Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  Detective Modelstein made sure he had room for six zeroes, typed in the number, and then interrupted her.

  “Where does your father fit in? What’s he doing? Why were you dealing this thing and not him?”

  “He’s dead,” said Clare quickly, and she almost got to another sentence. But her body became rigid and the next word stuck in her mouth, and tears cascaded down her clean white cheeks, and Detective Modelstein couldn’t find the tissues fast enough. He slapped his pockets, rummaged through his desk, looked on other desks, and almost tore the complaint out of the typewriter to soak up the tears. He had stepped in it. He had stepped into her tragedy, and now it was flooding him, and he felt awful. He knew he was not supposed to get involved emotionally because there was just too much tragedy in a career for a cop to handle emotionally. But this one had come suddenly out of left field. He was in the midst of a routine report before he realized he was in one of those things.

  The young woman refused to reach for a tissue herself, just stayed there with her mouth open, sobbing, and he had done it. He had triggered it all over himself.

  And if Detective Modelstein tried to avoid anything in his life, it was human pain. This was partly how he had gotten into Frauds/Jewels. There were, of course, accidents in his service that he could not avoid, like the time he had been nearby a plane crash at Kennedy, and the central dispatcher had located his car and ordered it to the scene. He had been temporarily put in charge of the detail handling grief-stricken relatives and the few survivors, making sure no one got in the way of the ambulances and ground crews. He was depressed for weeks. He knew then that if they ever transferred him to Homicide, he would quit. His older sister had said he never should have been a policeman in the first place.

  “You joined because it was the easiest damned thing to do. You’re always taking the easy course, Artie, and you’ll pay for it. In the end, everyone pays for it,” his older sister had said. If Esther were here, she would be lecturing this poor girl on getting her just deserts for not putting the affair into the hands of the proper people, for taking shortcuts by doing it herself. There were no random events in his older sister’s life, only laziness or cupidity punished by God, and that not strongly enough.

  When the young lady from Ohio could talk again, she explained that her father had died, she believed, trying to set her up for life. Detective Modelstein thought this was beautiful. He felt uneasy having thoughts about her body. But not that uneasy. He tried to be gentle. Other detectives had walked by the sobbing. He never could.

  “Did his killing have anything to do with this, do you think? Did anyone think?” he asked.

  She shook her head. Her eyes were red now.

  “It was one of those accidents. It was a mugging. A stabbing. Someone or some boys pushed him into an alley and stabbed him. Senseless. They didn’t even get all the money.”

  “These things happen. No one knows why. Senseless,” said Detective Modelstein. He was glad to see she had found a handkerchief.

  The man who had pulled the swindle, he found out, was Geoffrey Battissen, who owned a gallery on pricey Fifth Avenue. She had given up this cellar for a receipt that she showed with righteous justification. All it said was that Geoffrey Battissen had received a gold piece.

  “Anything else you have?” he asked. “Is that it?”

  “That’s it. That’s his signature. I saw him sign it.”

  Detective Modelstein made sure the tissues were close before he told her what her situation was.

  “Miss Andrews,” said Detective Modelstein, “when you let Battissen take that cellar, you as much as gave it to him.”

  “What about my receipt? He gave me a receipt.”

  “Even if it said ‘saltcellar with jewels,’ that wouldn’t be a receipt. You want to see a receipt, a real one? It has the gem prints. It has size and weight and grade. That’s a receipt. You got a piece of paper.”

  “I have his signature. I have my testimony. I can at least damage his reputation. He said he has been on Fifth Avenue for twenty-two years. I imagine that requires a degree of trust, Detective Modelstein. Let’s see how he feels about his reputation and a long court suit.” Claire pushed herself forward, her eyes wide, her nostrils flaring.

  “I’m sorry. You’re not someone who can hurt him. I’m sorry. If you had a lot of friends who bought art in that crowd, you might hurt him.”

  “You mean to say, Detective Modelstein, that because I am from Carney, Ohio, and because I trusted him, because I was defenseless, he is getting away with this?”

  Detective Modelstein didn’t answer. And he had a hard time looking into the clear blue of those eyes, the ones demanding an answer he was not giving.

  “No,” said the young lady. It was clear. It was sharp. It did not get modified, but hung there, sure as sunrise and just as bright. She would not accept this.

  “I don’t know what we can do,” said the detective.

  “You can arrest him. I am willing to swear out a complaint.”

  “I have to have evidence.”

  “You’re a policeman, aren’t you? You’re supposed to get evidence. Search his place. Don’t you have people who tell you if hot goods are for sale?”

  “What do you think I’m gonna find?”

  “You don’t know if you don’t look, do you?”

  “Look, that cellar doesn’t exist anymore. They melt down the gold first thing. They’d market the jewels anywhere. Hell, they don’t even have to cut the gems again. Lady, you don’t have a description.”

  “The ruby was like a goose egg,” said Claire Andrews very firmly to the New York detective.

  “Yeah. Okay. I’m sorry, lady, that’s not a description. It isn’t.”

