Cold Hit (23 page)

The receptionist buzzed on Daughtry’s intercom to tell him that more detectives had arrived.

Chapman stood up. “Why don’t you show my guys around?” Then he bent over the desk, the top of his fists pressed against the leather blotter. “Remember, it ain’t just me you gotta worry about, Mr. Daughtry. Mess with the cops and you’ve still got the boys on Eleventh Avenue to deal with — Knuckles Knox, Stumpy Malarkey, One-Lung Curran. They got ways I couldn’t get past the Supreme Court in six lifetimes.”

When Daughtry left the room, I turned to Mike. I was steaming. “Who the hell are you talking about? Bad enough I don’t know what you do when I’m
not
standing next to you. You can’t threaten people like that, and I can’t stand by and let you do it.”

“Not even once? I’ve waited a lifetime to say that to somebody. ‘Battle Row,’ this block used to be called. Those guys, Knuckles and Stumpy? Real hoodlums — used to scare my old man to death when he was a schoolboy. Relax, blondie. That gang broke up around nineteen thirty-two. Six feet under, all of ’em. Did I sound like Cagney? Did I scare you?”

Mike stepped to the doorway and motioned to Wrenley to come into the office and sit down. I introduced myself.

He was dressed in black from head to foot — collared polo shirt, linen slacks, tasseled loafers — and his jet-colored hair was slicked back, every strand in perfect placement. I guessed it was his style, not an expression of mourning.

“Hope you don’t mind some questions about Denise Caxton,” Mike began. “We understand you and she were quite close.” The edge in his voice with which he had addressed Daughtry was gone. It was clear to me that he was hoping to get Wrenley’s help with more personal information about the past year.

“Not a secret, Detective. I’d met Deni two or three years ago. After she and Lowell had their blowup last year, our relationship became more intimate.”

“You didn’t mind the competition?”

“Her husband, or do you mean Preston Mattox? I understood what it was about. Deni was just a kid when she hooked up with Lowell Caxton. She’d been faithful to him throughout the marriage, and don’t think there weren’t lots of opportunities for her to have a fling. After he embarrassed her with that episode in Bath, she was more than ready to spread her wings.

“And besides, she was still married to Lowell. She wasn’t very anxious to tie herself down permanently so quickly. We both seemed to get all the pleasure we needed out of each other’s company, professionally and personally.”

“I take it you’re single?”

“Always have been,” Wrenley answered.

“How’d you and Mrs. Caxton meet?”

“When I moved most of my business interests to New York—”

“What’s the business?”

“Antiques. High end. Furniture, silver, nineteenth-century for the most part.”

“Where’d you move here from?”

“Palm Beach, Detective. Grew up in Florida, in the Keys. Set up shop there, but I was always on the road. Auctions in England, France, Italy, and of course, New York. I still keep a place on the water down there, but I live here now.

“I saw Deni long before I met her. She was hard to miss — not just her looks but her spirit and energy. Always in the chase for a great find, and in those days, something to show Lowell how much she had learned from him.”

Mike tried the man-to-man thing. “Never came on to her before she split with him? Never asked her out, called her, till after the Bath scandal?”

“I never called her then, Mike. It was Deni who called
me
. We’d been to auctions together and gotten to know each other a bit. I’d asked her for advice about paintings when I was making acquisitions for particular clients. Nothing social. After she flew home from England that time, she was determined to make a statement to her friends back here. Called me and invited me to go to a couple of dinner parties with her. It almost began as a game, for both of us. I never imagined I’d fall in love with her, nor she with me.”

“What was the story with the other guys?”

“There were lots of men pursuing Deni. I’d have been an idiot not to think that would happen. I suppose my most serious rival was Preston Mattox. Had an airtight way of getting under my skin.”

“Why Mattox more than anyone else?”

“Ever hear of something called the Amber Room?”

“Yeah,” Mike answered. “Know all about it.”

“Mattox was convinced that Lowell Caxton had smuggled some of the panels out of Europe and had them hidden somewhere. He’s an architect, world-class. Deni said he had this dream — you ought to talk to him about it — of creating his chef d’oeuvre with remnants of the room. I don’t know whether he was interested in
her
or in what she could lead him to. But that possibility made her furious whenever I suggested it.

