Collar Robber: A Crime Story Featuring Jay Davidovich & Cynthia Jakubek

Copyright

Copyright © 2015 by Hillary Bell Locke

First E-book Edition 2015

ISBN: 9781464203374 ebook

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

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Contents

Collar Robber

Copyright

Contents

Dedication

Disclaimer

Epigraph

The Last Thursday in March

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

The First Monday in April

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

The First Wednesday in April

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

The First Thursday in April

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

The First Friday in April

Chapter Twenty-two

The Second Monday in April

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

The Second Tuesday in April

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

The Second Wednesday in April

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

The Second Thursday in April

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

The Third Monday in April

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

The Third Tuesday in April

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

The Third Wednesday in April

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Chapter Forty-three

The Fourth Sunday in April

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

The Fourth Monday in April

Chapter Forty-seven

The Fourth Tuesday in April

Chapter Forty-eight

The Fourth Friday in April

Chapter Forty-nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-one

Chapter Fifty-two

Chapter Fifty-three

Chapter Fifty-four

Chapter Fifty-five

Chapter Fifty-six

Chapter Fifty-seven

Chapter Fifty-eight

The Fourth Friday in August

Chapter Fifty-nine

More from this Author

Contact Us

Dedication

For Major Eric Sigmon, M.D.: husband, dad, officer, doctor

Disclaimer

Collar Robber is a work of fiction. The characters depicted do not exist, and the events described did not take place. I made this stuff up. Invented it out of whole cloth. Just pulled it out of my imagination. I am aware that there is no such institution as the Pittsburgh Museum of Twentieth-Century Art. I made that up too. No matter who you are, trust me on this: You’re not in here.

Epigraph

"The use of force is not an alternative to negotiation; it is a form of negotiation."

—Richard Michaelson in Washington Deceased

The Last Thursday in March

Chapter One

Jay Davidovich

No society in history has ever experienced a shortage of whores. I thought Dany Nesselrode was talking about the dead guy. He wasn’t. By the time I figured it out the body count had risen—and one of the bodies belonged to someone I’d miss.

I got involved on the last Thursday in March.

***

All dressed up and no place to go?

C. Talbot Rand, house counsel for the Pittsburgh Museum of Twentieth-Century Art, aimed this crack at Willy Szulz’s lawyer, Cynthia Jakubek. Szulz wanted to sell a piece of paper to my employer so that it wouldn’t have to write a very big check to Rand’s employer someday soon. A check big enough for me to have spent one hundred twenty-seven airplane minutes scrolling on my iPad through a briefing packet that Proxy Shifcos had zapped to me through cyberspace. That’s how I knew the names and roles.

Don’t be snide, Tally, Jakubek replied in a half-teasing lilt. Willy isn’t even fifteen minutes late yet. In the perspective of eternity, that’s scarcely an eyeblink. If the serene confidence radiating from her olive-brown face was a bluff, she had a knack for that useful art.

‘Eternity’ is a bit nebulous for us free-thinkers. Rand pointedly glanced from under bushy, charcoal gray eyebrows at a silver watch he pulled from a loden green vest pocket. Patience is a virtue, but I report to a busy lady.

I’ll try him again. Jakubek unholstered a Droid and stabbed its screen a couple of times with her index finger.

Rand’s condescending professor act put me off, but to tell the truth I was getting a little antsy myself. Not much of a party without the guest of honor. Please tell me that I didn’t put a computer hacking investigation on ice and fly fourteen-hundred miles on six hours’ notice for coitus interruptus.

What’s the deal, tiger? Jakubek demanded into her Droid. You’re about three minutes away from a value-billing write-up. Over the next seven seconds serene confidence morphed into serious-as-a-heart-attack concern as she lowered the phone and swung her eyes toward Proxy and me. He’s been driving around downtown for twenty minutes because he thinks he’s being followed.

I started pulling myself up from my seat even before I got Proxy’s subtle nudge. At six-four and two-twenty, I have ten inches and more than a hundred pounds on her, and God hadn’t created her WASP-Madonna face and inquisitive brown eyes to stop punches. The division of labor was obvious.

What’s our hotel?

Omni William Penn. On a street called William Penn Place, according to my itinerary. Intersects with Fifth Avenue.

Catching that one on the fly, Jakubek pulled the phone back up.

Drive to the Omni William Penn, leave your car with the valet, and wait for us in the lobby….No, don’t tell him you’re checking in. Just give him a big tip.

