Murder For Art’s Sake

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  Then, without going farther into the room, she had screamed down the stairs for help.

  Her questioning had been brief. She was Myra Dedek. She had a gallery in East Seventy-ninth Street and an apartment above it. If they wanted her to go over it again, and she supposed they would (although what had happened was certainly clear enough) they could get in touch with her at her apartment.

  There had been no reason not to let her go to her apartment, or wherever she wanted to go. She had walked in on an ugly thing, Detective James O’Brien had realized. There was no use in prolonged questioning of a woman obviously under strain, however she tried to hide it, at a moment when there were other things to do.

  That, Shapiro remembered from his briefing in the early afternoon. He agreed that there had been no point in keeping her hanging around. Now he looked down at her and then, at a level, at the man with her. Younger than she was, by the looks of him.

  “Weldon Williams,” the young man said, without being asked. “An assistant of Mrs. Dedek’s.” He continued to wave the screwdriver gently in his right hand.

  “What do you plan to do with that?” Shapiro asked him.

  The bearded man looked at Myra Dedek, obviously for guidance.

  “Take that down, of course,” Mrs. Dedek said. She pointed at the painting above the fireplace. “I think I have a buyer for it. It’s fixed in with toggle bolts, so we’ll need a screwdriver.”

  She was entirely matter of fact. She spoke as if her intention to walk into the apartment of a dead man and take his pictures off the wall was an obviously reasonable one. It was increasingly a day when nothing was particularly comprehensible to Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro.

  “Just like that?” Shapiro said.

  She didn’t, she said, know what he meant.

  “You and Mr. Williams planned to walk into Mr. Jones’s apartment and take his pictures off the wall. And, apparently, sell them if somebody wants to buy them. What makes you think you can do that, Mrs. Dedek?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” she said. “Heaven knows anything I can salvage—what’s your name, by the way? I don’t like to talk to people whose names I don’t know. All I know is that you say you’re the police.”

  Shapiro gave her his name and showed her his badge. He told her Cook’s name and Cook showed her his badge. She looked at both badges carefully. Shapiro suspected she was memorizing the numbers on them.

  “Seem to be all right,” she admitted. “Though why it’s any of your business.”

  “Death by violence,” Shapiro said, and let patience sound clearly in his voice. “Always business of the police, Mrs. Dedek. What do you mean, salvage?”

  “Get my money back is what I mean,” the trim, decisive woman said, and let impatience sound in her voice. “What did you think I meant? Take the picture down, Weldon. Don’t stand there like a ninny.”

  Weldon Williams looked uncertainly at Lieutenant Shapiro. Shapiro resolved his uncertainty by saying, “No.”

  “Suppose you explain what you mean,” Shapiro said to Mrs. Dedek, who said, “To you?”

  “To my superiors, if you’d rather have it that way,” Shapiro said. “Mean a trip across town. Maybe down to headquarters. Maybe to the district attorney’s office.”

  “A lot of fuss about nothing,” Myra Dedek said. “But, all right. If you insist on being officious.”

  She went to the long sofa which faced the fireplace and sat on it and put her handbag on the coffee table in front of it. Shapiro went over and stood in front of her and watched her open the bag. He could look down into it; could watch her fingers move certainly for what she wanted. There was not any jumble in the handbag. She did not need to paw through it, stir anxiously through it, as women usually stir through handbags. Her fingers went at once to a pocket in the bag and came out with a folded sheet of paper.

  Not as naive as she had pretended, Shapiro thought. She had come prepared. She handed him the sheet of paper and he unfolded it. Very neatly typed, the passage he read was. Electric typewriter. He read:

  “I hereby authorize Mrs. Myra Dedek, of—East Seventy-ninth Street, New York City, in the event of my death, to sell such paintings of mine as may be necessary to realize a sum sufficient to reimburse her for cash advances she has made to me over past years. After she has recovered the amount due her, I authorize her to continue the sale and, after deducting her customary percentage, to pay the residue to my estate.”

