Cold Hit

29

“I just woke up the housekeeper in Santa Fe. She doesn’t expect Ms. Sette back there for another week. Laid on a heavy Spanish accent, says I must have misunderstood her when I called on Sunday. I’m telling you, Alex, I swear that woman told me Sette had just flown back home the other day. This is Mercer’s life, for chrissakes. It’s not anything I would have made a mistake about. Today when I press her about where I can get in touch with Sette, all I get is that the housekeeper doesn’t know. ‘ La Señora ’ is traveling.” Mike was fuming.

“All right, relax. Let’s just make a plan.”

“You know why I like it better when I’m working on something where everybody’s poor? ’Cause the friggin’ perps can’t go too far. One guy’s maybe got a mother in Queens, next one chills out at his brother’s place in the Bronx, another sleeps on the rooftop. None of this Airborne Express crap that the rich can pull. That mope I locked up for the triple homicide in the Polo Grounds projects two weeks ago? Gave me more trouble than any of ’em. His sister told me he lived in a mobile home. In New York City? No way-we don’t have ’ em here. Took me days to figure out she meant the A train. He just moved his plastic bag of worldly goods into the subway and rode from one end of the system to the other and then back, night after night. It should happen to these people. What if it actually was Marina Sette who left the message for you and Mercer to meet her?”

“Then she either has something to do with the killings or she’s on the run because she’s truly terrified of something or someone.”

“When are you gonna get results on all the subpoenas for telephone records?” His impatience was palpable.

“I call every day, and every day they tell me that the volume is tremendous and I’ll have what I need as soon as possible. The only ones back were in yesterday’s mail. Omar Sheffield’s phone calls made while he was in jail. I had Maxine and one of the other paralegals go through them to check for calls to Denise Caxton. Not a one.”

“How can that be?”

“I checked with the warden. You’ll love this one. There’s a foolproof way for inmates to place untraceable calls now. They buy those prepaid telephone cards and then use the cards to make the calls from prison pay phones. All you’re left with is a record of a call to the company that issued the card, but no link at all to the number actually dialed. Max says Omar’s phone-privilege time slots-you know, the half hour each day he had access to the booth-show lots of activity in the period that would fit with the dates after Deni started to get letters from him, but all the outgoing ones he made just reflect the number of the calling card company in Brooklyn.”

“Damn. And no word on when you’ll have the incoming calls to the Caxton house or the galleries?”

“That takes longer. I’d guess we’re at least a week away from that stuff.”

“Let me go downstairs and get Wrenley. After he tells us why he’s here, I’ll move it to talk about Marina Sette, okay?”

I walked to my desk to find my file notes on the antiques dealer and review them. Laura stuck her head in the doorway and asked if she could borrow an emery board. I pointed to my handbag, which I had left on the leather armchair in front of the desk. “Just fish around in there. I know I’ve got a few on the bottom.”

“Would you mind if I take the day off tomorrow?” she asked tentatively.

I guessed that was the real reason she had come into the room in the first place. “As long as you can get someone to cover the phones. They’ve been wild since this started. And help Mike with the subpoenas he needs you to type up this morning.” We were short staffed because of the normal summer vacation schedule, but the pace of the investigation didn’t correspond with the seasonal slowdown. “Any luck in finding Rod Squires?”

“Rose says he’s on a sailboat off the coast of Maine. If he contacts Paul, she’ll flip him over to you.”

For the moment, Frank Wrenley’s unexpected appearance gave me a reprieve from McKinney’s plan to boot me off the case.

Mike came back into my office with Wrenley and I rose to shake his hand across the desk. This time he was head-to-toe in slate gray, a slight contrast to his jet black hair and almost a match for the cloud-filled sky that hugged the city with its humidity.

“Why don’t you have a seat and tell us what brings you down here?”

Wrenley turned to sit and I saw my bag in his way. “Just put it on the floor. Sorry.”

He lifted it and sat it down next to the row of file cabinets. “Must have your whole arsenal in there, Miss Cooper.”

Chapman laughed. “She would if we’d let her. Temper like hers, Mr. Wrenley, Cooper couldn’t get a permit to carry a pointed pencil.”

Wrenley looked directly at me. “I wasn’t sure who to talk to about this, but perhaps you ought to know. And you might be able to help me, too.”

It was getting harder and harder to find anyone to talk to us who didn’t want something in return. “What is it?”

“Last evening I found out that Lowell Caxton is going to be closing his gallery.”

He stopped speaking and both Mike and I waited for him to continue.

“I mean, this week. Abruptly. Doesn’t that surprise you?”

