Майкл Коннелли: Tampa Bay Noir

Now she needed him.

After his second loop he finally turned at Swann and stopped in front of the house. The neighborhood was called Hyde Park, close to downtown and one of the oldest in the city. The houses were built at a time when there was no air-conditioning. Large covered porches fronted most of them while up above there were screened porches for sleeping on warm summer nights. Her house was clad in yellow brick with large windows behind the full-length porch. She had told him she now owned the house. The garage apartment was still her studio.

Years earlier, when Bosch had first learned how to use the Internet to search for people, he had put her name into Google. Their relationship was long over but he thought about her often. He plugged in her name and found that she had become a successful artist both critically and commercially and her work was sold in galleries across the country, including New York, and she had her own gallery on MacDill Avenue in Tampa.

She had painted him once. He didn’t sit for it. It was a surprise he found on an easel in the studio. It was a dark, brooding painting, abstract and exacting about his character at the same time. She had depicted his eyes as piercing and haunting.

She had never sold the painting, nor had she given it to him. And now it was gone, stolen from a wall from inside her home. She had tried to explain to Bosch on the phone that the painting was vital to her, that she could not complete another painting until she had it back and knew it was safe.

Bosch parked at the curb in front and looked into the house through the windows. He could see an empty wall and could make out the nail and hook from which the stolen painting had hung.

He got out of the car and looked down the street, through a tunnel created by the canopy of the hundred-year-old live oak trees that lined the sidewalks. Down at the end he saw sparkling sunshine on the surface of the bay.

She answered the door before he could press the button below the brass No Solicitors sign and they engaged in an awkward hug. She was wearing a long white tunic over pale-green slacks. Like Bosch’s, her hair was gray with dark streaks through it. She kept it long and braided in a tail.

“Harry, I’m so glad you came,” she said.

“Not a problem,” he said. “It’s good to see you, Jasmine.”

She told him to come in. The entry area split a wide space with living room and grand fireplace to the left and a formal dining area to the right. Directly in front of Bosch was a curving staircase to the second floor.

“I know,” Jasmine said. “It’s a long way from when I lived in the back.”

Bosch nodded. “Congratulations. You deserve it.”

“I’m not so sure,” she said. “In the art world, it sometimes seems to be more about luck than craft or anything else.”

“Don’t kid yourself. From way back your paintings had a power. They held people. They held me .” He glanced at the blank wall where the missing painting had hung. She followed his gaze.

“It was the first thing I put up when I bought the house thirteen years ago.”

Bosch nodded and turned his eyes to the fireplace. Another painting with her distinctive style hung above it. He could tell that paintings on other walls in his view were not her work. That would have been too narcissistic. He looked back at the painting over the fireplace. It was of a man with a face turned away from the painter. He had a sharp jaw and an almost cruel look, as if he was almost intentionally holding something back from the painter.

“My father,” Jasmine said. “I worked on that one for twenty years before finishing.”

Bosch’s memory was fuzzy but he remembered her telling him something about her fraught relationship with her father. He had died just before Bosch had met her. “So,” he said, “why did they only take the one painting?” He pointed to the blank wall, and then to the painting of her father. “Isn’t that one just as valuable?”

“A painting is valued at what it sells for,” Jasmine said. “I never attempted to sell either painting. They were not for sale. The Guardian was one of my oldest pieces.”

“How much are we talking about here?”

“My more recent pieces sell in the twenty to thirty thousand range. My commission fee is twenty-five. My agent told me in the past that The Guardian could sell for as high as fifty but I said no. I did not want to part with it.”

Bosch glanced at her for a moment, then nodded and looked away. He didn’t know she called the painting The Guardian . “What did the Tampa police say?”

“That they’re investigating,” she said. “Detective Stone said they’re watching the art markets to see if someone tries to sell it.”

“That’s a long shot. Whoever stole it will know not to do that. Who else wanted the painting besides your agent?” Bosch knew that someone coming in and taking one of the paintings and not the other put this on a different path. He didn’t think it was a crime motivated by money.

“I can’t think of anyone,” Jasmine said. “Very few people have seen it. I don’t entertain very often. I keep to myself. I didn’t realize it was gone until someone came to the front door and when I turned I saw it was gone.”

“You’re saying you don’t know exactly when it was taken?”

“Right. I knew it was there and then it was just gone, you know? I don’t use the living room that often. I’m in the studio in the back and I use the kitchen here and then the upstairs. My bedroom.”

Bosch gestured to the grand staircase. “When you go upstairs to your bedroom, don’t you glance in here? Just to check things out?”

“I don’t use those stairs,” she said. “There is a set of back stairs off the kitchen. All of these old houses in the neighborhood have back stairs for the help.”

“Got it. What did Detective Stone say about when the burglary happened?”

“Nothing. They can’t pinpoint it either.”

“No sign of break-in?”

“Not that the police found. They think it’s my fault.”

“How so?”

“I go back and forth between the house and the studio. Sometimes several times a day. I don’t lock the back door every time. Sometimes I just don’t because I think I’ll be right back and then I get caught up in the studio. I sometimes work into the night. Anyway, the police said this may have been how the painting was taken. It was opportunistic. Somebody came off Swann, went through the gate into the yard, and found the back door unlocked. They went in and grabbed the painting.”

“You don’t keep the gate locked?”

“It’s locked from the outside but you can reach over and release the lock.”

Bosch took in the information but found himself disagreeing with the conclusions of the local police. The painting seemed targeted, not something that was grabbed in a random burglary of opportunity. “Nothing else was taken?” he asked.

“No. I mean, nothing that I’ve noticed missing.”

“Where do you leave your car keys and your purse on a regular day of work?”

“Well, the keys are in the purse and sometimes I leave it upstairs, sometimes in the kitchen. It all depends.”

“Do you take it with you to the studio?”

“No, almost never. I don’t need it. I don’t even take my cell phone to the studio.”

“And it wasn’t taken or touched.”

“No, only the painting.”

Bosch thought about that for a moment.

“Do you want to sit down, Harry?” Jasmine asked. “Or...”

“I want to see the backyard,” he said. “And the studio.”

Jasmine led the way. They walked down a hallway and through a kitchen to a back door. Outside, there was a stone path across a lush green lawn to a wooden staircase leading to the studio over the garage. Bosch paused and took in the yard. It was perfectly manicured and protected by a six-foot wall that ran the length of the property and connected to the walls of the garage. Bosch remembered that the garage was accessed by the alley behind it.