The Christmas Mystery Read online

  “I really would like to look at them further…but at a later time,” Burke says. “Luc and I are meeting our mutual friend, Etienne, for drinks.…”

  “Etienne is in town? I didn’t know that,” says Andre.

  Burke is, I think, becoming a bit too impressed by her own charade. We need to get out. Burke speaks.

  “Just for the day. An unexpected business meeting. So we will be in touch about the Monet and perhaps the Feldman. But, you know, I do have a question.”

  “Of course,” says Sophia.

  Burke continues.

  “Isn’t it unusual to have such valuable pieces stacked one on top of another, leaning against the wall, on a dirty floor?”

  “That’s how the artists often keep them in their studios,” says Andre.

  “But this is not a studio,” Burke says, her charming smile in place.

  Detective Burke and Mrs. Krane exchange tense smiles. But I know Burke well enough to realize that she is heading somewhere in this conversation.

  “I was so hoping,” she says, “that you would sift through those three paintings and reveal a fourth canvas. I was foolishly hoping for a piece by Frida Kahlo. One of the self-portraits.”

  “Yes, everyone loves the self-portraits,” says Andre. “The perfect scarves, the interesting headdress…”

  “You know…” says Sophia.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” says Andre. (I prepare myself for an avalanche of bullshit.)

  Sophia speaks directly to K. Burke. Here it comes.

  “You know, there is a collector, a very discreet individual, who has acquired three Kahlos over the years. The collector is away for the Christmas holidays. Saint Martin, I think. The French side, of course. I can get in touch, though. Would you be interested?”

  “It would be a dream come true for Madame Moncrief,” I say.

  Burke touches my shoulder. She smiles at me. She speaks.

  “What a sweet Christmas gift that could be.…” Her voice trails off. And we say our good-byes.

  As soon as we step onto 57th Street I say, “A magnificent performance, K. Burke.”

  “I’d like to thank the Academy.…” she says. “And we might get a fake Frida Kahlo piece out of this.”

  But I am already plotting our next steps.

  “I hope you are not too exhausted for tonight’s job, when we follow Simon again,” I say.

  “No, we’re not flying solo anymore. It’s time to brief Elliott on our suspicions.”

  “Tonight will be our last time, K. Burke,” I say.

  “No way,” says Burke. “No freakin’ way.” She is angry.

  I smile my most charming smile and say, “Tonight if we get Simon we will be able to arrest him.”

  Burke speaks slowly, firmly.

  “If you go on surveillance again, Moncrief, you’re doing it without me.”

  I speak, barely able to spit out the words. I am angry also.

  “If that’s the way you want it, then stay back tonight. Stay and punch the numbers, search the file. I will do real police work. Go on back to Elliott now. Tell him whatever you like. As for me, I’m going into the Sherry-Netherland for a martini.”

  Chapter 21

  I sit with a frosty gin martini—straight up—at the bar of the Sherry-Netherland. The happy quiver of the first sip calms me, at least for a moment. Then my phone buzzes. A message from K. Burke. She texts: Read this. Then call me or come to precinct.

  I read the following, from the New York Post’s website:

  Bye-Bye, Baby D

  Mrs. Ramona Driver Dunlop, the society matron known popularly as “Baby D,” was bid farewell today at a lavish memorial service at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street. White lilies and Bach cantatas filled the air as friends and family remembered the glamorous life of the social queen. Understandably, none of the speakers mentioned Baby D’s earthly farewell—a particularly gruesome murder.

  “There are more detectives and cops here than there are friends,” said nightlife gossip blogger Teddy Galperin. “Let’s hope one of them can finally make some headway in the case.”

  His comment was a reference to the NYPD’s inability to make any progress in solving the murder of Mrs. Dunlop Friday. NYPD has thus far offered no clues as to the story behind the grisly death of the elderly woman.

  In her youth Mrs. Dunlop was named New York Debutante of the Year. In recent years, the wealthy widow had turned her considerable energy and fortune to helping charities involved with the scourge of drug abuse. A lover and collector of fine art, Mrs. Dunlop also served on the boards of many museums, including the Frick and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is survived by her son and daughter-in-law.

