Painted Ladies by Robert B. Parker

something, and for all I knew, he could be a scholar of the eighteenth-century English novel.
    As I watched, they leaned across the table toward each other and talked with their faces very close. It looked romantic, but they didn’t touch. They talked intensely. She with animation. He was nearly motionless, except that he tapped his forefinger on the tabletop. They spoke for maybe fifteen minutes. Then she leaned back a little, as if she was going to stand. He put his right hand on her forearm and held her there.
    They spoke for several more minutes. He was doing most of the talking. She was nodding. And she appeared to be pressing a little against the restraint of his hand. When he let her go, she stood and walked away. From where I sat, I couldn’t read her expression. The man watched her walk across the reading room and out into the corridor and down the stairs. When she was out of sight, he sat quietly for a time, looking at nothing, slowly rubbing his chin with the back of his hand.
    I stayed where I was behind my newspaper and waited. After a while he stopped rubbing his chin, and stood and walked out of the reading room. I gave him a minute and then put my newspaper back in its rack and strolled out after him. He was at the bottom of the stairs when I reached the top. I let him cross the big lobby to the front door before I started down. He had no reason to think he was being followed, so he had no reason to do anything tricky. And, of course, he was being tailed by an ace. I went down after him.
    On the broad front steps of the library, I paused and took in some fresh air. Libraries always made me feel as if I’d been indoors too long. I saw my man across the street, heading toward a parking lot. I strolled after him. He got into a Toyota 4Runner and backed out. I recorded his license number in my steel-trap memory, and as soon as he was out of sight took out a little notepad and wrote it down. Just in time, before I forgot it.

31
    T he 4Runner was registered to Morton Lloyd with a Chestnut Hill address. Morton Lloyd was also the name of the lawyer that Prince had threatened Walford University with. And he was also the lawyer who represented the Hammond Museum, and it was through his recommendation that Prince got the job of negotiating the return of the painting. Seemed unlikely that there would be two Morton Lloyds in the same case.
    I was meeting Rita Fiore for lunch at Locke-Ober, and was already seated when she came into the dining room wearing heels that told me she hadn’t walked over from her office. The skirt of her gray suit was about mid-thigh, and everything fit her well. Her dark red hair was long and thick. Almost all the men in the place looked at her as she came in. Those who didn’t probably had a hormonal problem. I stood when she reached the table, and she gave me a kiss.
    “Everyone in the place watched you come in,” I said.
    She smiled.
    “I’m used to it,” she said. “And I want a martini.”
    “Anything,” I said.
    “If only that were true,” she said.
    She ordered a Grey Goose martini on the rocks with a twist.
    “What are you drinking?” she asked.
    “Iced tea,” I said.
    “For a superhero,” Rita said, “you are certainly a candy-ass drinker.”
    “I’m so ashamed,” I said. “What’s Morton Lloyd look like?”
    “Haven’t you seen him?” Rita said.
    “Once,” I said. “Tall, kind of heavy. Black hair combed back, lotta gel, kind of a wedge-shaped face, big mustache with some gray in it. Maybe fifty-five.”
    “That would be Mort,” Rita said.
    “Okay,” I said. “Same guy I met at the Hammond Museum. Not the same guy driving the car.”
    The martini arrived. Rita drank some.
    “Nothing like vodka and vermouth to knit up the raveled sleeve of care,” she said. “What car?”
    “A car registered to Lloyd,” I said.
    “But he wasn’t driving it?”
    “No,” I said.
    “I talked with him,” Rita said. “Says he barely knows Prince. Says Prince