“Yes,” Shapiro said. “Mrs. Jones is here. Expecting Mr. Osgood.” He put a hand over the transmitter and looked up the length of the studio and took in breath to call. He let the breath out again. Mrs. Isabelle Jones was closing the studio door firmly behind her.
“Mrs. Jones seems to have left,” Shapiro told whoever was calling in behalf of Mr. Jeremiah Osgood. Then he added a question: “She is registered at the Hilton?”
“Oh, yes. She merely wasn’t—to whom am I talking?”
The voice had suddenly become as guarded as the grammar.
“A police lieutenant,” Shapiro said, and got a startled “Oh,” and then, “I’d better—”
“This is Mr. Jeremiah Osgood,” a male voice said. “You say you’re from the police?”
It was evident that Osgood had been listening on an extension.
“Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro.” Then, after a momentary pause, “Homicide.”
“It seems,” Mr. Jeremiah Osgood said, “that my attorney was correct in advising me against premature entanglement. In warning me of possible litigation.”
His voice was as carefully cultured as his phrasing was elaborately unreal.
“You called to tell Mrs. Jones you’ve decided to back out?” Shapiro asked Jeremiah Osgood. “That was the idea?”
He could hear Osgood draw in his breath, possibly in recoil against crudity.
“For the moment,” Osgood said. “That is a correct assumption, Lieutenant. In my position in the art world—”
Shapiro cut through that.
“You know Jones’s work, Mr. Osgood?”
“Certainly. Most assuredly.”
“Is it good?”
“In my opinion,” Osgood said, “it, at its best, achieves a degree of imponderable permanence.”
Shapiro said, “Thanks,” and hung up. He used the telephone to call in, and got Anthony Cook, who had found Myra Dedek at her gallery—which was quite a place—and given her the agreement signed by the late Shackleford Jones and got back the receipt.
“There’s a Mrs. Shackleford Jones at the Hilton,” Shapiro told him. “Says she’s the widow. Says she lives in something called Emporia, Kansas. Says she left there by plane yesterday afternoon after she heard on the radio her husband was dead. I’m at Jones’s studio and she was. All at once she hightailed it out.”
“Bring her in?”
Shapiro considered for a moment.
“Check her out in this Emporia,” he said. “Her father apparently owns a grocery store. Name’s Cronin, apparently. Ask the Emporia boys to check on when she did fly out of there. If she did fly out of there. If it jibes, just ask her to stay put in the hotel until we get a chance to talk to her. If she makes a fuss—she probably will—talk about the D.A.’s office and a formal statement. But not unless we have to.”
Cook said, “O.K., Lieutenant.”
“And,” Shapiro said, “if one of the boys is sitting on his hands, have him check out a man named Jeremiah Osgood. Art dealer and expert, apparently. Makes a point of being Mister Osgood.”
“Anything special about him?”
“Not at the moment. Reputation. General feel of the guy. Just in case. Mrs. Jones hired him—thought she’d hired him, anyway —to appraise her late husband’s paintings. Which she expects to inherit. Although she thinks they’re rubbish. Says she does. This expert Osgood, on the other hand, says they achieve a degree of imponderable permanence.”
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Nathan Shapiro said, and hung up and went to find a picture with the number “79” on it.
It took him a little time to find it. He had to pull several canvases from a grooved rack. When he found it, he found it large. He pulled it to a light.
The painting was entirely realistic—a little startlingly so to Nathan Shapiro. It was of a naked woman; a most luxuriant woman. She was half sitting, half lying on a sofa—a sofa upholstered in a striped fabric of deep yellow and soft white.
Shapiro had seen Mrs. Maxwell Briskie, professionally known as Dorothy Goodbody, only with clothes on, so he could not be certain how accurately Jones had painted her curving body. But he had been meticulously exact in the painting of her face.
He had been exact, also, in painting the fabric against which, so enticingly, she half reclined. Shapiro knew precisely where a sofa so upholstered could be found. He had, in fact, recently sat on it.
He caught Cook at the office just as Cook was leaving it. He told Cook where he would be during the next hour or so and, briefly, why.
