Invisible Prey (31 page)

Sandy shrugged: “No problem. I can rip most of it off the Net. Be nice if I could see her federal tax returns.”

“I can’t get you the federals, but I can get you the state…”

T
HE
B
OOTHS CAME
through with a date on the donation to the Milwaukee museum. “The woman who handled the donation for the museum was Tricia Bundt. B-U-N-D-T. She still works there and she’ll be in this morning. Her name is on all the letters to Claire,” Landford Booth said.

“She related to the Bundt-cake Bundts?” Lucas asked.

Booth chuckled, the first time Lucas had seen anything that resembled humor in him. “I asked her that. She isn’t.”

A
RCHIE
C
ARTON CAME
through on the quilts. “The quilts had two owners. One was a Mrs. Marilyn Coombs, who got a check for one hundred sixty thousand dollars and fifty-nine cents, and one to Cannon Associates, for three hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

“Who’s Cannon Associates?”

“That I don’t know,” Carton said. “All we did was give them a check. The dealings on the quilts were mostly between our folk art specialist at the time, James Wilson, and Mrs. Coombs. The company, Cannon, I don’t know…Let me see what I can get on the check.”

“Can I talk to Wilson?” Lucas asked.

“Only if you’re a really good Anglican,” Carton said.

“What?”

“I’m afraid James has gone to his final reward,” Carton said. “He was an intensely Anglican man, however, so I suspect you’d find him in the Anglican part of heaven. Or hell, depending on what I didn’t know about James.”

“That’s not good,” Lucas said.

“I suspect James would agree…I’m looking at this check, I actually have an image of it, it was deposited to a Cannon Associates account at Wells Fargo. Do you want the account number?”

“Absolutely…”

“C
AROL!
”

She popped in: “What?”

“I need to borrow Ted Marsalis for a while,” Lucas said. “Could you call over to Revenue and run him down? I need to get an old check traced.”

“Are we hot?”

“Maybe. I mean, we’re always hot, but right now, we’re maybe
hot
.”

H
E GOT
Tricia Bundt on the phone, explained that he was investigating a murder that might somehow involve the Armstrong quilts. “We’re trying to track down what happened at the time they were disposed of…at the time they were donated. I know you got the donation from Claire Donaldson, but could you tell me, was there anybody else on the Donaldson side involved in the transaction? Or did Mrs. Donaldson handle all of it?”

“No, she didn’t,” Bundt said. Bundt sounded like she had a chipped front tooth, because all of her sibilant
S
s whistled a bit. “Actually, I only talked to her twice. Once, when we were working through the valuation on the quilts, and then at the little reception we had with our acquisitions committee, when it came in.”

“So who handled it from the Donaldson side?”

“Her assistant,” Bundt said. “Let me see, her name was something like…Anita Anderson? That’s not quite right…”

“Amity Anderson.” He got a little thrill from saying the name.

“That’s it,” Bundt said. “She handled all the paperwork details.”

Lucas asked, “Could you tell me, how did you nail down the evaluation on the quilt?”

“That’s always difficult,” Bundt said. “We rely on experienced appraisers, people who operate quilt galleries, previous sales of similar quilts, and so on,” she whistled.

“Then let me ask you this,” Lucas said. “Do museums really care about what the appraisal is? I mean, you’re getting it for free, right?”

“Oh, we
do
care,” Bundt said. “If we simply inflated everything, so rich people could get tax write-offs, then pretty soon Congress would change the rules and we wouldn’t get anything.”

“Hmph.”

“Really,” she said. But she said “really” the way a New Yorker says “really,” which means “maybe not really.”

“Does the quilt still have its original value?” Lucas asked.

“Hard to say,” she said. “There are no more of them, and their creator is dead. That always helps hold value. They’re exceptional quilts, even aside from the curses.”

Lucas thanked her for her help, and just before he rang off, she said, “You didn’t ask me if I was related to the Bundt-cake Bundts.”

“Didn’t occur to me,” he said.

“Really.”

A
S SOON AS
he hung up, his phone rang again, and Carol said, “I’m ringing Ted Marsalis for you.”

