The Heat (25 page)

‘What did you expect? You attempted to cheat me.'

Halperin clutched his side, where blood seeped between his fingers. ‘I need a doctor.'

‘You'll live.' She shrugged. ‘Or you may not.'

Wyatt trained his Ruger on them, watching the exchange. When Sten met his gaze, he said, ‘I thought you said you weren't armed.'

A tiny two-shot derringer, which she waved at him negligently. ‘This? A pop gun.'

Wyatt gestured with the Ruger. ‘Put it away.'

‘He would have shot you.'

‘No,' Wyatt said, ‘he wouldn't have shot me.'

‘Eyes in the back of your head?'

‘Something like that.'

She tucked the tiny gun into her bag.

Halperin groaned. ‘I need a doctor.'

Wyatt closed in on him and scooped up the .32. ‘I want you to call downstairs and say everything's sweet, we were expected.'

‘I don't know if I have the strength.'

Wyatt ground his pistol against Halperin's knee. ‘Find the strength.'

When the call was over, Halperin's voice steady and clear, Wyatt crossed to the painting.

‘I did what you asked. I need a doctor.'

‘You need an art expert,' Wyatt said.

He lifted the painting from the wall and angled it towards Hannah Sten.

She frowned. ‘What do you mean?'

‘It's as fresh as the day Teniers painted it.'

She frowned. ‘So? It's been cleaned by a conservator.'

‘No.'

She peered at the canvas. ‘Look: his signature, fine cracks in the paint…'

‘If I live long enough,' Halperin gasped, face clammy, ‘I might hear the end of the story.'

Wyatt took the painting to Halperin. ‘Sit up.'

‘Fuck you.'

‘Sit up.'

When the painting was in Halperin's lap, Wyatt said, ‘The man swinging the scythe.'

‘What about him?' Halperin said.

‘He's wearing Nikes.'

Halperin looked and he blinked and he closed his eyes and rocked in pain. ‘Oh, Christ.'

‘You and your girlfriend stole a fake.'

‘Let me see,' Sten demanded, grabbing the painting and crossing to the window.

Wyatt meanwhile stared at Halperin. ‘This is the painting you took from Ormerod's house?'

Halperin was glassy-eyed. ‘I didn't take it, I wasn't there. Leah brought it.'

Sten returned. ‘You were intending to sail into the sunset together?'

Halperin looked away. ‘That's what she thought…'

‘A true gentleman. So she had no motive to keep the real painting and give you a fake?'

‘No.'

Sten glanced at Wyatt. ‘Either the Ormerod family bought a dud in 1945, or Thomas Ormerod was warned he'd be robbed.'

Wyatt gave her a bleak smile. ‘I don't think Nike were big in 1945.'

‘You prick,' Sten said, turning to Halperin.

‘Hannah,' beseeched Halperin, ‘I had debts.'

She snorted. ‘Did you stop to wonder why I flew to Australia? I heard whispers, Mr Halperin. A man selling a David Teniers painting.'

Halperin began to sway. ‘Please, a doctor.'

‘What exactly did you say to Thomas Ormerod? You alerted him somehow. Why else would he hang a fake?'

But Halperin's eyes rolled up and he toppled over. Wyatt took the painting from Sten and wiped it of their prints. He hadn't touched anything else. Sten watched him amusedly. Then she stepped towards him, stood squarely in front of him, took his elbow. ‘Let's go,' she said. ‘The original painting is still in Ormerod's house.'

Wyatt shook his head. ‘Tomorrow. Things will still be tense there: extra security, police patrols, hyper-vigilant neighbours.'

She clasped his wrist. ‘Then we must find a place to hide and think.'

Wyatt felt the contact of her hand like an electric charge. It was ordinary human warmth, a pressing sensation from a pretty woman's fingers and normally neither here nor there, but he felt something. Briefly.

38

The place to hide and think was her hotel room.

Wyatt strolled around it, assessing the bed, the furniture. ‘I'll sleep on the sofa tonight.'

Her expression was hard to read. ‘Is that your wish?'

He made no reply. He walked to the window. Iluka Islet was just across the water, a knob of land beyond the bridge. Ormerod's house. The mid-afternoon sun was striking from glass and the shifting surface of the canals.

