Pushover (Iris Thorne Mysteries Book 5) Read online

  “Do you know about Dean Palmer?”

  “I know all about him. I also know he’s disappeared.”

  “What about Enrico Lazare?”

  Weems shook his head. “Don’t know much. Interpol is in Corsica trying to track down information on him.”

  “So who stole the fox and murdered Todd?”

  “Enrico Lazare with the help of Dean Palmer.”

  “What about me?”

  “You were a lucky coincidence for Palmer and Lazare. Fillinger must have told either one or both of them about your visit and his relationship with you. Palmer knew that after Todd’s murder, he could play on your feelings for Fillinger to get you to bring over the urn, no questions asked.”

  “The Customs officer X-rayed the urn at the L.A. airport and didn’t see the fox.”

  “The urn was probably lined with lead. It’s a common way of doing these things.”

  Iris felt a glimmer of hope. “Now that you know how I got involved in this thing, I guess I can go.”

  Weems scratched his pitted cheek. “I want you to help me.”

  “Help you? How?”

  “Winslow thinks you have or can get the fox. I want you to sell it to her. Then I can arrest her and Peru.”

  “Sell her a fake?”

  “No. She’ll spot a fake. The genuine fox.”

  Iris was confused. “But you said you don’t know where it is.”

  “Palmer’s sent out word that he has the fox and he wants to unload it fast. He’s been in contact with a known stolen art fence out of San Francisco, a fat little slime ball named Douglas Melba. Melba couldn’t resist blabbing about how he’s fencing the Czarina’s fox. The only way to get the fox and to flush out Fillinger’s murderer is to set up a sting. Arrange to buy the fox from Melba. Arrest Melba, then get Melba to rat out Palmer.” Weems chewed the gum. “I want you to pose as the agent of an anonymous buyer.”

  Iris was incredulous. “What?”

  All you have to do is make a phone call to Melba. Set up a time, place, and a price. Something you do every workday anyway, right?”

  “Why me? I don’t want to participate in any of this. You have all the information. Why doesn’t the FBI take it from there?”

  “Because I’d rather use a civilian. Crooks have radar for the law. And you’re already involved. Winslow believes you have the fox. If I bring in a stranger to try and sell it to her, she won’t do the deal.”

  Iris sat down and crossed her legs. She looked away from Weems, who was intently watching her. After a long pause and with weariness in her voice she looked at Weems and said, “I’m not doing it.”

  “Then I have no choice but to arrest you.”

  Iris’s jaw dropped. “Arrest me? You can’t do that! I’m an honest, tax-paying citizen.”

  “Miss Thorne, I’m glad you pay your taxes, but you did smuggle stolen art into the United States.”

  She clenched her fists. “I don’t know that for certain and neither do you.”

  “Maybe I can prove it and maybe I can’t, but while I’m investigating you, talking to everyone you know, you’ll have a hell of a lot of explaining to do to your employers and clients, not to mention the Securities and Exchange Commission. They’ll be on this like flies on horse manure.” Weems became glib. “Of course, we’d try to keep such an investigation quiet, but you know how things can slip out.”

  Iris pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers.

  Weems took the chair next to her. He dropped the sarcasm and spoke soothingly. “Miss Thorne, some person or persons crafted an elaborate plan to rob and murder a good friend of yours. They took advantage of your honest nature and desire to do the right thing, pulled you into their criminal web, and put your life in danger. I can’t speak for you, but I’d have a hard time going the rest of my life not only having to look over my shoulder, but knowing that I could have brought the people responsible for these terrible crimes to justice. But instead of choosing to be a hero, I chose—out of fear or just not caring enough—to do nothing.”

  Iris looked at Weems’s pitted face. The sweet fragrance of his chewing gum reached her. She knew his words were chosen to push her buttons and they had hit their mark. Though the message was overblown, she felt he was being sincere. “I’d like to think it over.”

  “It’s now or never.”

  Iris uneasily shifted in the chair.

