Stealing With Style

by Emyl Jenkins

  Anna nodded my way. I searched her face for any kind of response. I found none.

  Richie pulled up a chair for me beside Anna. For a half second, I hesitated.

  Don't be stupid, I told myself. She can't eat me.

  "I think Anna's told me pretty much everything, Sterling. She came in about thirty seconds after you called. Layton's has been suspicious of Dana Henchloe for some time. Nothing concrete-up until now, that is. Just little things. Goods coming in, then being pulled just before auction time. Commissions being cut with no explanation. One time there was a query about an important piece of French porcelain being auctioned off before it was even offered to us. The next week, Dana showed up with it. Just an accumulation of strange things. Things starting to point in his direction."

  "I think I'm missing something," I stammered, looking from Richie to Anna. "Dana? What about last night?"

  Anna responded with a weak smile and tear-rimmed eyes. "Last night, well, there was all the commotion. Everybody ran out before I could explain."

  "Especially you," I retorted. "You almost stepped on Joey."

  She ignored my comment.

  "I was trying to get away from Ralph."

  "Did you?"

  "Doesn't matter." Anna cleared her throat. "Here's what it is. I owed Ralph money. A lot of money. When he found out I worked at Layton's he wanted to know all about it." She looked away. "He didn't know I was just a secretary. I told him how dealers buy stuff cheap and sell it here for a quick turnover. He thought that was a good idea and he came up with a scheme where he'd buy something and I'd bring it in."

  "Why didn't he do it?" I asked.

  She frowned. "You saw him. How'd he he getting antiques and good stuff unless he stole it or something? That's what the people working here would think. Anyway, what he didn't know was that I was getting money for bringing the things to Layton's."

  "But is that right?" I asked. "You work here."

  "I told them I was just bringing the things in for an old woman, a friend of the family's. I said she used to be an antiques dealer and was helping this man dispose of the better pieces he'd inherited. I told them that since she didn't get into the city anymore I was bringing them for her, but she needed the finder's fee."

  "So," I said, "two checks were cut. One to Ralph for the proceeds from the sale of the pieces after Layton's took their commission. And one for the finder's fee. Who was that made out to?"

  "My mother." Anna paused. "Look, I had to do it. Ralph's from my neighborhood. I'd borrowed money from him. He said he'd forget some of what I owed him if I worked this deal with him. He said he knew Joey's shop and others like it where he could get things cheap. Sometimes when he'd find something but it cost too much, Ralph would send me in to make the deal."

  "Like on Saturday when I saw you in New York."

  Anna nodded.

  "Just the usual picker deal," Richie spoke up, "but in this case the picker is a thug and suddenly Anna was bringing in too many expensive things for this so-called antiques dealer. It just didn't feel right."

  "Did Ralph know enough about antiques to be able to know what to buy?" I asked.

  "Most of the time. He's got street smarts. Ralph learned to recognize good things real fast. He got taken a couple of times, but he'd unload those goods on some dealer who didn't know what he was buying," Anna said. "Ralph would tell him it was an antique and sell it for more than he had paid for it." She shrugged.

  I hated to admit it, but I knew she was right-on both counts. Most thieves knew what to steal, and many dealers didn't know their wares. Little matter. They just pass the goods on to somebody else as ignorant as they were.

  "But how does Dana fit into all this?" I asked, still miffed.

  "Francie Golden. You've met her, haven't you? She handles consignments," Richie said.

  "No. I've always worked directly with the department heads," I said.

  "'Course. Well, Francie's the one who called Anna's excessive activity to my attention. We decided that since Anna worked for me, I needed to look into what was going on." Richie paused. "You know how coincidences are. Henchloe came up when Francie and I were talking. He got wind of the situation and got to Anna before I did. I was in the middle of cataloging a big sale and Anna wasn't going anywhere. I had put it on the back burner."

  Richie rolled his eyes first in Anna's direction, then heavenward. "You can figure out the rest. When Dana confronted her, she confessed to the scheme. That's when he saw a way to do a little double-dipping himself. In exchange for not reporting her, he started slipping Anna's, or Ralph's rather, things in under his name."

  "So that meant Dana got the finder's fee instead of your mother," I said. "That cut you out."

