by Lee Carroll
“Is that why you never seem to age a day?” my father would say when he heard her telling me this story.
My mother would laugh, but I believed when I was young that she held the key to that magical place. And I believed that if you watched the shapes the steam made on early winter mornings, you might catch a glimpse of that world—of white-breasted swans gliding on crystal lakes and enchanted steeds stepping out of foamy waves. This morning, though, the wraithlike shapes massing in the shadows of the hospital did not suggest beneficent emissaries from a fairy-tale kingdom. They made me think instead of the shades of the damned rising up out of hell on Judgment Day. I don’t think I’d ever had that reaction to the steam before. It made me wonder if something had changed in the city overnight—or in me.
“Miss James?” The voice startled me out of my gloomy fantasy. I turned and saw at the foot of my father’s bed the detective who had been at the town house. I hadn’t heard him come in and I wondered if he’d deliberately snuck up on me, but then I dismissed the idea as ridiculous. The man was a New York City police detective, not a Native American pathfinder.
“Detective Joseph Kiernan, NYPD Art Crime Division,” he said, handing me his card. “I didn’t want to wake your father. I’m sure he needs his rest. The doctor said he’s in stable condition.”
“But he hasn’t regained consciousness,” I said. “I don’t think that can be good.”
“So he hasn’t been able to tell you what happened?”
“No, but I think that should be obvious. He surprised the burglars and they shot him.”
“Did you see them shoot him?”
“No. I was behind him on the stairs. By the time I reached the kitchen he was lying on the floor.”
“And was one of the burglars holding a gun?”
“No, he could have dropped it. They were packing away the canvases. They’d cut all but one out of their frames. They seemed to want to get out of there quickly once the alarm was triggered.”
“Yes, that’s another thing I’m confused about.” The detective tossed his trench coat on the spare bed and pulled up a chair. He looked as if he was getting comfortable for a long talk. “The safe alarm was triggered, but the front-door alarm wasn’t. Did anyone else but you and your father know the front-door alarm code?”
“Several people. Our housekeeper, the receptionist . . . we always kept anything valuable in the safe, so . . .”
“And who knew that combination?”
“No one but my father and me. The burglars must have used an explosive . . .” I paused, recalling the moment when the men passed me in the hallway. It wasn’t something I wanted to remember. It made me feel as if something were pressing against my chest. “I smelled something when they walked by. Sulfur . . . and something burnt.”
“There was no sign of an explosion,” the detective said. “They either knew the combination or . . .”
“Or what?” I snapped.
He tilted his head and smiled. He was handsome in a boyish, clean-cut manner, I noted in the same numb detachment I’d felt since finding my father shot on the kitchen floor: curly dark hair, square jaw, cleft chin, broad shoulders, deep brown eyes. He was no doubt used to charming women with his looks. But why was he trying to charm me? I was the victim here, wasn’t I? “I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”
“I have no idea,” I said truthfully.
“Could your father have given them the combination?”
“Only if they forced him at gunpoint.”
“But you said you were right behind your father on the stairs and they had already cut all but one of the canvases out of their frames. So there wouldn’t have been time for your father to give them the combination. At least not then.”
It took a moment for his words to sink in, but when they did I was furious. “Are you implying that my father was somehow in on the burglary?”
Detective Kiernan shrugged. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened. Are you sure the safe was locked?”
“Yes, I went back to the office to do it myself . . .” But I stopped, recalling that after I had walked Zach Reese to the door and come back to the kitchen, my father had already put away the Pissarros and locked the safe door. At least I’d assumed he had. “Actually my father closed the safe when I was seeing a friend to the door—”
“A friend?”
“An old friend of my father’s, Zach Reese.”
“The painter?” Kiernan took a notebook out of his suit jacket pocket. The motion revealed a flash of gun.
“Yes,” I said, my mouth dry. “So you have to study art to be on the Art Crime squad?”
“It helps,” he said, his lips curving into a brief, perfunctory smile. “But you wouldn’t have to be an art expert to know Zach Reese’s name. His exploits in the eighties made him pretty famous. There was that car accident out in the Hamptons. A young girl drowned.”
“Yes, that was awful. I was only a kid at the time, but my mother told me Zach was never the same. He became a heavy drinker—not that he’d been a light drinker before.”
“And he stopped painting. He ran into some trouble with gambling debts a few years later.”
“Yes, I heard something about that.” I had a cloudy memory of my parents arguing because Roman had bailed Zach out again, but I shook it away, anxious to deflect Kiernan from the direction he was headed in. “You can’t think Zach had anything to do with the burglary? He’s one of my father’s oldest friends.”
“We have to examine all possibilities, Miss James. I’m sure you want us to find whoever is responsible for doing this to your father.” He tilted his chin in Roman’s direction and stopped. Following his gaze I saw that my father’s eyes were flickering open. I got up and moved quickly to his side.
