Painted Ladies

from you.”

“You’re not a cop,” he said.

“True,” I said. “But I know one.”

His hands were resting on his expensive desk. He looked down at them. Then he cleared his throat and shook his head.

“I have nothing further to say.”

I nodded and took one of my business cards out of my shirt pocket.

“This whole thing is going to go right out from underneath you pretty soon. And if you’re still hanging on, it’ll take you down with it.”

He was still looking at the backs of his hands.

“We have nothing left to discuss,” he said.

I stood.

“I’ll let myself out,” I said, and walked to the door.

As I opened it, I looked back and nodded at my card on his desk.

“Don’t lose the card,” I said.

49

Brighton is mostly middle-class residential, and the house on Market Street fit in nicely. It had white aluminum siding and a porch across the front enclosed with jalousie windows. The concrete sidewalk was neatly shoveled, and ice melt had been scattered on it, and on the two steps to the porch door. A white signpost stood beside the door, with a white wooden sign hanging from it that read in black letters:

HERZBERG FOUNDATION

ART AND JUSTICE

I opened the porch door and went in. On the inside front door was a small brass sign that said Office. I opened that door and I was in what must have once been a living room but was now a reception area with a desk and several chairs, in case you needed to wait. At the desk was the guy I had seen with Missy at the Walford library.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

“You are?” I said.

“Ariel Herzberg,” he said. “And you?”

“Call me Ishmael,” I said. “Your father was Isaac Herzberg.”

Herzberg pushed his swivel chair away from the desk and leaned as far back in the chair as the spring would allow and stared at me.

“Your grandfather was Judah Herzberg,” I said. “He died in Auschwitz. Isaac, your father, survived Auschwitz and was liberated by the Russians with his friend Amos Prinz in 1945. He was about fourteen at the time. Amos was about eighteen.”

“He would have pronounced it ‘Ah-mose,’ ” Ariel said.

“They went together to Amsterdam,” I said. “Recovered a painting from a secret room in the now-abandoned Herzberg home, took it to Rotterdam and sold it to an art dealer for much less than it was worth but enough to feed them for a while.”

“So?” Ariel said after a bit.

“The painting was Lady with a Finch,” I said. “It was stolen a little while back, from the Hammond Museum.”

“I read about that,” Ariel said.

“I think you stole it,” I said.

“And of course you have evidence.”

“I think you blew up Ashton Prince,” I said.

“Evidence?”

“I think you tried twice to kill me, and succeeded in killing a guy named Francisco,” I said.

“Evidence?” Ariel said again.

“Ah,” I said. “There’s the rub.”

“It is a big rub,” Ariel said. “Don’t you think?”

“It is,” I said. “But I’m working on it. Did you know that Ashton Prince is the son of Amos Prinz?”

“I know nothing except what I have read in the papers.”

“Do you know—”

I stopped. I was going to ask if he knew Missy Minor, and if he knew Morton Lloyd, and what relationship he had with either. But if he’d tried twice to kill me for investigating, what might he do with a potential witness?

“You had a question?” Ariel said.