The Blue Place

three

I don’t like being surprised, especially by my own behaviour, and I had no idea why I had taken Julia Lyons-Bennet’s card and agreed to be at her office tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. When a machine acts oddly, it’s easy enough to take it apart and look for the fault. If it’s a computer, say, which freezes while you’re online trying to read e-mail, you just shrug and hit the reset button.

My preferred reset button is adrenalin.

Revolution is not the hippest women’s dance club in Atlanta, but it’s the biggest, a huge building in Ansley Mall. When I slid the Saab into a parking slot, the place was already filling with the vehicles so loved by Southern dykes with money: apple-green Samurais, blood-red Jettas, peach Cabriolets, dignified gold Camrys, two silver Isuzu Troopers. It was only ten o’clock and the air was still soft and sooty with rush-hour fumes. Dogwood blossoms lay underfoot, and the parking lot smelt of rubber and asphalt and perfume: an exciting, urban scent. I made sure I was wearing my open, friendly face.

On Tuesdays, there is no cover. I slipped in unnoticed and got a Corona from the bar. There were already about two hundred people in the club: half on the dance floor, the rest drinking and talking. Two of the three pool tables were occupied. The third had money lying on the side. I put down my own quarters, looked around a little, and took a pull of my yellow beer. Lovely cold bite.

“Toss for the break,” said a clear-skinned, long-haired woman who looked as though she were just off the farm.

I smiled. “Sure.”

We exchanged names—she was Cathy—and played the first round amiably. I let her win.

“Another?”

“Why not?” I got another beer, too.

This time I won, and there were more women in the club. It got warmer. I got another beer.

Cathy left and was replaced by Ellie. I didn’t much care. I was waiting, enjoying the beer, taking the pulse of the audience because there is always an audience. Of the women at the small tables surrounding the pool area, some were talking, drinking and watching, but some were just drinking and watching.

When Ellie was replaced by Jodie and I realized the club was nearly full, I decided it was time. I smiled at Jodie, tucked my hair behind my ears—to show my jaw and the small muscles in my neck—and opened myself to the audience. As I racked the balls I held the last one in my palm, the way you cradle the weight of a breast when your lover moves over you and your breath is searing in and out, in and out. As I leaned over the cue I let the yellow light hanging low over the table slide over the hollows in my wrist, up the long smooth muscle of my bare arms and lose itself in the dip and shadowed curve of collarbone and breasts. As I drew the cue—the long beautifully polished warm strong cue—back over the sensitive webbing between thumb and index finger, I enjoyed the sensation, and let my face show it, and then I thrust with my hips with my arm with my cue into the ball, through it, and the pretty-coloured triangle exploded into a dozen rolling pieces. I threw back my head and laughed as the balls dropped in the pockets: one, two, three. Around the table with the cue now, picking up the chalk—stroke it rub it over the tip, the rounded, velvet tip, cherish it, make sure that not a millimeter is ignored—laying my left breast plump against the felt and stroking that cue back and forth, back and forth, calculating, measuring, waiting as my breathing quickened and the moment trembled then thrusting again, and round the table and again, and again and again and again until the felt was all green and clean and I straightened, nipples hard against the silk of my waistcoat, and smiled a slow, satiated smile. And then she smiled back at me from a table and stood and stepped forward like a young deer leaving the shelter of the trees.

I ordered us a beer each. She was Mindy, up from Birmingham for two days, interviewing with Coca-Cola for a job in their budgeting department. She was staying in a nice hotel downtown but didn’t know anyone and was I here on my own? Oh yes, I said, and touched her lightly on the wrist, and now I had her scent, light and flowery but not innocent, and she brushed against me with her hip, her just-a-bit-old-fashioned-from-Alabama-jean-clad hip, and she lifted her chin a little and blinked and I kissed her.

“Such pale, pale eyes,” she said.

And we had another beer and played more pool and drank more beer and danced, and at one o’clock I took her back to the hotel and took off her clothes and, to the sound of a late-breaking thunderstorm, took my time. I kissed her, and stroked the soft planes of flank and thigh, teased with fingertip and breath and gaze, and when she was shuddering like a kite on a long line, when she began to whip and plunge, when she begged me, I turned her and steadied her and let her loose.

It was always the same. They flew and I flew, but to different places.

Later, she stroked my cheek drowsily. “Your eyes are different in this light. No colour at all. Like cement.”

The Bedouin definition of day is when the light is strong enough to tell the difference between a black hair and a white hair. There are no colours in the dark.

Eventually she slept. I listened to the rain and contemplated the relaxed face, smooth and fine and very young. No doubt she thought herself worldly, sophisticated, but what would she think if she knew she was sleeping next to a woman who had killed for the first time when she was just eighteen? What did she know of that blank look that always touched their eyes before they spat blood or tried to rattle out one last breath?

