Driven to Murder

by Judith Skillings

  “Nazi hunters have batted rumors around for years. Some think the family was liquidated when they refused to turn over the paintings to Rosenberg, who was acquiring art for the Reich. If so, the paintings may be in Russia, like so many others. My friend, however, clings to the belief that he—Kauffman, not Rosenberg—smuggled the art out of the country and used it to start a new life. Talmadge has some more checking to do on the computer. First, though, you must congratulate him. He found the new owner of your Corot. At least, I think it’s yours.”

  Rebecca plopped onto the sofa. She hadn’t expected that piece of news.

  Her grandmother sounded tickled as she explained that a painting entitled, Une Masion de Paysan aux Environs de Tours had surfaced half a year ago, quite unexpectedly. Corot had done a series of farmyards in the late 1860s. That particular painting had shown up on the list of missing art. Before Jewish art hunters could confirm the rumor, however, it disappeared again. Off the market. It had been purchased sub rosa by a trading company.

  “A holding company really. Only one principal was listed, L. Frankel with an address in Delaware. Naturally, everyone incorporates in Delaware if they can. Such lovely tax advantages.” Dorothea tittered.

  “At first, we weren’t sure it was a real name. Talmadge’s only hit was an L. Frank L. Or was it Ell Frank Ell, spelled out, no initials? Either way, the creature was a sulphurous flash in the art scene a decade ago, not a corporate trader. Signed the canvases with swooping ‘Ls.’ All the rage for a few weeks.”

  “I remember.”

  “You do? How remarkable.”

  How bizarre. Rebecca leaned against the pillow, closed her eyes. It had to be the same artist. She’d gone to the showing in Alexandria not long after she’d started at the Post. Went as a guest of another reporter. Not the art critic, but a social commentator. The opening was in a glass-walled gallery on the second floor of a converted home. There were only a dozen paintings on exhibit.

  That was more than enough. They were overwhelming, too large for the intimate space, the oil paint too thick, too intense in contrast to the white walls. They depicted concentration camp atrocities in primary colors. Lime green babies screaming as they were bludgeoned, purple blood spewing from their mouths. Crimson skeletons with canary eyes staring up from a pit of rotting flesh. The paintings were unskilled, primitive and totally unforgettable. Not art you’d hang in your hallway. Thankfully the artist had not attended.

  “Anyway, Rebecca, Talmadge found a tentative link between that painter and a Lisa Frankel who was something of a financial hotshot in the Northeast. There was an interview with her in a woman’s magazine in the mid-nineties. When the reporter asked her about her hobbies, she admitted she’d tried her hand at painting once. Described the oils as outré and laughed about one dismal showing. Not conclusive, but tantalizingly close.”

  L Frank L. Lisa Frankel. Amalgams of two recent acquaintances? Elise Carlson, Brian Franks? Elise Franks. Lisa Frankel. Hagan would call it a stretch: a hodgepodge of similar syllables, nothing more. She made a note to learn Elise Carlson’s maiden name.

  “Any siblings, other relatives?”

  “Give me a chance, Rebecca. How about a mother? The name Sophie Frankel appears on the roles of survivors from Mauthausen. She and an infant daughter were liberated when the allied troops arrived. They came to the United States in late 1947, via England, I believe.”

  The hairs on the back of Rebecca’s neck tingled. She swung her feet to the floor, began pacing.

  A child born near the end of WWII would be about sixty years old. Roughly Elise Carlson’s age. Was it possible that she was the daughter born to Sophie Frankel in a concentration camp? Had she changed Lisa to Elise and married someone named Carlson? Could it have been her arm holding the rifle that shot at the Lotus team? Her scar that Groën had noticed in the photograph? Why? Who or what was she aiming at? What was her connection?

  She bumped the table. Groën looked up. She turned away. It was too far-fetched. Or was it? Had she ever seen Elise Carlson’s arms not covered?

  She interrupted her grandmother. “Did the Nazis brand numbers on infants?”

