Cold Hit

11

The three of us settled into a booth at the Empire Diner, the sleek-looking chrome-fitted slice of a Deco eatery on the northeast corner of Tenth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, to regroup over a late-morning cup of coffee.

“I’ll take a mushroom-and-cheese omelette, too,” Chapman told the waitress.

“How many breakfasts have you had today?” I asked.

“I try to fortify myself in advance whenever I know I’ll be hanging out with you. And throw in an order of crisp bacon and some sausage, okay?”

Mercer was doodling on his napkin, connecting stick figures with arrows and seemingly going around in circles. “Someone killed Denise Caxton. I assumed it was Omar Sheffield. Someone probably kills Sheffield-I don’t think he just walked under a boxcar after forty-six years of careful living, but we’ll know for certain in a day or two. Denise had hired Sheffield to kill her husband-so maybe Omar’s the guy who screwed up the job and caused Lowell’s scalp wound. Deni seems to have all the money in the world, but keeps scamming for more. Plus, she’s got a class A dirtball pervert for a business partner. Where are we going here?”

“Nowhere, fast. I’ll feel better after some more caffeine,” I said.

I called Laura on my cellular phone. “I hope you picked up the voice mail I left at seven this morning, telling you I wouldn’t be in till we finished uptown. Any messages for me?”

“Jim Winright found nothing on the Internet about the woman you asked about in your E-mail. He doubts it’s her real name,” Laura said. “And someone called Marilyn Seven phoned to say she could meet with you at noon in the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel, on Fifty-seventh Street. Then the M.E.’s Office wanted you to know that there was indeed seminal fluid on the canvas piece taken from the Chevy, and they’d probably have DNA results by the end of the day tomorrow. Last one is from Jacob Tyler. He expects to be back from China by the weekend, and hopes you can get away to the Vineyard.”

I repeated the first three messages to my companions, omitting Jake’s call and my hope that we might find Deni’s killer so I could be with him by Friday.

“Good,” Chapman said. “I already told the M.E. we’d need a comparison DNA print for Omar, so he should have that one under way, too. One of us oughta take that meeting with Marilyn Seven and you.”

“It doesn’t sound like she wants to have this conversation with police around. I think the Four Seasons is still a pretty safe place to be.”

“Let Mike get on with what he’s got to do, Alex. I’ll take my car up there and sit in front of the hotel, in case you need me for anything.”

Mike took us back to where we had parked earlier in the morning, and I drove uptown, throwing my parking permit in the windshield and leaving the Jeep near the entrance to the building.

The only woman in the lounge was a slight, serious-looking brunette whose long hair was wound into a French braid. Her tortoiseshell eyeglass frames held tinted lenses, and as I stood in the entrance to the room she dipped an ivory cigarette holder in my direction.

A bit dramatic for my taste, but I approached her and introduced myself. She stood and shook my hand, smiling openly and inviting me to join her. “Sorry for the dark glasses. I’ve had some vision problems lately, and even the softest light bothers my eyes. And I also apologize for being so mysterious. With all of Deni’s problems, I just don’t know where to turn and whom to trust. I called the lawyer who handles all my business affairs here in New York yesterday-Justin Feldman-and he assured me that I could rely on your judgment and your discretion.”

“If he’s your lawyer, then you’re in very secure hands. Justin’s the best in the business.” Although I had been put off by her phone call, I liked this woman immediately. “Are you also an art dealer?”

“No, but my late husband was a collector. I live in Santa Fe now, but we bought a lot of our paintings from Lowell in the old days.”

She was wearing a dark blue sweater, probably silk, with a dark blue skirt that extended to midcalf, showing a bit of her thin ankle above the tops of her delicate blue sandals.

“Like Deni, I was married to a much older man, and a very rich one. Unlike her, I had inherited a lot of money, too-an automobile fortune-well, automobile parts, actually.” She smiled at me. “And Lowell had sort of put Deni in my hands, to help polish her up a bit. I was ten years older than she-I’m forty-nine now-but we became friends, best friends. I’m sure you know how important that is to a woman.”

