Proof of Intent (17 page)

“The last of the famous thirty-nine erotic scenes of Hayakawa. Executed circa 1825 in an edition of six. Of those only one full set exists
in toto
. I understand that a second set—
almost
complete—exists in . . .” Lisa smiled knowingly. “. . . private hands, shall we say? Sadly, however, I understand that the owner of the second set is missing this particular print.”

Van Blaricum stared at the print for a long time. Finally, he looked up at my daughter with a curious mixture of emotions in his eyes. Greed on the right side of his face, puzzlement on the left. “How, my dear, did you obtain this?”

Lisa smiled with merry superciliousness. “Now you know that's considered a somewhat tasteless question in this business,” she scolded.

Half of van Blaricum's face frowned. He flipped the print over, jabbed his finger at a small red circle. “I know this print. That's the Metropolitan Museum's stamp. This is the Met's copy.”

Lisa continued to smile. “Was. It's been deaccessioned.”

“No it hasn't. I would have heard.”

“The Met is unloading some of their more, ah, frankly sexual material. Rather quietly, so as not to create some sort of stupid media feeding frenzy. Being the conservative, mainstream shop they are . . . well, fellatio and rim jobs and so forth, they don't play well in front of the elementary school tour groups, do they? So they figure they might as well dump things of that nature on the quiet and buy something they can actually show.”

Van Blaricum's jaw clenched and unclenched. He flipped the print over, stared at it. “This is stolen,” he said softly. “You're putting me in a public place with a stolen print. I can't take terribly kindly to that.”

Lisa shrugged. “Fine. That's your opinion. Give it back, and I'll be on my way.”

Van Blaricum couldn't seem to let the print out of his hands. He looked around furtively. To my horror, our eyes met. I smiled blandly and looked away. Fortunately, he didn't seem to recognize me. At a minimum, he must have seen my face on the news; but I suppose he just didn't make the connection.

“Mr. van Blaricum?” Lisa's voice grew soft and insinuating. “Would you, by any off chance, be the private collector who's missing the thirty-ninth in the series?”

The pleasant side of his face smiled. “Obviously you already know the answer to that question.”

“There are merchants and there are collectors, Roger. Yes? The true collector is driven by a passion for their chosen field, not by the need to turn a profit. You're a collector. I can see it in your eyes. And given that for you it's about possession rather than profit, I suspect that the question of whether this was deaccessioned or whether it fell off the back of a truck is not, ultimately, of great interest to you. So. My question to you is, are you interested or not?”

Van Blaricum didn't speak.

Lisa reached across the table, pulled the print out of his hands, and stowed it back in her bag.

There was a long pause. Finally, van Blaricum reached down and picked his drink up off the floor. His soft white hair floated dreamily in the cigar-laden air. As he was lifting the glass, it slipped out of his hand. He made a grab for it but was too late. It had smashed into bits.

Van Blaricum jerked his hand back. “Ow! Damn it.” His hand was suddenly dripping blood. He yanked a white handkerchief out of his pocket, awkwardly trying to tie it around his bleeding thumb.

“Here. Let me.” Lisa carefully tied the handkerchief around his hand, pulling it tight.

“How much?” he said hoarsely.

Lisa took out a ballpoint pen and wrote a figure on her cocktail napkin.

Van Blaricum looked at the number, smiled, then looked carefully around the room, as though searching for police operatives or cameras. “Well, I'm terribly sorry, but under the circumstances I really couldn't offer you anything for the Hayakawa anyway. Too many uncertainties about where it came from.” He scribbled something on the napkin, pushed it back to her. “Here's my private line if you have anything more, ah, sanitary to offer me.”

My eyes are not what they once were, so I couldn't make out exactly what was written on the napkin, but it looked like he'd written his name and a number. Not a phone number. It was a number followed by quite a few zeros. A counteroffer.

“That's a shame,” Lisa said. “I guess I'll have to go elsewhere. Here's my cell in case you reconsider.” She crossed out the earlier number, scribbled another figure below it. Again, it wasn't a phone number.

