Silent Auction

by Jane K. Cleland

  “Did they tape yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t think that was ominous?” he asked.

  I pursed my lips. Wes used innuendo like a pickax to dredge out unspoken fears.

  “No,” I said. “I was cooperating with a Homicide investigation. Videotaping is standard operating procedure in Rocky Point, Wes, not a precursor of doom.”

  “Maybe … but why do you think they’re interviewing Greg Donovan at all? How is he connected to Frankie?” Wes asked.

  “He isn’t. I mean, Greg said he’d never met him.”

  “Then why are the police interviewing him?” he asked again.

  “He sold the Whitestones some objects, one of which—a scrimmed tooth—is missing.”

  “What!” Wes exclaimed, extracting a grimy piece of notebook paper from his pocket. “Tell me.”

  I described the missing tooth, explaining, “Even though it was sold without provenance, it still could be genuine. No one knows for sure how many teeth Myrick scrimmed, and rare objects are discovered all the time, in an estate sale, for example. Once it enters the marketplace without provenance …” I flipped open my hands and shrugged.

  “But if it has no provenance, weren’t they stupid to buy it for that much money?”

  I shrugged. “Stupid is the wrong term. Impulsive, maybe.”

  “You would have told them not to buy it, right?”

  “I would have encouraged them to have it authenticated.”

  “Why didn’t they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Wes made a note, then said, “This would make a great sidebar—bullet points on how to tell if your scrimmed object is the real McCoy.”

  I shook my head. “There are too many variables that nonexperts can’t test. Heck, Wes, some of the tests are so technologically advanced, we use outside experts.”

  “Love it, love it!” he said, continuing to write. “Mysterious and exotic.”

  “It’s not mysterious or exotic! It’s analytical.”

  “So is there a photo of the missing tooth?” he asked. From his eager look, I knew the sidebar title would read something like

  “Is My Antique Worth Millions? Science Reveals All,” which, as I thought about it, was a pretty good take on the pro cess. “Yes. I’ll send it to you.”

  He shot me a quick smile. “Thanks.” He wrote for another few seconds, then asked, “What else are you going to do to find the missing tooth?”

  “Once we confirm it wasn’t simply relocated or misplaced, I’ll list it as stolen with all the official stolen art registries.”

  “Gotcha. Will you send me the names?”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  “Anything else?”

  “Have they finished the autopsy?” I asked.

  “Not all the tests are back yet, but they’ve confirmed that Frankie hadn’t been drinking or doing any drugs.”

  I smiled. “I knew it!”

  “Also, they’ve narrowed the time of death to between eleven and two, probably closer to eleven.”

  “That can’t be—he didn’t leave my building until noon.”

  “Really? Great.” He jotted a note, then looked up. “You said you were about to call me—how come?”

  “I was wondering about alibis. Have you learned anything?” I asked.

  “Not yet. Soon, though. Give me something on the Whitestones. Did you speak to either of them today?”

  “Maddie is in town. I’ll be sending her an inventory of their collection so she can let me know if anything else is missing.” I paused and scanned the beach. The two girls, the man, and the dog were gone. Gentle swells crashed against the jetty, wetting the craggy rocks a little higher and a little closer to shore with each pass. The tide was coming in. “I know we need to think about alibis, but it seems to me that it all comes down to motive, you know?”

  “The motive is hatred, right? I’m telling you, Josie, the medical examiner’s report reads like a trashy novel—those wounds were brutal. I don’t think the question is what’s the motive—the question is who had that motive. You know what I mean? Usually things are just what they appear to be.”

  I nodded. “That’s true, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s us who interpret events to suit our own agendas, discounting the parts we don’t want to believe or that we think are wrong, and filling in the blanks with what ever supports our point of view.”

  Wes narrowed his eyes, concentrating. “Like what?”

  “Like the time I decided that I hadn’t been cast in the school play because I wasn’t as tall as the girl who got the part.” I smiled and shook my head. “My father pointed out to me that it was just possible that the other girl did a better job at the audition.”

