by Greg Herren
“So whoever killed Collier knew which discs to take, knew the son wouldn’t be home so neither Collier nor Myrna would be missed until either Collier’s body was found or until Cooper got home from school the following day and no one was there.” I stroked my chin. “And you say Meredith doesn’t have the safe combination?”
“No.” Blaine refilled his cup. “The safe has a secure drop for envelopes. They don’t do much cash business—no one carries that much cash around—so it’s usually just checks or credit card slips. Meredith would run the sale, put the signed slips into an envelope, which she would then date and drop into the safe. Myrna took the deposits to the bank in the morning and handled all the banking. If she was on vacation, Meredith would close out the sales and drop the envelopes…and they’d stay in the safe until Myrna came in to the gallery again.” He gave me a look. “Of course, it’s also possible that someone else knew the alarm code and was familiar enough with the system to take the DVR recordings.” He raised his eyebrows. “Another bizarre crime where the alarm was bypassed—sound familiar?”
I nodded. “So we have a robbery at Belle Riviere where the alarm was apparently never turned on, and a murder in New Orleans where the alarm was apparently set, turned off and then back on after the crime was committed, and the security camera footage has disappeared.” I exhaled. “The assumption with the robbery at Belle Riviere was that Tom forgot to turn the alarm on, but given this—it’s possible that the alarm there was turned off, isn’t it? Meredith is certain she armed the system when she left that night?”
Venus nodded. “Meredith swears that she turned the system on—and we’re waiting for the records from the security company that installed the system. The records will show when it was disarmed and re-armed that night.” She smiled at me, her eyes half-closed.
“Of course.” I shook my head, angry at myself for not thinking about checking with the Belle Riviere security company. I took out my phone and made a quick note, just in case the Vicodin was going to mess with my memory again. “What company installed the gallery’s security?”
“Vigilant Eye.” Blaine leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.
“That’s who installed the system at Belle Riviere.” It couldn’t be a coincidence. “Where are they based? Here in New Orleans?”
Security was part of the services my business offered, but I didn’t have a lot of clients because I had one major client, Crown Oil. Crown Oil was probably about seventy-five to eighty percent of the annual income accrued by MacLeod & Grosjean, LLC. It wasn’t a terribly difficult job—the fact my landlady and friend Barbara Castlemaine was majority stockholder and chairman of the board of directors had a lot to do with that—but it was incredibly time consuming. I was in charge of every aspect of their corporate security, from their Internet communications to the security of their domestic oil fields, pipelines, and refineries, as well as general security at their corporate buildings in Dallas and Tulsa. I subcontracted out a lot of the work because it was beyond what I personally could do, but I stayed on top of it. Four times a year I toured their office buildings and all of their properties, testing and upgrading the systems I’d designed for them.
Generally I would only take on local security jobs as a favor to someone, or if I was bored, but as a general rule I referred prospective security clients out to other local businesses I knew and trusted to do good work. Part of being a security consultant was staying current on recent developments in security equipment, and occasionally I went to seminars or sales clinics for companies developing new equipment or improvements on the equipment they already sold. There weren’t a lot of us in southeastern Louisiana, and over the years I’d gotten familiar with the competition, particularly in New Orleans.
But I’d never heard of Vigilant Eye, and that was odd. It was very odd, in fact, and I typed a note into my phone to look into them, see whatever I could find out about them.
Well, I’d probably put Jephtha on it, but it was something that needed to be done.
Maybe it was just a coincidence—there weren’t many security firms in the area, as I said—but it seemed a bit curious that Vigilant Eye, a business I’d never heard of, had installed the systems at both places involved in this case. It was yet another connection between the burglary at Belle Riviere and Collier’s murder, and one that couldn’t be overlooked.
“Too many coincidences,” Blaine said, and Venus nodded in agreement. They both rose. “Well, buddy, we’ve got to get moving,” Blaine said. “Is there anything you want to share with us?”
I thought for a moment as I stood up and pulled my jacket back on. “No, nothing that has anything to do with the murder. But thanks for the food, coffee, and information.” I nodded at them both. “I’ll keep you posted if I find out anything.” I didn’t expect them to reciprocate—they’d already shared more with me about an investigation in progress than they should have. But they knew they could trust me—I wasn’t going to jeopardize anything they were doing. And we’d cooperated so many times now it would have seemed weird if they didn’t help me out some on this one. I didn’t think they’d shared everything they had turned up with me—I was neither stupid nor naïve enough to believe that—but they’d shared what they could.
And they’d given me a really good place to start.
Vigilant Eye.
I went out the front door and waited for Blaine to buzz the gate open from inside. Once it buzzed, I went out and crossed over to the park. I pulled my phone out and send a quick text to Abby: What are you up to today? Want to meet for lunch, compare notes? I slipped it back into my pocket and started across the park. It vibrated in my pocket once I reached Camp Street. There was a bunch of traffic, so I pulled it back out again and checked the message while I waited for an opening to cross the street.
