A Victim Must Be Found Read Online Free Page B

stumbling over two times six. “Of course,” he said, making me feel about seven-and-a-half and not too swift into the bargain. “Tallon was a terrible businessman. Disorganized. Depended on his memory or slips of paper. If I didn’t force him to take my money, he would never take payment. The only receipts I ever got from him are written on torn-up pieces of cigarette packages.”
    Pambos was setting up Tallon as a bad businessman. I wonder whether he knew what kind of private investigator he was in the process of engaging. I thought of the ratty files in my single, disorganized stack of four filing drawers in the office. Usually I keep everything, new, old, important, sentimental, in an untidy stack in the middle of my desk. Once I start trying to sort things into categories and enter them in different files, that’s when I begin to lose hold of the shape of the universe. If everything’s under my nose, it can’t get lost. The file drawers are good places to hide my lunch in and store my galoshes between winters. I was beginning to get a picture of Tallon in my mind. It was the only substantial thing to come along so far, so I was holding on tight.
    “After Tallon died,” Pambos went on, “his assistant, Patrick Miles, couldn’t tell what paintings Tallon had out on loan. Tallon was always lending pictures. You know, ‘Take it home, and give me a call if you decide to keep it.’ That sort of thing. I’m talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of paintings, Benny. I mean, when he started out lending and selling, Tallon didn’t have to trust people very much. A Lamb in those days wouldn’t be worth more than a couple of hundred dollars. Now a single Lamb might be worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars.”
    “Tallon seems to have had a special liking for Lamb.”
    “Yeah. He discovered Lamb. Not that Lamb would ever admit that anybody discovered him, but you know what I mean. Tallon sold the first Lambs in Canada. When New York wanted to see what Lamb was doing, they had to go through Tallon. And Tallon was always generous with them, even though New York prices were always higher than even Toronto prices. Tallon told me he remembered when he couldn’t get more than fifteen dollars each for a Lamb canvas, not a sketch, mind you, but a full canvas.” I tried to look surprised. I didn’t own a painting or a sketch, and the only genuine oils I saw regularly were the work of my Aunt Dora in my mother’s living-room.
    “So, this list is a list of the people that Tallon knew had pictures on loan from his gallery. If the list was written around the time of his death, that makes it a good inventory of his estate not actually under his roof.”
    “That’s right. Of the Lambs anyway. He lent other pictures too, of course. Now Paddy Miles and Tallon’s brother are trying to put the estate in order. As it is, a good portion is unaccounted for. Not everybody who has pictures on loan has come forward. Without the list of pictures on loan a lot of people in big houses are going to make unrecorded capital gains.”
    I could see the temptation. Only the closest I ever come to that kind of gain is when I get the change from my five-dollar bill and my five-dollar bill handed to me by the distracted cashier at the convenience store. I don’t know much about rich people, but I’ve never met anybody who thought he was rich. Everybody always says he’s just getting by, even when I’m not on the point of asking for the loan of a few hundred. Anyway, I could see people at the top of the local cultural ladder sitting on their masterpieces and waiting to hear from the executors. After all, nobody got rich by volunteering to give back borrowed property before it was asked for.
    “Paddy Miles is going crazy trying to locate the missing pictures, Benny. When I told him about the list Tallon gave me, Paddy nearly kissed my feet.”
    I was beginning to feel strange getting mixed up in the art world, even the