Carnal Curiosity (21 page)

“Let me tell you how this is going to go,” Stone said, setting the briefcase on his lap and starting to stack bundles of hundreds on the footstool next to him.

“What do you mean,
you’re
going to tell
me
?” Bill pulled back his jacket a little, exposing a semiautomatic pistol tucked into his belt.

“Bill, that’s unnecessary,” Anita said. “Just listen. I want to hear what he says.”

“Thank you,” Stone said. “Here is how it’s going to go: I’m going to give you a hundred thousand dollars in cash, and you’re going to give me the ten pictures. In their original frames. Then I’m going to leave, and you won’t be hearing from me again. Is that clear?” He slipped his hand into the briefcase and took hold of the Colt .380, flipping off the safety with his thumb.

“I told you the pictures are fifteen grand each,” Bill said. “Now it’s twenty grand apiece.” His hand crept toward his pistol.

“Hold it right there,” Stone said, “or I’ll shoot you in the knee, and you’ll spend the next three months in a prison hospital. They don’t do very good knee work in those places, so you’ll limp for the rest of your life.”

Bill’s hand went back into his jacket pocket.

“May I continue?” Stone asked.

“Please do,” Anita replied.

“That’s my plan,” Stone said, “all of it. Call it the carrot, but there’s an alternative plan: after I shoot you in the knee, I can press a button and flood this place with police officers. After they’ve had a chance to compare your inventory to their list of stolen art, I’d guess you’d be answering at least a hundred charges of burglary, maybe a lot more. Call that the stick. Now, which is it going to be?”

Bill started to move toward Stone, but Anita put out a hand and grabbed his jacket. “Bill,” she said, “go get the frames. We’re taking the carrot.”

“He’s bluffing,” Bill said.

Stone removed the .380 from his briefcase and pointed it at Bill’s right knee. He thumbed the hammer back; it made a satisfying noise.

Anita held up a hand. “That won’t be necessary. Bill, go get the frames.” Bill vanished behind the mirror again, and Stone could hear him rummaging around in the back office.

“There’s a little more,” Stone said. “While Bill is busy, you can tell me how you came into possession of these pictures. And don’t leave anything out.”

Anita thought about it, then shrugged. “We were cruising, casing houses for jobs, on my motorcycle,” Anita said. “We were in Turtle Bay, in the East Forties, and we came upon what was obviously a burglary in progress. There were two guys, dressed in black, carrying the pictures out of a house and putting them in the van.”

“Describe the two men,” Stone said.

“Both big, Italian or Hispanic. They looked enough alike to be brothers.”

“Go on.”

“They drove away, and we followed them. They drove uptown into the East Sixties and turned down a street. They double-parked and left the engine running, then they got out and went into a town house.”

“Give me the exact address.” She did and described the house.

“And you stole the pictures from the van?”

“No,” she said. “We stole the van. Bill just hopped in and drove away, and I followed him back here. We unloaded the pictures, then he got rid of the van. We were disappointed—we thought there’d be a lot more than just the pictures.”

Stone laughed in spite of himself. “I love it,” he said. “It’s almost too good.”

“How’s that?”

Bill began fitting the pictures into their frames and tacking them in place.

“I love it that the people who stole my pictures got robbed, and I love it that you and Bill hadn’t the slightest idea what they are worth.”

“What are they worth?” she asked.

“You don’t want to know. If you’d tried to sell them to anybody else you’d have been arrested immediately. But you got lucky, you sold them back to the owner.”

“Come on, what are they worth?”

“Please believe me, you don’t want to know. But all this worked out very well for you: you’ve got a hundred and twelve thousand dollars of my insurance company’s money, Bill hasn’t been shot in the knee, and neither of you is going to prison.”

“Well, I guess it didn’t turn out too badly after all.”

“If you’re smart, you’ll use the money to shut down this place and walk away from it. The police know about it now, and they’ll come calling, sooner rather than later. You should be in another state by then, maybe in another country.” He used his cell phone again. “Fred, bring the car,” he said.

