Murder Times Two

by Haughton Murphy

  “It’s all very neat. Lord Hardup gets his money tax-free in Switzerland, his only risk being that Deybold might default on his note. And Deybold has the risk that what he’s got parked will decline in value. But that’s almost never happened, at least not yet.

  “Then, to finish up, Sherman brings the painting to New York and puts in on the market, or puts it up for auction. If any questions are asked, he produces his bill of sale from the foreign gallery and an affidavit from them that they owned it for three years. Lord Hardup’s name never gets revealed.”

  “You mentioned Switzerland. Could this fiddle, as you call it, be done in other countries as well?”

  “Certainly. Anywhere. The further away the better, to make it tougher to ask questions. Australia would be perfect.”

  “I thought everybody was obsessed with ‘provenance,’” Frost said, “wanting to be sure there’s a chain of title going back to the original artist.”

  “Not really. For example, if somebody comes in here with a painting and says he owns it, that satisfies me, assuming there isn’t anything fishy, and assuming I think the guy who brings it in is good for the sale price if it turns out to be a fake or he doesn’t own it. Obviously I wouldn’t touch it if there were anything suspicious. As for provenance, Reuben, you have to remember these works were painted in the sixteen-hundreds. A clear chain of title is difficult to put together and verify in the best of circumstances.”

  “I see. Very interesting. So we’re not talking about stolen works, or fakes. Just ‘hot’ ones where taxes and import restrictions are avoided.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is this sort of thing common?”

  “No, but it goes on more than you’d think. Deybold isn’t unique,” Mobeley said, no longer “supposing,” Frost noticed, but speaking definitely.

  “My impression is the rich everywhere are less willing to pay taxes than they used to be,” he continued. “This can slip people over the line from what you lawyers call ‘tax avoidance’ into tax evasion. Let’s say Sherman Deybold is profiting from a trend.”

  “This has been most instructive,” Frost said as he prepared to leave Hawkins & Co. “And don’t worry, I’ll keep everything you told me in confidence.”

  “Good. I don’t need either a slander suit or a lost customer.”

  Maybe Sherman Deybold is a prick, Reuben thought to himself when he was back on the street.

  17

  Gracie

  Frost entered the information he had gleaned from Mobeley in his “index,” fighting off as he did so a feeling that he was engaged in a pointless exercise. What he had learned about Deybold was interesting, but he did not think it advanced the cause much. What he really wanted to do was talk to Bautista; the silence of the police was both puzzling and annoying. And Reuben could not suppress a mild feeling of anxiety since, as far as he knew, he had not been eliminated from the list of suspects.

  For the first time in his life, he felt some compassion for those waiting to be indicted or tried or sentenced. If he, totally innocent, felt anxiety at a criminal process over which he had no control, what must it be like for someone who was guilty? He recalled having seen Ivan Boesky in a restaurant shortly before his sentencing hearing and had found his ostentatious bonhomie unattractive, like so much else about the man. But now he understood perhaps a little better why the Boesky party had been a trifle too boisterous that evening.

  As far as Reuben was concerned, one welcome side effect of the inactivity had been a sharp drop in the interest in Tobias’ poisoning on the part of the newspapers and television. Even the murder of one of the city’s richest men had a news life, it seemed, only slightly longer than the supermarket shelf life for a quart of milk or perhaps a dozen eggs. There were too many new crimes of violence to warrant continued attention to Tobias by the press and, Frost was bitterly certain, by the police.

  This sense of relief came to an abrupt end when his wife called him at lunchtime that Monday.

  “Bad news,” Cynthia told him. “You’d better go out and get New York magazine. There’s a story on Tobias.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Couldn’t be worse. It’s the cover story. ‘Who Closed the Book on Tobias Vandermeer?’”

  “What do they say?”

  “You’ll have to look at it. There are pictures of all the guests, including the two of us. And they had the nerve to use an old publicity still of me from my dancing days!”

  Frost rushed to the newsstand, muttering to himself that this was not the ideal way to start the week. He tried to start reading the story on the street, but decided that he’d better wait until he was safe within his own library.

  As Cynthia had told him, the story was illustrated with photographs: a drunken Tobias at a nightclub piano, taken years earlier; a staid Bachrach portrait of Robyn; and a motley assortment of pictures, arranged like a series of mug shots, of the members of the reading club, his own cropped from a Women’s Wear shot taken at a black-tie benefit. “Is One of These a Killer?” the headline over the photographs read.

  The article, by one Anita Fiddler, was a purple one, starting with its breathless lead:

  “An unanswered question at the end of Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray’s masterful comic novel about mid-19th century English society, is whether the book’s amoral heroine, Becky Sharp, murdered her old friend, Joseph Sedley, to collect his insurance.

  “Last March 5, the socially prominent members of society matron Robyn Vandermeer’s reading club, gathered to discuss Vanity Fair, found themselves the unwelcome subjects of another unanswered question.…”

  Frost had to steel himself before reading on. At least Ms. Fiddler seemed to be literate, he consoled himself. The consolation did not last long, as he found an “anonymous police source” quoted as saying, “It’s hard to believe, but the victim may have been poisoned by a respectable member of the city’s upper crust.” Springer, Frost thought. Damn Springer.

