Free Cold Hit by Linda Fairstein Page A

contrast was stunning.
    “A bit self-involved, would you say?” he asked rather facetiously.
    The room was like a shrine to its former occupant, with almost every painting in it a portrait of Denise. “Gifts from the artists, of course. Thankful for her ability to turn their talents into gold, in some instances. Quite like alchemy. The Warhol is the great irony, in that he started this whole odyssey for her, without his ever knowing it.”
    Displayed above the headboard of the king-size bed, covered in an exquisite set of antique linens with countless throw pillows layered on top, were the four-colored Warhol images of a younger Denise Caxton. The youthful bride with a swanlike neck and beauty queen smile was deserving of a few portraits, I conceded, but this accumulation was a bit frightening.
    The three of us circled the space, looking at signatures and taking in the variety of styles. I recognized some of the names — Richard Sussman, Emilio Gomes, and Aneas McKiever among them — but Caxton pointed out the rest of those I had never encountered. There were Deni Caxtons fully clothed and bejeweled, and there were Deni Caxtons completely nude and erotically posed. There were torsos without heads and limbs, and there were heads without body parts.
    “How’d she let this one slip in?” Chapman asked. He pointed at a yellow canvas, three feet square, with a small pink rectangle in the upper right corner.
    Caxton laughed. “That
is
Denise, Detective. According to Alain Levinsky. Even she had a sense of humor about it. She managed to sell about a dozen Levinsky ‘portraits,’ Mr. Chapman. One each to Bardot, Trump, and Ted Turner — can’t remember who sat for the others. A few rectangles, a few oblongs, a few squares.
Et voilà
, a portrait.”
    “This is all like ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ if you ask me,” Chapman said.
    “Precisely,” Caxton responded. “I couldn’t agree with you more. Denise mocked me for my traditional views — too representational, she used to argue, too old-fashioned. I wish P. T. Barnum had lived long enough to encounter this trend. Nowadays there are two or three suckers born every minute, if you ask me. He might have gone into partnership with Deni.”
    Mercer was scouring the surfaces of the furniture — bedside tables, dresser top, lingerie chest — for any signs of notes or papers, names or phone numbers. But there was nothing loose and nothing casually laid about. Either Mrs. Caxton lived that neatly or Valerie had removed every jotting or message pad before we arrived.
    “Would you — or the housekeeper — know whether any belongings are missing?” Mercer asked. “Jewelry, clothing, anything like—”
    “I couldn’t begin to guess,” said Caxton. He stepped to the only other door in the room and pulled the handles back to reveal a walk-in closet, which was probably larger than half of the studio apartments in Manhattan. Clothes were assembled by category — dresses, slacks, suits, evening gowns — and then again by colors within those groupings. “The lesser jewels are kept in that safe at the rear. The more important things, from my mother and
grand-mére
, are all safeguarded in a vault. We’ll certainly check for you during the week.
    “If you’ve seen enough here, we’ll go inside to Deni’s office.”
    I wasn’t sure that I was ready to leave the boudoir, but we were given no choice, and the three of us dutifully followed Caxton, retracing our steps back up the corridor and into the next room.
    Denise had constructed a thronelike encampment for herself at one end of this huge home office, centered around a fifteenth-century table that Lowell told us he had found in an Umbrian monastery. The table had become her desk and was ornamented only by a Fabergé clock. There were two chairs placed opposite Denise’s high-backed leather seat, and four more scattered around the room that matched that pair. Here the walls were decorated with paintings that