Perfect Sax (22 page)

“I’m so sorry about what happened to Sara,” I said, feeling awkward. “Say, do you want to sit in my car?”

“That’s okay. Let’s walk.”

It was a beautiful late afternoon. We started off down the pavement, under a bower of shady trees, walking side by side.

“The police detective told me you were looking for me,” Hurley said.

“It’s true. I was so upset about everything.”

Hurley kept his head down, not reacting at all.

“I must admit…” I looked over at him. “I hardly knew Sara. She had worked several of the large parties over about six months’ time. I wish I had known her better.”

“She wasn’t easy to get to know. Don’t feel bad.”

Was it my imagination, or was this guy not too broken up about the death of his girlfriend? “Well, Sara had been trying
to get home to you that night and I thought the two of you were close. I worried that you might need some help. That’s all.”

“What are you talking about?” Brett Hurley stopped at the corner and looked confused.

“That last night after the Woodburn ball. Sara was very upset. She said she had to get back to you. You were on her mind. I thought you would want to know that.”

“
I
was on her mind?” he asked, surprised.

“Yes. Didn’t you have some disappointing news that day? Something about your dissertation, she said.”

“Look, I didn’t tell this to the cops, for obvious reasons, but Sara wasn’t all she appeared to be. She looked sweet, but looks can fool ya.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sara had a lot of schemes going on. She was always working an angle. She didn’t look like it, but she was a real operator. Like how she put herself through school. She hooked. Did you know that?”

I shook my head, feigning surprise. Well, I hadn’t had a clue before I did a little checking around after her death.

“I’m sorry to tell you this,” Brett said, rubbing his little goatee, “but the reason she worked for you was to line up dates. She was sort of freelance. She wasn’t a streetwalker, you know? But if a guy had money, she was willing.”

“And you knew about this?”

He nodded. “I told her she was crazy to do it. It wasn’t safe. And she just laughed at me and asked if I knew of a better way to lay my hands on five hundred dollars for an hour’s work.”

Certainly more than the two hundred a night I paid my waitstaff, I mused. How was it I had no idea this sort of thing was going on at my own events? Damn it. Wes and I needed
to review our files of temp workers and figure out if we had any other parasites.

“So do you think that’s why she wanted my Jeep? To hook up with some guy from the Woodburn party?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, and began walking again, turning the corner and starting up the block.

“Then why?”

“Look, I’ll deny any of this. So don’t think you can tell anyone, right?”

I nodded, shocked.

“Sara was running a scam. I’m sure of it. She had found out some rich old geezer was a con man and she figured he’d pay her some money to keep the information from the police.”

“Wait. You think Sara was blackmailing some man at the Woodburn?”

“Yeah. She wouldn’t tell me about it. But I knew.”

“Who?”

“She wouldn’t tell me who it was, but the guy was loaded, she said. She was going to meet him after the party that night, that’s all I know. Maybe when her car broke down, she thought she’d blow her meeting. So she put on some sad story about having to get home quick to me. She was a great little actress. You know that was her major—theater arts?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Brett Hurley grunted.

It was taking a moment for me to get my head around this news. “So you’re saying Sara wasn’t in a rush to get home to you?”

“Sara? Worried to death about me? Like that isn’t a laugh. She and I were not doing all that well. I’d tried to leave her a few times, but with Sara, she’d show up at my house and have all this money on her and…Hey, I’m an artist. I’m
broke. She knew how to reach me. I kept breaking it off with her, but it wasn’t sticking. She said she’d have a really big score that night. She told me to wait up.”

“You didn’t tell the police all this?”

“Are you crazy? That my nasty hooker ex-girlfriend was shaking down some fat cat at the Woodburn ball? Get real. But that’s why, when I heard what happened that night, I wasn’t so shocked that she wound up dead. I mean, she was kind of asking for it. She didn’t think of the consequences. I told her, but she never listened.”

“Don’t you want to see some justice for Sara?” I couldn’t believe he would let the scum who had killed his girlfriend get away with it.

“Justice is funny,” he said, looking over at me as we walked together around the block. “It’s not black and white, like your fancy ball. Maybe Sara was just one of those girls who was going down the wrong side of the street. Sooner or later she was going to get creamed, know what I mean?”

I shook my head. No one should be written off. I didn’t care if this woman was a scam artist or a prostitute or whatever. “No one had a right to take her life.”

“So that’s your opinion. I don’t feel like getting into the middle of this mess, okay? What if the guy who got to Sara decides to come after me?”

