Dark Picasso

by Rick Homan

  John leaned across the table toward me. “How could Anne force him to do that?”

  “She had that fake receipt. She could have shown it to the police and claimed Jappling cheated her. Also, the owners of the Redburn gallery would have thought Jappling pocketed the sale price.”

  John’s jaw dropped. He sat back for a moment and stared into space. “We got a painting for the price of a forgery, and the Milmans paid full price for theirs,” he said.

  There was a warmth in his expression. I recalled the way Dale Milman had ridiculed John’s conservative attitude toward investing at the dinner party. I couldn’t blame John for taking some satisfaction from coming out ahead of his rival on this deal.

  “So then,” he continued, “I have a fake receipt for a fake painting. If I were to burn both of them, how much money do you think would go up in smoke?”

  “I’ve never hired a forger, so I don’t know for sure, but companies that make legitimate copies offer them for a few thousand dollars.”

  Ghent tipped his head back and let loose with a laugh that came all the way from his belly. I think it was the first time I’d seen him laugh.

  “This is much more believable,” he said. “It’s nice to know what Anne was up to. Maybe I’ll just keep that painting and the receipt as mementos. I’ll pay your expenses. I don’t mind paying for a story like that.”

  From my purse, I took an envelope containing my travel receipts and passed it to him. Since he was satisfied, I decided not to say anything about Anne’s further scheme to sell her Picasso at market value. I would share that part of the story with Detective Brian Murphy.

  Ghent stood up from the table. “Thank you, professor. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

  I nodded and said nothing. I was afraid if I opened my mouth I might vomit. I let him get to his car and drive away before I left the coffee shop.

  Upon hearing about Anne’s mischief toward the Milmans’, John expressed affection toward her, admiration, even. That changed my impression of their relationship. He wasn’t embarrassed by her cruelties at the dinner party. He loved her for them. They must have gone home afterward and laughed about how she had made everyone squirm throughout the evening.

  As I drove home, I felt as if I’d strayed from my profession by getting involved with the Milmans and the Ghents. I’d spent two weeks studying a pair of forgeries. As an art historian, I would have preferred studying real works of art. On the other hand, forgery is part of the history of art. I wondered if that was a story anyone wanted to hear.

  I was done with Ghent, but I still had to give Tiffany the bad news about her Picasso. When I got home, I would send her an email and set up a meeting for the coming week.

  On Tuesday, I had yogurt and a banana in my office after my morning class while looking up directions to the police station in Shawville. Before leaving I glanced at my inbox and saw an email from the dean of liberal arts, Vera Krupnik. It read:

  Dean Bayliss and I have reviewed the circumstances surrounding the dispute over Elaine Wiltman’s term paper for your course, Modern Art. Nothing we have learned suggests any impropriety in your handling of the matter. However, having spoken with Ms. Wiltman, we believe she understands the necessity of citing sources, and we recommend you grade the paper as if citation were not an issue in this instance. We thank you for your cooperation.

  Everything about this email was wrong. The word “dispute” was wrong. There was no dispute. Everything was plain as day. Like every other scholar, she needed to acknowledge her source.

  Krupnik’s attempt to reassure me by saying, “Nothing we have learned suggests any impropriety,” was wrong. No reasonable person would have seen any impropriety in what I did.

  The discovery by the deans that Wiltman “understands the necessity of citing sources” was irrelevant. Understanding is not enough. She needed to go ahead and cite them.

  Most profoundly wrong was their recommendation that I grade the paper “as if citation were not an issue in this instance.” In other words, pretend it never happened.

  Actually, it was much worse than that. Based on what Bert Stemple had told me, they were asking me to lie so they could appease parents threatening to sue the school. It was as if Vera Krupnik was saying to me, “All our troubles will go away, Nicole, if you’ll just tell this one little lie.” How courageous of them: willing to use my lie to repair their failure to communicate.

  The hell I would! That one little lie would turn my work with my students into one big lie. If Elaine Wiltman’s parents could squeal “not our daughter,” then why should anyone’s son or daughter be held to academic standards? Why should I demand good work from students whose parents did not threaten a lawsuit when things didn’t go their way? Why teach?

  Knowing I would fire off an angry email if I sat at the keyboard any longer, I walked down the hall to Frank Rossi’s office. The situation called for action from my department chairman. Professors shouldn’t have to deal with deans.

  The lights were off in Frank’s office and there was a note on his door, which said, “Dr. Rossi’s classes and office hours are cancelled today.” Frank might have been down with the flu or off to some appointment, medical or otherwise. But, the way things were going, this felt like some invisible hand was squeezing me a little harder, making my life a little more difficult, keeping me from doing my job with purpose and integrity.

  Breathing exercises helped me get my mind off that track as I walked back to my office. I could wait until tomorrow to talk to Frank. Once I had his perspective, I could decide how to respond to Krupnik’s memo.

  While walking back to my Rabbit Hutch, I remembered it had been two days since I’d talked to Pat. He had said he needed time to himself, and I had respected that, but enough was enough. When I got inside, I called him. “Hey, babe, how you doing?”

