The Big Score

by Kilian, Michael;

  “Of course. But there are already too many buildings along the lake, including the one I put there. Just look at them all. They’re a wall. If it wasn’t for the park and the open shoreline, it would be horrible. Like Manhattan. No, your husband’s building needs to be at Cabrini Green. It has to be by itself. It makes no sense, otherwise. It shouldn’t be built, otherwise.”

  “You’d like to rearrange this city to suit yourself, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’d like to rearrange all cities.”

  “Peter thinks like that.”

  “With me, it’s only fantasy. I’m not like your husband, Mrs. Poe.”

  “I know. I noticed that right off.”

  She only picked at her food, though she had a second glass of wine. He wasn’t very hungry, either. He hadn’t been since the policeman had brought the news about Jill.

  “Would you like coffee, Mr. Curland? Or should we go now? I really want to see your museum. And I’d like to get out of here. I spend too much time in this place.”

  Something about her face had changed. The light-blue eyes were very somber.

  “You’re staring at me, Mr. Curland.”

  “Sorry.” He rose and went to pull back her chair.

  Matthias turned on all of the lights in the museum’s main exhibition area, annoyed that so many of the fixtures needed new bulbs. Only a few of the paintings were left in shadow. He didn’t suppose she wanted to study them all.

  She walked on ahead of him. Again, he found himself transfixed by the beauty of her motion—her perfect poise and control and grace.

  She stopped and turned, almost a dancer’s turn.

  “All these magnificent paintings,” she said, “in this dark old building.”

  “It is a pity. The neighborhood was quite different when he acquired this place.”

  “Does anyone come to see them?”

  “Not many. The ambience in this area is a little off-putting.”

  “Why don’t you move the collection downtown?”

  “Can’t. My grandfather’s will. Everything stays where it is. Exactly.”

  She moved on, glancing from painting to painting. “How much are all these worth?”

  She reminded Matthias of her husband with that.

  “It’s hard to say,” he said. “Someone made an estimate once, before I left Chicago. It could be between thirty and forty million—those that are on exhibition. The ones in the vault downstairs, perhaps half that much.”

  Diandra smiled. “You may be richer than my husband.”

  “He’s a billionaire.”

  “Those are assets. I think he may have liabilities to match. But don’t ever let him know I told you that. I’m not supposed to know about his finances.”

  Matthias shrugged. “The paintings don’t belong to me, or any of us. They’re the property of the family foundation. And they’re art, not money. My grandfather wanted us to make our own way in life—not live off the genius and talent of others. Some of these painters died penniless.”

  “Your grandfather didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “Then he could afford noble ideas like that.”

  “Yes, he could.”

  She looked away. “My father died broke,” she said. “He was a foreman in an auto plant. He made good money, for a time. Enough to send my brother and me to college—a couple years for me, anyway. But there were layoffs and shutdowns and closings and he lost his job. He got another as a foreman for a parts manufacturer. One of those nonunion shops that sprang up when the auto industry began jobbing everything out. Most of the people there worked for little more than the minimum wage. There were no benefits, no health insurance. One woman worked a metal press. You know, you put a blank sheet of steel in, the press comes down, the press goes back up again, and you reach in and take out the stamped part. She did that all day, only once the press came down when it wasn’t supposed to and cut off her hands. She had no money to pay for anything. There was no medical insurance, nothing. He decided he couldn’t work at such a place, so he quit. His next job was in the service department of some car dealer—for about a third of what he’d been making at the auto plant.”

  She hesitated, taking in a deep breath. He sensed she hadn’t meant to launch into this resentful diatribe.

  “That was a noble thing to do, wasn’t it?” she said. “Only he couldn’t afford it.”

  “Your father sounds like a very honorable man.”

  “He was very Old Country. Polish. I’m part German and Polish, mostly Polish. He was from Krakow. He came here as a small boy. With his parents. His father was a factory worker.”

  She stepped close to one of the paintings.