I looked at my hands, turned them over in the tarnished shine of streetlights seeping through a crack in the curtains. They were long; strong and competent with nicely shaped nails; hard enough for a palm strike, soft enough to trace gentle arabesques on a taut trembling stomach or along a soft inner thigh. The stains did not show.

I woke up just after dawn, lying on my side, with a greasy headache and a craving for eggs and the bite of grapefruit juice. She scootched up behind me, tucked her belly against my back and ran a hand up my thighs. I stopped thinking about eggs. This time it was simpler, more straightforward, with grins on both sides. Angst was for the dark.

She moved away from me then, and I understood she was done: it was six-thirty, time to resume her job-seeking mask of brisk, detached efficiency. After I showered I was not surprised to find her encased in a business suit and hiding behind impersonal makeup. She didn’t have time for breakfast, but I was to feel free to use her room number in the hotel dining room. I thanked her politely, we nodded instead of touching, and I left.

The corridor to the elevators was long. I wondered why Atlanta hotels kept their public spaces so cold.

The Saab still smelled faintly of her perfume and the after-club effluvia of smoke and beer, and I told myself I was a fool. I drove back to Lake Claire very fast, with all the windows open, and found when I returned that the clocks were blinking 88:88—there had been a power hit in the middle of the night. The thunderstorm, no doubt.

I gave the homeless man in front of the Marquis Tower Two a dollar bill that was nearly whipped away in a gust of warm April wind, and went into the lobby which was all black marble and chrome. A very good, hidden sound system played Satie. The piano notes glided around the hard walls and polished floor, warming and humanizing the space, but not enough.

Thirty-four floors up, I headed towards the Lyon Art suite, expecting more sleek surfaces, with perhaps some uncomfortable furniture and elegant but indifferent staff. Instead the door swung open to laughter, bright colours and the earthy, welcoming scent of French roast. The woman who was laughing—comfortably plump, about sixty—turned at my entrance, scooted her chair under the beautiful pine reception desk, and smiled. “Good morning. How can we help you?”

The four or five people in the cubicles to the left were on the phone or tapping away at their keyboards. I smiled back. “Aud Torvingen. I have an appointment to see Julia Lyons-Bennet.”

She frowned. “Oh. She said…Didn’t she call you? I distinctly remember her telling me she was going to call you last night.” She swung her chair around again and called to a man who was munching a cinnamon bun by his computer. “Ricky, tell me I’m not losing my mind. Yesterday afternoon, when Julia got that message from InterCom, she said she was going to call Ms. Torvingen?”

“Sure did.”

She turned back to face me. “Well, somebody got their wires crossed. Julia’s not here. She had to go to Boston yesterday. She said she would call you and let you know last night.”

I remembered the storm battering the hotel window.

“I apologize on her behalf. I hope you haven’t been too inconvenienced. I know she particularly wanted to talk to you.”

Her look of genuine distress made me want to reassure her. “I think I know what happened. She probably left a message but I had a power hit last night. I bet the machine reset itself, and when I got in, there was no blinking light so I thought there was no message. No one’s fault.”

“I get so tired of the power company, don’t you? Every time there’s a storm, phht, the power goes. Still, at this time of year it’s not so bad. But when it goes in August, I just go crazy without my air-conditioning. The heat!”

“I know what you mean. When is she expected back from Boston?”

She looked surprised. “This morning. Didn’t I say? No, I don’t suppose I did.”

“Well, perhaps you could ask her to call me.” I reached for one of my not-very-informative cards.

“Oh, heavens, keep that. She’s got your number. Besides, there’s no need for you to rush off. Her plane lands in”—quick glance at her watch—“less than an hour and I’ll page her to make sure she’ll come straight here. Do you take sugar? In your coffee,” she added kindly.

“No. Thank you.”

She started bustling about. “How about cream? Yes? I wish I could get Julia to take some cream. Nothing but skin and bone. I tell her she could do with some padding, no one dates skinny girls, but she just gives me that look.” She handed me the coffee, directed a piercing look at my ringless left hand, and nodded to herself. “Dating can be hard for career women.”

I thought about Mindy, probably already smiling efficiently at her prospective employer.

She gave me a sly smile. “Well, come along, let’s go see if we can find that file she wanted you to see.”

I followed her past Ricky, who flashed me a sympathetic look, behind the cubicles and past a large room full of strange crates and bags of foam peanuts, into what I took to be Julia’s office. “Here we go.” She held out a maroon folder. I hadn’t seen where she had taken it from. “Well, don’t just stand there like a lamppost. Sit, sit.” I allowed myself to be chivvied into a comfortable chair. “You read that and drink your coffee and I’m sure it won’t feel like a minute before Julia gets here.”

