Cold Hit

well- friends to give me coke. Artists, dealers, even the guys who work in the warehouse. There’s no shortage of the white stuff on the streets. You know that.”

Chapman stood and looked out through the glass wall of Daughtry’s office, down over the tracks to the string- lined display that we had seen on entering. “Did Denise really go for this garbage? I mean, you’ve seen the paintings in her home, and in Lowell’s gallery, haven’t you? They’ve got an amazing collection.”

“Detective, van Gogh only sold five of his paintings in his lifetime. Relatively speaking, merely a handful of artists have ever been recognized by their contemporaries. Deni wanted to get in on the next wave, pick the giants of the future, take some chances. What Lowell does with his collection of masters takes no brains at all, no imagination. Just money.”

“Let’s talk about your business.”

“It’s Deni’s business, not mine. I’ve put some money into it, but she couldn’t risk attaching my name to a venture like this. Too many people seem to remember too much.”

“D’you know she was having problems? Legal ones?”

“Of course I did.” Daughtry looked down at his desk. “I mentioned van Gogh a moment ago. I’m sure you knew about the controversy over Vase with Eight Sunflowers. ”

“Let’s say we know our version of it,” Mike bluffed. “Why don’t you tell us yours?”

“There’s a bit of a storm in the market these days. Vincent van Gogh only painted during the last ten years of his life. He’s been credited with completing 879 oils, 1, 245 drawings, and a single etching.” Daughtry was talking to me now, as though Mercer and Mike wouldn’t be able to understand the story.

I glared back at him. “Talk to the detectives, Mr. Daughtry. They’re much better at this work than I am. They’re really quite intelligent.”

“The brouhaha is that a great many experts now believe that some of the most famous paintings, and even the one etching, are fakes. In fact, they suspect that many of van Gogh’s contemporaries created them and others passed them off as the real thing. Since his work is fetching higher prices than almost anyone else’s, it’s a rather hot debate these days.”

“And Deni?”

“Well, Deni recently sold Eight Sunflowers to a client in Japan. I don’t know his name offhand, but it’s a matter of public record. He’s now made a claim with the United States government-”

I broke in. “I don’t get it. There are supposedly fake van Goghs everywhere from the Musee d’Orsay to the Metropolitan.”

“Yes, Ms. Cooper, but the gentleman’s claim is that Deni sold it after she had sent it to Amsterdam to be authenticated by the curators there, and after they’d told her its value was questionable.”

“So, after she’d been told it was a copy?”

“An opinion she fought vigorously with the Dutch Ministry of the Arts.”

“But rather than waiting for the outcome,” Chapman said, “she stiffed the client anyway. How much?”

“Four-point-six million.”

Chapman let out a whistle. “Not a bad day’s work, Bryan. What’s your cut of that? And what do you know about the bidrigging investigation the Feds are doing?”

Daughtry was shaking his head. “I didn’t have a piece of the van Gogh. I’m only involved in buying the contemporary works.”

Chapman was pacing the small room, looking through the glass panel at the space below. “Phew. You musta had that leather mask wrapped too tight around your brain. This junk’ll never bring you a nickel.”

“Deni wasn’t the least bit worried about the auction investigation. She was above all that-it never occurred to me to even mention it. And about your eye, Mr. Chapman,” Daughtry said, “if what you’re referring to as junk is that single oblique line of string you saw downstairs, I just sold the artist’s last piece- Red Yarn as an Octagon Half -for a quarter of a million dollars.”

“To some yupster Cooper went to school with, no doubt. When’s the last time you saw Denise Caxton?”

“I think it was Wednesday of last week, before I went to the Hamptons. Things were very slow here-there’s really nothing that goes on in August in our business. I invited Deni to come out to the house with me, but she said she had errands to get done in town. I left her here late in the afternoon, and we never talked again.”

Daughtry was more emotional about Deni’s death than her husband had been, but this reaction could just as easily have been a function of his nervousness and discomfort.

“Alex, you got a couple of subpoenas for Bryan? Why don’t you give ’em to him now?” Mike turned back to Daughtry. “We’ll give you a few days to get this stuff together. Two other things. I assume you were printed when you went in the can, right? We’ll be pulling those out for comparisons with some of the evidence we’ve found. And you’ll also notice that there’ll be two cops parked in front of the gallery in a patrol car for the next few days. Nothing-and I mean nothing-goes in or out of here until we’ve been through the place with a finetooth comb. Ms. Cooper here will draft one hell of a warrant that’ll cover my ass in court, and I’ll expect your complete cooperation while we execute it.”

Daughtry stood up. “But, Detective, there’ll be art shipments coming in and out all the-”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Daughtry. From what I read in the newspapers, I take it you liked to be the top in your little S amp;M games. Well, I’d like nothing better than to make you the bottom-for me and for some eight-foot- tall, three-hundredpound convicted rapist waiting for you in a very crowded cell upstate, if I can get you there. So don’t misbehave too badly, ’cause you may go back into prison a tight end, but I know you’ll come out a wide receiver.”

I turned to face Mercer, biting my lip to suppress a laugh. “Get me out of here, will you?”

“Mr. Daughtry,” Mercer said, standing up and towering over the rest of us, “when’s the last time you saw Omar Sheffield?”

He looked up at the ceiling. “I’d guess sometime that same afternoon, last Wednesday, almost a week ago.”

“Who hired him to work here, and what’d he do for you?”

“Deni did all the hiring-and firing. Omar’s a sort of handyman-moves exhibits, hangs the artwork. Painted the gallery with a couple of his friends. Ask him yourself. He’ll be here within the hour.”

“Don’t count on it, Bryan. Omar’s feeling a little sluggish this morning.”

Mercer said, “Did you know that Omar had a record? That he was on parole?”

Daughtry hesitated, and I sensed that he was starting to filter-his responses to us.

“I’m not sure. I may have heard something about that, but didn’t pay any attention.”

“Didn’t pay attention?” asked Chapman incredulously. “What was this place, one-stop shopping for the parole board? You know that there are restrictions about who you do business with, don’t you? What if I tell you that you gotta hire a new whipping boy-oops, damn it, there I go again with that dominatrix crap. Omar Sheffield is the latest casualty in the Caxton-Daughtry partnership. He’s as dead as Deni. What do you think of that?”

Daughtry drew in a deep breath, and his hands started trembling again, uncontrollably. “I think, actually, that it’s not such a bad thing, Mr. Chapman. Would you like to know why Deni hired Omar to work for her?”

“Let me guess. A direct pipeline to a cocaine source, right?”

“Well, that was just a lucky coincidence. Denise actually had a special job for Omar,” Daughtry went on, clearly banking on his betrayal of his dear friend and partner to get Mike Chapman off his own back. “She put him on the payroll for a single purpose. And now that she’s gone, I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling you.

“The sole reason she employed Omar Sheffield was to kill Lowell Caxton.”

11

The three of us settled into a booth at the Empire Diner, the sleek-looking chrome-fitted slice of a Deco eatery on the northeast corner of Tenth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, to regroup over a late-morning cup of coffee.

“I’ll take a mushroom-and-cheese omelette, too,” Chapman told the waitress.