Murder For Art’s Sake

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  Anthony Cook was holding Myra Dedek and Bracken by standing in front of the street door with his revolver dangling. When Shapiro came from behind the stairs Bracken shouted at him. “They can’t drag me into anything. They can count me—”

  He stopped again, and again, after a second, Shapiro finished for him. “Out,” Shapiro said. “I heard you before, Bracken. Hold the picture up, Williams.”

  Williams held the big, flat parcel up and Shapiro cut the cords away and pulled the wrapping paper down.

  It was just planes and colors to Nathan Shapiro. But then it seemed to be moving upward in its frame and he saw why somebody had called it “Cityscape.” It didn’t really look like a city. Still …

  Dorian Weigand seemed to flow down to her knees in front of the painting which Williams held propped up on the floor. She peered at the lower right-hand corner of the picture.

  “It’s really quite a clear signature, once you know where Shack Jones hid it,” Dorian said, and she turned to face Myra Dedek. “Not really anything that could be Shayburn, Myra,” Dorian said.

  Myra Dedek seemed not to hear. She sat rigid on a bench and looked with hard eyes at Weldon Williams.

  “Fool,” Myra said. “Fool. Fool. Fool!”

  XVI

  Anthony Cook walked from the subway station at West Fourth Street toward Gay Street. It was a little before seven—he had allowed himself plenty of time; subway service is diminished on Sundays—and the mid-June sun still was hot. He wore the gray summer suit which he usually wore on summer Sundays. The jacket was a little looser than he would have chosen if left to his own devices, but a gun shows under a jacket which fits too well. And Article 288 of the Rules and Regulations of the Police Department of the City of New York did not leave Detective Anthony Cook to his own devices.

  “A member of the Force shall carry his service revolver at all times, except that a Colt or Smith & Wesson revolver, not less than a .32 calibre, may be carried under the following conditions:”

  One of the conditions was that the member of the force be either a detective or off duty. Tony Cook was, at the moment, both. His .32 was a Smith & Wesson. It was not especially uncomfortable against his chest. He was used to its being there.

  In the Gay Street vestibule he pressed the proper button and the answer was immediate and he climbed stairs and the door opened as he reached the top of them. For an instant he thought he must have pushed the wrong button.

  She wore a white silk dress with a red belt around her slim waist and she wore stockings and high-heeled white shoes. The dress was sheer; she was wearing a slip under it. She was also wearing a bra.

  She had done something to her black hair or, more probably, had had something done to it. It had been lank, falling straight almost to her shoulders. It was a little shorter now, and now it was softly waved. He looked down at her; although a tall man, he did not have to look far down. He said, “Well!” which was the first word to come into his mind.

  She grinned at him. He had not especially noticed her mouth before. It was rather wide and became her well. It was also delicately contoured.

  “Thanks, mister,” Rachel Farmer said. “I hoped you would. All yesterday afternoon it took me, after you signed off. The door’s open, mister. You can gawk inside.”

  Inside she sat on a sofa with her knees together. She said, “You bang the third panel to get it. Mine’s sherry, you know. And there’s bourbon and some gin I think, but I forgot the vermouth. The ice is in the bucket.”

  The ice was in the bucket and the bourbon was Old Fitzgerald, a hundred proof, and the sherry was La Ina, and, after he had poured drinks and sat down beside Rachel Farmer, Cook still felt that he was somehow in the wrong place. Not that it wasn’t a fine place.

  He looked at the girl and said, “Well!” which was the word which still came into his mind.

  “All right, mister,” Rachel said. “Haven’t you been surprised enough for now?”

  And she raised her wine glass to clink with his heavier glass. He had not noticed before how delicate her hands were. Her nail polish did not match, but blended with, the off-red of her belt.

  He said he was sorry about last night, but that it couldn’t be helped and that probably he didn’t need to tell her that, since it had been in the papers. Cook’s own name had been included in the account in the Times but that was nothing to mention boastfully.

  TWO FACE HOMICIDE CHARGES IN PAINTER’S DEATH, the headline had read, and, in a bank: “Third Held as Material Witness.”

