I said to Cambelli beside me, “Come on into Schweingurt’s office. I need a drink. And I think you do, too. Maybe we can find a bottle there.” He followed me into the office at the rear, nodding silently as the police detective warned him to stick around the building.
I closed the door of the office and Cambelli went over and took a bottle of Bourbon and a water glass from the bottom drawer of the desk. He poured a good triple shot into the glass, gulped it down, poured a lighter drink and handed the glass to me. I held it in my hand and sat down on the corner of the desk.
He told me he had worked for Max Schweingurt since coming from art school in Italy eight years ago. He wasn’t familiar with the Dionysus acquisition, he told me – Mr Schweingurt had been pretty secretive about it all – but he did know that the Dionysus statuette might possibly be a forgery. Mr Schweingurt had claimed it was, though Dr Bramble from the Lexington Foundation Museum was certain it was the original.
“Isn’t Bramble supposed to be an expert on that sort of thing?” I asked him.
He nodded quickly. “Oh, yes,” he agreed. “The very best. But Mr Schweingurt made tests of it up in the laboratory and proved to his own satisfaction that it’s no more than four or five hundred years old. The original would be several centuries older than that, dating back to around 450 B.C.” He spoke with a certain pride found only in men of his profession, but he spoke of centuries the way we might speak of years, say the turbulent Thirties or the roaring Twenties. “I shouldn’t claim that the Dionysus we received is a forgery, I suppose,” he said; “rather, it’s a copy of the original made by a sculptor of a later era. An excellent copy, too; and worth a great amount of money. But it can’t approach the value of the original.”
He was silent for a moment. I said, “You say that this Dr Bramble from the museum claimed the Dionysus was the original?”
“Yes.” He nodded his dark head. “He and Mr Schweingurt had quite an argument about it.”
“Ah!” I murmured. My thoughts began clicking into some semblance of order.
He leaned forward in his chair aggressively. “No, no! Dr Bramble wouldn’t have done anything like – that! Besides,” and he wiped his fine, smooth hand across his eyes, “the Dionysus is gone. Missing. Stolen! Dr Bramble wouldn’t have stolen it, let alone committed murder for it, whether it was the original or a copy.”
I sipped my drink, gestured with the glass in my hand and argued, “Look at it this way: Suppose the Dionysus was an original, even though Schweingurt’s tests proved it wasn’t. Bramble was so sure it was that he wanted it. An art connoisseur will commit murder for something so priceless as a statuette dating before Christ.” I emptied the glass and watched the thoughtful frown on his face, as he turned the theory over in his mind. He poured himself another drink.
He shook his head. “No. That’s no good. If Bramble were certain the statuette was an original, he could have agreed with Schweingurt and purchased it, as a copy, for a small fortune less than he believed it was worth. He would have done that if he had wanted it badly. He wouldn’t have stolen it.” He took my glass and filled it for himself. “Besides,” he said resolutely, “Dr Bramble wasn’t interested in the Dionysus, which is a decisive point in his favor. He has already bought the Athena – the statue of the goddess outside, which Mr Schweingurt struck when he fell. The Athena is the only original by the same sculptor in the country and is worth even more than the Dionysus. So you see – if Dr Bramble had wanted the Dionysus as representative of that period of art, he might have purchased it as a copy, rather than spend many, many times more for the Athena.”
“The Athena is an original?” I questioned.
“Oh, definitely!”
“You’re certain of that?”
“Well, I hardly think Dr Bramble would have purchased it as an original if it weren’t. He is an expert, you know. And he has been quite anxious to get it these last few days.”
“How long have you had this statue of Athena?” I asked him.
“About two years.” He thought a moment. “Maybe a little longer.”
“And Dr Bramble has been only anxious to buy it in these past few days?”
“Yes.”
“Odd, isn’t it? Especially since Bramble is supposed to be such an authority and would certainly have known of Schweingurt’s having the only authentic sculpture in this country?”
He shrugged indifferently. “I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. “Certainly, Dr Bramble wouldn’t have stolen the Dionysus. I can’t understand why anybody would want to steal a copy.”
