Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  Agent Farley Marsh was very familiar with the man sitting across the table in front of him. Dudley (The Dude) Sysco was well-known to every FBI agent in the Chicago office. Sysco was not a very accomplished crook but managed to make a living by working both sides of the street—doing low-level jobs for the syndicate and acting as a paid informant of the bureau. When the fingerprint of the Chicago hood showed up on the handle of the wheelchair of a victim of an abduction in Nashville, the police there sought help from the FBI in following through on the clue. Marsh immediately summoned Sysco to the office, installed him in an interrogation room, kept him waiting for an inordinately long period of time per protocol, and set about extracting information. This was not too difficult since the rat was bought and paid for, but the information was still often incomplete and usually more expensive than its quality warranted. The Dude rarely earned his keep in either of his chosen vocations.

  However, on this occasion, the Dude acted as though he had the goods and appeared to deliver them promptly.

  “Guy’s name is Wilton Argent, if you can believe it,” Sysco said. “Runs the cocaine concession for the Nashville crowd. He would be the local guy if you wanted to set something like this up. He has the necessary connections to do stuff like that, you know, local gofers to make arrangements. Argent’s not really big time, but he likes to keep connections with the big boys. Makes him feel more important than he is, I’m guessing.”

  “OK, yeah, we know about Mr. Argent, Dudley,” agent Marsh responded. “What I want to know is what your fingerprint was doing on the wheelchair of the abductee. What was your role in the caper, and who else was involved?”

  “Whoa, now Farley,” Sysco said. “You’re not busting me on a kidnapping charge. I was in Nashville, OK. But my people sent me there just to intimidate the ex-detective, scare him off the notion that the old artist was murdered. That’s what I did. I stalked him for a few days. I approached him on the street one day, grabbed the handles of his chair, and acted tough. That’s it. That could be when I left the fingerprint. If I had been involved in the abduction, surely I would have worn gloves or wiped everything down.”

  “I don’t really believe you. We both know that you are often less than meticulous with your dirty work. But assuming you are telling the truth, if not you, who?”

  “What can I say?” Dudley sighed. “The less I know about these small tasks I occasionally take on solely for the money, the better. I will tell you what I was told about the Nashville thing, but it may not help you very much.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Go ahead.”

  “Of course, it’s about the money, or, as best I could tell, the potential money. My employers seemed to be involved in a scheme to pump up the value of the Nashville artist Bechman Fitzwallington’s paintings after he died and get them assigned exclusively to a New York gallery where they had a financial interest and could control things. This paralyzed Nashville ex-detective somehow got a bee in his bonnet about how the old guy died, thought somebody bumped him off, and was slowing the whole process down. My guys were anxious to get the paintings and put them on the market while the iron was hot, so to speak, and the detective guy was in the way. So, they hired me to try to scare him off. I tried, but I guess didn’t succeed. They must have hired somebody else to put the detective out of the picture. The problem was that nobody involved in the plot realized that this detective guy was a local hero and so the plan was a loser from the start because of the public reaction, which came as a surprise to everybody. My understanding is that the big guys were, shall we say, less than pleased with that outcome.”

  “Who, Dudley? That’s what I need to know. Who were the oafs who bungled the kidnapping.”

  “I wasn’t in on that part of the scheme,” Dudley lied. “Whoever it was, they must have worked through Wilton Argent. He had to be involved in the local arrangements. Grill him. And, you might learn something by chasing anyone with connections to the New York gallery, especially if they happened to show up in Nashville.”

  “Name of the gallery?”

  “Galleria Salinas,” Dudley replied. “Upper East Side.”

  Hardy Seltzer had never put much stock in information from paid informants. The incentives were wrong. And there is something particularly repulsive about a snitch, paid or not. Even when the information is useful, it still feels tainted somehow, like you didn’t come by it honestly. And besides, in this particular case, the fed’s Chicago snitch hadn’t really told them very much he didn’t either already know or had figured out on his own. Well, maybe except for exactly what part The Dude played in the situation. He was almost certainly more involved than he said.

  It was pretty obvious that the Feds weren’t especially interested in this case, so while they agreed to question The Dude, they didn’t do it very aggressively and just fed what they found out back to the Nashville department, without indicating further interest on their part. So, by default, Hardy was still in charge of ferreting out the culprits in Shane’s abduction, and also still under the imposed prohibition from pursuing the murder possibility. Shane was doing that.

  Those were the things Hardy Seltzer was thinking as he sat opposite Marge Bland at a corner table in the rear dining room at Mere Bulle, staring out at the river rather than paying attention to his date. He was not deriving the maximum benefit from his investment in the pricey meal. Not yet, anyway. But it was still early. It was not the first time Marge had seen him in this distracted frame of mind. She usually tried to entice him out of it and sometimes succeeded.

