5
As I arrived at Salem Street, a sleek white Mercedes pulled up to the curb in front of Junk Emporium. A short, powerfully built man in a gray three-piece suit got out. He turned and, seeing me on the sidewalk, raised a hand in greeting.
“Hello! You’re Sharon McCone, aren’t you?” I recognized Oliver van Osten, a salesman from whom Joan had bought many of her antiques. “Yes, I am. How are you?”
“Shocked, really. This murder is a terrible thing.” He crossed to where I stood, giving me plenty of time to appreciate his Prussian good looks and the crisp way he handled himself. I’d met van Osten on two previous occasions at Joan’s shop but had never gotten past a nodding acquaintance with him.
He took my hand and grinned, showing even teeth in a wide smile. “Nice to see you again. What are you doing in the neighborhood? Has there been more vandalism?”
“No. I’m here about the murder.”
The smile faded, and he dropped my hand. “You’re investigating it?”
“That, and taking the final inventory of the goods in the shop. I work for Joan Albritton’s attorney.”
“Of course.” He frowned. “But what do you know of antiques?”
“Not a thing. Maybe you could give me some pointers.”
Van Osten’s smile returned. “I’ll be glad to.” He glanced at his watch. “1 have a full schedule of calls today, but tomorrow morning I’m free.”
“Fine. I’ll be at the shop then.”
He looked delighted. “I always wanted to be part of a whodunnit. You and I will make a good team of sleuths!”
His gaiety struck a discordant note in light of Joan’s death. Hoping to get rid of him I said, “I have to get the key from Charlie now.”
“I was on my way to see him, too.” Van Osten slipped an arm around my shoulders. “Let’s go together.”
I had never been a demonstrative person, and people who behaved so freely with comparative strangers startled me. Watch out, Sharon, I warned myself. Remember, this one’s a not-too-subtle charmer.
When I had met van Osten the previous October, I realized within minutes why he had the reputation of being a good salesman. He greeted me warmly, wrapped me in an easy flow of conversation, and quickly let me know he thought me a very special person. Only later, when I was away from his dominating presence, did I realize how carefully calculated his whole act was. That, to me, made him someone to be wary of.
This morning, as van Osten and I approached, Charlie sat tipped back in a straight chair in the doorway of Junk Emporium.
The big junkman looked better today than he had the night before. His tiny eyes were still red, but he’d combed his long gray mane and put on a fresh set of olive drab fatigues. I’d never seen Charlie in anything else.
When he saw us, he got up and said, “You’re here for Joanie’s keys. I’ll get my set.” He went into his shop and returned a few seconds later with two keys on a chain attached to a puffy ball of bright-pink fur. I stared at it, nestled in his outstretched hand.
Charlie smiled sheepishly. “It’s a security puff. Joanie gave it to me. When you’re depressed, you’re supposed to hold it and sort of meditate. The nice feel of it cheers you up.”
I asked, “Does it work?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes. Not today. I tried it, but it didn’t work today.”
Van Osten cleared his throat and said, “Charlie, I’m sorry about Joan’s death.”
Charlie turned to him. “Aw, Ollie, we all are.”
The salesman winced at the nickname. “It must have been an awful shock to you.” He began asking questions, the same questions I’d asked Charlie the night before: when had he found the body, were there any leads. I listened, thinking he might turn up something I didn’t know.
As I did, I watched van Osten, disregarding his carefully constructed facial expressions and looking straight into his eyes. Instinctively I stepped away from him, closer to Charlie. I was recoiling from what I had seen, for despite his sympathetic words to Charlie, his eyes were totally devoid of emotion.
Both men suddenly glanced at me, each with an undefinable ability to make me nervous. Charlie, too, seemed menacing. In my confusion, I muttered something about getting started on the inventory and fled across the street to Joan’s shop.
The warm air inside the shop smelled stale. A few pale rays of sunlight filtered through the bars on the little windows. Except for the chalk marks and stains on the floor, it was much as I remembered it. Except for that, and the absence of Joan’s cheery greeting.
