Chapter 10 #2
“More tae the point, he isn’t getting invited to digs.
Bigger projects are rejecting his CV. And he can’t get funding for his own.
His professional career has stalled. Word from my da’s friends is that he got too greedy, and rumors spread about the ruby.
There are only so many times you can sell off a chunk of ruby and no one asks questions.
Really, tho?” Holly leaned forward. I smiled inwardly—hearing a story from Holly was like peeling layers off an onion.
There was always another one. “His da, Lou Gillian, is shit, been in prison for art theft, and when he got out, he wanted some of that ruby, and when Mickey didn’t give it up, he started causing trouble for him.
Then our wicked witch of the south came in—”
“Who?” I feigned ignorance.
“Charmaine hired an investigator to dig up dirt on you, and they found it on Mickey instead. She got a guy with photographs willing to talk for a big stack of cash.”
I had been worried Charmaine would try something like that, and I suddenly had a burning desire to hear what this investigator found.
“So, that guy was Mickey’s dad, and he told Charmaine’s investigator about the ruby?”
“Aye. I’m sure for a big stack of cash of his own. At first, I was livid for him, thinking we were on the same team, Mick and me. I thought he would be done with all the scheming and he’d be livid that his dad gave him up…but no.” Holly gave a soul-rending sigh.
“Sorry, Holl.”
“Aye. The heart wants what the heart wants. I want his pretty face to look at me with trust and respect—and then have that agile academic hand grab my ass and show me all the ways I can be persuaded to scream his name.”
I felt my eyebrows graze my hairline with surprise. “Well, now…when you put it that way.”
We were quiet for a while, and then I realized she’d said something that might have a bearing on our pressing issue of a stolen Rembrandt.
“Did you say his father served time for art theft?”
She wiped her eyes clear. “Yeah, what are you thinking?”
“Let’s say, for example, you’re a—”
“An anal miss who wants to take a Rembrandt from a locked building, but you haven’t done much after-dark work, much less nab a rare artifact.” Holly was a mind reader.
“If she contacted him with a fat wad of cash to rat out his son, what’s to say she didn’t show up with another fat wad of cash and broker a deal to achieve her overreaching goals?
” I remembered asking her when I was shooing her out of the castle what she’d done and her reply, The thing you could never do.
“I mean, it’s the one piece to her ‘I’ve saved the day’ puzzle that didn’t make sense.
How’d no one see her? And it proves she knew she was being sneaky—that she knew she had to be sneaky. ”
“She wasn’t the one who took it off the wall.”
I made a sour face. “She wouldn’t be dumb enough to hire a known art thief, would she?”
“Take it from me, the things we do for love is downright bonkers. If she’s still got Rowan on her vision board, I’m thinking she’d hire the devil himself if he promised her what she wanted.”
“I dunno.”
“This could explain something Johnny at the pub told me a few days back.”
“What’s that?”
“One of the stained-glass craftsmen repairing the window—alleged craftsman,” she added, “showed up for a pint. Bartender Johnny chatted him up, asked him for a quote on his own windows.” Crickets.
“Mind ye, you’re still new here, so this glass man not wanting to get into the particulars of glass on his break would sound fine, but it’s downright odd.
If there’s anything we love tae do more than talk of ourselves and the things we know, it’s drink and talk of ourselves and the things we know.
Johnny thinks this man is a stained-glass craftsman to the same degree he thinks horseshit smells good. That’s how much he knew about glass.”
“Could it be that easy?”
“I think it is. He’d have to be good enough to get around the alarms, but not Ocean’s 11 keen because we’re not the Louvre. Then, he can’t help but have a pint for a job done well.”
“But that doesn’t tell us where he took it.”
“Aye. The banker must have it. If Charmaine gave it as collateral?”
“Rowan would have gotten a notification about it if it was applied to the loan, right?” I groaned.
Not hearing from the bank yet, and now suspecting that Charmaine had the painting removed in an underhanded way, I was definitely beginning to worry this was not as “Everything’s fine!
” as Charmaine led us to believe. I’d have to chat with Rowan about all of it, and none of it would brighten his day.
To Holly: “One part of this whole bankruptcy ordeal is sketchy as fuck, and the other half is by the book.”
“Welcome to my life, mate.”
I gave a short laugh, glad her dark humor was back. “Now we can sit down with Charmaine and the banker and have it out—with the constable on speed dial.”
