The Case of the Purloined Painting Page 2

  “And you say this incident on the bridge happened three days ago.” She dipped into her unremarkable purse and pulled out a newspaper

  Article torn from a page in our local daily, the Star Tribune. It told the story of the discovery of a body in the ice and detritus of the Mississippi River, a few hundred yards down river from the new I-35 freeway bridge. I didn’t tell her I’d already read the article.

  “This is him,” she said. “It’s got to be.”

  I took the article and looked at it. What it reminded me was that the body recently discovered on the ice of the Mississippi River was of an elderly man named Manfred Gottlieb. He’d worked as a back-office supervisor for a medium-sized department store in Minneapolis until his recent retirement. His wife had died years ago and there were apparently no children. Mr. Gottlieb did have a much younger relative who lived in Chicago. It was too soon for an autopsy report in this edition of the paper, and the only remarkable thing so far was the faint series of numbers tattooed on one forearm. Mr. Gottlieb had been in a Nazi concentration camp during World War Two.

  I looked up from the article and gave Anne or Ann my best P.I. Interrogator stare. Actually, my friend and sometime partner, Catherine McKerney, says I do the stare quite well. She says it was one of the things that attracted me to her. “A man who can do that look,” she told me one time, “Has intriguing potential.”

  I’ve had lots of practice, having been an active private investigator for a couple of decades. So I gave my visitor my best stare and after a couple of beats said, “After the two men left, you just went on, the opposite way, across the Tenth Avenue Bridge. Yes?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I kept going the way I had originally been headed.” “You didn’t walk across the street and look over the rail down at the river? You didn’t look around to see what else there might be to observe?” “No. As I told you I was afraid the men might come back. I’d be seen.

  For all I know they had already noticed me or maybe they were following me. Or maybe they decided to come back. I just left. I was nervous. I went off the bridge the other direction and home.”

  “Do you do that a lot?”

  “Do what a lot?”

  “Walk around the city at night in a snowstorm.”

  Her lips slid into a small smile and her eyes lit up. It was transformative. “Yes, sometimes. Often. I like to walk alone at night.”

  “Did you notice anything odd or unusual on your way home? After the incident on the bridge?”

  She gave me a negative shake of her head. She didn’t ask me why I even asked the question, either. I wasn’t prepared to answer, if she had.

  “Describe the two men, if you please.” I watched her think about the question.

  She shifted in her chair and looked me in the eyes. “They were older, white, I think. It was dark and snowy. One was very tall and even in heavy clothes he seemed gaunt. The other one was shorter and heavier. He walked like he had muscles. He wore a dark knitted cap, like a watch cap. Both men were bundled up against the storm.”

  I watched her eyes. They didn’t shift. I can make notes on a pad without looking. It’s something I practiced. So I was pretty sure she was telling me the truth as she knew it. Whether she was telling me everything was a different question.

  “Could you hear what they were saying?”

  “Only bits and snatches. But it was obvious they were arguing. The tallest man might have had an accent.”

  Anne or Ann stopped then. I stared at her in silence for a minute. “Do you have any evidence, even a vague uneasy sense, that some-

  Body is watching you? Maybe only occasionally?”

  She shook her head again. “No, why do you ask?”

  I lifted one shoulder. A one-shoulder shrug. “Something impelled you to come to me now, a couple of weeks after this incident on the bridge.” I left the implication hanging in the sunny silence of the late morning. Silence can be hard to bear and clients often fill it with information of later use to me. Clues, even. This client said nothing. Well, I’d taken on clients who were even less forthcoming so what the heck?

  “What exactly is it you would like me to do?”

  “I don’t want to be connected to this. I want an intermediary. A cutout isn’t that what you call it? That would be you. I want you to take what I know to the police. That poor guy was murdered, but I’m just not willing to get involved. More than this.” She stopped then and bit her lip. The lower one.

