‘Why did you tell him your relationship was finished?’
‘In one respect, I’m the same as Neil.’
‘Is that an answer?’
‘Dammit, you’re making me dot the i’s and cross the t’s because you’re enjoying making me squirm.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Then if you’re not being deliberately slow, you aren’t very good at judging people. I … I’ve always needed excitement to make life worth living. And the most exciting thing of all is to meet someone new and face the questions: will he, and if he does, will I?’
She was staring straight at him, her eyes wide, her lips slightly parted, the tip of her tongue just visible, her body tensed. He would have had to be a dolt not to have understood. She had set out to convince him of her and Burns’s innocence by an apparent show of total innocence. Failing, she had judged her position to be serious. She saw one way of escape. He had been unable to hide his lascivious interest in her. Then let him believe her, or at the very least accept that she had been the unwilling and unwitting partner, and she would offer affirmative answers to the questions he had just posed.
He longed to say he now believed her. His mind even provided Jesuitical justification for doing so. By seducing him in order to make him forget his duty towards the law he was supposed to serve, she would be proving herself to be corrupt; then it would not be unfair if his agreement, knowing he would not subsequently allow himself to be diverted from doing his job, were equally corrupt. Yet to accept such reasoning would be to betray himself, and the most precious thing a man possessed was his self-respect.
He finished his drink, said goodbye, and left.
CHAPTER 24
Monday was a ghastly day; midday Saturday was a long, long way away.
Alvarez stared at the pile of papers, memoranda and unopened letters on his desk and gloomily decided that he must sort out everything, even taking action over those that were very important.
A cabo opened the door and looked into the room. ‘So you’ve finally decided to turn up! Better late than never, as the puta said when Lent came to an end.’
‘I’ve already put in a couple of hours’ work.’
‘Cows might growl. This came in for you during the night.’ He entered the room to place a fax on the desk. ‘Don’t work yourself to death or you’ll live to regret it,’ he said cheerfully, before leaving.
Youth was a time of irrational optimism. Alvarez decided to go to the Club Llueso for a second breakfast in the hopes that a quick coñac would cheer him up; then, ever the man who observed duty, he read the fax.
America reported that Ernest White had been born in Philadelphia to Italian parents. He had had youthful convictions for gang-related offences; in adult life he had matriculated to major crime, but had been convicted only once and imprisoned for five years. Presently believed to be an enforcer for the Ruggiero crime syndicate. The authorities would be grateful for any information concerning his present activities.
Alvarez put the fax down, left the office. The old square was thronged with people, mostly foreigners with nothing to do but eat and drink, and he had to weave his way between them so that by the time he reached the Club Llueso he was sweating freely. The barman said that he looked like a man about to have a fatal heart attack.
He sat at a table by the window and drank some of the coffee, then topped up the cup with brandy. He lit a cigarette. Since White could not be the murderer, the reason for his having visited Cooper became immaterial. Nevertheless, America had asked for information and a drive over to Cala Xima was far preferable to sitting at a desk, sorting through papers …
* * *
The brunette, dressed in the briefest of bikinis, stared up at Alvarez with open resentment.
‘Back home,’ White said, snapping the words short, ‘I’d have a mouthpiece suing you for harassment.’
‘Then I must count myself fortunate that this is Spain.’
‘What the goddamn hell is it this time?’
‘I have received information from America.’
White’s expression became blank.
‘Perhaps we could go inside and discuss it?’
White turned to his companion. ‘I’ve got to talk to this guy.’
‘But why…?’ she began.
‘Grab another bottle and charge it to my room.’
She looked round for the nearest waiter.
The two men, Alvarez in the rear, went round the pool and through into the cool lounge; this time, unoccupied until their arrival.
‘Well?’ demanded White.
‘America says you have a record.’
‘So?’
‘And that you are an enforcer for a crime syndicate.’
‘Moonbeams.’
‘So I’ve been asking myself, what were you persuading Señor Cooper to do, or not to do?’
A waiter started towards the table, turned aside when waved away.
‘You can’t finger me,’ said White. ‘I was here, in this hotel, when he was wasted.’
‘Perhaps you could not have been directly involved in his death, but I think you arranged it. And as proof of that is the fact that you made certain you had an alibi both for the apparent time of death and the actual time.’
‘I’m guilty because I’ve an alibi? Even a dick back home would find that dumb.’
‘So unless you tell me what happened, and why, I shall have to arrest you as a material witness who refuses to cooperate.’
‘I’ll have the sharpest mouthpiece in the land shouting…’
‘He can shout as loudly as he likes, señor, but it will be to no effect. A material witness is obliged to reveal any evidence of which he has knowledge – not even American citizenship allows exemption … Since I can prove through eyewitness evidence that you were keeping observation on Ca’n Oliver through binoculars and this, prima facie, suggests a nefarious intention, it has to be reasonable to assume you know something of considerable consequence to the investigation. It is, then, up to you to rebut such assumption, perhaps by showing that the reason for your surveillance and your visit to the señor had neither direct nor indirect connection with the señor’s death. However, if you continue to refuse to cooperate, it will be my duty to arrest you so that you may be questioned further. It could then take you a very long time to gain your freedom – assuming you will be entitled to do so. It has been said that only the dead move as slowly as the Spanish legal system.’
