Murder For Art’s Sake

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  It is preposterous for her to say I am like my father, Nathan Shapiro thought. It is gentle and tolerant of her, but absurd. She knows better, of course. After many years of knowing me she can not help knowing better.

  “Why?” Rose said. She did not need to explain the question.

  “I’ve spent most of the afternoon looking at pictures,” her husband told her. “Very different. Not very comprehensible.”

  “Because of Mr. Jones?” Rose said. She had, Nathan Shapiro thought, bought a newspaper while she was walking the dog. The dog, a Scotty bitch named Cleo, had come out from under the sofa and gone to lie on a chair, which also was forbidden her. She knew when people were not in a frame of mind to notice dogs.

  “Bill Weigand handed it to me,” Shapiro told his wife. “Nobody else free, I guess. I’m making a muddle of it, as he ought to have known I would.”

  “Of course you are, darling,” Rose said, and looked at him fondly—a little hopelessly, but fondly. “Abstract, these paintings you’ve been looking at?”

  He nodded his head, dimly.

  “No wonder you’re tired,” Rose said. “Finish your wine and we’ll eat.” She smiled at him. “While the goulash is still representational.”

  Captain William Weigand, commanding, Homicide, South, finished reading the typed report on the desk in front of him and looked across the desk at the sad-faced man who sat opposite.

  “Not much, is it?” Shapiro said, with the intention of saying it first. “I’m out of my depth, Bill. Not the sort of thing I’m any good at. Johnny Stein, now.”

  “No,” Weigand said. “It’s your baby, Nate. A slippery baby apparently. But yours to cuddle. You agree with the M.E.’s man? Right?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I’d call it homicide. As much hunch as anything.”

  “Then it’s ours,” Weigand told him. “Because of the angle of the shot? And that he’d apparently planned to have a guest for dinner? Or supper? Hot bird and cold bottle. And … ?”

  “Perfectly healthy, according to the autopsy,” Shapiro said. “So we can count that out. He looked as healthy as a dead man can. Mrs. Dedek says his work was falling off, but this man Briskie says it wasn’t. It’s all there, Bill.” He pointed to the report which was the “there.”

  “Mrs. Dedek says she wasn’t going to help him eat the squabs and drink the champagne. This girl Rachel Farmer says she wasn’t. And Mrs. Briskie—” he consulted the typed sheet in front of him— “knew him only casually. Had never been to his apartment. Can’t imagine where you got the idea she might have been planning to have dinner with him. Or supper. You didn’t tell her about the Farmer girl’s insinuation?”

  “No.”

  “Right. Who his guest was to have been probably hasn’t anything to do with it, anyway.”

  “A loose end of string,” Shapiro said. “Something to pull at. But probably you’re right. Johnny Stein, now—”

  “No, Nate,” Weigand said. “The baby’s yours.”

  It was worth one more try, and Nathan Shapiro gave it one more try. He knew nothing about the kind of people who were involved—painters, models, song writers. People who ran art galleries. People who didn’t seem to know, or care, whether or not they had any clothes on. People who painted pictures that didn’t mean anything and made sketches of women with two faces from models who had only one.

  “I’ll never understand any of it,” Shapiro said. “Take this one thing, Bill. One person who ought to know says Jones was painted out. Another, who’s in the same line, says he was getting better, not worse. Maybe it isn’t important. I don’t know. And I don’t know which one is lying. Damn it all, I’ve no way of knowing. They all look alike to me. The pictures, I mean. None of them makes any sense.”

  “Wouldn’t to me,” Weigand said. “And wouldn’t to Johnny Stein either, Nate.”

  “I’m not trying to dodge a job. It’s just that I …”

  He was told not to be a damn fool. He was told that nobody thought he was trying to dodge a job. With that, Weigand looked over Shapiro’s head, at nothing in particular.

  “We get off course on something,” Weigand said, still addressing the opposite wall, or himself. “We look around for a pilot. Right? Toxicologist, maybe. Psychiatrist sometimes. Or a man who knows about wood. Or automobile mechanics. Have to go outside the department for some of them. Right, Nate?”

  Nathan Shapiro sighed and nodded his agreement.

