The Case of the Purloined Painting

by Carl Brookins

  I got up to leave, abruptly shoving back my chair. The feet made a growling kind of sound on the wooden floor. Carter was still looking at the photograph when I said goodbye and stalked out of the bank. I left the copy of the photograph. I had others.

  On my way through the lobby, I noticed a tall, gaunt, man leaning over one of the counters writing on a scrap of paper. I thought he looked vaguely familiar, then I forgot about him.

  Chapter 31

  I drove back to our Kenwood apartment. I realized along the way I’d let my anger influence the way I handled my interview with ex-bank president Carter. Not good. Riding up in the elevator from the garage to our floor I realized something else. I hadn’t paid my usual attention to my changing surroundings on the drive to Kenwood. I’d been on automatic pilot, not a good place to be when somebody had already taken a couple of runs at me. There was something else as well. I knew the guy in the bank lobby had been vaguely familiar. I thought now it might have been the same guy who was at the entrance to the library the other day. Obviously, I needed to sharpen my best practices and also find out if I was right about that fellow. Was I being followed? And if so, why? By whom?

  I let myself into our place and checked my gat into the safe in the spare bedroom-cum-office. It was a measure of respect and trust that Catherine had given me the combination to the safe. It was also true that she didn’t like having my gats lying about, either. I whipped together a light scotch and ice and sat down to read over the notes and information the Revulon cousins had cobbled together for me. I hoped to find some nuggets requiring a little more concentrated mining that could prove fruitful.

  My mind didn’t let me focus on the latest sheet of paper. After a few minutes of staring at the page, I hadn’t actually read the words. Crap. I closed the file and went to pick up the large bundle of copies. Since Catherine and I were acting like a married couple, and cohabiting two residences, I had files in the office we shared. What? I may be still in the twentieth century as it regards a lot of electronic advances, but I know enough to maintain copies of important case files in unknown locations.

  So I got the Gottlieb file and settled down to refresh myself, along with my scotch, of course. In the early interviews with Tiffany Market/Ann/Anne, when she described the murder scene on the bridge that snow-filled night, she’d said one of the men, a tallish figure, wore a dark old-fashioned fedora pulled well down on his head and a long dark overcoat.

  Fine. It wasn’t much to go on but when I saw that brief description and recalled the figure of a similarly dressed man in two recent locations, I began to get a prickle at the back of my head. Not hairs standing on end, exactly, just a niggle, a feeling. Was I being stalked by Manny Gottlieb’s killer?

  I set aside the file and went to the small bookcase. I was looking for my training manuals, the books by some of my favorite crime authors, Richard Prather and Wade Miller and Gil Brewer. Just then the doorbell chimed. I don’t understand why we have one. The front doors to all the apartments have them, even though every visitor has to be welcomed by the security guard in the lobby. To be vetted the visitor gives a name and the name of the person visitor is visiting to the guard. He calls on the inside phone line and you agree to see whoever it is who’s down there. There’s also a private video channel so you can see, in black and white, who it is in the lobby. If the guard calls and there’s no answer, the visitor doesn’t get admitted. No going up in the elevator and ringing the doorbell to see if you can wake up somebody who might be dozing, or in the bathroom. If the guard doesn’t get a response, the visitor can leave, or can wait a while and try again. Sometimes the guard would tell the visitor that the person wanted isn’t in. The guards didn’t always know that, unless the resident informed the guard or he saw the resident departing.

  I knew all this because when I started seeing Catherine on a regular basis I wanted to know about security. It only took a few minutes to get to our apartment door from the lobby, even if the elevator wasn’t right there, waiting. Which it always was.

  So, nobody got to a resident’s front doors if they weren’t home, or not answering, or someone whispered to the guard to send the visitor away with some other excuse. Nobody needed a doorbell. Sometimes Catherine hit it when she came home. Just to see if it still worked, I guess. She wouldn’t tell me why she rang the doorbell when she came home from work. Maybe it was a warning so she wouldn’t surprise me doing something naughty.

