Chapter 18: Gone

I played it again on speaker at the bar.

The mailmen stopped counting their napkins.

Fran stopped kissing the pickle jar.

"For authentication," Hutch said. "There's nothing to authenticate. I watched the man sign her."

"Can he do that?" Fran said. "The judge said nobody touches it."

"The judge golfs at his club," I said.

My lawyer called me back at eight on Monday morning.

She had already read the file.

Graydon's lawyer had gone in front of the judge on Friday afternoon, without telling her.

The order let either party remove the painting for "expert authentication," as long as it came back in thirty days.

Thirty days from Saturday was January fourth.

The judge left for Naples, Florida on Saturday morning and wouldn't be back until the new year.

"I'm filing to undo it," she said. "Nobody's going to read it until January."

"The gala is on the twenty-third."

"I know when the gala is, Neve."

So we went looking for her ourselves.

The storage warehouse was in Elk Grove Village, out by the airport, a gray box with no windows.

Hutch drove. Planes went over so low I could read their tail numbers.

The clerk at the front desk was the woman from the voicemail.

She looked tired in person too.

She wasn't supposed to show us anything.

Then she looked at me for a long moment, at my hair and my face, and I knew she'd seen the gold-crown post.

She turned her computer screen around without a word.

Release form. Crate 4471. Saturday, four p.m.

Signed in green ink.

Destination: Winthrop Trust, Lake Forest, Illinois.

"Thank you," I said.

"I have a daughter," she said, and turned the screen back.

Tuesday I walked into the bank.

I'd been through those brass doors a thousand times.

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