Murder For Art’s Sake

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  She said, “Good afternoon. Extension four twenty-one, please.” There was a moment of waiting. Dorian could hear the telephone crackling to itself. Then Myra said, “Mr. Bracken, please” and, after a moment, “I’ll hold on.”

  “Oscar Bracken,” she said, and put a hand over the mouthpiece. “He’s the curator there. Or whatever they call it at the stores. Yes, I’m waiting. It’s quite all right. Used to be here with me, you know. Yes, I’m holding on. Much more knowledgeable than poor Weldon will ever be. Not that Weldon doesn’t do all he can. Isn’t the most loyal soul—Oscar. Myra Dedek. Oh, fine. The thing is …”

  The thing was that a friend of hers had seen a painting in the Bryant & Washburn gallery that she thought was one of Shackleford Jones’s. She knew it couldn’t be, but …

  There was the sound of a man’s voice from the telephone. The words were indistinguishable.

  “Yes,” Myra said. “It’s really dreadful. About this painting—it’s called ‘Cityscape,’ my friend says. And she thought she recognized the signature as Shack’s. I told her that wasn’t possible. That Shack never sold to the stores. It’s—oh, say to settle a bet. He never did, did he?”

  This time Dorian could distinguish the words of the answer. “Not to us,” the man said.

  “You know the picture she means?”

  The deeper voice sounded again. The words were no longer distinguishable.

  “From the description she gives me, that’s the one,” Myra said. She began to nod her head, still holding the phone to her ear. “I was sure that was it,” she said. “I win my bet, don’t I? I thought it might be a Shayburn. I knew it couldn’t be Shack.”

  The male voice rumbled again.

  “I know you know about the contract, Oscar,” Myra said. “I know Bryant and Washburn wouldn’t dream. And that you of all people wouldn’t, Oscar. I know how careful you are. Who better?”

  The male voice again; the words indistinguishable again.

  “Perhaps the styles are a little similar,” she said. “I’ll tell my friend that. Has anybody else made the same mistake?”

  Dorian could hear the answer this time. The answer was, “No.”

  “Not anybody?”

  “Not anybody.”

  Myra Dedek hoped she had not dragged Oscar Bracken away from a customer. She knew how hard customers were to come by in the summer. She said, “And you take care, Oscar,” and put the telephone in its cradle.

  “Shayburn,” she said needlessly. “Dear Oscar says the styles are similar and that the signatures might be anything. Even to an eye as good as yours, dear. It’s a perfectly natural—”

  The telephone rang and Myra picked it up. Again the sound from the receiver was the scratch of a male voice.

  “Yes, Weldon,” Myra Dedek said. “I think we may as well. Of course, we mustn’t lock Mrs. Weigand in, must we? And you’ll remember about the alarm, won’t you? And to switch the phone to my apartment?”

  She said, “Good night, then,” and put the telephone back in its cradle and stood up behind her desk. Dorian crushed her cigarette out in a tray and stood too. Myra Dedek was glad, so very glad, that some of Mrs. Weigand’s work would be in the exhibit. Mrs. Weigand—“I always think of you as Dorian Hunt, really”—must choose for the show only the things she herself liked best.

  And—would it be at all possible for her to send them around the next day? Ten or twelve to choose from, if she had so many she wanted to show. So that, during the rest of the summer, she—“and dear Weldon, of course”—could get to work on the catalogue and the advertising? So that everything would be ready when the gallery reopened in September? She realized the notice was short, but…

  Dorian could.

  There was no one in the downstairs showroom. Weldon Williams was, presumably, setting the burglar alarm. Dorian went out of the sedate four-story building which housed the Dedek Galleries.

  Weldon Williams was not setting the alarm. He was standing by the curb, evidently looking for a taxi with its roof light on. Two came in sight and he waved and the first one pulled in, stopping the other behind it and itself stopped by traffic ahead. Williams said, “Here you are, Mrs. Weigand. Just in time,” and opened for her the door of the first cab. For a moment, Dorian thought he was about to take her arm, assist her into the low cab. He stopped short of that, but he closed the door for her and smiled and nodded at her through the open window.