  “In the camps? I believe so. As soon as they were born they became property of the Reich and added to the roster of those condemned to die. The Nazis were so considerate they even waited for failed suicides to recover before sending them to their state-controlled deaths.”

  Thirty-six

  “Rebecca?”

  The phone was still warm in her hand. Her cheeks were flushed. Groën wheeled toward her. “Rebecca, something is wrong?”

  She shook her head—something was right. She faced Groën. “Franks. Frankel. Could they be the same name?”

  “Why not? My cousin spells ours with a u instead of the o. Who is Franks?”

  “Brian Franks is a harried financial accountant. Lisa Frankel was a successful Wall Street type who may have painted holocaust scenes in technicolor. She and her mother were camp survivors.”

  “Ach. And where is she today?”

  “Possibly passing as Elise Carlson. If I’m right, Franks would know.”

  “But will he tell?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  She punched in the number for the Canterbury Hotel, asked to be connected with Elise Carlson. Franks could be with her. Rebecca wanted him alone and cornered.

  Carlson didn’t answer. That was good news. Presumably she was either at breakfast or on her way to the track with Madison, senior. Rebecca asked the operator to try Brian Franks. He picked up on the first ring. When she told him who she was, he sputtered that he was in hurry, he couldn’t talk.

  “Leaving town before the race?”

  “I have a business. A family.”

  “Does it include Elise Carlson?”

  Silence. Then, a whisper. “What do you want?”

  “One question, just answer one question: Did you know Elise planned to kill Peyton Madison?”

  A chair creaked as Franks collapsed. He sucked in a gasp, moaned. The moan turned into the wail of a wounded animal.

  She raised her voice over it. “Franks, was it intentional?”

  His voice caught, he was struggling for breath, close to sobbing. “God, no. She was obsessed to ruin him financially, that’s all. I swear. Nothing we did was illegal. A misleading tip to his broker. A hint about his gambling addiction to the press. He was a man self-destructing. We nudged a little.”

  “You didn’t cut the brake line on the race car, file threads off the wheel bolts?”

  “I wouldn’t know how to do such a thing. I thought we were turning the screws to make him sell more paintings. That’s all.”

  “Elise?”

  He sighed. “She knows how to do everything.”

  “She shot at the pits, didn’t she? Was she trying to hit Peyton?”

  “No. The car. It was about damaging the car to cost him money. Don’t you understand? It was all about monetary retribution.”

  She understood that it might have begun that way. She sat. “When did it change for Elise?”

  “Oh, God. Oh, God.” Rhythmic creaks from the chair as he sobbed. “I tried to warn her—the instant I learned your friend was a cop. Give it up. Leave. Find another way. She wouldn’t listen, exhilarated by the danger of getting caught. She bugged your house to keep tabs on him.” He let out air like a balloon deflating. “What’s going to happen now?”

  Rebecca didn’t have a clue. She had no official standing of any kind. If she were a nicer person she would recommend that he deny this conversation and call a lawyer ASAP. But she was a former reporter. Instincts persist. She sensed that Franks couldn’t take the tension any longer. He was primed, seeping gas, ready to talk. She let him, asked every question that occurred to her and took down notes in shorthand.

  Franks and Elise were first cousins. His father, Josef, was Sophie’s younger brother. As a child, Josef had suffered from tuberculosis and spent the war years in England. After he married, he came to
America, changed the family name to Franks to sound less Germanic.

  “My father never criticized Aunt Sophie. He felt her rancor against her Nazi captors had kept her alive in the camp. Once freed, once the Nazi regime was finished, she didn’t know what to do with that venom.”

  “She transferred it to the family of Heinrich Kauffman?”

  “Kauffman.” He sighed. “In my mind, that name clangs like noises in a ghost story. As children in New Jersey, Heinrich Kauffman was our bogeyman. In Germany, he had lived next door to Aunt Sophie’s. Heinrich junior and Sophie were pledged to each other when they were infants. Their fathers worked together. They wanted to build their own empire by joining the families. All I knew of Kauffman was that he was supposed to help my father and aunt, who had survived. But, of course, he didn’t. He betrayed them.

