Cold Hit

6

“Think about it for a minute,” Chapman urged me. “ Rebecca? Domestic violence. Notorious? Domestic violence. Gaslight? Domestic violence. Dial M for Murder? Domestic violence. Niagara? Domestic violence. Every one of your favorite movies has some kind of spousal abuse in it, you know? What does that say about you, blondie?”

I was staring at a Monet hanging in the Caxton living room. I had never seen any painting from the water lily series in private hands, and here was a glorious canvas, practically as large as the triptych that hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, stretching the length of the wall.

“ The Postman Always Rings Twice? Domestic violence. Double Indemnity? Domes-”

“Yeah, now you’re getting to the good ones. The ladies strike back, Mikey. Those are the ones I really enjoy.” I walked over to Mercer, who was studying the signature in the corner of the painting.

“Is this for real?” he asked me.

I smiled and shrugged my shoulders. “I assume so. I played around on the Internet for a couple of hours last night after Mike called me with the I.D., and it seems the Caxton collection is world famous. A lot of it has been in the family for generations.”

Mercer and I were moving around the forty-foot-long room like it was a gallery in the Louvre. Each painting and object was museum quality, and I was fascinated by their beauty and number.

Chapman was sitting on a sofa facing the stunning view of Central Park, watching as the housekeeper delivered coffee and English muffins to the table in front of him, pouring from a Georgian server that was worth our collective salaries for at least the next couple of years.

“Thanks, Valerie. I was starving.” Chapman gave the redeyed woman his best grin and began slathering butter on the toasted morsel he had picked up from the plate. “Valerie makes these from scratch, Coop. Got her own nooks and crannies-better than Thomas’. You oughta take a lesson from her.”

Mercer shook his head and walked over, spreading a napkin across the knee of Chapman’s jeans. The dripping butter would have been an unwelcome accent to the delicate design of golden Napoleonic bees on the peach silk fabric of the sofa. “How’d you get Valerie to let us in?”

“We bonded last night over a bit of Mr. Caxton’s Irish whiskey. I’ve frequently found it helpful in periods of bereavement. Basically I told her I wasn’t going anywhere until she located him for me.”

Chapman had called me again at midnight to tell me that Valerie had reached Lowell Caxton at his home in Paris and that he would be taking the Concorde back to New York. It was Mike’s idea that the three of us await him in his home, to deny him the opportunity to alter or destroy any evidence before we could interview him.

Air France flight 002 from Paris had been due in at 8: 44 a.m. on Sunday. Chapman had returned to the building at six, and Mercer had picked me up at home two hours later. “Why’d she let you back in today?” I asked. “The boss won’t be too happy about this, I’m sure.”

“Let’s just say she was encouraged by the doormen. One thing they frown on in these snooty buildings, Miss Cooper, is scenes. The sight of me alone in the lobby wasn’t all that upsetting to them at first, but it was probably when I asked Frick and Frack if they thought it was gonna be necessary for me to get the Emergency Services Unit over here with battering rams that they called and suggested to Valerie that I might be more comfortable waiting in Caxton’s salon. I’m telling you- doormen despise scenes.”

So much for any evidence that we might be lucky enough to come up with in the apartment. The kind of pressure that Mike liked to apply to get his way more often resulted in a consent under threat than the freely given consent necessary for a lawful entry or search.

Valerie returned to the room with another ornate tray and porcelain cups for Mercer and me. Her hand trembled slightly as she poured the coffee, and I wondered whether it was because of grief over her mistress’s death, the effects of a hangover, or fear of Caxton’s reaction when he found us settled in and enjoying his hospitality. She replaced the silver pot on a small table beside a large ormolu clock that bore an engraved seal depicting a royal crest I couldn’t identify.

“Hitchcock had it right, Coop. Think of how many movies it’s the husband or wife who offs the other spouse. Just because this guy was in Paris all week doesn’t mean he isn’t a prime suspect. Shit, we don’t even know exactly how many days she’s been dead. Besides that, someone with this kind of dough could hire a killer with his pocket change.”

