Treasure of Saint-Lazare (8 page)

His dream replayed in slow motion as they slowly undressed each other. He dreamt of sliding under the cool white sheet, and of Jen climbing in beside him, pressing herself close.

He awakened slowly to the realization that it was no longer a dream. Then he was fully conscious of her naked body pressed close to his, her breast resting on his chest.

Without a word, he put his arm around her and pulled her astride him. After an hour they tried to sleep, but soon Eddie felt her hand caress him as she put her leg over his.

“My turn this time,” he said as she rolled onto her back and clamped her legs around him. “Sleep is for later.” As he entered her he heard her murmur, “Old times.”

As they walked through the house toward the front door, Eddie said to her, “When we come back later today I want to go through the house carefully just in case there’s something that might help us.”

“I think you should. I looked it over carefully, but I didn’t know what we know now. I think it’s possible he left other clues for us.”

She locked the door as they left, then handed Eddie a key. “Keep this, in case you come back when I’m not here. You can use Roy’s study. There’s a wired internet connection there. He didn’t trust wifi.”

They turned to walk the block and a half to their rendezvous point, and as they approached the spot they saw a black Crown Victoria turn into the parking lot of a small apartment building. “That’s Thom,” Jen said. “The police think their unmarked cars make them anonymous, but who else drives a black Crown Vic?”

The detective stepped out of the car as they approached and stuck out his hand, first to Jen then to Eddie.  As she and Thom exchanged pleasantries Eddie sized him up. He saw a man about his age but an inch or two shorter and twenty pounds heavier, with sandy hair behind a receding hairline. He was wearing beige slacks and a blue blazer, neither of them expensive, and a white short-sleeved shirt with a thin black tie. Eddie picked him for a former military man, probably an Army sergeant who had served a few years after high school and then gone to college, which he might not have finished. His eyes were active and curious, a good sign.

“Sorry,” Eddie said when he realized Thom was speaking to him. “I was thinking about what happened here.”

“It wasn’t important. The only real news I have for you is that we found the car. The airport police checked the surveillance pictures and it came in the same day M
r. Castor was killed. It was a pretty smart plan — the owner left it to catch his flight and the thieves drove it out within 15 minutes. Then, a couple hours later, they brought it back and left it in the same spot. We didn’t hear about it until the owner came back and found the damage to the front end. They had run it through a car wash to remove the blood, but we found enough inside the grill to match it to Mr. Castor, so we know it was the murder weapon.

“There’s no longer any doubt this was a crime, not an accident. We’ve upgraded it to a murder investigation and I’ve been told to focus most of my time on it. Unfortunately, we still don’t have much to go on.”

Eddie asked if he would walk them through the events, and Jen interrupted to say, “I think I’d rather skip this part, and I need to go downtown to the shop. Call me there if you need me.”

Thom gave Eddie some of the background. “As far as we can tell, Mr. Castor was walking home from a Greek restaurant downtown, where he and a half-dozen friends have gathered every Wednesday afternoon since forever to talk about things. You know that he went back to Germany after the war. His friends tell us he accumulated considerable assets there and sold his business to move here. One member of this Wednesday group was his commanding officer in Germany.”

Eddie asked if he had their names and addresses.

“That will be no problem. Nothing we’ve found in this case so far needs to be kept confidential, mainly because we haven’t found much.

“He walked up Main Street to this north-south cross street, where we’re standing now, which is Osprey. He turned onto Osprey for a block, and when he got to Ringling he crossed and continued down Osprey, although normally he would turn and walk further up Ringling so he could cross through the art colony, which is shady. We don’t know why he chose this route that day, but it probably didn’t make much difference. These guys were waiting for him wherever he went.”

The day was hot and humid, as coastal summers in Florida tend to be, and Eddie noted that the sidewalk opposite where he and the detective stood was a cool green oasis that smelled deliciously of honeysuckle. It would have been inviting on a June day to avoid traffic-clogged Ringling and walk down a pastoral residential street. Thom’s voice recaptured his attention.

“Did Ms. Wetzmuller tell you about the witness? He’s a busboy in one of the Towles Court restaurants — I think it’s the only one — and he was on the way back from the bank when the killing happened behind him. We’re pretty sure one or more people came out of the parking lot behind this apartment building, grabbed Mr. Castor, and pushed him into the path of the car they’d stolen, or that he was trying to escape from them. We estimate the car was moving just under 20 miles an hour when it hit him, which doesn’t sound like much unless the thing that’s moving weighs almost two tons. This was a big Lincoln Navigator.

“The busboy told us he was walking this way to his job, so his back was turned and he didn’t see much. He said he heard someone call out, then turned to see the impact. I think he’s mostly telling the truth. He seems to be a good kid, twenty years old, lives with his wife and baby daughter just on the edge of Newtown, our black area, and has been working steady since he got out of high school a couple of years ago.”

“May I have his name and address?” Eddie asked.

“I presume you’d rather go by yourself?”

Eddie just nodded.

Thom offered to show Eddie the damaged Navigator. Although it was the blow to his head when it hit the curb that killed him, the impact of the car had been strong enough to leave blood on the damaged grill. Its DNA had matched Roy’s.

“The final test results just came back from the state lab,” Thom told Eddie as they drove toward the garage, which was in the center of a dreary suburban industrial park on the east side of town. “I didn’t have any doubt, but we’ve settled it for certain now.

“We also got some fingerprints and a little DNA material from inside the car, but there weren’t any hits from either of them, either in the state or FBI databases.”

“You won’t find any,” Eddie responded. “I’m pretty certain the killers were the Germans Jen and I met, to our unhappy surprise, on a Paris sidewalk two nights ago. One of them was carrying a nasty-looking knife, a bayonet.”