“Dad? Can you hear me?” Roman’s eyes opened and focused on me. His lips stretched apart—an attempted smile that turned into a grimace of pain. “Dad, it’s okay. You’re in St. Vincent’s. You were shot but you’re going to be okay.” I looked up at Detective Kiernan, who had moved to the other side of the bed and was studying Roman’s face. “Please get the nurse!” I said. Kiernan hesitated a fraction of an instant, then turned and strode quickly from the room. When I was sure he was out of the room, I looked back down at my father and took his hand.
“There was a burglary, Dad. Three men broke in and stole the paintings in the safe. Do you remember if you locked the safe after Zach left?” Then, lowering my voice to a whisper: “Did you give the safe combination to Zach?”
“It’s okay, dear,” Roman said. I felt his fingers moving; he was trying to pat my hand but barely had the strength. “They were insured. As long as you’re all right, Margot, everything . . . everything . . .”
“It’s me, Dad,” I said wincing at the sound of my mother’s name on my father’s lips. “It’s Garet. Mom’s . . . mom’s not here.”
My father tried to smile again, but another pain contorted his face. “Garet,” he said. “You look more and more like your mother every day . . .” Then his eyelids fluttered closed. The detective returned with the nurse and a doctor, who examined Roman and said his vital signs were strong.
“So there’s probably no danger in Miss James leaving for an hour?” Kiernan said to the doctor. “She lives just a few blocks away and I need her to go over the crime scene with me.”
The doctor not only concurred, but urged me to go out and get some air. He assured me that the floor nurse would call my cell phone if there was any change. Within minutes Detective Kiernan and I were on the street walking west toward the town house. It did feel good to be out in the air. Yesterday’s storm had passed leaving a blue sky and crisp, cold air; the morning sun had banished the ominous shadows from the avenue. Detective Kiernan didn’t bring up Zach Reese again during our walk. Instead he asked about the paintings that had been in the safe.
“I’ll have to look at the inventory, of course,” I told him. “But I remember them.” I listed each painting and its e
stimated value, ending with the Pissarros.
“Of course value’s a relative term in the art market, isn’t it?” Detective Kiernan asked. “Those Pissarros didn’t sell at auction. That must bring down their value.”
“I’m just giving you the valuation the insurance company assigned when the current policy was renewed several months ago.”
“So that was prior to the current downturn in the market. Conceivably the paintings might be insured for more than they’re worth in this market, couldn’t they be?”
We’d reached the steps to the brownstone, but the detective’s question brought me up short. The insurance. My father had just reassured me that the paintings were insured. And last night before he went to bed he had said, Something will turn up. But he wouldn’t have . . . ? Detective Kiernan couldn’t think that my father had arranged the theft and being shot to collect the insurance? He was smiling at me, his face as bland and mild as the morning sunshine.
I turned away without answering his question and climbed the steps. I wanted to be inside my home—the one place I had always felt safest—and yet, just yesterday I had learned that it didn’t even really belong to us anymore. I stepped inside . . . and immediately began to shake. The presence of those three black-clad men was so palpable I could feel it like a heaviness in the air. Detective Kiernan passed me in the hallway and went into the kitchen. “The forensic lab has finished in here, so you’re welcome to clean up the rest,” he was saying. I started to follow him, but stopped in the doorway; I wasn’t yet ready to step into the room where my father had been shot. Kiernan came back, holding an object in a plastic evidence bag.
“We found this on the floor. Do you recognize it?”
“Yes,” I told him, “It’s my father’s service revolver from World War Two. And no, I don’t suppose it’s licensed. Frankly, I can’t imagine it even works.”
“Uh-huh,” he said as if nothing surprised him anymore. “There’s one more thing. You said you were standing in this hallway when they passed you?”
“Yes.”
“So you weren’t blocking the front door?”
“No. I don’t think they would have cared if I had been. They didn’t seem to take any notice of me. It was almost like they didn’t see me.” I stopped, trying to remember something. “There was something weird about their eyes.”
But Detective Kiernan wasn’t interested in the burglars’ eyes. “Hm . . . so why do you think they didn’t go out the front door?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know . . . maybe they were afraid the police were on the way . . . or maybe there was something they wanted upstairs.”
“Is there anything of value up there?”
“Some keepsakes of my father’s . . .”
“He lives on the second floor, right? The burglars don’t appear to have gone into his apartment. But the third floor . . .”
I was on the stairs before Detective Kiernan could finish his sentence. The thought of those creepy burglars trespassing in my studio and bedroom made me feel sick. I sprinted up the two flights of stairs, Kiernan a few steps behind me. What had they done in my studio? When I reached the open door, I thought for a moment that a snowstorm had swept through the room. The floor was covered in white.
I knelt on the floor and touched one of the flakes. It was dry to the touch and left a grayish streak on my hands. Of course. It was the paper that had come out of the silver box last night . . . only I was sure that I had swept all the paper debris up and put it back in the box. Then I had closed the box and left it on my worktable.
I crossed the room in three long strides, the paper confetti crunching underfoot. My soldering torch lay where I had left it last night, but the silver box was gone.