Three minutes later I was striding beside Jakubek along Liberty Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh, about to turn the corner onto Fifth. Maybe Szulz was just a self-involved drama magnet, but that piece of paper he was hawking might save Transoxana Insurance Company fifty million dollars—which is why Proxy’s maroon leather attaché case held codes and passwords she could use to wire-transfer up to one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars to buy it. People get killed every week in America for three orders of magnitude less than that, so I couldn’t just blow off the being-followed stuff.

So your buddy is something-something Risk Management and you’re Loss Prevention-something—did I get that right?

Jakubek managed this question without panting even though I was setting the kind of pace you’d expect from someone who’d just flown in from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in March without time to grab a Pittsburgh-worthy coat.

My business card reads Loss Prevention Specialist. Ms. Shifcos is Senior Director—Risk Management—U.S. At thirty. If there’s a pool on divisional VP by thirty-five, I’m going all-in on ‘Yes.’

In other words, she’s the suit and you’re the muscle.

That’s one way to put it. I shrugged off the little locker-room towel snap. "Proxy says that in perfect loss prevention no one raises his voice—but on an eight-figure risk, perfection doesn’t happen very often.

Law calls muscle ‘litigators,’ although in our case it’s metaphorical. If everything went right when the C. Talbot Rands of the world negotiated their deals, trial lawyers would starve to death. Fortunately, they go wrong often enough to cover our bar-bills.

The intrigued glance I shot at her caught gently laughing eyes looking up at me. Or maybe mocking eyes, but I’m gonna go with gently laughing. She’s not the dish Proxy is, but Jakubek looked just fine and she knew it. I figured she hadn’t quite hit thirty yet, but she’d left any ingénue stuff way behind. Black hair pulled straight back with a clean part instead of Proxy’s sassy helmet cut, a hint of an attitude in those eyes that reminded me of my wife, Rachel, and nothing wrong with her shape, either. I’d figured all that out in the reception area. Not that Jakubek had done anything flirtatious. Didn’t have to. She’s the kind of woman who produces head-snaps from straight males just by walking into a room.

Not sure how I feel about sharing a category with trial lawyers, I told her. Even metaphorically.

Ex-cop, I’m guessing.

Close enough. Two combat tours with an MP battalion.

I bet you call all lawyers ‘shysters.’

Only male lawyers. Women lawyers I call ‘shysterettes.’

Instead of a scowling eye-roll at that little payback for muscle, Jakubek gave me a good-sport chuckle and a playful sock on the bicep.

I told myself right then to watch out.

Chapter Two

Jay Davidovich

As Jakubek and I walked I kept my eyes open, sweeping the street and sidewalks for a tail. Even for a pro, following someone solo is hard to do without standing out. Of course that doesn’t mean that everyone who stands out is a tail. By the time we were one block-plus from the hotel I had three possibilities but no certainties.

A slender African-American woman in her mid-twenties walked up and down the sidewalk on the south side of Fifth, smoking a cigarette. She passed up three chances to huddle in doorways out of the cold. Just east of the corner of Fifth and William Penn Place, a white guy in a gray Corolla with dirty snow residue on its fenders looked here and there kind of randomly in what struck me as an affectedly casual way. He wore a down vest instead of a jacket or overcoat. A twenty-something with Mediterranean coloring stood on the northeast corner of the same intersection. He sported a ragged gray hoodie and dark pants that didn’t look quite like jeans.

As we approached the corner the guy in the hoodie stepped toward a man in a fedora and a khaki London Fog who’d just left the hotel and begun walking toward Fifth. The hoodie panhandled the guy in a whiny, wheedling tone as he extended his left hand. London Fog blew right past him, careful not to make eye contact.

A familiar tension roiled my gut. I never want to walk down sidewalks dotted with invisible people, like Mr. London Fog just had. On the other hand, I don’t like being a sucker, kidding myself about my two bucks going for food instead of subsidizing slow-motion suicide. I haven’t figured that one out yet.

I sometimes give panhandlers something if I think they’re vets, I told Jakubek, but I’m not getting a vet-vibe from this guy.

I’m getting a guy-whose-shoes-cost more-than-my-coat vibe from him. When the hoodie stepped toward us Jakubek stopped in her tracks and looked him right in the eye. St. Benedict’s Open Door Café, just this side of PPG Place on Fourth. Free meals every day.

The panhandler stepped back, shaking his head with a disappointed frown. I took a look at his shoes: winterized Air Jordan Six-Rings, gleaming black. Not a penny under a hundred-and-a-half online, and probably twenty-five percent more in a brick-and-mortar shop. The shysterette apparently kept her eyes open too.

I had no idea what Szulz looked like, but I spotted him the minute we walked into the Omni’s lobby. He wore a parka over a non-descript charcoal suit and pinned a battered yellow-and-black backpack between his calves. Forty-seven, according to Proxy’s briefing packet. Two European languages: Czech and German. Curly hair thinning and going from dark brown to gray framed a roundish, animated white face. Pushing six feet but not quite there, and a good fifteen pounds overweight.

