“Back to Denise, if we may.”
“Certainly, Detective. I met Deni nearly twenty years ago, in Firenze. She was-”
“You were widowed at the time, Mr. Caxton?” Mercer asked.
“Widowed once, Mr. Wallace. My second wife was alive and quite well. Her mishap occurred several years thereafter. In any event, I had flown over to look at a Bernini sculpture that I wanted to bid on. It was at the gallery that I first saw Denise, and I was more infatuated with her than with the statue. That hadn’t happened to me in years.”
“And she was there to bid on the same piece for the Tate?” I ventured, having found that item of her biography on-line the previous night in an old magazine clipping about a museum opening.
Caxton smiled. “I should think you’d know better than to believe everything you read in the newspapers, young lady. Deni was just off her year as Miss Oklahoma, and a verydistant-second runner-up in the Miss America Pageant. You were probably too busy with your nose in your schoolbooks,” Caxton said, with a nod in my direction, “to be watching that year, but she was the kid from Idabel with great looks and no talent to speak of-traded in baton twirling in favor of reading a soliloquy from As You Like It. Not exactly a crowd pleaser. She took her ten-thousand-dollar scholarship prize and escaped. Worked her way over to Florence to study art, which she didn’t know the first thing about at the time. Figured if Andy Warhol could fool the world with what he was selling, she could catch on and find a niche.
“I decided to follow my grandfather’s route, Miss Cooper. What Denise lacked in breeding, she made up for in-shall we say?-élan. She was a marvelously quick study and I enjoyed teaching. All she needed from me was to create a provenance for her, no different than a clever forger would do for a fine painting.
“I gave Deni a vague and somewhat mysterious background-orphaned as a young child, with a trust fund. Raised abroad in a series of boarding schools. Moved her from the pensione she was living in to the Excelsior, where I was staying when I came to town. Had her tutored in French and Italian- she was adequate in the former and tolerable in the latter. Most of the men who met her were intrigued and forgave her the minor incongruities. She didn’t care much about what the women thought of her. Denise was never a contender for Miss Congeniality.”
“What did your second wife think of her, Mr. Caxton?” Mike clearly was fascinated by the circumstance of the thricewidowed husband.
“I’m not sure she ever knew about Deni, to tell the truth. She was riding in a cigarette speedboat when it flipped, killing her instantly. I had only known Deni a few years at that point. The whole arrangement was working perfectly for me. And yes, Mr. Chapman, there was an inquest when my wife died. Accidental death. I’m sure Maurizio, my assistant, can get you all the records that you need.”
“How long have you had the gallery in the Fuller Building?” Mercer wanted to bring this story up to the present.
“Deni and I moved back to New York twelve years ago. We bought this apartment so that she could open our gallery. For me, the satisfaction has always been in finding and collecting the great pieces-more than a century of Caxton taste that I can surround myself with in the privacy of my own homes. Not entirely selfish, mind you. We frequently exhibit portions of the holdings, whenever asked, and many of my mistakes have wound up permanently on the walls of museums all over America and most of Europe.
“But Denise also liked the game itself. It wasn’t enough to gift her with unique art or jewels, which worked very well at the beginning. She had come from nothing-her father was a soybean farmer-and she really needed to prove she was as smart as any of the rest of us out there. She liked the hustle of the art world. She adored being a tastemaker, if you will. But I suppose your research has revealed all of that.”
Now I was doubly sorry that I had suggested I knew anything about either of the Caxtons. “Not at all, Mr. Caxton. Forgive me, but I only tried to acquaint myself with information about Mrs. Caxton’s business when I learned that it was she who had been killed. It’s always helpful to me if I can get as close to the victim as possible-to try and understand why she might be a target for someone. That is, if her loved ones allow me that kind of access.”
“Anything you’d like, Miss Cooper. Perhaps it would help if we took a walk into Deni’s quarters, to give you an idea of how she lived. Would you like that?”
Chapman was on his feet before I could answer. Caxton moved to the double doors as Mike leaned in behind me and whispered, “Very smoothly done, blondie. Keep batting those eyelashes and you could be the fourth late Mrs. Lowell Caxton. A very temporary position, from the looks of it.”