I felt like a seven-year-old being comforted by a friend’s mother, but managed to regain my poise enough to smile and say, “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

She gave me a roguish twinkle, said “Mrs. Miclasz, but you should call me Annie,” and closed the door behind her.

I sipped the coffee. It was delicious, perfectly prepared, as I imagine anything prepared by Annie Miclasz would be. One of those formidable women who felt they had to hide their efficiency behind a soft, caring front; who hid for so long that the front became real; one of the women who kept the world turning; one of the women it paid to never, ever cross.

The office was large, and obviously made for use rather than show. Two large drafting tables, one with sheets clipped down; a computer; four filing cabinets; three different Rolodexes; rough iron statuary in the corner near a huge picture window; two lush green plants that I couldn’t identify; and lamps everywhere, mostly unlit. I had expected art on the walls, but they were covered with graphs and charts. No doubt the view of the city at night would be more than fair compensation.

I opened the folder. Fastened to one side were scrupulous records of billable hours (I lifted an eyebrow at her rates); phone calls; packing materials; special transport; estimated costs of airport tax; a list of security measures to be engaged to and from Atlanta and Orly—all subcontracted; a muddy Polaroid of a strangely angular picture of what looked like a ship crushed between ice floes, with Caspar David Friedrich, 39 x 51, oil pencilled on the bottom….

I mused on the relative value of things. The homeless man outside begging for dimes. Thousands of dollars to ship a single piece of canvas that was not even big enough to shelter a person from the wind and rain.

I looked at the photograph again. The pencilled writing was angular, too; that of a Lyons-Bennet more than a Miclasz, I decided. The items attached to the other side of the folder were more interesting: partly typed, partly handwritten memos detailing phone calls between Lyons-Bennet and the banker, one Michael Honeycutt; between Lyons-Bennet and James D. Lusk, Ph.D., ASA, ISA; between Lyons-Bennet and Paulette Ciccione, who turned out to be the insurance adjuster.

I took notebook and pencil from my jacket pocket and made notes as I read. Phone memo: on April tenth, David Honeycutt asked Lyon Art to ship the Friedrich to Mantes-la-Jolie (a careful annotation in Julia’s hand read: twenty-five miles from Paris), to provide insurance and security, and to have the painting in France before the end of the month. Receipts indicating that Honeycutt handed the painting over to Lyon Art on the twelfth. I jotted, Who brought? What transportation? Directly hand to hand? and went back to the notes.

Perhaps half an hour later the door opened and Annie came in. “I’ve paged her. She should be here soon.” She picked up my empty coffee cup, nodded with approval. “More?”

My forehead felt tight from lack of sleep and too much beer. Not something caffeine could fix. “No, thank you.”

Julia’s later notes were all handwritten. The prospect of the painting being a fake, of her having made a mistake, had understandably led to a desire for privacy. Handwritten notes were much more secure than any computer hard drive. I was willing to bet, though, that Annie Miclasz already knew everything in this folder.

When I had read everything I went to the window and stared out. Peachtree Street was, architecturally speaking, a virtual John Portman fiefdom. Typical of his New Atlanta, One Peachtree Center rose diagonally across from the window: arrogant, too big, erected without any consideration for neighbours; its open metalwork spire glinting wasteful and golden in the late morning sun. To the left was another of his monstrous towers with its buff-coloured stone and mean, prisonlike windows, linked—by those silly glass sky bridges that Dornan, a friend of mine, refers to as gerbil tubes—to the Mariott Marquis and the Gaslight Tower. People scurried back and forth looking nervous; below, the streets seethed with traffic even though it was not remotely near any kind of rush hour or even lunchtime. I wondered idly what kind of damage a couple of antipersonnel mines would do to those tubes and the street below.

Atlanta was a big city getting bigger every day: three million people living, breathing, working, cutting down trees and spewing out waste. This week there was one less than there had been: Jim Lusk, Ph.D., ASA, ISA. Where did he fit in the story of the fake painting, the very suspicious cocaine, and the banker? The police were no longer looking; they were only too happy to believe the soured drug deal story, but drug dealers would not leave several hundred thousand dollars worth of product lying around for the police to pick up.

Murders are committed for a variety of reasons but, given the supposed worth of the painting, and the cocaine, I would bet on money, power, or a warning—or a combination of all three. The question was, whose money, whose power, and who was being warned, and about what?

Ask any airline attendant and they will tell you that the worst passengers are always from first class: corporate CEOs who defecate on aisle trolleys and wipe themselves down with linen napkins when their third bottle of wine isn’t brought fast enough; the seventeen-year-old daughters of Arab sheiks who pinch and slap attendants who can’t provide Belgian chocolates. They have money and power and are used to the world conforming to their every whim. Lusk’s murder, like every other, came down to the same thing: someone out there believed that the rules everyone else obeyed did not apply to them.

