Crooked (6 page)

As Barney approached the pay phone, he ached to hear Nicasia’s voice. He hadn’t realized how much it would hurt to be apart from her. So why didn’t Drummond want him to call her or talk to anybody? What harm was there in calling? He’d just use his calling card and say he was in Costa Rica.

But Barney didn’t know he was supposed to be dead.

He dialed and the receptionist answered. “Nicasia Grieg, please.”

Her line began ringing. What harm could there be in giving her a call? Unless…

Barney scanned his surroundings, the parking lots and stadium behind the pay phone. There it was, a small red pickup truck with tinted windows, peeking from behind one of the Triborough Bridge’s fat legs.

“Grieg here.”

Barney’s chest tightened at the sound of her voice, but he hung up without a word and went back to his car. He’d noticed that same red pickup, or one too much like it, parked across from his temporary digs in Pugsley’s Point. Barney wasn’t completely sure, but with all the loot at stake, his employers would be keeping an eye on him, wouldn’t they?

Only one more week. Then he’d be back with Nicasia. One more week.

From the car’s trunk he produced a satchel and slung it over his shoulder. Was getting involved in this venture a very serious error in judgment? He could, after all, just tell Nicasia about his past and be done with it. But there was something from his more distant past, something that happened in a Japanese garden—before the thieving—that needed to be settled.

The whiz of tires sang overhead on the Triborough Bridge, trucks grumbling and gurgling as they shifted their way out of the tollbooths above. He checked the contents of his satchel: eight wood stakes, a hand sledge, fluorescent red tape, a couple of black Marks-A-Lots, a handheld GPS device, and a folder of old blueprints. Car locked, he took his coffee cup from the roof and started toward the spot where Little Hell Gate Bridge once connected the two islands.

The City of New York had, at some historic juncture, decided to dedicate Randall’s and Ward’s Islands to the civic cause of handling refuse: solid, liquid, and human. The channel of water that had once divided the two islands had been completely filled in with debris by the Army Corps of Engineers. It had become overgrown with saplings and haphazard drainage ponds. Above the channel, aligned along the east side of the island, loomed the New York & Connecticut Railroad trestle, a striding monster with oddly Oriental accents and gargantuan balustrades. Aligned along the west side was the Triborough Bridge. A paved asphalt road at ground level that ran between the two and across the filled channel had obviated the necessity for the Little Hell Gate Bridge, and so it had been demolished.

Bag over his shoulder, Barney walked around to the back of the stadium, to an entrance for an overflow parking lot along the Harlem River. The back lot was several acres of broken macadam, dirt, and occasional decorative shrubs. It looked like whoever filled the channel between the two islands had lost interest in the area where it joined the Harlem River. Amid piles of overgrown rubble, slivers of water had yet to be filled with debris. Ducks sliced the mirror surface of the slim ponds, moving quietly away from Barney’s approach. A stone seawall delineating the edge of the filled channel was still intact, forming one boundary of the parking lot. As Barney looked along the wall, he could see the bay where it joined the Harlem River and made a big lazy curve north. A fancy modern-looking footbridge had been erected across the bay. It connected the parking lot to a fence that dead-ended at the mental hospital grounds on the other side. Someone had had the bright idea to install little nature trails that meandered from the ramp of the footbridge down through the rubble and saplings. He wondered who came out to walk the trails in this no-man’s-land.

But it was there that he would find the
Bunker Hill
.

He slid over a downed section of flimsy wood slat fence, and into the scrub. It would be a little rough getting the drill rig in there, but the Pazzos were resourceful and would be undaunted by such obstacles. When he came to the edge of one of the ponds, he turned on the GPS and waited for it to pick up a signal. Because of all the terraforming, all the clutter, and overlapped infrastructure, it was hard to picture what the channel had looked like when it flowed beneath the Triborough Bridge’s legs.

Barney unfolded a blueprint entitled “U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, East River Land Reclamation Project: CLOSURE OF LITTLE HELL GATE CHANNEL (August 1943)” to help get his bearings. It was a crude plan view of Randall’s Island, Ward’s Island, and Sunken Meadow—formerly a grassy shoal at the channel’s east terminus.
X
s on the plan showed where a line of boulders had been placed across the channel, around Sunken Meadow, and to the far side of Randall’s Island. Also shown, with little detail, were the Triborough Bridge skyway to the west, the trestle to the east, and the channel passing below both. Numerous faint symbols resembling crosses were shown in Little Hell Gate Channel. Lowercase italics identified these as “wrecks hauled for fill.”

