Tarnished Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  The movie-magazine pleading in Francine’s eyes is as scary as her pride in her skill with guns. She’s turning out to be the sort of kid you handle with care, the kind of care you take picking out glass shards from your flesh. “Francine, you want me to find whoever killed your father and your aunt, don’t you? You want them brought to justice, yes?”

  “I guess so.”

  “And do you trust me to do it?” I even give her a smile. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Vivienne cringe.

  Francine reaches up to me and plants another of her girlish pecks on my cheek.

  That does it for Vivienne. She takes my hand and rises from the couch, plants herself next to me.

  Then I give her another surprise. “Vivienne, I assume you know the way to Hagen’s country place?”

  “Well, yes, of course.”

  “Good. You drive.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  During the day, the drive along Route 9 is one of the prettiest in the upstate countryside, especially at this time of year, when autumn shows off its flashy colors in high style. At night, though, Route 9 is just dark. The Buick’s headlights are no match for the primeval blackness of a backwoods night, the car’s high beams only able to pick out a few red and gold leaves and terrify the occasional raccoon as Vivienne drives us north.

  I’ve let her do the driving because she knows the way to Hagen’s, and—as she pointed out to Katherine Stern—I’m the one with the gun, which is my insurance against Vivienne diverting us to Timbuktu.

  She’s tried to make conversation during the drive, tossed me questions I’ve either sidestepped or haven’t bothered to answer, questions like What do you expect to find at Max’s place? and You think he knows more about the Dürer than he’s told us? and, my favorite, Do you really think I’m a murderer?

  I’ve answered every question the same way, when I’ve answered her at all: I’ll let you know when we get there.

  By the time we’re about an hour and a half out of the city, Vivienne finally gives up grilling me, but with each silent mile the tension in the car grows thicker, colder. The air cracks when Vivienne suddenly says, “You’re a louse, Cantor.”

  “I’ve been called worse,” I say.

  She doesn’t let up. “You really are low. The way you walked out on me last night was rotten. The way you treat your cabbie friend—Rosie, right?—is rotten, too. You think of yourself as so courtly, but you’re just a louse, Cantor. Frankly, I don’t know what Sophie ever saw in you.”

  That comes at me hard, sharp as a knife to the gut, and not just because I don’t want to hear Sophie’s name through the hate of Vivienne’s hurt feelings, but because Vivienne is horribly, monstrously, and perfectly right.

  I was always mystified by what Sophie saw in me, always wondered why she put up with the dangerous, unreliable existence that’s my life. She said she loved me, and maybe that was all it took for her to throw her life in with mine, but she deserved better. She deserved peace and security, and I gave her neither.

  But maybe I’ll have a second chance. I give myself over to imagining it, imagine mornings with the sun coming up over the city streets and Sophie asleep against me, snug and safe in our bed, my arm around her, the palm of my hand enjoying the warmth of her body, her hand unexpectedly taking mine, moving it up to her breast…

  “We’re here,” Vivienne says, breaking my reverie. I’m back in the dark night, where I’m not holding Sophie but untangling the tentacles of murder that have threatened to choke me since Hannah Jacobson died.

  Hagen’s place is at the end of a long avenue of trees that serves as a driveway. The house, or what I can see of it in the nighttime murk, is one of those gentlemanly rustic places newly rich city boys like to buy from landed locals whose pedigreed lineage has lived past their money. Lights are on downstairs, with music and male laughter filtering through the windows.

  “Sounds like a party,” I say when we’re out of the car.

  “Max likes parties.”

  “Yeah, he’s just a real good-time guy.”

  “He likes what he likes, same as anyone.” Vivienne’s shrug is either meant to defend Hagen or be dismissive of me. Probably both.

  As we near the front door, Vivienne takes a compact from her handbag, opens it, and in the light drifting from a nearby window, she applies fresh lipstick and fluffs her hair.

  Even in this meager light, Vivienne’s face, her lips freshly red, is as sensual as a royal portrait—the one of the king’s mistress, not his wife. “You’re beautiful,” I say in that dry way meant to state the obvious. “I don’t need convincing.”

  She shuts the compact with a loud snap, a stand-in, I guess, for slapping my face. “Who says it’s for you? It’s been a long drive and I just like to freshen up, look my best.”

