Earth Colors (22 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Earth Colors
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“You can leave us if you want,” Wardlaw told Noreen. “Our guest and I need to have a little discussion, and then I’ll bring her up to your laboratory.
I’ll be staying with her the rest of the time she’s in this building anyway. You got work to do, don’t you?”
“I’ll stay,” she said stiffly. I had to hand it to Noreen: She had not left my side since fetching me from the lobby. She was obviously annoyed that Agent Wardlaw had insisted on observing me for so long before letting me into the building.
I wanted to join her in kicking his butt up between his ears. “Okay, ask me whatever it is you insist on knowing,” I said irritably. “I’m not even sure who we’re talking about here.”
“William Krehbeil the Third,” said Agent Wardlaw.
My head sank toward my coffee cup. So much for my nonexistent poker face. “Okay, he is my client. But I have very little to say. Really, he’s a far better poker player than I am. Cool as a cucumber. Showed me next to nothing.”
“What
did
he show you?”
“No!” I said hotly. “Listen, this is not a fishing expedition. I am here because two of your best agents—Tom Latimer and Jack Sampler—have found me completely trustworthy. They like my instincts, approve of my ethics. So no, I am not going to blurt out everything I know about Tert Krehbeil to you just because you’re flashing a badge at me.”
“Tert?” said Agent Wardlaw. “Is that some sort of a nickname?”
I jumped to my feet. “I do not like your attitude, Mr. Wardlaw. I was looking for work when I found this job, and I can go right back to that status in a heartbeat with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. I don’t need Tert Krehbeil and I don’t need to answer to you. You want to serve me a subpoena? I’ll get myself a lawyer. I may be flat broke and naïve as shit, but I don’t go around letting people like you intimidate me, do you hear me?”
Wardlaw was grinning, his fingers interlaced on top of his necktie. “Jack said you were a spitfire. I like that in a—”
“Go to hell!” I roared. I was still shaking, but it was a different kind of adrenaline rush now. I was ready to move. “Noreen, maybe you’d better escort me back outside.”
Noreen stood up, and smiled for the first time.
Wardlaw leaned back in his chair and raised a hand to calm me. “Okay, fun’s over, I can see that. Jack never was no idiot, and I can see he’s picked hisself a smart girlfriend. Sorry. Sit down. Please.” He patted the air with his paw.
I stayed standing, but relaxed slightly. Noreen folded her arms across
her chest again and looked back and forth between us like she was watching a particularly good tennis match.
Agent Wardlaw cleared his throat. “Okay, we’ll do this the other way. This Tert Krehbeil—I like that nickname, kinda cute, kinda like ‘Turd’ or something—has got his tit in the wringer with us Feds. He’s an art dealer, you know that?”
I said nothing.
Wardlaw shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, well, art dealers are handling all kinds of dough, y’know? And it can kinda go to their heads sometimes. They start out with a little favor to a client … say, delivering the goods to them on the sly in-state, but shipping an empty crate to their country home out-of-state. That way the client avoids paying sales tax. That can amount to thousands, or even tens of thousands, of bucks.”
I sat down again and leaned my head onto my hands on the tabletop. I felt a ripping urge to start gabbling, to tell this moron that I had known all along that Tert was dishonest. I wanted to underscore once again that I was nobody’s idiot. What stopped me was that I wasn’t sure whom I would be trying to convince, him or me.
Noreen said, “So he’s been doing what, smuggling artworks? Defrauding the IRS?”
“Probably some of each,” said Wardlaw. “These guys are like cakes of soap in the bathtub. We catch one and another one dives in and starts to get slippery. Of course it doesn’t help that they’re dealing to high rollers who think it’s just a laugh and a half to flout their obligations to the government.” He examined his stubby fingers, and took a nibble of one cuticle.
“What do you mean?” I said.
Wardlaw yawned. “Oh, the clients are a bunch of rich guys. Multimillionaires. Billionaires, some of them. So they get a hard-on for ways to show off to each other. They get to needing some new hit, something no one else has. A thing of great beau-ty,” he sing-songed, lifting one pinkie like he was having tea with the Queen. “They’ll buy an artwork and hide it away in some inner room in their mansion somewhere, and even the cleaning lady isn’t allowed in. Only they get to look at it, see? It’s like an Arab sheik having a new virgin every couple months.”