  The taxi still was blocked. Dorian looked at her watch. It was a little before five; Bryant & Washburn would be open for half an hour. She said, “Bryant and Washburn, please,” to the taxi driver, who turned in his seat and said, “Where, lady?” She repeated her directions.

  “You’ve got Dotty all upset,” Maxwell Briskie told Shapiro as he entered Shapiro’s cubbyhole. Then he turned with quick grace and said, “Thanks, officer,” to the uniformed patrolman who had shown him the way to the headquarters of Homicide, South. He took three steps needed to bring him to Shapiro’s desk and stood in front of it and smiled down at the long-faced man. Shapiro said, “Sit down, Mr. Briskie. Sorry I disturbed your wife. How?”

  “All this fuss about the painting poor old Shack did of her. Feels she gave you the wrong impression about that. Left you feeling we were annoyed with Shack about it.” He sat in the wooden chair Shapiro indicated. “And that you’re looking around to find people who were annoyed with Shack. Ergo, that you don’t think he killed himself.” He continued to smile cheerfully across the desk. “Be simpler that way, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I did get the impression you were both, as you put it, annoyed with Mr. Jones about the painting of your wife. Just of your wife’s face, she says.”

  “Attack of modesty,” Briskie said. “Of course she posed for the figure, too. Why not?”

  Shapiro sighed.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Briskie,” he said. “Why did she deny it?”

  “Thought you’d get wrong ideas,” Briskie said. “Think there was something—let’s call it personal—involved. You do think somebody killed Shack?”

  “We’re looking into the possibility,” Shapiro said.

  “Of course you are,” Briskie said. “Sticks out a mile, wouldn’t you say? Ergo, looking for suspects. Suspects with motives. She posed for the picture. Thinks you might take that to mean she slept with Shack. And that I got annoyed and plugged him. Do you think that, by the way?”

  “We’re investigating a good many possibilities,” Shapiro told him. “Not jumping to any conclusions. I take it you didn’t come here to confess, Mr. Briskie?”

  Briskie laughed at that.

  “To murder? Not likely, is it? For the record—I wasn’t jealous of Shack. For the same record, wouldn’t have shot him if I had been. Might have cuffed him around a bit. I suppose you think I couldn’t have?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Shapiro said. He thought the quick small man who sat opposite him was disappointed by that. Small men are often sensitive. Shapiro softened it. “I take it you’ve been a boxer, Mr. Briskie?”

  “Few years ago,” Briskie said. “Amateur. Featherweight. It isn’t always a matter of size, Lieutenant.”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “That’s what you came to tell me, Mr. Briskie? That you weren’t jealous of Mr. Jones? Didn’t kill him. Because you thought your wife’s not very convincing denial that she had posed in the nude for Mr. Jones would give a conventional person like me the wrong idea?”

  “Mincing word, ‘nude,’” Briskie said and looked thoughtfully at Shapiro. “Or did I say that before? As to the other, I thought things could do with a bit of straightening out.”

  It could hardly, to Nathan Shapiro, have been put more mildly. He said, “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Briskie. Good idea to straighten things out. Anything else you want to straighten out?”

  Briskie looked at him intently, his eyes narrowed.

  “You think there’s something else?” he said, after he had, seemingly, studied Shapiro’s long, sad face. His voice
, which had been noticeably cheerful, changed; became deeper.

  “I gather you do,” Briskie said.

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Wednesday, Mr. Briskie. The day you weren’t in Chicago. Another false impression your wife might have given me, wasn’t it?”

  “What did you do?” Briskie asked. “Check flight passenger lists?”

  “Talked to a Mr. Halpern,” Shapiro said. “About you and Mr. Colbert. Who came down with a virus. Do you want to consult counsel, Mr. Briskie? You have the right, you know. The Supreme Court’s rather firm about it.”

  Again Briskie looked at him intently across the desk. Then he shook his head.

  “Believe it or not,” he said, “I’ve no reason to hide behind anything—lawyer or law or anything. Also, Shack was a damned good painter, for my money. If somebody killed him—” He ended that with a shrug of his shoulders.

