Ellie looked embarrassed, as though it was an admission of depravity that she knew so much rumor. There was something about Siegel that seemed unsoiled: her face was sophisticated, cynical even, without being malicious. It was that quality that had drawn Cardozo to her.
“If some of those Wall Streeters are overnight millionaires,” she said, “Steinman’s a five-minute billionaire. But it isn’t enough nowadays just to have money. You have to do something to get written up in Manhattan, inc., so Doria and Steinman collected modern art. They played artists like stocks and they bet lucky. By the time of the Devens trial they’d built up what the press calls an important collection. Doria left Steinman six years ago and took half the collection. She hasn’t divorced Steinman, because divorce would disinherit her two Forbes children, who Steinman agreed to support when love was in bloom. The kids are stowed in a Scottish boarding school at his expense. Steinman sued Doria for her half of the collection and the lawsuit had the art world lined up in warring camps.”
Across the squad room a telephone jangled. Detective DeVegh, receiver balanced between shoulder and ear, called out, “We got a squeal. Who’s up this morning? You catching, Ellie?”
“Ellie’s on a case,” Cardozo said, curtly, and DeVegh gave him an excuse-me-for-breathing look, and Cardozo asked Siegel, “Tell me about the Steinman lawsuit.”
“Vince, you really have time for this b.s.?”
“I want to know everything about these people, including what underarm deodorant they use.”
“Lewis Monserat, the art dealer, testified for Steinman. Doria threw the slop bucket at Monserat, accused him of being a little bit more than an art dealer.”
“How much more?”
“Doria said Monserat was a certified necrophile, a pederast, a porno film maker, a child prostitution ringleader, a Nazi collaborator who turned his own mother in to the Gestapo. Monserat’s lawyer pointed out that Spain was one of the few European countries not occupied by Nazis, and she waffled and said maybe Monserat just murdered his mother.”
“She said this in court?”
“Affirmative. Doria had her day, irrelevant and inadmissible though her testimony may have been. The one legally damaging shot she did get off was to claim Monserat used her to bid up his own clients’ paintings at auctions.”
“Did Monserat sue?”
“He threw the slop bucket back. Said Doria’s maiden name was Schinsky, she was a Belgrade hooker, she was already married to a certain Mr. Bravnik when she married Forbes bigamously and got her exit visa out of the Eastern bloc. If Monserat was telling the truth, the marriage to Steinman was bigamous too.”
“Did Doria sue?”
“No one sued, they all gave interviews and went on talk shows. Doria got more exposure than Monserat, because by then her name had surfaced as the other woman in the Scottie Devens trial. The smart money was betting Doria was the reason Scottie tried to put his wife under.”
“I was betting that too,” Cardozo said quietly.
Siegel flicked a dark-eyed glance at him. “So? It looked like a pretty sure thing to me too. You’re looking unhappy.”
“Just thinking. Is Doria still living with Scottie?”
“Last I read in the supermarket, they were an ongoing item.” Siegel’s smile was a miracle—world-aware and world-mocking but self-aware and self-mocking too. “It’s the real world out there, Vince—it’s a different mind-set: glamour and art and high fashion and beautiful people doing their beautiful thing—not us poor schleppers in the twenty-second precinct.”
“Who got the Steinmans’s art collection?”
“Doria got to keep her half. Including that mask.”
A butler led Cardozo into the livingroom of the Fifth Avenue duplex. The room was large and plush and sunny, with yellow chrysanthemums on the Steinway. The breeze of an air conditioner stirred the folds of dove gray window curtains. Track lights lit three oil paintings of the same cathedral, each panel done in dots of a different primary color, like a monster comic strip.
A woman came into the room.
Cardozo looked at Mrs. Forbes-Steinman, and he saw a statue, its broadly beautiful face smiling at him. She extended her hand: her slightly plump arm was covered with bracelets of light blue sapphires.
“I have great respect for the police.” Her voice was low and cultivated and bore a residual middle-European trace.
He would have loved to have answered, And I have great respect for women who give good head.
“How may I help you?” she said.
“You own a Nuku Kushima mask?”
“Bondage Nine.”
“Do you have it here?”
“Naturally. Would you like to see it?”
“Very much.”
He followed her into a hallway. Through an arch he could see the butler and a girl in a maid’s uniform silently setting a dinner table for twelve.
The mask had been fitted over a wig stand and was sitting on a teakwood pedestal. He noticed a faint pattern of minuscule lacerations around the eyes.
“How did it get scratched?” he asked.
She sighed. “Would you believe the Nicaraguan girl used lemon Pledge and a Brillo pad on it?”
She was standing close beside him and he turned his head and studied her. Everything about her struck him as exact, smooth, artificial, extremely tense. Even her skin, which was a pampered pale olive shade.
“Could I ask you a question?” he said.
She regarded him pleasantly.
“You’re an educated woman,” he said. “You have taste. Why do you own this? It’s ugly, and what it stands for is ugly.”
She laughed, showing white even teeth in the subtly reddened line of her mouth. “I suppose by the same token you could say Picasso’s Guernica is ugly.”
“This isn’t Picasso’s Guernica. This is the facial equivalent of a thumbscrew.”
“Beautiful art is often ugly. I know that sounds like a cheap paradox, but it’s my belief that the point of art isn’t to please, it’s to … arrest.” Her perfume filled the stillness. “I admire a work of art the way I admire a person. It has to take me without my permission, command my attention. The Kushima commands my attention.”
“You bought this through Lewis Monserat?”
Her large, thoughtful eyes came to rest on him. “My husband and I bought it through Lewis Monserat. The court awarded it to me as part of our settlement.”
He took note of the word settlement and realized that Doria Forbes-Steinman had her own way of tilting the truth. “Have you bought other pieces from Mr. Monserat?”
“I’ve bought from a great many leading dealers—Leo Castelli, Andre Emmerich, Ileana Sonnabend, Andrew Crispo when he was still in business. In fact, I came within a hairbreadth of owning the Brancusi head that Andy Crispo sold the Guggenheim; the deal was set, but Andy was in trouble with the IRS, and the Guggenheim offered a half-million more. I said, ‘Andy, I can’t hold you to our bargain, I release you, you need the money.’ There’s a lot of heartbreak in this business.”
“But did you buy other pieces from Mr. Monserat?”
“I’m so tired of being linked to that monster.” Doria Forbes-Steinman sighed. “Yes, I bought other pieces from Lewis Monserat—unfortunately.”
“Why unfortunately?”
“He has fine pieces. But he’s not the sort of man I like to deal with.”
“Why not?”
“In Europe, where I come from, he has a reputation. He’s a criminal. More than that. He’s evil.”
“Is that your way of saying you dislike him?”
“I dislike his deeds. Being a pageboy at Goebbels’s wedding—don’t you think that disgusting?”
“It’s not a crime.”
“Renting bodies from funeral homes—that may not be a crime either,” she said, “but it’s vile. Child pornography may not be a crime in our enlightened era, but that’s disgusting too. Or don’t you have children?”
“I have a child.”
She looked at him, half smiling. “Then we’re in agreement.”
The sky was high and cloudless and the sun was hot on Cardozo’s back. Limousines blocked Fifty-third Street and he had to make his way with a stream of well-dressed men and women into the Museum of Contemporary Arts.