“I can’t imagine going through life without one,” I said. Nina Baum, my Wellesley roommate, had taught me everything there was to know about friendship and loyalty. And even though she lived in Los Angeles and Joan Stafford was spending more and more time in Washington, I counted on the intimacy of our relationships to bolster me through the sometimes dark days and nights of my chosen work. “May I ask you to tell me about Deni-what you know, as well as what you think was going on recently?”

“Certainly. Would you care for something to drink?”

“No, thanks.” I watched as she sipped at a glass of white wine.

“At the very beginning, it was as though Deni had walked into the pages of a fairy tale. Lowell was amazingly seductive, and Denise was like a magnificent jewel that he wanted to place in the center of his crown. His dinner parties were legendary-has anyone told you about them?”

I shook my head in the negative.

“Not that it was his idea, really, but he copied a page out of Gertrude Stein’s ingenious recipe for entertaining. The living room-perhaps you’ve seen it-was hung with old masters and works from many of the greatest artists who ever lived. Then, with a handful of the richest collectors at the ready, he’d sprinkle the guest list with whoever was hottest in the art world-and seat the artist opposite his own paintings. Brilliant, wasn’t it? Those often surly and sullen personalities couldn’t help but smile as they were reflected in their own canvases and assured of almost immediate sales.

“Imagine at one table having Ellsworth Kelly, Keith Haring, David Hockney-all sitting amidst their creations while they debated each other about style and talent as well. Those were the days that Deni loved.”

“How long did life at the Caxtons’ go on like that?”

“Quite a good while, actually. Beyond Deni’s youth and exuberance, Lowell seemed to love everything about her, not least of all how eager she was to learn everything there was to know about his life’s passion. She was a tireless student, and though she had an untrained eye, her hunches could be brilliant. Lowell called her ‘my budding alchemist.’ First, he tempted her with really fine paintings that he’d search out in the ch‚teaux of Bordeaux and the palaces of the once-rich in Venice. She’d a gift for knowing there was something lurking beneath the crusted dust and oil, and she would coax Lowell to take the gamble.

“More often than not she was right. They came home with a Canaletto and two amazing Delacroix that way. Stole them, in a sense. Paid practically nothing for the works, then turned around and sold them for a fortune to several of the Caxton stable-Lowell’s devoted followers. He was less amused when she turned the same talent on the current art scene. He thought she was wasting her time.”

“Chicken or egg, Ms. Seven, which came first? Do you know how the marriage began to unravel or come apart?”

“That’s a bit too quaint a description. I’d say it came to a screeching halt.

“It was when Lowell had gone to Bath, a year ago this past June. There was to be an auction for the estate of Gwendolyn, Lady Wenbotham. She was the ninety-four-year-old dowager who’d owned a fabulous collection of portraits-lots of minor royalty and major military figures. Lowell and Deni were feuding, rather mildly, because she was too busy to go with him on the trip. Not only did he value her eye, but he wanted her there to show off at all the social events-Ascot, if they could get away early enough, staying on for Wimbledon, dinners, and balls. Kind of thing she usually loved to do.”

“What kept her away?”

“I’m not sure, really.” Ms. Seven stopped, as though considering whether or not to tell me what she guessed had been the reason. “She was vague even with me at the time.”

“Another man?”

“No, up to then she’d been quite faithful to Lowell. So he left for England-did the tennis and the horse races-and Deni was quite aloof for those weeks. Finally, she called and said that if I would go along with her, she’d surprise Lowell in Bath. We packed our trunks and off we went. I had a driver pick us up at Heathrow the morning of the auction and take us directly to the Royal Crescent. Do you know it?”

“Yes, I do.” I had stayed at the charming old hotel when one of Joan Stafford’s first plays was staged there before opening at the Lyric Theatre in London.

