Murder in the Arts District

by Greg Herren

Todd walked back in carrying a silver tray with a silver coffee service resting on it. He set the tray down on the black iron and glass coffee table in front of the sofa, filled two mugs with steaming-hot coffee, and gestured for me to be seated. I added cream and sweetener to one of the mugs and sat down in one of the chairs facing the sofa. The coffee was very strong and bitter. Todd sat down at one end of the sofa, resting against one of the arms. “Thank you for seeing Bill,” he said, after sipping his coffee. “I know you did it as a favor for Blaine.” He set the cup and saucer down on the side table. “I’ve known Bill for many years. He was one of the original investors in my gallery.” He gave me a strained smile. “I’ve of course bought out all of my investors since then, but Bill took a chance on me, and we’ve remained close. I never forget someone who does me a good turn.”

  Did you sleep with him? Is that why he invested in you? I wanted to ask, but it wasn’t any of my business and it had no bearing on the present case. “Bill and Tom seemed very nice,” I replied, slowly and carefully. “I have to say, though, I am curious about their not having insured the paintings. That seemed off to me. I can certainly understand why the parish sheriff would question their story. Is taking possession of the paintings before the provenance was settled and the sale completed a normal business practice in the art world?”

  “It’s not something I would ever allow.” Todd pursed his lips slightly. “You don’t ever let art out of the gallery until the final sale has closed and the work is insured. I won’t let anything that expensive leave my gallery without it being insured by the buyer. But Myrna Lovejoy—well, let’s just say she has a rather interesting approach to selling art.” He picked up his cup and took another sip. “But Bill really wanted those paintings. And he’d worked with Myrna before, so her, um, unorthodox methods didn’t seem to be a concern to him.” Todd shrugged slightly. “It’s his money.”

  “Did you see the paintings?”

  He shook his head slightly. “No.” He exhaled. “Look, Chanse, honestly? Something about this entire thing seems off to me. I’ve never known Bill to skirt legality, ethics, anything like that. He’s always been extremely honest in all of his dealings with me.” He gave me a knowing look. “Sure, people who have money sometimes have a corresponding lack of ethics. But not Bill. I would have never suspected Bill of being a willing participant in anything remotely shady.” He tilted his head to the side briefly, raising his eyebrows nonchalantly. “Tom, on the other hand…” Artfully he allowed his voice to trail off.

  “You don’t know him well?”

  “Bill has had a series of younger men in his life—he’s always had a thing for young men. He calls them protégés, which gives it an aura of, oh, I don’t know, authenticity? Legitimacy? He always ends up setting them up in business of some sort, and some of them have done very well for themselves.” He pointedly looked into his coffee cup. “And before you ask, no, I wasn’t a protégé of his. It was always strictly a business relationship between us. As for the others…sometimes things didn’t work out the way he’d hoped or how he’d wanted, if you understand my meaning. I can’t say that about Tom—I don’t know him well enough to have an opinion one way or the other about him. How did you read him?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “He seemed to be on the up-and-up.”

  “They always do, don’t they?” His tone was only slightly patronizing. “This whole thing—taking paintings before paying for them or without provenance, not insuring them—this is not normal operating procedure for a man like Bill Marren. I have to wonder how much of that is Tom’s influence? He’s a very sexy young man.” He pursed his lips again. “Then again, Myrna Lovejoy also has a rather unsavory reputation in the art world, so…” Again with the little shrug.

  “What do you mean by unsavory?”

  “One hears things. But nothing concrete, you know. Just gossip.” He refilled his cup. “She had a reputation in Manhattan for cutting corners, promoting artists who weren’t quite there yet, selling art before she had the right to sell it. You know, little things.” He glanced at his watch, a Tag Heuer. “Oh, dear, I’m going to have to cut this short—we’re hanging a new installation today, so I have to be there early.” He rose. “Not that I don’t trust my staff—I have some of the best in the business working for me, of course—but I prefer to be there to make sure everything is just so.”

