“You’re wrong.”
“Look, I’ll tell you what I know. In 1986, your father lent the Picasso drawing of the bull and the Soutine Bellhop to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for a show,” he said. “Museums usually insure loaned works under a blanket policy, and no one at the museum appraised the paintings. Goldstein had purchased the Picasso in 1979 at the Phoenix Gallery in New York for a hundred and forty-three thousand dollars. He bought the Soutine three years later from the Levitan Gallery for a little over seventy thousand. In 1986, they were worth about close to a million, combined, but he was allowed to file his own estimate of their value for the museum’s insurance purposes: four million. The museum drew up a loan agreement, stating the value provided by Goldstein. And Goldstein took that agreement and got a new insurance policy based on that inflated amount, underwritten by Lloyd’s of London and a German company, Nordstern. About a year after that, the art market fell, the work was worth even less, and the painting and the drawing disappeared.”
Lizzie was no longer in her body. Someone else was seated in this booth, trying desperately to hold on to that cup of coffee, nodding at the detective, thinking, It all fits.
Tandy was still talking. “Goldstein’s insurers denied the claim, saying that he had deliberately overvalued the artwork. He sued, alleging bad faith and demanding the four million and then some—he asked for another million in punitive damages.”
“My father sued?” How did she not know that?
He gave her a little hard smile. “He did. Rather than risk losing in front of a jury, the insurers backed down. They paid him the full amount.”
“You think he set it up.”
“I’m telling you the facts as I know them,” Tandy said. “And where the facts lead.”
“But that’s what you think.”
He gave the smallest of nods. “Yes.”
“So then he destroyed them,” she heard herself say coldly, as if she were talking about a stranger, a defendant whose case she’d taken on. “He had to get rid of the evidence.”
“I don’t know.”
“But it only makes sense.” That’s what she would do, she thought wildly. If she had done something insane like this, she would follow through. “You get rid of them, you destroy the evidence. You can’t fucking sell them; everyone’s on the lookout, who would buy them? If you’re doing something as horrible as this—if you’re letting your kid take the fall, you destroy them, don’t you?” Her voice had grown shaky. She slid out of the booth, stumbling. What had she been thinking, meeting with this man?
“I’m sorry,” he said, his mouth a hard line. “I’m sorry for us all.”
“Don’t,” she said as she flung a ten-dollar bill on the table. “Don’t for one moment pretend that we are in this together.”
Keep moving. That was her instinct, the only thing clear in her mind. She got on the freeway heading east and kept going, flying beneath those immense green signs that announced directions and destinations in what now seemed like a strange, foreign shorthand, not built for human scale. She passed the trickle of the concreted Los Angeles River and the Staples Center and glittery tower of the Bonaventure. The multiple lanes of freeway knotted up, traffic barely moving, and still she urged herself on.
Her mind was caught in an endless loop: her father and The Bellhop, The Bellhop and her father. She remembered how he had laughed and mussed up her hair when she had asked if the man in the painting was famous. “In our house he is,” she remembered him saying.
Did he hire someone? Did he not go to Boston at all?
All those years she had blamed herself. And he let her.
She sped up; she slowed down. No, it wasn’t true. Her hands remained tight on the steering wheel, she drove as if she had a plan. She switched the radio off, but within minutes clicked it back on. The silence was worse, shrill.
He had been ripped off by his office manager right before the paintings were stolen. His practice took a beating. And there had been that real estate deal that went bad. He stopped buying art. She knew he had expenses. Hefty ones. But this? Surely this wouldn’t have been his solution. There was that time in high school—it must have been before the paintings were stolen, it was definitely before the paintings were stolen—when Joseph had floated the idea of their moving. Friends had gotten a condo off of Olympic. A much smaller place than their house. “It’s great!” Joseph had said. “A shared pool and you girls could walk places, even to school. What do you think? Don’t you ever get tired of the hill?”
“No,” she could remember harrumphing, aggrieved. “I don’t.”
Her mind sputtered, flayed about. She remembered her first summer as an associate, when she had been doing research and came across a decision from the Second Circuit that seemed to go against the case they were building. She brought it to the senior partner, proud of herself. But the senior associate had thrown the decision back in her face. “What am I supposed to do with this?” Lizzie stammered something about how the facts didn’t match the case. “No,” the partner said, “you’ve got it wrong. You use the facts. You anticipate how others will use them. They don’t use you.”
Lizzie passed West Covina and Pomona, the sky giving in to a grayish, almost yellow tint of late afternoon. She dimly registered hunger, her gas meter dipping lower than a quarter of a tank. It was only then that she realized she was heading out into the desert.
She remembered the vastness of the desert from when she was a kid, Joseph’s small car careering along the ribbon of concrete, no match for the enormous stretch of sky and the sun-bleached ground and the snow-tipped mountains in the distance that seemed like a trick of the eye. She remembered the wind turbines, a gorgeous man-made orchard of tall sleek slices of metal, spinning, spinning.
But now the city had taken over, the Angeleno sprawl had spread. Now there were endless subdivisions and malls with Outback Steakhouses and Starbucks and Targets and Noah’s Bagels. Nothing was the same.
Lizzie drove and she drove and she thought: It’s not true. It can’t be. He had money; he did. And even if he had been in trouble, he loved the Soutine. He never would have done something like this. Not to me.
But the jagged details came careening back: her father’s face blotchy, hair matted down with sweat, as if he had flown back from Boston powered by his own vitriol and fear. A party, a fucking party, Elizabeth?! You lied to me; I trusted you and you lied. Those weeks of ugly silence: Sarah in the hospital, the two of them in the house, weary, embattled, alone. For years Lizzie’s own guilt had impelled her, shaped her.