For twenty-four years, Wexley's Table had one rule about gloves. We didn't wear them. We were a friendly operation. At our events, there was no wrong fork.
On Tuesday morning I stood in my kitchen on Dorsey Street and broke the rule in front of eleven staff, one conservator and a dog.
"Gloves," I said, and set a box of them on the steel counter. "White, cotton, one pair each. Starting Friday, we are that kind of caterer."
Benji Ziegler, who is twenty-four and has never once been asked to look formal, held a pair up to the light.
"Are we doing a magic show?"
"We're doing a private viewing at Wendt Fine Art," I said. "And Dr. Wardell is going to teach you how to carry a tray."
Imogen stepped forward. She wore a black Wexley's Table shirt, two sizes too big, with the sleeves rolled. Her hair was tucked under a black cap. In her apron pocket was a plastic bag labeled TUESDAY.
My staff looked at her. Then at her gloves. Then at the cat photo on Benji's phone, which he was not quick enough to hide.
"Yes," said Imogen. "That's me. The cat is also me, spiritually. Shall we start?"
We had spent Monday night deciding what to do. It went about how you'd expect.
First, Imogen tried Conrad again. She called him with the July glove, the gala glove and Otis's notes.
He listened for six minutes. Then he said, "Imogen, Otis is seventy-two. He hears things. That's a very expensive thing to hear." He suggested she rest.
Second, we went to the police.
The Westmere Police Department does not have an art crimes unit. It has a property crimes unit, which is one woman named Detective Greer Voight. She was forty-four, with a gray ponytail and a coffee mug that said I BRAKE FOR STOLEN BIKES. Her desk was covered in photographs of bicycles.
"Ninety percent of my job is bikes," she said. "The other ten is lawn ornaments. Nobody has ever brought me a painting."
"I'm sorry," said Imogen.
"Are you kidding? This is the best day of my career."
She leaned forward. "Tell me everything. Slowly. I'm writing it down."
Imogen told her. Detective Voight listened the way Otis listened: completely, with a pencil. When Imogen got to the varnish, the detective nodded like it made perfect sense.
"Bike thieves do the same thing," she said. "Fresh paint on an old frame. You can smell the hurry on it."
She tapped the July glove. "This is good. The guard's notes are good. But I can't walk into a gallery because a glove's a little yellow."
"What do you need?"
"Someone I trust has to see the original in that back room, with their own eyes. Then I call a judge."
She smiled. "Judge Yarnell owes me. I found his tandem bicycle in 2019. It was in a tree."
"How did it get in a tree?" I asked.
"That," said Detective Voight, "is still an open case."
Training a catering staff to wear white gloves takes about four hours. It should take ten minutes. The gloves are not the problem. The trays are.
Cotton on a silver tray has roughly the grip of a sock on a waxed floor. Benji dropped the first tray inside thirty seconds. Champagne flutes are plastic in rehearsal, thank God. They bounced across the kitchen like a xylophone falling down stairs.
Yolk, who had been asleep under the proofing cabinet, opened one eye and closed it again. He had seen worse.
"You're gripping it," said Imogen. "Don't. Gloves aren't for gripping, they're for being careful."
She showed him. "Flat palm underneath. The tray sits on you. You don't hold it. You carry it."
"What's the difference?" said Benji.
"Holding is about you," she said. "Carrying is about the thing."
Benji tried again. The tray stayed. Everybody clapped. Benji bowed, and the tray went over again, but this time he caught two of the flutes.
By the end of the afternoon, eleven people in white gloves could cross my kitchen with a tray of plastic champagne. Imogen walked behind them, correcting elbows. She was patient and precise and never raised her voice.
It occurred to me that she was very good at this. Not the trays. The people.
"You'd make a good caterer," I told her, while my staff practiced turning corners.
"I'd make a terrible caterer," she said. "I'd send back the bread."
"We'd make you a breadstick knife."
She did the short laugh. Then she looked around at all the gloves. Eleven pairs, moving around my kitchen like a flock of very polite birds.
"Nobody's going to notice me," she said, almost to herself. "On Friday. They'll all be wearing them."
"Is that a problem?"
"No," she said. "It's the first time in nineteen years that my gloves make me invisible instead of the opposite."
Wendt Fine Art had a black door on Vesper Street with a brass handle and a doorman in a long coat. Its front room served about fifty, standing, if nobody leaned on the sculptures. Everybody leaned on the sculptures.
We arrived at five. Laszlo was in the front room in a velvet jacket and a different scarf, this one the color of a bruised plum. He was rearranging small paintings by an inch and a half and sighing at each of them.
He didn't look at us. He looked at the trays.
"Gloves, good," he said. "Crab puffs, fine. Don't touch the art, don't talk to the guests, and don't go past that door."
He pointed at a gray door marked PRIVATE at the back of the gallery. "If anyone needs anything back there, I will handle it personally."
He walked away. I watched him go. Then I looked at Imogen, who was standing three feet from him with a tray of champagne. She had been there the whole time.
He hadn't looked up.
The guests began arriving at seven. They were the kind of people who say "interesting" about everything and mean "expensive."
My staff moved among them in white gloves, silent and careful. Benji did not drop anything. I have never been prouder of a twenty-four-year-old in my life.
At seven-forty, the doorman let in a man in a navy overcoat. He was sixty or so, bald, with a thin briefcase that he never put down. Laszlo met him at the door, shook his hand with both hands, and steered him straight toward the gray door.
"Mr. Zane," I heard him say. "Thank you for flying in. It's just through here."
The gray door closed behind them.
Imogen drifted past me with her tray.
"That's the buyer," she said, without moving her lips.
"How do you know?"
"Thin briefcase. He came straight in without looking at a single painting."
She adjusted a flute on the tray by a quarter inch. "Nobody comes to a gallery and doesn't look at the art. Unless they've already bought it."
At seven-fifty-two, Laszlo and Mr. Zane came back out, both smiling. Laszlo had the look of a man who'd just counted something and liked the number.
They went to the front window to admire a bronze horse. The gray door swung slowly shut behind them.
It didn't latch.
Imogen looked at me. I looked at Imogen. Then I looked at the gray door and the inch of darkness at its edge. I made the calculation I've made at a thousand events.
The back room served one. Briefly.
"Staff," I said quietly, "needs coasters."
Imogen picked up her tray and walked through the gray door like she'd been asked to.
I counted. Forty seconds, ninety, two minutes. My phone buzzed against my hip.
It was a photo. Two crates, open, leaning against the back wall. Two paintings of pears in two gold frames, side by side.
Then a second photo. A close-up of an upper left corner. And there, at the edge of the canvas, tiny and perfect, was a hole the size of a pinhead.
Then a text: It's here. Abner's tack hole. Call Voight.
I called Detective Voight. She answered on the first ring, and I could hear her car door slam.
"Ten minutes," she said. "Judge Yarnell is signing it on the hood of his car. Don't let anything leave."
I hung up and turned around.
The bronze horse was still in the window. Mr. Zane was still admiring it.
Laszlo Wendt was not.
The gray door was open about a foot. Through it I could see Laszlo's plum scarf and his back. Just past his shoulder stood a server in a black cap and white gloves, holding a tray.
For the first time all week, Laszlo Wendt was looking at the staff.
"Well," I heard him say, very softly. "If it isn't the glove girl."
Up next: Cotton Transfers
Continue to Part 6 →