The Case of the Purloined Painting Read online

  “I have nothing pressing at school this morning. Do you want to continue translating?”

  “I do,” I said, “Although I suspect we’re going to have more of what we’ve already done. Looks to me like this is just a list of somebody’s belongings.” I yawned and stretched.

  “Possibly, but there might be something in the rest of the page that will offer a clue, give us some context.”

  “Dim possibility, but it’s necessary.” I slid out of bed and headed to the shower. When I exited the bathroom Catherine was dressed in her favorite silk shift seated at her computer. The shift showed a lot of very attractive well-toned skin. One glance at her face suggested that she was mentally far away, concentrating on whatever was on the screen. I went to my closet and threw on some clothes. Minutes later I was in the kitchen rustling up some coffee, juice and a cold breakfast of heart-healthy oat cereal. Just a couple of young colts, we were. When the coffee pot signaled done, I yelled down the hall and Catherine appeared.

  “Anything of concern? You looked pretty focused there a few minutes ago.”

  She smiled and drank the orange juice I’d poured. “Nope. Just checking email and reading my DorothyL digest. You’re dressed for the world, I see.”

  “Well, for the office, anyway. No appointments so i’ ll be making phone calls, trying to locate my two clients of record. They need updates and I need an infusion of cash.”

  * * * *

  The man in my office was clearly comfortable with his surroundings, even though I judged he was wearing an expensive tailored suit that put him in a pay grade substantially above mine. His name, he said, was Anderson. He gave off vibes that suggested he was used to more elegant surroundings. It fit him, that dark suit, just like the line on his business card that told me he was an attorney with the Justice Department in Washington. That’s D.C. The capitol of the U.S. His card also told me he worked for the Office of Special Investigations. I’d never heard of it before, and I suspect most people haven’t either. Mr. Anderson explained tersely that his office focused on tracking down stolen goods from World War Two. He mentioned Simon Wiesenthal. I had read about Simon Wiesenthal, the famed hunter who dedicated his life to rooting out Nazis who had fled their past associations after the defeat of Nazi Germany in the most recent great war to end all tyranny. Catherine has a book he wrote. Wiesenthal, not this Anderson.

  “Mr. Anderson. I don’t usually deal with people from the Justice Department. In fact I can’t recall the last time it happened. In fact, this is probably a first.”

  “We had you checked out, Mr.… Sean.”

  “Awkward, isn’t it?”

  “Excuse me? What is?’

  I smiled my disarming smile. It comes naturally so I don’t have to practice it. “My names. As you’ve noticed, they’re both the same.”

  “Yes.” Mr. Anderson raised his black eyebrows. “I suppose at times it is a little awkward.”

  “Right. That’s why you paused, just now.”

  “Mr. Sean, as I started to say, we’ve had you checked out and almost everything I’ve learned is positive.”

  “Thank you. I try.” I nodded once. I guess I don’t do well with compliments. Catherine mentioned that one time.

  “I was in town on agency business and your name came up in connection with this Gottlieb affair.”

  “Gottlieb affair? I understand there is a dead man in the county morgue with that name attached, but I wasn’t aware that it was an affair.” I was being cautious. Even overly cautious, perhaps. From the beginning the Gottlieb affair seemed to give off an aura, something slightly unsettling.

  “I understand.” Anderson steepled his fingers and assumed a thoughtful expression. “However that may be, I wanted you to be aware of your government’s interest.”

  “I don’t talk about my cases, even with visiting fe… lawyers. Is there something specific I can help you with?”

  “Not really. I just wanted to touch base with you and suggest we might be mutually helpful. If you are willing to share what you learn in the course of your investigations, we, your government, would be most grateful. In the spirit of such cooperation, I’ve called my office to request a search of our files for anything on Mr. Gottlieb we might have that isn’t confidential. It’s a long shot, but if there’s anything useful, I’ll see that you receive copies.”

  “Thanks. Frankly, I’m not sure what useful information the government might have. This seems to be a straight-forward case of a man being murdered, possibly for something he may not even have ever had in his possession.”

  Raised eyebrows from Mr. Anderson. “I understand. There is another reason I wanted to talk to you. There’s a possibility that you might run afoul of some of the fringe element of home grown crazies, like the Aryan Nation, for example. Their potential for violence always seems close to the surface. So, I wanted to express some caution to you. Not a warning, just a heads up.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” I said. “I’ve been at this business for quite some time and while I’ve been lucky, I do pay attention to my surroundings.”

  “Does local law enforcement track hate groups activity?”

  “I’m sure they do,” I said. “I’ve never discussed it with my police contacts. I just assume they keep track of such activities.” I didn’t believe for a nanosecond this guy didn’t have the answer to that question.

  “You may discover some low-level surveillance, some vandalism, nuisance calls, things like that that haven’t happened in the past. If you begin to detect a pattern, don’t hesitate to ascribe it to your investigation of Mr. Gottlieb. And be careful.” Mr. Anderson smiled a wintry smile while offering this last bit and rising to take up his coat and gloves.

