Murder in the Arts District

by Greg Herren

  So, neither Tom nor Bill had actually verified that the paintings in the crates were actually the long missing Anschlers, which struck me as odd. Wouldn’t you make sure that what was delivered was what you actually paid for? Especially when you were going to be paying millions of dollars for them? Anything could have been inside those crates.

  And again, the crates could have been empty. Going with the assumption that Myrna was running a major scam on them—so Bill put several hundred thousand dollars into an escrow account as a deposit against the purchase price, once the provenance came through and the seller proved he or she owned the paintings legally. But if the paintings were “stolen” before they could be insured, it also stood to reason that Bill would not only lose the money in escrow, but would be responsible to the owner of the paintings for their actual value.

  With Myrna acting as agent for the owner, it also stood to reason that Bill would have to channel the money to the paintings’ owner through her. And if there were no paintings and no actual owner, she’d just made a couple of million dollars.

  It was actually a great scam, now that I was thinking about it. It couldn’t be pulled on just anyone, though. Myrna could only pull it on someone she had a long-standing business relationship with—someone like Bill Marren.

  If the paintings did exist, she could still pull the same scam, bilk a couple of million dollars out of Bill, and then turn around and sell the paintings to someone else.

  And maybe the paintings couldn’t be insured, or a provenance provided, because the paintings showed as having been stolen somewhere? Or were listed as Nazi war loot?

  But if everyone thought the paintings disappeared during the war, and there were no living Anschler heirs, the paintings belonged to the New Orleans Museum of Art.

  NOMA sure as hell wouldn’t be selling them.

  So, the key would be to target art collectors with questionable ethics. Bill Marren clearly fit that description, and there were bound to be any number of others like him.

  My phone vibrated in my coat pocket. I had stopped at the light at Magazine and Jackson, so I pulled it out and glanced at the screen. Jephtha’s smiling face looked back at me. I’d been distracted by the back pain when I got into the car and had forgotten to activate the Bluetooth, so I flipped on my turn signal and made a left turn onto Jackson, heading toward the river. I pulled over in the first available place I saw. I slid my finger across the screen, hit the speaker icon, and said “MacLeod” as I turned on the Bluetooth button on the steering wheel.

  “Hey, Chanse,” Jephtha said cheerfully. “You’re never going to guess what I found online this morning!”

  “And you’re right, I can’t guess,” I replied, shifting a little in my seat in a vain attempt to find some way to sit that would relieve the growing pain in my lower back. The cortisone shot was looking better and better by the minute. “So why don’t you just go ahead and tell me?” It came out bitchier than I’d intended.

  Stupid fucking pain.

  He exhaled with a heavy sigh. “You spoil all my fun,” he replied, grumpily. “Not even one guess?”

  “Yeah, well, you know it’s what I live for.” I closed my eyes and reached for the lever to push the seat farther back. Once it was back as far as it would go, I started twisting slowly from side to side, feeling the muscles stretch and pull. “So go ahead and tell me. I’m in the car.”

  “Yeah, you and Abby both are no fun at all,” he grumbled. “You both need to lighten up a bit, you know? Relax and enjoy life a bit.”

  I couldn’t help but grin. Abby and Jephtha had been together for five or six years. They’d met, of course, because he had been a huge patron of the Catbox Club. Jephtha was a genius when it came to computers, the Internet, hacking—you name it. He came from a pretty shitty background—he didn’t know who his father was, and saying his mother had an addiction problem was putting it kindly. He’d grown up in the lower Ninth Ward, a bright kid whose schoolwork didn’t challenge him. One of this mother’s boyfriends had gotten him a laptop when he was a teen, and he discovered his true calling.