“Right.” I couldn’t believe this guy. “But in the meantime, other people might be in danger.”

We had come around a full block. Party guests were still leaving the Hutsons’ house, pulling out of parking spaces along the street.

“Like I said, everyone has to look out for himself, Madeline. When this detective told me you were poking around, looking for me, I figured you were maybe getting yourself in
over your head. You don’t want to go near Sara’s trouble, miss. You just don’t.”

“I’ll think that over,” I said, trying to sound less judgmental than I felt. “But can’t you tell me anything about who Sara was trying to blackmail?”

“Nope. Don’t know and don’t want to know. But I can tell you this. She said a guy worth twenty million dollars should be willing to pay big.”

“Twenty million?” I turned my head and focused on Brett Hurley.

“Yeah. And I think she came onto his scam when I told her some old stories about the time I worked part-time for the County Art Museum.”

“What did you say?”

“I was a clerk there three years ago, just part-time while I went to school. You know, low-level typing and filing.”

“Did you work with their donated collections and special exhibitions?”

“Say, how did you know that?”

T
wenty million dollars had a tragically familiar sound to it. Just when I was working myself up to giving the whole Knight/Wyatt clan a break, the news just kept getting weirder.

“Baronowski here.” I had dialed the detective as I drove across town.

“Did you ever find out who left that semen stain on the backseat of my old Jeep?”

“Not yet. We’re DNA testing the boyfriend.”

“You might want to widen your search to anyone with five hundred dollars handy.”

“Yeah, we followed the lead at her apartment complex with that guy, Creski. Maybe Sara was doing a little part-time hooking. If so, and if she picked up a john last Saturday night, we may finally get a handle on this case. Problem is, we have no witnesses yet that saw Sara in that car that night, alone or with a man. But we might get lucky.”

“What did her boyfriend tell you?”

“Hurley? Nothing. Pain in the ass. He’s an artist with a capital
A.
Maybe a druggie. He’s the type who hates anyone in authority, so naturally we got along great. Still, he seemed pretty harmless, the little twerp. We fingerprinted the guy, by the way, and we didn’t match him to any prints found at your house, in case you’re wondering.”

“Good.”

“I gave him your number, like you asked, and figured he’d be hitting you up for money.”

“Men,” I lamented gently.

“We’re adorable. Call me if you learn anything meaningful, Ms. Bean.”

Next I dialed Holly.

“Say, don’t you have a friend who works at the L.A. County Museum of Art?”

“Megan Grossbard?”

“Right. Doesn’t she work in the costume department?”

“Yep.”

“Think she knows anyone in security over there? In the area of art fraud?” I gave Holly a quick rundown of what I had learned.

She promised to track down Megan and then called back five minutes later. We could meet Megan at the museum in an hour. The museum didn’t close to the public until eight on Saturday night, and Megan and her friend were both going to come in and talk to us.

I called for messages and found one from Honnett. He stressed how important it was for me to phone him back immediately.

“Honnett. It’s me, Mad.”

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m driving home from my gig in Pasadena. And I’m cutting across town to stop and meet Holly first. What’s up?”

“I’ve got to see you.”

“Can you tell me on the phone?”

“No. Where are you meeting Holly?”

“LACMA. I’ll be there a little early. Look for me outside, in front of the main entrance.”

“Right. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

All this urgency. What couldn’t he tell me over the phone?

The main buildings at LACMA are located in the Miracle Mile area of the city between Fairfax and La Brea, on Wilshire Boulevard. I had made good time, so I drove around the block searching for the ever-elusive street parking. After all, it was nearly five in the afternoon. But it was Saturday and it was Los Angeles and who was I kidding? I paid the steep rate and pulled into the parking lot, and then waited forever while an Astrovan loaded with kids finally pulled out of a spot.

Honnett was already there, waiting, when I walked up to the entrance of the museum.

“Can we sit somewhere?” he asked me.

“What’s the matter? You seem nervous.”

“Let me buy you a Diet Coke,” he offered, avoiding my comment.

I didn’t want to sit, so I ended up steering him past the Plaza Café near the courtyard. I checked my watch and warned him I’d have to meet Holly in thirty minutes.

“No problem. I can say this in ten.”

“Come with me,” I said, and led him down to the art rental and sales gallery, located on the lower level of the Leo S. Bing Center.

“Go ahead and talk,” I said, leading him through the exhibit rooms filled with artwork by contemporary young Angelino artists. This was not part of the official museum exhibition space. Each of these works was available for sale or rental. We walked among the paintings.

