Gwenny June's Tommy Crown Affair

By Richard Dorrance

Gwenny June's husband is out of town for a couple of months, and she gets bored. So what does she do but steal the most famous painting in Charleston, and hang it in her living room. The insurance company sends their best investigator, and soon he is on her trail. Just like in the famous movie, they fall for each other, Tommy Crown alternately courting her and trying to throw her in jail. Add to that the strange phenomenon of the woman in the painting, Gwenny's ancestor Gwendolyn, coming to two dimensional life and talking from out of the painting, and you have a fun story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Dorrance
• Release date: Mar 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311659576

Richard Dorrance

Richard Dorrance lives next door to Gwenny and Roger June in America's most beautiful town, Charleston, South Carolina. Four days after moving into his house on Church St., Richard heard gunfire on the other side of the 200 year old brick wall that separates his historic property from the June's. Being of stout heart, he stood on a chair and looked over the wall, where he saw Gwenny sitting on a wooden milk crate, holding a gun and looking at the wall along the back line of her property, where Richard could see small craters in the wall and brick chips on the ground underneath. The appearance of his head above the wall caught Gwen's eye, and she looked at him with a dazzling smile.She said, "Hey. Sorry about the noise, but I just had to sight this new baby in. Looks like it pulls a hair to the left." She got up, went over to the wall, and offered him a handshake.Richard never had had the inclination to kiss a woman's hand, old-fashioned style, but he did now. He would discover that Gwen made a lot of men feel and think things they never had before. He controlled himself, shook her hand regular style, and asked, "Don't the police mind you firing a gun in the back yard?"She said, "They do, or used to, but after they come to check it out they seem to leave satisfied. I don't do it very often. We like a quiet neighborhood."That was a few years ago, and since then Richard and the Junes have become good friends. So good, in fact, that Richard started writing books about them and the capers they get involved in. You can read excerpts from these books on Richard's website.Before meeting the Junes and being stimulated to record their multifarious lives in a series of comedy cum caper novels, Richard worked for many years as an historical preservationist for the National Park Service. He now finds living vicariously through his neighbors exploits to be much more interesting. He also really likes the June's dog, who communicates with him telepathically. Occasionally, as Richard works on a book, the Junes try to hide something from him about one of their capers, but the dog always squeals and tells the whole story.email: [e-mail]

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Chapter 1 – I Can’t Help It, I’m a Thief

You what? Roger said.

I pinched it.

You mean you stole it?

Yes, dear. That’s what pinched means. To steal.

Why?

Because it belonged to my family a long time ago, and I wanted it back. It looks great where it is now.

Where is it, Gwen?

In the living room, over the piano.

You stole the most famous painting in Charleston, and stuck it in our living room? In our house? Where people can see it?

Where else would I put it? If I want to see it, it has to be in our house.

My husband didn’t say anything for a minute, which wasn’t a bad thing. It meant he was trying to understand me, rather than simply figure out his own point of view on the matter, which is what most husbands do when their wives do something unexpected. Roger is good at corralling his own thoughts when I throw something at him, which happens now and then, and waiting to hear what I have to say before he offers a response. He’s not like most guys who turn on their opinion formation machinery before really knowing their wife’s thoughts and feelings. He’s a good boy in that department, which is one reason I love him after all these years. All these years of getting into trouble with him, and sometimes, like now, without him. If I’d known I was going to steal the painting before he left on his trip, I’d have told him. Honest I would’ve.

He said, Well for God’s sake watch who you invite over for cocktails. Especially the Mayor. You know how he likes to play chopsticks on the Steinway with you sitting next to him.

I promise not to invite the Mayor over while you’re gone. Or anybody else who knows about art stuff. Really, wait till you see it. It’s back where it belongs.

Ok, but be careful. They’re not going to let that go without an investigation, even if it’s covered by insurance, which I’m sure it is. I don’t want to come home to an empty house, knowing I only can visit you in the slammer once a month for an hour.

I’ll try to avoid that. But if it were to happen you’d still have the dog to keep you company.

The fact that the dog talks to us telepathically is not the same thing as having a wife to play with after we polish off a bottle of wine with lunch.

Why does everything with you always revolve around sex?