“Elephants flying? Monkeys tap-dancing? Those things might surprise me. The people in this case, the pals you’ve been running with who’ve been scamming each other and the public for most of their adult lives? Very little they do could surprise me at this point.”

Wrenley ignored Chapman and talked to me. “Caxton’s had one of the most substantial businesses in this city for longer than I can remember. It would be one thing for him to announce a closing and wind down his affairs over the next few months. But to pull a few moving vans up to the front of the building and start loading them like a gypsy in the middle of the night, well, it’s more than a bit odd.”

“Last night?” I asked. “Who told you about it?”

“Bryan Daughtry called me. He still has a lot of contacts who work in the Fuller Building.”

Wrenley’s statement reminded me that before Daughtry went to jail on the tax case, his original gallery had been on Fifty-seventh Street, several floors below Caxton’s suite.

“What else did he say?”

“One of the custodians, a fellow who runs the freight elevator, figured he could make a few dollars by passing the information to Daughtry. It worked. Bryan went right up there and gave the guy a hundred bucks. Saw what was going on himself. Paintings and sculptures being loaded onto a truck at eleven last night, complete with a cadre of security guards. But Caxton’s employees wouldn’t spill the beans. Not a word about where they were taking the stuff, or why. I’m sure he paid them well enough to ensure their loyalty.”

“I guess I’m missing the reason why either you or Daughtry think any of this is your business,” Chapman said.

“Understandable. That’s why, as I said a few minutes ago, I wasn’t sure what to do about it when Daughtry called me in the middle of the night. Both Bryan and I were involved in a number of art deals with Deni. She and I recently bought some paintings at auction together,” he said, switching his attention to Mike. “You’re the skeptic, Detective. Check with Christie’s. Back in May we were partners on some minor Impressionist works that sold pretty reasonably.”

“Lowell’s in on this, too?”

“Oh, no. Not at all. But a lot of the things we bought- well, it just made more sense for Deni to keep them for us, to store them until we decided whether we were going to hang on to them or sell them to clients. I mean, Lowell had warehouses and guards and insurance. Even their apartment was a safer place to keep artworks than any temporary facility she and I could arrange. We were lovers, after all, Detective. I didn’t have to get a signed pledge from Deni when I agreed to let her hold on to something we bought as partners. She wasn’t trying to screw me out of anything, if you’ll forgive the expression.”

“So you think some of the art you own is being spirited away by Lowell?”

“Possibly. And I don’t even mean intentionally. Lowell doesn’t have any reason to know the details about Deni’s latest acquisitions. I just think there should be some way for me to have a look at what he’s got before he ships it out of town or abroad. I have papers and sales receipts for everything. I’m not asking you to get in the middle of deciding what’s mine and what isn’t. My lawyer will handle all that. He wanted me to, well, to exaggerate to you a bit.”

“What do you mean?”

Wrenley was fidgeting now. “I called my lawyer to ask him to get involved this morning. The problem is, of course, that Lowell won’t let me inside to look, neither at the gallery nor the apartment-still their home, certainly. It was my lawyer’s idea to come to you, Miss Cooper. Look, I don’t want to lie to you, but he suggested I swear to you that I know Lowell Caxton has got property in the gallery that belongs to Deni and to me. That perhaps then you could intercede and go in with a warrant to search for things.” He tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair. “Frankly, I have no idea what Deni did with some of the paintings. I can’t ‘swear’ where they are-that would simply be a logical guess, but not necessarily true. Bryan Daughtry’s been very helpful. I’m going to go through his warehouse, too. Perhaps some of the things I’m looking for are stored with him.”

“Can you give me an inventory, a list of the works you have a claim to?” I asked.

“I don’t have one prepared right now, but I can have it drawn up within a day or two.” Wrenley’s hands were on his knees, and he looked down at the floor before he spoke again. “When you’re in love with a woman as young and healthy as Deni, you just never think that she’s going to walk out the door and… never, never come back. The business side of our partnership was the last thing it occurred to me to worry about during this past week. That afternoon, I just waited and waited for her to meet me for lunch-”

“The day she disappeared? She was on her way to meet you?” Chapman asked.

“Perhaps I have surprised you after all, Detective. I assumed you’d know that, from the housekeeper or someone you’d interviewed. Didn’t you ask me that the first time we met? I was sure you had.”

Chapman seemed embarrassed that he didn’t know one of the fairly basic facts about Denise Caxton’s last day. “The guys who work in her garage have her going out with the car early in the morning. No one else we talked to seemed to know much about her plans for the day. What did you do when she didn’t show up for lunch?”

