“Hitchcock had it right, Coop. Think of how many movies it’s the husband or wife who offs the other spouse. Just because this guy was in Paris all week doesn’t mean he isn’t a prime suspect. Shit, we don’t even know exactly how many days she’s been dead. Besides that, someone with this kind of dough could hire a killer with his pocket change.”
“Well, what did you get out of Valerie during your fireside chat last night?”
“Precious little. Seemed to genuinely like the late Mrs. C., who hired her personally and relied on her for all kinds of intimate service. But the husband pays the bills, and she’s not about to throw that out the window so fast.” Mike was almost finished with his second muffin, the buttered topping covered over with some kind of strawberry preserve. “Hey, Mercer, might as well lift the lids on those little-Coop, what does your mother call useless little dust catchers like that stuff over there? Tchotchkes? Maybe Denise stored her coke in one of those.”
Chapman pointed at a gilt-trimmed bureau plat, only half in jest. It was completely covered by miniature porcelain snuffboxes. Half a dozen of them would have fit at once in the palm of Mercer’s hand, but he lifted the lids of several of them individually. I sipped on my coffee as I walked beside him, noticing that each box was hand painted with portraits of cavalier King Charles spaniels in a variety of regal backgrounds.
Above the table was a Degas, familiar to me from my Wellesley introductory art course and close enough in detail to the famous Foyer of the Dance that it had to be the study for the great painting that hangs in Paris.
Chapman was on his feet, wiping his hands with the heavy damask napkin. He was standing in front of a Picasso about four feet by six, his head cocked as he tried to make some sense of the Cubist representations. “I just don’t get it. Why would somebody pay millions of dollars for something like this, which isn’t supposed to look like anything anyway? I must have spent too much time in church. I haven’t liked any artists since Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Just give me a Madonna-I mean, the old Madonna-and I’m happy.”
I had circled the room and was back in front of the lilies. “You’d like Monet. Impressionism got its name from one of his paintings- Impression of a Sunrise. ” Chapman joined me to look at the vast canvas, one of the endless images of the same subject portrayed at different hours of the day in different variations of light.
“That one you’re looking at was painted at Giverny, just before his death. He was nearly blind.” Caxton’s voice startled us as we turned to look toward the entryway of the long room.
“Looks to me like most of the stuff painted in this century could have been done by a blind man. Mike Chapman, Homicide,” Mike said, advancing to shake Lowell Caxton’s hand and show his identification. “These are my colleagues- Detective Mercer Wallace, and Alexandra Cooper from the District Attorney’s Office.”
Caxton extended a hand to each of us. “I hope Valerie has made you comfortable. Perhaps you’ll allow me to step inside and freshen up for a moment before we get on with what you need to do.”
It was a reasonable request after a trans-Atlantic trip, and although Chapman would have liked to tail him into the private quarters of the apartment, we had no choice but to let Caxton disappear to his suite of rooms.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later he returned to the living room, opened a set of sliding pocket doors, and gestured the three of us into the library. The walls were lacquered in a rich shade of Chinese red, strikingly showcasing another Picasso, this time from the artist’s Rose Period. Bookcases were lined with sets of leather-bound volumes, valuable and rare, and assuredly untouched and unread. Some decorator’s idea of a complement to the art.
Lowell Caxton seated himself in the largest chair in the room as we took our places around him. “It’s a bit more intimate in here,” he said to no one in particular.
As he looked each of us over to size us up, waiting for Valerie to bring him the tea he had requested, we examined him as well. The articles I had seen in Lexis-Nexis gave his age as seventy-four. But he was trim and vigorous, with a full head of thick gray hair, and I would have guessed him to be no older than sixty-five. He remained in the clothes in which he had traveled-gray slacks, loafers without socks, a tennis shirt, and a pink cashmere sweater looped around his shoulders. The solid gold Cartier Pasha on his wrist was the only jewelry he wore.
Valerie delivered the tea on yet another small silver tray. “Close the doors after you, will you, Valerie?” Caxton asked. Her hands were still shaking as she backed out of the room, sliding the doors together by pulling the brass knob on each of the sections.
“Am I supposed to open this session by telling you how distraught I am by Deni’s demise?” he went on. “Or have you already found ample fodder in the tabloids to know that it wouldn’t be a very sincere way for me to begin? The flight home-even with the abbreviated flying time of a supersonic transport-was more than enough for me to shed whatever tears I had left. I didn’t kill her, although there’ll be plenty of her friends to suggest as much to you. But I certainly didn’t love her any longer, so you might as well know that from the outset.”
“You want to ask us anything, before I get started?” Chapman queried.
“I know everything about how and where she was found, Detective. After Valerie reached me with the news last night, I had my assistant make all the inquiries he could. I’m sure you’ll tell me whatever else you think it’s necessary for me to know.”
I had worked with Mike often enough to get inside his head. You couldn’t look at a situation like this without thinking you could easily find a motive for the husband to want the wife dead-money, business, infidelity, and in this instance, even more money. A contract hit in this kind of marriage would be cheaper than any alimony decision made by a judge or jury. But it was also so obvious that we were each thinking that it was too easy. Now the guy plays right into the theory by not even expressing interest in how his estranged wife was killed. He probably had more channels of access to whatever information he wanted than I had pairs of shoes.
Mike had two short-term goals. He needed to get as much information about both Caxtons, personal and professional, as he could, and he wanted to shove open the pocket doors so he could see whether anyone was coming or going into the private rooms of the apartment.
“It’s warm in here, Mr. Caxton,” Mike said, taking out his notepad and loosening his tie as he rose and walked toward the doors. “Mind if I open these for a little air?”
Caxton lifted a remote control panel from the table beside him. “Not necessary, Detective. I’ll simply adjust the room temperature. It stays much cooler in here without the summer sun beating through those glass windows off the park. Carry on. Tell me what you need to know.”
Whether we needed it all or not, the Caxton family history and the building of the art fortune had to be explored, in case they proved to be links to the murder.
Lowell Caxton III was the grandson of the Pittsburgh steel baron whose name he bore. The grandfather had been born in 1840 and was one of those great American success stories-a poor kid from a large family who rose from menial mill jobs to running a production plant before he was thirty. When he recognized the growing demand for steel, needed to build the railroads across the country, he borrowed all of his working-class relatives’ money and purchased a factory. In 1873, when another young fellow, named Andrew Carnegie, came along and began his acquisition of businesses which he later consolidated into the Carnegie Steel Company, Lowell Caxton never had to work again. He became an investor and speculator, and thereafter a philanthropist responsible for helping Carnegie build libraries and art museums all over the Northeast.