Elizabeth Lowell - Blue Smoke and Murder

“Depends on the artist,” Faroe said.

“Some dude called Klimt.”

“Pass,” Faroe said. He looked at Grace. “I like my women to look like women.”

Grace smiled at the heat in Faroe’s eyes. If Lane hadn’t been a few feet away, she would have given her husband the kind of kiss they both loved.

“But Lane has a good point,” she said. “Why go to the trouble of inflating prices on relatively unknown art when you have much better known art you can give away with less hassle?”

“Vanity,” Faroe suggested. “Bet his name ends up on Nevada’s museum building. A Warhol wouldn’t get it done.”

“Maybe he actually likes that modern cra-er, stuff,” Lane said, looking at his little sister. “So he’s keeping it.”

“Or his best-known art could already be tied up,” Grace said.

“How?” Lane asked.

“Collateral on loans,” his mother answered.

“Huh?”

“Think of it as a high-class pawnshop,” Grace said. “You hand over the paintings to a bank vault, and the bank hands over the loan to you. It’s done all the time when there’s a cash crunch among the really rich. Very quiet. Very discreet. Nobody knows that the paintings are temporarily held hostage by the bank.”

“They loan at full value?” Faroe asked.

“Banks aren’t stupid,” Grace said. “With that kind of collateral, you get maybe fifty percent of retail price, usually less.”

“That’s still a lot of zeros to the left of the decimal,” Faroe said. He leaned toward his son. “How much did your swarmers get on Crawford’s finances in the last five years?”

“Not as much as I could if you’d let me hack into a few private databases,” Lane said eagerly.

“Give me what you have. If that’s not enough, we’ll talk about hacking.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “First we have Ambassador Steele home-schooling Lane on the reality versus the media coverage of world politics. Now we have Joe Faroe teaching his son the cutting edge of computer ethics. What’s next? Mary teaching applied physics by showing Lane how to drop a man with a sniper’s rifle at eight hundred yards?”

“Good idea,” Faroe said. “I’ll put it in the lesson plan.”

Hiding a smile, Lane started researching Talbert Crawford’s finances in open sources.

If he was a really good boy, the closed sources would come later.

SEPTEMBER 16

5:07 P.M.

Zach looked at the crowded lobby of the Golden Fleece. The huge tank of water with circulating gold dust was a big draw. People stood around watching a monster sheep fleece straining gold from the water until the fleece gleamed like its fabled namesake. It was a method of recovering gold dust that was as old as the legend. From the look of the fleece, it was nearly at the end of its collection cycle.

The hotel was booked wall-to-wall, and had been from the day it opened. One of the upsides to contract work for St. Kilda Consulting was that they could get a room almost anywhere, at any time, from a flophouse to a penthouse. Someone always knew someone who knew someone.

In this case the someone at the end of the chain of favors was Shane Tannahill, the owner of the golden-glass and black-steel monument called the Golden Fleece. And it was Tannahill’s name that had convinced someone in the auction bureaucracy to allow the hotel owner’s personal guests to see some of the paintings before the official preview tomorrow.

Thomas Dunstan’s paintings, to be precise.

No big deal. The paintings were, after all, there to be previewed. It was a necessary part of every auction protocol. Zach was just being certain that no one got in the way before they examined the stretcher edges of the paintings.

He didn’t have a good feeling about this op.

He kept telling himself it was because he was personally involved with the client, and therefore more edgy, but he wasn’t buying it.

Somewhere, somehow, in that great flusher in the sky, this op was going south.

He knew it.

He just couldn’t nail down how, who, where, or when.

Faroe’s call hadn’t helped. The idea that so many millions were at play for a man as politically powerful as Tal Crawford just made Zach jumpier. When the zeros started rolling up, people got crazy.

“What’s ‘the usual bodyguard arrangement’?” Jill asked, sitting next to Zach in the lobby.

“Two rooms, connecting door.” Only one of the beds will be used, unless we mess it up too much. Then we’ll use the other.

But thinking about that was stupid. He needed his mind on his op, not his crotch.

“I take it the connecting door gets left open?” she said.

“Always.” He looked at his watch. “Hope this auction dude gets here soon. I’m too old to live on junk food forever. No matter what the ads say, sugar, salt, and grease aren’t food groups.”

