After a pause she said, “I see.”
We listened to each other breathing for a moment and the phone went dead.
* * * *
Morning came late. The white sun shown through a high screen of clouds on a white city. The fresh snow lay thick on trees, wires, lawns and buildings. The muffled sounds of the city awakening included the heavy rumble of snow plows. After the plow opened my street, the kid up the block came and blew out my driveway. Radio news guys said that traffic was slow going around Minnesota but no roads were closed. I could go anywhere as long as I was patient. And careful. “Sean Sean is always careful,” I muttered to myself.
I called Catherine to tell her I might have to be away for a few days. Then I packed a small bag.
I loaded the bag in the trunk along with a carryall with one shotgun, and a couple of large handguns. Ammunition for all three weapons went in also. I was loaded for bear.
By three that afternoon I had a headache from peering at endless vistas of flat, contrast-less snowscapes. Even with all the black-appearing pine trees which populate that part of Minnesota, the fresh snow and the sun made me squint all the time, dark glasses notwithstanding. The temperature had fallen to minus five degrees.
The parking lot at Breezy Point Convention Center was plowed out and almost empty. I parked and trudged east toward the lake shore. Based on what Mrs. Murchison had told me, and with the aid of some seriously high-powered binoculars, I was able to pick out two, possibly three large lodges on the eastern side of Pelican Lake that were candidates for the Murchison place. Sure, I had the exact address and my little GPS device had pin-pointed the location, but I wanted a look at the neighborhood before I made my sortie.
Wind from the lake was coming up and the day seemed to be getting shorter by the moment. If I didn’t hurry I’d be skulking around unfamiliar terrain looking for a way into the Murchison lodge in the blackness of an overcast winter night. I picked up my binoculars and set out around the lake. An hour later I had determined exactly which lodge was the Murchison place. It wasn’t all that difficult. A mailbox at the road edge, perched on a metal post, had the name neatly lettered on it. I also determined that the homes on either side were vacant, at least at the moment. I hoped to be in and out before the light went away all together.
There was enough snow on the ground that it was impossible for me to reconnoiter the place without leaving tracks, so I didn’t worry about it. If the question ever came up I’d just do something weird, like tell the truth. The only tracks in the yard were wild ones, deer and something that might have been a fox or a dog or a coyote. A tracker, I’m not.
I peered through the tall glass doors at the rear, the ones that looked out over the private dock and the frozen lake. I could see pinpoints of lights from the lodge windows at Breezy Point. I was still of a mixed mind about doing a B&E. That is, I was until my eyes adjusted to the dark and I stared at the room behind the glass. It didn’t look right. I couldn’t put a finger on it, but the room looked messy, out of sorts. Not exactly ransacked, just, messy. My flashlight, never the best, had died from the cold and lack of replacement batteries. My breath bloomed on the glass and obscured the room even more. I moved on around the house. There was no question of trying to break through the glass doors. They were tall, heavy, well-secured and made of three-paned weather-resistant glass.
At the north side of the house, I found what I needed. The door appeared to open on a mud room. It was an ordinary door with a single thermal pane of glass. I peered at the latch and lock. Ordinarily I’d have whipped out my tool kit of picks and so forth, something every well-equipped P.I. carried, right? I had a set of lock picks, but they were in the car and it was too cold to wade back through knee-deep snow to get them. I reared up with my wellpadded elbow and smote the window a mighty blow. The pane shattered and my questing fingers found the deadbolt. I pulled the door open and sidled inside.
I’d been right in my assumption. The door opened on a mud room. There were pegs holding all manner of slickers, there were towels piled on hampers, and there were rubber boots lined up against one wall. I wasted little time looking and went up a couple of steps into the kitchen. Unlike the mud room I’d just left, the kitchen was tidy and closed down. The refrigerator was dark and the big gas range was cold and black. The counters were bare. This was a kitchen closed up for the season.