Barney strode slowly away from the parking lot, into the brushy rubble, eyes on the GPS, and came to a stop when it beeped. He knelt and put a hand to the ground. The
Bunker Hill
would be deep, and hard to detect using his magic touch. On his hands and knees, he crawled under some brambles, checking the tortured ground with his palm, trying to feel a void. It wasn’t a vibration or a mental picture that he hoped to sense, but the lack of either. Like putting one’s hand on an egg and knowing it’s empty or full, soft- or hard-boiled.

He pursed his lips, looked at a spot on the ground, and reached into his bag. He cleared away a tangle of twigs and leaves so he could drive a stake into the earth. But then he paused. His eyes latched on a glint in the dirt below, and instead he used the stake to pry a soda can from the soil. Just a gold soda can, not a pocket watch. Not the gold ring from the treasure box of an orangutan potentate he imagined it might be. He looked at it, and the secret smile grew on his face.

Barney was ten years old again, in the Japanese garden, and he could see Mr. Faldo’s eyes twinkle as he said:

Be happy with useful work and what you have now, for you will not always have either. It is the path to a life of truth.

C h a p t e r                           7

 
T
he fete was held at a grandiose town house in the upper east 60s, practically walking distance. But BB and Karen took a limo. It was noon and lightly snowing, as it had been all morning.

The event? An opening for Xavier Gliche, the neoconstructivist hailed in
Newstime Magazine
’s spring “Art!” issue as the very latest genius of modern art. The gallery? Osman Strunk Gallery, the namesake of a New York gadabout and competitor to BB. The time? Well, the only reason it wasn’t a twilight black-tie affair was that the work displayed was old and previously unsold. A clearance sale for an artiste on the slide.

“Why, Bea, you awful thing—here to steal Xavier from me?” Ozzy chortled. “Take him away, babe, and ol’ Ozzy will come for you with a shotgun,” he dared.

“Oz, would I do that to you? You remember Karen?” BB mused as to how Xavier might have been worth stealing a year ago. She handed her coat to a servant, but held on to her cell phone.

“Of course: Karen. You know, that hair! What a swirl, girl! Love it.” Ozzy pressed goblets of Moët Brut into their hands and herded them up the broad marble staircase.

Karen’s feline smile flickered. She reached out for BB’s hand and got a reassuring squeeze.

“Always so special to have you here!” Ozzy whispered in BB’s ear. “Find a winner, babe, and let’s haggle.”

By the time he got back downstairs another guest had arrived.

“I don’t believe I’ve had the—Oh, I declare! Ozzy likes tweed as much as the next person, but there is a limit!”

“Name is Palihnic.” Nicholas adjusted his double-breasted jacket, which was a somewhat original shade of rust. “And you’re Osman Strunk. I found something you lost once.”

Ozzy reaffixed his monocle so that he could examine the card Nicholas stuck into his palm.

“Really? Ha! I’m sure I would have remembered. Who in Allah’s name is your tailor? Red Buttons?” Ozzy lifted a goblet from a passing waiter’s tray, pressed it into Nicholas’s hand, and wheeled him toward the stairs.

“For Galloway Group, your insurer.” Nicholas sniffed at the champagne. “Photo-realist, name something like Pompano? Jean Pompano?”

“Jeanie?” Ozzy led Nicholas up the stairs. “Oh, yes, that piece stolen from the basement. You recovered that? Where do you buy your shoes?”

“In Philadelphia.”

“Oh, don’t say it. Just don’t. You buy your shoes in the cheesesteak mecca? I’m aghast.”

“The shoes I get from an importer in the Bronx. I found your painting in Philadelphia, hanging on William Poole’s wall. You remember your friend Bill?”

Ozzy snorted. “Bill was such a brat. Nice Italian shoes in the Bronx? To what is the world unraveling.” Ozzy rolled his fingers in the air and ducked away into the crowd.

Nicholas surveyed his surroundings. The walls were hung with pieces from one of Xavier Gliche’s particularly dreary periods: discombobulations of stovepipe, umbrella skeletons, barbed wire, and milk cartons featuring missing children. Corners were reserved for his brief venture into freestanding sculpture: stacks of rusty fuel tanks that not only looked bad but smelled worse. In contrast to the art, the room was newly painted white, with high ceilings and ornate trim. An uptown junkyard.

“Howdy.” Nicholas stepped up to where BB was flattering some guy in torn jeans, sweatshirt, and bowler. Long, dirty gray hair shot out from under his hat.

“You must be Xavier Gliche.” Nicholas forced a handshake on him with one hand, downing his drink in a gulp with the other. “I don’t think you’ve ever had any of your work stolen, have you?”

