Cold Hit (15 page)

“I’ll tell you, Miss Cooper, I was sitting in the same room, looking at the same objects. I thought the sculpture was too kitschy to put in my own backyard. Turned out to be an original by Giambologna, the great Florentine artist. Worth close to ten million. Deni refused to sell it. Just shipped it home and installed it in Lowell’s bathroom. She wanted to remind him of the entire experience. Make it indelible.”

“I take it that was the beginning of the end?” “

Basta. Finito. Terminato
. Neither one of them was willing to forgive the other, and for Lowell it was a confirmation that they had been moving in separate directions for a couple of years. Deni had no idea if that was his first indiscretion — although I really doubt it. He’d finished the Pygmalion thing with Deni. He was ready to take on someone new.”

“Why didn’t she just walk away from him? Certainly she’d made enough money to go out on her own.”

“I suppose when you come from a background like Deni’s, there’s never quite enough to erase the fears that you’re going to find yourself back on the farm sowing soybeans in the dirt for the rest of your life.”

“With what she was sitting on? I can’t believe that.”

“It wasn’t a very attractive side of my friend, but she also wanted to take Lowell to the cleaners. Deni wanted some of the Caxton treasures as well, and she had no plans to walk away without them.”

“But she had no right to them, Ms. Seven. They’re clearly Lowell’s, aren’t they, except for some of the works acquired during the marriage?”

She looked at me as though I were an absolute idiot. “I’m not talking about the art in their home or in the gallery. Don’t you know anything about the Caxton operation? Because if not, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

“The Caxtons have been at this now for three generations. Lowell has such a tight grip on the collection that not even his employees know the extent of what he owns, or more importantly, where all the art is. Deni knew there were paintings stashed in Swiss vaults and even in an old Cold War bunker on a hillside in Pennsylvania. He moves his pieces in armored cars and by private jet.”

Deni’s friend was certainly devoted to her. I could see she was going to go on bashing Lowell as long as I’d listen.

“Are you aware that Three — you probably know it was his childhood name, and it made him crazy when Deni called him that — was never invited to join the Art Dealers Association of America?”

Again, I shook my head to tell her that I was not.

“In seventy-five, I think it was, and certainly before Deni, he was caught bugging the telephones of the most prestigious galleries in New York, long before hi-tech spying became a tool of the business world. He was checking on their inventory, as well as trying to get an idea of what their customers were searching for on the market. Lowell’s father had used a lot of his money to pay scholars to write catalogues raisonnés.”

“Sorry, you’ve lost me. I don’t know what they are.”

“They’re the key to individual artists and their works. Good ones are well researched and documented, and by controlling the catalogues of a particular artist, you control the price and value of his work. Many experts think there’s an aura of questionability about the Caxton catalogues, that histories and pedigrees have been altered for the family’s private gain. Several art historians have denounced the works publicly, which made Lowell furious. It threw into question his Vermeers, his Légers, his Davids.”

“But Deni thought she could get her hands on those paintings?”

“Well, yes — in part. She was also terribly frightened that she knew too much about them for Lowell to let her go. His first two wives had never really participated in his professional world. But once Deni learned it and loved it, he let her in. She knew things about Caxton and his father, and their manner of doing business, that Lowell regretted having told her once the bottom fell out. Her greatest fear — and she spoke of it to me often — was that he’d never let her walk away from him, knowing what she did about his dealings. She couldn’t stay with him, Ms. Cooper, but he wouldn’t let her go.”

I wondered if Marilyn Seven knew anything about Deni’s partnership with the late Omar Sheffield. “Do you have any idea how desperate your friend was to get rid of her husband?”

“About as anxious as you or I would be, if your life had been threatened like hers had.”

“How and when was
she
threatened?”

“Well, that answers that. I didn’t suppose Lowell told you about the letters Deni got last year, which practically drove her insane.”

“No, so far he hasn’t mentioned any letters to us at all.”

“I’ve brought you a copy of one of them, if you’d like to see it.”