My ears tuned for any odd sounds other than those of my own making, I went forward into the next room which was obviously the dining room. Now that there were more windows, the outside light, even though fast disappearing, gave me enough to see there was a thin film of dust on the bare wood table.
I skirted the table and stepped into the next room. This was the room I’d peered into from outside the tall French-style window/doors. My impression had been right. This room was disturbed. Pillows lay helter-skelter on the floor and there was a sleeping bag tossed on one of the three couches that formed a misshapen ring around the fireplace. I bent down over the mound of ashes in the fireplace. They smelled like you’d expect. Wood ashes. Cold, ordinary. This fire had been out for several hours if not days.
At that moment I heard a faint click and the atmosphere of the room changed. I started to crouch down to the floor when I realized what had just happened. Listening harder, I heard the faint sound of a well-muffled fan. Somewhere in the place a furnace had just kicked on and the hot-air fan had started. It confirmed what I had suspected. When the Murchisons closed up the place, they left the furnace set to a temperature that kept the pipes from freezing. But when somebody came in, say an interloper, he might not want to heat the whole place, so he had a fire in the fireplace, and snuggled down in a sleeping bag. So where was my mysterious interloper and who was he?
I moved on to a door in the wall beside the fireplace. It led to a hall. I knew that because the door was partly open and I could see along the hall to the opposite side of the house. There was also a closed door in that same wall which I assumed would reveal an office or some other kind of room. A library, perhaps. I opened the door to discover my assumption was correct. It was obviously an office. There was also a body on the floor.
Chapter 36
There was no question in my mind the guy was dead. But just to be sure I leaned over and pressed my fingers against the carotid artery in his neck. His skin was cold to the touch and he had no pulse. Ergo…
I didn’t recognize the guy. Peering at the body through the gloom I realized I had a new dilemma, a dilemma and more questions. The DB wasn’t Clem Murchison. His blocky shape, even allowing for a winter coat was wrong. Who the hell was this? Sprawled out on his face, I had to lean over to get a good look at him. I peered at his chin, it was clear he hadn’t shaved in a few days. He was cold to the touch and didn’t smell so he hadn’t been dead too long.
What I should do was trudge out to the car, find a phone and call the local cops. If I did that and waited around, I’d have some explaining to do and I’d spend a lot of time doing it, always assuming I could persuade some deputy or the sheriff himself, that I was an innocent bystander, guilty of nothing more than innocent breaking and entering.
I stared at the scene for a few moments more to sort of fix things in my head, in case questions came up. My digital SLR always seems to be somewhere else. The dead guy was sprawled on his face beside the desk on which I observed nothing, except a few smudges in the dust. It looked like my dead body when alive, or someone else, had been interrupted in a search. None of the drawers of the desk, which were locked, appeared to have been jimmied. I scanned the room. Nothing appeared out of place. There were drag marks in the dust on the floor that sort of pointed to the side where my DB lay. I figured the marks occurred when this guy fell over. I examined his outer clothes. He was dressed in a heavy dark overcoat. It felt like wool that had seen better days. I rolled him over. He’d missed a hole when he buttoned up. The legs of the deceased below the he
m of the coat were encased in what looked like dark heavy denim and he wore low boots with thick soles. Workingman’s boots. On the floor beside his head was a black billed cap. Not like our baseball caps. This was the kind of billed cap you sometimes see on farmers working in the fields of Europe. This DB might be the third man, the one who actually threw Mr. Gottlieb off the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis, as described to me by that woman, Ann/Anne. I decided I needed to look at him more closely.
I sidled back into the living room. On a small shelf beside the fireplace I found a box of old fashioned kitchen matches. A hum came to my ears and a ghostly light flickered over the hearth. I looked toward the front of the property to see the blurry glow of headlights going down the road. If that was a concerned citizen, I might not have more than a few minutes before a nosy deputy showed up asking impertinent questions.