  “‘Hans von Aachen,’” she said, studying the name plate. “I never heard of him.” She had pronounced the name perfectly.

  “He was a sixteenth-century court painter for the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph the Second—the one whom some historians blame for the Thirty Years’ War.”

  “I don’t know about that, either.”

  “You’re Catholic?”

  “More or less.”

  “I’m Protestant. It was between us. Thousands and thousands were killed. A lot of them burned at the stake.”

  “Who is that naked woman? And why is she holding that sword? Did she stab that man lying on the ground?”

  “Most of von Aachen’s paintings were allegorical. She represents Truth, or Justice. Maybe Abundance. I’ve forgotten which. In any event, she symbolizes the empire. The wounded figure is discord. Rudolph the Second didn’t like the war he helped cause. The painting was done on copper sheeting. That’s why it’s so jewellike, so well preserved.”

  “I think she must be Abundance. She’s certainly abundant around the hips.”

  “Some think that was the womanly ideal of the time. Food was often scarce, so fatness was admired. People didn’t live very long back then, didn’t worry about health. I don’t think they knew about health. You would have been quite an anomoly, for an aristocrat.”

  She gave him a smile with some slyness to it. “Do you think of me as an aristocrat, Mr. Curland?”

  “In the best sense of the term, yes.”

  “Then I’m flattered.”

  “Your husband suggested I might paint you.”

  “I know. He told me.”

  “I wasn’t sure he was serious.” Matthias felt embarrassed, but completed his thought. “He said something about, well, a nude.”

  “I know.” She said nothing more, moving on to the next painting.

  They went through the three main exhibition rooms, her interest seeming to diminish with each.

  “They’re very pretty,” she said, “but I think I prefer modern art.”

  “The twentieth-century works are all downstairs in the vault. We really shouldn’t go down there.”

  “I trust you, Mr. Curland.”

  He flushed. “We’re not supposed to go in there, unless there’s a compelling reason, foundation business. But I broke the rule myself, yesterday.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Matthias hesitated. “Well, why not? Just for a few minutes.”

  She kept several paces behind him as they descended the stairs, remaining in the doorway until he had turned on all the lights.

  “It’s like I imagine Fort Knox,” she said.

  “Not quite, but the vault walls are pretty impregnable—and absolutely fireproof. Is there any particular artist you’d like to see? We have a Kandinsky.”

  “Just something modern.” She stepped up behind him as he opened the vault door.

  “I’m afraid the 1930s are as modern as we get.” He turned on the lights within the vault. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  He glanced about the storage shelves, then pulled out a box. With some difficulty, he released its fastenings. A moment later he pulled forth a hideous painting. It showed a wild-eyed man crawling across a hellish, dark landscape. Half his face was in blood. Looking closer, she saw barbed w
ire, and a gun. The man seemed to be screaming.

  “I’m sorry,” Matthias said. “I seem to have picked an Otto Dix.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “He was one of the ‘degenerates,’ what the Nazis called degenerates—artists they objected to because they were decadent or unpatriotic or Jewish, or because they glorified forbidden things like American culture, which Hitler thought too influenced by the Negro. Dix was considered unpatriotic. This is from his series Der Krieg—The War—World War One. As you can see, he didn’t think much of it. Hitler thought it the most glorious time of his life. He liked to see it depicted in heroic, Wagnerian paintings.” Matthias recovered the work with its protective cloth. “In 1937 the Nazis ordered a ban on ‘degenerate art.’ They burned some of it and confiscated the rest. They even staged an exhibition of it in Munich—‘Entartete Kunst,’ ‘Degenerate Art,’ to show the faithful how disgusting it was. Actually, I think Goering, who was quite a collector, kept some of it—pieces he liked.”

  Matthias closed up the box. Diandra was staring at him.

