I rotated my index finger.
He said, “What?”
“Picking up a nuance of romance in the air.”
“If she only knew.” He grinned. “Hey, she comes through for me, maybe I can be flexible. Scroll back to the masterpiece.”
A few squinting seconds later. “Talk about un-fine art. So what, Okash always wanted to be a painter but has no talent, decides to work with human flesh?”
“I still think it began with Gurnsey and expanded. Look.” I tapped the screen. “The young guy’s the center of the composition. The light hits his face.”
“Okash and Ricky at that party,” he said. “Something happens that pisses Okash off—maybe being caught by Candace Kierstead, she blames Gurnsey for roping her in.”
I said, “We know she’s got a violent temper. Rage kicks in, she decides on payback, knows about the painting and goes about assembling the rest of the cast. Probably beginning with poor Benny Alvarez. Small-stature, challenged guy sweeping up her place.”
I tapped the jester. “She could’ve seen it as an omen.”
“Huh. Talk about a gift from the Devil.”
“After that, finding a hag would be easy with all those street people downtown. So all she needs to find is a black coachman and poor Roget has the bad luck to fit. She snags his number from the Caribbean bulletin board, calls him, hears his accent, asks where he’s from. He says Haiti, the casting phase is over and the execution begins.”
He grimaced. “Okash and someone who lives at the Clearwater house. That package you saw her bringing there, could it be this?”
I scrolled beneath the image, enlarged the legend below. Title, possible attribution to Carascelli, dimensions. Thirty inches wide, twenty-four high.
I said, “No, too small.”
“So Mr. Rolls could have more of this garbage…Göring. Now a Nazi angle, wonderful…Robin here?”
“In the studio.”
“Let me say it in person.”
CHAPTER
40
Hugs, kisses, a proclamation of “Genius!”
Robin said, “Aw shucks, just doing my job.”
Milo: “As what?”
“Loyal girlfriend.”
“More like Supergirl. What you did is incredible.” He eyed her bench. “What’s that?”
“Renaissance lute,” she said. “Something that pretty boy in blue might’ve strummed.”
—
Milo left, nearly running to the door.
Alone in my office, I wondered how to sink an informational hook into Asian-Occidental Concepts. The parent company had covered its tracks. Maybe one of its subsidiaries had opened a cyber-door.
I struck out withheigurandWestern Import Export.Not expecting much, I triedniederschonhausen.
Fourteen-million-plus hits.
