The Case of the Purloined Painting Read online

  We’d recently acquired a new tenant, a young chocolate point Siamese. Or maybe he was a blue point. His pedigree was obscured by the fact that he had come to us by casual means. That is, his provenance was questionable and undocumented in any meaningful or official way. I was dealing with problems of provenances in this case, so I looked on the appearance of this animal as something approaching fate. I don’t believe in fate. I don’t care much for coincidence, either. That’s another story.

  One of Catherine’s students at her school of massage therapy had shown up at class with the creature in her hands. She explained, as Catherine later told me, she’d found the critter huddled in a corner of the school building, behind a scraggly bush where the snow hadn’t yet found a deep place. They couldn’t keep the thing at the school. Of course not.

  Neither the good Samaritan who brought the half-frozen cat inside, nor any of the instructors or students at the school was willing to adopt said feline. The director then stepped in, as she related to me while snuggling very intimately with me in bed that night, and announced that she knew a kind person whom she was sure would take ownership and shelter the animal.

  And that’s how this unnamed fur ball became part of my household. After three days, living with the creature, it was becoming clear to me and to the two other cats I housed, that our newest boarder was fast becoming the ruler of the palace, regardless of his small stature.

  “It’s his voice,” she whispered. Her pink tongue inserted itself into my ear. Catherine’s, not the cat’s. “I wonder if it will get any louder.”

  I nodded, carefully, so as not to dislodge her sensual ministrations. I loved it when she licked me. Catherine has a well-educated tongue. Living with an accomplished, well-trained massage therapist has its advantages, let me tell you. One of my cats liked to lick me too. Interesting, but nowhere near as sensual. Of course the cats’ emotional connection is, I suspect, considerably lower than Catherine’s. I certainly hope so.

  Yes, it was definitely his voice. As yet unnamed, the fur ball had an intimidating, angry sounding yowl that was as penetrating as anything I had ever experienced out of a Siamese cat. Catherine’s strong and agile fingers urged me to roll over and I did. Her tongue continued its ministrations, wandering down my breast bone and across my navel. The cat, apparently sensing complete lack of attention to its yowl remained silent.

  * * * *

  “You seem to have fallen into a bit of a funk,” Catherine said. She was puttering in my kitchen while I stood staring out the deck door at the back yard.

  “Have I?”

  “Is it the missing woman, or is it the missing book? The one that should have been in the slip case at Gottliebs?”

  “Sounds like a line from a song I heard once. I guess my problem is mostly centered around this woman I’m looking for. She seems to have erected an almost impenetrable wall around herself.”

  “How ’d she do that?”

  “Usually when that happens successfully, you have someone who lives off the grid, someone who has few legal or social entanglements. In this case, the woman Mr. Gehrz wants found has figured out how to erect such a wall. Or, perhaps, she had some serious technical help. I find her employment, but she doesn’t work there anymore and the HR woman I talked to seemed nervous about even telling me that she didn’t work there any more.

  “I don’t mean to suggest a professional hacker couldn’t trace her, but I can’t. I talked with contacts at the state and mined the little public record available. She has a driver’s license and she owns a vehicle. I could get lucky and spot the car while wandering about the city but the chances of that are fairly small, wouldn’t you agree?” I grinned at Catherine. “Her address is no longer of this world, being victim of infrastructure rebuilding.”

  She laughed. I didn’t blame her. “Even if you did spot her car on the street, you’d be going the wrong way on a one way street, right?” She laughed again and I smiled with her.

  “Can’t you get some additional help from your client? Mr. Gehrz?”

  “Hah. Mr. Gehrz is a no-show. In spite of several messages I left at the number he gave me, he neither returns my calls nor shows up at my office. I know he’s getting my messages, however. I submitted a request for expense reimbursements and lo, there came a wire transfer to my bank from somewhere else.”

  “Can’t you trace that back?”

  “Nope. Bank privacy customs deny me access to that information. Now, I suppose I could cultivate somebody at my or some other bank. Somebody who might ultimately be willing to risk their job by feeding me such information.”

  “The cost-benefit ratio seems out of balance, yes?”

  I gave Catherine the eye. She was occasionally wont to spring this CPA-accountant-style language on me. “Yes,” I said.

  “What next?”

  “I shall persevere, plodding on through the highways and byways, the alleys of our metropolis until I find that tiny bit of information that I can exploit. Did I ever mention that I’m pretty good at my job?”

  Chapter 10

  Did you get the package?” a woman’s voice asked. I instantly recognized the voice. It was my elusive client Anne or Ann, last name unknown, she who was the apparent witness to the murder of a man who may or may not have been Manfred Gottlieb.

  “The package? Do I correctly assume it came from you? The package appears to be two pages torn from a book of some kind, possible a ledger. A bound medium-sized ledger, judging by the pages.”

  I poked the brown wrapping paper with the end of my pencil. It had been heavily taped so I had been forced to cut the tape and wrapping paper to get it open. But I was careful. Always looking for clues.

  “Do you read German?”

  “No. And why are you sure it’s written in German?”

  There was a pause and I could hear the woman on the phone breathing rapidly. She sounded agitated. “I haven’t seen anything in the paper about progress solving that man’s murder.”