“Schweingurt told me the original was worth about sixty-five thousand dollars,” I said. “How much was the copy worth?”
“A couple of thousand, maybe.”
“Plenty of murders have been committed for less than that,” I told him. “Besides, whoever did steal it may not know it’s a copy.”
“Which would leave Bramble out of the picture.”
“Yes.”
Cambelli stared suddenly at the Bourbon in his glass. “Even stealing an original would be stupid,” he mused. “An original Dionysus would be too hard to dispose of. No art connoisseur would buy it unless he knew exactly where it came from. And no one but a connoisseur would be interested in it.” He sipped his whiskey thoughtfully. “There’s a lot more to this than robbery,” he added.
“Much more,” I agreed and let it go at that.
When we left the office, Schweingurt’s body had been removed and the lab men were packing their equipment. I hung around a few minutes near the Athena statue to see if I might pick up some faint clue to the murder, but found nothing and started to turn away when I saw what appeared to be a pencil-shaped object made of marble lying near the base of the statue. I stooped to pick it up when a rough voice behind me bellowed, “Keep your hands off that!”
I straightened quickly, my hands at my sides and stared at the object on the floor.
The voice came alongside me and said, in a friendlier tone, “Oh, it’s you, Mike.” I glanced up at the big, red, Irish face of the plain clothes man. “Sorry,” he said. “Reilly don’t want nothin’ touched. He’s comin’ back in a few minutes.”
“Okay,” I told him. “That pencil-shaped thing caught my eye.” I recognized it as the tip of the staff I had seen on the Dionysus statue, and it told me something – Schweingurt probably had been holding the statuette when he was murdered, the tip of the staff had broken off as he fell.
“What does Reilly think of this job?” I asked the cop.
“Reilly don’t know. The place was closed and there was only the assistant here.” He glanced furtively at Maurice Cambelli standing nervously near the door to Schweingurt’s office. “He thinks maybe there was a robbery motive . . . but he’s not so sure but what Cambelli might have something to do with it.”
I shook my head. “He had no motive,” I argued, thinking of what I already knew about the case – the statuette, Leiderkrantz, Bramble. “I don’t think he had anything to do with it.”
The cop shrugged. “Reilly just isn’t sure about him, that’s all.” He moved away, turned and said, “You won’t touch anything, will you, Mike? Reilly would raise hell with me if you did.”
I nodded, said, “The answer isn’t here, anyway, Grady.” I walked out of the place.
Picking up Leiderkrantz’s trail was a hopeless cause, but it was the only lead I could think of. It kept me busy for three days, picking up pieces, querying people who might have known him or seen him – and running up against a dead end every time. The Customs and airlines representatives were looking for him without success. I finally decided to give up that angle.
A week passed, a week in which I accomplished nothing. Then, one morning I picked up my newspaper and read that Maurice Cambelli had been slapped in jail for the Schweingurt murder. That night I had two visitors, Reilly and Grady from the detective division.
I pulled out a bottle and poured three drinks after they arrived. Reilly looked at the drink
s, then at me. “This isn’t a social call, Mike,” he said gruffly and shook his head at the drinks. “We want to know how much you know about the Schweingurt murder.”
I waved my hand at him and got up from my chair. “Okay,” I told him. “Ignore my hospitality. Besides I’m an unsociable guy.” I went into the bedroom, put on a lounging robe and came back. Two of the drinks were gone. That made me feel better. I don’t like the law to be out of sorts with me.
“What about the Schweingurt murder?” I asked. “I thought you’d grabbed the Cambelli kid for that.”
The fire had gone out of Reilly’s eyes. “Don’t try to sell it, Mike,” he said softly. “Maybe you know something, maybe you don’t.” He shrugged. “We grabbed the Cambelli boy. But that doesn’t solve the murder. We found out that a statue was stolen – a thing called Dionysus – and figured there probably was a robbery motive. We found the statue in Cambelli’s room.”
I glanced at him quickly, lowered my eyes and slowly lighted a cigarette. “That should clear up the whole case,” I said carefully, though I didn’t believe it. I still couldn’t tag Cambelli as the murderer.
