Art and Arsenic (Veronica Margreve Mysteries Book 2) (12 page)

19

I was listening to the ring tones coming from the phone at my ear, and angrily tapping my fingers on my desk. Finally, a gruff:

“Johnson here.”

“Detective Johnson, what do you think you’re doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Accosting Pauline like that! The young woman just buried her father! And you go and practically insinuate that she was the one who killed him! With all due respect, that behavior to me seems to be crossing the line.”

A silence and then a sound like chewing came over the phone line. He finally spoke.

“Did you wonder why I’ve been telling you stuff on the investigation, much more details than I’d tell a civilian? I looked you up after I talked to you originally, through some of our internal channels. Saw you did a bunch of cyber security things, found the hackers responsible for some big data thefts. So I thought that your analysis of this whole situation would be right. That’s why I didn’t mind you butting in and trying to investigate this stuff.” It sounded like he took a sip of something. “But when it comes to the real world, gathering evidence, chasing people around, dealing with killers, you don’t know what to do. I have experience in this. I know what I am doing. My tactics bring results.”

“You are harassing her! Stop it, she doesn’t deserve it. She’s just suffered a big loss.”

“She is a suspect, just like others. We haven’t ruled anyone out.”

“Oh really?” I was getting angry. “What about those others? Have you talked to any of them? Like the Benchams? Or Linda? Or Alex? Or Connie?”

“Yeah, we have”, Detective Johnson told me hoarsely. “We learnt some interesting things. For instance, the insurance for the show – it was something custom, but not too weird, as far as these things go. Basically, if any of the things insured against happened on the premises, the money paid out would be doubled.”

This was the insurance that Alex had arranged. Embarrassed for not having gotten around to finding out the details on it, I slowly digested the new info.

“Does this include injuries?”

“Yes, it mostly definitely does. And death.”

So the beneficiaries of the insurance policy were going to gain a lot more from this.

“How much would the insurance payout be, do you know?”

“Oh, so now you want info from me? Do I have your permission to do my job now? Great to know!” He paused, and then switched to normal tone of voice. “Let me just say, hundreds of thousands of dollars”.

“And I assume that Connie and Pauline are both beneficiaries?”

“Hummmmph.” I took that as a yes. So, each would get a nice chunk of change. “Still think that Pauline shouldn’t be a suspect?”

“I still think you are putting too much pressure on her.”

“I have a call coming in on another line.” He hung up.

I was mad at Detective Johnson, and sat there fuming for a couple of minutes, with the phone in my hand. Bubbles of anger rose within me, I breathed in and out. But I had to admit, he had something resembling a point.

Yes, Pauline had a motive too, and the police seemed to be giving it some weight. And in any case, I couldn't ignore a nagging thought that I was perhaps trusting Pauline too much. Even if I didn’t really believe that she was involved in her father’s murder, or even capable of such an act – she probably had some areas of his life she’d wanted to keep hidden, for whatever reasons; and she probably didn’t know everything about his life. So I couldn’t rely on her telling me the entire truth. I would do well to diversify my sources of info.

Connie, of course, would have reviewed the insurance terms together with Fred, I thought – or could have access to them via Alex. So most likely she was fully aware of her future inheritance. And Connie had another strong motive – an estranged husband who might have caused her to be glad to be rid of him, a chance to cash in on the entire value of the business, a way to save on divorce costs!

Bitty came by to inquire about what was going on, with a loud “Urr?” and a question-mark in her tail. I scratched her head and grabbed one of her string toys. As her eyes got big and she attacked the elusive end of the toy, I thought about ‘tactics’ that Detective Johnson mentioned. Maybe I ought to switch mine.

So far, I’ve been concentrating on motives. As for opportunity – everyone seemed to have had it (technically, even me), so I set it aside for the time being.

Well, what about means? Here I had to admit there was plenty to choose from. The murder weapon was arsenic. Old-fashioned and infamous as a poison – for the reason of being effective.

The medical examiner had said that Fred ingested arsenic between the hours of 4 and 9 pm – ie from before the party up to the time of Linda’s visit.  So in this situation, practically anyone who spent time with Fred on Friday or who attended the opening had an opportunity. The case would have to be built on motive and circumstantial evidence.

Did the murderer hope the death would be attributed to natural causes? Unlikely, with a substance as famous as arsenic. Tests for it already existed in the nineteenth century, and had gotten much better ever since. Why chose it? And where would the killer get it?

Dr. Bencham, being a practicing doctor, could get a wide variety of drugs and chemicals with ease. Monica Bencham would have access to them through him (with or perhaps even without his knowledge), if she had decided to take matters into her own hands.

Alex, being the gallery manager, likely bought all the cleaning supplies and any insecticides or other poisons, if needed. An old can of rat poison, containing arsenic, conveniently laying around could be explained away...

