Murder at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Dr. Philip Emma

Mick Maux (pronounced "Mouse") is an eccentric scientist. He's hired by Peter Pettanko, a Wall Street billionaire who lives in a mansion on the Connecticut coast. Pettanko's wife - Titiana Prosperosa, a glamorous fashion model - has gone missing. Pettanko wants her found.

As Mick leaves the Pettanko estate, he sees the beautiful Titiana dr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr. Philip Emma
• Release date: May 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955205023

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MURDER AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

DR. PHILIP EMMA

Murder at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Copyright © 2021 by Dr. Philip Emma

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN

978-1-955205-04-7 (Hardcover)

978-1-955205-03-0 (Paperback)

978-1-955205-02-3 (eBook)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my beautiful wife Sandy who has helped me in many ways. And I’d especially like to thank Agnes Puzak, a friend of ours who went through the entire manuscript, caught many mistakes, and make lots of helpful suggestions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Day 1   Titiana Prosperosa Disappears

Day 2   Pettanko Dies, and We Decode His Secret Message

Day 3   A Meeting at the Museum, and Decoding The Rest Of The Clue

Day 4   Who is The Counsellor?

Day 5   A Drive Upstate – Visiting the Beta Sigma Institute

Day 6   Basta Scorreggiare, and Vinny’s Apartment In Brooklyn

Day 7   A Trip to Palm Springs

Day 8   San Jacinto Peek, and Dinner with an Offer

Day 9   What Does Carol Think? Dinner in the Bronx

Day 10   Degas’ L’absinthe, and The Viking

Day 11   Who is Bardo Sitzpinkler? And Who is Jeeves?

Day 12   Lunch with Titiana at Umberto’s; Degas’ L’absinthe Gets Stolen!

Day 13   Ji Chu and Ji Chao; Barak Saleh and Jersey City

Day 14   Danny, Dottie, and Bill Stewart Appraise L’absinthe

Day 15   Pazzo Scorreggiare Pays a Debt

Day 16   Whatever Happened to Vinny Lamotza?

Day 17   Bardo Sitzpinkler and The Son of Man

Epilogue: A Stroll Through Times Square

DAY 1

TITIANA PROSPEROSA DISAPPEARS

Life depends a lot on how you look at things.

Take Peter Pettanko¹, who I was talking to in the formal dining room of his mansion. His wife was gone, and the décor of his dining room was disturbingly eclectic. If she’d left him because of the dining room, I couldn’t blame her. But if he’d killed her, what had he done with her body?

Peter Pettanko was the CEO of a trading company that had made a fortune by swindling their many small investors to manipulate the market for their few large investors. This was done simply by heavily discounting their commissions on small trades to give people a deal - thereby attracting lots of small clients, while whittling their principles down by churning their portfolios to drive the futures for their more elite clients.

Most of the small clients don’t really know the market, and would just assume that they’d been unlucky. They should have gone to a casino instead. There, there are no favorites at any table, and the dealer just deals. There, everyone loses at the same rate, and most of them at least have a good time doing it, while getting free drinks.

I couldn’t imagine Pettanko’s wife simply walking away from this marriage without first taking a sizable commission. While the son of a bitch didn’t deserve most of his wealth, she certainly should have been entitled to a large part of it.

Why would she simply pull a disappearing act? It didn’t make sense. I took a sip of my port, which he had offered to impress me, which it did.

Technically, ports are supposed to be from Portugal, but this one was a Charbay from Mendocino. The surprise - which caused me to do a double-take - was that it was only a 2006. I had to look at the bottle again just to be sure. It was a 2006 Still House Port, which was dark like a ruby port. It tasted more like a much older tawny port, with chocolate, cranberries, black cherries, and a touch of licorice in the finish. At least he didn’t waste all of his money.

Pettanko continued to bloviate, and tell me that he wanted her found, and that money was no object, etc., etc., etc. On second thought, I started to understand how she could have walked out on him. He was a bore, and a portly one at that. And when I say portly, I’m not referring to the Charbay.