“I waited half an hour. Tried her at home, in the car, at the gallery. No luck. Check with the maître d’ at Jean-Georges-I thought you would have done that by now. I must have tied up his phone for twenty minutes calling around to find Deni.”

“Were you upset? Call the police to look for her?”

“No, I suppose the maître d’ would also tell you I wasn’t very upset, so there’s no point pretending. Nothing from which a couple of martinis couldn’t distract me. I’d half expected she might stand me up that day. We’d had a bit of a tiff the week before.”

“Business?”

“Not business at all. And in retrospect, not exactly pleasure, either.” Wrenley looked me in the eye. “I told you when I met you the first time that Deni and I dated other people. Well, I ran into someone in Paris, a woman who’d been recently widowed and was doing the grand tour to announce that her mourning period was officially over. We spent a weekend together, which there was no need for Deni to find out about. Unfortunate coincidence, she turned out to be a friend of Deni’s.”

“Marina Sette?” Chapman asked.

“ Bravo, Detective! Forty-eight hours in a small hotel on the Left Bank, and tout New York seems to know all about it. I know Marina told Deni, and that’s what had her so mad at me. Deni didn’t mind what she didn’t know about, but Marina really pushed her nose into it.”

“Was it over between you and Deni?”

“Of course not. But it was cool, to say the least. She made a point of letting me know that she was spending a lot of time with Preston Mattox. But that was just to get back at me.”

“You don’t think she was in love with him?”

“Deni was an intensely physical creature, Ms. Cooper. She’d once made the mistake of telling me, when she was unusually giddy in the middle of a rather vigorous round of lovemaking, that there wasn’t enough Viagra in all the laboratories in the country to get Preston through another month of his relationship with Deni.”

Every time I was on the verge of liking her a bit more, I’d hear something that would cause me to take three mental giant steps in reverse. No point in exploring with Wrenley whether his rival had other redeeming features.

“When she didn’t show up at the restaurant for lunch and I couldn’t find out where she was, I thought that all she needed was some time to get over what I had done with Marina. She’d only graced me with the luncheon meeting because we had some business decisions to make and because she wouldn’t accept an evening date with me. She already had dinner plans with Mattox.” I didn’t think I had displayed any expression, but Wrenley looked from me to Mike. “Surely you knew that, didn’t you? Preston would have had more to worry about than I did when she didn’t show up for that date.

“I guess my trip down here wasn’t altogether useless,” Wrenley said. “I do hope you’ll give some thought to looking into why Lowell Caxton is in such a hurry to close his gallery.”

I had no intention of telling Wrenley what we would do next. “I’d suggest you let your lawyer go ahead with whatever action he thinks will protect your business interests as well.” I stood up to see him out. “Thanks for letting us know about it.”

“Do you still have any contact with Marina Sette?” Mike asked.

“Nothing directly. But I hear about her from time to time.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Couple of months ago.”

“She call you when she came to New York?”

“You mean yesterday?”

Chapman didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Yeah, yesterday.”

“No, but she called Bryan Daughtry. He told me that last night when he telephoned to let me know about Lowell Caxton. Bryan said that Marina had stopped by the new gallery on Twenty-second Street to see him. Probably to find out if he’d heard any rumors about whether Deni had left a will, or any instructions about who was to get which paintings.”

I thought she had told us she detested Daughtry. “Why did she go to him?”

“She could hardly go to Lowell, considering their relationship, and she wasn’t talking to me.”

“What did Bryan tell her?”

“That the only will he knew of was the original one Lowell’s lawyers had prepared for Deni when they first married. Like so many people her age, Deni thought she’d have all the time in the world to amend it. But Marina was still looking for her piece of the rock, what she thought was her ‘entitlement.’ She really believed, when their friendship was in full bloom, that she had convinced Deni to give her some of the Caxton heirlooms.”

“So Lowell gets it all?”

“I suppose. I mean-except for the handful of things that Deni bought with either Bryan or me. Her fortune all started with Lowell, didn’t it? In any event, Bryan just wanted me to know that Marina was bad-mouthing me, blaming me for her falling-out with Deni. And that she seemed frantic, out of control. Very hyper about something. That I should stay out of her way if she tried to see me.”

“Will you let me know if Marina Sette calls you?” I asked.

“Certainly, Miss Cooper. Thanks for your time.”

Chapman waited several seconds after Wrenley shook our hands and walked out the door. “Saddle up, blondie. Let’s see why Caxton’s heading for the hills.”