The Case of the Purloined Painting

by Carl Brookins

  “And remember when that federal lawyer showed up the other day? I have a nagging suspicion Gehrz and the woman could be feds. Now I think it must be Gehrz, not that lawyer Madison, who sent me to that basement to get the package.” I smirked with a degree of satisfaction. Hearing the words, gave the theory substance.

  I sank back onto the couch. Even if I was right about those two, the attacks on me and the murder of Gottlieb still didn’t connect tightly enough for my satisfaction. I needed to find some kind of rationale for that, some link.

  Was Murchison that connection?

  The death of the truck driver earlier that day at my hand seemed extreme. Even though I’d been defending myself and I’d already been assured I wouldn’t be prosecuted for the use of deadly force, the two unsuccessful attempts seemed over the top reactions to my messing about in the Gottlieb business. Maybe they weren’t connected at all. But one of my early priorities was going to be squeezing Ann/Anne and Gehrz. There were still too many unanswered questions.

  * * * *

  The next morning I went early to my office. It was one of those days. I hadn’t slept well, my restlessness impelled Catherine to move to the guest bedroom at about three. The day was dark with low-hanging February cloud lumps. If there was a sun up there somewhere, I couldn’t see it. I’d stopped for a Starbucks coffee on my way in and slopped some of it on the floor of my car, which didn’t improve my mood. The cops let me pick it up, the car. The Taurus didn’t drive quite right. No funny noises but the steering felt wrong. No big surprise there. Hell. I’d have to get it in the shop and rent something for the time being.

  Two calls on my answering service were quickly disposed of and now I was staring at my office door, willing somebody to show up or one of my clients to call. Maybe I should call Ricardo and bug him about the Gottlieb affair.

  While I thought about that briefly, I discovered I didn’t have to call him because he was standing in the door to my office after barging noisily in from outside. I didn’t recognize the man with him. A new partner?

  “This is Sergeant Morris, a relatively new addition to Minneapolis team of investigators,” Ricardo said. “We need to ask you some questions.”

  Morris was a large black man with a smooth, unmarked face and a serious expression. He had a pleasant baritone voice. We shook hands and sat down. His grip was firm but not crushing. I appreciated that.

  Ricardo and I stared at each other for a moment. “You doin’ okay?” he queried.

  “I guess.” I nodded once.

  Ricardo extracted a sheaf of papers from a slender briefcase he was holding and laid a selection on the desk in front of me. It was an array of mug shots. Felons, I presumed.

  “Recognize anyone?”

  I switched on the desk lamp and stared at the pictures. “This guy looks familiar. I think I had a run-in with him a few years ago. I can’t recall the details.”

  Ricardo nodded and I saw Morris scribbling in a small notebook he produced. “Try these.” Simon slid another group of pictures in front of me.

  “Here. This one. This is the guy driving the truck yesterday. Out by Murchison’s.” I tapped a picture and stared at the guy. Unremarkable, a typical police record picture, except I knew this guy was now dead by my hand.

  Ricardo nodded and Morris made another note. “You told us about the incident with a box truck a few nights ago when you were on your way to Casey’s. Can you say this was the same guy? Driving the truck?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I never saw the driver of that truck. And I can’t swear to it being the same truck, either. But both the one that hit me yesterday and the one the other night downtown were white box trucks with no markings. I’m almost certain they were the same truck.”

  Morris glanced at Ricardo Simon and said, “There have to be dozens of trucks like that in the metro.”

  Ricardo nodded. “I talked to the county attorney. Just to confirm that you aren’t gonna be prosecuted and you can pick up your weapon any time after today.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Anything about this guy that would help understand why he came after me?”

  Ricardo shrugged and glanced at Morris. “We know him. He has—had a record, including a short stint in Stillwater. A few violent incidents, mostly alcohol fueled. Muscle for hire, possibly. He’s local so we’ll be checking with relatives, the usual follow up, but we aren’t likely to learn anything about why he came after you.”

  So he was not a contributing member of society. That knowledge didn’t make me feel any better about having killed him.

