Wicked Business

CHAPTER EIGHT

Clara watched me pipe frosting onto a batch of spice cupcakes. “You look like you’re asleep on your feet,” she said. “You just frosted a cupcake with your eyes closed.”

“I had a bad night. Wulf popped into my bedroom at two in the morning, and I couldn’t get back to sleep after he left.”

“He popped in?”

“I woke up and there he was… watching me.”

“That’s creepy. What did he want? Did he attack you?”

“No. He wanted to talk. The conversation ran somewhere between a threat and a warning. He wanted me to stop helping Diesel.”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” Clara said.

Glo had been listening from the doorway. “She can’t stop helping Diesel. She has to save the world or we’ll all go to hell.”

“Hell would be a bummer,” Clara said.

Personally, I thought we were in big trouble if I was the one standing between the world’s population and hell.

“I need coffee,” I said to Clara. “I need a nap.”

I left work early, drove home, and crashed into bed. When I woke up, Diesel was standing, hands on hips, looking down at me.

“Could you ring a doorbell?” I said to him. “I’m tired of men barging into my house. Whatever happened to privacy?”

“Is someone barging in besides me?”

“Wulf. He dropped in last night to tell me I should stop helping you or else.”

“Or else what?”

“He didn’t say, but I don’t think it was good. Big trouble. Lots of danger. That sort of thing. He said if I stopped helping you, you’d go away.”

“I wouldn’t go away,” Diesel said, “but I’d be severely limited. He’d have a huge advantage.”

I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Did you read Goodfellow’s diary?”

“Yeah, and it wasn’t easy. Almost a hundred pages written in cramped script, detailing everything from the purchase of chickens to indigestion. And he had indigestion a lot.”

“What did he say about Lovey?”

“Lovey told Goodfellow he was in possession of an ancient artifact, a stone of great and terrible power, and it was a horrible burden that he wasn’t able to shed. He couldn’t destroy the stone, and he couldn’t part with it. When the stone was passed to Lovey by a distant relative, he was warned of the damage the stone could do if its evil energy was ever released. He was also told that the stone wasn’t always evil. The stone that now brought people to their knees with lust…”

I did an inadvertent giggle.

Diesel grinned down at me. “Lizzy Tucker, you have a dirty mind.”

“Sorry.”

“I like it. It shows potential.”

“Get back to Goodfellow.”

“Lovey told Goodfellow the stone was originally pure. It originally held the power of true love, but it had been corrupted by an evil force, just as all the Stones of SALIGIA had been corrupted long ago. Lovey was convinced the stone could be restored to its original purity, and that it could bring true love to him and to the world. Unfortunately, Lovey never found out how to remove the curse on the stone. Sensing his life was about to end, he hid the stone for safekeeping, leaving behind cleverly disguised clues. Goodfellow writes that only a believer in true love will have the ability to find the clues and the stone.”

“What do you think?”

Diesel shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I think. My job is to keep the stones out of Wulf’s hands. For what it’s worth, when I read the paper I got off Reedy’s desk, the one written in 1953, it was the first time I heard this version. For centuries, people have searched for the stones. The possibility that the stones could be uncorrupted is new to me.”

“It’s a nice thought.”

“I guess, but I don’t want to go down in history books as the guy who rid the world of lust. Speaking for myself, I like lust a lot. And to be honest, the whole true love thing feels kinda girly to me.”

“I must be getting used to you,” I said. “I’m only a little horrified.”

Diesel grinned. “It’s all about lowered expectations.” He stretched, and scratched his stomach. “I’m hungry. Do you have any more pumpkin muffins left?”

I shoved my feet into my sneakers and laced them up. “I have pumpkin muffins and blueberry muffins. And I think you’re an idiot.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot.”

Diesel followed me down the stairs and chose a blueberry muffin. “I’d like to go back to Harvard,” he said. “I have some questions for Julie. I don’t get the dating thing. At first I thought Reedy believed the sonnets would bring him true love somehow, and all he had to do was find the right woman, but that’s not it. The women were part of the search for the stone. I don’t think Reedy was interested in finding his own true love.”

An hour later, we met Julie in Reedy’s office.