  Marge was lost in her own thoughts that evening, ruminating over the last several days. Like most of her days, they had been pretty uneventful. Of course, her job gave her an up-close and personal look at a lot of lives, and that intrigued her—razor-thin slices of those lives. She paid some attention to the patrons of TAPS out of a general interest in people and from boredom. She often remembered names that she overheard or read from a credit card receipt. She had stored away a long list of names (she especially remembered the ones that sounded unusual) with no particular meaning to her. She would sometimes amuse herself by making up stories for them; she thought of the stories as TAPS Tales. Occasionally she would tell one of her stories to Hardy. She thought that he enjoyed listening to them at least once in a while.

  A sternwheeler chugged lazily along down the river, its gentle wake fanning out behind toward the river banks. On its way to nowhere in particular. Just doing its job, amusing the paying customers. Marge understood that. She thought that was how she spent most of her waking hours, amusing paying customers. Her rediscovered relationship with Hardy had been a special and totally unexpected addition to her life. They liked each other. And they were starting to feel comfortable together. He didn’t bore her.

  She reached across the table and touched Hardy’s hand. He looked at her, a vacant look, blank spaces behind his eyes, or spaces occupied by something other than the two of them having a pleasant evening together. Could be almost anything.

  “Sorry, Marge,” Hardy said, taking her hand in his. “My mind is wandering. Reel me in. You know how to do that.”

  Marge knew that sometimes a TAPS Tale could wrest him from the clutches of his current dilemma, lure him back to the present reality. Worth a try anyway.

  “So,” Marge began, “the other day when I came in to work to relieve Marva, around five, there were these three guys who she said had been there for a while drinking Dewars and having what looked like a serious conversation. They stayed for an hour after my shift started, and then one of them sprung for the drinks with his credit card and they left. I had the vague notion that I had seen one of them at TAPS in the past but wasn’t sure. It was obvious that they were not locals, accents from probably up north somewhere. You might have thought it was a business meeting of some sort except that business meetings don’t happen at TAPS and anyway, they didn’t look like businessmen, at least to me. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought they were cops, maybe d
irty cops. Not sure why. But I imagined they were up to no good.”

  “Just what no good did you imagine they were up to?”

  “Something really serious, maybe murder. Dirty cops plotting an intricate scheme to do in a clean cop who was on to their local protection racket and was threatening to rat them out.”

  “So why would they meet in a public place to hatch the plot?”

  “Well, TAPS isn’t exactly the town square, Hardy. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of shady plots get hatched there. We get a lot of characters who are, no doubt, looking for trouble. Seems to me that trouble often finds characters who are looking for it. Trouble is probably a regular customer at our place.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Hardy said, slowly resurfacing into the present reality, coming up for air. “So why do you remember these guys?”

  “Name,” Marge replied, “I remember names, especially ones that sound unusual to me. The guy who paid the bill was dressed a little better than the other two. He seemed to be the head honcho. And, unusual name, sounded kinda French. Therault, Bruce Therault.”

  Athena Golden didn’t remember exactly why she had called Blythe Fortune late at night. Maybe the wine. So, Athena was surprised when Blythe returned the call the next day.

  “Hello, Blythe,” Athena answered the phone after checking the caller ID and noting that it was from the Galleria Salinas, New York. “How are you?”

  “Surviving,” Blythe answered. “Surviving. Bruce tells me that there has been some action in your town.”

  “Bruce?”

  “My business partner, Bruce Therault. I thought I had mentioned him to you. He does the financial part of our operation. I do the art. It has worked out pretty well for the most part. Although I’m not always sure exactly how these money guys operate. And not totally comfortable with that sometimes.”

  Athena knew what she meant. From the time Athena had opened AvantArt, she had held to her initial determination to go it alone. She was confident in her appreciation of emerging art and hopeful that there would be enough popular interest in the works she identified to make her little operation a viable business. That had been true so far, although she was certainly not getting rich. She didn’t care about that. She felt good about boosting the careers, at least locally, of some up and coming artists whose work she admired. She had not previously had much contact with or, to be truthful, interest in, the art of Bechman Fitzwallington. Her interest now was primarily monetary. She had been gobsmacked by Arturo Carbone’s obit in the New York Times. Very unlike his usual hypercritical reviews. But there it was in black and white and that made it impossible to ignore Fitzwallington’s works for both esthetic and financial reasons. That obituary also introduced major complications to the process of dealing with the old artist’s legacy. This conversation was evidence of that.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Wasn’t there something like a kidnapping there that made a lot of news?” Blythe asked. “Did that have any connection to the Fitzwallington matter?”

  “All I know is what’s in the papers. The episode sounds fishy. A sort of local hero, a paraplegic ex-policeman, was snatched off the street, held somewhere for a couple of days, and then released for no apparent reason. No ransom demands, no obvious reasons for the abduction. I am not aware of any connection of this ex-cop and the Fitzwallington matter.” The ghost of a thought wafted through Athena’s mind and she continued. “Are you?”

  “I have no idea, but Bruce thinks so. He’s been keeping tabs on the progress of the disposition of the available Fitzwallington paintings. He thinks that has gone more slowly than it should have because your local hero has been unofficially meddling in the investigation of the artist’s death. I mean, the situation looks so straightforward. The guy died. His death was declared a result of natural causes by the powers that be. He has a single heir. What in God’s name is the holdup?”