  We speculated a few minutes about why I’d been attacked. I didn’t give the detectives anything useful in response to their probes. As they got up to leave, Ricardo revealed the real reason they’d come to my office for this interview.

  “There have been inquiries,” Ricardo said, struggling into his overcoat.

  “Inquiries?”

  “Yeah. The Chief has had questions asked about yourself.”

  “Really? From Saint Paul?”

  Ricardo regarded me silently for a long moment. Both investigators were still. “Saint Paul? Now why would you think that?”

  “I dunno,” I confessed. “It just popped into my head.”

  “Sure.”

  We both knew that Saint Paul officed state law enforcement people as well as federal agencies. People concerned with Homeland Security and who worked for some of the lettered organizations, like DEA and ATF and FBI and CIA.

  Chapter 26

  At four I prepared to leave the office for home, having accomplished just about nothing since Morris and Ricardo had departed. I figured to swing by the house in Roseville, stop at Byerly’s to pick up a salmon steak for dinner, and then hie myself across the river to Kenwood. That was the plan.

  The freakin’ phone rang and instead of letting it go to the machine, I picked up. It was Ann/Anne and she sounded just a tad impatient.

  “I guess you need to see me again, is that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I require another deposit and while you’re at it, bring me some more pages of that ledger, or whatever it is.” Silence.

  I almost decided she’d hung up when she said, “All right. But I can’t come to your office.”

  “Okay. How ’bout you meet me in an hour in the restaurant attached to the Byerly’s in Roseville. Do you know where the store is located? That work for you?”

  “All right,” she said again. Then she hung up. Apparently, she knew the area, or she’d find it.

  Aha! The last time I talked with Mr. Gehrz, I’d let slip that another client of mine wasn’t up to date on her retainer. I’d couched it in terms of appreciation for his—Gehrz’s—prompt payments. Now, what kind of coincidence do you call it when you tell client A that client B is late and client B soon calls to set up a meet? I don’t call it a coincidence at all. I call it trapping a client into revealing or confirming a connection. Also, the fact that she didn’t have to ask for directions to the Byerly’s store in question was some evidence that the woman was familiar with my neighborhood. Maybe more familiar than was comfortable.

  I grabbed the phone and called a guy I knew in Roseville. “Wally,” I said when he picked up. “I briefly need your talent in about an hour for just a couple of minutes. Can do?”

  “Okay. What is it?” Wally knows me. He’s cautious.

  “I’m gonna be in a booth in the restaurant in Byerly’s in about fifty minutes. I need a nice sharp picture of the lady I’ll be sitting with. It would be especially good if you can arrange it so I’m in the picture too.”

  “See you there,” Wally said and hung up.

  I left the office, smiling to myself. I was gonna get some serious mileage out of this meeting besides just another payment. Since I was early at the store I went to the meat counter and acquired a nice ch
unk of salmon for dinner later. As I was leaving the checkout and heading to the restaurant entrance off the next aisle, I saw a woman in a long white hooded coat coming into the restaurant from outside. Sparkles of fresh-fallen snow trembled on her shoulders. She disappeared into the women’s bathroom and I went into the restaurant and secured a booth. I sat so I could see along the booths to the entrance. Moments later, the woman I knew as Ann/Anne appeared and slid into the seat across from me. The long white coat was not in evidence. She was wearing a nicely tailored gray suit and carrying a medium-sized good-quality leather shoulder bag. I wondered if she was armed. In my business I have these odd thoughts from time to time.

  “Hello,” I said. “Coffee or tea?”

  We gave the waitress our order and my client produced an envelope. She opened it enough to show me its contents which consisted of some paper money and some other paper which I figured could be more pages from the ledger.

  She laid the envelope on the table and put her hand on it. “I have to tell you, Mr. Sean. I’m disappointed with the progress of this case.”

  I raised my eyebrows in feigned surprise. “It’s true the cops seem to be at a standstill and my contacts with a family member weren’t very productive. But you didn’t hire me to find the killer of Mr. Gottlieb. You just wanted a go-between, an interjector, as it were, between you and the police. Or so you said.”

