by Todd Cohen
Chapter 51
The doorbell rang. Like clockwork, Mr. Schwartz was back and so was Amy. We gathered around the living room couch as Alex passed out the French press this time. Black Peet’s, no milk. I did my part.
“I have a list of names. My buddy identified sixty-eight people nationwide with both a Medtronic Protecta defibrillator implant and a Cypher stent. Forty-eight of those individuals were male, and twenty female. In all likelihood, the true killer and thief was a male!” I said. The latter comment may have seemed somewhat chauvinistic, but it was also a scientific fact. “Just playing the numbers, the male-to-female ratio of those with defibrillators and stents as specified on the MedicAlert bracelet was greater than two-to-one. And there was also the size factor. Mrs. Weisberg seemed to be strangled without a struggle. And the shoe size was large as well.”
“Unless Mrs. Weisberg was the thief, and someone else was the killer,” said Amy. That theory I seriously doubted.
“I took the shoe print MD had provided over to one of our forensic experts,” Amy continued. “They created what they call a forensic print map, a copy of which I have here. You could see that this print copy has quite a bit of detail regarding the sole of the shoe, more than just the name.” Amy pointed with her index finger, with its perfectly polished red nail, to the top of the shoe. “Proceeding from the toe to the heel, in order, you can see a very precise pattern. There is a half-moon figure with a line cut right through it at the toe, followed by three rows of dots, each about the size of a pea. Four in the first row and then five in the next two rows.” As she moved her finger down she said, “After that come two rows of three dashes, followed by two rows of six dots, and then three dashes again, then a row of five dots and then three dots, and then two dashes.”
“Get to the point,” Alex said. “It sounds like SOS! This is not Morse Code.”
“But indeed, it is a very precise code, Dr. Shaw. I just described the toe and not even in complete detail. Special stitching visible in the print surrounds each row. And I am just talking about the toe. The heel has a different but unique pattern, and in between the two you could even see a curved leather pattern in which the word Cole Haan is imprinted, with some type of figure between the two names. To me it looked like the image of stirrups, from riding horseback, which separated the two names. But after checking the website and examining the Cole Haan logo, it became clear that the logo was the name with a vertical needle and thread between the Cole and the Haan name.
“When my associate took it to the local Cole Haan manager, she told him that this pattern is only specific to one shoe. The Cole Haan ‘Men’s Air Grant Penny Loafer.’ And the size was specific to a large-width number thirteen. The shoe is quite popular, according to the manager, but in a number-thirteen width, only one hundred twelve pairs had been sold from the northeast region. The manager was kind enough to provide us with the complete names and dates of each purchaser, as well as the store in which the purchase occurred. Incidentally, of the one hundred twelve pairs sold essentially in the last two years, only thirty-eight were from a New York Cole Haan retail store, and only five were from the Riverhead outlet.”
“Good work Amy,” I said.
“Better than OJ’s shoes or gloves. These Cole Haan, with their detail, are like a fingerprint biometric. And speaking of fingerprints, our forensics even looked for those on your muddy newspaper print. None were found.”
“Too bad,” I sighed.
“Not really,” Amy said. On a flash drive she had compiled a computer file that contained the names of everyone in the northeast who had purchased Cole Haan shoes of the precise type and size that matched the shoe print on the paper. “You see, the size thirteen, ‘Men’s Air Grant Penny Loafer’ names, together with Dawson’s medical-implant names, are so unique they will almost certainly provide a match.”
I placed all of this into an Excel spread sheet on my MacBook Air and looked. This took a few minutes. Only three names turned up that matched the defibrillator, stent, and shoe type and size in the entire country.
“Our matches are a Maxwell Foster from Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Fredrick Fox from Duluth Minnesota; and Seymour Vicks of East Hampton,” I said.
“Only one is local! Seymour Vicks. And not only local, but also a family name from across the street no less. Coincidence?” I said.
“I doubt it,” Amy asserted with a grin that said, “Of course, stupid, it’s him.”
