The Body in the Basement (15 page)

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Authors: Katherine Hall Page

BOOK: The Body in the Basement
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“Why are you being so nice to me?”
She didn't have an answer ready.
“I don't know. I guess I feel sorry for you.”
He nodded. She assumed he felt sorry for himself, too.
“Life sucks. Especially in this rinky-dink place.”
“It must seem small after living in Richmond. That was where you were, right?”
“Yeah. Richmond was okay. The best place was where we lived before my real father died. Outside the city.”
“There are a lot of good kids here, though. I've been coming every summer since I was born and I know everybody. You could come to the movies with us next week if you want.” Samantha had no idea why she proposed this. Arlene would kill her.
“I don't need your friends. I've got plenty of my own.” She should have saved her breath.
“Well, that's great. Now I'm going to go get something to eat before I starve.” Enough was enough.
“Plenty of friends. We even have our own club.”
“Club? That sounds like fun,” Samantha commented perfunctorily. She was picturing a steaming red-hot lobster.
“Maybe you'd like to join.” Duncan's tone was mocking.
Samantha resented the implication—that she was too good for his little club, or whatever.
“Maybe I would—and maybe I wouldn't,” she said in as even a voice as she could manage. He really was irritating. She stood up to go. Duncan got up, too. He seemed to have sprouted during the conversation and stood only a few inches from her face. He had a sour smell and the skin on his face was oily. She took a step backward. He followed.
“Naaah, I don't think you could get in.”
Suddenly, she had to know.
“So what do you have to do to be a member of your club?” she said slowly, moving away from him.
“You have to kill something.”
Jill and Earl had joined the Millers, bringing cups of fresh-brewed coffee for everyone. As soon as the sun had gone down, the air had assumed some of its more characteristic Maine snap and the sight of the steaming cups was a welcome one.
“You take yours with milk and Sam doesn't take anything, right?” Jill had an amazing memory. Pix could barely recall the preferences of her immediate family, let alone friends. This was why she made lists. But then, Jill might get lost on the intricate carpool routes Pix routinely negotiated without a second thought.
“Thanks,” Sam said, “When I find the energy—which could be sometime next week—I'll make a pie run.”
They talked about the summer. Jill bemoaned the economy; Earl bemoaned the increase in the island population—it doubled during these months—and Sam bemoaned the fact
that he wouldn't be back again until August. It took a while for Pix to steer the conversation around to antiques.
“We had a good time with Valerie the other day exploring the antique stores in Searsport. She has a wonderful eye. Plus, having an expert along was insurance against getting duped by fakes. Have you heard much about antique fraud along the coast?” She addressed Earl directly, evidently striking a nerve.
“Have we! It's big business. I went to some seminars last winter in Augusta on this very subject. The Sheriff's Department has a special unit that does nothing else but deal with these scams.”
“What kinds of things are being faked?” Pix asked in as idle a way as she could muster, aware that her mother had joined them, slipping quietly next to Sam.
“You name it. Toys are big.” Earl started to warm to his subject. He must have been a star pupil. “One way is to make them from scratch, putting celluloid or bisque into molds from originals to imitate things that are popular collectibles, like Mickey Mouse figures. The modern ones are easy to spot once you know how—different colors, obvious brushstrokes, but even dealers get fooled. Especially if they're made by joining a new toy with an old one, it's called ‘marrying.'”
“What do you mean?” Pix was glad to hear the word introduced, yet this sort seemed more likely to be headed for divorce.
“Well, you might have a part missing from an original and you substitute a fake, but often these two never left the factory together. Like Mickey in a car becomes Minnie at the controls. That sort of thing. Then they even forge Steiff buttons and insert them in the ears of new stuffed bears or other animals that have been made to look worn. Another thing we learned is that both fake and genuine toys are put into ‘original' boxes printed by color laser to increase the values. The boxes are the easiest to detect. You just need a good magnifying
glass, my dear Watsons. You should see dots, not the parallel lines the laser produces.”
