by Todd Cohen
Chapter 72
We awoke to a large pothole, which jarred us both. No more Dreamsville. It was back to reality. Where were we? I wasn’t sure. I was in a fog about everything, just a whirlwind tour of the US. One that made me feel apoplectic, partially from the cerebral contusion and partially from the pain of the past week. But Amy was my painkiller now. My touch of hope!
I opened up two bottles of water and two Kashi Cherry Almond Bars. I passed one of each to my soul mate. I was starting to get dehydrated. We had a limited supply of water, but enough to get us by for the next few days if we rationed ourselves to one bottle per day apiece. I easily could drink the entire bottle, but knew that was not in my best interest. I drank half now and wolfed the bar down! Amy did the same. Then she nuzzled her head back against my shoulder as I leaned against the crate. With the vibration of the truck, I drifted off to sleep again. And so did she.
The back of the truck opened and suddenly there was light!
“Pull out the Ghost Bikes,” one voice shouted. “Take out the four in front.”
We were well hidden behind a large crate box. The bikes were pulled out and the door slammed shut. Where are we? In OshKosh? Could I remember anything from the door opening to figure out where we were? The thought caught my mind, but I knew it was impossible from the angle of the back of the truck. But after they removed the bikes, I moved my head and for an instant I caught a glimpse of some other motorcycles in the parking lot.
“Hell’s Angels, perhaps.” I joked to Amy.
“No, Bike Babes,” she laughed back.
Chapter 73
It was my inner humor that kept me sane. Little thoughts like that. Amy had the same instinctual humor. She seemed to read my mind. We talked, and talked and talked. Our entire lives shared an endless whisper in each other’s ear.
Love and life. Love for life. My love for her life. How does that song go?
“Once in love with Amy . . .”
But this time, it was my humor that reminded me of the most simple of cell phone features. One that I had forgotten in all the hoopla; namely, my iPhone Maps app.
I’d made use of the app many times to locate exactly where I was, especially when lost. Last time was one month ago, when I was in Manhattan and got really lost. I knew I was in Chinatown but had no idea how to get to the Bowery. I was visiting the former artist studios of a husband-and-wife team of Abstract Expressionist painters. No, not Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, but Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof. Passlof, was the lesser known of the two, and previously resided at 80 Forsyth Street. The residence was an old synagogue, which at the time had been a massive art factory for the now-deceased artist. I needed to get from Forsyth Street to Bleecker, but had no idea amongst the confusing Chinatown hustle and bustle. So I pulled out my iPhone, tapped on the Google Maps app, and hit the corner arrow, which immediately pinpointed my exact location. Then it was simple to type in where I wanted to go on Bleecker and within seconds the app gave me the directions.
The ability to perform this function depended on cell phone access and service, which for me had never been an issue. That was, unless I was in jail, where luxuries, such as a cell phone, were frowned on by the local jurisdiction. Fortunately, my iPhone was sitting right next to me, resting on the floor of the truck’s storage container. I could also have used the same feature with my computer tethered to the iPhone, but why use two batteries when one will do? “How could I have been so stupid?” I thought. “I could have done this back when I awoke in the storage warehouse.” Did I have a concussion? Perhaps, but at least now I was thinking straight, so I opened the app, and hit the angled arrowhead in the lower-left-hand corner.
Within seconds it showed a blue ball in the center of a map, with a surrounding round circle. The ball showed that we were in the outskirts of Chicago in Villa Park, Illinois. A few clicks of my phone, and I soon realized we were just pulling out from a place called Wild Fire Harley-Davidson.
“Where else would we be?” I chuckled toward Amy.
All of this I forwarded to Alex.
Chapter 74
Two more days, and two more stops and all the bikes were gone. The last stop was in the big city and bright lights of Las Vegas. Again, I glimpsed out to see las vegas harley-davidson, but this time some new crates were loaded in the back of the truck, the doors were slammed shut, and we were back driving in no time.
I crept forward with the flashlight app on my iPhone to look carefully at the new crates.
This was not car parts, and it was not “Art” nor “Bikes.” This was something quite different.
The long wooden crates were labeled: ak-47.
The smaller crates were labeled: grenades.
“I don’t think Alex or the Feds predicted this,” I said to Amy.
“And we could be right in the middle of the line of fire,” Amy retorted.
I texted Alex: “Heavily armed crew with AK-47s and grenades!”
One of the crates was half opened, probably checked out by the driver or passenger to confirm the load. So, I opened up the crate. It was a long, semiautomatic rifle, similar to the M16 used by the military.
I had fired this gun before, when I went hiking with one of my dear friends, who served as a physician in the Vietnam War, Dr. James Nicholas. James, or Jim as he was called by his friends, was a practicing general cardiologist, who liked to go fly-fishing and target shooting in upstate New York near Hamilton. He was kind enough to invite my son and me for an outdoor adventure approximately ten years back.
We hiked into the woods with my son Jason and threw axes into trees, shot arrows at targets. But most importantly, we were instructed in the way to load, handle, and shoot an AK-47.