  “I doubt anyone in this house would notice,” I say.

  “How do you know? How do you know who else is in the house besides Max and Vern?”

  I ring the doorbell and say with a laugh, “Vivienne, do you really think any of Max and Vern’s friends are in your market?”

  A smile pulls at the corners of her mouth. She tries to stop it, tries to stop herself from enjoying a joke with me, but the joke and the smile win.

  I like seeing her smile again. I like seeing that elegance of hers, part high-hat, part gutter, take its place beside me, until I remember she probably committed cold-blooded murder. Twice.

  The front door opens. Hagen is silhouetted against the light, the rim of a highball glass glinting in his hand. “Well, I’m surprised—no, shocked to see you two,” he says. “What on earth are you doing here in the middle of the night? Wait, do you have a new line on the Dürer?”

  “Down boy,” I say, “we have other things to talk about. The Dürer is only one of them.”

  “I see. Well, come in then. My guests will be calling it a night shortly and retiring to their rooms. Vern can see to their comfort in the meantime.”

  I follow Vivienne through the door. Music and chatter, some of it the melodious, slightly high-pitched sort of male voice I hear at certain friendly nightspots, drifts from what I suppose is the living room. With a smile and a nod toward the party, I ask Hagen, “Hunting buddies?” He ignores the question.

  Hagen’s decked out in a well-tailored tuxedo, as formal as a night at the opera. I expected him to be tweedy. And since it’s nearly two in the morning, I figured even his pajamas would be tweedy. I might have to rethink the whole concept of proper country attire—that is, if I ever decide to live in the country, which I don’t really see in my future. I wouldn’t live anyplace where I’d have to drive to buy my whiskey.

  Hagen leads us across a Tudor-style main hall tricked out in brown leather club chairs and dark, heavy furniture. It wouldn’t surprise me to see pretty pageboys in red tunics announce our arrival. Instead, Hagen leads us away from the music and laughter coming from the living room and through a door which opens into a den.

  Unlike the study in his Park Avenue apartment, which crawls with a carefully cultivated taste in old books and antique maps, the walls of this room hold paintings of hunting scenes, most from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: lots of guys in red jackets and black caps riding horses at breakneck speed across the English landscape, with castles and country houses in the distance.

  Hagen evidently leaves his profession back in New York and treats the house purely as a vacation spot because there’s no desk in the room. There’s just two facing sofas separated by a burled maple coffee table of a consciously rustic design, side tables at either end of the sofas with a telephone on one of the tables, a burled maple liquor cabinet, a stone fireplace with the expected picture-perfect fire, and two dark walnut gun racks, one at each end of the room. One rack holds an assortment of fancy rifles, the other an assortment of equally fancy pistols.

  Also unlike the Park Avenue study, this one’s intimate, with a freer feeling, even a little homey. The green velvet overstuffed couches and chairs are comfort
ably tatty, as if time spent in them is relaxed and easy. There’s even a few framed photos around the room, all of them pictures of Hagen and Vern in various states of vacationing: waving from a swimming pool, waving from horseback, waving from wooden deck chairs, and one overly cheery picture of the two of them in flap-eared caps and heavy jackets, carrying their rifles and waving next to a couple of dead deer hanging by their hind legs, presumably that day’s prey.

  Hagen, always mindful of the social niceties, helps Vivienne off with her coat and places it carefully over a club chair. He says, “May I offer you a drink?”

  Vivienne asks for a cognac, I tell him to make mine Chivas. He pours both from the liquor cabinet. After handing us our drinks, Hagen refreshes his highball with gin over ice.

  Smiling an oozy smile, his brushstroke mustache spreading across his lip like a diva in repose, he seats himself at one end of a couch. Vivienne, not smiling, sits at the other end. I remove my coat and cap, toss them on the opposite couch, and sit down, forming the third point of our uneasy triangle.

  Hagen says, “All right, Gold, you said the Dürer is among the things you want to talk about. Let’s start with that, shall we? Since it’s the only item I’m really interested in.”

  “Nice place you’ve got here, Hagen,” I say after a pull on the scotch. “It must’ve cost you a pretty penny, not to mention the upkeep. You must do all right.”