  “All right,” Shapiro said. “Where were you Wednesday?”

  “Several places,” Briskie said. “Kennedy International, where Colbert caught up with me by phone and called it off. In my studio, working. I’ve got a loft a couple of blocks from where Shack had his. And—O.K., in Shack’s studio. And he was fine when I talked to him and when I left him. No holes in him.”

  “Again,” Shapiro said, “so you’ll be straight about it. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “That easy?”

  “Well,” Shapiro said, “if I got the idea you were withholding material information I could—”

  “I know,” Briskie said. “The material witness bit. All right. I decided to drop by and make another pitch. About this painting of Dotty. Because he’d planned to show it once and—” He shrugged again. “You couldn’t tell what Shack might decide to do next,” he said. “If he decided it was good for Shackleford Jones. So…”

  So, he told Shapiro, he had decided to have one more go at buying the painting and had gone to Jones’s studio on the chance he might be there. There was no good—there was never any good —in trying to get Shack on the telephone. Unless he expected a call, he didn’t answer the telephone.

  There was no sign Go Away on Jones’s door and the door was not locked. Under those circumstances, one pulled the door open and went in. Briskie pulled the door open and went in, and Jones was standing in front of an easel working on a sketch.

  “One of Miss Farmer?”

  It could have been. Most of the time Shack wasn’t representational. “The one of Dotty was an exception.” Anyway…

  Shackleford Jones had turned from his work and said, “Now who the—oh, it’s you, Maxie. I’m not taking any pupils today.”

  Which had been, Briskie explained, a gag. It was, with Jones, rather a running gag for fellow painters. He thought it was funny, and his friends pretended to. Not, usually, with any special enthusiasm.

  “All right,” Briskie said—now told Shapiro he had said—“what’s the least you’ll take for it, Shack?”

  Shack had, for a moment only, pretended he did not know what Briskie was talking about. But then he said, “Oh, still fussing about that picture of Dotty?”

  Briskie said, “How much, Shack?”

  It was good, Shackleford Jones told him; damned good. Look good on any wall.

  “Wall behind a bar,” Briskie told him. “How much, Shack?”

  “Ought to ask you five thousand,” Shack Jones said. “Especially after that crack. You’re the one who paints murals, Maxie. Anyway, you probably haven’t got five thousand. What about five hundred?”

  It was, Maxwell Briskie told Shapiro, more than he and Dotty wanted to pay. He had told Jones that. But it was not more than they could pay to avoid the “snickering” which would go about town if Jones showed the picture. They had, however, finally settled on three hundred, with the stipulation that the signature be painted out. “Because you might leak it out that you’d got a Shack for a measly three hundred.”

  The picture wasn’t, obviously, one to carry unwrapped through the streets. Jones thought he had wrapping paper somewhere, and started toward the rear of the studio to find it. He was halfway down the long loft when the telephone rang. He went on, more quickly, and out of Briskie’s sight, behind a canvas on one of the easels. But he was not out of hearing.

  Shackleford Jones said, “Oh, it’s you, is it?” To Briskie he had sounded annoyed. There was an interval during which Briskie assumed the caller was talking. Then Jones said, “Come along then. And see that you can,” and put the receiver back and, Briskie thought, put it down hard. Then Jones came back up the studio. “He always,” Briskie said, “walked as if he owned the earth.”

  “Can’t fool around wrapping it up now,” Jones said, when he was halfway up the studio. “Got somebody coming. Come back tomorrow and get the damn picture. And bring a check.”

  “He was peremptory as hell,” Maxwell Briskie told Shapiro. “As if, all of a sudden, he was sore about something. I said, ‘How about this afternoon?’ and he said, ‘Tomorrow, like I said. If you really want it.’ I didn’t want to rub him the wrong way, at least until I got the picture.”

  So Briskie said—now said he had said—“Tomorrow it is,” and left.

  “When was this?” Shapiro asked him. “Wednesday morning about when?”

  Somewhere around ten, Briskie told him. Probably a little after ten.

  “You said he didn’t always answer the telephone,” Shapiro said. “Unless he expected a call. You think he expected this one?”

  “Acted like it.”

