He had other things to do, yet they all seemed to take the form of Lu Aguilar. That voice: he had never paid much attention to its tone and timbre before because they’d been otherwise engaged. And the phone talk had never been more than a handful of words, until this morning, as she was speaking at length—or for her, at length. She was calling from the Zetter.
“Aren’t you dressed yet?”
He had the phone in the curve of his shoulder, rather wishing it were her face. He was tying a shoelace. “It’s eight a.m.”
“Half the world’s at work by now.”
“That would be your half, I take it?”
“I’m in the dining room. I’ve just ordered breakfast. I said not to take the other place setting away.”
“That would be for me, would it?”
She took the question as rhetorical. “I ordered granola.”
Jury set down his half-drunk tea. “Not my dish. I’m full English breakfast to the hilt.”
“We need to put our heads together.”
“Is that what it’s called these days?”
“Don’t be bloody stupid. Come on.”
Click.
Jury drank off his tea and pulled on his coat. He took the stairs beyond his door three at a time.
The Zetter’s dining room had a fair number of customers and yet the tables were far enough apart that you weren’t putting your spoon in another table’s granola—an image Jury found faintly erotic. He smiled.
It was what Lu was eating, a mountainous bowl of granola, topped with rhubarb. She was wearing a stoplight red sweater, but her face still looked sleepy. He sat down before the other place setting and he watched her shove a spoonful of the cereal in a mouth he’d gotten to know well. “Rhubarb?”
“Can you imagine? If you don’t like granola, believe me, this will change your mind.” She spooned up a cluster of grains, nuts, and rhubarb and held it to his mouth.
The gesture was so intimate, he felt like booking a room. “You’re right,” he said as he chewed it. “It’s good.”
“Here comes your breakfast now.”
“How did you know—”
Her look said oh, please.
The fresh-faced waitress put down Jury’s plate: eggs, bacon, mushrooms, tomato.
He was hungrier than he’d thought. He plowed right in. The eggs were so perfectly cooked they were luminous.
“Tell me about Rye. You saw Kurt Brunner?”
Jury told her what they’d said.
“Do you like him for this shooting?”
“I don’t know yet. If he was the one coming to see Billy, I’d find that odd.”
“Why?”
“Brunner would hardly make an appointment to see him; he saw him every day.”
She nodded, sat back. “Are you done?” She eyed his plate.
“Almost. More coffee?” He picked up the French press. She shook her head. He poured more for himself.
“I’ve been eating this granola for twenty minutes and the bowl’s still full. I want to go up to the room.”
“The crime scene. You want me to go? Us?” He tried to make the “us” bristle with implications, all unwise.
Aguilar rolled her eyes. “This is a murder investigation—”
Jury sniggered and polished off his last bit of egg.
“And we have some self-control, I’d hope.”
“Maybe I do, but you don’t.”
She balled up her napkin and tossed it at him.
Upstairs, Jury kept his distance.
She was reviewing a probable sequence of events. “He comes in, tosses his key card down, picks up the phone to call room service. Maybe at some point, he uses the bathroom. He orders his supper.” Aguilar sat in the chair at the long shelf where the tray had been, picked up the phone receiver, set it down. Then she rose and stood looking at Jury, but he didn’t think she was seeing him. She looked bemused. “Why didn’t he take off his jacket? You’d have done, wouldn’t you?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. There might have been other things of greater immediacy.”
“Such as?”
“Phone calls. He calls room service, he makes another call. Or calls.”
“But that doesn’t explain after the food comes. Especially before he ate something as messy as that hamburger. Mustard, ketchup drips, and you’re eating with your hands, too. That Italian-designer jacket? Armani, was it? What was it? You’d take that off, surely.”
“Maybe he did and then put it on again.”
She thought about that. She went on: “He makes another phone call, and then goes out to the terrace.” She trailed her little story out there.
He followed, stood near the table in the corner against the wall.
She was leaning on the balustrade, wind blowing her hair. “He stood out here…. He didn’t smoke, did he?”
“Not if this ashtray is evidence.” Jury picked it up from the table, set it back, leaned against the wall. It was an open invitation.
She walked around the table, pressed him back.
“This is a crime scene, love,” he said. The wind virtually blew the words across her face.
Close to his mouth, she said, “So’s your flat.”
“Told you.”
“Told me what?”
“No self-control.”
“Ha. I’m going to the station.” She stepped back. “What about you?”
“The Melville Gallery. I’ve a thirst for art.”
“Or something.” She smiled and turned away.
NINETEEN
The tall, very blond girl named Hilda Tripp who worked at the Melville Gallery said, “He was just so generous.” She made a pass at her eyes with a sodden tissue. “Most artists, as you can appreciate, have a hard time making ends meet.”
Jury said, “Billy Maples put up his own money to help some of your artists, is that right?”
She nodded as she pushed up the sleeves of her vivid lavender cashmere sweater. She was remarkably blond; her eyes remarkably empty, except of tears. It surprised Jury that a person with such little affect would be working in the heady environs of the Melville Gallery. Yet she had been for six years, stationed here to greet customers, so perhaps he was wrong about the emptiness of the eyes.