It would have been a lovely dining room had it not been startlingly incongruous. While I was fortunate in that the wall across the table from me had an extravagantly framed reproduction of some 17th-century Louis XV rococo porn hanging on it - Fragonard’s L’escarpolette, a.k.a. The Swing, the entire wall behind me was covered by Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, painted in 1950. Fortunately, I couldn’t see it from where I was sitting. I didn’t remember it’s precise dimensions, but they were huge: something like eight-feet by sixteen-feet - I’d look it up later.

Don’t get me wrong; I like both pieces of art, but they shouldn’t be in the same room. And One: Number 31 shouldn’t be in the dining room at all. While the crystal chandelier had classical French Empire styling and was congruous with the Fragonard, it would have looked upsetting to me had the background been Pollock’s work.

While the Fragonard was a decorous, albeit risqué, three-foot by two-foot painting, Pollock’s work covered the entire wall, which was what made it wrong for the dining room. The dining room wasn’t big enough to let you actually absorb the painting: it’s huge size made it look more like gross wallpaper - it made you miss the entire point of the painting. And the very same dinner would taste completely different depending on what side of the table you were sitting on: Pollock vs. Fragonard.

If you didn’t like the food, all you needed to do was to switch seats. Fortunately, the Charbay port would work just fine on either side of the table.

I looked again at Fragonard’s The Swing as Peter Pettanko continued with his windbaggery. The painting shows an older cuckold - nearly obscured in the background - pushing his lovely young wife high up on a swing. She’s careful to kick her right leg very high up in the air so that her lacy dress opens, flying upwards, and the shoe from her foot sails out into the air, and also so that her much younger lover, a guy about her age, lying in the shrubs in the foreground and looking up, gets a great beaver shot.

The exposure is angled so that we don’t get the beaver shot, but it’s clear that he surely does, since he’s extending one arm holding his cap, pointing it directly toward her crotch to patently suggest his erect phallus. On the right is a statue of Cupid, with his finger to his lips to suggest the secretive nature of their screwing around, while two cherubs below the swing stare with admonition at the humans playing their dirty little games. This brought an obvious question to my mind.

Is it possible that she was having an affair? I asked.

He looked stunned, like he had never considered that as a possibility. After all, he was a scintillating conversationalist, so why would she even consider another man? In all fairness to him, he was also loaded. And he sure served a mean port.

L’escarpolette (a.k.a. The Swing) - Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1767)

Peter Pettanko was in his early fifties according to the press, but he didn’t look a day over sixty-five. He was overweight, which in and of itself isn’t unusual, but his wardrobe was tailored to fit his pre-overweight stature. He seemed to hang out of his clothes wherever they were cordoned off, most noticeably at his belt-line. To put it kindly, he was embonpoint.

He sported a bald spot, and the rest of his hair was thinning. On the other hand, who wants fat hair?

He needed a shave, and when he spoke his jowls wattled, which were hard for me not to stare at. I’m sure that his pinguid jowls wattling incentivized staring from many, including his wife, and it was easy to appreciate how he might have mistaken that for interest in whatever it was he was saying: Yah-da, yah-da, yah-da. Or something like that.

Having an affair? he considered. With whom? he asked, being careful to use the objective form of who so as to feign education in addition to his studied bombast; the latter of which he had plenty, the former, not.

I don’t know, I said. Personally, I don’t know you, or her, or any of your friends.

Of course, I’d recognize her anywhere, since she had been a big-name fashion model, and was hard to miss. Her name, prior to marrying Pettanko, was Titiana Prosperosa². The tabloids frequently called her Tits Prosperosa, or sometimes just Tits (presumably to avoid redundancy).

Although I hadn’t seen her pictures in about five years, when she’d married Pettanko and stopped modeling, I was sure that she was still quite beautiful. She had been about twenty-five then, and would be about thirty now. I was sure that most men would notice her in any crowd.

