The Big Score

by Kilian, Michael;

  Matthias had a few hours remaining before he would have to pick up Sally for dinner at the Poes’. After dressing, he wandered into the upstairs room he had once used as a sort of studio. It was much given over to his brother’s work now, and for the storage of a few pieces of accumulated rummage, including a somewhat chipped and shabby wooden Indian he had bought long ago at some antique store in Wisconsin.

  In the corner of the room, propped up on a table, was a painting he had started years before and never fully completed, a sailboat coursing into the wind, close-hauled in full heel with a curve of swell and spray in the foreground. It was badly flawed, though not in a technical sense. The water was deftly realistic. The hull gleamed brightly. The sails billowed perfectly with the wind. It was very pretty.

  But it was idle, without point. No more than a handsome decoration for some suburban family room or beach house. Unlike Winslow Homer’s Breezing Up, it conveyed no sense of the power of the sea, of the quickness of life in a sailor’s hands in a small boat in high wind.

  The doorbell rang downstairs. Matthias guessed it might be Sally, or his sister, stopping by on her way home from a visit downtown.

  Instead, he found a rather huge, bearded, bespectacled man in an ill-fitting suit. He carried a cheap, metallic briefcase.

  Matthias was not interested in life insurance, home improvement, or a new religious faith. He resented people who earned their living making intrusions.

  “Mr. Curland? Christian Curland?”

  “He’s not home. And I’m afraid we don’t accept door-to-door solicitations.”

  “I’m not selling anything, sir, or seeking donations. I’m with the police.” The man took out a badge in a leather case. “The Grand Pier, Michigan, police. I’m Chief Rawlings. Zane Rawlings.”

  He had the habit of blinking, as if perpetually uncertain.

  “Yes, well, I’m Christian’s brother. There’s not been an accident or something, has there? He just left here.”

  “No, not that I know of. It’s about a painting. The Art Institute referred me to you. I mean, to your museum. I went out there, but it’s all closed up.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid so. Won’t you come in, Chief Rawlings.”

  Matthias accepted the man into the vestibule, but no farther.

  “We had an incident out my way this weekend,” Zany said. He paused. As with the woman at the Art Institute, he was reluctant to broach the subject of murder, at least immediately. He wanted cooperation and recollection, not shock, or panic. He wished he had learned more about handling homicide cases—in his long-ago three weeks in that division.

  “A boat washed up on our breakwater. It had been in, well, a pretty bad accident. We found a painting aboard. The Art Institute said it might belong to you, or your museum. They had a sort of catalog there that showed it had been bought by your museum in 1933.”

  Matthias smiled. “That’s a bit before I was born. And I’ve been living out of the country for the last few years. I’m not sure I can help you.”

  “Well, I’ve got it right here. Would you mind taking a look at it for me?”

  Matthias led the bearded policemen into the house’s long dining room. Bay windows on the far end filled it with light, but he turned on an overhead electric chandelier as well. Zany set the briefcase on the table, then hesitated, noticing a large painting of a full-length nude on the wall opposite, above the sideboard.

  “My wife would never let me have something like in the dining room, or anywhere in the house.”

  “My brother’s a bachelor. Also an artist. He lives here most of the time. I’m just visiting, more or less.”

  “Did he paint that?”

  “No. I did.”

  Zany opened the briefcase and carefully unrolled the picture, pressing down on two corners to keep it opened flat. Matthias studied it with some concern.

  “Is that blood on there?”

  “I’m afraid so. Yes.”

  “I can tell you it’s by Ernst Kirchner.”

  “That’s what the lady at the Art Institute said.”

  “It’s hard to say if it could be one of ours. There are more than three hundred paintings in the collection, and this one looks pretty obscure. Nothing famous. There’s a catalog here in the house, but it’s only for the pictures on display. We display no modernist art. All of that’s kept in a vault. I’d have to go out there and check the files.”

  “Could you, sir? It would be very helpful. You could have been burgled.”