Van Blaricum eyed the napkin. His protuberant lower lip went in and out once.

“That's my only number,” Lisa said. “It won't change.”

Van Blaricum reached out and touched the napkin thoughtfully with the tip of his finger. It trembled as though the napkin had been wired to a light socket. He took a deep breath. Finally, his head dipped slightly, and he said, “Alright.”

Lisa leaned forward in a confidential, flirtatious manner. I felt uneasy watching her: It seemed she was doing her best to let van Blaricum look down her blouse. I had to admire her work, but it made my skin crawl at the same time.

“I'll tell you a secret if you'll tell me a secret,” she said with a mysterious smile.

Van Blaricum seemed more interested in the number on the napkin than in her cleavage. “Secret?” he said finally.

“We all have our little perversions, hm?” Lisa said, showing her teeth. “Peculiarities, I meant to say.”

Van Blaricum's eyes had a moist, hungry sheen, but he didn't say anything.

“Me, I'm an absolute fool for celebrity gossip.”

Van Blaricum's malignant eye studied her for a while. “And?”

“Tell me about her.”

Van Blaricum didn't speak. “Who?”

“You know who. Tell me about her and Miles. Something about their past.”

Still van Blaricum sat silently, the wheels obviously turning in his head.

“Have you found me to be a disappointing person so far?” Lisa said. “Unsurprising? Uninteresting? Incapable, so far, of delivering the fascinating, the titillating, the rare, the unusual? Tit for tat, what do you say?”

Van Blaricum's eyes had narrowed slightly. He looked nervously around the room. Our eyes met a second time. Suddenly I saw a dawn of recognition.

Van Blaricum's face went white as he realized what was going on.

For a moment it seemed as though he was frozen, unable to move. Suddenly he rose slowly to his feet, shaking his head. “You disgusting, vile, cheap, terrible, ugly little people. Have you
no
shame?” He unwrapped the handkerchief from his cut hand, waving the large red splotch in front of Lisa's face.

“What's the problem?” Lisa said, still trying to bluff her way past his suspicions.

“You've been talking to MacDairmid, haven't you?” van Blaricum said. “Well, if Miles gets off, my sister's blood is on
your
hands!” he shouted. Then he threw the bloody handkerchief in her face.

As the red-stained piece of cloth fell onto the table, leaving a smear of blood on Lisa's face, he turned to me and said, in a slow malevolent voice, “You want to know the funny thing, Sloan? It doesn't matter if he gets off or not. He wants her money. But that's the one thing he'll never get.” He smiled slightly. “Never, ever. Or didn't MacDairmid tell you that?”

“He never had any interest in her money,” I said.

“Oh? Well, watch his face when the bastard shows up to take her fortune,” van Blaricum said. “Then you'll know the truth.”

“Is there a problem here?” The maître d' had appeared suddenly at my elbow, looking uneasily at the bloody handkerchief on the table.

“No problem,” I said, scooping up the handkerchief and stuffing it in my pocket. “In fact, we were just leaving.”

“Well, that could have gone better,” Lisa said. We were sitting in the overpriced restaurant in the lobby of our hotel. She was looking at me with a brittle smile on her face.

“You tried,” I said. “It was a pretty good effort if you ask me.”

She kept looking at me like she was waiting for the hammer to fall, for me to say something nasty about what she'd done. We ordered our meal, then I said, “Okay, so I have to ask. Where did that print come from?”

“I did some research on the Internet, trying to find out about the van Blaricum family. Turns out Roger is all that's left of them. So I figured he might help me figure out what Miles has been trying to hide. If anything.

“What I found out after doing some research was that Roger was a big collector of Japanese erotica. So I have this . . . well . . . there's this guy I know. He's an Asian art specialist for the Metropolitan Museum. I called him up trying to find out about van Blaricum. It turns out my friend knew a great deal about Roger. Not a big fan of Roger's, either. Anyway, we talked, and eventually my friend told me that the Met has a print that van Blaricum had been pining over for years.

“So I . . .” Another big sigh. “You know how one of the big things about recovery is you're supposed to stay away from your old drinking partners, your old haunts, all that stuff? Well, this guy was kind of a . . .” She sighed loudly.

