Murder in Primary Colors

  Chapter 19

  It was late in the afternoon before Chris, Drew and Walter returned home. Pansy fussed over all three of them in equal measure and insisted on feeding everyone before she would ask any questions or allow any explanations. Chris thought that was evidence that the three of them must look very stressed. At last the three humans sat at the dining room table full of Pansy's medicinal homemade chicken soup while Walter lay on the kitchen floor, working on an enormous rawhide bone.

  "Now tell me everything," Pansy said, leaning forward eagerly.

  Chris began with her arrival at the Music Department door and ended with the information that Colin McCarty's wounds were painful and disfiguring, but not life threatening. "Walter's the only one who got any licks in," she said. "Too bad we pulled him off. I was hoping for castration at the least."

  "Teensy!"

  "Well, I was," Chris countered, unrepentant. "You would too if you had heard him sneering. He said he was going to kill me as matter-of-factly as if he was ordering lunch. I have never been so frightened in my life."

  Drew launched into his side of the tale. "So I'm driving on my way to do parking tickets in the lots over by the fieldhouse and I see Mom's car in the Art Department loading dock so I stopped. Just as I open the door to the office, there's this guy jumping toward Mom's office and Walter jumping at this guy and then this big book comes flapping at me. It was mega-sketch!" Drew's eyes were as wide as Chris had ever seen them.

  "I take it that's bad? Sketch?" Pansy asked.

  "Mega," Drew replied with an energetic nod. "It was really messed up. I mean, jeez, who knew Walter would do that, y'know? And Mom was all, 'He's the killer!' and there's this dude on the floor with Walter trying to rip his nuts off and he's screaming to get him off and I'm like, wow, y'know?"

  Pansy knew.

  "They took McCarty to the hospital," Chris said. "Walter didn't 'rip his nuts off,' but every time he pees for the rest of his life he's going to know how close he came."

  Pansy's disapproving frown started to appear and dissolved into a chuckle. "Why'd he attack him there, for heaven's sake?" she said, reddening slightly.

  "He's only about a foot tall at the shoulder, Mother. When he jumps that's about as close as he can get to someone's throat." Chris began to chuckle as well.

  "Good ol' Walter," Drew grinned. "He sure acted like he was having a good time. I mean, he had a mouthful of McCarty's jeans and he was shaking him like that stuffed penguin we gave him when he was a puppy."

  Chris nodded and kept laughing.

  "Well, it's too bad he didn't rip his nuts off," Pansy said at last and raised her glass in Walter's direction.

  By the time Hjelmer Ryquist arrived at Chris's door later that evening everyone was starting to relax. When the bell rang, however, Chris jumped like she'd been stuck with a pin and Walter went into a frenzy of barking and snarling that stopped everyone in their tracks for a moment. When Chris opened the door to admit Ryquist, Walter apologized in the best basset fashion by fawning and falling at his feet for a belly rub.

  "You give him a reward, Doc? He did the work of ten today," Ryquist said from his squatting position where he rubbed the offered belly enthusiastically.

  "He got the biggest rawhide bone we could find. He's been chewing nonstop all afternoon," Chris replied.

  Walter seemed to remember that bone just then. He squirmed up and trotted away without a backward glance.

  Ryquist accepted the invitation to take off his coat, and Pansy went to the kitchen to get refreshments, calling as she went, "Don't start until I get back, Hjelmer. I want to hear everything."

  When he was seated, Ryquist surveyed Chris. "You all right, Doc?"

  Chris nodded. "I'll be fine. My stomach is still jumping, but I'm not shaking anymore." She held out a hand to demonstrate. It quivered only a little.

  "Well, you did great today," Ryquist said seriously. "You stayed cool when it counted. Telling him you had a gun was smart. It slowed him down."

  Drew said, "Even if she hadn't, his electro-gun wouldn't have worked because he pulled it out of the wall, right?"

  "Actually, McCarty had plenty of cord to get into your mother's office," Ryquist replied. "It just got tangled up and he didn't notice."

  "This isn't helping me calm down," Chris said faintly.

