Michelangelo's Notebook (21 page)

Kressman’s house was a classic Gulf Coast “cottage” of the old style, even though it was clearly very new. Covered and screened porches wrapped around the bottom floor, the second floor contained a master bedroom and a guest room and a spiral staircase led from the master bedroom to an eight-by-ten captain’s walk on the peaked roof, fitted like the bell tower of a one-room school-house.

The main floor had a living room and dining room that looked out onto the beach and the Gulf beyond. A kitchen led off from the dining room and behind that was a small bedroom facing the pool. Across the hall from the small bedroom was a large den. The bedroom, the den and the hall all had doors leading out to the pool area.

Even someone who had no idea of the victim’s identity would have picked up on a couple of things as soon as they entered the front door, or maybe even before. The car outside in the garage was a top-of-the-line S-class Mercedes and the furniture inside the house was mostly Edwardian, antique and expensive. Kressman had money. As well as the furniture, all of the art on the walls looked like the real McCoy, canvases thick with paint and framed with lots of gold. Izzy didn’t know art from a horse’s ass but most of it had the same rich feel as the butter-soft leather on the inside of the Benz.

Kressman had been no fool about it either. There was a class-A burglar alarm system and it was connected to the cop shop up on Clubhouse Road, not some empty office in a strip mall and a tape that told everybody the cops had been called in a loud, bullshit voice. At the price the old man had paid for the setup in the cottage there’d have been a cruiser at his front door thirty seconds after anyone so much as breathed too hard on his precious paintings. Not only that, as it turned out the art was all lag-bolted into the wall.

Izzy looked through the kitchen, checking the refrigerator first. In the first place it was huge, and in the second place it was almost empty. Automatic ice maker and a frigid bottle of white label Flagman vodka. Pricey stuff.

Down below a few takeout cartons from local joints, the carefully wrapped remains of a salad and a good supply of beer, most of it in the form of stubby brown bottles of Schultheiss Berliner Weisse which probably cost more to mail order than a single glass would cost in Germany. If it was one thing Izzy knew it was his beer.

He didn’t hesitate for a moment. He reached in, picked up one of the frosty bottles and snapped it open. He took a sip. Like old gold. The picture on the label showed women with parasols walking down a tree-lined boulevard. Even the guy’s beer was old-fashioned. Izzy gave a contented little sigh, belched lightly and continued on his tour, careful to keep the bottle top in his jacket pocket.

He moved into the study. It was good-sized, maybe fifteen feet on a side, and there wasn’t any sign of a woman’s touch. The curtains were dark, the walls were paneled in bookshelves filled with books by the yard and he had one of those Queen Anne-style globes that slid open to reveal a well-stocked bar.

Maker’s Mark, Hennessy Five Star, Jack Daniel’s, Johnny Walker Blue Label and a couple of single malts with unpronounceable names. Izzy grinned and wondered what Maggie would find when she sliced up the old man’s liver. He thought about the coroner’s exquisite, firm little fanny for a moment, took another sip of beer and continued his investigation.

Collection of beer steins, collection of model cars, a ship in a bottle, an old-fashioned rolltop desk. It was locked. Earlier on, Kenny had found a set of keys on a bureau which Izzy now had in his pocket. The detective sergeant took out the ring and tried the keys one by one.

He hit it right third time around and he pushed the rolltop back. Everything neat as a pin, envelopes and this and that sorted into the various pigeonholes. Right up front was an Acer Ferrari laptop in flame red, fitted with a wireless net access modem, very futuristic. Izzy tapped the computer on and spent five minutes noodling around in the old man’s files. Half of them were password protected.

He got up, went out onto the porch and called Kenny in to work his magic fingers on the machine, then went upstairs to the bedrooms. Nothing in the guest bedroom, nothing of real interest in the bathroom except an array of high blood pressure medications and dandruff shampoo. No Preparation H, so Kressman had been hemmie free. He went into the master bedroom and looked around. More big furniture including an ornate four-poster bed that reminded Izzy of that scene in the old black-and-white Scrooge movie where he wakes up and realizes it’s Christmas morning.

An old-fashioned hanging lamp hung from the ceiling and there was a palm tree in one corner, so tall its fronds were bent at the ceiling. Little rugs scattered everywhere, no wall to wall carpeting for a change. Izzy’s old man had worked house construction for forty years and Izzy’d spent his summers building crap all over New York and Jersey. He knew exactly the kind of shit you could hide under spackle ceilings and cheap broadloom. Not here: this was all top-grade stuff.

The walls were hung with more art. Like the paintings he’d seen downstairs, these looked like the real thing, and even a slob like him could almost recognize some of it. Even a slob like him could recognize the little dwarf guy’s stuff, the one they’d made the movie about. Always wore a top hat and liked hookers—what was his name? Toulouse-Lautrec—yeah, that was it.

The painting in question hung over the head of the bed, big, showing a man and a woman, both of them ugly, standing in some kind of beer hall at the edge of a dance floor. There was another one by the same guy, the same ugly hooker standing with a busy bar behind her. She looked bored. So was Izzy. Paintings weren’t high on his list for holiday giving.