  There was a flash of light from a corner of the restaurant and a quick burst of laughter. Somebody using a cell-phone camera, perhaps.

  The woman stared at me. “Does that mean if I hire you to find and apprehend the killers, you’ll work a little harder and charge me more money?”

  “Not at all. That’s because I wouldn’t take the case. I don’t take on murder cases. Oh, sure, in rare cases that I do accept, murder sometimes becomes a factor, but I try to leave homicide to our competent local police departments.”

  I never found out what she was going to say next because there was a loud crash in the aisle beside us when a man tripped over a bus boy carrying a loaded tray of dirty dishes. We both looked. Several people in booths around us stood up, or leaned out into the aisle to see what was happening, including Ann/Anne. She looked down at me, caught me watching her, instead of the mess of dishes on the floor. She shook her head slightly and slid the envelope to the middle of our table. Several staff rushed about cleaning up the mess and mopping spilled fluids, all the while apologizing to those of us in nearby booths. “I think we’re done here,” Ann/Anne said softly. She took her hand off the envelope and slid out, then headed up the aisle, neatly sidestepping the bus boy. I didn’t hear her say anything. I picked up the envelope she’d left and stuck it in my inside pocket. Then I finished my coffee. I’d hoped to detain her for a longer time, but even the best-laid plans and all that.

  Fifteen minutes later I pulled into my driveway through a dusting of fresh snow. I saw the dark figure of a man waiting under one of my tall pines that grew beside the driveway as I left the car. Behind me there was only the tracks of a single vehicle in the street. Mine.

  “Did you walk here from Byerly’s?” I asked.

  “Yep,” said Wally. “It’s not too cold and I need more exercise.”

  “There are no lights on in your house,” I observed. “No tracks in the road, so I assume you crossed the lots from Fairview. Came in the shorter, back way.”

  “Correct. Kept me off the street.”

  “Any particular reason for all this caution?” I didn’t ask Wally if he got the picture I wanted. He’s a competent professional.

  “We need to go back to the restaurant.”

  “Why is that?”

  “To get your picture. I left it with my cousin who works in the kitchen.”

  “Okay. How did that come to pass?” on the way Wally explained that he happened to observe the woman I met approaching the entrance from the parking area. She was wearing a long white coat with the hood thrown back and he said he thought she was attractive. He also noticed a man walking with the woman. Because he had a good view of her through the window from inside the restaurant, he recognized her when she came to my booth.

  “See, I was carrying two cameras. I only got the one shot when the bin of dishes fell over, and I gave that camera to Don, my cousin, to hold while I grabbed some more shots with the other camera. Then I went outside and the guy who was with your client found me. He took my camera.”

  “He what?”

  “He smacked into me. I wasn’t watching where I was going and we tangled and fell. It’s slippery out, ’case you hadn’t noticed. I dropped it. The camera. A car was coming. I rolled out of the street and when I got back up, the guy was gone and I couldn’t find the camera.”

  “Did you see him take the camera?”

  “No, and it’s dark, but I’m sure he did.”

  “But the picture I want is on the camera that Don, your cousin, has?” “On both. I had one in each hand and fired at the same time. I wanted to be sure to get at least one good one and usually when I do these shoots for you there isn’t time to reshoot or wait for the flash to recharge.”

  “I didn’t notice a flash.”

  Wally grinned in the dim light from the dash and said, “After you explained what you wanted me to do, I called Don. He suggested dropping a tray of dishes.”

  “I’ll cover the cost of the breakage,” I said, “And the lost camera.”

  “No problem,” Wally said.

  By now we’d reached the Byerly’s parking lot and I paused at the entrance so Wally could retrieve his camera from his cousin. I waited in the car, scanning the immediate area. Wally came back out and slid into my car, pressing buttons on the back of his expensive Nikon SLR. Then he showed me the screen. There we were in living color, my almost profile and Ann/Anne in an easily identifiable three-quarter shot. She was half-out of her seat and I was looking at her, one might even suggest with adoration on my face. Dandy.

