Murder For Art’s Sake

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  Shapiro, with plenty of time, walked on toward (he hoped) Little Great Smith Street.

  XII

  Shapiro climbed an insecure staircase. There were no lights behind the doors of IMPERIAL NOVELTIES, INC. or PERMA-SNAPS. On each landing of the loft building an electric bulb dangled, ineffectually, from a cord. When Shapiro stood in front of the door marked “Shack” his shadow fell on the lock as he groped Rachel Farmer’s studio key toward it. Finally, after some scratching around, he got the key into the lock. He then discovered he could have spared himself the groping. The door was not locked.

  It was not dark in the big studio. Day still is bright at a little before seven on a June evening. But shadows gathered in the room as if shadows were holding a convention there. Shapiro found a light switch and flicked it and some of the shadows fled, but others formed in other places.

  The air conditioning hummed. The police had decided to keep it in operation in case canvas and paint needed it. But, as he walked into the enormous room, feeling certain that he was alone in it, he felt a movement of air, as if a window were open somewhere.

  At the end of the room, he thought. One of the two narrow windows there. Not the one with the air-conditioning unit in it. That one, almost certainly, was unopenable. The other—the one which gave access to the fire escape Briskie had used when he had been interrupted in his search for the picture of his wife?

  Shapiro walked down the shadowy room, among the easels.

  The window was open—wide open. He leaned out of it and looked down, and thought he saw movement near the bottom of the fire escape. But it was only movement, and he could not be sure. His right hand had moved, by reflex, toward the shoulder holster under his jacket. He moved it away from there and used it to close the window. It went down more easily than he expected and landed with a bang. And—as if that had been a signal —someone moaned.

  It took him seconds to find Isabelle Jones, who lay on the floor behind a rack of paintings. He found another light switch and an overhead light went on and he crouched down beside her, and looked at the blood streaming from a head wound.

  The blood came fast. At first he thought that she, like her husband, had been shot in the head. But then he could not be certain. Scalp wounds bleed freely, even when they are not deep.

  She was unconscious now and not moaning. Perhaps the sound of the window’s closing had, for an instant, roused her.

  Shapiro found the telephone and dialed an emergency number and said what was wanted. Then he crouched again beside the unconscious woman, and used a handkerchief from his breast pocket to apply pressure to the bleeding wound. He applied it as gently as he could without making the pressure entirely ineffective.

  He thought, when he could see the wound more clearly, that she had been hit savagely with what might have been a metal rod. The blow had torn the scalp. There was no telling what it had done to the skull under the scalp. That was the reason Nathan Shapiro pressed so gently. If the skull of the plump little woman from Kansas was broken he did not want to press its shards into the softness of the brain.

  The handkerchief and the hand which held it grew red as Shapiro waited for the sound of sirens. It seemed a long time before he heard them. It was longer still before he heard feet on the wooden stairway.

  The first footfalls were the heavy ones of a cruiser sergeant and the patrolman who teamed with him. There was a washstand in this corner of the studio loft and what appeared to be a reasonably clean hand towel hung beside it. The patrolman soaked the towel in cold water and took over from Shapiro, who went to the washstand and flushed blood off his hands and shook them dry. Then there was the sound of more feet outside and three men in white came in, one of them with a folding stretcher under his arm, and one with a black bag in his hand. The ambulance surgeon took over from the patrolman. The wound was not bleeding so freely by then. But Isabelle Jones had not stirred.

  The intern from St. Vincent’s counted pulsebeats. He listened to a heart. He pushed eyelids up with a gentle finger and looked into eyes which did not look back at him. He used gauze partially to clean the bleeding wound and looked at it and bandaged the battered head.

  “Pulse is all right,” he said. “Slight heart murmur, but she’s probably always had that. Concussion. Could be a fracture. Depends on the kind of skull she’s got. Need X rays for that. All right, boys.”

  The “boys” put the stretcher on the floor and put Isabelle Jones on the stretcher.

  “Heavy one,” one of the white-clad men said. “And damn steep stairs. All right, Joe?”

