Marked Man

by William Lashner

“I hoped if I came in person,” I said, “you’d appreciate the seriousness of my inquiry.”

  “You hoped in vain,” she said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have much work.”

  “I can assure you, Ms. Chicos, that everything you say to me will be held in strictest confidence.”

  “But I don’t choose to be in your confidence. As I told you repeatedly, I am simply not willing to discuss my tenure at the Randolph Trust.”

  “Is there a reason?”

  “It is ancient history. It is a part of my past that I have chosen to put behind me.”

  “Do they know about it?” I said, gesturing toward the hallway. “Do they know what happened while you were there?”

  I was standing in the doorway of her rather small office. We were on the second floor of an impressive granite building with a huge bell tower, the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. She was in the curatorial department. Just down the hall was the director’s office, which was noticeably larger.

  She smiled a tense smile. “I have been at this museum for twenty years, Mr. Carl. The administration here is no longer concerned about my qualifications.”

  “So the answer is no.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint, but you will not be able to blackmail me into talking with you. My job as associate curator at the Randolph Trust was my first after I left school. It is clearly indicated on my curriculum vitae. In fact, it was Mr. Randolph himself who helped me attain this position just shortly before he died.”

  “That’s interesting, since I heard you were a suspect in the robbery at his trust.”

  “Who told you that?” she said sharply, but not before involuntarily glancing behind me to see if anyone was listening in.

  “Maybe we could discuss this whole situation somewhere more private?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me for a moment and then shook her head. “No, Mr. Carl. I will not talk about the Randolph Trust no matter what vile rumors are being spread about me. I’m sorry you wasted your time. If you want, I can give you a pass for the gallery. The collection is actually quite good.”

  “But not as good as at the Randolph.”

  “No. The collection at the Randolph is…astounding.” She sat quietly for a moment, as if remembering it painting by painting. “Is that all,” she said finally, “because I really do have work.”

  “It was Mrs. LeComte who implicated you in the robbery.”

  An eyebrow rose. “Oh, was it, now? And how is the old bat?”

  “Old. But still frisky and still there, on her throne. She said you had checked out certain blueprints just before the crime.”

  “It wasn’t true.”

  “She said there were fingerprints.”

  “A mistake was made.”

  “She also said your tastes were slightly vulgar.”

  “My tastes? Have you seen the height of her heels?”

  “And that your neck was too long.”

  “There are thirteen masterworks by Modigliani at the Randolph.”

  “What you’re telling me, I suppose, is that Mr. Randolph admired long necks.”

  Her hand started to rise involuntarily to her throat, and then she caught herself. A man and a woman, deep in some conversation, both peered into the office as they passed in the hallway. Serena Chicos fiddled with her hands and then sighed.

  “Where are you staying, Mr. Carl?”

  “The Airport Holiday Inn.”

  “I can give you a few minutes after work.”

  “Splendid,” I said. “I’ll be waiting.”

  HIS GIVEN name was Samuel Glickstein. Jewish, of course, which was certainly a significant part of Mrs. LeComte’s little dig. She was still rooted in that musty age in Philadelphia when to be a Jew was considered something sordid, like being a sloppy drunk or having a predilection for young boys, nothing to lose your job over, but still. Why, you’re a regular Sammy Glick. Yes, I was, wasn’t I? Little Shmelka Glickstein of the Lower East Side, whom we first spy as a copyboy at the fictional New York Record. “Always ran,” writes the narrator. “Always looked thirsty.” Sammy Glick.

  What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg was quite the celebrated novel when it appeared in 1941. You know Schulberg, he’s the guy who wrote On the Waterfront as a justification for naming names to the House Un-American Affairs Committee in the fifties. “I could have had class. I could have been a contender.” Sammy Glick’s shady maneuverings as he claws his way to the top made Sammy rich and Budd Schulberg famous.

  While I was waiting for Serena Chicos at my hotel, I followed Sammy’s meteoric rise from copyboy to columnist, from columnist to Hollywood screenwriter, from screenwriter to producer to head of the movie studio, married to a rich redhead with flawless beauty. You go, brother. Sure he had to cross a few lines and step on a few toes, screw a few writers out of credits and help smash the union, but nothing he did through the whole of the book was worse than what your basic U.S. congressman commits before breakfast. And Sammy had better taste in shoes.

  And yet I found the novel troubling. The problem wasn’t that I identified with Sammy Glick, the problem was that I didn’t, at least not enough, and not in the way I wanted. All my life his was the path I had expected to tread, the ruthless march to wealth and success, not to mention the redhead. But somehow I couldn’t pull it off. There was a weakness in my soul where in Sammy Glick’s there was only steel. If there was a curse in my life, it was that I didn’t have what it took to take what I wanted in this world. The great men and women in history all had that steel. If you think Gandhi was a pushover, you never tried to give him a ham sandwich.

