The Fine Art of Murder (14 page)

“How’d it go?” Brock asked as I started the engine.

“Better than I expected.”

“So the bank lady told you some stuff about Ms. Jordan?”

“Seems she thought of Stacey as a daughter. Her murder hit her pretty hard.”

“The boss called while you were inside. He says he couldn’t get a hold of you.”

“I wish he’d stop being such a—”

“He’s just worried about you, that’s all.”

“I know.”

“And as long as you keep investigatin’ and the killer’s still out there, you’re gonna run into him sooner or later. That’s all I’m sayin’. Neither one of us wants you to get hurt.”

As we came to a stoplight, I turned to Brock. “Thanks.”

“So are we goin’ home now or what?” he asked.

“No, we’ve got one more stop.”

***

The Palmer House Apartments was a retirement home unlike any I had seen before. Situated on a street corner in a gentrified section of downtown, it looked more like an upscale hotel. Beneath a green awning stood a doorman wearing a red jacket with shiny gold buttons. While Brock waited in the car, I walked into the lobby, where a security guard called upstairs to announce me before directing me to her room.

I took the elevator to the eighth floor and knocked on the door. A nurse in a white uniform answered.

“Are you Mrs. Sullivan?”

“Yes. Is Mrs. Davidson feeling well enough to talk?”

“About what?”

“I’m investigating the death of her daughter and was hoping she might have some information that would help me.”

The nurse shook her head. “Don’t you think this is too soon to be interrogating the poor woman? Besides, I saw in the news that the killer’s already been arrested.”

“There’s a man being held but he hasn’t been formally charged, yet.”

From just inside the apartment, a woman’s voice called out weakly, “For Pete’s sake, Josephine, let her in!”

Meekly, the nurse stepped aside and held the door open for me.

The woman I saw sitting on the couch looked to be in good health. She was rosy cheeked and had a full head of grey hair.

She waved at me and said, “Come in, dear. Sit down. Can I have Josephine get you some tea?”

“No, no, I’m not going to bother you for long. I just have a few questions.”

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you’re investigating my daughter’s death but I read that the killer’s already been caught. It’s that Randolph Pierce, the man she worked for in Edina . . . isn’t it?”

“Mr. Pierce claims that he’s innocent and has hired me to find the real killer. Besides,” I said, repeating myself, “he hasn’t been charged, yet.”

“Oh, my. Well, anything I can do to help. I certainly don’t want the wrong person to pay for my daughter’s death.”

“Did your daughter feel threatened while she was working for the Pierce family?”

“Well, I can tell you she and Mr. Pierce butted heads often. For some reason, he thought she was going to write a tell-all book. And you know how that family loves their secrets. But Stacey wasn’t afraid, if that’s what you mean.”

“Can you tell me anything about her association with a man named Antoine Rousseau?”

“You mean the Frenchman? All I know about him is that he was a perfectionist and was very generous to her.”

We talked a bit more about her friends, ex-boyfriends, and possible enemies, but her mother would just smile and say, “Everybody loved my Stacey.”

I felt the nurse’s hand on my shoulder from behind. “She’s getting tired. Maybe it’s time for you to leave.”

We said our good-byes and she invited me to come and see her again. On the way to the door, I looked around and asked Josephine, “Was Stacey paying for all this, or is there insurance?”

“Only Medicare, but her medical bills are astronomical. Her daughter was an angel and paid for everything else. I don’t know where she got the money, but she told me not to worry—in the art community, there’s plenty of money to go around.”

“She didn’t tell you where the money was coming from?”

“She’d recently started working at the Pierce estate and at his gallery as well. I tried telling her she was spreading herself too thin, but she kept saying she needed the money for her mother. I assumed she was being paid very well.”

“Did she talk to you about Randolph Pierce? Or Antoine Rousseau?”

“A little.”

I tried not to look too anxious. “Did she say anything about having an argument with Mr. Pierce?”

“There wasn’t just one. She told her mother he was an arrogant egotist.”

“And what did she say about Mr. Rousseau?”

