Murder For Art’s Sake

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  She said she knew it did; said, “After all, Nathan, I’m a cop’s wife.” Then she said, “It wouldn’t have had to mean anything. That he painted her naked, if he did, doesn’t have to mean any more than that. Specifically, that he also slept with her. Which might, as you’re thinking, have annoyed her husband. To most painters, I think, naked women are just objects. As, to a doctor, naked women are just bodies—ailing bodies.” She paused. “Usually,” she said.

  “Doctors,” Shapiro said, “have nurses in the examining room with women patients. But it’s more what Briskie might have thought, isn’t it? Whether he was right or wrong to be—annoyed?”

  “Only,” she said, “he’s a painter himself. Probably uses nude models.”

  He did, Shapiro told her. At least one. A Miss Rachel Farmer. Who also had modeled for Shackleford Jones.

  “And for photographers,” Dorian said. “Usually with clothes on. At least when she was a clothes model for Bryant and Washburn. They tried using photographs for a while. Gave it up, of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Too explicit. Women could tell what the clothes looked like. Bad for sales. Fashion artists sketch dreams. Dreams for Size Twenties who think they will look like Eights if they buy from Bryant and Washburn. Dear, frothy little dreams at one hundred ninety-eight fifty. And sometimes I guess they do buy their dreams, the poor bulgy dears.”

  Even very nice women, Shapiro thought, can be quite merciless. Especially when they do not bulge, as Dorian Weigand noticeably did not bulge.

  “Speaking of prices,” Dorian said, “Bryant and Washburn want fifteen hundred for a Jones painting they’ve got in the gallery.”

  “But you said you thought—”

  “And was wrong,” Dorian said. “I thought he would think he was above it, but apparently he didn’t. Once, anyway. He sold them a painting of a city, and it’s very good, Nathan. Very, very good, I think. Go look at it. He called it ‘Cityscape.’”

  Shapiro felt he had seen enough of paintings, particularly those signed “Shack,” to last for the rest of his life. He said, “Well…”

  “You don’t have to,” Dorian Weigand told him, in consoling tones. “You might like it, but you don’t have to. Nobody has to like anything.”

  “I got the idea,” Shapiro said, “from something you said, Mrs. Weigand, that the stores didn’t charge much for paintings. Fifteen hundred—that seems a good deal.”

  “It is,” Dorian said. “What I think is, they marked it up when they learned he was dead. That happens often enough. Supply and demand and the supply stops. Can be very pleasant for the estate, of course. Is Isabelle Jones going to be the estate?”

  He didn’t know. It seemed that Jones’s dealer had a considerable claim on it.

  “Dear Myra Dedek,” Dorian said. “By coincidence, Nathan, I’m going up to her gallery now. Why I called you instead of waiting for you to call and tell me what Dorothy Goodbody said about her portrait, Myra called me. She’s going to give a show of cartoons and caricatures in September. After they reopen. Wants me to be in it. And wants me to come up this afternoon and talk about arrangements. Which probably means, will I hold out against fifty-fifty, as I did before. The answer is, I will.”

  “Are arrangements usually made this far ahead?”

  “Yes. Sometimes, anyway. And Myra’s going to the Cape next week for the rest of the summer. Says she does every summer. She wants me to take my things in before she leaves. So she can start getting the catalogue ready.”

  “Does she close the gallery? Or have somebody to run it?”

  Dorian thought she closed it.

  “Probably with a caretaker,” Dorian said. “A man named Williams. Probably sets up the first fall shows.”

  “I’ve met Mr. Williams,” Nathan Shapiro said. “He carries a screwdriver.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Apparently,” Shapiro said, “to take pictures off other people’s walls.”

  Dorian said that it was an interesting occupation, and that she had to run.