Jill opened the auction catalogue and looked through it again. Like Zach, she hoped it wouldn’t be long until they saw the paintings.

She kept wondering if she was dreaming.

“I still don’t believe it,” she said in a low voice. “Five to eight million dollars. Each.”

“Remember what Frost said-the buzz on the art circuit is ten million bucks for the big ones. Each.”

“Is that common?” she asked.

“What?”

“To have a lot of rumors that basically fix the price of some paintings at a higher cost than the auction catalogue indicates.”

“It’s called excitement, and the more the better. The catalogue is nothing but a guesstimate of future bidding.” Zach’s stomach growled. Living out of mini-marts and fast-food outlets was a great way to starve.

“You heard those two back there,” she said, indicating the registration desk of the Golden Fleece, where guests waited twelve deep for the opportunity to check into the most luxurious hotel-casino-shopping megaplex in Las Vegas. “They were talking about ten million per Dunstan at Sunday’s auction like it was a done deal.”

“In good times, paintings can blow through the top of their range,” Zach said.

“Are times that good right now?”

“I could argue either side of the question.” He frowned, thinking back on the conversations he’d overheard while they waited in line to register. A lot of the people were here for the art auction, not the casino action. “But you’re right. Nearly everyone is talking ten million for the Dunstans. It makes me wonder.”

“About what?”

Zach kept watching the people milling in the lobby. The plainclothes guards were well dressed and invisible to anyone who didn’t know that in Vegas, armed guards were always around. A whole lot of those Bluetooth receivers plugged into men’s ears weren’t what they seemed.

It was easy to separate the hopeful buyers from the hopeful sellers. The sellers didn’t clutch heavily earmarked catalogues. But seller or buyer, the undercurrent of excitement, of being at the place where art history will be made, was unmistakable.

It made the back of Zach’s neck itch.

“What’s wrong?” Jill asked in a low voice.

“I’m wondering how big a fix is in on the auction.”

“That’s just one more subject my fine art education lacked,” she said wryly.

“What?”

“Fixing auctions.”

“Any auction can be fixed,” he said, thinking of Faroe’s conversation about Lane’s swarming. “Hidden floors for some goods is a favorite.”

“Translation?”

“Say that the auctioneer and the owner of some paintings have made an agreement that no paintings from that owner will sell under, oh, five million. Or a buyer and an auctioneer have an agreement on a minimum price. Normally a floor is put right out there for everyone to see. If the floor isn’t met, the painting or whatever is withdrawn. That’s open and legal.”

“And when the floor is hidden?” she asked.

“It’s illegal,” Zach said. “It could involve straw bidders in the crowd, or bogus signals from the phone banks, or winning bidders who quietly fail to follow through and take delivery after the headlines about a painting’s record price are made-any or all of the above can be used to be sure the floor is reached, and probably surpassed.”

Jill frowned. “I can see why the seller would want a big price. Where’s the benefit to the buyer if he’s the one doing the rigging?”

“Tax deductions. The bigger the sale price of the object, the bigger the deduction if the work is donated. When everyone is in on the fix, the seller gets enough of a kickback to pay capital gains on his art ‘profit,’ which he never really sees but still has to pay taxes on. Or the seller donates other paintings at the inflated price and ends up not having to pay taxes on his gains for the paintings he did sell.”

“You’re giving me a headache,” Jill said.

He shrugged. “Those are just a few of the ways to rig sales numbers. When St. Kilda’s researchers get some breathing space, they’ll go through the records and see just how much real money Dunstan owners have tied up in their paintings. I’m betting that at least one of them doesn’t have a tenth of the upcoming auction’s price into his Dunstans. The rest is blue smoke and auction fever. There are plenty of ways to juice the numbers, especially at an auction.”

“Is it common?” she asked.

“You mean like dirt? No. Common like something you should always be aware of in any auction? Oh, yeah. Millions of bucks change hands on the tip of a paddle or the lift of an eyebrow. A smart auctioneer or a savvy floor man can cover a multitude of backstage tricks. Sometimes the whole auction isn’t rigged, just certain lots in the auction. Real hard to prove and it all adds to everyone’s bottom line.”