Let Me Call You Sweetheart

86

At nine-thirty that morning, Jason Arnott looked out the window, saw the cloudy, overcast sky and felt vaguely depressed. Other than some residual achiness in his legs and back, he was over the bug or virus that had laid him low over the weekend. But he could not overcome the uneasy sense that something was wrong.

It was that damn FBI flyer, of course. But he had felt the same way after that night in Congressman Peale’s house. A few of the downstairs lamps that were on an automatic switch had been on when he got there, but the upstairs rooms were all dark. He had been coming down the hallway, carrying the painting and the lockbox that he had pried from the wall, when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He had barely had time to hold the painting in front of his face when light flooded the hallway.

Then he had heard the quavering gasp, “Oh, dear God,” and knew it was the congressman’s mother. He hadn’t intended to hurt her. Instinctively he had rushed toward her, holding the painting as a shield, intending only to knock her down and grab her glasses so he could make his getaway. He had spent a long time talking with her at Peale’s inaugural party, and he knew she was blind as a bat without them.

But the heavy portrait frame had caught the side of her head harder than he intended, and she had toppled backwards the stairs. He knew from that final gurgle that she made before she went still that she was dead. For months afterward he had looked over his shoulder, expecting to see someone coming toward him with handcuffs.

Now, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise, the FBI flyer was giving him that same case of the jitters.

After the Peale case, his only solace had been to feast his eyes on the John White Alexander masterpiece At Rest, which he had taken that night. He kept it in the master bedroom of the Catskill house just as Peale had kept it in his master bedroom. It was so amusing to know that thousands of people trooped through the Metropolitan Museum of Art to gaze on its companion piece, Repose. Of the two, he preferred At Rest. The reclining figure of a beautiful woman had the same long sinuous lines as Repose, but the closed eyes, the look on the sensual face reminded him now of Suzanne.

The miniature frame with her portrait was on his night table, and it amused him to have both in his room, even though the imitation Faberg’ frame was unworthy of the glorious company it kept. The night table was gilt and marble, an exquisite example of Gothic Revival, and had been obtained in the grand haul when he had hired a van and practically emptied the Merriman house.

He would call ahead. He enjoyed arriving there to find the heat on and the refrigerator stocked. Instead of using his home phone, however, he would call his housekeeper on a cellular phone that was registered to one of his aliases.

Inside what seemed to be a repair van of Public Service Gas and Electric the signal came that Arnott was making a call. As the agents listened, they smiled triumphantly at each other. “I think we are about to trace the foxy Mr. Arnott to his lair,” the senior agent on the job observed. They listened as Jason concluded the conversation by saying, “Thank you, Maddie. I’ll leave here in an hour and should be there by one.”

Maddie’s heavy monotone reply was, “I’ll have ready for you. You can count on me.”