Wes was leaning against an old dark blue Toyota in the parking lot of the Portsmouth Diner when I pulled in just before seven. It was thickly overcast and cold, and he wore a red-and-black checked woolen jacket buttoned to his chin.
I pulled up near the front in response to Wes’s signal. I lowered my window and he said, “Go ahead and park. I’ll drive.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
“Wait a sec!” I called as he walked away. From the back, he appeared rounder than he had from the front. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be fat before he was thirty. “What about breakfast?”
“Later.”
I pulled into a space and hurried to his car. Looking in, I spotted crumpled-up coffee cups, candy wrappers, and fast-food bags covering the floor in back, stacks of papers haphazardly placed on the backseat, and a portable CD player wedged between a scuffed, old briefcase and a battered CD storage case. It was a pit.
Reaching across from the driver’s side, Wes swept crumbs from the front seat onto the floor. Gingerly, I sat down and latched my seat belt, wrinkling my nose with distaste. The metal was sticky.
Wes revved his motor and accelerated as if he were on a race track, then, when he came up on a slower moving vehicle or red light, pounded the brakes to stop. And he did it over and over again. It was nauseating. Reaching Portsmouth Circle, a rotary that served as the unofficial entrance to the city from the interstate, felt like a major accomplishment. Wes swung south on 1-95, and at the next exit, reeled east toward the ocean.
“If we’re going far,” I said, turning to look at him, “let me drive.”
“What’s the matter?”
“You drive like a maniac.”
Amazement showed on his face. “What are you talking about? I’m a good driver.”
“Oh, God. Slow down, will you? You’re not a good driver-you’re a jerky driver. If you don’t stop it, I’m going to get sick.”
“Okay, okay.”
He slowed to a reasonable speed, but his driving stayed staccato. I readjusted my grip on the overhead handle, and hung on.
Fifteen minutes later he slammed to a stop at the edge of the dunes in Hampton Beach. The sky was overcast and thick. It looked like rain. I held on to the dashboard for a moment, relieved that we were uninjured and no longer moving.
“Wow. Whatever’s going on, I sure as shooting hope it’s worth what I just went through on that ride.”
“So,” Wes said with faux concern, “are you always cranky before breakfast or only when you’re with a new man?”
“Oh, God, save me from fourteen-year-old race-car drivers.”
“I’m twenty-four,” he protested.
“Well, you look and drive like you’re fourteen.”
“You’re getting old. The older you are, the younger other people look to you.”
“Did you bring me to the beach so you could insult me?”
“No,” he said, opening his door and stepping out. “That’s just an added benefit. Come on, don’t get me started. Follow me.” He handed me the portable CD player he’d extracted from the backseat. “Take this.”
“What in the world?…” I began, but he disappeared behind the car and opened the trunk. He pulled out a scraggly woolen blanket and a scuffed red-and-white Playmate cooler and locked the car.
“Ready?” he asked.
“For what?”
“Come on.” He scrambled up a dune, pushing through tall grass, and with a sigh and a shrug, I followed.
Wes headed toward the ocean, and looked around. He selected a fairly level spot about ten feet from the surf. Snapping the blanket to lay it flat, he smoothed it out and sat down, gesturing that I should join him. The wind off the blue-black ocean was bitter, and I shivered as I sat down, lifting the collar of my pea coat and rubbing my hands together.
As I got settled, I looked around. Wind-whipped whitecaps rippled across the ocean surface. The beach was mostly deserted. I saw someone sitting about a hundred yards to the north, huddled in a lawn chair staring at the ocean, and far to the south, a man was throwing driftwood to a golden retriever. Each time the man tossed the branch, the dog dashed away and retrieved it, trotting with a jaunty swagger, to drop it at his master’s feet.
Wes turned on the CD player, and Frank Sinatra began to sing “Fly Me to the Moon.” “I have no reason to think you’re wired, and I damn well know I’m not,” he whispered, leaning toward me. “But I’m going to be quoting a police source, so I can’t take any chances. With the ocean sounds and the CD, if we whisper, we should be fine.”
“Are you serious? You think I might be wearing a wire? You’ve been watching too many movies.” I noted that even as I expressed incredulity, I whispered.
Wes leaned back, resting his weight on the palms of his hands. “You might be right. So what? Indulge me, okay?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
He pulled a thermos of coffee, two plastic mugs, and a box of doughnuts out of the Playmate. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten a doughnut. I took a honey-glazed and nibbled. It didn’t taste like food. It tasted like dessert. Wes took an oversized bite of a chocolate-glazed doughnut. He used the back of his hand to wipe away smudged chocolate from his cheek.