  One day, she rang the bell because it turned out she’d forgotten her door key and I stripped off all my clothes and ran to the front door out of the bedroom to greet her, totally naked. She had a lawyer friend with her. My sudden appearance sans drapery evoked a momentary stunned look and then peals of laughter from both women. The entire evening was punctuated with semi-hysterical giggling and laughter. I’d look up and catch Joyce looking at me. She’d see me looking at her and suddenly giggle, which would set off Catherine. Frankly, I wasn’t ever sure what the glances and giggles were all about and Catherine refused categorically to elucidate. I never did that again.

  Anyway, the doorbell chimed and the door opened and my companion, Catherine McKerney, sashayed in. After exchanging greetings, which involved a meeting of tongues, I said to Catherine I was going to the garage for a moment.

  I left the apartment and traveled down to the basement garage with a brief stop at the security desk. In the cavernous dank place I did a discreet reconnoiter. The garage was secure, although not as tightly as the main entrance. There were a couple of cameras on electric-powered gimbals that scanned the space, but if you were sharp and spent a little time watching, you could find a way to get into the garage without being spotted. I had done it just to prove to myself it was possible. That little task had also satisfied me that my skills were still reasonably sharp.

  Finding no causes for alarm, I rose again to our place, changed and went for a nice swim in the building’s indoor pool. No one talked to me. Later, relaxing with a drink of fine single malt, I related the day’s happenings to my apartment mate.

  “Do you believe this man you’ve been noticing is really following you about the city?”Catherine queried.

  “I don’t know. You know I usually get a feeling about such and in the past we’ve both had a sense somebody was taking too much interest in us. But not with this guy, except that one time at the library where I had a strong feeling of being observed, but I couldn’t detect the observer.”

  “I’ll be extra watchful until you solve this case,” she said.

  I nodded and drained my glass. “That would be wise.” Rising from my chair, I wandered into the kitchen with our glasses and went then to the dining room window. We had a light on in the kitchen and in the living room, but the dining room was darker. When I stepped to the window I looked out toward a part of the Minneapolis’s downtown concentration of office and apartment towers. Many lights of traffic, streetlights, windows, spilt beams into the snowy streets and when I looked down there was somebody standing across the street from our building. Now in February one rarely saw people standing idly on the streets. They were most often hunched against the cold and hurrying toward their destination. About the only exception was for people watching the Winter Carnival parades in Saint Paul.

  The figure lit a cigarette, which was how I happened to notice him. No, he wasn’t wearing a fedora or a long coat and he appeared to have a backpack slung over one shoulder. No warning vibes, just a view of some guy on the street, smoking a cigarette on a sub-zero February evening.

  Chapter 32

  If I was being stalked and targeted by people involved with the murder of Mr. Gottlieb, it stood to reason the people doing said stalking were somehow associated with the Murchison clan. The only other very remote possibility was a third party, someone out of my past bent on righting some perceived wrong.

  That seemed unlikely so I lasered in on the Murchisons. My first choice was the old m
an, Al, who had started this whole thing by apparently “Liberating” the painting in question while he was stationed in Poland. I already had a file on him and I spent a few days asking around discreetly while also keeping an eye on my back trail. I had started watching for the tall dude in the old fashioned fedora, but he didn’t come back for an encore.

  A lawyer I knew contacted me for a possible insurance fraud gig. Over lunch I found out he had some peripheral knowledge of the Murchison clan. Minneapolis wasn’t that big a town so people generally knew or knew about a lot of other people, especially those in the same line of work.

  “I think the old man is retiring from the business. Leastways that’s what I hear. They have a place in Florida. On one of the keys, I guess.” He drank from his stemmed glass of chardonnay. We were doing lunch in a real restaurant with table covers and napkins of white cloth.

