“I should have told you sooner,” Kennedy said. “Made my position clear.” Had it been anyone but Sam Kennedy, Jason would have said there was guilt—regret?—in his tone. “But I like talking to you.”
“Yeah. Well.” He was relieved his voice had steadied again, because inside he was a churning mess of confused emotion. Mostly pain. “I liked talking to you too.”
Neither of them had anything to say after that, and the nearby crush and crash of broken cement filled the distance between them.
Chapter Five
Per usual, Barnaby Durrand was not taking Jason’s calls.
After the morning he’d had, Jason was not taking any more crap from anyone, and the minute he finished lunch—or, more exactly, finished the remaining half of a stale Kind bar while typing up a list of hundreds of Native American artifacts recovered in a raid on a local Van Nuys residence to send to a professor of anthropology and museum studies over at USC—he headed straight out to the gallery in Downey.
Traffic was moderate on the I-105 East, and he made the drive in just under forty minutes, pulling into the small parking lot behind the pink and white pseudo-Empire style structure.
In continuous operation since 1903, Fletcher-Durrand was technically the oldest art gallery in Los Angeles. A second branch had opened in New York in 1938, but the California gallery and Fletcher-Durrand’s early support and patronage of the Plein-Air and Modernist California School was what had established the company’s brand and reputation. Currently they specialized in 19th and 20th century European and American paintings of “investment quality.”
That said, the building looked more like a hair salon with a high-end security system than a reputable art gallery. Jason had been to the New York gallery once or twice, and that building was far more impressive. But despite its humble, even tawdry appearance, Jason remained convinced the Los Angeles office was where the real action was.
He got out of his car, crossed the cracked and broken asphalt lot empty of all but a large blue Dumpster and a small red Toyota, and went around to the front of the building.
“Special Agent Jason West to see Ms. Keating,” he said into the intercom and held up his badge to the security camera over the gated front door.
There was no answer, but he did not have long to wait before a tall, red-haired woman of about thirty came to unlock the door.
“Agent West, I told you this morning Mr. Durrand was not in the office today,” the woman protested as she pushed aside the security gate.
“Yes, you did, Ms. Keating,” Jason said.
“Well then…but…I really can’t help you, Agent West.” All the same, she stood back and allowed him to enter the building. It was very difficult for normally law-abiding citizens to tell law enforcement officers no, especially when the LEO in question was smiling and rueful and clearly taking it for granted he was coming in.
Keating was nearly as tall as Jason and could have modeled for one of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ odalisques. Creamy skin, doe eyes, and voluptuous build. She favored prim white blouses and dark-colored pencil skirts that somehow only served to emphasize that repressed sexiness. Jason suspected she had watched one too many of those 1950s office romances. The ones where the mousy and devoted secretary whipped off her spectacles, was revealed to be a raving beauty, whereupon the big boss instantly fell for her and, following a few comical misunderstandings, proposed marriage.
“So where is Mr. Durrand today?” Jason asked.
“I thought I— He had to fly back East this morning.”
Jason said lightly, “That’s the third time he’s canceled on me. I’m beginning to think he has something to hide.”
Keating could not take that impugning of her god lying down. She began to protest.
“It’s nothing to do with the…the investigation. It’s personal business. A family matter. His mother’s not well.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
And Mrs. Durrand would probably be feeling less well once her son was indicted for first and second degree grand larceny—in addition to other charges.
Two months earlier Durrand had been accused by married clients Hank and Roslyn Ontario of secretly selling off three Picassos, a Monet, and a Cézanne that he was supposed to be holding for them—and then keeping the profits for himself. Since then, another client had come forward with similar claims.
Jason believed there were more victims out there. He also believed many of those missing works had been stored and eventually sold through the Los Angeles gallery. But it had not been easy to build a case—a watertight case—against Durrand. Not all of Durrand’s clients kept accurate records. Further, although it was possible in the Ontarios’ case to prove Durrand had possession of the art, it was not possible to track down where it had disappeared to. A lot of business in the art world was still conducted with handshakes and notes on cocktail napkins.
It didn’t help that Fletcher-Durrand had been around longer than the FBI—or that they had a sterling reputation in the art world. At least for now. The problem with the contemporary art scene was there was more money to go around than art. A lack of supply was not good for business. And when business was bad, it led people into temptation. Jason’s gut told him the rot at Fletcher-Durrand went deeper than selling off collections and forgetting to pay clients, but so far he’d been unable to find proof of anything.
He’d tried hard to roll Keating, tried to impress upon her that as things stood, she was in very real danger of taking the fall for the gallery when the case eventually went to court, but either she couldn’t see her jeopardy, or her faith in the Durrands was stronger than her survival instinct.
Maybe she was counting on the case never making it to court. And fair enough. Jason figured there was a good chance the Durrands would settle with the Ontarios, though so far they were hanging tough.
“What about Shepherd Durrand? Is he available?”
Shepherd was Barnaby’s younger brother and the junior—so junior as to be all but nonexistent—partner at the gallery.