“I take it you’re single?”

“Always have been,” Wrenley answered.

“How’d you and Mrs. Caxton meet?”

“When I moved most of my business interests to New York-”

“What’s the business?”

“Antiques. High end. Furniture, silver, nineteenth-century for the most part.”

“Where’d you move here from?”

“Palm Beach, Detective. Grew up in Florida, in the Keys. Set up shop there, but I was always on the road. Auctions in England, France, Italy, and of course, New York. I still keep a place on the water down there, but I live here now.

“I saw Deni long before I met her. She was hard to miss- not just her looks but her spirit and energy. Always in the chase for a great find, and in those days, something to show Lowell how much she had learned from him.”

Mike tried the man-to-man thing. “Never came on to her before she split with him? Never asked her out, called her, till after the Bath scandal?”

“I never called her then, Mike. It was Deni who called me. We’d been to auctions together and gotten to know each other a bit. I’d asked her for advice about paintings when I was making acquisitions for particular clients. Nothing social. After she flew home from England that time, she was determined to make a statement to her friends back here. Called me and invited me to go to a couple of dinner parties with her. It almost began as a game, for both of us. I never imagined I’d fall in love with her, nor she with me.”

“What was the story with the other guys?”

“There were lots of men pursuing Deni. I’d have been an idiot not to think that would happen. I suppose my most serious rival was Preston Mattox. Had an airtight way of getting under my skin.”

“Why Mattox more than anyone else?”

“Ever hear of something called the Amber Room?”

“Yeah,” Mike answered. “Know all about it.”

“Mattox was convinced that Lowell Caxton had smuggled some of the panels out of Europe and had them hidden somewhere. He’s an architect, world-class. Deni said he had this dream-you ought to talk to him about it-of creating his chef d’oeuvre with remnants of the room. I don’t know whether he was interested in her or in what she could lead him to. But that possibility made her furious whenever I suggested it.

“Look, I’m on the road a lot of the time. I never expected her to sit home doing her needlepoint, waiting for me to come back to town. She knows-sorry, she knew-that I dated other women when I was in Europe, and that was fine with her. She’d been tied down too long to care about that kind of thing right now.”

“So, what brings you here?” I asked. There was nothing in Daughtry’s world that seemed remotely connected to the nineteenth century.

“I wasn’t invited to Deni’s funeral, as you probably already know. Bryan and I are old friends, and he knows how devastated I was by her death. I just wanted to talk, reminisce, try to make some sense of it. May I call you Alex? When you catch the bastard who did this, Alex-” Wrenley paused, then dropped his head and shook his hand back and forth, as though asking us to wait a few moments before he spoke. “No point in my going on. There’s nothing you can do to him in a court of law that would resemble any kind of justice.

“The newspapers said the police thought she was sexually assaulted. Is that true?”

“Probably,” Chapman answered.

He lowered his head again. “She was so loving, so-God, I can’t bear to think of any animal touching her, hurting her.” Again he paused. “There must be something I can do to be useful.”

“Let me have your numbers,” Mike said, taking his notepad out of his pocket. “There’s a lot more I’m gonna need to talk to you about as this thing unravels. As soon as we sort through some of the business records and evidence that’s developing, I’ll give you a call and set up an appointment, okay?”

Wrenley removed a business card from his wallet, added his home telephone to the number on it, and passed it to Chapman.

“Want me out of the way here? Sounds like you’ve got things to do with Bryan.”

“D’you know that Mrs. Caxton was being blackmailed? Threatened by a man in prison?”

“Sure I did. It terrified her. She was convinced Lowell was behind it.”

“Got any idea why she hired that guy Omar and had him working here with her?”

“It made me furious, actually. Bryan can tell you. I had dozens of arguments with Deni about Omar. And I wasn’t sorry to see him turn up in a ditch, Mike. But she thought it was her best protection against Lowell, sort of an insurance policy.”

“She’d have been a very rich widow if Lowell had died first, wouldn’t she, Mr. Wrenley?”

“Take a trip with me to Palm Beach, Mike. You want rich widows? I didn’t have to come to New York to catch myself one of those, if that’s your implication. They’re as thick as palmetto bugs down there.”

“Sorry about Denise, Mr. Wrenley.” I offered my hand as he stood up to leave.

For the rest of the afternoon, Bryan Daughtry led the detectives through the beginnings of a painstaking search of the art inventory in the gallery and adjacent warehouse. I sat in his office as he produced much of the documentation requested in the subpoena, reading and xeroxing stacks of bills and papers, the endless figures blurring my vision by the close of the day.

“You guys need me for anything?” I asked Mercer at six fifteen. “I’m supposed to go to dinner and the ballet tonight, if you can carry on without me.”

“Scat. We’ll grab some chow when we leave here, and see if we can catch up with the Crime Scene guys at Varelli’s studio. I’ll leave a message on your machine if we find anything interesting. You around tomorrow?”

I was tired, dismayed by the dead ends we kept meeting in this case, and glad the following day was Friday. “I’ll be in all day. I’ve got a ticket on the seven-thirty evening flight for the weekend, but I feel guilty leaving you with all this hanging.”

“Nothing you can do, Coop, till we give you a perp. Be on that plane. We’ll be talking to you before that.”

I went out to my car, squared the block, and fought the tunnel traffic of Jersey commuters going north on Tenth Avenue to begin their ride home. After I passed the entrance, I continued up to Sixty-fourth Street, turning to park in the cavernous garage below the Lincoln Center complex. Although the Metropolitan Opera House was usually dark during the month of August, there was a gala performance this evening, with pieces that the ballet company was staging for an international tour that was about to begin.

There were tiered sections in the underground lot, each identifiable by an enormous band of colored paint that wound around the walls of that area. In my fatigued state, I kept trying to think of a memory device to help me recall that I was directed up the ramp to the red-striped portion of the garage, and parked in the fifth row away from the door, behind a column boldly labeled 5.

I joined the line of patrons to prepay the parking ticket and took the escalator upstairs. Natalie Moody and her party of friends had already been seated in the Grand Tier Restaurant, below the immense Chagall mural looking out over the plaza. The group was ordering their dinners as I arrived, so I chose the grilled salmon and we chatted and ate before moving downstairs to take our seats in the orchestra.

Few things are as capable of transporting me from the images of violence that permeate my working days as is ballet. I have studied dance for almost as long as I have walked, and have continued to take lessons as both a form of regular exercise and a medium of escape from some of the seamy underside of life that I encounter on the street. Had I had the talent, I would rather have been a prima ballerina with American Ballet Theatre than almost anything else in the world.

So I sat back in my seat, ready to take refuge in this fantasy world, as the crystal chandeliers rose into the ceiling of the opera house and the curtain went up on the first piece. Victor Barbee made a rare appearance to partner the exquisite Julie Kent in a pas de deux from Swan Lake. The audience responded wildly with more than six curtain calls, and for half an hour I forgot about Denise Caxton. The second act featured Alessandra Ferri with the dazzling Julio Bocca in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, and I lost myself completely in the perfection of their pairing.