Cold Hit

16

I walked into the conference room after clearing security on the ground floor. Mike and Mercer were exchanging war stories with four very buttoned-down federal agents while they waited for me to arrive. I didn’t need a mirror to tell me what was obvious from the expression on Mike’s face as he looked up to see me.

“Mother of-jeez, what the hell happened to you? That picture’s got ‘line of duty’ written all over it. Someone messes me up like that and I could go out on three-quarters disability pay tomorrow.”

Mercer came over to examine the scrapes on my arm and ask whether I was all right.

“Yeah, I tripped into a hole on my way over from the courthouse.”

“All those years of ballet lessons and you’re a regular twinkletoes. You got four city blocks to walk here, what kinda hole we talking about?”

“I’ll explain later. Let’s get going here.”

“You’ll explain now, blondie.”

“Ran into somebody who doesn’t like me. Wakim Wakefield, a forty-something ex-con. Took his fifteen-year-old plaything away from him this afternoon and he didn’t appreciate it.” I told them a short version of the story.

“Just another friggin’ Ponce de Léon looking for his fountain of youth,” Mike said. “Let’s call in a police report on your hit-and-run attempt.”

“No,” I said firmly. “Just leave it alone. I’m not hurt. And this’ll blow over by the time he goes out tonight and finds himself another teen angel. It couldn’t have been anything more than chance that he saw me on the street as I was leaving and took out his frustration on me. I hate to tell you, but some cop’s going to walk out of Central Booking later tonight and find a radio car that got bashed up worse than my pride. Point me to the ladies’ room and give me a little time to make myself presentable.”

Special Agent Rainieri chose not to delay the discussion until my return, since I had already kept the group waiting an extra twenty minutes. He seemed to be speaking in answer to a question one of the detectives had asked. “Yeah, we had a turncoat. That’s what started the whole investigation. Seems he got cheated out of a very big sale and decided to rat out some of the other dealers in the pack.

“The point of these rings, you know, is to keep the prices of the artworks at auctions way down. One of them buys the painting at the public sale, then resells it at a vastly greater price-usually to a private client-and splits the big profit with his-or her-small clan of coconspirators.”

“Denise Caxton?”

“She was a player all right. Don’t forget, not only do we have ordinary business receipts and phone records, but we’ve got tapes of all the telephone bidding that goes on during an auction house sale. And the expense statements and each gallery’s credit agreements.”

I had to remind Mike that beyond the social cachet and great expense connected with the grand auctions, art was one of the only objects in the world that could be purchased in any currency and from any location.

“Do you know who her cohorts were in these deals?”

The only female agent present, Estelle Grayson, answered. “She moved in and out of a few partnerships. Lowell Caxton didn’t mess much with auctions, and didn’t run with the pack. He has always had his own sources and paid dearly for them. Doesn’t leave much of a paper trail, and didn’t mix well in the sandbox with the other kids.”

“Bryan Daughtry?” I asked.

“He’s everywhere in this. Not up front, not sitting there with a paddle in the air. But he was pumping cash into her operation and trying to guide her into play with some of this very contemporary art inventory.”

“Any names you can give us connected with the auction investigation?”

“Denise Caxton spent a lot of time at events this year. Sometimes she was with a personal client, a big collector.” Rainieri referred to his file and gave us a list of names, none of which sounded at all familiar. “Often she brought a friend or escort, and it’s hard to tell if there’s any business purpose instead of a social one. Chapman says you’ve been talking to Mrs. Caxton’s friend Marina Sette. She’s a figure at these things. Could be she’s just a big spender.

“Two of the men Denise had been socializing with also show up-Frank Wrenley and Preston Mattox. Again, one’s an antiques dealer and one’s an architect, so we’ve got subpoenas out for their records, too. Nothing in on them yet. We just don’t know if they’re around for the fun or the profit.”

“Well, do they buy anything?”