“I have some difficult things to tell you, Maddie. About this guy Wyatt you’ve been seeing.”

I looked at him, caught off guard. Honnett had been a busy investigator. “So. You know his name.”

“The guy hasn’t been straight with you. I ran a check on him. And I’ve had a friend of mine, an ex-cop, do some digging around.”

“You did
what
? I can’t believe this! Do you realize how completely
jealous
you are behaving, Honnett?”

“I knew you’d react like this. Just hear me out.”

I glared at him and he stopped. Okay. I probably deserved some of this. It’s true. I had felt some satisfaction over Honnett’s jealousy for a little while there. I knew it was immature of me, of course. It is unforgivable that I felt any empowerment from the pain of another, even if that person had hurt me really bad first. How could I? And now here was that jealousy, running amok, ultimately causing us all more pain. Honnett had come to see me this afternoon to share some horrible news about Dexter. How fitting was this retribution. Fate really had that irony thing down.

Honnett saw my face.

“Never mind,” he said. “If you don’t want to hear it, I’m not going to go on. I can see this was a mistake. I apologize.”

So here it was. I was being offered the information I had really wanted all along: evidence that would prove if I should dare to trust Dexter Wyatt. And here was Honnett, the least impartial investigator on the planet, offering it up.

“Tell me what you know,” I said, weariness setting in my throat. “Just don’t make this about you and me, Honnett. Please. If you have something, I’ll listen. But first know this. I really care about Dexter Wyatt. I like him. I am hoping to have a relationship with him. And even if you found out something completely sickening, like he was a criminal in the past, I’m not sure it would matter to me.”

Honnett met my eyes, looking like I’d kicked him, which I guess I had. He didn’t know what to say.

“So, there it is,” I said, a little more gently. “Knowing how I feel about Dexter, do you still want to tell me what you found?”

“Can I help you?” A tall, thin Asian-American woman materialized out of nowhere. “Have you chosen that one?”

She referred to a small abstract acrylic painting nearby, a challenging piece with thick blue streaks and black.

“How much to rent it?” I asked, not having noticed it before.

“Only twenty-seven dollars every two months. Very reasonable. And the rental payments go toward purchase.”

“The artist gets seventy-five percent of the money,” I told Honnett, who couldn’t have cared less about art.

“I’ll take it,” Honnett told the woman, and handed her his credit card. She praised his great aesthetic taste and hurried off to ring up the rental and work on the rental-agreement papers. He would have to become a member of the museum, she informed him as she glided off. But she would take care to include that amount in his total.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, surprised at him.

“I do what I want, Maddie. Don’t worry about me.”

“So tell me what you found out about Dex,” I said, calmer now. “What can it be? Fraud? Theft? What?”

His eyes told me what he thought about any man about whom I could so casually ask such extraordinary questions. “No, he doesn’t have that kind of record. A drunk-and-disorderly. A bar fight back when he was younger. But it’s his personal life that worries me.”

“Because…?”

“This guy used to date Sara Jackson, Maddie.”

The art on the walls swam and then settled down.

“Here’s your painting, Mr. Honnett,” the salesclerk said cheerfully, bringing a large bag over along with Honnett’s charge slip and the rental agreement. He signed them all and took his copies. As she explained again how the art rental program worked, I thought about this shocking new development. Could it be possible? Had Dexter known Sara? And why hadn’t he mentioned that fact to me after all this time?

The clerk smiled at the two of us and left.

“How do you know this, Honnett?”

“One of Wyatt’s friends told my pal. And then there is Sara Jackson’s cell-phone log. She had called Wyatt earlier on the night she died.”

“My God, Honnett. Is Dex a suspect in the murder?”

“You know the department doesn’t announce their suspects. But off the record, I can tell you he’s being looked at. Among others, so that’s something.”

I hadn’t thought I could feel anything like friendship for Honnett, so wrapped in anger had I been over the past few months, but when I heard him try to make the news about Dex sound a little less threatening, I began to unravel some.

“You’ll be okay, Maddie. I just wanted you to have all the facts. If that means you have to go on hating me, I know I deserve it.”

“I can’t hate you.”

“So what do you think of it?” Honnett asked, pulling the small painting out for me to view once again.

“At least it’s not
Dog Living in Luxury with Cigar,
I said and then, suddenly, I remembered something from the inventory of Grasso’s paperwork.