But the text wasn’t from Abby. It was from Tom.
Thanks again for letting me stay over. I really want to have a real date next time, okay?
Sure, I painstakingly typed out with a shivering finger and hit send. The street was clear, so I went ahead and crossed.
The problem with being a private eye is you tend to become more suspicious of your fellow man and his motivations. It was entirely possible Tom was attracted to me—I was still, despite the accident and lack of quality gym time, in fairly decent shape. My track record with relationships notwithstanding, I liked to think I was a pretty nice guy. I had a good sense of humor and I could make conversation. I wasn’t stupid. But this timing seemed suspicious to me. Tom was younger than me by about ten years or so—so is Rory, remember him?—but he could also be into older guys, or just didn’t pay any attention to age differences.
But the real question was, I realized as I climbed my front steps, what does he have to gain from flirting with me?
Distraction? I unlocked my front door. If he was the one who stole the paintings and killed Collier…
I locked the front door behind me. I’d forgotten to turn off the heat before I left, so I did so now and plopped down on the sofa. The TV was still on, with the blue screen.
Is it so out of the question? He knew Collier, he was the one who didn’t turn the alarm on the night of the robbery…maybe he wasn’t the one who actually did either, but he could be involved…the paintings were worth several million dollars. It wouldn’t be the first time someone turned on their mentor—and for several million dollars? Whoever stole the paintings also had to know the passcode to get onto the property, otherwise how did they get in the front gate?
I sat down at my computer and touched the space bar to bring it back to life. The Top Rope website was still up in my browser, open to the search I’d done on the site for Tom aka Jamie West. There he was, smiling at the camera, his strong jaw and curly hair, the muscles clearly defined, the square-cut white trunks I’d remembered. He’d worked as an escort and as a model during the missing years, he’d said, before enrolling in college. He continued doing the same work while in college. I looked at the name in red
letters across the page: Jamie West. I opened another tab in my browser and pulled up a search engine, typing the name in and entering it.
Almost immediately a long list of links appeared on the screen in front of me. Some of them were obviously not Tom—but there were a few that I assumed were him: Muscleboys4hire.com, Rentboys.net, and one that was just his name. I clicked through them all, one by one. Yes, those were definitely Tom’s listings on the hustler-for-hire sites—and they’d never been taken down.
Is he still for hire?
I clicked on his website. The front page had an age restriction; I clicked the box to state I was over twenty-one and entered the site. Once inside, the home page had a huge full-color image of him wearing nothing more than a wet jock strap. There was a page for “live cam”—I clicked on it but the page didn’t work—another page for rates, another page for videos, which had a link to the Top Rope site—and cruised around through the galleries for a few moments.
Maybe he just never got around to taking the site or the listings down, I thought, clicking over to check my emails. Nothing new.
I changed into my sweats and went through my yoga workout. By the time I finished and hopped into the shower it was almost ten. I got dressed and checked my phone. I’d missed a call from Abby. I called her back, but it went straight to voicemail. Odd. I went back to my computer and there was no email from her. That was even odder. I was expecting her report from her trip out to Avignon.
That wasn’t like her.
I called her cell number again, and when it again clicked over to voicemail, I called Jephtha. His also went to voicemail. I sent her a text asking her to call me again and sat down at the computer again.
I did a search for Benjamin Anschler. There were a lot of links, and a lot of information. I took a deep breath and dove in, following links and reading. Some of the information I already knew—the things that Bill had told me about his life and career. He had married a Jewish girl from New Orleans, Rebecca Goldberg. The Goldbergs had been a pretty prominent family in the Jewish community of New Orleans at one time. Rebecca had died before the war, before the Germans invaded and began exterminating the Jews of the Netherlands. Bill hadn’t exaggerated Benjamin’s importance as a painter, either. Several universities offered courses on his work; and his paintings, valuable while he was alive, had gone up exponentially in value after his death in the Nazi death camps. Then I saw a link with the headline Missing Anschler Paintings Nazi Loot?
I clicked on it and started to read. It was the English translation of an article from a French art magazine:
Benjamin Anschler was one of the most important painters in the Impressionist school before World War II. He was originally from Rotterdam and studied art in Paris at the Sorbonne. He established a strong reputation while studying, and once he began showing his work his importance continued to grow throughout his career. Most of Anschler’s art is accounted for in private collections and museums throughout the world. Yet there are three paintings that are missing, and have been missing since the outbreak of war in September 1939. Visitors to Anschler’s large home in Amsterdam all can attest to the presence of the paintings in the home; Anschler’s arthritis had caused him to cease painting during the late 1920s. These three paintings, which Anschler refused to part with, were considered by witnesses to be his best work, painted through the crippling pain of the arthritis that eventually ended his career.
