Hidden Riches

painting in sight.” He grinned cheerfully. “It must have gotten mixed up with my things after uncrating. Sherman, bless him, was a teensy bit careless.”
    “Yes,” Jed said. “I’m sure you’re right.”
     
    “He’s wrong,” Dora stated as she pulled open the car door. “I saw the stockboy setting up that entire lot. It had just arrived.”
    “Yeah.” Jed took out his keys, but he didn’t start the car. His eyes were opaque as he jiggled them restlessly in his hand.
    “There was a painting. I bought the damn thing.”
    “There was a painting,” Jed agreed. “There was a china dog and a lot of other things. None of which are listed on Flowers’s file. Not one item matches.”
    “Maybe he was lying.” She looked back across the street and shook her head. “But I don’t think he was lying.”
    “No, he wasn’t lying.” Shifting in his seat, Jed turned to her. “Tell me this, Conroy. If you were smuggling a Monet and several other illegal valuables, for your own use or for someone else’s, and you’d taken the time to conceal them, to make them look ordinary—”
    “I wouldn’t have them shipped to auction,” she interrupted, her eyes darkening with inspiration. “I wouldn’t let them be purchased by people scattered all over the east coast.”
    “Because then you’d have to go to the trouble, and take the risk, of getting them back again—when you’d had them in the first place.”
    “So somebody messed up. DiCarlo?”
    “Might be.”
    “What else?” she demanded. “There’s a ‘what else’ in your eyes.”
    “The packing slips. The one in Flowers’s file, and the oneI lifted from Porter’s. They were both from Premium Shipping.” He started the car. “I’ve got some calls to make.”
     
    Dora drank endless cups of coffee and toyed with a club sandwich, using her time in the small Brooklyn restaurant while Jed made his calls from the pay phone to think the puzzle through. Taking out her pad, she began to make notes and diagrams.
    “Looks like the Monet’s genuine.” Jed sat down and pulled Dora’s plate to his side of the booth. “They’ll need to run tests to be a hundred percent, but my grandmother and her pal gave it thumbs up.”
    “Who’s her pal?”
    “A guy she knows. Used to be a curator at the Met.” He wolfed down a triangle of sandwich and signaled for coffee. “It also turns out that every name on the list, everybody who bought from the shipment, was hit during the period between the twenty-second of December and New Year’s.”
    “Hit?” The blood drained out of her face. “You mean, they’re dead?”
    “No.” Jed took her hand and gave it a solid squeeze. “Robbed. In each case, the piece they’d bought at the auction was taken. Sloppy jobs. From what Brent tells me they look like deliberately sloppy jobs. And there’s still no sign of DiCarlo. He’s some sort of vice president of the New York branch of E. F., Incorporated. He hasn’t shown for work since before Christmas. He did call in a few times, but not since the end of the year. His secretary and his staff claim not to know his whereabouts. His mother filed a missing-person’s report with the NYPD this morning.”
    “So, he’s on the run.” Dora picked up her coffee and missed the flicker in Jed’s eyes. “Good. I hope he keeps running until he falls off a cliff. What do we do now?”
    Jed moved his shoulders and chose another section of the sandwich. “If we can put enough evidence together to tiehim to the murders in Philly and in Virginia, we can call in the Feds.”
    “You don’t have to tell me you don’t want to do that. I’m beginning to read you, Captain.”
    “I like to finish what I start.” Idly, he turned her notebook around so he could read it. A smile tugged at his mouth. “Playing Nancy Drew again?”
    “You’re not wearing a badge, Skimmerhorn. I guess that makes you Joe Hardy.”
    He let that pass. Her diagrams interested him. At the top she had Premium Shipping, with lines leading off right and left. At the end of one she’d written Porter. The tail of the other ended in a question mark. Below it was a list of the inventory Flowers claimed to have shipped. Shooting down from Porter were all the names of buyers from the auction and their purchases. Another line connected her name with Mrs. Lyle’s.
    “What are you getting at here, Nancy?”
    “It’s a theory.” Her spine stiffened at his tone. “I have two, actually. The first is