Art and Arsenic (Veronica Margreve Mysteries Book 2) (15 page)

25

“It’s been a long night.” Detective Johnson leaned back in his chair. Martins sat in the other flimsy plastic chair and looked at me silently.

“Yes,” I agreed. It seemed best to agree to things for right now. I was tired. It was around 2 am on Friday morning. The street noise had died down; even the dance clubs were no longer booming. A few lonely figures were stumbling on their way in the square. I didn't know whether they had a place to go for the night, or were just looking for a dry and relatively urine-free doorway where to lay down their heads.

Detective Johnson stirred black hot liquid in a plastic cup. “So, we were following you and Andrew this evening, and Christopher, as arranged. We saw that he tried to ambush Andrew and hit him over the head. That’s at least an assault charge in addition to the murder one. But explain to me how you figured out all of this.”

I had my right elbow on the table, and was resting my head on it. I was too exhausted for table manners. My head seemed to want to lay itself down on the table and stay there for a millennium or two. My throat felt as if someone had used sandpaper on it, like you could do to age a fake painting.

I nodded towards the small white cup with a plastic stirrer sticking out of it.

“I recalled the coffee cup I saw in the trash in the office right before the party. You said that there was only one coffee cup found in the trash can. I remembered Christopher arriving at the party with a coffee cup in his hand, and then going to the back room and coming out without it. The logical thing to think was that he threw it out in the back. But where? As I said, there was already a coffee cup in the trash can, I noticed it when I dropped off my bag. It occurred to me that he must have switched them. You told me that there were no clear prints on the surface of the cup that you found, but some of Fred’s prints on the lid. So Christopher switched the cups – the one that Fred originally drank from, that contained the poison, and his own, and wiped his cup for prints, and then put the original lid back on.  He must have taken Fred’s cup with him and disposed of it somewhere later on Friday night.”

“Yes, the security footage from the time of the party shows him coming into the office and doing something near the trash can.” Detective Johnson said. “His back hid what his hands were doing from the camera.”

“But it is clear on the video that he walked in with a coffee cup, right?”

Detective Johnson nodded. “And there is earlier security footage of Fred throwing his cup out, too. And no-one else really came close to the trash can – you were nearby, but you didn’t throw anything in there or take anything out.

“After your call, we followed the route that Christopher said he took to his hotel, and then searched in an increasing radius from that route, and found that the garbage from the beach parks hadn’t been collected yet.” My nose involuntarily scrunched up as I imagined the smell of the trash. Well, it was still plenty cold, and not a lot of people were using the beach parks, so maybe the garbage wasn’t full of smelly stuff just yet. “Looking for it was made easier since we knew he had to have crushed the cup to hide it in his pocket during the rest of the party.” He eyed his own coffee cup with distaste. “Well, we found it. The liquid soaked through into the paper, and so the test found plenty of arsenic in it.”

“He could probably have avoided all this trouble if he had just gone into the kitchen to rinse out the cup and then threw it out in the trash can in the gallery. Then you would have found two coffee cups there,” I suggested.

“Maybe. But the party was going on, and people kept going back there to bring out more food or drinks, or to use the restroom. Someone probably would have seen him. Not to mention the video tape would have recorded it. It’d look strange to be washing a disposable coffee cup – that you got out of trash can –  before throwing it back into the garbage.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” We sat in silence for a while. The yellow light of the cafe was hurting my eyes, and I closed them. With that, I heard only the sound of forks and chairs creaking. I counted my own heartbeats. I got to about twenty when Johnson asked:

“How did you figure out that Domain Lefl… Lef… whatever, that fancy wine was fake?”

“That might have been the key to the whole thing.” I kept my eyes closed. “When I was doing research on the wine, I saw that a case of it was sold at an auction in Nevada. And I was at the gallery when Pauline received a call from Vegas for Fred Nordqvist, saying that ‘he was right’ about something. She was puzzled about it, so I thought it was likely unrelated to art sales. I got curious, did a reverse lookup on the phone number, found out that it belongs to a company associated with the Nevada wine collector.

“My friend Krista sent me some wine reviews about how this vintage was ‘supposed’ to taste. What I tasted was pleasant enough, but different from the descriptions. I was worried that the unusual taste might have been from arsenic, and Krista had checked into that. It could just be different people’s taste buds, but it got me thinking.” I opened my eyes slowly.