She and Pettanko together would appear incongruous at any social event; kind of like the titillating and rococo The Swing being in the same room as the enormously abstract One: Number 31. I wondered on which side of the table each of them would sit, and again considered how the view of each painting would change the very taste of a dinner.

I took another sip of my Charbay, and looked at The Swing again, this time imagining Titiana Pettanko, nee Titiana Prosperosa, a.k.a. Tits - as being the woman in the frilly dress, high in the air with her right leg immodestly aloft. I think Fragonard used the wrong model.

While Titiana had brought lots of her own money into the marriage, it wasn’t quite in the same league as Pettanko’s money, and I couldn’t imagine her simply running off with a younger man without taking Peter Pettanko to the cleaners on the way. Running off with an even richer man? Yes. But then it would have been in the news. And in either case, it would be hard for Titiana to maintain a low profile, unless she’d become a Muslim and was now wearing a burka.

But that was hard to imagine. I looked at Fragonard’s The Swing again, and tried to imagine what the painting would look like if the woman had been wearing a burka. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine it: it just didn’t work - not even if it was a pink burka.

While I’m not actually in the detective business, I do take the occasional case when it’s sufficiently interesting, and the remuneration is understood to be generous. Based on this potential client, I had no doubt about the latter, and had come to his house to discuss the former.

When I say that I’m not actually in the detective business, I’m not actually in any business except for the business of being philanthropic. I did well for myself as a scientist, and I retired young. I’d spent most of my early adulthood in the Midwest, in California, and in Boston studying my butt off, and enjoying the heck out of it. I’d always enjoyed reading, and solving complex mathematical systems. I was a professor for a while back in California, and then down in Austin, where I came into some money and retired while still young.

Why I moved back here to Connecticut, I’m not sure. It certainly isn’t because I like paying lots of taxes. Connecticut has one of the wealthiest populations in the country as well as one of the poorest. Outside of the Washington, DC area, it has the most millionaires per capita. It also has a huge poverty class. Much of the wealth came from Wall Street, since it’s a short and easy commute from an Eastern coastal city like Stamford into Manhattan, and taxes in Connecticut used to be extremely low, which made the commute for Wall-Streeters very worthwhile.

Pettanko was one of these. His mansion was on the Long Island Sound, and his neighborhood was sufficiently insular so as to be secure from the hoi polloi - even secure from people like me.

I had needed to pass through security to get to his mansion, and my car had been subject to suspicious stares from neighbors on horseback when I was on my way in.

And when I say neighbors on horseback, these were not merely people on horseback, like you might see out west. No. They held riding crops in their gloved hands, wore riding helmets, and were attired in canary riding breeches and dark hunter coats topped with white chokers. They eyed my car suspiciously; probably assumed that I was a repairman or something like that - coming in to "fix the telly," or perhaps to unclog a toilet.

Who were her friends? I asked. And what did she like to do?

Most of her friends were people she knew when she worked in the fashion industry, he said, although she did become a patron to several of the art museums in the city, and was taking some art classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I think she also took a couple of classes at the Museum of Modern Art.

That explained it. She was fine with their dining room until she took some art classes. Then, once she understood what she’d been looking at these last few years, she’d had it. I couldn’t blame her.

Did she socialize with any of the fashion people or the art people? I asked.

Yes, of course, he said. They’d have the occasional benefit dinner, and would hold members-parties for some of the openings. But I would usually go with her, and I never noticed anything unusual.

Well I can’t see how she could have simply disappeared, I said. Did she pack any clothes or take one of the cars?

I don’t know, he said. I’ll have to ask the maids and our security guards. She had her own wardrobe rooms, and I’ve no idea what was in them. And we’ve quite a number of cars in the garage. I might not notice if any of them were missing, depending on what she took.

What about her phone and her computer? I asked.

She left her computer and doesn’t respond to email. She also doesn’t answer her phone, he said. And not answering her phone is not at all like her.

Unless she was changing her identity entirely, I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t answer her phone or respond to email, I said. Knowing nothing else, I’d say that this doesn’t look good.

Do you think she might have been kidnapped? he asked.