Tert’s missing painting began to flash like neon in my brain. “So, let me guess: A painting that hasn’t been seen by very many people is worth more than one that has.”
“The fewer the better,” said Wardlaw. “If the image is made public, they call it ‘burned.’ It’s like somebody else deflowered it.”
“They want the piece that went straight from the artist’s studio into a private collection a hundred years ago,” I said sourly.
So that’s it: If Tert’s painting had been real, it would have commanded an especially high sum. Crying over his lost childhood picture, my eye!
Wardlaw scratched an ear. “Or they go for the big time, and do art theft on request. They make the necessary connections, and their tricky-fingered friend goes into the museum with a mat knife and liberates a Renoir from its frame. Either way, they get their rocks off.”
My stomach was lurching at the terms he was using, but I could not deny that they fit perfectly with everything that had felt strange about Tert Krehbeil. He was my age or better, and had never married, presumably preoccupied with other obsessions. He had tossed out a check for three thousand dollars as if it were pocket change. He was aristocratic and dripping in a sense of entitlement, above the law. He was … what had his brother and sister called him?
Precious.
I asked, “Do you have anything solid on him, or does he just keep bad company?”
Agent Wardlaw did not reply. Having made his accusation, he had folded his arms across his chest, waiting to see what I would do. For all the affect he showed, he might have been a B-movie version of the Sphinx.
I sat and pulled my lip, thinking. What
was
I going to do?
It was tempting to tell Wardlaw that apparently this time someone had put one over on Tert, and that he had gotten stuck with forged goods. But Tert had told me that the painting in question was a family heirloom. Was it, or was that another one of his deceits? He had moaned so persuasively about his grandmother and her beloved painting. Had that story been imaginary? Or had that once-proud family long since sold its treasures? Had he hired me to document a fake so they could collect insurance on a painting he’d already sold to some high-roller?
And there was the little matter of Faye’s involvement with this deceitful little upper-crust so-and-so. She was staying with someone who was being watched by the FBI, and that was not good. Now I was completely certain that I should get Faye and Sloane Renee out of there.
“Your friend Faye Carter is staying with him,” Wardlaw said, as if reading my mind.
Another wave of adrenaline shot over me. I had let myself believe that Wardlaw was not the crispest card in the deck. “Faye Carter is the widow of Tom Latimer,” I said. “She has known Tert’s brother Hector since college, that much I’ll give you for free. She only met Tert a few weeks ago. I’m sure the whole thing amounts to nothing more than friend-of-the-family status, or I would have known about it. I am her closest confidante,” I said, appalled at the fiction I was weaving, “and she said nothing about him until a few weeks ago, when he phoned out of nowhere and asked her to transport some artwork for him.”
Wardlaw pursed his chubby lips. “Did she do it?” He actually managed to look concerned.
Heat swept up over my face as I realized that I was once again giving things away. Explaining now that the services she had intended to provide would support a show in a very highly regarded museum would sound like I was treading water, so I said, “If you’ve been following this guy closely enough to know I’m working for him, then surely you know the answer to that one!”
He pawed the air again. “Okay, okay, calm down. I just wanted to make sure we didn’t miss something.”
Through gritted teeth, I said, “Faye came east with me to take a break. It’s been a long, tough adjustment for her since Tom was killed. She thought she’d visit a few friends. Look, she has the baby with her. She’d never knowingly put that kid at risk, do you hear me?”
Wardlaw spread his hands out in mock self-protection. “Loud and clear. Jesus, I didn’t know what I was taking on here, or I would have brought a backup. A’right, a’right, so I’ve told you my stuff. So, I was wondering if you had anything you’d like to tell me. You get me?”
“I’d have to think about this,” I muttered. “No, on second thought, I don’t. The fact is I have nothing to tell you.”
Noreen took that as a cue. “Great! So why don’t we go on up to my office and get some science done, okay?”
Wardlaw opened his mouth to say something smart, but closed it again. After a moment, he said, “Okay.”
