Murder 101: A Decker/Lazarus Novel (Decker/Lazarus Novels Book 22)

by Kellerman, Faye

  “Of course. Everyone in the family knows. And probably a lot of people not in the family. Ken is not the model of discretion. And if you’re looking for someone to grill, I would suggest you talk to Max again. It’s like the one thing he wants that he can’t get hold of. I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

  Decker tried to keep his face flat. “Really?” She didn’t answer. He said, “I went online and looked at the Stewart and Harrison gallery inventory. The place has things far more valuable than the windows.” She still didn’t answer. “Does Max have any vices I should know about?”

  “If you call greed a vice, then yes. With Max, it’s always about having more, more, more. And he accuses me of being a spendthrift.”

  “He’s a spendthrift?” No response. “Is he in hock?”

  Melanie blushed. “I wouldn’t know about that. I mean he has all this jewelry but do you think his wife ever gets to wear anything . . . well, maybe she wears it, but she certainly doesn’t own it. I suppose she can borrow it if she wants.” She looked at Decker. “The point is that everything that Max and his family own is in that store. I mean he and my sister-in-law own this tiny, tiny duplex where they couldn’t even entertain a gnat. C’mon already. Just sell a couple of lamps and get something decent. Not something where the kitchen has a view of an air shaft. See what I’m getting at?”

  “Not exactly.” Decker looked up. “Maybe you should explain it to me.”

  “The gallery belongs to Max’s father and his uncle, Joe. Max is nothing more than a glorified salesman. I think it eats at his kishkas.”

  “So he doesn’t own anything in the gallery? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I don’t know what he owns or what he doesn’t own. All I’m saying is he always wants more.”

  “So you’re thinking that maybe he stole the windows so he could resell them and get some of his own money?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying. You’re twisting my words.”

  “I’m not trying to do that, Melanie. Do you think Max was involved with the theft?”

  She turned bright red. “Not really.” She sat up. “But if he’s telling you that I was involved, he’s crazy.”

  “Why would he think you’re involved?”

  “C’mon, I know what he told you.”

  “What did he tell me?” Decker prompted.

  “Lemme see how I can phrase this so it comes out right.” She stood up and began to pace. “Ken is a great guy, but tight with a buck, a quality that he passed on to my husband. I never ever buy things we can’t afford, but if I can afford it, I don’t see why I shouldn’t buy it. I mean, why do you work a million hours a week and earn all this money if you’re just going to have it molder in stocks and bonds. I realize that it’s Rick’s business, but he does have a family and why should our children do without when we can plainly do with.”

  She stopped pacing.

  “Anyway, this is all very beside the point. I don’t know anything about the theft. It’s not like it’s been preying on my mind. To tell you the truth, Tiffany isn’t my style. I am all about sleek and modern. This one room is my compromise to Rick. I mean where would I even put the windows? Although I suppose if I did steal them, I wouldn’t hang them out in the open. That would be pretty stupid.”

  Decker nodded.

  “Anything else? I’ve got a nail appointment.”

  “Can you think of anyone in the family with money problems?”

  “No . . . none of my business. I just wish they’d keep their noses out of my business.”

  “Anyone in the family who has an addiction—drugs, gambling, sex, bad business? Or bad business deals?”

  “Ken’s extended family is large: lots of cousins and second cousins. I’m sure there must be a couple with problems. Who doesn’t have a family without problems?”

  “But nothing jumps into your head?”

  She thought about it earnestly. “No . . . not really. But Rick and I try to mind our own business. We’re both way too busy to worry about other people. If other people don’t have a life, that’s not my problem. Are we almost done?”

  “Just a few routine questions that I’m asking everyone on the list. When was the last time you were in Greenbury?”

  “The funeral in the summer when Ken’s cousin died. We came in and left the same day. We were with everyone else.”

  “So you haven’t been to Greenbury or the crypt since then?”

  “No. I’ve got better things to do than to schlep up to a musty old crypt in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Besides Max, who do you think might have wanted to steal the panels?”

  She looked aghast. “I didn’t say Max stole them.”

  “So who do you think did it?”

  “How would I know?”

  “I’m not saying you would know. I’m just asking your opinion.”

  She stood up, examining her nails that looked perfectly groomed in contour and color. Then she shrugged. “No idea. All I know is it wasn’t me.”

  TWO PHONE MESSAGES, three texts, and five missed calls: all from McAdams. The kid either missed his company or had info. Decker dialed his cell. Harvard was peeved.

  “What’s the purpose of giving me assignments and telling me to call back when you don’t answer your phone?”

  “I was in the middle of an interview. What do you have for me?”

  “Since I outrank you, what do you have for me?”

  Decker smiled. He recapped the interviews.

  McAdams said, “She sounds like a nutcase.”

  “She’s intense.”

  “We should look into her financials.”

  “Great idea except we have no legit reason to pull paper on her. Now it’s your turn.”