“Well, what did you get out of Valerie during your fireside chat last night?”

“Precious little. Seemed to genuinely like the late Mrs. C., who hired her personally and relied on her for all kinds of intimate service. But the husband pays the bills, and she’s not about to throw that out the window so fast.” Mike was almost finished with his second muffin, the buttered topping covered over with some kind of strawberry preserve. “Hey, Mercer, might as well lift the lids on those little-Coop, what does your mother call useless little dust catchers like that stuff over there? Tchotchkes? Maybe Denise stored her coke in one of those.”

Chapman pointed at a gilt-trimmed bureau plat, only half in jest. It was completely covered by miniature porcelain snuffboxes. Half a dozen of them would have fit at once in the palm of Mercer’s hand, but he lifted the lids of several of them individually. I sipped on my coffee as I walked beside him, noticing that each box was hand painted with portraits of cavalier King Charles spaniels in a variety of regal backgrounds.

Above the table was a Degas, familiar to me from my Wellesley introductory art course and close enough in detail to the famous Foyer of the Dance that it had to be the study for the great painting that hangs in Paris.

Chapman was on his feet, wiping his hands with the heavy damask napkin. He was standing in front of a Picasso about four feet by six, his head cocked as he tried to make some sense of the Cubist representations. “I just don’t get it. Why would somebody pay millions of dollars for something like this, which isn’t supposed to look like anything anyway? I must have spent too much time in church. I haven’t liked any artists since Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Just give me a Madonna-I mean, the old Madonna-and I’m happy.”

I had circled the room and was back in front of the lilies. “You’d like Monet. Impressionism got its name from one of his paintings- Impression of a Sunrise. ” Chapman joined me to look at the vast canvas, one of the endless images of the same subject portrayed at different hours of the day in different variations of light.

“That one you’re looking at was painted at Giverny, just before his death. He was nearly blind.” Caxton’s voice startled us as we turned to look toward the entryway of the long room.

“Looks to me like most of the stuff painted in this century could have been done by a blind man. Mike Chapman, Homicide,” Mike said, advancing to shake Lowell Caxton’s hand and show his identification. “These are my colleagues- Detective Mercer Wallace, and Alexandra Cooper from the District Attorney’s Office.”

Caxton extended a hand to each of us. “I hope Valerie has made you comfortable. Perhaps you’ll allow me to step inside and freshen up for a moment before we get on with what you need to do.”

It was a reasonable request after a trans-Atlantic trip, and although Chapman would have liked to tail him into the private quarters of the apartment, we had no choice but to let Caxton disappear to his suite of rooms.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later he returned to the living room, opened a set of sliding pocket doors, and gestured the three of us into the library. The walls were lacquered in a rich shade of Chinese red, strikingly showcasing another Picasso, this time from the artist’s Rose Period. Bookcases were lined with sets of leather-bound volumes, valuable and rare, and assuredly untouched and unread. Some decorator’s idea of a complement to the art.

Lowell Caxton seated himself in the largest chair in the room as we took our places around him. “It’s a bit more intimate in here,” he said to no one in particular.

As he looked each of us over to size us up, waiting for Valerie to bring him the tea he had requested, we examined him as well. The articles I had seen in Lexis-Nexis gave his age as seventy-four. But he was trim and vigorous, with a full head of thick gray hair, and I would have guessed him to be no older than sixty-five. He remained in the clothes in which he had traveled-gray slacks, loafers without socks, a tennis shirt, and a pink cashmere sweater looped around his shoulders. The solid gold Cartier Pasha on his wrist was the only jewelry he wore.

Valerie delivered the tea on yet another small silver tray. “Close the doors after you, will you, Valerie?” Caxton asked. Her hands were still shaking as she backed out of the room, sliding the doors together by pulling the brass knob on each of the sections.

“Am I supposed to open this session by telling you how distraught I am by Deni’s demise?” he went on. “Or have you already found ample fodder in the tabloids to know that it wouldn’t be a very sincere way for me to begin? The flight home-even with the abbreviated flying time of a supersonic transport-was more than enough for me to shed whatever tears I had left. I didn’t kill her, although there’ll be plenty of her friends to suggest as much to you. But I certainly didn’t love her any longer, so you might as well know that from the outset.”