  “When they couldn’t locate him, my father begged Sophie to let it be, forget and go on. For a time, we thought she did.” He blew his nose. “Then she started to go a little crazy. More than a little. At an investors’ conference in Midtown, Lisa came to me for help.”

  Franks’s voice faded in and out. He was stumbling now, mumbling about how hard it was to speak of it after all this time. Rebecca was afraid she was losing him. She debated about offering to drive to the hotel and pick him up. They could talk it through, face-to-face.

  Before she could make the offer, he began again. “In forty-one, before the family was separated, Sophie’s parents made her memorize a list of their valuable artwork. She was the youngest, had the best memory, best chance to survive. Dutifully, she learned each artist’s name, title of the work, dimensions, medium, its provenance. We all knew bits of it; it was the family legend. Sophie never forgot a single word. In the months leading up to her death she would recite the list a hundred times a day like a nursery rhyme. If she stumbled, she would start again from the beginning. It was so eerie. You have no idea. She listed all previous owners. It sounded like the begats from the Bible going back to the beginning of time. She scared me senseless when she rambled on. Lisa couldn’t stop her. After a while she didn’t try.” He halted, panting.

  “When did Sophie die?”

  Franks thought for a moment. “Nineteen-ninety one, I think.”

  That jelled. It was easy to imagine Elise taking up painting following her mother’s death. Therapy to expunge the ordeal she’d listened to over and over and could do nothing about. Two years of throwing paint at canvases, resurrecting her mother’s demons, and L. Frank L. would have been ready for a showing. Not to sell the works, but to shock the world. Or maybe just flaunt her pain. Rebecca wondered what had happened to those vivid oversized oils.

  Franks sniffed. “Aunt Sophie was just too shattered to go on. She wasted away. Maybe once she transferred her hatred to Lisa, there was nothing left to sustain her.”

  Rebecca thanked him before hanging up. She didn’t offer reassurances that all would be well. He wouldn’t have believed her. He seemed convinced that his cousin had killed Peyton. It could have been a product of his own guilt. He was too close to the action to be objective. There was no proof Elise Carlson had done anything, just a lot of suggestive coincidences.

  The anguish in Brian Franks’s voice was enough to make Rebecca want to exonerate Elise/Lisa for whatever she might have done. It could have been justified. She dropped the phone on the table. “Samuel, we’ve been assuming that whoever damaged the car also tortured Peyton.”

  He looked up. “What, now you like a conspiracy theory?”

  “No. But we may have one. Elise Carlson was Lisa Franks, a Holocaust survivor. She claimed she was boar hunting in Argentina before arriving in Indy on Friday.”

  “If that’s true, then she has an accomplice?”

  “I don’t buy it. Who? Not Franks. He wouldn’t know a Phillips from a torx-tipped screwdriver. Whitten? Evans?”

  “Too fast, Rebecca.”

  She took a deep breath. Right. She was getting ahead of the facts. First, find out if Elise had been in South America. Or, more to the point, find out when she arrived in Indianapolis.

  She pawed through the drawer in the kitchen for the phone numbers Evans had left when he moved out. One was his cell phone. With luck, he’d have it with him at the track, and on.

  She paced the kitchen as she punched in the number. Three rings and he answered, yelled over the sound of engines warming up. “Moore? What the hell do you want? I’m busy here.”

  “Elise Carlson, when did she pick up her credentials?”

  “How the blazes would I know? Call her yourself. Or try the administration building.” He cut her off.

  She checked the clock. It was after eight, the offices should be open, busily handing out parking decals and credentials for one-day attendees. Not bothering to look it up, she dialed 411 and asked a pleasant-sounding operator for the number, let the phone company connect her to save time.

  The man on the other end was not pleasant. He refused to stop what he was doing to pull up the inventory of credentials they’d dispensed for the pre-race activities.

