Linda Fairstein - Cold Hit

“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.