“To the best of my recollection, I had just finished crossing the street and was about at the sidewalk on the other side. It all happened very quickly.”
“I quite understand … . Do you think it is possible that men could have been waiting inside the gallery until a car would appear because they wanted someone to witness their flight?”
Whelan rested his letter opener on the desk and stared at it thoughtfully.
“That’s a very interesting question. It’s altogether possible that is what happened. They did emerge in quite a rush. Why would they do that?”
“There are any number of reasons, sir. The criminal mind, as I’m sure you realize, is often quite twisted.”
I hear a sound from my assistant which could have been a suppressed laugh.
“Yes indeed, Mr. McDermot.”
“Did you notice whether the door of the Armacost Gallery was open when you went by it?”
“I had ample time to observe that it was wide open. I stopped there to determine what I ought to do next.”
“No lights on?”
“None at all. The place was as dark as a tomb.”
“Have you ever visited any of those galleries in the Suho district, Mr. Whelan?”
“No, I have not. I go into Chicago as little as possible. I find that, despite the claim, it is not a city that works. Moreover, I do not like this ‘modern’ junk at all. I much prefer realism, especially hunting and fishing scenes.”
He nodded in the direction of a syrupy canvas on the wall depicting a fisherman and fish staring at one another, the latter still in the water.
I asked the key question, one which the tapping of a pen on notebook next to me suggested I had delayed too long.
“Did you actually see the paintings—I mean, the canvases themselves?”
He puzzled over that one.
“It all happened so quickly. However, I have the impression that the paintings were either covered, or I was seeing the back of the frames. For a brief second or two, they were illumined by my headlights. I have no recollection of any colors.”
We thanked him, shook hands, and left the bank.
As we struggled through the wall of humidity, Nuala asked me, “Would the cops at Chicago Avenue really respond that indifferently?”
“In a district like that late Saturday night and early Sunday morning, cops are tired, jaded, and confused. Some of them, not all of them by any means, are dumb. You could walk in off the street and tell them that the Pope had just been shot in Holy Name Cathedral and some guy would make a note and tell you that they’d take care of it.”
As the Benz, its blessed air conditioner functioning flawlessly, cruised down the Northwest Toll Road towards the Kennedy, Nuala asked me another question, “What did you think of your man?”
“He’s a Republican and in addition to that, I didn’t like him. Otherwise he was all right.”
“You don’t think he’d be the kind that would be involved in an art heist?”
“Who knows? I don’t think so.”
“Neither do I … . Still they were waiting for him, weren’t they? They wanted a witness.”
If her theory was right, they did indeed want a witness.
Our next stop was the Armacost Gallery, a big new brick building with large picture windows on Superior Street just west of Orleans.
There were three viewing rooms on the first floor, each arranged tastefully and elegantly with thick beige carpet, soft indirect lighting, and attractive salespersons who spoke in hushed whispers. The walls and the pedestals displayed an incredible variety of art subjects, some of it very lovely and some of it gosh-awful.
I felt as if I were in church or a funeral home or maybe a suburban public library.
I whispered to Nuala, “The difficulty with stuff like this is how you know the good stuff from the junk.”
“The good stuff is the stuff you like; the bad stuff is the stuff you don’t like. That red-and-gold sunburst by Catherine Collins over there is good. That hideous black-and-green thing called ‘High Rise’ is grotesque. Anyone who hangs that in their parlor is a geek.”
The second room displayed older pieces—a Picasso, a Mondrian, and a Jackson Pollock among others. Two blank spaces on the north wall marked the former location of the missing Monets.
“You could look right in through that picture window and see the two paintings, couldn’t you?” Nuala murmured softly.
“Yep, they were sitting there just waiting to be taken.”
“Kind of silly, with all the thefts going on in town, wasn’t it? And everyone knowing that the thieves had a way of zapping the security systems. Asking for a break-in?”
“Maybe. And you gotta wonder why they didn’t take the Picasso and the Mondrian.”
I pointed at the two paintings.
“I like Mondrian.”
That settled that.
The third room contained more representational work. A few years ago, the Armacost would not have bothered with such stuff. Representational art was out, and too bad for Wyeth and Hopper. Now the market had changed and the Armacost had changed with it, though perhaps reluctantly.
There were no fishing and hunting scenes and nothing syrupy like Mr. Whelan’s canvas. Some of the canvases, like two misty nudes by Catherine Curran, proved that you could make powerful statements with representational or quasi-representational works. Idly I wondered whether Ms. Curran, who also was some kind of relative of the little bishop for whom Prester George worked, would want to paint Nuala. Maybe she could capture the shy whimsy, the vulnerable strength, the mystical wisdom of my love.
Applying her criteria that what you didn’t like was junk, there were also some junk canvases in this room, too: a hideous nude prostitute, which I deemed pornographic, a couple of exhausted racing dogs, a little girl who had been shot by a street gang. They all made statements, which was all right, and appealed for action, which was all right, too. They did not, however, incite the viewer to either compassion or hope.