I needed a light of some kind. I grabbed the matches and a section of newspaper and scuttled back to the DB. It hadn’t moved. With the aid of a match or two and a torch fashioned of tightly twisted newsprint, I determined that the dust on the floor had been seriously tracked and disturbed, probably in a scuffle, so my presence might be overlooked. I slid my fingers into the DB’s pockets, looking for anything that might tell me who he was. Nothing, zip. I pulled off one shoe. He had a hundred dollar bill folded under the sole of his left foot. His other shoe, except for sock and foot, was empty. I replaced the hundred.
I decided it was time to skedaddle. I would have liked very much to search the house, but I had to hope that the citizen who’d just driven past my car on the road hadn’t noted my license plate. I took my burnt matches and scraped up the ashes from the section of newspaper and crammed the mess into my side pocket. Then I beat it out of there. I took the time to wedge the mud-room door shut and retraced my footprints in the snow back to the road. As I fired up my Taurus, I looked both ways along the dark empty road and at the somber colorless forest. Then I drove slowly south.
In Little Falls, I stopped and found a pay phone. I called the Crow Wing County Sheriff to report suspicious goings on near the lodges along the lake across from the Breezy Point Resort. When the person at the sheriff’s office became insistent and started asking pointed questions I wasn’t prepared to answer, I gently hung up. By midnight, I was wearily unloading my arsenal through the garage and contemplating a good slug of scotch and a warm bed.
* * * *
Dawn came far too soon after a restless night. Damn it! What exactly had I learned? Or accomplished? In hindsight I thought now I could have just stayed on and searched the whole place for whatever I might find, hoping for something that would lead me to Murchison. Instead, now I had to deal at long range with finding that body. The more I thought about it the more convinced I was that the DB was one of the men on the bridge Ann/Anne had described to me.
The snow had stopped overnight, but the gray clouds seemed lower and denser. I made it to my office without incident. I contemplated calling Mrs. Murchison to tell her I hadn’t located her husband. But what if she asked me whether I went up north to their lake place? She had no reason to, except I’d asked her earlier if they had a lake cabin and she might remember. I could lie, of course, stock in trade for the nimble P.I. My decision was to avoid her for the time being. The overcast day was getting to me again. Or still. Time for a careful review.
Seeking answers to the circumstances surrounding the murder of Aaron Gottlieb’s great uncle, Manfred, I had encountered a woman who said she witnessed the murder. Her name, she told me, was Anne or Ann. Because she didn’t spell it, I wasn’t sure. Truth to tell, I was no longer sure if that was her real name at all. When I had earlier pressed her on her involvement, I learned she had been on the bridge and had seen Manny Gottlieb killed. She, I subsequently learned, had picked up a small package, a bound ledger-like book written in German script, which turned out to be a list of valuables, jewelry, art, like that.
At one point, a man who said his name was Robert Gehrz showed up. A very slick dude. He was paying me to find a woman whom he called Tiffany Market. He gave me a little song and dance about the woman he was dating. Tiffany Market. She had disappeared, he told me, hadn’t shown up for a date after their relationship had become well-established, according to Gehrz. It hadn’t taken me very long to decide that the woman in white, Ann/Anne and Ms. Market were the same person. But why the different names? I didn’t like it when people ran games on me, or tried to. That was my gig.
Then it occurred to me this whole ploy could be a game Gehrz was running. Maybe he was trying to determine how effectively the woman had stayed out of sight and off the usual radar screens. But why? How bizarre was that? Unless he and she were seriously worried about her safety. Sort of a small witness protection scheme. In the midst of my ruminations, I called the contact number I had for Gehrz. Naturally no one answered, but a hollow-sounding voice announced I could leave a message so I did.
All right. The timing for all this was coincidental, or, looked at from a different perspective, precisely on the mark. The little twist in the Gehrz-Market-Ann/Anne triangle is that I knew now that the females were one and the same and it appeared Gehrz was backstopping the woman. My gut told me I was on the right track. What my gut didn’t tell me was why this was happening. Was it only because she witnessed a murder and wouldn’t come forth, even though she was clearly anxious to have the murderers caught? But she wouldn’t come forward. Why not? The only reason I could think that makes sense was that she was following one of the people on the bridge. Either she was shadowing Manny, or the two murderers. This was all based on my gut feeling that Ann/Anne, otherwise known as Tiffany Market, was the very same individual. Ah, now we come to something quite interesting and for me, unsettling.