“It should,” Grady put in. “But a couple of things have happened, Mike. You remember that big statue outside Schweingurt’s office?”
I nodded. He meant the Athena goddess. “It was to be delivered to the Lexington Foundation Museum,” I said.
Grady moved his head at Reilly. “Tell him, Reilly,” he said.
Reilly said, “The statue was delivered to the Lexington Museum the day after the murder. It was stolen from the museum that night!”
“Stolen?” I snapped. “People don’t steal something like that. They’d need a derrick. It weighed a ton!”
He lowered his eyebrows. “Just the same, it was either stolen or picked up its skirts and walked out of the place. It’s gone!”
Grady interrupted. “Tell him where the old gal went when she picked up her skirts.”
Reilly’s expression didn’t change. “To Mexico!” he said.
I didn’t say anything for a minute, dropped my cigarette into an ashtray beside my chair and picked up my drink. I couldn’t catch up with them and asked simply, “Mexico?”
Reilly bobbed his big head up and down. “The insurance company that covered it picked it up in a museum in Mexico City and flew it back to New York. And all this in a week . . . It doesn’t seem on the level.” He cocked his head to one side and looked at me narrowly out of his left eye. “Cambelli told us that Schweingurt hired you for a job the day he was murdered. We wondered if there is some information that we haven’t run across yet. Something you may know.”
I took a drink from my glass, made a face and glanced up at him. “About Cambelli having the Dionysus statuette in his room – did you get a tip on that?”
He raised his bushy brows, still looking at me with narrowed eyes, and said. “Yes. As a matter of fact, we did. Why?”
“From whom?”
“I don’t know. It was one of those things.”
“I see,” I replied slowly. “Do you know if this Dionysus statue was an original?”
“Yes, it was an original. A guy named Bramble from the Lexington Museum said it was an original. He’s supposed to be an expert on that sort of thing.”
“Was it broken?”
“No . . . I’m sure it wasn’t broken. Dr Bramble would have remarked about that, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I guess he would have.” It occurred to me that Dr Bramble had insisted that Schweingurt’s Dionysus had been an original; but later that had been broken. I had seen the broken tip of the staff near the scene of the murder. I was sure of that. So another statuette had been switched in its place – possibly the original for the copy – and I wondered when this had been done.
The man who had posed as Leiderkrantz may have actually brought the original from Europe, switched it for a phony after I lost him that morning and brought the copy to Schweingurt. But he couldn’t have made the switch with Cambelli, because I had seen Cambelli in the galleries during that time, cleaning the Athena statue. Still, the original Dionysus had turned up in Cambelli’s room. He was either working with someone else, someone besides Leiderkrantz’s impostor, or the statuette had been planted on him to frame him for the murder.
Reilly suddenly said, “Are you holding out on us, Mike? That would be bad. You’re liable to lose your license if we catch you holding out on us.” His heavy, black eyes were smoldering.
I poured another drink.
I said, “I’m not holding out anything, Reilly. I’m in the dark. There’s an answer some place, but the Cambelli kid isn’t it. You don’t believe Cambelli is the murderer, do you?”
He moved his big shoulders and looked up. “I think maybe he was in on it. Where, I don’t know. But I think it was more involved than a robbery-murder job. It may be an inside job – which would mean Cambelli.”
I shoved the cork into the bottle and struck it with the palm of my hand. “This statue that was picked up in Mexico,” I said, “have you seen it since it was flown back?”
“No. It’s back in the Lexington Museum, as far as I know. Why?”
“You said yourself that something about that part of it didn’t seem on the level. It may be the clue we’re looking for. I think it would be a good idea to take a look at that statue.”
Reilly’s dark eyes brightened and he pushed himself from the chair. “You think we might find the answer there?”
I slipped out of the lounging robe and shrugged into a suit coat, strapped the shoulder holster under my armpit. “It’s just a hunch,” I told him. “Still, we may find something.”
The museum was a huge, impressive-looking brownstone between Fifth Avenue and Madison in the Sixties. The dull glow of a street light flickered dimly off the heavy iron bars at the windows; and here and there the motionless form of a statue was silhouetted against the darkened glass. A guard at the massive front door glanced at Reilly’s police shield, sighed wearily and said, “Another dick! What’re you guys doin’, holding a convention here?”
