ready for steaming, but Rebecca Powell, Nora’s college roommate, was late.
Hannah scraped the nachos into the garbage disposal, then rinsed the platter and slotted it into the dishwasher. Nora was at the long trestle table in the kitchen, folding starched linen napkins into swan shapes. Their mother, just down from napping upstairs, was putzing around the room, looking for something to clean or polish. Hannah watched her mother’s slightly frenzied hunt. It was pathological. The woman would probably end up ironing the sheets on her own deathbed.
“Ma, come and sit down.”
Instead, Nana picked up a dish towel and polished the taps and faucet at the sink until they gleamed.
Hannah sighed and turned back to her sister. “Could Rebecca have forgotten the invitation?”
Nora shook her head. “I was just talking to her last night. She won’t have forgotten. She’s probably stuck in traffic.”
“She still living in Malibu?”
“No. The gallery’s still there, but she moved into an apartment in Westwood.”
“I thought she was getting the house in the divorce.”
“Bill reneged. He got himself some shark of a lawyer and the lines suddenly shifted. I’m not sure exactly how he managed it, but poor Becs is fighting for her life here.”
“You think the shark dug up something on her? Like, maybe she had an affair, too?”
Nora’s shoulders lifted in a sad shrug. “I really don’t know. Becs hasn’t volunteered and I don’t like to ask. She’s pretty wrung out these days.”
“It’s a blessing she and her husband didn’t have children,” Hannah’s mother said. She’d moved on to wiping the brown speckled counter, even though it was already sparkling. If Rebecca didn’t show up soon, she was going to wear a groove in the granite. Hannah could sympathize. She’d inherited her mother’s restlessness, although in her case, it rarely manifested itself in an urge to clean.
“I suppose,” Nora said.
Nana’s head gave a sad shake. “Divorce is so hard on children.”
Hannah’s gaze dropped to her hands and she tried to ignore the stab in her solar plexus. Her mother wasn’t trying to make her feel crummy about her own messy divorce and lost custody struggle, she knew, but the comment stung just the same.
“Anyway,” Nora added, “I know she hasn’t forgotten about today because she asked last night if you were going to be here.”
Hannah glanced at their mother, then back at Nora. “Who, me? Why?”
“Something about a job.”
“What would she need a security contractor for? Guarding overpriced seascapes?”
Hannah had gone with Nora one time to Rebecca Powell’s Malibu art gallery. The place specialized in the kind of idealized, light-dappled images of coastal California, conveniently sofa-sized, that tourists seemed to favor.
“I don’t know why she needs your services, but here she comes.” Sure enough, through the big, multipaned window next to her sister, Hannah saw a bright red BMW convertible roaring up the driveway. Nora set aside the last in her flock of linen swans and got to her feet. “You can ask her yourself.”
It was courier work, it seemed.
Rebecca didn’t broach the subject until well after dinner. Neal and the boys were in the den, watching a football game, and Nora and Nana were loading the dishwasher. When they brushed off all offers of help, Hannah and Rebecca escaped the warm kitchen and took their coffee out onto the softly lit, tented gazebo on the patio.
“It’s for a client,” Rebecca said, after explaining what she needed from Hannah.
She smoothed her cream linen slacks and crossed her dainty, espadrille-clad feet at the ankles before lifting her china cup to her lips. Rebecca was one of those L.A. women whose voluptuous breasts didn’t seem to belong to her stick-thin body, like she’d ordered them from some mammary mail-order house—Boobs ’R Us. At least she’d avoided the clichéd long blond tresses, opting instead for short, ketchup-red spikes that made her look more arty than bimbo-esque.
“My client ordered a painting and he wants it delivered to his vacation home in Mexico.”
“He never heard of FedEx or UPS?”
“It’s a fairly expensive piece so he wants it hand-carried. A painting by August Koon.”
Hannah shrugged. “Never heard of him.”
Rebecca leaned forward to settle her coffee cup in its saucer on the patio table. As she did, her dangly silver earrings tinkled and a silver charm necklace swayed in the cleft of her ample breasts. Hannah’s personal inclinations left her lusting after manly biceps, not bosoms, but it was hard not to be distracted by that much cleavage. At dinner, she’d caught Nolan’s and even ten-year-old Gabe’s eyes wandering repeatedly to the deep V of Rebecca’s turquoise cashmere sweater although, she’d been happy to note, Neal had had eyes for no one but his wife. Bless his plodding, loyal heart.
“Koon’s work is what they call po-mo. Postmodern,” Rebecca said. “Not what I normally carry in my little gallery, but he’s local and fairly trendy at the moment. His work gets pretty good reviews, although to be perfectly honest, I think he’s overrated.”
“And this client? He’s a regular of yours?’
Rebecca hesitated. She might have been frowning, except her skin from the eyebrows up seemed frozen smooth. Damn Botox. It made reading faces really tough. Take now, for example. Instead of looking puzzled at the question, or cagey, or maybe just discreet, Rebecca only succeeded in looking dim. It was all but impossible to know what she was thinking.
“He hasn’t bought from me before this, but he has a home in Malibu—one of several, I gather, scattered all over the world. Anyway, he called a couple of weeks ago and said he’d been in my gallery a couple of times. I don’t know that I can really place him, but when he asked me about purchasing this Koon on his behalf, I jumped at it.”
“I didn’t realize you did that. I guess I just assumed you sell what you’re showing.”
“I haven’t really done much of this before. I mean, once or twice, I’ve acted as agent for a buyer who wanted something different from an artist I was showing, but never an artist in August Koon’s price range. I’d love to do more of this, though. Much better than running a gallery.” Rebecca shook her ketchup-red spikes. “All that financial overhead. Long hours. Trying to guess which way the market’s going.”
“Is being a buyer a full-time gig?”
“It can be. Most wealthy buyers prefer to work anonymously through a broker to keep the price down.”
“So this Koon deal is a biggie?”
Rebecca’s right hand seesawed. “Middling big. The purchase price is just over a quarter mil, plus my commission. Normally, the agent charges ten or fifteen percent, but when he called the other day, my buyer offered twenty percent before I’d even had