  Rebecca dropped her voice an octave, spaced her words and lied. She baldly announced that she was a reporter for The Washington Post and implied that he would not like what she’d write about the administration offices at the Speedway. He put her on hold. She crossed her fingers that he was searching records, flipping through computer data bases or checking 3" ×5" cards. Not trotting off to complain to his supervisor. Or worse yet, calling the Post to confirm her employment status. So what if he discovered she was lying? What could he do? There’s no law against impersonating a reporter. Some of her fellow journalists did it daily.

  The Muzak stopped abruptly. The administrator growled into the phone. He was somewhat mollified because the record had been easy to locate. Elise F. Carlson had picked up her Lotus Team Credentials and pass for the VIP Suites on Friday.

  “The day before yesterday?”

  “No. A week ago. She was one of the first.”

  Rebecca hung up without thanking him.

  Elise Carlson had not been in Argentina as she claimed. That had been a taunt. She’d been in town for over a week, hunting closer to home. With a pass to the track, she could have wandered into the pits anytime in the past nine days. No one would have questioned it. She was just one more person affiliated with some team. Her laminated ID clearly said she belonged.

  Thirty-seven

  Mick took the phone call at the deputy’s desk.

  They’d given him a cell for the night, unlocked it in the morning so he could join them for bitter coffee and a round of liars dice. They were betting on beers for after the race and teasing him about his lack of sex life with Moore. They roared over his booking a cabin at Dolores’s motel in the hope of getting lucky. A cabin that had gone unused the previous night. Ted wanted to roll for bunking privileges after the race; he figured Mick wouldn’t need it.

  He’d lost six rounds in a row before they confessed they would have let him go the previous evening, if Trooper Gunn of the State Police hadn’t suggested they hang on to him. Something about an unreported shooting at the track that Moore was mixed up in.

  The sergeant winked as he handed him the phone. “Speak of the devil.”

  With no preamble, Moore said, “I know who was harassing Peyton.” She didn’t sound pleased.

  “Someone other than me? That’s fantastic. The chief has gone to town to buy rope for my noose. I’ll have him call you when he—”

  “Listen, Hagan. Peyton was being stalked by a woman bent on revenge. Not against him, but against his family. For her family. For a decades-old crime. If I’m right, his father is now in danger.”

  Mick leaned against the graffiti-stained wall, stretching his spine to scratch it. “What’s the motive and who has it?”

  He heard Jasmine chatting in the background, probably to the squirrel, before Moore closed the slider. Wanting it quiet while she decided how much to tell him and what kind of a spin to put on it. When she resume
d, it was in a story-telling voice, a good indication that she was spending too much time around Delacroix. “Mick, you’re Irish. Do you sympathize with the IRA murdering Protestants, including women and children, and the Protestants retaliating over a treachery that happened hundreds of years ago?”

  “You’re kidding, right? I won’t bet a beer with an Irishman on the outcome of a soccer match. Guys know how to hold a grudge.”

  “Right. You accept that the mentality for harboring long-term vengeance exists. So, how hard is it to imagine a child of a concentration camp survivor, who decades later sets out to destroy the family that prospered while hers was eliminated? Former neighbors, whose children were once engaged, to whom a fortune in Old Masters had been entrusted. Gentiles, exempt from Nazi atrocities, able to relocate taking the family’s wealth with them. A child so twisted by—” “Moore, relax. Take a breath.” He demonstrated. “Have you been drinking Manischewitz with that Jewish photographer? Man’s Orthodox. Probably’s got the second coming marked on his calendar, he’s—”

  “He’s staying at the house, Hagan. Yesterday when Jasmine returned for the photograph, his shop and the rooms where he lived were destroyed. The police said an incendiary round was fired into the dark room. From a rifle. The photographer’s alive because Jasmine and I pulled him out.”

  Mick dropped his legs over the edge of the bunk. “You okay?”

  “Sooty. The shooter knew when to be there, because the house is bugged.”

  “Bugged? What are you talking about?”

  Using short words, she explained that a squirrel had dislodged a listening device from between the sliding glass doors. “It’s real, Hagan. I matched it to one on the Internet. It gave me the creeps last night, wondering if a stalker was right outside, listening.”