Quick & Dirty

59

Stone woke very early, slipped out of bed, and dressed in the bathroom, so as not to wake Morgan. He let himself out of the apartment and, on the way down, phoned Art Masi.

“Masi,” a sleepy voice said.

“It’s Stone. I’m on the Upper East Side, in the Seventies. Can we meet for breakfast?”

Masi suggested a place on Lexington Avenue in the Sixties. “See you in an hour.”

Stone walked slowly over to Lex and turned. He reflected that he should feel more satisfied than he actually did; he kept putting two and two together and coming up with five.

After some window-shopping, he reached the restaurant in time to see Masi getting out of a cab. They shook hands, went inside, got a table, and ordered.

“You look odd,” Masi said. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, exactly. There’s an old joke — do you know the difference between a moron and a neurotic?”

“No.”

“A moron thinks two and two are five. A neurotic knows two and two are four, but it makes him nervous.”

Masi laughed. “Which are you?”

“I haven’t been able to figure that out just yet.”

“Are you hopeful?”

“Not really.”

“We don’t have the van Gogh, do we? No million bucks?”

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Stone said, taking an envelope from his pocket and handing it to Masi.

Masi opened it and his eyebrows went up. “This is a check for two million dollars.”

“Then you’ll have more than a million after paying your taxes — and you’d better pay your taxes because there will be a record of this.”

“But I didn’t find the painting.”

“Neither did I,” Stone said, “but we solved the mystery.”

“I don’t understand this.”

“We both worked hard for it, and we should be rewarded, and as for doubling your reward, it makes a kind of sense, because we have two paintings.”

“Two paintings?”

“Two identical paintings — both the same van Gogh.”

“Then one of them is a fake.”

“Your logic is admirable, but which one?”

“You’ve seen them side by side?”

“I have.”

“And you couldn’t tell them apart?”

“I could not. Arthur Steele compared it to the color transparency, and he couldn’t tell one from the other.”

“But he paid the reward anyway?”

“He did. He hasn’t seen the other van Gogh — I discovered it accidentally last night when I was hanging the first one in her apartment. It was concealed inside the frame of a Utrillo hanging next to it. A perfect fit.”

“What do you make of all this?”

“I don’t know what to make of it. I didn’t know Mark Tillman, so I can’t guess at his motivation, not with any basis in fact.”

“I can,” Masi said.

“Please enlighten me.”

“We’ve talked about this — when people buy a very expensive piece of jewelry, multimillion-dollar jewelry, they often have a copy made so the wife can wear it in insecure places without fear of losing the original, which is at home in the safe.”

“And you think that’s why he had the picture copied?”

“Why else?”

“He was in what was, for him, reduced financial circumstances, and I think he needed the sixty million to get out of a hole, so he filed an insurance claim. I think he told Ralph, the doorman, to steal it and, when things had cooled off a bit, to fence it and keep half of whatever he could get for it. And if it was never found, Tillman still had the original.”

“That makes as much sense as anything I can think of. Are you feeling better now?”

“I am, but not a whole lot,” Stone said.

“Then two plus two equals four, but you’re nervous about it.”

“Does that make me a neurotic?”

“Very probably,” Masi said, grinning.

“Now, that makes me feel better.”

Their breakfast arrived, and they ate hungrily.

“Tillman was very smart,” Masi said over a second cup of coffee. “He would have gotten the insurance money for the fake, and the original was safe on the wall where it had always hung, and nobody was the wiser. It was so simple.”

“If it was so simple, why didn’t you find it when you and your people searched the apartment?” Stone asked.

“Because it was so simple. It was hidden in plain sight — well, almost in plain sight. It was right in front of us the whole time.”

“It was very clever,” Stone said, “or it would have been if Tillman had lived to enjoy both the money and the painting.”

“Any new theory on why he died?”

“Well, Pio and Ann have convinced me that they didn’t kill him. If they had, they would have kept the picture.”

“So it was the cat burglar?”

“I’m convinced there was no cat burglar. Morgan saw the painting was gone and made up a story that explained both its disappearance and her husband’s death because she was afraid she’d be accused.”

“Then she didn’t do it?”

Stone shook his head. “I’ve gotten to know her well, and I don’t believe she’s capable of murder.”

“Everybody’s capable of murder, under the right circumstances,” Masi said.

“No, it was an accident. The parapet was being reconstructed and was thus low. He could have gotten too near the edge and tripped.”

“Or she could have just nudged him a little.”

“No. They may have had an argument — maybe she told him she wanted a divorce, maybe she was angry, thinking he’d sold the painting without consulting her, I don’t know. But I think he was careless and caused his own death.”

“Well, you know her better than I,” Masi said.

Stone looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go see Angelo Farina. He’s in the Carlsson Clinic, recovering from a heart attack.”

“I hadn’t heard. Wish him well for me.”

Stone got up and reached for money.

Masi raised a hand. “No, breakfast is on me.” He smiled broadly and patted his pocket. “I can afford it.”