Marilyn Seven withdrew a xeroxed paper from her slim purse and passed it across to me. The copy was a page of lined white paper, covered with neatly printed handwriting and addressed to Denise Caxton. I scanned it quickly.

My name is Jennsen, and I live in Brooklyn. I know you don’t know me, but I have been watching you since you got home from England. I know how you look like, and I know how to find you. Listen, if you go to the police about this, I will hurt you bad, or go back to Oklahoma and kill someone you really love. I know when you leave your house and go to W. 22nd St., so I could follow you. I know you get your hair cut at La Coupe and you eat dinner twice a week at Fresco on 52nd St. Your husband pays you $ 125,000 a month for your expenses. Are you getting this yet? I know where you buy your underpants and how much you pay for your wine. Now here’s what I want. Listen close. I want you to send $1,000 to my friend, who is in jail, and who’s address is on this letter. This is to show you that I am not kidding, by two ways. One is that I know every move you make, and the other is to show you that my best friends are locked up doing time, so you know I am not playing games. We know how to hurt people very bad. Lowell also told me who the five men are who are your lovers. Now you think I’m jiving? Send a check or money order to my friend Omar Sheffield, 96 B-1911 , Box 968 , Coxsackie Correctional Facility, Coxsackie, New York 12051.

REMEMBER NO POLICE. If you don’t send my friend the money, I will take charge by getting you in the near future. Include your phone number so we can talk.

I looked up at Marilyn Seven. “What did she do about this?”

“Certainly not call the police.”

“Did she do what this guy wanted?”

“What would
you
have done?”

“Look,” I said, my impatience growing. “It’s not a contest about us trying to match wits.
I
didn’t get this letter.”

“These letters, Ms. Cooper. A shoe box full of them. It was obvious to her that this man could only have gotten the detail about her from Lowell, and that Lowell had hired him to kill her. She knew she was being scammed, but of course she did as he told her.”

“She sent money up to the state prison?”

“You bet she did. Early and often. The faster she sent it, the faster the ante was raised. By the time the guy finally called her, she must have already sent him twenty thousand dollars. She was terrified, and asked him point-blank whether her husband had hired him to kill her. He confirmed it for Deni. Told her that Lowell was trying to torture her first, mentally, and that’s why he’d given this guy Jennsen so much information about her movements and whereabouts. They were planning a way for the hit to happen sometime when Lowell was abroad and Deni wasn’t in her apartment — almost exactly the way it
did
happen — so it couldn’t be traced back to Lowell.”

“But she kept the correspondence going, of course,” I said.

“To stay alive, and to turn the tables on her beloved husband. It was her idea to outbid Lowell on this deal, too — and to get the Jennsen fellow to kill Lowell before he murdered her.” Marilyn Seven leaned in and put her hand on top of mine. “I told her over and over again that she was insane, and that it would be a deadly mistake for her to play with fire. She wouldn’t listen to me, of course, and my insistence that she abandon her plan took her further and further away from me. I don’t think, in the end, that she really had anyone left that she could trust.”

“Bryan Daughtry?” I ventured.

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t dignify that question with a response.”

“Do you have any of the other letters that she received?”

“No, I never saw them. And I have no idea where she would have kept them. The first one was the only one she sent to me, when she wanted my advice. I don’t know if they’re at her home, or office, or in a safe deposit box. I felt you should know about them.”

She removed a fifty-dollar bill from her pocket and summoned the waiter to bring a check. “I’ll be at the hotel for a few days before going back home, if you need me for anything.”

“Under the name ‘Seven’?” I asked.

“Yes, of course.” She smiled. “Why, I suppose you tried to check up on me before we met, Ms. Cooper. It’s close enough to my real name — the Italian word for ‘seven.’ I used it briefly, almost thirty years ago, when I attempted a career on the stage. Did I stump you?” she asked, seemingly pleased by the idea.

“In fact, you did. We came up blank. Much too blank for someone of your means.”

“That
is
my name, in a fashion. I was actually born Marina Sette, in Venezia. My mother abandoned me when I was eighteen months old. Left my father and ran off with a very dashing American — Lowell Caxton.”

