Cold Hit (20 page)

“Excuse me, are you Wakim? I’m Alex Cooper, one of the D.A.’s working on Ruth’s case. We’re almost done, but I’m going to need you to go back to Carol’s office until we finish the interview, okay?” Without protest, he handed me a soda and asked me to give it to Ruth, and walked back to the elevators. I didn’t want him anywhere around when I explained to Ruth that she wasn’t going home with her boyfriend.

Sergeant Maron and Detective Kerry Schrager arrived within minutes. “This could get ugly. I’ve got a very unhappy teenager here who needs to make a court appearance in Queens. Just stand by while we break it to her, okay? And then you can help me get transportation for her.”

I opened my office door to walk in. Maron and Schrager stayed in the doorway, and Ruth immediately sensed this was trouble.

“Why don’t we go back to a couple of basic questions, Ruth. What’s your date of birth?”

“I told you, I’m nineteen,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder at the cops. “Why are these people here?”

“I didn’t ask how old you were, Ruth. Tell me the year you were born.”

She was smart, but like many of us, lousy at math. The subtraction was off, and the year she gave would have made her sixteen.

“Your mother tells me that you’re only fifteen. Is that true?”

Ruth picked up a copy of the Penal Law from the top of my desk and threw it toward the window, missing my right ear by a couple of inches. “I
hate
my mother. All right, y’all, is this what you want to hear? Bruce Johnson didn’t rape me, okay. Bruce Johnson gave me ten bucks to get him off, and you know what? I did it. And you know what else? It wasn’t the first time.”

The tears began to flow. “Wakim woulda killed me if he caught me in that room with Bruce. And Wakim don’t ever give me nothing. No money, no clothes, no presents. You woulda made up a story, too, if it was your ass that woulda got broke.”

I spoke softly to Ruth as I tried to give her some tissues. “You just can’t go into a court of law, swear to tell the truth, and then lie about something. I realize Bruce is a bad guy, but you can’t put him in jail to save yourself. How old does Wakim think you are?”

She was sniffling. “He know the truth. He know I’m fifteen.”

“You understand that
he
can be arrested for having sex with you, because you’re underage? When you try to act like a big girl, Ruth, you’re gonna get stuck with the consequences.” I paused. “Your mother’s down the hall.”

She got up from her chair, shouting curses at the top of her lungs and trying to push past the detectives. I told Kerry to stop her. I made her sit down and explained that she had to go before the judge in Family Court, since she had absconded from the program and was wanted, AWOL.

“You can do this the easy way, like a young lady. I’ll let you leave here with your mother, and put you in a taxi to go to Queens. Or you can do this the hard way. That means the detectives would have to handcuff you and take you there like a prisoner.”

“Well, you can all go screw yourselves, ’cause I’m not going anywhere with her or with any of you.” She was screaming again and kicking the side of my desk. “I don’t care what you do with me, ’cause I’ll just run away again and Wakim’ll take me home.”

Sergeant Maron raised a pair of handcuffs and looked at me questioningly. “I guess that’s the way our customer wants to go.”

Ruth looked me straight in the eye and spat across the desk, hitting an old indictment on top of a pile of papers. “And you, you bitch, I hope you get what’s coming to you. I hope you—”

“Attitude,” I said. “Attitude from a fifteen-year-old. Save your breath, Ruth. You know how lucky you are to have a mother who cares about you and who—”

“Where’s Wakim?” She was screaming now, at full pitch. “I wanna go home with Wakim.”

While Kerry Schrager cuffed Ruth behind her back, I called Witness Aid to make sure that Margaret Feerick, one of our social workers, could go with the detectives and Mrs. Harwind to Family Court. Pat McKinney came to my doorway and started yelling over Ruth’s wail. “What the hell is going on in here? This is an office, Cooper, and the rest of us are trying to get some work done.”

I asked Sergeant Maron to go to Carol’s waiting area, find Wakim, read him the riot act about hanging out with a minor, and send him on his way.