  And here again, in that crummy hotel room in Rochester, it was playing out. In my desk drawer back at the office there was a pile of gold and jewels just waiting to be appraised and sold. And Lavender Hill was offering a king’s ransom if I could just convince Charlie to sell the Rembrandt and sail off into the sunset. I was in the golden land of either/or, where I couldn’t lose, but instead of taking care of business, I was off on some quixotic quest to find a missing girl. You know what I was? I was a sap, pure and simple, and I felt it all the more keenly as I read about Sammy Glick’s rise up the Hollywood ladder toward a success that I would never match.

  But I wasn’t reading the novel only to make myself feel blue, or to suss out the depth of Mrs. LeComte’s insult, or even just to pass the time, though I was accomplishing all three. No, I was reading the novel because Mrs. LeComte’s comment hadn’t been as offhand as she made it seem, and I couldn’t help feeling that maybe, just maybe, somewhere in the book was a clue that would help me discover what really happened to Chantal Adair twenty-eight years ago.

  And damn if I wasn’t right.

  “I WAS FRAMED, Mr. Carl,” said Serena Chicos, and perhaps she heard the inevitable sigh I sigh whenever anyone tells me he has been framed, because she added, as if compelled by that very sagging of my shoulders, “No, but I was. Really.”

  “By whom?”

  “I don’t know for certain, and I am not one to cast aspersions.”

  “As they were cast upon you.”

  “Precisely.”

  “But why would this person want to frame you?”

  “To divert attention, to scuttle a career. When Mr. Randolph was alive, the Randolph Trust was like Versailles, a snake pit full of courtiers vying for the king’s attention.”

  “And you were young and beautiful and long-necked, is that it?”

  She stared at me without responding, her fingers tapping impatiently on the little round table in the hotel’s café. But then a half smile turned her thin, tense lips, and I saw it all, the young art academic, the old millionaire art collector, the shared passion, the mutual admiration, lust among the Monets and the Matisses, the Modiglianis, his old bony hands on her long lovely neck.

  “It’s not something I’m comfortable talking about,” she said.

  “Do you have any children?”

  “Three. Two boys and a girl. And
they are waiting for me at home.”

  “I’m looking into the Randolph Trust robbery because something happened about the same time. A little girl disappeared. The detective involved in the disappearance thirty years ago believed that the robbery and the missing girl were somehow connected. On behalf of the family, I’m trying to find out if that’s so. Anything I can learn about the robbery would be a big help.”

  “I told you, I had nothing to do with it.”

  “I believe you, but you might be able to point me in the right direction.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “She was six when she went missing. Do you want to see a picture?”

  “No,” she said. She sat back, crossed her arms, thought for a moment. “Mr. Randolph and I were together until I was forced to leave after the robbery,” she said finally. “There were suspicions that there was some insider help. An insider had to go. I was chosen to take the fall.”

  “By Mr. Randolph?”

  “No, by others.”

  “And Mr. Randolph didn’t try to keep you?”

  “There were two people who held sway over Wilfred, at least while I was there. One was his wife, a quite formidable woman. Their marriage had become something of a museum piece itself, more mummified than alive. But she had been with him when he was still poor and had helped him amass the collection. Whatever secrets he had, she knew them.”

  “Even you?”

  “I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but from what I later learned, they discussed everything. They lived their lives in the spirit of their times, Kinsey, Masters and Johnson. It was in many ways a time of greater personal freedom than we have now. But Wilfred was always a little terrified of his wife. And also of Agnes LeComte.”

  “Mrs. LeComte? How did she get such power?”

  “She had became a close friend of Mrs. Randolph’s, for one. And before Wilfred and I began our…personal relationship, he was very much with her. They had been having an affair for a decade.”

  “Until he dumped her for you.”

  “That’s right. The two women convinced him that, for the protection of the trust, I had to be let go.”

  “It seems LeComte had a pretty good motive for framing you.”

  “Obviously, yes. We were never close, and at first her resentment was palpable, but when she came back, things were very different.”

  “Came back? From where?”

  “From her sabbatical. After Wilfred made it clear to her that he had found someone new, and after Mrs. Randolph refused to come to her defense, she left the trust. She was gone for more than six months.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Traveled, from what I heard, though she didn’t talk much about it. But when she returned, things were very different. There was something changed about her, she had found a certain peace, which I didn’t understand then, but now I think I do. I think she met someone during her travels, I think she fell in love. She would never admit to anything, but when she returned, she poured herself into the working of the trust, remained close with Mrs. Randolph, and began to take an active interest in my career. Maybe too active. Of course there was always an edge to our relationship, but she tried to become something of a mentor.”

  “How’d that work out?”

  “Not well. I already had a mentor in Wilfred. He was a brilliant man. He had so much to teach about so many things, and he was never boring. That is a rare quality in men, I’ve found, rarer even in lawyers.”

  “Tell me about the robbery itself.”

  “There’s not much to tell. That day we were closed, no visitors or classes. Wilfred was working with Mrs. LeComte in the gardens. The trust keeps a fascinating garden, full of rare specimens collected from all over the world. That whole day I was reviewing some records with Mrs. Randolph. After the night guards showed up, we all went home. No one knew anything had happened until we opened up the next morning and found the guards bound and gagged.”

