1 - Artscape: Ike Schwartz Mystery 1

by Frederick Ramsay

  “Thanks, Colonel,” said Ike. Scarlett was as phony as a three-dollar bill. Except for three years on the highway patrol, where he was an efficient, but not noteworthy writer of speeding tickets, Scarlett had served his entire career, before making regional commander, as one of the governor’s series of bodyguards and chauffeurs. Nevertheless, he was not stupid and he knew his limits. Right now, he was off limits and he had called in Ike.

  “You said ‘last night’? The robbery was last night?”

  Scarlett opened his mouth to answer, but Ruth Harris cut through whatever he was about to say.

  “That’s right, Sheriff, last night someone or some people broke in here and removed almost all the paintings.”

  “I see. When was the robbery discovered, Ms….Doctor Harris?” Ike asked, feeling the anger beginning to build. He knew what the answer might be, and he was trying to get his temper under control before his suspicions were confirmed. He did not want another go-round with this woman. Keep cool, he thought.

  “Nine this morning,” said Ruth.

  “Nine,” Ike exploded. “You knew at nine this morning and you waited until three this afternoon to report it? What in God’s name—”

  “You are mistaken, Sheriff,” Ruth interrupted icily. “We reported it almost immediately.”

  “To whom?”

  “Well, we called—”

  “We? Who’s we, Ms. Harris?” Ike was angry. There was no hope for it. He and this insufferable woman were going to go at it now.

  “We, is me, if you must know. I called—”

  “Thank you, that’s what I thought.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “Skip it. You called whom, President Harris?”

  “I called the Dillon people. After all, it’s their art and their building. I thought they should know. And of course, I wanted their guidance. They, that is, Mr. Dillon himself, said he’d arrange for the state police and the FBI to be notified. So then I called the insurance company to alert them. That’s it,” Ruth said.

  “That’s it?” Ike asked in amazement. “Didn’t it occur to you to call the police?”

  “We did, Sheriff. Colonel Scarlett is here. The FBI’s on the way, I’m told.”

  “No, no, Ms. Harris. Not the state police, not the Federal Bureau, the police—me. Don’t you know that you call the local police first, that the state troopers and the feds have no jurisdiction here—can do nothing for you unless I ask them to?”

  “What?” Ruth exclaimed. “You mean to tell me that you are going to decide how to investigate the theft of a half a billion dollars’ worth of the world’s art heritage—you?”

  “Sorry, lady, but that’s the way it is—my rural police force and me. Isn’t that right, Colonel?”

  “That’s the size of it,” Scarlett said, “and you know you can call anytime, Sheriff. Well, I’m off. Keep in touch.” Scarlett ambled off with a wave of his hand.

  “Colonel Scarlett?” Ruth was near panic. “You can’t leave. Mr. Dillon expects you to take charge here. He.…”

  “I’ll be in touch, Colonel,” Ike said and turned to Ruth Harris.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Let me get this straight. This robbery was pulled off last night. It’s now three in the afternoon. You have known since nine o’clock this morning and nothing has been done? Your bungling gave the thieves a six-hour advantage they shouldn’t have. Do you have any idea how far you can go—I suppose in trucks for this job—in six hours? Do you have any idea what your screw-up gave them?”

  “Bungling? Screw-up?” Ruth shouted, “Now look here, Mister—”

  “Screw-up. In six hours, they could have gone three hundred, three hundred fifty miles. Figure they pulled out of here at dawn, say, five-thirty. They’ve had nine hours to get lost. They could be in New York or Pittsburgh by now. What in hell were you thinking about? I am fifteen minutes away. You call your police. They start the investigation. If the state police or the FBI or the U.S. Army is needed, we call them in—not you,” Ike shouted back, outraged at this smug, arrogant woman.

  “You? You and your fumble-fingered cowboys are the last people in the world I want to handle this. We are talking about five hundred million dollars in art, Sheriff. This is not a holdup at the local Taco Bell. We need experts—”

  “You get me, lady. Until I say otherwise, you don’t get a choice.” Ike turned his attention to the two embarrassed security police.

  “Nine o’clock you discovered this?” Ike asked, fixing them with eyes that by now had taken on the characteristics of a ninety-mile-an-hour wind off the South Pole.

  “Yes, sir, nine,” one answered. He swallowed, his eyes gazing out of focus at a tree behind Ike’s right shoulder.

  “I thought this building had the most elaborate alarm system and television surveillance in the state,” Ike shot at him.

  “Sheriff, I don’t believe I want my people to be interrogated by—”

  “Dr. Harris,” Ike snarled, “you will go over there to that bench and sit down. You will stay there until I say so. If you don’t, so help me, I will arrest you on suspicion of grand theft larceny, obstruction of justice, assaulting a police officer, jay walking or anything else I can think of. Is that clear?”

  Sparks flashed from Ruth’s eyes. She was about to reply when something in Ike’s manner convinced her she was not hearing an idle threat. She turned and did as she was told, settling for a frosty, “You haven’t heard the last of this, Sheriff.”

  Ike turned back to the guard.

  “Well?”