  Wes laughed. “What did you say to that?”

  “I was shocked, really shocked. I know it sounds stupid, but it had never even occurred to me that she might have been better than me. Isn’t that something? Talk about narcissistic! The arrogance of youth—which, as you and I both know, isn’t limited to young people. Of course my dad was a hundred percent right. She did do better at the audition. She did a great job in the show, too.”

  “Did you resent it?” Wes asked.

  “No, not once the shock wore off. It was a good lesson. If I hadn’t had that realization, I might have tried to be an actress. Instead, I tried out for a couple more parts, took a few classes, and noticed a trend—there were lots of girls better than me.” I chuckled. “Perseverance is all well and good, but not if you lack the innate talent. I decided that I needed a new career aspiration. I’m lucky—I found a field I love, and it’s a good fit with my abilities. You, too, right?”

  “Yeah, but writing is all I ever wanted to do.”

  “Speaking of which, did you reach Ray Austin?”

  “He wants to see a proposal,” he said, grinning. “I’m pretty stoked.” I could tell from his tone of voice, though, that he felt anxious, too.

  I patted his arm. “Oh, Wes! I’m so pleased. You’ll do a great job.”

  “Thanks. To tell you the truth, I’m not just stoked … I’m wicked stoked.”

  “Way to go, Wes!” I smiled. “I’ve got to get back.”

  “Don’t forget to send me those photos and the stolen art organizations’ names.”

  “You’re relentless, Wes.”

  “Thanks,” he said again, flashing an appreciative grin.

  I laughed, waved good-bye, and slid down the dune.

  My cell phone rang. It was the Rocky Point police station number. I was tempted to let the call go to voice mail. I wanted to go home and get dinner or ganized, see Zoë and her kids, and talk to Ty. Instead, I slipped in my earpiece and took the call. It was Chief Hunter.

  “I could use some help,” he said. “Any chance you can stop by the station for a half hour or so?”

  According to the dash clock, it was five thirty. “Okay,” I said, resigned to doing the right thing. “What’s it about?”

  “Antiques. Something smells fishy to me.”

  Something smelling fishy when it came to antiques could mean anything from an easy-to-spot bad repro being passed off as a valuable original to a motive for murder. My curiosity gland was working double time.

  “I’m on my way,” I said and turned south.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I called Zoë to ask how she was doing and tell her to go ahead and feed the kids; I hoped to get there, leftover Chicken Florentine in hand, around seven, maybe seven thirty, I said. She was fine with that, and she wanted, she said, to fill me in on her day.

  “Tell me now.”

  “Nope, only over a Lemon Drop.”

  “God, doesn’t that sound good.”

  “See ya,” she said and hung up.

  I turned into the Rocky Point police station lot. The phone still in my hand, I sat for a moment, looking across the street into the wild roses and scrambled vines that lined the sandy shoulder, wondering how Ty’s work was going, wishing he were home a
nd that I could tell him everything. I called and got his voice mail.

  “This is a nothing special message,” I told him. “I just felt like hearing your voice. I love you.”

  Inside, I approached the counter. Cathy, the civilian admin, told me that Chief Hunter was expecting me and would be right out. She buzzed him, and within seconds his office door opened and he waved me in.

  I hadn’t been in the police chief’s private office since Ty had left the job. The ash cabinets, bookshelves, and desk were the same, and so was the tan and brown nubby carpet, but the artwork was different. Instead of Ty’s photographs of Rocky Point, Chief Hunter had hung three reproductions of Norman Rockwell illustrations, The Gossips, Gramps at the Plate, and Doctor and the Doll.

  “You weren’t kidding when you said you were a Rockwell fan,” I commented.

  “Like them?”

  “Love them.”

  He smiled and pointed to a guest chair, waited for me to sit, then sat across from me.

  “Thanks for coming in.” He leaned back. “I’m out of my depth in questioning Mr. Donovan about the missing tooth. I’m hoping you’ll jump in and help. I have this niggling sense that I’m not getting the full story because I’m not asking the right questions.”