  “Well, it seems that grave robbing and stealing from cemeteries are time-old traditions. I found quite a few cases of people stealing from cemeteries. The items usually taken are for personal use, things like urns, planters, gravestone decorations, and statues. The thieves usually live close to the graves and were caught with the items displayed in their houses or yards. Then there are the practical thieves who lift things like lawn mowers or weed whackers or shovels for their own gardening purposes.”

  “Okay. What about valuable items?”

  “I don’t know how relevant it is to our case because it’s old, but I’ll tell it to you anyway. A very well-known art dealer named Alastair Duncan was caught selling a stolen Tiffany window to a guy in Japan. It was looted from a local cemetery by a guy named Anthony Casamassima who used to work as a caretaker there.”

  “Where’s there?”

  “Salem Fields, New York. It’s a massive cemetery on the Brooklyn/Queens border. And it has a lot of Jewish mausoleums because a lot of the families used to belong to Congregation Emanu-El in Manhattan, which used the cemetery to buy plots for its membership. That’s the synagogue I told you about with a Tiffany window.”

  “Where is it?”

  “On Fifth Avenue in the Sixties. It’s open to the public and from what I saw online, pretty damn ornate. You might want to take a look at it. The Met has some gigantic Tiffany works if you want to get a feel for the art. It’s right off the Temple of Dendur.”

  “The what?”

  “A re-creation of an Egyptian temple built by some Roman official. It’s a little touristy but a nice space.”

  “As long as I’m here, I’ll try to take it in. What happened to this Duncan guy?”

  “Twenty-seven months in prison and $220,000 in restitution. I don’t know how much time he actually did and how much of the fine he paid, but he’s still considered an active authority on art deco. My guess is it’s highly unlikely that Duncan had anything to do with our itty-bitty theft.”


  “Don’t say that to Ken Sobel. When did that theft take place?”

  “In the 1990s. Duncan was sentenced in 2012, I believe.”

  “What about this Casamassima guy?”

  “He appears to be a thief of convenience. Like I said, the cemetery was in the neighborhood. I don’t think it’s likely that he’d travel upstate to steal. And even less likely that he’d bother replacing the stolen windows with fakes. Plus since the original case was solved and they were exposed, all eyes are on both of them.”

  “Sometimes old habits are hard to break. How was the case solved?”

  “I don’t know the ins and outs of the investigation but I do know that an FBI informant posed as a hired thief. Graveyard thefts are relatively common. Now if you want to go into actual art thefts, there are lots to choose from: mostly items taken from museums and homes. They also dwarf in size and scope our cemetery break-in.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Let me pull up my notes.” Shuffling over the line. “Okay. Here goes. The most famous art theft in this area was paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.”

  “Is that the one where they still have the empty picture frames hanging on the walls?”

  “I’m impressed, Old Man. How’d you know that?”

  “It’s called reading the paper. I also remember getting the notice over the lines when I was in LAPD. When did the Gardner theft take place?”

  “That was also in the nineties. Thieves posed as police and tied up the guards and walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars of artwork: a Manet, a Vermeer, several works by Degas, and Rembrandt’s only known seascape. I don’t see this having any connection with our case.”

  “I agree with you. Anything else that’s vaguely similar . . . a theft from an odd place?”

  “I did find one theft that was more our scale. And it’s still unsolved. But it’s also very old.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Hold on . . . okay . . . here we go. It took place twenty-five years ago in Marylebone, Rhode Island, about an hour away from Greenbury. Four mosaics were taken from the iconography of St. Stephen’s, a Russian Orthodox church. The mosaics were fashioned after the ones at the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. Would you like to know about Ravenna, Italy?”

  “First I’d like to know what an iconography is.”

  “Oh, sure . . . you know that most churches are laid out like crosses.”

  “Yeah, the transept, nave, and apse . . . I do crossword puzzles.”

  “Okay. On the transept wall—that’s the wall that forms the shorter end of the cross—leading up to the nave where the priest leads the service, there are often images of the saints or the Madonna or Jesus. It can be statues, gold work, bas-relief, oil paintings, and in this case, they were mosaics. Would you like to hear about Ravenna now?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let me get my notes . . . here we go. Around 400 Common Era, there were essentially two parts to the Roman Empire—a western Rome that was under siege by the Ostrogoths and an eastern Rome that still had its territories in eastern Europe and the Levant. Justinian along with his general Belisarius recaptured and reunited a large part of the Roman Empire. But Justinian was also a religious autocrat and that resulted in a schism with the pope in Rome. So Justinian’s solution was to move the capital of the western Roman Empire to Ravenna, Italy. The city was influenced more by Venice—then a city-state—than by Rome. Venice, in turn, was way more influenced by Byzantine Christianity than Roman Christianity because Venice did its primary trade down the Adriatic to Greece and Turkey.

  “At Ravenna, inside the Church of St. Vitale, there are these incredible mosaics done in Byzantine style, influenced by the masterpieces in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which he rebuilt as well. The tile work in Ravenna was commissioned by Justinian and his coruling wife, Theodora. Their faces are on the models in the mosaics and she is featured almost as much as Justinian was. And—point of information—neither one of the Roman rulers ever lived in Ravenna as its capital.