“What do you want to hear about first?” he asked. “Phone, prints, or background?”
“It doesn’t matter. Phone, I guess. Were you able to learn who called Mr. Grant?”
Wes nodded. “Basically, no one.”
“What do you mean, ‘basically’?”
“His daughter, a widow named Dana Cabot who lives in Boston, called several times. So did his next-door neighbor and his lawyer, Epps. Also, there were two business calls.” He shrugged. “Other than that, no one but you and another dealer, Barney Troudeaux, called him during the last month.”
“What kind of business calls?”
Wes reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a single sheet of lined paper, folded into a small square. Consulting it, he said, “His doctor’s office. And Taffy Pull, a candy store on the beach.” He refolded the paper and placed it on his lap.
“Nothing there seems to stand out, does it?”
He shrugged. “Not to me. The police are checking them out.”
“Do you know what they’ve learned?”
Wes pursed his lips. “No.”
“Your source won’t tell you?”
“My source says he-or she-doesn’t know.”
“Do you believe him-or her?”
He turned both hands up and gave me a “my guess is as good as yours” look, then smiled, and said, “I’ll keep pushing.”
I nodded. It was hard to imagine that calls from a candy store or his doctor were relevant. The former was probably a sales call, and the latter was most likely routine.
“Did Mr. Grant make any calls?” I asked, thinking that perhaps he’d initiated one or more of those calls.
“No one but you, Troudeaux, and his lawyer.”
“Not even his daughter?”
“Nope. No other calls.”
“Was he in frequent touch with his lawyer? Mr. Epps?”
“Doesn’t look like it. There were a couple of calls, but earlier in the month. Nothing from, or to, Epps in the last week.”
“How about Barney? When did Barney last call him, or vice versa?”
He smiled. “Are you ready? Troudeaux called Mr. Grant at seven-thirty-two the night before he died.”
“The night before,” I repeated. I turned toward the ocean, and watched as water rushed in, then slowly seeped away. “What does he say they talked about?”
“Changing an appointment.”
“What appointment?”
“Did you know Mr. Grant kept a diary?”
“Yes. My appointment to see him the morning he was killed was in it.”
“Right. Well, apparently, so was Barney Troudeaux’s. Troudeaux had an appointment to see Mr. Grant the morning he died, too.”
“That morning? You’re kidding!”
“Yeah, at nine. Except that Barney said he called Mr. Grant and changed it.”
“How do you know?”
“My source tells me that Barney said that Mr. Grant agreed to change the appointment to three that afternoon.”
“Why the last-minute change?”
“A board meeting for the association Barney heads up.”
“But he would have known about a board meeting sooner than the night before,” I objected.
Wes shrugged. “Looks like he screwed up and double-booked himself.”
“Were there any calls on the day Mr. Grant was killed?”
“Yeah. From you, his daughter, and his neighbor. That’s it.”
“But then how did Barney learn that Mr. Grant was killed?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
I shrugged. “I’m just wondering… did he show up at the Grant house for his appointment that afternoon?”
Wes looked intrigued, wiped his chocolate-sticky fingers on his jeans, and wrote a note on the folded square of paper. “Good question,” he said. “I’ll check it out.”
“What about fingerprints?” I asked.
“Apparently yours were everywhere. Barney’s were around, too, but not as many as yours.”
I smiled. “I’m more thorough.”
“I’ll keep that in mind when I’m ready to sell my family’s treasures.”
“Does your family have treasures?” I asked.
“Hell, no. I was joking.”
“Too bad. I would have made you a good deal.”
Wes shook his head, grinning a little. “There were other prints, too. Miscellaneous and explainable. Grant’s wife, for instance, obviously from before she died, a house cleaner who came in periodically, and a delivery boy from a grocery store in town. There was one set of prints in the living room that is still unidentified.”
“Can they tell anything about who left them?”
“No, not to quote them on. They’re adult prints, but smallish, so based on the size, they may be from a woman.” He shrugged. “But there are small men, too. And large men with small hands.”
“Doesn’t it seem incredible that no other prints were found? I mean, what about his daughter and granddaughter? Or other delivery people? Or friends?”
“I guess he lived a pretty quiet life.”
I shook my head, wondering what prints they’d find in my house if they looked. I wasn’t a bad housekeeper, but I wasn’t a nut about it either. It made me wonder whether maybe one of my dad’s prints was still somewhere, maybe on the side of a dining room chair, a remnant from one of the scores of times when he’d sat, idly tapping a beat, waiting for me to serve the meal.
“Anything else scheduled for that morning?” I asked, focusing on Wes, chasing away the memory. “Besides me?”
