“You found those rather fast,” she said, with a hint of suspicion in her voice.
“They were right on the top of the desk,” I said. “Trevor must have been working with them when… you know.” I glanced toward the basement door.
“I’ve checked the declared value for customs,” she said in a disapproving tone a few minutes later. “There is nothing listed anywhere close to a million dollars. I suppose our customs officials are concentrating on finding terrorists and weapons, not furniture that is seriously undervalued.”
“That doesn’t make Trevor a criminal,” I said. “The reason this was supposed to be worth as much as it was rested entirely on the claim that it was by one of the masters of the Arts and Crafts movement, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Trevor, when he bought it, might have wanted it to be Mackintosh, but he wouldn’t necessarily have known that it was. He would have to do his research. So he would have valued it at what he paid for it, which was probably a decent sum for a writing cabinet, but a pittance for Mackintosh. People take chances on this kind of thing all the time. It doesn’t make them dishonest.”
“Tell that to the poor sod he ripped off,” she said.
“Not entirely fair,” I said. “Trevor did his research. The owner didn’t.” I felt a stab of sympathy for the nice old woman with dementia in Percy’s photograph, but still I continued. “Trevor took a chance. He paid to ship it. If it wasn’t what he thought it might be, he’d be out a lot of money. If you’re going to sell something like this, then maybe you have to do some work to find out about it. If you don’t, then people prepared to take a chance may be the winners. I wouldn’t knowingly rip somebody off, but I might take a chance on something, and win, and I wouldn’t be too happy if the owner came back to me and claimed I’d ripped him off. Now let’s have a look at all this stuff.”
“He seems to have done better shipping back to Scotland,” she said a few minutes later.
“We ship all over the world. I can only assume Trevor did the same.”
“For your sake I hope you have this kind of business. This one is valued at just under million bucks. It’s a chair. It must have been some chair!”
“Wow! Let me see.” I looked at the paperwork she showed me. “I guess Trevor was doing better than I thought.”
“Not exactly,” she said, pulling out another file. “Looks to me as if he shipped it but he only got a commission, just under ten thousand, plus shipping and handling. So that means he sold it for someone else, I presume.”
“I guess so.”
“Would that be unusual?”
“Not unprecedented. We take some pieces on consignment from time to time. The markup is usually pretty good.”
“Would one percent or so be considered good in your business?”
“For consignment, no, but the percentage would be lower on a high-ticket item.”
“But not that low.”
“I guess not.”
A few minutes later Anna spoke again. “Baldwin,” she said. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Baldwin what?”
“It was Baldwin’s million-dollar chair. He cashed a check for nine hundred and fifty thousand, and paid Baldwin, less the small commission and expenses.”
“Blair had a chair worth nine hundred and fifty thousand? Not from me.”
“Too bad.”
“I’ll say. Let me see.” It looked to me as if Anna were right. The chair was marked as museum quality, which it would have to have been. The merchandise was delivered to a dealer in Glasgow. There was a copy of both checks in the file.
“Is there really such a thing as a nine-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar chair in real life?” she asked.
“Obviously, there is. Not in my league. I helped Blair buy an Antoni Gaudi chair for something over a hundred thousand once.”
“That’s nowhere near this one. Name one chair that would be worth that much.”
“King Tut’s throne?” I said. I was being facetious of course, but I was also making a point.
“You found that desk thing yet?” she said.
“Not yet.” In fact, it took a couple of hours going through Trevor’s files. I’d known Trevor for years, but never this intimately. I felt as if I were going through his underwear drawer. To make matters worse, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the door to the basement, and half expected Trevor’s ghost to come floating past. It was not a pleasant experience. I tried to concentrate.
Trevor had specialized in Scottish antiques, obviously, given his background and the name of his store, and when I’d first known him he’d gone to Scotland at least three times a year. In the past year, however, he’d gone only once, and that was about six months earlier. He’d shipped back a container of furniture at that time, which had arrived about three months before. There wasn’t anything specifically referred to as a writing cabinet in that shipment, but there was something I was reasonably certain was it, a lacquered mahogany cupboard. The dimensions were about right. Its value was listed as $15,000 U.S. I pointed it out to Chan.
“You think this is it?” she said.
“I think so. There isn’t anything else that qualifies.”
“Nice markup if Wylie got over a million for it.”
“I guess he hasn’t been doing too well financially,” I said. “Up until the transaction with Baldwin.”
“Why would you think that?” she said.
“He only made one trip this year to Scotland, which would indicate he wasn’t selling enough to make another trip.”
“Hmmm,” she said. Another police officer not inclined to answer my questions. When I thought about it, though, I realized that wasn’t right. I’d had to check invoices and receipts as well, and he wasn’t doing too badly. He didn’t have any employees, just minded the shop himself, and while the rent in the neighborhood was considerable, as I very well knew, he’d managed to sell a decent amount of merchandise.
“I wonder what this is,” I said aloud a few minutes later.
“What?” she said.
“Another shipment from Scotland about a month later. It’s only one piece, though.”
“And that would be unusual because?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose it just didn’t make the container, for some reason. It’s expensive to ship one piece all by itself, that’s all.” But that wasn’t really it. This shipment was for one black cabinet, valued at $10,000 U.S. “I guess this one could be the writing cabinet, too. It got here about eight weeks ago. That would have given him a few weeks to get it out of customs, do the research, and approach Baldwin. I’m sorry, but I think it could be either of these.”
“If you had to choose one?”
“I don’t know. Have you found receipts or invoices for this trip? There might be more information there.”
“Wylie did keep all the paperwork for that trip in one file. Let me see. Here,” she said, a few minutes later. “A receipt from an antique shop on George’s Square in Glasgow called J.A. Macdonald and Sons Antiques, for the right amount, and it refers to it as a lacquer cupboard.”
“Let’s see,” I said. “This looks like it, and you’re right, when you do the currency conversion, it’s about fifteen thousand dollars. Is there something for the other one?”
“Not that I can find,” she said. “Hold on. It’s in another file. This one is for someone by the name of, well, I can’t read the name, it’s handwritten, but the address is, are you ready for this? St. Margaret’s Hope. Where do you think that is?”
“I have no idea. I think that has to be the one, though. Percy, the man Detective Singh does not believe exists, said the cabinet was purchased from his grandmother, and the first one we found was purchased from an antique dealer. I wonder if St. Margaret’s Hope is near Glasgow. So my vote is with the second one. It’s called a cabinet, for one thing, and I don’t think Trevor would have waited four months to contact Baldwin once he knew what he had.”