Sten joined him. She stood very close to his hip and there was a charge in the air. She pointed. ‘But a reconnaissance mission this afternoon, from a little boat?'

Wyatt thought about it. ‘Okay.'

Her elbow brushed his. And then he was tugging up on the hem of her shirt and her arms rose to assist him.

Afterwards she glided unselfconsciously across the room. Wyatt watched her, the flexing of her lithe muscles, the shape-shifting of the warm hollows. She was creased here and there from the sheets. He did not forget she was a killer.

She disappeared into the bathroom and as he waited Wyatt thought about the fake Teniers.

It was possible that Leah Quarrell had commissioned it to occupy everyone while she disappeared with the real painting, but Wyatt was betting that Ormerod had commissioned it. Alerted by Halperin's initial approach on behalf of Sten, and fearing a successful court action or even a theft, he'd asked an artist to paint a copy to hang on his wall. Then, if he was obliged to relinquish ownership, or it was stolen, he'd have the last laugh.

He wouldn't have commissioned the anachronistic Nikes, however. That was most likely the artist's little joke.

Australian painters of fake masterworks weren't thick on the ground, but Wyatt had met a couple over the years. He knew of one who specialised in artists with a large body of work not yet fully documented: Dickerson, Whiteley, Blackman, some of the Indigenous painters. Another created unsigned pastiches of nineteenth-century Australian landscapes, genuine examples of which were increasing in value. She was careful not to claim the paintings were genuine, with a clear provenance, but she didn't say they weren't, either. She relied on buyer greed and ignorance, which was boundless, and no one could prove intent to defraud.

Both of his acquaintances got away with it because the new owners were embarrassed to appear gullible or naive and the police didn't have the expertise to investigate. Auctioneers and gallery directors kept their mouths shut, fearing a loss of consumer confidence, and legal action was slow and costly. Often, duped owners would move the painting on to another unsuspecting buyer rather than take a financial hit.

Wyatt thought about the artist hired by Ormerod to fake the Teniers painting. Highly skilled but unsuccessful professionally, he or she probably painted fakes and copies as a sideline, probably on a modest scale. They'd be careful not to reproduce anyone too famous—middle-rung painters only. None of that explained the Nike logo, though. A sense of humour? A whack at Ormerod, because he'd been a prick to deal with?

Wyatt joined Sten under the shower and when they were dressed she drove them to Noosaville. They parked and walked downriver to T-Boat Hire. Past waterbirds imprinting the damp sand with webbed feet, past two children who poled and wobbled on a surfboard. Hannah Sten was Wyatt's cover this time. They were lovers or honeymooners. No one would look at them and think of yesterday's runaway gunman.

They rented a runabout for one hour and puttered back along the river, under the bridge, making a slow loop past Iluka and into the network of inlets between Lions Park and Wyuna Drive. They shared the steering and passed a pair of field glasses back and forth. At Wyatt's insistence, they changed their appearance a little each time they passed Ormerod's house. Wyatt alternated between a yellow sun hat and a broad-brimmed straw hat, a yellow T-shirt and black short-sleeved shirt. Hannah, pulling a T-shirt over her bikini top for the second pass, draping a scarf over her head, grumbled at him, ‘You always carry on like this?'

‘Yes.'

‘It comes naturally?'

Wyatt didn't know how to answer that. He didn't know if he worked from instinct or thought and preparation, and the question wasn't worth considering. He raised the glasses and swept the lenses over Ormerod's house and at last said, ‘He has a secret room.'

Hannah Sten stared at him. ‘You found it yesterday?'

‘No. But I remember thinking there was something odd about the area of the room behind the dormer window. It's smaller than it looks from the outside. There's a false wall.'

‘That is where the painting will be?'

‘Perhaps. If he still has it.'

‘Minto said he flew to Thailand. Now is our chance.'

Wyatt shook his head. ‘Tomorrow. I can see people in the house. Probably police.'

‘And if they find the room?'

‘Then we try something else.'

Hannah Sten took the glasses and focused as Wyatt steered in a slow arc away from Iluka and under the bridge and out onto the river. They returned the boat. They strolled hand in hand to the Corolla and drove to the hotel. The air was intense, everything unspoken.