I suppose that I was unable to stifle a slight gasp.

“My father left Italy and came to the States, where his parents raised me while my mother raised her stepchild and had two more of her own with Lowell. She never glanced over her shoulder, not even to stop from being run over in that boating accident.”

I had grown up with the most loving mother on the face of the earth and could not comprehend how any woman could leave a child to take off with another man.

Marina Sette went on. “My father turned his automotive parts factory in Michigan into an integral part of the Ford Motor Company — Sette Moto — by the time I was six. If you can measure wealth in material ways — and believe me, I can’t — money has never been an issue.”

“But Lowell Caxton — surely he knew who you were.”

“Perhaps he’d have recognized me if I were as breathtaking as my mother must have been. But he never caught on. Not for a moment. Then, after the fireworks in England, when Deni was looking for every conceivable way to hurt him, she couldn’t resist telling him exactly who I was.”

“And his reaction?”

“I wanted it to be rage, of course. I wanted it to cause him to agonize over me — or at least, if he didn’t care about my feelings, he should regret the loss of my husband as a rather substantial client. As I should have expected, all I got was indifference.

“Surely you can understand why I thought Deni was on such a treacherous course with her pen pal. After all, there was no need to go outside the family.” Marina Sette removed her cigarette from the holder and crushed it in the ashtray on the table. “I could have killed Lowell Caxton myself.”

Laura stopped me on my way back to my desk, half an hour after I had left Mercer in front of the Four Seasons Hotel. It was almost three and I was making my first appearance of the day at the office. “McKinney was looking for you. He’s assigned someone to the investigation of the dead guy they found in the rail yards last night.”

“Tell him to listen to his voice mail. I called him this morning to tell him it’s part of my case. As nicely as you can say it, Laura, tell him to keep his hands off my corpses, okay? Boss back from Albany yet?”

“Rose said not to worry. He’s in a meeting all afternoon with some of the lawyers on that foreign bank scandal. They’re offering millions of dollars of forfeitures — Battaglia hasn’t even asked about your case since he returned. But you’ve got an unexpected visitor, Alex. Mrs. Braverman is back. I’ve had her in the waiting area since lunchtime, but she won’t leave and she won’t talk to anyone else. You’re the only one who can help her.”

“Tell Max to bring her in. I don’t think I’ve seen her in six months, have I?”

“Got that search warrant ready for me yet?” Chapman asked. I knew he’d come down to meet me when he had finished at the M.E.’s Office, but I hadn’t expected him to walk through my door quite so soon.

I lowered myself into my chair and groaned. “Slow down. I just walked in and I’ve got some social work to do. Just stand by for a few minutes. You’re about to meet my favorite witness.”

“Do not ever go to an autopsy of someone run over by a freight train. I’ve seen some pretty gruesome sights, but this was like chopped—”

“Spare me the details. The photographs will be more than I need to know.” It was mandatory for one of the assigned detectives to be present during the medical examiner’s autopsy proceedings on a possible homicide victim.

Max walked in, leading a very obese elderly woman on her arm. Mrs. Braverman was wearing a garishly colored sundress and a chartreuse straw hat with an enormous brim.

“Alexandra, darling, I’m so glad you got down here in time to see me.” The octogenarian dropped Max’s hand and waddled across the room to embrace me as I came out from behind the desk. “And who’s this handsome young man?”

“Michael Patrick Chapman, ma’am, Miss Cooper’s favorite detective,” he replied, giving her his best and brightest grin.

“Is he on
my
investigation now?” she asked me.

“He’s the man. I brought him in specially for you. He’s solved hundreds of these cases. What’s been going on since the last time you were here?”

She plopped into one of the leather armchairs opposite me, while Mike leaned against a file cabinet and listened to her story. “You were right about Christmas and New Year’s, Alexandra. They must have gone away for the holidays because I didn’t have any problems after I saw you. Then, of course, I went to Boca to be with my son and grandchildren for a few months. Now, ever since I’m back, they’re making life miserable for me.”

“Tell Detective Chapman who they are, Mrs. Braverman.”