  “What in particular is troubling you?”

  “Talk to me about pickers.”

  “Pickers are in de pen dent itinerant sellers. Some specialize; others sell what ever they pick up.”

  “Do you deal with them?”

  “All the time.”

  “Know anyone named Sam?”

  “Sam who?”

  “Don’t know. Mr. Donovan claims he knows very little about him—except that Sam often brought him rare maritime artifacts and that he has the communication talents of a hood ornament. Sam no-last-name was the source of the undocumented Myrick tooth. Because he’d done business with Sam before with no problem, he didn’t hesitate to buy it. He paid seven thousand dollars. Does it sound right to you? Would you give a man whose last name you don’t know thousands of dollars in cash?”

  “It’s not unusual for pickers to be … secretive.”

  “Is he a fence, or is he avoiding the tax man?”

  I shrugged. “Depends on the picker.”

  “How do you protect yourself?” he asked.

  “We rarely buy expensive objects from pickers, partly because, in my experience, it rarely comes up—that’s not their specialty. Sam sounds like an aberration. Sometimes we get lucky and in a box of miscellaneous things there’s a rare object, but usually their goods are more prosaic than distinctive.” I paused. “May I ask you a question? Greg doesn’t deal in antiques, so why would this picker go to him?”

  “Maybe for just that reason. If he doesn’t deal in antiques much, he’s likely to be a less discerning buyer than, say, you,” Chief Hunter said.

  “That’s possible, I suppose, but not likely. Not if we’re talking thousands of dollars. That’s pretty rich for most nonexperts’ blood. I wouldn’t have thought that Greg was that much of a risk-taker.”

  “Do you think he knew it was a fake?”

  “I’d hate to think that about him,” I said.

  “What about the receipt he gave the Whitestones? What does it indicate to you?”

  I shrugged. “At a guess, probably it’s nothing more than laziness. If Greg knew the tooth was a phony, he would have faked a provenance.”

  “If you were me, how would you figure out who Sam is?”

  I thought for a moment. “Can’t you trace his phone number and learn his name that way?”

  “It tracks to a disposable cell phone, the kind you buy in a discount store and add pay-as-you-go minutes to.”

  “Isn’t that kind of suspicious in itself?” I asked.

  “It’s pretty common for people with no credit or bad credit.”

  I nodded again. “Or people who want to stay below the radar for some reason because they’re suspicious of government interference. That’s consistent with the pickers I know.”

  “What is it about pickers that makes them want to avoid mainstream living?”

  “From what I’ve observed, they’re either relentlessly private, the rugged individualist type, or they’re paranoid.”

  Chief Hunter nodded slowly, his interest fully engaged. “Someone doing business, presumably eager to sell to the highest bidder … you’d think he’d be easy to find, wouldn’t you?”

  “Not necessarily. Pickers want to move their inventory quickly and without hassles. They’re not businesspeople, per se. Some might be, but usually that’s not what they’re about.”

  He nodded. “Back to that Myrick tooth. Mr. Donovan said Myrick’s style is distinctive.” He consulted his notes. “‘It’s detailed, yet with a tidy folk art feel.’ What do you think? Is that right?”

  “Yes, but lots of scrimshanders used that style. You’d still need to authenticate it.”

  “He called in Ms. Morse for that part.”

  “Ashley?” I exclaimed. “I didn’t know Ashley did appraisals.”

  “I spoke to her just before I called you,” Chief Hunter said. He glanced at his notes again. “She consulted a reference book to confirm that the etching style was similar to known Myrick scrimshaw, which was just a matter of form since she recognized the master’s work on sight.”

  I didn’t respond. If I’d been alone, I would have chortled.

  “Then she did the hot pin test. I didn’t ask her to explain—I was hoping you’d translate.”

  “Sure. It’s a tried-and-true, low-tech way to discover if the material is plastic or resin. The way it works is that you take a pin and heat the tip until it’s red-hot. Insert it somewhere it won’t show, and voilà! If it’s ivory, the pin won’t penetrate. If it’s plastic, the pin will slide through easily.”