The police apparently insinuated that Pauline could have made the poison out of apricot pits. And the same suspicion could apply to anyone else.

And Christopher, I remembered, was a high-school chemistry teacher. It was feasible that he could have ordered some nice specimen of an arsenic salt for his classroom months ago, and then chopped off a little piece to bump Fred off with. If he brought it over to Seattle, would a police search find any traces of it in his luggage or in his hotel room?

And what about Linda?
I figured that it was time I talked to her again. I might as well make an evening out of being argumentative and confrontational to people on the phone.

“Hello?”

“You’ve been holding out on me.” I purposely gave my voice a slightly threatening tone.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been told that you had plans to make significant in-roads into Nordqvist Fine Art gallery.” I said and waited.

“Well… I was considering some business opportunities. Just like in any business…” Her voice trailed off. I kept silent and waited some more.

“Yes, I made offers to the staff to come work for me!” She finally burst out. “There is no crime in that!”

“Everyone on the staff?”

“Yes.” Her voice had a challenge in it.

“That's a lot of people. It looks like you were really trying to put your competitor out of business.” She didn't respond. Finally I asked:  “Is that all?”

“OK, OK, I learned that Fred was going to get another divorce. So I thought I’d make Connie an offer for her share of Nordqvist Fine Art, and then if she accepted, I could use that as a bargaining chip to get Fred to close it down altogether!”

“How do you expect me to try to convince the police that you didn’t do it, when crap like this comes up and almost blows up in my face?”

“But you do believe me, that I didn’t kill Fred, don’t you?” The challenge was gone from her tone, replaced by an edge of panic.

“Is there anything else I should know about your involvement with anyone at Nordqvist Fine Art? Anyone at all?”

“No, no, that’s it, I swear!”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I… well…  You didn’t ask…”

“Linda, I hope you have a very good lawyer!” I played up my irritation to throw her off-balance a little.

“Wait, wait. Hear me out, please! The police came today with a warrant and did some tests on a bunch of my stuff. They implied it tested positive for arsenic! Like I kept poison here before going over on Friday and poisoning him!”

“Did you?”

“No, absolutely not!  Maybe my stuff tested positive because I had some hair removal stuff around, left from my trip to the Middle East last year? That's what I told them.”

I didn’t know that they could get the results of the arsenic test on the spot, so I thought that Detective Johnson might be bluffing and putting pressure on Linda.

And Linda had an explanation prepared as to why anything in her possession might have traces of arsenic on it. It seemed suspicious that she was so ready with blaming it on the depilatory – but it might be that she just did what I did when I first learned that Fred Nordqvist had been poisoned with arsenic: do a web search for arsenic and products containing it.

But in that case, wouldn’t it be smarter to get rid of the hair-removal product, so that the police couldn't find a ready-made means for the murder? After a moment’s thought, I realized that it would have looked more suspicious, and that leaving the stuff around where it was had been as good a choice as any on her part, once she knew that she would be suspected in the death.

“What did you and Fred really talk about on Friday, Linda?”

There was a long pause, then a sigh.

“He knew that I wanted to get some of his people to come work for me. He threatened me, said that with the DoS report and with accusing me of trying to poach all his employees, he could destroy me, my gallery and everyone who went to work for me.”

So – Linda’s motive just went from just ‘eliminating a competitor’ to ‘protecting the very existence of her business and livelihood’. That seemed to be a lot weightier!

“Linda, I think you really need good legal advice!” I repeated. “Think about it!” And hung up.

Linda sure seemed to get around – she was tied up in Fred's business practically everywhere I turned. She appeared to have talked to everyone connected with Nordqvist Fine Art in an attempt to handicap that gallery
.
And she was the only one so far who took any proven damaging action against Fred and his business; the others had just lots of sharp words
.
That fact made me wonder: Could
she
be involved in some sort of a conspiracy to murder Fred? But Linda herself was at the scene on Friday night, and was therefore under a cloud of suspicion. So being a part of a conspiracy (as opposed to plotting everything by herself) didn’t seem to get her any benefits.

And she couldn’t expect Fred to call her and demand to see her on Friday, could she? Maybe not; as a novice at cyber-attacks she probably didn’t expect to be found out so quickly. But in everything else, she was a shrewd woman. She could have refused to go to his office if she knew that someone else had poisoned Fred already, to establish an alibi for herself.

Hmm… Much as I’d like, a murder conspiracy with Linda in the center didn’t quite fit.

But I had to admit – Fred's threats against Linda did have weight behind them.  He could have easily destroyed her reputation in the art world, and maybe sued her for damages. I thought of Fred's words about “reputation” on Thursday, the conversation between Alex and Fred, and Fred's cold tone alluding to ruining “that woman”.  And I recalled Alex's denials of coming back into the inventory room and threatening Fred.

