it gets you fired.”
“This place would fall apart without me. I’m the only one on the detail who can operate a spectograph and brew a decent pot of decaffeinated.”
“In that case, go ahead.”
“We took your advice and put in a request with the Swedish Military Archives for copies of samples of Greta Garbo’s handwriting to compare with the fake love letter. If you remember, we had to confirm similarity before we tackled the problem of where Akers obtained a specimen extensive enough to scan into his computer and make it plausible.”
“I remember.” He sat up straighter. He sensed something coming his way.
“The curator got back to us an hour later. He was so uptight he kept forgetting his English. The last time anyone looked at the documents was a year ago last March, when an independent researcher checked them out and then checked them back in. Sometime between then and this morning, two long letters and two postcards were removed. No one knows what happened to them.”
**
CHAPTER
10
“VAL, ARE YOU there?”
He’d been silent a second longer than needed to take in the information she’d given him. In a flash, he’d remembered something Lieutenant Padilla had said, and had almost blurted it out, but vetoed the urge because it looked as bad for Matthew Rankin as it did for Roger Akers—possibly worse—and in any case if the police didn’t want Harriet talking to Valentino about the investigation he wasn’t disposed to tell them anything they could find out for themselves. He didn’t like Ray Padilla; the man could wage his personal crusade against the upper class by himself.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was in deep shock. Garbo accepted their security, and she didn’t place her faith lightly. Do they have any idea what happened?”
“Not yet. They’re rattled, too. But for us it opens up a whole new line of speculation. Akers needed to gain access to that material, and it goes missing just about the time he started making substantial monthly deposits in his savings account. If we can establish how it got from a locked file in Sweden to a mansion in Beverly Hills, we can drop the lid on the case. Any ideas?”
“None whatsoever,” he lied.
“And you call yourself a film detective.”
He decided to derail that train of thought. “Are the archives going public with this discovery?”
“Not yet. They’ve asked us to keep it from the press until they can come up with some kind of strategy. My opinion? They’ll offer a fat reward for the documents’ return, to steer attention away from a colossal blunder. If I were the curator I’d just wait for them to show up on eBay.”
“Whoever was smart enough to sneak them out from under armed guard is probably smart enough not to try to peddle them publicly.”
She spoke to someone on her end. “Tom, who broke that Picasso case?”
Valentino heard a murmuring in the background. It sounded like “Danielle.”
“Right. Thanks.” She spoke into the receiver. “Danielle Cox works Wire Fraud. Last year four men broke into a house in Bel-Air, walked around a high-tech security system with five backups, and left with one-point-two million in Picasso drawings from a private collection. They posted them on eBay. Danielle traced them to the robbers in forty-five minutes. No one’s smart all the way around third base.”
“How much of this is confidential?”
“The Picasso perps are public record, and guests of the state for the next fifteen to twenty. And the whole department knows about the other thing. Stockholm must know it’s going to be a race between its media team and whoever leaks it to the press on this end.”
“You’re leaking it to me.”
“You’re not the press. How are you two getting along, by the way?”
“So far it’s First Amendment, one, Valentino, zero. Don’t be alarmed next time you see me. You’ve
“This place would fall apart without me. I’m the only one on the detail who can operate a spectograph and brew a decent pot of decaffeinated.”
“In that case, go ahead.”
“We took your advice and put in a request with the Swedish Military Archives for copies of samples of Greta Garbo’s handwriting to compare with the fake love letter. If you remember, we had to confirm similarity before we tackled the problem of where Akers obtained a specimen extensive enough to scan into his computer and make it plausible.”
“I remember.” He sat up straighter. He sensed something coming his way.
“The curator got back to us an hour later. He was so uptight he kept forgetting his English. The last time anyone looked at the documents was a year ago last March, when an independent researcher checked them out and then checked them back in. Sometime between then and this morning, two long letters and two postcards were removed. No one knows what happened to them.”
**
CHAPTER
10
“VAL, ARE YOU there?”
He’d been silent a second longer than needed to take in the information she’d given him. In a flash, he’d remembered something Lieutenant Padilla had said, and had almost blurted it out, but vetoed the urge because it looked as bad for Matthew Rankin as it did for Roger Akers—possibly worse—and in any case if the police didn’t want Harriet talking to Valentino about the investigation he wasn’t disposed to tell them anything they could find out for themselves. He didn’t like Ray Padilla; the man could wage his personal crusade against the upper class by himself.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was in deep shock. Garbo accepted their security, and she didn’t place her faith lightly. Do they have any idea what happened?”
“Not yet. They’re rattled, too. But for us it opens up a whole new line of speculation. Akers needed to gain access to that material, and it goes missing just about the time he started making substantial monthly deposits in his savings account. If we can establish how it got from a locked file in Sweden to a mansion in Beverly Hills, we can drop the lid on the case. Any ideas?”
“None whatsoever,” he lied.
“And you call yourself a film detective.”
He decided to derail that train of thought. “Are the archives going public with this discovery?”
“Not yet. They’ve asked us to keep it from the press until they can come up with some kind of strategy. My opinion? They’ll offer a fat reward for the documents’ return, to steer attention away from a colossal blunder. If I were the curator I’d just wait for them to show up on eBay.”
“Whoever was smart enough to sneak them out from under armed guard is probably smart enough not to try to peddle them publicly.”
She spoke to someone on her end. “Tom, who broke that Picasso case?”
Valentino heard a murmuring in the background. It sounded like “Danielle.”
“Right. Thanks.” She spoke into the receiver. “Danielle Cox works Wire Fraud. Last year four men broke into a house in Bel-Air, walked around a high-tech security system with five backups, and left with one-point-two million in Picasso drawings from a private collection. They posted them on eBay. Danielle traced them to the robbers in forty-five minutes. No one’s smart all the way around third base.”
“How much of this is confidential?”
“The Picasso perps are public record, and guests of the state for the next fifteen to twenty. And the whole department knows about the other thing. Stockholm must know it’s going to be a race between its media team and whoever leaks it to the press on this end.”
“You’re leaking it to me.”
“You’re not the press. How are you two getting along, by the way?”
“So far it’s First Amendment, one, Valentino, zero. Don’t be alarmed next time you see me. You’ve
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