“Denise went to the desk and announced that she was Mrs. Caxton and would like the key to the room. I had one of those suites facing the crescent, but to get to Lowell’s room she had to pass through that quiet little garden, where half of the guests were having high tea.

“Five minutes later I heard Deni yelling as though she were standing in my very room. Language I doubt many of the hotel guests had heard before. Lowell, as I later learned in exquisite detail from Deni, was in the middle of some kind of acrobatic sexual maneuver with Gwendolyn’s great-granddaughter, a twenty-five-year-old local beauty who was no doubt trying to up the ante on the family fortune. She had captured Lowell’s attention and was hoping to keep his bids high that evening.”

“Any point in asking what happened next?”

“Deni used more four-letter words than I thought I’d ever find in Webster’s. The young lady came downstairs wearing a hotel bathrobe, and Deni tossed her underwear out thewindow, probably landing it on someone’s scones and crumpets. Gwendolyn’s eighty-nine-year-old sister, Althea, watched the whole episode unfold from her wheelchair in the middle of the courtyard.

“When Lowell stormed through there, fully dressed, about fifteen minutes later, Althea lifted herself up with her cane, reached it out to stop him in his path, and announced for all the family friends to hear, ‘I applaud your courage, Mr. Caxton. Must have been something like trying to fit an oyster into a parking meter, having your way with my great-grandniece? Lovely to have met you. Sorry you can’t stay for the evening.’ ”

“He didn’t go to the sale, after all that?”

“No. In fact, he had our driver take him directly to the airport for a flight back to New York.”

“And Deni?”

“She and I went to the auction. She was furious, and determined to do something to show what he had taught her professionally. Everyone in the room, of course, was impressed that she showed up at all. To them it was pure American moxie. She dressed elegantly, beamed at everyone-flirting with the men and being unusually courteous to the women- and focused her attention on every item in the sale.”

“How’d she do?” I asked.

“Like a dream. She bought a portrait of the Marchesa Cecchi for sixty-seven thousand dollars. It had been unattributed in the catalogue. But Deni brought it back to her restorer, Marco Varelli-have you encountered him yet? He’s a genius. And after he cleaned it up, they actually found Sir Joshua Reynolds’s signature under a couple of centuries of grime. She sold that piece for more than a million and a half. And just for fun, she bought a small piece of garden statuary, some kind of wood nymph if I remember correctly. I don’t think it cost her two thousand dollars.”

Marilyn Seven took a breath, put out one cigarette and lighted another, and reminded the waiter to bring her another glass of Saint-Véran.

“I’ll tell you, Miss Cooper, I was sitting in the same room, looking at the same objects. I thought the sculpture was too kitschy to put in my own backyard. Turned out to be an original by Giambologna, the great Florentine artist. Worth close to ten million. Deni refused to sell it. Just shipped it home and installed it in Lowell’s bathroom. She wanted to remind him of the entire experience. Make it indelible.”

“I take it that was the beginning of the end?” “

Basta. Finito. Terminato. Neither one of them was willing to forgive the other, and for Lowell it was a confirmation that they had been moving in separate directions for a couple of years. Deni had no idea if that was his first indiscretion- although I really doubt it. He’d finished the Pygmalion thing with Deni. He was ready to take on someone new.”

“Why didn’t she just walk away from him? Certainly she’d made enough money to go out on her own.”

“I suppose when you come from a background like Deni’s, there’s never quite enough to erase the fears that you’re going to find yourself back on the farm sowing soybeans in the dirt for the rest of your life.”

“With what she was sitting on? I can’t believe that.”

“It wasn’t a very attractive side of my friend, but she also wanted to take Lowell to the cleaners. Deni wanted some of the Caxton treasures as well, and she had no plans to walk away without them.”

“But she had no right to them, Ms. Seven. They’re clearly Lowell’s, aren’t they, except for some of the works acquired during the marriage?”