  I stood up and held out my hand. He hesitated for just a slight moment before taking it and shaking it vigorously. “Thank you for doing this, Chanse. I owe you one.”

  “Thank you, Todd.” He walked me to the door. Once I was standing on the porch, he said, “One last thing, though. I don’t trust Myrna Lovejoy.” He reached into his pocket and handed me a business card. “She can tell you more about Myrna and her business practices.”

  I looked at the card. It was ivory, a heavy vellum, with the name Serena Castlemaine in raised letters with a phone number underneath it. Before I could ask anything, Todd shut the door, leaving me standing there on the porch.

  Chapter Four

  I checked my email on my phone as I walked back across Coliseum Square.

  The air was even damper and the wind more piercing than earlier, so I walked a lot faster than I had on the way to Todd’s. I’d stupidly not worn a stocking cap, so my head was cold and my ears hurt. My nose was starting to drip a little bit. I was shivering by the time I got my front door open, and I headed straight for the thermostat. The heater kicked on immediately, and I flipped the switch for the ceiling fan. I’ve been told that in the winter if you reverse the normal direction of the fan’s turning, it pushes the heat down and keeps it from rising to the ceiling. Every little bit helps, I thought as I went into the kitchen. I dumped the old pot of coffee and started another one. My teeth were chattering. I thought about turning on the oven and opening the door, letting that warm the apartment. As soon as there was enough coffee in the pot, I filled my mug and walked back into the living room just as rain started pelting the windows.

  Before I got too cold to keep looking and had slipped my phone back into my jacket pocket, I’d noticed there were several emails from Abby, with attachments. I grabbed my blue wool blanket off the couch and draped it over my legs as I touched the keyboard to wake up my computer. The vent on the floor next to my desk was blowing hot dry air. It felt good. I opened the web browser and clicked on the shortcut to my email account. There were the usual sales emails and other junk, which I deleted quickly. The oldest email from Abby didn’t have an attachment—all that was inside was a link. I clicked on it, and it took me to the New York Times piece about Myrna Lovejoy. I read through it again quickly—it was actually worse than I remembered. There was the bit about “riding her bicycle in pajamas” and how no one “batted an eye”; the kale quote actually began with the condescending observation that “New Orleans isn’t very cosmopolitan”; how fun it was to go to local eateries and run into “famous celebrities”; and on and on.

  Yes, it was very hard to understand why the locals had been so offended.

  I sighed and bookmarked the page in case I needed to reference it later. Abby’s next email had several attachments, and the subject line “Reports.” Each attachment was named: Myrna and Collier Lovejoy, William Marren, and Thomas John Ziebell. I downloaded them all before clicking on the Thomas John Ziebell file.

  As always, Abby began her report with basic facts: date of birth, parents’ names, place of birth, names of siblings. Tom had two older brothers and a younger half sister, product of his father’s second marriage. He’d been born in Boston and gone to private Catholic schools until he graduated from high school. There was a several-year gap between his high school graduation and when he enrolled in a Rhode Island junior college. After getting an associates degree in communication there, he move on to the University of Connecticut. He’d pulled a double major, graduating with degrees in pre-law and arts administration. He’d gotten an entry-level job at a small art museum in Boston and had lived in the suburb of
Quincy. He left the job after a few years, enrolling at the LSU law school. He had finished last summer. There was again a slight gap from when he left the job at the museum to when he enrolled at LSU. Abby had also appended a list of his addresses—after he left the museum his mailing address was given as an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Around the time he enrolled at LSU, his address had changed—to Belle Riviere.

  His job history also had several gaps—ones that corresponded to the gaps in his schooling. What were you doing, Tom? I wondered.

  There was no marriage information listed, but I didn’t think there would be. There were also current addresses listed for his siblings, all of whom were married and still lived in the same neighborhood they’d grown up in. His mother had died during his senior year of high school; there was an address in Boston listed for his father as well as the date of the remarriage, two years after the death of Tom’s mother. I stared at the addresses. I’d never been to Boston and didn’t know much about the city. Tom’s brothers had blue-collar, union jobs. So did his father. The brothers hadn’t gone to college.