As the doors slid apart I could see the back of a man carrying a black leather suitcase as he walked out of the entryway that led from the living room to the elevator. Mercer nudged Chapman. “There goes Kardashian with Simpson’s bloody clothes.”
“Mr. Caxton,” Chapman said, “I’d appreciate it if you could hold that gentleman before he leaves here with any property that we might need to look at.”
“Is it safe for me to assume, Detective, that you don’t have a warrant to search my luggage?”
Mike and Mercer were silent. Caxton continued. “That was Maurizio. He simply unpacked the bag I returned with this morning and is taking it down to the storage area in the basement of the building. Sorry to disappoint you.” We heard the heavy door swing closed.
He led us past the Picasso and pointed at three doors across the room. “That far exit goes to the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. Unless you think the butler did it, Mr. Chapman, that portion of the household needn’t take up your time. These other two are-rather, were-our separate apartments. Nothing new about that. Even when we were getting along very well, we always had distinct living spaces. Different lifestyles, different tastes in art.
“I didn’t approve of the drugs, and I didn’t much care for Deni’s current passion for modern painting-some of the very abstract, jarring works she’d developed an interest in recently.” We followed Caxton as he opened the door to Denise’s wing.
“You know, gentlemen, this may sound a bit peevish in light of the fact that I’m standing here with you while my wife is being fitted for a coffin, but if your department had taken my shooting a bit more seriously, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened to Deni.”
Mercer, Mike, and I couldn’t conceal our puzzlement as we exchanged looks.
“Are any of you with the Nineteenth Precinct? That’s the unit that’s handling the investigation,” Caxton explained.
“No, we’re not. Could you tell us what happened?”
Chapman was plainly annoyed that we had come here without such an important piece of information. “Just crossing Madison Avenue, six weeks ago, on my way home from the Whitney. Holding a Styrofoam coffee cup in my hand. A car driving past slowed down, and the man in the passenger seat pointed at me-it was happening so quickly that all I saw was his hand-then I heard the sound of a gunshot and felt a stinging ing on my scalp. I found myself sitting on the curb, people running over to help me. Never even dropped the coffee.”
Caxton bowed his head and parted his silver hair with his hands. “I’m sure you can still see the scar, like a seam across my scalp. At that moment I was quite sure I was dead. This must be what it’s like to die, I thought to myself. No pain at all. It took me a few seconds to realize, as the blood dripped onto my face, that I had been grazed by the bullet and not seriously injured at all. If someone had actually tried to kill me, they’d hired the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
“I trust you’ll be able to figure out whether Deni’s death had anything to do with that, won’t you?”
He pivoted away and walked on ahead of us to turn on the lights in the dim hallway. “The only thing I trust,” said Chapman, “is that some ass-kissing lieutenant in the Nineteenth was trying to make his numbers look better for the commissioner. When I call over for the case report on the assault on Lowell Caxton, I’ll probably find out that
they’re carrying the investigation as disorderly conduct instead of attempted murder. Heaven forbid you alarm the good citizens of the Upper East Side by suggesting a violent crime could happen here- they might confuse the place with Harlem.”
7
“Here’s another Degas,” Caxton said to me, stopping in front of a painting. “Perhaps you remember from your college days that after the Napoleonic wars, it was presumed of firstborn sons of a certain class that they would become lawyers. Edgar dutifully followed his father’s wishes and enrolled at the Faculté de Droit. Fortunately for the rest of the world-if not his parents-he dropped out in favor of doing something more creative than litigation after only a month.”
He walked on. “Cézanne spent almost three years at law school in Aix, replete with boredom. And Matisse actually clerked for a lawyer for quite a while, drafting briefs and keeping files. It was only when he was forced to stay at home with appendicitis that he was given his first paint set by his mother. A decade later, he changed the history of the art world with the birth of Fauvism-exuberant colors and wildly distorted shapes. Imagine our loss if any of these giants had become mired in the law. You don’t paint by any chance, do you, Miss Cooper?”