  I do not call K. Burke. I know what she will tell me: No more screwing around, Moncrief! We must get help!

  I text K. Burke: Hold Elliott off until tomorrow. Don’t be angry.

  Burke texts me back: Not angry. Just worried.

  Chapter 22

  I’m waiting exactly where I waited the previous night. But this time, I’m waiting in the car that Dalia had christened “The Baby Blue from ’62.” And K. Burke isn’t here to tell me that driving a flashy Corvette is a foolish idea.

  Simon/Brunetti sits in his Escalade. The “rich kid” comes out of the building and slides into the backseat. When they take off, I take off after them.

  Okay. A slight variation this time around: Simon deposits Abosch at Dirt Candy, a hip vegetarian restaurant on Allen Street.

  This time Simon heads back to the Henry Hudson, only we take the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. Simon speeds…85…90.…I speed too. It seems like Simon knows all the speed traps. He slows down three times, always unexpectedly. Then back up to 85…90.…The Baby Blue from ’62 and I are loving it. Detective Burke, you don’t know what you’re missing.

  An hour and a half later, we’re in Monticello, New York. A few minutes later we’re maneuvering around dark roads in the Catskills.

  I turn off my headlights and drop back to a safe distance. The guardrails and ditches on the country roads become my guide. If I lose track of Simon’s car, I’ll be adrift.

  Occasionally I see a house decorated with Christmas lights. A few Nativity scenes on front lawns. Neon wreaths. But mostly murky darkness.

  Ten…fifteen…twenty minutes. Amazingly at a certain point I see Simon’s car flash a right-turn signal. Is it a driver’s reflex? Or, as Americans say: Is this guy just messing with me?

  Chapter 23

  A touch of winter moonlight provides just enough illumination to watch the Escalade pull into a very long dirt driveway. At the end of the driveway is a large Tudor-style mansion. I park on the road.

  Two in the morning, but most of the windows are bright with lights. Simon leaves his car. He carries two packages. I’m assuming that they’re the same paintings from last evening in Riverdale. But why drop them in storage instead of coming straight here? Maybe for discretion.

  He rings the doorbell and looks around him. Yup, he’s nervous. In a few moments Andre Krane opens the door. Simon disappears inside.

  Now I exit my car. I stretch. I step into the woods a few feet. I survey the area. Woods and woods and then more woods. Giant trees—bare oaks, bare elms, hundreds of pines and evergreens. Tiny-sized to majestic-tremendous. The ground is covered with snow, tree limbs peeking out. Not far from the house is an ice-gray lake. More evergreens surround the lake, a lake so big that I can’t even tell where it ends.

  I return to the car and open the glove compartment. I unwrap a perfectly ripe piece of Camembert. I push a piece of sliced baguette into the soft cheese and enjoy my meal. A crisp Belgian ale, a perfect heirloom apple. A good snack along with this simple fact: I love solo detective work so much that even these bizarre and boring stakeouts are enjoyable to me. I’m a hunter after the game. There is a prize at the end for my perfect patience.

  I crack the car window open an inch. The cold air rushes in.

&
nbsp; Then I turn on the engine and warm the car. This on-and-off engine procedure occurs four times in the next hour. My eyes remain fixed on the house. I watch the lights go out. The mansion is draped in darkness. But I will not sleep.

  At three o’clock I exit the car again. I bend and touch my toes a few times. I tie my silk scarf snug around my neck and chin. The snow begins again. The night is relentlessly cold.

  I decide to move closer to the Krane house. Histoire de voir. I’ll see what I can see.

  Chapter 24

  Through the lead-framed windows of the dining room, when my eyes adjust to the dark, I see a giant oak table with chairs that look like Tudor thrones. If I expected to see a Matisse or an O’Keeffe hanging on the wall, I am disappointed. Four British fox-hunting prints. Nothing else.

  I walk to the rear of the house and look into the huge kitchen. Two old stoves. Two deep sinks. A refrigerator from the 1950s. A marble-topped pastry table. A butler’s pantry.

