Okay, you prissy asshole, Jonas thought. We’ll play, but it’s my move. He walked around to the alley and saw that the gallery had a large sliding door big enough to accommodate a van. There were two parking spaces in the alley, one of them containing a red BMW roadster. Yeah, that’s his, Jonas thought. A fag car.
He hurried to his VW bug, moved it to the end of the alley, and sat there watching the rear door of the gallery, thinking he’d trade three Franklins for just half an ox at this moment. An elderly woman left the door of the jewelry store behind him to empty a trash container in a Dumpster. Jonas eyed her in his rearview mirror and she looked to him like an undercover cop.
When Nigel Wickland had finished locking up and turning out the lights, he returned to his office and found himself looking at the muzzle of a gun.
Raleigh was standing by the door to the storage room, and he said, “Let’s you and me have a look in here, Nigel. If the paintings aren’t here, we’ll take a ride to your condo and look for them there.”
And at last Raleigh Dibble saw something that he had longed to see ever since the entire misadventure had begun. He saw something that he knew too well from his own experience. He saw real fear in the face of Nigel Wickland.
“What’re you playing at?” Nigel said, and Raleigh was pleased to see that the tic at the corner of Nigel’s eye had intensified.
“I’m not playing,” Raleigh said. “Not anymore.”
“Please, Raleigh!” Nigel said.
“You’re looking at a desperate, angry man,” Raleigh said. “I believe that I’ll spend many years in prison if I don’t put this thing right, and that’s what I’m going to do tonight, one way or the other.”
“You won’t use that,” Nigel said. “You can’t!”
“I will certainly kill you, Nigel,” Raleigh said, “if you don’t walk into that storage room right now. And then I might kill myself. Don’t test me.”
Nigel didn’t just walk, he skated. He seemed to glide along the floor with his hands held in front of him palms up, as though to ward off any bullet that Raleigh might fire. When he stepped into the storage room, he switched on the light.
“You see,” he said, “there’s nothing here but store supplies…”
“How about your van,” Raleigh said.
“Go ahead and search,” Nigel said. “This is ridiculous.”
Raleigh said, “Get me a flashlight. It’s too dark in here.”
“On the workbench,” Nigel said. “But I’d like you to put the gun away.”
Raleigh saw the toolbox, the one that Nigel had had the day they removed the paintings from their frames and installed the replicas in their places. The small flashlight was in the top tray. Raleigh took it out and said, “Turn around, Nigel, with your hands held high.”
“What’re you going to do?” Nigel said, sounding like he might weep. Sounding the way he did on the night that the thieves stole the van.
“Just be very still,” Raleigh said, shining the beam into darkened crannies and inside cabinets and even up to the exposed beams.
“Satisfied?” Nigel said. “Can we stop this charade now?”
“Not yet,” Raleigh said.
When Nigel heard the door to the van open, he said, “For god’s sake, Raleigh!”
“Do not move a hair,” Raleigh said. Then he shined his beam inside the van and saw the familiar blanketed bundles.
“Raleigh…,” Nigel said, unable to immediately come up with more than that. “Raleigh, Raleigh…”
“Do I need to have you take these out and open them?”
Nigel turned his face and spoke over his shoulder, saying, “I swear to you that I didn’t know anything until the girl Valerie marched in here today with the paintings. I gave her the twelve thousand and she marched out again.”
“And you were going to tell me about it when you got around to it, weren’t you?”
“Can I put my hands down?”
“No, but you can turn around and face me.”
Nigel turned, hands still held high, and said, “I couldn’t tell you! All you’ve been talking about lately is how much you’ve regretted what we’ve done. You wanted to return the paintings to the house. I was afraid you would do it. I wasn’t going to tell you about this until I shipped them to Europe and made the deal. Then I was going to surprise you with your share of a million dollars. I swear it’s the truth, Raleigh!”
“You’re amazing,” Raleigh said. “You’re an utterly amazing liar and four-flusher.”
Nigel then began wheezing and reached frantically for his inhaler, but Raleigh said, “Move those Joan Crawford hands very slowly, Nigel.”
Nigel said, “I… I… can’t… can’t catch my breath!”
“Slowly,” Raleigh said, and Nigel complied, taking two puffs from the canister and inhaling deeply.
When his breathing improved, he said, “We can still make this work, Raleigh. There’s no real harm done. You can’t turn back now. Let me do what I was going to do. Half a million, Raleigh. Tax-free!”
“Very carefully, toss me the van keys,” Raleigh said.
Nigel took his key ring from his pocket and tossed it ten feet across the storage room to the floor. Raleigh picked it up, returned the flashlight to the toolbox, carried the toolbox to the van, and put it behind the passenger seat.
“Get in the van behind the wheel,” Raleigh said.
“This is madness,” Nigel said. “Madness!”
“Get in!”
Nigel scurried to the van and got in the driver’s seat.
“How do you open the sliding door?” Raleigh asked.
Nigel’s voice was nearly inaudible when he said, “I have a remote here in the van.”
Raleigh sat in the passenger seat and said, “Open the door.”
Nigel pressed a remote clipped to the visor, and the door slid open.
“Drive,” Raleigh said. “I think you know where.”
“Madness!” Nigel Wickland said.
Jonas Claymore started his engine the minute the storage room door slid open. He saw the cargo van drive out and the door slide shut again. Darkness was arriving sooner now that Los Angeles was experiencing its version of autumn weather. It was too dark for Jonas to see if the gallery owner was alone in the van. The other man in the office could have gone out the front door, for all he knew. Alone or not, the gallery owner would be coming back for his little red car, but Jonas opted to tail him rather than just to sit there. There might even be a better place to confront the sissy and make him give Jonas what was coming to him. And anyway, the crystal had made Jonas feel too supercharged to wait.
Jonas had to control himself as he drove in the early nighttime traffic. He didn’t figure that the gallery owner would be looking for a tail, so he could get close, but in the heavy traffic he couldn’t get close enough to see if the man was alone in the van.
He almost lost the van on Sunset Boulevard when it turned north on Fairfax. He picked it up again going east on Hollywood Boulevard but lost it for a moment when it made a left turn on Sierra Bonita. He picked it up again when it was eastbound on Franklin, and he lost the van completely when he was stopped by a traffic light on Outpost Drive. Jonas sat meth-crazed in his VW bug, and he banged on the steering wheel and kept his other hand on the horn, screaming out the window at the cars, at the traffic light, and at life in general.
A man next to him in a new Lexus lowered the window and said, “What’s wrong with you, buddy?”
Jonas pulled the kitchen knife from his waistband, waved it, and said, “Nothing if I could cut your fucking eyes out, you rich cocksucker!”
The Lexus sped away and Jonas turned onto Outpost Drive, moving northbound aimlessly until a thought occurred to him. If he kept on going to Mulholland and veered left, he’d be climbing high into the Hollywood Hills on his way toward Woodrow Wilson Drive. Could the van be going back there? Back to the big house where all this had started in the first place? Where his betrayal had begun?
Raleigh Dibble made Nigel Wickland remove the bundles from the van at gunpoint while he carried the toolbox into Casa Brueger. Once inside, Raleigh turned on the foyer and corridor lights, and he sat on the carved antique chair with the needlepoint seat cushion, and said, “Go to work, genius.”