  "Well, you were lucky, Teensy," Pansy said, returning with a bottle of beer and a glass. She handed them to Ryquist and bent to pat her daughter's hand. "But you were also smart, as Hjelmer says. You bluffed him. He'd have been hard put to get you, what with Walter in the way."

  Chris's eyes filled with tears. "He'd have killed Walter and then come for me. Poor Walter wouldn't have stood a chance." The thought stung her eyes and closed her throat more powerfully than had her own peril. She sniffed into a tissue.

  "Well, Doc, I don't know about Walter not standing a chance," Ryquist said. "One reason dogs are so effective on the police force is that they're quick and bad guys see them as unpredictable. Tends to freeze them in place, at least for a while."

  "Yeah, Mom, you should have seen how quick he moved to grab the guy's balls," Drew said.

  "How about you, Drew?" Ryquist asked, appraising the young man's flushed face. "You doing okay?"

  "I'm fine. It's cool. What's happened to McCarty?" He leaned forward with his arms on his knees.

  "Don't you answer that!" Pansy called from the kitchen.

  Drew chuckled. "You heard the question well enough, Gram. Let him answer."

  Ryquist laughed. "I'll speak up, Pansy. McCarty is in jail. Took about three hours to stitch him up and now he's in a cell with the novocaine wearing off."

  "Good," said Pansy, approaching with a tray loaded with cheese and crackers. "I hope no one gives him so much as an aspirin."

  "Cruel and unusual punishment isn't our style. He's got some pain killers, but the doc said they weren't going to be perfect, so you'll be happy to know Walter's handiwork will be a constant reminder."

  "How much damage did Walter do?" Drew asked, squirming in his chair.

  "You don't want to know," Ryquist said, crossing his legs after he loaded a cracker with brie.

  "Has he confessed?" Chris asked.

  Ryquist shook his head. "He's not saying one word. Other than to ask for a lawyer, he's been a clam."

  "A lawyer won't get him out, will he?" Anxiety flooded Chris and her arms began to prickle once again.

  "No chance, Doc. He's charged with two counts of capital murder and one of assault with intent to kill. No judge in this part of the state would let him see daylight with what we have on him."

  Drew moved to sit closer to his mother and hold her hand. The gesture brought tears to Chris's eyes and she nodded.

  "I just came to let you know that, Doc. It's all over. You can relax."

  Chris cleared her throat. "I was sitting here earlier thinking that I should actually have a gun in my office, just in case someone goes nuts or something. Can you believe that? Me? Thinking about getting a gun? I think I've totally lost it." She sniffled again and fumbled for a tissue.

  "Don't worry, Doc. We got him by the short curlies. Pardon my French. I checked with New York about that arrest. He told it to you straight. The kid hung out with the theater crowd. Everyone in the company knew him and they all thought he was of age. Little prick was cutting school, staying out until all hours." Ryquist shook his head. "His parents never tumbled to it. Makes you wonder, don't it?"

  "The only thing it makes me wonder is where his parents were when he wasn't in school or home at night," Pansy said tartly. "If his being gay came as a surprise to them it's no wonder." She sniffed disgustedly and passed the cheese plate. "Whatever happened to him after all that, I wonder."

  "Died of a drug overdose two years ago," Ryquist said promptly.

  Finally Drew broke the quiet that followed this revelation. "So McCarty killed Ms. Page because she was threatening to tell everyone he'd been arrested for being homosexual?"
r />   "Not for being homosexual, Drew, for pedophilia," Pansy corrected. "For having sex with a minor. Homosexuality is not illegal. Having sex with children certainly is."

  Chris shook her head. "I still can't take it all in. How did she think she could get the museum out of the Division of Fine Arts by coercing one person? I never thought of her as stupid, but that alone would qualify."

  "You said yourself she wasn't an academic, Doc. Maybe she really didn't know how the system worked." Ryquist reached for another cracker and took a big swallow of his beer.

  "I see her as one of those people who are so self-centered they're just oblivious to anything outside their own concerns," Pansy said. "Like Martha Hartly across the street—you remember, Teensy?" She waved a hand at Ryquist. "Terrible woman. All oil and nice words when she wanted me to watch her rotten kids, and vinegar when I asked her to return the favor by helping out with a neighborhood drive. Nearly slammed the door in my face." Pansy sounded as if the incident had happened last week instead of almost thirty years ago.