“You want to ask us anything, before I get started?” Chapman queried.

“I know everything about how and where she was found, Detective. After Valerie reached me with the news last night, I had my assistant make all the inquiries he could. I’m sure you’ll tell me whatever else you think it’s necessary for me to know.”

I had worked with Mike often enough to get inside his head. You couldn’t look at a situation like this without thinking you could easily find a motive for the husband to want the wife dead-money, business, infidelity, and in this instance, even more money. A contract hit in this kind of marriage would be cheaper than any alimony decision made by a judge or jury. But it was also so obvious that we were each thinking that it was too easy. Now the guy plays right into the theory by not even expressing interest in how his estranged wife was killed. He probably had more channels of access to whatever information he wanted than I had pairs of shoes.

Mike had two short-term goals. He needed to get as much information about both Caxtons, personal and professional, as he could, and he wanted to shove open the pocket doors so he could see whether anyone was coming or going into the private rooms of the apartment.

“It’s warm in here, Mr. Caxton,” Mike said, taking out his notepad and loosening his tie as he rose and walked toward the doors. “Mind if I open these for a little air?”

Caxton lifted a remote control panel from the table beside him. “Not necessary, Detective. I’ll simply adjust the room temperature. It stays much cooler in here without the summer sun beating through those glass windows off the park. Carry on. Tell me what you need to know.”

Whether we needed it all or not, the Caxton family history and the building of the art fortune had to be explored, in case they proved to be links to the murder.

Lowell Caxton III was the grandson of the Pittsburgh steel baron whose name he bore. The grandfather had been born in 1840 and was one of those great American success stories-a poor kid from a large family who rose from menial mill jobs to running a production plant before he was thirty. When he recognized the growing demand for steel, needed to build the railroads across the country, he borrowed all of his working-class relatives’ money and purchased a factory. In 1873, when another young fellow, named Andrew Carnegie, came along and began his acquisition of businesses which he later consolidated into the Carnegie Steel Company, Lowell Caxton never had to work again. He became an investor and speculator, and thereafter a philanthropist responsible for helping Carnegie build libraries and art museums all over the Northeast.

In the mid- 1880 s, Caxton became enamored of the bohemian lifestyle of many of the young artists living and working in Paris. He bought several apartments in Montmartre and let some of the struggling upstarts live there rentfree, in exchange for paintings that he took to America.

On one of his trips, drinking in the nightclubs with Toulouse-Lautrec, Caxton took up with a dancer, whom he married and brought back to the States. Their son, Lowell II, inherited the entire fortune-the money and the art-when both of his parents died in the sinking of the Lusitania, in 1915. He was thirty years old at the time.

As though the passion for art had been genetically transmitted, the junior Caxton carried on his father’s interests, patronizing the creators and expanding the family collection. He was a popular figure at Mabel Dodge’s “evenings” in her home at 23 Fifth Avenue, where he championed the Postimpressionists to Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger, John Reed, and the other intellectuals who gathered to exchange ideas while Dodge puffed on her gold-tipped cigarettes. It was at one of those soirees that he met his wife, a guest of Gertrude Stein’s named Marie-Hélène de Neuilly, who was a well-known patron of avant-garde art before the First World War. Our host, Lowell III-or Three, as his father liked to call him as a boy-also had the love of art in his blood.

“The first artist I ever met was Picasso,” Caxton continued, “at our home in Paris, before he went off to Spain to fight. He was having an affair with my mother at the time, although I was much too young to pick up on that. And in case you’re wondering, it was perfectly all right with my father. Got him some stunning paintings for his collection. You might like to see them someday. They’re in my bedroom-never been shown publicly.”

“Do you mind if we talk about your wife, Mr. Caxton?” Chapman asked.

“I’ve had three, Detective. I assume you mean Deni?”

“Well, actually, why don’t you tell me about the other two first? Then, yes, I’d like to know as much about Denise as possible.”

