Authors: Reba White Williams
She believed him about the office, but he sounded a little too “aw, shucks.” Country boy? Dinah bet he played that card often. She smiled to show him she knew he wasn’t serious.
“Don’t worry, you don’t have to hang art in here,” he added.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Dinah said. “Nothing suitable comes to mind. Most art would be overpowered.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Maybe rhino heads? I was impressed with your proposal—the price, the art, and especially how fast you plan to get it on the walls.”
Dinah nodded. “We can underbid the competition because we deal exclusively in fine prints, less expensive than paintings or drawings. We’ll be finished six weeks from today at the latest. I expect to start hanging tomorrow, if the young men who hang for me are available.”
The quicker she could get out of here, the better. DDD&W made her uneasy, and it wasn’t just Patti Sue’s animosity, or the spat in the restroom. The offices were like the
Marie Celeste
, as if they had been designed for a big staff that had disappeared—too silent, too empty, too cold. Art on the walls would make it less bare but wouldn’t overcome the pervasive chill. Beneath the odor of burnt coffee, the office smelled stale, like the air in an unused refrigerator.
“I’m going to take Ms. Greene down to Patti Sue’s office, Hunt,” Douglas said.
“Good. I look forward to seeing the result of your work, Ms. Greene. Ted, are we still on for dinner?”
“Absolutely. The Harvard Club at eight thirty. See you later.”
Douglas escorted Dinah back down to thirty-two and directed her toward the corridor leading to Patti Sue’s office. The office was empty, but at a nearby workstation a tiny girl with wispy brown hair pounded a keyboard. She looked up. “May I help you?” Her pink nose and big eyes behind round steel-rimmed glasses reminded Dinah of a storybook rabbit.
“Hi, I’m Dinah Greene, from the Greene Gallery. Patti Sue expects me,” Dinah said.
“Ms. Victor is in a meeting, but I’ll, like, show you your office. I’m Ellie McPhee, Ms. Victor’s assistant. You’re across the hall, and I’m to, like, help you with anything you need.”
The “office,” probably designed to store supplies and only slightly larger than a closet, was windowless and crammed with a small metal desk, two chairs, a file cabinet, and a bookcase, all painted jailhouse gray. Thank goodness she wouldn’t have to spend much time in this hideous room. She’d hang some prints to make it less grim and bring in a scented candle to get rid of that ghastly air-conditioning smell. She couldn’t abide the “office” as it was, even for a little while.
“Thanks. Could you make sure I have supplies—pads, pens, folders, all that?”
“All done. And a DDD&W telephone directory with, like, office locations.” Ellie looked every day of twelve and apparently couldn’t raise her voice above a whisper, but she seemed efficient.
“Office services was supposed to install a lock on the door of the room where we’ll store the prints until they’re hung. Do you know if they did? I’ll need a lock for this office, too,” Dinah said.
Ellie blinked, and her nose quivered, making her look even more like one of Peter Rabbit’s sisters. Flopsy? “Uh, I don’t think so, Ms. Greene. No locks, I mean. I mean, Ms. Victor didn’t tell me to, like, arrange that. She doesn’t have a lock.”
Ellie spoke as if a lock on the door were a status symbol. Maybe it was. Theodore Douglas’s office had a lock, and Hunt Frederick’s had two: one on the door to the anteroom, and another on the door to his inner sanctum. Dinah didn’t care. She had to have those locks. Her insurance company demanded them.
“I need locks because I’ll have art here on approval,” she explained. “When art is stolen from a corporate site, it usually happens before it goes on the walls.”
“Uh…I mean, like, you’ll have to ask Ms. Victor,” Ellie said.
“Ask me what?” Patti Sue pushed past Ellie into the room.
“Hi, Patti Sue. I asked Ellie about the locks for this door, and the art storage room.”
“Not possible,” Patti Sue said.
“I’m sure it is—it’s standard when you have art waiting to be hung, and it’s in my contract. I have to have a secure place to keep the prints,” Dinah said, trying not to sound like a kindergarten teacher.
Patti Sue tightened her lips, smearing her purple lipstick. “Then I gotta have a set of keys.”
“I’m afraid not. Until the prints are on the walls, I’m responsible for them, and I’ll keep the keys.”