“She liked him better than Mr. Pierce.” Josephine laughed to herself. “At first she was impressed with his credentials, and the fact that he was a Frenchman seemed to sort of excite her. She thought he was very . . . continental. That was the exact word she used. But then, after a while, she found his obsessive-compulsiveness to be unbearable. Everything had to be perfect. His suits, his hair, even Stacey’s clothes. That man drove her crazy.”

“Yes, I’ve met him. He is very fastidious. The last time I saw him, he was standing outside a gallery in the middle of the day and looked like he was going to a formal dinner.”

“He must be loaded. The money he’s spent on his art collection—”

“He has a private collection?”

“Oh yes. He swore Stacey to secrecy. Told her that he’s dedicated his life to tracking down specific pieces. One time, he was working on the restoration of a villa in Spain. He heard that a Goya he’d been looking for since the nineties had been discovered, and he took off. He spent the next few months tracking it down and finally convinced the owner to sell.”

“Do you mind if I take notes?” I asked.

“Not at all. I’m not telling you anything that I wouldn’t tell the police if they asked. But no one’s been around to ask a single thing about that beautiful girl.”

I took my note pad out of my purse. Now that I was getting new information, I couldn’t afford to forget a single bit of it.

***

“Any luck?” Brock asked as I got back into the car.

“Let’s head home. I’ll tell you along the way.”

Brock looked at his watch. “Do you think we’ll make it in time for my six o’clock workout?”

“Traffic seems to be moving well. I don’t see why not.”

***

After dropping Brock off, I pulled over and called Dean Bostwick. He was out of the office but the officer on duty gave me his cell number.

“Bostwick here.”

“Dean, it’s Katherine Sullivan.”

“I was wondering why I didn’t recognize the number.”

“Have you talked to Randolph Pierce today?”

“Right after he took the polygraph. I don’t know how you did it but . . . it was a big help.”

“And the DNA?”

“Oh, he gave that up, too. We even hooked up his lawyer—your daughter. Both parties couldn’t have been more cooperative.”

“And?” I hated that he made me ask.

“They passed with flying colors. But I have to tell you, I was surprised that your daughter was his alibi—”

“So when do you release Randolph?”

“He’s still our number-one suspect. So I’m holding him until I’m one hundred percent satisfied that he’s innocent.”

“But he passed the polygraph.”

“Come on, Katherine, you know those machines and tests aren’t perfect.”

“But you can’t just continue to hold him without charging him.”

“You want me to charge him?”

“That’s not my point. Even a seventy-two-hour hold would be up by now.”

“Let’s say I’m keeping him in protective custody, at least until the DNA test comes back.”

“Protecting him from what?”

“Taking off!”

It seemed the wheels of justice moved slower with the introduction of each new technique instead speeding up. Some still claimed that DNA testing was junk science.

“But you still owe me,” I said. “You agreed to share information if I got Pierce to take the test. Can we meet in your office tomorrow?”

I expected him to start handing me excuses but he didn’t. Instead he said, “How’s two o’clock?”

“I’ll be there.”

After hanging up, I called Lizzie to tell her I wouldn’t be home for dinner and drove to Nathan’s office.

***

“Knock, knock.”

“Hey!” he said looking up from his desk.

“What kind of a security business doesn’t have a system wired up in their own office? There was no one out front and I just walked in. I could have been a serial killer, a burglar, or a—”

“Okay, I get it. The damn thing just quit today. It should be up and running tomorrow.”

I couldn’t let it go. Not after he’d insisted I take Brock along with me for protection. “Tomorrow isn’t today . . . now is it?”

Nathan came around his desk, laughing. “Enough already.” Then he hugged me. “It’s good to see you, even if you just came to chew me out.”

“No, I’m here to discuss this case with you. The fact that I got to lecture a security expert about security was just an added bonus.”

“So should we talk here or over dinner?”

“Please—no more food today. Brock and I had a big lunch; I’m still full.”

“That boy can sure put it away, can’t he?”

I decided not to tell Nathan that Brock was a foodie. It made me feel that I’d bonded with the big guy in a way no one else in the office had. “Let’s talk here, but I will take a Coke from that machine over there . . . please.”