Pix remembered that Valerie had a whole battery of devices tucked into her jaunty Pierre Deux bag when they had gone off yesterday: a fancy kind of flashlight, a Swiss army knife with more than an extra blade and toothpick, plus a magnifying glass.
“This is amazing,” Ursula commented. “I had no idea things were so sophisticated. Tell us more.”
Pix looked at her mother. Ursula's face showed nothing other than sincere interest, but it was almost as if she was in on the plot. Whatever the motive, Pix silently thanked her for keeping the conversation going.
“Oh, I could talk all night about this,” Earl said jovially, “There's nothing I hate more than a fraud, and these crooks are accomplished ones.”
Jill, oddly enough, since antiques were a current and growing interest, did not seem as fascinated. “I'm sure we all do, but I think Louise is cutting the pies.”
“Oh, she's barely started, and I can't eat anything yet, anyway,” Pix said quickly. “Do tell us some more, Earl.”
“Part of the problem is that some people pay such fool prices for things that even legitimate dealers get itchy. Take a painting, for instance. You might think it's old, but you get tempted to sweeten the pot a little by rubbing some dirt and grime on it, tucking it under the cobwebs you don't sweep away in the back of your shop for some tourist to ‘discover.' A real con man—or woman—takes what he or she knows is a new painting, maybe even painted it him or herself, and does the same thing. Just now, the unit is getting a lot of calls about paintings—and photographs, fake tintypes and ambrotypes.”
“What's an ambrotype?” Sam asked. “Is that anything like a daguerreotype?”
“Yup, daguerreotypes are older and they were more expensive. Ambrotypes used a glass plate to capture an image. And tintypes were obviously on metal. They were the most common,
relatively cheap compared with the other two. The thing is that now all three methods can be duplicated using the old cameras or even doctoring a modern image with the right emulsions. So you get a friend to dress up as an Indian chief or a Civil War soldier—this is what people want—and lo and behold, in a few months you've made enough for that condo in Florida.”
“I had no idea you were learning so much at those seminars,” Jill remarked a bit tartly. “Do you think it has much relevance for law and order on the island?”
Earl frowned. Her tone was decidedly un-Jill-like.
“Maybe not, although what with everyone and his uncle putting some thundermugs in the shed and calling it an antiques store, it will probably pay off one of these days.”
“Are you by chance referring to my decision to carry antiques?”
Pix was not happy with the turn the conversation was taking. Not only were they veering from the topic but it seemed that Jill and Earl were heading for a quarrel and about to topple off the top of the cake.
“Of course he isn't!” she said in what she hoped was a light-hearted tone. “We're just gossiping. It's fun to hear about how other people get fooled, so long as you're not one of them.”
“Exactly.” Ursula came to the rescue again. “Like the Pilgrim chair hoax.”
“What was that?” Earl asked eagerly, slipping his arm around Jill in an attempt to make up—for what, he knew not. She sat stiffly but didn't shrug him off.
“This all happened about twenty years ago and it was big news. Our forefathers and mothers didn't have dining sets,—they were lucky to have a crude trestle table and a few stools, however there were exceptions. These few people, men, of course, had imposing thronelike chairs with elaborately turned spindles at the back and below the rush seat. You can see the one said to have belonged to Elder William Brewster
at the Pilgrim Hall down in Plymouth. Sometimes the chairs are called ‘Brewster chairs,' and nobody had to remind you to sit up straight in one. It must have been pure torture for them, and perhaps why they always have such sour expressions in the paintings. Now, where was I? Oh yes, in the 1970s, a Rhode Island furniture restorer concocted one of these chairs and aged it by, among other things, putting it in a steel drum with a smoky fire to get the right patina, if that's the right word, on the wood. He then allowed the chair to surface on a porch here in Maine.”
“I
do
remember this story,” Earl exclaimed, “Some museum bought it for a bundle, right? And now they have it on display as a fake next to one of the real ones.”
