Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5) by Joe Reese, T Gracie Reese

painting with the same contempt with which they regarded her.
    Then she changed planes and took off for Graz.
    By late afternoon, she was in the city center, being dropped at the Main Square, or Hauptplatz, by a cab.
    She got out of the vehicle, made her way through a crowd of people for a few steps, stopped, and breathed.
    She had never been to Graz before.
    It was a lovely place.
    Red tiled roofs, a ring of mountains around the city...
    And the hotel behind her came right from the nineteenth century.
    She checked in and went up to her room.
    Again, from another time. Great goose down comforters lay upon the beds, and wall-length windows let in the light of the sun, which was setting over city hall.
    Situated directly under the window was an ebony desk, massive, incorruptible, and as subtly decorated with gold trim as an Austrian General’s tomb might have been decorated with rank and insignia. The drawer slid open as though it had been permanently oiled, revealing a thick envelope and black ball point pens that had the weight and solemnity––not of utensils––but of artifacts.
    She took the Durer out of her backpack and propped it against the desk.
    Then she opened the envelope.
    Sure enough:   a cashier’s check for twenty thousand dollars.
    She caught her breath.
    It can’t be this easy , she found herself thinking.
    And, in thinking this, she was entirely correct.

    END OF PART ONE

CHAPTER SEVEN:   FRAME CHANGE

    It was a big Friday night for New Orleans, an even bigger one for the French Quarter, and a bigger one still for Bourbon Street. LSU was playing Alabama the following day at three PM. That game was to be played in Baton Rouge, of course, but a distance of ninety or so miles meant nothing to ardent fans of: (A) big time SEC college football, (B) drinking, and (C) sex. (Well, all right, it wasn’t real sex, since prostitution had been practically nonexistent in the Quarter for decades. But it was good fake sex, with pictures of naked or near naked women flashing in garish lights above all the bars, and naked or near naked women dancing on makeshift stages down inside the bars.)
    Everyone pretended they were genuinely sinning, and they could all go back to Ruston or Opelousas or Tuscaloosa the following week feeling proud of their debauchery without actually having to pay for it in the afterlife, since they hadn’t really done any of it in the current life.
    And not only that, the Saints were in town to play the hated Dallas Cowboys on Sunday.
    It was, in short, the kind of weekend the Quarter lived for.
    By eleven PM, Bourbon Street was a sea of people, all shouting, all drinking, all being carried along like a brackish and slow-winding river which was running either toward or away from Canal Street, depending on celestial forces unknown to anyone being moved by them.
    Michael Gellert blended into the scene.
    He was a bit smaller than the football and sex fans who surrounded him on both sides, but he had learned over the years how to blend in with all environments, and he was doing so now.
    As was the man walking beside him––Beckmeier, his employer. The man seemed out of place in New Orleans, but he was a man of strange habits, most of them unknown to the people who worked for him, as Michael Gellert did. He had, of course, appeared out of nowhere, just as he always seemed to appear out of nowhere, just as he had appeared some months ago near midnight on the far side of the dark and deserted Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
    The man who was now saying, in that raspy voice that seemed always to be produced by vocal chords that had been burned by acid:
    “Something has happened. You need to change your way of doing business.”
    Horns were everywhere around them: car horns, horns that resembled musical instruments, and devils’ horns that seemed to sprout from the foreheads of florid and beefy men who were awaiting either hangovers or heart attacks, and not caring, at this point in the