Page 53 of The Best Trick

Whereas Wilson's fine-instruments center was apparently a huge, brightly lit, gleaming wooden-floored showroom in a glam part of town, Harold’s violin repair shop was a little hole-in-the-wall in a modest part of town known for pawnshops and dollar stores. Dusty instruments hung in crooked rows along the walls, and the place smelled of wood stain and resin and strange seed oils.

We rang the bell on the counter. A tall bald man with bushy brows came out from a back room, wiping his hands on a stained brown cloth. His rubbery-looking apron was also stained brown.

“I already talked to your other guys,” Harold said after Odin made introductions and told him that we had questions.

“We need to go over a few things,” Odin said.

He frowned. “Is everything okay with Wilson? Things are okay with him, right?”

“No change,” Zeus said.

Harold nodded.

I could barely concentrate on anything because of Harold’s wildly bushy eyebrows. I desperately wanted to ask him to smooth down those brows, maybe with a dab of that seed oil or something, or at least get them even, but that was probably not the kind of question my guys wanted to lead with.

“Just a bit of background clarification,” Thor began, “did you and your brother go into the stringed-instrument business at the same time?”

“In a way, yes,” Harold said. “I mean we both attended music conservatory. We were both interested in classical music—something of a family tradition, really, though Wilson was more on the performance end of things. Wilson is a brilliant musician—a lot of people don’t know that. He wanted to be a concert violinist, and he could have done it, too, but competition at the highest levels is really fierce, and auditioning was never his strong suit. But being involved with the instruments, it keeps you close to the music.”

“Was that hard for him?” Thor asked. “Being close to the music but not as a performer?”

“Oh, he still played around. He did a lot of gigging, and he had his quartet,” Harold said.

“How often did you see each other? Did you do business together?” Thor asked.

“I wouldn't say we saw each other a lot. Life gets busy, and I have grown children and grandbabies, the shop. But we always knew what was happening in each other's lives…” Harold’s brows knit in confusion, which made them look even more wildly unkempt. “Or I thought we knew, anyway. We would text about family matters and funny shit, business stuff—missing instruments, that sort of thing. He was a great uncle to my kids, and that might be the biggest loss. My three boys are grown now. They don't know what's happened—you all have kept it out of the papers, so they have no idea what's up with Uncle Wilson. They think he’s on a buying trip. They're going to need to know the truth eventually.”

“Did you have any ideas that he was up to anything?” Zeus asked him.

“Absolutely not!” Harold said, lifting his brows of madness halfway up his forehead.

Wildly I looked over at Thor—was he seeing this? Thor quirked his head at me as if to say,what’s up?Zeus and Odin didn’t seem to notice anything, either.

Harold went on and on. “I had no idea what he'd gotten involved in, or I would have tried to help him. I've been going over it in my head, over and over. If only I had taken the time to visit his shop and taken a look at the instruments he was valuing in the six figures, I could have told you something was wrong.”

“You ran very different establishments,” Thor pursued, delicately.

“If you mean the success of his shop, I want you to know that was all elbow grease. Yes, I know what they're saying about him in terms of the inflated appraisals, but I can't imagine it was anything that he'd been doing on the regular. He must have gotten into trouble, that's all I can think. He's a good man, Wilson is, and a fine businessperson. He enjoyed taking risks on fixer-upper instruments. He loved being the center of attention, but I guess somewhere along the line…” He shook his head sadly, brows lowered in consternation, trembling slightly. Oh my god, the eyebrows! Was hetryingto distract us?

He did this for a long time, shaking his head and making his brows tremble.

“What happened, do you think?” Thor asked.

“That’s what I keep asking myself,” he said.

“You’ve been asking yourself that?” I repeated, trying not to look at his brows.

“Yes, a lot,” Harold said.

Odin gave me a dark look. “Can you think of why he might have needed all that extra money when his store was doing so well?”

Harold sighed and gazed out the window. “When he'd go on his buying trips to Europe, he did tend to go in style. He liked nice hotels. But that was him. He lived life to the fullest.”

“Buying trips?”

“Taking a chance on worn-out or damaged instruments from lesser-known makers and refurbishing them was a big part of his business.”

“People do that?” Thor asked. “They speculate on violins?”

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