“Look, I’m on the road a lot of the time. I never expected her to sit home doing her needlepoint, waiting for me to come back to town. She knows — sorry, she knew — that I dated other women when I was in Europe, and that was fine with her. She’d been tied down too long to care about that kind of thing right now.”

“So, what brings you here?” I asked. There was nothing in Daughtry’s world that seemed remotely connected to the nineteenth century.

“I wasn’t invited to Deni’s funeral, as you probably already know. Bryan and I are old friends, and he knows how devastated I was by her death. I just wanted to talk, reminisce, try to make some sense of it. May I call you Alex? When you catch the bastard who did this, Alex—” Wrenley paused, then dropped his head and shook his hand back and forth, as though asking us to wait a few moments before he spoke. “No point in my going on. There’s nothing you can do to him in a court of law that would resemble any kind of justice.

“The newspapers said the police thought she was sexually assaulted. Is that true?”

“Probably,” Chapman answered.

He lowered his head again. “She was so loving, so — God, I can’t bear to think of any animal touching her, hurting her.” Again he paused. “There must be something I can do to be useful.”

“Let me have your numbers,” Mike said, taking his notepad out of his pocket. “There’s a lot more I’m gonna need to talk to you about as this thing unravels. As soon as we sort through some of the business records and evidence that’s developing, I’ll give you a call and set up an appointment, okay?”

Wrenley removed a business card from his wallet, added his home telephone to the number on it, and passed it to Chapman.

“Want me out of the way here? Sounds like you’ve got things to do with Bryan.”

“D’you know that Mrs. Caxton was being blackmailed? Threatened by a man in prison?”

“Sure I did. It terrified her. She was convinced Lowell was behind it.”

“Got any idea why she hired that guy Omar and had him working here with her?”

“It made me furious, actually. Bryan can tell you. I had dozens of arguments with Deni about Omar. And I wasn’t sorry to see him turn up in a ditch, Mike. But she thought it was her best protection against Lowell, sort of an insurance policy.”

“She’d have been a very rich widow if Lowell had died first, wouldn’t she, Mr. Wrenley?”

“Take a trip with me to Palm Beach, Mike. You want rich widows? I didn’t have to come to New York to catch myself one of those, if that’s your implication. They’re as thick as palmetto bugs down there.”

“Sorry about Denise, Mr. Wrenley.” I offered my hand as he stood up to leave.

For the rest of the afternoon, Bryan Daughtry led the detectives through the beginnings of a painstaking search of the art inventory in the gallery and adjacent warehouse. I sat in his office as he produced much of the documentation requested in the subpoena, reading and xeroxing stacks of bills and papers, the endless figures blurring my vision by the close of the day.

“You guys need me for anything?” I asked Mercer at six fifteen. “I’m supposed to go to dinner and the ballet tonight, if you can carry on without me.”

“Scat. We’ll grab some chow when we leave here, and see if we can catch up with the Crime Scene guys at Varelli’s studio. I’ll leave a message on your machine if we find anything interesting. You around tomorrow?”

I was tired, dismayed by the dead ends we kept meeting in this case, and glad the following day was Friday. “I’ll be in all day. I’ve got a ticket on the seven-thirty evening flight for the weekend, but I feel guilty leaving you with all this hanging.”

“Nothing you can do, Coop, till we give you a perp. Be on that plane. We’ll be talking to you before that.”

I went out to my car, squared the block, and fought the tunnel traffic of Jersey commuters going north on Tenth Avenue to begin their ride home. After I passed the entrance, I continued up to Sixty-fourth Street, turning to park in the cavernous garage below the Lincoln Center complex. Although the Metropolitan Opera House was usually dark during the month of August, there was a gala performance this evening, with pieces that the ballet company was staging for an international tour that was about to begin.

There were tiered sections in the underground lot, each identifiable by an enormous band of colored paint that wound around the walls of that area. In my fatigued state, I kept trying to think of a memory device to help me recall that I was directed up the ramp to the red-striped portion of the garage, and parked in the fifth row away from the door, behind a column boldly labeled
5
.

