Dark Picasso

by Rick Homan

  She shook her head. “I wouldn’t know about that. I’m saying it’s possible someone painted them more recently.”

  I nodded “They could be forgeries.”

  “It’s possible.”

  I took a sip of my latte before replying. “It seems like a leap from saying they don’t feel like his best work to saying they’re fake.”

  “Maybe not such a leap. Thomas Hoving, the legendary director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, trained his curators to write down their first impressions of a piece being considered for purchase. They had a detailed process for authenticating an item before purchasing it, but he said those first impressions almost always proved to be true.”

  I had the feeling that comes when riding down in a fast elevator. Your insides seem to float for a moment. “So, both Tiffany and Anne Ghent bought Picassos from the Redburn gallery and both might be forgeries.”

  She nodded.

  I could easily have spent two hours with her going over all the implications of what she was saying, but I remembered what had brought me here. “John Ghent has suffered a huge loss this week,” I said. “He’s grieving the loss of his wife. I hate the thought of dropping this on him. Anne paid over $600,000 for this painting.”

  “I can understand that,” she replied.

  “What can I do?”

  “Do what he asked. Help him sell the paintings.”

  “No. I mean, how can I find out if his Picasso is real or fake?”

  Sandra had a faint smile as she said, “Before we ask that question, we have to ask why we would we want to find out.”

  “So I can tell John. Tiffany, too, when I talk to her.”

  “Tell them what? That they paid a lot of money for worthless paintings? Trust me: They won’t thank you for that.”

  “But then they would know they should return the paintings to the dealer.”

  “If you tell John Ghent his painting is fake, and he goes to the dealer and says, ‘you sold me a forgery,’ the dealer might threaten to sue John and you for ruining his reputation.”

  “I’m not saying he should do that. But dealers will usually take a painting back if a buyer just doesn’t like it.”

  Sandra thought about that for a moment. “How long ago did they buy them?’

  “A little over two years.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Depends on the dealer, I guess.”

  “What is John supposed to do?”

  “Sell the painting, if he wants to.”

  “Knowing it might be a forgery?”

  “His wife bought it in good faith from a dealer. It belongs to him now. He can supply a provenance when he sells it. The next buyer can make his decision based on that.”

  I started to feel angry. “I can’t let him do that without telling him Picasso may not have painted it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s dishonest.”

  “Did he ask you to authenticate his Picasso?”

  “No, but it seems wrong to keep this to myself.”

  “Unless somebody asks you or John to guarantee the painting’s authenticity, there’s no reason to bring it up. This is how works of art are bought and sold.”

  Now I was really teed off. “So, you’re saying the whole art market is just people selling fakes to each other.”

  “Of course not. Most of the time people are buying and selling the real thing. But it happens more than you would imagine. And when it does, everyone keeps quiet about it.”

  My head was spinning. “Let me get this straight. There could be people out there right now creating forgeries . . .”

  Sandra nodded. “They’re definitely out there.”

  “And the dealers are too interested in making a sale to authenticate the works . . .”

  “Some of the dealers, some of the time.”

  “And wealthy buyers don’t care so long as they can resell it.”

  “Typically.”

  I picked up my cup and found it was empty.

  “It’s like a high-stakes poker game, and some people cheat,” said Sandra. “I’m sorry to dump all this on you.”

  “Don’t apologize.”

  She pointed to the folder of information on the auction house. “I need to put that back on file at Greenbrae.”

  “Oh, sure.” I handed it to her. “I already wrote down contact info. Thanks.”

  We walked out onto the sidewalk. The late-afternoon light had only made this spring afternoon more beautiful. We said our goodbyes and walked different directions to our cars.

  As I drove back to campus, I thought about Sandra’s question: Why do I want to find out if these two Picassos are fake? In my gut I knew I had to find out. That’s what art historians do. We answer questions such as, “Who painted this?” If the owners didn’t want to know, maybe I could find out without telling them.

  As I crossed the steel truss bridge into Blanton, it occurred to me I hadn’t talked to Abbie in a couple of weeks. I pulled into a parking space on Maple Street and took out my phone. It was never difficult to find parking in Blanton, a small town that had shrunk when its shoe factory was shuttered many years ago. It survived by providing retail, banking, and legal services to farmers east of Chillicothe, along with a couple of bars and churches and a Chinese restaurant. We who lived on the campus of Cardinal University also depended on it.

  “Hey, neighbor,” I said when Abbie answered. “Are you back from Pittsburgh?”

  “Yep, just got in.”

  Abbie’s partner, Sharon, lived in Pittsburgh and worked for an investment company. Her condo was very nice, as Pat and I had discovered last fall when we drove up and spent a weekend with them.

  I heard a sigh before Abbie said, “There’s something about leaving Sharon’s condo overlooking the rivers and coming back to my little shack in the woods that makes me wonder what I’m doing here.”

  “The answer is obvious,” I said, “you’re keeping me company.”

  “Hmm. How about if we all move to Pittsburgh and keep each other company there?”

  “Get me a job in art history, and Pat a job in psychology, and that’s a deal.”

