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art before the First World War. Our host, Lowell III — or Three, as his father liked to call him as a boy — also had the love of art in his blood.
    “The first artist I ever met was Picasso,” Caxton continued, “at our home in Paris, before he went off to Spain to fight. He was having an affair with my mother at the time, although I was much too young to pick up on that. And in case you’re wondering, it was perfectly all right with my father. Got him some stunning paintings for his collection. You might like to see them someday. They’re in my bedroom — never been shown publicly.”
    “Do you mind if we talk about your wife, Mr. Caxton?” Chapman asked.
    “I’ve had three, Detective. I assume you mean Deni?”
    “Well, actually, why don’t you tell me about the other two first? Then, yes, I’d like to know as much about Denise as possible.”
    “Not much to say about them. Rest in peace.” Caxton looked over at me, daring a smile. “I married Lisette in France at the beginning of the war. She died in childbirth. Tragic, really. I adored her. My second wife was from Italy. She raised Lisette’s child and then two more daughters of our own. Killed in a boating accident in Venice.”
    “Aha!” Chapman said under his breath, shifting in his chair and leaning across to me. “
Rebecca
. I told you so.”
    I ignored the crack and went on. “Where are your daughters now?”
    “All grown, married, living in Europe. And if you want to know whether or not they liked Deni, they didn’t. She was younger than all of them, and they never got along very well. But they’ve had absolutely nothing to do with her for years.”
    “I understand,” Chapman said. “We will, of course, need to get in touch with them at some point.”
    “I’ll have someone from my office get you all their information.”
    “Back to Denise, if we may.”
    “Certainly, Detective. I met Deni nearly twenty years ago, in Firenze. She was—”
    “You were widowed at the time, Mr. Caxton?” Mercer asked.
    “Widowed once, Mr. Wallace. My second wife was alive and quite well. Her mishap occurred several years thereafter. In any event, I had flown over to look at a Bernini sculpture that I wanted to bid on. It was at the gallery that I first saw Denise, and I was more infatuated with her than with the statue. That hadn’t happened to me in years.”
    “And she was there to bid on the same piece for the Tate?” I ventured, having found that item of her biography on-line the previous night in an old magazine clipping about a museum opening.
    Caxton smiled. “I should think you’d know better than to believe everything you read in the newspapers, young lady. Deni was just off her year as Miss Oklahoma, and a very-distant-second runner-up in the Miss America Pageant. You were probably too busy with your nose in your schoolbooks,” Caxton said, with a nod in my direction, “to be watching that year, but she was the kid from Idabel with great looks and no talent to speak of — traded in baton twirling in favor of reading a soliloquy from
As You Like It
. Not exactly a crowd pleaser. She took her ten-thousand-dollar scholarship prize and escaped. Worked her way over to Florence to study art, which she didn’t know the first thing about at the time. Figured if Andy Warhol could fool the world with what he was selling, she could catch on and find a niche.
    “I decided to follow my grandfather’s route, Miss Cooper. What Denise lacked in breeding, she made up for in — shall we say? — élan. She was a marvelously quick study and I enjoyed teaching. All she needed from me was to create a provenance for her, no different than a clever forger would do for a fine painting.
    “I gave Deni a vague and somewhat mysterious background — orphaned as a young child, with a trust fund. Raised abroad in a series of boarding schools. Moved her from the
pensione
she was living in to the Excelsior, where I was staying when I came to town. Had her