He picked up the portfolio. It did not seem awkward for him to carry. Of course, he evidently lugged much heavier things—framed paintings among them—in the course of his duties at the gallery. He carried the portfolio toward the stairs which Dorian had climbed the day before.
She hesitated for a moment and looked around the room. It was impossible to be in a room of paintings without looking around it.
Now there was not much to see; two of the walls were bare of pictures. Those now, presumably, were in the air conditioning, and behind the locks, of the gallery vault. The one Williams had been taking down was one of three remaining on that wall.
It was a rather large painting—a painting of curving lines and softened colors. At first neither lines nor colors seemed more than design. Then, partially, elusively, they shaped themselves into something more. What was perhaps a man emerged from the canvas.
If a man, a dissolving one, outlines of face and body indistinct; a man, if a man, in slow collapse. A man, if a man, who wore a conical hat, like a dunce cap. The cap, if a cap, was dissolving, too. Was melting. Melting. That was the word. It was a word suddenly very clear in Dorian’s mind.
“Are you coming, Mrs. Weigand?” Weldon Williams said, from the foot of the stairs.
For a moment, Dorian continued to look at the picture. She could not make out the signature from where she stood. But she was almost certain that the signature, if she could make it out, would confirm what she already was quite sure of. She would tell Nathan Shapiro how sure she was.
Dorian joined Weldon Williams at the foot of the staircase. She walked up it ahead of him.
XV
There was no place to park in the Seventy-ninth Street block. Cook wheeled the police car slowly through it and waited for lights to change and rolled on into the next block. They were lucky near the end of it; a car pulled out ahead and left a space against the curb. Cook backed the car into it. It was too close to a fire hydrant, as the car which had left a vacancy had been. That couldn’t be helped. They walked back the way they had come.
They were almost at the avenue when Shapiro said, “Wait a minute, Tony,” and walked back several cars and leaned down between two of them so he could see the license number on a Buick. It had been a hunch; the car was one of many thousands of Buicks of the same model and color. But it was a good hunch. They walked on until they came to the white four-story building which, with the utmost discretion, admitted to being the Dedek Galleries. A station wagon was parked in front of it.
Shapiro tried the knob of the reticent green door and nothing came of that. They looked through the glass of the door and looked into a large, lighted room. It was empty. Most of the walls were bare. Shapiro looked for a bell push and found none and knocked on the door and that, too, came to nothing.
“Could be we’re late,” Cook said and Shapiro sighed, thinking that all too probable, and knocked again. He knocked several times again, each time more loudly. Cook leaned down and examined the doorknob, which had a keyhole in it. He said, “I’ve got the gimmick. Want I should?”
“Not yet,” Shapiro said, and knocked again on the glass of the small green door.
Mrs. Myra Dedek appeared from somewhere in the rear of the room and walked across it briskly, and Shapiro knocked again on the door, using a key against the glass. He got a fine sharp sound but no response to it, although he thought that Mrs. Dedek turned her head a little as if she looked toward the door. But if she did she apparently saw no one beyond it. She walked, still briskly, to a flight of stairs at one side of the room and up the stairs.
“Maybe she’s deaf,” Cook said, and Shapiro said, “Could be,” and knocked again. Using the gimmick was the last resort; using gimmicks to open locked doors is no more legal for policemen than for anybody else. It makes a bad impression. Shapiro tapped with his key, almost hard enough to break the glass. Which would not have been legal, either. After several minutes, something did come of this. Weldon Williams came of it—came down the stairs Myra Dedek had gone up. He came to the door and stood on the other side of it and caressed his beard. Then he shook his head. Then, leaning close enough to the door so that his voice carried through it, he said, “Closed for the summer.”
Williams had a poor memory for faces, Shapiro thought. Maybe he was shortsighted. Shapiro took his badge out of a pocket and held it against the glass. He reinforced the suggestion with the word, “Police,” spoken loudly. Williams removed his right hand from his beard to the doorknob and turned and the snap lock clicked. He opened the door.