“You like this one?” Nuala asked me, still sotto voce.
She pointed at a misty scene of the new Navy Pier at night with the Ferris wheel radiating magic light.
“Great,” I said fervently, despite my unfortunate experience with the wheel.
“Oh, Dermot …”
“Michael.”
“Such an eejit I am! … But look, isn’t it your man the painter?”
She pointed at the signature which said: “Michael Patrick Vincent Casey.”
“Can I help you sir?” one of the attractive (female and blond—probably authentic) attendants asked us.
“Mr. Michael McDermot and his assistant to see Mr. Armacost.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. McDermot. Wayne is expecting you.”
Wayne, huh? Aren’t we the informal ones around here.
We were conducted up a spiral staircase to the second floor.
The corridor was lined with offices where men and women were working on computers and other men and women were trying to complete a sale.
It reminded me of the office wing of a car dealership—maybe, given all the tony people in the offices, a Lincoln or Cadillac or, in these days, an Infiniti or Lexus dealership.
At the end of the office an open door awaited us. So Wayne Armacost was a man whose door was always open.
“You may go right in, Mr. McDermot,” the attendant said and nodded with a faint perfunctory smile at herself, again to her dumb clerk persona.
Wayne Armacost turned off his computer and stood up to greet us, a tall slender handsome man with white hair, a white goatee, and a faintly English accent (though he had been born in Chicago). He was wearing gray slacks and a white dress shirt with the neck open and the sleeves rolled up. The smile on his thin face was pleasant enough, though his hard brown eyes suggested irritation. With his supple posture, his hooked nose, and the appearance of wisdom provided by his white hair, he might, outfitted with a toga, be an important senator in ancient Rome.
He shook hands vigorously and summoned his wife Julia from an adjoining office. She was definitely someone to catch and hold the male eye—younger than he was and in her light gray sweater and slacks curvaceous in a Junoesque way. That style of woman was out of fashion now—regrettably, I always thought.
We sat at chairs around his desk, chairs and desk the creation of some modern type. They looked comfortable until you sat in them. Slim Keegan would have destroyed one of them immediately.
Nuala took out her notebook and faded into the background.
“I’m ready to be as cooperative as I can,” Wayne Armacost said, leaning forward over his desk. I want to see justice done in this case as well as recover our canvases. I am not at all persuaded that those unfortunate young immigrants would have been capable of a crime of this sort. More than likely, the theft is the work of highly skilled professional art criminals from the Continent. The sophistication of their laser beams which wipe out the security protection suggests men and women of quite superior proficiency. The fact that the various security companies have been unable thus far to develop countermeasures indicates that the thieves are hardly youthful amateurs.”
“Do you expect them to be captured?”
“Hardly. I assume that they chose Chicago because of the concentration of galleries in one place, though that does perhaps improve the possibility of their capture. Such men—probably from Eastern Europe, I would guess—will not be greedy. They will commit their last crime fairly soon, I would expect, and then vanish without a trace.”
He spoke with the practiced weariness of someone who, in the last couple of days, had repeated this analysis frequently.
“Wasn’t it an invitation to theft to leave them hanging on the wall where everyone who looked through the picture window would see them?”
“In retrospect, it may seem so. However, everyone knew that the gallery had those two canvases. We might have attempted to hide them if our insurance company had so ordered. However, they did not. In addition, with the upcoming exhibition at the Art Institute, we stood an excellent chance of selling them. As much as we would hate to lose them, their sale would have been an enormous advantage to us in this rather difficult time in the art marketplace.”
“Surely the insurance companies will pay you for the loss.”
“Eventually,” he said with a grimace, “and after much snooping and haggling and at a level much less than the pieces would bring on the marketplace today, especially since the Art Institute exhibition will increase the interest in Monet’s works enormously. Their loss is a terrible blow to us; certainly not a deadly blow, but nonetheless one which will cause us great discomfort.”
“I wonder that you did not take more effective security precautions.”
He shrugged, suggesting some of the acute discomfort he was feeling.
“Actually, we had twenty-four-hour guards here, just in case, until the week before the break-in,” he said wearily. “The insurance companies recommended a new device to add to the security systems of all the galleries in this district. You might have seen the stories in the press about these units. They were very costly, indeed—especially for a gallery with such an elaborate system as we have here. Yet their laser beam overcame our protection units and shorted out our system, apparently with a single blast. Julia deals with the insurance companies and is much more effective with them than I am. I am much too trusting. She was also the one who arranged for the purchase of the two Monet canvases and verified their provenance. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
He touched her arm gently. A faint flush of pleasure raced across her face; her breathing quickened for a second or two. Then, just as quickly, these signs of instant sexual arousal disappeared. She really loves him, I thought; and he knows how to turn her on.
“Would you like to see what their laser blast did to our security system?”
He rose from his chair and opened a neatly carved oak cabinet on the wall behind him, perhaps once a valued antique. Inside it, however, there was an elaborate maze of wires and circuits, most of them burned out.
