Closure: An Eli Quinn Mystery Page 5

  “No, but you’re old. Maybe you forget basic procedure.”

  My friend bounced the rubber ball once on the patio, hard, and it came right back to his hand. “Not my procedures anyway,” he said. “You know they don’t let us posse guys do any investigating. But yeah, they looked back to first thing that morning. Every plate was either a homeowner, an invited guest who was OKed by a homeowner, or a known contractor.”

  “Contractor?”

  “UPS, FedEx, guys like that. A few landscapers that come regularly.”

  “So nobody suspicious?”

  “I don’t know the details, but I hear they checked a couple that might’ve been a wee bit suspect, alibies were solid. Dead ends.”

  “So whoever killed Tinker Bernstein,” I said, “was either a country club resident…”

  “Unlikely, but we found a few friends and acquaintances out of that list of fifteen hundred people and interviewed them. That went nowhere. Been pretty quiet up there for what, ten years now?”

  “Or one of their guests…”

  “Also unlikely. We did run a couple down who had priors. But nothing serious.”

  “Or a contractor who’s been there before…”

  “More likely, but we didn’t find any motives, and we found good alibies.”

  “Or someone snuck in.”

  “That’d be my bet,” Beach said.

  I nodded. He finished his coffee and pushed himself up.

  “Professional job?” I asked.

  “Hard to say. But that’s a good question. There were two bullets. Coroner can’t be sure, but he thinks the one to the forehead was first, and that’s what killed Tinker. The other one, to the chest, looked to have been fired when he was already lying on his back. The bullet was embedded in the concrete right underneath him.”

  “So the second shot wasn’t necessary.”

  “And pros don’t like to waste bullets. Leaves more evidence. Is messy. Pros pride themselves on doing it in one shot.”

  “But two shots might not be a total amateur, either.”

  “Right,” Beach said. “If the killer didn’t expect Bernstein to be there, and he were surprised, he might fire several shots, miss a couple times. But Bernstein took one to the forehead, apparently while sitting in his chair. That doesn’t sound to me like a run-of-the-mill burglar got surprised.”

  “What kind of gun?”

  “Can’t be sure. We know the caliber, but we’d need a gun to match it to. Silencer, they figure, since there were neighbors at home and nobody heard anything.”

  “So it’s someone who probably knows how to use a gun, given the precision of the head shot and the clock shot. Someone who has a silencer, has probably been in some shady situations before, but isn’t a top-tier hired shooter. Probably not a jealous lover from the country club.”

  “That was roughly our profile, yeah,” Beach said. “And that’s where we ended up. Nothing else pointed anywhere. The deputies didn’t tell Bernstein’s wife all the details. She’s still a suspect. Can’t give away all our big clues. The case folder is still on someone’s desk, but it probably hasn’t been opened the past day or so, and by end of week it’ll be in a file cabinet. sheriff will have a couple more press conferences after that and say everything possible is being done, but in reality the manpower will be shifted to other cases.”

  We each looked at our coffees. Beach had stopped working the ball. It was never pleasant to talk about a murder. Even though it was our jobs to talk about Bernstein being shot in the forehead, a little silence seemed in order.

  ***

  “Solo looks good,” Beach said, breaking the silence and looking over at the dog in the red Jeep, who was looking back at us.

  “Always,” I said. It was Jack Beachum who’d brought Solo to me. Shortly after Jess was killed, the sheriff’s K-9 unit had a dog that needed a new home. Solo had made it through all the training and knew how to chase a suspect, growl ferociously, and hold the suspect. But ultimately he was deemed unfit for service. He performed all the tasks well, but had two flaws. He often intuited situations and moved in before his handler commanded him to do so. More often than not Solo was right, and he’d make a beeline for the acting “bad guy,” but in the K-9 unit, discipline was not negotiable. Also, Solo wasn’t much of a barker. He would let out one intimidating bark at the first recognition of a situation, but then relied on his deep growl. The growl was plenty effective up close, but the Bark and Hold training method relied on a lot of barking. Barking alone scared the crap out of criminals, before the dog even got close, and sometimes they’d just put their guns down and freeze a block away. The K-9 unit had a lot of good dogs to choose from, and they didn’t need a loose cannon or a non-barker in their ranks.