  “So in this case, Ms. Morse was able to demonstrate that the tooth was real.”

  “Not necessarily. Assuming it passed the hot pin test, all that proves is that the object isn’t made of plastic or resin. She might also conclude that it probably was made of ivory or bone. I bet her next step was examining the tooth under a loupe, am I right?”

  “Yes. What was she looking for?”

  “Grain. Ivory has a grain pattern in it, but bone doesn’t. Sometimes bone resists the pin in a hot pin test just like ivory, but under magnification, you can see that it’s completely free of grain. Also, it shows pockmarks where marrow and blood were.”

  “So if she saw grain, she knows it’s real?”

  “No, all she knows is that it’s ivory. The tooth could still could be a modern-day scrim. What did she do next?”

  “Nothing. That was it. How about you? What would you recommend as a next step?”

  “If we think a scrimmed object might have significant value, we send it out for spectroscopic analysis.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Just last year spectroscopic analysis proved that a tooth we were appraising, purported to have been scrimmed in 1810, was a modern repro. The ivory was only about fifty years old. It was one of the best fakes I’ve ever seen.”

  He tapped his pencil on the desk’s edge. “Let’s say the ivory dated right. Then what?”

  “The next step is verifying the location of all known examples of the artist’s work.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “If there’s a finite number of extant examples, and it’s rare that they come on the market, yes.” I held up a finger. “However, in this case, no one knows how many Myrick teeth were scrimmed, so it’s completely plausible that a previously unknown tooth might surface.”

  “How do you handle it?”

  “I’d trace the ownership of this particular tooth.”

  “How?”

  “By asking Sam, the picker, where he got it.”

  “Would he tell you?” he asked.

  “Not without what we might call encouragement.”

  “Which means?”

  “Cash,” I said
.

  “Won’t that just motivate him to tell you what you want to hear—like he got it from a man named John Smith who found it when Aunt Mabel died, wink wink?”

  “Yes, which is why we appraisers have to become adept at sniffing out liars.” I shifted in my seat. “I wouldn’t make it adversarial, I’d make it collaborative, but that’s my business model—other dealers might take a different approach. I’d tell the picker the truth, that this object might be rare and valuable. I’d offer him a bonus based on the selling price—if he helps me verify provenance.”

  “What do you think of Mr. Donovan and Ms. Morse’s approach? I’m asking for your expert opinion.”

  “Not for quotation?” I asked.

  “Fair enough.”

  “I’m shocked and disappointed. Even if Greg doesn’t deal in antiques much, he should know better. So should Ashley. No way could either of them think a book, a hot pin test, and a loupe repre-053-42980_ch01_4P.indd 116 2/20/10 12:12 AMsent a proper appraisal of a previously undocumented tooth alleged to have been scrimmed by Myrick.”

  “You told me he was a reputable businessman.”

  “Yeah. Goes to show you,” I said.

  Chief Hunter nodded and stood up. “Thanks for coming in.”

  “Now what do you do?” I asked.

  “Check into the anatomy of repute.”

  I nodded, thinking that was a pretty fancy way of saying that Greg was in for it.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I had just arrived home when Ty called. It was six forty-five. He sounded beat.

  “Your message was great,” he said. “I love you, too.”

  I smiled, switched on the kitchen light, and sat at the round table that overlooked the meadow. The thick clouds at the coast hadn’t moved inland. Out over the vast field of grass and wildflowers, the sky was streaked with red. According to the sailor’s lore I’d learned from my dad—red sky at night, sailor’s delight—tomorrow would be warm and clear.

  “I’m eating a sub,” Ty added, “from the local pizza joint. An Italian sandwich, they call it.”

  When I’d moved back to New En gland, I’d had to relearn that those long sandwiches were called subs. In New York, they were called heroes. Speaking the proper dialect—doing as the Romans did—was, I knew, an important part of fitting in, and from the first moment I’d arrived in Rocky Point, I’d been determined to do just that.