Not if no one has asked for ransom, I answered. Has anyone?

Not yet, he replied. At least I don’t think so.

Then I’m not sure what to tell you, I responded. At least I don’t think so, I added, to mimic him, which I’m sure he didn’t realize.

And frankly, I’m not sure what I’d do to discover her whereabouts, I added. She didn’t take her computer, she doesn’t answer her phone, and she might or might not have packed some clothes and taken a car. How do you even know that she’s missing? And what do you mean by ‘I don’t think so’? I asked.

Well she’s not home, and she hasn’t contacted me, he said. But someone left a piece of paper with lots of numbers on it. That’s what I meant by ‘I don’t think so.’

Perhaps we should put out an All-Points-Bulletin (APB) on her, I suggested. It’s possible that she was in the city and was a random mugging victim, although I’m sure that the police would know who she was because her face is very well known. Or maybe she hit her head, and is wandering around somewhere, not sure who she is.

No, I can’t do that, Pettanko said.

Why not? I asked.

The entire reason that I’ve asked you to come here is in the hopes that you can resolve this quietly, he explained. We are both high-profile people, and the last thing I need is to have this publicized by putting out an APB on her. I want her found quietly.

Can you tell me anything else about her? Have you noticed anything strange among her personal effects? I asked.

As I said, I did find a large and strange piece of paper with lots of numbers on it sitting on her desk in one of her dressing rooms, he said.

What was strange about it? I asked.

Well in the first place, numbers and her don’t mix. I can’t imagine her writing out lots of numbers. It’s not how she thinks, he said pensively, and didn’t continue.

And in the second place? I asked.

In the second place, the numbers were unnecessarily big; written with a really thick magic marker, he responded.

With a really thick magic marker? I asked. Why is that strange? Didn’t she ever use a magic marker to write things before?

Absolutely not, Pettanko replied. She always used a fine-tipped pen. Her writing was dainty. She’d never use a big magic marker to write with – unless it was to label a cardboard box, or something like that. But she’d never write lots of numbers on paper, let alone write them with a big magic marker.

You’ll need to give me that piece of paper - or at least let me take a picture of it so that I can study the numbers. It might be nothing, or it might be an encoding of something that will provide some clues.

Peter Pettanko took a large sheet of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and put it on the table. As he’d said, it had numbers on it all written with a thick magic marker. It did look odd: there were lots of numbers, and they completely filled the page in several streams. I looked at it closely, and saw that not all of the characters were numbers; there were a few capital letters in the streams too. And they were all drawn very neatly. The streams of numbers looked completely random. There was no apparent pattern to it - each of the characters seemed to be written with equal frequency.

It was clearly an encoding. I looked at the digits and saw that about a third of them were letters, and the rest were numbers. The letters were all in the set A-through-F as far as I could see, which made me think that it was a hexadecimal (base 16) encoding.

While I was hoping that it was simply an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) representation of some text, the fact that the characters seemed completely random made me unsure. If it were text, you’d expect to see some encodings much more frequently than others (e.g., the encoding of the letter e would appear much more frequently than the encoding of the letter z). It didn’t look that way, but I couldn’t be sure.

My hunch was that it was just standard ASCII code, but I’d need to study it. I’d be surprised if it were difficult to decipher, but I’d have to try it before I knew. I took a picture of the paper with my phone, and I gave it back to him.

Can I see where you found this? I asked.

Certainly, he said, getting out of his chair, so I got out of mine too.

Now that I was standing, I was able to turn and get a full view of Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31.

Ironically, if the code for the painting were in ASCII, the hexadecimal code 31 represents the printed character 1, so we’d call the painting One: Number 1. Pollock should have thought of this, and done it in ASCII. How could you beat that for the name of a painting?

On the wall, One: Number 31 (One: Number 1) was breathtaking in its absence of the essential dimensionality of Pollock’s work. It was flat, glossy, and purely two dimensional. It was applied to the wall like wallpaper. While this would have been great for a Lichtenstein, it displayed a shocking disregard for the essential dimensionality that Pollock brought to his work. If this had been an awful joke, it would have been very funny. But I’m sure that Pettanko wasn’t joking.