Because I’m married to a woman who, in terms of sexual attractiveness, would make Sharon Stone cry. That’s why. It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with you. Don’t try to pin my libidinous inclinations on me; I’ve got nothing to do with them. If I was married to Sharon Stone rather than you, I’d probably be taking a testosterone drug, and I’m only forty-four. I’m pleased that you assist me in coming by my inclinations in an honest and natural way.

So far, I added, sticking it to him a little. My hubby.

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

By the way, what are you doing with your inclinations over there in France, far away from me, the dog, and your home?

I’m doing what every guy does when he doesn’t have a playmate. What are you doing while I’m so far away, here in the vineyards? When you’re not stealing things from museums?

I told you one big secret today, can’t tell them all.

Wonderful. My wife either will end up in jail for twenty years or married to someone else after she gets rid of me. I do so look forward to coming home.

Chin up, Roggy. If I do leave you for another man I promise to leave the painting here in the living room for you to enjoy, as a token of the esteem in which formerly I held you.

Will you leave the dog, too, so I’ll have someone to talk to, ensconced in my loneliness?

Don’t get greedy, or I may take the painting, the dog, and the Steinway with me. When are you coming home, assuming I’m not in jail or living in a mansion on Lake Como with Adonis?

Adonis. Adonis. Oh, the Greek god.

I’m not going to leave you for chopped liver, darling.

That’s very considerate. Is that his first name or last, as in Mr. Adonis?

He’s like the Brazilian soccer players who are so famous in their country they only use one name. Sometimes, when we’re alone, he lets me call him Donnie. But never in public. Image thing.

I’m still on schedule here, so two more months. You can come over here and visit if you want. You know that.

Let me see how I feel in a week or so. The excitement of the heist hasn’t worn off yet, stilling buzzing on the high. I’ve slept on the living room sofa the last three nights just to be near it.

Alone?

Yes dear, for the time being, just me and the big piece of canvas.

I love you, Gwenny.

"I know, dear, and I love you. See you soon.

Chapter 2 – What Made Me Steal It

While my hubby is in France writing the script for a little doco on the wines of Burgundy, I was stealing paintings from the Charleston Museum. One painting that is, not multiple. That’s not such a bad thing to do, is it? One little painting that was owned by my family in the early 1800s. A girl’s gotta do something when her husband’s away, right? Some girls have flings, which despite my teasing is not something I do, and others, well, steal things. Or, as I rationalized it to myself, reclaimed some long lost family property. And I was a little bored without Roger, me liking the wine with lunch and the apre lunch roll in the hay as much, or more, than him. But it was seeing the painting hanging in the museum with that little card pasted on the wall next to it that said, Formerly in the collection of Manigault Bedgewood, who was my great great great great great granddaddy, died in 1825. Bedgewood was my maiden name until Roger showed up, him being lucky as hell to meet me and have me grant him access to afternoon delights nonpareil. The Charleston Museum, being the oldest museum in the United States, founded in 1773, stole the painting from ole Manigault and made it the cornerstone of their collection of paintings. At least that’s my family lore, though whether the museum staff would agree is another matter.

It was one of the first days after Roger left for France, and already I was bored. Ergo the trip to the museum. And there it was on the wall, all four feet by six feet of it, showing Manigault’s wife standing next to the fireplace in full flowing white dress with a crystal goblet wine glass in her elegant hand. Seeing the card was enough to rile my sense of injustice. Whenever Roger and I visit the museum and stand looking at the painting, he says, That’s you, you know. She’s you; or you’re her. Same face, same body under the dress, same hands. Same wine lush of a personality, and he’d smile at me with the last part. I don’t know if I love the painting because of what he says, or because the woman at the fireplace is quite beautiful, or if I love it because she represents the history of my Charleston family going way back, or if I love it because of the skill of the artist who painted it. I just know I love it, and now I can love it at home, rather than in the museum. Or, maybe, just between you and me, and not to put too fine a point on it, I love it because I stole it, and doing that was a lot of fun.

Chapter 3 – The Investigator

The Director and Curator of the museum stood with the Mayor and the Chief of Police looking at the discolored rectangle of wall where the painting had hung since the new museum building was constructed in the 1970s. The Director said to the Mayor, We gotta get it back.

The Mayor looked at the Chief of Police and said, We gotta get it back.

