The Case of the Purloined Painting Read online

  “The fire apparently started in the attic.”

  “Odd is it? Near a large upright storage cabinet?”

  “That’s it. Just preliminary observations, of course, but attic fires in older well-maintained homes like this one are a little unusual.”

  “Odd, you said.”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps you will look for an accelerant of some kind.”

  “You can count on it.”

  “May I call you later on for an update as the investigation proceeds?”

  The commander smiled at my choice of language. “I’d consider it a privilege to share information. Nice meeting you, Mr. Sean.” We exchanged business cards. I’d recently started carrying cards Catherine had had produced for me.

  I went away from the stink of charred wood and the noise of large diesel engines, the shouts of men carrying ice-encrusted hoses. I went back to my office and my growing pile of little white file cards. The day continued dark and dreary.

  Chapter 15

  Your phone is compromised.”

  I recognized the voice immediately, although we rarely spoke together.

  “Mr. Madison. What do you mean, my phone is compromised?”

  “I had a technician sweep your offices and your connections. He says you need to upgrade and buy some shields. Never mind that. You are clean at the moment but I don’t know when they’ll reinstall a tap.”

  “Who’s this ‘they?’”

  Madison ignored my question. “That establishment where we met the first time?”

  “Up north? Yeah, I remember. What time?”

  “Four this afternoon work for you?” I checked my pocket calendar and nodded at the phone.

  “Sure,” I said. “See you then.”

  My phone was compromised? What a thing to say. How did he know that? Was it even true? I was liking this whole business less and less.

  I was late to our rendezvous. A snow squall that blew across the northern suburbs jammed up traffic considerably. Madison was ensconced in his wheelchair at a table with his back to the outside wall near one corner of the place. He had a drink in front of him. He wasn’t easy to spot unless you were looking for him as I was. Madison had placed himself so he could see the whole room and anybody coming or going from the two exits.

  I stopped at the bar for a scotch and water and took it to the table. They didn’t stock Macallan so I settled for the bar scotch. I sat with my back to the room. No itchy feeling crawled up between my shoulder blades, even though I was reminded of scenes in some western movies.

  “Well, here I am,” I said. “Sorry for being late. Traffic is a mess.”

  “I almost gave up on you,” he said, looking at me over the rim of his glass.

  “What gives? And what’s with that crack about my phone being bugged?”

  Madison sipped what looked like a whiskey sour and said, “You’ve apparently stumbled onto one of my projects. I prefer to keep my involvement with Atria below the radar where possible.”

  “Does this have something to do with Aaron and Manny Gottlieb?”

  Madison nodded and took another drink. I didn’t know him well, never socialized with him, so it was hard to read him. But he seemed off, a little nervous. He put his glass down and rotated it between his fingers.

  “Yes, it does. In a way. First, I need to give you some background. About Atria.”

  I nodded encouragingly. At least I thought so.

  “Atria is a loose organization of people who are interested in European history. Specifically they—we—do research into the aftermath of World War Two. It’s not a tightly organized group because we try to maintain a low profile. The local Atria is not very large. There are similar organizations around the world, and we have links with most of them.”

  “Okay,” I said. The scotch slid nicely down my throat.

  “We get information in a variety of ways, much of it word of mouth. Most of it incomplete.”

  “So a lot of what you acquire is unverifiable? Gossip? Water cooler stuff?”

  “Exactly. Somebody gives us a letter, or a fragment of a letter, maybe an old blurry photograph of somebody who looks like somebody. We also get depositions. Most of those depositions are from older individuals who want some kind of justice. They want the people responsible to pay.”

  “We’re talking about specific accusations of wrongdoing, right?” I said.

  “That’s correct,” Madison nodded. “Here’s an example of what I mean.” He took another drink. I could see he was warming to his subject. “I got a call a couple of days ago from an old woman.” He shrugged. “At least she sounded old. She wouldn’t give me her name. She said she was at the Mall of America with her granddaughter the other day. She refused to say what day or how long ago. She said she saw a man she recognized from the old country.”

  “And I bet you asked what country and she wouldn’t tell you, right?”

  Madison nodded. “Then she told me the name she knew him by in the camp where she was held during the war.”

  He didn’t have to tell me what war he was talking about.

  “Now this woman must be in her eighties or nineties and her eyesight is maybe not so good any more. Maybe her memory is also faulty. I don’t know because I’ve never met her. She read me the number she said was tattooed on her forearm. And she said the man’s name and that he’d been a guard or trustee at her camp. Her concentration camp.”

  “Did his name mean anything to you? Did you recognize it?”

  Madison nodded again. “Yes, but not the way you mean.”

  I raised one eyebrow.

  “The name she used is a prominent political family in Minnesota.” He stopped and licked his lips. It was almost as if he was afraid to say it aloud. “Murchison.”

  I raised both eyebrows.

  “Exactly my reaction,” Madison said in a lower tone. “Not possible. She’s mistaken. Plus, when I checked, we found no record of a guard or trustee with that name at that camp. What’s more, as far as we could determine, everybody in that camp’s administration is dead. Still, she could be right and the records are wrong or incomplete.