  Chris ignored her mother. "Do you have any idea why he killed Richard, Hjelmer? He said it was to stop a prank, but he didn't say what kind?"

  "It's my guess something made McCarty think Bjornson knew he'd killed Page, but with one party dead and the other not talking, we aren't likely to find out much."

  Pansy went back to the kitchen for another beer.

  Chris said, "Tell me, Hjelmer, why did you take Howard Randall away from the meeting with the Picasso expert, Richard Price?" She'd almost called him Richie and suppressed a grin. It would have been the first smile she'd experienced in some hours.

  "No sense me trying to disguise this because you all know who and what we're talking about. Howard J. Randall knowingly gave a fake Picasso to Midstate University." He paused, waiting for the reactions to subside.

  "Knowingly?" Pansy said with a gasp of disbelief from the kitchen doorway. "You don't mean it! He told you that?"

  "Yep. He did it on purpose and Midstate was chosen for not the most flattering of reasons." Ryquist eyed Chris. "You don't seem surprised, Doc."

  She shrugged. "I guess I'm not."

  "Why do you think he tried to pawn if off on Midstate?"

  "He thought we wouldn't notice."

  Ryquist smiled. "You got it in one, Doc."

  "How could he imagine that no one would notice?" Pansy asked, bewildered. "It's supposed to be a Picasso, for Pete's sake! There aren't so many of them in Camford that people wouldn't be looking at it pretty closely."

  "He's not the first person to underestimate us, Mom," Chris said with a shrug. "Medium-sized university in the Midwest. He didn't think anyone here would be able to tell it was a fake because he didn't think there would be anyone knowledgeable about such things in his old alma mater. Am I right?"

  Ryquist nodded. "Two for two, Doc. He needed a tax break, and donating a work of art with a supposed current value of between twenty and twenty-five million was just the ticket."

  Chris nodded. "I thought he might have substituted the fake himself. I just didn't know why. So what happened to the original?"

  "He sold it to a drug dealer in Columbia in the late Eighties when he was hard up for cash." Ryquist poured more tea for himself and Pansy.

  "Did his wife know?"

  "Nah, he'd had the fake made two or three years before he married her. She didn't know anything about it." He waved a hand. "That's what I wanted to ask you about. See, he says all his collector friends were doing it, having fakes made of their priciest stuff. Does that sound right to you?"

  "Our Picasso expert says it's been going on for some time. I knew that a market existed for reproductions, but I didn't know this other side of it. Reproductions have caused a lot of flap in art history circles off and on for years. Debates about the value of authenticity, the nature of uniqueness in this mass-production culture, that sort of thing."

  "Well, he says his friends told him to put the original in a vault, that its value was too high to risk theft or whatever. He says they told him to have a fake made, hang it and not say a word to anyone but his insurance company. No one would be the wiser. Does that sound right to you?" Ryquist wrapped his big hands around his glass and leaned forward.

  "Sounds like what Price was describing, but that's really outside my expertise. I'm a lowly art historian, Hjelmer. What I make in a year, Tweety Randall spends on clothes. It wouldn't surprise me at all though."

  "Well, he told us that he paid three and a half million for the painting when he bought it, and when he had the fake made it was worth ten times that. Could that be right? Everyone says the value is about twenty million, not thirty-five," Ryquist said skeptically.

  "Oh, I believe that part all right," Chris said decisively. "The price of important art by marquee artists went through the roof in the Eighties. Then the bottom fell out and there was a time when you couldn't give the stuff away, literally. Collectors had been able to deduct the market value of any piece they donated to a museum. It became a common practice to try to raise the value of a piece before it was donated."

  "Sort of trying to get the most out of it?" Pansy asked.

  Chris nodded. "Yes, I'm sure that's how it started. But traditional appraisals in the Eighties weren't keeping up with the inflation in the art market. Appraisers were apparently very reluctant to jump prices up. Even auction houses were routinely underestimating what a work would bring at a sale."

  "So some big donor would be pretty sure the painting was probably worth more than they were being told," Ryquist said.