“We’ll see about that. I’ll take it up with Ted Douglas.” She flounced out, Ellie scurrying behind her.
Dinah closed the door behind them. Patti Sue’s leathery skin, straw-like mane, and long bony face reminded Dinah of a bad-tempered pony she’d encountered as a child. She looked to be in her fifties, but her hairdo and clothes were designed for a teenager, or a hooker: Lurex, gaudy colors, miniskirts, and platform shoes. Dinah sighed. The woman’s appearance was none of her business, but Patti Sue’s attitude was a problem. Argue, argue, argue. Insisting on involvement and getting in the way. This lock issue was typical—all about power and control. Oh, well, with luck she wouldn’t encounter Patti Sue again after the job was finished, and that couldn’t be too soon. When the prints were installed, Dinah would be out of here, check in hand, as fast as she could walk, never to return.
She called Douglas’s assistant, who promised to have the locks installed right away. Half an hour later they were in place, and the keys were stowed in Dinah’s handbag. She checked out the storage room, making sure the key would work, and returned to her cubbyhole. Now the fun part: telling Bethany. She made the call, and when Bethany answered, announced, “We got the contract!”
“Hallelujah! When do we start?”
“Today. Would you call the warehouse and arrange delivery of the prints early tomorrow? We’ll start hanging Wednesday night, if the guys are available. And would you messenger over that set of William Seltzer Rice prints—the southern flower series in the black frames—and my tool kit? They’ll dress up this hole of an office.”
Her next call was to Jonathan, but he was in a client meeting, and Coleman was out to lunch. She left her cousin a jubilant voice mail
,
and was on the phone with one of the men she employed to hang art, when Patti Sue barged in and slammed the door against the wall.
“It’s against policy to keep your door closed,” she announced.
“Thanks. I’ll see you Wednesday,” Dinah said, and hung up. She’d never heard of a closed-door policy. Could it be possible? This place was a zoo. So far she’d been reminded of parrots, cats, a rabbit, and a pony in her short time at DDD&W. Their standards were so bizarre, perhaps they did forbid closed doors and give locks only to top management. “Nonsense. I’ll be discussing money and prices. I need privacy, and a quiet place to make my calls,” she said.
Patti Sue, ignoring her, rattled on. “And I gotta have a key to your office, and one to the storeroom. Frannie Johnson, head of human resources, says so.” She spoke as if that settled the matter.
Dinah took a deep breath. “Human resources didn’t hire me, and I am not a DDD&W employee. I’m an independent consultant, and according to the terms of my agreement with the company, if I’m not available, if anyone needs access to my office or the storeroom, one of my employees will take care of it.” She stood up and stared at Patti Sue. Maybe she would go away.
The woman’s face was scarlet. “I am well and truly sorry you got the job here, Miss Stuck-Up! I saw your picture in the paper showin’ off and actin’ like a big deal. You make me sick. Everybody wanted Great Art Management to come back. When they helped me with the collection, they didn’t put on airs, or have locks, and secrets. I’m gonna get you thrown outta here, see if I don’t!” She stormed out.
Dinah wrinkled her nose. Jungle Gardenia had replaced eau de refrigerator. She wasn’t worried about Patti Sue’s threat—Jonathan’s lawyer had drawn up her airtight contract—but she wished the ugly scene hadn’t occurred. What was “the collection” and what happened to it? Marks on the walls in the corridors, the reception room, and the managing director’s office, where pictures had once hung, revealed a ghostly presence no one mentioned. And who was Great Art Management? She looked at her watch. Noon: time for a break. While she nibbled the chicken salad sandwich she’d brought for lunch, she looked them up on her laptop.
Headquarters in Miami; branch offices in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles. Big. But not in New York, and not well known, or she’d have recognized the name. How had they “helped” Patti Sue? Never mind. Whatever they did, that was then; this was now, and the Greene Gallery had the contract.
When the Rice prints and her tools arrived, Dinah hung the exquisite aquatints of magnolias, roses, camellias, and lilies in simple black frames. She backed away to admire them and stepped on a large brown envelope. Someone must have slipped it under the door while she hammered. Inside were colored photocopies of two paintings she recognized as the work of George Stubbs, an eighteenth-century English artist famous for his images of horses. The paintings were portraits of a woman in elegant riding clothes on a beautiful bay, and a similarly attired man on a larger black horse.