The instant he spotted Jakubek he sprang to his feet, pulling a Steelers watch cap from the parka’s right pocket with one hand while he grabbed the backpack with the other. The hem of his suit coat came down a good two inches below the bottom of the parka.

Okay, let’s roll. He spoke with a peppery, machine-gun cadence. Sorry about the cops-and-robbers stuff, but swear to God I had a dark Jap car tailing me all the way from the bridge.

Jakubek didn’t turn around as the seller blew past us. After three strides toward the door he wheeled and showed us a puzzled, impatient face.

C’mon, let’s go!

Willy, this is Jay Davidovich, Loss Prevention Specialist with Transoxana Insurance Company. Mr. Davidovich, this is Willy Szulz, who’s here to save your company fifty million dollars.

Pleased to meecha. Szulz offered me his right hand as he slipped his left arm through one of the backpack straps. Now—

In other words, Willy, Jakubek said in an unruffled voice, you’re in the presence of the enemy. Don’t act like you’re in a hurry, and don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to hear again in front of a jury.

Bingo, C.J. Szulz had the grace to grin. That’s why you get the big bucks.

Now we headed for the door.

Chapter Three

Cynthia Jakubek

We made it back to the Museum with no more drama. The receptionist promptly showed us into an anachronism. The Olivia Stannard Room featured a long, blond table that was all lines and angles with form-follows-function chairs around it, like you might see in a Perry Mason rerun. An oil portrait of President Eisenhower graced the north wall, and a painting depicting the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri took up at least sixty square feet of the intersecting west wall. Heavy glass ashtrays sat on the table, with a cylinder of cigarettes in the center.

No kidding? Willy said. We can smoke in here?

I’m guessing no. I noted a flicker of relief cross Shifcos’ face as I answered my client.

But…? Willy pointed at the cigarettes.

Fortunately for me, Tally strolled into the room at that moment through a discreet door under Ike’s grinning face. Picking up the gist of Willy’s protest, he saved me the trouble of explaining.

Grace Stannard Dalhousie donated six-hundred-thousand dollars to the Museum in 1963, in memory of her mother, Olivia. One of the stipulations in the deed of gift was that this room would be kept in exactly the condition it was in on October 10, 1958, when Mrs. Stannard succumbed to a heart attack immediately after presiding over her last board meeting.

Oh, Willy said.

Ms. Huggens will be joining us presently. Tally moved to a chair immediately to the right of the table’s head. With his perfectly cut ash-gray blazer and navy blue slacks contrasting nicely with the green vest, he looked like he had been born to occupy chairs like that in rooms like this. Please help yourselves to coffee or water, and feel free to find a seat.

I went to the sideboard for coffee, and I took my time about it. I figured that Jennifer Stannard Huggens would let us cool our heels for at least ten minutes to punish us for my client’s tardiness. I didn’t particularly blame her, but I wanted to keep Willy under control in the interim. He’d let loose with some standard-issue Willytude on the way over, when we found red lights facing us for over five seconds from both directions at Fifth and Wood. "So no one gets to move! Great! It’s like living in a Third World country!" His Jersey hustler routine could get old fast, and I didn’t want him to blow up the negotiations before they started.

Any for you, Tally? I gestured toward him with the orange-topped carafe.

No, thanks. He smiled pleasantly and did the pocket-watch thing again. If it said the same thing my Citizen wristwatch did, he saw that we were now just past three-ten, on the verge of starting our meeting forty-five minutes late.

Tally and I had intersected on another matter I was handling, which he’d gratuitously alluded to with his free-thinker crack. So far I had him down for a bronze medal in the asshole Olympics. This afternoon, though, I was counting on him. Huggens was the third managing director he’d worked under in his not-quite-fifteen years as inside counsel for the Museum. The first director had had a reputation as an old-school, old-money, model of rectitude. The second had wanted to jack up the endowment without a lot of chat about technicalities along the way. Huggens was a by-the-book pragmatist who dreamed of someday reading in the New York Times that Pitt MCM had put together a world-class collection.

Tally had gotten along smoothly with all three. He’d tacked nimbly to the prevailing winds, deftly shaping his advice and his formal opinions to get his client of the moment wherever she wanted to go. And in all three cases he’d generally gotten her there without abrading the delicate susceptibilities of heirs, trustees—or courts. That made my job simple: make Tally think Jennifer Stannard Huggens wanted to spend Transoxana’s money to save a painting for the Museum.