  “I could identify it if I saw it again. It was carved. I saw the head of Christ on it. I remember that from the basement when I was a child. And I remember the blue stone too. Daddy said it was a man with a spear and it was a funny spear ’cause it had three prongs.”

  “Okay, a red stone and a blue stone. With pictures. Wonderful. You don’t even know if they’re really gems. That guy could come back with colored glass and you couldn’t prove it wasn’t yours. Please already.”

  “The spear was a trident. That’s what three prongs are. A trident. Put that in the description. I am pressing charges, Officer Modelstein.”

  “And the proof that you own it?”

  “It’s ours.”

  “Okay. Get the bill of sale, and maybe that’s got the gem prints and we maybe got something to begin with. Not much, but better than that,” said Artie, nodding to the receipt from Battissen Galleries on clean gray dramatic paper.

  “We have had it for years. It’s my father’s lucky piece.”

  “But what about the bill of sale?”

  “I don’t know of one. Maybe he had it. I don’t know where he kept it. I suspect he may not have had one,” said Claire. “He kept it in our basement at home. It was a personal possession.”

  “In the basement?” asked Detective Modelstein. If she weren’t so firm in her conviction, and so fragile, he would have laughed.

  “Yes, that’s where he kept it.”

  “And he didn’t come here to some big auction house to sell it but to this guy Battissen who I never heard of.”

  “He had to be discreet for business reasons.”

  “Well, you know you love him, and I’m sure your father’s honest and you’re sure your father’s honest, but some people might think that a thing he kept in the basement all his life and then tried to sell so quietly might not be his in the first place.”

  “Of course it’s his.”

  “Yeah, but you got to have proof it’s yours; otherwise, if you press a criminal complaint against someone, you might run into problems that really come down on your head hard. Real hard. Do you know what I mean?”

  “It was my father’s and I want it back.”

  “You want to press charges, press charges,” said Modelstein. “But I’d like to
see some proof of ownership.”

  “My father was a hard businessman, but an honest one. Do you think in Carney, Ohio, people would let my father get away with even the slightest hint of shadiness? We have a wrong side of the tracks in Carney, and he came up from that, and no one, least of all—”

  Modelstein put his hands over his ears. When she stopped grinding at his head, he said: “Okay. Okay. It’s your business. You’re pressing charges. Charges being pressed.” He typed up the report as she talked on about her father and Carney, more information than he wanted to know about any place west of Bayonne, New Jersey, and east of California. She said it was important to her that Detective Modelstein understand who her father was, because then, he would know that he earned everything he ever had in his life. Nothing ever came easy for him. And he wouldn’t steal just because so many people would be happy to see him get caught. Carney was like that.

  For a moment Artie Modelstein thought Carney, Ohio, was like his sister Esther.

  “Look, I never accused him of anything. I don’t even want to accuse this guy Battissen,” said Artie. “What’s your value on the piece?”

  “Say a million and a half dollars as of now.”

  “A million and a half,” said Modelstein, typing it into the form. “And it’s a saltcellar, right?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” said Claire.

  “You don’t know for sure.”

  “I thought it was. Geoffrey Battissen said it was. He seems to be an expert on them.”

  “So we will call it a large gold piece with jewels?”

  “All right. We’ll do that,” said Claire Andrews, burning.

  Detective Modelstein finished the report and handed her a statement to sign.

  Claire poised the ballpoint pen over the form and looked to the darkly handsome detective. He couldn’t be right about Geoffrey Battissen just getting away with things. Maybe being raised in New York had dulled him to a sense of justice. Maybe he didn’t understand how determined she was.

  She must have waited with the pen a long time because Detective Modelstein began talking to her about how the city was cruel at times, and how it seemed there was no justice in the world, but he knew that the loss of her father had to be greater than any financial loss, that perhaps it was her father’s death that was really motivating these charges. He wasn’t a psychologist, he admitted. But he did know the city and did know jewel fraud, and maybe it was so that her father had acted in only the best traditions, but it wouldn’t appear that way to the public necessarily. They didn’t know her father. He didn’t know her father.

  “What are you saying?”

  “If I were offered some money, even though it wasn’t what I wanted, or even if it wasn’t fair, more importantly, I’d take it if I didn’t have a chance of getting anything else.”

  “Take the money?”

  “I’m a cop. I can’t give advice.”

  “You’re saying I don’t have a chance.”

  “Listen, you come from a nice town. It’s clean. People care what other people do. You’re somebody there. I’ve seen a town like that once. Everybody was nice. What do you need this for? See if you can get a check from the guy. Don’t carry cash. And go home. Thirty-five grand was his nuisance payoff, you said. If he gives you any trouble with that, call me. I think we can get you your money.”

  “Make a deal?”

  “Go home. Banging your head against a wall doesn’t move a wall. It gets your brains hurt.”

  Detective Arthur Modelstein saw the little half-smile on the pretty lady’s face. He was sure maniacs had just that sort of smile before they shot up a restaurant full of strangers.

  She signed the complaint.

  “I think that says it all,” she said. “I don’t make deals with criminals and this is what I learned from my father.”