  “There’s always a chance those two might come looking for me. What if they remember something? I have money. I can pay you to maybe find them, or help the cops find them so they can be arrested.”

  She put her hands back into her purse and fished out a business-sized white envelope, the kind with printing on the inside to conceal the contents. When she opened it I could see bills, money, in it. She kept the envelope partly concealed on her lap. Her long slender fingers brought out five one hundred dollar bills. It didn’t look like she’d depleted the contents of the envelope much at all. Anne or Ann laid the bills on the edge of my desk in front of her and then with two fingers pushed them across in my direction. Déjà vu.

  “Here’s a down payment. I’ll pay you this much every week until we get to the end or I decide to stop. Agreed?” She looked me in the eyes again. She had a good stare too.

  “Do you want an accounting? A bill? A record?”

  She shook her head again. I liked the way it set her hair to swinging. “No. You don’t have to write it down, but I want you to tell me everything you do each week when we meet.”

  “How do I get in touch with you if that becomes necessary?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr.… Sean? There is just no way for you to call me. Anyway, I doubt it will become necessary.” She nodded and looked thoughtful. Maybe she was checking off a mental list. “I’ll call you.” She cocked her head and seemed to be thinking about it. “Yes, I guess I’ll check with you occasionally by phone, and to set up our next meeting.” She smiled. She had a pleasant smile.

  With that, Anne or Ann with the nice ankles and the pretty dark hair and the pleasant smile, replaced her boots on her feet, shrugged back into her nice but ordinary brown winter coat and left my second floor office on Central avenue in Minneapolis. I heard the elevator and from my window a few minutes later, saw her emerge from the front door of the building. I watched her step into the street between two parked cars and wave one hand, as if signaling for a cab.

  It was no cab that slid up and stopped for her in the slushy street. It was a long shiny black limousine. Given the sloppy state of the streets that winter day, the limo had been recently washed, probably only hours earlier. Anne or Ann pulled open the back door of the shiny limo and disappeared. The vehicle slid back into the sparse traffic and went off—I knew not where. The angle was wrong so I had no chance to read the license plate number.

  Things were looking up. I had two clients on one day who were paying me in cash that, were I so inclined, might go mostly unreported. Neither appeared to involve physical danger. I couldn’t see any reason to get up close and personal with the guys who may have murdered Mr. Gottlieb and locating a woman who didn’t want to be found for the elusive Mr. Gehrz was almost always a relatively easy, if sometimes tedious, job.

  The one sure way to avoid being found by anybody is to get off the grid. Totally off the grid. Use cash or barter. Sign nothing, make no contracts, do not fly anywhere. Do not go by train, even if you can find an empty box car. Do not drive a vehicle licensed in your name, especially on toll roads. Avoid going out in public. Move to a rural or small town environment and then move again, occasionally. Limit your personal contacts. Be very much alone. Even so, there are people in our prisons who can tell you it’s almost impossible to disappear and remain alive for any great length of time. It is possible to disappear by carefully organizing your de
ath so that the body is never discovered.

  I figured a little face time with the cops and some information sharing and Mr. Gottlieb’s murderers would be apprehended within a reasonable time frame.

  I also had no doubt I would find Mr. Gehrz’s girlfriend, if that’s what she was. It was just a matter of time and not only am I very good at my job, I’m also persistent.

  Chapter 4

  How was your day?” Catherine had just been giving me a blow by blow of another day at her massage school. If that sounds a little condescending, I don’t mean it like that. I never do. Catherine knows I am 100 per cent in support of her enterprises, but sometimes, murder

  Intrudes over massage.

  I was standing at the kitchen counter building us each a drink. It was late and I was still processing Anne or Ann’s appearance in my office earlier. Catherine was across the room putting out some cheese and crackers. I detected by her tone of voice I might not have seemed as attentive as usual to her narrative. That’s one of the difficulties of being a high-level man of attention. Particularly when it involves personal relationships. If you slip a little, for whatever reason, your friends notice.