  “About the same.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  After a few seconds, he said, “It is what it is.”

  “Let me be more direct. Should I come over there and make sure you’re wearing clean clothes and eating regular meals?”

  I was glad to hear him laugh at that.

  “You don’t need to worry about me. I’ve dealt with this before. I have people I can call about this, and I have called them. I don’t make the mistake of trying to deal with it by myself.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I’ll be off campus most of this afternoon. How about if I pick up a pizza in Blanton on my way back and bring it over to your place? Maybe around six?”

  He sighed. “Can you give me another day or two? I want to talk to you about all this, but I’m not quite ready.”

  “If you say so, but you’d better not be fooling me.”

  “Not a chance. I put on clean underwear this morning. Cross my heart.”

  “Oh, thanks a lot! Now I’m going to be thinking about you in your underwear until I see you again. Don’t make me wait too long.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  I knew Pat would be okay. I could hear warmth and humor in his voice that hadn’t been there when I’d seen him on Sunday. That gave me courage as I started my drive to Shawville to tell Detective Brian Murphy about Lester Jappling.

  Chapter 29

  Shawville’s police station was a one-story, flat-roofed, brick building surrounded by a parking lot on a plot of land carved out of a stand of scrub trees. It had an entrance at one end and not enough windows for its size. Without much effort, it could have been turned into a small shopping center. I was surprised to see so little had gone into a civic building in a city full of upscale malls, country clubs, and grand homes on sweeping lawns.

  The officer at the front desk walked me to Detective Murphy’s desk. I declined the offer of soda or coffee.

  Murphy wasn’t much over forty, with thick brown hair showing only a few strands of silver. In his corduroy jacket, denim shirt and wool pants, he could have passed for a college professor.

  “Professor Noona
n, have a seat,” he said, as he took out a pad of paper and clicked his ballpoint pen. “I believe you said Anne Ghent was involved in some shady business dealings.”

  “That’s right. This goes back a couple of years and was still going on until a couple of weeks ago. Anne Ghent paid someone to paint a picture that looked like it might be by Picasso and put Picasso’s signature on it. She bought a forgery. Then, a year-and-a-half ago, she went to a gallery and got an employee to write her a receipt to show she had paid $625,000 for it.”

  From the way Murphy was squinting, I could tell this was new territory for him. “Why would someone at a gallery do that?” he asked.

  “She could be very persuasive.”

  “What is this employee’s name?”

  “Lester Jappling.”

  “And what was the name of the gallery?”

  “Redburn Gallery.”

  Murphy jotted all this information on his pad as he asked, “In Columbus?”

  “No, in New York.”

  “New York City?”

  I nodded.

  He stared across the room at nothing in particular for a moment, before jotting “NYC” on his pad. “And how do you know that Ms. Ghent got this receipt from Mr. Jappling?”

  “I went to New York on Sunday and spoke with Mr. Jappling at the Redburn Gallery. That is what he told me.”

  “Why did you go there to talk to him?”

  “I’ve been working with John Ghent. He wants to sell his late wife’s collection of paintings.”

  Murphy reviewed what he’d written on his pad. “From what you’ve told me so far, neither of them committed a crime,” he said. “Did either of them sell this forgery, claiming it was by Picasso?”

  “About nine months ago, Anne Ghent came to Jappling and said she wanted him to do exactly that: Sell the painting on consignment through the Redburn Gallery for as much as it would command in the current market.”

  “And what did Jappling do?”

  “He refused, but she threatened to show the receipt he had signed to the police and to the owners of the gallery. Basically, she was going to accuse Jappling of selling her a forgery.”

  Murphy smiled, appreciating the irony. “So, she had him in a corner.”

  “Yes, and there’s a little more to it. A little over a year ago, she bought another forgery and again used that same fake receipt to force Jappling to sell it through the Redburn to Tiffany Milman for the full price of a Picasso.”

  Murphy hummed while he jotted. “So, they conspired to defraud Ms. Milman.”

  “That’s right.”

  Again, Murphy read over his notes. “Just to be clear, Dr. Noonan, in your view how does this relate to the murder of Anne Ghent?”

  “I think it gave Lester Jappling a reason to kill her. Twice she threatened to ruin his career if he wouldn’t join her in committing fraud. When I spoke to him on Sunday, he was clearly frustrated—frantic, really. He said when she came to him the last time—that is, when she wanted him to sell her forgery through the gallery—he couldn’t stand the thought of being involved with her any further.”

  Murphy scratched the back of his head while reading over his notes again. “Dr. Noonan, the murder of Anne Ghent was a brutal crime. She was gunned down in the parking lot of a shopping mall. It’s hard for me to imagine a guy who works at an art gallery in New York doing something like this. Do you understand what I’m saying? I think we’re dealing with a different class of people here.”

  I wasn’t sure what Murphy meant by “class of people,” but I didn’t like the sound of it. “I’m sure Lester Jappling is perfectly capable of pulling a trigger.”

