Eli’s desk backed diagonally into the corner of his office farthest from the door, which allowed him to face the door while keeping the office walls as distant as possible.
“You’ve got a knack for this work,” said his boss, stepping through the open door. “Takes one to know one, right?” Ted closed the door behind him and sat on one of the twin chairs facing the desk, his large hands capping his knees. The desk now separated them, as had the visiting-room table the day they had first met face to face.
“You have me all wrong,” said Eli, spreading his hands to give the appearance of humor, though he meant his words. You have me all wrong. He was nothing like those Missouri amateurs, who’d stolen what wasn’t theirs from the place that paid their bills, who’d been too dumb to know the value of what they had, too dumb to find a buyer to make the statues disappear without an incriminating trace. When he’d been on that side of things, he’d been good at what he’d done, and there was earned pride in the difference between criminal and art thief.
But Ted knew that. Eli’s skill was why he’d been offered this job and the early release it had helped secure. The distinction Eli wanted Ted to understand was this: He’d never taken anything from the person it really belonged to, never taken a beautiful thing from someone who deserved to possess it. His mission had never been to steal from but to give back, to turn tables needing turning. Repatriation. One rung up from Robin Hood. The joke of it all was that when he’d finally been caught, it had been for stealing something with his name on it: a painting by his own hand.
But Ted knew all that, too. That first visit, when he’d flown east to recruit Eli, Ted had led with a smart if easy line. “So,” he’d said, “I hear you like to return things to their rightful owners.”
So now Eli kept his mouth shut and the good mood on. “There’s another case I’m sniffing,” he told his boss. “The Mercury paintings. I’m pretty sure the lawyer’s got them. Slimeball after the finder’s fee. Should be easy to smoke him out, use a few dollars as bait.”
Ted had extraordinarily thick hair, going from dark to silver in a way that made it look like he’d been born old and was passing through middle age on his way to young. It lifted from his head like water leaving a fountain and moved in unison when he nodded. “You have good instincts, and I’ll put someone on that. But I’ve got something bigger for you.”
Eli straightened. Something that he couldn’t identify had entered Ted’s voice, some groove in his throat that gave it a more complex texture. Eli had no experience to draw from with men like Ted. Men born into easy citizenship, who belonged to clubs with golf courses, who had wives who were beautiful but so thin they looked frail, looked like someone you could sit across from but not lie on top of.
Ted had done him a good turn, and Eli even liked the man, but he couldn’t trust someone he didn’t know how to measure. Maybe Ted could be trusted and maybe he couldn’t, and Eli saw no reason to put himself in a position where it would matter which way it was. A caution with others that he’d learned the hard way, the cost being more than a decade of life as he would have lived it and the only woman he’d ever met whom he thought he could live with.
The image of dark hair against a smooth shoulder came to him when he blinked, real as taste, and he swallowed it.
“Bigger sounds good,” he said, “but remember I’m a rookie.”
“Well, the painting isn’t very big at all.” Ted tipped his chin toward Eli’s closed briefcase, which sat on the floor next to his desk. “Fit in that, maybe, if you needed it to.”
“So the price tag, that’s where the size comes in?”
Ted nodded. “Pretty big, but it’s more about the need for quiet, which may or may not be easy. There’s a body, too — that’s a problem. It seems that no one may care because this body got caught up in a sea of bodies. With a body, though, you never know whether there’s someone who cares but just doesn’t know yet. Or someone who cares and already knows but is playing it close for some reason or another.”
Eli sustained eye contact with effort and said, “Usually your lines are easy enough to read between, but I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“The Crescent City, Eli. You’re going to New Orleans. Right before the hurricane, guy turns up dead in a hotel room in possession of two paintings that have been missing from Europe for a dozen years.”
Eli did the simple math. “You don’t think?”
Ted smiled, shook his head. “It may have happened just before you went in, but definitely not your work — or really your part of the world.”
Eli swallowed again. “You said the paintings have already been found, so where do we come in?”
“I said two paintings were found, but, back when, three were stolen together. Your job is to find the third. The police are probably thinking that if they find the painting, they’ll find the killer, but for us it’s the reverse. Vice versa. I’m not saying you should catch a murderer, but if we can find out who might have wanted this guy dead, the third painting just might turn up.”
After Ted left his office, Eli read the file, which included a Times-Picayune story with an artist’s rendering of the unidentified man found dead on a bed in the Hotel Richelieu in a city waiting to hear whether it would take a direct hit from a powerful hurricane. The choice to use a drawing when someone could have photographed the corpse seemed strangely inefficient. Indeed, the artist with the charcoal and pencil had probably worked from such a photograph. A prohibition, probably — some taboo against publishing direct representations of mortality. Protect readers’ delicate sensibilities by rendering the dead in soft graphite, as something that might be fiction.
The suspicious circumstances mentioned in the article might have warranted a focused homicide investigation if that storm had never hit — a tourist dead inside an almost-tourist-district hotel is a problem no matter what crime rate you’re accustomed to — but a lot of bodies had journeyed through the morgue in the weeks that had followed the murder. Eli wondered if the perpetrator was smart that way or just lucky. Not smart, he decided, given that he seemed to have left behind two paintings that were as valuable as the one he’d taken. Or maybe smart but unlucky — interrupted.
Or maybe it was more complicated. Perhaps the missing painting had been sold earlier, and the murder and paintings were unconnected. If that was the case, the identity of the dead man would still be the only trail to the painting, but it might be a very long trail. Eli’s thoughts circled back to the paintings: There would be a reason the dead man had brought them to New Orleans. Or had found them there or bought them there or stolen them there from whoever had stolen them in the first place.
Horizontal windows opened a narrow, broken line across the wall to his left — a series of dashes — giving the effect that he was looking at the world through squinted eyes. Not the world: a single stratum of the Hollywood Hills. “You’re lucky,” his prison friends had said when they’d heard where he would land. Lucky to be out, yes, but he found the monotonous sunshine melancholy. He had always thought of Los Angeles as a place where people’s dreams are disappointed, a disappointment made sharper by the presence of those few whose dreams have come spectacularly true. As for the beautiful women, he remembered having once been good at talking to them, convincing them into bed. But he could not remember how he’d gone about it — not the sex itself but the getting to it.