Read Online Cold Hit by Linda Fairstein - Free Book Online

outset.”
    “You want to ask us anything, before I get started?” Chapman queried.
    “I know everything about how and where she was found, Detective. After Valerie reached me with the news last night, I had my assistant make all the inquiries he could. I’m sure you’ll tell me whatever else you think it’s necessary for me to know.”
    I had worked with Mike often enough to get inside his head. You couldn’t look at a situation like this without thinking you could easily find a motive for the husband to want the wife dead — money, business, infidelity, and in this instance, even more money. A contract hit in this kind of marriage would be cheaper than any alimony decision made by a judge or jury. But it was also so obvious that we were each thinking that it was too easy. Now the guy plays right into the theory by not even expressing interest in how his estranged wife was killed. He probably had more channels of access to whatever information he wanted than I had pairs of shoes.
    Mike had two short-term goals. He needed to get as much information about both Caxtons, personal and professional, as he could, and he wanted to shove open the pocket doors so he could see whether anyone was coming or going into the private rooms of the apartment.
    “It’s warm in here, Mr. Caxton,” Mike said, taking out his notepad and loosening his tie as he rose and walked toward the doors. “Mind if I open these for a little air?”
    Caxton lifted a remote control panel from the table beside him. “Not necessary, Detective. I’ll simply adjust the room temperature. It stays much cooler in here without the summer sun beating through those glass windows off the park. Carry on. Tell me what you need to know.”
    Whether we needed it all or not, the Caxton family history and the building of the art fortune had to be explored, in case they proved to be links to the murder.
    Lowell Caxton III was the grandson of the Pittsburgh steel baron whose name he bore. The grandfather had been born in 1840 and was one of those great American success stories — a poor kid from a large family who rose from menial mill jobs to running a production plant before he was thirty. When he recognized the growing demand for steel, needed to build the railroads across the country, he borrowed all of his working-class relatives’ money and purchased a factory. In 1873 , when another young fellow, named Andrew Carnegie, came along and began his acquisition of businesses which he later consolidated into the Carnegie Steel Company, Lowell Caxton never had to work again. He became an investor and speculator, and thereafter a philanthropist responsible for helping Carnegie build libraries and art museums all over the Northeast.
    In the mid- 1880 s, Caxton became enamored of the bohemian lifestyle of many of the young artists living and working in Paris. He bought several apartments in Montmartre and let some of the struggling upstarts live there rent-free, in exchange for paintings that he took to America.
    On one of his trips, drinking in the nightclubs with Toulouse-Lautrec, Caxton took up with a dancer, whom he married and brought back to the States. Their son, Lowell II, inherited the entire fortune — the money and the art — when both of his parents died in the sinking of the
Lusitania
, in 1915 . He was thirty years old at the time.
    As though the passion for art had been genetically transmitted, the junior Caxton carried on his father’s interests, patronizing the creators and expanding the family collection. He was a popular figure at Mabel Dodge’s “evenings” in her home at 23 Fifth Avenue, where he championed the Postimpressionists to Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger, John Reed, and the other intellectuals who gathered to exchange ideas while Dodge puffed on her gold-tipped cigarettes. It was at one of those soirees that he met his wife, a guest of Gertrude Stein’s named Marie-Hélène de Neuilly, who was a well-known patron of avant-garde