A relative of the Vicks? I toyed with the idea. The Vicks had to be involved somehow. How could that be possible? Mr. Vicks was still in the hospital, and his kids were attending to the old man’s medical woes.
“I guess we’ll have to figure out who Seymour Vicks really is,” said Mr. Schwartz. Schwartz continued: “Perhaps a visit to East Hampton is in order. I have nothing better to do right now. I’m going to take a drive and head out that way.”
“I think I’ll head into town and pick up something for us to snack on. I’m sure you’re all tired of Dr. Dawson’s stale snacks,” Amy rejoined.
I proceeded to walk Amy and Gale to the door. We had made considerable progress, but there was still work to be done if we had any hope of catching the assailants. I had not lost an ounce of interest in Amy, in fact, quite the contrary. I just hoped I was not overdoing it with my formality when she was around the other folks who were working on my behalf.
“Goodbye, Gale and Amy,” I said. “Great work.” I escorted both of them out to their cars and could not help giving one last Dawson pun.
“I guess we’ll be “Seeing More” of you guys and hopefully “Seeing More” of Mr. Vicks! I smiled, knowing full well that my life might depend on it.
Chapter 52
The place had no electricity. It was pitch black before the storm and pitch black after the storm. It had been there for over a century. It was never repaired or updated. At least, that was how it appeared from the outside. It was a large clapboard structure, much like a reinforced barn, that to the outside observer was associated with peace and serenity. The only apparent thing that may have been repaired at some time was the roof. It was impervious to rain, sleet, and any other wrath that came from Mother Nature. Sandy had no effect on this ancient remnant that withstood all the big storms that any living soul could remember. Its owner remembered all of them, every single one of them, including that bastard of a storm from the late 1930s. But this time he wasn’t there. His underlings would have to sit in and do the legwork to get it done.
There were two large barn doors at the back that were invisible from the road. Each door was made of thick, solid oak and weighed at least one hundred pounds. The two door panels were split down the middle vertically and rotated on a strong black hinge in order to open up. A large, mangy, dark-haired man pulled the handle on the door to the left and swung one side of the barn door open, revealing the interior. Another large-framed man with a mustache followed him.
The inside of the structure looked nothing like the outside. The outside was “old school” farm barn. The inside was neon-light bright, state-of-the art high-tech, and none of the sparkle and glimmer made it outside. In fact, at night, the barnlike structure was as dark as night. No light penetrated. Every window was boarded up, and all the neighbors thought that it was just deserted—another refuge for someone’s junk. That someone would have been Mr. Vicks. But no, junk was not what was inside.
Inside, a man stood behind a camera on a tripod directed to an easel against the backdrop of white drapes. The cameraman was using the latest Olympus SLR camera with a superhigh-resolution lens with state-of-the-art digital capabilities. In stage one, he would first photograph the easel-supported painting front and back before the piece made it to stage two. But this painting was much too large and heavy to sit on an easel. No, this one had to rest against the clapboard wall, and the cameraman used three large photography spotlights, all rotated towards the piece, in order to reveal each and every detail of the painting. On the side stood a number of already-crated pieces.
“It’s here,” came a voice from inside the structure. The voice was not talking to the two gentlemen that were standing at the doorway. It was directed at a flip-top cell phone held to his ear. Harry Massino was a chubby, balding, squat Mafioso type who barely made five and a half feet. Though short in stature, Massino was huge as a master art forger. Harry was not only a master forger—he was a master forger of Pollocks. A trove of Pollocks recently came out of the woodwork and hit the art market. Even without any provenance he had the experts baffled. Seven Pollocks in all, and not even a record of the pieces’ prior existence, and the authorities could not distinguish the type of canvas, medium, age of the materials, quality, and type of images from a truly bonified Pollock painting. This included the Pollock authorities from the MoMA and the Pollock catalogue raisonnée authentification team.
Yes, Harry was good, very good.
But nobody knew who Harry was. He was always too obscure and elusive and one step ahead of the authorities.