“Wrenley does. But that’s a new twist, new buzzword in the auction world. It’s called ‘cross-marketing.’ So, when Sotheby’s has a sale of Impressionists, for example, they don’t start the program off with a Monet. Last spring at their big show, the first piece sold was a pair of silver soup tureens made by a French silversmith in the eighteenth century. Used to belong to J. P. Morgan. Went for more than seven million bucks. The houses are trying to lure art collectors into new passions.”

“Wrenley bought those tureens?”

“No, no. But he’s shown up often and bought a lot of silver pieces-old French royalty. And Denise Caxton had Preston Mattox bidding on a set of murals out of an old Scottish estate. So we haven’t reached a point of figuring whether this was business or romance.

“Anyway, Kim asked us to start making connections between Mrs. Caxton and anyone who’d have a reason to do her in. We’re looking, and a few months down the road, when we have all the paper we need, something might leap out at us. In the meantime, if you guys have subpoenaed some of the same phone and business records that we did, we can cut through a lot of this and give you our copies. Maybe you’ll find things that wouldn’t mean anything to us.”

I fished through my overstuffed pocketbook to pull out copies of the file folders with the subpoenas inside. The bag had turned upside down in my fall and was even more disastrously messed up than usual.

“I don’t know how she finds anything in there,” Chapman said as I clasped lipstick, a compact, a handkerchief, Tic Tacs, four pens, and a wallet in my left hand, trying to free up the folder with my right. “What do you know about the Gardner Museum heist?”

“Not our turf. We’ve talked to the team who’ve worked it for practically ten years, just ’cause they’re figuring the stolen items have got to surface somewhere before too long. So they’re watching the auction houses pretty closely, too. D’y’all know about Youngworth and Connor?”

More than anything, Mike hated telling a Fed that there was something about which he was ignorant. He wouldn’t say no to them, so I did.

“There are two guys in Boston, William Youngworth and Myles Connor. Youngworth’s an antiques dealer-been in and out of the can on minor things-and Connor’s a master art thief. Both of these men were in jail when the Gardner job was pulled, but word is, if they weren’t the brains behind the theft, they certainly knew about it.

“Last year Youngworth claimed that he could broker the return of the missing Rembrandt for the five-million-dollar reward the FBI put up, along with immunity for him and his pal. You know about the chips?”

Another thumbs-up for Joan Stafford. “Sure,” said Chapman, puffing. “Know all about the chips. Those assholes cut the painting right out of the frame.”

“Yeah, well, Youngworth gave some Boston news reporter a few chips to support his claim that he could produce the goods. Our experts looked them over. Not authentic, not from the missing painting. That’s the latest on the Gardner case.”

“Who was your expert? Got a name for us?”

“No idea who it is. We’ll get it for you tomorrow.”

We spent the next half hour sorting through documents to see which ones I was legally entitled to examine at this point. At six fifteen, Mercer suggested we close up. “Let’s get over to the funeral parlor before the seven o’clock visiting hours. Maybe we can chat up some of Marco Varelli’s friends and family.”

Varelli’s wake was in a small, dark funeral home on Sullivan Street, in the narrow block just north of Houston. I had been in the neighborhood before, which had been home to Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, whom I had often seen there walking up and down the street in his bathrobe, feigning insanity, before his recent conviction and trip to federal prison.

I stepped out of Mercer’s air-conditioned car and onto the steamy pavement in front of Zuppelo’s funeral parlor. “You think they got a TV in there?” Mike asked.

“You are not watching Jeopardy! in front of the mourners,” I said. “Call your mother when we leave here and ask her what the question was, okay? Live without it for one night.”

The three of us presented ourselves to the manager of the mortuary. “The only one here at the moment is Mrs. Varelli. You’re a little early. Are you friends?”

“Distant relatives,” Chapman answered.

Mr. Zuppelo looked skeptically from Chapman to me, then frowned at Mercer Wallace’s dark skin.

“Northern Italian,” Mike said. “With a trace of Sicilian.”