  “Headlines,” Rachel said. “I don’t really read the newspapers very much, mister. Especially the Sunday ones, when they’re so big. Advertisements of dresses sometimes and about the poor dear Mets.”

  “Myra Dedek and that assistant of hers,” Cook said. “It looks as if they killed Shackleford Jones. Anyway, that she did and he helped. And that a man named Bracken, who’s head of the art gallery at Bryant and Washburn’s, was in on it—anyway, on what led up to it. And—”

  “I read that far,” Rachel said. “Then it was continued somewhere and I found it but it was right next to a robe I liked. Only, you can’t tell much from these sketches they use nowadays, can you?”

  “I guess you can’t,” Tony Cook, who had no idea one way or another, told the unexpected girl who sat beside him on the sofa.

  “Tony,” she said, “you’re sort of a dear. I did read most of the rest of it; only I thought, He’s one of the arresting officers and he’s taking me to dinner tonight, unless somebody else kills somebody and he has to break the date, and he’s the one who worked it out, probably, and I’ll get him to tell me. Because the newspapers are all full of ‘alleges.’ Do you know a poem by Robert Graves about cats?”

  “Sort of nuts,” he had told the lieutenant. And one hell of a witness, he had told himself. And, of course, a dame who was quite a dame.

  “No,” Detective Anthony Cook said to Miss Rachel Farmer, speaking as quietly as possible.

  “‘Cats make their points by walking round them,’” she said. “Newspapers are like that. Only it’s ‘alleging around them,’ isn’t it? Why would Myra Dedek want to kill poor Shack? Not that I ever liked what I knew of her.”

  “For money,” Cook said. “She had got herself out on a financial limb with the gallery. She thought he was away for a year and that she could sell off some of his paintings and keep the money. Still can’t get used to the idea myself—that pictures like that are really worth money.”

  “Yes, Tony,” Rachel Farmer said. “Sometimes they are worth quite a lot of money. Haven’t you heard about the cultural explosion? It’s all over everywhere. And compared to a lot of them Shack was pretty—coherent. If you’d said that to him he’d really have shot himself, I guess. Or you. But it’s safe to say it now he’s dead. Go on, mister.”

  He looked at her again.

  “Go on, Tony,” Rachel Farmer said. “And then we’ll have another drink and go to Charles’. Because I’ve got a new dress and you think it’s pretty. And because it costs more than the lasagna place, we’ll go Dutch and …”

  Tony Cook took time out to resent that suggestion. Then did go on with it; went on with what they knew of it, and what they put together about it. “It was Shapiro worked it out,” Cook said.

  It remained speculative, he told her, and the lieutenant was uneasy about that. “He seems to be uneasy most of the time.” Myra Dedek and Weldon Williams were, as was to be expected, doing nothing to help. Oscar Bracken, however, was doing his best to talk his way out of involvement—certainly out of involvement in murder. To that extent, he might succeed. He was, meanwhile, helping them to piece together a scheme which had started as theft and led on to murder. Because Myra Dedek needed money.

  That they could prove, without too much difficulty. She had mortgage payments due—overdue—on the building she had bought to house the gallery. She did not have the money to meet the payments. The mortgage company had been growing increasingly insistent. Things like that could
be proved.

  She needed money, and there was the potential of money in Shackleford Jones’s studio. She had a key to the studio, and Jones was in Spain and expected to remain there for a year or more. That Mrs. Dedek herself had told them. Enlist Williams as an accomplice; take the pictures most likely to sell and let them dribble onto the market.

  “He would have come back sometime,” Rachel said. “He’d have found out sometime.”

  “That paintings were missing? Yes. But if he’d stayed away as long as Mrs. Dedek thought he would they could have cashed in on a good many of the paintings and—the lieutenant thinks—spread the rest out thin. All over the country maybe.”

  They had started to do that, apparently. Williams had been crating pictures the day before; he had loaded some of them into a station wagon. They were going to get them out of the gallery. Planning to start selling them in the fall. Which they could then do safely, because, with Jones dead, Myra Dedek had an agreement which would permit her to sell openly.

