,” he said with a Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery sort of ahaed-ness to his voice.

“How dare you accuse me in that tone,” I said, going for indignant outrage. “I am not a child who needs scolded. I’ll have you know that I was putting together the information strictly to get everything clear in my mind so that I can talk to your detective friend and give him the most helpful information that I can.” Then I added, “The board helps me think. I discovered that while I was working on Mr. Banning’s murder.”

“Quincy.” The way he said my name had it sounding more like an expletive.

“Cal,” I said, trying to mimic his tone.

“You make me crazy,” he muttered.

He’d said as much to me in the past. Sometimes when he said it, it had nothing to do with my playing amateur detective.

Sometimes he said it in that husky, sexy voice of his and it made me melt a little.

That was the mood I wanted to foster right now.

“It was nice of you to bring pizza for the boys. But you know they won’t be home for a few hours.”

I stepped into his arms and nuzzled his neck, which was as high as I could nuzzle unless he bent down. “I mean, we could go back and eat more pizza or we could find something else to do to kill the time until they come back. Two very long hours.”

“That’s funny. I don’t have to be back to work on my case until after my dinner break. That means I have time to kill if you can think of something other than pizza to do.”

“I can come up with something to do,” I said, trying to distract him. I looked down. “Or obviously you’ve already come up with something.”

My distraction worked just fine.

A couple hours later we were eating cold pizza when the boys came home.

“Hi, Cal,” they said as if finding a man eating cold pizza in the kitchen with their mother was nothing out of the ordinary. The fact of the matter was, it wasn’t. At least not for the last few weeks. Now, before they’d gone on vacation with their father it would have been, but since I met Cal, we’d spent a lot of time together. Which was amazing given we both had careers and I had two boys left at home, one son in college, a script I was writing, and now a mystery to solve.

Miles and Eli talked about the play practice, then somewhere around the boys’ third slice of pizza, they started talking football with Cal.

That’s when I zoned out.

I may have three boys and the fact that I may have watched more than my fair share of sporting events makes me a good mom, not a sports fan.

So instead of talking about downs and kicks and trades and other bally stuff, I started to think about the forgeries.

I needed to talk to the clients who’d had their art replaced with forgeries.

As an owner of the cleaning service that was under suspicion, I wasn’t sure they’d want to talk to me. I didn’t imagine they’d want a free day’s cleaning services, which had been a ploy that had worked well when I was investigating Mr. Banning’s murder.

I could talk to my insurance agent and see what she’d found out.

Wait.

I bet the clients had all spoken to insurance agents.

Our business’s agent as well as their own.

What if there was an insurance
investigator
who came to question them?

They’d recognize me and Tiny, so we couldn’t pretend to be one.

I needed a real private investigator. A gumshoe. A private eye. A flatfoot. A private dick.

Better yet, a Dick. After years of writing mystery scripts and teaching about how to write a detective, maybe it was time for Dick Macy to experience investigating first hand.

Thoughts of private dicks, gumshoes, and paintings kept me occupied while the sports talk went on and finally died down.

I enjoyed having Cal over, but I was anxious for him to get back to his murder investigation so that I could get back to my forgery investigation.

“Quincy, what were you thinking about when the boys and I were talking about football?” he asked as I walked him to the door.

“Shoes.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. I was thinking about gumshoes. A particular gumshoe insurance investigator who I planned to invent.

I suddenly wondered why private investigators were called gumshoes. I’d have to look it up.

But that’s not what I said to Cal. I said, “I was thinking about the new pair of shoes I want for our next date.”

“Are we going to have a date soon?” he asked.

“As soon as you solve a murder. We’ll go out and paint the town.” Hopefully we’d be celebrating my solving the mystery of the forged paintings, too.

“Sounds good,” he said.

And then he kissed me.

“That was a chaste one,” he assured after he’d kissed my socks off. The first time he’d given me a
chaste
kiss, I’d doubted its chasteness, but having experienced Cal’s passionate kisses I no longer doubted that this one was chaste.

“It was,” I whispered back. “Call me later.”

“I will.”

As soon as he’d backed out the drive, I made a call. “Hey, Dick. It’s me, Quincy. I have an idea and a favor to ask you.…”

I looked up the term gumshoe the next morning. The theory was, it came from the fact detectives wore shoes with gum soles in order to creep around stealthily.

I met my own personal gumshoe mentor, Dick, at his house the next afternoon and outlined my plan.

“I’ve got the perfect disguise,” he said excitedly.

So excitedly that I didn’t have the heart to point out he didn’t need a disguise because no one knew who he was.

He came out with glasses on and wearing a pair of black slacks, a white, short-sleeved shirt, a tie, and the pièce de résistance… “A pocket protector,” he said excitedly. “Seriously, if I were an insurance man, this is what I’d wear.”

I wanted to tell him that my personal insurance agent was a very attractive, well-dressed woman, but he looked so pleased I didn’t have the heart.

“You know how to play this?” I asked, not commenting on the outfit, which I thought was very kind of me.