  “I apologize, my pet. I suspect I have been a bit distracted the past several minutes.”

  She turned her head and smiled down on me. It felt warm, her smile. Catherine McKerney has that ability. Her very presence warms me. Hell, when she walks into a room, even if she hasn’t been actively looking for me, she warms me. It was a little unnerving at first, when we were just starting out. I’ll be frank. I am aware that good looking women are often attracted to short guys like me. Go figure. And Catherine McKerney is one good-looking doll. Besides that she’s taller than the average babe, being a shade over six feet in her bare feet. Add to that her money, yes, she’s a well-paid executive massage therapist with her own school and her own income. So you’d think I’d be more careful when she talks to me.

  “I’m sorry, doll, I am distracted, disturbed, even. It’s this case.” “Maybe it would help if you’d talk about it.” “Hmm, point taken. I haven’t talked to you much about this one, have I?”

  “No.”

  “The basic problem is that my client isn’t being as forthcoming as he should be.”

  “Is he hiding bad stuff, you think?” “That’s what I thought at first. But the more I unpeeled his onion, the less substance there seems to be there.”

  “Wait. You unpeeled his onion?” Catherine grinned. “It sounds dangerous, dirty, even.”

  I smiled and sipped the single malt I had just poured myself. “Just an expression. You know most cases are a situation around which facts and actions coalesce until you got this ball of knotted twine or layers of an onion. Then somebody gets frustrated and calls for outside help. Me. My job, much of the time, is to cut the knots, or peel away the levels of the onion to get to the core. The answer.”

  “And now you’re getting to the core and it’s slip-sliding away, yes?” “Your perspicacity is breathtaking,” I said sliding over to her side of

  The couch so I could lay a kiss on her cheek. We had adjourned to the living room ready to absorb the evening news from our local television channel.

  “My number one client, Mr. Gehrz, is paying me to find this woman, but I keep stumbling over anomalies. Like is she a blond or something else? Maybe a red-head? He alluded to both or either in our one and only interview. Her age seems uncertain in his mind as well. And if that’s not enough, there appears to be a third party wandering around the edges of this thing.”

  “you mean somebody out there on the fringe, but not connecting with you?”

  “Something like that. It’s sort of an itch that won’t be scratched,” I said. “Or like this—every so often I look up like there’s another person in the room with me.”

  “You feel you are being watched?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes. Other times it’s just this vague sense of unease. As if I’m not doing what I should.”

  “Ohhh. Ghostly apparitions, yet.” Catherine smiled. “I don’t believe in ghosts.” I heard me say that and then stopped to consider. True on the face of it, but what about intuition? I often did something or followed an unpromising lead because my gut said to. Sometimes it worked out. Often it didn’t.

  “How do you know this feeling you have is connected to Mr. Gehrz? Could it be the other case? The one about poor Mr. Gottlieb?”

  “Well, I suppose. My gut tells me Mr. Gehrz is the source of my current unease.” I shrugged. I do that some times. It comes under the same heading as my vaunted eyebrow lifts.

  “Gottlieb seems even odder. The cops aren’t getting anywhere. Or, at least they aren’t saying so if they are, which is odd in itself. The only thing I know right now is that miss Anne or Ann says some guy was murdered by a push off the Stone Arch Bridge one dark and snowy night a couple of weeks ago now. Her information is confirmed by the discovery of old man Gottlieb’s mortal remains some yards downstream a day later.

  “She insists she had no other information except there were two guys who did the deed, one of whom sounded like he might have been German. Her words, not mine.”

  “Do you think she’s telling the truth?” “Yes, I do.”

  “All of it?”

  “No. I think she isn’t lying but she’s leaving out pieces of the story. If I can figure out what she isn’t telling me and why she’s avoiding the telling, maybe I can solve the rest of it, whatever it is.”

  “Well,” Catherine said in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice, “Why don’t you ask her about it. Her story?”