  He told Rachel about the agreement.

  “What I think is,” she said, “she planned all along to kill him. It would have made things so much simpler.”

  That might well be true. It would be difficult to prove.

  Certain things they could prove. They could prove that someone representing himself as Jones, probably Williams, had offered to sell pictures to store galleries at a time when Jones was not in the country. And they had Oscar Bracken, who actually had bought one for Bryant & Washburn. As, wriggling now to get as far as he could out of bad trouble, he would willingly, even eagerly, testify.

  “He was getting a cut?”

  Not according to his story. But Myra Dedek had a hold on him and was ready enough to twist. Something to do with his authenticating fake paintings when he had his own gallery. It was to avoid exposure that he had bought the painting called “Urban Rectangles,” or “Cityscape.” He would admit he had bought it from Williams, just before Jones’s unexpected return. He would testify that, when she heard that Jones was early back from Spain, Myra Dedek had telephoned him and instructed him not to hang the painting for sale.

  He had agreed. But he had not been able to do what he promised.

  “Seems,” Cook said, “the head of the whole department—furniture floor—is interested in paintings. Poked around, Bracken says, and found the Shack painting and told Bracken to get the hell on with selling it. So Bracken had to hang it. And, what we’re pretty sure happened, Jones saw it.”

  Probably—and here they were piecing mere probabilities together—by accident. One of the things they had found in Jones’s papers was a bill from Bryant & Washburn for a sports jacket, purchased three weeks before. Apparently soon after he got back. While he was in the store he had, almost certainly, decided to visit the art gallery. He had found one of his own paintings there.

  “Somebody would have recognized him,” Rachel said. “With that beard of his.”

  “He’d gone to a barber and had the beard shaved off,” Cook told her. “The day before he bought the sports jacket, according to the barber. Anyway, as well as he can remember.”

  “Tony,” she said, “did you go around and ask all the barbers in the city if they shaved Shack Jones?”

  “Not personally,” he said. “There are fifty or so men working on it now. And a couple of policewomen. Now that we’ve gone out on a limb. One of the boys, with a before and after picture of Jones—before and after shaving, I mean—found a barber last night. And somebody else found the clerk who sold the sports jacket. Says, sure he sold a sports jacket that day, because his number’s on the salescheck, but he can’t remember when he sold a jacket to a man with a beard. Can’t remember he ever did. Says, ‘We don’t get many beards here.’”

  Jones had gone over the paintings in his studio and found thirty-two of them missing and had made a list of the missing ones. That they could prove; they had the typed list and a carbon of the list. They had found both in the vault of the Dedek Galleries, along with most of the paintings themselves, some crated, others waiting to be crated. Williams had been using the list as a check-off guide.

  “One of the ones not crated,” Cook told Rachel, sipping from his drink and trying to keep his mind on his subject, “was something Jones called ‘The Melting Clown.’ Doesn’t make any sense to me, but most of them don’t.”

  That one had still been on a gallery wall when Dorian Weigand took her sketches in—the sketches which had, she assumed and the police assumed, served Myra as an excuse to bring up the subject of the painting called “Cityscape” and deny it was by Jones. Dorian Weigand had seen “The Melting Clown” and jumped to an accurate conclusion.

  “The lieutenant had asked her about it,” Cook said. “She knew it fitted in some place. Williams saw her looking hard at it and realized she had recognized it. So, when the lieutenant and I showed up, he shut her in the vault to keep her from telling us about the clown picture.”

  “It was a silly thing to do,” Rachel said. “Unless they were going to kill her.”

  It was, unless they were. Possibly Williams hadn’t thought that far ahead. Quite possibly, as Myra Dedek had kept saying, he was a fool. Certainly, things had got beyond him—got beyond both of them. They were improvising, by then.

  “Shack made a list,” Rachel said. “Suppose you make us a drink?”

  He poured sherry and bourbon.

  “You’ve found the list,” she said, and prompted. She also looked at her watch.

  “Typed,” Cook said, “on the portable in Jones’s apartment. That we can prove. He sent a carbon to his wife. Presumably for safekeeping. He may, with or without the list, have gone to other store galleries, doing his own detective work. We don’t know and probably won’t know.”

