Leverage in Death (In Death 47)

She didn’t get the still-life tag. Weren’t all paintings still?

Trueheart led the way into an office. It hit glossy, too. Obviously Banks had liked his fancy comforts. The big sofa, the big chair, the big desk. Lots of naked people on the walls here, and a full-size AutoChef.

Baxter sat on a rolling chair hip to hip with the iced artist chick.

At the length of bare leg showing under the desk, Eve judged her as tall, and clearly thin as a whip. Her hair had that just-out-of-bed tousle in cool, cool blond, and her eyes held an emerald pop of green.

She spoke in a breathy, I’m-so-aroused voice Eve imagined had Baxter’s blood simmering.

“I really think . . . maybe.”

She looked up, blinked those emerald eyes. “Oh, I’m so sorry. We’re closed.”

“Maisie, this is Lieutenant Dallas. And Detective Peabody.”

“I see.” She rose—and yes, a lot of long leg in a short, tight black skirt. “I’m really sorry I can’t be sure about the artwork. Jordan . . .”

“It’s not speaking ill of the dead, Maisie,” Baxter said gently. “It’s helping find out who made him dead.”

“You’re right. He just took artwork when he felt like it. He usually brought them back every few weeks. A rotation. He should have recorded it all—he excused it by calling it marketing. Having guests over, potential clients, showing off the work in his home. But that wasn’t the reason, and he didn’t care about excusing it.”

Maybe she spoke in a breathy baby-doll voice, Eve thought, but she wasn’t anyone’s idiot.

“Your work?”

“Mine, too. I could’ve objected, but I needed the job here, and wanted the exposure. Most of the artists displayed here feel—felt—the same. He took a steeper commission than the standard, but he also took a lot of new artists who couldn’t get into other galleries. It was a trade-off.”

“He piss anyone off?”

“Routinely.” She smiled a little. “Not enough to kill him. With him gone, the gallery’s going to close. That doesn’t do any of us any good.”

“Okay. Can you show me the art you think might be the one?”

“What I did was dig up some old files—mine,” she added. “I minored in office management, which is how I got the job here as gallery manager. Anyway, sorry. I tried keeping my own files, and I’ve been trying to coordinate them with what I can pull from the web pages of artists we’ve featured.”

“That’s good,” Eve told her.

“It’s been nagging at me. I just couldn’t let it go, so I remembered the files I’d stored at home. I was just about to tag David when he tagged me because I thought, maybe . . .”

She lifted her hands. “I can’t get it below these three—and now there’s another I think . . . maybe. Not all artists are good at the business and marketing sides, so their web pages aren’t well organized and updated, so there’s that issue. The other problem is, I haven’t been in Jordan’s place for months, and I know he switched things out since. A few times since. But these . . .”

She brought one up on the wall screen from her tablet. “This is Selma’s. Selma Witt. It’s her Woman at Rest. Selma’s very good. She works primarily in acrylics, but does some excellent charcoals and pastels. I know Jordan took this one out, but that was last fall—maybe even the end of last summer. There’s no record of him bringing it back, or of it being sold. It’s not in the gallery. The thing is, he didn’t usually keep anything as long as that.”

Eve studied the work—the drawing of a woman in bed, reclining against a mound of pillows and on tangled sheets.

Eve closed her eyes, put herself back in Banks’s apartment, tried to bring back the black-and-white art on his walls.

Should’ve paid more attention, she thought. They all looked so much the same.

“Give me another.”

“This is Simon Fent’s work. He’s . . . Well, he’s not as good as Selma, but he does show promise. There’s still a student’s hesitancy in his work, a failure to commit to the vision, but Jordan liked it. It’s the only one of Simon’s we took on.”

“Keep going.”

She brought another up, and Eve lifted a hand. “This one. Wait.”

She turned away for a minute, tried to bring those damn walls back, the black frames, the black-and-white figures in them.