  “I’ll keep you posted.”

  “I’m in Blanton on my way back to campus. Are you in the mood for some Chinese food?”

  “That does sound good. Get me some of those walnut prawns.”

  “Will do. Do you have wine?”

  “Now that you mention it, I seem to recall a couple of bottles finding their way into my overnight bag before I left Pittsburgh.”

  “See you in thirty.”

  Chapter 12

  Since I’d arrived on campus, almost three years ago, Abbie, an assistant professor of economics, had been my best friend and confidante. She had helped me with all kinds of practical matters from hauling furniture from Ikea to learning to drive in snow. Without her I’d have been even slower to grasp the politics of the school. We’d had a lot of laughs together along the way. Since I got together with Pat over a year ago, I’d spent less time with her, but we were still pals, and we called on each other whenever needed.

  She wasn’t kidding when she called her campus housing a “shack in the woods.” We lived on a gravel road called Montgomery Avenue where the college had provided prefabricated plywood housing modules for single faculty. We called them Rabbit Hutches. All faculty started out in them, unless you happened to show up with a spouse and children, in which case you skipped right to a duplex or maybe a detached house. The formula for moving to better housing without enlarging one’s household was known only to the Office of Campus Housing.

  I parked in front of my Hutch and popped in to change into lighter clothes because the afternoon had gotten warmer than I’d expected. I walked in my front door, looked around the living-dining-kitchen room of my Hutch, and groaned. I hadn’t gotten around to cleaning over the weekend and the place needed it.

  Fortunately, after living here for three years, I had my cleaning routine down to half an
hour. Mostly I had outdoor furniture: a cafe table and two chairs by the back window and two canvas-sling beach chairs by the front window with a little table between them. When I cleaned, I folded all those pieces and stuck them in the bedroom along with the “rug” made of several pieces of artificial turf stitched together. That way I could dust, sweep and mop with only the two tall shelving units to work around.

  After reassembling the living-dining-kitchen room, there wasn’t much to do in my bedroom since it contained only my futon on a frame and a night stand. My closet and the shower-only bathroom were partitioned off one side of the room.

  I promised myself I would clean before I went to bed.

  After changing my clothes, I walked fifty yards up the road, carrying the take-out food with me, and knocked.

  She opened the door saying, “The sauvignon blanc isn’t chilled, so we’ll have to get along on beaujolais.”

  “Works for me.”

  When I walked into Abbie’s Rabbit Hutch, I felt a familiar yearning. She had an oak pedestal table with two oak chairs upholstered in brocade, two armchairs, and a wool rug. Of course, there was a trade-off. Since the living-dining-kitchen room of a Rabbit Hutch was ten feet by fifteen feet, and had a miniature kitchen built into one corner, all her full-size pieces of furniture were touching each other, which made it necessary to side-step around them.

  While Abbie opened the wine and poured two glasses, I unpacked the cartons of food and prepared two plates, walnut prawns for her, General Tso’s chicken for me.

  Once we were seated at her small pedestal table and had each eaten a few bites, Abbie asked, “So, what have you been up to?”

  “Last Saturday, Pat and I went to a dinner party at the home of Tiffany and Dale Milman.”

  Abbie paused with a morsel of food on her fork, halfway to her mouth. “Dale Milman? Why do I know that name?”

  “He’s some kind of investment guru. Their house looks like the setting for a movie based on a Jane Austen novel.”

  “Hedge fund manager,” said Abbie. “That’s it. Sharon mentioned him.”

  “Really? His office is in Columbus. Why has she heard about him in Pittsburgh?”

  “He made a lot of money very quickly. That tends to get the attention of people in her line of work. So how was the dinner party?”

  “I felt like a fish out of water, except for the part where Tiffany showed us her art collection.”

  “Ooh! I bet that was nice.”

  “Yes, she certainly has spent some money on her pictures. One in particular is supposed to be by Picasso.”

  “Supposed to be?”

  “I have some questions. I sort of invited myself back Tuesday afternoon so I could ask her about it, and it became clear she’s not all that knowledgeable. I think she wanted something spectacular for her collection and paid a dealer for it without thinking about it.”

  “Was she able to answer your questions?”

  “We didn’t get that far. When I pointed out to her the painting is sexually explicit, she got upset and left the room.”

  “Sounds like a wasted trip, unless . . . do you have a scholarly interest in Picasso?”

  “No, I haven’t done any work on him. I probably wouldn’t even be thinking about it except that on Wednesday I heard one of the guests at the dinner party, Anne Ghent, had been murdered. Then on Friday her husband called saying he wants to sell all her paintings, and yesterday I went to look at them and found a Picasso very similar to Tiffany’s.”

  “Whoa! That’s a lot of information. How was this woman murdered?”

  “She was shot in the parking lot of a mall. The police are treating it as a robbery and they’ve arrested someone.”

  “That’s terrible. And the husband . . . well, he’s not wasting any time.”

  “I’m not sure how much to read into that. The point is Tiffany and the murdered woman were friends, and both had paintings that are supposed to be by Picasso but seem a little off.”

