Stealing the Countess (7 page)

“Whose idea was it to ask Duclos to play the concert?”

“That's a good question. I have no idea. Could have been Heather Voight. She and Duclos were an item back in the day. King and queen of the prom. You know how it is, though. He leaves, she stays; he becomes famous, she marries the local schnook—typical small-town cliché. It's not like she spent all her time pining for him, though. Heather owns half of Bayfield. If it wasn't her who called that asshole—you should ask the girl who plans our events at the visitors' bureau. She would know.”

“I've already made myself unpopular down at the visitors' bureau and over at the Queen Anne. I all but accused Lauren Ternes of helping to plan the burglary.”

“That dyke?”

“I didn't mean anything by it. I'm just trying to get the word out that I'm willing to make a deal for the violin.”

“I wouldn't worry about it. News travels pretty fast in this town.”

Speegle stood. He called, “Ellis,” and the young woman who had served us earlier spun away from the table she was bussing to look at him. He pointed at our table.

“I got this,” he said.

“Thank you for the beer,” I said.

“Come back later tonight and I'll buy you another one. We've got some kids going onstage who think they can play the blues.”

“I'll be here.”

*   *   *

Speegle moved back inside the tavern. I was about to leave myself when a dark blue police cruiser with the name
BAYFIELD
stenciled on the door pulled up; the front high-grade push bumper was about five yards away from where I sat on the sidewalk. The car was parked illegally. The driver stepped out. He was an older man and bigger than I was, wearing a police uniform and sunglasses. He stepped around the cruiser. Tourists strolling the sidewalk gave him plenty of room; those sitting at tables like mine watched while pretending not to.

Speegle was right,
my inner voice said.
News does travel fast here.

“You're McKenzie,” the police office said.

It wasn't a question, yet I answered anyway.

“I am,” I said.

“Come with me.”

“Where?”

“We're going to the hall. Now get up.”

“No.”

My eyes followed his hand as it slowly moved to the butt of his holstered Glock.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“I said no.”

My response seemed to catch him by surprise. The officer whipped off his sunglasses with a dramatic flourish and took a step toward me. He pointed his glasses at my face, his other hand still resting on the Glock.

“We can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way,” he said.

He was close enough now that I could read the name tag over his left pocket.

“Chief Neville,” I said. “Am I under arrest?”

“I should arrest you.”

“I didn't ask what you should do.”

“No, you're not under arrest.”

“Good, cuz if I was under arrest, I'd lawyer up and not speak to you at all. On the other hand, if you were to remove your hand from your gun and sit down, we could have a friendly conversation about any damn thing that you want. What do you say?” I gestured at the chair across from me. “Sit. Relax. Can I get you anything?”

The chief put his sunglasses back on and reluctantly pulled out a chair. I raised my hand and waved at the waitress, who had been watching the scene intently. She hurried over.

“Chief,” she said.

“Iced tea,” he said. “Thank you, Ellis.”

Ellis,
my inner voice repeated.
Another small town where everyone knows everybody. That could be useful.

Ellis glanced at me, and I pointed at the empty South Shore bottle.

“One more,” I said.

She hurried away.

“So, Chief Neville,” I said. “What would you like to talk about? The weather? It's just perfect.”

“The reason you're in Bayfield.”

“What have you heard?”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“Honestly, sir, I am not.”

“You're here to buy stolen property, specifically, the Countess Borromeo. You're willing to pay a quarter of a mil for her.”

I was thinking about G. K. Bonalay's warning, the one about lying to the police, when I answered.

“I have been spreading that rumor, it's true,” I said. “However, it could be mere subterfuge, a lie spoken to draw out the thieves and see that swift and merciless justice is meted out. Who knows?”

The chief chuckled at that.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “You've done this before.”

Ellis returned with our drinks. We both thanked her by name, and she moved away.

“Sir, I mean to cause you and your department the barest minimum of inconvenience,” I said.

“I like the ‘sir.'”

“And I apologize for flouting your authority in public, only I wanted to talk to you as much as you want to talk to me, and I don't think we could do that at the hall.”

“Why not?”

“Too official. Too much public record. I used to be a police officer myself, in St. Paul, Minnesota.”

“I did twenty years in Houghton, Michigan, before coming here to do eight more.”

“So, we understand each other.”

“I was hired to serve and protect the citizens of Bayfield. You're not from Bayfield. Do you understand that?”

“I do. Just out of curiosity”—I glanced at my watch; I had been in Bayfield for just over three hours—“who told you I was here?”

“You're staying at the Queen Anne, am I right?”

Good answer,
my inner voice said.
A cop's answer, giving me information without giving it.

“I am at the Queen Anne,” I said aloud.

“Is that where you're keeping the $250,000?”

“Only a moron would carry around that kind of cash.”

“You can get it in a hurry, though, isn't that the correct answer?”

“Tell me, Chief. Of the five hundred and thirty people living in Bayfield, who do you think was the most likely to steal the Stradivarius?”

He took a long sip of his iced tea before he answered.

“These violins have been stolen before from dressing rooms and apartments; a café outside a train station in London that I read about…”

“Or B&Bs,” I added.

“Usually it was done quietly. The thieves—and the owners—always wanted to create as little noise as possible, which would make recovery that much easier. Yet this particular theft created nothing but noise that got louder and louder. There's also the issue of who would buy a four-million-dollar Stradivarius after it was stolen. No dealer in the world would touch it. The FBI's art crime guys told me that a collector might want it even if he could never show it to anyone. But all the collectors I know—and I don't care what it is that they're collecting, cars, comic books, autographs, whatever—they live to show off their stuff.”

“What's your theory?”