He flashed his badge at Zuppelo, who led us into a dingy sitting area. The odor of more than thirty flower arrangements-mostly orange gladioluses and yellow carnations- was especially stifling in the intense late-summer heat. The open casket was in an alcove at the far end of the room, and Mrs. Varelli sat beside it, clutching a set of rosary beads. The jacket of her gray suit seemed to overwhelm her delicate shoulders, and she looked as if she had cried all the tears she was capable of shedding in the past twenty-four hours.

Mike nudged me and told me to introduce myself. “See if you can get her outta this hothouse and away from her husband’s body. Bond with her, Coop. Be sensitive-if you still remember how to do that.”

I left Mike and Mercer at the doorway and approached the widow. “Mrs. Varelli, I’m Alexandra Cooper. I’m-”

“So nice to meet you, Miss Cooper. You were, perhaps, a friend of Marco’s?”

“Actually, no, Mrs. Varelli. Would you like to come inside with me, to another room, and I’ll explain why I’m here?”

“Sixty-two years, Miss Cooper. Never apart for one night in sixty-two years. What am I going to do without him?” She grabbed the side of the coffin and started to talk to her husband. “I’m just going to be a few minutes, Marco. I go with this young lady to see what she’s going to try to sell me.”

She extended her hand, and I grasped the white cotton glove and braced her elbow, helping her to her feet. “Everyone thinks I just got off the boat from Napoli. Do I want a mausoleum, do I want a condominium, do I want a ticket back to the old country? I was born in Newark, New Jersey. Lived here all my life. These people think I’m stupid. Think I’m going to give away Marco’s paintings or turn his studio into the YMCA.

“All I want is for Marco to get up and walk around the corner with me to have our dinner at Da Silvano, sitting on the sidewalk, like we did almost every evening in the warm weather. Artists would look at Marco with respect, Marco would look at the young ladies with longing, I’d have a couple of glasses of wine, and together we’d go home very happy. It’s awfully lonely after sixty-two years, Miss Cooper. You want to sell me something, or you want to buy?”

As she talked, I walked her past Mike and Mercer and into an empty room decorated in somber, waiting-for-thenextbody tones of neutral palettes. There was an elegance to the old woman, with her perfectly erect carriage, fragile body, and very keen mind.

“I’m an assistant district attorney, Mrs. Varelli. A prosecutor.”

“Somebody make a crime here?”

“I’m working on another case, a murder case. A woman who was killed last week. I understand that Mr. Varelli had done work with her. We-the detectives and I-had planned to come see him later this week. Then we learned about his death. I’m so sorry for your great loss. I don’t mean to burden you now, but maybe you could give me the name of your husband’s assistant, who could tell-”

Her back was straight as a rod as she poked herself in the chest. “I am the only one he trusted with his work, Miss Cooper. He had several workmen who helped him with the physical labor, the movement of large pieces, the arrangement of supplies, and from time to time he had an apprentice. But there is nothing I didn’t know about his business. Who is this lady who was killed?”

“Caxton. Denise Caxton.”

Mrs. Varelli turned her face ninety degrees, away from me. She was silent.

“You knew her, then?”

“It’s not good to speak ill of the dead, is it?”

“What kind of business did she have with your husband?”

“The same as everyone, Miss Cooper. You know about Marco?”

“I have to admit that I had never heard his name until this week. But all the people I’ve talked to say what a wonderful man he was.”

“A genius. Did they say that, too? Mostly, he was a genius.”

I nodded to her.

“As a boy, in Firenze, he studied art at the Accademia. Paint is what he loved-not the canvas, but the substance that made color-and he had even more passion for that than for beautiful women. But he never did it so well himself-the drawing or the creation. What he did brilliantly was to find the beauty in the paintings of others who had gone before him.

“Marco could stand in his atelier for hours, some eager dealer at his heels watching, working on what appeared to be a dirty old piece of burlap. He’d fasten his binocular headset on-that was the only thing that even looked like it connected him to this century. Gently, ever so gently, he would swab at the tired colors with a little touch of cotton.

