Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [23]
“All of them, probably.” She pushed aside the menu without even looking at it. Time to tell the truth—if not all of it. “Like I said, they may not be as highly placed, but they all have grudges, and the means to execute them.”
“So…?” Oh, she knew that tone of voice. Damn. And twice damn. He knew she was hiding something—he always knew, somehow. Like a vulture knows when dinner’s about to pass over. She looked up into deep brown eyes and wanted to tell him everything. Only a decade’s worth of resisting that lure—and seeing it work on too many others—gave her the ability to look away.
Sorry, partner. This one I’ve got to deal with on my own. You’d only freak, anyway.
“So I’ll try to narrow the list down. See if I can’t talk to some of them, face-to-face.”
Sergei kept his face calm, and only the little tic at the corner of his jaw gave him away. “Any of them wizzarts?” Casual. Too casual. She could hear enamel grind. Their partnership had taught him when to step back and let go, too. He just didn’t always—ever!—listen to what he knew.
“A couple. All recent, though, nothing to worry about. I can handle myself, big guy.”
She hoped.
five
Although it was nearing noon, activity on Blaine Street, deep in the so-called “artist’s maze” favored by trendy galleries, was better suited to early morning, with half the stores just beginning to see an early trickle of customers. The short, narrow street had clearly once been the home to warehouses, metal steps rising up from the curb to oversized metal doors set in otherwise stark brick buildings. But where most of the other converted buildings that now housed trendy stores and galleries had clear glass windows, the better to display their contents in a carefully designed presentation, the narrow glass front on 28 Blaine had been replaced with artisan-made stained glass. The deep blues, reds and greens seemed at first to be randomly placed, but if you stepped back a moment, the wavy striations in the glass and the choice of colors created the appealing effect of an underseascape.
Between the window and metal double doors, a small bronze plaque announced that this was the home of The Didier Gallery.
Inside the gallery, the floor was covered in a muted gray carpet, and walls painted Gallery White were hung with paintings in groupings of three or four, interspersed occasionally with a three-dimensional piece on a pedestal. The works displayed this month were brash, almost exhibitionist in their use of color. A curved counter ran through the middle of the space, and behind it a sturdy wrought-iron staircase rose to the second-floor gallery, where smaller pieces were displayed. A young blond man sat at the desk, flipping through a catalog. He looked as though he belonged in a catalog himself: perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed and bored out of his overbred skull.
Sergei blew through the door, setting the chime alert jangling. The young man looked up, gauged the expression on his boss’s face, and wisely decided not to speak unless spoken to. One look around told Sergei that no one else was in the gallery, and with a grunt that could have been satisfaction or disgust, he nodded to his associate and went to the back wall of the gallery, where touching a discreet wall plate opened the door to his private office.
The door closed behind him, and the young man went back to flipping through the catalog.
“Of all the stupid, harebrained…” Sergei had managed to keep a hold on his temper all the way home from Genevieve’s apartment, which meant that by now, although he was just as angry as before, he was unable to let go and have the temper tantrum he so righteously desired.
She hadn’t answered the phone when he had called this morning. She hadn’t been home when he had arrived on her doorstep an hour later. Not that she didn’t have a perfect right to go off on her own. He was her partner, her agent, not her damned keeper. That would have been a full-time job alone. But he had known