  “Not a bad companion in your new line of work,” Beach said. “Be careful. He’s an eager one. Could cause you trouble.”

  “I’m not worried. He always seems to know exactly what to do, before I tell him.”

  “But he hasn’t been truly challenged, in a real situation, where you might need him to corner a creep and avoid mauling an innocent citizen. Or who knows what.”

  “He’s not going to maul any innocent citizens. If something comes up, I think he’ll know what to do. And if he doesn’t, he’ll do what I tell him.”

  “I think you’re right,” Beach said. “Helluva dog.”

  “Yep. I owe you one. And thanks for the information today, too.”

  “I’ll put it on the tab.”

  Chapter 7

  I called Samantha Marcos on her cell.

  “Hey, you,” she said.

  “Hey, it’s me,” I said, even though her phone had already clued her in. “Did you know Steve Wynn sold Picasso’s Le Rêve to Steven Cohen for more than $155 million a couple years back? And that was after Wynn had accidentally put his elbow through the painting.”

  “Steve Wynn, the casino owner?”

  “Yep, that Steve Wynn. And Cézanne’s Card Players was sold by an individual to the Qatar government in 2011 for more than $250 million.”

  “Qatar bought a Cézanne?”

  “They have a lot of money in Qatar,” I said. “Almost as much as Steve Wynn.”

  “And you’re telling me this because …”

  “Fortunes can be made buying and selling art.”

  “Ah, I see,” she said. “Or stealing it.”

  “Exactly. Tinker Bernstein didn’t collect the most expensive paintings, but there’s plenty to be made buying less famous works. And there’s a ton of shady stuff goes on, too.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Seven paintings were stolen from some museum in Europe in 2012. There was a Monet, a Picasso and a Matisse in the mix. Same year, a Warhol was among nineteen pieces lifted from a private collection in Detroit. Thefts like this occur every year. Fewer than ten percent are ever recovered. Apparently there’s no trouble unloading pieces on the black market. They don’t have to get anywhere near market value to rake in some big money. And the art doesn’t even have to be legit. A while back a woman was caught hawking fake paintings, forged by a Chinese immigrant who was proficient at copying the Modernist masters. He painted in Queens. She sold them through a gallery in Manhattan. She made something like $33 million over the years, and the gallery made even more. The painter got screwed.”

  “They often do.”

  “He was paid in the thousands for each forgery.”

  “OK, got it,” Sam said. “But nothing was stolen from Tinker Bernstein’s collection.”

  “Nothing we know of.”

  “You think maybe there was a painting Delores didn’t know about?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t. But it was a decent hunch, I figured, that the pair of Bernstein crimes might be related somehow to art. “But if there was, and the thieves thought she might not know about it, then killing Bernstein might’ve been a way to keep the sheriff off their tail, at least for a while. For all I know, maybe Delores took it herself.”<
br />
  “All sounds a little far-fetched. You’re going to need some more information. Clues. That’s what you need. Clues.”

  “Yeah, I’m looking. Know any art thieves?”

  “Personally, no,” she said. “What do you have in mind?”

  “If I can find some, I’ll poke around. Ask questions. Maybe make somebody nervous. I interviewed the close friends of the Bernsteins this morning, including Charlie Entwill, Tinker’s golf buddy. I learned roughly nothing. I need to go in a different direction, and if there was some sort of art theft involved, I want to move quickly. The longer this goes, the greater chance the evidence, if there is any, gets sold and shipped who knows where.”

  “So you’re going to find a couple known art thieves, ask questions, and hope they happen to know something about this case. Sounds like a shot in the dark.”

  “I got nothing else.”