This purely two-dimensional One: Number 31 sort of reminded me of some religious friends of ours who don’t follow art, that proudly showed me a paint by numbers rendition of da Vinci’s The Last Supper that they had done. Discretizing the colors in a da Vinci into color regions was similarly unsettling.

One: Number 31 - Jackson Pollock (1950)

Further, were I picking a Pollock that I’d intended to flatten the way it had been done here, One: Number 31 would have been my last choice. The background is beige, and the rendition is entirely in black and white, with a very occasional brown spot. The point of the painting is hardly color; it’s about texture. Flattened, it looks like gloomy wallpaper. True, when you are 30 or 40 feet away from it, its immensity is striking, and its third dimension isn’t readily discernible. But when you’re 6 feet away - as in a dining room - because of its size you’re unable to see its entirety, and its texture is what it’s all about. This had none. In fact, it had a glossy finish to make it easy to clean with a sponge. It quite missed the point.

Pettanko wattled his corpulence out of the dining room, and I followed. We went through a sitting room, into the main entryway, and then he flatulated his way up the left staircase to the upper landing, so I took the right staircase, and I met him at the top.

Then we went through a small library full of untouched volumes with leather covers, into the master bedroom, and then out one of several doorways into a hallway containing four doors. He explained that these four rooms were all Titiana’s dressing rooms. She kept different kinds of clothing in each of the rooms. The second room on the right contained a sink, some mirrors, and two makeup tables, as well as many racks of fashionable clothes.

It was on this makeup table, Pettanko said, gesturing at one of them.

How was it that you happened to notice it? I asked. Do you usually come in here?

No, Pettanko reassured me, I almost never come down this hallway, but I was looking for any clue as to her whereabouts, so I looked in all of her dressing rooms. This paper struck me as very odd - not at all Titiana’s style. She wouldn’t have written cryptic things using numbers, and she certainly wouldn’t have written them with a magic marker. Someone else wrote this.

Then how did it get here? I asked.

What do you mean? Pettanko asked.

The fact that it was on her dressing table means that either she put it here, I said, or it means that whoever put it here knows the layout of your house, and knew that her dressing tables were in this room - off a hallway that you get to by going through a library and then through the master bedroom. Who would know that?

Any of the maids would know that, he said, but I don’t see how anyone else would.

But if it were one of the maids, why would she put it in one of Titiana’s dressing rooms? I asked. I could understand someone putting it in here - in a dressing room - if the message was to Titiana. But if the message was to you, why put it in this dressing room? And if it was to Titiana, why would they encode it in such a way that Titiana would be unlikely to know how to unscramble it?

Pettanko looked puzzled, and agreed that neither of these scenarios made sense. I was wondering whether Peter Pettanko had planted this mysterious coded message, and had then concocted this story. But if he had, why would he bring in a private detective like me? As I’ve explained, I’m a scientist and professor who was able to retire comfortably while still young. I spend most of my time doing philanthropic things, and inventing new kinds of appliances and applications to improve how we live. But I will take cases for people who are comfortable paying my fees, and I’m interested in cases that have unusual circumstances.

So far, in the case of Pettanko, I’m not sure that there was anything to investigate. According to him, his wife had simply disappeared, and he found a mysterious piece of paper in one of her dressing rooms with numbers written on it with a magic marker. And according to him, there were no marital problems, she had no boyfriend that he knew of, and she’d given him no indication that she was about to disappear. She simply vanished. And it’s hard for someone with the good looks and easy recognizability of Titiana Prosperosa to simply vanish.

I’m not sure what to tell you, I said. I’ll study the photo that I took of the sheet of paper with the numbers on it, and I’ll see whether I can figure out what it says. That will give me a better idea whether there are other clues worth pursuing. Until I do that, I’m not even sure that there’s a case here. If you’ll show me out, I’ll be in touch.

"OK, I’ll walk you