39

On Monday they walked around Iluka under an umbrella. The weather was on the turn, clouds layering the sky, black hollows in the pillowy grey, brief showers darkening the roads and paths.

They strolled arm in arm as if looking at real estate, pausing at the auction and sale boards, at least six on the islet. Whenever they encountered a local, they stopped, said hello, chatted, playing the role of a prosperous couple.

‘We were thinking of buying,' Wyatt would say, ‘but I heard you had some trouble here over the weekend.'

Up close, on a normal day, most people would see him for a suave bruiser, not a businessman: the hands, the corded tendons, the chill. But no one was looking closely this morning. They were too full of Saturday's gunplay and yesterday's doorknock, detectives asking everyone what they knew about Thomas Ormerod and had they ever seen young children coming or going from his house.

‘We couldn't believe it,' trilled one woman, idling at her front gate. ‘Gunshots, police coming and going, carting stuff away.'

Hannah Sten put her hand to her mouth. ‘He was seen with young children?'

‘I knew something was off about him, the way he'd scurry into his house. Never stopped to talk.'

Hannah stared at Ormerod's house, still aghast. ‘Did they find anything in there?'

‘Who knows?' shrugged the woman.

Wyatt could see Sten was going to push the woman for specifics. He tightened his grip on her elbow and they moved on.

Passing the Ormerod house again they saw crime-scene tape, a notice nailed to the door. No activity. The place looked shabby already, damp and diminished, cringing under the weight of the sky and the neighbours' gaze.

‘How will you do it,' demanded Sten, ‘under a street of watchful eyes?'

Wyatt led her back over the little bridge to the car. ‘What have those eyes seen these past two days?'

‘Police coming and going. So how will you do it?'

‘Police coming and going,' Wyatt said.

She drove him to the airport and he rented a white Holden sedan, an everyman's detective car. Having lost or abandoned most of his belongings, he stopped first at the Junction to stock up, walking out of a menswear outfitters dressed in a plain dark suit, a white shirt and a plain tie. From a pharmacy he bought a razorblade and a new pair of heavy-rimmed low-magnification spectacles. Then to a newsagency. Pens for his top pocket and a manila folder, which he fattened with a random selection of government forms.

Back to the hire car, scraping the agency sticker off the rear window before driving down to Noosa Parade and across the bridge to Iluka Islet. He drove once around the circular road: no police cars in the street, none at Ormerod's house.

Once more around, then he nosed into Ormerod's driveway and got out. He altered his posture, his gait, as he paused a moment then approached the house. Stooped slightly, tiredness weighing on his bones.

He knew he couldn't go in by the front door. Picking the lock would take time. The neighbours would be twitching their curtains, wondering why a policeman didn't simply turn a key and let himself in. He headed towards the rear of the house.

There was a side door. He picked it unobserved and stepped into silence. As he'd hoped, the police hadn't reset the alarm. A quick look around downstairs, then he drew on latex gloves and climbed the stairs to the junk room.

He stood a while, confirming his earlier impressions that the proportions were wrong. The dormer window wasn't situated in the middle of the exterior wall but almost flush with the built-in robe on the inner wall, and the room was smaller than the roofline suggested. Either a very deep wardrobe, or there was another room on the other side of it.

The door opened onto a small hanging space, a chrome rail with old suits and dresses on coathangers, shoes heaped on the carpeted floor and a bank of narrow drawers at one end. Wyatt reached between a couple of jackets and tapped: the rear wall of the closet made a hollow thud.

Pushing the clothes aside, Wyatt ran his gaze around the edges, then the little ceiling and each narrow end wall, and spotted a brass hook. There was nothing hanging from it yet it had the burnished gleam of regular use. He pulled down on it experimentally. The back wall slid away.

It was a sick man's den. A bed with a flowery coverlet was heaped with bright cushions and teddy bears. Camcorders and lights, a computer, DVDs, a plush chair facing a home theatre set. A rack of costumes: leotards, tutus, tiny bikinis. A couple of framed paintings sat on the floor, facing the wall. Loose photographs featuring little girls, under ten by the looks, were scattered and stacked here and there. The girls—nude, costumed or draped in bits of frilly cloth—gave kittenish smiles for the camera, those who weren't dazed-looking or expressionless. The backdrop in every photograph was the flowery bed.