Kelp said, “John, I knew you’d do it. The Moody hair matches the Moody body, and Little Feather’s in.”
“If we can find an heir,” Dortmunder said.
Irwin laughed. “This is wonderful,” he said. “The absolute accuracy of DNA testing! First, we put in a wrong body to match our wrong heiress, then we get a wrong wrong body, and now we’re gonna get the wrong wrong hair. One switched sample is gonna get compared with another switched sample. Absolutely nothing in the test is kosher.”
Kelp said, “Irwin, that’s the kind of test we like.”
Guilderpost said, “If there’s Moody issue.”
“That’s up to you to find out,” Dortmunder told him.
“I know it is, I know it is,” Guilderpost agreed. Looking at the food on his plate, brow furrowed, he said, “I can’t eat. I have to know. I have to go to my room and start the search.” Looking at Dortmunder, he said, “That was brilliant, John. Here, you have my breakfast, I can’t wait. Good-bye.” And he was up and out of there.
Dortmunder had by now drunk his coffee and both his orange juices and finished one little box of cornflakes. Tiny pushed Guilderpost’s plate toward him and said, “You don’t eat enough, Dibble.”
“John,” Dortmunder said. He looked at Guilderpost’s hash browns and eggs over easy, untouched. “What the hell,” he said, and dug in.
The waitress came by a minute later to give them all more coffee, whether they liked it or not, and she paused to frown at the plate in front of Dortmunder. “I could of brought you that, hon, if you’d asked me,” she said.
Dortmunder pointed the business end of his fork at where Guilderpost had lately sat. “He got a sudden attack a the runs.”
“Oh, that can be tough, hon,” the waitress said. “Believe me, I know. You won’t be seeing him for a while.”
An hour and five minutes, actually, before Guilderpost returned. He seemed to be smiling and frowning at the same time, as though he wasn’t sure what he thought about what he’d learned.
At this point, their breakfasts had all been cleared away, and the four had only coffee cups in front of them, from which they didn’t dare take even one sip, or the waitress would come back and fill the cup again. So everybody looked up from all that cooling coffee to try to read Guilderpost’s face, and Irwin said, “Well, Fitzroy? Did you find it?”
“It isn’t,” Guilderpost answered, “that I have good news and bad news. It’s that my good news is my bad news. Yes, I found her. No, you’ll never get close to her or her hair.”
Dortmunder, brow furrowing, said, “Why not?”
“Because she’s the Thurbush heiress,” Guilderpost told him. “She lives at Thurstead.”
Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other. Kelp said, “I think Fitzroy thinks he just said something.”
Guilderpost said, “You never—” and the waitress appeared beside him, solicitous, to say, “You feeling any better, hon?”
“In a way,” he said, not understanding the question.
She said, “Would you like a glass of milk, hon?”
“As a matter of fact,” he told her, “I would like another order of hash browns and eggs over easy. I find I’m famished.”
She looked dazed. “Hash browns? And eggs over easy?”
“And coffee. Thank you, dear.”
She nodded, forgot to call him hon, and left.
Guilderpost started his sentence again: “You never heard of Russell Thurbush.”
“Never,” Dortmunder agreed.
“Well, it happens I learned quite a bit about Russell Thurbush some years ago,” Guilderpost told them, “when it was happily my opportunity to sell several paintings at gratifyingly high prices that might very well have been Thurbushes, for all anybody knew.”
Dortmunder said, “He’s a painter.”
“Was a painter,” Guilderpost corrected. “His dates are 1901 to 1972, and he was one of the principal figures of the Delaware River School, portrait and landscape painters who flourished between the world wars. He became very famous and very rich, traveled throughout Europe doing portraits of royalty, made a lot of money, invested wisely during the Depression, and by the time World War Two came along and the Delaware River School was looked on as old hat, he was rich enough to retire to Thurstead, the mansion he designed himself and built in the mountains of northern New Jersey, overlooking the Delaware River.”
Dortmunder said, “And the Moody family has something to do with this guy.”
“Russell Thurbush married Burwick Moody’s only sister, Ellen,” Guilderpost told him, and took a sheet of motel stationery out of his pocket. A hasty family tree was scribbled on it. “Burwick himself died without issue,” he went on, “so the descendants have to be through Ellen, his sister.”
Dortmunder said, “But she did have descendants.”
“Oh, yes.” Guilderpost studied his notes. “The family just keeps daughtering out,” he said. “Ellen and Russell Thurbush had three daughters. Eileen became a nun. Reading between the lines, Eleanor was a lesbian. That leaves Emily Thurbush, who married Allistair Valentine in 1946, at the age of eighteen. She had two daughters. The older, Eloise, died at sixteen in an automobile accident. The younger, Elizabeth Valentine, married Walter Deigh in 1968 and produced one daughter, Viveca, in 1970. Elizabeth died in 1997, at the age of fifty, leaving Viveca the sole bearer of the Moody DNA. Viveca is also the sole inheritor of Thurstead, where she lives with her husband, Frank Quinlan, and their three daughters, Vanessa, Virginia, and Victoria.”
Dortmunder said, “In New Jersey.”
“That’s right,” Guilderpost said. “Overlooking the Delaware River, in a rustic, forested mountain area with majestic views Thurbush frequently memorialized in his paintings, or so it says on the Thurstead Web page.”
Dortmunder said, “So what we do, we go to this place—”
“Thurstead,” Irwin interpolated.
“Fitzroy knows the place I mean,” Dortmunder said. Back to Guilderpost, he said, “We go to this place, like Irwin says, and we sneak in and grab this Virginia, Viveca, whichever one it is, grab her hairbrush, and gedadda there.”
Guilderpost had been shaking his head through almost this entire sentence, which Dortmunder had been doing his best to ignore, but now Guilderpost added to the video with audio: “No.”
“Why not?”
“Thurstead is on the National Register of Historic Places,” Guilderpost told him. “It is operated by a nonprofit trust. The house and grounds are open to the public at certain prescribed hours. In addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of paintings, by Thurbush and others, the house also contains the jewels, the silver goblets, the rare golden stilettos, and all the other treasures Thurbush brought back with him from his travels around the world. The place is very tightly guarded, with a private security force and alarm system. The Quinlans live in a portion of the house, the rest devoted to the museum, the entire place under extremely tight protection. You’ll never get at that hairbrush, John. I’m sorry.”
“That’s awful,” Irwin said. “That’s a goddamn shame. We were so close.”
“Your idea was brilliant, John,” Guilderpost said, “but it just won’t work out.”
Irwin said, “John? Why are you smiling?”
“At last,” Dortmunder said. “A job for me.”
36
There’s no point driving the getaway car if nobody’s going to get away. Stan Murch, a stocky, open-faced guy with carroty hair, had been sitting in the black Honda Accord, engine idling, just up the block from the bank, for maybe five minutes after his passengers had gone in there, when the three cop cars arrived. No sirens; they just arrived, two angling into the No Parking area in front of the bank, the third angling curbward just past the Accord’s front bumper.