She looked at me as though I were an absolute idiot. “I’m not talking about the art in their home or in the gallery. Don’t you know anything about the Caxton operation? Because if not, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

“The Caxtons have been at this now for three generations. Lowell has such a tight grip on the collection that not even his employees know the extent of what he owns, or more importantly, where all the art is. Deni knew there were paintings stashed in Swiss vaults and even in an old Cold War bunker on a hillside in Pennsylvania. He moves his pieces in armored cars and by private jet.”

Deni’s friend was certainly devoted to her. I could see she was going to go on bashing Lowell as long as I’d listen.

“Are you aware that Three-you probably know it was his childhood name, and it made him crazy when Deni called him that-was never invited to join the Art Dealers Association of America?”

Again, I shook my head to tell her that I was not.

“In seventy-five, I think it was, and certainly before Deni, he was caught bugging the telephones of the most prestigious galleries in New York, long before hi-tech spying became a tool of the business world. He was checking on their inventory, as well as trying to get an idea of what their customers were searching for on the market. Lowell’s father had used a lot of his money to pay scholars to write catalogues raisonnés.”

“Sorry, you’ve lost me. I don’t know what they are.”

“They’re the key to individual artists and their works. Good ones are well researched and documented, and by controlling the catalogues of a particular artist, you control the price and value of his work. Many experts think there’s an aura of questionability about the Caxton catalogues, that histories and pedigrees have been altered for the family’s private gain. Several art historians have denounced the works publicly, which made Lowell furious. It threw into question his Vermeers, his Légers, his Davids.”

“But Deni thought she could get her hands on those paintings?”

“Well, yes-in part. She was also terribly frightened that she knew too much about them for Lowell to let her go. His first two wives had never really participated in his professional world. But once Deni learned it and loved it, he let her in. She knew things about Caxton and his father, and their manner of doing business, that Lowell regretted having told her once the bottom fell out. Her greatest fear-and she spoke of it to me often-was that he’d never let her walk away from him, knowing what she did about his dealings. She couldn’t stay with him, Ms. Cooper, but he wouldn’t let her go.”

I wondered if Marilyn Seven knew anything about Deni’s partnership with the late Omar Sheffield. “Do you have any idea how desperate your friend was to get rid of her husband?”

“About as anxious as you or I would be, if your life had been threatened like hers had.”

“How and when was she threatened?”

“Well, that answers that. I didn’t suppose Lowell told you about the letters Deni got last year, which practically drove her insane.”

“No, so far he hasn’t mentioned any letters to us at all.”

“I’ve brought you a copy of one of them, if you’d like to see it.”

Marilyn Seven withdrew a xeroxed paper from her slim purse and passed it across to me. The copy was a page of lined white paper, covered with neatly printed handwriting and addressed to Denise Caxton. I scanned it quickly.

My name is Jennsen, and I live in Brooklyn. I know you don’t know me, but I have been watching you since you got home from England. I know how you look like, and I know how to find you. Listen, if you go to the police about this, I will hurt you bad, or go back to Oklahoma and kill someone you really love. I know when you leave your house and go to W. 22 nd St., so I could follow you. I know you get your hair cut at La Coupe and you eat dinner twice a week at Fresco on 52 nd St. Your husband pays you $ 125,000 a month for your expenses. Are you getting this yet? I know where you buy your underpants and how much you pay for your wine. Now here’s what I want. Listen close. I want you to send $ 1,000 to my friend, who is in jail, and who’s address is on this letter. This is to show you that I am not kidding, by two ways. One is that I know every move you make, and the other is to show you that my best friends are locked up doing time, so you know I am not playing games. We know how to hurt people very bad. Lowell also told me who the five men are who are your lovers. Now you think I’m jiving? Send a check or money order to my friend Omar Sheffield, 96 B- 1911, Box 968, Coxsackie Correctional Facility, Coxsackie, New York 12051.

REMEMBER NO POLICE. If you don’t send my friend the money, I will take charge by getting you in the near future. Include your phone number so we can talk.

I looked up at Marilyn Seven. “What did she do about this?”

“Certainly not call the police.”