  "What else was I going to do?" Anna sounded pathetic. Then dropping her eyes she said, "He paid me something so I wouldn't get behind with what I owed Ralph. We had a .. She shuddered. "An arrangement."

  "Well," Richie broke in, obviously anxious to save Anna any additional embarrassment. "Now that we know Henchloe's role in all this, you can be sure he's out on his ear."

  So. Little Richie Daniel still had a spark of humanity in him, I mused. A glimmer of compassion. I found that comforting. Almost sweet. But not sweet enough to wash away my memory that he had been willing to do some private dealings himself.

  "Anna, that Art Deco figure you sold to Maribelle. You told her that Layton's was going to sell it, but then-"

  Richie broke in again.

  "My fault, Sterling." He laughed apologetically. "My fault. I had another figure too similar to that one already cataloged for the sale. Can't flood the market. Of course at that point I didn't know the new figure being offered for auction was one of Anna's." He gave Anna a contrite, regretful look. "The consignment sheet had Dana's name all over it. He took it hack."

  "And Dana gave it back to you. That left you holding the hag," I said to Anna.

  I walked over and picked up the figure from the bookcase.

  "What about this one? Where did it come from?"

  "From some woman's estate. There weren't many good things, even though her family had once been well educated and wealthy hack in the old country. Her daughter brought it in. The parents died only two or three weeks apart, over in Brooklyn. They were no longer wealthy people. Came here as immigrants from ... Why can't I remember? You asked me the other day. It was either South America or Europe. I meant to look it up after you asked me before. It'll go into some sale. If not here, maybe one in Paris."

  I ran my fingers over Sol's mark, S. S. Surely this was one of the figures Sol had carved and given to one of his old neighborhood friends. After all the love and care that had gone into making it, now here it was, just drifting from place to place, waiting for a new home.

  I glanced over at Anna. She was sitting slumped down in the chair, her usually placid face fearful and pale. Richie didn't look much better himself. Now was not the time to spring the fact on him that the figure's ivory parts were newly carved.

  I chewed on my bottom lip until I could reach deep enough down into my gut to find the courage. "I think there's more to this story than you know," I said to Richie.

  Anna's teary eyes darted up to greet mine.

  "Not your story, Anna." I smiled at her, longing to tell her that she'd suffered enough for one day. "Dana Henchloe's story. Richie, you know that silver tea urn I brought up here to Nigel? Well, seems there's a Southern ring funneling things up to Layton's. Some of the items Dana's been sending to Nigel are from the leader, a Dwayne Sloggins. They both happened to he at an appraisal day in Montgomery ..

  AFTER WE MET with the legal department, Nigel, Richie, and I pored over consignment papers relating to items Dana Henchloe had brought in to Layton's. Several of those pieces were not uncoincidentally ones listed as missing on the Hanesworths' appraisal. Henchloe, that pompous ass, was guilty as hell.

  Most damning of all was the letter Layton's had received from Dana, just a day or so ago: it said he'd he sending u
p a fine Meissen tureen and Tiffany sterling vase, along with some other items that Jane Finn had been packing up when Ed, Peter, and I arrived on her doorstep.

  When Ed Pavich tied Dana Henchloe in with Dwayne Sloggins, Dana's problems would be more far-reaching than some insider deals at Layton's. I wouldn't be surprised if once Ed started digging he found Henchloe had plenty of other schemes in the works. By the time it was all over with, I'd wager that Dana Henchloe would have some mighty steep lawyer bills mounting up. It couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.

  BACK IN MY hotel room, I turned on the TV for no reason other than to remind myself that another world lay beyond the one of thieving and lying and blackmailing and doublecrossing I had just left, a world centered around nothing but things. Right then I didn't care if I never saw another thing as long as I lived.

  Yet how I was looking forward to getting home, home to the things that I loved, the things that held cherished memories of people, of places, of times of laughter and sadness.

  What was that quote by Socrates that Mother was so fond of?

  How many things I can do without, she answered.

  How about making that, "How many people I can do without," I said aloud. For it wasn't the things, it was the people lusting after them. And too often people, like furniture, were little more than veneer-at least the ones I seemed to have been thrown in with lately.