  “Well, Sir, them alarms got broken into somehow and the television worked all right, but they fixed it so we seen the same picture all night.” The guard shuffled his feet and looked at the ground like a small boy caught sneaking into the movies.

  “Fixed? What do you mean fixed? What picture all night?” Ike said.

  “Ike,” Whaite Billingsly broke in, “they got a pair of video tape decks back there.” He gestured toward the back of the building. “They must have tapped the line, recorded a couple of minutes for each of the cameras, then cut the tapes in on a loop playback and cut the live transmission out. These guys looked at the same sequence all night.”

  Ike thought a minute and turned back to the guard again. “The interior scene, I can understand, but the exterior camera…it was a night scene, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right, I guess,” the guard mumbled.

  “And the sun comes up around five-thirty, six o’clock, this time of year, right?”

  The guard nodded.

  “So by six-thirty at the latest, someone should have noticed that the sun was shining on the whole State of Virginia, everywhere except on this parking lot. Didn’t it occur to you that something was wrong?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess, only—”

  “Only what?”

  “Well, I come on at seven o’clock and the monitor for the lot was off,” he replied.

  “Off. Why off?”

  “Well, Jake, he had the eleven to seven shift, said that on account of the car…see, we didn’t want to make no trouble for old Parker, you know, and so we generally turn it off when there’s a car down there.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? What car?” Ike shot back. He was getting angry again. His whole day seemed to be filling up with circumlocutions.

  “Well, Sheriff, we got this rule, see, that nobody’s supposed to park down there, so if someone does, Captain Parker he slips down and shoos them away. Sometimes he makes the kids walk out and hitch back to town and then they have to come back next day and get their machine. Parker calls it impounding. He says it teaches them a lesson.”

  “If no one’s supposed to come down here at night, why don’t you all just lock the damned gate at the end of th
e lane at the main road?”

  “Well, generally we do, but—”

  “But what?” Ike waited, watched the man’s eyes turn from apprehensive to fearful.

  “Well, see…listen, you won’t tell him I told you, will you? He can be mean as hell sometimes, and I need this job,” the guard stammered.

  “Tell? Tell whom? Who’s mean as hell? What in God’s name are you talking about?” Ike was shouting again.

  “Parker. See, he leaves the gate unlocked sometimes when he’s on duty at night, you know? He hopes kids will come so he can go after them. You won’t tell, will you?”

  “No, I won’t tell. So, because you didn’t want to know about the car, you or your buddy turned off the monitor. Where is Parker, by the way?” Ike asked, looking around,

  “Don’t rightly know,” the second guard said. “When I came down here this morning to open up and seen this mess, I right away called and…Well, nobody can find him.”

  “Whaite.” Ike turned to his deputy. “You seen or heard anything of Loyal Parker?”

  “Not a thing, Ike. You want me to look?”

  “No, not you. I need you here. Get a bulletin out. Have one of the boys start looking for him. Get on the radio and tell Essie to pull everyone back on duty. Get one group to go through town and locate Parker, and ask for anything you can get on two men.” Ike described the two men he had seen Monday in the Crossroads Diner.

  “Get another group out here and see if they can find anything. Start inside, then out here. We will want footprints, tire tracks…anything. Then move out a hundred yards or so—have Billy do that.

  “I want you to get those TV tapes and get what you can on the car. Find it. And Whaite…” Ike paused. “Fingerprint the whole lot here, including her.” He jerked his head in Ruth’s direction.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Oh, yeah—her particularly.” He turned back to the guards. “You two stay here, and, I’m sorry, I don’t know who you are,” he said to the bearded man who sidled up.

  “Bialzac, Sergei Bialzac. I am the head of the history of art department here at Callend. Shocking, positively shocking,” the man said.

  “Yes, well,” Ike muttered, “you’ve been inside, Dr. Bialzac?”

  “Yes, I have. It is awful. It is just dreadful. They have gone through there like vandals, like Huns. Even if you find the paintings, it will be months, perhaps years, before they can be displayed again,” Bialzac groaned.

  “How’s that?” Ike asked.

  “Look, I’ll show you, Sheriff,” said Bialzac, and indicated that they should enter the building.

  Ike paused at the door and noted the hole inscribed in its face. He inspected the magnet on the contact alarm and stared at the screen lying against the wall, the trough of water in the corner. He walked to the alarm panel and whistled at the lace-work of wires, clips, and jumpers that had been constructed. He peeled away the tape that held one of the palette knives in place and stared in admiration. Good work, Ike said to himself, better than good—damned near perfect.

  “Sheriff?” Bialzac ventured.

  “Coming, Doctor. I was just admiring a little artwork they left behind.” Ike shook his head, and turned to join Bialzac.

  Ike and Bialzac surveyed the wreckage on all four floors of the building. All but twenty or thirty paintings had been removed from the racks that held them vertically. Their progress was slow because they had to step over the hundreds of frames scattered all over the floor.

  “Tell me,” Ike said, “what’s the collection worth?”

  “Well, that’s hard to say, Sheriff. It’s insured for five hundred million dollars. That’s its appraised value—the amount they might get for it if Dillon decided to sell. If they don’t sell, they’re worthless.”