He went over and gave the one of the old broad standing by herself a tug. Lag bolted like all the others. Ugly or not, this wasn’t the kind of thing you picked up at the starving-artists sale down at the Holiday Inn. The burglar alarm and the lag bolts said big insurance policies. Too bad one of them hadn’t been stolen, at least then he’d have a motive to work with, but to steal one you’d have to cut it out of the frame with a utility knife and that hadn’t happened. He went over to a big chest of drawers. There was a big silver plate with personal goods in it.

Rolex Daytona, money clip with half a dozen twenties and hundreds, loose change, pinky ring with a big green stone in it, a wallet and a cell phone. Izzy didn’t know art, but he knew watches. The last time he’d looked at a Daytona they’d been ten or eleven grand. He stared at it, shook his head and sighed. Lovely but he’d never be able to explain it in a million years. Whatever, it hadn’t been a robbery. Someone had whacked the guy for something other than money.

Izzy flipped open the wallet. Alabama driver’s license in the name of Carl Kressman, showing a birth date that made the corpse seventy-five years old. The issue date was five years ago with this address, which meant he’d been here for at least that long. He flipped open the other flap and went through five major credit cards, social security card and a laminated Gulf Shores Library card. There was a single lambskin condom tucked into one of the interior pockets and something behind it. He pulled. A New York State driver’s license in the name of Karel Kress. What was the guy doing with two names and two driver’s licenses? Weird, but at least it was getting a little more interesting than just another dead old man. He went downstairs and checked in on Kenny, who was bent over the Acer laptop in the study, pecking away.

“Find anything?”

“The guy was rich.”

“Figured that out for myself.”

“He collected art.”

“That too,” Izzy answered, glancing around the room. Paintings everywhere…

“He got them all from someplace in New York, the Hoffman Gallery.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, and he paid lots of money for them, look.” The younger man leaned back and Izzy leaned forward. There was a row of names and figures on the screen.

The list continued on for half a dozen pages. There were at least two hundred paintings, far more than were in the cottage. Most carried a price tag well over a million. Kenny demonstrated the depth of the program by randomly picking a name on the list by clicking the cursor on the odd, underlined letter code:

Renoir, Pierre-Auguste/awlohe 750,000

Almost instantly the computer jumped to a digitized photograph of a painting showing a woman leaning on her hand with some sort of multicolored background, perhaps flowers.

The title underneath read:

“I don’t get any of this shit.”

“It’s a list of paintings.”

“You really must think I’m some kind of an asshole. I got that, Kenny, even though I didn’t go to college.”

“The list is keyed into these records through the letter code.”

“The letter code being the name of the painting, yeah, I got that too, Ken.”

“The other stuff is what we call ‘provenance.’ ”

“We?”

“It’s the name for where the picture came from, its background and sales history.”

“And?”

“And so far they all ran through the same provenance. The same history. The Grange Foundation gives it to the Parker-Hale, who gets rid of it by selling it to the Hoffman Gallery, who then flogs it to private citizens like Kressman.”

“Who winds up being sliced to ribbons in his swimming pool.”

“You think the two things have anything to do with each other?”

“Lot of money.”

“But nothing’s been stolen.”

“Any way you can add up all the figures on those sheets?”

“I think so.” Kenny played with the computer for a few minutes. The figure appeared:

“To one guy?” said Kenny. “Christ on a crutch!”

“I think we’re out of our depth here, Kenny,” said Izzy. “In deep water, you might say.” And then he laughed. Kenny didn’t think it was funny at all.

Eric Taschen’s apartment on Fifth Avenue was on the top floor of a mid-1940s building, facing Central Park with a spectacular view out over the Sheep Meadow and the Ramble. From what Valentine could tell the apartment itself was modest enough, five or six rooms, one bedroom with a study, but the location, the view and the art on the walls were definitely high end. A Warhol John Wayne silkscreen in the foyer, a Roy Lichtenstein taking up almost an entire wall in the living room and a crockery-plastered Julian Schnabel facing it. There were no obvious clues to his domestic situation, no telltale feminine touch, nothing that spoke overtly about a male presence either. At a guess, Taschen lived alone.

Taschen himself was slim, well-dressed in a white-on-white open-collared silk shirt and tailored jeans, his feet pushed into a pair of expensive loafers, no socks. The watch on his wrist was plain stainless steel; he wore no other jewelry. The man appeared to be in his fifties, dark-haired with a smear of gray at each temple. He was clean shaven, his face unlined. When he met Valentine at the door he was wearing red-framed reading glasses and holding a section of the
New York Times.
He led Valentine into the living room, sat him down on a butter-leather, not quite new sofa and dropped into a matching armchair with a glass-topped coffee table between them.

“You collect sixties and seventies,” said Valentine, looking over Taschen’s shoulder at the huge Lichtenstein. The canvas showed a sofa and a chair not unlike the one the man was sitting in. Some kind of small joke; an art collector’s pun. Taschen shrugged, then cleared his throat.

“She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro’ the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.”