“Yes.” Ursula nodded. “The hoax worked and the restorer always claimed it was not his intent to make money, merely to point out how easy it was to fool even the experts, and you can believe him or not.” Ursula's stern expression made her own prejudice clear. “It's in the Ford Museum in Michigan. I don't know if it's next to a real one, but they do have it on display with a note telling the real story—that it was still a tree in 1969.”
Earl was off and running again. “Furniture can become an antique over night—a little ink spilled in a drawer or table and chair legs rubbed with a brick on the bottoms to simulate wear. Old furniture isn't that difficult to duplicate for a master furniture builder. You can age wood by just throwing it into the woods for a winter, and period nails are available—people collect those, too! But legitimate reproductions are marked as such, and they command a lot of money!”
“Yet not as much as originals,” Sam said.
“There are still bargains to be had,” Jill asserted emphatically.
“I know”—Sam laughed—“just look at what my wife carts home!”
Before they got back on the question of pie again—Pix had noticed Sam's eye turning in that direction—she squeezed in
her last question. “Who's doing the faking mostly, and what kind of crime is it?”
“To answer your first question, we'd like to find out. Some of the rings have been broken up and they've included dealers, but it's also people who know nothing about antiques, except for the ones they're duplicating. It's a business to them, just not a legal one. Which answers the next part: Selling fakes is larceny. Transporting them across state lines is not a federal offense, however a phone call to set up the transport is—fraud by wire—and we got some guys that way. I guess I get pretty worked up about the whole business, because people come to Maine trusting that they'll find some nice old things here and instead they get burned by a few selfish, crooked individuals. And we haven't even talked about all the traffic in stolen antiques!”
“But we have talked enough about this business for one night. I for one want dessert.” Jill jumped up and headed for the table with a seeming determination for pie that brooked no opposition.
“Sure, honey, I want pie, too.” Earl joined her and Pix could hear him asking, “Now what's going on? What did I …” The rest of his remarks were inaudible, as was Jill's reply, but what all could see was that this time she did shake his arm away.
Pix and her mother looked at each other. Ursula raised one eyebrow. Even Sam, normally oblivious to the ins and outs of the relationships about him—his own was enough to keep track of—noticed and said, “I thought those two were an item. They don't seem very chummy tonight.”
“A lovers' quarrel—or more like a spat,” Ursula said. “I expect they'll iron things out. You and Pix do.”
“Oh, come on, Mother, Sam and I never fight.”
“Then you probably should.”
It was hard to get around Mother.
With one accord, they all started walking toward the dessert table, discreetly waiting for Jill and Earl to get theirs and
disappear in the darkness. At least, Pix thought Jill got a piece of pie. In the dim light, it was hard to see.
“Did I hear you talking about antiques as I passed a while ago?” asked a voice at Pix's elbow. It was the Bainbridge's guest, Norman, and he was returning for seconds, or maybe thirds, judging from the crumbs that lingered on what Pix assumed was his normally impeccable mouth.
“I'm Norman Osgood, by the way. I came with Adelaide and Rebecca Bainbridge.”
The Millers introduced themselves in turn and while doing so, Pix reflected that it was never Rebecca and Adelaide, always the other way around. Was it Pix and Sam Miller? Or Sam and Pix? She thought they were getting roughly equal time.
“We were talking about antiques, or rather, fake antiques.”
“Fakes. So unpleasant when one has been burned. I'm in the antique business myself and have been totally tricked on several occasions—once by a nice Russian lady from New Jersey who one would have sworn was directly related to the Romanovs, but in fact, all her trinkets might as well have been prizes from a penny arcade. Has one of you come across such artifice lately?”
Pix wondered whether it was her imagination at work again, but his query seemed to be couched in a rather probing tone. Why was he so interested? Merely because it was his business?
“No—at least not to our knowledge,” she added. “But all of us are interested in antiques and we like to know what to guard against.”
“Stick to reputable dealers and beware of bargains, that's my advice,” Norman said.
Pix thought of her quilt with a twinge. It was too gorgeous. It
had
to be real. The pile had been in a dusty corner with more than a few cobwebs, but the whole barn had been like that.

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