“Behind him, some greedy collector or dealer would be urging him on. ‘What do you see, Marco? Who do you think it is, Marco?’ You have no idea what treasures he has found over the years. Even so recently, his eyes saw things through the filth of centuries that no one else could dream possible.”

“And his illness-he was still working until recently, even with his heart condition?”

Mrs. Varelli snapped at me. “Illness what?”

“I, uh, I knew that a doctor had come when he collapsed.”

“A touch of arthritis, that’s what the doctor was for. Marco’s skill depended on two things, his eye and his hand. Neither one of us-no pills, no machines, no medicines. He only had a doctor to help him when his hand ached from the arthritis and it hurt him to hold a scalpel for so long. Un po’ di vino, Marco believed in. The medicine from the grapes.”

“It was his heart that gave out,” I said, hoping it was gentle enough a reminder of what the doctor had told the M.E.’s pathologist.

“There was nothing wrong with Marco’s heart. His heart was so good, so very strong.” Mrs. Varelli became tearful.

“Were you always in the studio with your husband?”

“No, I was rarely there. We have an apartment in the same building. We had our coffee together in the morning, then he would go upstairs to work. Back home for lunch and a nap. Then more work, always. Sometimes into the evening, if he found himself in the middle of a surprise or a painting he had come to adore. Then he would come home to bathe himself, to get rid of the oil and varnish and streaks. Together we would go off for dinner, alone or with friends. A simple life, Miss Cooper, but a very rich one.”

“Had you ever met Denise Caxton?”

“It was her husband I met first. I can hardly remember when, it was so long ago. He was not a warm man, but he was very good to Marco. Lowell Caxton bought a portrait at an auction house in London, maybe thirty years ago. It had been miscatalogued in England and sold as an unidentified portrait of a young girl. Lowell bought it only because he said it reminded him of his wife, whichever one that happened to be at the time. He didn’t believe it had any value, and he brought it to Marco simply to clean it up to be hung.

“But Marco thought she was a beauty, too. ‘Overpainted,’ he complained to me every time he came downstairs. He didn’t use many words, Marco. He didn’t need to with me. Days and nights he worked on it, until there was life in the child’s face and her petite blue dress had texture and the warm glow of silk. One afternoon, Marco came down for lunch. I give him his soup and he looks across the table. ‘ Gainsborough,’ he said to me, ‘it’s a Gainsborough.’ Every museum in England wanted to buy it back.

“Many people would just have paid Marco the price he asked for the restoration, and still my husband would have been happy. Lowell Caxton did that. But then he came back the next week, when Marco had come home for his lunch. I let him in the house-that’s when I met him. He had under his arm a small package wrapped in brown paper. It was a Titian-very small, very beautiful. We have it still. You come to my home, you’ll see it.”

“In your apartment? A Titian?”

“But so very little. It’s a study, just a piece of one of his great works. You know The Rape of Europa?”

Of course I knew it. Everyone who had ever taken an art course in college had studied it. Rubens had called it the greatest painting in the world. And I had seen it many times because it was part of the collection at the Gardner Museum. Was this just another coincidence? “When did you say Mr. Caxton gave you the Titian?”

Mrs. Varelli thought for a moment. “Thirty, thirty-five years ago.”

Before Denise, before the Gardner Museum theft.

“And Denise Caxton, was she a client of Mr. Varelli’s?”

“First she came many times with her husband. Then alone. Then with other people-maybe dealers, maybe buyers. I never met them in the studio. Sometimes Marco would tell stories about them.”

“Did he feel the same way you did about Mrs. Caxton?”

Mrs. Varelli tossed back her head and laughed. “Of course not. She was young, she was quite beautiful, and she knew how to make an old man feel wonderful. She’d practice her Italian on Marco. She’d flatter him and tease him and bring him fascinating paintings to examine. Always looking for gold where there was none. Wasting Marco’s time, if you ask me.”

“Do you know who the men were that she brought recently?”

“No, no. For this, I give you the names of my husband’s workmen. Maybe they were introduced or can tell you what these men looked like. You give me your card, and next week I call you with their telephone numbers.”