  It was signed “Shackleford Jones,” and the signature had been notarized. The notarization was dated three years ago the previous November.

  When he had finished reading, she held a hand out and said, “Satisfied?” But he did not put the again folded paper into the hand held out for it. He gave it to Cook to read. When Cook had read it, he looked at Shapiro and raised his eyebrows.

  “Give Mrs. Dedek a receipt for it,” Shapiro told him.

  Myra Dedek pushed herself violently from the sofa. She said, “You can’t do that! You haven’t any right to. My lawyer—”

  “You’ll get it back,” Shapiro said. “See your lawyer by all means, Mrs. Dedek. I’ll sign the receipt, Tony.”

  Tony Cook tore out of his notebook a sheet on which he had written, “Received from Mrs. Myra Dedek a notarized document purporting to be an authorization to sell paintings by Shackleford Jones, dec.” He dated it. Nathan Shapiro signed it. He gave it to the trim dark-haired woman and for a moment he thought she was going to tear it up. But she put it in her handbag. She said, “You’ll be sorry about this, Lieutenant.”

  Shapiro thought that quite possible, but did not say so. He might well be exceeding his authority, which was to clean up odds and ends after a suicide. If, of course, this was suicide. Murder would make it quite another matter.

  “The advances he mentions,” Shapiro said. “Want to tell me about those, Mrs. Dedek?”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  Shapiro answered, first, with a sigh. Then he said, “No, you don’t have to tell me anything. That’s quite right. You and Mr. Williams can go any time you like. Without taking any pictures with you.”

  “If I—”

  “No. You still can’t take the pictures. Not now. With this—” he waggled the authorization Cook had given back to him and then put it in a jacket pocket—“you’ll probably get them. But you’ll have to do it legally. You did advance Mr. Jones money?”

  “For years. There’s not really a secret about it. A good many dealers …”

  All at once, she was willing to talk. It was possible, Shapiro thought, that she had come prepared to talk, if she needed to.

  A good many dealers advanced money to painters who, they thought, might eventually sell, on the reasonable assumption that a promising painter will be more productive if he doesn’t starve to death. It was a gamble, obviously. As often as not it was a losing gamble. Sometimes it paid off.

  “It’s all a gamble,” she said. “We set up a gallery and that costs money. We keep it running. Pay the rent. We show paintings and sell them and get our percentage. If we sell them.”

  “You sold Jones’s paintings?”

  “Some of them. Five years ago it looked as if he was a comer. Recently—” She spread her hands to finish the sentence.

  “Not so good?”

  “Not at the ridiculous prices he set on things. Anyway—”

  This time she shrugged her shoulders. Shapiro waited.

  IV

  Nathan Shapiro sat in one of the chairs by the sofa and Anthony Cook sat in the other and made notes. Weldon Williams, his sandals flapping slightly, walked around the room and looked at the pictures on the walls. He continued to dangle the screwdriver.

  Myra Dedek let her “anyway” hang for more than a minute, while, Shapiro thought, she considered it.

  “I may as well tell you what I think,” she said, after the long pause. This was an introductory statement which Shapiro had seldom found convincing, but she looked at him from almost black eyes, as if for re
sponse. He nodded his head and said, “Do that, Mrs. Dedek.”

  She said, “You’ll spread it around. Could be I’m cutting my own throat.”

  There was nothing to say to that because, to Shapiro, it was a meaningless remark.

  “Ten years ago,” Myra Dedek said, “I could have sworn he was a comer. Not another Motherwell. I don’t say that. Not as good as he thought he was. Not by miles. But … good. Good enough to invest in. You see what I mean?”

  “To make cash advances to,” Shapiro said, to show that he followed. He did not, entirely. “Not another Motherwell” got him nowhere.

  “Of course,” Myra Dedek said. “I gave him his first one-man show. Did you know that?”

  “No,” Shapiro said, and forebore to ask, “Was that good?”

  “Style,” the slim, dark woman said. “Originality. Oh, you could see derivations. I don’t argue you couldn’t see who had influenced him. But a real talent. A talent to bet on. And did I bet on it! Didn’t I just.”