VII
The telephone was ringing when Dorian went into her apartment. She walked to it quickly—Bill might be calling; the sad, long-faced lieutenant might be calling; the bell might be about to give up fruitless ringing. She said, “Hello” and got, in a secretarial voice, “Mrs. Weigand? Mrs. Fields is calling. One moment, please.”
She waited several moments. The advertising manager of Bryant & Washburn usually had many things going at once. Dorian had a chance to wonder if Nathan Shapiro had made anything out of the painting which carried a gallery catalogue number “79” and whether she herself had made too much of it. After all, she had based a guess on a newspaper photograph and that had been risky. If she were right, exhibiting it had been—call it rude. If—
“Dorian? Been trying to get you all morning.”
“I was—”
“Want you to do a spot for us,” Ursula Fields said. One seldom finished a sentence directed toward Ursula Fields. Ursula did not wait out the hesitant. “Free?”
“If you don’t want it yesterday, Ursula.”
Ursula Fields was rather in the habit of wanting things yesterday. This time, however, and after a brief snort, she said “Monday.”
“If it jells.”
“Even Tuesday. I’m tied up for lunch.”
One sorted Ursula Fields’s words out and put them in order.
“After it, then?”
“Time enough before. If you get the lead out, dearie.”
“As soon as I can,” Dorian promised and thought how like Ursula Ursula was.
The glass wall at the end of the living room called to her, as it always called. She walked to it and looked down at the East River. A tanker was working down it toward, she supposed, the sea. The anxious little tug had towed its barge out of sight; perhaps now was laboring through Hell Gate toward the Sound. Dorian picked up the watercolor she had been working on. The tug did show its effort. Hobby painting, Dorian Weigand thought, and tore the sheet in half and then in half again. Occupational therapy.
She had changed from the green slack suit into a summer dress of greenish gray. It would do very well for the advertising department of Bryant & Washburn. A new face was indicated; white gloves were required. She did the face and found clean gloves. She telephoned down a request that George do what he could to catch her a cab. The big Buick was nothing to try to park in Fifth Avenue. She followed her request to the lobby of the high apartment house. George had been lucky.
“Mrs. Fields is on the telephone,” the receptionist told Dorian Weigand, in the Swedish modernity of Bryant & Washburn’s eighth floor. (Executive Offices Only.) “She—just a moment, Mrs. Weigand.”
Ursula Fields was large behind a large desk. She wore a gray suit and a white shirt and had straight, thick gray hair. And, as Dorian knew, was firmly, even devotedly, married and had two sons, one graduated that same month from the Columbia Law School and the other still at Yale.
“Our buyers turn up in the oddest places,” Ursula Fields said. “’Morning, dearie. Like it?”
“It’s long,” Dorian said. “Odd place to find a buyer?”
“Don’t worry your head about the copy,” Ursula Fields said. “What it is—buyer. Dressed like Bryant and Washburn. Maybe talking to cowboys. But—French cowboys. Berets? South of France. Horses. Chief thing is the pants, of course.”
One sorted out. It was to be presumed that t
he horses were not wearing the pants.
“Want to do it? Your kind of thing, dearie. Funny as you want to, long as the pants show up. French cowboy pants. Casuals wants to do them for the gals. Eights and tens, I hope to God. Though I wouldn’t put it past them to do some twelves.”
“Just the spot? Elegant buyer and cowboys with pants on? I didn’t know they had cowboys in the south of France.”
“Neither did I, dearie. Still doesn’t seem very likely. Yes, just the spot. Sally’ll do the sketches of the little prancers. Nancy can give you a rough of the layout. O.K.?”
“It shoots a weekend. Bill and I had thought—”
“You and that Bill of yours. You’re a pro, aren’t you? We pay you enough, God knows.”
The words of her own thought repeated themselves in Dorian’s head. “Hobby painting.” And Bill probably would be working over the weekend. “Homicide Squad, South. Captain William Weigand commanding.” It had sounded good, once. It had, once, sounded like regular hours.