  He takes a cigarette from a pearly box on the coffee table and a small gold lighter from his pocket. Before he lights his smoke, he offers a cigarette to Vivienne, who takes one from the box. Lighting her smoke, then his, he’s a master at tasteful flaunting. “I work hard for my money, Gold,” he says through an exhale, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean,” I say. I light a smoke of my own, take a deep pull, and let Hagen fidget while I busy myself with putting my pack of Chesterfields and my lighter back in the inside pocket of my suit jacket. Hagen might be the master of this country castle, but I’ve got a lot riding on this trip to the sticks, so I’ll be damned if I let him be master of this conversation. After a long exhale, but before Hagen has a chance take a drag on his own smoke, I say, “Tell you the truth, I had no idea your auction commissions at Pauling-Barnett brought in this kind of cash.”

  “They can, if you handle the higher-end items,” he says with a tart mix of snobby pride and equally snobby annoyance. “I handle nothing but the very best, and you know that.”

  “Well, it certainly has paid off handsomely.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I assume you pay Vern’s expenses, too?”

  “Now look here, Gold, what does this line of questioning have to do with the missing Dürer?” His annoyance is no longer snobby. It’s just raw.

  “I’m just trying to figure how you make your scratch, Hagen, trying to figure how your loyalties to Pauling-Barnett jive with going behind their backs. And mine. And maybe Vivienne’s, too.”

  Hagen’s doing his best to look like he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, or at least not specifically what I’m talking about. “I beg your pardon?” he says, as much a probe as a question. I guess his side-deal shenanigans regarding the Dürer—first with me, then with Katherine Stern—aren’t the first time he’s gone catting around behind his employer and clients.

  Hagen keeps his eyes on me, his stare like an ice pick trying to dig out what I know or what I don’t, but it’s Vivienne who blows his secret. “We know,” she says, her tone soft as silk, her red lips around a smile bright and cold as winter moonlight. “We know about your call to Katherine Stern, Max. We know about your offer to buy the Dürer from her, if she ever gets her hands on it. I can understand you not telling Cantor, but not telling me? Really, Max? After all the business we’ve done together? All the museum business I’ve steered your way?”

  “My dear Vivienne,” he says, his voice thick with false benevolence as if speaking to a hopelessly ignorant child, “surely you don’t expect me to share everything? You certainly don’t share the museum’s secrets with me.”

  It never fails to fascinate me, the way Vivienne’s chin tilts up, the way her eyes narrow as she assumes that regal bearing she trots out when the common folk—even rich common folk like Hagen—becomes presumptuous. “I don’t have to share,” she says with a chill in it. “I’m not pursuing the Dürer to make money.”

  “Well, how fortunate for you,” Hagen says. “Some of us need to make our way in the world, and we rather enjoy it, too. Wouldn’t you agree, Gold?”

  “Sure,” I say. “It’s a regular barrel of laughs. Why, in just the last few days my life’s been graced with two grisly killings, cops with guns and handcuffs coming at me from one side, and gangsters with more guns coming at me from the other. I don’t remember the last time I’ve had this much fun.”

  Hagen’s looking at me as if I’ve introduced a vulgar odor into the room. Vivienne’s looking at me with a surprising hint of fear. It must’ve been my bit about cops and gangsters that upset them. The Jacobson and Stern killings certainly haven’t shaken these two cold and selfish paragons of the art game. “Listen, Hagen,” I say, “when I visited Mrs. Stern after her husband’s funeral, she’d never heard of Albrecht Dürer and had no idea she’d married into a family that owned one of his watercolors. And by the time I visited her again tonight, she was swimming in a bottle of bourbon, barely able to tell me her name, never mind give me any useful information. But maybe when you spoke to her this afternoon, before she got lost in her heavy drinking, she was sober enough to know what’s what. So my question is this: What did she say when you made her an offer for the Dürer?”

  Glad to be talking about things more comfortable and familiar to him than my world of predatory cops and bloodthirsty gangsters, the irritation is gone from Hagen’s face, replaced by his usual air of high culture. “She said she’d think about it. But of course, until the picture is found,” he adds with a showy wave of his well-manicured hand, “it’s all moot.”