  I wondered about that gap between high school and the junior college. I checked the address history. Tom had moved out of his parents’ home shortly after graduation into an apartment, also in Boston. But no source of income was listed for that period. How were you paying the rent? How did you end up going to junior college in Rhode Island?

  I bit my lower lip. Maybe there’s a history of being a boy toy. Bill might not be his first sugar daddy.

  I still couldn’t shake the feeling I knew him from somewhere. I could picture him so clearly in my mind—in a darkened room with dim, yellowing lighting shining on his pale, sweaty skin as he leaned against the black wall, just wearing those sweaty white boxer briefs. But where was that? Where had I seen him before? Where was that room?

  Could it have been porn?

  I dismissed that thought. Tom was very hot, no doubt, but his muscularity was more athletic than porn-star like. Porn stars were ripped with very little body fat, if any. Tom wasn’t built like that. There probably was some porn with guys like Tom in it—there was porn for any and all tastes—but the only kind I’d ever seen had the ripped boys.

  It was frustrating.

  Finally I gave up and opened the Lovejoy document.

  This report was a lot longer and more detailed than the one on Tom. I expected as much. Tom wasn’t as public a figure as the Lovejoys. They clearly craved the limelight and apparently had employed a press agent when they still lived in New York. Since he worked in show business, it was to be expected. The report ended with a lengthy list of links to newspaper and magazine articles where one or both of them had been mentioned; it went on for several pages. I whistled softly as I scrolled through it. It must have taken Abby hours to compile all this information. She also provided a link to the Lovejoy Gallery’s current website. I went back to the top and started reading.

  Collier and Myrna had been married for almost twenty years. Myrna’s maiden name was McDonnell, and she was originally from Biloxi. That’s odd, I thought, remembering the article in the New York Times. If she grew up in Biloxi, she had to be relatively familiar with New Orleans; why would she act like it was someplace she’d never been before? Her family had moved to Rochester, New York, when she was a teenager, and she had a younger brother who’d died of cancer when she was in her early twenties. The parents apparently still lived in Rochester. She’d done her undergraduate work at SUNY on scholarship and gotten a scholarship for graduate school at Columbia. She married Collier right after she finished graduate school; they had a fifteen-year-old son named Cooper. They were both in their mid forties and were the epitome of the American dream—coming from nothing and achieving success.

  I had to give it to Myrna—she was a hustler. Right out of college and a newlywed, she got a job working in a tony gallery in Manhattan. She established a reputation in the New York art scene in a very short period of time. It was amazing how quickly Collier and Myrna became part of the glitterati. They were always seen at the best clubs, the best parties, and the best restaurants, always managing to get their pictures taken with big names. Myrna had even appeared on a season of Grande Dames of Manhattan. Grande Dames was a horrific series of reality television shows about spoiled social-climbing women in various cities around the country. New Orleans had even gotten a franchise but only filmed one season, which never aired. Myrna hadn’t been a cast member, merely a regular credited as “friend of the Grande Dames.” That gig had only lasted one season. According to the articles Abby had looked up and condensed, Myrna had not gone over well with the audience; the viewers hated her. There had even been a Facebook campaign to get Myrna fired.

  In an interview with a fan website dedicated to the shows, Myrna claimed, “I had to close my Twitter and Facebook accounts and hire security guards for my home and my gallery. I was getting death threats. Come on, people—it’s a goddamned reality show! I got the bitch edit! Let it rest already!”

  There was also a quote from New Yorker magazine (with a link) when Myrna closed her gallery permanently a few years later, where she blamed the show for destroying her business: “I lost many of my clients because of that stupid show and the way I was edited,” she said. “But nothing can keep me down for long because I’m a survivor. Collier and I are kind of burnt out on Manhattan anyway, and he got a very lucrative buy-out offer from his agency. We both fell in love with New Orleans when we visited there for Jazz Fest last year, and we’re going to buy some decayed, ruined mansion and renovate it, help get the city back on its feet after the horrors of Katrina. New Orleans is resilient and so am I…so it only makes sense for us to rebuild our lives there. I may even open another gallery—there’s a vibrant arts scene in New Orleans, and I want to get in on the ground floor. New Orleans is one of the few authentic places left in the country.”

