Linda Fairstein - Cold Hit

“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.”

“Here’s another Degas,” Caxton said to me, stopping in front of a painting. “Perhaps you remember from your college days that after the Napoleonic wars, it was presumed of firstborn sons of a certain class that they would become lawyers. Edgar dutifully followed his father’s wishes and enrolled at the Faculté de Droit. Fortunately for the rest of the world-if not his parents-he dropped out in favor of doing something more creative than litigation after only a month.”

He walked on. “Cézanne spent almost three years at law school in Aix, replete with boredom. And Matisse actually clerked for a lawyer for quite a while, drafting briefs and keeping files. It was only when he was forced to stay at home with appendicitis that he was given his first paint set by his mother. A decade later, he changed the history of the art world with the birth of Fauvism-exuberant colors and wildly distorted shapes. Imagine our loss if any of these giants had become mired in the law. You don’t paint by any chance, do you, Miss Cooper?”