  Ordinarily Reuben might have enjoyed the reference to him as a “powerful Wall Street superlawyer” or (for different reasons) the description of Cynthia as the “formidable arts czarina.” But in this context he did not.

  Hastily finishing the article, which had nothing new to say, he tossed the offending magazine aside and sat with his head in his hands. “This bad dream has got to end,” he muttered. He felt very isolated and lonely as he realized there was no one to whom he could direct his sotto voce command except himself.

  Robyn Vandermeer was on the telephone to Reuben within hours of the appearance of the New York piece, panicked at the thought of appearing at Gracie Mansion the next day to receive her award for READ from the Mayor.

  “I don’t know what to do, Reuben,” she said. “That dreadful girl and those sly references to Becky Sharp! The most manipulative woman in all of fiction, and she compared her to me!”

  Frost tried to calm her down, saying—quite correctly—that there had been no one-to-one comparison between Thackeray’s heroine and Robyn.

  “I agree that the article’s appalling,” Frost told her. “But Ms. Fiddler pointed the finger at each of us, not just you. It was a silly piece of work and I’d ignore it.”

  “Oh, that’s easy for you to say, when I’m the one that has to go on public view at Gracie Mansion tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Robyn, we discussed that last week. It would be a great mistake to cancel out now. How many people have been invited? Two hundred?”

  “Around that.”

  “It would look terrible, as if you had something to conceal. You’ve got to be brave and go ahead with it. Summon up all your dignity—which is considerable, my dear—and brazen it out.”

  “But you know Norman. He always wants to milk every event for the maximum publicity.”

  “Yes, yes, the Prince of Photo-Ops,” Reuben said, repeating the derisive nickname that he had heard recently from some journalist friends.

  “It will be a circus. Every sensational reporter
in the City will be there.”

  “Let me talk to Norman. He certainly has to understand the circumstances. If it’s a circus, let me at least see if we can’t confine it to one ring.”

  “Reuben, you’re wonderful. I only agreed to accept this stupid award to get some publicity for READ—not to give the tabloids a field day with a new Becky Sharp.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Bless you, Reuben. Please make Norman understand.”

  Frost had always gotten on with the Mayor. He had taken on a number of tricky, unpublicized assignments for him over the years, some involving hard dog work, others simply consisting of frank and objective (if not necessarily welcome) advice. And he had never asked for anything in return, his reward always having been the totally intangible one of doing something of possible use for the City that he so much loved.

  He had never been certain whether Norman, in fact, remembered his name, though others assured him that there was nothing personal in this; the Mayor didn’t remember anyone’s name. (There was even the apocryphal story, told to him by another reporter, of the time that Norman, in his early campaigning days, shook his own mother’s hand on a street corner without recognizing her.)

  Frost made a late-morning call to City Hall, leaving his name and number in the hope the Mayor would call back during one of the “phone breaks” Frost knew he took between appointments. He was gratified when Norman was on the line within the hour.

  “Reuben, how’s by you?” the Mayor said, employing the ungrammatically distinctive greeting that had become his trademark.

  “I’m fine, Mr. Mayor.”

  “What can I do for my old friend?”

  Frost explained Robyn Vandermeer’s fears concerning the next day’s ceremony.

  “That’s easy. I’ll talk to Bob Twitt, my press secretary. We’ll limit the press to the City Hall crowd. Most of them are too lazy to make it uptown to Gracie anyway.”

  “You’re sure that’s right when Robyn is the featured attraction?”

  “Yeah, you’ve probably got something there. Okay, we’ll let everybody in for the ceremony, but that will be it. No questions, no press conference. Just photographs of the presentation.” The Prince of Photo-Ops seemed pleased with his solution.

  “Robyn will be grateful. She’s under a great deal of strain, as you can imagine. The uncertainty of not knowing who killed her husband is pretty terrible.”

  “I’m sure it is. The police doing okay?”

  Frost leaped at his unexpected opportunity. “I can’t honestly say, Mr. Mayor. Those of us involved—of which I’m unfortunately one—haven’t heard from them in the last few days. The officers assigned seem conscientious enough, but I don’t know how many other things they’ve got on their plates.”

  “Well, if there’s anything I can do, just call me.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.”

  It was ironic that Norman, that most urban of mayors, lived in what had once been a farm mansion, built by Archibald Gracie at the end of the eighteenth century on land that may well have belonged originally to the Vandermeers.

  “If they can’t get photographed at the White House, they want to do it at Gracie,” Norman had once told Reuben, speaking of his fellow members in the National Mayors’ Conference.

  The residence, newly and tastefully restored through the generosity of private donors, was an attractive oasis, preserving the feeling of a country estate amid a dense urban environment. Only implacable adversaries of the Mayor refused invitations to it (a circumstance that did not occur often; Norman, the tough but highly sensitive Mayor, knew who his enemies were, and they were simply never asked there).