  He pressed his palms together as if in prayer and continued in a gentle voice, “All you have to do is make a phone call to Melba. A single phone call. Set up a meeting. Go to the meeting. It’ll be in a public place, in broad daylight with undercover FBI agents everywhere. Once you get the fox, we’ll arrange to sell it to Winslow and Peru, also in a public place and under the eyes of the FBI. I won’t tell you there’s no risk, but it’ll be safer than crossing Wilshire Boulevard during rush hour…or flying to Moscow by yourself.”

  “Okay. I’ll do it.” She didn’t see how she could get out of it. He did make it sound as if it were no big deal.

  He stifled a smile and extended his hand. When she took it, he clasped hers firmly. “Okay.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In contrast to their quiet drive to the Department of Justice office, Iris and Weems were lively on the way back to the gas station. Iris was nervous and welcomed the distraction. Weems told her how he’d started with the FBI twenty years ago after he’d graduated from the University of Louisiana and spent three years in the army, doing two tours in Vietnam. He was a lieutenant in the signal corps and a communications specialist, working behind the front lines, but he still saw a lot of action. He was sent home after he was wounded by a sniper near the Cambodian border.

  “Were you in the hospital for long?”

  “Just a year and a half,” Weems said lightly, as if making a joke.

  “Then you joined the FBI?”

  “Yep.”

  “How did you end up investigating stolen art?”

  “Sort of started with my first assignment with the FBI. I was on a team investigating a string of warehouse robberies in Brooklyn. One night, we were tracking this truck that we suspected was loaded with electronic equipment. We pulled it over on a quiet, rural road when this punk comes out of the cab with guns blazing. A couple of guys on the team took him out, but I just stood there.” He gave Iris a sidelong glance. “I saw and heard the flashes of gunfire in the night, and I was paralyzed. Guys were yelling at me to get down, bullets were flying…”

  Weems became somber. “I thought, this could be a problem. The FBI thought so too. They put me in mail fraud. I figured my career was over before it even started. After a few months, long months, something crossed my desk that changed my life.

  “An antique dealer in Philadelphia, an old guy by the name of Rhys Coverdale, filed a complaint. He’d spotted a Louis the Fourteenth sideboard and two chairs in a catalogue mailed to him by a London art dealer, Rita Winslow. He suspected they’d been stolen from the estate of a Philadelphia Blue Line matron who had died two years previously. Coverdale had been hired by the executor of the estate to inventory the art holdings. When it came time to distribute the art, about a dozen pieces that he’d counted turned up missing.

  “When he saw the sideboard and chairs in Winslow’s catalogue, he spoke with one of the heirs who asked Coverdale to buy them. When they arrived, the pieces had markings and characteristics that Coverdale remembered when he’d inventoried the dead woman’s art. Unfortunately, he hadn’t made notes of them, so there was no way to prove that Winslow was dealing in stolen goods. I gave Winslow’s name to Interpol. My experience with Rhys Coverdale piqued my interest in stolen art. I took classes in art history and asked to be a liaison with Interpol in the stolen art detail. That was seventeen years ago.”

  They reached the gas station where Iris had left the Triumph. The gas bays were still open, but the garage was gated and dark.

  Weems pulled up next to the Triumph.

  “Is that when you started pursuin
g Winslow?”

  He left the Thunderbird’s engine running and put it in park, then turned to face Iris. “Not quite. I tucked her name away. About five years later, I got a tip that a middleman for a wealthy art collector in Bethesda, Maryland was going to Buenos Aires to buy the Czarina’s fox. Rumor had it that the fox had surfaced after being in someone’s attic or something for years. Winslow got the same tip. We both ended up in Buenos Aires. We both got ripped off. But at least I found out that the fox existed.”

  “Were you sold the fake that’s in your office?”

  “Something like that.” After a pause, he said, “Look, I want you to make this phone call to Douglas Melba, Dean Palmer’s middleman, on Saturday. That’ll give me a day to set things up. Everything is cooking now. If we don’t move fast, it’s going to slip through our fingers.” He clutched the top of the steering wheel.