Lowell Caxton managed to summarize a bit of art history while making clear his disdain for the legal profession. I got the point.
So far, the hallway lined with Impressionist paintings was as breathtaking as any gallery in the finest museums. Caxton opened the last door, which had been Denise’s bedroom. The contrast was stunning.
“A bit self-involved, would you say?” he asked rather facetiously.
The room was like a shrine to its former occupant, with almost every painting in it a portrait of Denise. “Gifts from the artists, of course. Thankful for her ability to turn their talents into gold, in some instances. Quite like alchemy. The Warhol is the great irony, in that he started this whole odyssey for her, without his ever knowing it.”
Displayed above the headboard of the king-size bed, covered in an exquisite set of antique linens with countless throw pillows layered on top, were the four-colored Warhol images of a younger Denise Caxton. The youthful bride with a swanlike neck and beauty queen smile was deserving of a few portraits, I conceded, but this accumulation was a bit frightening.
The three of us circled the space, looking at signatures and taking in the variety of styles. I recognized some of the names-Richard Sussman, Emilio Gomes, and Aneas McKiever among them-but Caxton pointed out the rest of those I had never encountered. There were Deni Caxtons fully clothed and bejeweled, and there were Deni Caxtons completely nude and erotically posed. There were torsos without heads and limbs, and there were heads without body parts.
“How’d she let this one slip in?” Chapman asked. He pointed at a yellow canvas, three feet square, with a small pink rectangle in the upper right corner.
Caxton laughed. “That is Denise, Detective. According to Alain Levinsky. Even she had a sense of humor about it. She managed to sell about a dozen Levinsky ‘portraits,’ Mr. Chapman. One each to Bardot, Trump, and Ted Turner-can’t remember who sat for the others. A few rectangles, a few oblongs, a few squares. Et voilà, a portrait.”
“This is all like ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ if you ask me,” Chapman said.
“Precisely,” Caxton responded. “I couldn’t agree with you more. Denise mocked me for my traditional views-too representational, she used to argue, too old-fashioned. I wish P. T. Barnum had lived long enough to encounter this trend. Nowadays there are two or three suckers born every minute, if you ask me. He might have gone into partnership with Deni.”
Mercer was scouring the surfaces of the furniture-bedside tables, dresser top, lingerie chest-for any signs of notes or papers, names or phone numbers. But there was nothing loose and nothing casually laid about. Either Mrs. Caxton lived that neatly or Valerie had removed every jotting or message pad before we arrived.
“Would you-or the housekeeper-know whether any belongings are missing?” Mercer asked. “Jewelry, clothing, anything like-”
“I couldn’t begin to guess,” said Caxton. He stepped to the only other door in the room and pulled the handles back to reveal a walk-in closet, which was probably larger than half of the studio apartments in Manhattan. Clothes were assembled by category-dresses, slacks, suits, evening gowns-and then again by colors within those groupings. “The lesser jewels are kept in that safe at the rear. The more important things, from my mother and grand-mére, are all safeguarded in a vault. We’ll certainly check for you during the week.
“If you’ve seen enough here, we’ll go inside to Deni’s office.”
I wasn’t sure that I was ready to leave the boudoir, but we were given no choice, and the three of us dutifully followed Caxton, retracing our steps back up the corridor and into the next room.
Denise had constructed a thronelike encampment for herself at one end of this huge home office, centered around a fifteenth-century table that Lowell told us he had found in an Umbrian monastery. The table had become her desk and was ornamented only by a Fabergé clock. There were two chairs placed opposite Denise’s high-backed leather seat, and four more scattered around the room that matched that pair. Here the walls were decorated with paintings that were completely unfamiliar to me-all contemporary and none bearing signatures that I recognized.
Caxton walked behind the table and lowered himself into Denise’s chair, looking around the room as if for the first time from that perspective, and invited us to sit down and ask him whatever questions we wanted to pose about her.
“When do we reach the point at which you ask me who her enemies were, gentlemen?”
“We’re ready anytime you are. How long’s the list?” Chapman said.
