Linda Fairstein - Cold Hit

“To…?”

“The grant covered the expenses of my study, but not an apartment in Manhattan. My girlfriend and I sublet a room in a loft in SoHo. She’s here in graduate school at NYU. When I was free to leave I’d head for the library, an art show, or a movie. But I’d get out of his hair, that much was clear.”

Chapman checked off Caxton’s name on the list he had started and went down to the next line. “Bryan Daughtry. Ever run into him?”

“Yes, he was another visitor. Not so much anymore, with the contemporary work he was trying to sell. But Marco had done ventures with him before I arrived here, which was before Daughtry went to jail. On that tax fraud, not that other thing.” Cannon looked at me to see whether I registered any reaction to his reference to the girl in the leather mask.

“What do you know about his background?”

“I don’t mean to make light of the story about Bryan Daughtry’s involvement in that old case, but it kind of fascinated Mr. Varelli. He never saw the cruel side of Bryan. Met him as a young man who had a rather good eye for art, albeit untrained. I was a bit shocked to meet him myself when Bryan first came to the studio. Marco told me all about him that first day.”

Cannon moved in his chair, put the fingertips of his right hand together, and shook them easily in front of his face, imitating the old man’s accent. “ ‘But can you tell me why, Mr. Cannon, why a young man wants to tie up a beautiful young girl and cause her pain? This I don’t understand at all. From a body like this you should get only pleasure, only sweetness, only- come si dice in inglese? -rapture. But maybe I am too old to understand.’

“Quite frankly, I used to think when Daughtry was here to visit and Mr. Varelli kicked me out, it was to ask him questions about his sexual proclivities. Marco was much more curious about that than he was about contemporary art.”

Cannon talked for a while about Bryan Daughtry’s more recent business focus, but again could think of no incident that unnerved him in regard to Varelli.

“How about Marina Sette?”

Cannon seemed to draw a blank.

“Marilyn Seven?” I asked, adding a physical description as well as telling him where she lived.

“It’s quite possible she had been to see Marco, of course. It’s just not a name I recognize.”

“Frank Wrenley?”

Again, not familiar. Neither was Preston Mattox. Cannon knew the names of some of the workmen, but Omar Sheffield and Anton Bailey were not among them.

Chapman put down his pen and clasped his hands on the desktop.

“Talk to me about Denise Caxton. Everything you know. When you met her, what she was like, what Marco thought about her. Things that don’t seem important to you may be exactly what we’re looking for, so give it all to me, okay?”

“This one’s a bit complicated, Detective. There was Denise Caxton the woman, and there was Denise Caxton the collector. Marco Varelli’s eye was unerring. He admired great beauty, on a canvas or in human form. Nothing inappropriate, nothing unusual. But he would look at a handsome woman’s face as though it had been sculpted by Michelangelo. Didn’t matter if she were a waitress in a diner or a client with millions. Mrs. Caxton had a real head start with Marco, from the old days. He had met her when she was a kid, just married to Lowell.

“If I’m not mistaken-you might have to check her apartment for this-I think Mr. Varelli once painted her portrait, a full-length nude. He was very proud of it. Told me it was hung in her room at home. I believe she had a collection of self-portraits, right?” He chuckled at the vanity of that idea, it seemed to me.

Cannon continued, “She was a real flirt-Mrs. Caxton, I mean. Knew exactly how to play the old guy, with words. When I first met her, almost three years ago, she could light him up like a flare when he knew she was coming. She would always bring his favorite chocolates, if she had been to Paris, or a chilled bottle of wine to sip with him in the afternoon. She loved to listen to his stories, wanted to know every painting he’d ever worked on-who owned them, what he did to them, what became of them. Marco used to complain that his wife didn’t want to hear the old tales over again. Denise Caxton hung on his every word, or at least she let him think that she did.”

“Did you ever work on any of the paintings she brought into the gallery?”

“Yes. She had a knack for picking up sleepers, bidding on some incredibly lifeless old canvas that she’d either had a good tip on or had followed with her gut instincts. ‘Who is it, Marco? Tell me who’s hiding underneath there, mi amore .’ She’d tease him into playing with almost anything she brought in. And what was funny about it was that most of the time, he wanted me there to watch this game she played with him. As if he wanted me to see that a magnificent young woman doted on him, that it wasn’t just happening in his imagination.”

“When did his feelings for Deni change?”

Cannon paused. “Is that what Mrs. Varelli said?”

“Yeah. Said she didn’t make him quite so happy anymore.”

“I can’t recall exactly when the change occurred, but she’s right. Mrs. Caxton’s visits were fewer and farther apart. She rarely came alone anymore, and the games were over.”

“Who’d she bring with her, if she wasn’t alone?”

“Friends, clients-I don’t know. Varelli would shoo me out of the studio. There was no longer any verbal foreplay, so he didn’t need me around.”

Chapman was annoyed. “You must know who some of them were, don’t you? Start somewhere-women? men? young or old?”

“Occasionally she came with people I knew, like Bryan Daughtry. Once or twice she might have been with a woman- maybe even that lady you described earlier, with the French braid. Seven or Sette, whatever you called her. But most of the time it was men, two or three different ones in the past few months, since she split up with her husband.”

“Can you describe any of them for us? Would you recognize them if you saw them today?”

Again Cannon shrugged, not attaching any importance to these visitors. “There wasn’t anything remarkable about any of them. Sure, maybe I’d know them if I ran into them again, maybe not. You have to understand, Detective, that if Marco Varelli wasn’t working on a canvas, I was just as happy to be out of there. It was as much an education for me to spend a free afternoon at a museum as to be a fly on the wall when he was chatting up rich collectors. I didn’t need the small talk.”

Chapman stood now, walking behind Cannon’s back. “In the last three years, is there anybody else who spent as much time with Marco Varelli as you did?”

Cannon thought and then told us, “No. Except for his wife.”

“Anybody who knew what he thought about everything and everybody?”

“No, probably not.”

“They have any kids?”

“No.”

“I bet you were sort of like a son to him, weren’t you?”

“Not exactly. But he was very good to me.”

“What was the most important thing in the world to him, Don? Leave his wife out of it for the moment. Tell us.”

“You know the answer. He lived for great art-for looking at it, touching it, smelling it, dreaming about it.”

”And he trusted you with his legacy.”

“Well, I’m not the only one who ever apprenticed with him. There are dozens of experts in museums around the world who-”

“But now, Mr. Cannon. You’ve spent these last three years joined to him at the hip. I find it really kinda hard to believe that he had many secrets from you.” Mike’s fist pounded down on the top of the lieutenant’s desk. “I’d like you to tell me why he and Denise Caxton had a falling-out.”