“Yup. Let me run that up for you…” Lucas could hear keys clicking, and then Carton said, “The total was four hundred seventy thousand dollars. If you want, I could send you the file. I could have it out in five minutes.”
“Terrific,” Lucas said. “If my wife ever buys another antique, I'll make sure she buys it from you.”
“We'll be looking forward to it,” Carton said.
That'd been easy. Lucas leaned back and looked at the number scrawled on his notepad: $470,000. He thought about it for a moment, then picked up the phone and called Carton back.
“I'm sorry to bother you again, but I was looking in an antiques book, and I didn't see any quilts that sold for this much,” Lucas said. “Was there something really special about these things?”
“I could get you to somebody who could answer that…”
Two minutes later, a woman with a Texas accent said, “Yes, the price was high, but they were unique. The whole history of them pushed the price, and the curses themselves have almost a poetic quality to them. Besides, the quilts are brilliant. Have you seen one?”
“No. Not yet,” Lucas said.
“You should,” she said. “So you'd pay, what, a hundred and twenty-five thousand for one?”
The woman laughed. “No. Not exactly. What happened, was, the owner of the quilts, a Mrs. Coombs, put them up for sale, and we publicized the sale. Now, as it happened, two of the original six quilts had already been acquired by museums…”
“Two?”
“Yes. One was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, and the other to the Walker Gallery in Minneapolis,” she said.
“I knew about the Walker.”
“The Walker and Chicago. Their original sales price established a price level.
Then, when the other four came up, the museums that were interested would have reached out to their donor base, informed them of the Armstrong quilt history, and they would have asked for support on this specific acquisition. All of these museums have thousands of supporters. All they had to do was find a hundred and thirty women interested in donating a thousand dollars each.
Remember: these quilts commemorate a woman fighting for her freedom and safety, for her very life, the only way she knew how. And how many affluent veterans of the feminist wars do we have donating to museums? Many, many.”
“Ah.” That made sense, he thought.
“Yes. So raising the money wouldn't have been a problem,” the woman said. “There were a dozen bids on each of them, mostly other regional museums, and, we had the four winners.”
“Thank you.”
Who'd said it? The woman with the dangly earrings? The thin-nosed woman? One of them had said, “Big money.”
Lucas turned and looked up at the wall over his bookcase, at a map of St. Paul. Gabriella Coombs had told him that her grandmother “got lucky” with the quilts, and with the money, and the money she had in her former house, and been able to buy in the Como neighborhood.
But houses on Coombs's block didn't cost $470,000, certainly not when she bought, and not even now, after the big price run-up. They might cost $250,000 now, probably not more than two-thirds of that when Coombs bought. Maybe $160,000, or $175,000.
And Gabriella said she'd put in money from her old house…
There was money missing. Where was it? For the first time, Lucas had the sense of moving forward. Most murders didn't involve big money. Most involved too many six-packs and a handy revolver. But if you had a murder, and there was big money missing… the two were gonna be related.
Bucher and Donaldson and Coombs, tied by quilts and methods.
As for the kidnap attempt on Jesse Barth, by somebody in a van, that was most likely a coincidence, he thought now. An odd coincidence, but they happened-and as he'd thought earlier, there were many, many vans around, especially white vans.
The two cases were separate: Coombs/Bucher on one side, Barth/Kline on the other.
All of Marilyn Coombs 's papers were in her house. He had Gabriella's keys in a bag in his car, he could use them to get in. All that time at Bucher's house, looking at paper, had been wasted. He'd been looking at the wrong paper. He needed Coombs's.
He was on his way north in the Porsche, when John Smith called.
“We showed the tape to Jesse Barth. She swears it's the same van.”
“What?”
“That's what she says. The van in the film shows what looks like a dent in the front passenger-side door, and she swears to God, she remembers the dent.”
Lucas had no reply, and after a moment, Smith asked, “So. What does that mean? Lucas?”
Marilyn Coombs's house was not as organized as Bucher's. There were papers all over the place, some in an old wooden file cabinet, others stuffed in drawers in the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom. Lucas found a plastic storage bin full of checkbooks trailing back to the '70s, but tax returns going back only four years.
He finally called his contact at the state tax office, and asked her to check Coombs's state returns, to see when she'd gotten the big money.
He had the answer in five minutes-computers made some things easier: “She had a big bump in income for one year, a hundred eighty-six thousand dollars and then, let's see, a total of thirty-three thousand dollars the year before, and thirty-five thousand nine hundred dollars the year after. We queried the discrepancy, and there's an accountant's letter reporting it as a onetime gain from the sale of antique quilts bought two years earlier. I don't have the letter, just the notation. Does that help?”
“I'll call you later and tell you,” Lucas said.
He spent an hour scratching through the pile of check registers, stopping now and again to peer sightlessly at the living room wall, thinking about the van. What the fuck was it? Where was the van coming from? The checks were in no particular order-it seemed that she'd simply tossed the latest one in a drawer, and then, when the drawer got full, dumped the old ones in a plastic tub and started a new pile in the drawer.
He finally found one that entered a check for $155,000. The numbers were heavily inked, as though they'd been written in with some emotion. He went through check registers for six months on either side of the big one, and found only two exceptionally large numbers: a check for $167,500 to Central States Title Company. She'd bought the house.
A few months later, she registered a check for $27,500; and then, a week later, a check payable to U.S. Bank for $17,320. The $27,500 was the sale of her old house, Lucas thought. She'd taken out a swing loan to cover the cost of her new house, and the check to U.S. Bank was repayment.
He'd been sitting on a rug as he sorted through the checks, and now he rocked back on his heels. Not enough coming in. There'd been $470,000 up for grabs, and she only showed $155,000 coming in as a lump sum. He closed one eye and divided $470,000 by $155,000… and figured the answer was very close to three.
He got a scrap of paper and did the actual arithmetic: $470,000 divided by three was $156,666. If Marilyn Coombs had gotten a check for that amount, and to use the $1,666 as a little happy-time mad money… then she might have deposited $155,000.
Where was the rest? And what the fuck was that van all about? He called Archie Carton at Sotheby's, and was told that Carton had left for the day, that the administrative offices were closed, and no, they didn't give out Carton's cell-phone number. Lucas pressed, and was told that they didn't know Carton's cell-phone number, which sounded like an untruth, but Lucas was out in flyover country, on the end of a long phone line, and the woman he was talking to was paid to frustrate callers.
“Thanks for your help,” he snarled, and rang off. Carton would have to wait overnight: he was obviously the guy to go to. In the meantime…
Alice Schirmer was the folk art curator at the Walker. She was tall and too thin with close-cropped dark hair and fashionable black-rimmed executive glasses. She wore a dark brown summer suit with a gold silk scarf as a kind of necktie. She said, “I had two of our workpersons bring it out; we've had it in storage.”
“Thank you.”
“You said there was a woman missing…?” Schirmer asked. She did a finger twiddle at a guy with a two-day
