“Was Hiram?” I followed him.
“Aware? Yes.” When he turned toward me, Jean-Paul had a wicked gleam in his eyes. “Maggie, it was Hiram, as you call him, who commissioned a workshop in China to produce the paintings. If his client wanted a Picasso, Hiram got him a Picasso.”
I remembered Karen Holloway telling me about Chinese workshops replicating fine Venetian glassware.
I said, “But surely Weidermeyer checked the provenance of the paintings before he accepted them as collateral.”
“Surely, if one can produce a credible Picasso, one can produce credible bills of sale and other evidence of provenance. Weidermeyer told the court that he depended on Chin’s expertise. But Chin testified that he never counseled Weidermeyer about either value or authenticity. If there was fraud, it was committed by a national leader who is now dead, and not he.”
“How much money are we talking about?”
A little shrug as he picked up hot pads and opened the oven door.
“The arms purchases in total? Billions. The collection, if it were genuine, would represent only an earnest money deposit in the neighborhood of, at most, half a billion dollars.”
“Dear God.”
While Jean-Paul busied himself arranging chicken and green beans on plates, I leaned against the counter, lost in thought.
At about the same time that Weidermeyer’s financial ordeal began to unfold in the courts, Park Holloway and his old friend Hiram Chin had a falling out, Holloway resigned from Congress, went home and drove himself and his problematic son off a mountain road and into a ravine.
Some details were still missing, such as Holloway’s possible role in negotiating the arms deal using Chin’s fakes as collateral, or in bringing his two friends together, or his knowledge of the nature of the fraud the collection represented. But it didn’t take a lot of imagination to find grounds for murder lurking in the corners. They had played a dangerous high-stakes game, and lost.
The Holloway-Chin-Weidermeyer triad became very messy, certainly, and was fraught with betrayals and manipulations that were both personal and public. Though I had some qualms about collateral damage to innocent family members, exposing the international skulduggery Jean-Paul was telling me about would broaden the scope and content of my film project enormously, which was good, and could potentially shift the focus away from Holloway’s former wife and children, also good. Like Sly, hadn’t they been through enough already?
None of the above answered the big question: Who killed Park Holloway?
“Maggie?”
Jean-Paul had set plates on the table and was waiting for me.
“Sorry,” I said, walking toward him. “A lot to ponder.”
He gave my arm a pat as I took the seat he held for me.
“A caveat, Maggie,” he said. “You must now consider that once the cat is out of the bag, he cannot be put back in.”
“Who is the cat?”
“Gilbert. I told him about Madame Snow’s private catalogue. By now he has made some phone calls of his own. And from there…?”
The possibilities that could ramify from those phone calls still hung heavily in the air when the first shot cracked the night stillness; a bullet pierced the patio window and lodged in the wall ten inches from Jean-Paul’s head. As reflex, we both dropped to the floor.
“You have no curtains for the windows,” he whispered, an unfortunate discovery.
“There’s no one up here to see in,” I said.
“Except when there is.” He reached up and snapped off the light over the table. “Where is he?”
“At least fifty feet from the house, or he would have tripped the backyard lights.”
The kitchen doors opened onto a patio that was walled on its far side by a sheer, stony canyon face. A stairway cut into the stone led up to a dirt fire road, which was about fifty feet above the house. The motion sensors that tripped the back lights began near the top step. Because the area remained dark, the shooter was probably up on the fire road, shooting down through the trees into the lighted kitchen.
I crawled out of the eating alcove into the middle of the kitchen, shielded on both sides by cupboards. When I reached up to hit the light switch, a second bullet zinged through the window too near my hand and ricocheted off the front of the stainless steel oven door, a shot that was sufficiently well-placed that the shooter must have been waiting for someone to show himself at the window, like playing Whack-a-Mole with a firearm.
“Are you okay?” I said into the sudden black void around me.
“Yes.”
When my eyes adjusted, I saw a ripple in the dark that was Jean-Paul edging toward me. I grabbed for him, found his elbow, and, staying low, made a dash through the living room, past the big windows opening onto the front, and into the relative protection of Mike’s study. We dropped to the floor behind the desk. I opened the bottom drawer and felt around until I found Mike’s Beretta.
“There’s a box of rounds somewhere in the drawer,” I said, taking Jean-Paul’s hand and nestling the gun butt into the middle of his palm. “Do you know how to use this?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. I heard the snap of the clip being ejected. “Oh! It’s fully loaded. Maggie, you shouldn’t keep a loaded weapon in such an accessible place.”
“Tell me that later,” I said. “And watch the door.”
I angled the desk lamp so that it would hit anyone who came through the door, leaving us in the dark, and then, from the floor, pulled the telephone by the cord until it was within reach at the desk’s edge.
He laughed, part nerves, part realization of how ridiculous his concern was in the circumstance. As apology, or from adrenaline, he pulled me against him and kissed me passionately.
“I saw that movie,” I said, reaching up for the phone. “Bogart and Bacall, To Have and Have Not.”
“Exacte,” he said. “Also The Big Sleep. Everything I know about romancing women while under fire I learned from Bogart movies.”
“Good tutor.” I hit speed dial and waited impatiently through three rings before Roger answered.
“Don’t tell me someone is shooting at you again,” Roger said when he picked up.
“Yes, someone is. I am not kidding, Roger. And this time it looks like real bullets. Two shots fired into the house from somewhere in the back. Jean-Paul and I are pinned down in Mike’s study. Tell your people that we have a gun.”
“Ah, Jesus. Mom was just dishing up pot roast.” I could hear him dialing another phone. “You know how I love Mom’s pot roast.”
“You just stay home and enjoy it, Rog.” I knew he was teasing to keep me calm, but I didn’t have time for the banter. “But will you send someone over, ASAP? And don’t say anything to my mom, please.”
“Sure, sure. Hold on, emergency line just picked up.”
I heard him barking orders into the other phone, and then he was back on my line.
“We’re on our way, honey,” he said. “Five minutes max. Keep your head down until we get to you. And don’t shoot yourself with that damn gun.”
Next I called my neighbor, Early Drummond.
“Maggie, did you hear gunfire?” he said as greeting. “I don’t see anyone out there.”
“I think he’s up on the fire road. He put two through the kitchen windows.”
“I’ll be right over,” he said.
“No. Stay where you are and take cover, Early. Cops are on the way.”
The third call, while we waited, lying flat on the floor of Mike’s study, was to Sly.
After some preliminaries, during which I hoped he didn’t sense that anything was wrong, I asked him if he remembered how he lost track of his phone on Monday afternoon.
“Yeah,” he said. “I lent it to this girl I know-she was in my life drawing class last fall.” He told me her name; the same girl Preston Nguyen mentioned. “Her phone was dead and she needed to call someone she was supposed to meet at this coffeehouse up in Ventura where a lot of the art kids hang out.”