  I sipped my very good single malt and nodded. “Ah, now you have reached the nub of my unease. I haven’t heard from the lady for two days.”

  “She is, to use your cop-speak, in the wind?”

  “I guess. There was just the one face to face in my office and then the call two days later. She said she’d call and she did that. Gave me addresses, numbers, contacts. Just what you’d expect. That was last week and since then nothing, zip, nada.”

  “You have tried to locate her, I assume.” “Indeed I have, my pet. This very morning I tried. Called the cell number

  She gave me. Not in service. No contract with any local phone service. Her address turns out to be a long-vacant lot, excuse the cliché. The one employment reference I weaseled out of her turns out to be wrong. At least, no one at the company would admit ever hearing her name before. Of course, Target Central is a large company and I didn’t talk to every soul who works there, only to ones who would have reason to know the answers.” Since I have been in the Pi business for a good long while, I have developed many and sundry networks and contacts that almost always produced at least small tidbits of useful information. We call ‘em clues, in this business. But my client, miss or Ms. Or Mrs. Ann/Anne Somebody-or-other, had left damn few traces on the ground. Well, to be more accurate, whatever traces she was leaving were, so far, indiscernible to myself.

  A sudden warm breath wafted over the side of my neck. A soft murmur crawled into my ears and a very sultry voice I instantly recognized began to suggest things, intriguing things, intimate, even erotic, things. There was even an explicit hint of some sort of lubriciousness that carried an intriguing attractiveness.

  We decided to go to bed for a while. Sometime later, the telephone chimed.

  Now, it was getting late in the evening and Pi lore to the contrary, I was not in the habit of sortieing into the dark streets of Gotham at the beck and call of any old one, known or not. That be said, something told me I’d better answer the call. We have two lines in our shared apartment, one being a private line tied to my business. The other was your regular, garden variety land-line. Catherine also had a cell.

  W hy, you might ask, in this age of cells, blackberries, cages and pads of various configurations, with the ultimate mobility in communication all
around, why we didn’t both have cell phones. You may well ask. I make no reply.

  I rose gracefully from the bed, wrapped a robe around my nakedness and crossed to the phone. Lifting the receiver, I said, “Good evening, Sean Sean, at your beck and call.”

  The earpiece hummed and I heard breathing. Then an asthmatic voice said, “I need to talk with you, Mr. Sean. My name is Derrol Madison.”

  I blinked. Derrol Madison! One of the most expensive and well-thought-of attorneys in the state was calling me. Late in the evening.

  Chapter 5

  It was nearly noon the next day and I was standing in the skyway over Nicollet Mall when the feeling struck me again. Somebody was watching me, observing my actions. Or maybe just paying mild attention. That’s

  Always been one of my useful attributes, an occasional hypersensitivity to being the target of interest. It’s saved my life on a couple of occasions. It’s nothing paranormal or woo woo, no hairs rising on the back of the neck, it’s just a feeling I get once in a while. Whenever it happens, it’s usually because I don’t seem to be making much progress on whatever it is that’s occupying my attention at the time. Occasionally it helps focus my thought process.

  Without appearing obvious about it, I hitched myself around so I could look the other way, back toward Macy’s department store from whence I’d come. I slid the picture of the woman Mr. Gehrz had given me back into my breast pocket. I’d tried to reach out to Mr. Gehrz because I had more questions. Mr. Gehrz had not responded, a circumstance that was getting on my nerves, just a little. I maneuvered my crutch so I could sag back against the glass wall over the suspended walkway. I didn’t need the crutch. It was a prop designed to elicit a little sympathy. It made my frequent stops and slow progress through the skyway more plausible. I didn’t appear to be loitering. Loitering was frowned upon, although there was a good deal of it in the Crystal Court of the IDS building. So here I was, watching Catherine, trying to identify who might be watching her. I had, in fact, spent several hours over a few days running surveillances on Catherine’s daily comings and goings.