“Harry, are you done with this one?” said Mustache Man.
“Yes, got the front and back. Now let’s move it to stage two. Stage two was a technique of forging not yet known to any other art forger in the whole wide universe. Unlike any other forger who used a skilled artist’s eyes and steady hand to replicate a masterpiece, Harry used high tech 3-D scanning and printing. In this second area, the large painting was hoisted onto a conveyor belt, and multiple precise laser beams scanned the entire painting surface front to back. Samples were taken to duplicate the materials, and the precise color and type of canvas was chemically analyzed by a mass spectrometer. The 3-D scanner would not only capture the precise colors and swirls of the Pollock in two dimensions, but also its entire surface structure. The red laser light went back and forth along the entire surface of the painting, which spanned 8 feet by 4 feet. Each pass was slow and methodical, and each additional pass was elevated by a fraction of a millimeter in order to replicate the surface’s complete topography. In essence, the 3-D scanner created a 3-D image of the surface that included the exact color, surface texture, brush stroke, depth, and thickness of the paint. Even a stray hair, bristle, or fingerprint in the paint was precisely reproduced. The information was all captured and stored on a state-of-the-art computer that stood across the room. After scanning and recording each and every aspect of the Pollock, the job was nearly complete.
“You guys can pick it up and pack it in that large crate on the other side,” said Harry.
Across the room was a seventy-inch computer screen, which recorded the high-definition-image photograph and the 3-D scanned image. On the full screen appeared an image, of the yellow, white, and red swirled painting. The image was labeled front. Alongside that was another more mundane image: the back—with its raw, aged canvas; some writing including the name of the piece; and a number of stickers. The image fell into this sophisticated database, which catalogued the name of each piece, the images, the dimensions, medium, date, signature, provenance, and then the ZIP file. The final row of the database was entitled “ZIP,” which stood for the computerized, compressed scanned 3-D image file and included the chemical composition of each of the paints used in the picture.
Harry checked the computer and double-checked the name and all the rest of the details. He looked at the computer and saw “Pollock No. 5,” with its HD front and back images and the not-yet-compressed surface analysis. Harry then pressed “compress and encrypt.” The custom-made program did just that, and all the information fell into the ZIP file and column. When all was complete, every detail of the canvas, including the period writing and stickers, were all reflected in the files and would assure the authentication of the piece’s provenance. Provenance for each piece was critically important! Any painting can be copied, but without the aging, the medium, and the provenance, it would be very hard to sell even the best of reproductions. Harry’s process was not just good, no, it was perfect. Damn perfect! He had been running the operation for years and had never been caught.
“A okay!” Harry hit the send button, and the information went electronically via a secure, scrambled service over the World Wide Web to a secure cloud storage service. That service could be securely accessed and used by the rest of the team in order to re-create an identical copy of whatever object was catalogued. And the object at hand was Jackson Pollock No. 5!
Harry’s partner was also there. He sat at a desk alongside the fine-art cataloguing computer, with an old cell phone at hand. But even seated, he appeared much taller and more slender than the rest of the men in the clapboard barn. Lanky, like Ichabod Crane from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—with a prominent jaw or jowls, a result of his unusual facial features and absent adipose tissue. If anything, his face looked like a fish. He spoke into the phone. “It’s here. Now what?”
“Good,” said the big voice on the other end. “Have them take it, and then give them the envelope.”
After a few minutes of lifting, packaging, and crating, the two men, one with a mustache and another by his side, grabbed the large wooden crate, which was almost nine feet tall by five feet wide. The two picked up the heavy crate and placed it in the back of a concealed truck. The truck had entered the property from an obscure entrance not visible from the road. The jowled, fishlike man holding the cell phone handed them the envelope. And the larger, clean-shaven man opened it and counted the Benjamins. But they were not Benjamins. They were Grover Clevelands. The two large-framed couriers were not familiar with Grover Cleveland, and they may not have even been familiar with President Obama, for that matter. But they were familiar with the number on the bill, and it had one more zero than the more familiar Benjamins, namely one thousand dollars. The man counted each and every bill. There were one hundred in total. “There’s only one hundred thousand here,” he said angrily to his compadre. “We were promised two hundred thousand.”