  “I doubt that very much. The place is like the Bastille.” Matthias looked at his watch. “This isn’t very convenient.”

  “It’s not convenient for me, either, sir. I drove a long way out here.”

  “All right. Let’s take a look.”

  Zany was a little surprised by Matthias’s unique old Rolls-Royce, and by his willingness to park it in the seedy-looking street outside the museum. It was a big stone mansion, darkened with age and grime. There were thick, cast-iron grates over all the windows, which were shuttered. Curland opened three locks to get inside, and then disconnected a burglar alarm in the foyer before proceeding any further. It would take an army commando team to break into this place.

  Matthias led Zany into an office off the main exhibition chamber, snapping on a light switch. Unlike every other office Zany had ever been in, it contained no fluorescent fixtures, but three green-shaded desk lamps came on. There were two desks, both old and huge. The third lamp was on a long table, stacked with dusty-looking art books. A row of file cabinets lined the wall nearest the door.

  “I really doubt we have it,” Matthias said, going to a cabinet in the middle and stooping to open a drawer. He thumbed through the backs of the thick notebooks it contained. “My grandfather didn’t like Kirchner, not in the end. Although he once tried to buy his painting Street, Berlin, before the Museum of Modern Art got hold of it.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would he want to buy something he didn’t like? As an investment?”

  “Oh, no. My grandfather despised people who did that, who treated art as a form of stock shares. He just couldn’t make up his mind about modern art. He had a long debate with himself about it. He was caught up in the emotionalism of modernism. Some of the paintings he bought absolutely terrified him, but they also fascinated him. In the end, he decided they expressed too much truth, that truth was really all about death. He decided art should be an antidote to truth. He was fairly old by then. He would never willingly destroy a work of art. I think he valued art more than he did a lot of human beings, but he took all his modernist things—anything that wasn’t somehow warm and beautiful—and locked them all away in the vault downstairs. I’m not sure what all is in there. I don’t think I’ve been in it more than two dozen times in my entire life.”

  The policeman was looking at him with wary puzzlement. “How about the Kirchner painting?” he said finally.

  “Yes, excuse me.” Matthias took a huge, dusty, loose-leaf ring notebook from the file drawer and set it on the nearest desk, flipping through its pages quickly. Suddenly he stopped and stood frozen.

  “I’m quite surprised,” he said, laying a finger by a small photograph glued to the page. “There it is. Das Rot Turm. The Red Tower. Ernst Kirchner, 1913. It’s in the vault. At least, it’s supposed to be. You say you found your picture in a boat, after an accident?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand how that it could be. You’re from Grand Pier, Michigan?”

  “‘Have a grand time in Grand Pier.’ That’s what the highway sign says.”

  “But Mr. Rawlings. You might not believe this, but no one has ever stolen anything from this museum. It’s never been broken into, the neighborhood notwithstanding. We’ve had problems with vandalism. Graffiti and the like. But no burglaries.”

  “Well, I can believe that. But here’s the painting. Right in my hands.”

  Matthias stood up straight, his hand at his chin, his eyes on the canvas Zany was holdin
g.

  “I wonder if it could be a copy,” he said.

  “You mean a forgery?”

  “No, a copy. People copy paintings all the time. Especially art students. I just wonder. Kirchner was fairly popular in some avant garde circles. But it couldn’t have been copied here. It’s one of the very strict provisions of my grandfather’s will. No one was to be allowed to copy any of the paintings in the collection. And no photographs, except for those he had taken for our records. This copy would have had to have been done before he acquired it. Unless, of course, it’s the original.”

  “Mr. Curland. Just a suggestion. Why don’t we go down to your vault and look?”

  “All right. I’m as curious as you are.”