“I’ll have a shot at it,” Dorian said. “Signed, I suppose?”
“Part of what we pay for, dearie,” Ursula Fields said. “Run along and talk to Nancy.”
Dorian went along a corridor, and into a smaller office, and talked to Nancy Sperling, art director. She looked at a roughed layout—spot at the top, centered, using about a quarter of a newspaper page; squiggles occupying the rest, in lieu of the sketches of attenuated girls in French cowboy slacks which Sally Painter would supply. “With a little bit of inspiration,” Nancy Sperling, who was slender and becomingly wore a black sheer from Better Dresses, fifth floor, told Dorian. “Convulse them, darling.”
The executive elevator was, from its indicator, at the ground floor, presumably discharging executives for lunch. Dorian rode an escalator to the seventh floor, where one bank of customer elevators ended. Furniture. Fabrics. “The Decorators’ Corner.” “The Sleep Shop.” “Desks, Traditional.” The escalator landed her among sofas, also traditional. She walked among sofas toward a bank of elevators. There was a sign “Art Gallery” and the sign was shaped to point.
Dorian Weigand, by instinct, went as the sign directed.
The gallery opened from the floor of sofas and upholstered chairs. There were pictures on the display-room walls, adding a homey touch to an acre or so of homeless overstuffed seats. Most of the pictures were in heavy gilt frames which distracted, but insufficiently, from the paintings themselves. Most of the paintings seemed to be portraits of men and women who had lived, stiffly and tepidly, a century or so ago. Briefly, Dorian Weigand wondered if customers bought portraits of simulated ancestors to go with sofas covered in restless monotones.
The gallery itself was somewhat different. It occupied several small rooms, one of them devoted to seascapes, all by one painter who, it appeared, lived within view of an extremely conventional sea—a sea full of large rocks on which waves obediently broke.
The room beyond was entirely different. Here “pop” and “op” competed. Here collage was noticeable and bristled out toward the observer in apparent anger. On one of them a spring—presumably from a large alarm clock—coiled as if to leap.
The next room again was different. Here the paintings, most of them not large, were modern in feeling. For the most part abstract but now and then, in their fashion, representational. One, and in front of it Dorian stood for several minutes, pictured a village street which pitched sharply down toward, she thought, a river. Houses and store buildings clung precariously to the precipitous street. The picture had a title: “Foster, Missouri.” It had a price: $275. It had been painted—Dorian leaned close to the canvas—by a man whose name appeared to be Sanders. “San” something, at any rate. Dorian put “San-something” in her mind for reference. She thought somebody could get himself a bargain for two hundred and seventy-five dollars.
She moved on along the wall and did not, for a good many pictures, hesitate again. Most of those she passed had, she thought, been passed often. On some the slips of paper which served as price tags had yellowed with their waiting; one or two had begun to curl away from the frames to which they were pasted. None of the neglected canvases was, Dorian thought, really bad. But none of them was especially good. Spots of color for walls which needed spots of color; unassertive pictures with which one could live untroubled and unconcerned.
She should, Dorian thought, go home and get her own sketch pad and get about her own work—get about a sketch of a buyer for Bryant & Washburn looking, with inspiration dawning in her eyes, at French cowboys in very special pants. She should, at least, go home—go somewhere—and have lunch. She had told Nathan Shapiro she would be home by two. She had also told him she had a date for lunch. But that had been only a convenient excuse for escape from Annabelle Jones and her talk of “rubbish” and her eagerness to learn what the “rubbish” might sell for. Over the counter, presumably. Probably, Dorian thought, Annabelle had been very pretty once and her prettiness had filled a painter’s eyes and —
She stopped abruptly before a canvas which was larger than most of the others and better lighted than any of them. It was “Cityscape”—a portrait, recognizable but imagined, of a city rushing toward the sky. Buildings were blocks and pointing fingers and from somewhere not defined sunlight touched the tops of the tallest. But the sunlight was not really from any actual sun. Nor were the buildings of any city colored so, except in some one’s dreams of a city which transcended cities.