  “Somebody who knows something about modern art, this time,” Weigand said. “Somebody we can trust.”

  “It would help,” Shapiro said. “God knows it would help.”

  “You haven’t met my wife, have you?” Weigand asked him.

  “No.”

  “You’re going to,” Weigand said. He reached for the telephone.

  Detective Anthony Cook stopped the car in front of a tall and shining apartment house on the upper East Side. He said, “Jeeze. The captain must be in the chips. Hate to think what they nick you in a place like this.”

  Cook was new to Homicide, South; he was new to Manhattan and to the Detective Division. He probably, Shapiro thought, getting out of the police car, wonders if Weigand has had his hand out somewhere along the line. There had been cops who had held hands out, in the long history of the New York Police Department.

  “Got money of his own,” Shapiro said, telling Cook what was generally known in the department. “Somebody left him money years ago, when he was already on the cops. Pounding a beat like anybody. Way you did. Way I did. He stayed on the cops.”

  “Why the hell?”

  “I don’t know, Tony,” Shapiro said. “Ask him some time if you want to. Maybe he’ll tell you. Maybe he’ll just wonder why you need to ask.”

  Tony Cook said, “Uh,” and said it thoughtfully. He drove off on his errand, which was to return to Mrs. Myra Dedek the notarized document that, on its face, gave her unrestricted right to sell the paintings of Shackleford Jones, deceased. Shapiro went into the lobby of the apartment house, and to the desk where a young man in uniform stood. The young man smiled with marked detachment in the general direction of the long-faced detective. He said, “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Mrs. Weigand,” Shapiro said, and was asked who he should say, sir? Shapiro told him who to say and that he was expected. The attendant said, “Certainly, sir,” his voice as detached as his smile. He used a desk telephone. He said, “A Mr. Shapiro, Mrs. Weigand. A Mr. Nathan Shapiro.” He listened momentarily. He said, “Certainly, Mrs. Weigand,” and cradled the phone and said, “Eighteen C, Lieutenant. The elevator’s on your left.”

  Shapiro pressed a button beside a door marked “18 C” and chimes sounded beyond it. At the first note, the door opened.

  She wore dark green slacks and a white blouse and a jacket which matched the slacks. She was slim and her brown hair had a hint of red in it and her eyes were green. Perhaps, Shapiro thought, looking down at her, the green in her eyes was a color borrowed from slacks and jacket. Probably, in another light, in a different costume, her eyes would be another color. Gray, perhaps. Or even hazel.

  “Yes,” Dorian Weigand said, “they’re really green, Lieutenant. Come in.”

  She turned with that and he followed her into a big room. The far wall of the room was glass and sunlight came through it and lay bright on a deep yellow carpet.

  There was a flowing grace in Dorian Weigand’s movement as she walked through the big room toward the glass wall with which it ended. She moved, Shapiro thought, as a cat moves. And he thought, There is nothing planned about her moving so. (“Ht. 5-7; wt. 115.”)

  There was a long, low table in front of the glass wall of the room, and a sketch pad was lying on it, face down.

  “Sit there and you can see the river,” Dorian said, and indicated a chair, not in the sunlight, which faced the enormous window. Beyond the glass, far below, was the East River. A tug was towing a lumbering barge up it, toward Hell Gate.

  Dorian Weigand sat in a deep c
hair facing the one she had pointed out to Nathan Shapiro. She seemed to flow into the chair, and one of her long legs curled into it, under the other. She said, “Now,” and waited, without seeming to wait.

  Shapiro had been briefed by the husband of this green-eyed woman.

  “Used to do fashion sketches,” Bill Weigand had said, after he had used the telephone on his desk and ended by saying, “I hope I can, darling. Let you know later.”

  Shapiro had had no trouble in guessing the question Bill Weigand answered. He had answered with much the same words, often enough. “Can you make it home to dinner?” That had been the question. It is one often asked by the wives of policemen.

  “… fashion sketches. Still does, now and then, but she’s not tied down to it. Mostly, now, she does cartoons. Magazines use a good many of them. Does a few for what they call ‘institutional ads.’ She signs them, ‘Hunt.’ That was her maiden name. Does watercolors, too. Doesn’t show them. Has shown her cartoons a few times. And she likes to go and look at pictures, Nate. All kinds of pictures. She’s bought a few.”