  Don't get me wrong. Veneered furniture had a long and noble heritage. When it was done properly, veneering was a real craft and made for a more impressive piece. Gorgeous veneer could turn a plain chair, chest, or table into an intricately inlaid, sophisticated object. But the flip side was that veneer was no more than a cover-up designed to conceal the inner structure, its real inner core. And chances were, over time, whether you were dealing with a person or a piece of furniture, that thin, outer layer would warp, crack, and fall away.

  I pulled the hotel curtain back and stared down on Lexington Avenue at the cars and people rushing by on this gray, wintry day. Yes, I really had been in another world ever since yesterday. Well, actually, ever since I arrived on Wednesday. I didn't even know if the sun was shining or not. Not that it mattered now. Other than the dinner with Matt, what did I have to show for my trip to glamorous Manhattan? A case of frayed nerves and, thanks to no sleep, raccoon eyes.

  Turning my back on the city, I made a firm resolutionnever again to get involved in any sort of a mess like I'd lived through these past few days.

  There was just enough time to make a pit stop and brush my teeth and still make the hotel's checkout time. I needed to leave early, anyway. Friday's 5 P.M. rush-hour traffic started at noon in the city. I stopped to double-check the closet to be sure that in my morning dash out the door, I hadn't overlooked anything. I'd lost a favorite scarf in a hotel a couple of years back when it slipped off the coat hanger onto the dark floor.

  The phone rang.

  "Sterling. You are there."

  "Matt?"

  I don't know who I thought would be calling me, except maybe the front desk. Or possibly Richie or Nigel.

  "Yes, yes. For a minute I was afraid you might have had a change of plans and checked out. You're not going to believe this, but as luck would have it I already have a job for you. There's been a strange burglary in a house museum in Orange County that Babson and Michaels insures. Fingers are pointing at the curator, but she seems above reproach. Tell me, is there any chance that you might consider staying over tonight so we could discuss it at dinner? On our clock, of course. Overtime, if necessary. I know it's Friday and you surely have plans for the weekend in Virginia. I would say lunch, right now, but I'm meeting with the attorney for one of our clients with multiple international properties and that's at twelve thirty. Who knows when that meeting will he over. Don't hesitate to say no, but ... "

  I looked out the window, then at my suitcase. Then I thought of Sol.

  "I'll see what I can do," I said, settling hack down on the hotel bed.

  That's the thing about surprises, Sterling, Mother said. They're so damn surprising.

  Acknowledgments

  I THANK MY FORMER HUSBAND, Clauston Jenkins, for his great patience in listening to me drone on about the idea for this book twenty years ago. Jan Karon, thank you for encouraging me to stay the course. It was Claudio Pollio who suggested the title over dinner one night, and I freely borrowed my friend Sterling Boyd's name for Sterling Glass. (Though there the resemblance ends.) Thank you dear friends and fellow writers of Nectar. Without you, I'd probably be stuck somewhere in the middle of the story.

  I received invaluable assistance and advice from Janella Smyth and Steve Minor; John Hays and Peggy Gilges at Christie's; Helene and Martin Schwalberg of the Meissen Shop, Palm Beach, Florida; Amanda Winstead at Neal Auction Company; Florent Heintz at Sotheby's; and Frederick Brandt at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. And I owe special thanks to Joslin Hultzapple, Charlotte Litzenberg, Cyndee Moore, Vickie Vaden, and Annique Dunning. I am privileged to be the beneficiary of three great publishing professionals' experience and wisdom: my tireless champ of an agent, Jeanne Fredericks, my incomparable and insightful editor, Kathy Pories, and that consummate bookseller, Nancy Olson.

  I thank my fellow antiques lovers-amateurs, connoisseurs, and professionals-for sharing their stories with me over the years. We thrive on the thrill of the chase, the joy of the conquest, and the anguish of the loss in our ventures-those past, and the many yet to come.

  My deepest love to my delightful husband, Bob Sexton, who sometimes doesn't know the cast of characters competing for his attention, but endures anyway, and to our family, Langdon and Amy, Joslin and Mike, Benjamin and Matthew, and Erika.