He seemed surprised to see Shapiro and Cook. He said, “Lieutenant somebody, isn’t it? We’re closed for …”
But then he shrugged, and Shapiro and Cook followed him into the lighted, empty room.
“Mrs. Weigand here?” Shapiro said.
Williams looked surprised again and shook his head.
“Arranged to meet her,” Shapiro said. “Probably she’ll be along. Mrs. Dedek here?”
“Upstairs,” Williams said. “But—”
“I’d like a few words with her,” Shapiro said. “Point or two to clear up. About her finding—”
He stopped because Myra Dedek was coming down the stairs. When she was at the bottom of them she said, “I told you I heard somebody,” and said that to Weldon Williams, with reproach. Then, to Shapiro, she said, “There are so many things to do when we’re closing for the season,” and, after a momentary pause, added, “Lieutenant.” She paused again and said, “I suppose some more questions. I hope it won’t take too long.”
“It shouldn’t,” Shapiro said. He looked around the room. There were several benches on which, presumably, prospective customers could sit and consider paintings. There were also a few chairs. He said, “Rather expected to find Mrs. Weigand here, Mrs. Dedek.”
“Did you?” Myra Dedek said. “She was here. Brought in some sketches for a show. But she left an hour ago, didn’t she, Weldon?”
“More than that, I’d think,” Williams said. “Just popped in and dropped her portfolio and popped out again. Didn’t say anything about expecting you, Lieutenant. Or Mr.—” He looked at Anthony Cook, who helped him by saying, “Cook.”
Williams stroked his beard and looked at Myra, rather as if awaiting instruction.
“I’m sure you can get on with what you’re doing, Weldon,” she said, and then turned to Shapiro and said, “Can’t he?”
“Rather he didn’t,” Shapiro said. “Why don’t the two of you sit down some place? Unless your office, Mrs. Dedek?”
Her office was a “terrible mess.” He had said it shouldn’t take long. But …
She said, “Come on, Weldon. Seems there’s no help for it,” and crossed the room to one of the benches. Williams followed her and they sat side by side. Shapiro pulled a chair in front of them and sat on it and saw, without appearing to see, that for a moment Williams’s hand touched a hand of the woman beside him. A touch of reassurance?
Cook leaned against a wall and took his notebook out.
“If it’s about that picture Dorian was so mixed up about,” Myra Dedek said. “I suppose she told you about that mistake of hers? She’s been quite persistent about it, Oscar Bracken tells me.”
“The one that wasn’t by Mr. Jones,” Shapiro said. “No, not primarily about that, Mrs. Dedek. About your discovery of. …” He paused. “Come to that,” he said. “Speaking of Mr. Bracken. You expect to get the job you asked him about, Mr. Williams?”
Williams repeated the word “job” with a rising inflection and apparent astonishment.
“Way I understand it,” Shapiro said. “May have got it wrong.” He sighed. “Often do,” he said. “Job in the Bryant and Washburn art gallery for the summer, I understood you asked about. While this gallery is closed.”
“Weldon,” Myra said. “Did you really? With all the things you promised to help me with?”
Williams caressed his beard again. He seemed to Shapiro to be very fond of it.
“Just for a
few hours a day, Mrs. Dedek,” Williams said. “Still have plenty of time for other things. Anyway, I gather he hasn’t anything open.”
“I should hope not,” Myra Dedek said. She looked intently at her assistant. (Who had patted her hand in reassurance?) “I’m really surprised, Weldon.”
“Happened to be in the store,” Williams said. “Went up to take a look at the gallery and ran into Oscar. Just a spur of the moment thing. Surprised old Oscar thought it worth mentioning to the police.”
“Heard you were there,” Shapiro said. “Wondered about it. We wonder about a lot of things. Get us nowhere for the most part. How did Mrs. Weigand’s hands look, Mrs. Dedek?”
“Hands? Whatever … ?”
“Almost got run down by a bus outside the store,” Shapiro said. “Banged her hands up a little. Apparently stumbled on the curb or something.”