“Not until it’s safely delivered will you get the rest,” stated the jowled man. The full name of this gentleman was a mystery to almost everyone. He was called, as one would guess, almost jokingly, “Fish.” In reality, the jowled man was Jimmy “the Fish” Facone. Jimmy or “The Fish,” or just plain “Fish,” as he preferred to be called, got the name from not only his fishlike looks, but the recurring fact that his deceitful clients wound up swimming in the East River, and they never got out!
The man with the mustache approached the seated, jowled, fishy man. He grabbed the seated man and threw him into a headlock. “Where is the rest of the money?” Mustache Man asked. Fish could not speak. He began to choke and then gag. If the headlock were held for thirty more seconds, he would not only lose consciousness but would likely meet an untimely demise. But before that could even occur, a large shadow of a man came out from under another desk, having been lying underneath it, on the floor.
He was dressed entirely in black and wearing a black, hooded sweatshirt, which covered his head, revealing only a shadow of a face. The Shadow resembled Darth Sidious, the scheming Sith Lord from Star Wars. Cloaked in black, none of his features showing. He must have been sleeping on an old couch cushion beneath the desk. There invisibly with The Shadow was what appeared to be a gun, and not just any gun, but a PO8 Luger no less. It must have been hidden under The Shadow’s cloak. The Shadow pointed the pistol right at the man with the mustache. “You have sixty seconds to let him go or you will die.”
As The Shadow waved the gun near his face, Mustache Man immediately eased up on the jowled man, who gasped for air. The Shadow now redirected his Luger to the clean-shaven man’s head. “Like your mustachioed friend had, you have sixty seconds to give the money back, or else.” He pulled out a pocket watch and clicked the start button. The clean-shaven man was no dope. He had seen this timed killer in action before. Always a stopwatch, always sixty seconds. And if he didn’t get his result, a pulled trigger followed by a brain-dead victim, or a quick blow to the heart with the equivalent result. Within ten seconds, the clean-shaven man released the money, and The Shadow withdr
ew the pistol. He then counted half of it, put it in his own pocket, and then gave back the other half. “You get only fifty thousand dollars, asshole! You’ll get the rest once it is safely delivered and it reaches its final destination.”
The pistol was directed loosely towards the man with the mustache as they made their way back to the truck. These two larger gentlemen, if you could call them that, closed up the back of the truck and left. With only a quarter of what they thought they would get. “Fuck you,” said the pissed-off Mustache Man.
The cell phone was still connected and The Fish continued. “The delivery is on its way.”
“I heard what happened,” said the voice on the other end. “We have a big problem. Those two are troublemakers. But more importantly, those two troublemakers can lead the Feds to us. Only one local person met these bozos, and that’s our friendly neighborhood Dr. Dawson. Our intel tells us he could be a problem. I want you to dispose of him.”
“But, sir?” objected The Fish.
“Don’t ‘but, sir’ me. Get rid of him. No, better yet. Bring him to me, and I will see to it that he is properly disposed of.”
Chapter 53
There was too much talking. My head was spinning. I had to go for a walk, get some fresh air. Alex and I walked energetically down Homans and around the peninsula, past the waterfront mansions, each one with its own character. Most were cedar shingled, painted light grey, yellow, or an occasional white, some with gabbled roofs, others with a widow’s watch, but all with the grandeur of the Hamptons. Every house was still in place, but who knew what internal damage the storm’s tidal surge caused. Debris was still on the street, and many of the downed trees had already been carted off to the side of the narrow road. The sea had receded, but a fair amount of saltwater debris was left behind. Some houses had major damage to their bulkheads. Waterfront pools were badly damaged, and docks were almost universally destroyed.