Checked Out: A Dead-End Job Mystery - Softcover

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Elaine Viets has actually worked many of those dead-end jobs in her mystery novels, just like her character Helen Hawthorne. She is also the author of the Josie Marcus, Mystery Shopper series; the Francesca Vierling mysteries; and numerous short stories. Elaine has won an Anthony Award and an Agatha Award.

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Also by Elaine Viets

OBSIDIAN

For the librarians who gave me so much entertainment between the covers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1

“I need your help,” Elizabeth Cateman Kingsley said. “My late father misplaced a million dollars in a library book. I want it back.”

Helen Hawthorne caught herself before she said, “You’re joking.” Private eyes were supposed to be cool. Helen and her husband, Phil Sagemont, were partners in Coronado Investigations, a Fort Lauderdale firm.

Elizabeth seemed unnaturally calm for someone with a misplaced million. Her sensational statement had grabbed the attention of Helen and Phil, but now Elizabeth sat quietly in the yellow client chair, her narrow feet in sensible black heels crossed at the ankles, her slender, well-shaped hands folded in her lap.

Helen studied the woman from her chrome-and-black partner’s chair. Somewhere in her fifties, Elizabeth Kingsley kept her gunmetal hair defiantly undyed and pulled into a knot. A thin, knife-blade nose gave her makeup-free face distinction. Helen thought she looked practical, confident and intelligent.

Elizabeth’s well-cut gray suit was slightly worn. Her turquoise-and-pink silk scarf gave it a bold splash of color. Elizabeth had had money once, Helen decided, but she was on hard times now. But how the heck did you leave a million bucks in a library book?

Phil asked the question Helen had been thinking a little more tactfully: “How do you misplace a million in a library book?”

“I didn’t,” Elizabeth said. “My father, Davis Kingsley, did.”

“Is it a check? A bankbook?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s a watercolor.”

CHAPTER 2

Elizabeth sat with her hands folded demurely in her lap, a sly smile on her face. She seemed to enjoy setting off bombshells and watching their effect.

“Perhaps I should explain,” she said. “My family, the Kingsleys, were Florida pioneers. My grandparents moved to Fort Lauderdale in the 1920s and built a home in Flora Park.”

The Kingsleys might have been early local residents, Helen thought, but this pioneer family hadn’t roughed it in a log cabin. The Kingsleys had built a mansion in a wealthy enclave on the edge of Fort Lauderdale during the Florida land boom.

“Grandpapa Woodrow Kingsley made his money in oil and railroads,” Elizabeth said.

“The old-fashioned way,” Phil said.

My silver-haired husband is so charming, only I know he’s calling Woodrow a robber baron, Helen thought.

“For a financier, Grandpapa was a bit of a swashbuckler,” Elizabeth said, and smiled.

Helen decided maybe Elizabeth wasn’t as proper as she seemed.

“He enjoyed financing silent films. He often went to Hollywood. Grandmama was a lady and stayed home.”

The old gal was dull and disapproving, Helen translated. Grandpapa had had to travel three thousand miles to California to go on a toot.

“Grandmama would have nothing to do with movie people. She dedicated herself to helping the deserving poor.”

Heaven help them, Helen thought. Their lives were miserable enough.

“Grandpapa put up the money for a number of classic films, including Forbidden Paradise—that starred Pola Negri—and Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow.”

Films with scandalous women, Helen thought. Did Grandpapa unbuckle his swash for some smokin’-hot starlets?

“Impressive,” Phil said. “Von Stroheim was famous for going over budget. He ordered Paris gowns and monogrammed silk underwear for his actors in Foolish Wives so they could feel more like aristocrats.”

A tiny frown creased Elizabeth’s forehead. She did not like being one-upped.

“When he was in Hollywood, Grandpapa would drink scotch, smoke cigars and play poker,” she said. “He played poker on the set with the cast and crew, including Clark Gable.”

“Wow!” Helen said.

“Oh, Gable wasn’t a star then,” Elizabeth said. “Far from it. He was an extra and Grandpapa thought Gable wouldn’t get anywhere because his ears were too big. Many men made that mistake. Until Gable became the biggest star in Hollywood.”

There it was again, Helen thought, that glimpse of carefully suppressed glee.

“Gable was on a losing streak that night,” Elizabeth said. “He was out of money. He’d lost his watch and his ring. He bet a watercolor called Muddy Alligators.”

“A painting?” Helen said. “What was Gable doing with that?”

“I have no idea, but he was quite attached to it,” Elizabeth said. “He thought gators sunning themselves on a mud bank were manly. Grandpapa won the painting with a royal flush, but he didn’t trust Hollywood types. He made Gable sign it over to him. Gable wrote on the back: I lost this fair and square to Woodrow Kingsley—W. C. Gable, 1924. Gable’s first name was William. He changed his stage name to Clark Gable about then.

“Grandpapa admired the watercolor, and was surprised that a roughneck like Gable owned a genuine John Singer Sargent.”

“Sargent painted muddy reptiles? I thought he did portraits of royalty and beautiful society women,” Phil said.

“He did, until his mid-forties,” Elizabeth said. “Then he had some kind of midlife career crisis and painted landscapes in Europe and America. Sargent painted at least two alligator watercolors when he stayed at the Florida home of John D. Rockefeller.”

“Sargent switched from society dragons to alligators,” Helen said, then wished she could recall her words. Elizabeth’s grandmother was definitely a dragon.

“Dragons in training, usually,” Elizabeth said, and again Helen caught a flash of well-bred amusement. “Most of his society belles were young women.

“Grandmama refused to display the painting in her house. Grandpapa couldn’t even hang it in his office. She said it was ugly. I suspect it also may have been an ugly reminder of his Hollywood high jinks. She banished the alligator watercolor to a storage room.

“Sargent died the next year and Grandpapa had a fatal heart attack seven years later, leaving Grandmama a widow with one son. The watercolor was forgotten for decades.

“Until about five years ago,” Elizabeth said. “My father, Davis Kingsley, inherited the family home in the fifties. Papa was eighty when he found the watercolor in the storage room. Sargent’s work was fashionable again. He had it authenticated and appraised. The watercolor wasn’t worth all that much, maybe three hundred thousand.”

Helen raised an eyebrow and Phil gave her a tiny nod. Three hundred K might not be much to Elizabeth, but the PI pair thought it was a substantial chunk of change.

“But it was worth much more, thanks to what the art world calls ‘association.’ A painting owned—and signed—by a film star brought the price up to more than a million dollars. The story behind it helped, too.

“Papa told everyone he’d discovered a lost family treasure. My brother, Cateman, and I begged him to have it properly stored and insured, but Papa said it wasn’t necessary. ‘It’s in a safe place,’ he’d say. ‘Safer than any vault.’ But we were concerned. Papa suffered from mild dementia by then.

“He died in his sleep six months ago,...