The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [23]
Bobby continued, “You said Liu—sorry, the guy in the mask—took the requiem. Who else would have known Gold was working on it?”
“I don’t know,” Reggie said truthfully. “Solomon hadn’t mentioned it to me before that night.”
“How about his wife?”
“Maybe. Solomon seemed to think he could patch things up with her, but that might have been his ego talking. He probably had a hard time believing that anyone could actually leave him.”
“Did you ever ask her?”
“Even if I had, I probably wouldn’t discuss it with you.”
“Are you her lawyer, too?”
“I am counsel and also a board member for the Gold Foundation, which she runs.”
Kloska pressed his teeth together like he was trying to set them with glue. “So we found Solomon’s watch and his wallet among Michael Liu’s things, but we don’t know what happened to the requiem. If it showed up today, that manuscript would be worth a tall pile of cash. Gold is even more famous dead than he was alive. You know how many Web sites are devoted to Solomon Gold’s missing masterpiece? Hundreds of them.”
After Gold’s murder, Reggie had assented to dozens of interviews with the media, and in each one he spoke of the requiem, the lost masterwork that had been wrenched from Solomon Gold’s hands as he weakened and died. The story had served to secure Gold’s legendary status as an artist, which, in turn, had helped cement Reggie’s professional reputation.
Reggie said, “The thief would have a hell of a time selling it. Any expert would recognize Gold’s handwriting. I’d know it if I saw it again.”
Kloska sniffed. “There’s a black market eBay for every damn thing. The guys who steal Picassos don’t have any trouble finding buyers, especially if they have the patience to lie low for a while. Remember when a Norman Rockwell ended up in that movie director’s collection? He didn’t even know it was hot.”
“Then maybe it’s still out there. I don’t know.”
“We never found the mask, either.” Kloska’s voice echoed with the remains of old cigarettes. “I’ll be honest. If you were just some witness and not Reggie Vallentine, I’d say you made up this story the night of the murder to protect Michael Liu’s identity. And then the next day, when Liu offs himself and we can put him on the murder, you’re stuck with a bullshit story, and you’re still stuck with it today. And now I’m stuck with a dead doctor in Andersonville and a bunch of crazy whodunit bullshit that doesn’t make sense.” He rubbed his thumb against a pain in his forehead, an attempt at do-it-yourself acupressure. “Three things still missing from the scene of Gold’s murder—the mask, the gun, and the requiem. Sometime after he left and before he killed himself, Michael Liu stashed them somewhere.” The detective gears in Bobby’s head were still grinding together. “Canada is really our common denominator, right? We got to find her, maybe to protect her from the shithead that killed Falcone, but also because she’s the connection between our corpses. That and your story and the ballistics on this gun.”
Reggie didn’t like the way Kloska said the word story. He scanned his brain for something he should be curious about. On a different day at Mr. Beef, Bobby had told him that when a suspect didn’t ask a lot of questions about the crime, he always knew the guy was guilty. “What did you say the doctor was killed with? The .357 or the .38?”
“The .38 Special. Not the one that ended your golf career. The same one he used to poke Gold between the eyes. Liu used the .357 again to kill himself.”
A cold twitching in Reggie’s abdomen. An untwisting of his intestines. “You said they’re going to release it? The news about the gun connecting this new murder and Solomon’s death, I mean.”
“As we speak, probably. The Sun-Times got it on their own somehow, and like I said, it’s gonna be a fucking heater. Day and night. Overtime.”
Sunlight bounced off the mirror of a passing cab and Reggie deflected