Bill tied the pictures with twine, making bundles of them, and he and Anita carried them outside and put them into the trunk of the Bentley.

Stone started to get into the car with Dino.

“See you around,” Anita said.

“Better not,” Stone replied, then closed the door. Fred drove them away.

“Everything went as planned?” Dino asked.

“I told you, I just improvised. By the way, wait until tomorrow before you send the art squad around here. It was part of the deal.”

46

S
tone called the house and asked Helene to make them some lunch. When they arrived Fred brought the pictures into the house and hung them in their original locations while they had lunch, and Stone related to Dino his conversation with Anita Mays and Bill Murphy.

“So we’ve got a witness to the burglary and a description of the burglars?”

“Not really. The burglars were the Drago brothers, and they took the pictures to Crane’s house on East Sixty-first—until they were re-stolen—but Anita and Bill aren’t going to be around to testify against them. They’ll clear out before dawn tomorrow. Your art squad will recover a hell of a lot of stolen stuff, and the previous owners will be happy about that, but the thieves will be gone.”

“So why didn’t I just arrest them today?”

“Because they wouldn’t have told us anything, and now we know for sure that Crane and Dugan were behind the theft.”

“A lot of good that will do us.”

“Wrong. Now you can eliminate all other suspects and concentrate your investigation on the two of them.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess.”

“And you may bag Jake Sutton, as well.”

“The jewelry squad is all over him.”

“I wonder if he’s smart enough to know that?”

“He’s been getting away with it for so long that he’s probably overconfident by now.” Dino’s phone rang. “Bacchetti. What do you mean? How did that happen?” He listened some more. “All right, get warrants for his house and business, and let’s see what we can find. If we’re lucky, we can go for extradition.” Dino hung up. “Jacob Sutton and his wife left their Brooklyn home before dawn this morning and took a nonstop flight to Tel Aviv. They’re probably halfway there by now.”

“What happened?”

“He must have sniffed out our surveillance. I thought we were better than that.”

Stone thought for a minute. “Dino, don’t search his house and business.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Suttons might just be going on a little vacation, and if they don’t get a call from someone telling them that your people are ransacking his house and office, they might just come back. People do take trips abroad, you know.”

Dino got out his phone and made the call. “Cancel the warrant requests and sit on the investigation until further word from me.” He hung up.

“Even if Sutton suspects you’re after him, if nothing happens here while he’s in Tel Aviv, he might think he’s being paranoid and come home.”

“You’re right,” Dino said. “We’ll just wait for him to make a decision. We’ve got a guy in the diamond center. We’ll know if he returns to work.”

“Would what Anita told me about the burglary here and the stealing of the van constitute probable cause for a search warrant of Crane’s house?”

“Well, it’s thirdhand information, and that isn’t good. And the pictures never made it into Crane’s house, so we can’t place stolen goods there. That’s a tough one.”

“That’s why you’ve got the top job,” Stone said, “to handle the tough ones.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You know,” Stone said, “I think we’ve given Anita Mays and Bill Murphy enough time to bolt. Why don’t you send some people down there and wait for them to load up and run, then bust them?”

“Why wait until then?”

“Because they’ll have all the best stuff in the van, so you won’t have to figure that out. Also, I gave them fair warning. One more thing: if there’s anything they didn’t tell me, they might give it up to make a deal.”

“That’s a thought,” Dino said. They finished lunch in the kitchen and went up to Stone’s study. Dino used the landline to issue his orders for the Barrow Street location. “Don’t let them drive away,” he told his people. “Take them when they look loaded up.” He hung up. “You want to go to a movie?”

“Sure, why not, it’s Saturday afternoon.”

They took a cab up to Third Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, where there was a cluster of theaters, and found a movie, then after that, found another one.

Viv met them at P.J. Clarke’s, and they were having dinner when Dino got the call on his cell. He listened quietly, then said, “Good job,” and hung up.

“What?” Viv asked.