I joined the line of patrons to prepay the parking ticket and took the escalator upstairs. Natalie Moody and her party of friends had already been seated in the Grand Tier Restaurant, below the immense Chagall mural looking out over the plaza. The group was ordering their dinners as I arrived, so I chose the grilled salmon and we chatted and ate before moving downstairs to take our seats in the orchestra.

Few things are as capable of transporting me from the images of violence that permeate my working days as is ballet. I have studied dance for almost as long as I have walked, and have continued to take lessons as both a form of regular exercise and a medium of escape from some of the seamy underside of life that I encounter on the street. Had I had the talent, I would rather have been a prima ballerina with American Ballet Theatre than almost anything else in the world.

So I sat back in my seat, ready to take refuge in this fantasy world, as the crystal chandeliers rose into the ceiling of the opera house and the curtain went up on the first piece. Victor Barbee made a rare appearance to partner the exquisite Julie Kent in a pas de deux from
Swan Lake
. The audience responded wildly with more than six curtain calls, and for half an hour I forgot about Denise Caxton. The second act featured Alessandra Ferri with the dazzling Julio Bocca in the balcony scene from
Romeo and Juliet
, and I lost myself completely in the perfection of their pairing.

There was a sparkling
Rodeo
with Kathleen Moore and Gil Boggs, and a final intermission before the corps was going to perform the “Kingdom of the Shades” from
La Bayadère
. It was after ten thirty, and I told Natalie I needed to get a jump on the crowd and head for home. I was afraid the Minkus music and the endless line of white-tutu’d Shadows would lull me to sleep in my seat.

I dug into my seemingly bottomless pocketbook for the Jeep keys, reminding myself that I had to relocate the redstriped parking area, behind column 5 . The walk back to the car seemed farther than it had on the way in, but it was four hours later and I was really dragging. There were plenty of gaping spaces between the automobiles, I noted to myself, and it usually displeased me that so many suburban ticket holders walked out of the theater before the end of the event. Tonight I was one of the guilty leave-takers.

I started the engine, flipped on the headlights, and backed out of the space, heading over to the end of the row toward the ramp down to the exit. As I made the wide turn, a sport utility vehicle larger than my own careened around the adjacent line of cars and came racing at me, head-on.

My foot jammed the gas pedal to the floor and I swerved to the left, speeding down lane Red 4 as the chase car followed closely on my tail. I saw an opening midrow, where two spaces had been created side by side as well as back-to-back, and I barely braked as I nosed the Jeep into a curve and an immediate second left turn.

The dark car in pursuit took the long way around, and I could see that it was skipping two rows to try to cut me off at the top of the ramp.

I was pressing on the horn with my left hand as I steered with my right, hoping that someone would be annoyed by the blaring honk. A Jaguar with two couples in it pulled out in front of whoever was trying to cut me off, and I lurched ahead, hoping to see a security guard at the foot of the incline, where the giant red arrow merged with the equally wide yellow and blue stripes.

Instinctively, my foot hit the brake as a caution, and I immediately recognized that even a second’s delay could be a costly mistake. But I had hesitated as I always did when leaving that garage, choosing between the exits on the north and south sides of the building, depending on which one was open at a given hour.

Just as I decided to make the right turn and go out onto Sixty-fourth Street, where there was a bus stop and, always, a posttheater crowd, the dark chase car came roaring down the steep rise of the garage behind me. Its driver passed me on the left side and cut me off. His engine still running, a male figure with a stocking cap over his head opened the door and got out, running toward me with the gleam of something metallic in his hand.

The empty sport utility vehicle was between me and the mechanical arm of the barrier that would have been my escape. As he slammed his left hand on the hood of the Jeep, I juiced the gas again and jumped the curb of the divider that separates the entrance from the exit gate. My Jeep kept going, smashing against the retractable arm of the entry blockade and cruising up the hill to the wide flat pavement of Sixty-fourth Street.

My repeated pounding on the horn cleared the crossing of pedestrians who were out for a summer stroll on Broadway. I paused to make sure the traffic light was with me, then goosed the car across the busy intersection, never stopping for a moment as I raced through the Central Park transverse and reached the East Side.