“First we have to get you
both
cleared to enter the lab space,” she said nastily. Then she opened the door and swept a hand toward it, showing us the way.
I DID NOT EVEN TRY TO FIND MY WAY BACK TO THE RENWICK Gallery to visit the Catlin portraits. I was too distracted by the weight of my heart, and I was sure that if I looked half as bad as I felt, some White House guard would shoot me first and ask questions later.
I was never so glad to see a couple of sweet old geezers as I was to see Mr. Carter and Mr. Hauser that evening at the Cosmos Club. I wanted to grab Mr. Carter by the lapels and say,
Your niece needs help. Drive up to Philadelphia and drag her away from that gray-eyed snake!
It took me until halfway through dinner to concentrate on what was being said.
“The dosage makes the poison,” Mr. Hauser was saying, as he slathered butter on a second roll and I finally got my anxiety-ridden brain into the room. “Anything, even this butter, can become a poison if taken in sufficient amounts.”
“What are the symptoms of butter poisoning?” asked Mr. Carter jovially, raising his astonishing eyebrows at his friend’s paunch.
“A large bill from one’s cardiologist,” answered Mr. Hauser. “But seriously, toxic thresholds are calculated as the amount in excess of what one can take in over an eight-hour period and hope to excrete within the following sixteen.”
“I have never been able to take in as much butter as you, Martin,” said Mr. Carter.
Mr. Hauser smiled. “Some of us are made of stouter stuff than others, my friend.”
“Ah. Just so.”
I asked, “What are the symptoms of heavy-metal poisoning?”
“Oh, that varies. And it depends on the vector, of course. One has to think in terms of ingestion, inhalation, or transdermal absorption.”
“Lead, for instance,” I said, trying not to make the question sound pointed. “Or lead chromate; you know, ol’ Baltimore yellow.”
“Oh, lead is a horrible toxin if eaten or inhaled, but it doesn’t move through the skin. Inhalation would cause obvious distress—painter’s cough, and with greater exposure, pneumonia; but that would show up on X-ray, the lead being photo-opaque.” He speared a mouthful of salad and munched it down like a great rabbit let loose in Mr. McGregor’s garden.
Wouldn’t Mrs. Krehbeil’s doctor have taken an X-ray? I wondered.
“How does it act on the human body?”
Mr. Hauser said, “Lead is a cumulative poison; the body does not expel it well, which is common to many heavy metals. It is absorbed by the bloodstream, where it deactivates the enzymes that create hemoglobin. This results in the buildup of precursor molecules of aminolaevulinic acid, which causes the various symptoms of lead poisoning. It is taken up in the bones, replacing the calcium and forming lead phosphate. It paralyzes the gut, causing cramps and constipation; it results in excess fluid in the brain, causing headaches and insomnia; and it affects the reproductive system, causing infertility and miscarriage. Beyond that it moves to weariness, anemia, and insanity. All of these symptoms are also characteristic of other disorders. Mild lead poisoning might be easily overlooked. Long-term exposure is insidious. The ultimate symptom is death.”
I said, “Would it mimic pneumonia, or senility?”
Hauser smiled and added more dressing to his salad. “Oh, certainly. It mimics many other diseases, but when a great many people develop the same symptoms, then one gets to looking closely for the cause. The Romans were the first to discern that lead caused problems, and historians point to it as a major cause of the fall of Rome. You see, their water-supply pipes were made of the stuff. But we’re still using it. In very recent times we’ve put lead in our gasoline, belching it out into the air as exhaust. Our city streets became contaminated with it. It rose as a dust that accumulated in the lungs, particularly afflicting young children, whose brains were still developing. It was, within my lifetime, still used in the glazes on tableware, and was often ingested with one’s dinner.”
Mr. Carter looked doubtfully at his plate. I thought of Sloane Renee and wanted to jump up and start screaming.
The waiter brought our entrées. Mr. Hauser took a bite and chewed merrily. “Ignorance is only one problem. There is also vanity. Young ladies, from the ancient Egyptians clear up through Victorian times and in Japan, the geisha, used lead-based cosmetics to whiten their complexions. Over time, they lost their appetites and slowly swooned, all the time applying more and more of the stuff in order to keep up appearances. No, sorry to tell you, we’re selectively blind where it comes to some of the things we release in our environments, despite our best intentions.”
