Murder at the Library of Congress - Margaret Truman [68]
Annabel nodded and smiled. “I think I’ll stick to that decision, at least for the rest of the day.”
“Okay, but remember what you promised, that you’d let me know if you pick up anything I can use about the murders.”
“Murders, plural? Oh, John Bitteman. I didn’t promise anything. But if some startling revelation jumps up and bites me, I’ll pass it along, if I can.”
“Can’t ask for more. Best to Mac. See ya.”
Returning to her work area, Annabel decided that she’d have to tell someone at the library about her conversation with Lucianne, and made up her mind to call Cale Broadhurst later in the day.
Chapter 26
It was said that you could set your watch by Abraham Widlitz. The seventy-two-year-old art restorer and conservator rigidly adhered to a schedule ingrained in him ever since emigrating to Hollywood from New York City in the late 1940s.
Like so many young men and women seeking fame and fortune in L.A., Widlitz carried with him a change of clothing and a talent, in his case a considerable skill at drawing. He landed work at Columbia Pictures, where he served an apprenticeship in the set design department for small pay, supplemented by the excitement of being close to the glamour of the burgeoning film industry and its famous players.
His technical skills were appreciated at the studio; he stayed there forty years, until someone in the increasingly youthful hierarchy decided he was too old to understand and contribute to modern films and sent him out to pasture with a decent pension and four decades of memories. His wife of thirty-six years, Sylvia, whom he’d met when she was a secretary in the set department, died four months after his forced retirement, leaving Widlitz to fend for himself, which he did quite nicely.
Unlike many widows and widowers, his routine didn’t change following his mate’s death. He just kept doing what he’d done for the past fifty years, up at five, a light breakfast, an hour devoted to the plants and flowers he and Sylvia took pleasure in cultivating, a walk to a neighborhood convenience store for the morning paper, a second cup of tea with honey while reading the news, a phone call to their only child, Philip, an orthodontist in Pittsburgh, then boarding an RTD bus for the ride downtown to where he had opened his small art restoration and conservation studio in El Pueblo de Los Angeles a year after leaving Columbia.
This morning, like all other mornings, he stopped at a bakery before entering his building to buy for his lunch one churro, a Mexican doughnut, and then on to a street vendor’s puesto where he purchased a peeled mango and papaya.
Abraham Widlitz was a familiar figure in the lively, multiethnic neighborhood, although few knew him through conversation. Aside from never failing to extend pleasant greetings to others in the area, he kept to himself, seldom leaving his small studio until it was time to retrace his route home.
He went to work immediately in the outer room of the two-room studio on a small, damaged oil a customer had picked up in a thrift shop. The painting was of a garden and featured a frog in the lower left-hand corner; the client collected anything depicting frogs, including coffee mugs, jewelry, bric-a-brac, and pictures. A tree overhanging the frog had suffered water damage and Widlitz carefully repainted its leaves.
He completed the task by noon, and after consuming the fruit and doughnut went into the back room where he’d spread the Reyes painting on a large flat surface. He’d started work on it the previous day, going over every inch with a jeweler’s loupe, through which he examined the pigments the artist had used, seeking visual evidence that the scene of Columbus kneeling before the king and queen might have been painted over another work of one sort or another. Heavy coats of varnish had been applied to the entire painting; Widlitz judged the most recent to be no older than fifty years, probably done when the painting was last put up for sale. He also noted that the original, finely woven canvas had been lined with an equally fine