“You can't discount the nitwit factor.”

Another cop answer. He's telling you that the crime was either unplanned or planned by amateurs.

“I have copies of reports,” I said. “The FBI's; yours, too.”

“Is that right?”

“They tell me that the violin was removed from its case and the case was dumped in the street.”

“The case had a GPS tracker.”

“Which makes me think the thief wasn't a complete nitwit.”

The chief took another pull of his tea; nothing in his expression or demeanor gave away what he was thinking.

“Where exactly was the violin case found?” I asked.

“Didn't the reports say?”

I pulled the map from my pocket and unfolded it. I was going to search for the location noted in his police report, yet before I could, the chief reached across the table and tapped a spot on the map—the intersection of Eleventh Street and Wilson Avenue.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You're not carrying a gun in my town, are you, McKenzie?”

“I'm not licensed to carry in Wisconsin.”

“That's not what I asked you.”

“No, I am not carrying a gun in Bayfield.”

“Keep it that way.”

The chief stood and stretched; a lot of the tourists standing on the sidewalk and sitting at the tables watched him do it.

“If you're looking for a good restaurant, I recommend Hill House,” he said. “I know the owner; a woman named Heather Voight. Say hi for me.”

“I will.”

“We'll talk again real soon; shoot the shit like old pals. You can tell me what you think of my city after you've had a chance to look around a bit, meet a few citizens.”

“Sure.”

I watched as the chief climbed into his cruiser and drove away, leaving me to ask myself—did he really just invite me to investigate the theft of the Countess Borromeo and report back to him?

Why would he do that?

*   *   *

I paid for the pale ale and iced tea in cash, leaving Ellis an obscenely generous tip. Using the map for directions, I made my way south through the city. Most of the restaurants and galleries were in the center of downtown, so it didn't take long to escape the tourists. Soon I found myself alone on Manypenny. I walked up the steep hill across Highway 13 into the heart of Bayfield's residential area, past the Lutheran church to Eleventh Street, and then east to Wilson Avenue. I stood in the middle of the T-intersection. There were a few small houses nearby and one mansion large enough to have a carriage house on its property.

“Why here?” I asked myself aloud.

It seemed like such an unlikely spot. Taking Highway 13 east or west was the quickest way to get out of Bayfield by car. Or the thieves could have escaped by boat across Lake Superior. There were many places to ditch the violin case along both possible routes. Yet the intersection was several blocks from the highway, a mile from the lake, and maybe twice as far from the Queen Anne.

“So why dump the violin case here?”

Maybe the neighbors would know, I told myself.

*   *   *

I recorded the addresses of all the houses in the immediate vicinity into my notebook and began hiking back toward the B&B. The quickest way to reach it was to walk down the hill and cut through Bayfield's downtown, and soon I was approaching the Lakeside Tavern again. That's when I noticed a second man dressed in a police uniform. This one was younger, not more than twenty-five. He was standing among the sidewalk tables and talking to Ellis. She shrugged her shoulders at whatever he had to say and moved past him in a hurry as if she wanted to put as much distance between her and the officer as possible. He barked words at her. She spun around abruptly to face him. Tourists sitting at nearby tables looked up. He said something, and they quickly averted their eyes. He spoke to Ellis. She shook her head and waved her arms, then noticed me watching the scene from up the street. She pointed. The officer followed her finger to where I was standing. He stared at me. I folded my arms over my chest and stared back. He moved in my direction. Ellis stepped in close and said something. He shoved her away.

The officer walked toward me with the swagger of a D-I college football player; big man on campus taking up much of the sidewalk, forcing tourists to walk around him instead of giving up space for them to pass. He tried to appear menacing as he approached; think Lee Van Cleef in all those spaghetti Westerns that you've seen late night on TCM.

“You're McKenzie,” he said. “I've been looking for you.”

My eyes found his name tag—Brian Pilhofer. I recognized it instantly.

“You're the guy who thought a four-million-dollar Stradivarius was a fiddle,” I said.

“Who told you that?”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation”—which wasn't true, but still … “You're also the guy who's going around calling Connor Rasmussen a thief, which leaves you, the police department, and the City of Bayfield open to a lawsuit that you would almost certainly lose.”

“Wait a minute.”

“I already met Chief Neville, so I'm going to guess that you're the bad cop. What do you want?”

“The missing Stradivarius…”

“What about it?”

“You're looking for it.”

“Yes, I am. Aren't you?”

Pilhofer obviously enjoyed the authority his badge gave him, yet he used it poorly. He expected people to back down when he spoke, and when I didn't he took it as a personal affront. He leaned in, purposely violating my personal space in an effort to make me feel uncomfortable.

“I want you to get the fuck outta my town,” he said.

“You realize that people are watching, right? That they can see and hear you threatening an innocent tourist, right?”

Pilhofer backed away immediately. He began turning his head this way and that. There were people watching, not many, but enough. He seemed surprised. I didn't know why. A uniformed police officer confronting a man on the sidewalk, the world the way it is these days, you might be tempted to pay attention yourself.

“Why do you want me to leave town, Officer?” I asked. “How am I a threat to you?”

“You, McKenzie—I know you're here to buy stolen property. That's against the law.”

“So I have been told. But that's not why you want to get rid of me—I just spoke with Chief Neville, like I said. No, this is something personal. What is it? The money?”

“What money?”

“If it's about the reward—if you want me to leave so you can recover the violin on your own and collect the $250,000, I'm fine with that. Believe me.”

“I don't care about the damn reward.”

“Then what's your motivation? Why are you threatening me on a street corner less than an hour after your boss told me to have a nice day?”

“He doesn't know anything about being a good cop.”