  The ground is frozen hard, yet beneath the snow are deep hidden holes. I look toward the lake. The dock is covered with layers of tarp.

  I move cautiously through the ice and snow. I now stand at the windows to the living room. Nothing on the wall except some African carvings and bronze antique sabers.

  I decide to head back to my car. Too cold. Too icy. Also I must be there if Simon suddenly leaves.

  I hear the door to the house open, and voices. There he is. I begin to run—then I trip. A hole? A branch? A discarded fake Picasso? I am not hurt. I get up quickly. But my fall has apparently tipped someone off to my presence.

  Suddenly the unmistakable sound of a bullet cracks the air. It shatters a piece of the stucco wall near where I stand and lands significantly away from where I’m standing. But a bullet can never land far enough away.

  Then another bullet.

  Another shot. Because the woods appear thicker near the lake I try to run there as fast as possible. To hide. To escape. I take out my gun, but I’m not acting in a Western. Real life offers no chance for me to spin on my heels and actually shoot my pursuer.

  My knees are bent. I run close to the ground. If I fall I have less chance of getting hurt.

  Then a scream in the darkness.

  “I will get you, Moncrief.”

  The dumbest detective in America could identify the British-sounding voice. It is, of course, Preston Parker Simon/Rudy Brunetti.

  I keep running as fast as possible toward the lake. What once looked like a short distance seems like a marathon challenge.

  Another bullet. Then immediately another.

  My shoes and ankles and calves are soaked with melted snow and ice.

  Another bullet.

  As I get closer to the lake, a voice comes at me: “You’d better be able to swim that lake, asshole.” He’s stalling. Probably reloading.

  Simon is closer. But now he sounds simpler, cruder, American. I get it. He’s slipped into being his real self. He’s not Preston Parker Simon. He’s Rudy Brunetti. Now I am at the water’s edge. In the dim moonlight I can see Simon. He is getting closer.

  He fires three more bullets in succession. The bullets land close enough to where I stand that I can see sections of the icy surface shatter.

  He fires two more shots.

  He suddenly shouts, “Who the hell…? Angel, is that you?”

  No response.

  “Angel? Angel?”

  Still no response.

  Another yell from Simon: “Krane. Is it you? Are you there?”

  I can see Simon clearly now. I watch him raise his gun. He fires in my direction. He fires again. He misses. He aims carefully. I fall to the snowy icy ground. He lowers his aim just a bit. He sees me.

  He raises his arm slightly. He reevaluates the situation.

  I am like a scared child. I close my eyes tightly.

  Then…one more bullet shot. It comes nowhere near me.

  I wait for the next bullet. And I wait. I only hear the sounds of nature. Winter birds cackling in the sky. Strong winds whipping through the pine trees.

  Then a voice calls out.

  “You okay, Moncrief?”

  I know that voice. It is K. Burke.

  Chapter 25

  The cheesy Tudor-style living room—like something out of Disneyland—fills up quickly with lots of local law enforcement.

  The New York State police arrive: seven burly men and two substantial-looking women. The local Monticello police arrive: two detectives, two coroners, four police officers. This may be the entire town police department. The local press arrives, as eager and noisy as anything in Manhattan or Paris. The coroners do a quick on-site examination of Rudy Brunetti. Then they begin to transfer the body to an ambulance.

  I stand at an open window and watch them speedily move the body to the ambulance. The coroner sees me and explains what I already know: “We need to minimize dermal contamination.”

  Why do American officials enjoy using big words? Couldn’t he just have said “skin decay”?

  Detective Burke and I are at different corners of the room. We see each other, and I immediately join my colleague, the person who just saved my life.

  “So, K. Burke,” I say. “You did accompany me after all.” I squeeze her shoulders, as close to a loving gesture as we have ever shared.

  “You probably predicted that I’d be following you,” she says.

  I tell her the truth.

  “Not this time, I must say. This time I thought our disagreement was too great for it to mend quickly.”

  There is a pause. Then she looks at me with intense eyes. Softly she says, “I could never let you down, Moncrief.”

