Bad News

“Well, it happens I learned quite a bit about Russell Thurbush some years ago,” Guilderpost told them, “when it was happily my opportunity to sell several paintings at gratifyingly high prices that might very well have been Thurbushes, for all anybody knew.”

Dortmunder said, “He’s a painter.”

“Was a painter,” Guilderpost corrected. “His dates are 1901 to 1972, and he was one of the principal figures of the Delaware River School, portrait and landscape painters who flourished between the world wars. He became very famous and very rich, traveled throughout Europe doing portraits of royalty, made a lot of money, invested wisely during the Depression, and by the time World War Two came along and the Delaware River School was looked on as old hat, he was rich enough to retire to Thurstead, the mansion he designed himself and built in the mountains of northern New Jersey, overlooking the Delaware River.”

Dortmunder said, “And the Moody family has something to do with this guy.”

“Russell Thurbush married Burwick Moody’s only sister, Ellen,” Guilderpost told him, and took a sheet of motel stationery out of his pocket. A hasty family tree was scribbled on it. “Burwick himself died without issue,” he went on, “so the descendants have to be through Ellen, his sister.”

Dortmunder said, “But she did have descendants.”

“Oh, yes.” Guilderpost studied his notes. “The family just keeps daughtering out,” he said. “Ellen and Russell Thurbush had three daughters. Eileen became a nun. Reading between the lines, Eleanor was a lesbian. That leaves Emily Thurbush, who married Allistair Valentine in 1946, at the age of eighteen. She had two daughters. The older, Eloise, died at sixteen in an automobile accident. The younger, Elizabeth Valentine, married Walter Deigh in 1968 and produced one daughter, Viveca, in 1970. Elizabeth died in 1997, at the age of fifty, leaving Viveca the sole bearer of the Moody DNA. Viveca is also the sole inheritor of Thurstead, where she lives with her husband, Frank Quinlan, and their three daughters, Vanessa, Virginia, and Victoria.”

Dortmunder said, “In New Jersey.”

“That’s right,” Guilderpost said. “Overlooking the Delaware River, in a rustic, forested mountain area with majestic views Thurbush frequently memorialized in his paintings, or so it says on the Thurstead Web page.”

Dortmunder said, “So what we do, we go to this place—”

“Thurstead,” Irwin interpolated.

“Fitzroy knows the place I mean,” Dortmunder said. Back to Guilderpost, he said, “We go to this place, like Irwin says, and we sneak in and grab this Virginia, Viveca, whichever one it is, grab her hairbrush, and gedadda there.”

Guilderpost had been shaking his head through almost this entire sentence, which Dortmunder had been doing his best to ignore, but now Guilderpost added to the video with audio: “No.”

“Why not?”

“Thurstead is on the National Register of Historic Places,” Guilderpost told him. “It is operated by a nonprofit trust. The house and grounds are open to the public at certain prescribed hours. In addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of paintings, by Thurbush and others, the house also contains the jewels, the silver goblets, the rare golden stilettos, and all the other treasures Thurbush brought back with him from his travels around the world. The place is very tightly guarded, with a private security force and alarm system. The Quinlans live in a portion of the house, the rest devoted to the museum, the entire place under extremely tight protection. You’ll never get at that hairbrush, John. I’m sorry.”

“That’s awful,” Irwin said. “That’s a goddamn shame. We were so close.”

“Your idea was brilliant, John,” Guilderpost said, “but it just won’t work out.”

Irwin said, “John? Why are you smiling?”

“At last,” Dortmunder said. “A job for me.”

36

There’s no point driving the getaway car if nobody’s going to get away. Stan Murch, a stocky, open-faced guy with carroty hair, had been sitting in the black Honda Accord, engine idling, just up the block from the bank, for maybe five minutes after his passengers had gone in there, when the three cop cars arrived. No sirens; they just arrived, two angling into the No Parking area in front of the bank, the third angling curbward just past the Accord’s front bumper.

At the first flash of arriving white, Stan had switched off the engine, and as the men in blue piled out of their cars, putting on their hats and pulling out their gats, Stan pocketed his big ball of car keys and slowly eased out to the street. Not a good idea to make rapid movements around excited people with guns in their hands.

One cop from the nearest car gave Stan a quick suspicious glare over his shoulder, but Stan rested a forearm on the Honda’s roof and looked very interested in what all the cops were doing, so he gave up that suspicion and trotted on with his pals. They all went on into the bank, and Stan walked around the corner.

He hadn’t known any of those guys well, and he doubted he’d be getting to know them any better, not for several years, anyway. But none of them would expect their chauffeur still to be there, outside the bank, amid the cop cars, when they were led out. All the surprises would be over by then.

This bank and this town were way the hell and gone out on Long Island, so those had been Suffolk County cops who would be taking a belated look at the recently stolen Accord, in which Stan had worn nice leather driving gloves, only partly because it was December. If the one cop who’d glared at him tried to reconstruct the suspect from memory later, all he’d come up with would be a bland and unremarkable pale face under a black knit cap; not even the red hair had been visible.

On the other hand, this was no longer a neighborhood and a town—and a county—in which Stan wanted to linger, so once he was out of sight of the bank, he walked briskly, looking for wheels.

A supermarket. In front of it and to one side of it, a blacktop parking lot. A bunch of cars clustered in the general area of the entrance, and another smaller clump of cars were gathered in the far corner around the side. Those would belong to the employees, ordered to leave the better parking spaces for the customers. None of them would pop out the supermarket door, arms full of grocery sacks, while Stan was choosing his next transportation, so that’s where he went, deciding on the manager’s car, a blue Chrysler Cirrus—much nicer and more expensive than the resold clunkers all around it—which his third key opened like a flip-top box.

If he had noticed when he switched on the engine that the damn car was almost out of gas, he’d have left it where it sat and taken one of the cashiers’ cars instead. But he was busy looking for other things, like Suffolk County cops or the supermarket manager, so he was all the way to the on-ramp for the Long Island Expressway before the lit Fuel warning attracted his attention.

Well, hell. It was miles from here to Maximilian’s Used Cars, where Stan had decided he would deliver the Cirrus, so that the day wouldn’t be a total loss. But first he would have to put in a couple bucks’ gas.

The next exit, three miles west of where he’d gotten on the LIE, had two huge gas stations handy on the service road, both with convenience stores and car washes attached, plus gigantic signs stuck high enough up in the air to interfere with planes landing at La Guardia. Both were doing very good business.

Stan pulled in behind a late-model black Mercedes-Benz, whose driver, a big bulky bald man in a creamy tan camel’s hair coat, was just finishing at the pump. As Stan got out of the Cirrus behind the Mercedes, he could hear that guy juking those last few drops into the tank: gluk-gluk-gluk.