by John Gaspard
“It was stolen in 2010. The thief says he panicked and threw the painting in a dumpster.”
“A dumpster?”
“That could happen,” he said with a shrug, then turned his head to the left and got a dreamy look in his eyes. “I’d also love to have Van Gogh’s View of the Sea at Scheveningen.”
I was about to ask the obvious question, but he beat me to it. “Also stolen,” he said without looking at me, still staring at that point on the blank wall. “2002,” he added.
He continued to gaze almost lovingly at the wall. I felt for a moment like I was intruding on something…intimate.
“How about movie memorabilia?” I asked, hoping a new category might pull him from his reverie. He turned back to me.
“That’s a very limited area in my mind,” he said. “Not a lot of Holy Grails out there. With one exception, of course.” He smiled broadly and then whispered, “Rosebud.”
“The sled from Citizen Kane? I thought there were more than one of those out there.”
Chip shook his head. “They made three for the movie. They shot two takes of the final shot of the sled going into the fire, so two of them were burned.”
“But didn’t somebody famous buy the third one? Like Spielberg or something?”
“He may think he bought it, but word on the street is the one he got is a fake.”
“Which means?”
He looked over my head, at the blank wall behind me. “Which means, it could still be out there. Somewhere.” Again, a long, loving gaze, which was just this side of creepy.
“But this sort of collecting doesn’t really make sense, does it?”
“How do you mean?” He didn’t look at me and I could tell I still didn’t have his complete attention.
“These are all things that, if you had them, you could never tell anyone you had them. Right? Being stolen and all.”
He continued to stare at the wall. “I could make my peace with that,” he said. “Sometimes, just the having is all.”
“How about London After Midnight? Does it have any interest for you?”
“The police asked that very same question,” he said, turning back toward me. “However, as I remember, it was phrased differently and their tone was nowhere near as nice as yours.”
“Did you have any interest in it?”
“I’ll tell you what I told the police: Tyler approached me, as I imagine he approached a lot of people. He said he might have access to the only surviving print of the movie. And he wanted to know if I was interested.”
“Were you?” I heard the siren call of the bowl of nuts and reached forward, taking another handful from the side of the dish which seemed to offer the greatest number of cashews.
“I considered it,” he said. “But in the end, I didn’t pursue it. Which I also told the police,” he added.
“Why not? You’d have the only one.”
“True enough,” he agreed. “But a bunch of film reels doesn’t hold the same visceral, visual appeal for me. In order to get any real pleasure out of these things, I need to be able to see them, physically in front of me. A film print, as alluring as its unique individual status may be, just doesn’t do it for me.”
“And that’s what you told the police.”
“Essentially. To be honest, I’m not sure they understand my need to collect, so I didn’t go into much detail with them. Certainly not as much as I’ve told you.” He flashed a smile which was both sincere and sad. I got the sudden impression that behind the smile he was actually sad most of the time.
“All right then,” he continued, visibly putting his cheerful self front-and-center. “Anything else?”
“Sure. One last question: Does your family belong to the Summit Club?”
He thought about this for a moment. “Belong? I think that’s too weak a word. My great-grandfather was one of the founding members. Not that I spend much time there. A little too stuffy for my liking. Mr. Marks, is that all you needed?”
The fact he stood up while saying this suggested if this weren’t all I needed, it would have to suffice, as it was all I was going to get. I stood up and moved toward the door, with Chip Cavanaugh right behind me.
“I have to admit,” he said, “I still don’t fully understand your role in all this.”
I stopped at the door and turned. “To be honest, Mr. Cavanaugh, I don’t either. But the sense I’m getting is that, for your part, you had virtually no role in this.”
“That’s what I tried to explain to the police. However, I must admit you seem more open to that scenario than they did.”
“That sounds like a compliment, so I’m going to say thank you.” I reached for the door handle, but stopped when he put his hand on my arm.
“Eli, you seem like a man I can trust. I’m a pretty good judge of character and that’s the sense I’m getting.”
“Thank you,” I said again slowly, not at all sure where this was headed.
“You want to see something?” His voice was low and his tone conspiratorial. He smiled at me and I think he even winked.
“Maybe,” I said without conviction.
He moved past me to the other side of the doorframe, reaching toward the light switch plate. Instead of flicking the final switch in the row, he gave it a slight pull and the entire plate opened on a hinge, revealing yet another row of switches recessed in a small opening.
“This is just between you and me, okay?”
I nodded slowly, glancing down at the door handle and quickly calculating how fast I could pull the door open and dart down the hallway.
He turned back toward the room and looked at the white wall to our left. He glanced at me and tilted his head in the direction of the wall. As I turned, I heard him flip a switch and suddenly the wall disappeared. It was there one moment and gone the next. I realized it was not an actual plaster wall, but glass that had, by some electronic means, been frosted white, giving the impression of being a solid wall. Now, after the switch had been flipped, I saw it was a wall of clear glass, encasing another wall about two feet behind it.