  “Most of the artists, of course, fled the country, taking a lot of their stuff with them,” he said. “Ernst Kirchner, one of my favorites, went to Switzerland. He couldn’t take being called a degenerate and committed suicide. My grandfather was very troubled by all this. He hated the Nazis and bought up as many of these things as he could. We have quite a few pieces. I’m very proud to have them. But it’s ironic. They’re all locked up down here, and have to stay here, because of my grandfather’s will. We might as well have left with them with the Nazis.”

  “You’d put something like that on display?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s truth, isn’t it?”

  He shouldered the packing case up into its place on a shelf, then turned to face her again. She was standing very close.

  “I want to kiss you, Mr. Curland.”

  He was unable to move. This was something he realized he’d wanted to do since he first met her. But there was Sally. And there was Peter Poe. This was trouble—madness.

  “Don’t misunderstand,” she said, her face gliding closer.

  He tried thinking of Sally, of how much she represented his old life restored, but it was no good. Diandra’s eyes closed. Their lips came together, softly, gently. His hand went to her back, but he did not pull her close.

  She stepped back, looking at him with great seriousness.

  “This is my way of embracing all this art, of thanking your grandfather for saving it. Does that sound crazy?”

  “A little.”

  “Sometimes I get that way, Mr. Curland.” She turned and went upstairs. She was waiting for him in the entrance foyer by the time he had closed up the vault and rejoined her.

  “Don’t tell my husband,” she said.

  “Of course not.”

  She smiled politely.

  He switched off all the lights.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Curland,” she said.

  “I wish you’d call me Matthias. You did when we were at your place for dinner.”

  “Peter likes me to do that, call people by their first names. But it makes me feel a little uncomfortable.” Her eyes held his for a moment. “I guess I don’t feel so uncomfortable with you anymore—Matthias.”

  They drove back toward the lakefront along North Avenue, past small brick buildings with stores and bars on the ground floor and dark-windowed apartments above. The high-rises along the lake to the east seemed to beckon, like the towers of some distant, quite different city. But the real Chicago was here in these rough and gritty streets that stretched for miles and miles in every direction except east. Poe was in the business of destroying these old neighborhoods, replacing their raw, rough burly toughness with what in comparison was effete, ostentatious, and artificial. Matthias’s great-grandfather had helped create some of these neighborhoods. If Poe built his new tower, they might disappear. And Matthias was helping him.

  Diandra—he called her that now—was mostly silent on the drive back. Passing through the Gold Coast, they turned south onto the Inner Drive. At the next traffic light, she said something about finding Sally Phillips a very nice person. Matthias muttered something in response, but the conversation lapsed again until they reached the Michigan Avenue entrance to Poe Place.

  “That was wonderful,” she said. “I’d like to do it again.”

  “Anytime.”

  Diandra got out, closed the door, then leaned against it. “I think it may be some time before you hear from Peter, about that building.”

  “That’s his prerogative.”

  “Would you like the answer to be yes?”

  “I guess I would.”

  “Just make sure he learns how to sail.” Another smile. “And make sure his boat wins that race.”

  Zany felt like a yo-yo, yanked on a string from one side of Lake Michigan to the other. He was now on the Chicago Skyway, thumping along past the old Indiana steel plants on his way back to the Michigan shore, wondering when he was going to be yanked back to Chicago again.

  He’d identified his stolen property for Baldessari, and signed a statement reiterating that it had been taken from his hotel room in his absence and that he had never met or had any previous knowledge of the slain hooker who’d ended up with his possessions. A few of his former brother officers gave him some winks and a ribald hard time about that, but it didn’t seem likely the Chicago P.D. was going to bother him about the matter any further. In fact, Baldessari didn’t seem interested at all in the odd coincidence that his things were found in the woman’s apartment. All that mattered to Frank was O’Rourke’s business card, which he treated like some rare, priceless jewel—a ticket back to the peace and quiet of routine cases.

  Zany had stopped once again at the Curland house on Schiller Street—as he half expected, finding no one home. He went up to Poe’s business office, only to be told Poe was once more out of town.

