TRIAL BY FIRE (37 page)

“You said you worked with Sister Anselm,” Hal said when she set his Scotch in front of him. “What happened to her? I expected her to be there for Mimi and me this afternoon. I can’t believe she just deserted us like that.”

Gag order or not, it was time someone told this man what had really happened, so Ali did. She told him all of it—about Sister Anselm being lured into a kidnapper’s vehicle and being left in the desert to die by the same man suspected of murdering Mimi Cooper. Because the charge was murder now that Mimi was dead.

Hal listened to what Ali had to say in stricken silence. “I don’t understand any of this,” he said when she finished. “None of it makes sense. Mimi didn’t have an enemy in the world, and she would never have been mixed up with those Earth Liberation people. That just wasn’t her.”

“Tell me about the painting,” Ali said.

“The painting?” Hal asked, as though he weren’t quite paying attention.

“The Paul Klee,” Ali supplied. “The one you said is missing from your house.”

“Oh, that. Mimi did plan to sell it eventually,” he said. “In fact, she had it reframed last year for that very reason—as a preparation for selling it. I never much liked the piece, and I wouldn’t have bothered reframing it, but I still wonder if maybe it hasn’t found its way into one of Serenity’s galleries. I don’t
trust that woman, and I don’t think she’d be above trying to sell it behind her mother’s back.”

“It’s insured?” Ali asked.

“Yes, for something like $750,000, but that’s probably less than it would bring at auction. At least that’s what I was led to believe.”

“You have a record for the reframing?”

“I suppose so,” Hal said. “Somewhere. Mimi always kept meticulous records of everything, including the vet bills.” He patted Maggie while the dog continued to snooze in his lap. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why are you interested in the reframing job?”

“Because investigators found a piece of frame stock in the burned-out wreckage of one of the houses in Camp Verde.”

Hal was aghast. “They burned the painting, too?”

Ali nodded. The bartender emerged from the bar long enough to deliver their food, napkins, and silverware. Hal ordered another drink. Ali did not. For a long time after the bartender left the table, Hal stared after him.

“Why would someone hurt her?” he asked. “Mimi was a wonderful person. A lovely person. She wouldn’t hurt a fly, and yet someone did this to her—murdered her and destroyed her prize possession, because that’s what that painting amounted to. I don’t understand.”

“I do,” Ali said. “What it means is you were wrong a little while ago when you said Mimi had no enemies. She did—at least one.”

“She never said a word to me about it.”

“Maybe she didn’t know about it, either, and that’s why she didn’t mention it to you. Tell me, who was there in Mimi’s room this afternoon?”

“Win and Serenity and me. Surely her own children wouldn’t do something so despicable.”

“I don’t think so,” Ali said.
And neither does Sister Anselm.
“There is the art connection.”

Hal nodded. Absently he tried one of the wings. By then, noticing the food on the table, Maggie had roused herself. She was sitting up and taking notice.

“Too hot for you, little girl,” Hal said to the dog. “Try a bit of french fry.”

Ali watched as the tiny dog downed one morsel of potato and then pleaded for more.

“So it was just the three of you in the room?”

“Not at the end,” Hal said, swallowing hard. “Then it was just Mimi and me. Serenity was acting like a jerk and Mimi wanted her out of there. So Win took her back to the waiting room. I know Sister Anselm kept hoping that she’d be able to tell us something about what happened. At first she didn’t remember anything at all. Right at the end, I think she was starting to remember, and she wanted to tell me. That’s why she wanted the ventilator out. So she could talk. So she could say something.”

“Did she?” Ali asked.

“She tried. She only managed one word,” Hal said. “She said, ‘Donna.’ That’s what makes me think she really had started remembering what happened. Donna Carson, Serenity’s personal assistant, was the last person who came by to see Mimi that day, the day she disappeared. The problem is, that’s all Mimi managed. Before she could say anything more, she was gone.”

Donna,
Ali thought. Maybe that name wasn’t just part of what Mimi remembered or wanted to say. Maybe it was exactly what she intended and needed to say.

“Tell me about Donna,” Ali said.

