Art Theft 101

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

“Don’t even think about it.”

I stopped reading the paper, turned to look over my shoulder, and quirked an eyebrow. Liddy, one of my partners in crime, strolled farther into my living room. “Why? And have you ever heard of knocking first?”

She shrugged, pointing to picture in the newspaper. “It’s the kind of thing that could get us in jail or dead, or worse.” I knew she was teasing—sort of.

Chuckling, I replied, “There’s nothing much worse than dead. Take it from an expert on the subject.”

The ‘it’ she was referring to was an article in the arts section of the paper. Why did it interest me enough to make Liddy say what she did? Because the story was about a new show at the Roger Prentice Gallery—a retrospective exhibit of the works of James Kiefer, a renowned New Orleans painter who had died two years ago. His works are valued in the tens of thousands. Getting our hands on one of them could keep us in caviar for quite a while. Well, if we liked caviar. Personally I prefer my fish fully grown and well cooked.

By the way, I’m Philip Archer. No relation to Lew Archer. I took my most recent surname for a private eye novel I read when it first came out. It sort of struck me as amusing, considering what I do for a living. My given name is a variant of my birth name, Philippe—Philippe Duchamps.

“Spending twenty years in jail could put a big crimp in your feeding habits, Philip,” Liddy countered. “And the exercise yard at noon? Uh-uh. Not a good thing.”

I was about to point out to her I could easily escape, even before things went to trial, when the door to my apartment on the second floor of our building opened again and my favorite cat walked in. Okay, maybe cat is not the best description, according to him. He’s a black panther shifter who goes by the name Duff Logan, and another one of my partners.

Our fourth partner, Robert Traver, a.k.a. Rob, shows up when the spirit moves—quite literally. He’s a ghost. Has been for just over two hundred years—which makes him just about one fifth my age. He died fighting with Jean Laffite during the Battle of New Orleans in 1814.

“Why are we ending up in jail?” Duff asked.

“Unless I’m reading him wrong,” Liddy replied before I could, “he wants us to lift a painting or three from the Prentice Gallery.”

“Oh really?” Duff came over, taking the paper from my hands. “Do we have a buyer?”

“Well…” I smiled wryly. “Not yet, but…”

“You want us to do it on spec?” Liddy asked. “And if we can’t unload it, or them, then what? It does us no good if we can’t sell it.”

“She’s right,” Duff grumbled. “Sometimes, Philip, you seem to forget it takes money to pay the property taxes, utilities, and you know; the things we have to ante up for to keep the wolf from the door.”

I swear, Duff’s a CPA at heart and I’ve told him so more than once. Still, he does have a point. Theft pays our bills—housing, clothes, small things like that. Not something Rob has to worry about but the rest of us…

“I do worry about it,” Rob said, materializing in front of the door to my balcony, which overlooks Saint Philip. The three of us own the building, just up the street from Lafitte’s Bar. All of it, lock-stock-and-barrel. Have since I bought it in 1870, in conjunction with one Dogald Logan, who presumably died at the ripe old age of sixty-nine. His ‘grandson’, Duff, inherited Dogald’s share of the building in 1914. Rob’s the silent owner as it were, since he couldn’t actually sign the papers at that point. Liddy’s a newcomer—and human—so of course she’s not on the title.

“Reading my mind again, Rob?” I asked.

He smirked, turning to look at me. “It’s easy when you leave the link between us open. That said, I don’t want to lose this place because we go after something without having a buyer.”

“We don’t do it that often,” I protested.

“Let’s see, there was that rare vase we co-opted from a sleazy gallery because the owner conned the poor lady into signing it over to him for next to nothing. You just had to make it right for her by switching it out for a replica and giving her back the original,” Duff said. “That took what? Two weeks between planning and then having our favorite art forger make the copy? Which by the way cost us a pretty penny. Two weeks during which we ignored two potentially lucrative jobs. Then there was—”

“Okay, okay, so I like helping victims of scumbags like him when the situation warrants. Shoot me.”

Liddy laughed. “Like that would do any good.”

“Says the only one of us for whom it might be fatal,” I told her.

Liddy, being, as I said, human, shrugged. “It would be for you too, if they got you in the heart, and you know it.”

“She has a point,” Duff said, ruffling her blonde hair. He can do that since they’re a couple. If I tried it I’d probably lose a hand—or worse. She’s a sweet kid, but feisty that way.

“Can we get back to what we were talking about before all this chit-chat?” I asked, adding, “downstairs.”

Part of the ground floor is Duff’s apartment. Liddy has hers on the second floor, across from mine. Another part of the ground floor is a small art gallery that handles works by local artists. To all intents and purposes it’s how we support ourselves. It’s managed by Vince, a very nice young man who has no idea what goes on behind the scenes.

To the rear of the building is our true business area, if you can call art theft a business. It consists of two rooms. One is our office/workroom where we can do our planning without fear of being overheard. The other, smaller one is where we store our ill-gotten gains until we can pass the article, or articles, in question on to a buyer. Both rooms have more security than…the Pentagon? They have to, for our own protection. There are people out there who would love to prove we’re not the upstanding citizens we purport to be.

We all trooped down to the office. Okay, Rob took the easy way, vanishing then reappearing there before we arrived. There’s something to be said for being able to go through walls and floors rather than taking the stairs.

Once we were all settled in, Liddy and Duff in armchairs, me at the antique desk I’d picked up back in the early nineteen hundreds, and Rob on the surprisingly comfortable French antique loveseat that we’d gotten on whim from a gallery on Royal while we were on a job many years ago.

After booting up our top-of-the-line computer, I brought up the website for the Prentice Gallery. It didn’t give us the information we needed about the building itself, but then I’d have been surprised if it had. A check of real property records would do that. I just wanted a look at the interior set-up before we paid it a visit.