“Just Barney Troudeaux’s nine o’clock appointment.”
“I thought he changed it when he called the night before.”
“That’s what he says, but it was still in the diary.”
“Maybe Mr. Grant hadn’t gotten around to changing it before he died,” I said, saddened at the thought.
I recalled the day that I’d made a mistake in my schedule, realizing it only after I’d left the Grant house. I hurried back and knocked on the door. When he answered, I apologized for my error, he assured me it wasn’t a problem, and escorted me back to the kitchen. I could picture him sitting at his kitchen table, erasing the mistaken entry, turning pages to find the correct date, his callused index finger running down the center of the page until he located the time slot he wanted. He smiled then, and using a freshly sharpened pencil, he wrote my name.
“We’ll never know, I guess,” Wes said.
“Yeah. And probably, it doesn’t matter. Because Barney was at the board meeting, right?”
“Right.”
Bright sunshine unexpectedly illuminated the beach from a sudden break in the clouds. I heard the dog bark, and squinted into the sun in time to see him run a circle around his owner as they made their way up the dunes. I took another bite of doughnut. My coffee had cooled enough so it was comfortable to sip.
“How about Mr. Grant’s background? Were you able to learn anything about him or his family?”
Wes nodded. “Yeah. Quite a story, actually. He was born in Kansas, the only son of successful ranchers. He came east to go to prep school, and never lived in the Midwest again.”
“Was he in the war?”
“Yeah. He joined the army in 1942, and for a lot of the time, he was stationed in France. That’s when he met his wife. According to all reports she was a piece of work. A tough old bird with a temper. She was maybe French, maybe Belgian, maybe who knows what.”
“What do you mean, ‘who knows what’?”
He shook his head, and gestured that he had no idea. “I know that her name was Yvette. Or at least that’s what she called herself. I couldn’t even find a record of her maiden name.”
“How can that be? What does that mean?”
“Probably nothing. Maybe she was a Jew on the run. Maybe she was a Nazi sympathizer. Who knows? Back then, there were lots of good reasons to change your name and reinvent yourself.”
I thought about that for a long minute, watching as shards of sunlight dappled the sand and water. Gretchen had wanted to reinvent herself, a fresh start, she’d called it. I wondered if Gretchen was her real name, or if, like Yvette, she too had changed it. No matter. She was Gretchen to me, and I felt grateful that her desire for a fresh start had led her to my door.
After a sip of coffee, I asked, “What did Mr. Grant do after the war?”
“He settled in Rocky Point and started a painting contracting business.”
“And?” I prompted.
“And he made a fortune. Everyone I checked with said he was a ruthless SOB, but likable. The kind of guy who could sell tulips to a Dutchman.” He shrugged. “Apparently he was a good talker and a terrific negotiator. But you’d better be careful every step of the way because if there was anything he could exploit, he would.”
“Why? What does that mean?”
“You know… it means that he was a smooth operator, a guy who knew the angles and never missed an opportunity to make a profit. He built his business by winning federal contracts until it became the biggest company of its kind in New England, then sold out to a national firm. That was about fifteen years ago.”
That sounded like both the Mr. Grant I’d met and the one I’d gotten to know after his death: charming and shrewd. “How big a fortune are we talking about?” I asked.
Wes glanced at the folded square of paper. “Somewhere around thirty million dollars, depending on who you ask.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Wow it is.”
I remembered that Max had planned to ask Epps who would inherit Mr. Grant’s estate, and wondered if he had done so. From my conversation with Mrs. Cabot yesterday, I assumed she inherited everything. It occurred to me that Wes might know.
“Does his daughter inherit everything?” I asked.
“Nope. Fifty-fifty split with the granddaughter. Nothing to anyone else.”
“No siblings, uncles, cousins? No other family?”
“No. Mr. Grant had a sister who died in her teens back in Kansas. Mrs. Grant-who knows what family she might have had. According to my source, no one else has surfaced yet.”
I nodded. That would account for Andi’s impatience. Fifteen million dollars would buy a lot of independence. I wondered whether she cared that she had such a small family. As the only children of only children, apparently Andi and I shared a common legacy-small families that grow smaller with each generation.
“Anything else of note?” I asked.
“Something about the daughter’s leaving after high school. Mrs. Cabot. She left to get married in… let me see here… 1964. It seems she and her father had an argument sometime during the summer after her high school graduation that was heard for miles around.”
“What about?” I asked.
“No one remembers. But they sure remember the shouting. The fight started on the beach, and continued through the village. Dana marched into the house, packed two bags, and, with her mother pulling at her and begging her to stay, left.”