“A drunk,” I said.

“Right. Anyway, I got together with him hoping I could get my hands on that print. A loan or something. Naturally he said no. So we went out to some trendy little hot spot, I plied him with Glenfiddich, showed a little leg, eventually we got all silly and he . . .” She put her face in her hands. “I know it was stupid. It was stupid and manipulative and awful . . .”

She stared out the window for a while.

“The bottom line,” she continued, “is that once he was fairly well plastered, he took me over to the Met, and he snuck the print out the back door, saying he'd let me use it—twenty-four-hour temporary deep-cover extremely unofficial loan kind of thing.”

“And while you're doing this,” I said, “you joined in the fun, had a nip or three yourself?”

“One thing led to another, yeah.” She looked at the floor, her brown eyes looking bleak and hopeless. “You know, it's weird, I keep feeling like half of me is proud of being such a slick operator and half of me is disgusted with myself.”

“That's the story of the first thirty-odd years of my life,” I said. “I pulled off several grubby, sneaky little legal coups that I'd never have even tried if I'd been sober. Trust me, it's not worth it.”

We sat in silence until the food arrived. I tucked into my chicken, but Lisa just picked at the salad she had ordered.

“While you're examining your salad leaf by leaf,” I said, “you want to tell me what happened to you this year? Why you left school?”

Lisa shook her head. “Not yet.” For a moment she looked glum. Suddenly she glanced up, full of enthusiasm. “So, what do you think he meant when he said—what was it exactly?—watch the bastard's face when he shows up and takes her money?”

“I assume he meant that Miles's greed will be evident on his face whenever he gets her inheritance.”

Lisa frowned. “Yes, but he had just said that Miles will never ever get her money.”

“It doesn't make sense, does it? But maybe more importantly, who is MacDairmid? You asked him to talk about Diana's past, and more or less the next thing he said was, ‘You've been talking to MacDairmid.' As though whoever MacDairmid is, he would know something about some kind of dark secret in her past.”

“Oh, I'm glad you mentioned that,” Lisa said. “I went by Roger's co-op yesterday, slipped the doorman a small gratuity, as they say. It was obvious he was no great fan of Roger van Blaricum. Didn't know anything about Diana, but he said that there was this old guy who had been some sort of butler/driver/general factotum for the family for a million years and who Roger had fired a couple years back. The doorman said this old guy wasn't happy about it, and that if anybody would have some juicy information on the van Blaricums, it would be this old guy. His name's Ian MacDairmid.”

“I guess we better track him down, huh?” I said.

“Only problem, this guy MacDairmid was apparently pretty long in the tooth when he was fired. The doorman figured he could be dead by now.”

According to the phone books, there was only one Ian MacDairmid in the entire city of New York, and he lived out in the far reaches of Brooklyn.

No one answered the phone when I called, so the next morning we took the subway out to where he lived—a five-story walk-up in a neighborhood populated by one of those odd New York ethnic mixes, Koreans and Latvians. We pressed the buzzer, but no one answered. Lisa kept pushing the button.

“We can wait,” I said. “He'll probably show up after a while.”

Lisa started pressing all the other buzzer buttons at once with the ham of her hand. “This is what they do on
NYPD Blue
,” she said. Eventually a tinny, unintelligible voice answered in what, for all I could make out of it, could have been English, Latvian, or Korean.

“We're trying to find Ian MacDairmid,” I said.

“Go away!”

That phrase, though, came through loud and clear.

Lisa kept pressing buttons. A certain amount of abuse in a variety of languages came out of the little speaker.

Just as I was about to suggest she stop pressing buttons, a very thin man threw open the glass door to the meager vestibule. He wore a turban over dyed blond hair, and a silk bathrobe hung open, exposing his hairless chest. “What in blue blazes do you people want?” he said. His accent sounded like pure Alabama.

“We're looking for Ian MacDairmid,” I said.

“Do I look like a hundred-year-old Scottish man?” the man in the turban said.

“No, but do you know where we can find him?”