Lane snickered. “The blogs are saying that the four to six million dollars per Dunstan is low end, because he comes on the market so rarely that there’s a lot of demand. The figure ten million dollars keeps coming up again and again in the really recent hits. Some serious buzz going down.”
“Good news for the art business,” Faroe said.
“Bad news for Uncle Sam,” Lane said, “according to one source.”
“Yeah?” Faroe asked. “In my experience, the government always gets its cut of the action.”
“Something to do with taxes,” Lane said.
“Are we talking Crawford?”
“Yeah, but you said you wanted to talk about Dunstan.”
“Do you have anything else on Dunstan?” Faroe asked.
“Just secondary and tertiary sources quoting primary sources and then each other. For example-”
“Quit jerking Joe’s chain,” Grace cut in. “He may be in the mood for it but I’m not. Bottom-line time.”
Lane started to defend himself, then thought better of it. He knew he was yanking his dad’s chain, but only in a sideways, sort of buddy kind of way. Nothing serious.
“About two years ago,” Lane said, drawing up a new document on the computer, “Crawford’s business manager was busted on some bad tax shelters. He got bail on appeal, then hopped a plane to Paraguay with two showgirls and a lot of money in offshore accounts. Turns out that some of the deals he cut for Crawford weren’t what they looked like on the surface. Certainly not when it came to claiming federal tax deductions on losses.”
“Bottom-” Faroe said.
“-line,” Lane finished. “Crawford owes over a hundred million in taxes and penalties to our favorite uncle. He’s fighting it, but he’s lost two appeals already. The third one is still in the works.”
Faroe’s soft whistle was all the reward Lane needed.
“I don’t really understand a lot of this,” Lane continued, “but one of the swarmers has real financial smarts. She said that a cheap way to pay taxes is to give away stuff you already own to charity and take its value off your taxes.”
“Stuff?” Faroe asked.
“You know. Art, jewelry, property, that sort of thing. Stuff. Give it to a charity or a public trust.”
“Or a museum,” Faroe said. “Good job, Lane.”
His son grinned.
“Giving away ‘stuff ’ works especially well if you can somehow inflate the cost of the donation,” Grace said, turning away from her computer without disturbing little Annalise. “That way you never paid full price, but you’re taking a full-price deduction. Or the sale price says one thing, but the buyer pays only a fraction. Under the table, of course. Deductions all around.”
“Nothing like auction fever for raising prices,” Faroe said. “Or plain old bid-rigging works, too.”
“Does Crawford own any other art?” Grace asked Lane. “Or just Western art?”
“I came across something about a really important Picasso or two, plus some Warhols and a huge painting by the splatter dude.”
“Jackson Pollock?” Grace guessed.
“Yeah. Him,” Lane said.
“Why wouldn’t Crawford sell or donate those?” Grace asked. “Modern art is at an all-time high. No need for inflating prices, artificial or real.”
“Yeah,” Lane agreed. “Can you imagine paying over a hundred million dollars for a picture of a guy kissing a girl?”
“Depends on the artist,” Faroe said.
“Some dude called Klimt.”
“Pass,” Faroe said. He looked at Grace. “I like my women to look like women.”
Grace smiled at the heat in Faroe’s eyes. If Lane hadn’t been a few feet away, she would have given her husband the kind of kiss they both loved.
“But Lane has a good point,” she said. “Why go to the trouble of inflating prices on relatively unknown art when you have much better known art you can give away with less hassle?”
“Vanity,” Faroe suggested. “Bet his name ends up on Nevada’s museum building. A Warhol wouldn’t get it done.”
“Maybe he actually likes that modern cra-er, stuff,” Lane said, looking at his little sister. “So he’s keeping it.”
“Or his best-known art could already be tied up,” Grace said.
“How?” Lane asked.
“Collateral on loans,” his mother answered.
“Huh?”
“Think of it as a high-class pawnshop,” Grace said. “You hand over the paintings to a bank vault, and the bank hands over the loan to you. It’s done all the time when there’s a cash crunch among the really rich. Very quiet. Very discreet. Nobody knows that the paintings are temporarily held hostage by the bank.”
“They loan at full value?” Faroe asked.
“Banks aren’t stupid,” Grace said. “With that kind of collateral, you get maybe fifty percent of retail price, usually less.”
“That’s still a lot of zeros to the left of the decimal,” Faroe said. He leaned toward his son. “How much did your swarmers get on Crawford’s finances in the last five years?”
“Not as much as I could if you’d let me hack into a few private databases,” Lane said eagerly.
“Give me what you have. If that’s not enough, we’ll talk about hacking.”
Grace rolled her eyes. “First we have Ambassador Steele home-schooling Lane on the reality versus the media coverage of world politics. Now we have Joe Faroe teaching his son the cutting edge of computer ethics. What’s next? Mary teaching applied physics by showing Lane how to drop a man with a sniper’s rifle at eight hundred yards?”
“Good idea,” Faroe said. “I’ll put it in the lesson plan.”
Hiding a smile, Lane started researching Talbert Crawford’s finances in open sources.
If he was a really good boy, the closed sources would come later.
SEPTEMBER 16
5:07 P.M.
Zach looked at the crowded lobby of the Golden Fleece. The huge tank of water with circulating gold dust was a big draw. People stood around watching a monster sheep fleece straining gold from the water until the fleece gleamed like its fabled namesake. It was a method of recovering gold dust that was as old as the legend. From the look of the fleece, it was nearly at the end of its collection cycle.
The hotel was booked wall-to-wall, and had been from the day it opened. One of the upsides to contract work for St. Kilda Consulting was that they could get a room almost anywhere, at any time, from a flophouse to a penthouse. Someone always knew someone who knew someone.
In this case the someone at the end of the chain of favors was Shane Tannahill, the owner of the golden-glass and black-steel monument called the Golden Fleece. And it was Tannahill’s name that had convinced someone in the auction bureaucracy to allow the hotel owner’s personal guests to see some of the paintings before the official preview tomorrow.
Thomas Dunstan’s paintings, to be precise.
No big deal. The paintings were, after all, there to be previewed. It was a necessary part of every auction protocol. Zach was just being certain that no one got in the way before they examined the stretcher edges of the paintings.
He didn’t have a good feeling about this op.
He kept telling himself it was because he was personally involved with the client, and therefore more edgy, but he wasn’t buying it.
Somewhere, somehow, in that great flusher in the sky, this op was going south.
He knew it.
He just couldn’t nail down how, who, where, or when.
Faroe’s call hadn’t helped. The idea that so many millions were at play for a man as politically powerful as Tal Crawford just made Zach jumpier. When the zeros started rolling up, people got crazy.
“What’s ‘the usual bodyguard arrangement’?” Jill asked, sitting next to Zach in the lobby.