“What are we supposed to say?”
“Whatever we want.”
Dorothy sounded plenty weary herself. “Why did Karen Liu do this?”
“She has a reason. She didn’t have time to discuss it with me.”
“I thought I liked her!”
Charles was very weary. “Then let’s pull that copy of her checks out of the basement and send them to the Washington Post. That will stop her.”
“That’s not very funny, dear.”
“Today I’m doing irony.”
“Did Angelo say anything?”
“No, he’s doing granite. Why would Karen Liu take such an interest in Angelo?”
“Mr. Beale?” Alice was never weary. “There’s someone downstairs to see you. Mr. Frank Kelly.”
“Mr. Kelly. Good morning.”
“And you, too. Just stopping in. I was down in Mount Vernon.”
“You’re welcome anytime.”
“Thanks.” He lowered his voice. “And I’ve got a question.”
Charles edged closer. “Go ahead.”
“Your man, Angelo Acevedo. You said he was in the Bastien house?”
“Once, last fall. It was the first delivery I took him on.”
“Okay. Look, um…” Mr. Kelly paused. “We got a couple of the stolen pieces back.”
“Oh my! You did? How?”
“I won’t say, for now. But yeah, it was that ivory dolphin and a couple other things.”
“That’s excellent, Mr. Kelly. Can that lead you to the burglar?”
“Maybe. It wasn’t on eBay, it was somewhere else. So anyway, I need to ask you something. Your man, Acevedo. You think maybe he touched anything when he was in the house?”
“Touched anything?”
Mr. Kelly was speaking very quietly. “We’ve got some DNA off the ivory and his name came up on the computer.”
“Angelo!”
“Right. I was just looking through the list of all the matches. Most of them were no match, and there was a match with Highberg.”
“Norman? Did he sell that to Derek?”
“He did. And then one good match of your night guard.”
“That would have been six months ago!”
“Right, but Highberg’s would be that far back, too. Usually that’s way out of range, so either it got touched recently or somehow it lasted longer than usual.”
“How does DNA work?” Charles asked.
“It’s great. The new equipment we’ve got, all you have to do is touch something and you leave behind enough trace cells that we can match you. We did it with Acevedo.”
“He must have picked it up when we were there,” Charles said. “Do you want to talk to him?”
“Uh, no. I don’t think I’ll rock that boat. But you think he could have picked it up or something. Then let’s just say that’s what it is. That’s what I’ll put in my report. So,” he said, suddenly louder, “what do you think? Raymond Chandler?” His eyes darted toward the stairs, then back. “Would that be a good place to start if I wanted to get a few of these?”
“Chandler?” Charles was distracted. “Oh, of course. Or anything on the shelf there. Some of them are less expensive.”
“Right. I’ll think about it. Maybe next time.” Mr. Kelly tipped his hat to Alice and turned his broad shoulders toward the door.
“Hey, boss.” The front door had just closed. Angelo was on the stairs.
“Oh! Yes, Angelo?”
“I am going out to a place.”
“All right. Yes, go ahead. When you get back, we need to talk.”
“What did Mr. Kelly want?” Dorothy asked.
“Oh, nothing. Just stopping in. He’s still interested in mysteries.”
“Did Angelo leave?”
“He left. I told him we’d talk when he got back,” Charles said. “Did you see him? How long after I went down did he go by?”
“He was right behind you when you went downstairs. There was a message from Vivian at Dupont Travel. She said she had the names of the guides you were asking about.”
“Oh. Of course. Was she sure they had John Borchard on their tour?”
“She had a long story about how they needed to get a special helmet for him. His head was too big.”
“So he really was gone when Derek was killed. Well, I need to think things through. I think I’ll go down to the basement for a little peace.”
“Mr. Beale?” More of Alice was almost more than he could take. “You have a telephone call. It’s Mr. Leatherman. From California.”
Charles paused. “That might be just what I need. I’ll take it in the basement.”
“Good morning, Jacob,” Charles said.
“Too early to tell.”
“That’s the advantage to time zones. Ours is almost over. To tell the truth, it hasn’t been the best.”
“The afternoon will probably be worse.”
“By all indications, it will be. What can I do for you, Jacob? Are you wanting the benefit of my immense experience and wisdom?”
“If you ever get any, I might, except you’d be old as I am.”
“And you’ll be wiser by decades then, so I’ll never catch up. I won’t even try.”
“You’re thirty years behind, Charles.”
“Thirty years doesn’t seem that long any more. So what can I do for you, Jacob?”
“I want to know if you found out anything about your Homer.”
“I did. Good, and bad, and then strange.”
“Strange? Tell me, Charles.”
“I had Morgan track Victoria’s schoolbooks through to possibly a 1925 Sotheby’s auction.”
“That’s the good.”
“Yes. Then Sotheby’s was a brick wall. They wouldn’t say a thing?”
“Not anything?”
“Nothing. No confirmation, no information, nothing.”
“They should at least have told you something,” Jacob said. “Is that the strange part?”
“No, that’s the bad, because the strange is much stranger. This morning I had a call from a Mr. Smith. He was English.”
“English?” There was an odd cackling sound. “English? Smith? Sounds like you might have caught a big fish there, Charles.”
“Well, I wonder. What do you think? It must have been Sotheby’s that alerted him. No one else would know I had it, besides the seller in Denver.”
“But somebody’s big enough to hush Sotheby’s, and we both know who that would be.”
“Yes, someone who’d be very interested in a book of Queen Victoria’s,” Charles said.
“Then I think what you think. What did this Mr. Smith say, then?”
“He will meet me in New York on Wednesday.”
“Wednesday? When will you leave?”
“That afternoon. The appointment is for nine in the evening.”
“Then I’ll come in the morning.”
“You’ll come, Jacob?! Here?”