I took off my jacket and draped it over a chair near the cash register, then sat down on the mauve velvet settee next to Clothilde. Forcing my mind away from van Osten’s awful eyes, I queried the headless dummy, “Now, where the hell am I supposed to begin?”
I had a lot to learn. Didn’t antique dealers refer to furniture by periods, for instance? Chippendale, Hepple-white, Louis XIV? How was I ever going to be able to attach a meaningful label to each and every object in the shop, plus keep my eyes open for clues to the killer?
I smiled faintly, picturing my finished inventory: “One old table, three older chairs, one whatchamacallit, four something-or-others, one object that looks like it could be an umbrella stand.” A crash course in antiques was in order; I’d have to stop by the library later on to pick up some general books on the subject.
Joan had been an expert. She’d been a dealer for twenty years or more and could tell the value and antecedents of any piece after a single glance. When a customer came in, she had a way of drawing him or her into a fantasy world, where every object in the shop came alive with its own special past. I felt a fresh sensation of loss as I remembered the first time I’d come to the shop, early last October.
A tiny, gray-haired woman in a blue smock and slacks had greeted me, a feather duster in her hand. “Welcome to Joan’s Unique Antiques!” she’d announced with a wide grin. “I’m Joan Albritton, and this is Clothilde.”
She gestured at the headless figure on the settee. The dummy was clad in a long gown of red sequins, which clashed horribly with the mauve upholstery.
“Clothilde,” Joan Albritton had gone on, with a glance at me, “used to be an extremely successful haute couture model in Paris, and still would be had it not been for her foolish heart. You see, she fell in love with a man from San Francisco and followed him here, only to find he was married, with thirteen kids. So she ended up on Salem Street working for me and pining for her lost love. You can tell she completely lost her head over the fellow!”
I chuckled and bowed to Clothilde. “Pleased to meet you.”
Joan’s sharp eyes watched me with pleasure. “Maybe you prefer children to glamour girls though. Come this way.” She led me down an aisle, stopping here and there to flick the feather duster at imaginary cobwebs.
“This is Edwin of the Iron Shoes, named for his very uncomfortable footgear.”
The mannequin, aloof, stared away from us, his pale-blue eyes fixed on the wall. His face had a semi-gloss to it, and the artist who had painted his features onto the carved wood had given him apple cheeks, blossoming with health.
“Hello, Edwin,” I said.
Joan’s smile grew wider. “Personally, I think Edwin would have preferred a pair of tennis shoes, don’t you? As it is, he’s been forced into a life of contemplating the arts instead of running around with the other little boys. Edwin’s not for sale, but the painting is. I have to change it often so he doesn’t get bored.”
With his halo of painted gold hair and little boy’s sailor suit, Edwin looked very much the innocent on a first trip to the art museum. The painting he studied was of some shepherds and their flock, in a wheat-colored field. The landscape reminded me of parts of Italy or, for that matter, parts of Southern California. The shepherds didn’t look too different from some of the fellows I saw walking around San Francisco.
“Are you an art lover by any chance?” Joan Albritton asked me.
“I don’t kn
ow much about art, probably less than Edwin does. It’s a nice painting, though.”
“Oh. Oh, yes, it is.” She turned from Edwin and led me toward the front of the shop.
“Of course, there’s Edwin’s playmate.” She reached for a cloth doll with long yellow braids. “She’s very changeable though.” Flipping the doll, she revealed a second one, an old-fashioned Aunt Jemima, hidden among its full skirts. “And then there’s Bruno. He gets in on the fun, too.”
She gestured at a stuffed German shepherd standing nearby. For a few seconds I couldn’t take my eyes from it. What a terrible thing to do to a pet!
Joan must have sensed my squeamishness. “Yeah, I would have buried him, too. But you get used to him.” Her voice had lost much of its animation, as if she’d wearied of her act. “What can I do for you?”
“Hank Zahn sent me over. From All Souls Legal Cooperative. He said you need some investigative work done.”