  Reuben and Cynthia arrived separately for the Vandermeer ceremony, he from home, she from her office. He was delighted that it was a fine spring day, and the reception preceding the six o’clock ceremony was outside on the splendid lawn, looking out toward the East River. The inside rooms were somewhat small and confining; the outdoor expanse was much more inviting.

  Being the veteran of many of these receptions, Reuben commanded up a martini from the bartender, knowing that the liquor bar was reserved for the select guests at the pre-ceremony party; the unlucky hordes at the reception afterward would be limited to soda water and, most likely, a truly lamentable New York State white wine.

  Strolling the lawn, Frost was stopped by Wayne and Barbara Givens.

  “Liked your picture in New York,” Givens said.

  “Thanks. Yours was pretty flattering, too,” Frost said.

  “Reuben, when is this going to end? It’s very embarrassing. And Barbara’s a nervous wreck.”

  Mrs. Givens gave every evidence of living up to her husband’s description, looking pale and smoking nervously.

  “I wish I knew. Heard from the police lately?”

  “Not since last week, when they wanted to know about the waiter at Robyn’s party. Were they after you on that?”

  “Oh, yes. Did you have anything to tell them?”

  “Nothing. Except that I think he did it,” Givens said. “Why don’t they have an all-points alarm out for him?”

  “They probably do. But why do you think he was the murderer?”

  “Who else could it have been?” Givens demanded.

  “How about the lady on the porch steps?” Reuben asked, as he directed his listeners’ attention to Robyn’s arrival. Again on the arm of Bill Kearney, she came down to the lawn with almost a regal sweep. She was dressed in black, but high-fashion black, not grim widow’s weeds. She was wearing an elegant black knit suit—Chanel or Missoni? Frost wondered—and black stockings and shoes, the dark effect relieved only by her pearls and the small gold buckles on her shoes.

  “That’s rather a nervy question,” Givens countered.

  “Wayne, anything anyone says at this point is going to be considered ‘nervy’ or worse. I asked the question to show how hopeless the case is.” Except for my lingering suspicion about you, he could have added.

  “There’s the Mayor!” Barbara said, almost with excitement, as Norman made his entrance and kissed Robyn. He was handed a glass of white wine (an adequate Macon Village, unlike the swill that would be available later), which he carried with him, but did not drink, as he “did” the lawn.

  “The fix is in,” he said, as he came up beside Reuben, in a low voice the Givenses could not hear. “Photos when I present the award to the honoree, and that’s it.”

  “Excellent, Mr. Mayor,” Frost replied. “Robyn will be pleased.”

  Moments later, completing his circle of the guests, Norman cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted out, “Okay, everybody inside! Time to go inside!”

  Undignified though it was, his barked-out order had its effect, and those on the lawn dutifully went up the porch steps, through the main entrance to the mansion, and on down the narrow corridor that led to the area where public functions were held.

  The Susan Wagner wing, the mansion’s meeting hall named for the late and well-liked wife of a former mayor, was now arranged for the ceremony, with rows of chairs facing a podium in front of the handsome antique fireplace. As those from the garden entered, they found the room half filled with others not privileged enough to be invited to the preliminary lawn party.

  As Reuben looked around, he was startled to find that the audience seemed to resemble very closely the one that had attended Tobias’ funeral, with a sprinkling of political figures and their wives whom the Mayor was most likely cultivating at the moment.

  Reuben and Cynthia sat on folding chairs midway back in the room. They had deliberately taken places off to the side to avoid what was sure to be a crush of cameramen rushing down the center aisle, once they were admitted through the wide doors at the back.

  A string quartet of students, recruited from one of the City’s music schools, played on the other side as the guests took their seats in the airy, yellow-walled room. The Mayor and Robyn, arm in arm, came in last, t
o warm applause.

  The program began with testimonials to READ from three diverse pupils who had learned to read under its auspices: a young Hispanic teenager; a black woman, not much older than the boy, who identified herself as a former welfare mother now employed by the city’s Human Services Administration; and a thin, rugged white man in his sixties, a building superintendent who told the crowd of his decision to reveal his lifelong secret of illiteracy in order to enlist in the READ program that “changed my life.” A cynic might have found the parading of these speakers exploitative, but the three seemed both proud and eager to tell their stories and seemed startled, but pleased, at the enthusiastic applause they received.

  The Chancellor of the City’s secondary schools spoke next, praising Robyn for her efforts “in giving hope to young people where we, with our slashed budgets, could not.” He looked pointedly at the Mayor as he referred to “slashed budgets,” but got a fixed, perhaps even frozen, smile in return.

  Then the Mayor spoke, in a manner that came as close to approaching eloquence as he ever did. Robyn’s “pioneering” and “determination” in advancing the “unglamorous” cause of literacy were lauded, consolation for her “recent tragic bereavement” was given and the Certificate of Appreciation—no Steuben apple, after all—was produced and presented.

  Robyn, who had been facing the audience and staring into the middle distance, a sad smile on her face, rose and accepted the certificate and a kiss from the Mayor amid tumult. The spectators gave her a standing ovation, almost drowned out by the click and whirr of cameras and the cries of “just one more!” Mercifully no one attempted to shout questions at her, and the photographers, duty done, retreated behind the rear doors from whence they had come.