  “Not a clue, Blythe,” said Athena Golden. “Not…a…clue.”

  Shane Hadley’s mind was focused on three people when KiKi broke the silence that had parked itself between them.

  “You might be interested in this, my love,” she said. “My molecular guys have been mining the genomes of our outliers, and one thing they found will interest you.”

  “Yes?” Shane questioned.

  “There is a clear genetic connection between the old dead artist and one of the other outliers in our study.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Not sure. He’s still alive, so hasn’t been identified. All I have is a study number. I’ll need permission from the IRB to link that to a name. I’ll try to get that but this study has suddenly attracted a lot of attention from the regulatory people, so I’m not sure what will happen.”

  “Sorry,” Shane responded, “IRB?”

  “Institutional Review Board. They control all clinical investigations, enforce the rules.”

  “Do you think they might be willing to bend the rules a smidge in the case of a possible murder?”

  The sarcasm was obvious in his tone, and KiKi didn’t appreciate it.

  “I hope not,” she said.

  They had finished most of the penne Norma that Shane had made, their plates bare but for a few lonely shards of eggplant, and were nearing the bottom of the bottle of Rombauer chardonnay. It seemed obvious to both of them that their dinner and their conversation were essentially finished. Shane took his glass of wine and wheeled himself through the French doors out on to the deck. Katya didn’t join him.

  Three people had regularly visited Bechman Fitzwallington prior to what Shane considered his mysterious death: SalomeMe, Parker Palmer, and Fiona Hayes. A daughter, easy enough to understand, but the other two? What was the attraction? Both claimed to dislike the old guy, in the Hayes woman’s case, intensely. Why did they keep coming back? Shane had the gut feeling that one of them was the murderer but, apart from the daughter who seemed to him too obvious a suspect, what was the motive?

  Who was it? The carefree and garrulous Parker Palmer or the tightly wired and intense young ceramicist? Or, maybe the obvious one, the daughter? After all, sometimes a murderer will declare themselves openly either out of guilt or as a defensive counter-ploy. It was also possible that Shane was completely off track. Perhaps either there was no murder, as everyone else seemed to believe, or he had yet to encounter the culprit. It had always been the period of uncertainty in an investigation that most interested him. Once that was resolved, the rest was just going through the motions.

  Shane wheeled himself back into the living room over to the bar, poured himself a generous glass of sherry, and drank it.

  Chapter 25

  “Should we just ignore these Moleskin things?” Hardy asked.

  Hardy considered the question rhetorical, but wanted his conclusion corroborated by Shane. A printout of the two emails lay in the center of the table between their glasses of sherry. The relationship between the two men, the Moleskin notes, and the glasses of wine reflected their relative importance to the detectives: their wine was closer.

  “Of course not,” Shane answered. “Ignore is not a word that has any place in the vocabulary of criminal investigation, my friend. The careful investigator does not have the luxury of ignoring anything. All information must be carefully examined, thoughtfully considered, and placed in the context of all the other available information before concluding whether or not it is useful. Surely you know that, my man.”

  Shane not infrequently yielded to the temptation to preach to his friend about the investigative process. This was one of his most frequent but not one of his best sermons. Hardy tolerated it with some effort. The wine helped. Hardy sat quietly, relishing the taste and feeling of the sherry, and trying hard to ignore Shane’s pontificating.

  “Yes,” Hardy said, not entirely sure what he was assenting to.

  “So,” Shane continued, “it is possible, although as your demeanor suggests, perhaps unlikely, that this Moleskin is real and has informat
ion relevant to your investigation. It is also possible, given the tenor of the missives, that either there is no such person as Moleskin or that such a person has nothing useful to divulge. It could be either. I suggest filing away the Moleskin notes with whatever other information you have, but not forgetting them. Time has a way of ferreting out relevance despite us.”

  “OK, done,” Hardy replied. “Now, does the name Bruce Therault mean anything to you?”

  “Why do you ask? And while we’re at it, am I to interpret our meeting this lovely afternoon as an interrogation? I should hope that you would save such efforts for your inquiries of the criminal elements.”

  “Sure,” Hardy answered, “but Bruce Therault?”

  “I must repeat myself,” Shane mumbled. “Why do you ask?”

  “Of course,” Hardy replied, ignoring his friend’s obvious testiness; something was troubling him. “There was someone by that name at TAPS the other day. Marge waited on him and a couple of other strangers sitting with him. She thought they looked like they were up to no good.”

  “According to the Internet, Bruce Therault is a partner in the New York gallery with a more than passing interest in the art of Bechman Fitzwallington. There is also a suggestion that he may be a man of less than pristine character. Did Marge recognize his drinking friends, or hear any names?”

  “She thought she may have seen one of them in the bar at some point but wasn’t sure. No other names that she mentioned. Got the Therault guy’s name because he paid for the drinks for the group with a credit card.”