Dark blue, like this one?

Down below, the Jaguar's windshield wipers clicked into motion, swiping back and forth. As Zane watched, the Jaguar moved away, rolling sedately down the block, its yellow right directional blinking, an intermittent bright spot in the rain. He wasn't positive it was the same sort of car as he'd seen near the clinic. Same color, perhaps, but a different make?

"Grrowww!" said the cat, and scratched at Zane's wrist.

Startled, Zane released his grip – lost in thought, he'd been strangling the thing – and the cat ran away to hide under the daybed. Zane picked up the milk carton, for something to do, and limped with it to the refrigerator. The cat's eyes peered out at him from under the bed, but he ignored it. His mind was moving again, away from the unanswerable questions about the car, on to other concerns. He sat at the formica table, brooding, his eyes vague, his hands relaxed with curved fingers on the tabletop, the aching in his foot forgotten for the moment, everything forgotten for the moment.

The psychiatrist's wife. An accident, a fall. Hmmmmmm…

Chapter 7

Kelp was so happy he was crowing. "Don't say I never did anything for you, Dortmunder," he said. "Not after this."

"All right," Dortmunder said. Owing a debt of gratitude to another person always made him nervous, and that other person being Kelp didn't improve the situation.

"Over two months I staked out that clinic," Kelp pointed out. "I musta gone through a thousand paperback books. Day after day, three, four days a week, and boy, I finally hit it."

"For sure," Dortmunder said. "This time it's positively for sure." In the last two months Kelp had three times followed limping men home from the Westchester Orthopedic Clinic, a site that by the very nature of things would be bound to provide a certain steady quota of limping men, and all three times Kelp had insisted Dortmunder accompany him on expeditions to remote neighborhoods to look at these guys, and none of them had been even remotely like the killer Dortmunder had met back in November.

But this time Kelp was sure. "Absolutely," he said. "And you know why? Because I waited after he went in his building, and then I followed him and looked at the mailboxes, and there it was: Zane, room thirteen."

"All right," Dortmunder said.

"So we got him."

"We'll have to check every once in a while," Dortmunder said. "Be sure he doesn't move."

"Oh, sure." Kelp then looked slightly pained and said, "Maybe the other guys could do some of that, huh? I spent more time in cars the last two months than A. J. Foyt."

"Oh, naturally," Dortmunder said. "We'll all take our turns."

"Good," said Kelp, and then there was a little silence.

Dortmunder sniffed. He rubbed a knuckle against his nose. He hitched his pants. "Kum, kak," he said, and coughed, and cleared his throat.

Kelp said, "What?" He was leaning forward, looking alert and helpful.

"Urn," said Dortmunder. He stuck his finger in his ear and jiggled it, looking for wax. He took a deep breath. He put his hands behind his back and clasped them together tight. "Thanks, uh, Andy," he said.

"Oh, sure," Kelp said. "Don't mention it."

Chapter 8

"That's pretty good," Dortmunder said.

Griswold Porculey gave him a look. "Pretty good? Dortmunder, I'll tell you what this is. It's a work of genius."

"I said it was pretty good," Dortmunder said.

They were both right. The nearly finished painting on Porculey's easel was an incredible piece of work, a forgery so brilliant, so detailed, that it suggested true genius perhaps did reside within the unlikely corpus of Griswold Porculey after all, just as genius has so often in the past chosen other unlikely vessels for its abode. The paint-smeared hand holding the paint-smeared brush, the bleary washed-out eye observing the work, these had turned a lumpish array of pigment into a painting Jan Veenbes himself might have been proud to claim.

Tacked and taped on the wall to Porculey's left were nearly two dozen representations of Folly Leads Man to Ruin, ranging from full-size photographic reproductions to reduced-size copies torn from art books. The differences in color and detail among these many imitations were enough to discourage the most determined copyist, but somehow Porculey had maneuvered this minefield and had made so many right choices that Dortmunder, looking at the almost-completed work, thought he was seeing an exact duplicate of the painting in Arnold Chauncey's sitting room. He wasn't, of course, but the differences, though pervasive, were minute.

Porculey was contemplating now that darkness in the lower right, where the road curved away and down a dim slope. This was the most difficult part because it was the vaguest, with the least specific detail and yet it was far from being a featureless wash of umbra. It was a peopled gloom, its obscurity filled with faintly seen writhings, hints of grotesquerie, suggestions of shape and form and movement. Porculey's brush moved cautiously over these deeps, touching lightly, pausing, returning, moving on.

It was early April, three weeks since Kelp had finally found the killer, and Dortmunder was back in this garret-boutique for the first time since that night in December when Porculey had thrown such cold water on Kelp's original idea. Dortmunder had wanted to return, several times, to see for himself what Porculey was up to, but his exploratory phone calls to the painter had received unrelenting negatives. "I don't want a lot of amateurs breathing down my neck," Porculey had said, and when Dortmunder had tried to point out it was his own neck that was being breathed down, and by a professional killer at that, Porculey had merely said, "I'll call you when there's something to see," and had hung up on him.

So it came as a surprise this morning, and a very happy one, when Porculey himself had gotten in touch, calling Dortmunder at home and saying, "If you still want to see what I'm doing, come along."

"I will, right away."

"You can bring your partners, if you want."

But Dortmunder hadn't wanted; this painting was too important to him, and he preferred to see it without a lot of conversation going on all over the place. "I'll come by myself," he said.

"Up to you. Bring a bottle of wine, you know the stuff." So Dortmunder had brought a gallon of Hearty Burgundy, some of which Cleo Marlahy had at once poured into the usual disparity of drinking vessels, and now he stood holding his white mug of wine and watching Porculey's brush make small tentative decisions on the surface of the painting. In the last four months, it seemed, laboring away in his shopping-center sanctuary, Porculey had been bringing forth a miracle.

Which he was willing to talk about. Stepping back from the easel, frowning at that troublesome darkness in the lower right, he said, "Do you know how I did it?"

Porculey nodded. "I began," he explained, continuing to brood at the painting as he spoke, "with research. The Frick has one Veenbes, and three more hang in the Metropolitan. I studied those four, and I looked at every copy of them I could find."

Dortmunder said, "Copies? Why?"

"Every artist has his own range of colors. His palette. I wanted to see how Veenbes' other pictures reproduced, to help me get back to the original colors in this one."

"I get the idea," Dortmunder said. "That's pretty good."

Cleo, sipping her wine and musing at Porculey and the painting as though she herself had invented both and was pleased with the result of her labors, said, 'Porky's had a wonderful time with this. He got to rage and carry on and throw things and make disgusting statements about art, and then preen himself at being better than anybody."