The Fatal Touch by Conor Fitzgerald

have to sell my apartment to pay for the damages below.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that, Commissioner. What about building insurance?”
    “Ha-ha.”
    “Do you have a good lawyer?”
    “I don’t think I want a lawyer. Just cost more money, and there’s not much to contest when you fill your neighbor’s apartment with . . . Guercino.”
    “Guercino?”
    “There. The artist. Barbieri was his real name. He was cross-eyed, so they called him Guercino.”
    Blume was squinting at a pen-and-wash figure. “That’s definitely Guercino,” he said to himself, surprised at knowing the style of drawing so easily; surprised, too, at hearing his father’s labored pronunciation in his head. He remembered his father’s effort to get his foreign tongue to make the “tsch” sound of the soft Italian “c,” while trying to remain casual and natural about it. To Caterina he said, “And what makes you say he was unemployed?”
    “Who?”
    “Treacy. Concentrate on where we are, Inspector. You called Treacy an unemployed foreign drunkard.”
    “The fact he died drunk and the way he was dressed. But if he had this place and these paintings—I don’t know what to make of him now.”
    “A lot of northern Europeans, even if they have money, don’t dress as well as they might,” said Blume. He remembered his father’s habit of wearing socks with his Birkenstock sandals, white legs, checkered shirts. “Americans, too. And don’t feel resentful. Treacy lives nowhere now.”
    “It came out wrong,” she said. She watched as he resumed leafing through the canvases and sheets on the table again, this time more slowly. “You’re looking at those pictures like they meant something.”
    “My mother specialized in works such as this. This etching by Fontana . . . If any of these are authentic, the only question is why Treacy didn’t live in a grander place than this.”
    They continued their exploration of the house. A cast-iron spiral staircase in the far corner of the room led up to a single bedroom which gave on to a larger bathroom containing a huge enamel tub with lion-claw feet and a large rosewood medicine cabinet with latticework windows. The ceiling was low and sloping.
    Blume opened the cabinet and stood back. “Maybe he ran a pharmacy on the side. No one can be that sick.”
    “That’s not too bad,” said Caterina. “My father takes about that many.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Blume.
    “Prescriptions accumulate, and before you know it, you’re taking ten, twenty pills a day.”
    “Then you need to stop taking them,” said Blume, “before they mount up. That’s what I did. First it was Zantac, then they wanted me to take Zocor. Maybe if they didn’t make them sound like the bad guys in a comic book.”
    “Palonosetron, Venlafaxine, Baclofen,” read Caterina. “The man was in pain. I think he had cancer.”
    “Well, that’s different,” said Blume. “You should probably take pills then.”
    She picked up another bottle. “Nexavar.” She turned it around. “Doesn’t say what it does.”
    “Bag them,” said Blume. “We can look them up, maybe get the labs to check them.”
    When they returned to the living room downstairs, Caterina started looking more closely at the framed works on the walls.
    “He was a collector of some sort as well as an artist?” said Caterina. “He seems to prefer unfinished drawings to paintings.”
    “Art forgery,” said Blume. “The name had been bothering me for a while but I remember now. Treacy. My father mentioned him a few times. Admiringly, if I recall. Not an artist, an art forger.”
    Caterina tapped a thumbnail against her bottom teeth. “That means corrupt dealers, theft, fencing goods, high prices. There is a possibility of some background to the death. At least we have a category of suspect.”
    The pictures and the books in his room reminded Blume of his parents and their apartment, the one he still lived in. Their books, reproductions, and