“—and he demanded to be bought out. Haig must have found someone else to finance him and now the place is all his.”
“He had to be financed?” Bill asked. “You don’t think he bought Baxter out himself?”
“Doug Haig only spends other people’s money. Count on it.” He looked Bill over again. “So Nick whatever, he was what the Russian gangster gag was for?”
“Greenbank. Gangster and his art consultant.” Bill thumbed at me. “Worked, too. He gave up Shayna Dylan. A gallerina at Gruber. You know her?”
“Nope. Must be new.”
“She’s reputed to have photos of these Chaus on her cell phone. Nick doesn’t know where she took them.”
“Gallerina?” I asked. “Is that really what they’re called?”
Jack nodded, verifying.
“Does that make Nick Greenbank a gallerino?”
“No,” said Jack. “It makes him a yellow-bellied sapsucker, if he gave up his girlfriend.”
“She’s not his girlfriend. According to him he hardly knows her.”
“My judgment doesn’t change.”
“Stubborn consistency in the face of facts,” said Bill. “I like it.”
“We also talked to the monumentally revolting Doug Haig himself,” I said. “You should have heard Bill say ‘Gvai Yink Shunk.’”
“Sounds like a Yiddish curse. You’re not telling me Haig bought it?”
“What Haig bought was the idea that
“Well, he’s a greedy enough bastard that I can see that. Blinded, by the radiance of rubles, to the ridiculousness of your Russian ruse.”
“Not bad,” Bill said.
“But I’m guessing he wasn’t any help, or we wouldn’t need to see this gallerina.”
“Not only wasn’t he any help,” I said, “he completely destroyed a woman we interrupted his so-called meeting with.” I replayed the scene for Jack.
“Wow,” he said when I sputtered to a halt. “I guess he made you mad.”
“I’m going to stick a pin in the pompous pig and watch him deflate like a balloon.”
“Okay then. As soon as we’re done with the case.”
“That’s what Bill said.”
“That doesn’t make it wrong.”
“Then let’s get done fast.”
“All right.” Jack executed a sharp U-turn. “We’ll go to Gruber. And after that, you’ll still owe me a martini. How’s that?”
Bill said, “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
* * *
Jack’s instinct was to step into the street and hail a cab, but I stopped him. We were only twelve blocks from Gruber Arts. It was faster to walk.
Three people making tracks on a midtown sidewalk is like running a team obstacle course. Especially when the other two have long legs and one of them is on an adrenaline high from being shot at for the first time. There was no way I was being left behind, though. Jack reached our destination first, me second, and Bill, who’d stopped to light a cigarette, last.
Gruber Arts was one of about a dozen galleries stacked vertically in a limestone-faced building on Fifty-seventh Street, the heart of New York’s uptown gallery district. For an artist, to have any gallery is a great thing, even in the East Village or Williamsburg. If yours is in SoHo or Chelsea, you’ve arrived. If it’s uptown, you’re annointed.
“Okay.” Jack spoke as the elevator rose. “I’ll provide covering fire and you two go in and take out the enemy.”
“You know,” I said, “this getting shot at thing may have had more impact on you than we thought.”
“Either that,” Bill said, “or Jack knows the gallery owner and is offering to distract him while we talk to Shayna.”
“Her,” said Jack. “Jen Beril. Lots of white wine under that bridge.”
“Maybe Shayna Dylan’s just a step on the way to her,” I suggested. “Maybe Jen Beril’s the one who’s got the paintings and is going to be unveiling them next week.”
“Contemporary’s not a period she generally deals in. Her focus is strictly pre-Republic, mostly Tang through Yuan, but she’ll extend as far as the Han in one direction and the Ming in the other.”
I blinked. “Show-off.”
“I’m overcompensating for not knowing how to shoot. Anyway, believe it or not, I did think of that. I’ll probe discreetly. Are you guys going to use funny accents?”
