Linda Fairstein - Cold Hit

“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?”