I stared at Wes. Was it possible that a forty-year-old argument had anything to do with Mr. Grant’s death? It was hard to believe that a long-ago altercation could be relevant today. Turning my attention to the sea, I looked at the whitecaps shimmering in the now-bright sun. I remembered Max asking Alverez why he was interrogating me about the jewelry in my safe. Alverez had said that until he knew what was going on, it was impossible to know what was a tangent and what was a clue. Dana’s departure had been so remarkable, it was etched in the community’s memory even after forty years. An event that memorable might, in fact, have repercussions that rippled through the generations.
“That kind of breach between parents and a child, it’s sad, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Wes answered with a shrug, seeming not to care much one way or the other. “I guess. But I bet that her half of thirty million dollars will help heal a lot of wounds.”
“Don’t be cynical,” I said. “It’s sad, and that’s that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I gotta tell you, Wes, that my head is spinning a little from all this information. But I’m not sure whether any of it is relevant.”
“Me either. I just provide the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.”
“Good point.”
“Plus which, there’s more.”
“What?”
The sun was warming the air, and Wes paused to unbutton his jacket. I followed suit. He offered me some more coffee, and I accepted a little. He poured himself a full mug. “Stardust” resonated through the speakers.
“Want another doughnut?” he asked.
“No, thanks.” Three-quarters of my first one rested on a nearby napkin. “So, what else?”
“Seems Mrs. Grant ran a tight ship. One of the things she did was keep a detailed record of purchases.”
“What kind of purchases?”
“Everything. Appliances, antiques, dry cleaning. Even milk, bread, and gasoline. Everything.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, a little anal, wouldn’t you say?”
“She probably grew up poor. You know what I mean… like how for some people who survived the Depression, watching pennies was a way of life.”
“Yeah, whatever. The point is, she listed everything in big ledgers. By category, in chronological order by date of acquisition.”
“So?”
“So the police experts have accounted for everything on the ledger except two things.”
“What?”
“Two paintings-one by Cezanne and one by Matisse.”
“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed.
“Nope.”
“What paintings?”
Consulting his notes, he said, “Apples in a Blue Bowl with Grapes. That’s the Cezanne. The Matisse is called Note-dame in the Morning.”
I shook my head. “Think about it… a Renoir, a Cezanne, and a Matisse.”
“Good taste, huh?”
“When were they purchased?”
“September of 1945.”
“Where?”
Wes shook his head. “Only initials. Apparently Mrs. Grant used a kind of shorthand. I guess since she knew where they bought things, she didn’t bother spelling everything out.” He shrugged. “According to my source, the paintings were purchased from an ‘A.Z.’ ”
I nodded. “Sounds like a private party. You know, some person’s initials. Were all three paintings bought at the same time?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s hard to picture, isn’t it? At the end of the war, with everything going on, can you imagine buying art?”
“Who knows the circumstances? Things were completely chaotic over there. Maybe the Grants were helping a friend by taking the paintings off his hands when he needed hard cash, not art.”
I nodded, letting Wes think he was making a valid point. I was willing to bet that the Cezanne and the Matisse would be on the Swiss Web site’s listing of pillaged art, alongside the Renoir, and flirted with the idea of telling him about it. I decided to stay quiet. My knowledge of the Renoir’s provenance was the only leverage I retained. Once revealed, its usefulness was gone. At some point, I might need to parlay what I knew for something, so it made no sense to offer it for free. Right now I had nothing to gain and, potentially, everything to lose.
“Maybe,” I answered finally. “How much did they pay?”
“Ten thousand each. In U.S. dollars. Cash.”
“Wow. They paid in cash?”
“Right. I bet most transactions in Europe at the end of the war were in cash.”
“That makes sense. But would they be in U.S. dollars?”
“I guess the U.S. dollar was primo even back then.”
“Interesting,” I mused. “But only ten thousand dollars? Even for sixty years ago that sounds like a bargain. I wonder how much that would be in today’s dollars?”
“I looked it up,” Wes said, unfolding his paper to check the figure. “Close to a hundred grand. Each.”
“That’s unbelievable.”
“Cheap, huh?”
“Just a little,” I responded, opening my eyes wide and shaking my head, astonished.
“How much are they worth today?”
I shrugged. “I’d need to do research to be sure. There are lots of variables. But in 1999, a Cezanne sold at auction for more than sixty million.”
Wes stared, disbelieving. “You’re kidding.”
“No. So if you bought a Cezanne for a hundred thousand dollars today, it would be fair to say that you got, ahem, a good buy.”
“But we don’t know the going price for a Cezanne back then.”