Air & Mist
“What’s wrong? Is something missing?”
I looked up from the table to Detective Kiernan. I noticed that a flake of paper was stuck in a curl of hair that fell over his forehead. The paper was drifting around the room, buoyed by a draft from somewhere.
“A silver box,” I answered, looking around for the source of the draft. “Something I was working on last night.”
“Was it valuable?”
“I don’t really know. It wasn’t mine.” I described how I had come by the box, as briefly as I could.
“It doesn’t sound that valuable if the jeweler would just let you walk out with it.”
“No, I suppose not.” I thought of the blue symbols I had seen scrolling across the inside of the lid last night, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell the police detective about that. It had been an ocular illusion, that was all, a new twist in my ocular migraine symptoms.
“They probably just grabbed it on their way out.” Kiernan pointed up with one finger. I stared at him, confused. One might use that gesture to indicate a person had ascended to heaven, but the burglars hadn’t died. Then I looked up and saw what he meant. The skylight above our heads had been shattered. The metal bookcase against the wall was tilted slightly out of line and pieces of scrap metal had been shoved aside. The burglars must have used it as a ladder up to the skylight and the roof above. “But you will have to add it to the list of stolen items,” he continued. “You should let the owner know as soon as possible.”
“I would, only I don’t have his name or address.” I was instantly sorry I had admitted to this. I could just have said I’d contact the man later. The detective was staring at me now as if I were crazy.
“I know, it sounds nuts, but you have to understand that I was distracted. I’d just gotten some bad news at our lawyer’s office.”
“Really?” Detective Kiernan took out his notebook and sat on the edge of the worktable. “Why don’t you tell me about that?”
An hour later I finally managed to get away from Detective Kiernan, but only because the hospital called to tell me that my father was awake and asking for me. I told Kiernan I really needed a few minutes to myself before returning to the hospital, and so he reluctantly left the town house as I practically shoved him out the door. Then after he’d turned the nearest corner, I walked the few blocks to St. Vincent’s, cursing myself for letting the police detective lure me into a full disclosure of our financial troubles. True, he would eventually have found out about the loan being called, but now it would color the whole investigation into the burglary. He’d focused on how convenient, as he kept saying, it was that the insurance money could be used to pay off the loan, or some of it. It was clear he suspected my father had arranged the burglary to collect on the insurance. All he needed now was to find out that Roman had been arrested for insurance fraud once before.
It had happened eleven years ago when I was fifteen. I knew that money was tight because I’d had to switch from private school to public the year before. I hadn’t minded that—I’d gotten into LaGuardia and loved the art program there—but I hated hearing my parents arguing about money. Especially when I heard my mother complain that Roman had used money set aside for my college to buy a Warhol silk screen from one of Zach Reese’s friends.
“I’ll sell it for twice what I paid for it,” I heard my father say one night. “And Garet will go to Harvard if she wants to.”
But then the Warhol Board had denied authentication to the silk screen. They claimed that Zach Reese had run off copies of the silk screen without Warhol’s permission. Without the Board’s seal of approval the piece was almost worthless. Three days after Roman received the news from the Warhol Board the gallery was robbed. A few paintings by minor artists were taken, but the only item of “value” taken was the Warhol, which had been insured for the purchase price. When the same friend of Zach Reese’s who had sold the painting to Roman was arrested while trying to sell the same painting to a Japanese art collector, Roman was also arrested for conspiring to defraud the insurance company. The case had dragged on for a year, during which time the gallery’s reputation was nearly destroyed and my mother died in a car accident. Her obituary ran in the Times the same day that the case against R
oman James was dropped due to lack of evidence. It wouldn’t take long for Detective Kiernan to dig up that information. In fact it was weird he didn’t know about it already.
Unless he did know and had only been waiting for me to mention it. Had I looked more suspicious not bringing up the other case? But then why should I mention it? The cases were completely different. After all, Roman had been shot in this burglary. If he’d hired the burglars—and the idea of my father having anything to do with those thugs was unthinkable—surely they wouldn’t have shot him.
You could almost say he was lucky he had been shot.
I admonished myself for the thought as I entered my father’s room. He looked shrunken and ancient in the hospital bed, his skin a sickly yellow against the white bandages on his shoulder, the bruises on his bald scalp livid under the hospital’s fluorescent lighting. His eyes were open, but he was looking toward the window so he didn’t notice me until I bent down and kissed his forehead.
“There you are!” he exclaimed, as if we’d been playing hide-and-seek and he’d just discovered me crouched behind the couch. “I told that nurse you’d be back any minute. My Margaret wouldn’t abandon her old father.”
“I’m sorry I took so long, Dad,” I said, drawing a chair closer to his side. “I had to talk to the police at the gallery, give them the inventory list—”
“Our beautiful Pissarros!” he wailed, pressing his hands together as if in prayer. “That must be what they were after.” Then, lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper, he added, “I bet it was someone at Sotheby’s that tipped them off. How else would those ganovim know the paintings had just arrived back?”