The Chief looked at the wall and thought, ‘I don’t even know how they stole it, much less how I’m going to get it back.’ He said, I’m on it boss, all day and all night. He had a squad in the room taking photos and looking for fingerprints, but he knew tomorrow they’d be on a murder scene or something like that, and the Mayor would say to him then, Gotta catch that guy, can’t have murderers wandering around the tourist district knocking off visitors, and he’d say, I’m on it boss, all day and all night.

The Mayor said to the Director, There, he’s on it, and walked out.

The Chief looked at the Director and said, Was it insured?

Of course. Everything in here is insured.

How much?

I’m not sure, but I think it is $2 million, something like that.

The Chief said, The insurance company’s not going to want to pay that without doing an investigation.

You just told the Mayor you’re doing an investigation.

We are. See these people? That’s the investigation. Tomorrow they’re going to be investigating a murder, or something like that. And the next day another crime. That’s the way it is here.

The Director said, Are you telling me you’re not going to do a full investigation, put a team on this until you catch the thief? Get back the City’s most important work of art?

Of course not. I just told my boss I’m on this case day and night.

Well?

Well, my boss has a short memory. He’s a politician. Tomorrow something else will catch his attention, and he’ll tell me to work on it, put the whole force on it, day and night. Then the next day....you see my point? You reading between the lines?

The Director looked at the Chief for a moment, then at the rectangle on the wall, then at the police technicians who already were packing up, then back at the Chief, and said, Got it. An hour later he sat in his office and called the insurance company. He had a copy of the policy in front of him, and the person on the other end of the phone call sat with her copy of the policy in front of her. She said, It’s covered for two and a half million. Anything over quarter of million, we don’t rely on the local police; we do our own investigation. Anything over a million gets bumped up to the highest priority category for our investigative unit. So, we’ll have somebody down there day after tomorrow. Let me see who’s available right now, hold on. The Director heard the woman talk on another phone, heard her say, Is he back from Paris yet? Pause. Ok, tell him not to unpack, he’s going out again right away. Charleston. Painting. Pause. I don’t care if his mother’s dying or his dog’s dying or if he has a dentist appointment or he doesn’t have any clean clothes. He’s going. That’s why we pay him the big percentage.

She came back on his phone and said, You there? Ok, we got the guy who's coming down, be there day after tomorrow. He’ll come to your office.

What’s his name?

Crown. Tommy Crown. You can tell your cops they can go chase murderers. Tommy’ll find the painting.

Chapter 4 – The Type of Girl I Am

The type of girl I am has to do with family history and genes. That is what Roger referred to when we stood looking at the painting and said I am like the girl in the painting: She’s you; or you’re her. There's a family story that illustrates this transfer of behavioral traits down to me from earlier Bedgewood women, and it is recorded in the book The Buildings of Charleston by the architectural historian, Jonathan Poston. I like Jonathan because he is a great scholar, and because he dresses so perfectly retrograde. Winter or summer, one can see Jonathan walking the streets with this khaki pants perfectly pressed, and his starched-like-a-board white shirt with those cool and old fashioned creases and pleats at the shoulders and wrists, and of course the obligatory bow tie. If its ninety-five degrees in the shade and ninety percent humidity, Jonathan still will sport a white dress shirt and tie.

In his book entry describing the historic Luxembourg Hotel in Charleston, Poston tells a delicious anecdote about Elspeth and her husband, Lowndes. Lowndes was the sixth mayor of Charleston, mayoring from 1832 till 1842, and Elspeth was the daughter of Gillespie Bedgewood, governor of South Carolina from 1819 till 1824. Lowndes was wild, and Elspeth was wilder. They both had money, even when young, and they both loved horses, and they both could shoot shotguns, and they both loved to drink English gin and French bordeaux, and they both loved to make love. Now that, folks, is the recipe for fun.

Lowndes and Elspeth weren’t married when they decided they would have fun together, though they ended up hitched for twenty-six years. Before they got married they had to find places where they could have the types of fun they wanted, and one of those was the hotel. When the owner of the hotel objected to them firing shotguns at pigeons while standing in the garden, they had to give up that fun. Sometimes they raced their horses down Broad Street past the hotel, him on his gelding quarter horse and her on her Arabian mare, but that ended when the City decided Broad Street deserved more that hard-packed dirt as a surface, and installed cobblestones taken from the holds of ships. The stone was loaded into the ships in England as ballast, and unloaded in the ports of Charleston and Savannah and Wilmington. Anyway, the horses couldn’t run on the cobblestones, which eliminated that fun.