“Unfortunately, I only have a few minutes,” Julie said. “I have a class at the top of the hour.”

“I appreciate the few minutes,” Diesel said. “Some women have come forward saying they dated Dr. Reedy recently. The family would like to know if he was serious about any of these women. We thought you might know.”

“First, let me say that I had the utmost respect for Dr. Reedy. And in fact I believe he considered me to be a good friend. Putting all this aside, I have to tell you he wasn’t always the most rational of men when it came to anything connected to John Lovey. He believed the Lovey sonnet book was a huge breakthrough. He said it contained the first clue to the Luxuria Stone’s location. He even paid a visit to someone in Louisburg Square who, according to Dr. Reedy, owned the object that held the next clue.”

“Do you know what the object or the next clue was?” Diesel asked.

“No. Only that Dr. Reedy got to see the object that held the clue, but he couldn’t decipher it. His contention was that only someone who believed in true love could decipher the clue. Call me a cynic, but I think it’s possible there simply wasn’t a clue.”

“So he was looking for a woman who believed in true love to decipher the second clue,” I said to Julie.

She nodded and checked her watch. “Yes. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I have to run.”

“One final question,” Diesel said. “Who was Ann?”

Some color rose to Julie’s cheeks. “She was another one of the true-love women. The last, so far as I know. And Dr. Reedy changed after meeting her. He became agitated and untrusting. He even accused me of spying on him when I was waiting outside his office for our weekly meeting.”

“Do you know anything about her? Last name? What she looked like?”

“No. Nothing. Only Ann.”

Julie left, but we stayed in Reedy’s office.

“There has to be something here to help us,” Diesel said. “A Beacon Hill address on a scrap of paper. A map. A phone number for Ann.”

“I imagine it would help if we had the book of sonnets.”

“Only if we knew what we were looking for. Wulf has the book, but I don’t see him moving forward. He’s got Hatchet trying to steal the key. My guess is he needs the key for something more than just opening the book. I’m sure Wulf has already opened the book without the key.”

I sat in Reedy’s chair and studied his desktop. I’d already gone through everything on his desk and in his drawers the other day, but I repeated my search. It seemed to me that if a clue existed, it would be close at hand. Reedy would have been at his desk, taking notes, doing his research. One of the items on his desk was a book on the life and works of Vincent van Gogh. It hadn’t seemed significant yesterday, but today it caught my attention because I remembered the librarian saying the cover on Lovey’s book of sonnets reminded her of Van Gogh’s almond blossom painting. I thumbed through the book and found the painting. Oil on canvas. Branches and blossoms against a blue sky. Completed in 1890. It was owned by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, but it was currently part of a traveling exhibit.

The page was held by a computer printout of what at first glance appeared to be the same painting, but on closer inspection showed small differences. Someone had circled the differences and written private collection and a Louisburg Square address in the margin.

“I think I might have something,” I said to Diesel. “Come look at this. The librarian said the Lovey book cover reminded her of a Van Gogh painting of almond blossoms. I found this art book on Reedy’s desk, and it looks like there were two almond blossom paintings that were similar but different. One is owned by a museum, but it looks like the second is in a private collection. There’s a Louisburg Square address here, and Julie said Reedy went to see someone in Louisburg Square about the clue.”

Diesel looked over my shoulder and ruffled my hair. “Way to go, Sherlock.”

Beacon Hill is a Boston neighborhood delineated by the Boston Common, the Charles River, and busy Cambridge Street. Streets are narrow, lit by gaslight, and mostly one way. No matter where you want to go on Beacon Hill, if you’re driving, you can’t get there from wherever you happen to be. Sidewalks are uneven from time and tree roots. Residences are primarily Federalist-style town houses, with some Greek Revival thrown in for variety. Charles Street slices through the residential area from one end to the other, with its antiques shops, restaurants, boutique stores, coffee shops, bakeries, and greengrocers. Louisburg Square sits two blocks uphill from Charles. The Square itself is a green oasis surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence and a sprinkling of trees. Houses around the Square are redbrick with black shutters, and usually five floors, with half of one floor belowground, opening out to a tiny backyard. This is high-end Boston real estate, with houses selling for multimillions of dollars. I’d walked the streets as a tourist, from Charles Street, up Beacon, to the Massachusetts State House, so I had a vague understanding of the geography.