  Unfortunately for Jephtha, he’d also discovered how easy it was to hack into other people’s computers and get their credit card information. He was sixteen when he was finally caught, and he’d pled down to a two-year sentence in juvie. He’d served his sentence for credit card fraud, got his GED while inside, and was released when he was eighteen. The problem was the conviction pretty much meant he couldn’t get work doing what he was best at—computer programming. His grandmother had died while he was inside and left him her old camelback double shotgun in the Irish Channel. He got a job working the grill in an uptown bar and spent his free time designing computer games. He’d been doing this for about two years when Paige found him. She was doing a story about the waste of talented youth who’d fucked up as teenagers in New Orleans, and brought him to my attention. He’d learned his lesson about using his powers for evil, and before long I put him on a healthy retainer so he could quit the grill job. He used the extra money to become a big tipper at the Catbox Club—and there were any number of strippers who’d been more than happy to take advantage of the nerdy guy with a good cash supply.

  I’d had to intervene a few times to run off some of the more leech-like of them.

  Given his track record, I was more than a little suspicious of Abby when she turned up in his life. But once she moved in with him, it was pretty clear she loved him and worshiped the ground he walked on. I wondered sometimes if they were ever going to get married and have some kids. However, the thought of what evil genius their combined genes might create was terrifying, so I avoided thinking about it as much as I could. Jephtha, despite spending two years in juvenile hell (which he never talked about), was still nothing more than a big kid. And I do mean big. He’s at least six feet six, and when I first met him was lucky if he weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. Abby’s cooking had filled him out to about two hundred pounds or so, but he was still way too thin for his height. He flatly refused to join a gym or hire a trainer. His arms were long, he slouched, and he wore his light brown hair long—sometimes pulled back into a ponytail. He also wore Coke-bottle glasses that magnified his murky brown eyes so they looked like a fly’s—but Abby had succeeded in nagging him into wearing contacts most of the time.

  The conviction was unfortunate, because when it came to all things computer, he truly was a genius. Oh, sure, he had trouble tying his shoelaces, but park him at a keyboard and he could do anything. The retainer I paid him was sizable, but I was still not paying him what he was truly worth. Had he not gone to jail and become an insurance liability, he’d probably be working for a major software company.

  Silicon Valley’s loss was my gain.

  “So, what did you find?” I prodded. “I don’t have all morning.”

  “Well,” he drew the word out into about twenty syllables before continuing, “did you get a chance to read the report Abby and I put together on Bill Marren?”

  I cursed under my breath. “No, I haven’t.”

  He sounded a little hurt. “Dude, that was a lot of intense work for both of us. And we did it pretty darned fast, too.”

  “I know, and it was really thorough—maybe a bit too thorough, you know? I just haven’t had the time to sit down and go through it all. It was really good work, though. I will when I get back to the apartment, I promise.”

  “You need to get the goddamned cortisone shot,” he lectured. “It’s affecting how you do your job, Chanse, seriously. You would never let a report on a case you’re working on go this long before you hurt your back. Especially one that involves murder! Dude, we’re both worried about you. Promise me you’ll get the damned shot.”

  “I’m seriously considering it, all right?” I shifted in my seat again. “So tell me—what did you find that’s so important?”

  “Oh, yes, of course.” He cleared his throat. “Well, there were a couple of things in his background that got my antennae twitching. O
ne, he was married when he was young—that in and of itself isn’t a big deal, of course, back then lots of gay men stayed closeted and got married because they thought they were supposed to, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But what was interesting was the grounds for his divorce was adultery—and the co-respondent wasn’t a man, which you’d automatically assume, right? His wife caught him with another dude and she got a lawyer. But that wasn’t the case.”

  “He cheated on her with a woman?”

  “Oh, yeah. The divorce was sealed, which bugged me. It took me a while to crack—”

  “I don’t want to know this.”

  He exhaled, “Oh yes, of course, sorry, anyway, I managed to get the name of the woman he was having the affair with—her name was Jane Meakin.”

  “That name sounds familiar.” I frowned.

  “That’s because she was Myrna Lovejoy’s mother.” I could almost see the smirk on his face. “And no, he couldn’t have been Myrna’s father, although I suppose without a DNA test we can’t say for sure, but anyway, she wasn’t born until several years after the divorce, and her mother had remarried. I also found out that Bill was the one who fronted the money so Myrna’s father could open the gallery in New York.”