The door opened behind me. Julia. No coat, hair in a French braid so tidy that either the wind had stopped or she had taken the time to replait it after arriving. She was sipping from a large coffee mug: probably already briefed by Mrs. Miclasz.

“I’m so sorry you have had to wait.”

I nodded over the file still on the chair. “It’s been fruitful.”

“I imagine you have questions.”

“I do. But let’s discuss them over lunch. I didn’t have time for breakfast.”

“Certainly, but there is one formality we should attend to first. The fee.” Here on her own turf she looked different: more whole and competent; denser somehow.

I had no idea what private investigators charged. “One twenty-five an hour, plus expenses, with a three-thousand-dollar advance.”

“The advance is fine, but I can’t pay more than eighty an hour, and the only expenses I’ll allow are travel.”

“One hundred, travel and food.” I smiled and added, “I’ll buy lunch.” I didn’t need the money but, judging by the rates she charged for her own services, she could afford it.

She gave in gracefully enough and asked Mrs. Miclasz to draw up a contract. It appeared in suspiciously short order. “Do you hire investigators often?” She shrugged, which I interpreted as no. I read it carefully—it seemed straightforward enough—and we both signed. Mrs. Miclasz then cut a cheque, one of those oversized corporate things that I had to fold twice to get in my pocket.

The old Murphy’s Restaurant had reminded me of the lower decks of a nineteenth century sailing ship: hot and airless, with cramped alcoves and no headroom. Five years ago, they had moved to specially built quarters just across the street, and Julia and I took a table by one of the many long, open windows where the spring air—softened, now that we were out of the canyon streets of downtown, to a gentle breeze—wafted pink and white dogwood blossom over the flagged floor, and where sunlight made me want to blink and stretch like a cat.

I ordered mixed greens with oregano garlic dressing, followed by lemon chicken and wild rice. “And please bring some bread meanwhile.” Julia pondered the menu, her blue eyes the colour of faded ink in the strong sunlight. I sipped idly at my water, felt a sudden flush of desire as a bare-midriffed waitress eased by and reminded me of Mindy’s pliant body under my hands.

Never mix business with pleasure. I thought deliberately about the fire, what it would have done to a human being. “Somebody out there killed Lusk for a reason. Do you have any ideas?”

“No. But the whole drug idea is ridiculous.”

“Yes.”

“You agree?”

“The cocaine was a plant. Did Lusk have any enemies—or any friends, lovers, ex-spouses who might want him dead?”

“No. Or at least not to my knowledge.”

“How good a friend was he?”

“Good.” A pause. She made a visible effort to let down her barriers. “Getting better. We met ten years ago, at Northwestern. He was one of my teachers. We kept in touch. When I moved to Atlanta six years ago, we had lunch. We had lunch regularly. Sometimes we had supper at his house when he had a rare painting or sculpture for me to look at. It doesn’t sound like much, but for him it was. He was a kind, gentle man. Shy. I think it took him all those years to realize I didn’t want anything from him except friendship, to share his knowledge and love of art. But he was beginning to unbend. We’d been talking about maybe going to Memphis together this summer to see that Moderns exhibition. He doesn’t like to travel, but he was so excited….” She looked fixedly out of the window.

I didn’t want her to cry before I’d had something to eat. “Were you romantically involved?”

“No.” It came out clipped and glacial. I could imagine the half-formed tears freezing across her cornea.

“What do ISA and ASA stand for?”

“The International Society of Appraisers and the American Society of Appraisers.”

“That’s how he earned his money?”

“Yes. As I said, he didn’t like to travel very much, he hated to fly, so he told me he made his travel rates quite ridiculous, but every now and again there would be a particularly difficult identification problem somewhere like New York or Vancouver and a client would be willing to pay his huge fees plus the expense of travelling by train, first class.”

“When you say ‘ridiculous,’ just how much?”

“I don’t know, but probably something like four thousand dollars a day.”

A day. “So he wasn’t under any financial pressure.”

“Not that I know of. But he was a very private person.”

I pulled out my notebook, made a note to check out Lusk and to ask a few questions about the recovered cocaine. The salad came. I paid attention to the food for a few minutes, then flipped back a couple of pages for the notes I had made reading Julia’s file.

“Tell me about the transfer of the painting from the banker to your premises. One of your staff picked it up from an address in Marietta—was that Honeycutt’s home or an office?”

“His home. He works downtown, at Massut Vere.”

“Was the painting received from his hand, or from one of his representatives?”