  It took Matthias a long time to root out the combination to the vault’s outer doors from the files, and an even longer time to make it work, but at last the lock’s tumblers fell into place. He pulled open one of the doors, and they were greeted by a cool, moist, musty rush of air. Curland clicked on a light, and Zany saw that they were in a long storeroom, crowded with metal racks that were filled with paintings, each in a flat, narrow box. There were numbers on the boxes’ corners and on the racks’ frames beneath each painting. Matthias moved quickly to where the Kirchner work should be.

  The slot was filled. There was a narrow box in the slot.

  “Something’s there,” Matthias said.

  “Can we take it out and look at it?” Zany asked.

  “I rather hate to do it, but I guess we must.”

  There was a workroom just outside the vault. Matthias set the box on a bench, located a small pry bar, and began lifting the edges of the wood all around the perimeter. When it was sufficiently free, he gave it a tug and lifted. The painting inside was covered with some kind of treated cloth. Gently he lifted the picture out.

  There was the street, the people in evening clothes, the woman in the red coat, the red tower in the distance.

  “Das Rot Turm,” Matthias said.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Zany. “Two of them.”

  “Well?”

  “I guess maybe you’re right. Maybe this is a copy.” He looked at the canvas in his hands. What with the watermarks, bloodstains, and holes, it did seem a little cheap and shoddy. “I just wonder how it turned up in a boat on my breakwater.”

  “Paintings, copies—all sorts of things—turn up in the strangest places,” Matthias said. “There’s a folio of Shakespeare’s in the Folger Library in Washington that they found in a barn in Sweden wrapped up in an old nineteenth-century lottery ticket.” He picked up the picture from the boat, gently fingering the back of the canvas. “This is a little surprising, however. It’s hard to tell with the condition it’s in, but the canvas doesn’t seem very old. Of course, someone might have sneaked a photograph of it. That happens all the time. But the original’s been here in this vault for years. Very strange.”

  “Strange as hell.”

  “It was in an accident, you say?”

  Zany hesitated. “Involving gunshots. More like murder.”

  “Murder?”

  “Yes. A young woman.”

  “In Michigan?”

  It occurred to Zany he ought to show the man a photograph of the victim—just in case, just on a hunch. But he had given the two copies he’d brought with him to the Chicago police.

  “We’re not really sure where it happened. The boat turned up at our harbor. It was pretty bloody.”

  “Sounds awful. I think I’d better put this back. My grandfather’s will also stipulated that the vault paintings weren’t to be disturbed. We try not to come in here too often.”

  Zany felt a little embarrassed, and bewildered. He thought he’d been onto a major art theft, but now he was back on square zero. He needed to think.

  “Who was murdered?” Matthias asked, rewrapping the painting.

  “We haven’t identified the body yet. It was a woman. She was all alone on the boat. The painting was under her body.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yeah. Young, late twenties, early thirties. Nice looking. You know someone like that? Somebody who’s been missing?”

  Matthias frowned. “Not offhand. This was in Grand Pier? You hear about these things in the Caribbean. But Lake Michigan?”

  “The whole world’s getting pretty dangerous.”

  Curland completed his work and went back into the vault. “Can I drop you anywhere?” he said, after he’d come out again and was closing the big doors. “I’m running quite late. But if it’s nearby.”

  “Thank you. I’m at that Days Inn near the lake.”

  Peter Poe was still getting dressed for dinner when Matthias and Sally arrived at his Michigan Avenue penthouse. His wife, Diandra, received their guests in his place, explaining her husband had been over in Michigan City on business and had been delayed by a thunderstorm over Gary flying back in his helicopter. At first, Matthias thought she might be trying to impress them—he had met very few people in his life who flew about in their own helicopters—but she spoke so matter-of-factly and changed the subject so quickly that he decided she was simply relating an occurrence that routinely happened. Poe’s wealth was so conspicuous he didn’t need his wife to elaborate on it. Anyone who looked at the Chicago skyline was aware of Peter Poe’s presence in the city.