Hal favored Ali with a puzzled look and then fed Maggie another bit of french fry. He let his breath out in a long, ragged sigh. “Let’s see. She’s been around the galleries for a long time,” he said. “I think she first went to work for Mimi’s first husband, Winston, when she was still in high school, and worked for him the whole time she was in college and since then, too. She was Winston’s personal assistant for a while. Now she’s Serenity’s.”

“In other words,” Ali said, “a long-term family retainer.”

“Exactly,” Hal agreed. “I don’t remember all the details. It seems like Donna’s family had some kind of difficulties, and Mimi and her husband took her in, looked after her, saw to it that she got an education.”

Ali was busy filtering everything Hal said about Donna Carson through the sum total of everything she had seen and heard during her endless hours in the burn-unit waiting room, trying to examine everything she had learned with her heart as well as her brain.

For example, Ali knew that Donna wasn’t necessarily on the best of terms with Serenity Langley, her current boss. Ali recalled that Donna had left out some of the telling details—details about the missing painting—when she had reported events to Serenity over the phone. And what was it Serenity had said to her brother, Win, about Donna? Something to the effect that she knew the art and she knew the customers but that she wasn’t irreplaceable.

“Do you happen to know what Donna’s major was in college?” Ali asked.

“Art history, I believe,” Hal said, “but I’m not sure. Don’t quote me on that.”

Ali felt her heartbeat quicken. What she had right then was little more than a spiderweb of tiny facts and innuendos, but she knew how strong spiderweb fibers could be when they were used to trap unsuspecting insects, and Ali was busy constructing her own spiderweb.

An art history major would know the worth of that Paul Klee. So would someone who had worked for years in the Langley art galleries. What was it Hal had said about Winston Langley being a chronic womanizer? Donna Carson was a dish now; Ali could easily imagine what a gorgeous bit of womanhood she might have been back in her teens and twenties.

What if Winston had betrayed Donna in the same way he had betrayed Mimi, by taking up with someone else?
After all, wasn’t that what womanizers did, go from one unsuspecting victim to another?

Suddenly Ali was struck by another thought. Maybe Winston Langley hadn’t betrayed Donna at all. Maybe Winston’s plan had been for them to be together eventually, a plan that was inalterably derailed when Winston died before his divorce from Mimi became final. Good for Mimi; bad for Donna. Sort of like what had happened to Ali—good for Ali, bad for April, the young woman who had planned on being Paul Grayson’s second wife.

“Do you have any idea where Donna lives?” Ali asked.

Hal Cooper had been staring off into space, sipping his drink and woolgathering. He seemed startled when Ali’s question drew him back into the present.

“I seem to remember that she bought a condo, or maybe a town house, up in Paradise Valley. I don’t know where, exactly,” Hal added. “I’ve never been there. Had no call to go, but it seems like it wasn’t that far for her to come when Serenity needed her to keep an eye on Mimi.”

That was another strand to add to the web. Donna was the last person known to have seen Mimi on the day she disappeared. There had been no sign of forced entry. Whoever had taken Mimi and the priceless painting had been let into the house by someone.

Ali did her best to contain her excitement. The bartender poked his head out the door. “Last call,” he said.

“Nothing for me,” Ali said. “Just the bill.”

Hal pushed his empty glass away, put Maggie down on the floor, and stood.

“It was very kind of you to listen to my blabbing on and on tonight,” he said. “My mother is flying in tomorrow morning, and tomorrow I’ll be busy making funeral arrangements, but tonight I really needed to talk. You were a handy target. I hope I wasn’t too much of a burden.”

After billing their tab to her room, Ali reached out, took Hal’s free hand, and shook it. “I didn’t mind, Mr. Cooper,” she said. “You weren’t a burden at all.”

Ali exited the elevator on floor three while Hal and Maggie rode on up to twelve. By the time the door closed behind her, Ali had her cell phone out and was punching in B. Simpson’s number. Yes, it was the middle of the night, but those were B.’s prime working hours.

“Are you all right?” he said when he answered the phone. “I talked to your folks. They told me some of what happened this afternoon. I figured you’d get back to me when you could.”

“I’m a little battered and bruised,” she said. “Nothing serious.”

“That’s not what your mother said.”

“Mothers tend to exaggerate,” she told him.