  I was used to clients abruptly changing direction so I trotted right along. “The difficulty is the cops still have no solid connection from what you say you saw on the bridge that night and the body of Mr. Gottlieb. Where did you get these pages?” I was trying to get an admission.

  “C’mon, Mr. Sean. What are the chances that whoever I saw thrown off the bridge that night was somebody else? Somebody whose body has totally disappeared?”

  She was right, of course. I didn’t tell Ann or Anne that there’s been no report of anybody else in the city going missing around the time she saw the guy go off the bridge. Fact was, aside from my contact with the cops, and Derrol Madison, Esq., and Aaron Gottlieb, the young man from Chicago, it was shaping up to be an almost perfect crime. Only one anonymous witness, no evidence, no motive. “The other thing is, there’s no solid evidence of foul play. For all the authorities can say, Gottlieb fell or jumped.”

  “But I saw—“

  “So you said, but you haven’t come forward, have you? You haven’t made a statement to the police about what you saw, have you? If you did that, they might take more interest. And another thing. What were you doing on that bridge at that time of night in the middle of a snowstorm? And what’s this business of sending me pages torn from a ledger?”

  “I told you. I was out walking, something I often do at night.”

  “So you were apparently within walking distance of your home?” I don’t usually do my detecting out loud in front of clients, but I hoped a little provocation might open her up.

  “A very tenuous supposition,” she retorted. Again we went silent. I held the phone between my shoulder and ear,

  Cupping the mouthpiece in my left hand. The late morning sun streamed through my office windows. The top of my desk was clear except for the small package and the telephone. I didn’t even see any dust.

  “I can
’t come forward, Mr. Sean. I simply can’t. I know I should, good citizenship and all that, but it’s not in the cards. Not possible. That’s why I came to you. I need you to remain as my intermediary, my cut-out, so to say. I have to go now. I’ll be in touch.”

  The call was disconnected before I could even suggest she might soon have to send me more money. I stared at the phone.

  Intermediary. Cut-out. She used the words as if they were a normal part of her world. Not everybody did. Odd. Interesting, even.

  The telephone rang. Two calls inside one hour. Business was looking up, recession or no.

  “Sean Sean, at your service.”

  Silence. Well, not quite. I could hear breathing. Then, “Sean, dammit. What are you doing?” “Excuse me?” There was a crackle and the voice in my ear got wobbly.

  That often meant a cell phone in motion, like in a car.

  “I’m getting inquiries. My staff is asking questions. My partners and associates are talking to possible clients who come in and then disappear. Missed appointments. Wasted time. What the Hell is going on?”

  “Madison?” I said. “Is this you?” “No names,” he snapped.

  Cloak and dagger shit, I sighed to myself.

  “Okay, Sir.” I came down hard on the sir. “What is it you want?”

  “I want you to make it all go away.”

  “Let me point out to you the obvious. You have no way of being sure the source of your current agitation has anything to do with me. And if it does, please remember, you came to me, sir. And apart from that meeting and this call we’ve had almost no contact. I haven’t breathed your name to a single soul. If you are feeling exposed, I assume it’s either some other client you are involved with, or you were being watched before we met. Is that possible? And here’s the biggie, why?”

  Silence. Then: “I think the best way to clean this up is to find out what happened to Mr. G. And pronto. That’s what I’m paying for.”

  The connection died. Paying? Madison wasn’t paying me anything. He wasn’t a client. Or was he? Madison was a good attorney, sharp, always zeroed in on the main points or lapses in the other side’s case. But everybody occasionally slips. Even Derrol Madison. Maybe he was paying. Maybe he was fronting for someone. More questions.

  I poked at the small brown package. When I’d opened it a few minutes before my client’s call, I’d been mildly let down. For some reason that wasn’t quite clear to me, the arrival of the small brown package with no return address had seemed to offer some possibilities. An answer or two perhaps.

  Inside the brown paper wrapping—metered at a substation on the East Side of Saint Paul, I noted, was an ordinary white business envelope backed by a single piece of blank white cardboard. The envelope wasn’t sealed. Inside were two standard white sheets of paper, folded in thirds. On each sheet was a copy of a smaller lined page, apparently, obviously even, torn from a small bound book. Judging from the size of the lined paper, the book was about five inches wide and seven high. The columns printed on the pages looked like what you’d find in a small ledger, the sort one might use to record expenses in. I handled everything gingerly, by the edges, just in case there were fingerprints or DNA. I wasn’t holding my breath on that.

  On the ledger pages was a series of words, numbers, possibly phrases in some kind of foreign language. It looked to me like a list. The copies weren’t numbered so I couldn’t tell if the pages were sequential. Did it matter?

  I wasn’t sure. Ordinarily I might have set the pages aside. What did this have to do with the question of Manny Gottlieb, deceased? I called the Foreign Language Department office at the college in Arden Hills. I didn’t want have to deal with parking at the U.

  A young sounding woman answered the call. “Here I have a piece of paper for which I need some help in translation. I wondered if there is someone I could meet with today. It’s a somewhat urgent matter,” I said.