  Several days after he had seen “Cityscape” at Bryant & Washburn, Jones had called Bracken and asked where he had got it. Bracken would testify to that. Bracken had a hide to save.

  “He told Jones, he says, that Williams sold him the picture. He says he had, then, no idea Williams didn’t have the right to sell it, since the Dedek Galleries was Jones’s dealer. That may be true. It’s what he’ll say. He did call Mrs. Dedek and told her about Jones’s question. And she told him to take the picture down. He says he began to wonder then, but he took it down.”

  “Only,” Rachel said, “Mrs. Weigand saw it.”

  It was possible, Cook said, to be a little sorry for Bracken. What with one thing and another, he was kept hopping around like a flea. The head of the department found the picture missing and no record of its sale, and jumped Bracken about it. Bracken made some excuse—about its needing cleaning, he said. The excuse didn’t satisfy the department head, who told Bracken to put it up again. Bracken did.

  “He kept hoping somebody would buy the damn thing,” Cook said. “But nobody did. Then Dorian Weigand, whom Bracken knew by sight, began to ask him about ‘Cityscape.’ He says he began to think something fishy was going on and called Mrs. Dedek again. She told him—he says—that there wasn’t anything fishy. Only a little confusion which she would straighten out with Jones. Meanwhile, Bracken was to take the picture down again and send it back to her, and that she’d refund the money the store had paid for it. Bracken says he was pretty sure something was fishy, but he took the picture down.”

  Cook took a long swallow from his glass and looked at his own watch.

  “We’ll have to lean pretty heavily on Bracken,” he said. “Anyway, the D.A.’s office will. It’s not too happy. But, then, it never is, much. Bracken and odds and ends. Some of which we’re looking for. We’ve pretty much got Williams cold on the slugging of Mrs. Jones to get the carbon, on account of he had the carbon. And how else would he have got it?”

  “How did he know she’d be at the studio?”

  “Jeremiah Osgood says he made the date with Mrs. Jones when she caught up with him in an elevator at Bryant and Washburn’s. And that Williams was in the elevator and could have overheard. We suspect he act
ed on his own on that. As when he pushed Mrs. Weigand in front of a bus. If he did.”

  “Not when he killed poor Shack?”

  Anthony Cook put his glass down rather hard on a table and said, “My dear girl. He didn’t kill Jones. Myra did that. Got to thinking things over and decided it would be simpler to kill Jones than to explain to him. Also, with him dead she’d have a legitimate claim to the pictures she had already stolen. And Osgood and Mrs. Weigand agree that the pictures probably will be worth more with Jones dead than with Jones alive.”

  “Can you prove she killed him?”

  They could, he thought, make it appear pretty damn likely. Briskie would help with that although they might have to put the screws on Briskie, who wouldn’t be enthusiastic about explaining his presence in the studio on Thursday. But who would, Shapiro was pretty certain—told Cook he was pretty certain—testify that Myra Dedek had not stopped at the door that day, but had walked into the studio and over to the body, to be sure she had got the “suicide” straight the day before. Which wouldn’t jibe with Myra Dedek’s account, which was on record.

  “I don’t,” Rachel said, “think that either Myra or Williams was very bright.”

  “Murderers aren’t,” Cook told her. “Anyway, the ones we catch. Shapiro says—”

  He stopped, because Rachel Farmer had put her empty glass down on a table and was looking thoughtfully across the room at, he thought, nothing in particular.

  “Looking for missing pieces?” Cook asked her.

  She shook her head. But then she said, “Maybe I was, in a sort of way. I was thinking about squabs. Anyway, I was deciding whether I was hungry and squabs came into it. Not that I especially like squabs.”

  He sorted things out. It seemed to be becoming easier. He said, “You mean the ones Jones was going to feed to somebody? The ones the lieutenant found in the refrigerator? That convinced him Jones hadn’t planned to kill himself?”

  “Was it Dotty? She does like squabs. Only, I’ve always thought she liked Maxie a good deal. A lot, maybe.”