“Not much to say about them. Rest in peace.” Caxton looked over at me, daring a smile. “I married Lisette in France at the beginning of the war. She died in childbirth. Tragic, really. I adored her. My second wife was from Italy. She raised Lisette’s child and then two more daughters of our own. Killed in a boating accident in Venice.”

“Aha!” Chapman said under his breath, shifting in his chair and leaning across to me. “ Rebecca. I told you so.”

I ignored the crack and went on. “Where are your daughters now?”

“All grown, married, living in Europe. And if you want to know whether or not they liked Deni, they didn’t. She was younger than all of them, and they never got along very well. But they’ve had absolutely nothing to do with her for years.”

“I understand,” Chapman said. “We will, of course, need to get in touch with them at some point.”

“I’ll have someone from my office get you all their information.”

“Back to Denise, if we may.”

“Certainly, Detective. I met Deni nearly twenty years ago, in Firenze. She was-”

“You were widowed at the time, Mr. Caxton?” Mercer asked.

“Widowed once, Mr. Wallace. My second wife was alive and quite well. Her mishap occurred several years thereafter. In any event, I had flown over to look at a Bernini sculpture that I wanted to bid on. It was at the gallery that I first saw Denise, and I was more infatuated with her than with the statue. That hadn’t happened to me in years.”

“And she was there to bid on the same piece for the Tate?” I ventured, having found that item of her biography on-line the previous night in an old magazine clipping about a museum opening.

Caxton smiled. “I should think you’d know better than to believe everything you read in the newspapers, young lady. Deni was just off her year as Miss Oklahoma, and a verydistant-second runner-up in the Miss America Pageant. You were probably too busy with your nose in your schoolbooks,” Caxton said, with a nod in my direction, “to be watching that year, but she was the kid from Idabel with great looks and no talent to speak of-traded in baton twirling in favor of reading a soliloquy from As You Like It. Not exactly a crowd pleaser. She took her ten-thousand-dollar scholarship prize and escaped. Worked her way over to Florence to study art, which she didn’t know the first thing about at the time. Figured if Andy Warhol could fool the world with what he was selling, she could catch on and find a niche.

“I decided to follow my grandfather’s route, Miss Cooper. What Denise lacked in breeding, she made up for in-shall we say?-élan. She was a marvelously quick study and I enjoyed teaching. All she needed from me was to create a provenance for her, no different than a clever forger would do for a fine painting.

“I gave Deni a vague and somewhat mysterious background-orphaned as a young child, with a trust fund. Raised abroad in a series of boarding schools. Moved her from the pensione she was living in to the Excelsior, where I was staying when I came to town. Had her tutored in French and Italian- she was adequate in the former and tolerable in the latter. Most of the men who met her were intrigued and forgave her the minor incongruities. She didn’t care much about what the women thought of her. Denise was never a contender for Miss Congeniality.”

“What did your second wife think of her, Mr. Caxton?” Mike clearly was fascinated by the circumstance of the thricewidowed husband.

“I’m not sure she ever knew about Deni, to tell the truth. She was riding in a cigarette speedboat when it flipped, killing her instantly. I had only known Deni a few years at that point. The whole arrangement was working perfectly for me. And yes, Mr. Chapman, there was an inquest when my wife died. Accidental death. I’m sure Maurizio, my assistant, can get you all the records that you need.”

“How long have you had the gallery in the Fuller Building?” Mercer wanted to bring this story up to the present.

“Deni and I moved back to New York twelve years ago. We bought this apartment so that she could open our gallery. For me, the satisfaction has always been in finding and collecting the great pieces-more than a century of Caxton taste that I can surround myself with in the privacy of my own homes. Not entirely selfish, mind you. We frequently exhibit portions of the holdings, whenever asked, and many of my mistakes have wound up permanently on the walls of museums all over America and most of Europe.

“But Denise also liked the game itself. It wasn’t enough to gift her with unique art or jewels, which worked very well at the beginning. She had come from nothing-her father was a soybean farmer-and she really needed to prove she was as smart as any of the rest of us out there. She liked the hustle of the art world. She adored being a tastemaker, if you will. But I suppose your research has revealed all of that.”

