Murder For Art’s Sake

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  What it came to, Shapiro thought, was that the man had been able to draw—draw with skill and imagination, so that what he sketched became more than, yet without essentially abandoning, what was real. And Nathan Shapiro, to his entire surprise, wished that he could take this sketch home to his Brooklyn apartment and hang it on a wall. Rose would not approve of the woman’s being naked, rather explicitly naked. But she would, as now he did, want to keep on looking at it.

  “The rest of it I don’t get,” Cook said. “A lot of crazy junk, for my money. But this—”

  He stopped and both men turned and faced up the long room. A key scraped in the lock and the lock clicked. The door opened, and there was no hesitancy in its opening. Whoever had used a key to open the way into Shackleford Jones’s studio did not expect to find anybody in it.

  A woman came in and her movements, too, were without hesitancy. She did not look around the room; obviously did not see the men who, half hidden by easels, stood at the end of it. They stood very quietly.

  The woman was tall and very thin. She wore black slacks tight on long legs and a black jumper, its turtleneck almost to her chin. She had black hair which drifted to her shoulders. She was, Shapiro guessed, over six feet tall. She was, he guessed, somewhere in her twenties. When she walked into the room her long legs took long strides.

  She walked directly to the easel which had a chalked outline in front of it. She did not seem surprised to see an outline chalked there and if she saw the blood on the floor, and in the cracks of the floor, she paid no attention to it.

  The drawing paper with the sketch on it of, perhaps, a woman who was all height and no width, had been thumbtacked to a board fitted into the easel’s frame. The tall, black-clad woman began to loosen the thumbtacks.

  Shapiro moved then, his shoes making a harsh sound on the gritty floor. The woman turned, her right hand still holding at a thumbtack. Shapiro said, “Looking for something, miss?”

  She turned away abruptly, as if about to walk toward the door, but then stopped herself and turned back to face the two men who walked toward her.

  “It’s mine, mister,” she said. “He told me it was mine. Anyway, it’s me.”

  The drawing sagged down from the easel board, only one tack holding it. Suddenly, Shapiro remembered it very clearly. In that moment he realized too, why, when the tall young woman walked with long strides into the room, he had thought there was something vaguely familiar about her. She had posed for the sketch. Presumably, and most understandably, she had come to tear it up.

  “Who are you, anyway?” the tall girl said. She had, unexpectedly, a low-pitched voice.

  “Police,” Shapiro said. “You posed for the drawing, miss?”

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s me. And Shack said—” She did not say what Shack had said. Instead, she said, “He owed me for the posing time. So it’s mine, isn’t it?”

  Which was somewhat bewildering. She implied, Shapiro thought, some correlation between money owed and the plucked ostrich sketch. Which was absurd. If she wanted to destroy it, keep it out of any possible circulation, that would have been entirely reasonable. Shapiro tried to keep his bewilderment from showing in his voice.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know whose it will turn out to be, now that Mr. Jones is dead. You knew he was dead when you came in, didn’t you?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Everybody knows. It was on the radio or something.”

  That, Shapiro thought, would be surprising, if true. Radio bulletins are selective. That an incomprehensible painter had killed himself in a loft building in the West Village would hardly seem to editors an item of importance. Probably the girl was lying; perhaps she had another way of knowing that the man who signed himself “Shack” was dead. Which would be interesting.

  Her name was Rachel Farmer, if it was any of their business. She was told that it was. She had an apartment in Gay Street, if that mattered to anybody. She was a model. She posed for artists mostly. Sometimes for photographers. She was abrupt in her answers. Shapiro thought she was trying to show contempt for the triviality of the questions. She’s wary, Nathan Shapiro thought, and wondered why. She did not know why they asked her these things and, No, she wouldn’t sit down, because she wasn’t tired and, anyway, she had an appointment. And what everybody said, Shack had killed himself, hadn’t he?

  “It looks that way, Miss Farmer,” Shapiro said.

  Then?

