Painted Ladies

“As far as I know,” Trachtman said. “But if it weren’t, I wouldn’t be startled. He seems just like the kind of man that would change his name . . . and Ashton Prince is the kind of name he’d change it to.”

“Anything else about him bothers you?” I said.

“Walford,” Trachtman said. “He stayed, for God’s sake, at Walford.”

“Not a good thing?” I said.

“Walford is all right,” he said. “But it is not a first-rate art department, neither in composition nor history. It does not value artistic scholarship in the way that, say, Yale would. Or Brown. Prince was not as free as he might have been someplace else to do scholarship. He had no research support. He always had classes to teach.”

“Salary?” I said.

“He would have been paid more had he taught at a major university.”

“And he was good enough to upgrade?” I said.

“Absolutely,” Trachtman said.

“Any idea why he stayed?”

“In many people I would speculate inertia,” Trachtman said. “But Ashton Prince was one of the great forensic art scholars in the world in his period. People who achieve that kind of expertise are rarely inert.”

“Hard to generalize,” I said.

“Yes.”

“But he had the credentials to work at better schools for more money and fewer teaching hours and more research support.”

“He did indeed.”

“And he apparently chose not to,” I said.

“Yes,” Trachtman said. “That is a puzzle.”

“Maybe he liked teaching,” I said. “Maybe he wanted to be in the classroom.”

“I am, myself,” Trachtman said, “a reformed academic. In my years at the trade I never met anyone who didn’t want his or her teaching load to be smaller.”

“So they can do more research?” I said.

“No,” Trachtman said. “Because they don’t like to teach. It’s hard work if you really do it.”

“Most things are,” I said. “What would they prefer to do?”

“Sit about in the faculty lounge, drinking bad coffee and discussing intensely matters of great import with which they have no active engagement.”

“Frees their mind,” I said, “to romp with the mind of God.”

“Who said that?” Trachtman said.

“Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby,” I said. “Did Prince seem like that to you?”

“No,” Trachtman said. “He seemed a man who might actually want to be engaged.”

“Be my guess, too,” I said.

We spent the rest of the afternoon at it, but nothing much else surfaced. So I went back to the Carlyle, which was always one of my New York indulgences, along with the Four Seasons restaurant and the Bronx Zoo. I had a couple of drinks from the minibar, ordered room service, called Susan, and had a pretty good time.

In the morning I had breakfast in the dining room and got my car from the garage and drove home straight to Susan’s house. Where I spent the night.

37

Susan had early appointments, and I left her to them and went home at about seven-thirty. In the Back Bay all the streets have a public alley behind them, and the alleys are numbered. The one behind my building was number 21. I pulled into it off Arlington Street and parked in my spot behind my building. There was a back entrance, but I always liked to walk around and go in the front door. It was a good-looking street, and I liked that I lived there. I’d gotten the place when it was far cheaper than it would be now, and I’d worked on it during slow moments in the sleuthing business, so it was pretty much just the way I liked it. Actually, it was probably more the way Susan liked it, and I didn’t mind.

One of the collateral benefits of having someone try to kill you is that it makes you alert . . . unless they succeed. And as I walked to my door, I noticed a maroon Lexus sedan parked across the street from my building. The passenger-side window went down as I walked up Marlborough Street, and a cigarette flipped into the street. It was cold, but the motor wasn’t running. So somebody in there was sitting in a cold car. It could be that he didn’t want to attract my attention to the white exhaust that would tail up from the car if the motor was running. Might be that he was waiting for someone and didn’t want to waste gas, or pollute the atmosphere by letting his car idle.

If he was waiting for me, he probably expected me to come out of my building in front of him, and not walk up the street behind him. Or he might be killing time until a meeting that he didn’t want to be early for. The car had tinted windows, and I couldn’t see in. So I paid it no apparent attention and turned into my front walk and up the low stairs. The entry to my building had a glass door, and I could see the Lexus reflected in it. There was no movement. I opened the door and went in and looked back out covertly. Nothing.

I shrugged and went to my apartment. The door seemed as always. Still, no sense being careless. I put my overnight bag on the floor and took out my gun while I unlocked the door. I felt a little paranoid, but that was quite a bit better than feeling a little dead.