Murder For Art’s Sake

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  Mrs. Shackleford Jones had recovered consciousness. The physician attending her said she could be talked to.

  It is an easy walk from West Ninth Street near Sixth to St. Vincent’s Hospital, between Eleventh and Twelfth streets on Seventh. Mrs. Jones was in a private room on the third floor of one of the older wings. Detective Michael Flanagan was sitting on a straight chair outside the door. He plopped the chair down to four legs and stood up. He said that, from what they said, it was all right to go on in.

  Mrs. Jones looked even plumper in a hospital bed than she did out of it. Her head was extensively bandaged. But there was nothing wrong with her voice when she said, “So it’s you, is it? A lot of care you take of people here in New York. I might have been killed, for all you did about it.”

  “I was there at a little before seven,” Shapiro said. “Before the time you and Mr. Osgood had set.”

  “So I was ahead of time,” Mrs. Jones said. “It’s my late husband’s place, isn’t it? I’d a right to be protected, hadn’t I? The way you people do things in this city you make so much of!”

  Shapiro said he was very sorry. He said, “Suppose you tell me what happened, Mrs. Jones?”

  She had let herself in with her key. There had been nobody there. Nobody she saw, anyway. She realized now, of course, that there had been somebody lurking there. Hiding behind something. It had got so a person wasn’t safe anywhere in New York. All those muggings.

  Shapiro was patient. He said, “You had a list with you, I understand.”

  “Of course I had a list. The one he sent me.”

  “And you and Mr. Osgood planned to try to identify the pictures on the list. Your husband had given you no explanation of why he sent you the list?”

  “You seem to know all about it,” she said. “It was the way he was. Irresponsible. Years ago I found out what kind of man he was.”

  “You started to try to identify the pictures without waiting for Mr. Osgood to get there?”

  She had.

  “No order about any of it,” she said. “Just higgledy-piggledy. Also, the place needed a good cleaning. If Papa ran his store like that.” She started to shake her head and stopped that and said, “Ouch! These city doctors. Makes a person wonder if they know what they’re doing.”

  “This is a good hospital,” Shapiro told her.

  She said, “Huh!”

  Shapiro’s patience held. It led him to statements from which he managed to strip the verbal fringe.

  She had at first looked at the pictures nearest the door. None of them seemed to fit the descriptions on the list. But how on earth was a person to tell? She had worked her way back into the depths of the studio. There were racks there, and she had begun to take paintings out of the racks.

  She had heard someone behind her and had said something, assuming the person she heard was Jeremiah Osgood. “Took you long enough to get here,” was what she remembered she had said. Then there was something like a big flash, and the next thing she knew she was here in this place.

  “This sound you heard,” Shapiro said. “Somebody walking behind you?”

  She thought so. It was all “knocked out of her head.” And no wonder.

  “Could you have heard a window opening? Could that have been the sound? Or that and then somebody walking on the floor?”

  She thought just somebody walking.

  Heavy footsteps, as of a man? Or the lighter, sharper, footfalls of a woman?

  “What you mean is,” she told him, “whoever it was got away. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  He was afraid so. This list, she had carried it in her handbag? Taking it out now and then to look at it? Check a listing against a picture?

  Of course. What did he think? And why didn’t he just look in her handbag and find out. But then she said, “Oh!”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said, “I’m afraid your handbag is missing, Mrs. Jones.”

  She said, “What I would have expected. Just what I would have expected in a city like this.”

  There was more about the city like that, with considerable reference to the superiority of folkways in Emporia, Kansas. Of police-ways in particular.

  Shapiro’s patience held. He guided her back to what he wanted to know. Could she remember any of the titles, or descriptions if they were not titles, on the list? And any of the dates?

  The titles, descriptions—whatever they were—hadn’t meant anything. “Any more than what he called his paintings did.” She did remember one, anyway. “Composition With Figures.” It had been dated the previous year. And there were several others listed merely as “Composition,” with dates. No, she did not remember that more than one painting so described had been dated in the same year. And what had he meant by “Composition”? It didn’t tell a person anything about what a picture was about, did it?