“Ricky and Maya—that is, Ricard Plessis and Maya Hall—who have both worked for me for a long time, took one of our trucks to Honeycutt’s house at ten in the morning and took delivery of the painting from his housekeeper. It was already crated. They gave her a receipt.” Fast, clear, detailed: she had obviously been through all this herself before talking to me.

“Did they unwrap it to check what it was before giving the receipt?”

“No.”

“Did the fact that it was all crated and covered up not make Ricky or Maya suspicious?”

“No. It’s usual to protect such valuable objets.”

“Yet you uncrated it to check.”

“No. That is, yes, I uncrated it, but that’s usual, too. If I’m to be held responsible for the safe transportation of a painting, I like to pack it properly from scratch in-house. Owners sometimes have very odd ideas about wrapping pictures. I’ve heard horror stories of Old Masters wrapped in newspapers and arriving with ghostly copies of the funnies imprinted on a stately old forehead.”

“Do you think the clients know you will unpack their careful work?”

She considered that. “I don’t know. Those that ask are told we carry our own packing materials to protect the work during the transfer from client to Lyon Art, but not many do ask, so I suppose they assume we’ll just crate up around their packing.”

“How well was the Friedrich—or the fake Friedrich—packed?”

“Very well. Clean linen wrappings. Properly measured wooden frame crate with the correct filling. Actually, it came wrapped in the same packing I used when I first brokered it to the original owner, Charlie Sweeting, two years ago.”

I made a note to ask for Sweeting’s address. “Tell me about the painting.”

Apparently Caspar David Friedrich was arguably the most important German Romantic. His technique was impersonal and meticulous. The picture was painted in 1824, insured for three million dollars. “It would probably fetch a little less than that at auction, of course. Two years ago, when I first brokered it to Sweeting, it sold for one and a quarter.”

“And you were quite persuaded of its genuineness two years ago?”

“I was.” Her pupils were tight and small.

I said easily, “I don’t know as much about art as I need to for this, so if I ask questions that seem to question your expertise or, even worse, your integrity, chalk it up to my ignorance, but please answer them. I need the information.” She nodded infinitesimally. “What made you so sure, then, that it was genuine, and equally sure now that it was not?”

“There is a certain quality in Friedrich’s work, a haunting, prismatic loneliness.” She didn’t sound the least self-conscious. “It doesn’t editorialise. It doesn’t try to manipulate the emotions the same way, say, Turner did with his tinted steam.”

“Tinted steam?”

“Something that Constable said about Turner. Anyway, when I first saw Crushed Hope it seemed to me that this clarity was present. When I saw it again, ten days ago, it was not.”

Interesting, the way her speech got more formal as she discussed art. “So, if pushed, would you say you might have been mistaken two years ago, or that there were two different paintings?”

Our entrees arrived then and she used them as an excuse to delay her reply, but after a while, she sighed and said, “I don’t know. I think they’re different paintings, but I don’t know how to prove it.”

We ate for a while longer. If it was the fake painting that had gone up in smoke, where was the real one? “When you first brokered the deal to Sweeting, did you check the painting’s provenance?”

“I took a look, of course. The then-owner had had possession for more than thirty years, and he showed me the provenance he had been given by the auction house in the sixties.” I frowned, but before I could say anything, she said, “A provenance from a reputable auction house is a bit like the deed to a house, like a bank note. You just…accept it.”

“Do you have a copy of that provenance?”

“Yes.”

“I think we need a division of labour. I’ll check on the people, you take the painting.” She needed to be clear about the provenance; doubt about her own judgement was eating her up. “Find out everything you can. Check back more than a hundred years if you have to. I’ll need addresses for Honeycutt and Sweeting. And Julia, when I say division of labour, I mean it. Stay away from Honeycutt and Sweeting. Stick to the painting. Can you do that?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m making it a condition of working with you.” I took the oversized cheque from my pocket. “If you don’t agree, I’ll tear this up now and we’ll part on friendly terms.”

“But why—”

I held the cheque up. “Yes or no.”

“I don’t have much of a choice, do I? Yes, all right. I’ll stay away from Honeycutt and Sweeting.”

We talked some more but said nothing useful. I paid. We walked out into the sunshine, stopped by our respective cars. After chi sao, it seemed ridiculous to shake hands.

“I’ll call,” I said.

“Benny? It’s Torvingen. Yes, I know it’s been a long time but why would I want to spend my days hanging around the evidence locker when I don’t have to? Pretty good, pretty good. Listen, Benny, just curious: What can you tell me about the coke that was fished out of that Inman Park burn earlier this week? No, Benny…Benny, I don’t need to know everything. Just tell me if it was the real thing or dreck cut a hundred times. It was? You’re sure? Yeah, me too. How about later this week? There’s a new Katherine Bigelow coming out.”