“Depends on where you are in the art community, I would think. A disgruntled ‘artiste’ who thinks his dealer has taken too great a commission for his work. Just glance at the walls and see how many of those there might be. Then you’ve got the clients, who’ve found they’ve paid too much for a painting, on the dealer’s advice, that they neither like nor will be able to resell for anything remotely near the price they put out.
“There isn’t anyone in the business,” he went on, “who hasn’t been accused of selling a forged piece, by accident or design, over the years. And then there’s the current brouhaha in the auction houses, with the government charging sellers with rigging the bids to knock up the prices. On the surface, gentlemen, it’s a world of exquisite beauty and refinement. But it’s every bit as filthy and cutthroat as any other commercial enterprise, as soon as you get beneath the top layer of gouache.”
Mercer was leaning forward, balancing his pad on his knee while he reviewed subjects he wanted to ask Caxton about. “We’ll need a client list, then, as well as contact information for the painters she represented.”
“You’ll have to talk to her partner about that tomorrow at his office.”
“I thought you were her partner,” Mike said.
“As I mentioned, I set her up in the gallery in the Fuller Building originally. Without the Caxton name, I doubt she would have been able to sell the Mona Lisa, had it come on the market. I was the entrée to the uptown world in Manhattan- old money, large walls, deep pockets. But once she got involved in the New York scene, she had her own separate business-a thriving one at that-with a silent partner who mirrored her taste much more directly. Perhaps you’ve heard of him-Bryan Daughtry? They called their business Galleria Caxton Due.”
Mercer and I certainly knew Daughtry’s name. He had been a suspect in a very bizarre murder case in a neighboring county-beyond our jurisdiction but right up our alley. Chapman went for the bait. “Dead girl in the leather mask? That Daughtry?”
“Indeed, Mr. Chapman. That’s why I was so grateful that he was a silent partner. The scandal didn’t alarm Deni at all. Might even have helped, with her type of clientele. But none of the stigma ever stuck on Bryan. I haven’t spoken with him yet today, but he knows all the players i
n their professional life.”
“Does he have any part of your Fifty-seventh Street business?” I asked.
“Not a dime. Not a speck of paint.”
“Where was their operation? SoHo?”
“You’re not keeping up with the trends, Detective Wallace. SoHo is dead. It’s a commercial mall these days, not a creative zone any longer.”
The area south of Houston Street and north of Canal had been claimed by the avant-garde art community in the sixties and seventies. Abandoned lofts and warehouses, uninhabitable and overrun with rodents, had been renovated, populated, and gentrified by the struggling artists who were unable to afford midtown rents and needed the cavernous space to house their oversized canvases. The old meat district known as Washington Market became chic with its new infusion of hip locals and its redesignation as “Tribeca,” the triangle below Canal. By the late eighties, galleries there were being displaced by designer boutiques, chain store branches, and bed-and-bath shops with their ubiquitous supply of votive candles.
Caxton described the exodus. “In the mid-nineties, Paula Cooper moved her business up to Chelsea, the west twenties between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Have you been over there lately?”
“You won’t be asking Alex questions like that after you get to know her a little better, Mr. Caxton,” Chapman said. “She doesn’t eat, shop, or sleep outside of her zip code. Makes her skin crawl soon as you say the words ‘West Side,’ doesn’t it, Coop?”
“We have a lot in common,” Caxton replied, smiling back at me. “Paula Cooper-no relation, I take it?”
“No, I know her only by reputation.” And because my father had bought some paintings from her, I thought to myself, remembering a Jennifer Bartlett I particularly loved.
“Well,” he continued, “she’s the real class of this business. And its bellwether. I don’t actually know the reason she moved, but it’s a safe guess to say that it’s because of what happened in SoHo. This district in Chelsea was full of enormous warehouses. Fifty years ago, when the ocean liners docked on the piers all along the Hudson and connected to the railways there, it was a commercial hub. Lately, the warehouses have been used for auto repair shops and taxi dispatch centers-vast and utilitarian, but not terribly attractive.
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