“Oh, you’re Sharon McCone!” She shook her head, laughing softly. “And here I was, giving you a sales pitch!”
“It was pretty effective. In a few minutes you could have sold me anything in the shop.”
“That’s good to know. Have a seat, why don’t you.” She gestured at a nearby chair. “I spoke to Hank on behalf of our Merchants’ Association, which I’m a member of. All Souls has been handling my legal work and … oh, excuse me.”
A remarkable-looking woman had come into the shop. She was tall, and her fine cascade of blond hair fell to her shoulders from under a brown suede hat with a long pheasant feather. Her face was well made up, classically beautiful; and her entire outfit was of suede like the hat, even to laced knee-high boots.
As if she sensed a sale here, Joan moved in quickly. “Good afternoon, ma’am. You look like you might enjoy meeting a lovely lady …”
I sat there for a minute as she drew the newcomer along on the same fantasy trip she’d taken me, modified here and there when she pointed out different objects of interest. Finally I got up and wandered around the shop, finding a couple of Oriental lamps and a carved table that would be perfect for my apartment. I was considering a black lacquered trunk with brass trimmings and a price very much out of my range when Joan Albritton called out to me.
“Okay, she’s gone. Now you and I can talk business.”
Reluctantly, I returned to the front. “She buy anything?”
“Sure, but frankly I thought she’d be more of a sale than she was.”
“Oh, not so good?”
“Not bad, forty bucks. That Italian painting I showed you. Now I’ll have to find Edwin a new picture to appreciate.”
Then we had sat down and launched into a discussion of the vandals who had been plaguing Salem Street. It occurred to me, with a pang, as I came back to the present, that had I been more successful in my investigation, Joan might be here today, introducing still another unsuspecting stranger to the lovelorn lady from Paris.
Suddenly there was a tap on the door. Charlie Cornish. I went to let him in.
He entered the shop cautiously, keeping his eyes averted from the floor where Joan’s body had lain. “Thought I’d stop in and see how you’re doing.”
“I’m not doing much. Right now the thought of the inventory intimidates me.”
Charlie sat down on a stool by the counter. “I take it you don’t know anything about antiques.”
“Not a thing.”
He nodded. “Let me warn you then: the hard part is telling the real ones from the others.”
“The others?”
“Sure. Joanie had some good pieces here, damn good, but she ordered a lot through van Osten’s catalogues, too.”
“I know she bought things from him, but what do you mean?”
Charlie assumed a mock-pedagogical stance. “Well, consider how many antique stores there are in this city. Couple of hundred, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Take my word for it. There are close to five pages of them in the phone book. Now, multiply that by all the other cities around the country. See what I mean?”
“I’m getting the drift.”
“Good. Now, how many antiques are there to go around? Lately, the trend is for dealers to order stock from Europe, through catalogues. But Europe has only so many antiques, too.”
“Are you saying the antiques are fake?”
“Oh, the catalogues claim they’re the real article. But when a big dealer or a department store orders fifty of number SS173X, oak washstand with marble inlay, how many of those washstands do you think the European catalogue house found sitting around in somebody’s barn?”
“Not fifty, at any rate.”
Charlie bestowed a proud glance at me. At this rate, I was going to go to the head of the class.
“Now,” he went on, “if you think of them as products of an assembly-line process, that makes it more believable, right?”
“So most of this stuff,” I gestured around the store, “is fraudulent?”
He winced a little. “That’s kind of harsh. Let’s face it, we’re not any of us big-name dealers down here. Mostly the people who come to Salem Street are looking for something cheap to fill space in their apartments. Or, if they have a little extra to spend, they want a conversation piece. They’re none of them collectors, and they don’t demand authentication on what they buy. A lot of them are tourists who want to take a souvenir of their trip to San Francisco—maybe something like a lacquered Oriental vase—back home to the Midwest.”
“And?”