Ben Heglund was a movie buff. He would do anything to get a free pass and see a film a week before the general public. He was also five-foot-eight and thin as a rail and could eat more junk food at one sitting than anyone I have ever known.

So the cocaine was pure. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of it left to be found by the police. Why? It no more fit the drug killing scenario than the murder itself.

Drug killings generally fell into two categories: simple, gang-related turf warfare—who controls what parts of the neighbourhood, who decides on the volume of product; and struggles among the real power brokers which usually led to the spectacular executions of whole families and sometimes even friends and acquaintances, executions gruesome enough to serve as a dire warning to other little fish who were tempted to grow bigger. The burn that killed Lusk, though, had been surgically precise.

Three names: Lusk, Honeycutt, and Sweeting. Lusk was dead and out of the game, and it wasn’t to Sweeting that Julia had talked about Lusk and her doubts about the painting’s provenance. There was no hurry. Honeycutt would have no reason to think anyone suspected him of anything, and complacent people are rarely dangerous.

I mulled it over. I had spent more time as a member of the Red Dogs, the hit squad of the APD, than I had as a regular detective, but the basics were very simple: gather information, assimilate the evidence, make an arrest—or, in this case, give everything to the police so they could make the arrest. But information was the first step.

Although I had Charlie Sweeting’s phone number, I looked him up in the book. He was listed under Charlie Sweeting, not C. or Charles, and the number matched the one Julia had given me. One face for all comers. I phoned. He agreed, in the kind of Southern accent that seems to embarrass the inhabitants of the New Atlanta, to see me just as soon as I could get there.

He lived ten minutes from me, on Spring Street, where the servants’ cottages in the back gardens were bigger than my house. I pulled up before a mansion with a sweeping front lawn that was probably planted sixty years ago, bright with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of perfect tulips. They would not last much longer in this heat, no matter how many gardeners he employed. One of them was out there now in threadbare summer chinos, clipping busily.

He stood up as I approached the door and I realized immediately that he was not the gardener. “Miss Torvingen?”

White moustache beautifully trimmed, greyish blue eyes, thin, freckled arms with crepey skin, liver spots showing through the thinning yellow-white hair. Old enough to be stubborn about the ways to address women. “Yes.”

He stripped off his work gloves and held out a long, beautifully kept hand that looked absurdly young and able. “How do you do?”

“A little warm.” I wasn’t, particularly, but I am tall and move too easily, and old-fashioned Southern men never relax around me until they can convince themselves that they are physically superior. It speeds things along a little if I help them out. He led me into the airy entrance hall and then a sunny drawing room. Air-conditioning whispered in the background. He spent some time pulling out the chair, ordering me iced tea from his housekeeper, asking me if the temperature was agreeable.

“Lovely tea,” I said when it arrived, and it was: brown and strong as a tennis player’s arm, and cool, with just the right touch of lemon.

“Thank you. Bessie’s been making it for the family to that same secret recipe for twenty years.”

I smiled, and we complacently admired our exchange of information: I had the breeding and manners to not rush, to appreciate his hospitality; he was rich and settled enough to have an old family retainer and to putter about in his own garden if he chose.

“Now then, Miss Torvingen—”

“Aud, please.”

“Then you must call me Charlie. Miss Lyons-Bennet tells me there’s been some unpleasant business with the painting I sold to Honeycutt. Something about a fire, and now questions about the insurance.”

“Yes.”

“And you think I can help?”

“I do. I’d be grateful if you could tell me first why you decided to sell.”

He looked at the European cut of my clothes. “I don’t know how long you’ve lived in Atlanta, Aud, but it’s a thrusting, hot-blooded place. Fortunes to be made, even now.” He knew as well as I did that Atlanta fortunes were now made by real estate reptiles with cold eyes and flickering, forked tongues. “I’m a hot-blooded man myself, and that Friedrich was a cold piece of work to wake up to, day after day, every brushstroke just so, making the ice look like a bunch of stacked bricks. I just got tired of the darn thing.”

“You didn’t start to wonder whether or not it was authentic?”

His face stilled for a moment, then stretched in a grin that was wide enough to draw what was left of his widow’s peak an inch closer to his eyebrows. “So that’s what this is about! No wonder Julia was so goddamned coy on the phone. Looks like I got rid of it in the nick of time. They think my Friedrich’s a fake?”

“Actually, it depends on who you mean by ‘they.’”

“Oh, let’s quit fencing, shall we?” He was full of good humour now: he hadn’t been skunked in any deal. He was still a top dog. “So what you want to know is: was I a dupe, or was I trying to dupe someone else?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“All I can tell you is that I bought a painting from Julia Lyons-Bennet in good faith, and sold that exact same painting in just as good faith three months ago. I believed—still do, as a matter of fact—that it was genuine. No one but a poker-faced German with a high pucker factor could have painted such a humourless thing. No, no,” he said genially, “the only thing I can’t tell you is why I bought it in the first place.”