  “So who did she see or think she saw? We have no clue except, guess what? Research into the Murchison family tree reveals that a branch of the family with an almost identical name came from that part of Europe. I’m telling you this so you understand what Atria is and what it does and doesn’t do. A lot of the bits and pieces we get can only be classified as gossip, gossip that would be slanderous and even libelous if some kind of action ensued without incontrovertible proof. Documentation. This is all fragmented and very difficult. We aren’t interested in stirring things up unnecessarily or making nebulous accusations.”

  I love listening to lawyer talk. Sometimes. “I get it. Atria collects all this stuff and looks into it as time and resources permit, right? And most of it just gets filed away because no corroborating evidence shows up. Or it gets filed until some other fragment appears. Am I correct?”

  “You are. But there are the exceptions. Sometimes we get a name or a query from somebody that links to information in our files or from another organization that has sent us a query. And then there are possible links to missing art, to missing belongings of various kinds. The Nazis confiscated all kinds of stuff, a lot of which has been deliberately destroyed or is missing.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That’s a particularly thorny issue, I take it.”

  “The amount of money potentially involved is huge. Let me give you a hypothetical. I’ll say that you are living and working in Germany in 1940. You have money, and over months and years you’ve acquired a number of paintings by the Austrian painter, Gustav Klimt. Comes a knock on the door and a band of thugs roars through your house and confiscates a couple dozen of your paintings, knocking you
on your ass in the bargain. Today, you’re dead, your immediate family is likewise, but some of your descendants are alive and those heirs believe they have some rights to those paintings. You follow?”

  “Sure. After the war lots of stuff was recovered, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of art pieces, still unrecovered.”

  “Some of them,” Madison continued, “were sold, some are in museums or private hands with faulty provenances, and most of them are worth significant money.”

  “Define significant,” I asked.

  “The Klimt collection? Upwards of two hundred million U.S.” Madison swallowed the last of his drink.

  “Dollars? You’re exaggerating,” I said, staring across the table at the lawyer. To say I was startled would understate the case. A short unremarked private investigator living in the upper midwest rarely if ever comes into contact with such wealth. Particularly in the world of high art and culture.

  “Probably more by now. Well, last year, an old Polish fellow showed up in my office. He asked for a representative of Atria. That’s unusual. Most of my office people don’t know about Atria, much less my connection. I met with the man and he explained that he believed he had stumbled across a connection to somebody in Minneapolis who was somehow involved in prison camps during the 1940s. Maybe the man was a murderer,” he said.

  “He went on to state he might have evidence that somebody in town was profiting from events at one of the concentration camps active during World War Two. He further stated that his family home had been looted when they were sent off to the camp and he produced a list of their possessions.”

  Madison reached into his inside pocket and brought out an envelope. He fished out a single sheet of paper and unfolded it. When he did so, I recognized it. It was a copy, very much like two I already had, of a page from a small ledger that was once enclosed in a slipcase labeled “Seizures.”

  “Manfred Gottlieb,” I said, staring down at the sheet of paper.

  “Manfred Gottlieb,” echoed Madison.

  Chapter 16

  I looked at the piece of paper Madison had placed on the table between us. Then I looked at Madison. “Why do I get the feeling we’re dealing with dynamite here?”

  He didn’t smile. “Because we are. Mr. Gottlieb accused a family well-known in the Twin Cities of being connected to those long ago events. The Murchisons.”

  “But—”

  Madison raised one long finger, a move I’d seen him use in court. “And this is why we move so slowly and cautiously. Even one incorrect accusation like this can be disastrous to our work. Obviously, it’s highly unlikely that the man accused is still alive. But his family is and we’re not about to sully their reputations plural, without incontrovertible proof.”

  “This page here is not proof,” I murmured. We’d both lowered our voices even though there was no one sitting near our table.

  “Not by itself. If there were more pages, it would help. If we had the rest of the pages from what appears to be a ledger, that would help. Frankly, even with the whole ledger, assuming that it’s similar to those we know about, we might not have enough to actually accuse someone. The information could lead to some restitutions, however.”

  “Okay, I understand. The thing is, I’m really not interested in going after the descendents of whoever this is. They can’t be held responsible for acts committed before they were born, can they?”

  Madison shook his head. “I agree with you, except for one thing. This particular family, assuming again that Gottlieb’s information is correct, appears to have directly profited from those crimes.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “Ah, indeed,” said Madison. “Atria is following up on some additional leads, but I’m not very hopeful. I had the impression that Mr. Gottlieb had the rest of the ledger or at least more pages. But he wouldn’t say and he refused to tell or show me anything more without something in return.”

  “Like what?”

  Madison stared at me. “We didn’t get to that.”

  I stared at the wall behind Madison’s head. Then I told him what the woman Anne/Ann had described to me, how Mr. Gottlieb had wound up dead on the river ice. “That suggests to me that someone in this town is anxious to lay hands on and probably destroy the ledger.”

  “Watch your back, Sean.” We shook hands and Madison wheeled himself out of the bar. I presumed he had someone to help him or he would have asked. I finished my scotch, went into the darkening afternoon, and drove back to my office.