White’s expression was no longer blank, but ugly.
‘Let me ask you once more so that you have the chance to avoid much unpleasantness: Why did you keep watch on Ca’n Oliver? Why did you visit Señor Cooper, whom you had never met before?’
There was a long silence. Finally, White said: ‘He owed money.’
‘To whom?’
‘Someone.’
‘How much?’
‘One million, three hundred and fifty grand.’
‘In what currency?’
‘Dollars.’ He spoke as if no other currency were possible.
‘Why did he owe this money?’
‘He sold a couple of paintings which later turned out to be fakes.’
‘So the buyer wanted his money back?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘Why did he not go through the usual legal channels?’
White did not answer.
‘The paintings were bought with black money so that it was impossible to sue in open court?’
‘Work it out for yourself.’
‘You told him to pay up or suffer the consequences?’
‘I advised him.’
‘Presumably, he saw that as good advice, but difficult to act on?’
White said harshly: ‘It was in the interests of the person I represent for Cooper to go on living.’
‘Yes, I realize that,’ Alvarez replied slowly. He also realized several other things.
* * *
He drove slowly, his thoughts more on the
case than the road.
For many years, members of organized crime syndicates had laundered their black money by investing in legitimate enterprises; recently, they had turned to art as an investment. Ironically, this had bred the mirror image of prideful boasting to be found amongst most legitimate collectors which had led to their pursuing ever more avidly the better paintings.
Cooper had been commissioned to find and buy some valuable paintings. The art world was an enclosed one in which gossip charged fact and fact, gossip. He had learned enough to judge, and perhaps instinct had partially told him, that the unnamed purchaser was a wealthy American criminal. Such a purchaser was a sucker waiting to be taken. Regarding any purchase as an investment rather than a work of genius so that instinctive taste would never cause him to doubt, he dare not reveal his ownership of the painting except to close friends, far less to put it on the market for many years, so that the chances of its being identified as a fake during such time as this would be dangerous to the seller were almost nil.
Cooper had known Field, a brilliant restorer and copyist for many years. Field was in money troubles because of his wife’s long illness and so was likely to be open to making by unorthodox means the money he so desperately needed. Cooper had bought two genuine Poperens. Field had copied these, Cooper had sold the fakes and what they had fetched, together with the sale of the gallery, had made him a rich man. He had kept the genuine Poperens because a) it would be an act of total folly to put them on the market, b) he possessed a very strong sense of proprietary interest in the works because it was he who had done so much to establish the artist’s greatly enhanced standing and c) they provided the secret, perverted pleasure which came from enjoying something denied to others.
The world was such a small place that if the paintings were hung in his own house – which they had to be for safety’s sake and his pleasure – the odds were that someone who visited the house would identify them as those supposedly sold in America. So he’d hidden them in the safest possible way – in full view, labelled copies. (Remember the sexually active figures in the corners. When he had remarked on their brilliant execution, Field had bitterly said that his copies were only a shadow of the originals; Field had known that the praise was for work which possessed that extra quality which only genius could provide and which his must always lack.)
When White had turned up, Cooper’s smooth, luxurious world had suddenly been shattered, as he was faced with either handing over one million three hundred and fifty thousand dollars or suffering physical brutality, perhaps death. He had chosen to mix with a set where wealth was God and therefore if reduced to what, by their lights, would be poverty, he must become an object of scorn; even the threat of physical violence turned his bowels to water. A clever man, if pompously self-satisfied, panic had helped him to work out a way of escape. Short-term, he would set a scene of suicide which appeared to have been sufficiently mishandled to suggest murder – then people (and White in particular) would be far less likely to believe he was not really dead. Long-term, he’d leave the island and settle somewhere fresh, making certain he could not be traced. But whilst it was safe to leave the house to be sold at a later date, whereupon the money and Rachael could catch up with him, all the time the two Poperens were not in his physical possession, they – and his innocence – must be at risk, or so his panicky mind had assured him; the possibility of someone else’s acquiring them and discovering his fraud was one he could not contemplate. So when he had deemed it safe to do so, he had returned at night to Ca’n Oliver, expecting Rachael to be there so that he could explain everything, tell her what to do, and get her to help him load the paintings into the van he’d hired. What he had not foreseen was that ironically she would not be at home because his faked death had given her the green light to pursue her affair. Finding the house empty, he’d turned for help to the one man he believed would give it without the possibility of any risk to himself.