Just suppose, I considered, this woman in white was there on the bridge, following the two thugs she claimed murdered Gottlieb because they were all somehow involved in a wider conspiracy. Perhaps she was connected in some way with an international agency. Oh, crap. I did not want to be involved in any way with this kind of situation. I put international crime right up there with the mob, the Mafia, organized crime. The kind of stuff that could get you too easily snuffed for no rational reason. In spite of my attitude, it appeared I was trapped.
This raised the question of why and how my home-town miscreants, the Murchison gang, was involved. There was only one possibility I could see. The damn Neumann painting now hanging at the MIA must be the connection. I was betting that somewhere in the pages of that little brown ledger was a reference to that painting and, therefore, who owned it, who confiscated it and who was, therefore, implicated in thievery and murder.
How implicated, I asked myself?
My assumptions suggested that old man Murchison stole the painting, that is to say, in the parlance of the times, he liberated the painting from a stash probably collected originally by the SS. He rolled it up and brought it home where he used it as collateral for a loan to buy into a machine shop on the north side of Minneapolis. That which now goes by the name of Murchison Machinery.
Lately, there had been some publicity about valuable paintings and other artwork being in the possession of institutions and private individuals but without adequate provenance. Like bills of sale. Or wills, or letters of transfer. Now, in the old days, during the time of empire building, certain powerful companies and individuals went marauding through foreign countrysides and when they unearthed art works of interest, carted them home to help enlarge national museums of one sort or other. Some, like the sphinx, were too large to transport, but the carting off of subjugated nation’s heritage was sort of normal, at least to the victors. Today we tended to think of that as plain old robbery.
In a few recent cases museums have graciously returned to heirs objects found to have been stolen. Such, I suspected, was the circumstance surrounding the Neumann painting. Once the piece was donated to MIA without adequate provenance, MIA officials began a
process to find the true owner. Somehow, that triggered the tragic murder of Manfred Gottlieb. Wait a minute. Maybe the painting was only a part of this picture. Could I have been going at this the wrong way? What if Murchison was a player but not the prime mover? Suppose it’s not the painting but the missing ledger that was the real focus and the motive for the murder of Manny Gottleib?
Was I back to square one? The door opened and in sashayed Belinda Revulon from down the hall. She carried a thick brown envelope of the document size.
“Hey, Sean. This got mis-delivered.”
She handed me the envelope and sashayed back out the door with a little hip bump and finger wiggle.
The package was from Aaron Gottlieb in Chicago. Inside were fresh photocopies of sheets of a diary in Polish and English. The note from Aaron confirmed they were parts of Manny’s diary, along with a translation. It was that little brown ledger. What I learned was that Manfred Gottlieb returned to his home along the Bug River and found a lot of rubble and a book in a slipcase. A ledger.
Now I could develop a logical scenario. The gift of the painting to MIA, which triggered a search for provenance, in turn created a ripple or two inside Derrol Madison’s organization, Atria. Somehow, those ripples revealed that Manny Gottlieb had in his possession a ledger that contained information about the SS theft of art works in far off Poland during the early part of World War Two. If the ledger turned up and was authenticated, a lot of prominent people elsewhere in the world might see their lives and reputations trashed. The solution was to locate and destroy the ledger, or use it as primary evidence to seek out and arrest the perpetrators of the thefts to which the ledger would testify. Even the copies of a few pages that I had, were of little use without the original. It looked to me like my mysterious woman in white, Ann/Anne had the ledger, was sending me copies of pages to keep me interested in catching Manny’s killers, all while using me to preserve her wall of secrecy. Gehrz was in the picture to backstop the bogus Tiffany Market.
The Case of the Purloined Painting Page 18