  “We’re trying to make sure that that was the way it was,” Shapiro told her. “Part of the job they give us to do. How’s it happen you have a key, Miss Farmer?”

  “Lots of people have, mister,” she said. “Shack gave lots of people keys. So that if he was working he wouldn’t have to go to the door and let people in. Unless there was a sign on the door.”

  “Sign?”

  “If he didn’t want to be bothered he wrote, ‘Go away’ on a sheet of drawing paper and tacked it on the outside of the door.”

  “When were you last here, Miss Farmer? To pose for him?”

  “Day before yesterday.”

  According to the Medical Examiner’s report, Shackleford Jones had been dead between twenty and twenty-four hours when Myra Dedek had walked into the studio at about ten o’clock that Thursday morning and seen his body and begun to scream. She must have screamed loudly, because they had heard her in the loft two floors below. She must have screamed urgently, because the owner of “Perma-Snaps” had gone running up the stairs. Benjamin Negly, the owner of “Perma-Snaps” was, and he had called the police. The call had come through at 10:08 that morning.

  “Not yesterday?” Shapiro asked Rachel Farmer.

  “Day before,” she said. “That was—what’s today?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Tuesday. At three in the afternoon. I was right on time and I stood there—” she gestured imprecisely to one side of where she stood—“for two hours. And if you moved while he was working he yelled at you. And then he said he didn’t have any money and would pay me next time. He said that lots of times.”

  “He did pay in the end?”

  “You’re damn right he did,” she said. “You think I pose two hours for the fun of it?”

  She’s being very tough, Shapiro thought. Tougher than she needs to be. But I’m no good at summing people up, at finding out what makes them tick. And I don’t know anything about people like this girl—models and painters and people like that. Put me back on a beat in Brooklyn and I’d make out all right.

  “You came back today,” he said. “To get this drawing he had made of you day before yesterday. When you heard he was dead you came back to get the sketch. Why?”

  “It’s mine. He hadn’t paid me for it. Two hours and being yelled at. And—”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I understand how you feel. What did you plan to do with it, Miss Farmer?”

  “What do you think, mister? Or are you a captain or something?”

  “Lieutenant,” Shapiro said, and there was sad acceptance in his voice. “You planned to sell it? Somebody would have bought it, you thought?”

  She looked surprised at that. She had fixed her expression to superior detachment, or tried to. When he asked her that last question detachment melted out of her face. Her surprise was, Shapiro thought, almost childlike.

  “Look,” she said, and she was patient with the ignorant, with the outsider. “It’s the last thing he did, isn’t it? And you say, would somebody have bought it.” She shook her head and the black hair swayed with the head’s movement. “He used to get maybe two-three hundred for sketches. When he was willing to sell them. Of course, he only sold the ones he himself didn’t like very much, when he needed money. He would now, I guess. I mean, if he hadn’t killed himself and that’s the last thing—”

  She stopped on that and shook her head again. It was easy enough to finish. It was, she was saying by not saying, the last thing she would have expected of Shackleford Jones.

  “The others?”


  “He just kept them. Things he really liked a lot he wouldn’t even let people see. Anybody who might buy them, I mean. Myra Dedek used to send people down to look at things. Museum directors and people like that. And he’d show them only the things he didn’t like, himself. And Myra would blow her top. You can’t really blame her, I guess. A dealer’s got to sell things, doesn’t she?”

  Involuntarily, Shapiro looked again around the loft, with pictures everywhere. He looked back at the tall young woman.

  “People did buy his st—paintings? For hundreds of dollars?”

  He heard the incredulity in his own voice. And when she answered, he heard incredulity in hers.

  “Hundreds?” she repeated. “Are you out of your mind, mister?”

  Nathan Shapiro thought it very likely. Or that the world was. Of course, the dark girl probably was making up a story. People do, sometimes for no special reason, when they talk to the police.

  “You mean,” Shapiro said, and spoke carefully, “that people paid more than hundreds?”

  “You don’t know much about this sort of thing, do you?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. He said, “How much more?”