I choked back vestigial blue-collar resentment as Huggens entered with a gracious smile and a firm handshake for each of us. Not her fault she’d been born blond and rich. She’d worked full time at real jobs in the twelve years since completing her second degree—not as hard as I had, but not many people outside Chinese sweatshops do. I could tell she charmed Willy right out of his socks. For a second I was afraid he was just going to hand her the goods right then and there.

Once we finally took our seats, Tally spent thirty seconds on the usual thanks-for-coming-and-welcome-to-the-Museum palaver. Then he looked at me.

It’s your party, Ms. Jakubek. What’s your pleasure?

I began by passing around a redacted photocopy of a handwritten German bill of sale dated 23 March 1938. It documented Dietrich Heinzen’s purchase of a painting titled Maiden in Apron from Scholeim Himmelfarb for eight thousand marks. Or at least it would have documented that purchase if I hadn’t blacked some stuff out. I had an English translation attached to it, with blanks instead of blackouts. I’d stapled the two-page packets into blue construction-paper backings like lawyers used for Very Important Documents fifty years ago. I hoped that would make them seem more like something worth the kind of money my client wanted.

Why have you blacked out the names of the seller and buyer and the painting sold? Huggens asked.

Because I don’t want to tempt Transoxana to try to track down a duplicate original of this bill of sale instead of buying the one Mr. Szulz is offering.

"So the painting isn’t the one the Museum owns, Klimt’s Eros Rising?"

No.

Then what good would this document be to us?

Tally came in right on cue.

Comparable sale would be my guess.

Explain. Please. Huggens added the please as an afterthought, but give her credit: she got it in.

"On the tenth of October, 1937, Gustav Wehring sold Eros Rising to a Swiss industrialist for seven thousand marks. Not chump-change, but it might strike many as a derisory sum for a painting purchased by a generous American benefactor for three million dollars in 1973, appraised at more than twenty million when he donated it to the Museum in 1996, and valued at fifty million today."

Comes the dawn. Huggens gave Tally the kind of smile that high school teachers offer students who combine clever with earnest. "Wehring’s heirs are claiming that he sold Eros Rising for far less than its real worth in 1937 because he was forced to by the Nazis, making that sale illegitimate. But if a comparable painting sold around the same time for something like the same price and without any hint of coercion, that would show that the original sale of Eros Rising was a legitimate, arm’s-length transaction at a fair price."

Exactly.

Huggens turned her plum-colored eyes toward me.

And you’re saying your client could prove that happened?

No. I wanted to be real clear on this next part. "I’m saying Mr. Szulz can sell you documentation of a roughly contemporaneous sale, in the same price range, of a painting that has gotten appraisals in the same ballpark as appraisals of Eros Rising at around the same time. What that proves will be up to you."

Or up to a court. Huggens’ smile now had Gotcha! written all over it.

Not exactly, Shifcos said, shifting her gaze to Huggens. "The statutes of limitation have run on all possible legal theories that could be used to challenge the sales. You have a bulletproof defense to any legal action seeking to recover Eros Rising—unless you choose to waive that defense voluntarily."

What about the Washington Convention? Huggens’ eyes darted back and forth between Shifcos and me, as if we were in the middle of a long rally in a tennis match. Doesn’t that treaty waive the statute of limitations and other technical defenses? And hasn’t the United States signed it?

The United States has signed the Washington Convention, but the Pitt MCM hasn’t, Shifcos said. The Convention binds most European museums because they’re essentially government institutions. The Pittsburgh Museum of Twentieth-Century Art is a private entity and therefore not bound by the treaty.

Ms. Huggens is aware of that, Tally said, lying with angelic sincerity. But ethical private American museums have informally agreed to abide by the Washington Convention’s waiver of technical defenses as a moral obligation in cases where they feel that a claim for a particular work of art is valid on the merits.

Shifcos gave Tally and Huggens a cocked eyebrow, which I roughly translated as: Transoxana Insurance Company isn’t in the moral obligation business. You blow off a killer defense, we don’t write a check. Save your souls on your own dime. This struck me as a good time to jump back into the conversation.

"I agree with Mr. Rand. Especially the ‘on the merits’ part. If the Museum decides that the claim for Eros Rising is meritorious, it may feel morally compelled to waive technical defenses. But if the Museum itself reaches the opposite conclusion, there’d be no reason for any waiver and therefore no basis for a judge even to look at the bill of sale Mr. Szulz is offering—much less decide what it proves or doesn’t prove. You’re the sole judge of that. All you’ll ever have to say in court is, ‘Statute of limitations, we win.’"

Willy beamed. Is this a great country or what?

Chapter Four

Cynthia Jakubek

Tally