Why would anyone give her these pictures? Everyone knew her gallery dealt exclusively in American prints. Could they have been sent to her by mistake? No, the envelope had her name on it, hand printed in tiny letters. The note inside, in the same writing, was also addressed to her:
Dinah Greene: you should know about these.
She tossed the envelope and its contents in the wastebasket and stowed her tool box in a drawer in the file cabinet. A few minutes later, she had second thoughts and retrieved the Stubbs photocopies. Maybe they were important, although she couldn’t imagine why. She stuffed the envelope in her pouch with her laptop and her other papers. There was nothing else she could do at DDD&W today. She might as well go home. On her way out, she’d stroll through thirty-one and thirty and take the elevator to the lobby from there. She wanted to see those floors. It seemed odd that she’d been asked to install art on thirty-two and thirty-three but ignore the lower floors.
Whoever decorated the thirty-first floor must have been color-blind. The walls were painted mustard and the carpet was cow pie brown, which still couldn’t disguise coffee and other stains. Dusty fake plants in filthy plastic pots were scattered around the corridors. Wads of crumpled paper lay on the floor near wastebaskets and fax machines; empty cardboard coffee cups and soft drink cans cluttered desks. A big table draped with a stained paper tablecloth stood in an open area. It was littered with crumbs, dirty paper plates, and plastic spoons and forks. A mouse scurried across the table and, twitching its whiskers, paused to nibble crumbs. Ugh. She smelled pineapple and brown sugar. Pineapple upside-down cake, maybe? Yep, someone had ground a maraschino cherry into the carpet.
A throng of people was moving down the corridor, talking and laughing, headed toward the sound of shouting. Dinah followed the crowd, expecting any minute that someone would ask who she was and why she was there. But no one even glanced at her.
All eyes were on a man jumping up and down on a table surrounded by bystanders. The table, like the one where she’d seen the mouse, stood in an open area, but it was covered with piles of paperwork instead of a tablecloth. The tall Ichabod Crane–type on the table gibbered and shuffled the papers with his oxford-clad feet. His audience cheered, and Dinah stared in disbelief while the man unzipped his fly and peed a great flood all over the papers and the table. His audience clapped and yelled encouragement. She nearly gagged. The stench of urine mixed with pineapple upside-down cake and the odor of the sweaty crowd was nauseating. Who could the lunatic be? And why did people act as if he were a rock star? She turned to a nerdy young man standing near her. “Uh—who is the man on the table?”
He stared at her. “You must be new. That’s Oscar Danbury. You know, as in Davidson, Douglas, Danbury & Weeks. That’s how he lets people know he doesn’t like their work.” He snickered, as if this sort of thing happened often. Maybe it did.
“Oh, yes, of course,” she said, and ran for the elevator.
In the subway car on her way downtown, Dinah was unable to concentrate on
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
. She couldn’t erase the revolting image of Danbury from her mind. How could that man have done what he did? And the crowd cheered him on. She’d looked forward to telling Jonathan about her contract, and how weird DDD&W was. She’d thought he might be able to explain the emptiness of the office and why the people were such an odd assortment. It was hard to imagine how the likes of C. Theodore Douglas IV and Patti Sue Victor ended up in the same company, let alone working together.
But Oscar Danbury was in a class by himself. His behavior was beyond strange. The word
madness
came to mind. If Jonathan heard about his exposing himself, and his public urination, not to mention the degradation of the wretched employee he was “punishing,” he’d never let her go near DDD&W again. Well, she wouldn’t tell him. She was determined to complete the job and get the gallery on firm ground.
She had changed out of her cranberry wool suit into jeans and a sweater and checked the pot roast she’d left in the slow cooker all day, but she was still thinking about Oscar Danbury when she heard Jonathan at the door.
He was bursting with news. He had to be in Los Angeles on Friday, and he’d reserved a suite at the Hotel Bel-Air. He and Dinah would fly to California tomorrow night and return to New York Monday. They’d have a long romantic weekend in one of their favorite places. He beamed, certain she’d be as pleased as he was.
