Monster Read online

Nick picked up the phone half-way through the first ring and clipped out his name into the receiver. “Nick Case.”

  "This is Tagget. You still interested in the stolen paintings?"

  Nick blinked and looked at the keypad on the phone. Tagget? Paintings?

  "Hello?" Tagget asked.

  "Yeah, yeah, I am. What do you have?" Nick asked, turning to look over his shoulder at the wall clock. It was a minute past eight.

  "The owner is Bill Maxell. He lives over on Strathmore Street: 411 Strathmore. He said you can come by anytime today before noon. He thinks the publicity may do a little good at spreading the word," Tagget said.

  Nick copied down the phone number Tagget gave, scribbled the address and name below it, and thanked the detective. Nick pulled his sport coat off the back of his chair and slipped his arms into it as he walked over to his editor's desk.

  "John, I'm heading out to check out those stolen paintings. I should be back sometime later."

  "What paintings?" John asked. He looked up from his computer and stared at Nick.

  "The ones that were stolen the other week on that police report with no information on it."

  John scratched his chin. "Did the Morning News have anything on it?"

  Nick shook his head. "Nope."

  John smiled almost imperceptibly. "See you later."

  Strathmore Street had once been in one of the more affluent of the inner city suburbs strung out between downtown and the city limits. The street was a river of smooth asphalt unmarred by center lines and bordered by perfect sidewalks and deep lawns that reached back to brick and stone mansions. In the days when steel had ruled the city, these had been the homes of the upper-most crust of management, the wealthiest bankers and the most prominent doctors. Now, though, they were occupied by corporate middle-managers, college professors and lawyers. It still smelled of money as much as the elms that lined the grass strips separating sidewalk from road, but was less storied and retained none of the aroma of power.

  Maxell's house was a wide, three-story brown-brick affair with a turret on the left side and a slate roof. The front of the house was awash in red, yellow and blue tulips that blazed brightly against the building’s facade and dared the neighbors to compete. Many did, matching Maxell's flower moat with equally dazzling arrays of cineraria, forsythia and agapanthus. Nick pulled his car to the curb and popped out of the door. He popped a mint into his mouth to drown the smell of tobacco from his breath and walked up the driveway and along the cement path to the entrance.

  He assumed that on the other side of the door a chime was singing some few notes of a Mozart piano piece while he waited on the stoop for the door to open. Mansions didn't have buzzers or bells, they had chimes, and a man with stolen paintings certainly had a specialized chime to announce the fact there was someone waiting on the other side of the door. The door opened to show a man in a blue blazer, tan slacks and a white shirt, his tie loose around his neck. He was in his mid-fifties, his head topped with thick gray hair, two dark commas above his hazel eyes.

  "Yes?" the man asked.

  "I'm Nick Case. I'm a reporter with--"

  "Oh, yes, come in. Detective Tagget said you'd be out," the man said as he pulled the door open and stepped aside. "I'm Bill Maxell."

  Nick stepped into the house and looked around. Vases with fresh cut flowers stood on wooden stands and the hardwood floors were covered with Persian carpets. Nick stopped a few steps in and turned around to watch as Bill Maxell pushed the door shut and turned the deadbolt. The older man stuck his hand out to Nick and Nick shook it.

  "Here's my card," Nick said as he reached into a blazer pocket and pulled one out. Bill Maxell took it and set it on a vase stand

  "Come, I'll show the study that was robbed," Maxell said as he brushed past Nick and mounted a staircase to the left of the foyer in which they had been standing. The stairs creaked as they walked up. Nick scanned the walls for paintings, but none were anything not readily available from a mall art store and most likely gracing the walls of millions of American and Canadian homes. They arrived on the second floor landing and walked to a door at the end of the hallway and Nick stood silently as Mr. Maxell pulled a key from his pocket and turned the lock open.

  "It's just up here on the third floor," Maxell said over his shoulder before clambering up a narrower, steeper staircase.