  “What’s the language?” She queried.

  “I don’t know for sure but I’m pretty sure it’s German. It’s hand written.”

  “Umm. Well, maybe if you spelled out some of the words, I could tell what the language is.”

  Good idea. So I spelled out several words. Möbel Zwei Bahaus Anrichten.

  “Well,” she said after a brief pause, “The second word is two and the third is the name of an artistic movement in Europe in the nineteen twenties. So I’d say it’s definitely German, but I don’t know the other two words. You know, there are translation programs on the internet. Are you aware of that?” I wasn’t and said so. She explained that there were programs on the Internet that one could access to translate almost any language into almost any other. “They aren’t perfect because regionalisms and dialects can distort subtle meanings, but you can certainly get the gist of your list.”

  I thanked her and rang off. That’s what they say in the UK, I’m told. I think it’s a hold-over from the old days when people used real telephone instruments and a bell sounded when you broke the connection.

  Never mind. She’d given me an idea. I put the packet into a larger envelope and decamped for home.

  W hen I arrived dark was falling and I found Catherine hard at work on a new lap top computer. I say new because I’d never seen it before, but the thing didn’t appear to be brand-spanking new out of the box.

  “Whuzzup?”

  “After you cautioned me against doing internet stuff related to your current case on my desktop, I borrowed this machine from my lawyer who swears the protections are so advanced, only the NSA or the CIA could ever detect it. This machine is connected to our server through the Wi-Fi link and then only when it’s powered up. I just thought you might want some additional research.”

  “Huh. Thank you, sweetie, that’s very thoughtful. What shall we do about dinner?”

  “Veal hotdish in the oven. Have a drink. Relax for an hour.” She frowned at the big screen inches from her nose. I did as directed and sat beside her.

  I stuck my tongue in her ear which she almost always likes. Then I whispered, “I have need of your assistance. Do you know about on-line translation services?”

  “You mean language to language? Sure. They’re fairly common.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard, pausing only briefly as she followed arcane paths and instructions. “Why do you ask?”

  “I have here some pages I want translated.”

  “Easy. Quickest is to scan them to a flash drive and bring the drive to me.”

  “Does it matter they are handwritten?”

  “Oh. Yes, I’m sure it does. Do you know the language?”

  “The script is in German.” I held the pages before her. Catherine reached to take them but I whisked them out of range. “Ah, ah, no touch, please.”

  Catherine stared intently at me for a moment and then turned her intense gaze back to the pages. For a long moment she eyeballed the page. Then she dipped her eyes to the keyboard and her fingers began to play slowly over the letters. I watched the screen as she connected and called up a translation program. It might have been in Yahoo or Google, I wasn’t sure, but then she typed in the same four words I’d given to the woman at the college earlier.

  Möbel zwei Bahaus Anrichten. What came back instantly was furniture, two Bauhaus sideboards.

  I stared at the screen.

  “Try this,” I muttered. Beschlagnahmen. I had the word lettered into my notebook and I carefully spelled it out for her.

  It came back “Cramps.” “What the hell?”

  “Wait,” Catherine said. She typed some more and this time the English word that came back was “Seizures.”

  We looked at the word. “Oh,” Catherine murmured. “Seizures. Not cramps, but as in taking something. Confiscations.” We stared at each other for a long silent moment.

  Chapter 11

  Cathe
rine and I spend the better part of the evening, after a sumptuous hotdish of veal and other stuff she had put together, puzzling over the two pages from some mysterious ledger. The writing was small and in places it was smudged as if it had gotten damp. There was almost no punctuation except for a couple of occasional dashes here and there. Mostly what the pages appeared to contain was an inventory of somebody’s belongings. Everything, right down to the walls. Not particularly unusual if you were somewhat obsessive about listing possessions.

  At Catherine’s urging I had such a list of the stuff at my place in Roseville and she maintained one here in Minneapolis. Our lists include some details, where known. Details such as acquisition and purchase price. All useful stuff for insurance purposes, in case of a fire or a bomb. This list appeared to be mostly of items with no particular detail.

  There were a few names in the ledger that we recognized, including the afore-mentioned Bauhaus. They included a couple of well-known fellows, Raphael and Monet. I assumed these were references to the painters. Catherine wasn’t so sure, partly, because we couldn’t see any descriptive language. Were these referring to cheap prints? Originals, what? It was as if the writer was deliberately trying to be obscure. Raphael, X275Y, was one entry. I began to hope that when I laid hand on the rest of the pages there might be some sort of code or explanation. Always assuming I ever came across the other pages.

  The work was complicated. We persisted on into the night, puzzling out the words and then peering at the computer screen. Sometimes the translation programs gave wildly different meanings to the same words. Sometimes the translation changed when a word coupled with other words. It was tedious and I realized, along about the time we started on the second page that if we’d had more context the effort would have been easier.

  Bed called and we shut down the computer and toddled off to slumber land. My dreams were easy, that is to say they were nonexistent. At least I didn’t remember anything in the morning. My memory loss was helped along by the sight of Catherine’s naked form as she sauntered around the bedroom, collecting discarded clothing from the night before.