“Lieutenant,” Myra Dedek said, and for the first time her tone was sharp, almost combative. “I told you we had a hundred things to do. Do you have to waste our time this way? If Dorian Weigand’s hands bother you, whyn’t you ask her?”
“Sorry,” Shapiro said. “I realize I’m wandering. Apt to, they tell me. Nothing to do with you, I realize. Or Mr. Williams. Did happen about the time you were in the store, Mr. Williams. Or leaving it. Police cars. An ambulance. Thought you might have seen it.”
“No. Can’t say I did.”
His hand did go back to his beard.
“She had a notion somebody pushed her,” Shapiro said, and shook his head. “Given to notions apparently.”
“She must be,” Myra said. “This nonsense about the picture she thought Shack had done. Urban something or other, or something like—”
She stopped rather suddenly.
“‘Cityscape,’” Shapiro said. “The title of Mr. Shayburn’s painting. The title the store gave it, anyway. But I don’t want to waste your time. What I came to ask you, will you tell me again about going to Mr. Jones’s studio? Hate to bring back such an unpleasant experience, but there’s a point I’m not too clear about.”
“I told the detective—”
“I know you did. Have to go over and over things. As exactly as you can, Mrs. Dedek.”
She couldn’t see why the police didn’t get things right the first time. However …
“He’d told me he had some new canvases he wanted me to look at. I happened to be down his way—”
“You didn’t telephone him first? To be sure he’d be there? But, then, you had a key, didn’t you? Didn’t matter whether he was there or not. You could tell him your reactions to the new canvases that evening, if he wasn’t at the studio.”
“There was never any point in calling him,” Myra Dedek said. “He didn’t answer the telephone.”
And then, for an instant, her eyes narrowed as she looked at the sad-faced lieutenant of detectives.
“What do you mean, ‘that evening’?” she asked him.
“Probably got something mixed up,” Shapiro said. “Afraid I do sometimes. You went to the studio and … ?”
“Knocked at the door. Used my key and opened the door a little and called his name. When he didn’t answer I opened the door wider and saw—” She put her hands over her eyes for a moment. “Saw him lying there,” she said. “And the gun on the floor. And the—the awful blood.”
“Bad thing to walk in on,” Shapiro said. “Hate to have to make you remember it, Mrs. Dedek. You didn’t go into the room? To make sure he was dead?”
She said, “No,” and then again, “No!” She said, “I knew he was dead. You could tell from—from the way he was lying. I think I screamed and then—then called for help. Down the stairs. And some man, after a long time, heard me and came. I told the first policemen all this. Why do you keep making me go over it?”
“Just to be sure I’ve got it straight,” Shapiro told her. “You know a man named Briskie, Mrs. Dedek? Painter. Does murals, I understand.”
She knew his work. Thought she had met him. And why on earth …?
“He’s told us an odd story,” Shapiro said. “We get a lot of them. Not very believable, some of them. Mr. Briskie says he was at Jones’s studio Thursday, Mrs. Dedek. Says he found Jones’s body before you did. Had gone there to buy a painting, he says. Anyway, after he found Jones dead, he says he went looking for this picture. Not very likely, of course. You didn’t see him there, obviously.”
“There wasn’t anybody there. There couldn’t have been.”
“Well,” Shapiro said, “it’s a big barn of a place. Lots of things a man could hide behind, if he had some reason to want to hide. And you didn’t really go into the studio, did you? Didn’t look around it for anything. Like, say, a list of paintings?”
She did not know what he was talking about. She had done only what she had just told him—stood at the door, and …
“According to Briskie’s unlikely story,” Shapiro said, “he was in the rear of the studio. Heard somebody knock at the door and then use a key. And call Jones’s name from the doorway. Call it very loudly, he says. And then, while he was still behind something in the rear of the room, he says he heard someone walking around for—oh, for perhaps a minute. A woman’s heel taps, he says.”
“Not mine, if that’s what you’re getting at. As for the list—” She broke off.
Shapiro did nothing to indicate he had heard her last four words.