Marsalis came on a minute later, and Lucas said, “I need you to check with your sources at Wells Fargo. I’m looking to see what happened to an account there, and who’s behind it…”

L
UCAS SAT BACK
at his desk and closed his eyes. He was beginning to see something back there: a major fraud. Two rich old ladies, both experienced antique buyers, buy quilts cheaply from a well-known quilt stitcher, and then turn around and donate them to museums.

For this, they get a big tax write-off, probably saving $50,000 or $60,000 actual dollars from their tax bills. Would that mean anything to people as rich as they were? Of course it would. That’s how rich people stayed rich. Watch your pennies and the dollars take care of themselves.

The donations established the value of the quilts and created a stir in the art community. The remaining quilts are then moved off to Sotheby’s, where they sell for equally large prices to four more museums. Why the museums would necessarily be bidding, he didn’t know. Could be fashion, could be something he didn’t see.

In any case, Marilyn Coombs gets enough money to buy a house, and put a few bucks in her pocket. Two-thirds of the money disappears into Cannon Associates, which, he would bet, was none other than Amity Anderson.

How that led to the killings, he didn’t know yet. Anderson had to have an accomplice. Maybe the accomplice was even the main motivator in the whole scheme…

He got on the phone to Jenkins again: “How would you feel about around-the-clock surveillance?”

“Oh, motherfucker…don’t do this to me.”

M
ORE DOODLING
on a notepad, staring out a window. Finally, he called up the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, and got the head of the folk arts department, and was told that the curator who had supervised the acquisition of the quilt had moved on; she was now at the High Museum in Atlanta.

Lucas got the number, and called her. Billie Walker had one of the smooth Southern Comfort voices found in the western parts of the Old South, where the word
bug
had three vowels between the
b
and
g
and they all rhymed with
glue.

“I remember that clearly,” she said. “No, we wouldn’t have bought it normally, but an outside foundation provided much of the money. A three-to-one match. In other words, if we came up with thirty thousand dollars, they would provide ninety thousand.”

“Is this pretty common?”

“Oh my, yes. That’s how we get half of our things,” Walker said. “Find some people willing to chip in, then find a foundation willing to come up with a matching grant. There are many, many foundations with an interest in the arts.”

“Do you remember the name of this one?” Lucas asked.

“Of course. In my job, you don’t forget a funding source. It was the Thune Foundation of Chicago.” Lucas asked her how she spelled it. “T-h-u-n-e.”

“Did you have to dig them out of the underbrush to get the donation? Or did they come to you?”

“That’s the odd thing. They volunteered. Never heard from them before,” she said. “Took no sucking-up at all.”

Lucas scribbled
Thune
on his desk pad. “Have you ever heard of a woman named Amity Anderson?”

“No…not that I recall. Who is she?”

H
E’D HEARD
the name Thune, he thought. He didn’t know where, but he’d heard it, and recently. At Bucher’s, one of the relatives? He couldn’t put his finger on it, and finally dialed Chicago directory assistance, got a number for the Thune Foundation, and five minutes later, was talking to the assistant director.

He explained, briefly, what he was up to, and then asked, “Do the names Donaldson, Bucher, or Toms mean anything to you?”

“Well, Donaldson, of course. Mr. Thune owned a large brewery in Wisconsin. He had no sons, but one of his daughters married George Donaldson—this would have been way back—and they became the stalwarts of this foundation.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“Claire Donaldson?” Lucas asked. “I believe she was the last Donaldson?”

“Yes, she was. Tragic, what happened. She was on our board for several years, chairwoman, in fact, for many years, although she’d stepped aside from that responsibility before she died.”

“Did she have anything to do with grants? Like, to museums?”

“She was on our grants committee, of course…”

L
UCAS GOT OFF
the phone and would have said, “Ah-ha!” if he hadn’t thought he’d sound like a fool.

A new piece: even the prices paid for the quilts in the auction were a fraud. He’d bet the other purchases were similarly funded. He’d have Sandy nail it down, but it gave him the direction.

A very complicated scheme, he thought, probably set up by Anderson and her accomplice.