“And it gives them the chance to poke around down here and have some fun buying that vase. It doesn’t matter that it’s the same thing they could have bought in Chinatown, ’cause hunting around Salem Street isn’t as plastic as shopping in Chinatown. Sure, a lot of these so-called antiques are mass-produced, but Joanie and the others would have been the first to admit it, had anyone asked them.”
I hadn’t meant to put him on the defensive. Quickly I asked, “So they’re all ordered from catalogues?”
“Right. Oliver van Osten acts as a broker for several European antique manufacturers.” Charlie smiled at the contradiction in terms. “He comes around once a month and takes orders.”
“He sells to a lot of people on the street?”
“To Joanie, Austin Bigby, maybe five or six others. He even helps them coordinate what they buy so they don’t all end up with the same stock. It would look pretty funny if that same marble inlaid washstand turned up in every shop on the street!”
I grimaced sympathetically, trying to imagine the dealers explaining their way out of that. “Can you show me one of the fakes?”
“Sure.” Charlie got up and went over to what looked like a little pedestal table. “This is a smoking stand. Carved pedestal, light ornamentation, copper-lined. Circa nineteen hundred. Now come with me.”
He went toward the little workroom at the back, motioning for me to follow. The room was stacked with furniture, furniture I’d assumed needed refinishing or repairs before it was salable. In the corner, behind the littered workbench, Charlie pointed out three more smoking stands, identical to the first in every detail.
“Joanie bought five; that’s about a standard order for large pieces. She sold one, and as soon as the customer left the shop, its twin was out on the floor.”
I shook my head. “It still sounds underhanded to me.”
“You’re probably right, but that’s the way it’s done.”
We returned to the main room and took up our former positions by the cash register.
I asked, “This van Osten, what do you know about him?”
“About Ollie?” Charlie shrugged. “He’s a damned good salesman.”
I was aware of that. “He must make a lot of money. I mean, he dresses well and drives an expensive car.”
“Money is the prime motivation for any good salesman, and Ollie’s a real success story.”
“Tell me about him. What’s his background?”
“We
ll, once when I got him talking, he told me he grew up in North Dakota—Fargo, to be exact. His father owned a tavern. Ollie ran away and joined the army as soon as he could, to get out of working in the bar. The army sent him to Europe, he got interested in art, and stayed on to study. Now he’s one of the most successful brokers in the country. Covers five states.”
“Strange he’d go from studying art to selling fakes.”
Charlie shook his head. “Not if you know Ollie. He found out there wasn’t enough money in art, and so …”
“I see. You realize he hates for you to call him ‘Ollie,’ don’t you?”
Charlie’s grin was sly. “Of course. That’s why I do it. But don’t tell me you suspect Ollie?”
“I suspect anyone who was associated with Joan in any way.”
The grin dropped off his face, and he flinched.
“Oh, Charlie, I didn’t mean you.” As I said it, I wondered why the big junkman wasn’t on my list of suspects. “You cared for her, I know.”
“A lot of people did. The street’s not going to be the same without her.” Charlie gazed into the shadows, as if he expected Joan Albritton to emerge from one of the aisles and make everything all right again.
“Of course,” he added, “it’s never going to be the same anyway. Come May first, we’ll all go our separate ways, to wherever we can find new space.”
“Have you found any?”
He gestured wearily. “Austin Bigby and I are going in together on a place over on Valencia Street. It’s got lots of room, and the combination of my junk and his antiques should have good drawing power. But, damn it all, it’ll never have the atmosphere we had here!” He looked as if he were about to cry.
Briskly I said, “At least you have good offers to pick from.”
He nodded. “The Ingalls real-estate syndicate is bidding the most. They want to develop this into shops and condominiums.”
“What’s Cara Ingalls like anyway?” I had heard she was a power behind many of the large real-estate deals in the city, and she interested me, since women didn’t generally get in on the big operations.
“Don’t know. I noticed her name in the business section of the paper this morning; that might tell you something. Why don’t you come over and take a look at it?”
Edwin of the Iron Shoes Page 3