  My head turns to the ground. My throat aches with anxiety. I know that I should be lying dead on the icy ground. I shake. My neck hurts. I speak.

  “Merci, merci beaucoup. You have saved my life. I am beyond grateful.”

  Burke smiles. Her eyes sparkle.

  “As you should be.”

  I smile. This will not grow any further into a sentimental moment. That is simply not the way Burke and I behave.

  And anyway, we must not allow the local police to take over. No. Now we must take control, as all the little puzzle pieces of the investigation begin to fall into place.

  The results turn out to be fairly much as we expected. The elegant Sophia and Andre Krane are the masterminds in this grand fraud scheme. They maintain a large basement studio at this home. It looks like a classroom at a university’s fine arts painting course. Easels with half-finished canvases dot the room—a large Picasso here, a tiny Rubens there, a Schnabel that looks like every other Schnabel, a Warhol “Liz Taylor” that looks like a thousand others.

  Handcuffs are locked onto the Kranes. Sophia Krane is calm, stoic, almost bored, as she stands with three police officers guarding her.

  “Rudy was a fool. I told him all he had to do was steal some goddamn paintings, from her bedroom. He didn’t have to kill the old lady,” she says.

  “But he did,” K. Burke says.

  Now the Kranes are led out of their gloomy house to join Angel, who is already in a police car.

  Burke and I question and Andre quickly admits that they sold the Hockney and Lichtenstein forgeries to Baby D. Only too eager to sell out their pal Rudy, he described how they had planted him—already an accomplice in art forgery sales—as her driver, when other clients of the gallery had started to raise alarm about the legitimacy of their pieces.

  Rudy was supposed to gain access and steal the paintings back, but she’d sniffed him out and fired him before he had the opportunity. Desperate, after their last drive Rudy had killed her—but was too cowardly to take the paintings then, sniffed Sophia.

  So they’d enlisted Angel Corrido to “retrieve” them from the apartment after her death. Their fear at that point, of course, had become that Mrs. Dunlop’s estate would identify the pieces as forgeries. “You might as well look in Baby D’s second maid’s room,” Sophia tells us. “She has a box spring wit
h a secret compartment. Right now you’ll probably find a Giotto wood panel and a group of architectural drawings from Horace Walpole’s country home that Angel couldn’t manage to get out. And…oh, yes…ten animation cels from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

  “No one can say we don’t offer a variety,” says Andre.

  The local chief of police, the Monticello district attorney, and the sergeant of the county police approach us like a pumped-up sports team. I know what they want: a quarrel. Will these three criminals be tried in Sullivan County where they were arrested? Or will they be tried in Manhattan where their crimes were committed? I’m way too weary to deal with this.

  “K. Burke, you have given me the greatest gift that one person can possibly give another. Thanks to you, I am still alive.”

  “All in a day’s work,” she says, with only a trace of irony in her voice.

  “Now I must ask for one more favor, a small favor,” I say.

  She simply rolls her eyes.

  “What is it, Moncrief? Do you want me to give you a kidney?”

  “Actually, worse than that. Would you please deal with these three local police people? I have an errand to run.”

  “An errand? It’s five thirty in the morning. We’re at a crime scene in the middle of the woods a hundred miles from home base…and you’ve got an errand to run?”

  “Merci, K. Burke. Merci, merci, and for good luck, one more merci.”

  Chapter 26

  It is dark as midnight when I walk outside. The late-November morning is misty and cold. It is snowing lightly, just enough to make the air wet and icy. It is a perfect environment for sadness. The frozen lake, the dark night, the icy air…it should be ideal for depression. Yet I am strangely buoyant. I am calmer than I have been in months. I know it is the result of a successful end to the art forgery case. The usual sense of smugness that runs through me is stronger than ever. I look forward to discussing the details with Elliott. I know that some of my New York colleagues will have a touch of envy that this French interloper cracked the case. But most of all I am deeply warmed by Katherine Burke’s extraordinary role in saving my life. Beyond friendship, and even, in a certain way, beyond romantic love.