Page 152 of Homeport

It only took her three seconds to reach out, nip the bill with the lethal tips of bloodred fingernails. “Okay, come on in.”

The room held a bed, a single chair, two flea market tables, and a metal clothes rack crowded with bright, eye-catching colors and cheap fabrics. He’d been right about the wig, he noted. Two of them, a long, curly blond and a sleek raven-black, sat on plastic foam heads.

A little desk held a dressing room mirror and a department store array of cosmetics.

While distressingly bare, the room was tidy as an accountant’s spread sheet.

“For fifty,” she told him, “you can have a beer.”

“Appreciate it.” While she moved toward the two-burner stove and midget refrigerator that constituted her kitchen, Ryan stepped up to a bronze dragon that guarded one of her flimsy tables.

“This is a very nice piece.”

“Yeah, it’s real art. Rembrandt did it.”

“He has talent.”

“I guess.” She moved her shoulders, didn’t bother to tug her robe back together. He was entitled to look at the merchandise, she thought, in case he wanted to invest another fifty. “I said how I liked it, and we worked out a trade.” She smiled as she handed him a bottle of Budweiser.

“You’re friendly with Mathers?”

“He’s okay. Doesn’t try to scam me for freebies. Once I had a john up here who wanted to use me for a punching bag instead of a mattress. Kid comes banging on the door when he heard I was in trouble. Yelled out how he was the cops.” She snickered into her beer. “Asshole went out my window with his pants around his ankles. Rembrandt’s okay. Gets a little down, smokes a lot of grass. That’s an artist’s thing, I guess.”

“He have many friends?”

“Slick, nobody in this building has many friends. He’s been here a couple years now, and this is the first time I’ve seen two people come around to his door in one day.”

“Tell me about the other guy.”

She fingered the fifty in the pocket of her robe. “Big. Ugly face. Looked like meat to me, somebody’s arm, you know. And you could tell he liked breaking legs. Said how he wanted to buy one of Rembrandt’s statues, but that creep wasn’t no art lover. Gave me grief when I said he wasn’t around, and I didn’t know where he was.”

She hesitated a moment, then moved her shoulders again. “He was carrying. Had a bulge under his jacket. I shut the door in his fat face, and got out my friend there.” She jerked her head toward the pie-plate-sized kitchen counter where she’d laid the .45. “You only missed him by a few minutes, that’s why I thought you was him.”

“How big was he, the other guy?”

“About six-four, maybe five, two-sixty easy. Gorilla arms and meat cleaver hands. Spooky eyes, like dirty ice, you know. Guy like that comes up to me on the stroll, I give him a pass.”

“Good thinking.” The description clicked very close to the man who’d attacked Miranda. Harrison Mathers was very lucky he wasn’t home.

“So, what do you want with Rembrandt?”

“I’m an art dealer.” Ryan took a business card from the case in his pocket, handed it to her.

“Classy.”

“If you hear from Harry, or he comes back, give him that, will you? Tell him I like his work. I’d like to discuss it with him.”

“Sure.” She rubbed a finger over the embossing, then lifted the dragon and set the card under its serpentine tail. “You know, Slick . . .” She reached out and trailed one of those scalpel-sharp nails down his shirt. “It’s cold and rainy out there. You want to . . . converse a little more, I’ll give you a discount.”

He’d once been mildly in lust with a girl from the Bronx. The sentiment of it had him taking another fifty out of his wallet. “That’s for the help, and the beer.” He turned for the door, giving the dragon a last glance. “You get tight for money, take that to Michael at Boldari here on the waterfront. He’ll give you a good price for it.”

“Yeah. I’ll keep that in mind. Come back anytime, Slick.” She toasted him with the beer. “I owe you a free ride.”

Ryan walked directly across the hall, finessed the lock, and was inside Mathers’s apartment before his second fifty had been hidden away.

The room mirrored the one he’d just been in as to size. Ryan doubted the tanks for welding metal were approved by the landlord. There were several pieces in varying stages of work. None of them showed the insight or talent of the dragon he’d given a whore for sex. His heart was in bronzes, Ryan decided when he studied the small fluid nude standing on the stained tank of the toilet.

A self-critic, he thought. Artists could be so pathetically insecure.

---