  Sitting where he could look down at the East River, Nathan Shapiro remembered that, and looked at the walls which were not glass. Over a fireplace—which would burn wood, and evidently had—there was a large framed painting, done in greens and yellows. It seemed to change as he looked at it. For a moment it was merely shapes and colors. Then it was, almost clearly, yellow flowers in green vases.

  “The Captain said you might be willing to help me, Mrs. Weigand,” Shapiro said. “There’s this case I’ve fallen heir to. Bill’s—I mean the Captain’s—assigned me—”

  “I,” Dorian said, “call him Bill too, Lieutenant. So it wasn’t suicide. You and Bill think somebody murdered Shack Jones.”

  She did not phrase it as a question, but Shapiro answered it as one. He said, “I think so, Mrs. Weigand. All your husband has to go on is what I dig up.” He sighed. “Could be I’m wrong. Could be I’m messing things up.” He sighed again, and Dorian Weigand looked at him with interest. She saw a long-faced man with a long, straight nose and deeply brown eyes. He looks sad, she thought; looks sad and without confidence. But he is a lieutenant, and not old for it and advancement in rank is not normally rapid in the Police Department of the City of New York. And Bill has given him this case. Bill must think more highly of this sad-faced man than this man thinks of himself.

  “What it comes to,” Shapiro said, “I don’t know anything about art, Mrs. Weigand. What it means. What it’s all about.” And then, unexpectedly, he smiled and that changed his face. “Don’t even know what I like,” he said.

  “‘Guide through the world of art,’” Dorian said, quoting what Bill had said on the telephone—said lightly, amusement at his own phrasing underlying his words. “I’ll do what I can, of course. But I’m not really in the world of art, Lieutenant. Not really in the world at all. It won’t have me. I’m commercial. They draw the line sharply.”

  Shapiro shook his head.

  “Men like Mr. Jones sell their paintings,” he said. “You do cartoons, Bill tells me, and sell them.”

  “Sometimes on assignment,” she said. “One of the differences. And an illustrator is one thing. A serious artist is another. And never the twain shall meet. Only they do. Sometimes in the same man, come to that.”

  “Shackleford Jones?”

  “Never an illustrator, so far as I know,” Dorian said. “All serious artist. They pre-empt that word, you know—‘artist.’ A writer is a writer. A composer is a composer. An architect is an architect, even if he’s Frank Lloyd Wright. A photographer is a photographer, even if he’s Steichen. A painter is an artist. Period. Even if he isn’t.”

  “Jones was? Good, I mean? That may come into it, Mrs. Weigand. Not that I know what comes into it. Or that anything does. It’s still possible that he killed himself. Precinct thinks so and they were there first.”

  She is easy to talk to, this green-eyed wife of Bill Weigand’s, Shapiro thought. She’s making herself easy to talk to, I suppose because I’m not.

  “Shack Jones had a name,” Dorian said. “Or was getting one. I don’t really know his work, Nathan. The Dedek Galleries has two, on more or less permanent exhibit. I’ve seen those.”

  “You liked them?”

  She thought for a moment.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think so. I’m not sure I’d want to live with them. But, yes, I think they are good paintings. It may be, of course, that Myra picked his best. She—or he—set the prices high enough, heaven knows. Which is probably why the exhibit has turned out to be so permanent. They were there a year ago, when Myra gave me a share of a group show of cartoons. Although ‘gave’ isn’t precisely the word. We paid for the ads. And the programs. And she took her forty per cent.”

  “Forty?”

  “She wanted fifty,” Dorian said. “I—haggled her down.” She laughed, then. She had a quick, gay laugh. “I still wasn’t very commercial,” Dorian Weigand said. “None of the department stores made me offers. There wasn’t any rush of private collectors, either.”

  Shapiro said, “Department stores?”

  “That’s rather recent,” Dorian said. “Department stores and Fifth Avenue shops have discovered art, more or less all at once. Gives painters a new outlet. Of course, a good many of them scream their heads off and talk about prostitution. But a good many of them, particularly the ones coming up, go along. Painters, too, have to buy groceries. The stores pay cash.”

