White Collar - as an unofficial novel - part 6

The Architect

When Peter walked up to his office the next morning he saw Neal working in the conference room. It was a good sign. He took his coffee with him inside.

"Morning."

"I found something on the card," the kid answered. Peter scanned the material Neal collected on the table. Art?

"I'll take obscure Russian painters for a thousand."

"The 'A' has a definite Cyrillic influence," his pet convict grinned back at him while he grabbed for some of the loose pages.

"Well, our tech guys already cracked that one," Peter said. "If the Architect is a mad Russian, that doesn't narrow down our list of possibles."

"Not a Russian," Neal said, "but a fan of Russian paintings." He flipped a book showing Peter. "Ivan Aivazovsky." Peter leaned closer. Lots of oceans and waves. Dramatic and quite dark. "Look at his signature," Neal requested and held out a sheet of plastic with Aivazovsky's signature on and one paper with an enlargement of the business card on. He placed the As on top of each other. They matched perfectly.

"Ohh, look at that!" Peter sat down and grabbed the pages, thrilled. Neal was so good. This would have taken another one weeks or months to find.

"Got it!" Diana said, rushing into the room. Peter looked up. She had addressed Neal and they were smiling at each other.

"Look at you two working together," he said, delighted. "Look at that teamwork."

So Diana had accepted Neal as a team member. That was wonderful.

"We dug up every auction in the last two years to see who's been bidding on Aivazovskys," she said and handed him a three pages long list.

"Excellent, but that's a pretty thick list. What if we cross-referenced people with a business connection in Dallas, Chicago, and..." Peter saw Diana smiling.

"Right here," Diana said. Peter stared at a list with one name on. "Yeah, the list gets shorter."

Neal and Diana made a fistbump.

"One name... Edward Walker." He grinned at Neal. He was so lucky to have the brightest team members in the whole Bureau. "Let's go have a visit."

"Let's do it," the kid agreed.

"Good work." Peter held out his fist towards him for a fistbump. That never came. Alright, he was not Diana. He could live with that. "Good work."

Considering where Edward Walker lived, Neal did not exactly need to think hard to guess that this was a man with lots of, probably legal, money. Mr. Walker lived in a several floors apartment, just like his fan Dan Picah, but this was placed on the top floors. When a woman who introduced herself as Whitney, Mr. Walker's assistant, showed them out on the rooftop patio, Neal also saw that the apartment had a grand view over the Hudson River.

It was nothing compared to his view over Central Park, though, even if it was from a less glorious height.

"Mr. Walker, these gentlemen are with the FBI," Whitney said as he and Peter stepped out on the patio where Mr. Walker, amazingly enough, practiced his golf swing, wasting good balls in the gray, opaque water of the Hudson. Neal sent the young innocent-looking assistant a smile.

"Well, if you're here to give me a ticket for hitting golf balls into the Hudson River, I'll have to write you a check," the man said from his golf platform without looking at his visitors. He made another ball ready on the peg. "Whitney, get my checkbook, would you?"

"The Bureau doesn't give tickets," Peter told him. Neal had never thought of that.

"Well, in that case, Whitney, get my golf permit, will you?" The woman left as Mr. Walker, still without acknowledging them, took a swing at the ball. Hitting Hudson again, hurray!