Quinn pondered that.

“Learn anything useful about the sisters?” he asked.

Lido gave his weary shrug again. His inebriated mannerisms had invaded his sober world. “Both dead,” he said.

“Don’t give me a lotta crap, Jerry. I get enough of that with the menagerie I have to contend with here.”

“Every one a Sherlock,” Lido said. “Speaking of which—Weaver.”

Quinn rested his elbows on his desk and leaned toward Lido. “Nancy Weaver?”

“The same. While I was doing my research, I came across her tech footprints.”

“Meaning?”

“She’d recently visited several of the sites I explored.”

“Doing her own exploring?”

“Looked that way. No surprise. She belongs to Renz.” Lido raised his eyebrows. “She has to be pretty good on a computer, judging by what I saw.”

“Weaver has multiple talents.”

“That’s what I hear, but who really knows?”

Quinn’s land line desk phone rang. He nodded to Lido, dismissing him, and snatched up the receiver. The phone’s caller ID said the call originated at the Far Castle.

Quinn identified Q&A and himself, watching Lido drift out the door. On his way to catch up on either his drinking or his sleep. Quinn knew how he would bet.

“This is Winston Castle,” said the voice on the phone. It was well enunciated and deep. Castle’s BBC voice. “There’s been a development that might be of interest to you.”

“Try me,” Quinn said. He couldn’t get over the feeling that he was being played by Castle. He reminded himself, not the first time, that the business he was in might create that kind of suspicion. Everyone he met while on a case didn’t necessarily have some sort of angle or ulterior motive. It only seemed that way.

“That woman called me again, about ten o’clock last night,” Castle said. “Identified herself as Ida Tucker again and said she was a distant relative of my wife.”

“Is she?”

“Maria isn’t sure.”

Quinn bet Jerry Lido could be sure. He wished now that Lido hadn’t left. On the other hand, even Lido might not be able to straighten out this mess. “So why did Ida Tucker call?”

“She wanted to negotiate some more on that Michelangelo bust, Bellezza.”

Quinn was beginning to really like this case. “Negotiate what?”

“Not just the missing art, but the letters she claimed are with it, the ones Henry Tucker wrote on his deathbed, just before he succumbed to wounds he’d suffered at Dunkirk. She wanted me to come to someplace called Green Forest, Ohio, and examine and purchase the letters. I asked her to simply mail me copies, but of course she wouldn’t do that. What’s valuable—in her mind, anyway—is what the letters contain, as well as their authenticity.”

That made sense to Quinn. So did something else. “Why didn’t you simply tell her no thank you and hang up?”

“Because I’m curious. And so are you, eh, my friend?”

Quinn smiled. Castle had him there.

“We’re both afflicted with that dread disease, curiosity,” Castle said. “The one that killed the cat. And there’s something else. This time when we talked, Ida Tucker seemed especially interested in whether the police had found any letters among the contents of Andria Bell’s luggage, or in the hotel suite where the murders took place.”

“And what did you tell her?” Quinn asked.

He could almost see Castle’s devilish dark smile over the phone. “I told her nothing, of course. She was so curious, I thought I’d leave her that way. Knowing you’d understand.”

“Oh, I do,” Quinn said.

Quinn caught up with Jerry Lido at the Dropp Inn lounge, a few blocks from the office. It was a bar with a step-down entrance that caused first-timers to stumble. Regular customers amused themselves by silently watching newbies for interesting falls and reactions. Dim and cool inside, the Dropp Inn at this time of day was almost deserted.

Quinn knew about the tricky threshold, but nevertheless had to take a quick double step to maintain his balance when he entered.

There was one other drinker besides Lido in the lounge, an absolutely ravished looking gray-haired woman in her sixties. She had an expensive-looking choppy hairdo, and without the wrinkles in her clothes she would have been stylishly and crisply dressed, as if for finance and business. There was a sadness about her bearing that was almost tangible. She made Quinn wonder if the stock market had tanked.

Lido was slouched in a cramped wooden booth near the opposite end of the bar. At least he’d had sense enough to stay away from the woman. Though he was glancing in her direction.

“That’s how you’re going to wind up,” Quinn said, motioning toward the life-worn woman as he slid into the seat across from Lido.

Lido squinted at the woman and brought her into focus. “Oh, her. I happen to know she’s eighty-seven.”

“Like we are,” Quinn said.

“She’s a gin drinker,” Lido said.

“I’ve seen you drink gin.”

“I’ve seen you try to keep up.”

“Not one right after the other in slow-motion suicide.”

“She was probably beautiful once,” Lido said, still staring at the woman. “I can perceive that in her still.”

“You’re beginning to sound like Winston Castle.”

The bartender came out from behind the bar and stood over the booth. These weren’t free, these seats on the sidelines while the world slid past outside.

Quinn ordered the same kind of beer Lido had—a microbrewery brand he’d never heard of—and a fresh one for Lido. Quinn figured Lido had had time to consume about three or four beers, so he might be at his perceptive best.

“I need to ask you something more,” Quinn said.

Lido gave him a mushy grin. “I didn’t think you followed me here to assess the female presence and possibilities.”

“Not that female,” Quinn said, with a nod toward the woman at the bar. “A woman named Ida Tucker. Do you recall where she fits into the family tree whose roots and various branches you researched?”

A certain gleam appeared in Lido’s bloodshot eyes. A sharpness that Quinn recognized. In its strange way, alcohol acted as some kind of cerebral lubricant that allowed Lido’s thoughts to follow appropriate tributaries to surprising headwaters.

In a voice not at all slurred, he said, “Let me tell you about Ida Tucker.”

“And the rest of her family. The whole mess of a maze of them.”

Lido smiled. Sipped. “I took it back to Henry Tucker, a British soldier who died in an English hospital after escaping the German advance at Dunkirk.” Lido fixed a bleary eye on Quinn. “We’re talking World War Two here.”

“I figured,” Quinn said.

“Henry had a brother, Edward. Edward had a wife, Ida. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Henry, at the time of his death, was having a hot affair with an English nurse named Betsy Douglass. Betsy had a sister, Willa, living in Ohio and married to a Mark Kingdom.”

“Okay,” Quinn said. “Mark and Willa Kingdom. Should I be writing this down?”

“I’ll give you a printout later,” Lido said. He continued. “For medical reasons, Willa and Mark couldn’t have children—he’d been injured in the merchant marines—and they adopted two wards of the state: Robert and Winston. That’s where the two families intersect, in the breeding grounds of Ohio. Winston died in childhood.”

“Wait a minute,” Quinn said. “Winston Kingdom? Winston Castle?”

“Not yet,” Lido said. “He’s actually Robert Kingdom, Jr. He’s something of an Anglophile.”

“I’ll say.”

“Still, he’s married to Mariella Lopez, a Mexican immigrant.”

“Maria? Are you kidding me? I assumed she was Italian.”

“She is Italian. Her last name was Righetti until she married a Mexican mathematician named Lopez. He died five years ago.”

“Don’t tell me his boat blew up.”

“No, he was struck by lightning. A year later, Mariella migrated to the U.S. and married Winston Castle. Whose name was Kingdom, Jr. then.”