The owner was out, so Hilda would try, she said, to help about the Billy Maples case.
“We were devastated,” said Hilda.
Jury nodded. “It was a blow, I expect. Do you know anyone who might have wanted to harm him?”
She shook her head in such a decisive manner that her pale hair swirled above her shoulders like wheat in the wind. “Not given the way he was.”
“What way was that?”
“He was, you know, like an angel. I mean, the way West End theaters and Broadway plays have them.”
“You mean a benefactor?”
“That’s right. And he’d do it through the gallery, anonymously. He’d arrange with Linda—Linda Bevins, the owner—to give the money to whatever artist he wanted to have it. You know, an angel, as I said.”
“I know. But after he’d done this more than once, the painters must have worked it out that he was the angel.” Jury smiled. He liked the word in this context.
“Not really. Linda would say it was one or another elderly art lover who wished to remain anonymous. And it wasn’t based on which artist was the best. There were other conditions.”
“What were they? The criteria?”
“Of course they would have to have a lot of talent, but they would, wouldn’t they, if they were showing here? Then there was need. Some of these paintings sell for a great deal more than others. For instance, there’s this one by Calvin Lipp.” Here she moved Jury to a large canvas on the west wall suffused in natural light. “It sold for four thousand pounds.”
Jury’s eyebrows shot up. Not only at the amount but at what the four thousand had bought. It was a generic scene, bucolic, of sheep in a field with trees. No matter how the painting had tried to disguise its ordinariness with a blur of
brush strokes, it was simply representational and boring.
Hilda apparently thought so, too. She whispered, although the few people in the gallery were well out of earshot, “Calvin thinks he’s another Constable. Can you imagine?”
Jury laughed. “No, I can’t. But the one who bought it apparently thought he was. So I take it that this Calvin Lipp would not be a front-runner for Mr. Maples’s largesse?”
The hair swung again, decisively. “Definitely not.”
“How often did he do this? Was it an annual contribution?”
“Oh, much more often than that. When he sees—saw—work that he was especially enthusiastic about.”
“He came here frequently, then?”
She nodded. “He was at the reception for Getz Johns. It wasn’t very well attended.”
“That was the same night—”
Sadly, she smiled, and again dabbed at her eyes.
“What prompted this role of benefactor? He wasn’t a painter himself, was he?”
“No. But he seemed so sympathetic to the whole process, to the whole notion of art. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know how to put it or what prompted him.” She frowned slightly, as if in not knowing she had somehow failed. “Excuse me—”
A phone was ringing somewhere and she took herself off to answer it.
Jury looked around; there were only three people in the gallery besides himself and Hilda: a boy and girl holding hands, both with backpacks, both in jeans; a middle-aged man in an expensive overcoat with a dark green velvet collar, who had been standing for a long time before an ambrosial concoction of clouds as plump as marshmallows in a sky of liquid blue.
The whole thing, Jury thought, might just leap off the wall. He wondered why it hung here, it was so wrong—even he, hardly a judge of art, thought it bad—except perhaps it wasn’t. After all it was here and had captured the attention of a perfectly intelligent-looking viewer. Jury wanted to ask him, to go over and pin him down about the painting’s artistic merit.
But the experience set him thinking about Billy Maples and how Jury suspected people, including himself, had got him wrong. His attention drifted, like the marshmallow clouds themselves, to the painting. Getting Billy Maples wrong, or not telling the truth.
While he waited, he decided to join the gentleman in front of the cloud painting. After a few moments, Jury said, “I guess I just don’t see it.”
The man in the overcoat glanced at him, not bothered by a stranger’s interrupting his meditation on clouds. “Don’t see what?”
“Well, you’ve been looking at this for a long time. Apparently you think it’s rather good.”
The observer’s smile was thin-lipped but still warm and amused. “Not necessarily. But it’s hanging here in this gallery, which rarely puts a foot wrong, so perhaps I’ve been studying it for the same reason you’ve been studying me. Trying to work out why they’d hang such a bloody awful painting. At least that’s how I see it.”
Jury had been expecting a rebuff or a lecture on contemporary art, not agreement. Certainly not agreement couched in the language he himself would use. Now they were both looking at it. The little card beside it announced the painting as Nebulae.
“The point is, I think,” began Jury’s new acquaintance, “to look for a good long time before deciding whether one likes something or not.”
“To be fair, you mean?”
“Yes, but not to the painting, which still looks to me like a child’s painting; no, not fair to art, but to yourself. I imagine we’d be the losers if we’d pronounced an artist like, say, Roy Lichtenstein—”
“The comic book painter?”
“Yes, had we said Roy Lichtenstein was a comic book painter.”
Jury laughed. The couple who’d been transfixed by their own painting—one of cows—had heard and looked around and smiled, then turned back to the cows and laughed, too, as if the antics of these other two had freed them to do so. They moved on to the next painting: similar cows, different configuration. They stood each with hands clasped behind their backs as they rolled slightly, back and forth, on their feet. They laughed again.
