Now Nikki waited. Now she wanted words.
“I need your help with something. I know you always did things for Matthew, and now I want you to do the same for me.”
“Things?” His tone was still guarded.
“Come on, Noah, cut the shit. We both know Matt pulled a lot of crap that was shady and you handled it. I need some of that from you now.”
“I’m listening,” he said.
“I have the paintings.”
Nikki caught herself making tension fists and loosened her grip.
Paxton’s office chair creaked. “Excuse me?”
“Am I not speaking English? Noah, the art collection. It wasn’t stolen. I took it. I hid it.”
“You?”
“Not me personally. I had some guys do it while I went out of town. Forget all that. The thing is, I have them and I want you to help me sell them.”
“Kimberly, are you nuts?”
“They’re mine. I didn’t get insurance. I deserve something out of all those years with that son of a bitch.”
Now it was Heat’s turn to swallow hard. It was starting to come together. Her heart was punching to get out.
“What makes you think I’d know how to sell them?”
“Noah, I need help. You were Matthew’s fixer, now I want you to be mine. And if you’re not going to help me, I’ll find someone who will.”
“Whoa, whoa, Kimberly, slow down.” Another pneumatic hiss, and Heat pictured Noah Paxton rising up behind his horseshoe-shaped desk. “Don’t call anybody. Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening,” she said.
“We should talk this out. There’s a solution to all this, you just need to keep your head.” He paused and asked, “Where are these paintings?”
A swell of anticipation gathered up Nikki and carried her until she felt suddenly weightless at its crest. A trickle of sweat curved around the vinyl ear seal of one of her headphones.
“The paintings are here,” said Kimberly.
“And where’s here?”
Say it, thought Nikki, say it.
“At the Guilford. Pretty cool, huh? All the searching they’ve been doing and they never left the building.”
“All right, listen to me. Don’t call anybody, just relax. We need to work this out face-to-face, OK?”
“OK.”
“Good. Stay there. I’ll be right over.” And then he hung up.
Nikki took off her headphones. When Rook removed his, he said, “I called it. I was right. It was Kimberly. Ha-ha, where’s my five?” He held up his palm to her.
“Uh, we don’t do fives.”
Rook stood. “Listen, we’d better get over there before Noah. If this woman killed her husband, who knows what she’ll do next.”
Nikki rose. “Thanks for the pointer, Detective Rook.” He held the door for her and they strode out.
NINETEEN
Heat, Raley, Ochoa, and Rook crossed through the lobby of the Guilford to the elevators. When the doors opened, Nikki put the palm of her hand on Rook’s chest. “Whoa, whoa, where do you think you’re going?”
“With you.”
She shook her head. “No way. You stay down here.”
The automatic doors kept trying to close. Ochoa braced them open with his shoulder to keep them from bouncing.
“Come on, I did what you said. I thought like a detective and I deserve to be there when you take her down. I’ve earned that.” When all three of the detectives broke into laughter, Rook walked it back a hair. “How about I just wait in the hall?”
“You told me you’d wait in the hall when I arrested Buckley.”
“OK, I got impatient once.”
“And on our raid in Long Island City, what did you do after I told you to stay behind?”
Rook kicked the toe of his shoe against the lip of the rug. “Look, this is starting to sound more like an intervention than an arrest.”
“I promise, we won’t make you wait long. After all,” she said with mock solemnity, “you’ve earned that.” She got in the elevator with Roach.
“Just for that I may do my whole article about someone else.”
“Break my heart,” she said as the doors shut on him.
When Detective Heat entered through the front door of the apartment, she found Noah Paxton by himself in the living room. “Where’s Kimberly?”
“She’s not here.”
Raley and Ochoa stepped in behind Nikki. “Check all the rooms,” she said. Ochoa disappeared with Raley down the hallway.
“Kimberly’s not back there,” said Paxton. “I already checked.”
Heat said, “We’re do-it-yourselfers. We’re funny that way.” Her gaze went to the room full of artwork, hanging as it always had been, floor to ceiling. Nikki marveled at the sight. “The paintings. They’re back.”
Noah seemed to share her bewilderment. “I don’t understand it, either. I’m just trying to figure out where the hell they came from.”
“Relax, you don’t have to playact anymore, Noah.” She watched the furrows crease his brow. “They never left the Guilford, right? We tapped her phone call to you not twenty minutes ago.”
“I see.” He thought a few seconds, no doubt sorting through his side of the conversation, wondering if he could be an accessory after the fact. “I told her she was nuts,” he said.
“Now, that’s a good citizen.”
He opened his palms to her. “I apologize, Detective. I knew I should have called you. Guess I still have my protective instinct for the family. I came over here to talk sense into her. Too late now.” Nikki just shrugged. “When did you find out she stole them? During that phone call?”
“No. The alarm bells sounded for me when I heard our widow-in-mourning bought a piano and left town for the delivery. Does Kimberly strike you as someone who’d leave rearranging her precious antiques to a work crew and a dimwit nanny?” Nikki ambled to the Steinway and tinkled one key. “We checked with the building super. He confirmed the piano movers came here in the morning with a huge crate, but didn’t recall them leaving with one. It fell off his radar, I guess, after all the confusion around the blackout.”
Noah smiled and shook his head. “Wow.”
“I know, pretty sneaky, huh? They never left the building.”
“Ingenious,” said Paxton. “And not a word I associate with Kimberly Starr.”
“Well, she wasn’t as smart as she thought.”
“What do you mean?”
Nikki had run this over and over in her head so that it was crystal clear to her. Now she would bring Noah along on the ride. “Did you know Matthew had changed his mind about selling his collection?”
“No, I didn’t know anything about that.”
“Well, he had. The same day he was killed, a woman from Sotheby’s named Barbara Deerfield came over here to appraise it. She was murdered before she got back to her office.”
“That’s horrible.”
“I believe her murder was connected to Matthew’s.”
His brow darkened. “It’s tragic, but I don’t understand the connection.”
“Neither did I. I kept wondering, Why would anyone kill an art appraiser? Then I discovered that Starr’s entire art collection was made up of forgeries.” Nikki watched a pallor wash out Noah Paxton’s face.
“Forgeries?” He let his gaze wander the walls. Nikki saw his eye fall upon a piece of art near the archway. The one covered by a shroud.
“Fakes, Noah.” His attention snapped back to her. “The whole collection.”
“How can that be? Matthew paid top dollar for these paintings, and from reputable dealers.” Paxton’s color was coming back and then some as he grew more agitated. “I can assure you when we bought these they were not fakes.”
“I know,” said the detective. “The insurance documentation pictures bore that out.”
“Then how could they now be fakes?”
Nikki sat on the arm of a sofa that cost more than most people’s cars. “The appraiser took her own set of photos of the collection as notes. We found her camera and her pictures didn’t match the insurance shots. She had documented a roomful of forgeries.” Heat paused to let that sink in. “Sometime between the purchase and her appraisal, someone switched the art.”