  "Yes. They figured out that instead of traditional appraisals, they could use how much was offered for it at auction as a measure of the current value and—"

  "But if they sold it at auction, they wouldn't have it to give away. That doesn't make any sense."

  "But they wouldn't actually sell it. Sometimes they worked a scam with the auction house to buy their own piece back. The auction house agreed to take a small percentage as a brokerage fee and they had proof of the piece's value."

  "That's like churning in the stock market," Pansy said.

  Chris nodded.

  Ryquist leaned his elbows on the table. "But why would the IRS go for it when they were listed as the seller as well as the buyer?"

  "They could offer it anonymously. Or if asked they could just say the reserve price wasn't met and it was withdrawn from the sale," Chris explained.

  "Jeez Louise," Ryquist said through his teeth.

  "Oh, it was even worse. Sometimes there was no legitimate interest in the particular piece being 'churned' and the auction house would have a shill or two bid to get the piece to the level the owner thought he wanted. They created wholly artificial markets for some artists who would otherwise have slipped into oblivion."

  Ryquist shrugged. "I'm not so sure that's worse, Doc. So a few artists get a boost. So what?"

  "It distorts history, Hjelmer. It makes a mockery of scholarship. It—"

  "Okay, I get it. So the Go-Go Eighties comes to an end and then what? Why'd the bottom fall out of the art market?"

  "I'm not sure what all the economic factors were, but I do know that Reagan's Tax Reform Act changed the law. You couldn't use current market value to figure a gift deduction any more, only what you'd paid for a thing, no matter when you bought it or what had happened in the interim. There was a sudden drying up of gifts to museums. Collectors couldn't afford to give a work away when they could sell it for a huge profit, so the museums started lobbying to get some kind of secondary reform so philanthropy would return."

  "But Randall said he wanted to give it away for the tax deduction," Ryquist said.

  Chris shrugged. "Well, Reagan's reform has been changed, so now museums can expect to get major works of art again."

  "So Randall says he needed the deduction because of some business reversals and he decided to give you guys the fake that's been hanging in his apartment for the last fifteen or so years. He doesn't figure the re
al one will surface anytime soon. He thinks no one here will be any the wiser and he can avoid paying a pile to Uncle Sam." Ryquist shook his head sadly.

  "Why'd he tell you all that, Hjelmer?" Chris asked.

  "To avoid being suspected of murder." Ryquist grinned. "Something about the way he was acting made me suspicious. He just wasn't being forthcoming about things, so we threatened to put him in jail as a material witness to help clarify his thinking." He smiled at the memory.

  "Jail? Howard Randall? Oh God... he'll never want to come back to Camford again." Chris thought about how that would play in the administration building.

  "Well, he got himself an attorney. After they'd discussed it for a time we agreed not to say anything publicly in exchange for the whole story. Randall isn't happy about it, but at least the questions about your painting are all answered."

  "There's one question nagging me that this doesn't answer," Chris said, rising to go to the kitchen.

  "What's that, Doc?"

  She returned with two glasses of wine. "Why did Elizabeth Page let the Gala proceed when it seems likely she knew the painting was a fake?"

  Ryquist nodded and set his glass down. "I asked Randall if Page had given him any indication that she knew the Picasso was phony. He wouldn't talk about it for quite a while."

  Pansy interrupted in confusion. "Wait... he'd talk about forging a major work of art, but not about whether she knew it was a fake? I don't understand."

  "He was afraid he was providing himself a motive for murder," Ryquist explained. "See, she did know. It took some persuading and consultation with his attorney, but Randall finally admitted she dropped little hints the first time he met her when he came to campus last fall. She finally laid it on him when they opened the crate and told him he wouldn't need to worry about it as long as he gave generously to the Museum Endowment Fund. Essentially she was blackmailing him."

  "Blackmail?" Pansy's head swiveled from Chris to Ryquist and back.

  Chris sat back in her chair and looked at the ceiling. "I don't think she thought of it like that," she said at last. "She probably thought, since it wasn't for her personally, it was just fund raising."

  It was perfect. The explanation fit everything she'd learned about the late director of the Midstate Museum of Art in the last five years: self-absorbed, single minded, dedicated to the museum and completely ruthless.