  When he had hung up, Shapiro spun a report form, with suitable carbons, into his typewriter and sat and looked at it. Chronologically, as was stipulated. Visit to the Weigand apartment. Visit with Mrs. Weigand to the studio of the deceased. Arrival of widow of deceased. Who had been in Emporia, Kansas, when her husband killed himself—or was killed. Who expected to inherit his paintings, and thought them of no value, but who might have read a newspaper story which said they were. Who might have driven from an isolated house to Kansas City, and flown to New York on Wednesday and killed her husband. Whose father needed money. Discovery by Mrs. Weigand of a painting of a naked woman, whose face was that of Mrs. Maxwell Briskie, who denied she had posed for the painting. Interview with Mrs. Briskie and—

  Shapiro reached hands toward the keyboard and pulled them back again. It was too bad, he thought, that Chicago was so large a city. Probably there would be dozens of cooperative apartment buildings under construction there. Perhaps several designed by New York architects. But—many ambitious enough to include murals in lobbies? One way to find out—Detective Captain Leonard Finley, Chicago police. Oh, a good many ways, but Len Finley might be the simplest. Good guy, Shapiro had thought Finley a few months before, in connection with the identification and detention in New York of a man wanted in Chicago. And a good cop.

  It took a while to get through to Finley, and Nathan Shapiro spent part of it convincing himself that Finley, if he ever came on, would have blankly forgotten that a man named Nathan Shapiro existed.

  “Hiya, Nate,” Leonard Finley said. “New York’s finest out of their depth?”

  Shapiro certainly believed himself to be, but it was too long a subject to go into. He told Finley he could use a hand, and explained where.

  “Building permits,” Finley said. And then, more loudly, “Jim. Give the Department of Buildings a ring, will you? Joe Buckley would be the best man. Ask him…”

  “Shouldn’t take long,” Finley told Nathan Shapiro, after Jim had been instructed. “How’s that pretty wife of yours?”

  It did not take long. A good many apartment buildings were under construction, some of them large ones. But only one firm of New York architects was involved—Colbert & Halpern, with offices on Park Avenue.

  Neither Mr. Colbert nor Mr. Halpern was available, the operator at Colbert & Halpern told Nathan Shapiro. Could somebody else help him?

  It took a little while, as Shapiro had assumed it would. But finally a voice said, “Halpern,” rather crossly, and Shapiro went through it.

  Primarily, it was Mike Colbert’s baby. Only, Colbert was in Chicago. Yes, Maxwell Briskie was one of several artists who had been approached about a mural in the lobby. His cartoons looked pretty modern. Probably they’d settle on a nice simple prairie scene. No point in scaring away prospective purchasers of apartments. But it was Mike’s baby.

  And what brought the police into it?

  “Routine checkup,” Shapiro said. “We understand Mr. Briskie flew out to Chicago Wednesday. With the architect, was the way we got it. Just checking it out.”

  “In connection with?”

  “Just a routine investigation,” Shapiro said. That did not, to his own ears, sound particularly adequate.

  “No idea what Briskie may have done,” Halpern said. “Except he didn’t fly out with Mike Colbert. It was set up that way. That’s true. Only Mike got a virus and had to call it off. Or, put it off. Until today, as a matter of fact. They were going to catch an early flight, and so far as I know they did. Look at a wall and see the construction people and talk figures. Give Briskie a chance to make his pitch with them. For what good it will do him, probably.”

  “You think it won’t do him much good?”

  “Mike’s baby, Lieutenant. His idea, the mural is. Way it worked out, it’s a hell of a big wall. Needs something. But if Briskie wants too much…”

  Shapiro assumed a shrug of shoulders.

  Colbert had expec
ted to fly back late that afternoon. Probably wouldn’t stop by the office, but would go on to the country. After all, the weekend was coming up. Which reminded Irving Halpern that he had a train to catch.

  Shapiro thanked Halpern and hung up. He looked up the telephone number of Maxwell Briskie and, to his surprise, found it listed in the directory. Less to his surprise, the Briskie telephone was not answered.

  Shapiro typed for upwards of an hour, using language as terse as official phraseology permitted.

  “Wife’s statement that Briskie spent Wednesday in Chicago not confirmed,” he wrote, toward the end. “Did not fly to Chicago with architect as she stated. His whereabouts at the time of Jones’s death therefore—”

  His telephone rang.

  A Mr. Maxwell Briskie was at the precinct desk downstairs and wanted to see Lieutenant Shapiro in reference to the Shackleford Jones case.

  Mr. Briskie was, by all means, to be sent up.