“Briskie,” Shapiro said, “told me he looked around whatever he was behind and saw who was walking around the room. And —he says it was you, Mrs. Dedek. You’d gone back to the door by the time he saw you, according to this story of his. Were standing in the doorway, screaming. But he’s quite certain that before you stood in the doorway and called for help you had walked over to Jones’s body.”
“He’s lying. I—why would I go over to poor Shack’s body? When I could see from the door—” Suddenly she covered her face with her hands and her body shook. Weldon Williams put a sustaining hand on her shoulder. “All I could bear to see,” Myra Dedek said, and took her shielding hands down from her face.
Then she stood up suddenly.
“So that’s it,” she said. “He was killed. And Maxwell Briskie killed him, didn’t he? Because of that picture poor Shack did a long time ago of Max’s wife. And was going to show until I talked him out of it. And—of course! You’ve known it all along, haven’t you? He went back Thursday to see—to see that he hadn’t slipped up—hadn’t forgotten something which wouldn’t fit in with suicide. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “I think that was very probably the reason for the Thursday visit, Mrs. Dedek. Murderers do get to worrying. Sometimes decide to tidy things up. Or be sure they are tidy. As for the list—what, Mrs. Dedek? I’m afraid I interrupted something you started to say.”
But then he was himself interrupted. Somebody knocked on the glass of the street door. Both Myra Dedek and Weldon Williams started to get up, but Nathan Shapiro was ahead of them. He said, “Probably Mrs. Weigand,” and took long strides to the door and opened it.
It was bright outside and Oscar Bracken’s eyes apparently did not adjust immediately to the relatively dimmer light inside.
He said, “Here’s the damn thing, and from now on you two can count me—”
Then he looked at Shapiro and stopped.
“Out,” Shapiro said, finishing the sentence for him.
Bracken had put the “damn thing” down on the floor so that it leaned against the wall. It was a framed picture, wrapped in brown paper, tied up with cord.
Williams and Myra Dedek had crossed the room side by side and Myra spoke from a little distance.
“I didn’t mean you had to bring it yourself, Oscar,” Myra said. “Such a big, awkward thing. I could have sent a messenger over for it. It was merely because I wouldn’t be here Monday that I couldn’t wait for the parcel service. And I did want to get it into the vault for the summer. Weldon?”
“I’ll take it down,” Weldon Will
iams said and reached for the picture.
“Let’s unwrap it first,” Shapiro said. “I always like to unwrap presents.”
He put a hand in his pocket, fingers searching for a knife to cut the heavy cord. And Weldon Williams grabbed the awkward parcel the painting made and ran with it.
“You fool!” Myra Dedek called to him, yelled after him. “You impossible fool!”
“Hold them, Tony,” Shapiro said, not so loudly but loudly enough. “Mr. Bracken’s going to want to talk.”
He said the last as he ran after Williams, who moved fast for a man carrying an awkward parcel—who ran under a stairway. Then he ran downstairs to the basement before Shapiro caught up with him.
Williams stood in a wide corridor and had dropped the framed picture, which lay on the floor behind him.
He had a steel bar in his right hand and held it by the notched crook. A tool for wrenching open wooden crates, Shapiro thought, as Williams lifted the tool-turned-to-weapon and started toward him.
Shapiro had to shoot the steel rod out of Weldon Williams’s hand, which was a little risky, since bullets ricochet in confined places. The rod jumped out of Williams’s hand, and the hand dropped down with the shock of the blow.
The bar flew the length of the short corridor and clattered with violence against a metal door at the end of it.
“Open it,” Shapiro told Williams, and kept his revolver pointed. Williams shook his stunned right hand and hesitated.
“Get going,” Shapiro said and moved the revolver a little.
Williams got going.
He did not need a key to open the metal door of the gallery vault. It had a snap lock. There was no knob on the inner surface.
“It took you rather long,” Dorian Weigand said, and walked out of the vault. “Not that it isn’t nice and cool in there. Did you have to kill anyone, Lieutenant?”
Williams, with Shapiro’s revolver directing him, carried the painting back up the stairs. He used his left hand and still shook his right, to shake feeling back into it.
Murder For Art’s Sake Page 18