It should be pretty obvious what was left for Lowndes and Elspeth to do. They would ride sedately to the hotel, look wistfully at the flying pigeons as they crossed through the garden, and enter the hotel bar. There they would start with the bordeaux, and after a couple of glasses, they would graduate to gin. Lowndes wished he had trained Elspeth to like port, as he felt that was a more civilized drink than gin, but he knew what she liked and he wasn’t about to mess with a formula that worked so well and provided him with so much pleasure later in the day.

After a gin or two, and after much conversation with the other bar tenants, and after lots of laughing and maybe a dance step or two, and after giving Henry the hotel owner a lot of shit for not letting them shoot out in the garden, well, Elspeth would look at Lowndes, and Lowndes would look at Elspeth, and that was that; up the stairs they would go.

Now Jonathan the architectural historian, being a true Charlestonian, would not overtly describe a romantic assignation at the Luxembourg, but he was not above alluding to it. So in his book on the buildings of Charleston he simply states that after Lowndes and Elspeth would depart, the other patrons of the hotel bar patiently would settle into a silence and wait for the inevitable. The inevitable inevitably came from above in the form of shrieks of laughter, loud thumps, and much verbal bubbling of energetic endearments. With this done, the habitués of the bar knew that all was right with the world, and they would return to their mint juleps, scotch lemonades, and discussions about the evils of northern culture.

I like this story, and soon after Roger and I were married, demanded that we become the 21st century counterparts of Elspeth and Lowndes. We agreed that riding down Broad Street on horseback probably would snarl downtown traffic, and we agreed that carrying shotguns probably would generate frowns on the part of the police. So we've been left with drinking and making love. And unlike Elspeth, I appreciate the virtues of port, so now after the obligatory two glasses of bordeaux, we graduate to the Portuguese elixir.

Oh, and there's one more little difference between Elspeth and me. She fired shotguns in the garden of the hotel and raced horses down the main drag of town, while I, umm, steal works of art. And that's the type of girl I am.

Chapter 5 – The Type of Guy He Is

The 747 touched down at Kennedy and Tommy Crown was the first one out of the first class section. He wanted to get home and lock himself away in his apartment for a week. He wanted to sleep until nine, eat a breakfast of eggs and potatoes, instead of that vile French non-breakfast of croissants and jam, read the New York Times until noon, and then have a decent lunch with a decent bottle of French wine. How those Frenchies got is so right with wine and so wrong with breakfast he’s never understood. And the British, they’re the opposite; they know breakfast. Thank god us Americans get everything right. Everything. Right? Well, almost everything.

In the taxi on the drive into the city he looked at his email and saw the subject line from the office, Call in immediately. He selected the message and hit the delete button. Screw them. He’d been in Paris for six weeks running down some guys who were duplicating and printing the labels for rare bottles of old German rieslings, and flogging the fakes on the auction markets. The labels were printed on old paper and the bottles were old; it was just the wine inside that wasn’t old. These guys also had devised a way to give the wine a semblance of aged flavor, by adding a chemical called dymethyaminetestoserone, which fooled those collectors with more money than tasting expertise. These collectors were all about acquiring trophy wines for their cellars, never having the intent to actually drink the wine. But one real seventy-five year old connoisseur had, and he thought the wine tasted like the Viagra he was taking, and raised an alarm, and the auction houses that had guaranteed the provenance of the wines made a claim against the insurance company, and they sent Tommy to sort it out, which he had. Six weeks of seven days a week, dealing with the fucking French bureaucrats and cops, and now he almost was home and had no intention of reading any email from his boss that said Call in immediately. He could hear the three security deadbolts on his apartment door clicking, one after the other, shutting out the world for an entire week. Just him and his newspaper and his wine.