  IX

  On the house telephone, George was doubtful. He would certainly do what he could. But Mrs. Weigand knew how it was at this time in the afternoon.

  Dorian did know. In late afternoons, just when they are needed most, the taxicabs of New York tend to light their Off Duty signs and run for home garages. They re-emerge later with night-shift drivers, but the hiatus remains inconvenient. When Dorian reached the sidewalk in front of the apartment house, George was in the middle of the street, blowing hard on his whistle. And nothing was coming of it.

  He came to her shaking his head. He could call the garage and have Mrs. Weigand’s car sent around. Perhaps he had better do that, if Mrs. Weigand was in a hurry.

  If there is one thing more difficult in late afternoon than achieving a taxicab it is parking a car. Dorian walked the several crosstown blocks to the reserved small building, faced with what might well be marble, which housed the Dedek Galleries. She opened the reticent green door and went into a large, cool room. There was nobody in the room. A few paintings hung on the neutrally painted walls. It was all pointedly noncommercial. It was true that, when she opened the door, Dorian had heard a bell tinkle discreetly somewhere.

  She looked at pictures while she waited, which is always a good thing to do while one waits. Then she remembered something and went to the end of the room where, she was almost certain, two paintings by Shackleford Jones hung, and had hung for rather a long time.

  There were no paintings by Shackleford Jones on the wall she looked at. She had, Dorian decided, been wrong about the wall on which the Shack paintings hung, waiting for a purchaser. Probably they were in one of the upstairs exhibit rooms.

  Behind her, somebody made a small sound which was a rather artificial clearing of the throat. Dorian turned to face a tall man, immaculately dressed to the point of a waistcoat, and with a carefully tended beard. He asked whether he could help madame. He had what seemed to her an inordinately cultivated voice.

  Dorian said, “Mrs. Dedek?”

  “I’m not sure she is free at the moment,” the tall youngish man said. “If madame has some particular picture in mind, I—”

  “I have an appointment with Mrs. Dedek,” Dorian said. “She telephoned me. My name is Weigand. Oh, Dorian Hunt, professionally.”

  “Of course,” the tall man said. She tried to remember his name. She had just mentioned it to Shapiro—of course. Weldon Williams. One man with a beard tends to look like another man with a beard, if age and structure are reasonably similar. This one would tell Mrs. Dedek that Mrs. Weigand was there. He went across the room and under a staircase which rose out of it. She could hear his voice, muted as, she supposed, he talked on a telephone—a telephone relegated to obscurity under the stairs.

  He emerged. If Mrs. Weigand would not mind going up to the office? One flight up, and to the rear.

  “My dear Mrs. Weigand,” Myra Dedek said, and stood, very trim, behind a period desk, and in front of what was either a Picasso or something very like it. On the wall to her right as she faced Dorian there was a portrait of a can of beans. There was a can-opener beside it. On the opposite wall there was a canvas covered with straight black lines, which seemed vaguely to converge. It looked rather like a chart for the detection of astigmatism.

  “Richard Taylor, I hope,” Mrs. Dedek said. “And perhaps Steinberg. And three or four others I already have, in the small salon. You’ll be in good company. Six of yours, I’d say. Or perhaps more. In September, when people are coming back to town.”

  It took only a few minutes; agreement was surprisingly easy. Not fifty-fifty. Sixty-forty, with the sixty Dorian’s. And catalogue and advertising paid for by the gallery. No exclusive contract with the Dedek Galleries. The show to go on when the gallery reopened in September.

  There was, in fact, nothing which could not have been settled on the telephone. Dorian sat in a comfortable chair across the desk from Myra Dedek and fished in her handbag for a pack of cigarettes. Urged, she took a cigarette, instead, from a box Myra Dedek pushed toward her. A “D” was imprinted on the oval cigarette.

  “About now,” Myra Dedek said, “I usually treat myself to a small glass of sherry. Won’t you join me?”

  Dorian joined Myra Dedek in a small glass of sherry. She agreed with Myra Dedek that a glass of sherry was relaxing in late afternoon.

  “It’s a dreadful thing about poor Shack Jones, isn’t it?” Myra Dedek said. “So much to live for.”

