Finding the Forger by Libby Sternberg

anger clouds storm onto her face. I figured the Witherspoon connection was enough to entice her. She might assume I had Neville by the ear, waiting to hear her sales pitch.
    Shortly after I landed outside on the top marble step, Conniejoined us. If she was disappointed the Witherspoon firm wasn’t there waiting for her, she didn’t let it show.
    “What’s up?” she asked, thumping her hands against her arms to warm up. It was getting a bit nippy.
    Sarah looked at both of us with wide, scared eyes. “Come with me.”
    We followed her down the street to where her old beat-up car was parked, its front fenders the only two inches of the car safely inside the “No Parking Beyond This Sign” sign. Looking up and down the street both ways to make sure no one saw her, she went to the trunk, which she smacked hard with her fist. It popped open. (Some old fashioned automatic opener, I guess.)
    Inside, on top of some old newspapers, a tire, a flashlight, a battered case of some kind, and two Cosmopolitan magazines, was a painting. It was blue and white and gray, kind of streaky, with a yellow ball the size of a quarter painted in the upper right hand corner. Outside of the museum, it didn’t look like art any more. It looked like a child’s imagination gone wild, kind of whimsical and playful, and if it hadn’t been on stretched canvas, I could have seen it smiling from some proud mom’s refrigerator door, anchored by magnets from the local appliance repair shop.
    “Holy sh—” Connie began to say, but I trumped her with my own shriek of “Sarah! How on earth did you get this?”
    Her eyes teared up, and she shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know! I don’t know! It was there when I went to get my blouse out of my car, when I was trying to find a blouse Kerrie could change into at the museum!”
    Oh, man! That was when she couldn’t get back in because the car door had been locked. Whoever put it in her trunk had keys. Probably Hector!
    Connie leaned over and studied it. “This is it,” she said definitively. “I’d put money on it.”
    “This is what? ” I asked.
    “The painting that went missing this weekend.”
    “There weren’t any missing paintings that I saw,” I said. Yup, like the museum would just let an empty frame hang on the wall as an advertisement for would-be art thieves (“Steal from us! We won’t notice!”)
    “A Bargenstahler,” she said, accent and all. “Some up-and-coming German. Worth about twenty grand or more. And if he gets hot, it could be worth lots more in a few years.” She must have been studying art appraisals.
    “When was it taken?” I asked.
    “They’re not sure. A replacement was hung in its place, but no one noticed until this weekend.”
    “You mean a forgery was put up?” I pressed. Sarah stood mute and afraid in the cold dark evening.
    “Yup,” said Connie, who turned the moment she heard a car drive up behind us, and quickly slammed the trunk so no one would see the painting.
    Then Connie pulled a Polaroid photo from the breast pocket of her blue Oxford shirt. She held it out for us to see. Although it was cheesy, it appeared to be a picture of a painting about the same size as the Bargenstahler, and in the same shades. But the streaks in the Polaroid’s painting were at a sharper angle. And the yellow ball was muddy, as if the painter hadn’t bothered to clean his brush before dipping it in the new color.
    “Whoever did that fake isn’t very good,” I murmured.
    Connie laughed. “That’s the beauty of this scheme. Whoever’s taking these things only takes abstracts and doesn’t even bother todo a full-court-press forgery. He just uses whatever paint’s on hand and throws it on the same-sized canvas in the same general shapes.” She tapped her nail on the photo. “That’s standard-issue gray paint from Home Depot.”
    “What am I going to do?” asked Sarah. “I can’t just take this to the police! I didn’t even know