  Authentic. It made me want to slap her. And again, no mention of her Gulf Coast roots, which was interesting.

  Collier Lovejoy was from rural Kansas, some small town in the middle of nowhere called Admire. The town was so small that other Kansans, per an article in New York magazine, didn’t know it was a town or where it was located. Collier managed to earn a scholarship to the University of Kansas, and like Myrna, got a scholarship for graduate school at Columbia. He had left Kansas and never looked back again. His parents were both dead, and he’d been an only child—both of his parents had worked at a beef processing plant in the county seat. He downplayed his past as much as he could, also like Myrna. Ashamed of their pasts, I thought with a knowing nod. I wasn’t exactly proud of where I was from either, but I never denied I was born and raised in Cottonwood Wells, Texas.

  While getting his master’s Collier had interned at several major publishing houses, and once his master’s degree was in hand he went to work for a small literary agency. Within three years he had moved on to a major literary agency, representing best-selling authors and making a ridiculously good living. A lot of their friends credited Myrna as a full partner in Sam’s drive to the top. They’d had a lovely apartment on the Upper West Side, with a great view. The Lovejoys seemed to have it all—he made partner at the Johnson Harris Agency, and she had her gallery. They got their names in the society pages all the time, mixing with the Beautiful People of Manhattan. They were at every important Broadway opening, every major gallery show, and had even finagled an invitation to the Met Gala one year.

  I rubbed my chin. I found it really hard to believe the fallout from her appearing on a reality television show on a basic cable network had been enough to force them out of Manhattan. I vaguely remembered Abby telling me something…

  Collier had, indeed, been bought out of the Johnson Harris office. There was a link to an article about it, but there was no real information there, no details. Collier was quoted as saying he was “feeling a bit burnt out with the publishing industry” and so decided to simply leave the business entirely rather than “giving my clien
ts short shrift.” He also said he was “looking forward to finding new challenges in life.”

  Right beneath this Abby closed with this: Chanse, according to this gossip site, Collier Lovejoy was fired from his agency after the senior partners were made aware that Myrna was sleeping with not only prospective clients for Collier, but another one of the senior partners. That senior partner, Steve Marwood, was married—his wife divorced him and apparently took him to the cleaners—and he, too, was bought out of the firm. There were also rumors that Myrna’s affair with Steve Marwood was what got Collier his partnership in the first place. He was apparently a terrible agent—he lost the Johnson Harris Agency any number of high-profile clients to the point where they would only assign him clients they could afford to lose. Steve Marwood apparently also protected Collier and kept him from being fired—how good is Myrna in bed, you think? Or maybe it was blackmail…anyway, once Collier was bought out of the agency, the Marwood divorce happened and he too got bought out. Myrna also got a pretty good price for her gallery business and the building, which she apparently owned. They also sold their apartment in Manhattan for a pretty nice profit. They bought a house on Sixth Street in the Garden District here, and she is leasing a building on Magazine Street for her gallery in the Arts District, close to the World War II Museum and Todd Laborde’s big gallery on Camp Street. I didn’t provide a link to the gossip site because there’s no confirmation, it’s all just rumor—but I doubt the gossip site would have gone with the story if there wasn’t some truth to it, and neither the Lovejoys nor the Marwoods even bothered to do any spin or take any legal action against the site. The court sealed the Marwood divorce settlement and the transcripts, but Jephtha is working on getting access (another one of those things I’d prefer not to know about) but Steve Marwood’s ex-wife now lives in Palm Beach in Florida, and I am still working on tracking him down. I will update you as soon as I get any confirmation on the gossip site and a location for Steve Marwood.