  “How much?” It wasn’t, he supposed, really any of his business. But it was impossible to tell what was his business.

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” she said. “Five thousand a year for ten years.”

  Involuntarily, Nathan Shapiro looked around the big, well-furnished room. He thought of champagne in the refrigerator. He thought of the air conditioning in the loft studio, which must have cost plenty. He tried to fit these things together with five thousand a year.

  “These payments,” he said. “They were advances, I gather? Against what he might sell. He didn’t sell?”

  “Some things. Particularly at first.”

  “You charged what he got—would have got—against the money you advanced?”

  “A percentage. Not all of it. I was soft about that.” Shapiro waited. “All right,” she said, “I thought he would work better if I kept him happy. He raved and ranted. Anybody will tell you that. But underneath, he wasn’t certain. Underneath, he wasn’t sure. They’re like that, some of them. You have to keep on telling them they’re wonderful.”

  They seemed, Shapiro thought, to be going off on a tangent. But he had no way of knowing, in this tangential day, what was a tangent and what was not. He sought more solid ground.

  “When he sold a picture through your gallery,” Shapiro said. “The buyer would pay how much, Mrs. Dedek?”

  “A thousand sometimes. Once or twice twenty-five hundred. That was before he began to ask those exorbitant prices.”

  “He fixed the prices?”

  “Oh,” she said, “we argued about them. But he didn’t have to sell through me, you know. Anyway, when he wanted outrageous prices, it was because he didn’t really want to sell some of his paintings. He just wanted to keep them and look at them himself.”

  That was a tangent Shapiro recognized. Rachel Farmer had said much the same thing. It hadn’t made much sense when she said it, either. He worked back toward the tangible.

  “Say you sold one of his pictures for a thousand dollars,” Shapiro said. “What part of it would he get?”

  “As a dealer,” she said, “I take half of what a picture sells for. With most of them, anyway. You’ve no idea what my overhead is. You—” But then she looked at him intently and said, “What business is all this of yours, Lieutenant? The poor man shot himself. You know that.”

  “It looks that way,” Shapiro said. “Helps if we can find out what makes a man kill himself. You see, we have to be certain that he did. Always a chance what looks like suicide isn’t.”

  “And go around getting people who knew him to talk about him?”

  “Comes to that. This thousand somebody paid for one of his paintings. You got five hundred. He got—how much? How much did you charge off against what he owed you?”

  “Half of his share. Two-fifty.”

  Five thousand a year in advances. Occasional sales with half of his share deducted. Shapiro looked around the room again, and this time made it obvious. Not that he thought things needed to be made obvious to this sharp-eyed and probably sharp-witted woman. This woman who, after having started with antagonism, had suddenly turned talkative.

  “All right,” she said. “He sold some things on his own. Some of his early things. He was free to do that. That was understood. As long as it was not through another dealer.”

  “You know a Miss Farmer? Miss Rachel Farmer?”

  “She posed for him. Posed for several others, too. Slept with him, for all I know. Or with all of them. What’s she got to do with it?”

  “She says,” Shapiro told her, “that you recently sold one of his paintings for ten thousand. That he told her that. And that he showed her a check for five thousand. His share.”

  “He had the nerve to tell her that?”

  “What she says. It wasn’t true?”

  “Never. I never—wait a minute. When was this? Did she say?”

  “Last autumn.”

  “He told her that?” The incredulity was stressed.

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “It wasn’t true?”

  “The five thousand—yes, that was true enough. Only, it was my last bet. Throwing good money after bad. I may as well tell you, I suppose. You want to know why he killed himself, don’t you? That’s what all this is about, you say.”

  “Yes.”

  “He was painted out,” she said. “And he knew it. He’d been to his analyst, of course. Even that hadn’t helped. Oh, he still kept on painting. But the last two or three years he’s been repeating himself. The vigor went out of everything. No new conceptions. You understand what I mean?”