And then the penny dropped.  The rest of the conversation I overhead on Thursday – I knew who Fred was talking to and was threatening to expose! I felt pretty confident I had figured out a piece of the puzzle. But was that person the killer? 

20

If I was right in my suppositions up to now, then that conversation was related to the works in the show almost certainly being fakes. Did that by itself amount to a motive for murder? I went back over the legal angles of fake art, from my library book research.

Apparently, creating a fake painting wasn’t illegal by itself; even if using materials in the old style (e.g. old wooden boards from the furniture of the period, pigments created according to old recipes). Signing a fake canvas with a fake artist signature
could
be legal also – after all, a painting is not a legal document. Even trying to sell such a painting could be perfectly legal – if you never actually
claimed
that it was by a famous master!

What was illegal and fraudulent was knowingly claiming that the painting was real when it was in fact fake, when offering it for sale – either by describing it as by a certain artist, or by faking a provenance document or a certificate of authenticity (because those, in fact, were legal documents). Interestingly, relying on an opinion of an expert made it alright, in the eyes of the law – the expert could be making a mistake, and being mistaken is not a crime.

I contemplated for a while what to ask Andrew, the art expert, and whether he would even tell me anything. How do you ask someone lightly, in passing, whether they had recently committed criminal fraud? He’d probably get a lawyer and keep quiet. I congratulated myself on coming up with a pretext to spend some time with him tomorrow night – we’d be looking at and talking about art, and I probably would find some way to ask about the shows at Fred Nordqvist's gallery.

Was Fred himself a criminal? If he knew of the fakes and still sold them as works of David Cox, then yes, he was. If he didn’t know and was just relying on Andrew’s opinion – no, he wasn’t. In any case, he certainly benefited from the paintings being passed off as real: in publicity for the gallery for such a rare collection, and in higher prices for the works, and thus higher commissions.

And Christopher, – assuming he knew for sure that the works were fake, – very carefully, made sure that he was within the law on this one. Very, very interesting!

But if he did poison the bottles of Montrachet he gave Fred Nordqvist, it seemed a bit stupid to hope to not be caught, because that wine was a memorable element of the opening party. And a lot of people drank it – if the wine contained enough poison that a small sip killed a man as large as Fred, that’s potentially a lot of dead bodies. And Christopher drank it himself: I searched my memory and came up with an image of him, red in the face, with a little of the liquid in his glass. At the time, I attributed his facial color and expression to being embarrassed – but maybe he was angry instead?

But perhaps he didn’t know that the wine would be served at the party on Friday? Maybe he hoped that Fred would drink it at home, later in the evening? And that might happen a bit later on, when Christopher was safely back in Walla Walla… According to Alex and Pauline, Fred always served his “usual” wines at the opening parties – so it might have been a good guess to think that he’d drink a collectible wine at home.

But in that scenario, one bottle would be enough to kill Fred. And whatever still remained in that bottle, plus the second bottle, would be very convincing evidence against Christopher.

Why would Fred open such a rare and expensive wine as Domain Leflaive Chevalier-Montrachet 1985 at the reception, in any case? Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to keep it in his cellar for showing off to friends, or for drinking to commemorate a special occasion – or just as an investment? Fred formerly positioned himself as an advisor in alternative investments. And wines – both in their physical form, in bottles and cases and cellars, or in abstract, like Bordeaux futures – had become a relatively well-known form of investing one’s money. And if memory served, they didn’t lose in value during the financial crisis much, either.

Fred was smart and tended to look beyond the obvious – what was his angle on this? He might have thought that offering the reception crowd the taste of the exclusive wine would showcase his gallery as being more high-class, and loosen people’s purse strings? That the “cachet” of the wine would translate to the art? In which case spending  – (I did a quick internet search and found the price per bottle for this vintage, and brought up the link to the sommelier's tasting notes sent to me by Krista) – $3400 on alcohol to sell a painting for ten times that might have made financial sense to him. And Christopher said that the two bottles were a gift to Fred, so Fred wouldn't have been spending cold hard cash on the wine – even though he was surely aware of the price of those bottles, and could have sold them quickly. I looked at the tasting notes on my screen absent-mindedly, as I thought about how Fred talked about the wine and the art coming from the same collection.

Suddenly it hit me. My heart was being fast and I felt my mouth going dry. The bottles would still be in police custody, so the thing I was thinking of could be checked. It didn’t amount to full evidence of the murder, but it was start. And it fit almost all of the known facts.

I called Detective Johnson again.

“Yeah, what?”, he grumbled into the phone.

“I think I know who killed Fred Nordqvist, and how it was done.”