On the center of the wall was a large, framed painting. It looked cubist to my uneducated eye, primarily because much of it was made up of gold and gray cubes. The word Café was written in the top right corner. From this distance I didn’t see any pigeons, and even though I couldn’t see the signature, it somehow felt like a Picasso painting. Given the way Chip Cavanaugh was looking at the framed piece, it most likely was.
After a long moment, Chip tilted his head toward the wall on the right and I heard him flip another switch. The frosted glass was immediately transparent, revealing another large framed painting on the interior wall. It showed a ship in the distance, the seashore and dark figures in the foreground. The thick swatches of paint and wavy lines screamed Van Gogh, but again, what do I know?
I looked at Chip Cavanaugh, but he did not return my look. Instead, he gazed longingly at the painting. He exhaled, caught my eye, and then tilted his head at the wall behind me. I turned just as the frosted glass disappeared and found myself face to face, as it were, with a piece of movie history.
Hanging on the interior wall, inches away from me (albeit, behind a thick pane of glass) was a small, fragile-looking child’s sled.
I read the name stenciled on the front of the sled, unconsciously slipping into a hoarse whisper as I did so.
“Rosebud.”
On the drive back to Minneapolis, I considered the two suspects I’d met so far. Both rich, both eccentric, both living in what appeared to be their own little worlds.
Each used his considerable wealth to fuel his hobbies and each seemed obsessed enough in their little worlds that stepping outside it in the name of murder—while not likely—still didn’t seem completely out of the question.
Throughout it all, I couldn’t help think of a plaque
we had trouble keeping in stock in the small section of Chicago Magic devoted to gag gifts. Amid the fart spray and fake dog vomit was a series of posters and plaques which sold far better than most of the magic tricks we were ostensibly there to sell. The bestseller, hands down, was the image of a quartet of rotund animated men, each holding their sides with laughter. The side-splitting caption above them explained their mirth-filled state: “You want it when?”
But the plaque I couldn’t shake from my consciousness after spending some time with Clifford Thomas and Chip Cavanaugh was a perennial favorite found in offices across the land. It read, “You Don’t Have To Be Crazy To Work Here. But It Helps!”
Based on these two most recent encounters—coupled with other odd experiences in the past year—I was getting the sense you didn’t have to be crazy to be rich, but it certainly helped.
I was still mulling this over when I pulled my car into a slushy spot in front of the magic shop. Dusk had fallen and the street seemed unusually dark, even for a late January afternoon. I had just opened the car door when my phone buzzed on the seat next to me. The caller ID read Unknown Caller and I considered letting it go to voicemail, but it was cold outside and the car was still warm, so I shut the door and answered the phone. This is how decisions are often made during long, cold Minnesota winters.
“Mandrake, how does life find you on this fine snowy evening?”
Any warmth I had been feeling left my body at that instant, driven by a primal and Pavlovian response to the voice of Mr. Lime, which had taken hold of my central nervous system without even stopping to ask permission. I cleared my throat and struggled to sound relaxed and at ease. I was neither.
“Mr. Lime, good to hear from you,” I said with what sounded to me like forced cheer. “How are you doing?”
“What a coincidence. I called to ask you that very question,” he said, his thin, reedy voice sounding far more substantial than my own. “I understand you were quite recently the victim of what they call a ‘near miss.’ I hope you are suffering no ill effects from the encounter with an errant automobile.”
“How did you hear about that?” I asked, immediately recognizing the futility of the question.
“I have my fingers in a number of pies,” he said and I could see him smiling at the metaphor. “Some stickier than others. I must say, my boy,” he continued, sounding much avuncular than I would have preferred, “when I asked you to take on this endeavor, I did so thinking it would not put you in harm’s way. Please accept my apologies. It has never been my wish to see harm come to you.”
“You and I have that in common,” I said.
This produced a low chuckle from the other end of the phone and then silence. I waited it out for a moment and then had to fill the quiet gap.
“So...” I began and was immediately cut off.
“The good news, of course, is you are unharmed,” he said, once again seizing control of the conversation. “The other news is an incident such as the one you experienced often means you’re heading in a productive direction.”
I considered this for a moment. “But,” I said, as a thought occurred to me, “when the car tried to run me down, I hadn’t talked to any of the suspects yet.”
“True enough,” he said with another low chuckle. “But you had said ‘yes’ to the enterprise. And sometimes, in this world, just saying ‘yes’ can set the wheels in motion. As it were.”
Another pause and another attempt by me to fill it.
“So...” I repeated and once again this was enough to jumpstart the conversation.
“Be assured, I will investigate further,” he said. “For the time being, I suggest you maintain your course. Keep an eye peeled. As they say, ‘there be dragons here.’ And sometimes they be right.”
There was the sound of a click and then once again nothing. I truly couldn’t tell if he had ended the conversation or not. “So...” I ventured again, but this time the only response was silence.
