Free Cold Hit by Linda Fairstein

distinct living spaces. Different lifestyles, different tastes in art.
    “I didn’t approve of the drugs, and I didn’t much care for Deni’s current passion for modern painting — some of the very abstract, jarring works she’d developed an interest in recently.” We followed Caxton as he opened the door to Denise’s wing.
    “You know, gentlemen, this may sound a bit peevish in light of the fact that I’m standing here with you while my wife is being fitted for a coffin, but if your department had taken
my
shooting a bit more seriously, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened to Deni.”
    Mercer, Mike, and I couldn’t conceal our puzzlement as we exchanged looks.
    “Are any of you with the Nineteenth Precinct? That’s the unit that’s handling the investigation,” Caxton explained.
    “No, we’re not. Could you tell us what happened?”
    Chapman was plainly annoyed that we had come here without such an important piece of information. “Just crossing Madison Avenue, six weeks ago, on my way home from the Whitney. Holding a Styrofoam coffee cup in my hand. A car driving past slowed down, and the man in the passenger seat pointed at me — it was happening so quickly that all I saw was his hand — then I heard the sound of a gunshot and felt a stinging on my scalp. I found myself sitting on the curb, people running over to help me. Never even dropped the coffee.”
    Caxton bowed his head and parted his silver hair with his hands. “I’m sure you can still see the scar, like a seam across my scalp. At that moment I was quite sure I was dead. This must be what it’s like to die, I thought to myself. No pain at all. It took me a few seconds to realize, as the blood dripped onto my face, that I had been grazed by the bullet and not seriously injured at all. If someone had actually tried to kill me, they’d hired the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
    “I trust you’ll be able to figure out whether Deni’s death had anything to do with that, won’t you?”
    He pivoted away and walked on ahead of us to turn on the lights in the dim hallway. “The only thing I trust,” said Chapman, “is that some ass-kissing lieutenant in the Nineteenth was trying to make his numbers look better for the commissioner. When I call over for the case report on the assault on Lowell Caxton, I’ll probably find out that they’re carrying the investigation as disorderly conduct instead of attempted murder. Heaven forbid you alarm the good citizens of the Upper East Side by suggesting a violent crime could happen here — they might confuse the place with Harlem.”
     

7
     
    “Here’s another Degas,” Caxton said to me, stopping in front of a painting. “Perhaps you remember from your college days that after the Napoleonic wars, it was presumed of firstborn sons of a certain class that they would become lawyers. Edgar dutifully followed his father’s wishes and enrolled at the Faculté de Droit. Fortunately for the rest of the world — if not his parents — he dropped out in favor of doing something more creative than litigation after only a month.”
    He walked on. “Cézanne spent almost three years at law school in Aix, replete with boredom. And Matisse actually clerked for a lawyer for quite a while, drafting briefs and keeping files. It was only when he was forced to stay at home with appendicitis that he was given his first paint set by his mother. A decade later, he changed the history of the art world with the birth of Fauvism — exuberant colors and wildly distorted shapes. Imagine our loss if any of these giants had become mired in the law. You don’t paint by any chance, do you, Miss Cooper?”
    Lowell Caxton managed to summarize a bit of art history while making clear his disdain for the legal profession. I got the point.
    So far, the hallway lined with Impressionist paintings was as breathtaking as any gallery in the finest museums. Caxton opened the last door, which had been Denise’s bedroom. The