  “There’s a point to all this rambling. A lot of art nouveau was influenced by the incredible tile work of this period. So it’s not uncommon that tile workers in the Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox churches at the turn of the twentieth century would model their works with Ravenna or Hagia Sophia in mind, only they’d throw in an art nouveau riff. These particular mosaic icons were the work of a Russian artisan named Nikolai Petroshkovich who had worked on all the Romanovs’ palaces—Peterhof, the Catherine Palace, the Hermitage—doing restorations. He immigrated to New York in 1910 when he saw which way the winds of discontent were blowing. The iconography in the church was considered a prime example of art nouveau mosaic work done in the Byzantine style. And it was a major heartbreak to the church when it was stolen.”

  A long pause.

  McAdams said, “I’m done unless you want to know more history about Justinian and Theodora.”

  “No, I’m fine for now. I’m just thinking . . .” A long pause. “We are interested in this case because . . . it took place around the same geographical area and a break-in involved a theft from an unusual place—a church and a graveyard—not a museum or the home of an art collector.”

  “And they both involve art nouveau items.”

  “Right . . . that’s good, McAdams. And the church case was never solved?”

  “I haven’t found it on the Internet. I’ll delve a little further. What are you thinking?”

  “It could be someone local who’s paying for stolen art. But if the cases are related, it’s someone who has been collecting for personal use over many years. We’re not talking museum thefts, we’re talking thefts that would go under the radar. Someone who started stealing in his twenties through forties and would now be between his fifties and seventies.”

  “And still active.”

  “Someone with champagne taste on a beer budget. Like an art historian, a curator, or maybe a professor.” Decker paused. “Maybe an art history prof at Littleton because it’s an art college. But first I have to rule out the family. And that will take a while.”

  “Take all the time you want. Nothing is happening here.”

  “McAdams, could you find out who the detectives were on the case? If they had a few local suspects in mind, they can tell us what roads to travel.”

  “Well, whatever roads they traveled were bad ones because the case wasn’t solved. Besides, I didn’t find anything about the detectives on the Internet.”

  “That’s why you need to call up Marylebone and get the names. Then I’ll call up the old-timers and pump them for info. I can relate better than you.”

  “That’s for sure. You know if these guys are still alive, they must be like eighty.”

  “Haven’t you heard, McAdams? Eighty is the new sixty.”

  CHAPTER 7

  AFTER WALKING THROUGH a sally port, Decker and Rina walked into a mirrored-wall gallery fronted by display cases filled with gems, jewelry, and objets d’art. A twig-thin blonde of forty was perusing the wares, her face and eyes registering indifference at the pieces being shown to her. Decker supposed it would take something massive to compete with the rock on her finger. As he regarded her face, he thought about the difference between the coasts. It wasn’t that L.A. didn’t have its fair share of “look at me” gals, but the women seemed to relish their bling. This Park Avenue princess seemed to delight in her disinterest.

  On the black velvet tray was a mine’s worth of ice that had been set into earrings, bracelets, and necklaces. Maxwell Stewart looked up and gave Decker a nod. He was dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and plaid bow tie. As the woman talked, he listened and brought out another piece of serious sparkle. He seemed professional but not fawning. A minute later, he pressed a button. Another forty-year-old woman, wearing an emerald dress and pearls, came thro
ugh the back. She had curly red hair and a big, white smile.

  Max said, “Could you excuse me for a moment, Dawn? I have an appointment that I can change but I have a feeling that Detective Decker can’t.”

  “Detective?” Dawn’s face finally registered an emotion: a speck of curiosity. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing important.” He smiled at Decker. “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  Dawn looked Decker up and down, her eyes completely ignoring Rina.

  Max said, “Jill knows the inventory better than I do. She can help you find whatever you want.” He lifted up the countertop and came over to Decker and Rina. “Welcome to the gallery.” His eyes on Rina. “Maxwell Stewart.”

  “Rina Decker.” She held out her hand. “We can wait until you’re done with your client.” Her lips formed a big smile. “We don’t mind browsing.”

  “Speak for yourself, Lone Ranger,” Decker grumped.

  “You could get into a lot of trouble here,” Max said.

  “Thankfully I’m limited by my wallet.”

  “Nonsense. We have something for everybody.”

  “Let’s hear it for jewelry ecumenicalism,” Rina said. “Why don’t I have a look around while you two gentlemen talk? There’s a lot here to keep me occupied.”

  “Enjoy yourself. But I feel compelled to tell you that our best pieces are downstairs.”

  Decker said. “Is that where you’re hiding all those Tiffany lamps that I saw online.”

  “I’m not hiding anything,” Max said. “This is not a museum. Everything is for sale. That’s how I pay my mortgage. Would you like a tour?”

  Decker looked at Rina who said, “Sure, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Not that we can buy anything,” Decker said.

  “Not right now but there’s always the lottery,” Rina said.

  “Exactly.” Max was already headed down the stairs. “And when you do strike it rich, remember me with fondness.” He flicked on the lights and the modern world of technology suddenly gave way to an elegant life of yesteryear.