Elizabeth Lowell - Blue Smoke and Murder

“But Tal was so upset.”

“I’ll call Tal and straighten things out. Are you in Las Vegas now?”

“Yes.”

“Keep a lid on Lee. The less said, the better.”

Betty looked at the man pouring whiskey into a tumbler and sighed. “I’ll do what I can.” She hesitated. “This will make the paintings less valuable, won’t it?”

“Don’t worry,” Worthington said. “And keep Lee away from the public until he’s sober. If you get a call from anyone offering to sell new Dunstans to you, pass the call on to me.”

“Why would anyone want to sell us Dunstan paintings? We don’t have that kind of money.”

Extortion, you silly twit. What else? Worthington’s thumb ached almost as much as his head. Lee verifies fake paintings and everything is sweet-except Crawford will have my balls if I don’t generate enough auction excitement to support a minimum of eight million dollars per Dunstan. Ten is what Crawford really wants. That will make the kind of waves that nobody can question, not even the IRS.

Worthington was, in his own way, as eager as Crawford to make a huge splash. It would bring his new auction house to the attention of the big players in the art world in a dazzling way. But that would be hard to pull off with a dozen dubious Dunstans coming out of the woodwork at the last moment.

Crawford didn’t have the money to soak up twelve new paintings at four million each, much less at ten. And if the new paintings went for less, they would devalue the ones Crawford already owned.

“Don’t worry about anything except keeping a lid on Lee and calling me if someone contacts you about the paintings,” Worthington said. “Do you understand?”

Betty sighed. “I don’t understand anything, but I’ll do what you say.”

Worthington hung up and dialed Crawford’s cell phone number from memory.

Answer, you bastard. Time is running out.

SAN DIEGO

SEPTEMBER 16

4:15 P.M.

Dad?” Lane asked, sticking his head out of the bedroom doorway. “Where are you?”

“In our office,” Faroe called out, “burping the eating machine.”

“I didn’t know if you wanted all this on the St. Kilda network, so I thought I’d give you what I have so far.”

Computer under his arm, Lane walked into his parents’ office. He took the locked gun cabinet and the wall of electronics for granted, but he always loved seeing the array of computers. Working for St. Kilda Consulting meant not only that his parents had great equipment but that he got to use it sometimes.

His idea of heaven.

The baby tucked against Faroe’s shoulder gave a belch that Lane would have been proud of.

“Is that a round-two burp?” Lane asked.

Faroe blinked. “A what?”

“You know. You’re full and then you give a big belch and you’re ready for-”

“Round two,” Faroe said, shaking his head. “Gotcha.”

Grace looked up from her computer and held out her arms for little Annalise. “I have a new search running on the Moorcroft case.”

“Anything?” Faroe asked.

“I’ll know in a few hours. Or days. Depends on how many levels I have to go through to strike gold.”

“We’ve got to hire some more researchers,” Faroe said.

“Steele said he’s vetting them as fast as he can.”

“He’s worse than the government when it comes to background checks.”

“Good thing, too,” Grace said dryly. “St. Kilda is a lot more demanding than good old Uncle Sam.”

“Steele has me,” Lane said, smiling and opening his computer. “Look at this. I don’t understand half the language, but there are a lot of zeros to the left of the decimal.”

“Drag a chair over,” Faroe said, settling into his own office chair, “and show me what your swarm found.”

“This is only preliminary,” Lane said. “We haven’t had much-”

“Gimme,” Faroe cut in. “No researcher ever has enough time.”

Lane sat and scooted a rolling office chair across the Spanish tile floor. Faroe stuck out a long leg and cushioned the impact of his son’s landing.

“I’m not sure where to begin,” Lane said.

“At the bottom line,” Faroe said.

“Which one,” Lane said under his breath.

“You always say that.”

“You always give me a reason.” Lane frowned at the computer. “Okay, most recent hits first. I shunted all the general Western art stuff into a separate file if-”

“Bottom line,” Faroe said ruthlessly.

“Right. Recent Dunstan hits. Governor of Nevada, one of the state senators, a congressional representative, and a rich dude called Talbert ‘Tal’ Crawford congratulated themselves at a press conference called because Crawford is making a big contribution to something called the Museum of the West. He’s donating his entire collection of Western art, including whatever he buys at the Vegas auction on Sunday.”

Faroe watched his son with steady eyes that were more green than hazel, intelligent, and fierce in their intensity. “Generous man.”

“Yeah. It’s his first big charitable contribution, too, and he has megabucks. Has had it for years. Oil, mostly.”

“Interesting.”

“I thought so,” Lane said. “You always say to look for the pattern, then look where it isn’t followed.”

Faroe’s smile made him look deceptively gentle.

“I’ve got a bunch of stuff on Crawford from the financial angle,” Lane said.

“Let’s stick with Dunstan for now.”

“There’s not much to stick with. All the really recent hits have to do with the museum. Most of the other recent hits on the Dunstan name have to do with the upcoming auction. The art bloggers are all over it like a cat covering-” Lane glanced up, saw his mother nursing the baby, and cleared his throat. “All over it like a cat in a sandbox.”

Faroe bit back a smile. Lane was really trying to keep his language clean around his baby sister.

So was Dad.

“A month or so ago there was a thread on some art blogs that some new Dunstans had been discovered,” Lane said, “but nothing came of it that got posted on the Internet. Other blogs said anything new by Dunstan would be a fraud or a scam of some sort.”

“Copy the blogs to me,” Faroe said.

“Already did.”