Reilly glanced at me over his shoulder, raised his heavy eyebrows and then walked into the building. Another guard led us through a dimly lighted hall to the rear.
Dr Homer Bramble’s office was not unlike that of Max Schweingurt. There were a large walnut desk, cases of richly bound books, a thick expensive rug, and odd bits of bric-a-brac, statuary, rock samples and the like. Bramble himself complemented the room. He was a tall, cadaverous-looking man in his sixties, with thick gray hair and piercing black eyes. He had a thin, tight mouth in a pinched, gray face; and his clothes, old-fashioned, of rich black broadcloth, were dust-flecked and ill-kept.
He fixed heavy black-rimmed pince-nez on his long nose as we came into the office, cleared his throat and stared coldly at us.
Reilly said brusquely, “I’m Lieutenant Reilly from Police Headquarters, Doctor Bramble. We’d like to see the statue you purchased from Max Schweingurt.”
“The one that was returned from Mexico City,” I put in meaningfully.
Bramble glanced at me, a wary sarcasm in his sharp eyes. He removed the pince-nez, letting it drop on the black silk ribbon that hung around his neck. “The museum is open at ten o’clock tomorrow morning . . .”
“I beg your pardon,” Reilly interrupted him, “I said we were from Police Headquarters.”
Bramble shrugged. “Very well.” He pressed a button on his desk, picked up a sheaf of papers and, ignoring us, hunched forward on his desk and began to study the papers intently.
In the tense silence I heard the faint sound of footsteps coming toward a door, not the door through which we had entered from the hall, but one to the left of Bramble’s desk. The others seemed to pay no attention, if they heard at all, and I looked at Bramble. In the light from the desk lamp, I saw his eyes darken and a tense expression came over his pinched face. His fingers turned white at the knuckles as he gripped the papers in his hand. I glanced back
at the door. The knob turned slowly; then, before the latch clicked, the knob turned back again. The footsteps retreated almost soundlessly away from the door. I watched Bramble wipe a nervous hand across his forehead. The papers trembled in his fingers.
At that moment, the guard who had ushered us to see Bramble came into his office.
Bramble, looking up, said hoarsely, “Take these men to the Athena statue.”
I caught Reilly’s eyes and nodded significantly.
Reilly said sharply, “You too, Doctor,” and added, “if you don’t mind.” The tone of the detective’s voice told Bramble that if he did mind, he’d probably be dragged along anyway.
Bramble’s thin lips drew back against his teeth. He pushed himself from his chair, muttering angrily beneath his breath as he led the way. I stepped aside as Reilly and Grady followed. As they turned into the corridor, I ducked swiftly back into the room and through the door I had been watching a moment before.
I played a narrow beam of a pencil flashlight about the short hallway, narrow and dusty, and followed it till I came to another door at the end. This opened upon a steep, worn stairway which led down into solid blackness. The stairs creaked eerily beneath my cautious step, and I stopped, turned out the flash and held my breath. I could hear nothing. The dank, musty odor from the basement put an unpleasant taste in my mouth, and the dust smarted in my nostrils. Snapping on the flash, I went on down the stairs with each step seemingly shrieking louder in the smothering silence.
At the bottom of the stairway, some instinct seemed to prompt me. I switched off the flash. The blackness pressed down upon me like a great cat. I took three steps slowly, carefully; and my foot struck something. There was still no sound.
With my foot, I felt around in the dark and touched that something again. An icy coldness trickled along my spine.
Using the flash again, I shielded it with my hand and crouched down. A man lay on the concrete floor at my feet. A dead man. He looked about thirty or thirty-five years old, was wearing an ordinary brown suit and had light-brown hair. He was lying on his side, but his clothes were covered with dirt and his shoes were scuffed as if he’d been dragged here. His head had been smashed in horribly and the blood stained the collar and sleeve of his suit coat. I swept the light to the stairs. No blood marks there. He had not been killed upstairs, apparently.
The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction Page 87