“About the detective.”
“Oh,” Lizzie said, and her stomach contracted. The detective, Max. She couldn’t handle thinking of either. “I haven’t spoken to him.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.” That wasn’t exactly true. She thought back on the other day, when he was so adamant. “I didn’t think it through. I wanted to talk to you.”
“Ah. So you ran away.” Sarah grinned, which was both irritating and comfortingly familiar. “You ran away like you often do.”
“Come on, that’s not true,” she said, although the second Sarah said it, Lizzie was supplying her own examples: she had run away from Ben; she had fled California and her father; she had hightailed it out of L.A. after meeting with Tandy. She ran away as if leaving the scene of the crime would negate it—which it never did. “Jesus, do you ever let up?” she said with affection. Her sister had driven a hundred miles, just for her.
Sarah shrugged. “Not really,” she said, grinning again.
They ate fried calamari and tuna burgers sandwiched in sweet buns and slathered in tarter sauce and all that richness didn’t come close to filling Lizzie up. They curled up on the giant bed, flipping through the channels until they found Gene Hackman in The Conversation (Sarah: “I always thought he was sexy.” “You think a lot of men are sexy,” Lizzie said, which made Sarah laugh.) Lizzie called Max, leaving a message on his cell phone, saying, “I’m out with my sister, and I’m drunk. I’m staying with her tonight,” which was, at least, part of the truth.
They pulled back the comforter and climbed beneath the sheets, so soft they made Lizzie want to cry. “You’re always looking for answers, you think every situation has an answer,” Sarah said after they turned off the lights. “Maybe there isn’t one here; did you ever think that?”
“No,” Lizzie murmured honestly. “I didn’t.” She rested her head on her sister’s shoulder. She was so tantalizingly close to sleep. She had a flash of flying back and forth from New York to L.A. when they were kids, Sarah’s head damp with sweat as she slept against her, shuttling between their parents’ homes, thousands of miles up in the air. They weren’t their mother’s or their father’s then, but each other’s. Here was the best thing their parents had ever done.
The next afternoon, they took to the road, and before Lizzie knew it, she was back in Venice. There was Max, swinging the door open before she rooted out her key. “I thought I heard you,” he said, leaning in to kiss her. “I just got home a few minutes ago.”
In an instant, she was taking in his watchful eyes, the lanky height of him. She felt her heart lurch, a gawky, clumsy step. “You look tired,” she said, following him in. If anything, she knew she was the exhausted-looking one. But his eyelids did seem heavier, the lines gullying his mouth sharper, more pronounced. He seemed, if only for a second, not just older but old.
“I stayed up late last night—too late. But I still can’t believe I found it,” he said with a sly smile.
She looked at him, not comprehending. “Found what?”
“Didn’t you get my message?”
She shook her head; she had never listened to the voice mail he left last night.
“The gallery records,” Max said, gesturing toward a pair of open boxes by the sofa. A cloth-covered book lay next to the glass bird sculpture and a bottle of scotch on the coffee table. Max picked up the thick book. “I found it on my first try,” he said with a melancholic stamp of pride. “See?” He pointed at a swollen page. The entry, written in florid cursive, was divided into columns and filled with numbers looping and dipping across. Lizzie felt dizzy, as if she too were swimming off the page:
Chaim Soutine (1893–1943)
The Bellhop
signed “Soutine” (lower right)
oil on canvas
26 1/8 x 20 1/8 in.
Painted c. 1921
“My parents purchased it on September 12, 1971, for fourteen thousand seven hundred dollars. They bought it from a Jack Mendor. I went online,” Max was saying. “And I found this obit.” He handed her a printout. She read: “John (“Jack”) Thomas Mendor, of Fair Lawn, N.J., passed away on November 29, 1989, his beloved wife, Maggie (Ingoglia), by his side. A World War II veteran, he proudly served his country during three major battles in the European theater, including Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. After returning from war, he gained employment at the Joseph Kurzon Electrical Supply Company as a salesman, and worked at the company for twenty-nine years, rising to become an executive. He leaves behind his loving wife and two sisters.”
“I’ll bet you he bought the painting while he was in Europe during the war,” Max said. “Doesn’t that make sense? It all fits.”
It all fits. That’s what Lizzie had told herself when she was speaking to Tandy, that’s what she had said to Sarah earlier. “Yeah,” she said faintly to Max now. A GI brought The Bellhop back to America, to Jersey? An electrical supply salesman?
“I looked up his wife too. She died in 2002. They didn’t have any children. I wish there were more to learn,” Max said. “But now we at least know who my parents bought it from and how it probably got here.”
“Yes, thank you,” Lizzie said automatically. “Thank you for going to the trouble for finding this.” Her mind was skittering about: a vet grilling in his Jersey backyard, boasting about the painting he had bought for pennies in Europe; I’m telling you where the facts lead, Detective Tandy was saying. Lizzie put Mendor’s obituary and the gallery book on the coffee table, next to the bottle of scotch. It was open, she saw. “You’ve been drinking,” she said.
“My company while you were gone. I’ve gotten used to having you around.”
She nodded, looking out the window at the strip of muddy canal.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I saw the detective yesterday.” Her voice sounded hoarse.
“What detective?”
“Gilbert Tandy.”
“I don’t know who that is. Should I?” There was no look of recognition on his face—his gaze remained steady, maddeningly difficult to read. Could he really not know?
“The detective investigating my father’s stolen artwork.”
“Oh,” he said, and she could have sworn that he pursed his lips. “And how did that come about?”
There was no turning back now. “I called him.”
“And? Did you learn anything?” He folded his arms over his chest, but his voice stayed infuriatingly calm.
“He said; he said . . .” The words felt bony, useless; she had to force them out of her throat.
“What?” And there was something—a shadow crossing his face, a crack of hesitation. She hadn’t imagined it, and now she felt a terrible fear.
“You have to tell me. Please tell me,” she said.
He shook his head.