Create the quilts. Create an ostensible value for them by donating them to museums, with appraisals that were, he would bet, as rigged as the later sales.

Sell the quilts at Sotheby’s to museums who feel that they’re getting a great deal, because most of the money is coming from charitable foundations. Why would the foundations give up money like that? Because of pressure from their founders…

The founders would be banned from actually getting money from the foundations themselves. That was a definite no-no. But this way, they got it, and they got tax write-offs on top of it.

H
E PUT DOWN
boxes with arrows pointing to the boxes: Anderson sets it up for a cut; the funders, Bucher and Donaldson, get tax write-offs. At the Sotheby’s sale, the money is distributed to Coombs and Cannon Associates—Amity Anderson. Anderson kicks back part of it—a third?—to Donaldson and Bucher…

What a great deal. Completely invisible.

Then maybe, Donaldson cracks, or somebody pushes too hard, and Donaldson has to go. Then Bucher? That would be…odd.

And what about Toms? Where did he fit in?

T
ED
M
ARSALIS
called back. “The Wells Fargo account was opened by a woman named Barbra Cannon,” he said. “Barbra without the middle
a
, like in Barbra Streisand. There was a notation on the account that said the owners expected to draw it down to much lower levels fairly quickly, because they were establishing an antiques store in Palm Springs, and were planning to use the money for original store stock. Did I tell you this was all in Las Vegas?”

“Las Vegas?”

“In Nevada,” Marsalis said.

“I know where it is. So what happened?”

“So they drew the money down, right down to taking the last seven hundred dollars out of the account from an ATM, and that’s the last Wells Fargo heard from them,” Marsalis said. “After the seven hundred dollars, there were six dollars left in the account. That was burned up by account charges over the years, so now, there’s nothing. Account statements sent to the home address were returned. There’s nobody there.”

“Shit.”

“What can I tell you?” Marsalis said.

“What’d the IRS have to say about that?” Lucas asked.

“I don’t think they said anything. You want me to call them?”

“Yeah. Do that. That much money can’t just go up in smoke.” Lucas said.

“Sure it can,” Marsalis said. “You’re a cop. You ever heard of drug dealers? This is how they make money go away.”

D
RUG DEALERS?
He didn’t even want to think about that. He had to focus on Amity Anderson. Jenkins and Shrake would stake her out, see who she hung with. He needed as much as he could get, because this was all so obscure…He was pretty sure he had it right, but what if the red thread came back as something made only in Wisconsin? Then the whole structure would come down on his head.

H
E CALLED
S
ANDY:
“Anything on Anderson?”

“A lot of raw records, but I haven’t coordinated them into a report, yet,” she said.

“I don’t want a fu…friggin’ PowerPoint—where’d she work? You look at her tax stuff?”

“She worked at her college as a teaching assistant, at Carleton College in Northfield, and then she worked at a Dayton’s store in St. Paul,” Sandy said. “Then she worked for Claire Donaldson, which we know about, and then she went straight to the Old Northwest Foundation, where she still is,” Sandy said. “Also, I found out, she has a little tiny criminal record.”

“What was it?” Something involving violence, he hoped.

“She got caught shoplifting at Dayton’s. That’s why she left there, I think. The arrest is right at the time she left.”

“Huh.”

“Then I’ve got all kinds of tax stuff, but I have to say, I don’t think there’s anything that would interest you,” Sandy said. “She does claim a mortgage exemption. She bought her house six years ago for a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and she has a mortgage for a hundred and fifty thousand, so she put down about the minimum—like seventeen thousand dollars.”

“Any bank records?”

“Not that I’ve gotten, but she only got like forty dollars in interest on her savings account last year. And she doesn’t report interest or capital gains on other investments accounts.”

“Car?” Lucas asked.

“I ran her through DMV,” Sandy said. “She has a six-year-old Mazda. One speeding ticket, three years ago.”

“Ever own a van?”

“There’s no record of one.”

T
HERE WAS MORE
of the same—but overall, Amity Anderson’s biography seemed to paint a picture of a woman who was keeping her head above water, but not easily.