“Come to think of it, my apartment looks fine with a couple of NFL posters, a slightly used baseball signed by Bernie Williams, and an eight-by-ten glossy of Tina Turner that Miss Cooper gave me. Your stuff makes me wanna puke.”

“Shall we go back up to my office?” Daughtry asked.

Mercer and I started to follow him. Mike stretched out his arm to Daughtry’s companion, who remained seated as I started to walk away.

“Hi. Sorry to break this up. I’m Mike Chapman. Homicide. You are…?”

The attractive dark-haired man, who I guessed to be about forty years old, stood up and smiled, returning the handshake. “I’m Frank Wrenley. How do you do?”

“Well, well, well-Mr. Wrenley. And how do you do? Tell you what-c’mon upstairs with us. I got a few questions for you when we’re done with Mr. Daughtry.”

“Of course. I assumed you’d want to talk to me about Deni. I’m happy to try to help.”

Mercer whispered to me as we walked to the narrow staircase, “You and Mike go at Daughtry. I’ll baby-sit Wrenley till you’re done, so he doesn’t make any calls while he’s waiting. This is a rare opportunity to get him when he wasn’t expecting us.”

Mike and I settled into the dealer’s office with him. “Like I told you, we got a warrant to go through your gallery and warehouse. A team of detectives will be here shortly to do that. You can make this real easy on yourself if you wanna give us most of what we ask for, which are Deni’s business records and belongings, access to the contents of Omar’s locker, and things like-well, look at the papers for yourself.

“We’d also like to look through some of the paintings you’ve got stored here.”

“Anything in particular you’re looking for? Your taste in art, Mr. Chapman, is so hard for me to define.”

“Got any Rembrandts on hand?”

“So you’re joining the search for the mythical Holy Grail, too? Everybody’s looking for the big score. You’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery than finding that missing painting.”

“Then you won’t mind if we look, will you?”

“Certainly not.”

“Had you and Deni talked about it? I mean, about The Storm on the Sea of Galilee?”

“Many, many times. But so did everyone else in our business.”

“Seems to me,” Mike said, “that if I were an ex-con sitting on a hot item, my best bet would be to contact somebody else in the same shoes. I wouldn’t be likely to walk into a classy operation where they might give me up to the Feds just for talkin’ to them, but I’d sure be likely to sniff out some creep who’d done time and was completely amoral.”

“What do you want me to say, Detective? ‘Sticks and stones’?”

“Look, we know someone offered Deni the Rembrandt. And we even know about her meetings with Marco Varelli, to authenticate the chips.”

Daughtry met Mike’s stare head-on. “That’s the oldest trick in the book, Mr. Chapman. Varelli is dead. Don’t expect me to believe he summoned you to his bedside just before he had the big one. I doubt you ever spoke to him. Not much of a talker, that man. Try me again, harder this time.”

“Lowell Caxton told us about the hijacking of the Della Spiga paintings last June. Said to ask you why it made Deni so crazy.”

“Well, I assume the disappearance of a truckload of any artist’s work would make his dealer berserk. Caxton Due represented Della Spiga. The whole thing was rather odd. Nobody ever saw who stole the truck, so we don’t even know whether or not the thieves were armed. Deni had actually rented an eighteen-wheeler from a soda delivery company so the truck would be inconspicuous on the highway. After the drivers made a stop for coffee on the thruway, they came out of McDonald’s and the truck had disappeared.”

“Never found it?”

“To the contrary. It was found the next day, abandoned behind an old factory upstate. Not a thing missing. Either the thieves didn’t like Della Spiga or they were looking for cola and not art.”

“What did Deni think?”

“That first night? She was wild. Figured it had to be an inside job, someone who knew she was shipping fine art but disguising the delivery truck. When every painting was found intact, she calmed down and assumed the hijacking was just a coincidence. Amateur soda swipers foiled again.”

“So maybe somebody did think she had the Rembrandt and was slipping the stolen painting in with the transport of the Della Spigas?”

“One might have thought that to see how upset she got. But of course, Detective Chapman, the police who found the truck went through it and listed every item on it. No Rembrandt recovered. And Deni was far, far too relieved the next day to have been missing one great masterpiece.”

Mike jumped back a year in his next question.

“That trip to England that Lowell made alone the June before-the one that broke the marriage apart. What were you and Deni up to that kept her away, that kept her so busy here?”

“Try as you might, Chapman, you won’t mix me in this soup. Whatever it was, Deni never let me in on it. But you’re right, it was serious. Whoever called her, whoever contacted her-someone made an offer she couldn’t refuse. She withdrew from me completely and was very secretive. It bothered me at the time, but after a few days she changed her mind and went off to join Lowell. You obviously know the rest. I didn’t think any more of it. Figured she’d been onto a deal and that it must have fallen through. Happens all the time in this business.”

The receptionist buzzed on Daughtry’s intercom to tell him that more detectives had arrived.

Chapman stood up. “Why don’t you show my guys around?” Then he bent over the desk, the top of his fists pressed against the leather blotter. “Remember, it ain’t just me you gotta worry about, Mr. Daughtry. Mess with the cops and you’ve still got the boys on Eleventh Avenue to deal with- Knuckles Knox, Stumpy Malarkey, One-Lung Curran. They got ways I couldn’t get past the Supreme Court in six lifetimes.”

When Daughtry left the room, I turned to Mike. I was steaming. “Who the hell are you talking about? Bad enough I don’t know what you do when I’m not standing next to you. You can’t threaten people like that, and I can’t stand by and let you do it.”

“Not even once? I’ve waited a lifetime to say that to somebody. ‘Battle Row,’ this block used to be called. Those guys, Knuckles and Stumpy? Real hoodlums-used to scare my old man to death when he was a schoolboy. Relax, blondie. That gang broke up around nineteen thirty-two. Six feet under, all of ’em. Did I sound like Cagney? Did I scare you?”

Mike stepped to the doorway and motioned to Wrenley to come into the office and sit down. I introduced myself.

He was dressed in black from head to foot-collared polo shirt, linen slacks, tasseled loafers-and his jet-colored hair was slicked back, every strand in perfect placement. I guessed it was his style, not an expression of mourning.

“Hope you don’t mind some questions about Denise Caxton,” Mike began. “We understand you and she were quite close.” The edge in his voice with which he had addressed Daughtry was gone. It was clear to me that he was hoping to get Wrenley’s help with more personal information about the past year.

“Not a secret, Detective. I’d met Deni two or three years ago. After she and Lowell had their blowup last year, our relationship became more intimate.”

“You didn’t mind the competition?”

“Her husband, or do you mean Preston Mattox? I understood what it was about. Deni was just a kid when she hooked up with Lowell Caxton. She’d been faithful to him throughout the marriage, and don’t think there weren’t lots of opportunities for her to have a fling. After he embarrassed her with that episode in Bath, she was more than ready to spread her wings.

“And besides, she was still married to Lowell. She wasn’t very anxious to tie herself down permanently so quickly. We both seemed to get all the pleasure we needed out of each other’s company, professionally and personally.”