I switched direction. “How did you come to offer the painting to Honeycutt?”

“He made an offer to me.”

“How did that come about?”

“We were at one of those damn charity dinners, for the zoo, I think, or maybe it was the symphony. Anyhow, he was asking about reputable dealers in the city. I told him about Julia—how she got me a good price on the Friedrich even though I now hated the damn thing. Then a few months later we bumped into each other in Turner’s box at a Braves game.” He was much too well bred to wait to see if I had picked up on the fact that he had been Ted Turner’s guest, but I obliged him with raised eyebrows anyway. “He’d remembered our conversation. We talked some more about other things, investments and so on. It’s always good to know another banker, so I invited him to the party I give every year to pay off all my social obligations—kills about a hundred birds with one stone. Anyhow, he accepted. During that party—and I remember particularly because we were just about to start serving the food, and goose goes cold so fast—he asked to see the painting. It used to hang in the upstairs dressing room, so I told him to take a look but not to be too long if he wanted any of the bird. When he came down, he said he’d like to buy it. I told him he could have it and welcome if he paid what I paid for it two years ago, plus ten percent—art goes up all the time, you know, even stiff Germanic mistakes like that—plus any expenses. And that was pretty much that.”

“When was your party?”

“January nineteenth.”

“And the Braves game?”

“That would have been September or thereabouts.”

“Tell me what you think of Honeycutt.”

His eyes gleamed with amusement. “He speaks well and knows the right people but I wouldn’t put my money in his bank, and I sure as hell wouldn’t trust him to be able to shoot his own dog if he had to.”

I considered for a moment. Good old Charlie Sweeting liked me, probably thought I was a smart, sweet thing. “I’d like to ask you a favour.”

“Fire away.”

“I’d like to meet Mr. Honeycutt, but I don’t want him to know why I want to meet him. It’s all very delicate, with Ms. Lyons-Bennet’s reputation involved and so on. Perhaps you could think of a way?”

“Well, now, I might just at that. Give me a day to chew on it.”

I gave him my card and left him feeling quite pleased with himself.

When I built the deck and the master suite, I turned one of the original two bedrooms into my work space. It is a big, square room, with a heart-of-pine floor, large windows and a skylight. Up against the two white walls farthest from the door are my benches and vises, the mitre, jig, and radial arm saws, the sanders, well machined, efficient and reasonably new. I use them when needed and forget about them when not. The wall on the right as I enter the room is where I keep my hand tools, some of which I have had since I was a teenager. I found my brad-awl, for example, in a junk shop in a small Yorkshire town; it was probably made in the 1920s; its smooth wooden handle nests perfectly in my palm. I have several planes, different sizes and types. Their handles are painted sober, strong colours—navy blue, hunter green, chocolate—their blades all gleam that particular oily grey of quality steel. The chisels, with their matching pale oak handles, are a complete set that belonged to one of my mother’s uncles. I know the foibles of every single tool, how each shapes the wood to which I set it.

Wood is an endlessly adaptive material. You can plane, chisel, saw, carve, sand, and bend it, and when the pieces are the shape you want you can use dovetail joints, tenpenny nails, pegs or glue; you can use lamination or inlay or marquetry; and then you can beautify it with French polish or plain linseed oil or subtle stains. And when you go to dinner at a friend’s house, the candlelight will pick out the contours of grain and line, and when you take your seat you will be reminded that what you are sitting on grew from the dirt, stretched towards the sun, weathered rain and wind, and sheltered animals; it was not extruded by faceless machines lined on a cold cement floor and fed from metal vats. Wood reminds us where we come from.

When I want to use my long muscles, feel arms and legs flex and bend, the sweat run down my neck and get in my eyes, I build something big. Framing in the master suite extension had taken me two weeks, the deck another six days. But after talking to Sweeting, I wanted something more exacting than energetic, something to free my mind.

I had been working for the last two weeks on a chair of English pine. My hand plane slid down the wood, zzst zzst, and buttery shavings curled to the floor. Zzst zzst. English pine is darker than its acid-yellow American cousin, so rich it makes you want to reach out and put it in your mouth. The grain is finer, denser, a little less spongy, such a joy to plane that when I first started working it I often took off more than I needed in the sheer pleasure of watching the blade slide through it. Zzst zzst. The shavings piled up. Sunlight, shivered and greened by the foliage outside the window, warmed the heaps, filling the room with the simple, uncomplicated scent of fresh-cut pine. Zzst zzst. I could feel my face relaxing, the muscles around my ribs letting go.