  The study was the entire third floor of the house and had been, in its heyday sixty or seventy years earlier, an in-house ballroom. The ceiling was high and the hardwood floor was polished to a basketball court sheen. A marble bar stood in one corner of the room, the shelves behind it crammed with crystal decanters filled with clear and brown liquids and a full load of glassware. Elsewhere through the room were scattered love seats and groupings of easy chairs surrounding low, glass-topped circular tables. Several of the wall spaces were occupied by framed paintings of people, flowers, and cities by artists not recognizable to Nick. Near several of the copses of chairs stood easels with charcoal drawings or pen-and-ink renditions of naked women.

  Bill Maxell walked across the center of the floor, the heels of his tasseled loafers slipping perceptibly from the heels of his feet and slapping the floor a split-second before each step, and leaned against the bar. Nick pulled a notebook from his pocket and clicked his pen to life, scribbled a few quick impressions of the room onto the paper, and walked across the room to where Mr. Maxell leaned against the bar. On his way across the room, Nick noticed four spaces on the walls that had seemed, at one point, to have been home to paintings but which were now bare spots of unblemished umber-colored paint. Mr. Maxell barely moved as Nick crossed the floor, his eyes were fixed to one spot on the wall that was merely paint, and Nick made a mental note to write that fact down after finishing the interview.

  "Mr. Maxell--"

  "Bill, please."

  Nick nodded. "Bill, so what happened here, so far as you know?"

  Bill Maxell shrugged and sighed, rubbing his right palm across his brow as if the thought of it all were something too unimaginable to readily discuss.

  "They took my Wyeth. My `Dr. Syn.'"

  Nick scribbled that down and looked up at Mr. Maxell. "Your `Wyeth?'" Nick asked.

  Bill Maxell nodded solemnly. "It wasn't the most expensive of the four, but it was my favorite. I've had it for years. It was the first real painting I ever spent any money on and it was one of those paintings that you know you have to have the minute you lay eyes on it," Mr. Maxell said as he walked to the rear of the bar. He put a glass on the bar, the room echoing for a moment with the clink of glass on stone, and he took a crystal decanter from one of the shelves.

  "Do you want a Scotch or something?" Bill Maxell asked, motioning to Nick with the bottle. Nick shook his head. "Yeah, it's a bit early, but," Bill Maxell shrugged and poured his glass a third full, "when you lose something like that, sometimes you need a drink to talk about it. Even this early in the morning."

  Nick nodded.

  "Anyway, that Wyeth was a beauty. It was different. Just a skeleton sitting in an admiral's coat and staring out the window of some old warship -- the kind that used canons and were sail powered, when naval warfare was personal -- and it just felt so right to look at it," Bill Maxell said, putting the bottle back onto the shelf and looking across the room at the blank space of wall. "I don't know what it symbolized to anybody else, but to me," he said, pausing for a second to take a small sip of the Scotch, "…to me, it sort of said we are all fighting losing battles, all destined to end up dead on the battlefield, all of us wondering what the fight was ever for.

  "You know, you could fight with your wife a million times -- who doesn't -- and at the end you'd wonder what all the fighting was for. Did anyone win, or will there just be more fighting between other couples?" Maxell said, taking another sip of whisky. "But, at the same time, and this is what intrigued me about the painting, it also showed that we will always fight, no matter what. That everything is a struggle until the end, and that you s
hould never stop."

  Nick was writing furiously and barely paid attention as Bill Maxell walked into the middle of the study and stood there with stooped shoulders.

  "Imagine walking into your house to find that the very thing you identify with had been stolen," Maxell said, turning and staring at Nick. "Sure, it's only a painting. It's insured. All that stuff. But, what if you walked home and the thing that you liked to look at for a few moments just to come to terms with everything, what if that were gone?"

  Maxell shrugged and turned slowly in place, surveying the room Nick felt sure hundreds of parties had been thrown in just for the sake of Bill Maxell's peace at being with people who could see his art collection. The Maxell identity, as depicted by a dozen dead painters who had never once dreamed a thought that he, Maxell, would own their work and cherish it the way he had.