Now I was doubly sorry that I had suggested I knew anything about either of the Caxtons. “Not at all, Mr. Caxton. Forgive me, but I only tried to acquaint myself with information about Mrs. Caxton’s business when I learned that it was she who had been killed. It’s always helpful to me if I can get as close to the victim as possible-to try and understand why she might be a target for someone. That is, if her loved ones allow me that kind of access.”

“Anything you’d like, Miss Cooper. Perhaps it would help if we took a walk into Deni’s quarters, to give you an idea of how she lived. Would you like that?”

Chapman was on his feet before I could answer. Caxton moved to the double doors as Mike leaned in behind me and whispered, “Very smoothly done, blondie. Keep batting those eyelashes and you could be the fourth late Mrs. Lowell Caxton. A very temporary position, from the looks of it.”

As the doors slid apart I could see the back of a man carrying a black leather suitcase as he walked out of the entryway that led from the living room to the elevator. Mercer nudged Chapman. “There goes Kardashian with Simpson’s bloody clothes.”

“Mr. Caxton,” Chapman said, “I’d appreciate it if you could hold that gentleman before he leaves here with any property that we might need to look at.”

“Is it safe for me to assume, Detective, that you don’t have a warrant to search my luggage?”

Mike and Mercer were silent. Caxton continued. “That was Maurizio. He simply unpacked the bag I returned with this morning and is taking it down to the storage area in the basement of the building. Sorry to disappoint you.” We heard the heavy door swing closed.

He led us past the Picasso and pointed at three doors across the room. “That far exit goes to the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. Unless you think the butler did it, Mr. Chapman, that portion of the household needn’t take up your time. These other two are-rather, were-our separate apartments. Nothing new about that. Even when we were getting along very well, we always had distinct living spaces. Different lifestyles, different tastes in art.

“I didn’t approve of the drugs, and I didn’t much care for Deni’s current passion for modern painting-some of the very abstract, jarring works she’d developed an interest in recently.” We followed Caxton as he opened the door to Denise’s wing.

“You know, gentlemen, this may sound a bit peevish in light of the fact that I’m standing here with you while my wife is being fitted for a coffin, but if your department had taken my shooting a bit more seriously, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened to Deni.”

Mercer, Mike, and I couldn’t conceal our puzzlement as we exchanged looks.

“Are any of you with the Nineteenth Precinct? That’s the unit that’s handling the investigation,” Caxton explained.

“No, we’re not. Could you tell us what happened?”

Chapman was plainly annoyed that we had come here without such an important piece of information. “Just crossing Madison Avenue, six weeks ago, on my way home from the Whitney. Holding a Styrofoam coffee cup in my hand. A car driving past slowed down, and the man in the passenger seat pointed at me-it was happening so quickly that all I saw was his hand-then I heard the sound of a gunshot and felt a stinging ing on my scalp. I found myself sitting on the curb, people running over to help me. Never even dropped the coffee.”

Caxton bowed his head and parted his silver hair with his hands. “I’m sure you can still see the scar, like a seam across my scalp. At that moment I was quite sure I was dead. This must be what it’s like to die, I thought to myself. No pain at all. It took me a few seconds to realize, as the blood dripped onto my face, that I had been grazed by the bullet and not seriously injured at all. If someone had actually tried to kill me, they’d hired the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

“I trust you’ll be able to figure out whether Deni’s death had anything to do with that, won’t you?”

He pivoted away and walked on ahead of us to turn on the lights in the dim hallway. “The only thing I trust,” said Chapman, “is that some ass-kissing lieutenant in the Nineteenth was trying to make his numbers look better for the commissioner. When I call over for the case report on the assault on Lowell Caxton, I’ll probably find out that they’re carrying the investigation as disorderly conduct instead of attempted murder. Heaven forbid you alarm the good citizens of the Upper East Side by suggesting a violent crime could happen here- they might confuse the place with Harlem.”