The phone rang. I listened with only half an ear as the answering machine stopped clunking and the caller started to talk. Helen and Mick, telling me about the performance artist and body sculptor who would be at the King Plow Arts Center on Thursday night, and asking if I wanted to go with them. I hadn’t seen Helen and Mick for two or three weeks. I might enjoy it.

Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. “Ms. Torvingen, this is Philippe Cordova. Our client is arriving in two days and I would like to go over some of her intended activities with you before then. At your convenience.”

Less than fifteen seconds. Very European: no hello-how-are-you, no extraneous information, blessedly uncluttered.

I put down the plane, twirled the brass handle of the vise, lifted the thick oblong of wood. Coming along nicely. I resecured it. Set the plane to the wood, stopped when I realized this side needed slightly less pressure, then began again until I was back in the unhurried, endless rhythm. Zzst zzst. This was the kind of work I understood. I knew where the wood came from, that for every tree cut down, another was planted, that I could make a chair both functional and beautiful. I was adding to the world, not taking.

Did Julia ever feel this kind of inner satisfaction? I had only ever seen her look tense or worried or irritated. I could not imagine that face in contented repose, or that the fierce competitiveness of collecting might induce such a frame of mind. But everyone has a private and joyful hobby, even if it’s just bobbing about in the bath playing with yellow rubber ducks. I smiled at the thought of Julia talking to her ducks, hair pulled up in a topknot, soap bubbles clinging to the damp skin just below her bare collarbone….

Zzst zzst.

Little Five Points is Atlanta’s East Village, the hipcoolfunky heart of the city where the two most recent commercial buildings are a tattoo parlour and a leather and fetish rummage store called The Junkman’s Daughter. I don’t know if there’s a special tenants’ committee, but the uncool are not allowed. Even the pharmacy is run by a man called Ira who knows everything about everybody and flips pills and salves and prescription printouts with the pizzazz of a cocktail waiter. Here is where you’ll find Charis, the city’s only feminist bookshop, and Sevenandah, the whole-food cooperative. Here is where Atlanta’s musicians and poets and artists hang out to reassure themselves that, yes, they really are right to starve for their art.

The two triangular patches of grass at the nexus of the five converging roads were as usual full of long-haired men and short-haired women trying to look drawn and anguished and tragic and succeeding only in looking a little muddled, rather young and tolerably well fed. Dornan calls them the Oh-I’m-so-depressed-I’ll-paint-my-room-black-and-purple crowd. He takes their money with great delight.

Dornan owns the Borealis Café chain. There are seven stores in Atlanta and its suburbs but the L5P store was the first, and Dornan spends most of his time there. Today, it smelled of dark, bitter coffee, frothed milk, red wine and, very faintly, pot—as always.

“Torvingen! Luck smiles on you as usual. A second or two later and I’d be away to Marietta to pay a little visit to the newest addition to our café family. But now that you’re here, perhaps I’ll stay a minute or two.”

He was always just about to leave, always about to pick up the phone, and he always persuaded himself to sit for a minute or two that stretched into thirty, into two hours, all night. We go back a long way.

“And what’s new in your life?” he asked as we took our usual table in the corner where he could lean over and beckon a server, watch the other tables, and look through the window all at the same time.

“This and that.”

“Ah, now, don’t be coy. You’re wearing your hunting face. Two lattés, tall, and biscotti, Jonie, if you please.” The long-suffering barista was already lifting cups and spoons onto a tray. “Thank you, my dear.” As always, he looked delighted, but I knew if she had not known what to prepare, those merry blue Irish eyes would have glinted cold as Galway Bay in February. He sipped, sighed with pleasure as though it were his first coffee of the day, and leaned over the table. “So tell me about your hunt.”

I told him about bumping into Julia, the fire, Denneny poking his nose in, and Julia’s offer. “So unless it’s all one big coincidence, I’m looking for someone who can find a professional torch at six hours’ notice, who thinks nothing of leaving several keys of pure cocaine behind as false evidence, and who is somehow tied in with a valuable piece of art.”

“Is that all,” he said comfortably.

“And she doesn’t even realize that the burn was as much directed at her as Lusk, or the painting.”

“You haven’t told her?”

“No. She doesn’t need to know. The painting was burnt, the art historian is dead, and she told the insurance adjuster she had no doubts about the painting’s genuineness. She has no evidence and has already undermined her own credibility by lying to the insurance company. She’s not in danger.”

“So what is it that’s making you think you want to be a detective again instead of a nice, boring personal security consultant?”

I ignored him but, as usual, that made no difference.

“Well, maybe it is the boredom. Ah, but then why don’t you just go risk your life rock climbing or skydiving or hang gliding, in your usual way?”

He didn’t really expect an answer, which was good because I couldn’t give him one.