“Did she do what this guy wanted?”

“What would you have done?”

“Look,” I said, my impatience growing. “It’s not a contest about us trying to match wits. I didn’t get this letter.”

“These letters, Ms. Cooper. A shoe box full of them. It was obvious to her that this man could only have gotten the detail about her from Lowell, and that Lowell had hired him to kill her. She knew she was being scammed, but of course she did as he told her.”

“She sent money up to the state prison?”

“You bet she did. Early and often. The faster she sent it, the faster the ante was raised. By the time the guy finally called her, she must have already sent him twenty thousand dollars. She was terrified, and asked him point-blank whether her husband had hired him to kill her. He confirmed it for Deni. Told her that Lowell was trying to torture her first, mentally, and that’s why he’d given this guy Jennsen so much information about her movements and whereabouts. They were planning a way for the hit to happen sometime when Lowell was abroad and Deni wasn’t in her apartment-almost exactly the way it did happen-so it couldn’t be traced back to Lowell.”

“But she kept the correspondence going, of course,” I said.

“To stay alive, and to turn the tables on her beloved husband. It was her idea to outbid Lowell on this deal, too-and to get the Jennsen fellow to kill Lowell before he murdered her.” Marilyn Seven leaned in and put her hand on top of mine. “I told her over and over again that she was insane, and that it would be a deadly mistake for her to play with fire. She wouldn’t listen to me, of course, and my insistence that she abandon her plan took her further and further away from me. I don’t think, in the end, that she really had anyone left that she could trust.”

“Bryan Daughtry?” I ventured.

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t dignify that question with a response.”

“Do you have any of the other letters that she received?”

“No, I never saw them. And I have no idea where she would have kept them. The first one was the only one she sent to me, when she wanted my advice. I don’t know if they’re at her home, or office, or in a safe deposit box. I felt you should know about them.”

She removed a fifty-dollar bill from her pocket and summoned the waiter to bring a check. “I’ll be at the hotel for a few days before going back home, if you need me for anything.”

“Under the name ‘Seven’?” I asked.

“Yes, of course.” She smiled. “Why, I suppose you tried to check up on me before we met, Ms. Cooper. It’s close enough to my real name-the Italian word for ‘seven.’ I used it briefly, almost thirty years ago, when I attempted a career on the stage. Did I stump you?” she asked, seemingly pleased by the idea.

“In fact, you did. We came up blank. Much too blank for someone of your means.”

“That is my name, in a fashion. I was actually born Marina Sette, in Venezia. My mother abandoned me when I was eighteen months old. Left my father and ran off with a very dashing American-Lowell Caxton.”

I suppose that I was unable to stifle a slight gasp.

“My father left Italy and came to the States, where his parents raised me while my mother raised her stepchild and had two more of her own with Lowell. She never glanced over her shoulder, not even to stop from being run over in that boating accident.”

I had grown up with the most loving mother on the face of the earth and could not comprehend how any woman could leave a child to take off with another man.

Marina Sette went on. “My father turned his automotive parts factory in Michigan into an integral part of the Ford Motor Company-Sette Moto-by the time I was six. If you can measure wealth in material ways-and believe me, I can’t-money has never been an issue.”

“But Lowell Caxton-surely he knew who you were.”

“Perhaps he’d have recognized me if I were as breathtaking as my mother must have been. But he never caught on. Not for a moment. Then, after the fireworks in England, when Deni was looking for every conceivable way to hurt him, she couldn’t resist telling him exactly who I was.”

“And his reaction?”

“I wanted it to be rage, of course. I wanted it to cause him to agonize over me-or at least, if he didn’t care about my feelings, he should regret the loss of my husband as a rather substantial client. As I should have expected, all I got was indifference.

“Surely you can understand why I thought Deni was on such a treacherous course with her pen pal. After all, there was no need to go outside the family.” Marina Sette removed her cigarette from the holder and crushed it in the ashtray on the table. “I could have killed Lowell Caxton myself.”