  “The story is he’s not too fond of his son, Al. Thinks he hasn’t the stones to take over the running of the plant.”

  “Why don’t they kick him upstairs to higher management?” I drank from my own glass of wine. The lawyer had ordered for both of us. I don’t usually drink chardonnay. It’s too fruity. “I mean Al. The son.”

  “You got me.”

  I didn’t have him and I was getting a little impatient. So I pressed the lawyer and we came to terms and I was getting ready up to leave when the guy said, “I guess you know about the scandal, right?”

  Since this was news to me, I sat right down again and stared into the lawyer’s face. His eyes narrowed under my look and I raised one of my eyebrows. I forget which one.

  “No,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “Nothing you can take to court, you understand, but the story is the kid, Clem, may not be young Al’s true son.”

  “This is a big deal?” did I care if the Murchison men and women had been screwing around sometime in the past? You bet I did. Or might. But I wasn’t going to give this attorney-client a clue to my level of interest if I could help it. He had a loose lip and I knew my business would soon be in the ears of others. I’d already revealed more about me to him than I was comfortable with.

  “Oh, probably not, but the story is that the old man found his daughter-in-law in flagrante delicto as they say. I heard they were doin’ the nasty at the plant.” The attorney smirked and blotted a little wine from his lips. I was beginning to wish we hadn’t come to terms on the insurance gig.

  “So the story is the old man cold cocked both of them, sent the guy to the emergency room and then paid him off to keep him quiet. Then, about nine months or so later, the wife in question was delivered of a bouncing baby boy they named Clem.”

  I raised both eyebrows.“No abortion? And why don’t they do DNA to clear things permanently?”

  The attorney shrugged. “Dunno, but I’m betting they prefer not to know in case the kid’s father is not a Murchison.”

  I left to make some notes in private and to hope there would be no possible way I would use this information about the marital peccadilloes of anybody in that family. I had several other questions to follow up on regarding these new nuggets of information. But I wasn’t about to question lawyer loose lips any further, thereby revealing my level of interest in the clan Murchison. As it was, I expected he’d tell his office mates about our lunch date and however he assessed the value of my interest in what I was now coming to call the Murchison affair.

  In my office, while the dimness of the day outside grew. My hands were busy at routine tasks while a part of my mind shuffled through the new information I’d collected about the Murchisons. Then I decided to label it gossip for the time being. I had a few tasks to pursue that involved keeping my business going, such as sending out a few bills and making some follow-up calls.

  Eventually I cleaned up my agenda and decided to turn my jaundiced eye on a Murchison. For no particular reason, I chose Alvin the current president. A quick drive by the plant revealed that his parking slot was empty. I drove to their neighborhood in Minnetonka Mills and discovered nothing. A light snowfall that morning lay undisturbed late this day on the driveway that pierced a gap between tall Colorado blue spruce and went on long enough that I had no sight of human habitation. I drove on up the road until I came to a small commercial district and an honest-to-god restaurant that wasn’t a chain. I had no particular reason to stop at this establishment except it was not far from Murchison’s and I felt the need of a cup of coffee.

  I suppose you’d call it a coffee shop. It was situated back from the road, the narrow end pointed at the street with the door on the long side, where the big parking area lay. I parked, went in and sat at the counter. A lot of investigators, I read, would sit in a booth and chat up the waitress as she came by. But I found over the years that waitresses were mostly on the move, whereas the person behind the counter, male or female, was often restricted in space, which made it easier to carry on a conversation and, in the process, learn a few things.

  “Pretty quiet this afternoon.”

  “Pretty quiet most afternoons.” The woman poured me a cup of coffee without asking and stood waiting for an order.

  “What kind of pie do you have?” I asked.

  “The usual. Apple, pecan, cherry and one piece of banana cream left.”

  “I guess I’ll have that, banana—”

  “—Cream,” she finished. “I thought you looked like coffee and banana cream pie when you came in.”