  It was all right with Joe, and they carried the unconscious woman the length of the studio and out the studio door.

  “Who is she?” the sergeant asked, and looked around the studio. His comment on it was, “Jeeze!”

  Shapiro told him who the unconscious woman was. “Jones,” the sergeant repeated, and then, “Wait a minute, Lieutenant. Any relation to the artist who knocked himself off?”

  Shapiro answered that. He said, “You two look around and see if you can find her handbag. Big, black shiny thing, as I remember it.”

  It could, of course, be no more than that—could be a coincidence; could be merely that a passing burglar had come up a convenient fire escape to see what he could find, and had found a woman and slugged her—with a jimmy?—and grabbed her handbag and run for it. Possibly, Shapiro thought, when he heard me at the door, scratching around with the key.

  He went to the fire-escape window and lifted it, using a pencil to press with. It went up as easily as it had gone down. Shapiro leaned out, trying to touch nothing, and examined the frame of the window. No sign it had been prized up. The window catch was not broken and not latched. All anybody would have needed to do, probably, was to push up on the window frame and the window would conveniently have popped open.

  He looked at the fire-escape landing. Feet had scuffed in the sooty dust which is so major a part of the atmosphere of the city of New York. Maybe the lab boys could make more of the marks. They might even be able to guess at the size of the shoes which had made them. Perhaps they would be able to establish that two people had recently used the fire-escape landing and the iron stairs leading down from it into an areaway between this loft building and the next.

  Shapiro leaned out the window and looked down. The movement he had sensed rather than seen would have been near the foot of the fire escape. Perhaps he might, after all, have fired a warning shot in that general direction, after a shouted command. He didn’t, on the whole, think he should have. He might have hit something—man or woman or dog or cat. There is, to Shapiro’s mind, nothing defensibly inadvertent about the use of a handgun.

  “Want something, mister?” a heavy, policeman’s voice said behind him and Shapiro drew back into the studio. The cruise-car sergeant was standing near the distant door, confronting a tall lean man. Shapiro said, “All right, Sergeant,” and walked up the room. When he was near enough, he said, “Mr. Osgood?”

  “Certainly,” the tall man said. “What’s going on here? I had an—” He stopped and looked carefully at Shapiro. “Appointment,” he said. “If you’re Lieutenant Shapiro, with you and Mrs. Jones. Not, however, with the entire police force.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said, “I’m Shapiro.” He looked at the watch on his wrist. “You’re a bit late, Mr. Osgood. Seven the time was. It’s a quarter after.”

  “Waited for a customer,” Osgood said. “Who never showed up. What is this about, Lieutenant? Somebody break into Shack’s studio? Or—” he shrugged his shoulders—“hasn’t Mrs. Jones got here yet?”

  “Got here,” Shapiro said. “Been carried out of here. In Saint Vincent’s Hospital by now. In the emergency ward.”

  Unexpectedly, Osgood said, “Goodness!”

  “Come in,” Shapiro said. “Find something to sit on, if you can. And—remember where you were half an hour ago.”

  “I don’t really,” Osgood said, and looked at his own watch. “I have an—”

&
nbsp; “Come in,” Shapiro said, and sounded like a policeman.

  Osgood came into the studio. He took a handkerchief out and flicked the seat of a wooden chair. Then he sat on the chair.

  Shapiro went to help the uniformed men find a handbag. With them he looked behind things and under things and on top of things. It took them fifteen minutes to decide they were not going to find a shiny black handbag with, presumably, Isabelle Jones’s fingerprints on it.

  “Maybe,” the sergeant said, “she didn’t have one.” He considered this. “No,” he said, “she’d have had one. The guy who slugged her could have grabbed it. Maybe just some small-time burglar.”

  “Maybe,” Shapiro said. He heard more feet on the stairs. That would, probably, be a couple of men from Fingerprints. It was a couple of men from Fingerprints, and a man from the police lab.

  “Somebody,” Shapiro told them, “probably went out the window down there. Or in and out. Using a fire escape. Could be there were two men. You’ll find my prints on one of the crossbars, incidentally. The window was open and I closed it.”