  “Listen,” she said, “I didn’t keep books for him. Ask Myra Dedek. She did. And how she did! Fifty-fifty.”

  None of which made any particular sense to Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro.

  “What he said…” the girl said, and reached back toward the easel, apparently to extract another of the thumbtacks which held the drawing.

  “No,” Shapiro said, and there was policeman in his voice. She removed her fingers from the tack they had started to fidget with.

  “‘What he said’?” Shapiro repeated.

  “They say he asked a lot,” Rachel Farmer told him. “Asked crazy prices. Once he had a painting he insured for a hundred thousand dollars when it was being moved to Myra’s gallery. Of course, it was a big painting. Ever so big. They had to take it out of here with a derrick or something. A piano—what do they use to move pianos?”

  “From this high up, a hoist,” Shapiro told her, and spoke as if he talked to the sane. “You’re telling me Mr. Jones thought somebody might pay—” he steadied his voice— “a hundred thousand dollars for one of his paintings?”

  “It was a big one,” the girl said. “The biggest he ever did, I guess. Of course …”

  She paused and Shapiro waited.

  “I don’t suppose,” she said, “he really expected to get that much. He did put crazy prices on things he didn’t really want to sell. But, then, he did think he was as good as Picasso. Or maybe almost.”

  “Have you any idea how much he would have taken for this picture? This very big picture?”

  “Half of what he insured it for. I don’t know. Sometimes he talked sort of wild. Lots of them do, you know.”

  Shapiro did not know. He thought it probable. Anything that afternoon was as probable as anything else.

  “Myra sold one of the others—one he didn’t like much—for ten thousand,” the girl said. “Anyway, he said that. And he showed me the check. That was last fall. Of course, it was only for five thousand. He yelled about that. He was always yelling about Myra.”

  Shapiro steadied himself as well as he could.

  “This one he sold,” he said. “Do you know what it was about?”

  Again there was astonishment in her face.

  “About?” she said, and incredulity was in her voice. “About? Paintings aren’t about things.”

  “They put titles on pictures, don’t they?” Shapiro said. “There’s one against the wall called ‘Still Life.’”

  “He called lots of them that,” she said. “They all do.”

  “This one he told you was sold for ten thousand dollars?”

  “Oh,” she said. “That one. ‘Composition in Planes’ he called that one.”

  III

  Shapiro told Rachel Farmer he would take her key to the studio. There was sulkiness in her face and she looked at the sketch she had come to get—come to steal. Which would have been grand larceny if her guess at its value was anything like true. Which it, of course, was not.

  She said, “It’s mine, really,” and Shapiro said, “No. Let’s have the key, Miss Farmer.”

  She did not carry a handbag, which was strange, but no stranger than anything else about all this. She fished into a pocket of her tight-fitting slacks and, after a slight struggle—she could not really get her hand into the pocket, so tightly did the slacks mold her—produced a ring with two keys on it. She started to separate the ring to take one of the keys off and Shapiro made a guess.

  “The other one?” he said. “To his apartment, isn’t it?”

  Her expression told him he was right. She said, “Is it any of your business?”

  “Perhaps not,” Shapiro told her. “But I’ll take them both,” and then to Cook, “You’ve got her address, Tony?”

  Cook said, “Yeah,” with finality, and in a special voice experienced policemen keep available. The tone was not really threatening.

  “We may want to ask you some more questions,” Shapiro said. “You weren’t planning a trip or anything like that?”

  She shook her head and looked again at the drawing of the plucked ostrich. Shapiro again said, “No, Miss Farmer.” He could not, actually, see why she would want it. He looked at it again himself. Her story about selling it was obviously a made-up story. But, as obviously, she wanted it, for whatever reason. Which was reason enough not to let her have it.

  “You said you have an appointment,” he said. “You can go along and keep it.”

  “You can’t order me—” she said, and stopped with that and for a moment looked hard at him and again her expression seemed to him almost childlike; the expression of a resentful and uncertain child. Then she turned and took long strides to the door. She closed it after her with a bang.