  We said a cordial goodbye and he went off. I watched him from my window as he entered the passenger side of a clean dark blue sedan parked at the curb. When it drove off, I could clearly see the government issue license plate. I jotted down the plate number but I knew trying to find out who was driving the vehicle, or what agency it was assigned to would be a monumental waste of time.

  * * * *

  Catherine and I had talked about our odd feelings of sometimes being watched. Interestingly it was something we both had recognized in recent days. I had met in an out of the way bar with a lawyer who never said so, but seemed anxious to keep things at arm’s length. Derrol Madison was known as a pretty forthright guy so that was odd. I had two other cases with individuals showing greater than normal caution.

  Robert Gehrz, the lovelorn lad seeking the missing woman, seemed abnormally skittish. The reticent woman who may have seen the actual murder, Ann or Anne whatever-her-last-name, was also odd because of the timing. Now I was beginning to wonder if she might be more involved in the Gottlieb incident than I’d been led to believe. I had no particular reason at this time to suspect her of complicity, but people lie to detectives all the time. I expected it. I also expected coincidental events to be almost always resolved with connections when sufficient facts were revealed. More facts, that was the key. I would gird my whatevers and sally forth to do more fact finding, always keeping one eye peeled.

  Anne or Ann, she of no last name and uncertain spelling, seemed now in retrospect, to be way too skittish. So did the man I was now calling the mysterious Mr. Gehrz. They had both paid me a nice chunk of change to do similar tasks. Most of the tasks that came my way were not all that different from these. So why did I have a feeling that Mr. Gehrz and the woman were somehow connected?

  I reached into the bottom drawer of my desk and pulled out a well-thumbed copy of The Concrete Blonde. Maybe I’d find some answers in its pages.

  * * * *

  Michael Connolly and his Concrete Blonde, while interesting and well-written, was not particularly helpful in my present circumstances. So I went home to our apartment in Kenwood. Since I was early, I was s
urprised to discover that Catherine had beaten me to it.

  “Hey, slack day at the massage parlor?”

  “Mmmmm hmmmm.”

  Her reaction was unusual. Catherine is a bit sensitive to labels attached to her professional career. That’s due to the frequent claim that many so-called massage parlors in the city are thinly masked operations of commercial sex. I’ve never understood why we can commercialize just about everything, but draw the line at sex for hire. But it’s not my call is it?

  “You are fruitfully engaged I take it?”

  “Ummm humm. Make us a drink, please,” she responded.

  I did that and carried them to the spare bedroom-cum-office where Catherine sat staring intently at her computer screen. I set her drink on the table beside her and glanced at the screen. Then I stared. “Hey! What the Hell is that?”

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” Nodding enthusiastically. “It looks a lot like the

  Pages you got from that Anne or Ann woman.” She took her fingers off the keyboard and picked up her drink.

  “For just a second there, I thought it was those pages. What have you got here? Assuming you are going to reveal all.”

  Catherine sat back. “This morning’s paper had a story about a project between the Holocaust Museum and some others to create this database of all the stolen art that’s still out there, in the wind as you sometimes characterize it.

  “So I went to the site and one of the items was some inventory ledgers from the Bundestag. And when I brought up some sample pages I got these.” She gestured at the screen.

  “They look nearly identical to the pages we have, don’t they?” She nodded again. “What we have here is pretty conclusive proof that the pages you got are related to the thefts of art and other things in Europe during the Nazi occupation.”

  “I can buy that, just based on this alone, but let’s test the theory some more,” I said. “I see some of the pages are typed. Ours are hand-written.”

  “True, but some of the pages in other books they have are handwritten.”

  “Style? Handwriting?”

  “Not remotely similar,” she said sipping her drink. “That doesn’t surprise me, Sean.”

  “Nope. I’d assume whoever was assigned to loot a particular residence, let’s say, would make the list in a ledger and then turn the ledger over to some superior officer. Different looting parties had separate ledgers.”

  “In the case of Parisian looting, the superior officer would be Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg. He was in charge there.”

  “Any references to the area of Poland where Gottliebs came from?” “None that I can find. I think this is confined to Central Europe. The inventories on the website are labeled unidentified Jewish owners.”

  “They are samples, I suspect. Those that have been specifically identified are probably being handled with more delicacy,” I said.

  “There are date stamps from 1943,” Catherine said. She shut down the computer and we ambled to the kitchen to prepare supper.

  “I need to get that woman to send me more of the ledger pages,” I said. At the moment, I had no idea how dangerous and complicated that would become.

  Chapter 12

  The tuck came out of nowhere. Not entirely true, of course. It came from somewhere, mostly out of the dark alley on my left. And it went somewhere. I couldn’t say where. I was head over tea kettle in a dirty snow bank. The one thrown up by a city plow trying to stay ahead of what seemed this winter to be constant snow falls. That’s why I didn’t see where the damn truck went.