  "But how did the thieves get into your house?" Nick asked, trying to bring the conversation into some sort of question-and-answer format that would give him the information he needed for a story.

  Maxell shrugged and motioned to one of the windows in the room. Nick walked over to it. There were no signs of it being damaged or of the sill being pried open, and he noticed evidence of police fingerprint dust. He looked through the window and noticed a large oak tree with a branch that overhung the garage, which was attached to the lower portion of the roof that sloped upwards to the room he now stood in. Nick turned around and faced Mr. Maxell.

  "They climbed in off a tree?" Nick asked. Maxell made two barely perceptible nods. "You don't have a security system?"

  Maxell shrugged. "No. I’d thought about it. Never in my life have I ever been robbed. I mean, never. No break-ins to any of the apartments I ever lived in; never mugged; never had a car broken into. I guess I just figured it would never happen," he said, bringing his glass to his lips and taking in a small sip. "I'm fifty-three and never been robbed. I guess that's weird."

  Nick shrugged and began the nuts-and-bolts part of the interview, pulling information on the different paintings from Maxell and transferring them to his notebook. There was a lot of money in those four paintings, all of which were insured, although Maxell's tale of woe stretched more along sentimental than monetary lines. Nick had spent almost an hour in the study listening to Maxell before he managed to get a tour of the house and an explanation of the other various sculptures, vases, wood carvings and assorted items that Nick wrote off as bric-a-brac, albeit expensive bric-a-brac. Bill Maxell and his wife, she was some sort of computer systems consultant currently in Argentina doing something concerning several polysyllabic computer terms strung together, had spent the better part of their thirty-one years of marriage accumulating what would most likely be auctioned off by their two children in about thirty more years, causing Nick to wonder how much money they had invested in decorations.

  The den, as Bill Maxell termed it, was long room with dark oak walls, an expansive fireplace of natural stone, several high-back overstuffed leather armchairs draped with dark cotton throw blankets, and a Steinway grand piano covered with a scattering of music sheets. Nick easily imagined Maxell on a snowy Sunday afternoon seated in one of the chairs, his legs resting on one of the ottoman's and covered by a blanket, listening to his wife noodle around on the piano.

  "So, what can you do at this point to track down your paintings?" Nick asked as he stared absently at the esoterica on the walls.

  "Not too much. I've contacted all of the art dealers that would likely know anybody interested in the works. The FBI was out here the other day for information on them, too. I guess I just have to wait and see if they turn up. Maybe visit a lot of galleries, too," Maxell said. He pulled up the left sleeve of his jacket, looked at his watch and pursed his lips. "Well, Mr. Case, I've got only a few more minutes before I have to leave, so if you will excuse me, I need to finish getting ready."

  Maxell walked across the room and turned into the hallway, motioning for Nick to follow him. They strode down the hall toward the front door and Maxell snapped the deadbolt open. Nick stopped on the threshold, turned around and looked back at Mr. Maxell.

  "Oh, by the way, are you going to get a security system now?" Nick asked.

  Maxell shrugged and tilted his head. "It's almost pointless now, since the good stuff is gone," Maxell said, "but I don't want the bastards coming back thinking there's more good stuff to be found, so tomorrow I'm having installed the best security system money can buy."

  "Don't forget to tell your wife before she comes back and tries to get in," Nick said, smiling and turning to leave.

  He wasn't sure, but he could have sworn Bill Maxell scowled.

  By the end of the day, Nick had transcribed his notes into the computer and logged a dozen calls to art dealers, law enforcement agencies, and New York City galleries. None of the paintings merited much of a ruffle in the art world, although a couple of people were sad at the loss of the Wyeth painting and doubted that it would appear for sale. The majority of art thefts were done when a buyer was already known. Nobody, Nick was told, was stupid enough to steal someone's collection and put it up for open sale. Someone would notice and that would be that.

  The phone trilled on his desk and Nick snapped it off the hook and pressed it to his head.