  “Why are you so hot to get Rita Winslow?”

  “She blew my deal for the fox. She’s a bad person. I don’t like bad people.”

  “Is she the one who did that to you?” Iris pointed at the long, white scar across the back of his hand.

  Weems removed his hand from the steering wheel and let it drop into his lap. He didn’t answer right away. “No.”

  “Since I’m involved in this fox situation, I think I deserve to know the whole story. I want to know what I’m getting into.”

  “Miss Thorne, it’s not in your best interests to know the whole story. You only need to know this. You have the power to bring to justice the person who murdered your friend and set you up as a stolen-art mule. I need to have your absolute commitment to this. Do I have it?” He stared at her.

  Iris met his stare. “Yes.” She opened the car door. “What’s the next step?”

  “I want you to come to the office Saturday at two o’clock.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there.”

  Weems waited as she got into the Triumph, cranked the engine, and left the gas station. He drove behind her for several blocks. At Robertson Boulevard, he turned south and she continued home.

  Automatic timers had turned the lights on, making Iris’s small house look warm and inviting. She pulled a stack of mail from the brass box near the front door and walked inside. After a hectic day at the office, she usually loved the quiet and solitude of her home. She rarely felt lonely. Tonight she did. The silence seemed oppressive, as if it had physical mass that enveloped and bore down on her. She normally enjoyed the retort of her pump heels against the hardwood floor. The old house’s solid walls and floors made her feel secure and happy with what she’d accomplished. She had earned all this. It was real. It was something she could put her arms around. It had stood the test of time. It was hers. Now each footstep seemed to mock her, chiding that it was all hollow and meaningless, that she’d anchored her dreams to a false star.

  She felt desperate to call Garland and tell him the whole story. Since she’d returned from Moscow, she hadn’t leveled with him. She’d wanted time to come to grips with all that had happened, but things kept moving too fast. But she hadn’t even been honest with him about her reasons for going to Moscow in the first place. She did go there intending to apologize to Todd about dumping him. It was an incident in her life that was unsettled and she saw an opportunity to clear the air, but secretly, she wanted to see Todd. Of course, she was deeply in love with Garland and their relationship was stable and enduring, yet Todd still haunted her. She wanted to face that unresolved chapter in her life and close the book, at long last.

  Garland had probably figured it out. He was wise enough not to stand in her way. She had gone to Moscow and come home. And Moscow had come home with her.

  She opened the doors of the armoire and turned on the television inside. The canned laughter of a sitcom filled the room with false gaiety. She had the feeling of being trapped at a cocktail party where she wasn’t having fun, a smile frozen on her face, a drink warming in her hand. She walked through her house, picking up things, putting them down, without any purpose. She hadn’t eaten since her big lunch with Liz earlier that afternoon, but she wasn’t really hungry.

  She decided to take a shower when her front doorbell rang. Through the rectangular peephole that was covered by a small, brass door, she saw Fernando Peru on her front porch.

  He was smoking a cigarette and had wandered to the edge of the porch. He turned toward the door when the hinge on the peephole cover squeaked, moving his face close to the opening, which was covered with a brass grille on the outside.

  “Iris, I’m sorry to bother you, but if you’d talk to me for a few minutes…”

  She said through the peephole, “Are you going to pull a gun on me again?”

  He apologetically raised both arms. “I said I was sorry about that. Rita told me to do it, then acted like it was my idea. Look…” He pulled up his knit shirt, revealing his muscular chest and six-pack abs. He turned around to show her that he didn’t have a gun stuck in the waistband of his jeans. “You can pat me down if you want.”

  She closed the peephole cover and unlocked the door. She wanted to hear what he had to say when Rita wasn’t around. When she opened the door, she grimaced when he tossed his cigarette butt into the flowerbed off the front of her porch. “Come in.”

  He stepped inside and raised his arms as if waiting for the pat-down.