When Dinah explained she couldn’t go to Los Angeles because she had to hang prints Wednesday and Thursday, Jonathan blew up: “Why must you work at night? When we agreed you’d expand the gallery and move uptown, night work wasn’t part of the deal.”
She told him she’d already hired people to hang the prints Wednesday night. That they’d have lots of opportunities to go to California, but she must complete the DDD&W project right away. He knew how much the contract meant to her business. They’d discussed it often enough.
His anger tonight was part of a familiar theme: Jonathan wanted all of her time and attention. Until their marriage ten months earlier, she’d been the curator in a Connecticut museum. He’d expected her to retire as soon as they were married, but she wanted to work a few more years, and after a lot of arguing, they’d compromised. They’d bought the house in the West Village, where they lived in the apartment upstairs, and she ran the gallery in the street-level space, almost like working out of her home. A cottage industry, and about as profitable.
Coleman had warned her that an art gallery in the West Village wouldn’t succeed; she’d said a gallery needed to be near other galleries to get drop-in business. Jonathan had disagreed. The Village was convenient for his commute to Wall Street, and he insisted the gallery would be fine. Anyway, she didn’t need to earn money; the gallery was just something to pass the time until she had children. The location would be ideal when she had a baby. She’d be able to take the baby with her to work.
She’d gritted her teeth and once again explained that she wanted to run a
real
gallery and make it succeed—that she was years away from having a child. He’d sulked, and when it became obvious the gallery would fail unless it was relocated, he’d balked at her request to move. Chelsea was her first choice, but Jonathan didn’t want any part of that area—too bohemian, he said.
After weeks of arguments he’d finally agreed to her renting Midtown space for a two-year trial period. If the gallery failed, she’d retire. If it succeeded, they’d renegotiate.
But now the battle had resumed about her plan to move ahead with fulfilling her contract with DDD&W. He was cold and distant during dinner, and afterward, instead of helping her clear the table and load the dishwasher as he usually did, he disappeared to pack for his trip to LA. While she tidied the kitchen, she forced herself to close cupboard doors gently instead of slamming them shut, and to avoid clashing pots and pans. Technically Jonathan was right: they hadn’t discussed her working at night, but he worked nights, and weekends, too. Investment banking was not a nine-to-five job. But neither was an art gallery, and for the next two days, DDD&W had priority.
When she went into the bedroom, she met Jonathan coming out.
“I’m taking Baker for a walk,” Jonathan said.
Dinah nodded. “I’m exhausted; I need an early night.” When he returned fifteen minutes later, she pretended to be asleep.
Ted Douglas and Hunt Frederick had finished their steaks and had covered a series of client-related issues. They were at the coffee stage, and Hunt was looking at his watch, ready to head for home, when Douglas asked, “What did you think of Dinah Greene?”
“She’s a beautiful young woman,” Hunt Frederick said. “Those blue eyes with that dark hair are extraordinary.”
Douglas shook his finger. “Now, now, naughty, naughty. None of that.”
Hunt frowned. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no law against admiration. Now, one more time: are you positive she’s right for the job?”
“Absolutely. She’s excellent at what she does. Her gallery has a good reputation, and she should make real money with the move to Midtown, but she has temporary financial problems. She needs this job. She’ll complete our project on schedule, she’ll do as she’s told, she won’t ruffle feathers, and she won’t poke her nose in where she shouldn’t. Jonathan Hathaway is a successful investment banker from a prominent family, and one of the biggest stuffed shirts that ever came out of Boston. Trust me, he wouldn’t tolerate anything but a docile yes-girl as a wife. She’s thirtyish, but she comes across as naïve, almost childlike, except about her business. You heard her—she’s a Southern belle, born and bred in North Carolina. Nothin’ could be finah than our gal Dinah. Sweet as pecan pie,” Douglas drawled, in a misguided attempt to mimic Dinah’s accent.
“Okay. But if you’re wrong, we’re all in trouble. And I don’t like it that her cousin is a journalist. Make sure Dinah doesn’t learn anything her cousin can use,” Hunt said.
“I’ll vouch for Coleman,” Douglas said. “I’ve known her a long time. She won’t cause any trouble—she’ll want Dinah to succeed.”
“I hope you’re right,” Hunt said. “She could kill us with a negative article about us.”