“That Murdoch, he’s not going to just give it back, do you think? Da says he has a beef with the MacLaochs that was taught tae him.”
“I’m sure he will, wouldn’t he? Bankers live by a federal code of conduct, and any misstep is a fireable offense, or at least would get you demoted to the mailroom. At least, in the US.”
“Aye. Here too. But only if he’s sane. Most Murdochs are, but there’s history there. And you know what history does to some folk around here. Quirks a few of ’em. This one might be itching to give Rowan trouble.”
I racked my brain. The name Murdock had always been, on Rowan’s lips, less about banking and more as some kind of idiom for unsolicited anger.
“Do you know of the police raid in ’89?” Holly said, again seeming to read my mind.
“Rowan told me they’d been making whisky the same way they’d always had for centuries, but in the eighties, the government cracked down hard on the small, independent distilleries.”
“And?”
“That’s all.”
“Oh aye. Not a natural-born storyteller, that one. I’ll catch you up: In the eighties, they were ordered to pay taxes on their private whisky operation or else.
When the police come, though, half of it is gone.
They confiscated what was down ’ere and interrogated the clansmen.
Da said the lads were all being good boys, saying ‘yes, sir,’ and ‘no, sir,’ next to their chief out there on the castle steps.
” Holly pointed behind her in the direction of the castle steps.
“Now, mind ye, they’ve got Rowan with them, holding his uncle’s hand.
Then, seeing how they’re just a solid wall of shrugging shoulders, claiming to be not knowing where the other half of the whisky went, one copper goes too far. He gets in Jacky’s face—”
“Who?”
“Seac.”
The name sounded like Jacques. And the only one I knew was Cousteau.
“Again, who?”
“Rowan’s uncle, the chief. Has he no’ ever told ye his name?” Her face contorted into a weird angle, confused on how daft one of us could be.
“No, of course he has,” I lied.
“Right, so Jacky was getting grilled by the officer. He’s asking, ‘Where’s the rest?
Where was it taken?’ But Jacky didn’t give an inch.
Then”—Holly waggled her eyebrows at me and let the pregnant pause add drama to her story—“then,” she said again, “he stabbed a finger into Jacky’s chest and said, ‘How’s about I take yer little boy, and we’ll see if you’ll start talking? ’”
I sucked in air between clenched teeth. That was a gauntlet only the foolhardy would throw down at a posse of MacLaochs.
“What happened?”
“Oh aye, my da says, it was electric. Jacky knocked the man’s head back, and they all went nuts. Take Rowan from the clan? Over their dead bodies. Da says they were punching their way into the backs of patrol cars. Then, at the station, they were let go. Get this, ‘for good, cooperative behavior.’”
“What?”
Holly was nodding now, into the retelling as much as I was gobbling it up.
“Turns out there was another matter—coke, a much bigger deal than untaxed whisky—needed all hands on deck. I’m sure some money still exchanged hands—the coke distraction just allowed the cops to entertain being bribed. ” Holly winked.
“What the…”
“Aye, isn’t it the best? And here I am, having missed tha’ and the battle.” She sighed with longing.
“That’s incredible.”
“Surprising that the laird hasn’t shared it with ye.”
“Not that level of detail. Your dad had a front-row seat to it all. And was an adult. Unlike Rowan.”
“For sure, but back to the banker. He’s a Murdoch. His uncle raised him, like Rowan was raised by his. His uncle is—”
“Oh no,” I said not believing where this was going.
“Oh yes.”
“Not the officer who threatened to take Rowan.”
“One and the same man. The same man who ate fist and pride for it.”
I marinated in the story for a few beats more, then realized: “Even if Dick Jr. did take payment in the form of the Rembrandt, any institution would be allergic to accepting stolen goods for payment. Once they’ve been publicly notified, of course.”
“Aye, the laird will make sure it’s public all right.” She thought of something I was mulling over. “He’s still going to need payment, though, either way?”
I reached down to the coins that had spilled onto the floor.
Turning their crusty edges over in my fingers.
“I’m sure he is. Especially since Rowan refuses to sell the Ulfberht.
A solution I keep suggesting, even now with the whisky business.
It’ll take time we don’t have before it’s operating in the black. ”
“Oh?”
“He thinks selling the Ulfberht will bring the Viking back.”
“Oh…” she said, looking over to it in its plexiglass case. So that’s how I bring him back?”
“Please, no, I need to sleep through the night sometime this century. The more he stays gone, the better I’ll—we’ll all—be.”