  “And that, after he got the call, he was, as you put it, ‘sore about something.’”

  “Sounded like it.”

  “You say ‘all of a sudden.’ He hadn’t been annoyed before?”

  “He was always a scratchy sort of bastard. Particularly if he was interrupted while he was working. But no, I’d say he was about at his usual pitch.”

  “You didn’t get the impression he was depressed?”

  Briskie had not. After the call he was annoyed, but only that, so far as Maxwell Briskie could tell.

  “If you mean, Did he seem like a man who was going to kill himself? the answer is No. Not that I know how a man would act just before he killed himself.”

  “You didn’t go back later that day?”

  Briskie had not. He had gone out of the loft building and walked toward his own studio. And…

  “I suppose I’d better tell you this. So as not to withhold material information. About a block—block and a half—from Shack’s place I ran into Rachel Farmer. I said ‘Hi’ and she said ‘Hi, Maxie.’”

  “She was going toward Mr. Jones’s studio?”

  “In that direction. But three or four painters have studios around there. Rent’s cheap. God knows it ought to be. She poses for a lot of people. Could have been going anywhere. All right, I did think that perhaps she was the one who had called Shack. And I suppose you think I’m a heel to drag her into it.”

  Shapiro said he didn’t. He did not mention the possibility of red herrings. He said, “I take it you didn’t go back the next day? To pay for the picture and pick it up? Why? Because you’d heard, somewhere, that Mrs. Dedek had found Mr. Jones dead?”

  “I could say that, couldn’t I?” Briskie said. He spoke slowly, and there was uncertainty in his tone, or Shapiro thought there was. “That I heard it on the radio. It was on the radio, you know. Maybe I’d better say that, Lieutenant.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Shapiro said, “unless it’s true, Mr. Briskie. I take it it isn’t true?”

  “All right,” Briskie said. “I was there, Lieutenant. I—I’m not making myself sound too good, am I? All right. I found him before Myra did. I…”

  He had gone to Shack’s studio a little before ten o’clock Thursday morning. “With a check in my pocket, and a roll of wrapping paper under my arm.” Again, the door to the studio was not locked, and again, after knocking and not being answered, Briskie had pulled it open. He had taken two or three steps inside and seen Shackleford Jones’s b
ody on the floor. With blood around it. “A hell of a thing to walk in on.”

  He had, he said, been certain that Shack Jones was dead. “From the way he was lying. You can tell if—well, if somebody’s been dead long enough.” But, staying as much as he could out of the congealed blood, he had walked to the body to make sure. He had touched one of the dead hands and found it cold. And then, to the surprise of the man he talked to, Briskie seemed momentarily to break up. A kind of shudder went through his slim body; he made both hands into fists and held them before his face.

  “Damn it all,” he said, and his voice, too, shook. “The hand I touched was the hand Shack painted with. Damn it to hell. The hand he painted with.”

  After a moment he took his own hands down and took a deep breath and then his body no longer shook. ‘Sorry,” he said. “He was a good painter, Lieutenant. Ought to have had years to paint in.”

  “And to live in,” Shapiro said. “Go on, Mr. Briskie.”

  Certain Jones was dead, Briskie had started toward the rear of the studio and toward the telephone. But then he had turned back and gone to the door and pressed the button which activated the snap lock.

  “Damned if I know why I did that,” Briskie said and looked at Shapiro, who said, “Don’t you, Mr. Briskie?”

  There was a considerable pause.

  “All right,” Briskie said. “I didn’t want to be walked in on. Because I thought, I call the police and they start rummaging around and they’ll find the picture of Dotty and somebody will recognize it and—well, get the notion Dotty thought you’d got. So…”

  So he decided to find the picture and wrap it up and get it out of there. After that, he told Shapiro, he was going to telephone the police from some other place. Shapiro could believe that or not.

  Nathan Shapiro didn’t, particularly. He thought that the Briskies were people who preferred to stay out of unpleasant things, whether they had special reason to or not. He also thought that they were by no means unique in this.

  “It didn’t work out that way, evidently,” Shapiro said. “Because the police were called after Mrs. Dedek found the body. And not by you.”