“No,” I acknowledged. “If I remember right, though, in the mid-1940s, a master would have sold for something like a few hundred thousand dollars.”
“In other words, it’s safe to assume that ten thousand dollars was low.”
“Probably, but not necessarily. Sometimes art appreciates exponentially, sometimes prices stay flat, and sometimes, prices even decline. It’s pure capitalism. Art sells for what a buyer will pay, and no more.” I shrugged. “The bottom line is that there’s no way to tell without extensive research what Cezannes sold for back then.”
“If it’s that complicated, how do you set prices?”
“Recency is a big factor. I can do a good job of accurately predicting today’s values by looking at sales of similar items over the recent past-unless something has occurred to impact value-up or down. For instance, if a great artist’s studio burns to the ground along with half of his works, whatever still exists is likely to shoot up in value. On the other hand, if an artist painted in a certain genre or style that falls out of favor, who knows why, the marketability of the paintings might plummet. That said, if all things are equal, the fact that a Cezanne sold for sixty million dollars in the last few years tells me that a similar piece is likely to go for many millions now-even if sixty million dollars is an aberration. But there are so many other factors to consider-provenance, historical value, condition, and so on.” I flipped a hand. “The point is that not knowing what Cezannes typically sold for during the war, I have no way of knowing whether the Grants got a bargain or not.”
He nodded. “And the Matisse? How much would it have sold for?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. A lot.”
Wes leaned back and soft-whistled. “The things we don’t know about our neighbors.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“Where do you figure the Grants got thirty thousand dollars cash back then?”
“Who knows? Didn’t you tell me Grant came from money?”
“Successful ranchers, yeah, that’s true,” he agreed, and stretched. “So, what do you think?” he asked, putting his square paper away in an inside pocket. He smiled and half winked. “Did I earn my exclusive?”
“If we forget the winklike thing you just did… yes.”
“What ‘winklike thing’?” he asked, sounding hurt.
“That thing you just did with your eye.”
“That wasn’t a ‘winklike thing,’” he protested. “That was a suave move.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Forget about it. So? Did I do okay?”
“Yeah. Wes, you did more than okay,” I said, meaning it. He’d done an amazing job of discovering facts and uncovering hidden memories, and he’d done it quickly. I was impressed.
With a lopsided grin, he reached up to high-five me, and I looked to the sky, embarrassed, but high-fived him back. Jeez Louise, kids today.
“Ready?” he asked.
“You bet.”
He stood up, scooped up my mostly uneaten doughnut with a napkin, and dropped it in the Playmate while I shook sand from the blanket. We made our way through the shifting sand to the dunes. As we approached the street, the CD player still on, Frank Sinatra began singing “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”
The drive back to Portsmouth was as bad as the drive to the beach had been. Wes jumped a red light in the center of the small downtown, and as I braced myself for the inevitable quick stop that I was certain would follow, we passed a sliver of store-front called the Taffy Pull, the candy store that had come up in Mr. Grant’s telephone records. Funny, I thought, that I’d never noticed it before. I didn’t have much of a sweet tooth, maybe that was why.
I looked back as we sped by. At this hour, it was locked up tight. The entire block of tourist-oriented stores was deserted. Come July, even at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, the place would be hopping.
“What’s our next step?” I asked.
“I follow up,” he said, patting the pocket where he’d placed the paper with his notes. “How about you? What will you do?”
“I’m not sure. There’s so much to think about. You’ll call me when you learn more, right?”
He assured me that he would, and when we arrived, he pulled up near my car and added, “I believe you, you know.”
“Believe me about what?” I asked.
“I believe that you didn’t kill Mr. Grant.”
I swallowed, oddly touched by his unsolicited vote of confidence, and tried to smile. I reached over and touched his shoulder. “Thanks, Wes. That means a lot.”
My stomach grumbled and I decided to get a real breakfast. I sat at the counter, ordered bacon and eggs, and shut my eyes. I heard voices, but no conversations, rustlings as people turned newspaper pages, and the clatter of coffeepots. In the midst of life, I felt cocooned and able to focus on Wes’s revelations.
I felt restless, anxious to be up and doing, not sitting and eating. But I wasn’t sure what to do. The Grants owned a trio of paintings of nearly inestimable artistic and monetary value-where did the Cezanne and Matisse come from and where were they now?
A deepening sense of dread colored my outlook, yet my growing fear was nonspecific. It was as if I’d wandered unawares into Act II of a three-act drama, but didn’t know my lines or even the role I’d been assigned to play.
I opened my eyes and took a long drink of orange juice. I had more questions than before, and no idea about how I could get answers. Nothing made sense. In fact, it seemed that the more I learned, the less I knew.