  “It’s lucky you used two cameras,” I said as we drove away.

  “Yeah, if the guy looks at the images on the card he got he’ll assume he got the only picture of her. And it just happens that it wasn’t this camera I held onto, but the little point and shoot.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, but I silently wondered as we drove home through the snowy night. The thing was getting more problematical. I hadn’t considered Tiffany Market might have an escort and I should have. Maybe the fat envelope she’d left me would provide some answers.

  Chapter 27

  How and where had my blond benefactor, my client, acquired the ledger pages she was feeding me? I still hadn’t figured that out but I was happy to discover a bunch of them in the fat envelope that same client, Ann/Anne, had left on the dining booth table at Byerly’s. I copied them, along with the color eight-by-ten Wally supplied a few hours later. The next day I made several smaller color copies, cropping my own face out of the shot. What I planned to do was to heat up the hunt for the lady, Ann/Anne, or perhaps Tiffany. I was almost certain in my mind that the two women were one and the same. I was also pretty sure the ledger pages she was feeding me were the reason Manfred Gottlieb had been murdered. I was confident, but a little less certain, that my client had acquired the ledger in an extralegal way. Maybe she stole it from Gottleib. Maybe he gave it to her. Nah, unlikely.

  Repackaging the fresh ledger pages and mailing copies to my friend in the language department at MacAlester College took some time and brought no fresh insights. My friend at Mac had translated other materials for me. I knew he’d be discreet and while he almost always asked questions about the material, he wasn’t persistent when I demurred. I assumed he knew I’d lied to him on a few past occasions.

  Now that I had a decent picture of my client, I was going to retrace some of my steps. I took the pictures and went off to do my thing. Initially, I left some copies for the Minneapolis cops I kn
ew would have some level of interest in keeping eyes peeled for the woman.

  The scenario I was building went like this: appear in a medium-sized city where you have no relatives or other above-the-line associations. Why? I’m leaving that alone for the moment, I told myself. Find a temporary residence in a downtown hotel. Apply for a bunch of jobs, starting with a temp position that could and did, lead to something permanent. With a job one gets to give an apartment leasing agent a reference.

  Leasing agent calls human resources, which verifies the woman has a job. Fine, lease is signed, woman, named Tiffany Market, moves in some time later. The apartment in question is centrally located in northeast Minneapolis, not too close and not too far, it turns out, from any of the players in my little drama. No one pays a whole lot of attention to that, or to her comings and goings. Fine.

  I’m in my car, driving to the Ford place in Roseville where I’ll surrender my Taurus to the tender mercies of the body shop and rent something suitable. Maybe they’ll have a new Lincoln stretch limo. Right. With that business taken care of, the shop mechanic will call with repair costs and the timeline. I’m now renting a black 2011 Ford Taurus. It’s a four-door with most of the bells and whistles, but not all. It doesn’t have the souped-up engine, nor is there a handgun bracket beneath the dash, or the cleverly concealed space in the trunk where I can stash special supplies when I need to. Driving around town with a bag of tools designed to clandestinely enter places with a minimum of breakage, or with a sawed off shotgun, let’s say, would lead to arrest and detainment, should I be involved in a casual fender-bender or a traffic survey stop. Better such things be transported, when rarely required, in secure and secret places. I decided to return to the woman’s apartment building for another examination. Yes, I’d been there before but sometimes, reexamination after a little time has passed can bring fresh insight. It was worth a shot.

  I stopped in a no-parking zone in front of Tiffany Market’s apartment building. Through a time-honored subterfuge, I gained entrance to the building and hot-footed it up the stairs to the fourth floor. In the stairwell, which is roomy and well appointed, I turned and stared for a moment out the glass wall at the city of Minneapolis. Off to my left, through the bare tree branches was the graceful curve of Jimmy Hill’s Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi River. It was the bridge that once carried Mr. Hill’s railroad tracks to the west. It was the same bridge from which person or persons unknown, threw the unfortunate Mr. Gottlieb to his death one cold snow-filled February night.