Eventually, the miserable troupe of characters was ready to leave the office, with Ruth Harwind in tow. By the time I got them off to court, contacted Bruce Johnson’s parole officer to find out if we could have his parole revoked for statutory rape — the sexual acts with an underage teen — wolfed down a light yogurt, and dealt with the stack of messages on Laura’s desk, it was a quarter of five and time to go to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

With summer vacations in full swing, the elevators were practically empty as I rode down to the lobby. I chatted with some of the secretaries who were walking out onto Hogan Place with me, then made the left turn onto Centre Street for the short walk to McFadden’s office.

The area in front of the Supreme Court, Civil Division, had been under renovation for almost a year in an effort to convert a cement triangle into a small green park.

I crossed with the light and had just passed in front of the plywood frame of the construction area when a dilapidated livery cab with tinted windows veered across the sparse line of cars moving north on Centre Street. Brakes squealed and horns blasted, so I picked up my head to see what was happening.

The gypsy cab was coming directly at the sidewalk, where I was trapped between a parked police car and the wooden fencing behind me. The driver slammed into the patrol car, which jumped the curb and was catapulted toward me, as I flattened myself against the plywood boards. The marked police vehicle caught its right fender on the fire hydrant in its path, but as the left fender made contact with the lumber, the fencing gave way and I fell backward into a small ditch.

My embarrassment was greater than my discomfort as I lay on the ground in the dirt, my heart racing and my lip quivering. Three court officers had seen the accident from the steps of the courthouse and came running down to check if I was all right.

“Are you a juror, ma’am? You’re gonna have some great lawsuit against the city,” the first one to my side remarked.

“I’ll be fine,” I said as they helped me to my feet. I wiped pebbles out of my hair and brushed the soot off the rear of my pale aqua suit. There were long scratches on my calves and one of my elbows was bleeding.

“Did you get a license off that car?” one of the men asked me, as onlookers gathered to see what the disturbance was about. “We’ll help you make out the police report.”

“No, thanks. I couldn’t see the plate at all.” But I had no trouble making out the face of the driver.

“Must’ve been a madman,” the second guy said. “Did you hear him?”

I shook my head to indicate I had not. But as I thanked the officers and continued on my way to Kim’s building, the driver’s words — “You’re dead meat, bitch” — were still reverberating in my ears.

I walked into the conference room after clearing security on the ground floor. Mike and Mercer were exchanging war stories with four very buttoned-down federal agents while they waited for me to arrive. I didn’t need a mirror to tell me what was obvious from the expression on Mike’s face as he looked up to see me.

“Mother of — jeez, what the hell happened to you? That picture’s got ‘line of duty’ written all over it. Someone messes
me
up like that and I could go out on three-quarters disability pay tomorrow.”

Mercer came over to examine the scrapes on my arm and ask whether I was all right.

“Yeah, I tripped into a hole on my way over from the courthouse.”

“All those years of ballet lessons and you’re a regular twinkletoes. You got four city blocks to walk here, what kinda hole we talking about?”

“I’ll explain later. Let’s get going here.”

“You’ll explain now, blondie.”

“Ran into somebody who doesn’t like me. Wakim Wakefield, a forty-something ex-con. Took his fifteen-year-old plaything away from him this afternoon and he didn’t appreciate it.” I told them a short version of the story.

“Just another friggin’ Ponce de Léon looking for his fountain of youth,” Mike said. “Let’s call in a police report on your hit-and-run attempt.”

“No,” I said firmly. “Just leave it alone. I’m not hurt. And this’ll blow over by the time he goes out tonight and finds himself another teen angel. It couldn’t have been anything more than chance that he saw me on the street as I was leaving and took out his frustration on me. I hate to tell you, but some cop’s going to walk out of Central Booking later tonight and find a radio car that got bashed up worse than my pride. Point me to the ladies’ room and give me a little time to make myself presentable.”

Special Agent Rainieri chose not to delay the discussion until my return, since I had already kept the group waiting an extra twenty minutes. He seemed to be speaking in answer to a question one of the detectives had asked. “Yeah, we had a turncoat. That’s what started the whole investigation. Seems he got cheated out of a very big sale and decided to rat out some of the other dealers in the pack.

“The point of these rings, you know, is to keep the prices of the artworks at auctions way down. One of them buys the painting at the public sale, then resells it at a vastly greater price — usually to a private client — and splits the big profit with his — or her — small clan of coconspirators.”