Field had never been a serious suspect. First, because it had always seemed that he lacked any motive for the murder. How could he gain from killing the only man who was prepared to help him attain his burning ambition? But the truth was that he’d known the two Poperens were genuine and worth a fortune and that Rachael (whose values were always financial) disliked them because she believed them to be worthless. (Cooper would never have told her the truth when this was not necessary, since to do so would have been to identify himself as a crook; a man of his character always needed to believe that in the eyes of others he was cause for envy, not contempt.) So Field had known that if Cooper died, a fortune would become his merely by persuading Rachael to give him the two ‘copies’. Secondly, he had made certain he had had no alibi for the time of death as set by the broken watch. The psychology of that move had been spot on. When the revised time of death had been set, it had seemed he had to be innocent. But just in case, and to sew everything up, he’d provided himself with an unshakeable alibi for the actual time of death.
The Mallorquin character had been summed up as quiet hostility towards all without, total loyalty to all within. When Field had saved Carolina from possible death by drowning, he had become a member of the Calvo family. So when he’d asked them for an alibi, they had not hesitated to give this. Challenge them, call them liars, plead with them to tell the truth in the name of justice, threaten them with the law’s penalties for false testimony, and they would stare vacantly into space. They would forever observe the one truth – no sacrifice was too great for one’s family. It was this that had enabled the islanders to survive centuries of invasion, persecution, and poverty. It made Alvarez proud to recognize the limitless boundaries of their loyalty to their own. It made him swear because it was going to be very, very difficult to uncover the outside evidence that would prove Field to be the murderer.
CHAPTER 25
‘You’re serious when you accuse me of murdering Oliver?’ Field sounded more surprised than anything.
‘I am,’ Alvarez replied. ‘You knew the two paintings were genuine, not fakes.’
‘That is possibly true.’
‘And that they are worth over a million dollars.’
‘Probably well over, by now. Oliver was convinced that Poperen’s works will continue to rise steadily in value.’
‘They represent a lot of money.’
‘In my financial dictionary, a fortune.’
‘Which you decided you could steal without any risk to yourself because only you and Señor Cooper knew that the paintings on the wall were genuine. Since Señora Cooper had no idea of their true worth, believing them to be copies painted by you, and did not even like them, once Señor Cooper was dead she would be happy to give them to you to get them out of the way.’
‘An ingenious theory. But aren’t you overlooking something? At the time of Oliver’s death, I was at Carolina’s party.’
‘If you ask the Calvo family to lie for you, they will lie. They are lying when they say you were in their house throughout the time.’
‘Can you prove that?’
‘The surrounding circumstances will make it clear that the court is entitled to draw the inference that the Calvos are committing perjury because they feel under the obligation to do so.’
‘What surrounding circumstances?’
‘The fact that on Señor Cooper’s death the only person who knew the worth of the two paintings was you; that instead of telling Señora Cooper the truth about them, you have persuaded her to give them to you in the belief that they are worthless.’
‘You would hold, then, that it is motive which forges the proof against me?’
‘Motive usually does.’
‘Then suppose I tell you that I have offered, as a gift, one painting to the Prado and the other to the National Gallery, neither of which possesses a Poperen?’
Alvarez did not try to hide his surprise and consternation.
‘Perhaps you don’t believe me? Then ask the directors to confirm the offer … I’m sure you’ll be the
first to appreciate that if I had no intention of gaining from my unique knowledge concerning the paintings, my motive for murdering Oliver cannot be financial. So why should I have killed him when I owed him so much and I had reason to hope I would soon owe him more? And one final point. I didn’t tell Rachael the truth about the paintings because I did know she’d been having an affair. In the circumstances, I was damned if I was going to see her enjoying a further fortune from his estate.’
Alvarez slowly accepted the logic. With no motive for the murder, Field could not be the murderer.
‘Now, just to show you that I’ve no hard feelings over being falsely accused, let me offer you a drink – coñac and ice, as last time?’
* * *
Alvarez entered the dining-room, sat. He stared at the almost-empty bottle of brandy on the table. ‘Have you got the other?’
Jaime reached under the table and brought up a second bottle, half full. Alvarez poured himself a drink.
‘Pass the bottle back,’ Jaime said urgently.
‘She’s still on the warpath?’
‘Worse than ever. And I don’t care what she says, it wasn’t my fault.’
‘What wasn’t?’
‘That I tripped over something and fell against that print she bought at the fair last year and made such a fuss about. If it had been a decent frame, it wouldn’t have bust when it fell on to the floor. She’s shouting that I’ve got to get it reframed. I tell you one thing, if I decide to do that, I’ll let Eduardo know exactly what I think of his work. He bloody well ought to make the frames solid enough to stand falling on the floor without busting. I said to her, I can knock the slivers of wood back into place with some tacks, but she wouldn’t listen. Never does…’
Slivers of wood. A sliver of wood in the dead man’s wounds. Someone whom Alvarez was certain was the murderer, yet whose character seemed to deny the possibility; who was a brilliant copyist, but who yearned to be a true artist. A man who had been assured by Cooper that he could and would become a true artist, even though his work seemed to have little merit; a man who had trusted Cooper. A stout frame, a torn canvas …
An Artistic Way to Go Page 17