  “Doing something is better than doing nothing,” she said.

  “And maybe if I find somebody who wasn’t involved, but knows about stuff like this, they can point me somewhere. Or if I just shake the tree, maybe word’ll get around and a bad apple will fall out somewhere.”

  “The apple analogy isn’t working for me.”

  “I’ll lose that. Thanks. Meantime I’m going to go see Delores again, learn a little more about Tinker’s art collection, get a better feel for her. You at the paper?”

  Even though The Republic ran with an online-first mentality, everyone still called it “the paper.”

  “Yep,” Sam said. “I’ll see what I can find out in our Art Thieves in Pleasant archives. I guess this makes me a sidekick. Shall we discuss the evidence over lunch?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll call you when I leave the country club. I met with Beach this morning, too, and he told me something really interesting. I’ll fill you in. Meet you at Amir’s?”

  “You don’t want to take me to the Clubhouse Grill?”

  “On my new salary, I can’t afford their water, let alone the BLT.”

  “It tastes like crap anyway,” Sam said. “And other than you and me, it’d be a stuffy crowd.”

  “We have similar tastes,” I said. I wished I hadn’t said it. It was starting to sound like a date. I hoped Sam didn’t think of it as a date. I wished I didn’t think of it that way. Or maybe we both wished it were a date. Before I could dwell on the idea any longer, Sam said “Bye” and clicked off.

  Chapter 8

  “Hello, Mrs. Bernstein,” I said as she opened her front door.

  “Delores, please,” she said.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Delores.” She’d beaten me down on the formalities issue.

  “I hired you. Of course I’ll see you,” she said matter-of-factly. “Please come in. Can I get you something to drink? Water, coffee? Something stronger?”

  “Some coffee would be great,” I said, though I was fully coffeed up and didn’t need any, and something stronger sounded good. The house was cool again. At least the coffee would feel good in my hands. I could wait and have a drink later.

  While she made coffee in the kitchen, I walked around the living room and inspected the paintings. Didn’t recognize any of them. Didn’t even recognize any of the signatures. That didn’t mean some of them weren’t famous. My knowledge of art didn’t extend very far beyond comics, a couple well-known living photographers like Art Wolfe and Annie Leibovitz, and a handful of dead painters I was made to study in school.

  Delores returned with two coffees in white ceramic cups on the same tray, set it on the coffee table. She sat down on the Queen Ann. She was wearing a long-sleeved blue crinkle-neck top with a simple knit pattern, loose black slacks and black flats. Simple and sensible again, without being unconscious of fashion.

  I thanked her, then started my inquiry. I tried to sound like I knew what I was doing.

  “There’s just one entrance to the country club, and I’m told nobody gets in unless they're an invited guest, or are working for some contractor like FedEx or a hired contractor. Have you had any work done on the house recently?”

  “Tinker hired a handyman to redo the back wall there,” she said, pointing at the wall of windows beyond the living and dining area. “It had small windows, and a big view, so he had the whole wall blown out. The contractor put a giant beam in, with a post in the middle, then rebuilt the wall with as little wall and as much window as possible.”

  “When was this?”

  “He finished a couple months ago.”

  “So this guy was in your house for what, several days?”

  “Two weeks, off and on.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “Of course. J.D. Fish. A local contractor. Nice man.”

  “Did you mention this to the sheriff deputies?”

  “Well, no,” she said. “They didn’t ask.”

  “Potentially important, don’t you think?”

  “Frankly, no,” she said. “J.D. is a good person. We’ve known him since we moved here. Tinker had him help with several projects. Tinker was good with mechanical stuff, but he couldn’t pound a nail straight to save his life. He called J.D. whenever there was carpentry, or anything that was just too big or heavy for one person to handle.”

  “You have J.D.’s card?” After she fetched it in the kitchen, I looked at it: J.D. Fish, Handyman. The phone number was inside the outline of a fish, with an address below that, and a boldface italic line at the bottom: You want it, I build it. I wasn’t sure if it was a Jesus fish, or just a fish.