  “Interesting.” I started tapping my fingers on the steering wheel. The connection between Bill and Myrna was even deeper than I’d thought originally, which meant it would be even easier for her to run a scam on him. He’d known her almost her entire life and had also known her father—had been intimate with her mother.

  Of course he would trust her! Of course he would take delivery of the paintings before paying for them, before seeing the provenance. He had no reason to not to believe she was being aboveboard with him.

  It was all very clever. Collier had to have been in on it as well. But why did she kill him? What had changed?

  “Yes, it’s very interesting, isn’t it?” He exhaled. “And there’s another thing I found out as well. I don’t know how it fits into anything else that’s going on, but Bill’s father? He wasn’t American—he was British, from Lancashire and educated at Cambridge. He married someone with a bit of money, and worked in investments, built it up into a nice little nest egg to get Bill on his way to being filthy, disgustingly rich. Bill was an only child, by the way, and the family emigrated to the United States in the late 1940s. And get this, it gets even better, believe it or not. Bill’s father, Stuart Marren? He was a friend of the Anschler family. He was the London banker who loaned them money and tried to help Rachel get them out of Nazi-occupied Netherlands after the war started and the Nazis invaded.”

  “What?” I shook my head. I couldn’t have heard that right. The Marren-Anschler connection went back that far?

  “I thought that would get your attention,” Jephtha said smugly. “So there’s been a connection between him and these paintings that goes back a lot further than he’s been letting on.”

  “You haven’t heard?” I replied. “He was killed last night.” I bit my lower lip. Maybe he found out about the scam? Maybe he confronted Myrna?

  Myrna was getting out of control.

  None of this was making sense.

  The more I found out, the more confused I was.

  “Dude.” Jephtha inhaled sharply and was silent for a moment. “That sucks. Do they know who did it?”

  “No—no, they don’t.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “No, no, I don’t.” I almost gasped as a flare of pain shot out from my lower back. I grasped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned white. I closed my eyes, not wanting to say anything. The last thing I needed was to hear I told you so again about the fucking cortisone shots. I managed to say, “Thanks, man, I need to get going, I promise I’ll read the Marren report when I get back home.” I didn’t give him a chance to say anything before I hung up on him.

  I sat there for a moment, still gripping the steering wheel.

  It was all there in my head, but I couldn’t piece it all together in a way that made sense to me. There were still too many missing pieces. I took a deep breath and put the car into drive, turned around, and headed back to my apartment. I walked inside and found my pill bottle on the nightstand. I shook out a Vicodin, found my pill cutter in the bathroom, and sliced it in two. After dry-swallowing the half-Vicodin along with two Advils, I sat down at my computer and touched the spacebar to wake it up. The Bill Marren document was still on my desktop, so I clicked on it. I switched on the heating pad and slid it behind my back while the document loaded. I scanned it quickly. He did have a history of questionable ethics and business practices—always skirting that line between unethical but never crossing into criminal. Jephtha had also tracked down rumors about his methods of art collecting—again, never anything criminally actionable, but certainly questionable ethically.

  He would have been easy prey for Myrna’s scam…if it was indeed a scam, and I was beginning to believe Serena was right. Myrna had never had the paintings in the first place. The crates had been delivered empty. There was a fireplace in the gallery—that would explain how the crates had been taken out. All the thief would have needed was a claw hammer to pry the crates apart and break them down. The wood could have been burned in the fireplace—and to anyone, it would look like the paintings had been stolen.

  I had to hand it to Myrna, it was a fiendishly clever plan.

  I was still staring at my computer screen when my cell phone rang again. I didn’t recognize the number, but I was pretty sure the number that came up had a Dallas area code.

  Jude.

  I closed my eyes and answered. “MacLeod.”

  “Hey, Chanse, it’s Jude.” His voice sounded guarded, and in the background I could hear people talking. He was in a public place. “I have to say I never thought I’d hear from you again. I wasn’t sure I should call you back or not, to be honest. But finally I was too curious not to, you know?” He laughed hollowly. “What on earth could Chanse MacLeod want from me after all this time? So, today I figured what the hell. How are you? Well, I hope?”