  It was a dreadful thing about poor Shackleford Jones.

  “You were his dealer, weren’t you?” Dorian said. “I seem to remember two of his canvases. I thought they were hanging downstairs.”

  “They’re being cleaned,” Myra said. “They’d been hanging there forever. Perhaps now he’s dead collectors will be more—appreciative.”

  Dorian agreed that that was possible, even probable.

  “Bryant and Washburn have jumped the price on that one of his they have,” Dorian said. “At least, I think they have. The one he called ‘Cityscape.’ It’s a very fine—”

  “Bryant and Washburn!” Myra said, and her tone was astonished. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “A city rushing up toward the sky,” Dorian said. “Give me a sheet of paper.”

  “I’m sure you’re wrong,” Myra Dedek said, but slid across the desk a sheet of paper with “Dedek Galleries” printed at the top of it. No, engraved at the top of it.

  With quick pencil strokes Dorian sketched on the letterhead planes which reached irregularly toward the sky. (Or, at any rate, toward the words “Dedek Galleries.”) She turned the sheet toward Myra Dedek. “The shape of it,” she said. “What I remember of the shape of it. At the top a special kind of light.”

  Myra Dedek looked at the sketch and held it close to her eyes and then farther from them. Then she shook her head.

  “Nothing of his I ever saw,” she said. “And he wouldn’t have sold to a store. Not ever. You must be wrong, Mrs. Weigand. And, he was under contract to me. Was this paintin—” she waggled the sheet of paper—“was it signed?”

  “A squiggle. But I’m quite sure it spelled ‘Shack.’”

  Myra Dedek shook her head again, and again studied the sketch Dorian had made.

  “You can’t tell anything from that,” Dorian said. “I realize that.”

  “The composition,” Myra said. “Not at all like his, really. More like—” She leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling. “It does remind me of someone,” she said. “I can’t at the moment—wait, I think I can. A new man named Shayburn. Did a good many city scenes. And ‘Shayburn’ could look like ‘Shack,’ couldn’t it? The way they scrawl?”

  “The brushwork,” Dorian said. “The—oh, the feel of it.”

  “They derive from each other,” Myra said. “Especially when they’re starting in or just groping around for a style. Shayburn was quite young. You’re familiar with Jones’s work?”

  “I’ve seen a good deal of it,” Dorian said, and did not amplify.

  “He varied more than most,�
� Myra Dedek said. “And lately—was there a date on this painting you thought was his?”

  “Yes. Last year.”

  Myra looked again at the rough sketch Dorian had made to indicate the composition of the “Cityscape”; the upward thrust of it.

  “It has movement,” she said. “A great deal, really. From your version.” She continued to look at the sketch, and also to talk. “He was static last year,” she said. “Shack, I mean. It was part—part of his going downhill, really. Being painted out. Which was, I’m afraid, the reason he did such a dreadful thing. Killed himself.”

  She put the sketch face down on her desk and lighted a cigarette.

  “I told some detective that,” she said, and now looked across the desk at Dorian. “Your husband is a police officer, isn’t he?”

  Dorian nodded her head.

  “It seems so strange,” Mrs. Dedek said, “that they don’t accept the obvious. I suppose it’s merely that they’re not allowed to. Isn’t that it?”

  “They have to make sure.”

  “You know,” Myra said, “I found his body. It was—dreadful. I’d gone to look at his new work. Things he’d done while he was in Spain. And he was on the floor with blood all around and—and a revolver on the floor just beyond his hand. Where it had fallen after he shot himself.” She covered her eyes with a hand, the movement abrupt. “I’ll never get it out of my mind,” she said. “Never. Never!”

  She seemed to shiver momentarily.

  “I know it’s a dreadful thing,” Dorian said. “It will fade out.”

  “It was so obvious what had happened,” Myra Dedek said. “I can’t understand why …”

  She left the sentence unfinished and straightened her trim body in the chair.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s nothing to bother you with, is it? About this picture at the store. That’s something it’s easy enough to straighten out.” She looked at the watch on her wrist. She said, “Oscar’ll still be there,” and reached to her telephone and spun the dial. The number she wanted apparently was ready in her mind.