“Is that the only reason you didn’t like Denise?”

“I don’t need many reasons. She was trouble. Even Marco thought she was trouble.”

“How, Mrs. Varelli? What did he tell you about her?”

“Like I said, Miss Cooper, Marco didn’t use a lot of words. But these past few months, on the days that Mrs. Caxton came to see him, he didn’t come home smiling like he used to. She was trying to get him to work on something that upset him, gave him agita. That he did say. ‘At this age, I don’t need any agita. ’”

“But didn’t he get any more specific than that?”

“Not with me. I was just glad he didn’t want to work with her any longer. He didn’t seem to like the people she was bringing around.”

“Did Mr. Varelli talk about Rembrandt ever?”

“How could one make his life in this world and not talk about Rembrandt?”

I was grateful that she had not responded by saying what a stupid question I had asked. “I mean recently, and in connection with Denise Caxton.”

“You don’t know, then, that Marco is”-her chest heaved visibly as she breathed deeply and changed the wording. “Marco was the world’s leading expert on Rembrandt, no? Perhaps you’re too young to know the story.”

Mrs. Varelli went on. “Rembrandt’s most famous group portrait is called The Night Watch. Have you ever seen it?”

“Yes, I have. It’s in Amsterdam, at the Rijksmuseum.”

“Exactly. Then maybe you know that originally, more than three hundred years ago, it had a different name.”

“No, I’ve only heard it called by this one.”

“When he painted it, it was entitled The Shooting Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq. Over the decades, it became so covered with grime that people assumed that the setting was at nighttime-the name you know it by. Well, after World War Two was ended-in about nineteen forty-seven- when Marco was just getting a reputation as a restorer, he was part of the team of experts put together to restore the enormous painting. During the cleaning, it lightened brilliantly. That’s the first time anyone in the twentieth century realized that it wasn’t a night scene at all.

“Marco was the only member of that restoration group still alive fifty years later. When anyone-and I mean anyone, Miss Cooper-has a question about the attribution of a Rembrandt today, it was only my Marco who knew the truth. Monarchs, presidents, millionaires-they all came to see Marco Varelli about their paintings.”

“Denise Caxton, did she ever bring him a Rembrandt?”

“This I don’t know.”

“Did your husband ever say that she or anyone else asked him to look at paint chips recently?”

Again Mrs. Varelli looked at me as though I had no brain at all.

“That’s what my husband did every day of his life. Paint, paint chips, paint streaks, paint fragments. From this, Miss Cooper, come masterpieces.”

“Excuse me, Alex. Could I see you a minute?” Mercer was speaking to me from the hallway.

“May I go back to Marco now?”

“If you’d give us another few minutes, Mrs. Varelli, we’ll be out of your way,” he said to her.

I thanked her for her graciousness at such a terrible time and walked back to the room in which the coffin rested. Mike was standing next to the dead man’s head.

“I hope by paying your respects to the deceased you got more than I did from the widow,” I said to them as I reentered the room. “A bit of art history and a hunch that Denise Caxton was nothing but trouble.”

“Then I’d say Mrs. Varelli’s got great instincts. Remember that case I had a few years back in Spanish Harlem? The Argentinian dancer, Augusto Mango, who died prematurely during a sexual encounter with a rabid fan?”

“Very well.”

“You know how we found out it was murder and not a bad heart?”

“No.”

“Some doctor declared him dead at the scene. I think he must have been a podiatrist. Then, at the funeral parlor, while they were combing his hair into place, the mortician found a bullet hole in the back of his head. Small caliber, barely the trace of an entry. The fan’s husband was the killer. Post headline was Don’t Tango with Mango.

“Well, Mr. Zuppelo wouldn’t make such a good barber.”

Mike carefully turned Marco Varelli’s head away from us and smoothed the thick white hair back from his left ear, much as he had done at Spuyten Duyvil when we first saw the body of Denise Caxton. There was the unmistakable mark that a bullet had pierced the skull of the gentle old man.