  I nodded and pulled out my small notebook while Hilda went to dish up my pie. I knew her name was Hilda because she was wearing a name tag on her breast that said so. Somebody started moving pots around in the kitchen, behind the counter, but Hilda didn’t react so I assumed she knew who it was. There were two old guys in a booth wearing heavy coats and old baseball-style caps. The one I could read said Cargill Feed on it. There were two ceramic cups of coffee on the table. Steam tendrils backlit by the light from the windows rose from the dark liquid.

  Hilda slid a generous piece of pie in front of me and refilled my coffee. “You want whipped cream?” She was holding a pressurized can of stuff and I nodded. She squirted a thick white gob of real whipped cream on my pie and I nodded.

  “So, what brings you out this way, stranger?” she asked over the sound of the whipped cream issuing from the nozzle of the can.

  I glanced up and saw her lips curving into a small smile.

  “Wal, muh horse needed a rest and some water,” I drawled.

  Her smile widened and she said, “Plenty of room at the hitchin’ post out back.”

  “Zane Grey or Max Brand?” I indicated the edge of a dog-eared paperback on the shelf behind her.

  She chuckled with obvious pleasure and said, “Son of a gun, a reader. Actually, neither. That’s an OK Western Romance by some gal named Beth Williams. Not my usual, but it passes the time.”

  She went off to offer refills to the two men in the booth. I tore a page out of my notebook and printed the Murchison postal address on the sheet. When Hilda came back behind the counter I showed her the address. “That’s the Murchison place just down the road here.”

  “I recognize it. You a cop?”

  “Private,” I said. “How come you know the address?” She grinned fleetingly. “Back in the day, I had a small thing with Clem. We were young, barely out of high school. That’s his address. Before he got married,” she added.

  I made a note and started to ask another question. That’s when the big window facing the street blew apart and glass and buckshot flew all over the place.

  Chapter 33

  In the sudden hush following the double boom from the shotgun and the high crash of disintegrating plate glass, one of the men in the booth started cursing in a flat, rapid, shock-filled monotone. When I risked a glance in his direction, he was staring at his wrist, specked with glass and blood. I was splattered with glass and kn
ew I’d been hit by some buckshot, but my winter coat had protected me from serious damage.

  I crunched around and looked for hilda. She was sprawled on the floor behind the counter, still clutching the handle of the now disintegrated glass coffee pot and staring at nothing. There was a lot of blood on her face and her uniform was spotted with glass and crockery that had been on the counter to my right, toward the window.

  “Hilda,” I yelled and jumped the counter. The contents of the coffee pot were splashed all over Hilda and the floor. She blinked. I pried the broken pot handle out of her fingers and looked up at a white, frightened-looking face that appeared from the back. “Call 911,” I snapped. “Quick. Nine-one-one.”

  The kid disappeared and I could hear him screaming into the phone. I peered at Hilda’s eyes. She was breathing rapidly and scrabbling her heels, trying to get up, I guess. Her shoes slipped in the liquid on the floor underfoot. I took her hand and said, “Hilda, talk. Say something. Where does it hurt? Are you shot?”

  Hilda took a quick gulp of air and her fingers squeezed mine. Then she took a deeper breath and whispered, “My face. My face hurts.”

  I bent closer, ignoring the rising pandemonium in the café on the other side of the counter. Hilda had black and sparkly speckles all over her face from plate glass and the birdshot. Birdshot! Somewhere in my mind I registered that the guy with the shotgun had been firing birdshot. If it had been double-ought buckshot, we would all have been killed or seriously wounded. As it was, the place was a mess and several patrons and one waitress would probably carry bandages for a while and maybe some scars for a lot longer. I had birdshot in the back of one hand and a peppered overcoat. This was obviously an unplanned opportunistic effort. It gave me a noticeably higher level of anger at whoever was trying to take me out. That they were incompetent made no difference. Birdshot through a plate glass window. Nuts.