  “In what way?”

  “They might be forgeries.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Noonan, you do have a way of stumbling into these things. Did you ever consider going into a less stressful career, like—I don’t know—hostage negotiator?”

  “Very funny.”

  Abbie cleared our plates and added a drop of wine to her glass. “More for you?”

  “No thanks.”

  We moved to the easy chairs covered in brocade next to her front window. I curled up in one, and Abbie stretched her long legs out in front of the other.

  After a sip of wine, she asked, “Are you going to tell Tiffany about her friend’s Picasso? Or tell the husband about Tiffany’s Picasso? Or tell either of them that something seems fishy?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve just come from a meeting with Sandra Carlini, registrar at the Greenbrae Art Museum.”

  Abbie shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s in Elbridge, over toward Dayton. It just opened at the end of last year. She said that, once a fake gets in circulation, it’s very difficult to expose it. Whoever owns it doesn’t want to see a million-dollar investment become worthless.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “So presumably neither Tiffany nor John Ghent would want to know their painting might be fake.”

  Abbie pursed her lips for a moment. “Or they might want to know so they can unload it before word gets out. It’s called the ‘greater fool theory of investing.’ When you buy stock in a company, for instance, you might not worry about whether the company is profitable so long as you’re sure you can always sell that stock to a greater fool than yourself.”

  A memory from the previous Saturday night flashed before me. I sat forward and put both feet on the floor. “Dale Milman talked about Tiffany’s paintings like they were investments. When we first arrived for the dinner party, he asked me something about calculating the returns and the risks. The rest of the evening, Tiffany talked about her collection of paintings as a hobby. She said she wanted to become a connoisseur, but she doesn’t know much about art, and I’m not sure how interested she really is. What if Tiffany’s art talk is just a smokescreen, and the paintings are really part of Dale’s investment portfolio? Is that possible?”

  “Sure. I remember reading about a guy who helped start a tech company and made hundreds of millions. He used third parties as buyers, so he could remain anonymous, and built a collection of rare musical instruments, mostly violins and violas. He kept them in a fireproof vault.”

  “Nobody played them?”

  “Nope. To him they were just investments.”

  “So, these super-rich guys buy these things to make money?”

  “Not so much for the return on investment. For that they spread their money around in different kinds of stocks, bonds, real estate, and so on. They diversify so if the market in one area goes down, they have some other investments that hold their value. Things like paintings, musical instruments, vintage cars, and rare wines don’t go up and down in price like the stock market does. Investors buy these things just to park some money, usually a small percentage of their wealth.”

  I took a moment to feel dizzy over the idea that a small percentage of the Milmans’ wealth was probably several times the amount of money my family would ever see.

  “So, this would not be a big deal for Dale Milman?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If one painting turned out to be worthless, he wouldn’t be all that upset?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Guys like him play to win. If you made it known one of his expensive paintings was worthless without first giving him a chance to unload it, I think he would be very upset with you.”

  I went cold all over, wondering if Anne Ghent had learned something was wrong with the paintings she and Tiffany had bought and had started talking openly about it. I wondered how far Dale Milman would go to stop her.

  “I guess I had better tread lightly,” I said.

  Ab
bie nodded. “Think real hard about how far into this you want to get.”

  “I have to go. Thanks for the wine.”

  “Thanks for the food.”

  Chapter 13

  The morning light was especially flattering to the redbud trees on the hillside below my office window. In the past three days their buds had opened, adding pink and white accents to their spring display. The white blossoms of the dogwoods were at their height. I knew from my two previous springs in the foothills this was about as good as it got.

  My thoughts were not nearly as pretty on that Monday before class. I’d had almost forty-eight hours to think about calling Detective Brian Murphy of the Shawville Police Department. I still wasn’t sure communicating my suspicions about Curtis Diaz was the right thing to do, but I recalled that slogan, “If you see something, say something,” and dialed.

  Once I had him on the line, and we’d introduced ourselves, I said, “I’m calling about the murder of Anne Ghent.”

  “Thank you for calling.” He spoke slowly as if he were taking notes. “Do you have information that might be relevant to our investigation?”

  “It might be. I attended a dinner party at the home of Tiffany and Dale Milman a week ago, Saturday. After dinner Tiffany invited the women to join her in another room to see her collection of paintings. She also invited Curtis Diaz because he is the director of the Greenbrae Art Museum. Anne Ghent turned to Curtis and said, ‘You’re just one of the girls.’”

  “I see. And did Mr. Diaz appear to be upset by this remark?”

  “He didn’t say anything, but it was an awkward moment.”

  “Did Mrs. Ghent and Mr. Diaz exchange any other remarks during the evening?”

  “No, but since then I’ve visited the Greenbrae Art Museum and learned that Curtis is gay and doesn’t want to share that in his professional life. He became very upset when his co-worker mentioned it in front of me. So, I thought perhaps he may have had some resentment toward Anne Ghent.”

  “Understood. But you’re not aware of any altercation involving Mrs. Ghent and Mr. Diaz that may have occurred after this dinner party and before the night of the murder?”