Jim placed an Osama Bin Laden target against a tree and we stood back about forty yards, loaded, aimed, and fired.
Most of my shots at first missed the target, but with a steady arm and keen eye, I was quickly able to take out his disgusting beard and his smirking face.
I picked up my phone, flipped it on, and texted Alex:
“Leaving Vegas. Be prepared.”
Then pressed send and turned off the phone. Only twenty percent of the battery life remained. We cuddled up behind a large wooden box and quickly fell asleep. Amy was snuggled into my chest, and I had my arm around her shoulder.
When I awoke, I turned back on my iPhone to check our location, and we had entered California.
She looked at me. “I knew you didn’t do this, from the start.”
“Then why did you look at me incredulously when you first met me at the courthouse? I thought you were going to be as ridiculous as Alex and push the insanity plea nonsense.”
“Any half way decent lawyer would never argue the insanity plea from the get-go. The insanity plea is notoriously either an obvious plea or one used in desperation. It’s not even used in one percent of felonies, and is rarely even successful. Alex may be a hell of a scientist, but he would make an awful attorney. There were too many things pointing to you as a suspect. I knew they were all circumstantial, but as your buddy Schwartz would say, it is ‘fucking’ hard to refute the facts. My job, Alex, is to do everything I can to help my clients. And bringing Schwartz into your team was one of the best things I could do. He will dissect the timeline like a medical student dissects their cadaver. Then he will look not only at the evidence and its timeline, but he will also examine how and by whom the evidence is handled. Every detail will be examined with a fine-tooth comb.”
“Nice to know that now,” I exhaled with great relief.
“I knew something else,” she continued.
“And what was that?” I quipped.
“I knew there was something about you, something very endearing, and very sincere. Something very special.”
The light that emanated from my iPhone’s screen shimmered like candlelight, and our little hideaway became very romantic. Even more romantic than a fancy night out at Star’s. Star’s was short for Star Boggs, the upscale eatery b
ehind Main Street in Westhampton Beach.
I kissed her lips. There was no taste of lipstick! No smell of perfume! But we both shared a long, drawn-out French kiss one that I will never forget. I held her tighter, and she grabbed me. My heart was pounding, and I could feel her heart beating as well.
Then I slipped off her blouse and slid my hand beneath her soft silky bra, and cupped her breast. I have not felt these emotions for anyone, at least not in the last twenty years!
Chapter 75
“We’re going to find the killer!” I professed.
“And we’re going to live happily ever after?” she asked, but in a manner as though she knew the answer. Her facial expression was quite serious, as if she were giving the closing arguments in a murder trial! “But just not my murder trial,” I chuckled to myself.
We were pulling over, and again I was clueless as to our precise location. I only had a limited amount of juice left on my iPhone, and that was even with the use of the extended-battery carrying case. I was trying to limit the usage to just an occasional few minutes at a time, but I just had to find out where we were.
“Amy,” I said as I gently nudged her. “I think we’re coming to a stop. Let’s be real quiet.” We both hid behind the crate and did not say a thing. Though I needed to find out a little more information.
“Careful with the phone,” she said. “If they open the door and see the light, we’ll be dead meat.”
I knew she was right but I still had to find out.
Were we at Fort Mason? I didn’t think so. Not enough time had passed to make it all the way to the West Coast. Where were we? The suspense was killing me.
The Maps app showed the location as Chico, California. I quickly opened Safari and typed in “Chico, California,” to look on Wikipedia. I had heard of the college town before. One of my old classmates, Brian O’Hara from North Shore High, had gone to college there, Chico State, I believe. He was more of a burnout. You might call him a pothead. But Brian was also quite the artist. He won our school’s art prize and got a full ride to Chico.
As I studied the screen, I learned that Chico was northeast of Sacramento in the northern Sacramento Valley and was home to Chico State. Yes, the school Brian went to. That place had a reputation as a big party school. Lots of stoners. According to Wikipedia, it was also apparently an education and cultural center for the region. “For potheads,” I thought. But it also had a highly recognized art and art history program. Perhaps that’s what made it quite the cultural center, though it was in the middle of nowhere.
“Another bike drop-off?” I first thought. “No, it couldn’t be. There were no bikes left!”
Chapter 76
Amy and I continued to read from the cell phone’s screen the description of Chico, California. We read that that Jackson Pollock had also lived in Chico when he was very young.
“Just another coincidence?” she asked.
“There are no coincidences,” I replied confidently.
“Pollock moved here when he was a little boy,” she said with an inquisitive eye.
The truck stopped near Orville, where Highway 70 intersected with Highway 99. The door opened only a crack, and I quickly turned my phone over. “Whew,” I said to myself as my pulse started to race.
From the side of the crate, I could see out the back. Not a glimpse of the driver or his passenger. What I saw was a large black, yellow, and white sign that read:
pick and pull, self-service auto & truck dismantlers
There was an old yellow car on top of the sign.
I looked around and realized what it was. One vehicle on top of the other. Junk! Compressed vehicles. It was a junkyard, a place to find used-car parts and to dispose of a totaled vehicle.
“What are we doing here?” I whispered to Amy.
She shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyebrows. This was a universal sign, which indicated that she was clueless.
This time, when the back opened up completely, I knew we were in trouble. Amy and I had hidden almost the entire trip behind the crated bikes, but we were at the end of the road as far as transported merchandise. If these last few crates were removed, there would be nothing left. How does that 1967 Herman’s Hermits song go? You know, the one that was remade by the Carpenters in 1976: “There’s a Kind of Hush (All over the World).” The line I was referring to went like this:
“Just the two of us and nobody else in sight . . .”
or maybe it was this line:
“. . . you can hear the sounds of lovers in love.”
No matter which one it was, we were dead meat. A team of oversized men in army fatigues started unpacking all the remaining crates, and as they came towards us, we made a dash out the back. A tall, lanky, heavily jowled man grabbed Amy and threw her to the ground. Another large, somewhat-hidden shadow of a football player tackled me as if I were going to score the winning touchdown.
“What were you two doing in the back of the truck?” said the man with the fishlike face.
“Hitchhiking,” I said.
“And you?” asked the all-black-garbed, hooded tackler as he glanced toward Amy.
“With him, just trying to get home.”
“Likely story,” The Fish said.
“Ah, shit,” I said to myself. “I left my phone in the truck. Now I really will be out of touch.”
We were firmly escorted to a large multi-garage complex located right in the middle of the junkyard. Storage, at a car junkyard, is always used for something related to the selling of car parts, that is, of course, unless something else is being sold under the cover of junk. If one had to guess what that something was at a shithole of an out-of-the way place like this, it would have to be drugs. The door opened up, and there were no car parts, and no drugs.
Chapter 77
Inside the garage complex was a room that looked more like NASA’s Mission Control than a junk warehouse. There was a series of centralized computerized workstations with a number of terminals with large flat-screen displays. On the wall was an oversized monitor with none other than a 3-D image of the Pollock painting rotating about its axis. The painting on the screen looked exactly like the one that was stolen from the Weisberg Estate, to a T. It was not a flat image, but rather a slowly rotating image, showing all the details front and back. The front had the colored swirls that by now were fixated in my mind. The side of the painting looked to be about two inches thick, and the back had several aged Sotheby stickers, including one browned-out space for a missing sticker. “The one that fell off,” I thought. There was no wire attached to the back, only the two secure fasteners. “All consistent,” I thought again.
Amy and I were then forcibly escorted into an even larger room. The room contained catalogued storage shelving for paintings. To the side of the room was a slave computer and monitor workstation with the same Pollock 3-D image as appeared on the previous NASA-styled Flight Control Room wall. In the center of the room was a twenty-foot-long conveyor belt. On the belt rested a painting, but not just any painting. It was “the Pollock.” A large horizontal steel bridge was mounted in the middle of the belt, with hydraulic tubes hooked to a number of colored tubes in what looked like a triangle. The central array of rubber tubes included the primary colors of red, yellow, blue. Two of the outer tubes were black and white. I quickly counted the remaining tubes in a variety of rainbow colors, and there were fifty-nine other gradations. The tubes were actually not tubes, but hexagonal pipes in a geometric array and pattern that I had seen before. “Pascal’s Triangle,” I thought.
I had looked at the screen in the room and saw that they were using the latest CAD/CAM software to accomplish their task. This was the same program Dr. Shaw and I had used to create our MATAL system. The CAD/CAM computer program could take our concept and create a rapid three-dimensional prototype. Here, they were scanning a masterpiece painting and creating an exact 3-D replica. The original Pollock was already reproduced, using this same software. The painting I was looking at, o
n the conveyor belt, was an EXACT 3-D replica of the Pollock! Two guys in army fatigues picked it up and flipped it over; another applied the aged Sotheby replica stickers to the back, and a third attached a hanging wire. The black writing on the aged framed read in cursive: “Pollock No. 5.”
If someone was going to copy the painting, I would have anticipated a skilled artisan standing and reproducing every little detail. I envisioned an artist in his or her forties, paintbrush in hand—like the forgers that were identified through the Knoedler Gallery in New York City. But our forger was not an artist, artisan, or even a human being. No, our forger was a computerized machine: a 3-D machine, no less.
The finished “Pollock” product was picked up and then put under a heat lamp to “bake.” This team had the process down to a science. They used a finely refined “bake and fan” method to seal in the finished process and simulate the aging. The painting was then packaged in coffee beans to absorb and mask the smell of the paint.
Amy and I were forcibly brought over to the side by the shadow of a man and both handcuffed to a lally column, while the rest of the truck’s crates were hauled inside. The large crate, nine feet by five feet, which accompanied our cross-country trip was placed on the floor alongside the conveyor belt. First, the wood crate was carefully opened up. The remaining Plexiglas cover was quickly unscrewed and removed. Then the veritable Weisberg “Pollock” was exposed. There was no perceptible difference between the two paintings; they were identical in every respect. Except for two things that were absent from the original: one, the missing Sotheby’s sticker I had in my back pocket, and two, the missing hanging wire used to strangle Mrs. Weisberg.