  I had been trudging through the cold afternoon twilight toward a small bar on the north side of downtown, not far from the new Target Center, which was near the newer Target Twins baseball field which was quite close to… Well, you get the idea. I had my head down, never a good idea for a private detective, whether on a case or not, and I definitely was on a case. It came close to being Sean’s last case. I was trudging along when this small box truck blasted out of the alley. Fortunately my reflexes are still pretty good, and I flung myself backward and to the right. So I ended up in this snow bank, as I said. I suppose it was fortunate that there was so much snow that season so there was a large relatively soft snow bank close at hand.

  I remember thinking that red Keds were not exactly appropriate footwear, and my feet were getting chilled. The truck roared at me, blaring its horn as an afterthought and then sliding into the street and out of sight around the next corner. Now this could have been one of those random accidents that occur in the big city. You know, small insignificant person (myself ) unfortunately run down and crushed by inattentive driver of commercial vehicle. Except that the truck kept going in a great hurry and flurry of snow and slush. Except it didn’t have its lights on and the driver didn’t blow his horn first. I conclude from all that, plus other odd events in my recent life, that this was an attempt to take me out of the picture. Or the action.

  I gathered from that that I must be getting somewhere in my unending quest for answers to the important questions of my time. You know, questions like, where is Robert Gehrz, who is Anne or Ann and why are people paying attention to this humble private investigator who seeks merely to serve his clients? I regained my feet, brushed myself off while hurling some meaty and obscene imprecations at the departing driver. Well, the Justice Department lawyer had warned me, hadn’t he? He’d told me that when private citizens get involved, things can get messy. And dangerous. By this time, I was convinced somebody was out to dust me, put out my lights, cancel my reservation. It was adding measurably to my irritation. Unlike some cases, I couldn’t just chuck it. I had no way to terminate—bad choice of words I guess—my relationship with Mr. Gehrz because he wasn’t anywhere in evidence. He’d left my office telling me he’d be in touch if I needed more gelt, but that had apparently been a small lie. Aaron Gottlieb, on the other hand was all over my case. Even though he’d gone back to his life in Chicago and wasn’t due to return to Minneapolis unless and until there were significant developments, he called almost every day with a question or a thought.

  So I bounced up, brushed myself off and continued on my lonely way to the bar. It’s called Casey’s, should anyone ask. It’s a blues bar. That is because, on most evenings a solo guitarist, occasionally a keyboardist, would appear on the postage-stamp-sized stage at the back corner of the place and entertain the local patrons with some down-and-sad soulful music. Sometimes the music was slow and dark, other times it might leach a little more into modern rhythms. Blues music is a label not given to precise definitions. It bears some similarities to crime or mystery fiction in that regard. Tonight the performer was a man I happen to know.

  Michael Katz was a classically trained harpsichordist, keyboardist, guitarist, and he had a nice singing voice in the bargain. A long time ago he’d aborted a career with a rock band in another city at the dawn of the rock-and-roll era for greater stability with an academic life. But the call of the music is sometimes hard to resist. So here we were, and because of his ethnicity, it occurred to me that he might be a useful source of background information. I didn’t expect he ever knew the dead Gottlieb, but he might very well have known of people with the kind of background and experience similar if not identical to Mr. Gottlieb’s. The kind of experience that gets you killed.

  I warmed myself in the noisy, convivial atmosphere of Casey’s blues bar and listened to the music. When Katz took a break he was doing a solo gig tonight, I offered to buy him a drink, which he accepted.

  “Nice to see you here,” he said, “but I suspect you aren’t merely on the town for a little culture.”

  “And how do you deduce that, my friend?”

  “You’re alone. Your tall and lissome friend isn’t with you.”

  “Astute observation.”

  “Well, my Ph.D. is good for something. You’re never or almost never seen as a
couple when you’re working so I assume your dropping in is not a casual occurrence.”

  Since Katz was right, I explained some of what I needed to know. I was careful to avoid entangling my acquaintances and friends in my cases in any way other than the most peripheral, so telling all was not on the table.

  “Why do you have dirty snow melting on your shoulders?”

  Katz had interrupted my thought and I looked at him with my mouth hanging open. “Excuse me?”

  “Not that I consider you a sartorial icon, but I wonder if you’ve been burrowing in snow banks.”

  I explained about my truck-dodging incident.

  “You need to acquire a body guard who could punch out the truck motor, like bubba? That friend of kenzie and Gennaro?”

  “What I’d like to learn,” I said, after the woman who served as waitress and often bartender at the same time, refreshed my weak drink and slunk back down the bar. “What I’m wondering is this. I’ve learned that the invaders who overran Europe in the previous century and looted thousands of privately and publicly held art works, frequently kept meticulous and detailed records of their depredations.”

  Michael Katz nodded. “This is true.”

  “In the aftermath of the war, some G.I.s brought home a little loot from the war. I guess that happened a good deal. You would agree?”

  “Sure. What I’ve read is that most of the booty soldiers carried home in their duffels were weapons and medals and flags, stuff like that. And art.”

  “Art,” I said.

  “Yeah. Lost art from the big war is something that has interested me. Parenthetically, did you know the Nazis also looted whole houses of furniture and other stuff. They stripped homes to the walls.”

  “What happened to all that?”

  “A lot was destroyed during the war, some was put into use elsewhere in Europe and some is still missing.”