“What did he lecture on? Business ethics?”
Cove laughs. “Something about how the FBI spots forgeries.”
“And she remembered him after all this time?”
“It was a bit more complicated than that.”
“Wait. Let me guess. She called him Alan, not Mr. Metcalf. So that means they were…”
My mind whirls through the possibilities. Friends? Mentor and mentee? Surely not lovers? The mind boggles. He’s thirty-plus years older than she is. And in the looks department, he’s barely a three.
“Yup. They dated a couple of times,” Cove confirms.
“I wonder what she saw in him,” I say.
“Who knows? Some women go for that type, I guess.”
“You mean cold, self-involved, and selfish?” As I’m describing Metcalf, I realize I could be describing Ben as well.
“Well, you know what Auden once said,” he adds. “Something like: The ways of the heart are as crooked as a corkscrew.”
Then neither of us says anything. For a moment, we’re both lost in thought. More than a moment. Even this bruised, banged-up postmenopausal woman knows a pregnant pause when she hears one.
“From what I understand,” Cove says at last, breaking the spell, “targeting Ben was all Metcalf’s idea.”
“Was it a revenge thing?”
“Hard to say. When the cartel wanted to get its claws into a new business, Metcalf suggested Ben’s gallery. We think that’s how it went down. We’ll learn more in discovery.”
Amber and Metcalf?I can’t seem to get past that.
A nurse is at my door with a new IV bag. With my good arm I wave her in. She needs to change my sheets too. Cove is still talking and I don’t want to interrupt him so I missa few words of his narration as I scoot over. Then I tune back in.
“… threatened to go to the authorities,” Cove is saying, “unless they backed off.” I assume he’s talking about Ben. “So he put the money in escrow and hid the painting someplace. We’re not sure where.”
“I know,” I say. I tell him about Hailey’s friend Alison and her mother.
“Great,” Cove says. “Seems it was a painting by Graham Loxton.”
Of course.Loxton!Who threatened Ben at the party, complained about not getting paid, was later found dead. It’s all falling into place. “Carlos was their liaison guy with the cartel,” Cove says. “When Metcalf heard someone had approached Ben at home, he and Taggart began to panic. Was it Carlos, double-crossing them, trying to make them look bad? Or was the cartel losing patience with them, so they sent someone new?
“Thanks to you, Taggart and Metcalf discovered something they could blackmail Ben with. A possible scandal. Murders don’t sit well in small, affluent communities. Even accidental ones. You told Metcalf, Metcalf told Taggart, and we picked it up in a wiretap I was able to get in place.”
“You set up a wiretap? That quickly? Whatever happened to Title Eighteen US Code Section Twenty-Five Sixteen?” I ask.
“Well, um, I was able to bypass it,” he says in his sweet aw-shucks way.
Wow. The only way he could have bypassed that was to call the attorney general directly.
“Ben must’ve thought the whole sad story was safely hidden away,” I say. “Just like his mother.”
“Right. Until his mother blabbed.”
Blabbed.Is that what they call it in Cleveland? “You sound like a G-man in a 1940s gangster movie,” I tell him. He laughs.
“Yeah. My wife would agree with you.”
Oh, right. His wife. So they’re still together. I should have known. Well, as Charlie Brown once said in an oldPeanutscartoon, “There is nothing more upsetting than the clobbering of a cherished belief.”