  “Funny way she has of walking,” Cook said. “Like a man almost.”

  “I don’t think so,” Shapiro said, and did not have to explain what he did not think. “Skinny, but girl enough. Reason she had a key to his apartment, could be.”

  “Next stop?”

  “May as—” Shapiro began and stopped. Precinct was ahead of them at the apartment, as it had been here at the studio—as, of course, it was everywhere. It was a nuisance to start hours behind. As long as they had to, they might start as nearly as they could at the beginning. At the moment, Shackleford Jones was an abstraction of a man. That could, to a degree, be remedied.

  “Let’s,” Shapiro said, “go have a look at this cadaver of ours, Tony.”

  Across town and uptown to the morgue. Cook fumbled their way to Eighth Street. He drove slowly because traffic was moving slowly.

  Shapiro had opportunity to look at Eighth Street, which was not much like anything he had seen before. Most of the men and women—and, obviously, the in-betweens—who walked the sidewalks between Sixth Avenue and Fifth seemed to be young, except when they were evidently very old. A heavy woman who walked a heavy dog was one of the old ones. She moved slowly, with numerous dog stops, and the younger swirled around her.

  They swirled in twos, for the most part. They were in slacks, for the most part, and nobody wore a hat. Many of the males—the movements of hips identified the sexes, but some who were presumably female moved as stridingly as Rachel Farmer—were bearded. Some had achieved beards of stature. The less fortunate had wispy beards. They had, for the most part, made up for that by letting their hair grow long.

  “Takes all kinds, like they say,” Cook said, with the police car stopped in the narrow street to let a car ahead back into a parking space. “There’s a pair for you.”

  He indicated the pair. Male and female from the way they moved. Yes, one of them with a beard. A red beard. He wore purple slacks. The other had no beard and walked somewhat as a woman walks. She wore green slacks into which, it was to be assumed, she had been poured.

  The one with the bear
d walked with an arm about the other’s shoulders. As the police car began to edge forward, the couple stopped and, with enthusiasm, kissed. Nobody else walking the sidewalks of the main street of Greenwich Village paid any attention to this. A Negro man and a white girl who had been walking behind the two who now clung so resolutely together swerved around the parked couple without breaking stride. As adeptly, they avoided a baby carriage, which a man in a red shirt and shorts and sandals was wheeling toward Sixth Avenue. There was a baby in the carriage. With the baby there were two large paper bags and from one of the bags a cabbage bulged. Two men walked behind him, both young. One of them, Shapiro was almost certain, had rouge on his lips.

  Except for the people, Shapiro thought, Eighth Street here was the cluttered Main Street of a smallish town. There were grocery stores on either side, and liquor stores. On a corner there was a bookshop and it was crowded. A little beyond it, as they crept toward Fifth, there was, a flight below street level, “LeRoy’s Gallery” and in the window which Shapiro could peer down into, a picture which looked, in the glimpse he had of it, like something from Shackleford Jones’s studio. Above the gallery there was a Chinese restaurant. A man who wore a business suit and a straw hat and carried an attaché case led a clipped white poodle down the stairs from the Chinese restaurant. He opened the door of a Cadillac parked in front of the restaurant and the poodle jumped into it.

  They came to Fifth and the lights stopped them. A nursemaid in white uniform crossed Eighth, and held the hand of a small child in each of her hands. One of the children was a girl of five or six in a dress which was shiningly white; the other a boy, perhaps a little older, in a long-trousered blue business suit and a carefully tied blue four-in-hand. A Negro boy in blue jeans threw a ball over their heads and ran past them and almost caught it on the fly. But a bearded man of sixty or so really caught it and made a little bow and handed it to the Negro boy.

  Across Fifth, at the corner, in a drive which curved from street into a towering apartment building, a uniformed chauffeur held the door of a limousine open for a billowy woman who wore white gloves almost to her elbows and a black dress which reached almost to her ankles. She wore a round black hat on very white hair. If it took all kinds, Shapiro thought, this was the place to find them.