  Shapiro said he hadn’t known about that. He added that he didn’t know about any of this.

  “Some of the stores,” she told him, “have set up galleries. Usually in connection with their furniture departments, if they have them. They buy paintings outright, for low prices and directly from the painters. They add their markup, just as they do on the dresses they buy on Seventh Avenue. As they do on all the commodities they sell. Some of the paintings are quite good and a few are very good, and most of them, I suppose, are botches. But the same thing goes for most commodities, doesn’t it? For dresses and fabrics and beds and tables?”

  The world of Fifth Avenue shops was an alien world to Shapiro, a world almost as alien as the “world of art” through which, bemused, he wandered now. Rose bought her clothes from stores in Brooklyn. To Nathan Shapiro’s eyes they looked fine on her.

  “Would a man like Mr. Jones sell paintings to the stores?”

  She did not really know. Possibly, if he needed money. He would not, certainly, get anything like the prices he asked for the canvases on exhibition in the Dedek Galleries. But he apparently did not get them there, either.

  “He had a name of sorts,” Dorian said. “As ‘Shack.’ At a guess, he wouldn’t.”

  But that was only a guess. He was very modern; very abstract. The stores, for the most part, did not put so much of a strain on prospective customers. And the stores paid, for the most part, in hundreds. Shackleford Jones apparently thought in thousands.

  She had had dealings with Myra Dedek. What could she tell him about Mrs. Dedek?

  She was a widow. Her husband had been Anton Dedek, an importer. Apparently a successful one. Myra had started her gallery after her husband died, it was generally assumed on the money he had left her. She had a reputation—a reputation for sharpness and shrewdness. “Some people think ‘ruthless’ is the word.” Hers was a good gallery. “In.”

  “She says she advanced money to Jones. A considerable amount, she says. Over a period of years.”

  That was not unprecedented. Dealers did, sometimes, tide over painters they thought good, likely to sell.

  “For the most part,” Dorian said, “painters need a bit of tiding over. A good many people buy paintings nowadays. That’s ‘in’, too. But there are a good many painters.”

  “Mrs. Dedek,” Shapiro said, “thinks that Jones’s work had fallen off in the last few years. That he was painted out. Offers that as a reason for suicide. Does that seem likely to you?”

  “I can�
��t,” Dorian said, “think of any likely reason for suicide. I don’t know what kind of man Mr. Jones was. If you devote your life to something and it falls out from under you. …” She ended that by lifting her shoulders.

  “A man I’ve talked to,” Shapiro said. “He’s an artist—painter—too, says that Jones’s work was getting better, not worse. I don’t know whether this man—a man named Briskie—knows what he’s talking about. The trouble is that I don’t know whether any of these people know what they’re talking about. Did you ever hear of a painter named Briskie, Mrs. Weigand?”

  “I don’t think—” Dorian said, and stopped with that. She looked at nothing for a moment and then said, “Wait.” Shapiro waited.

  “I don’t know his work,” Dorian said. “Or whether he knows what he’s talking about. But the name—it’s not a common name. Is it Maxwell Briskie?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s married to a composer,” Dorian said. “A woman who writes under the name Dorothy Goodbody. Is that the man?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “That’s the man, Mrs. Weigand. He says that, during the last two or three years, Jones was almost as good as he thought he was. You see the point, Mrs. Weigand.”

  “Whether Myra is providing a motive for suicide by making one up. Yes.”

  Her tone was not tolerant. But Shapiro sighed, lamenting himself. Only a stupidly groping man asks an intelligent woman if she has seen an obvious point.

  “I’m sorry,” Shapiro said.

  She laughed lightly. She said there was nothing to be sorry about.

  “Of course,” Shapiro said, “he may have had another reason to kill himself. We may come on it. Meanwhile. …” He shrugged, this time.

  “Meanwhile,” Dorian said, “confirmation or rejection of Myra’s theory. Why would she? Unless—”

  “Conceivably,” Shapiro said, “she has a good deal of his early work on hand. Wants to spread the word that his recent paintings are inferior.”

  “Conceivably.” She did not sound especially convinced. “Did he date his paintings, do you know? Some of them do and some don’t.”