  “How did the crooks get in?”

  “Apparently someone was inside. No one knows how he got there.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “None. It has remained a mystery.”

  “Anything unusual about the guards that night?”

  “The crew had been working together for ages. The supervisor was an old friend of the Randolphs’. The police naturally focused on them, but they all came up clean. Everyone came up clean except for me.”

  “The fingerprints and files.”

  “It wouldn’t have been so hard to fabricate the evidence, which was why no charges were ever filed. The file jacket could have come from anywhere. I handled many. And my signature on the sign-out sheet must have been forged. Really, if I was stealing the blueprints, would I have signed them out?”

  “Not likely.”

  “I had enough freedom to take home what files I needed without a signature. But it was quite convenient for me to be blamed. Wilfred had been making noise about marrying me. I didn’t want that, but still, I heard later that Mrs. Randolph was horrified that he might divorce her. And Mrs. LeComte was growing concerned about my influence over the trust. Wilfred was giving me more and more responsibility.”

  “And with you gone, Mrs. Randolph’s marriage and Mrs. LeComte’s place at the trust were both secure.”

  “Yes. But even after I was forced to leave, Wilfred took care of me. Gave me money when I needed it and then got me a position at the gallery here. He was really very sweet. Is there anything else?”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. LeComte. On her sabbatical. Where did she go?”

  “Europe, Asia, Australia. She came back through the West Coast.”

  “California.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hollywood.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Stayed there awhile.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Took a lover.”

  “That’s what I believed, yes.”

  “I bet I know who it was.”

  “Really?” She leaned forward, captured for a moment by a piece of gossip from decades in her past. “Who?”

  “Sammy Glick.”

  47

  The brown building of the Randolph Trust, with its great red door, stood once again before me.

  I couldn’t look at it now without thinking of its sordid history. The philandering Wilfred Randolph, his long-suffering wife, the catfights between the two mistresses in Randolph’s life. And then the robbery of jewels and golden figurines and two priceless paintings that was carried off by a quintet of neighborhood mooks, aided by someone inside. The investigation, the accusations, the missing girl, the lovely young curator who shared Randolph’s bed and was framed for the crime. All of that past was as much a part of the building as the stones and mortar.

  But now Randolph was dead and his wife was dead, Serena Chicos was raising a family in Rochester, and Agnes LeComte was shriveling by the day as she searched for a young man to sexually mentor. Chantal Adair was still missing, and Charlie Kalakos was in exile, and Ralph Ciulla was murdered, and Joey Pride was on the run. To top it all off, the forces of power and money were trying their mightiest to wrest the fabulous art collection from this very site, and it looked very much like they were about to succeed.

  It was sad in its way that the collection was bound for another location, it was part and parcel of this very building and its history—sad, but not tragic. The Randolph Trust was a monument to a man and his money, but what does a great Cézanne canvas or a Matisse portrait care about such a monument? Put the works in a museum, put them in a brothel, it wouldn’t make a difference, they still would shine. In the end the paintings Randolph collected were too luminous, too perfect to be controlled; mediocrity could be contained, but the greatness of the art Randolph bought had now transcended the cage he built around it.

  I was tempted to bang on the door and go inside, to see them all once again, but this wasn’t the second Mond
ay of the month or the alternate Wednesday or Good Friday, and I wasn’t there for the art.

  I found her around the back. I had called first, been told that she was working today in the gardens. Did I want to leave a message? “No,” I said, “no message.” What I needed to ask, I needed to ask in person.

  “So you’ve come to me at last, my darling,” said Mrs. LeComte. “Are you here to take me up on my offer?”

  She was sitting on a small green cart, leaning over and weeding a bed of bright flowers as red as her lipstick. She glanced up at me as my footsteps approached and then turned her attention back to her work. She was wearing a smock, gloves, a wide-brimmed hat, and she looked every inch the suburban dowager tending her garden, except that she was still wearing her improbable high heels and this garden was spectacular, with brilliant beds and marble statues and lovely stone paths. Each tree and bush and patch of flowers was carefully labeled with a neat green sign inscribed in Latin. Around her a crew of gardeners in their blue overalls pruned and raked while she tended her own small plot.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’m afraid I have to pass.”

  “That is rather a shame. In these sorts of mentor-protégé relationships, I’ve found that even with very little sexual desire at the start, through time and intimacy the sexual attraction can grow positively voracious.”

  “They say the world will be destroyed in five billion years.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Victor, I’m sure whatever repulsion I feel for you now can eventually be turned around, if you are ardent enough.”

  “Is that what happened between you and Mr. Randolph, your repulsion for him was turned around?”

  “To whom have you been talking?”

  “I just came back from Rochester.”

  “How is the little tramp?”

  “Older, with children.”

  “Serves her right. Whatever she told you was a lie. Wilfred and I were violently attracted to one another from the start. Our passion was a force of nature.”

  “As long as it lasted.”

  “But while it lasted, it was glorious. I wouldn’t trade our time together, I wouldn’t trade all he gave me, for anything in the world. It was the most precious period in my life.”