Dorian stood in front of the picture and wished it were hers to live with. It would not be a spot of color anywhere; it would not bring contentment; it would not be ignored. Quite possibly it could not be lived with, would never reduce itself even to the surface conformity which is an essential part of living from day to day. Its colors would not be peaceful with any of the colors in the apartment. It was absurd to think of buying it.
She leaned closer. The slip of pasted paper on which a price had been typed was fresher here, and the typing very black and clear. “$1,500” was the price. Quite absurd to think of buying it. She moved back from it and kept on looking at it, and gradually a faint sense of familiarity built into her mind. It was not familiarity with this painting. She had never seen this painting. The familiarity was recognition of a style—of brushwork, of a way of laying color on.
Taped to the wall beside most of the other paintings was a typed slip on which the painter was named. There was no such identification of the painter of this upward-rushing city.
She leaned closer to the painting and sought a signature, and for a minute or two sought it without success. Then, finally, a series of brush strokes which had seemed part of the composition—part of the base of one of the soaring buildings—took on a shape of its own. Even then she could not be entirely certain. She herself signed her work clearly; the “Hunt” was entirely legible. But many who work on canvas or on drawing paper prefer rather to intimate than reveal their identity.
The brush strokes concealed in the composition might spell “Shack.” She thought they did. And under what might be the signature of Shackleford Jones there was a squiggle which might be a date. If it was, it was the date of the year before. She continued to study the signature, and became almost certain, but not entirely certain, that the painter had signed it “Shack.” She was surprised. She had told Nathan Shapiro that she thought Shackleford Jones would not sell to a store’s gallery. Unless, of course, he needed the money very badly. She would have to tell Shapiro that she was no longer nearly so certain.
A tall dark-haired man, dressed with elegance—and looking a little like a maitre d’ of Dorian’s acquaintance—came into the room accompanying, and guiding, a small plump woman in a flowered dress. She wore a hat. She somewhat reminded Dorian of Mrs. Isabelle Jones of Emporia, Kansas.
“Something about three feet wide by four feet tall,” the woman said. Her voice was assured, and carried. “There will have to be blue in it.”
The two went to the end of the room and stood in front of a
painting of an ocean. Fortunately, it was a blue ocean. A sandy beach, which was reasonably sand colored, shelved down to the suitably blue ocean. In the foreground there was a beach umbrella. It was red.
The elegant man took a flat cylinder from his pocket and unwound a metal tape and measured the ocean. “Three-six by three,” he said, and looked over the dumpy woman at Dorian and smiled and raised eyebrows. Dorian Weigand shook her head and smiled the smile of a woman who is only looking. He nodded welcome to that, but continued for some seconds to look at Dorian, his eyes slightly narrowed.
“Four feet would fit better,” the plump woman said. “But it is a very pretty blue. And the ocean looks so real, doesn’t it?” She moved closer to the ocean and looked at its price tag. She said, “It’s really more than I planned to spend. And not being really the right size. On the other hand…”
Dorian thought there might be a good many “other hands” and that she would not wait to ask the salesman if “Shack” had really painted the soaring city. She was, she decided, sure enough he had, and decided that if she was to get any lunch and be home by two, in case Nathan Shapiro called by two, she had better get about it.
She lunched in the tea room on the third floor of Bryant & Washburn, an experience she had resolutely avoided when she worked as a staff artist in the advertising department and had done, always against a deadline, such sketches of “little prancers” as Sally Painter now supplied.
The windows on the second floor of the house in Gay Street were closed although it was becoming an afternoon which warmly asked for open windows. Apparently Rachel Farmer did not mind the heat, or had gone out and closed windows against the late afternoon thundershowers tentatively predicted. Or perhaps her apartment was air-conditioned.
The windows of the floor above were open and somebody was playing a piano beyond them. Nathan Shapiro looked up at the open windows and listened to the music. A show tune, with lilt in it. One Shapiro had never heard before. He climbed three red-stone and gritty steps to the front door of the house and, in the entry-hall, pressed the button marked BRISKIE.
Murder For Art’s Sake Page 8