The paintings were titled “Midnight on the North Sea,” a beautiful seascape depicting the full moon in a cloudy purple sky over the rough sea; “Spring Tulips,” depicting the massive tulip fields outside the city as they began to bloom in a riot of color under a bright sun; and “Skaters on the Canal,” a winterscape of one of the city’s many canals, frozen in the dead of winter with skaters going about their business on the ice.
After the German conquest of the Netherlands in 1940, Anschler and his family were placed under house arrest under the anti-Jew laws of the Nazis. His youngest daughter, Rachel, had left for England shortly before the Germans invaded; the story was she had gone to England to try to secure money for her family to escape before the Nazis came. Anschler and his entire family not only did not escape from the oncoming terror but were victims of it; Rachel Anschler, in her late twenties, was the only Anschler to survive the war. In 1948, unable to remain in Europe with its incredibly painful memories, Rachel immigrated to America, where her mother’s family, the Goldbergs, still lived in New Orleans. Rachel Anschler survived everyone in her mother’s family as well, as one by one her American relatives died off until she was the sole survivor of both branches of her family. Rachel died of cancer in 1968. She left her entire estate to the New Orleans Museum of Art, creating an endowment to assist young Jewish artists and leaving her extensive art collection to the museum.
However, once her collection was catalogued by the museum, conspicuous by their absence were her father’s three paintings from the Amsterdam home.
Stories have circulated that Rachel had gone to England to sell the paintings to raise the money to get her family out of Amsterdam and over to the United States—the sale of the paintings would have raised enough money for them to live on comfortably. Rachel herself never spoke of the paintings, and no one has seen them since an American journalist mentioned them in an article he wrote about Anschler; he viewed the paintings on visiting the Anschler townhouse in the summer of 1939 as the clouds of war began to gather on the horizon in Eastern Europe.
There are also stories that the paintings were looted and removed to Germany, part of an enormous trove of treasure the Nazis “liberated” from the countries they invaded and conquered. While some of this art was recovered after the Nazi surrender, some remains missing to this day. Were the last paintings of Benjamin Anschler a part of the Nazi loot, or did they come to America with his daughter in 1948? No one in New Orleans has seen the paintings, nor were there ever any reports of the paintings being seen in the apartment in London Rachel Anschler lived in during the war.
The mystery of the Anschler paintings remains unsolved to this day. Did Rachel sell them in England to a private collector who has kept the paintings hidden away from the public ever since? Did she bring them with her to America and sell them once she arrived? Rachel refused to be interviewed after the war. She was a recluse, rarely leaving the Goldberg home in the Uptown district of New Orleans. She would speak to no journalists, no biographers, no war or art historians. There’s a story that she also destroyed all of her papers, including diaries, journals, and personal correspondence of her father’s, in the weeks after her cancer diagnosis; a longtime servant said as much after Ms. Anschler’s funeral. Why would she destroy her father’s papers? What happened to his final three paintings, which would be worth a minimum of $750,000 apiece in today’s market? Why did she refuse to be interviewed about her father, about her family and her childhood?
Perhaps the memories of everything she lost were too painful for her to relive. We can only guess to her motives. But whatever her secrets were, she took them with her to the grave.
I bookmarked the page and stood up.
But rather than answering any questions, the article had done nothing more than add to the mystery.
I could certainly see why Bill wanted the paintings—their value alone, not to mention the provenance would prove, once and for all, what had happened to the paintings and where they had been for almost seventy years, ending a great mystery of the art world.
That is, if Myrna had been able to produce said provenance, and it was valid.
I felt in my coat pocket for the card Todd had given me the previous morning. Serena Castlemaine, my landlady’s cousin-in-law who had recently moved to New Orleans.
Maybe Serena could provide some answers.
I was just about to dial her number when the phone started ringing, and the damned Beyoncé / Lady Gaga song started up again. Rory had downloaded and set up ringtones for my phone—“Telephone” was the default for most people
calling. He’d thought it was funny to set up “Bad Romance” as the ringtone when he called, and whenever my best friend Paige called, the ringtone was “Hips Don’t Lie” by Shakira.
Paige found it much less amusing than Rory had thought she would.
But Abby’s face was smiling at me from the screen, so I slid my finger across her face and said, “There you are. What’s going on?”
“I’m out in Redemption Parish, in Avignon. Barney Fife gave me a call first thing this morning, and I booked out here.” She added, a bit defensively, “I was going to get you my report this morning but then this happened. I did try to call you a little while ago.”
“What are you doing out there? What was so important that you went back out?”
“You’re going to be hearing from the sheriff’s department soon enough.” She exhaled. “Chanse, someone murdered Bill Marren last night. Shot him through the heart.”
I closed my eyes. “And I’ll be hearing from them because?”
“Apparently, you’re Tom Ziebell’s alibi.” She sounded exasperated. “He spent the night with you?”