“He tried to kill you, too?” Thom asked,
surprised.

“No, I don’t think so. They were looking for something, and they thought at one time Roy knew where it was. They obviously decided he didn’t, so they killed him. Either that, or it was an ugly accident. Maybe he was trying to escape.”

Thom asked, “Pardon me if I’m being too inquisitive, but how are you involved in this? Don’t you live overseas?”

Eddie told Thom about his father’s association with Roy during the war and how they had stayed in touch for several decades after it ended, and how his father had brought him to Sarasota in the late 1980s, which was where he had met Jen for the first time. “But I think Roy’s interest flagged in recent years. He left a letter for my father that looks a lot like he’d reached the end of the line and given up on the project. It wasn’t dated, but it appeared to be several years old. It was marked for hand delivery to my father, so Jen got on a plane and delivered it.”

“So you think he may have been killed because of something out of the distant past?”

“It’s beginning to look that way. Someone is very interested in it. The two men who tried to attack us the other night in Paris were from the eastern part of Germany. That happened less than two weeks after Roy was killed, so I’m betting it was the same people.”

“How could you tell they were from the east?”

“The police in Paris arrested them after we got away. And, Jen heard them talking to each other and recognized the accent.”

“She speaks German?”

“She moved here when she was 13 years old. She doesn’t use it much but you don’t forget your mother tongue.”

“That’s interesting. She’s a very well-known businesswoman in Sarasota, so much so that my chief asked me to keep him up to date. I haven’t had much to tell him yet, but he was very interested in the Paris connection.

“How did they attack you, and how did you get away?”

Eddie told him about the two men waiting in the museum’s front door, then how he had fought them off and escaped through the hotel, where the police had arrested the Germans.

“That’s impressive. Where did you learn close combat like that?”

“Special Forces. I hadn’t even thought about it in years, but it really came in handy.”

Thom said, “That’s what I wanted to do in the Army, but there was nothing going on while I was in and I couldn’t find a slot.”

“You must have been a few years behind me,” Eddie told him. “I was in Kuwait and Iraq, and mustered out shortly after that, then moved back to Paris.”

“Paris is without a doubt my favorite place in the world. My wife and I went there on our honeymoon, traveling on a dime, but we loved it. Have you lived there long?”

“I was born there and have lived there my entire life except for college, when my American father wanted me to come back to the States, and my time in the military. I wouldn’t live anywhere else now, although your town is pretty nice. I know Jen loves it here.”

Thom steered the Crown Victoria behind a nondescript beige steel building that could have been in any industrial park, then opened the door with a passcard. The gloom of the interior was relieved by pools of bright light cast by fluorescent fixtures hanging on chains from the high ceiling. A row of fans turned quietly high in the opposite wall, reducing a strong smell of gasoline and chemicals.

In one of the circles of light stood a large black Lincoln Navigator, its front grill pushed in. The heavy bumper was undamaged.

“The technical types have been over it carefully,” Thom said. “We think they ran it through a gas-station car wash to get off any obvious signs, but they didn’t get the blood behind the grill.”

Eddie asked if Thom could send the DNA and fingerprint information from the interior to the French police for comparison. “If they match, we’ll know we’re dealing with something international and even if the French have to release them you can ask for extradition.”

“I’ve already asked the state’s attorney for permission and it’s under way,” Thom replied. “It can’t hurt us and it might really help, because otherwise I don’t have any real clues to go on.”

Thom drove Eddie back to Jen’s house and pointed out the restaurant across the street where Arturo Ruiz worked. “Most restaurants are closed on Monday, so he’s probably not working today,” Thom told him. “He lives on the edge of Newtown. It’s safe so long as you don’t go there at two in the morning looking for drugs.”

Eddie nodded as he wrote Arturo Ruiz’s name and address in the thin black Moleskine notebook he always carried. “And the one who was in the Wednesday group?”

“Sommers,” Thom replied. “Al Sommers. He lives on five acres outside of town to the east. He’s pretty prominent. He used to be in local politics and he owned part of a bank, which is a big deal here.”

As he walked back to Jen’s house his iPhone beeped and he found a text from Aurélie asking him to call. She answered immediately with “Édouard,
mon cher
. I am glad you called, because my friends and I have solved a big part of the problem.”

“
Dis-moi
.”

“We know from the two men who tried to attack us that they’re looking for a painting, and we know from Roy’s note to your father that it was associated with Hans Frank. I put those two facts to a friend down the hall, and he’s pretty certain it can only be one thing — a very famous old-master painting by Raphael called “Portrait of a Young Man,” which may be a self-portrait.

“It was stolen from one of the major Polish museums, the Czartoryski, right after the Nazis invaded. They earmarked it for the big museum Hitler planned to build in Austria after the war. Several Nazi bigwigs fought over who should have custody in the meantime, but it spent most of the war on Hans Frank’s wall in Crac
ow. As the Russians closed in near the end of the war he supposedly sent it to his home in southern Germany, near Munich, along with two other famous paintings he had looted and a bunch of smaller stuff. The other two arrived and were recovered by American soldiers, probably including your father. The Raphael hasn’t been seen since. I can see why those two Germans want it, because it would be an incredibly valuable piece of art today. More then ten years ago its value was estimated at perhaps a hundred million dollars.”

“Wow. That has to be the connection between the painting and Roy, and maybe my father as well. They handled the other two paintings, and someone thinks they know where the Raphael is hidden. Or thinks they stole it themselves.”

“Maybe, but Frank’s son wrote a bitter memoir after the war and said Frank had one of his assistants steal it. That might agree with Roy’s letter about the painting going to Paris, but it’s impossible to be certain. My colleague is talking to some of his contacts right now. The big problem is that all the principal actors are either dead or very old.”