  Shapiro thought of the painting he had looked at in the studio, and didn’t at all understand what she meant. But he said, “I think so, Mrs. Dedek.”

  “He came to me last fall and said he was going stale. And made a pitch. If I advanced him enough to spend the winter somewhere else, somewhere he could see different things and think different thoughts, it might turn the trick. He knew I’d already invested a good deal in him. He didn’t want to leave me holding the bag. Apologetic as all hell, he was. Seen him like that before. Sounded sort of licked. So, all right, I turned soft. Myra Dedek—Myra Dedek of all people—got soft. Can you believe it?”

  She did not appear to expect an answer, which was as well, since Nathan Shapiro had none ready.

  “So,” the black-haired trim woman said, “I gave him a check for five thousand so he could go to Spain and—refresh himself. That’s the way he put it. ‘Refresh’ himself. And—all right. I thought something might come of it. And that we’d get back to selling Shacks. I don’t deny I’m a business woman. Never have.”

  A woman touched by a man who sounded “licked.” A woman who, all the same, thought there might be profit to be made by further investment—adding to a total of five thousand dollars? All this about colors smeared on canvas. Shapiro sighed.

  “He went to Spain?”

  “Yes.”

  “And been back how long?”

  “About three weeks.”

  “Did it work? Or don’t you know?”

  “I know. No, it didn’t work. He’d planned to stay a year, but it didn’t work and he came back. Blamed Spain, of course.”

  “He told you that?”

  “And showed me that. Oh, he’d done some things while he was in Spain. They weren’t any better. Worse, if anything. Tired, familiar things. I couldn’t say they weren’t. Wouldn’t have made any difference if I had, because he wasn’t a fool. Just a man who had run through his talent and—hadn’t anything left. Not anything at all.” There was emphasis on the last words.

  “You think that might have led him to kill himself?”

  “I know it did. Know it did.”

  She leaned forward as she said this. Her small hands clenched into fists. Then, abruptly, she stood up and said, “Weldon!” and her voice was sharp. Weldon Williams, still with screwdriver in hand, wandered back into the room, apparently from the bedroom. Possibly, of course, from the bathroom.


  “We’re going,” Myra Dedek told the lanky, bearded man. She turned to Shapiro sharply. “Any reason we shouldn’t?” she asked him.

  “No,” Shapiro said. “You’ve been helpful. Oh—there’s one other thing. Have you any idea who Mr. Jones might have planned to have here for dinner last night?”

  She widened her eyes.

  “What a ridiculous question,” she said. “However would I know, Lieutenant Shapiro? I never had anything—anything at all—to do with his personal life.”

  She was very emphatic about it, Shapiro thought. Made an issue of it. Which a little made him wonder.

  Weldon Williams came up the long room and went on toward the door. He still dangled the screwdriver. Mrs. Dedek went around the coffee table and started to join him.

  “One more thing, Mrs. Dedek,” Shapiro said. “Until everything gets cleared up, you’d better give me your key to this apartment. One of the rules is, we keep places locked up until we’ve finished.”

  He expected a protest, a further reference to her lawyer. He got neither; he got a key from her handbag. Then she joined the lanky, bearded man at the door. There she stopped and turned back.

  “What makes you think he planned to have somebody here for dinner?” she asked.

  He told her, briefly.

  “That Rachel Farmer one,” Mrs. Dedek said. “She’s one for champagne, from what little I know of her. Go on, Weldon.”

  She went after Weldon Williams. It was she who closed the door behind them. She closed it with marked decision, although she did not really slam it.

  “Gives us a motive, anyway,” Cook said. “For Jones to kill himself.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “There’s that, Tony. When we passed here earlier, on our way to the morgue, you happen to notice a woman who stopped in front of this building and looked up at it? And then went on?”

  Cook had not. He had, he pointed out, had enough things to look at, what with the crane blocking most of the street.

  “Mrs. Dedek, I think,” Shapiro said. “Checking to see if the coast was clear. Deciding it wasn’t. Police cars around.”