“Denise Caxton?”

“She was a player all right. Don’t forget, not only do we have ordinary business receipts and phone records, but we’ve got tapes of all the telephone bidding that goes on during an auction house sale. And the expense statements and each gallery’s credit agreements.”

I had to remind Mike that beyond the social cachet and great expense connected with the grand auctions, art was one of the only objects in the world that could be purchased in any currency and from any location.

“Do you know who her cohorts were in these deals?”

The only female agent present, Estelle Grayson, answered. “She moved in and out of a few partnerships. Lowell Caxton didn’t mess much with auctions, and didn’t run with the pack. He has always had his own sources and paid dearly for them. Doesn’t leave much of a paper trail, and didn’t mix well in the sandbox with the other kids.”

“Bryan Daughtry?” I asked.

“He’s everywhere in this. Not up front, not sitting there with a paddle in the air. But he was pumping cash into her operation and trying to guide her into play with some of this very contemporary art inventory.”

“Any names you can give us connected with the auction investigation?”

“Denise Caxton spent a lot of time at events this year. Sometimes she was with a personal client, a big collector.” Rainieri referred to his file and gave us a list of names, none of which sounded at all familiar. “Often she brought a friend or escort, and it’s hard to tell if there’s any business purpose instead of a social one. Chapman says you’ve been talking to Mrs. Caxton’s friend Marina Sette. She’s a figure at these things. Could be she’s just a big spender.

“Two of the men Denise had been socializing with also show up — Frank Wrenley and Preston Mattox. Again, one’s an antiques dealer and one’s an architect, so we’ve got subpoenas out for their records, too. Nothing in on them yet. We just don’t know if they’re around for the fun or the profit.”

“Well, do they buy anything?”

“Wrenley does. But that’s a new twist, new buzzword in the auction world. It’s called ‘cross-marketing.’ So, when Sotheby’s has a sale of Impressionists, for example, they don’t start the program off with a Monet. Last spring at their big show, the first piece sold was a pair of silver soup tureens made by a French silversmith in the eighteenth century. Used to belong to J. P. Morgan. Went for more than seven million bucks. The houses are trying to lure art collectors into new passions.”

“Wrenley bought those tureens?”

“No, no. But he’s shown up often and bought a lot of silver pieces — old French royalty. And Denise Caxton had Preston Mattox bidding on a set of murals out of an old Scottish estate. So we haven’t reached a point of figuring whether this was business or romance.

“Anyway, Kim asked us to start making connections between Mrs. Caxton and anyone who’d have a reason to do her in. We’re looking, and a few months down the road, when we have all the paper we need, something might leap out at us. In the meantime, if you guys have subpoenaed some of the same phone and business records that we did, we can cut through a lot of this and give you our copies. Maybe you’ll find things that wouldn’t mean anything to us.”

I fished through my overstuffed pocketbook to pull out copies of the file folders with the subpoenas inside. The bag had turned upside down in my fall and was even more disastrously messed up than usual.

“I don’t know how she finds anything in there,” Chapman said as I clasped lipstick, a compact, a handkerchief, Tic Tacs, four pens, and a wallet in my left hand, trying to free up the folder with my right. “What do you know about the Gardner Museum heist?”

“Not our turf. We’ve talked to the team who’ve worked it for practically ten years, just ’cause they’re figuring the stolen items have got to surface somewhere before too long. So they’re watching the auction houses pretty closely, too. D’y’all know about Youngworth and Connor?”

More than anything, Mike hated telling a Fed that there was something about which he was ignorant. He wouldn’t say no to them, so I did.

“There are two guys in Boston, William Youngworth and Myles Connor. Youngworth’s an antiques dealer — been in and out of the can on minor things — and Connor’s a master art thief. Both of these men were in jail when the Gardner job was pulled, but word is, if they weren’t the brains behind the theft, they certainly knew about it.

“Last year Youngworth claimed that he could broker the return of the missing Rembrandt for the five-million-dollar reward the FBI put up, along with immunity for him and his pal. You know about the chips?”

Another thumbs-up for Joan Stafford. “Sure,” said Chapman, puffing. “Know all about the chips. Those assholes cut the painting right out of the frame.”