  "Nick Case," he said as he looked over his shoulder at the clock. The end was near.

  "Nick, it's Dave, what's shakin'?" the voice on the other end, Dave Kryzcapowicz, asked.

  "Not much, Cap, just trying to get out of here. You?"

  "Same. You up for happy hour at that place around the corner from your apartment?" Cap asked.

  "The Grove?"

  "Yeah."

  Nick looked at the clock again, it was almost three. "Sure, when can you get there?"

  "I'm thinking about four-thirtyish."

  "Good, uhhh-yee," Nick said, reaching his hand down to his side.

  "What the heck does `uhhyee' mean?" Cap asked, laughing once on his end of the line. "Or was I supposed to say, `domo arygato'?"

  "Funny," Nick said, massaging the area just above his right hip. "I keep getting these dull, achy pains in my side."

  "Well, you're getting old, that's why. How long 'till your thirty?"

  "Fuck off," Nick said and Cap laughed.

  "I'll see you then," Cap said and hung up.

  Nick looked around the newsroom and the scattering of people in it and tried to stretch out his side while sitting in his chair. Maybe he needed a new chair. Or a back support. "Shit," he said softly while rubbing his side, "I'm not that old."

  Happy hour ended at midnight with Nick, Cap, and Sarah stumbling out of the third bar of the night, all of them drunk on beer and Jaegermeister. The happy hour crowd and their suits had morphed into jeans-wearing men and midriff-exposing, mini-skirted women long before any of them had noticed, and when they had, it was too late to go home, change and re-enter the nightclub scene. Cap had called a cab, refusing the offer to crash on Nick's couch and telling him to expect a call around noon for a ride back to his car. Nick shrugged and he and Sarah pushed their way off the curb and down the gray sidewalks toward their apartment.

  "How's your little monster feeling tonight?" Sarah asked and giggled as they turned the corner onto their street and strolled past the coffee shop's patio. Nick smiled and looked over at her.

  "Tired. Very, very tired."

  Sarah raised her eyebrows twice and nodded toward the patio. "A double espresso'd get you up, I'm sure."

  Nick grimaced at the thought of a double dose of coffee concentrate and smiled weakly. "I wish, but I'm just beat. And drunk. I'd only be wasting your time."

  They tramped up the street and into their apartment. Inside the bedroom, Nick stripped off his clothes and stood on the opposite side of the bed from Sarah, watching as she slipped into a nightgown. When she turned around and saw Nick standing naked she smiled and cocked her head to the side.

  "I thought you were too drunk and tired," she said before looking between his legs. "And
I guess you still are."

  "But I'm all ready for tomorrow morning," Nick said before falling face forward on the bed and rolling over onto his back.

  Sarah sat down on the bed and stared at Nick's body. She reached out and put her hand on his right hip and tapped it with the fingers of her right hand.

  "What's this?" she asked, pulling her hand away and pointing at a spot on Nick's hip.

  Just below the crest of his hip bone was a small, two inch long bulge of flesh that stood out against the rest of his skin. Nick looked down and fingered it for a second before shrugging.

  "I don't know, nothing. It's been there since forever. I think it's just fat or something," Nick said as he returned his head to the pillow.

  "Are you sure? I've never seen that there before."

  "Sure you have. It's been there forever, you just must have never noticed it."

  Sarah bent over and looked at it more closely, her blonde hair falling from behind her shoulders and onto Nick's stomach.

  "I don't know. I don't think so. I'd remember something like that. I think that's new," she said as she prodded it lightly.

  Nick sighed. "It's nothing. I think it's been there forever; maybe it's just bigger now or something."

  "Have you ever had it checked out?"

  "No. It's nothing."

  "I don't know. I'd get it checked out if I were you."

  Nick shook his head on the pillow. "Why? It's just a lump of flab, that's all."

  Sarah sat up and shrugged. "I don't know, but it doesn't look normal. I'd get it looked at if I were you."

  Nick closed his eyes and the world began to spin slowly from the alcohol. "Great. One more thing to worry about."

  FIVE