  “They tell me that pictures aren’t necessarily about anything,” Shapiro said. “I don’t know what they mean, precisely.”

  “You and me.”

  “As for composition, I suppose it’s an arrangement of shapes in a certain way. In balance, perhaps.” He remembered some of Shackleford Jones’s paintings. “Or out of it,” he added.

  “Arrangements,” she repeated. “Like flower arrangements?”

  Shapiro didn’t know. Perhaps, in a sense.

  “We do those at the garden club,” Mrs. Jones said. “He listed several things he called just ‘Still Life.’ And—I do remember this —one called ‘Reclining Figure.’ Probably a woman with no clothes on. He was always after me to pose that way. When we were first married. I had a good figure. That I’ll say for myself.”

  “Did you pose?” Shapiro asked, and realized that, as usual, curiosity was leading into a dead-end street.

  “Certainly not,” she said. “What do you think I was?”

  A man’s wife, Shapiro thought, but did not say. Did she happen to remember a listing for a picture called “Cityscape?” What he could see of her face amid the bandages took on a puzzled expression, or he thought it did. She said, “Like fire escape?”

  “More,” Shapiro said, “like ‘landscape.’”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t remember anything like that. ‘Landscape.’ Yes, I think there was one called that. The date on it was —oh, three or four years ago. No, wait. It was ‘Landscape With Cat.’ Whatever that means. And there was something called ‘The Melting Clown.’ I tell you, the man wasn’t in his right mind. He never was, really. Not being good enough to get a job with the greeting card company did something to him, I always thought.”

  And probably, Shapiro guessed, always said. He felt a passing sympathy for the late Shackleford Jones.

  “I remember one other,” Isabelle Jones said. “It didn’t make any sense any more than the others did. Something called ‘Urban Rectangles.’ It was dated last year, I think. I mean, just the year. He was always vague about things like that.”

  She did not remember any other descriptions or titles from the list. She did remember how many paintings had been listed. If, of course, the list she had been sent was one of paintings. There had been thirty-two. She had counted.

  “Mr. Osgood said you plan to go back home,” Shapiro said. “We’d a little rather—”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m not going. Nobody’s going to scare me out of here until I find out what’s going on. You can bet on that, Lieutenant. Not that I won’t be glad to get out of this terrible city.”

  From a booth on the main floor, Shapiro dialed the number of the Weigand apartment. He got no answer.

  XIII

  Detective Anthony Cook told Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro that the Farmer dame was quite a dame. And that she had been in Little Great Smith Street on Wednesday morning and that she had seen Maxwell Briskie there and that she was certainly not on her way to Shack Jones’s studio and that she considered Briskie a louse, trying to drag her into it when he was in it himself up to the ears, and that she hadn’t mentioned being there because nobody had as
ked her. And because she had thought Maxie was a friend of hers. The louse.

  She had opened her apartment door to Cook only to the extent of the guard chain and looked at him and said, “Now what, for God’s sake?” She had added that she was tired of being badgered by cops. But then she had looked at Cook more carefully and said, “All right. Come on in.”

  She had been wearing a robe which, as she moved ahead of Cook into the living room and then turned to face him, only intermittently covered her long, slender body. Cook resolutely remembered he was a detective, on duty. And she had laughed at him and then had said, “Anyway, I guess you’re not one of the gay boys. Makes a nice change. What do you want, mister?” She laughed again. “Among other things,” she said.

  Cook brought his mind back from its rather pleasant wandering.

  “To know where you were Wednesday morning,” Cook said. “At about ten o’clock, Miss Farmer.” The “Miss Farmer” was to steady things.

  She sat down in a low chair and crossed long legs.

  (“Regardless,” Cook told Shapiro, across Shapiro’s desk in the offices of Homicide, Manhattan South. Shapiro said he had met Miss Rachel Farmer.)

  “Walking along Little Great Smith Street,” Rachel Farmer had told Cook. “About a block from Shack’s studio. I suppose Maxie passed the word along? He’s a louse, isn’t he?”