  A huge, chuffing semi caused him to brake sharply to avoid its swinging rear end as it pulled into his lane after passing him, a cloud of diesel smoke trailing in its wake. A sign overhead informed him he was entering Indiana. Poe’s “out-of-town” destination could be nothing more than his casino up ahead in Michigan City.

  He decided he’d stop on the odd chance Poe was there. As he thought upon it, a visit to the gambling palace might even be more productive if Poe wasn’t. If Christian Curland had been out there before his rendezvous with Sally Phillips, Zany wanted to hear it from roulette croupiers and blackjack dealers and cocktail waitresses.

  He got as far as the daytime pit boss. A squat, dark-haired, perspiring fat man in a mod double-breasted suit, he fingered Zany’s police I.D. carefully. Zany had no more jurisdiction here than he did in Chicago, but the man raised no complaint about that.

  “Sorry,” he said, handing back Zany’s I.D. “I wasn’t working that shift that night.”

  “Is there anyone around who was?”

  The man shrugged. “You’ll have to ask them.” He drifted away without another word.

  Zany tried a couple of idle dice dealers and a cocktail waitress. She said she knew Christian Curland but wasn’t on duty the night Zany mentioned. He moved on to a bartender, with the same result.

  He ordered a beer, wondering what to do next. He had taken all of two sips when the pit boss reappeared at his side.

  “Mr. Poe would like to speak to you,” he said. “Come with me.”

  Zany took a large gulp of the beer then got up off his stool. “Come with me ‘please.’”

  “Yeah. Please.”

  The man led him back to the main lobby and then to a bank of elevators at the rear. They proceeded up to the top floor and an office suite as spacious as the one Poe had back in Chicago. The secretaries there studiously ignored him.

  Poe, to Zany’s surprise, greeted him at the door to the immense chamber that was his private office, shaking his hand and showing him to a long leather couch that faced a huge sweep of Lake Mi
chigan out the wide, floor-to-ceiling window. One could probably see the lights of Chicago from it at night. Poe had no desk, but there was a long, glass-topped table at the far end of the room with two telephones and some papers on it. There were several modernistic paintings on the wall, but none remotely resembling the one that had turned up in the sailboat with the dead girl. A fireplace along one of the walls had some real logs with real flames curling around them, even though the temperature outside was in the eighties. Zany thought they only had offices like this in Hollywood.

  “It’s nice of you to drop by, Chief Rawlings,” Poe said, seating himself carefully in an adjoining chair. “I meant to get back to you, but you know how it is—busy, busy, busy. I never seem to have a minute to myself.”

  “I’m investigating a homicide, as I told your people.”

  “So you did. I guess it’s been pretty busy for you guys these days, too. Which homicide are you looking into? Something out here?”

  “A Chicago girl. She turned up in my town up the shore, in a sailboat. It was in the papers.”

  “Oh, yeah. She worked for the Train gallery. I do some business with them. Nice girl, I guess. A real shame.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “May have met her. I meet a million people. Usually I don’t go into the Train gallery, though. Usually he comes to me. I was away that night, the night of the murder. Up with my wife at my place at Lake Geneva.”

  “That’s not why I’m here, Mr. Poe. I’m checking on a customer of yours, Christian Curland. The dead girl used to work for him. He says he was here for part of that night.”

  “Chris Curland. Nice guy. A regular customer. I wish he wasn’t. He’s been on a hell of a lucky streak.”

  “Was he here?”

  “If he says so, I’m sure he was. Like I say, I was up in Wisconsin. But let me call in somebody who was here.” He got to his feet, as nimbly as an athlete coming off the bench, and went to a phone console, depressing a button.

  “Have Mr. Mann come in here,” he said. “And Miss Bellini, too.”

  Poe remained standing where he was. In a moment, a trim, well-dressed, mean-faced man entered, looking grimly unhappy, followed closely by the best-looking woman Zany had seen all day, if not all year. The man was dressed in the same kind of suit as the pit boss, but was much taller and handsomer, with a lean, muscular face. He had overlong, black curly hair that might have been a toupee.