  He got an, “O.K., Lieutenant,” from one of the men and nodded heads from the other two. He went back to Jeremiah Osgood, who did not look comfortable on the wooden chair.

  “I was in a taxi on Fifth Avenue,” Osgood said. “Stuck in traffic. There ought to be a law against trucks blocking the avenue at side streets. Pulling into it on a light when they know damn well the street’s blocked beyond.”

  “There is a law,” Shapiro told him. “So, half an hour ago you were in a taxi on Fifth Avenue.”

  “Suppose,” Osgood said, “you tell me what has happened to Mrs. Jones? To put her in the hospital.”

  “Somebody hit her on the head. At, apparently, a little before seven. About half an hour before you got here.”

  “The name of the man who drove the taxi is Morris Oblonsky,” Osgood said. “And I can give you his number. And, aren’t they required to keep some sort of record of where they pick passengers up and let them out?”

  New York hackers are required to keep such records. Passengers are not required to note the names of hackers or jot down medallion numbers. Osgood had unusual curiosity. Or was unusually foresighted.

  “He was reckless,” Osgood said. “I told him once or twice to take it easy. He didn’t. So I wrote down his name and number. Just in case. Do you insist that I stay here, Lieutenant? I have an appointment for eight-thirty. I had expected to have time to go home and change. It’s dinner and black tie.”

  “There are one or two points you might help us on,” Shapiro said. “I don’t like to inconvenience you but …”

  Osgood would tell him what. Osgood had an apartment on West Ninth Street, which wasn’t far. Unless Shapiro had to stay in the studio, why shouldn’t he go to the apartment with Osgood and they could talk there? Osgood didn’t know what he could tell the lieutenant, but it would be everything he could.

  Shapiro considered briefly and went with him, after telling the sergeant to see that the studio was locked up when they had finished with it. Not that it seemed to do much good to lock up the studio of the late Shackleford Jones. It was a most porous studio. He got Osgood’s telephone number and passed it along, as a telephone at which he could be reached if, for example, they turned up Mrs. Jones’s handbag.

  They were lucky with a cab, and to find a hacker who knew his way. Osgood had a studio apartment, complete with skylight, in the block on West Ninth between Fifth and Sixth, and Ninth Street turned out to be very different from Eighth. If the lieutenant would like a drink? A wave toward the bar. The lieutenant would not. If the lieutenant didn’t mind they could talk between rooms while Osgood changed. It was not, to Shapiro, an ideal arrangement. It was an arrangement which he could change if he needed to.

  So—how could Jeremiah Osgood help the New York police? Help them find the murderer of a good painter, since he assumed it came to murder.

  “When Mrs. Jones first asked you to appraise Jones’s work,” Shapiro said, his voice raised to reach the bedroom in which Osgood was changing, “you agreed to. Then you said—on your lawyer’s advice—you had changed your mind. Then you changed it again. Why?”

  “Talked to my lawyer when it appeared to be getting complicated. Followed his advice. Then Mrs. Jones called again and told me about this list. You know about that, I assume?”

  Osgood came to the door of the living room, suspenders dangling from dark blue dress trousers.

  “No,” Shapiro said.

  “Assumed you’d come across the original in his papers,” Osgood said. “What she has, she says, is a carbon. I haven’t seen it. She was to bring it along this evening and—” He stopped abruptly. Then he said, “That handbag you were all looking for?”

  “If she brought a list to show you, I’d assume she brought it in her bag,” Shapiro said. “A list of what?”

  Osgood said, “Minute,” from the bedroom. It was a little more than that. He came back with suspenders up and black tie on and a cummerbund around a trim waist. He carried a deep blue dinner jacket. In the living room he put it on, and was ready for a black-tie dinner.

  “Of paintings, I suppose,” Osgood said. “Titles and dates, at any rate. About thirty, she says. Sure you won’t have a drink?”

  Shapiro was sure he wouldn’t have a drink. Osgood poured scotch into a glass and added water and a single cube of ice. He came back and sat down facing the dark-haired, sad-faced lieutenant of detectives. When he talked, between sips from his glass, he talked with unexpected succinctness. He could, of course, pass on only what Mrs. Jones had told him.