“Two main rooms,” Duff commented after getting up to look over my shoulder at the monitor. “The large front windows might be a problem. That door—” he tapped the screen, “—probably leads to the office area and maybe…No, there’s the restrooms. We need floor plans, Philip.”

I nodded, minimizing the website and then doing a search. “Now this is nice,” I murmured when I found an article about several galleries in the city that showed their floor plans, including one for Prentice Gallery. I printed out four copies, handing everyone one.

“I was wrong,” Duff said. “There’s three showrooms, the main one, one through the arch at its rear, and the third down the hall from that one. So where are the offices and storage area?”

“Best bet,” Rob said, “on the second floor. Those stairs at the end of the hallway must lead to them.”

“The Kiefer retrospective is in the main showroom?” Liddy asked.

“Yep,” I replied.

“Which painting are we going after?”

I went back to the gallery’s website to bring up the information on the Kiefer exhibition. There were photos of each piece. “My thought was one or all of these three.” By then everyone was hovering behind me to look.

“None of them have a price, which is good,” Liddy pointed out.

“Because they’re not for sale. They belong to a private collector who lent them to the galley just for this exhibit,” I told her. “It was in the newspaper article I was reading.”

“All right, Liddy and I will pay the gallery a visit to see exactly where they’re hanging and check out what sort of security the gallery has,” Duff said. “Obviously we won’t be able to get up to the second floor offices.”

I nodded. “Rob can handle that. I’ll go with him but—” I glanced at Rob. “As always, I’ll need to know if there are motion sensors up there before I can move around freely.”

“And,” Duff shot me a hard look before going back to sit down, along with the others, “we need a buyer before we do anything.”

“Yes, bossman,” I replied, giving him a mocking salute. “I actually have two people in mind who might be interested.”

The men I was thinking about were very private collectors. No one saw what they owned except a few like-minded people who understood the virtue of silence. One of the men was a fairly regular client. The other was someone he’d told me about during our last transaction.

“Who?” Duff asked.

“Bryce Milton, whom you know, and Ian Croft.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Bryce recommended him,” I replied to Duff. “They tend to be interested in the same types of art.”

“Style-wise or stolen?” Libby asked with a grin.

I laughed. “Both?”

Duff nodded. “We need to meet with this Croft guy before we make any decisions about him. And do a complete background check on him. I don’t want to find out we’re being set up by Bryce, whether he knows it’s what’s happening or not.”

“I doubt Bryce would do that intentionally. He likes our…services. Besides, if he did turn on us, we know about a few paintings he has in his collection he’d rather the FBI not find out about. Last I checked, one of the pieces is on their top ten list.”

“The Pissarro?” Rob grinned. “Getting our hands on that for Bryce was an interesting challenge.”

“One I’d rather not repeat,” Duff muttered. “Galleries are easy compared to taking something from a museum. If we’d been caught, we’d still be sitting in a French jail.”

“Not me,” Rob pointed out. “Even if I had been along for that job. Not any of us except Liddy, if she’d been around back then.”

“Right, throw me to the dogs,” Liddy muttered, but she was smiling. She knew Duff would never let that happen. He would teleport her away as easily as he does himself in case of emergencies.

“All right. I’ll get in contact with Bryce, and feel out Ian Croft once I know he’s legit.”

Liddy snickered. “Feel out, or feel up.”

I looked at her in feigned shock. “I would never do that to a potential client. Well, not until I got to know him well enough to find out if he was interested, and interesting.”

Rob rolled his eyes. “The last time you did that you disappeared for a week and came back looking like you hadn’t fed for a month. Still, we did make a nice profit from the painting we stole for the guy.”

I smirked. “And I got to release some tension from the job.”

“Please be smart, Philip,” Duff said with a worried shake of his head. “You, all of us in fact, have too much to lose if you can’t keep it in your pants if he is gay, and cute.”

“I’m not stupid, Duff. I know that. Besides, it’s probably a moot point.”

“Hopefully.” Duff got up then. “For the moment, I need some sleep. Let me know as soon as you get the information on Croft.”

Liddy stood as well, linking her arm over Duff’s as they left the room. I had a strong feeling neither of them would be sleeping for at least an hour.

“I should go too,” Rob said, “so you can get to work.”

I nodded distractedly. I was already beginning my search on Ian Croft.

* * * *

Twenty minutes later I leaned back, looking at the very basic information on Mr. Croft, and the photos that accompanied it. He was nothing if not handsome. Tall—six one—with jet black hair, a well-trimmed beard, and grey-green eyes.

He owned Croft Design Group, an interior design firm for both business and residential projects, according the company’s website. His firm had won numerous awards as well as being written up in several local magazines.

Digging deeper, I found out that both he and his company were financially sound. Some of the financial info was easily obtained. The rest? Let’s just say I’ve been around since the inception of the Internet and learned how to use what it has to offer to my advantage. The term hacker fits me to a ‘T’.

Now that I knew something about Mr. Croft on a business level, it was time to check out personal details. He was thirty-two, according to his personal f*******: page, single, and if the number of friends he has there is any indication, fairly popular with men and women in about equal numbers. And as I said, damned good looking. Other people-search sites let me know he has one sibling, a sister many years his senior, parents living in Montana of all places, and he has never been married. Nor is he involved with anyone, at least according to his sss page.

Having determined he was financially stable to the point of being relatively wealthy, with a home in the Garden District—not too far from his company headquarters—I decided it was time to make contact with him. Not something I could do until tomorrow afternoon, given my sleep patterns. I might be old enough to be awake during the early morning and late afternoon, but I sincerely doubted he wanted me calling him at home at seven A.M.