Black Swan Rising by Lee Carroll Read Free Book Online Page A

burglars hadn’t died. Then I looked up and saw what he meant. The skylight above our heads had been shattered. The metal bookcase against the wall was tilted slightly out of line and pieces of scrap metal had been shoved aside. The burglars must have used it as a ladder up to the skylight and the roof above. “But you will have to add it to the list of stolen items,” he continued. “You should let the owner know as soon as possible.”
    “I would, only I don’t have his name or address.” I was instantly sorry I had admitted to this. I could just have said I’d contact the man later. The detective was staring at me now as if I were crazy.
    “I know, it sounds nuts, but you have to understand that I was distracted. I’d just gotten some bad news at our lawyer’s office.”
    “Really?” Detective Kiernan took out his notebook and sat on the edge of the worktable. “Why don’t you tell me about
that
?”
    An hour later I finally managed to get away from Detective Kiernan, but only because the hospital called to tell me that my father was awake and asking for me. I told Kiernan I really needed a few minutes to myself before returning to the hospital, and so he reluctantly left the town house as I practically shoved him out the door. Then after he’d turned the nearest corner, I walked the few blocks to St. Vincent’s, cursing myself for letting the police detective lure me into a full disclosure of our financial troubles. True, he would eventually have found out about the loan being called, but now it would color the whole investigation into the burglary. He’d focused on how
convenient,
as he kept saying, it was that the insurance money could be used to pay off the loan, or some of it. It was clear he suspected my father had arranged the burglary to collect onthe insurance. All he needed now was to find out that Roman had been arrested for insurance fraud once before.
    It had happened eleven years ago when I was fifteen. I knew that money was tight because I’d had to switch from private school to public the year before. I hadn’t minded that—I’d gotten into LaGuardia and loved the art program there—but I hated hearing my parents arguing about money. Especially when I heard my mother complain that Roman had used money set aside for my college to buy a Warhol silk screen from one of Zach Reese’s friends.
    “I’ll sell it for twice what I paid for it,” I heard my father say one night. “And Garet will go to Harvard if she wants to.”
    But then the Warhol Board had denied authentication to the silk screen. They claimed that Zach Reese had run off copies of the silk screen without Warhol’s permission. Without the Board’s seal of approval the piece was almost worthless. Three days after Roman received the news from the Warhol Board the gallery was robbed. A few paintings by minor artists were taken, but the only item of “value” taken was the Warhol, which had been insured for the purchase price. When the same friend of Zach Reese’s who had sold the painting to Roman was arrested while trying to sell the same painting to a Japanese art collector, Roman was also arrested for conspiring to defraud the insurance company. The case had dragged on for a year, during which time the gallery’s reputation was nearly destroyed and my mother died in a car accident. Her obituary ran in the
Times
the same day that the case against Roman James was dropped due to lack of evidence. It wouldn’t take long for Detective Kiernan to dig up that information. In fact it was weird he didn’t know about it already.
    Unless he did know and had only been waiting for me tomention it. Had I looked more suspicious
not
bringing up the other case? But then why should I mention it? The cases were completely different. After all, Roman had been
shot
in this burglary. If he’d hired the burglars—and the idea of my father having anything to do with those
thugs
was unthinkable—surely they wouldn’t have shot