With the grimace of a man with a caper stuck between his teeth, Xavier turned away to where Karen was hobnobbing with a woman in a gold lamé pantsuit.

“Mr. Palihnic.” BB toasted the air.

“I got your message. So you have something for me, or is there someone else here you’d like me to insult?” Nicholas slid his empty glass onto a passing tray of smoked oysters.

“Well, if that’s a genuine offer…”

“I charge by the head. The first was a freebie.”

“You take checks?”

“Just the rainy kind, and only with an alibi.”

“Bravo.” Beatrice toasted the air again.

“So you called me here to tell me something, and here I am.”

“Yes. I wanted you to know that I made a few calls about Moolman. As a professional courtesy. But I’m afraid I haven’t heard anything. Which Moolman was it again?”

“
Trampoline Nude, 1972.
”

“Well, I’ll keep my eyes open. I put out feelers for you.” BB brushed some imagined lint from her lapel. “But to be honest, I really don’t follow Moolman’s work at present and don’t know any dealers that do, so I’m probably the wrong person to be helping you.”

“C’mon, BB. What’s with the coy act? Look, I know you have a hungry client that you feed Moolmans to like they were potato chips.”

“Potato chips? Really?”

“At Christie’s last month, you bought two Moolmans for over five hundred thou, a good hundred and twenty-five thou more than they were worth. Two weeks ago at Sotheby’s you picked up
Legs Wide, 1975
for four hundred and fifty thou, a good two hundred thou more than you should have paid. These kinds of overruns wouldn’t have been unusual back when. But things have been staying within estimates these days, unless you’re talking about Artschwager or maybe Lichtenstein or Calder…”

“You needn’t be didactic.” BB took a pair of goblets from a passing tray and handed one to Nicholas. “In my world, last month was last year. I move a lot of art, Mr. Palihnic. And it’s no secret that I’m an aggressive player. What I want, I get. What I get, I either have a market for or I make a market for. I’ve done my best to be of help to you. If you want to bite my hand, I’ll pull it away. What about the other dealers you were pestering? Surely you found someone more versed in Moolman than I?”

“I’m not picking on you, BB. One dealer thought maybe I had it, and I think he wanted to buy it from me. He’s out. Two others are out of town, one in California having liposuction and the other at a spiritual liftoff at the Great Pyramids. Another was the nervous type who confessed immediately to an indiscretion with a runway model. And the last was incredibly forthcoming, showing me all his bank transactions, a collection of antique tin toys, and his catatonic great-aunt.”

“Maybe you’re barking up the wrong tree, doggie.” BB’s attention began to wander as she started eavesdropping on Ozzy’s conversation behind her.

“Maybe. But I’ve got to believe that whoever took it plans to sell it. For that to happen, there needs to be a broker.”

“Or maybe, doggie, a collector had it stolen, direct to his collection.” She stole a glance at Ozzie and saw he was eavesdropping on her.

“I’ve investigated and solved…let’s see, eighty-seven stolen art cases as of last Friday. Two were by collectors.” One of them being Barney Swires. “Odds are against it.”

Nicholas figured it was time to press his luck, see what happened. He didn’t want to shove her. Just give her a little nudge.

“What I’m thinking is that maybe you had someone swipe it for you, BB. The day he got killed, the thief told me he had another offer. I thought he was putting me on. Looks to me like whoever it was just came and took it.”

BB fixed an even, dull look on Nicholas. Her bloodred lips twisted in what he guessed was amusement. Like someone watching a hapless spider approach their shoe. He guessed she imagined him the spider. Just the same, he liked those lips. Sensuous.

“If you have the audacity to suggest that I, or an agent of mine, stole that Moolman…”

“You said yourself, ‘What I want, I get.’ I’m a suspicious person. These are hard times for most dealers. Yet you’re opening a new gallery downtown. Some say you’re heavily leveraged.”

Her cheeks reddened, and her lips quivered as though she’d lifted her shoe and the spider ran under the radiator. One thing Nicholas figured she couldn’t, wouldn’t, and had never abided was impudence. Or the erosion of her reputation.

“That’s enough, Palihnic. Karen?” It was clear that the audience with the queen was at an end.

Nicholas studied Karen’s sleek form approach and take BB’s hand. He tried to catch her eye but she kept her gaze on BB. Girlfriends, the nonplatonic kind. Interesting.

“Should I ever come upon stolen art,” BB sniffed, “I would report it to the police, not to a natty character like you. You’ll not bite my hand.” With that, she and Karen glided from the room.

