The Dead Caller from Chicago

Thirty-four

She had people… I said I’d be hanging… She said she’d call.

It was like that with us. We’d not been married long, really only weeks, before we developed senses of each other that were ordinarily reserved for people who’d been together for decades. She knew the endings of my sentences, as I knew hers. Answers to the big questions, though, we never had the time to figure out, and we crashed when I was wrongly accused of falsifying evidence in a suburban mayor’s insurance scheme. I’d looked around for anyone other than myself to blame and saw Amanda, a rich man’s daughter who’d brought me notoriety because of her father’s prominence. Or so I reasoned, through the ninety-proof haze I’d taken to using to blur my shame. It killed my self-respect, her tolerance, and our marriage.

Our abilities to finish each other’s sentences were taking longer to die. Even the last time we’d spoken, months before, we laughed awkwardly at that last stubborn vestige of our marriage.

Her knowing that I was calling about an art question, though, went way beyond that.

The afternoon faded into dusk, and the dusk into darkness. An hour after that someone knocked on the door.

Cassone wouldn’t knock. Still, I grabbed Leo’s revolver before running down the stairs. I turned on the outside light, raised the gun, and jerked the door open.

Her beautiful brown eyes, made even darker by the hood on her black parka, went wide at the sight of the gun. She was carrying one of those small plastic-wrapped bundles of firewood that gas stations sold. A little white bag was perched on top. I tugged her inside.

“What the hell, Dek?” she asked, staring at the gun.

“What a wonderful surprise, Amanda,” I said, slamming and bolting the door with the hand that wasn’t holding an armament.

“Don’t give me that.”

“Damned out of season trick-or-treaters?”

“Nor that.”

I jammed the gun, barrel down, in the waistband of my jeans, hoping it would not shoot off anything vital, and took the firewood and the little white bag that most certainly looked like it came from a bakery.

“Are you in danger?” she asked, in a small voice.

“Nah.”

“We’ll talk.” She put a smile on her face, trying to summon up some of the old playful sternness she used to level at me, but her eyes weren’t going along. They were wary, maybe from the gun I’d added to my wardrobe, or maybe from the fact that so many months had passed since we’d last talked. I followed her up to the second-floor fireplace. Certainly there would be no banter about bringing the firewood up to the one on the third floor, opposite the bed. I set the wood down next to the hearth and turned to her.

She was looking past me, into the huge fireplace. The last time she’d come to the turret, it had been unmarked. For a moment, neither of us said anything.

“Coffee?” I finally thought to ask.

“Great,” she said, relieved.

We walked across the hall. “My,” she said, looking at the cabinets, trim, counters, and absolute lack of new appliances. “You’ve done nothing with the kitchen since I was last here.”

“I found work, for a time.”

“Insurance?”

“Profitable, too.”

“It’s coming back, finally?” The document scandal had left a long-lasting residue of doubt in the minds of my former clients.

“Slowly,” I said.

“Are you going to build a special cabinet in here so visitors won’t have to look at your revolver?”

“Ah.” I took it out of my waistband and set it on the farthest counter.

We talked of safe things while I made coffee. The little white bag contained croissants from a Chicago bakery I’d never heard of. We brought them and the coffee back across the hall, and I started a fire with scraps of trim wood I’d conveniently left all over the floor. When those caught, I added three of the split short logs she’d brought. She sat in the electric blue La-Z-Boy, I sat on the tilted red desk chair, and we ate the croissants as the fire found strength.

“I only brought enough wood for a quick fire,” she said, warming.

“Always thinking.”

“What’s with the damned gun?”

“Extra precaution for a little project I’m working on.”

“Leo?”

I paused midbite, a rare enough occurrence. “When I called, you said you were expecting to hear from me. Because of Leo?”

“Actually, I was expecting to hear from him, not you. He called me a few days ago-”

“How many days ago?” I cut in.

“I don’t remember, exactly. It was the day we got a lot of snow, before the last day we got a lot of snow.”

It was the day he’d sent Ma and Endora away and disappeared himself. “Sorry. Go on.”

“He’d called about the provenance of an obscure set of paintings that had been in the news recently. He wanted to know if I had any sources.”

“Isn’t that the sort of thing you’d be asking him about, and not the other way around?”

“Absolutely; origins are his specialty, not mine. I figured he was being extra careful, covering all his bases, because of the publicity.” She smiled softly. “When I told you I wasn’t surprised to hear from you, it was because I’d wondered if Leo’s calling me had been a way of staying in touch. I don’t think he’s ever given up on us.”

I looked away, toward the fire. “He’s a romantic.”

“And the most loyal of friends.”

“You mentioned publicity? A series of paintings has been in the news?” I asked.

“A big Hollywood divorce. Two wealthy people are fighting for control of a set of paintings.”

“Wait here,” I said. I went up to the fifth floor, brought down the picture, and set it on the card table. I switched on the Luxo.

“My, my,” she said, coming over. “Primitive. Not Grandma Moses primitive, just plain awful primitive.”

I pointed to the signature in the lower corner.

She started to grin. “Leo B.,” she read. Then the smile disappeared. She bent down and sniffed.

“I would have said grammar school artistry,” she murmured, “but the paint’s too fresh. He painted this eclectic monstrosity in acrylic, and very recently.” She turned the painting over.

“See the open seam?” I asked.

She was already picking at it as I had, gently with a fingernail.

“That doesn’t belong, does it?” I asked. “It’s been pasted on, as though to cover up the back of the original canvas?”

She said nothing as she reached for the plastic ruler I keep in a coffee mug, along with pencils. She measured the painting.

“Amanda?”

“Leo, Leo,” she whispered, setting the ruler back in the mug with exaggerated slowness.

“Amanda!”

“I thought he was talking about one of the three,” she muttered. “One of the divorce attorneys…”

She straightened up, blinking her eyes as though she’d just emerged from a cave.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, wanting to yell.

“The fourth flower.”