  Unlike many of my cases, the more I learned about the Gottlieb murder, and I had almost no doubt now that the woman Ann/Anne was telling me the truth about what she’d observed, the more certain I was that I was in imminent danger of getting in over my head.

  Back to my growing pile of index cards. An hour later, getting near supper time, it was dark, of course. Somebody once remarked that we P.I.s do our best work in the dark of the night. P.I.s and vampires. When somebody banged on my door, I slid open the lower left drawer where I sometimes keep a small gat. My friend, detective Ricardo Simon, made me remove the revolver I had affixed to the underside of the lap drawer, demonstrating that I could inadvertently plug somebody, which would be very bad for business. Besides, the landlord had insisted I unfasten the guest chair from where I’d screwed it to the floor.

  “Come,” I hollered when my visitor rapped again. The door opened and a man I didn’t know entered. He was bundled up against the cold and he was carrying a tool box.

  “I’m Jesse Toogood,” he said.

  “Okay,” I ventured.

  “From Electronics R Us? You wanted a sweep?”

  “Sure.” I waved him in. Madison had told me my phone was bugged. Later at the bar he’d admitted he had no evidence but he wanted to get my attention. So I’d called my friendly IT tech who worked for a well-known technical squad who specialized in internet and computer installations and repair. ERU was a moonlight operation I used occasionally for bugging and other electronic surveillance, things not strictly legal. So it followed they could purify my office if indeed Madison was right about a bug.

  “I was here earlier, but you were all locked up.”

  “Business. You got ID?” he was already fishing a card case out of his inside pocket. It was the same move a killer going for a shoulder holster would make. His business card had an odd blue squiggle in one corner that I recognized. To the casual observer it looked like he’d nicked the corner of the card with a ball point pen. To those few who knew, it was a mark that legitimized the carrier.

  “Make yourself at home. Just the one room is all I have.”

  Mr. Toogood dropped his big puffy coat on my guest chair and unpacked the tool box. He hooked a wand on a cable to a black box. Then he systematically went over my office from top to bottom, side to side and paid particular attention to the electronics on my desk.

  After twenty minutes he shrugged and said, “Nothing here. You’re clean as a new cue ball.”

  I thanked him, and Jesse Toogood packed up, dressed up and disappeared. I called Catherine and told her I was going home to Roseville tonight. The cats needed tending and I didn’t like leaving the house unvisited too many winter nights in a row.

  The drive home was uneventful, no vehicle appeared to be following me. No shots were fired in my immediate vicinity. My service had plowed out the driveway and the motion-sensitive perimeter light fixtures dutifully flashed on when I entered the driveway. I could tell the temperature was dropping. A few flakes of white stuff drifted down. I stuck out my tongue and tasted the cold icy snow as I put the key in the door and went into a warm house.

  My two-cat greeting committee was impatiently waiting at the door. They complained that I had been neglecting them in favor of more human contacts but that could have just been my impression. I don’t speak cat. For penance I opened a fresh can
of high-end cat food and gave them each a couple of morsels. They wolfed down the treats with hardly a pause, as though they figured their next meal would be a long time coming. The back-up supply of bowls of dry food were not quite empty.

  Moving into the kitchen I found a bottle of twelve-year-old Macallan and poured myself a drink. The good scotch went down smoothly, and I turned to the small pile of mail that had accumulated in my absence. I set aside two bills and went through city notices and several ads. After a quick scan of each, that all went into the recycle bin. I almost always scan the ads sent to me. One sometimes learns odd bits, such as a late night fast food restaurant changing its hours. Late night hunger sometimes comes with my business.

  I wrote checks from my household account for the two bills. Yes, I know there are electronic and automatic payment systems, but I like writing checks. It keeps me in touch with my money. Real money in and out, bank statements. It’s too easy to forget that income and outgo have real consequences with all the automation that pervades our lives. Just tap a few buttons. One day the process servers show up, the water and electricity are turned off and foreclosure happens. By then it’s a few dollars too late. Roseville streets are cold and inhospitable in the winter.

  I fired up my home computer and discovered I was overdue to change the furnace air filter. While I did that, a scenario built in my mind. Manny Gottlieb was trudging across the Stone Arch Bridge on that recent February night. Nobody had yet figured out why he was there in that snowstorm. He went over the railing, helped by two men, according to the mysterious Anne/Ann. Apparently the two murderers had been following Gottlieb. But why was the woman out there? Sure, she said she often took that walk late at night. But that night it was cold and storming, a near blizzard. What a coincidence!

  Baloney. My BS meter told me she was there because she was either following the two guys or she was following Gottlieb. That meant she must be involved at some other level. Of course, she could have been the one who levered Mr. Gottlieb over the rail and onto the river ice, but my instincts said no. I thought she presented the scene just as it happened, except for the things she was apparently leaving out. I thought the omissions might contain vital keys to a solution. I was going to have to look more intensely at this woman. Links. Circles within circles. Nevertheless, not to be forgotten was the lonesome fact that I only had her word and my gut for what had gone down out there on the bridge. That and the deceased Mr. Gottlieb.