Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,81
he picked this painting out of a bunch of them lying against a wall. He told us Arthur took the canvas, made a black rectangle with some paint, and then signed it.” I pointed out the black rectangle with Arthur’s name scrawled in bright yellow. “Do you see the difference between the black part and the rest of the painting?”
“The painting looks shiny,” O’Byrne said, scooting over to get a better look at what I was pointing out. “So what?”
“One of the things Jae likes to watch is painting restoration. And I’m not talking about a couple of dings and scratches. There’s this guy that fills in big chunks of missing old paint and repairs torn canvases. He narrates as he goes, but the cool thing about it is he explains that everything he does to the painting is reversible. He uses special paints that can be removed a lot easier than standard oils or acrylics.” I zoomed in even tighter until we could see the even line of black covering a good portion of the canvas’s corner. The ebony cover was unforgiving, as deeply pitch and light-sucking as a monolith coming down to the ground and scaring a bunch of monkeys. “The one thing that stuck with me was something he always says. He does this thing to the original painting that glosses it up so he can see what the final colors are when he varnishes it at the end.”
“This all sounds very cool, but I don’t see what this has to do with anything,” O’Byrne said, nodding toward my beer. “How many of those have you had?”
“Just the one. Hear me out. The reason he has to do that is because the paint he uses doesn’t have any oils in it. So it doesn’t have the same sheen as regular oil paint, and he needs to be able to color match with what’s already there. Once he’s done, he varnishes the whole thing, and you can’t tell where the restoration is. Well, unless he does that crosshatch painting technique, but I only saw that once, and it looked weird. But most of the time, it’s flawless. But the paint is matte until he finishes it up.” With a flick of my finger, I restored the painting to the full screen. “That black part is what the paint looks like before the restorer finishes his work. The rest of Watson’s painting has already been varnished. If Arthur was doing these to give away or to sell, his signature would be under that layer of varnish. And why would he put that big black rectangle there?”
“So what are you thinking?” O’Byrne took the iPad from me, studying the painting closer.
“I think if we removed that black rectangle, we’d find Rubens’s signature underneath it. Maybe there’s something about this painting that he didn’t think was good enough to pass off as an original or maybe even one made by a student, but I’m thinking Arthur Brinkerhoff never stopped passing off forgeries.” Neko demanded another pet, and I picked her up to cuddle her in my lap. “I think someone figured out he was still working his magic and tried to blackmail them. That’s why Adele was out there. I think she was paying somebody off, and that somebody knew those diamonds she had on her were lab grown. That’s why they killed her.”
“And if Arthur was still doing forgeries, chances are Adele still had either a stash in their old house or was still pulling enough jobs,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “She was an older woman. Getting into somebody’s house would be kind of hard for her. They’d notice somebody’s grandmother trying to break in.”
“Not if she was their lover,” I said with a smile. “Remember how I told you I met her? Wrapped up in a leather corset, doing a BDSM scene with a younger woman? I checked something when I came home today. That house I found her at was burglarized three months later. The only thing taken was the woman’s jewelry. So yeah, I think the Brinkerhoffs never gave up their life of crime. Just like they never gave up that house. Now we’ve just got to find where they’ve hidden their loot and who the hell is ballsy enough to try to blackmail a couple of old criminals.”
Eighteen
O’BYRNE AND I kicked around a few options, eventually even eating the cold grilled cheese sandwiches after giving them a quick trip into a hot skillet to warm