“I’m late,” I said, with a start. “I’ve got to meet Holly and her friend.”

Honnett looked up at me as I rushed off to find the elevators.

“Three years ago, Bill and Zenya Knight lent some of their etchings to the museum for a temporary show. Would there be any paperwork on it?”

“Of course.” The young woman sitting before us was tapping on the keyboard of her computer. “Only three years ago, it should be here.”

Holly’s friend Megan had introduced us to Divinia Denove,
one of the museum’s investigators. Both Megan and Divinia had come in on their day off to answer our questions.

“I should have realized it when Caroline Rochette fell into the pool,” I told Holly quietly so as not to disturb Divinia, who was searching her computer files.

“Why?” Holly whispered.

“She said something about getting insurance.”

“I wasn’t there,” Holly reminded me. “What exactly did she say?”

I thought back to that day in Wesley’s backyard. “She said she must get insurance.”

“Like accident insurance?”

“I thought she was making a joke. It didn’t make a lot of sense at the time, but then the woman had just tripped into the pool, for heaven’s sake, wearing at least sixty dollars’ worth of makeup. But now I think she must have meant something else entirely. I think she had come there that day to get her hands on some insurance paperwork that was among that junk from Albert Grasso. There were policies there from Mid-Pacific Insurance and North American Home Insurance.”

“Here it is,” Divinia said. She had found the file she had been searching for. “We had an exhibit a little over three years ago. ‘Black and White: The Genius of the Etchings of the Sixteenth and Seventh Centuries.’ The Knights lent us thirteen works.” She read over the file, clicking through multiple pages. “It looks fairly routine. Was there a problem?”

I was sitting with Holly and Megan in chairs in front of Divinia’s desk.

“They were insured?”

“Of course. We have a blanket policy that covers all the art in the museum. But according to our notes, these pieces were undamaged and returned to the Knights,” she said. She
scrolled down the screen and looked back at us. “The museum’s receipt was scanned into the file. The date of delivery to an address in Beverly Hills is marked and Mr. Knight himself signed upon receiving the works back in good condition.”

“Do your records list the appraisal value of the etchings?”

“Well, it’s not really our appraisal,” Divinia said, smiling. “It’s sort of a formality. When the owners fill out the paperwork, they mark down what value they want placed on the works.”

That sounded odd.

Divinia noticed my expression. “It’s never been taken advantage of. But, as I said, the museum carries insurance against all the artwork we own or borrow. In the case of works on loan, the actual dollar amount is filled in for each individual piece by the lending party. We pay extraordinary insurance premiums, as you might imagine, so we have taken pains to make sure no owner feels their work is undervalued.”

“Oh, I just had an amazing idea,” I said, wheels turning ever so quickly now. “Would you mind taking a look at the values placed on the Knight etchings?”

“Well,” she said, “it is pretty typical for our patrons to undervalue their artworks a little. Most aren’t up on the current market value since the pieces were often acquired so long ago. Then we have others who fudge a little on the upside. Let’s see.” She read through several electronic documents. “Wait now. This is strange.”

We looked at her.

“One etching from the Knight collection is a true masterpiece. A Dürer of exceptional quality. Nothing like it has been at auction in years. Who can say what its value might be today? Maybe three million. Maybe six. On this form, Mr. Knight listed it at ten million.”

“Wow.” Holly looked impressed.

“The Dürer is an extraordinary piece, and in the art world, one can never tell what a truly great work might bring,” Divinia said. “So that valuation, in and of itself, is not terribly out of line. But here’s the amazing thing. Look at the other etchings in their collection! The other twelve pieces were nowhere near that value. There’s a Madonna listed by Raffaello Schiaminossi and Luca Ciamberlano. It is valued by the Knights at five million.”

“And its real value?”

“About five hundred.”

We stared at Divinia.

“Only five hundred thousand? That’s one tenth what they claimed.”

“Actually, Madeline, this Schiaminossi is only worth about five hundred
dollars.
”

“And they claimed it was worth ten thousand times more?” Holly asked. “Holy schnitzel.”

“I can see that the five-million-dollar value they claimed was absurd.” Holly’s friend Megan spoke up for the first time. “But what harm could it do?”

“I have an idea about that,” I told Megan. “And the other works?” I asked Divinia. “The same overinflation of value?” I finally figured out what had happened.

“Yes,” Divinia said, laughing. “It’s much the same. The greatest real value is two thousand dollars, but all of them are self-appraised in the millions. What does this mean, Madeline?”