“The art squad busted Anita Mays and Bill Murphy,” he said. “They had a stolen motorcycle in their van and a lot of antique jewelry.” He paused for effect. “And a little more than four hundred thousand dollars in cash.”

Viv and Stone applauded.

“The boys are cataloging the shop’s inventory now, and they say it looks like running into the millions.”

“Good bust!” Viv said.

“And all because Stone had his mother’s pictures stolen,” Dino said.

“And they’re back on my walls.”

“You’ll get your hundred grand back,” Dino said.

“My insurance company will be delighted to hear that, since they won’t have to reimburse me.”

“So everybody’s happy,” Viv said.

“Only thing wrong with that is Dugan and Crane are still happy,” Stone pointed out.

“I’ll see that there’s nothing released about your pictures,” Dino said, “so they still won’t know what happened to them and their van.”

“I hope it drives them crazy,” Stone said. “Go ahead and report their van stolen, Dino. If you recover it, I’d like to see the expressions on their faces when they get the call.”

47

A
nn arrived at Stone’s house in a state of excitement. She kissed him and threw her bag into the elevator. “Come on,” she said, “we’ve got to change.”

“Are we going out?”

“We’re having dinner at the Carlyle apartment with the president and Kate.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“The
Times
story—the big one on Marty Stanton—is going to break tonight, and she wants to be incommunicado when it does, but they don’t want to be alone, so we’re company.”

They took a shower together and used the tiled seat in the stall to good advantage, then Ann spent the better part of an hour doing her hair and makeup, while Stone watched the news.

“There won’t be anything on the air about it yet,” Ann said, “unless there’s a leak, and the paper has gone to some lengths to see that there isn’t. The story goes into the early Sunday edition, which won’t hit the newsstands until the middle of the evening.”

“Tell me again why we’re excited about this?”

“All I’ve got is a rumor that there’s something big in the story.”

“Suppose it’s something big about Kate?” Stone shouted over her hair dryer.

Ann turned off the hair dryer and faced him. “What?”

“If they had big news about Kate, wouldn’t this be a good place for it—in a story about Stanton?”

Ann thought about it. “No, if they had something on Kate, it would be its own story.” She turned the hair dryer back on.

“If you say so.”

She turned it off again. “What did you say?”

“I said if you say so.”

She turned it back on.

—

T
hey arrived at the Carlyle on time and rode up in the elevator with two Secret Service agents, who escorted them to the apartment’s door, where the butler greeted them and took their drink orders. They sat in the living room and waited.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you nervous before,” Stone said.

“I’m not nervous.”

“Then why are you tapping your glass with your fingernails? You never do that.”

“All right, I’m a little nervous. I just have the feeling that something’s about to change in the campaign. Call it a premonition.”

“A premonition about what?” Kate said as she swept into the living room, a half-finished martini in one hand. She administered kisses and sat down. “Will’s on the phone about something,” she said. “He’ll join us in a few minutes. Now, what premonition?”

“I was just telling Stone that I have a feeling that the campaign is going to change when this story hits the streets.”

“You know, I have the same feeling,” Kate said. “That’s why I’m drinking martinis. I know I’m not going to make any statements tonight, no matter what it says, so I can relax.”

A man came into the living room. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said. He went to a computer set up on a table next to the big flat-screen TV and typed in some keystrokes.

Will Lee came into the room. “Have you got it?”

“Five seconds,” the man said. He hit
ENTER
, and the TV came to life.

Will didn’t bother to greet anyone; he sat down. “Watch this,” he said.

The screen was pretty dark, except for some pinpoints of light.

“We’ll bring up the light level,” the technician said.

There were two clicks, and the screen became brighter, then brighter again.

“It’s the middle of the night over there,” Will said.

The lights were strung out in a line now, and it became apparent that they were looking at four vehicles, all of them black, racing along a desert road.

“Which car are they in?” Kate said. “I’m counting four.”

“All of them,” Will replied, his eyes glued to the screen.

“This is being shot from a drone,” Kate said by way of explanation.