  “How’s that again? What do you mean, worthless?”

  “Well, Sheriff, this is a well-known collection. It has been cataloged, studied, and described by hundreds of scholars and collectors over the years. Everything in it is as well-known in art circles as La Giaconda, um, the Mona Lisa. It is, for all practical purposes, unsellable. No reputable art collector would buy any part of it. He would know right away where the item came from. I do not understand this at all.

  “There are some people, of course, who even knowing it was stolen, might buy a piece—rich collectors, Arabs, people like that, who would put the painting aside for ten or twenty years, then bring it out. But there aren’t many of those.” Bialzac paused, deep in thought.

  “There are pieces in the collection which are not well-known which Dillon bought later and which, while valuable, haven’t the sort of recognition the bulk of the collection has, but.…”

  “But what, Doctor?”

  “Well, they seemed to be the ones they left behind. They took the most important pieces, the least saleable. It’s strange.”

  Ike studied the little man and tried to read his thoughts. Then he said, “You wanted to show me something, Doctor.”

  “I beg your pardon, what?” Bialzac came out of his reverie.

  “You said before, outside, something like vandals, it would be months or years before the paintings could be displayed again when they are recovered,” Ike replied.

  “Oh yes.” Bialzac’s mood shifted again. He became agitated, angry once more. “Look here, Sheriff.” He picked up a dozen or so frames and discarded them. “You see, the pictures are held in place by clips or a retainer of some sort. To extract the paintings from the frames properly, they must be removed. But look here, and here, and here; they have just yanked the pictures out. They must have torn or damaged them. Scandalous, they had no right—they knew how important.…”

  Bialzac retreated into the professor’s cluttered world again.

  “No time, I suppose,” Ike said. “If they’d removed all the paintings like you’re supposed to, they’d still be here.”

  “But it’s monstrous, the work of thugs, people who know nothing about art, crazies,” Bialzac expostulated.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Ike said.

  “What do you mean, Sheriff?”

  “Well, the work on the alarms has a master’s touch. And they only took the good stuff. You said so yourself, they left the less valuable pieces. No, these people were professionals, and professionals never pull a job without knowing what they’re stealing.”

  “But the damage…” Bialzac said, concern in his eyes.

  “Oh, that. Well, that confirms your guess, Doctor. They do not care about the paintings as paintings. They have something else in mind for them. Now, if we only knew what.”

  They were back at the door. Ike turned to the little professor and extended his hand, which, after a brief hesitation, Bialzac shook.

  “Thank you for your help, Doctor. Would you do me a favor and join the others, and tell Dr. Harris I would like to meet with her in her office later, say, six o’clock. I’ll be tied up here until then.” Bialzac’s hand was dry.

  Ike watched him make his way over to the bench and speak to Ruth Harris. He was amused to see her back stiffen and smiled at the angry glare she flashed at him. If looks could kill, Ike thought. He looked at the door and let his eye run over its surface, down to the sill. He bent, looked again, and picked up the wafer-thin diaphragm. Very good, he thought, very good indeed.

  Police cars began to arrive. Ike made his assignments and told Billy to call the county.

  “We haven’t the time to do all of this, Billy. See if they will send out a crime unit to dust inside. You stay with them, look for things that might be useful. Start inside, and then do the outside. Take your time. I don’t want to miss anything. Whaite will join you when he gets done up at the college.”

  Ike got on the radio and was patched through to the state police frequency. Colonel Scarlett was as laconic as ever.

/>   “Can I do for you, Sheriff?”

  “I’ve had a chance to look around, Colonel. I think we’re looking for trailers, one tractor and two trailers. That means unless they’ve got another tractor somewhere, they’re hop-scotching the paintings out of the area, or they’re parked. If your people notice anything would you let us know?”

  “Will do, Sheriff. Anything else?”

  “Not right now, thanks. I’ll be in touch,” Ike said, and signed off.

  The afternoon submerged into the orderly confusion of police work. Ike moved through the ever-growing cadre of people arriving on the scene. He had cordoned off the area, but still had to deal with the media, local papers, a stringer from the New York Times, a television crew, and the editor of Callend Comments. He shooed away self-appointed assistants and people with theories from the college faculty and the town. He moved in and out of the bunker a dozen times. Billy joined him outside the building a few minutes before six.

  “Ike, I reckon we got one or two hours of good light left. You want me to get the floodlights?”

  Ike considered a moment and then said, “No, I guess not, Billy. We’ve lost so much time already. We’re better off being careful than quick. Wait until tomorrow if you have to. We can’t afford to miss anything. Tape this place off and put a couple of the boys on the line to keep folks out before you go.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if it means anything, but I found this piece of paper over by that tree there. Somebody tossed their cookies and this might of fell out of their pocket.”

  Ike scanned the scrap. The word Artscape had been scrawled at the top and there was a series of figures and what could be serial numbers in a neat column below.

  “Bag this and give it to Whaite.”

  Ike stretched and glanced around him. He was startled to see Ruth Harris still seated on the bench. She could not have been there all the time, or could she? He walked over to her.