Four hours later, just after finishing the second glass of an aged Hermitage, someone knocked on his door. He went to the table in the hallway, opened the center drawer, took out his gun, went back to the dining room table, and poured himself a third glass. If Sharon Stone had called through the door saying, Tommy, I need you, now, he wouldn’t have opened it. And it wasn’t her voice he heard after the third knock, it was Jimmy’s voice, saying, Mr. Crown. Mr. Crown. If you’re in there, I have a message from Ms. Granite. She says you gotta call her. Jimmy was the office boy with only one hand who Ms. Granite sent after Tommy when she found out Tommy couldn’t ignore Jimmy the way he could ignore her, despite the fact that her management style mirrored her name. Mr. Crown, it’s Jimmy. Ms. Granite told me to tell you who it is at your door. It’s me, and would you please call the office? Ms. Granite says my job depends on you calling the office right away. Ms. Granite says she has a bonus for you for the Paris job, and she’ll present it to you in the office providing you’re there in one hour which she says should give you time to make yourself a large cup of coffee and repack your bag, providing you’ve unpacked it. If you haven’t unpacked your bag she says you can just bring it with you as is and just put the cleaning bill from the Charleston hotel on your company credit card. Jimmy paused, thinking what a clever woman Ms. Granite was, sending him and coaching him how to sound mournful and plaintiff through Tommy’s door. He’d have to remember this when he was running the company in a couple of years. He went on, Mr. Crown. Mr. Crown. You ever been in the offices of the State of New York Unemployment, Disability and Rehabilitation Department (SNYUDRD)? Makes the Motor Vehicle Department seem like a Silicon Valley startup, you know, with ping pong tables and cafes and surfboards lined up for the staff during break time. Mr. Crown, can’t you please call in, save my ass from SNYUDRD, a fate worse than death. Please, sir. Jimmy leaned against the wall opposite Tommy’s door, hoping he hadn’t laid it on too thick, but confident he’d crack Tommy even if he had. He checked his Facebook account, then read an email confirming his handball reservation at the New York Athletic Club for later that afternoon. The company had a corporate membership, and Jimmy got special perks from the club staff, who he played just like he was playing Tommy.

And Tommy knew he was being played, and knew his boss had won this one, the bitch, and why hadn’t he had more sense and checked into a hotel for a few days before going back to his apartment. It was the allure of that aged Hermitage, that’s why. He wasn’t one to cry over spilled wine, so he unlocked the three deadbolts, and a smirking Jimmy entered. Jimmy didn’t say anything, though he thought, at least superficially, ‘sorry, guy’, sat down at the dining room table and looked at the bottle of wine and the gun. He thought, ‘If he offers me a glass of the wine, should I take it, knowing I gotta play against a guy with two hands later today, at the club?’ Jimmy knew any wine in Tommy’s place was going to be special, but he decided he’d better not take the wine, and transferred his attention to the gun, which was an H&K forty caliber semiautomatic. He said, You expecting trouble?

Any trouble that required use of the gun, Tommy said, would have been less than what you bring, and you know that.

Jimmy said, Charleston’s a great town. The people there are polite; not like here. The women who bag your groceries call you honey, and baby, names like that. ‘Can I help you out to the car with those bags, baby?’ The restaurant waitresses ask, ‘What you having today, hon?’ You ever heard anyone here say that? You’ll love it down there. He picked up the gun and hefted it, knowing he'd have trouble racking the slide if push ever came to shove. He’d have to stick with the Smith and Wesson 38 revolver he kept in his hallway table drawer. Maybe he could get H&K to make a semiauto for the disabled, be their poster boy, earn a nice fee.

Tommy said, Why am I going to Charleston?

Because Ms. Granite says so, I guess.

Tommy really wanted to argue that point but he knew he couldn’t, given the percentage she paid him for recovering stolen stuff and obviating the company from paying out. Seven percent, plus the expense account. For the six weeks in Paris he’d earned $70K. He asked, What got stolen in Charleston?

Jimmy knew Tommy only did thefts, which included forgeries. Some painting. Famous, at least for Charleston.

What’s the coverage?

2.5.

Tommy did the math: $175,000. He nodded at the wine in the bottle, Jimmy nodded, No, so he poured it down the sink, put the gun in the table drawer, got his unpacked bag out of the bedroom, and said, Let’s go.

Chapter 6 – The Accomplices

Little Jinny Blistov sat on the bench at the Steinway and wondered what it would be like to play a Rachmaninoff sonata. DA DA DA, DUM, that was Rachmaninoff, wasn’t it? Gale the Mouth sat on the sofa with me, sipping a Sidecar and luxuriating in knowing what it was