  He sounded friendlier than I thought he would, so that had to be a good thing. We hadn’t really left things between us very well. “I could be better, thanks for asking. You sound good. I hope you’re doing well?”

  “Can’t complain,” he replied. “Well, I can always complain, but that’s a quirk in my personality.”

  “Great.” I forced out a laugh. “I did have a reason for calling, though.”

  “I figured you weren’t calling up to catch up on things with an ex after—how many years has it been? Christ, I don’t think I want to know how long it’s been.” He sighed. “Look, things just didn’t work out with us, but there’s no need for us to not be friends. Maybe it was me, maybe it was you, whatever—but I came to terms with it all a long time ago. I’m actually glad you called, Chanse. It’s really nice to hear your voice again…we just weren’t suited, and you weren’t in the right kind of head space anyway.” He paused. “What can I help you with?”

  “Thanks, Jude.” I was touched. “I mean it, really.” I did, too—it was nice to know there was an ex out there who didn’t hate me. “I’m glad you’re willing to help me.”

  “Yeah, well, you never were much for the personal, were you?” He was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to go there. Forget I said it. So why did you call? I assume you need something?”

  “I’m working on a case—”

  “Of course you are.”

  “And I kind of have run across someone you might know, so I thought I’d call you, see what you knew. I was hoping you could give me some perspective on him. I’m not really sure what to make of him, if he can be trusted.”

  He sighed. “Who?”

  “Tom Ziebell.”

  There was silence on the line. After a few moments, Jude said slowly, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you, Chanse. I don’t know him. That name’s not even familiar.”

  “Ar
e you sure?” I prodded. “Think back to your wrestling days, when you did the videos for Top Rope. That’s where you’d know him from. You worked together.”

  “I told you, Chanse, I’m positive I don’t know this guy, not even from back then,” he said, his voice rising a little. “I mean, it’s been a long time, but I remember all the guys I worked with. I’m still in touch with most of them, you know, and I have never heard that name before.”

  “He wrestled under the name Jamie West?”

  There was silence for a moment, then, “Oh, him.” He barked out a laugh. “I don’t know what he’s trying to sell you, Chanse, but his name isn’t Tom Ziebell. Jamie West’s real name was Rand Barragry.” He paused. “You need to stay away from that guy, Chanse. Get as far away from him as you can. At the very least, he’s a sociopath.”

  I felt my stomach start twisting. “A sociopath? Are you sure?” The hairs on my arm began standing up.

  He sighed. “Look, Chanse, I don’t know, it’s been twelve years or so since I last saw him, okay? We did a match together once, that’s all—but we were at several different tapings together. When I first met him I didn’t get a good feeling from him, okay? It was probably one of the worst experiences I had with Top Rope, working with him…I didn’t trust him, I didn’t like him, and you can’t work well with someone taping a wrestling match if you don’t trust him, you know? Trust is essential…Sure, he was hot. My God, he was hot. But still…” His voice trailed off.

  “Was there anything specific?”

  “I don’t know, it was a while ago. Let me think.” He was quiet for a moment. I could hear the noise behind him, someone’s name being called, the whirr and hiss of an espresso machine. He was in a coffee shop. Finally, he went on, “You know, there was just something about him I didn’t like, I wasn’t comfortable with. He was friendly enough, and good-looking enough, and the body—well, he wouldn’t have been filming if he wasn’t hot as hell, but…” He hesitated. “After that first trip, where I met him the first time, I had some fraudulent charges on my credit cards, all of them coming from Rhode Island, which I, you know, didn’t think anything about. Department store cards, Visa, MasterCard, that sort of thing. I filed disputes with the companies and it was all taken care of. I never thought anything about it. Well, I was talking to Steve—the guy who owns the company—online a couple of weeks later and he mentioned the same thing happened to one of the other guys who was there that weekend—a coincidence? Steve also said some things were missing from his house—nothing major, nothing worth reporting to the police. Come to find out later this kind of thing happened every time Jamie West taped. So Steve decided to fire him, not use him again. I know Paul—” He stopped.