Cold Hit

him and bring him fascinating paintings to examine. Always looking for gold where there was none. Wasting Marco’s time, if you ask me.”

“Do you know who the men were that she brought recently?”

“No, no. For this, I give you the names of my husband’s workmen. Maybe they were introduced or can tell you what these men looked like. You give me your card, and next week I call you with their telephone numbers.”

“Is that the only reason you didn’t like Denise?”

“I don’t need many reasons. She was trouble. Even Marco thought she was trouble.”

“How, Mrs. Varelli? What did he tell you about her?”

“Like I said, Miss Cooper, Marco didn’t use a lot of words. But these past few months, on the days that Mrs. Caxton came to see him, he didn’t come home smiling like he used to. She was trying to get him to work on something that upset him, gave him agita. That he did say. ‘At this age, I don’t need any agita. ’”

“But didn’t he get any more specific than that?”

“Not with me. I was just glad he didn’t want to work with her any longer. He didn’t seem to like the people she was bringing around.”

“Did Mr. Varelli talk about Rembrandt ever?”

“How could one make his life in this world and not talk about Rembrandt?”

I was grateful that she had not responded by saying what a stupid question I had asked. “I mean recently, and in connection with Denise Caxton.”

“You don’t know, then, that Marco is”-her chest heaved visibly as she breathed deeply and changed the wording. “Marco was the world’s leading expert on Rembrandt, no? Perhaps you’re too young to know the story.”

Mrs. Varelli went on. “Rembrandt’s most famous group portrait is called The Night Watch. Have you ever seen it?”

“Yes, I have. It’s in Amsterdam, at the Rijksmuseum.”

“Exactly. Then maybe you know that originally, more than three hundred years ago, it had a different name.”

“No, I’ve only heard it called by this one.”

“When he painted it, it was entitled The Shooting Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq. Over the decades, it became so covered with grime that people assumed that the setting was at nighttime-the name you know it by. Well, after World War Two was ended-in about nineteen forty-seven- when Marco was just getting a reputation as a restorer, he was part of the team of experts put together to restore the enormous painting. During the cleaning, it lightened brilliantly. That’s the first time anyone in the twentieth century realized that it wasn’t a night scene at all.

“Marco was the only member of that restoration group still alive fifty years later. When anyone-and I mean anyone, Miss Cooper-has a question about the attribution of a Rembrandt today, it was only my Marco who knew the truth. Monarchs, presidents, millionaires-they all came to see Marco Varelli about their paintings.”

“Denise Caxton, did she ever bring him a Rembrandt?”

“This I don’t know.”

“Did your husband ever say that she or anyone else asked him to look at paint chips recently?”

Again Mrs. Varelli looked at me as though I had no brain at all.

“That’s what my husband did every day of his life. Paint, paint chips, paint streaks, paint fragments. From this, Miss Cooper, come masterpieces.”

“Excuse me, Alex. Could I see you a minute?” Mercer was speaking to me from the hallway.

“May I go back to Marco now?”

“If you’d give us another few minutes, Mrs. Varelli, we’ll be out of your way,” he said to her.

I thanked her for her graciousness at such a terrible time and walked back to the room in which the coffin rested. Mike was standing next to the dead man’s head.

“I hope by paying your respects to the deceased you got more than I did from the widow,” I said to them as I reentered the room. “A bit of art history and a hunch that Denise Caxton was nothing but trouble.”

“Then I’d say Mrs. Varelli’s got great instincts. Remember that case I had a few years back in Spanish Harlem? The Argentinian dancer, Augusto Mango, who died prematurely during a sexual encounter with a rabid fan?”

“Very well.”

“You know how we found out it was murder and not a bad heart?”

“No.”

“Some doctor declared him dead at the scene. I think he must have been a podiatrist. Then, at the funeral parlor, while they were combing his hair into place, the mortician found a bullet hole in the back of his head. Small caliber, barely the trace of an entry. The fan’s husband was the killer. Post headline was Don’t Tango with Mango.

“Well, Mr. Zuppelo wouldn’t make such a good barber.”

Mike carefully turned Marco Varelli’s head away from us and smoothed the thick white hair back from his left ear, much as he had done at Spuyten Duyvil when we first saw the body of Denise Caxton. There was the unmistakable mark that a bullet had pierced the skull of the gentle old man.

17

“Criminal court press room-where every crime’s a story and every story’s a crime. Mickey Diamond here.” The veteran New York Post reporter had covered the courthouse for longer than anyone could remember, and answered the phone with his usual elan on Thursday morning.

“What did you think you were doing by running that story this morning?” I asked when I called, trying to control my temper.

Pat McKinney had left a copy of the page-three clipping on my desk, quoting me in an article about the Caxton murder investigation. Battaglia had an inviolable policy about assistants talking to the press. He enforced it rigidly, and he was right to do so. With more than six hundred lawyers in the office and three hundred thousand matters a year coming through our complaint room, it would have been insane to let prosecutors comment on cases they handled. First I had called Rose Malone, urging her to let Battaglia know that Mickey’s feature was pure fiction, and then I had dialed the newsroom.

“Slow news day, Alex. My editor was begging me for a story.”

I looked at the lead paragraph in the piece, in which Diamond attributed to me a statement about a major break in the case.

“If we’re close to a solution, as you say I say, then it truly is news to me,” I told him. The story reported that, working closely with detectives from the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, I had discovered the motive in the Caxton killing and an arrest was imminent. “Battaglia will be furious when he reads this. It’s bullshit, but now he’ll get pressure from the mayor to make an arrest, and we don’t even have a suspect yet.”

“The truth is so rare, Alex. I like to use it sparingly.” He laughed at his own joke, knowing that I wouldn’t. “Straighten me out. Give me some real scoop to go with. Maybe this’ll make the killer show his hand-he’ll think you know more about him than you do.”

“Thanks for the help, Mickey. When he turns himself in because of your story, I’ll make sure you get the reward money.” If nothing else, I confirmed that word of Marco Varelli’s murder had not yet leaked to the press. Diamond would have been all over me if he’d heard what we had discovered last night.

We had broken the news to Varelli’s widow just as mournershad gathered for the evening visit to the funeral home. Her initial shock at the fact that her husband had been nated was replaced with her proud resolve that she had known he had not died of natural causes. Bravely, she composed herself and greeted their friends and associates for more than two hours, while we mingled with the small crowd in the room.

She had finally thanked Chapman warmly and then turned to tell me good night. “You see, Miss Cooper, I was