A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(208)
St. James chuckled. “But he didn’t go on?”
“Apparently Mr. Vallera Senior came on the scene. There was some background noise suggesting someone’s displeasure and the line went dead shortly thereafter.”
“You’re owed, Tommy,” St. James said.
“Not by Mr. Vallera Senior, I hope.”
Now in his hotel room, St. James contemplated his next move. Without getting one agency or another of the United States government involved, he reached the ineluctable conclusion that he was on his own, that he would have to ferret out more facts in one way or another and use those facts to smoke out Guy Brouard’s killer. He considered several ways of going at the problem, made his decision, and descended to the lobby. There he inquired about using the hotel’s computer. The receptionist, to whom he had not endeared himself earlier by having her track him round the island, didn’t meet his request with unbridled enthusiasm. She drew her lower lip in under her protruding upper teeth and informed him she would have to check with Mr. Alyar, the hotel’s manager. “We don’t usually give residents access...People generally bring their own. You don’t have a laptop?” She didn’t add “or a mobile?” but the implication was there. Get with it her expression told him just before she went in search of Mr. Alyar.
St. James cooled his heels in the lobby for nearly ten minutes before a barrel-shaped man in a double-breasted suit approached him from beyond a door that led into the inner reaches of the hotel. He introduced himself as Mr. Alyar—Felix Alyar, he said—and asked if he could be of help. St. James explained his request more fully. He handed over his business card as he spoke, and he offered DCI Le Gallez’s name in an effort to seem as legitimate a part of the ongoing investigation as possible. With far more good grace than the receptionist had possessed, Mr. Alyar agreed to allow St. James access to the hotel’s computer system. He welcomed him behind the reception counter and into a business office behind it. There, two additional employees of the establishment sat at work at terminals and a third fed documents into a fax machine. Felix Alyar directed St. James to a third terminal and said to the faxer,
“Penelope, this gentleman will be using your station,” before he left “with the hotel’s compliments” and a smile that bordered on the flagrantly insincere. St. James thanked him and made short work of accessing the Internet.
He began with the International Herald Tribune, logging on to their Web site, where he discovered that any story over two weeks old could be accessed only from the site at which the story itself had originated. He was unsurprised, considering the nature of what he was looking for and the limited scope of the paper. So he went on to USA Today, but there the news had to cover too wide an area and was thus confined to the Big Story in nearly every case: governmental issues, international incidents, sensational murders, bold heroics. His next choice was the New York Times, where he typed in PIETER DE HOOCH first and, when that brought him nothing, ST. BARBARA second. But here again, he achieved no useful result, and he began to doubt the hypothesis he’d developed upon first hearing about Vallera & Son of Jackson Heights, New York, and upon then hearing the exact nature of Vallera & Son’s business.
The only option left, considering what he knew, was the Los AngelesTimes, so he moved on to that broadsheet’s Web site and began a search of their archives. As before, he entered the time period he’d been using all along—the last twelve months—and he followed that with the name Pieter de Hooch. In less than five seconds, the monitor’s screen altered and a list of relevant articles appeared, five of them on one page and an indication that more followed.
He chose the first article and waited as the computer downloaded it. What appeared first on the screen was the headline A Dad Remembers. St. James scanned the article. Phrases leaped out at him as if rendered in a script bolder than the rest. It was when he saw the words decoratedWorld War II veteran that he slowed down his reading of the story. This covered a long-ago, heretofore unheard of triple-transplant operation—heart, lungs, and kidneys—that had been performed at one St. Clare’s Hospital in Santa Ana, California. The recipient had been a fifteen-year-old boy called Jerry Ferguson. His father, Stuart, was the decorated veteran mentioned in the article.
Car salesman Stuart Ferguson—for so he was—had apparently spent the remainder of his days seeking ways to repay St. Clare’s for having saved his boy’s life. A charity hospital whose policy it was to turn away no one, St. Clare’s had required no payment for what had amounted to a hospital bill well over two hundred thousand dollars. A car salesman with four children had little hope of amassing that kind of money, so upon his death Stuart Ferguson had willed St. Clare’s the only thing of potential value that he possessed: a painting.
“We had no idea...” hi s wi dow was quoted as saying. “Stu certainly never knew...He got it during the war, he said...A souvenir...That’s all I ever learned about it.”
“I just thought it was some old picture,” Jerry Ferguson commented after the painting had been evaluated by experts at the Getty Museum.
“Dad and Mom had it in their bedroom. You know, I never thought much about it.”
Thus, it seemed that the delighted Sisters of Mercy, who ran St. Clare’s Hospital on a shoestring budget and spent most of their time raising the funds just to keep it afloat, had found themselves the recipients of a priceless work of art. A photograph accompanying the story featured the adult Jerry Ferguson and his mother presenting Pieter de Hooch’s painting of St. Barbara to a dour-looking Sister Monica Casey, who, at the time of presentation, had absolutely no idea what she was laying her pious hands upon.