“You see what they did; somehow they introduced a current which ran through the whole system virtually instantaneously, before it could activate any alarm either in the building or at our security agency or at police headquarters.”
I stood up and peered at the mess inside the cabinet which still emitted the acrid smell of burnt-out circuits.
“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty powerful blast all right.”
“You may, if you wish, check all the other boxes in the building. They’re all in the same condition. Even the lines to our more expensive inventory and the beams across the two stairways were burned out.”
“Could the laser blast have caused a fire?”
“It didn’t, neither here nor in any of the other galleries that have been robbed. So they must use a device which destroys the network so quickly that fire cannot occur.”
“Didn’t it affect your computers?”
“No, not at all. They are on a separate electrical circuit. We had trouble with our telephones the next morning, as have some of the other galleries that have been robbed. I should mention that the insurance investigators, who are considerably more thorough than the police, think that the blast which hit us could have been substantially stronger than those that struck the other galleries. Having been warned by the media of the new units which had been added to the security systems, they developed countermeasures. In effect, they called our bluff. The articles in the press were supposed to frighten them off. Instead they were merely a challenge to their ingenuity.”
“So now …?”
“Now we and most of the other galleries are back to twenty-four-hour guards. It is costly, but the insurance companies insist. For us it is rather like locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen, if you understand my meaning.”
He moved uneasily in his chair, anxious to get rid of us and get on with his work.
“You would not have exhibited those two paintings in the Art Institute show?”
“Hardly. They would be lost over there. Here they are unique. We considered it when the Art Institute approached us, but we declined regretfully. Naturally, they understood.”
A patent lie. We had caught him in a lie, and an unnecessary one at that.
“Now, Mr. McDermot, if there are no more questions,” he moved as if to stand up and dismiss us, “Julia will be happy to show you around the gallery. You may stay as long as you like and look at anything you want to.”
We shook hands with him and followed Julia out of the office. She had listened to our questions and his answers with an expressionless face and a motionless body. An Eastern European woman, perhaps. No Celt or Latin could possibly have accomplished such a feat of immobility.
She gave us catalogs, on the cover of which I noted with interest was the Mondrian. The inside cover displayed the Jackson Pollock. Otherwise, the catalog looked the same as the one I’d seen at the Art Institute and carried the same title: “Armacost Gallery Summer 1995.”
You can print new catalogs pretty quickly. Still, why the rush to change? Probably didn’t mean a thing.
Julia gave us the red-carpet tour. We entered every room in the building, including the washrooms. She described the works of art, explained the temperature-control system, opened the blown-out security boxes, and indicated where the lines which had been shorted had protected the most costly paintings. She also praised work which I did not like and indicated lack of enthusiasm for the Mike Casey and Catherine Curran works.
“They are pretty, of course, but they are not very earthy, don’t you see? A little too much Celtic twilight to please the discriminating art lover—is that not the case?”
I didn’t see, and it was not the case, but I didn’t argue. What the hell was wrong with Celtic twilight, anyway?
“You would like to see the downstairs, perhaps? It is where we store our canvases. Naturally, we cannot exhibit everything at the same
time. But if you do not have time …”
We assured her that we had time.
The basement, as I would have called it, was cooler than the ground floor and seemed to be quite old. Its stone walls were painted a dark brown. It contained perhaps a half-dozen rooms, each with neat cabinets in which canvases—sometimes in frames, sometimes stretchers—could be stored.
Julia explained that, when the demolition company had torn down the old warehouse and uncovered the foundation, Wayne had been delighted with the battered basement. Its thick stone walls were precisely what was needed for storage and workrooms. The architects said the foundation was as good as new, so the gallery had been built on top of it.
She conducted us through the storage rooms and opened the two safes in which their more precious canvases were stored. She stood aside as we casually examined some of them.
Two Jackson Pollocks, I noted. This place was rolling in expensive art.
We turned a corner and entered a large workroom area—stretchers and frames and tools and worktables, all in a workroom arranged for a portrait. Against the south wall stood an ancient coal-burning furnace painted red and black.
“Naturally, we don’t use that,” she explained. “Wayne, however, with his remarkable eye for such things, realized instantly that it was a classic. So naturally we preserved it.”
I remembered my grandfather’s stories about stoking the coal furnace early in the morning and shuddered. I spotted behind the furnace, leaning against the wall, a stack of large frames without canvases in them. Brand-new frames.
Julia and I continued our tour while Nuala Anne ducked over to inspect the frames.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her quickly tilt the frames from against the wall. I caught a glimpse of a square iron door, maybe four feet high, probably to a coal bin to which it had been connected by an automatic stoker of the sort Pa had described to me. Nuala pulled the door. Naturally, it was locked.
Julia did not seem to have noticed Nuala’s departure from the grand tour. If our suspicions were correct, Julia would have been suspicious of any unusual snooping in this part of the basement.
Irish Lace Page 23