  She waved her hand. “Would you like some coffee or something?”

  He lowered his arms. “That would be nice.”

  He smelled of faded cologne and fresh cigarette smoke. “Let’s sit in the dining room.”

  She picked up the remote control and clicked off the television, then passed beneath the arched opening that led to the dining room and beyond it, the kitchen. She began grinding coffee beans and filling the ceramic sugar bowl and creamer set that she used only when she had guests. “I don’t have decaf. This is full octane.”

  “Never drink decaf.” He was looking over Todd’s photos on the dining room table.

  “Me neither.”

  “Rita’s at a reception at the British Consul General’s house.” He picked up the framed photograph of Iris and Todd. “She likes that sort of thing. Rubbing elbows with the rich and famous. She says it’s good for business, but she likes it just because she likes it.” His Catalonian accent made the letter “s” sound like a soft “z.”

  The coffee started brewing, filling the room with its cozy aroma.

  “I came to clear up some things from this afternoon.” Peru stood the photograph on the table. “I’m sorry Rita was so cruel to you.”

  In the kitchen, Iris looked for something to serve with the coffee. “She seems to enjoy it.”

  Peru smiled knowingly.

  “Why do you stay with her?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Iris remembered an amaretto cake that a client had given her the previous Christmas. She dug it out of the freezer and started to unwrap it.

  “Please don’t go to any trouble for me.” Peru gestured toward the boxed cake.

  “No trouble.” Iris put the cake on a plate and zapped it in the microwave. “That was a rotten thing for Rita to say, especially after what happened to Todd.”

  “She’s mad that she was ripped off. She’s trying to make everyone pay. Iris, I want you to know that you weren’t just some woman in Todd’s life. Sure, Todd had girlfriends. Lots of them. But you were special to him. He loved you.”

  Iris took the cake from the microwave. She stopped to look at him.

  His eyelids with their long lashes drooped seductively. “He left Paris because of you. He was distraught after you left. Paris lost its magic for him. I told him to come to London. He moped around Rita’s flat for months. It was like he was broken.”

  Iris felt empty. She snatched a knife and sliced the cake. She carried the plate to the table. She took cups, saucers, and dessert plates from the china cabinet in the dining room and arranged them on the table, the china rattling with a brittle noise. She got out silverware and nap
kins.

  “Todd eventually snapped out of it. We did London. Partied till we dropped. He was the same old Todd again. And like the old Todd, it wasn’t too long before he moved on.” Peru sauntered around the room as he talked. “Went to Prague for a while. Made that scene. When Prague got too tame for him, he moved to Moscow. But I don’t think he ever got over you.”

  Iris poured coffee into the cups. “Please sit down.”

  Peru took a chair after Iris sat. “Todd was a good guy. A complicated guy, but good at heart.” Peru tapped his chest over his heart with his fist. “So sad, what happened to him.” He stirred several spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee.

  “Terrible.” Iris drank her coffee black. She lifted a piece of amaretto cake onto a plate, broke off a corner with her fingers, and slowly chewed.

  “Especially when you consider that the people who murdered him will probably get away with it.”

  “Who do you think did it?”

  “Lazare. It had to be Lazare.” He looked at her over the top of the coffee cup, which he held in both hands. His sleepy eyes definitely had the power to seduce.

  “Have you ever met him?”

  Peru lowered his eyes to indicate he hadn’t and took another sip of coffee.

  “What about Dean Palmer, an American, a consular officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow?”

  “No, I haven’t heard of him. Who is he?”

  Iris was vague. “Someone Todd knew.” Almost as an afterthought, she asked, “Do you know whether Todd smoked?”

  “I never saw him smoke. Why?”

  Iris shrugged. “Just wondering.”

  Peru gazed morosely out the picture window. “Poor Todd. I wish there was some way…” His voice trailed off into silence.

  “We have to find a way,” Iris said firmly, as if coming to a decision. “We can’t let the bad guys win.”

  “If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.”