Murder at the National Gallery Read Free Page A

head of the table, “I supposewe should get to today’s main topic, the Caravaggio exhibition.” He asked Naomi Warren to bring in Annabel Reed-Smith.
    Annabel, in a tailored brown skirt, white button-down shirt, and softly shaped camel-hair jacket, entered the room with confidence and easy grace, someone at home in unfamiliar places and with unfamiliar faces. The red hair with which she’d been born had burnished over the years into copper. She wore it full, creating a glowing frame for her creamy, unlined face. Her eyes were, of course, green, as if ordained, and large. Her nose, ears, and mouth had been conceived with a stunning sense of proportion.
    Annabel Reed had once been one of Washington’s leading matrimonial attorneys, known for sympathizing with the pain men went through in divorce, as well as the suffering of her female clients, many of them well-known Washington figures. But her passion had always been art, particularly pre-Columbian.
    An elderly curator of Dumbarton Oaks’s pre-Columbian collection retired and opened a gallery to fill his days. But running a business became overwhelming to him—more accurately, to his wife, who wanted him with her in the garden—and he sought a partner. Enter Annabel.
    She eventually bought him out, maintaining her law practice while running the gallery. A year later, she took down her shingle and became a full-time, and blissfully happy, gallery owner.
    The men at the table stood. “Please, have a seat,” said Whitney, having buttoned his suit jacket for the few seconds his midriff was exposed. “A pleasure to see you this morning, Mrs. Smith. You know some of us. I’ll let the others handle their own introductions.”
    Annabel pleasantly returned greetings and took a chair next to senior curator Luther Mason, who kissed her on the cheek. “Good to see you,” he said.
    “First, Mrs. Smith, let me welcome you to this meeting of the exhibition committee.” Whitney had unbuttoned his jacket. “Sorry to have asked you to remain outside, but we try to keepthe discussion of proposed exhibitions to a minimal number of people.”
    “Hardly an unpleasant wait,” said Annabel. “Not that I was surprised, but there are lovely pieces of art everywhere, in every hallway, above every desk. It must be a delight working in a museum, surrounded by such beauty.”
    “There are those who view our surroundings as a perk of working at the National Gallery,” said Whitney. He added, “Of course, there are others who would prefer higher pay.”
    “Insensates all,” Paul Bishop muttered.
    “Hard to understand why anyone would want health insurance with all this art around,” said George Kublinski, chief of the National Gallery’s Design and Exhibition Department. Kublinski was a cherubic man with animated blue eyes and a seemingly unlimited reservoir of humor and energy. His large collection of splashily colorful suspenders was a personal trademark.
    “Employees are a bother, with their incessant demands for survival,” Luther Mason said, with a warm smile.
    Annabel noted that senior curator Luther Mason and director Courtney Whitney were built along the same lines, both tall and reed-thin, enabling them to model their clothing nicely. But that’s where the similarity ended. Whitney had a full head of brown hair flecked with gray. Mason’s male-pattern baldness had progressed to the middle of his head. Was he allowing it to grow long enough at the back to drape over his shirt collar in an attempt at compensation? Or was it, as an occasional detractor commented, Mason’s gentle rebellion against Washington’s conservative image? Curators in New York might get away with long hair, but few would in the nation’s capital. That day Luther wore jeans, a red-and-blue-check button-down shirt, rumpled tweed jacket, maroon knit tie, and tasseled loafers, sans socks.
    But it was the marked difference in their facial expressions that struck Annabel. Whitney had lank lips; the