  Cook reserved comment. He said, “Going to Mr. Jones’s studio, Miss Farmer?”

  “I certainly was not. Did Maxie say I was? Trying to drag me into something to save his own hide. Do you want a drink? Because I do.”

  Cook said he did not want a drink, which was not strictly true.

  “Where were you going, Miss Farmer?”

  Rachel Farmer swirled out of the low chair, her silk robe swirling with her, at an indiscreet distance. She walked across the room and banged with a small fist against wood paneling. A section of the panel opened and Rachel reached into a cupboard and came out with a long-necked bottle. She poured what Cook took to be wine into a small glass and returned to the chair she had been sitting in. She swirled back into the chair and crossed long bare legs.

  (“Regardless,” Cook said. “Yes,” Shapiro said, “I got the point before, Tony.”)

  “Where were you going, Miss Farmer?” Cook asked again, in as much a cop’s voice as circumstances permitted.

  “To pose for Malcolm Serbin,” Rachel said. “You know his work, I expect? All coils, sort of. Except when he’s being an illustrator. He’s doing a nude coming out of the ocean. For a fish company.”

  It was warm in the living room, among other things. Cook wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “Take your jacket off if you want to,” Rachel told him. “Or aren’t you supposed to expose your revolver?”

  (“Kidding, sort of,” Cook told Shapiro. “As if we were playing games. What do you suppose she meant, ‘a fish company’?” “I don’t know, Tony. About Wednesday morning?”)

  She was there. She’d walked from Gay Street and was supposed to be at this Serbin’s place at ten. And about a block from Shackleford Jones’s studio she had run into Maxwell Briskie.

  “You didn’t tell us this before. Why?”

  “Because you didn’t ask me, mister. And because it didn’t have anything to do with anything.” She paused then, and sipped from her small glass. She said, “Come to think of it, maybe it did.” She put the glass down on a small table. She said, “I’ve always liked Maxie, mister. I didn’t want to drag him into something. But if he wants it the other way round.” She picked the glass up again and sipped from it.

  “All right,” she said, “he looked to me like he’d been in a fight with somebody. And that somebody had hit him on the side of the face. And he was walking fast. Almost running, I guess. He said, ‘Hi,’ and I said, ‘Hi, Maxie. Thought you were in —’ But he kept on going.”

  “Thought he was in what, Miss Farmer?”

  “Chicago. The night before he had said he was flying out there. Something about a mural he was maybe going to do.”

  “A bruise on his face? Or a cut?”

  It had been just a bruise, she thought. On the left side of his face, below the cheekbone. It had been “sort of blackish-purplish.”

  “Of course,” she said, “he’s a great one for going to gyms. He used to be a boxer, he says. Pretty good, to hear him tell it. For all he’s pint-size. Maybe he was boxing in a gym and somebody punched him.”

  “You didn’t see where he came from? I mean—out of a building somewhere?”

  She had not. But, yes, he was coming from the direction of the loft building in which Shack Jones had a studio.

  Cook had taken the address and telephone number of Malcolm Serbin, who had been doing a picture of a nude coming out of the ocean. For a fish company. After he had left Rachel Farmer’s apartment, and climbed a flight of stairs and knocked on the apartment door of Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell Briskie and got no answer, Cook had found a telephone booth. He had dialed the number Rachel had given him and Serbin had answered his telephone.

  Rachel Farmer had posed for him Wednesday morning. Yes, he thought she had got there somewhere around ten. Stayed a couple of hours. At ten dollars an hour.

  “Around ten?”

  She hadn’t punched a time clock, if that was what Detective Cook was getting at. Near enough to ten.

  “That’s about it,” Cook said. He looked at his watch. He said, “Want I should type it out tonight, Lieutenant? Because I haven’t had dinner and—well, I’ve sort of got a date.”

  Morning would be time enough for the formal report, Shapiro told Detective Anthony Cook.