I was still considering his opaque warning as I navigated the steep, snowy mounds which separated the street from the sidewalk. I wasn’t really paying attention to much more than where my feet were landing, so it took a moment for me to realize the standard form of lighting, which generally blanketed the front of the store in the early evening, was not currently providing illumination of any sort.
The marquee for the movie theater, which normally lit up several doors on either side of the cinema, was dark, as was the theater lobby. I checked my watch, thinking I might have completely lost track of time, but it was only 7:10 p.m. Under normal circumstances, the theater should have been open for business by now.
The ladder Tracy had been using earlier in the afternoon had been haphazardly abandoned, splayed across the doors to the theater. The box of black metal letters, which had hung from the ladder, had been pushed to the curb, with several letters protruding from the snow.
However, the most unsettling element—which was visible even in the dim light—was what was staining the icy sidewalk beneath the marquee. Partially frozen, but still sticky and viscous, was a disturbingly large pool of blood.
There be dragons indeed.
Chapter 10
“I don’t have all the details, but my understanding is that someone—person or persons unknown—pushed or pulled the ladder from beneath her while poor Tracy was atop it. She landed on the sidewalk, sadly breaking her fall with her head.” Harry was standing in the doorway to his apartment, just putting on his coat, while he brought me up to speed on the events of the afternoon.
“Is she okay?”
“That is still an open question,” he said, shutting the door behind him and heading down the narrow stairway toward the shop below. “Megan was the one who found her. She called 911 and then when the ambulance came, Megan accompanied them to the hospital. I thought she would have called by now with a report, but my cell phone has been oddly silent.”
“It’s lucky someone was there,” I said as we made our way through the dark shop. “I think I should go down to the hospital and see how she’s doing.”
“I’m not entirely sure which ‘she’ you mean, nor do I wish to know, but that’s an excellent notion,” Harry agreed.
For a moment, I wasn’t actually sure either.
We parted ways in front of the shop, with me heading back toward my car and Harry headed, I assumed, next door to Adrian’s for a spot of dinner and some camaraderie with whichever members of the Minneapolis Mystics were in attendance that evening. However, as I pulled away from the curb and performed a neat U-turn in the middle of Chicago Avenue, I was surprised to see he had bypassed the door to the bar and was heading farther down the sidewalk. The stoplight was in my favor, so I didn’t have time to think about it as I continued down the barely plowed street toward the hospital.
There was no answer the several times I tried Megan’s cell phone while I drove, but that seemed reasonable, as many hospitals limit the use of cell phones in some key areas. I imagined the Emergency Room was one of them.
What was intended to be a quick check-in at the front desk took longer than anticipated, when I realized to my chagrin that while I knew Tracy’s first name, I had never bothered to learn her last. The front desk attendant was kind enough to perform a computer search using only the first name and moments later I was in the elevator, on my way to the third floor.
Finding the room proved to be easier than anticipated, as I immediately spotted Megan as I exited the elevator. She was chatting with a man dressed in traditional blue hospital scrubs standing in front of the door to a patient room.
“Oh, Eli,” she said, breaking into a sad smile. “You must have heard.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me into the conversation, giving my hand a warm, steady squeeze.
I looked at the doctor and recognized him immediately. Redheaded with a thick ginger beard, he had written out a prescription over a year bef
ore which I still carried in my wallet. It read, “Don’t get hit on the head anymore.” A quick glance at his name badge confirmed my memory.
“Dr. Levine, I’m Eli Marks. You saw me after I got a concussion last year.”
“Have you stopped getting hit on the head?”
I couldn’t believe he remembered the specific incident, so I assumed this was a standard line he gave to any patient who had taken a blow to the head.
“I do my best every day,” I said.
“Good to hear,” he said. “As I was just telling Megan here, your friend Tracy is a very lucky lady. She took quite the fall and amazingly broke nothing but her noggin.”
“How badly?”
“There was so much blood,” Megan added.
“Head wounds are notorious gushers,” Levine said. “She’s got a nasty concussion and we’re watching for internal bleeding, which is why I want her to stay the night. We did an initial CAT scan and didn’t see any evidence of epidural or subdural hematomas. But I want to keep an eye on her for the next twelve to sixteen hours.”
He glanced down at the chart he was holding and then looked up at us. “That being said, she could have easily broken an arm, a leg, her back,” he continued, then paused and added, “even her neck.”
As if on cue, Megan and I both turned to look into the room, where Tracy lay motionless.
“Has she been conscious at all?” I asked, addressing my question first to the doctor and then adding Megan. “Did she say what happened?”
“She’s been in and out,” Megan said. “I asked her if she saw what happened and all she said was someone knocked the ladder over. She didn’t see anyone.”
It struck me for the first time that someone had tried to run me down just a few feet from where Tracy had fallen.
I flashed back on the two of us standing outside the projection booth, leaning in to see Tyler’s body and the evidence which lay around him.
Megan must have seen the puzzled look on my face.