Ozzy fluttered up to Nicholas. “You have been naughty, haven’t you? What on earth did you do to poor Bea?”

“I said I thought that she was overleveraged, that she was desperate, that she was making a lot of rash buys.” She had the painting, all right. And he meant to find a way to make her surrender it to him.

“Congrats.” Ozzy gripped Nicholas’s shoulder and smiled wickedly. “You just made the permanent guest list.”

“Ozzy?” Nicholas’s eyes narrowed, his face gone foxy. “We need to talk.”

“Really?”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a von Clarke, would you?” He could simply ask BB to give him the Moolman, but that was a low-percentage play. Odds were in favor of blackmail as the tool of choice to make her cough it up.

“Do I ever!” Ozzy snapped his fingers over his head in triumph. “And wouldn’t Bea like to get her mittens on it. Ha!”

Nicholas’s face shifted from fox to wolf. “What if she stole it from you?”

Ozzy froze, his monocle swinging from its beaded chain on his chest.

“Bea? Steal?”

“You know, like that brat, Bill.”

Sucking in his cheeks, Ozzy squinted his own foxy look. “Just what are you suggesting, naughty man? Billy lived here. He could waltz off with anything. And did.”

“You live here, right?” Nicholas tapped his lips in thought.

“Why…” Ozzy’s eyebrows knit in bewilderment, his mouth curled with curiosity. “Why would I steal my own von Clarke?”

“What if you did, and said someone else did, and she ended up with it? What then?” Nicholas waited for him to figure it out.

“Oh!” Ozzy looked like he was going to faint, and put a hand on the wall. “Why would I do that to poor Bea?”

“Would she do it to you if she thought it would ruin you? Take out the competition?”

Now Ozzy gripped his chest as though expecting an asthma attack. He opened his mouth a few times to say something but obviously thought better of it.

“Well? Would she?”

Ozzy’s melodramatics faded as he composed his deportment and put a thoughtful finger behind his ear. “Well, of course she would. It’s a jungle. But I cannot afford to let the von Clarke go without moolah.”

“You’ll get what it’s worth. Probably more. What if I told you I could get Bea to broker it for you and then hand you all the money? Fee free.”

“Ha! Don’t tease. So what’s in it for you, m’boy? Hmm?”

“Well, it’s like this.” Nicholas drew Ozzy close, put a conspiratorial hand on his shoulder. “Sometimes you need a fish to catch a fish. We both get the fish and she’s left holding the rod.”

Nicholas changed bars almost as often as he changed phone numbers: often. Friends and acquaintances were kept abreast of his latest hangout and knew where to find him, but now and again there’d been those who’d sought to do him harm. Some thought him slippery, he simply considered himself cautious.

As far as bars went, he liked anonymous dives where nobody knew, cared, or would be able to remember him. He used them as neutral yet familiar meeting places that wouldn’t spook a crook. Most of these dives teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, eviction, health violations, or all three. Dirty Bud’s, Terminal Bar, and Tiny Tini Hut were among his past haunts.

Nicholas’s current place of business was known simply by its address, “113” 15th Street. The main barroom was as dark as any Spanish grotto, each dingy booth lit only by a votive candle in a highball glass. In fact, the only electric light, other than in the bathroom, was a single 25-watt globe over the bar’s deco proscenium. A single window illuminated the poolroom, which was off to one side. There was no table service, no kitchen. The joint was run by an ex-beatnik called Wax, a burnt-out guy who concentrated more on his jazz CDs than on his bartending.

“Hey, man,” Wax said, his back turned. “What can I get yah?”

“Rolling Rock.” Nicholas grinned. The ashtray in front of him was littered with joint nubs. A stoned bartender was his favorite kind.

“Right with yah. Now where did my man Davey Brubeck slide off to?” Wax felt around between the top-shelf liquors for the wayward CD with one hand. With the other, he snatched a cold bottle of beer from an ice bin and plunked it on the bar. “Happy Hour: Two-fifty. You hiding up there, Davey?”

Nicholas slapped three bucks on the bar and retreated to the dark recesses of a booth. For all Wax knew, Joseph P. McCarthy had just bellied up for a beer. Except for two uniformed UPS guys playing pool, 113 was empty.

When Maureen entered some minutes later, Nicholas watched her squint around the room before approaching Wax.

“Hey, sister, what can I get yah?” Wax had given up on the Brubeck disc and slid Duke Ellington’s
Blues in Orbit
into the machine. A boozy tenor sax filled the room with a sexy rhythm.