  “You don’t really think J.D. had anything to do with this.”

  “I have no clue,” I said. “Almost literally. I’ll visit him, ask him a few questions. Do me a favor and don’t tell him about me.”

  “You want to surprise him.”

  “Yes.”

  “See how he reacts.”

  “Yes.”

  “Be nice to him.”

  “I promise,” I said. “As long as he’s nice to me.”

  I put the card in my pocket. “The night your husband was killed, you came through the gate at 6:48. He was apparently shot at 6:59, according to the clock.”

  “You still suspect me, Mr. Quinn.”

  “I’m just looking at all the facts,” I said. “What you hired me to do.”

  “Very well.”

  “Does that timing sound right to you?”

  “I suppose,” she said. “I really don’t know exactly what time I came through the gate. I would have guessed a bit later than that, but if they say 6:48, then sure, that sounds about right. All I know is the sun was about to set, so I went and watched it go down.”

  “How long did it take to get from the gate to the place where you watched the sunset?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe five minutes.”

  “I’ll check the distance and time in my Jeep,” I said. “I looked up the sunset time. 7:05 that night. Did you wait long for it to set after you got there?”

  “A few minutes.”

  “And did you watch it for long, after it set?”

  “Several minutes.”

  “So that would put you back at the house around what, maybe 7:15 or 7:20?

  “That sounds about right. I didn’t pay close attention to the time. There was no reason to.”

  “Nobody saw you after you came through the gate, before you got home?”

  “No.”

  She was being helpful, answering a lot of questions. Maybe that was a good sign. I didn’t know. I had more questions, so I just kept going. “OK, so tell me about some of these paintings. I’d like to know what they’re worth.”

  “Does that mean I’m no longer a suspect?”

  “It means I’ve asked all the questions I can think of about the sunset and the clock and the time of death. Honestly, Delores, I don’t make you for a murderer, but your lack of an alibi is a problem. You hired me, but I’m a pretty smart guy, and I have my own reputation at stake here on this first case, so I’m being thorough. The more I
understand, the better chance I have of solving it. Right now, I don’t understand much of anything, so all I can do is keep asking questions, see where the answers go.”

  Delores stood, and I followed her to a black and white, cut-paper silhouette. “That’s a Kara Walker,” she said. Tinker paid $250,000 for it a few years ago.” To me it looked like something you’d find in a public domain stock art book, but I didn’t say so.

  “He picked up that delightful Winslow Homer sketch for $120,000 last year. It’s one of my favorites.” It was a lightly drawn sketch of two girls walking in a field. I guessed “minimalist” would be the word to best describe it. I liked it.

  Delores pointed out several other pieces by artists I had never heard of, mostly six figures, a few worth less.

  “Did it ever occur to you, to Mr. Bernstein …”

  “Tinker. Please call him Tinker.”

  “Did it ever occur to you and Tinker to lock all this art up?”

  “We talked about it. But Tinker always just wanted to enjoy it. And he did. Often he’d walk around the living room like it were a gallery, inspecting each piece at a distance, then up close. It brought him great joy. Anyway, what should he do, put them in a safe deposit box? Or lock them in a closet? We live in a gated community, the house has an alarm, and we’re not overly social. Not many folks know who we are or where we live, or what’s in our house.”

  Looking around the room, I noted that she still sometimes spoke in the present tense about her husband. I understood. Took me months before I could speak of Jess in the past tense. I got up, took the cup of coffee, walked up to one of the paintings, an abstract piece that might have represented a building, or maybe a rock outcropping. I inspected it as if something profound might occur to me. Nothing did. So I moved to the left where the bust of Ben Franklin sat perched, a little precariously I thought, on the narrow pedestal. He looked a lot like the image on the hundred-dollar bill—bald on top but with long, stringy hair that had a greasy, hippy-like quality that eccentric geezers are often excused for. But this sculpted Benjamin seemed older.