  “Could be I’ll be down that way later,” Cook said. “Off-duty. Shall I have another shot at getting Briskie’s side of it?”

  “If you happen to be down that way.”

  “There’s an Italian restaurant around there I go to sometimes,” Cook said. “Good lasagna.”

  What a detective does when off duty is a detective’s business, providing he does nothing illegal and carries his gun. There is nothing illegal about eating lasagna. Cook was a youngish man and probably had a good digestion. Nathan Shapiro sighed and regarded the top of his desk, and thought of going home.

  But something fidgeted beneath the surface of that pleasant thought. Shapiro tried to probe beneath the surface. Probably, he thought, the discrepancy he fumbled for would stick out a mile to anybody else. Perhaps something about the picture which wasn’t by Shackleford Jones, but by a painter named Alan Shayburn, which had been called “Cityscape” and which no longer hung in the art gallery of Bryant & Washburn? Shapiro puzzled over it. There was something …

  Of course. And nothing much. “Urban Rectangles” and “Cityscape” might conceivably be different titles for the same picture. And obviously might not. Pictures are not “about” anything. He had, Shapiro thought, learned that, if little else.

  Probably the itching in his mind was not caused by the painting, which had been sold to somebody. It concerned something he had been told. He fumbled further. He began to feel that it was something he had been told by Maxwell Briskie, who had had a bruised face when he walked through Little Great Smith Street on Wednesday morning. Who had, further, gone back to Jones’s studio the next day.

  Shapiro searched his mind for the precise details of Briskie’s story of the two days, and found them, neatly filed. For, of course, what they were worth. There remained something which did not jibe with something else. He looked up the report Detective James O’Brien, of Precinct, had made concerning his brief interview with Myra Dedek when she was still in shock because of what she had walked in on. Shapiro tried to match things which wouldn’t match.

  He dialed the telephone number of Maxwell Briskie and let the telephone in Gay Street ring four times. He was about to give it up when Briskie answered. He was panting slightly. He said, “Hold it a minute, will you?” and Shapiro held it. “Had to run upstairs,” Briskie said. “Wind isn’t what it used to be. Who did you
say?”

  Shapiro repeated his name. He got “Oh,” for an answer, the inflection trailing down. Briskie was, Shapiro thought, disappointed.

  “Small point we’d like to clarify,” Shapiro said. “You be around for, say, half an hour or so?”

  He was asked what was the matter with the telephone.

  “Rather see you, if it’s all the same with you,” Shapiro said. “Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.” He waited a second. “Unless,” he said, “you’d rather come here. To West Twentieth.”

  “Come along,” Briskie said. “Bringing your small point.”

  Shapiro went downtown by subway. Gay Street was no longer difficult to find. As he turned at the jog in the middle of its block he saw a couple walking away from him toward Waverly Place. Rachel Farmer was almost, but not quite, as tall as Detective Anthony Cook, who was a youngish man with a good digestion. And who was not doing anything illegal. At the moment, anyway.

  Briskie had, Shapiro thought, been near the button in the hallway of his apartment. The lock release in the vestibule of the building buzzed admission while Shapiro’s finger was still on the doorbell. Briskie was waiting for him on the stair landing. He looked at Shapiro intently. He said, “Don’t see the rubber hose, Lieutenant.”

  “Left it uptown,” Shapiro told him, and followed him into the apartment. It was well lighted. It was Shapiro’s turn to look intently. No bruise he could see on Maxwell Briskie’s face. Perhaps Briskie healed quickly. Perhaps he was using some preparation which would cover a bruise. Shapiro didn’t think so.

  He told Briskie what Rachel Farmer had said about him.

  “Up to tricks again, Rache is,” Briskie said. “Full of tricks, the girl is. And sore because I’d squealed on her. See any signs of a bruise, Lieutenant?”

  He sat down, quickly, in a chair with a reading light beside it. He tilted his head so that the light fell on his left cheek. Shapiro looked at the face.

  “Now and then,” Briskie said, “the lady’s a malicious bitch. Mostly she’s just scatterbrained. Well?”