Mr. Carter dropped a dollop of salad dressing on his skin. “But you said lead wasn’t transdermal, didn’t you?”
“They smeared it around their mouths. It’s sweet, you know. The English used to place pellets of lead in their wines for flavor,” said Mr. Hauser cheerfully. “Many toxins will move readily through the skin, especially if the barrier formed by the skin’s protective oils is breached. An artist clears away his protective oils by handling solvents, such as turpentine, and then off we go.”
“I suppose one gets scars from that,” I said, remembering Mrs. Krehbeil’s fingers.
“Oh yes, a marvelous little symptom called paronychia: They’re sores that develop around the cuticle. The subject hardly feels them, as the toxin also poses as a nerve deadener, but they don’t heal well, and form odd little scars.”
Bingo: fingers, pulmonary distress, and dottiness. Did Mrs. K paint all those not-so-great pictures at her house, or is someone … such as Precious William, feeding it to her?
“So, artists are known to have been exposed to it,” I said. “The man at the National Gallery today was telling me about Van Gogh licking his brush.”
“Yes, certainly,” said Mr. Hauser. “He developed insanity, after all, and those halos around the stars … that could be what he actually saw. Lead would have caused swelling on his optic nerve. Oh, yes, toxicologists have had a lovely time fixing twenty-twenty hindsight to some of our more famous characters. Oh, yes, great stuff. Beethoven’s hair has been shown to have one hundred times the normal amount of lead. Perhaps that explains his erratic behavior, and maybe even his deafness.”
Mr. Carter said, “What about that hexavalent chromium you were espousing last evening, Hauser? What lovely thing does that do to us?”
“Cancer,” said Mr. Hauser. “But chromium is also necessary for the body to utilize glucose. And lead chromate itself is a carcinogen.”
“Last evening you said that chromite ore was processed and manufactured into pigments in Baltimore. And you mentioned the Krehbeils,” I said.
“Ah yes, William Krehbeil Primus. He was the youngest son of an old Mennonite family. His parents left their farm to his oldest sibling, so he left them and said he’d buy his own farm, and quit the church in the bargain. They shook their heads and said he’d never amount to anything because the land he bought was down in the barrens, but then it proved to have one of the hottest ore bodies. He sold out to the entrepreneur who bought up all the claims and set himself up in paint manufacturing down in Baltimore. Then, to finish the job of thumbing his nose at his forebears, he bought a very large farm back in Lancaster County and built a grand house on it.”
“Did Krehbeil the second and Krehbeil the third carry on the business?” Mr. Carter asked.
Martin Hauser wrinkled his brow as if to massage his brain for further information. “Krehbeil Primus was well advanced in years when he married. Wed a lovely lass from Philadelphia, the story goes. She was a lively young thing, wanted to go west, but of course young girls didn’t just travel at will in those years. He built a grand house for her, so she could have that sense of the rural and he could have his sense of grandeur. She gave him two children, a son and a daughter, and outlived the old man by many decades.”
Mr. Hauser took another bite of his buttered roll and continued his tale. “The son wasn’t much for engineering and such. He tried to run the shop for a while after the old man died, but the board of directors made short work of him, jacked him up and ran a man with a mind for business underneath. I’ve heard it said they bought him out with a bit of stock maneuvering, and everybody was happy, or so the story goes. I’ve heard that he went into dealing art, or some such.”
“I think Faye knows the current generation,” I said tentatively.
Mr. Carter lowered his eyebrows in thought. “Couldn’t say.”
Hauser forked a bit of chop into his mouth and chewed. “Krehbeil Secundus died recently. Your niece could know his son.” He smiled abstractly.
“Yes, in fact she’s staying with him in Philadelphia just now. It’s a business
visit, you see. She wants to start that flying delivery business of hers again.”
Mr. Carter stiffened. “Surely not! Not with a baby!”