  Between two and three weeks before she had got in the mail, with a New York postmark, a two-page typed list of titles and dates. It had been a carbon. With the typed sheets, but in long-hand, in pencil on typewriter paper, a brief message beginning, “Hi,” and signed “Shack.” She could quote the message, and had to Osgood. The message was: “Stick these in Papa’s safe for me, will you? Could be I’ll need them.” That was all. She had done what she was asked to do. “I could never make any sense out of him, anyway,” she had told Osgood—he said, sipping his drink, she had told him.

  She had telephoned her father the evening she got to New York. He had got the list out of his safe and mailed it to her airmail, special delivery.

  “She got it this afternoon,” Osgood said. “Got me on the telephone and told me about it. And—well, I got interested, Lieutenant. All my lawyer had said was that, if he were in my place, he’d stay out of it. I decided it wouldn’t do any harm to have a look at the list. And see the pictures which went with it.”

  “She hadn’t any idea why he had sent her the list?”

  Osgood had passed on all he had been told by Isabelle Jones.

  Would it be a usual thing for a painter to make a list of his paintings? Or, if there were only thirty titles on the list Jones had sent his wife, a partial list? Because, at a guess, there must be upwards of a hundred canvases, large and small, in Jones’s large studio.

  Osgood, a little elaborately, shrugged his shoulders.

  “Never know what one of them may do,” he said. “Take one, and he’s sensible and businesslike. Take another and you’d swear he was nuts. From what little I know of Jones I’d say he was—call it eccentric.”

  He regarded his glass.

  “There’s this,” he said. “Most of them, probably, would make a list of pictures they had chosen for an exhibit. Before they shipped them off, or the gallery sent somebody to collect them.” He smiled faintly at his glass. “A good many of them,” he said, “are suspicious of dealers. Think we’re out to do them in. Ours isn’t, what with one thing and another, a restful occupation.”

  “Would they have titles for their paintings?”

  “You mean on them? As a writer puts a title on a story? No. In their minds, Yes, I suppose so. Descriptions in their minds. Of course, they generalize. ‘Composition,’ or ‘Composition in Yellow.’ Or ‘Still Life With Flowers.’ Descri
ptions which might apply to a hundred paintings by as many painters.”

  “So the list, even if we had it, wouldn’t—”

  But Shapiro stopped, because Osgood was shaking his head.

  He completed the head shaking with the word, “No.”

  “With dates,” he said, “and most of them date. With even a general description, a man familiar with an artist’s work could pretty well tell what the painter had had in mind. Even a painter as modern as Shack was.”

  “You mean an expert could?”

  He could call it that.

  “If you had a copy of this list which Mrs. Jones probably has lost, if she’s lost her handbag, you’d be able to pick out the paintings he’d made the list of?”

  “I think so. For the most part, at any rate. Of course, if he just called a painting, say, ‘Still Life,’ and gave a dating year for it, and there were several others in the same year all called ‘Still Life’—well, nobody could know which one he had in mind. But maybe he’d describe one as—oh, ‘Still Life With Pitcher.’ That would help, of course. Or, as I said, ‘With Flowers.’”

  “You could tell, in Mr. Jones’s work, which was a pitcher, and which were flowers?”

  Shapiro spoke with doubt. Osgood laughed, and saw what Shapiro meant. He said, “Probably,” and added, “For the most part.” And he looked at his watch and then at Shapiro with raised eyebrows. He said, “The dinner’s on Park in the Nineties, Lieutenant. If there’s more, couldn’t we—”

  The telephone interrupted him and he walked the living room to answer it. He looked very much as a man going to a black-tie dinner on Park Avenue should look, or Shapiro supposed he did.

  “A Detective Flanagan. Says he’s at Saint Vincent’s.”

  Shapiro went to the telephone looking, he supposed, like a tired detective in a gray summer suit which, after a day as warm as this had been, undoubtedly needed pressing.