Diesel left Storrow Drive for the flat of the hill, found Mt. Vernon Street, and turned into Louisburg Square. He counted off houses and idled in front of a perfectly renovated town house that sat in the middle of the block.

“This is the address on the computer printout,” he said. “According to the text I just got from my assistant, the house is owned by Gerald Belker. He’s president of Belker Extrusion. Has a wife and two adult children. This is one of three houses he owns. It’s not clear if he’s in residence. Reedy was let into the house to see the painting, but that was a couple weeks ago. My assistant called the house and got a machine.”

“What’s your assistant’s name?” I asked Diesel.

“I don’t know. She’s been with me for three weeks, and it’s too late to ask. She’d get insulted and quit.”

“So how are we going to get in to see the painting?”

“We ring the doorbell. If someone answers, we lie our way in. If no one answers, we break in.”

“I don’t like either of those ideas.”

Diesel parked two houses down. “What’s your plan?”

“You treat me to dinner at a nice restaurant, we go home, and we pretend we didn’t discover the computer printout of the second painting.”

“Not gonna happen, but after we break into the house, I’ll buy you a pizza and a beer.”

“I’m not breaking into the house. Look at these places. They all have alarm systems. The police will come and arrest us.”

“No worries. There’s not a jail that can hold me.”

“But what about me? I can’t do the whole Houdini thing you do with locks.”

“Yeah, you’d be behind bars for a long time.”

“Good grief.”

Diesel grinned. “I’m kidding. I’ll take care of the alarm.”

“You can do that?”

“Usually.”

“Only usually?”

“Almost always.”

I followed him up the stairs to Belker’s house and waited while he rang the bell. No answer. He rang again. Still no answer.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” I said. “I don’t think we should break in. It’s daylight. People will see us.”

Diesel put his hand to the door and the lock tumbled. “No one’s looking.”

He opened the door, we stepped in, and the alarm went off.

“Bummer,” he said. “I usually block the electrical signal.”

“Shut it off! Shut it off! Do something.”

“Look around for the painting.”

“Are you insane? You set the alarm off. The police are rushing over here.”

Diesel was going room by room. “The alarm company will call first.”

The phone rang.

“What should I do? Should I answer it?” I asked him.

“No. You don’t know the code word. Just look for the painting.”

My heart was racing, and I was having a hard time breathing. “I’m gonna go to jail. What’ll I tell my mother? Who’ll make cupcakes for Mr. Nelson?”

“I found it,” Diesel yelled from upstairs, barely audible over the screaming alarm.

“I’m leaving,” I yelled back. “You’re on your own. I can’t eat prison food. It’s probably all carbs.”

Diesel jogged down the stairs with the painting.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I’m borrowing it.”

“Omigod, you’re stealing it.”

“Only for a little while. Help me wrap this bed sheet around it.”

“It’s huge!”

“Yeah, it didn’t look this big in the book. The gold frame doesn’t help, either.”

We got the sheet around the painting, and Diesel hustled it out the door and down the street to his car. I had the hood pulled up on my sweatshirt and my face tucked down in case someone was looking and making notes or, God forbid, taking pictures. We slid the painting into the back of the SUV, scrambled into the front seat, and Diesel took off. He turned out of Louisburg Square, onto Pinckney. I looked back and saw the flashing lights of two cop cars as they came in and angle parked in front of Belker’s house.

“See,” Diesel said. “No problems.”

“We missed getting arrested by two minutes. And we’ve got a hot painting in the back of the car. It’s probably worth millions. I mean, this isn’t like shoplifting a candy bar. This would be a felony. Remember what they did to Martha Stewart? They put her in jail. I don’t even remember why. I think she told a fib.”

“Nobody said saving mankind was going to be easy,” Diesel said.

“We’re art thieves.”

Diesel looked over at me. “Does that turn you on?”

“No! It scares the bejeezus out of me. Aren’t you worried?”

“No, but I’m hungry.”