  We hope you enjoy this sneak peek at Emyl Jenkins's next novel,

  The

  BIG STEAL

  Coming soon from

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL. HILL

  Chapter 1

  THERE I WAS, shivering from head to toe while digging through family pictures and records left behind by Mazie and Hoyt Wyndfield. They hadn't had any children of their own to sort through their things after their deaths several years ago, which partly explains why, in the dead of winter, I was up in the attic of this place called Wynderly. Once it had been a gracious home. Now it was a museum teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

  Unlike the stately eighteenth-century Georgian plantations Virginia is known for, Wynderly had no massive columns or breeze-kissed verandas. It was a huge, sprawling Tudor-type house with peaked turrets, rounded towers, and rooms with vaulted ceilings. Rooms and wings jutted out here and there, almost as if some tipsy architect had thrown his plans up in the air and built rooms wherever the blueprints had landed.

  The vast attic, so large in fact that it could house three families with room to spare, mirrored the helter-skelter, multilayered house beneath. Every inch of it was filled with furniture, garden ornaments, boxes, books. I had begun with the trunks and boxes.

  The first two or three trunks I opened were filled with carefully folded clothes. As tempting as the lace negligees and satin ball gowns were, I was searching for papers, receipts, diaries-anything that would tell me more about the opulent objects in the house below.

  It all started when Matt Yardley, a dangerously handsome New York insurance executive, asked me if I was available to take on an appraisal in Orange County. My brain had zipped into overdrive. Orange County, California, in the middle of February? Who wouldn't have jumped at the chance?

  It was only after I had said yes that I bothered to ask a few questions. That's when I learned he was speaking of Orange County, Virginia, a three-hour-plus drive down lonely back roads, instead of a four- or five-hour flight, from my home in Leemont, Virginia. But it was too late. I'd given my word.

  There had been, Matt said, an unsolved burglary at Wynderly and some items had also been broken during the theft. Because there were no signs of a break-in and the police had no obvious suspects at the moment, a serious cloud had been cast over the whole
situation. In addition, the only existing appraisal of the items at Wynderly was twenty or thirty years old, totally out of date.

  "We need to determine whether or not we should pay the full amount for the damaged and missing items," Matt said. In truth, his company, Babson and Michael, was paying me to snoop around the place, which is exactly what I was doing.

  The next trunk I opened proved more promising. I was lifting out a photograph album when a picture fell from between its pages. Picking it up, I noticed faint writing on the back: Mazie and Hoyt. Wynderly. 1924.

  Few women today looked like the woman in the picture. She had been born Mary Elise, but was called Mazie. Her jetblack hair was pulled straight back at the nape of her long, pearl-white neck, made whiter by the black and white of the picture. Even fewer men looked like Hoyt Wyndfield, dressed in a crisp linen jacket, white shoes, and fully pleated pants held up high by a dark leather belt. Then again, it was no longer 1924, the year Wynderly, towering high behind them, had been completed.

  Matt Yardley had told me that the Wyndfields named the house Wynderly after themselves and the windblown hills at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia where it was built. The name seemed perfect for this lavish home. It made me think of Biltmore, Agecroft, San Simeon-houses that, like Wynderly, had been built by that rarified generation with the money, style, and taste to build monuments to themselves. Their owners had traveled the world over, bought with abandon, and then returned with treasures to fill every room.

  Though Mazie and Hoyt's house and the objects in it had survived the ravages of time, their fortune had not. Rumor had it that with the foundation operating Wynderly now in dire financial trouble, the fate of the house and its furnishings lay in doubt. That, of course, made Babson and Michael even more suspicious about the validity of the insurance claim. I had only been there for a few hours, but I, too, was beginning to have my doubts.

  Good appraisers are, by nature, detectives. I've always said it's because we see so many fakes and frauds-both the inanimate and the two-legged variety-that we never take anything, or anyone, at face value. Once upon a time I was as innocent as the next person. I loved antiques for all the right reasons-beauty, craftsmanship, the memories our treasures hold. Then I learned how some corrupt silversmith used to fuse eighteenth-century English hallmarks on the bottoms of Colonial Williamsburg reproduction silver pitchers, and how Granny's beautiful eighteenth-century lowboy was really made by some sly forger in the 1920s, not by Mr. Chippendale himself.