“You got it. Make yourself comfortable.”

I hooked my purse on the coatrack in the corner, unzipped my jacket, and hung that up, too. It had been a long day, and at that moment, I was uncomfortable in my clothes and skin. The collar of my blouse felt restricting, the button on my jeans pulled, and my new shoes had rubbed blisters. I dragged a second chair over and put my feet up.

Nathan walked into the room with a Coke in each hand, and when he saw me like that, he chuckled. “This getting old crap is for the birds, isn’t it? I swear every day there’s another ache in another region of my body.”

“Lizzie and the kids never give me a free pass when I complain and I’m not giving you one. If you think old, you are old.”

He handed me the soda. “You try being around all these young folks. It just gets to me sometimes.”

“Well we can grumble amongst ourselves, but we can’t let the youngsters see us sweat.”

“I hear that.”

We relaxed a minute before he started.

“So what happened in Minneapolis?”

I told him about going to Stacey’s house. It really wasn’t breaking and entering if we had a key. Right? I could tell Nathan didn’t agree with my logic, but he kept his opinion to himself and just nodded. When I got to the part about finding the ledger, he got excited.

“Where is it? Did you bring it with you?”

“It’s in my purse.” I pointed to the coatrack.

He jumped out of his chair and grabbed my bag, but instead of rooting around for the book, he handed it to me. I appreciated his respect for my privacy.

“Are your prints all over it?”

“Come on, you talk like I’m an amateur. No, I was very careful.”

“I have some gloves here. Hold up a minute.”

He went to a large filing cabinet by the door and pulled out a box of latex gloves. Then he took out two pairs and handed one to me before removing the book from the plastic bag.

I reluctantly took my feet off the chair so Nathan could sit. As we started reading through the entries together, neither one of us said a word. When we came to the last page, it was obvious we didn’t understand what we’d just read.

“Do you recognize any of these names?” I asked. “You have to know at least one of these people.”

“Look at those addresses: Paris, San Francisco, New York. I’m a hometown boy; how would I know these people?”

“I just hoped that between the two of us, something would click. Luckily we can Google anyone we want.”

“Read off the spelling of the first guy,” he said as he got behind his computer.

When I was finished rattling off the letters, we scrolled through the search results.

“Here it is. Says this guy is a movie executive and lives in Beverly Hills. His last three pictures grossed over a billion. Blah, blah . . . next project, a romance scheduled to be released in the winter . . . blah, blah . . . two children . . . married four times, divorced four times . . . here it is! The last wife tried to get half of his art collection, which is valued at one hundred million.” Nathan whistled. “This dude’s a serious collector.”

We checked out the next three names in the ledger. The one thing all of them had in common, besides wealth, was their art collections.

“So Stacey was involved with these people somehow,” I said. “The dollar amounts next to their name could mean a few things.”

“Services rendered, commissions,” Nathan said. “Or blackmail payments. Wow, this could be a whole new list of suspects.”

“Or maybe she was just keeping the records for someone else who was doing one of those things.”

“I’ll keep the book here and run these names by Rosie tomorrow. That girl has a contact in every racketeering operation out there.”

“Good.” Then I told Nathan about my meeting with Cynthia Price at the bank.

“She sounds like a sad lady,” Nathan said, after I finished.

“And so sweet. I think she wants this killer caught more than we do. She looked up records without one second of hesitation. Cynthia thought of Stacey more as a daughter than just a customer at the bank.”

“Was there anything unusual in her checking account statements?”

“As a matter of fact, there was,” I said. “Three large amounts, electronically deposited from L’Etoile du Nord in New York. It’s a charitable foundation that has funded schools and orphanages.”

“So this book could just contain names of contributors along with the amount of their donations.”

I shrugged. “Could be. But why would Stacey be keeping records for a huge organization in a little book hidden in her kitchen? Wouldn’t they have accountants and lawyers for that?”

Nathan nodded.

“And don’t you find it weird that the name of the foundation is French and that it’s the state motto of Minnesota?”

“What if Stacey had money of her own and she’s—”