“Hmph.”
“Really,” she said. But she said “really” the way a New Yorker says “really,” which means “maybe not really.”
“Does the quilt still have its original value?” Lucas asked.
“Hard to say,” she said. “There are no more of them, and their creator is dead. That always helps hold value. They're exceptional quilts, even aside from the curses.”
Lucas thanked her for her help, and just before he rang off, she said, “You didn't ask me if I was related to the Bundt-cake Bundts.”
“Didn't occur to me,” he said.
“Really.”
As soon as he hung up, his phone rang again, and Carol said, “I'm ringing Ted Marsalis for you.”
Marsalis came on a minute later, and Lucas said, “I need you to check with your sources at Wells Fargo. I'm looking to see what happened to an account there, and who's behind it…”
Lucas sat back at his desk and closed his eyes. He was beginning to see something back there: a major fraud. Two rich old ladies, both experienced antique buyers, buy quilts cheaply from a well-known quilt stitcher, and then turn around and donate them to museums.
For this, they get a big tax write-off, probably saving $50,000 or $60,000 actual dollars from their tax bills. Would that mean anything to people as rich as they were? Of course it would. That's how rich people stayed rich. Watch your pennies and the dollars take care of themselves.
The donations established the value of the quilts and created a stir in the art community. The remaining quilts are then moved off to Sotheby's, where they sell for equally large prices to four more museums. Why the museums would necessarily be bidding, he didn't know. Could be fashion, could be something he didn't see.
In any case, Marilyn Coombs gets enough money to buy a house, and put a few bucks in her pocket. Two-thirds of the money disappears into Cannon Associates, which, he would bet, was none other than Amity Anderson.
How that led to the killings, he didn't know yet. Anderson had to have an accomplice.
Maybe the accomplice was even the main motivator in the whole scheme…
He got on the phone to Jenkins again: “How would you feel about around-the-clock surveillance?”
“Oh, motherfucker… don't do this to me.”
More doodling on a notepad, staring out a window. Finally, he called up the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, and got the head of the folk arts department, and was told that the curator who had supervised the acquisition of the quilt had moved on; she was now at the High Museum in Atlanta.
Lucas got the number, and called her. Billie Walker had one of the smooth Southern Comfort voices found in the western parts of the Old South, where the word bug had three vowels between the b and g and they all rhymed with glue.
“I remember that clearly,” she said. “No, we wouldn't have bought it normally, but an outside foundation provided much of the money. A three-to-one match. In other words, if we came up with thirty thousand dollars, they would provide ninety thousand.”
“Is this pretty common?”
“Oh my, yes. That's how we get half of our things,” Walker said.
“Find some people willing to chip in, then find a foundation willing to come up with a matching grant. There are many, many foundations with an interest in the arts.”
“Do you remember the name of this one?” Lucas asked.
“Of course. In my job, you don't forget a funding source. It was the Thune Foundation of Chicago.” Lucas asked her how she spelled it. “T-h-u-n-e.”
“Did you have to dig them out of the underbrush to get the donation? Or did they come to you?”
“That's the odd thing. They volunteered. Never heard from them before,” she said.
“Took no sucking-up at all.”
Lucas scribbled Thune on his desk pad. “Have you ever heard of a woman named Amity Anderson?”
“No… not that I recall. Who is she?”
He'd heard the name Thune, he thought. He didn't know where, but he'd heard it, and recently. At Bucher's, one of the relatives? He couldn't put his finger on it, and finally dialed Chicago directory assistance, got a number for the Thune Foundation, and five minutes later, was talking to the assistant director.
He explained, briefly what he was up to, and then asked, “Do the names Donaldson, Bucher, or Toms mean anything to you?”
“Well, Donaldson, of course. Mr. Thune owned a large brewery in Wisconsin. He had no sons, but one of his daughters married George Donaldson-this would have been way back-and they became the stalwarts of this foundation.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“Claire Donaldson?” Lucas asked. “I believe she was the last Donaldson?”
“Yes, she was. Tragic, what happened. She was on our board for several years, chairwoman, in fact, for many years, although she'd stepped aside from that responsibility before she died.”
“Did she have anything to do with grants? Like, to museums?” “She was on our grants committee, of course…”
Lucas got off the phone and would have said, “Ah-ha!” if he hadn't thought he'd sound like a fool.
A new piece: even the prices paid for the quilts in the auction were a fraud. He'd bet the other purchases were similarly funded. He'd have Sandy nail it down, but it gave him the direction.
A very complicated scheme, he thought, probably set up by Anderson and her accomplice.
Create the quilts. Create an ostensible value for them by donating them to museums, with appraisals that were, he would bet, as rigged as the later sales.
Sell the quilts at Sotheby's to museums who feel that they're getting a great deal, because most of the money is coming from charitable foundations. Why would the foundations give up money like that? Because of pressure from their founders…
The founders would be banned from actually getting money from the foundations themselves.
That was a definite no-no. But this way, they got it, and they got tax write-offs on top of it.
He put down boxes with arrows pointing to the boxes: Anderson sets it up for a cut; the funders, Bucher and Donaldson, get tax write-offs. At the Sotheby's sale, the money is distributed to Coombs and Cannon Associates-Amity Anderson. Anderson kicks back part of it-a third?-to Donaldson and Bucher…
What a great deal. Completely invisible.
Then maybe, Donaldson cracks, or somebody pushes too hard, and Donaldson has to go.
Then Bucher? That would be… odd. And what about Toms? Where did he fit in? Ted Marsalis called back. “The Wells Fargo account was opened by a woman named Barbra Cannon,” he said. “Barbra without the middle a, like in Barbra Streisand. There was a notation on the account that said the owners expected to draw it down to much lower levels fairly quickly, because they were establishing an antiques store in Palm Springs, and were planning to use the money for original store stock. Did I tell you this was all in Las Vegas?”
“Las Vegas?”
“In Nevada,” Marsalis said.
“I know where it is. So what happened?”
“So they drew the money down, right down to taking the last seven hundred dollars out of the account from an ATM, and that's the last Wells Fargo heard from them,” Marsalis said. “After the seven hundred dollars, there were six dollars left in the account. That was burned up by account charges over the years, so now, there's nothing.
Account statements sent to the home address were returned. There's nobody there.”
“Shit.”
“What can I tell you?” Marsalis said.
“What'd the IRS have to say about that?” Lucas asked.
“I don't think they said anything. You want me to call them?”
“Yeah. Do that. That much money can't just go up in smoke.” Lucas said.
“Sure it can,” Marsalis said. “You're a cop. You ever heard of drug dealers? This is how they make money go away.”
Drug dealers? He didn't even want to think about that. He had to focus on Amity Anderson.
Jenkins and Shrake would stake her out, see who she hung with. He needed as much as he could get, because this was all so obscure… He was pretty sure he had it right, but what if the red thread came back as something made only in Wisconsin? Then the whole structure would come down on his head.