Free Cold Hit by Linda Fairstein Page B

were completely unfamiliar to me — all contemporary and none bearing signatures that I recognized.
    Caxton walked behind the table and lowered himself into Denise’s chair, looking around the room as if for the first time from that perspective, and invited us to sit down and ask him whatever questions we wanted to pose about her.
    “When do we reach the point at which you ask me who her enemies were, gentlemen?”
    “We’re ready anytime you are. How long’s the list?” Chapman said.
    “Depends on where you are in the art community, I would think. A disgruntled ‘artiste’ who thinks his dealer has taken too great a commission for his work. Just glance at the walls and see how many of those there might be. Then you’ve got the clients, who’ve found they’ve paid too much for a painting, on the dealer’s advice, that they neither like nor will be able to resell for anything remotely near the price they put out.
    “There isn’t anyone in the business,” he went on, “who hasn’t been accused of selling a forged piece, by accident or design, over the years. And then there’s the current brouhaha in the auction houses, with the government charging sellers with rigging the bids to knock up the prices. On the surface, gentlemen, it’s a world of exquisite beauty and refinement. But it’s every bit as filthy and cutthroat as any other commercial enterprise, as soon as you get beneath the top layer of gouache.”
    Mercer was leaning forward, balancing his pad on his knee while he reviewed subjects he wanted to ask Caxton about. “We’ll need a client list, then, as well as contact information for the painters she represented.”
    “You’ll have to talk to her partner about that tomorrow at his office.”
    “I thought you were her partner,” Mike said.
    “As I mentioned, I set her up in the gallery in the Fuller Building originally. Without the Caxton name, I doubt she would have been able to sell the
Mona Lisa
, had it come on the market. I was the entrée to the uptown world in Manhattan — old money, large walls, deep pockets. But once she got involved in the New York scene, she had her own separate business — a thriving one at that — with a silent partner who mirrored her taste much more directly. Perhaps you’ve heard of him — Bryan Daughtry? They called their business Galleria Caxton Due.”
    Mercer and I certainly knew Daughtry’s name. He had been a suspect in a very bizarre murder case in a neighboring county — beyond our jurisdiction but right up our alley. Chapman went for the bait. “Dead girl in the leather mask?
That
Daughtry?”
    “Indeed, Mr. Chapman. That’s why I was so grateful that he was a silent partner. The scandal didn’t alarm Deni at all. Might even have helped, with her type of clientele. But none of the stigma ever stuck on Bryan. I haven’t spoken with him yet today, but he knows all the players in their professional life.”
    “Does he have any part of your Fifty-seventh Street business?” I asked.
    “Not a dime. Not a speck of paint.”
    “Where was their operation? SoHo?”
    “You’re not keeping up with the trends, Detective Wallace. SoHo is dead. It’s a commercial mall these days, not a creative zone any longer.”
    The area south of Houston Street and north of Canal had been claimed by the avant-garde art community in the sixties and seventies. Abandoned lofts and warehouses, uninhabitable and overrun with rodents, had been renovated, populated, and gentrified by the struggling artists who were unable to afford midtown rents and needed the cavernous space to house their oversized canvases. The old meat district known as Washington Market became chic with its new infusion of hip locals and its redesignation as “Tribeca,” the triangle below Canal. By the late eighties, galleries there were being displaced by designer boutiques, chain store branches, and bed-and-bath shops with their ubiquitous supply of votive candles.
    Caxton described the