Still Lives(48)

I flip through the rest of the folder. Nothing there exactly, except an unsettling feeling that Bas hasn’t changed since that interview. Not underneath. He’s always been dazzled by money, especially by how money shapes the art world. That might have blinded him, or tied his hands, when it came to an obsessive collector who wanted to buy everything an artist had ever made.


I dial Cherie.

“The arraignment is scheduled for late this afternoon.” Her voice has lost none of its clip, but deep down I hear a note of defeat. “There’s enough evidence.”

I tell her Dee’s story about Kim’s sister leaving rehab.

“Rachel Lord, missing since March,” says Cherie. “I’ve been following that lead, but—” She stops herself. “Is that why you called me, or did you want to get a message to Shaw?”

“How’s he doing?”

“He’s surprisingly stoic,” she says. “Nights there can be hard.”

And grief is hard. Greg in a jail cell is an image that refuses to materialize in my mind. Instead, I see him in the weeks after his mother died, his face hawkish, badly shaven, his clothes hanging like wilted leaves. Truth be told, I didn’t know what to feel about Greg then: he was so far gone into himself that he was a stranger to me. He sat at the kitchen table and stared into space, or went on walks alone. Sometimes he held books but didn’t read them. I roamed his periphery, making useless soups and toast, wondering if I should turn on the radio or let the silences cloak us. That was the beginning of the ending: I couldn’t be Theresa for Greg, and I couldn’t be myself either, because I reminded him too much of how he’d resisted her influence all his life. How he’d settled on an ordinary, pretty girl from the country, when he was the son of a queen.

“Do you have a message for Shaw?” Cherie repeats.

I can’t ask her to ask him about the flash drive. “Not really,” I say. “Tell him I’m thinking of him.”

“Can I ask you something?” says Cherie. “Shaw said he tried to talk with you at the Gala, but you avoided him. Why?”

For a stunned moment I wonder: Is Greg trying to implicate me?

“I was embarrassed,” I say. “Humiliated might be a better term. We hadn’t seen each other much since our breakup.”

“You were humiliated by Shaw Ferguson,” she repeats.

I know where she’s going. Where Detective Ruiz was going. Angry ex. Prime motive, right?

“Yes, humiliated. In an ordinary, dumped kind of way,” I say coldly.

“I see.” She waits. “Why did you call Shaw on the night of the Gala?”

I remember my phone in Yegina’s hands that night. “My coworker asked me to call him, to find out where Kim was.”

“But you hung up before he answered. Were you upset with him?”

And so we go on for several minutes of useless prying, until I’ve had enough, and tell her I have to go.

I click end on my phone, but I waste the next thirty minutes googling Cherie Rhys to see how many cases she’s actually won (turns out, quite a few). I scroll through page after page of her pretty, intelligent face, a thinner and sharper version of Kevin’s. It bothers me to think of them discussing me. Did he give her the idea that I might be a suspect? Then I remember Kevin’s article, the call from ArtNoise, the faxed copy of it I was supposed to review.

Downstairs, the fluorescent mailroom is neatly stuffed to the brim with boxes of museum letterhead, shipping materials, and one sluggish photocopy machine. A wall label beside the copy machine says:

Copier, 1998

5 × 3 × 4 feet

Metal, lights, toner, infuriating paper jams



I check my mailbox. Empty. I check the boxes around it. Also empty. I check the fax machine. Nothing. I can’t believe Cherie Rhys—anyone—would think I could hurt Kim Lord. But who did? I wonder if Evie has had any luck with the provenance question. Although I only asked her this morning, it feels like years ago.

When I return upstairs, Yegina is marching out from Jayme’s office with a big binder, her cheeks still pink from our exercise class.

“Art of the Race Car is almost off the schedule,” she says. “I just have to win over Development. They’re going to hit the roof, though.”

“The Art of Yegina.”

She rolls her eyes. “Art of J. Ro, more like it,” she says, but the flush deepens. “You want to go out for happy hour tonight?” She follows me into my office. “Sliders and fries half off at Luster’s.”

Luster’s is our default after-work place, a dark steakhouse right across the street and dirt cheap if you hit it before seven.

“I’m saving my energy for tomorrow and Bootleg,” I say, sitting down and grabbing my folder from Juanita. After she leaves tonight, I intend to sneak over to her cube again and check her calendar.

“Yeah, Bootleg. But that’s with them,” Yegina says, sounding as if she’s slightly dreading our plans with Hiro and Brent. “Come on. We should catch up, just us.”

“We’ve talked sixteen times a day since 2002,” I joke, opening the folder.

Yegina stands there, the binder perched against her waist, tucking her black hair behind one ear.

She never begs like this. I want to say yes. But if I say yes, it ruins my plan to search Juanita’s cube.