  “Uh-huh. Did she seem frightened? Like maybe her life was next in line after the deaths of her sister-in-law and her husband?”

  “No. Why? Oh!”

  “Oh, what?” I say.

  “You’re right, Gold, she certainly should have been frightened, unless, of course, she killed them! It wouldn’t be the first time a wife did away with her husband to collect an inheritance.”

  I toss that away. “Nope. Won’t work. Katherine Stern was with her daughter in the limousine on their way home from the cemetery, far ahead of me when her husband was killed in my car.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, of course.”

  Vivienne, finishing her cognac, says, “And besides, Cantor seems to think I killed Hannah Jacobson and Marcus Stern.” She says it as if it amuses her and takes a long, haughty drag on her smoke.

  A light glints in Hagen’s eyes, flickers brighter, then settles into an easy glow fueled by cunning. “Well, there’s an idea,” he says.

  Vivienne’s surprise snuffs her amusement. She stubs out her cigarette in an ashtray on the coffee table with a fast, nervous rat-a-tat tapping, her red polished fingers flashing in the firelight. “Don’t joke, Max.”

  “But I’m not joking,” he says. “It makes perfect sense.” Hagen’s pleasure in this scenario has all the charm of a circling vulture, smiling as if he can’t wait to feast on Vivienne’s bountiful carcass. The smug cheeriness in his voice makes me wonder how long he’s wanted to take her down. “And you could do it, too, Vivienne. You’re a first-rate huntress, an excellent shot, and strong, too. I’ve seen you bag a running buck from a hundred feet and then skin him with ease. No doubt about it, my dear, you’re athletic enough to have cut up poor Mrs. Jacobson, and you’ve got the skill to pick off Marcus Stern.” Hagen’s smile is a thin crease of knifelike sparkle, and then he digs that knife even deeper, twisting it into Vivienne’s very soul. “Oh, and let’s not forget there’s violence in that tawdry Trent family of yours.”

  The guy’s
overblown sense of triumph annoys me, and I’m caught off guard by how much it annoys me, considering he’s strengthened my case to nab Vivienne as the killer. Maybe that’s what annoys me. Maybe I wanted to be proven wrong.

  Hagen stands up from the couch with the puffed-up seriousness of a mind too easily satisfied. “Well, Gold, I must admit, you’ve done it. You’ve solved the case. Very clever of you to recognize Miss Parkhurst Trent as a cold-blooded killer. Perhaps we should call the authorities?”

  But Vivienne’s not down for the count. She might be nervous, she might be facing the electric chair, but she stands up and gives Hagen a stare that pins him to the wall. “Wouldn’t that be oh so convenient for you, Max. With me out of the way, you’d get rid of the competition for the Dürer—that is, if Cantor ever finds it.”

  I’m about to stub out my smoke to hide my enjoyment of the verbal shoving match going on between Vivienne and Hagen, when I hear a gentle male voice say, “Finds what?” It’s Vern. He’s walking into the den, and the whole world turns upside down.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I nearly trip over the coffee table. Vivienne asks if I’m all right.

  “Yeah, fine,” I say, more a mumble than a certainty as Vern sashays over to me. He puts one hand on his hip, fingers the lapel of my suit jacket with his other hand, says, “Well hello again, Cantor Gold. Why the shocked expression? I’d think a fashionable sort like you would appreciate my style,” and lifts the veil of his hat. It’s a wide-brimmed black Victorian number, perfect for a woman attending a funeral.

  Vern, as svelte and elegant in his black cocktail dress and black elbow-length gloves as he was in his trim tuxedo last night, slinks gracefully on high-heeled pumps over to Hagen while I stand there, numb, the brutal acts of the recent days and nights slipping through my mind and circling around this cross dressing, red-lipsticked vision of a femme fatale who’s taken over the room. “Darling,” he says to Hagen, though the pronoun he doesn’t really fit the bill for Vern tonight, “where are you? The party is winding down and everyone wants to say good night before they go upstairs.” With an affectionate stroke of Hagen’s cheek, his pale green nail-polished fingertips brushing across Hagen’s lips, Vern coos, “And I want to go upstairs, too.”