  Artie took the complaint and filed it with the computer system. In the old days it was called entering something on a blotter. Now it was faster. There would be a warning sent to major jewelers, which would be useless because even if they got any of the stones, there wasn’t a description that would hold up in any court of law. In fact, the claim of a swindle of a million and a half dollars would probably not even get a paragraph in any New York newspaper. It could open Claire Andrews up to a charge of slander, but she did have her receipt. If she got a civil lawyer, the whole thing might end up, after some hefty fees, with Battissen settling out of court for no more than the nuisance money he was going to pay her to begin with.

  The only people who would get excited about this would be those in her hometown, where people were going to start asking questions about what her father was doing all those years keeping secret a big gold thing worth over a million dollars.

  The pretty lady from Carney, Ohio, had taken a big swing at the forces of injustice, which would probably deck only her father’s reputation.

  “All right, what happens now?” she asked.

  “Now I get supper. I eat, you know.”

  “Aren’t you going to arrest Mr. Battissen?”

  “I got enough to talk to him. Not to arrest him. If I had enough to arrest him, he would have offered you more. Everybody knows what’s goin’ on here but you.”

  “But if you get a search warrant you can move now.”

  “I don’t have enough to get a search warrant. That’s what I been tellin’ ya. Besides, it ain’t there. It ain’t anywhere anymore. If it did have those gems, it was broken down into separate stones before you finished that fancy meal he sent you out on. That gold is something else now. You been had. It’s what I’m tellin’ ya.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Right,” screamed Artie.

  “Don’t yell,” said Claire.

  Artie Modelstein gave up. He engineered his chair away from her and rose from his desk.

  “I will be back here in the morning. I am going to eat,” he said.

  She came to supper with him.

  She didn’t know where else to go. She didn’t want to leave things like this, just with a report going into a computer. She was pretty enough to get glances at Farnies restaurant, two blocks from Artie’s Nineteenth Street apartment (which contained his bedroom). He offered to buy her supper. She said she wasn’t hungry and then absentmindedly picked from his plate.

  She talked on about her father and what he meant in Carney, someone who had risen from a very wrong section of the town to the top of it. She was beautiful but Artie sensed she was not truly aware of this. He also sensed she might be crazy, and crazy could outdo beautiful anyday. He had enough crazy in his life. Life was crazy. The purpose of life was to avoid grief. He had become a policeman in a futile effort to avoid personal grief. Granted, that had not been too successful, but it was better than other things.

  Artie was six foot two and had been an all-city linebacker for DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He had gotten a scholarship to a Texas university with a promise that they would put him through law school. It seemed a lot easier than struggling for grades, and he had plans on cramming for the bar with special help later. He had plotted a course with the least amount of uncertainty and difficulty, financial and academic.

  And then he got down to freshman football camp, and the two-a-day drills, and the special sweat drills to separate the men from the boys. Down in Texas they took football with a seriousness that he was not used to. He walked out on the second day.

  “You know, Modelstein,” said the linebacker coach, “you got everything it would take to make an all-American except guts. You don’t have it here.” The linebacker coach had pointed to his chest.

  “Right,” Artie had said.

  The coach had never heard that answer before, especially from someone who was eighteen years old. The coach said that Artie had wasted a scholarship the university could have used on someone who wanted to play ball.

  “You don’t play football. This is war,” said Artie.

  “You quit here and you’ll quit on everyth
ing in your life, Modelstein.”

  “Fine,” said Artie, who had plenty of preparation in staying away from his sister’s assaults. This coach was an amateur.

  “The thing I like about the Israelis is they got guts. If the likes of you were over there, Modelstein, they’d all be a hind end on a camel.”

  The implication was clear: the linebacker coach could accept Israeli Jews but not New York ones, which was all right with Artie because he had no intention of staying in Texas, let alone that university. He quit the Texas university, enrolled at City College in New York, found out he could become a policeman and get the NYPD to help pay for his school, which he also quit because he really didn’t need a college degree once he got in Frauds/Jewels. He belonged there. He knew the dealers on Forty-seventh Street. He knew the new crowd from Iran. He knew where everyone was and everyone knew where he was, and unless there was some accident, life was good and even modestly challenging. He had taken easily to the jewels. He liked the people. They liked him.

  And now this young lady, who reminded him so very much of that linebacker coach in Texas with her talk about not giving up, was pushing herself into his life, specifically into his garlic bread.

  She had asked if he minded. He really couldn’t say no. It was still very possible that she would wind down, have a drink, come with him down the street to his apartment, and then take off her clothes.

  She talked about her childhood, about being protected by her father, and about her natural reluctance to face a city like this alone. She talked of aloneness.

  Artie thought of soft blondish pubic hair. Claire talked about how inhospitable New York City was and about how perhaps that was inevitable with a city this size.

  Artie thought of running a hand down the silk blouse and what the nipple would feel like when it hardened.

  Claire said that people were a lot kinder when you got to know them, that she didn’t think they would pass you by in New York City if you passed out on the street, as people said they would.