“And I knew that Fred figured something out, since he asked Christopher to bring that wine specifically. Fred must have guessed that the wine was bogus. After all, he knew that the paintings were fake, and knew that Christopher had no qualms about selling fraudulent stuff, if it made him a profit. If you know someone is OK selling expensive paintings under false pretenses, it's not a huge stretch to assume that they are not above cheating a little where rare and collectible wine is concerned. When Fred Nordqvist heard that some of the Domaine Leflaive had been sold at an auction to a collector, he must have thought that Christopher was the seller. He got in touch with the buyer, I guess through his existing contacts in the wine auction world, and probably suggested he test the wine for authenticity. I remembered Fred’s speech at the opening, how the wine had the same pedigree as the paintings. And how angry Christopher looked at that time. Looking back, it occurred to me that the speech was Fred’s way of announcing to the world, in a veiled manner, that the wine was fake. Maybe he viewed making that fact public, even if in an obscure manner, as ‘insurance’.” I shrugged. Officer Martins was taking notes, scribbling quickly. “And Christopher lived in Walla Walla, plenty of wine and wine knowledge around, relatively easy to create a passable fake.”

“Was it all counterfeit, you think?” Martins asked, eyes on his notepad.

“I think some of the wine from Calvin Willembauer’s collection must have been real – but for each case of real wine, Christopher probably was ready to create two, or five, cases of the fake wine, with laser-printed labels, containing some local Washington or Oregon product, wine that was good enough to be a plausible stand-in for the rare white and red Burgundies that he was selling.”

“We’ll run some tests on the bottles at Christopher’s house, and those that he sold to the Nevada collector.” Detective Johnson said, draining his coffee cup.

I yawned. It'd been a long night.

“I've got to get home,” I said finally.

I got a ride home in the police car and was greeted with Bitty’s demanding meows as soon as I turned on the light in the entryway.  I was glad to see her again after my adventure, and gave her a couple of small salmon treats – she inhaled them in the time it took me to close the bag, and said “Urr urr” in gratitude. I lifted her up to my chest and gave her a kiss on top of her head. She purred. She was happy to have me back home, and all was right in her world.

Epilogue

The news media were all over the arrest story in the following days. I had talked to Detective Johnson to make sure that my role in that evening's happenings got minimized, so much as to be practically non-existent, and that my name wasn't mentioned anywhere. I preferred to keep my anonymity, – I'm shy, and it's not good for me to become too well-known and be too easily findable (online and in the physical world), because of what I do. So the focus of the breathless reportages had been Detective Johnson and Pete – who talked about running to help a woman who slipped, and then noticing an altercation in the alley. It looks like he might get some job offers from his altruism and new-found renown.

The coffee cup in evidence, the one fished out of the garbage in a waterfront park, had Christopher’s fingerprints on it.  And the police found scanned wine labels on his computer, and correspondence with people from whom he was buying old, empty bottles at auctions – to create a ready supply of bottles for pouring the fake wine in. Gamma- ray spectrometry on the contents of several bottles at his house showed that it was not from 1985, but much more recent. And the label analysis concluded that the labels on the bottles were fake, just fancy photocopies.

In exchange for testifying against Christopher on the subject of fake paintings, Andrew accepted a reduced sentence of a year in jail on art fraud charges.

Linda Raven made a deal with Pauline and Connie to buy the gallery. Pauline is studying art and working in the gallery part-time. She tells me that Connie and Alex are starting a business together.

Linda Raven also stood by her promise to pay if I could prove that she didn’t do it.  I told her that the Pioneer Square missions would be more worthwhile recipients of her cash – so she, with a big flourish, gave them a check, and got plenty of publicity for it in the local newspapers. As for myself, I added a donation to the charity providing veterinary care to homeless people’s pets.

Some time soon, I may head to the drugstore to pick up a box of haircolor.

Acknowledgements

A big ‘Thank you’ to the readers of my first novel, “A Motor for Murder”, for your interest, encouragement and reviews!

Thank you, Mom, for your help with inspiration and research materials!

Very grateful to Krista, Marina, Lena, Anna, Jonathan and Olga for their kind words, and for their patience in listening to me talk about my book.

Thank you, Mark, for editing and taking care of the logistics involved in getting this book completed.

About the author

Valerie Murmel has been working in the software industry for over 16 years. She enjoys traveling the world, hiking, skiing, volunteering, improv theater and dance. She lives in the Seattle area with her cat, Bitty, and is working on the next novel in the Veronica Margreve series.