  In contrast to Sally’s traditional little black cocktail dress, Diandra Poe wore a summery, floor-length gown of midnight blue, with a simple white top that left her shoulders bare. Matthias had no idea who the designer might be, but it was obviously extremely expensive. For their first few minutes there, Sally’s eyes scarcely left it. Matthias’s eyes, too, when Mrs. Poe walked. She moved more gracefully than any woman he had ever seen other than on a ballet stage. It had long perplexed Matthias that no artist had ever adequately captured the beauty of motion; damn few film directors, either. They were concerned with photographic composition, with framed scenes, not movement.

  He was about to comment on this, but caught himself. Mrs. Poe might not appreciate a discussion of her walk.

  They followed her through an enormous, highly contemporary living room and out to a long terrace with a view of the avenue and, over the tops of other buildings, the lake. It had turned turquoise in the evening light, the color of Poe’s eyes. After drinks were ordered, Mrs. Poe lingered at the railing, gazing out over it like a pleased child.

  “You design buildings, Mr. Curland,” she said, turning to him after a moment. “What do you think of this one?”

  He worded his reply carefully, seeking a useful euphemism. When fellow artists were unimpressed with his paintings, which was often, they would say things like “Matthias, it’s your best work yet.”

  “It’s very powerful,” he said, “but it suffers from its companions.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It has too many neighbors. There are too many buildings on Michigan Avenue. Too many near the lake. A tall, tough building like this should really stand by itself, on its own. Like Lake Point Tower over there.”

  “Oh, yes. I love that building. I love to watch the light move on it around sundown.”

  “It’s based on a design by Mies van der Rohe, one he did back in 1921, if you can believe it. It was pure fantasy then. They didn’t have the construction materials or the air conditioning and high-speed elevators a structure like that requires. They had to wait until after World War Two for all that to be invented. By then Mies was designing his famous glass boxes. Lake Point Tower was the work of some of his young protegés. The only thing wrong with it is that it’s too close to the lake. It’s the only building they’ve allowed east of Lake Shore Drive. I’ve always been afraid developers would try to use it as a precedent to put their own buildings on the shoreline, like Miami Beach. The open waterfront is what makes Chicago unique. It’s sacred ground. If they allowed development on it, the city would just be another Milwaukee, or Cleveland.”

  “I’m glad Peter didn’t buy it. He’d probably put a big r
ed ‘P’ on the side.”

  “Well, I love your husband’s building, Diandra,” Sally said. “Everyone does. At Crickett’s last week, the girls were talking about how much it’s added to Michigan Avenue. It’s our very own Trump Tower.”

  Matthias winced, worrying how Mrs. Poe would react to Sally’s gaffe. To an architect like Matthias, to anyone with taste and an eye for line and beauty, Trump Tower was a gleaming, self-indulgent, egomaniacal grotesque. Sally knew that. Was she indulging in a little sniping? How well did he know Sally Phillips, beyond the altered images of reverie and nostalgia? What had she become?

  Mrs. Poe was restrained: a flicker of a downward glance followed by the distraction of movement, as she went from the railing to a small chaise longue, not sitting so much as arranging herself on it, as if for a photograph. Either she admired the former billionaire’s gleaming gaucherie on New York’s Fifth Avenue or she disliked her husband’s building just as much, and thought Sally’s compliment ironic. Her real feelings would remain a mystery, like so much about her.

  Poe arrived a few minutes later. To Matthias’s surprise, he was not wearing a suit but was dressed much as Christian had been that afternoon, only the blue blazer he wore with his perfectly pressed gray flannels was double-breasted and emblazoned with a gold crest on the pocket that included a crimson “P.” He wore an open-collared silk shirt and large gold-and-diamond cufflinks that clashed with rather than complemented his huge gold watch.

  “Sorry to be so late,” he said, after greetings had been exchanged. “Busy, busy day.” He looked to his watch with great display. “But we still have time for a tour.”

  Sally seemed delighted. Mrs. Poe, unlike most hostesses with something to show off, seemed unenthused. As Poe led his two guests inside, she remained on her chaise longue.