  “I’m sure he is,” said Murphy. “But it’s the psychology that concerns me. Most people, when they have a problem, don’t decide to solve it by picking up a gun and shooting somebody, even if it’s a serious problem like this one.” He clicked his pen a few times, as if punctuating his remarks.

  “Detective, if you had seen the state Jappling was in when I questioned him about all this, you would have believed he was willing to kill. And on top of these other frauds, there is a third forgery hanging on the wall at the Redburn right now, or at least there was on Sunday. He said the gallery pressured him to make another big sale, so he bought another fake. He was willing to do that rather than sell Anne Ghent’s forgery because he couldn’t stand the idea of having further dealings with her.”

  Murphy made another note. “I can alert the police in New York to these cases of fraud. Really, though, it sounds like Jappling was ending things with Ms. Ghent without resorting to violence.”

  “But she had the power to ruin him any time.”

  “Dr. Noonan, think of the practical side of this. Ms. Ghent was shot in the parking lot of a mall not too far from here. Mr. Jappling works in Manhattan, so he probably lives in New York, maybe New Jersey. Do you think he would travel across the state of Pennsylvania and half the state of Ohio, and somehow could know where Ms. Ghent would be in a very large parking lot, at a particular time, so he could shoot her? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe he didn’t actually pull the trigger.”

  Murphy had a smirk on his face as he said, “You think he hired a hit man? No. That’s in the movies. Nobody outside of organized crime has the ability to put out a contract on somebody they don’t like. Think about it: If there was somebody at your university, who was making your life miserable, would you know how to hire someone to kill them?”

  Murphy didn’t know how close he was to describing my situation with the deans.

  “Of course not,” he continued. “This was a crime of opportunity. The man we have in custody has a history of petty crime. He was in that parking lot, looking for a soft target, to make a quick score. This time it got out of hand.”

  “So, because he had a history of petty crime, you think Tyrell Johnson did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And because he comes from a different class of people?”

  Murphy’s face hardened several degrees. “I don’t like what you’re implying. We’ve got the right man. Thank you for coming in today, Dr. Noonan. We appreciate your cooperation. I’ll walk you out.”

  We didn’t speak as we walked to the front desk.

  “Thanks, again,” said Murphy as he left me at the desk, but he didn’t sound like he meant it.

  Familiar though I was with the drive between Shawville and my campus, I paid extra attention to the road signs and mileage markers because I couldn’t stop thinking about what had just happened. Murphy refused to take seriously Jappling’s motive for killing Anne Ghent because he thought violent crime was committed by “a different class of people.” I was pretty sure he meant people from Wickwood, black people.

  Murphy was right about one thing though. It wasn’t clear how Jappling could have done it. That meant someone had to find out where Jappling was when Anne Ghent was shot and find out if he had an alibi. If he was in New York, and people saw him there, he was in the clear. If not, someone had to investigate whether Jappling could have traveled to Shawville, found her, and killed her.

  That sounded like a job for the police. If they didn’t do their job, I would have to think of something else. I couldn’t go back to my comfortable life as a college professor, read the news reports about the wheels of justice crushing Tyrell Johnson, and say to my friends, not to mention the donors I was trying to develop, “Such a shame!”

  Maybe I could write a letter to the editor of Shawville’s newspaper protesting the police department’s failure to follow a promising lead. There were only two problems with that plan. I didn’t know if Shawville had a newspaper, and I doubted the city that separated itself from Wickwood wanted to know about their police failing to look elsewhere for a suspect.

  I needed help deciding what to do about my suspicions regarding Jappling. I decided to call Mason Adams, sheriff of Payne County, who had investigated past murders connected to my campus. More than two years ago, we had started on the wron
g foot, but we had come to respect one another. I doubted he could get directly involved in this investigation, but I hoped he could help me understand my options.

  Chapter 30

  I caught up with Frank Rossi in his office around lunchtime on Wednesday. He had departed from his usual, colorful clothes by wearing a black blazer and gray slacks with a black-and-white striped shirt.

  “Nicole. Have a seat. Ready to wrap up the semester?”

  “Almost,” I said. “Do you remember when I told you I’d been called to a meeting with the deans of liberal arts and business?”

  “Right. How did that go?”

  “Krupnik said they wanted to be informed about the situation. Bayliss questioned me about how I handled plagiarism.”

  Frank looked confused. “Plagiarism?”

  “I know. I never said anything about plagiarism to my student. I wasn’t sure why Bayliss brought it up. Then, this morning, I got this.” I handed him a printed copy of Krupnik’s email.

  After reading it, Frank said, “Well, then, false alarm. No plagiarism.” He put the email on his desk where I could reach it.

  “Frank, they’re suggesting I ignore all this and grade the paper.”

  Frank shrugged. “Lets you off the hook.”

  “I wasn’t on the hook. They’re saying I should give her a grade without first making her put a citation on the paper.”

  Frank glanced at the email again. “Right. Says the student understands about that now.”

  “So why wouldn’t she just write the citation on the last page?”

  Frank shrugged.

  “I don’t feel right about giving a student credit for something she didn’t do.”