The baby. Indeed, it was the baby I feared for the most. Tert appeared to have affection for Sloane, but if he would poison his own mother—and that was what I was beginning to suspect—would he be sick enough to hurt an infant? Or might he have the stuff about?
Lead is sweet, after all
…
I lifted my napkin to my lips and gave Mr. Carter a sideways glance. “Um, I think you and I ought to have a talk about this situation.”
He addressed his roast beef with mathematical vigor. “Yes, I agree. Are you available tomorrow morning?”
“I have to run back up to Pennsylvania, but may I give you a call soon?”
“Please do, my dear.”
Mr. Hauser said, “On to lighter topics. You haven’t told us anything about your visit to Quantico. Please don’t hold out on us. That sounds like a most stimulating experience.”
I paused with a forkful of fish halfway to my lips, my stomach tightening at the memory of my meeting with Agent Wardlaw. “Ah … yes, it was quite something. Noreen Babcock, their forensic geologist showed me all about the labs.”
Mr. Carter’s eyebrows shot up. “The whole place?”
“The whole kit and caboodle. Geology—that’s trace evidence—gets the evidence first, because they’re dealing with fine stuff that can easily be lost in other analyses. They work with geologic materials—dirt, dust, sand, all that—but also glass, hairs, and fibers. They have a scraping room where they hang up the evidence and knock free the trace materials for analysis. They have all the standard equipment—X-ray diffraction, SEM, mass spec, Fourier-transform IR, and such, but also the good old hand-lens and their quick minds.”
“Hear, hear,” said Mr. Carter. “No amount of machinery is going to replace the power of a good analytical mind.”
“My favorite thing was the duct-tape archive,” I said.
Both men chuckled. “Duct tape?” asked Mr. Hauser.
“Oh yes,” I assured him, doing my best to offer entertainment when what I wanted to do was weep. “The FBI’s motto is: ‘No crime is committed
without duct tape.’ Imagine the criminal tearing off his bit of duct tape to accomplish his crime. Then, being frugal, or tidy, or both, he tosses the rest of the roll into the trunk of his car. Voilà. Ergo and forthwith, the FBI keeps on file one of every kind of duct tape ever manufactured.”
“But surely duct tape is duct tape,” said Mr. Hauser, his eyes dancing with amusement.
“Oh, no, no, no! Think of all the different companies that make it. There are seven or eight different adhesives, for starts. The fiber used to reinforce it varies, as does its weave, and the density of the weave. And even within your basic gray duct tape—it comes in red, and blue, and … well, what have you—the tape material itself varies, and the filler material in it, which, by the way, is also geologic trace evidence, because that filler is made of clay—kaolinite, bentonite—and the coloring pigments include rutile, calcite, aragonite … .”
Both men laughed, covering their mouths with their napkins in mirth.
I managed a smile, but it had been damned hard enjoying any part of the tour with Agent Wardlaw breathing down my neck. What I had hoped would be a discreet, exchange of methodologies was not possible with him there, and now that Noreen knew who my client was. I said, “It gets better: Duct tape does not always tear cleanly. So, Joe Criminal tears off his chunk to, say, tape the victim’s mouth shut so she can’t scream for help. Nasty stuff. But the tape comes off ragged, and Joe’s kept the rest of the roll. Aha, our forensic expert now matches the two sides of the tear.”
“Marvelous,” said Mr. Carter. “And what else did she show you?”
“Oh, let’s see. There was the questioned-documents section, shoeprint analysis, tire tracks, chemistry, latent fingerprints, genetics … .”
“And bomb analysis?” said Mr. Hauser. “I understand they have quite a lab for that.”
Bombs. Yes, Noreen had shown me photographs of what was left of the yellow trucks that had bombed Oklahoma City and the garage at the World Trade Center. Bombs and yellow trucks brought to mind Fritz Calder, but they also brought to mind Jack, who was still over there, wherever “there” was, looking for the colleagues of the people who had taken the Trade Center the rest of the way down. Jack who had taken the trouble to warn me about Tert. Jack needed and deserved my support in return. How could I reject him for not coming home?
I stared at my dinner plate. The conversation ebbed. Even Mr. Hauser laid down his fork.

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