Jury wondered what had happened to Hilda. Jesus, what sort of copper are you that instead of lighting dynamite under a witness, you’re standing here bouncing on your feet? What do you think this is, Jury? A game? Racer wasn’t there to ask the question, so Jury asked it for him, and in just as snarly a voice.
Then, as if wondering about Hilda had conjured her up out of fog and ashes, she came toward him. “I’m sorry; a friend was in a bit of a muddle.” She shrugged her shoulders in place of any further explanation. She turned to lead Jury into another part of the gallery.
“It’s been nice talking to you,” said Jury to the art lover.
“I won’t be long, George,” she said to him.
George nodded. “No hurry.”
As they moved away, Jury said, “I take it he’s a return customer.”
“One who’s awfully particular.”
Jury would have thought that art was something to be particular about.
“I wanted to tell you about someone you might wish to speak to. She’s…she was a friend of Billy’s. I don’t know how close they were but I do know they chummed about together.”
It had been a long time since he’d heard that expression, but it seemed to fit this dreamy place, with its cotton candy clouds and cows and the young couple who dressed and acted in every way alike.
“Though I don’t think,” Hilda continued, “well, they might have been lovers. It’s a woman named Angela Riffley. She lives in the West End. Mayfair. I know she’s home now; that was her I was speaking to on the telephone. Here.” Hilda slipped a gallery card from the silver card holder on the table, turned it over, and wrote down the address. Then she handed it to Jury. “I think they might even have been engaged at one point, though, you know, she’s a bit older.”
“His fiancée? Have police talked to her?” Why hadn’t this woman been mentioned?
“Yes. Police were just round to her house. That’s why she called.”
“Thanks for your help. I’ll go to see her.” Jury looked at the card. “Mayfair. And the phone number?”
“It’s near Berkeley Square.” Hilda gave him the number and he thanked her again.
On his way out of the Melville Gallery, he stopped by the cloud painting again and shook his head again.
No sale.
THE TALENTED MRS. RIPLEY
TWENTY
It must have been Jury’s year for lovely women, although Angela Riffley’s power was to be undercut by the manner she was intent on assuming, an ostentatious air of mystery.
She gestured for him to come in. “Just go on through, Superintendent. I’m right behind you.”
For a few uncomfortable moments, he was sure she literally was.
“On through” turned out to be a resplendent study or library, where she left him to take a seat, saying, “I’m just organizing some coffee; I’ll be back in a moment.” She was dressed in something scandalously lightweight and translucent and she seemed to leave on wings.
It was a well-furnished room, the furnishings being largely antiques that might have whetted Trueblood’s appetite. An inlaid gilt and mahogany library table against the far wall; the long case clock whose tone was so dulcet—it had just struck the half hour—it might have been apologizing for time passing; a carved oak dressoir near the marble fireplace in front of which sat a serpentine fire fender. Dark wood paneling stopped halfway up the walls, on which hung perhaps a dozen wild animal heads—several different kinds of big cats: tiger, cheetah, leopard—as well as a zebra, a mountain goat of some kind, and others that Jury couldn’t even identify. There were numerous animal skins and Jury hoped the zebra-striped love seat he was sitting on wasn’t one of them. Jury thought about Ernest Hemingway. Among these trophy heads hung a few dark brown and shriveled things that he wondered about. He was sitting some distance away from this wall and had no intention
of drawing any closer.
Sitting around on tables and up on wall brackets was a heady collection of Lalique and Polish crystal and a parian figure of the Lady of the Lake. At least that’s who he assumed the beauty in the flowing gown to be; she was holding an oar and standing in the front of a boat. He picked it up, checked under the base. Minton. He had frankly never seen such swag. He picked up and then put down an object that looked like a miniature stump, dark and rough hewn, a piece of wood or thick vine one might have to hack one’s way through in an Amazonian forest. What the hell was it doing on the coffee table? The table itself had a glass top that seemed to be protecting some document filled with a dense and untranslatable language. At this point, the Wiggins defense was coming into play: he would refuse to ask.
Angela Riffley was back with the coffee tray, which Jury rose immediately to help her with.
“You’re welcome, you know, to something stronger.”
He smiled. “Coffee’s fine.”
“Well, then I’m welcome to something stronger.” She poured his coffee, left him with the sugar and cream and repaired to a drinks table, where she added ice to a few fingers of Glenlivet.
“Ice in drinks seems to be the thing these days, but I don’t see why.”
Returning to her seat on the sofa she said, “Decadent, isn’t it?”
“It’s not decadent; it just melts, that’s all. Miss Riffley, I’m here about Billy Maples.”
“It’s Mrs., actually, and I’m devastated by Billy’s death.”
Interesting that marital status came before devastation.
“I’m sorry. I had the impression you were single.”
“Well, of course. But I haven’t always been. That’s my ex’s little collection there on the wall.” She plugged a cigarette into a jade holder and smiled. “Norman was quite the adventurer, and I, too, though on a smaller scale.”
“There were safaris, I take it?”
She laughed; it was a little like the ice cubes plinking about in her drink. “There were safaris, yes.”
His look went up to the zebra’s head, which struck him as particularly poignant. “Why the zebra?”
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