“Despite what you sometimes think,” Grace said without looking up from her computer or the baby, “your son actually listens to you. Sometimes.”

Lane snickered. “The blogs are saying that the four to six million dollars per Dunstan is low end, because he comes on the market so rarely that there’s a lot of demand. The figure ten million dollars keeps coming up again and again in the really recent hits. Some serious buzz going down.”

“Good news for the art business,” Faroe said.

“Bad news for Uncle Sam,” Lane said, “according to one source.”

“Yeah?” Faroe asked. “In my experience, the government always gets its cut of the action.”

“Something to do with taxes,” Lane said.

“Are we talking Crawford?”

“Yeah, but you said you wanted to talk about Dunstan.”

“Do you have anything else on Dunstan?” Faroe asked.

“Just secondary and tertiary sources quoting primary sources and then each other. For example-”

“Quit jerking Joe’s chain,” Grace cut in. “He may be in the mood for it but I’m not. Bottom-line time.”

Lane started to defend himself, then thought better of it. He knew he was yanking his dad’s chain, but only in a sideways, sort of buddy kind of way. Nothing serious.

“About two years ago,” Lane said, drawing up a new document on the computer, “Crawford’s business manager was busted on some bad tax shelters. He got bail on appeal, then hopped a plane to Paraguay with two showgirls and a lot of money in offshore accounts. Turns out that some of the deals he cut for Crawford weren’t what they looked like on the surface. Certainly not when it came to claiming federal tax deductions on losses.”

“Bottom-” Faroe said.

“-line,” Lane finished. “Crawford owes over a hundred million in taxes and penalties to our favorite uncle. He’s fighting it, but he’s lost two appeals already. The third one is still in the works.”

Faroe’s soft whistle was all the reward Lane needed.

“I don’t really understand a lot of this,” Lane continued, “but one of the swarmers has real financial smarts. She said that a cheap way to pay taxes is to give away stuff you already own to charity and take its value off your taxes.”

“Stuff?” Faroe asked.

“You know. Art, jewelry, property, that sort of thing. Stuff. Give it to a charity or a public trust.”

“Or a museum,” Faroe said. “Good job, Lane.”

His son grinned.

“Giving away ‘stuff ’ works especially well if you can somehow inflate the cost of the donation,” Grace said, turning away from her computer without disturbing little Annalise. “That way you never paid full price, but you’re taking a full-price deduction. Or the sale price says one thing, but the buyer pays only a fraction. Under the table, of course. Deductions all around.”

“Nothing like auction fever for raising prices,” Faroe said. “Or plain old bid-rigging works, too.”

“Does Crawford own any other art?” Grace asked Lane. “Or just Western art?”

“I came across something about a really important Picasso or two, plus some Warhols and a huge painting by the splatter dude.”

“Jackson Pollock?” Grace guessed.

“Yeah. Him,” Lane said.

“Why wouldn’t Crawford sell or donate those?” Grace asked. “Modern art is at an all-time high. No need for inflating prices, artificial or real.”

“Yeah,” Lane agreed. “Can you imagine paying over a hundred million dollars for a picture of a guy kissing a girl?”

“Depends on the artist,” Faroe said.

“Some dude called Klimt.”

“Pass,” Faroe said. He looked at Grace. “I like my women to look like women.”

Grace smiled at the heat in Faroe’s eyes. If Lane hadn’t been a few feet away, she would have given her husband the kind of kiss they both loved.

“But Lane has a good point,” she said. “Why go to the trouble of inflating prices on relatively unknown art when you have much better known art you can give away with less hassle?”

“Vanity,” Faroe suggested. “Bet his name ends up on Nevada’s museum building. A Warhol wouldn’t get it done.”

“Maybe he actually likes that modern cra-er, stuff,” Lane said, looking at his little sister. “So he’s keeping it.”

“Or his best-known art could already be tied up,” Grace said.

“How?” Lane asked.

“Collateral on loans,” his mother answered.

“Huh?”

“Think of it as a high-class pawnshop,” Grace said. “You hand over the paintings to a bank vault, and the bank hands over the loan to you. It’s done all the time when there’s a cash crunch among the really rich. Very quiet. Very discreet. Nobody knows that the paintings are temporarily held hostage by the bank.”

“They loan at full value?” Faroe asked.

“Banks aren’t stupid,” Grace said. “With that kind of collateral, you get maybe fifty percent of retail price, usually less.”

“That’s still a lot of zeros to the left of the decimal,” Faroe said. He leaned toward his son. “How much did your swarmers get on Crawford’s finances in the last five years?”

“Not as much as I could if you’d let me hack into a few private databases,” Lane said eagerly.

“Give me what you have. If that’s not enough, we’ll talk about hacking.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “First we have Ambassador Steele home-schooling Lane on the reality versus the media coverage of world politics. Now we have Joe Faroe teaching his son the cutting edge of computer ethics. What’s next? Mary teaching applied physics by showing Lane how to drop a man with a sniper’s rifle at eight hundred yards?”

“Good idea,” Faroe said. “I’ll put it in the lesson plan.”

Hiding a smile, Lane started researching Talbert Crawford’s finances in open sources.

If he was a really good boy, the closed sources would come later.

LAS VEGAS

SEPTEMBER 16

5:07 P.M.

Zach looked at the crowded lobby of the Golden Fleece. The huge tank of water with circulating gold dust was a big draw. People stood around watching a monster sheep fleece straining gold from the water until the fleece gleamed like its fabled namesake. It was a method of recovering gold dust that was as old as the legend. From the look of the fleece, it was nearly at the end of its collection cycle.