“To what do I owe the honor of this call? It’s late for you—or is it early? I can’t tell which.”

“Late,” she said, “but I need your help, and so does Bishop Frances Gillespie.”

“As in the local bishop?” B. asked after a pause. “Of the Phoenix Catholic diocese?”

“The very one,” Ali said.

“What does he need?”

She explained the telephone-tracing problem.

“That’s no big thing,” B. said when she finished. “As long as I have the phone numbers, it shouldn’t be that difficult to triangulate the calls and create a cluster map of where they came from and where they went. That’s the wonderful thing about phone calls. They have a point of origin and a point of destination. Knowing those two things can often tell you a whole lot. What else?”

“Can you search Maricopa County property records for a Donna Carson? I believe she owns a town house in Paradise Valley. Anything else you can give me on Donna would be terrific.”

“Do you want this to be official information, or unofficial?”

“Whatever you can find without a court order,” Ali said. “School transcripts, property ownership, motor vehicles. If this person turns out to be who I think she is, I don’t want to have done anything that might come back on the sheriff’s department and muddy the water.”

“Okay,” B. said. “I’ll do my best to keep our noses clean. By the way, I think I found your Mr. Yarnov, the Russian art collector. Mr. Vladimir Yarnov. If he’s done something bad, he won’t be easy to catch. He’s a former arms dealer who took his money and an extensive art collection and decamped to Venezuela before the Russian economy went south along with everyone else’s. I understand he lives like a king in a beachfront mansion
outside La Guaira, near Caracas. It turns out his private collection is thought to contain several Paul Klees.”

“You’re right,” Ali agreed. “Sounds like Vladimir is our guy.”

“Let me see what else I can find for you. Do you want me to call later tonight, or in the morning?”

“Morning,” Ali said. “I’m running on empty.”

“Good,” he said. “I’ll work the night shift. You get some sleep.”

On the bed in the bedroom part of her suite, Ali found a Nordstrom bag that hadn’t been there before. Wrapped in tissue inside the box was a brand-new jogging suit—the same make and model as her pink one, but this one was navy blue.

A card was enclosed. “Hope this fills the bill. L.B.”

Leland Brooks rides again,
Ali thought.
That man is a wonder and a marvel.

She was asleep the moment her head hit the pillow, and she was dead to the world until the phone on her bedside table rang at 7 a.m.

“It’s not much of a breakfast,” Edie Larson grumbled, “but your father and I are here in the lounge. The coffee is good, and there’s plenty of it.”

When Ali tried to get out of bed, she discovered that the parts of her that had gone slipping and sliding down the wall of the gully the day before were stiff and sore, and when she looked at her face in the bathroom mirror, the scar, still accentuated by the sunburn, stood out on her face. B. had told her once that he thought the scar gave her character. She did what she could to fix her face, then peeled the price tags off the new blue tracksuit and wore that upstairs to breakfast.

In the club lounge Ali discovered that the pickings weren’t nearly as grim as Edie had implied. As far as Bob and Edie were concerned, anything less than a cooked-to-order breakfast was
something of a hardship. Ali helped herself to a bowl of fresh raspberries, a few slices of salmon, some cream cheese, and a bagel. Then she joined her parents at a small table, where her mother had already poured Ali a cup of coffee.

“I hope you had a better night’s sleep than we did,” Edie said. “Your father turned the air-conditioning down so low I was afraid we were going to freeze to death by morning.”

“I was hoping she’d cuddle up to get warm,” Bob said with a grin.

“I slept fine,” Ali said.
Fine, but not long.

“What’s on your agenda for today?” Edie asked. “Since we’re both here, your father and I plan to check out some of the restaurant supply places. I did what you said and asked him about that big-screen TV. What he really wants is a new stove in the restaurant.”

That sounded like even less of a gift than the outdoor barbecue, but Bob Larson was nodding enthusiastically.

“Some things you can order from a catalog,” Edie continued, “but with something as important as a stove, he likes to see it up close and personal before he forks over his credit card. You can join us if you want, but I don’t know how much fun it’ll be.”

Ali was glad to know the Father’s Day question was settled. As far as her going along? Ali had gone restaurant equipment shopping with her parents on other occasions. This was an invitation that didn’t require much thought.