Murder For Art’s Sake Read online

  Murder For Art’s Sake

  A Nathan Shapiro Mystery

  Richard Lockridge

  For Hildy

  I

  She paid the cabdriver. She stood on the sidewalk and watched the cab roll slowly down the street to the next corner. It hesitated there and then made a right turn. That was the way she had told the driver would be the simplest out of the jigsaw of streets she had guided him into. After the cab was out of sight she stood for some seconds in front of the tottering old building and knew she was postponing, and that it was useless to postpone.

  The three flights of stairs would not grow less steep because of her delay. The treads would remain as narrow. She took a deep breath in preparation and went into the building. She hesitated again at the foot of the first flight, but this time only for a moment. She climbed it, holding onto the handrail and feeling the same sense of insecurity she always felt. The stairs canted away from the wall and she thought, as she had so often thought, that one day the whole building would tumble down. She had said that often enough, and had been snorted at for saying it.

  She went along the corridor of the second floor to the foot of the next flight. Her heels clattered on the worn bare boards of the corridor. She climbed again, and at the top of the flight she paused to catch her breath, holding to the handrail.

  She walked the third-floor corridor and climbed the final flight and stood in front of the familiar door. She groped the key out of her handbag and put it in the keyhole and tried to turn it to the right.

  It would not turn.

  For an instant, then, she thought that he might have had the lock changed. It didn’t seem likely. Then she realized that she had, once more, made a mistake. If the key was pushed too far into the keyhole, even by the smallest fraction of an inch too far, it would not turn. She eased it out that smallest fraction of an inch, and turned it and the lock clicked. She pushed the door open and, as she stepped into the big cluttered room, she called, “Shack? You here, Shack?”

  She called loudly and was not answered. She called again, the door still open behind her, and then, leaving the door partly open, went on into the room—into the unpartitioned area which was the whole of the fourth floor of the loft building. She went only a little way and stopped, and put both hands up to her mouth for an instant.

  He had bled a good deal there on the floor in front of the small easel. The blood had spread out from his body. He lay face down and there was a hole in the back of his head, behind the right ear. The revolver was on the floor near his outstretched right hand.

  Her screams slashed through the emptiness of the great room. Now she had started to scream she could not stop. She turned away and went back toward the door, her steps uncertain, almost stumbling. She heard the screaming continue, but it was as if somebody else were screaming.

  She pulled the door open and held to the knob and then there were words in the scream. “Help!” she cried. “Help!”

  She groped her way to the head of the stairs and screamed down them.

  For a moment she thought that she still was not heard. She began to go down the steps. But then, from two floors below, she heard a door slam open and the banging of feet on the stairs.

  Still holding to the stair rail she sank down to sit on the top step.

  The man who ran along the corridor below and then up the stairs toward her was thick-set. He wore a white shirt open at the neck. When he was halfway up the staircase toward her he stopped and said, “What’s the matter, lady?” He spoke loudly. He almost shouted the words.

  She gestured behind her with her free hand and then, slowly, pulled herself to her feet.

  “Mr. Jones,” she said. “In there.” Again she gestured toward the open door of the fourth-floor loft. “He’s—he’s dead! He’s—” Her voice broke off, and she stood against the wall to let the thick-set man go past her. Then she spoke again, her voice low, shaking, but audible. “He’s killed himself,” she said. “Shack’s shot himself.”

  Then, leaning against the wall, she began to sob.

  II

  Detective Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro looked around the enormous room and realized that he was entirely beyond his depth. This did not surprise him; he was accustomed to his inadequacy and only astonished that it was not universally recognized. Captain William Weigand, in command of Homicide, South, should have been the first, after Shapiro himself, to realize his subordinate’s limitations.

  “Looks like suicide, Nate,” Weigand said that June afternoon. “Precinct’s satisfied. M.E.’s man isn’t. Angle of entry apparently. So it comes through ‘suspicious death.’ You can have Tony Cook.”

  Detective (1st Grade) Anthony Cook had some difficulty in finding Little Great Smith Street, and poked the police car into numerous wrong turnings before he did. Cook had recently been transferred from a precinct squad in the Bronx, for reasons which baffled him. He knew every byway of the Bronx precinct. Little Great Smith Street, indeed! The whole of Greenwich Village, for that matter. A region in which there was an intersection of West Fourth and West Twelfth streets, by all that was holy!

  Shapiro sighed his sympathy and thought wistfully of Brooklyn, where he had first walked a beat. And where, for his money, he should still be walking one. The Police Department of the City of New York was clearly out of its collective mind. Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro, by all that was holy.

  “Might try the next left,” he said to Detective Cook, and Cook said, “You’re the boss,” and tried it. He had to nudge the curb of a narrow street so that the mortuary van could inch past. The driver of the van jerked a directing thumb, pointing behind him. Beyond a jog, police cars clogged the street, which had jogged itself a change of name from “Albert” to “Little Great Smith.” The lab truck had had to park on the sidewalk. Cook edged the squad car in behind it.

  The loft building the cars clustered in front of listed considerably to what Shapiro took to be the west. But the three flights of stairs they climbed listed to what Shapiro took to be the east. They also creaked. Doors of two of the lofts they climbed past had lettering on them: IMPERIAL NOVELTIES, INC. That was the first floor. PERMA-SNAPS. That was the second. The third floor of the loft building—a building which should, Lieutenant Shapiro morosely thought, have been condemned twenty years ago—was unoccupied.

  The door of the fourth-floor loft was half open. A sheet of paper was tacked to it, and on the paper, climbing up it, lettered in black, was the single word “Shack.” At least, the word looked rather like “Shack.” Printed, Shapiro thought, by a child. Probably a somewhat backward child. He pushed the door farther open.

  The room was enormous; the room was the whole floor. A skylight slanted over half of it. No sun shone through the skylight. Of course—north light. The room was unexpectedly cool. Because sunlight did not reach into it? No. The unpartitioned room was air-conditioned. Shapiro had had a room air conditioner installed in his Brooklyn apartment and it had been expensive as hell. What it must have cost to air-condition this space—fifty feet wide by a hundred deep, at a guess—baffled the easily baffled mind of Nathan Shapiro. More, he thought, than the whole of the building was worth. In the approximate center of the loft a single wooden column held the ceiling up. For the moment, Shapiro thought. The supporting column listed, like everything else.

  There were a good many men in the room and they were doing familiar things. One man held a sketch pad and penciled rapidly on it—he was making a plan of the room. Two men were dusting for fingerprints, dusting a wooden chair and a wooden table deep in the room, and the sills of windows which, at the far end, let in a little of the afternoon’s sunlight. Precinct and police lab were doing their job, whether or not it was a job worth doing. Lieutenan
t Myron Jacobs, of the precinct detective squad, stood at one side of the room, under the skylight, and looked thoughtfully at the floor.

  Shapiro walked over to him and Jacobs quit regarding the floor and regarded Nathan Shapiro; looked up and down a long thin man with a long sad face and sad brown eyes. He said, “So you got it, did you, Nate?” and Shapiro said it looked like it, his voice as sad as his face. He looked again around the room and sighed. He looked down at the floor, and at the chalked outline marking what once had been a man. There was a good deal of blood on the floor within the outline and beyond it. The blood had seeped into the cracks between the floor boards and congealed there.

  “Behind the right ear,” Jacobs said. “Gun on the floor where it would have been. Thirty-two revolver.”

  “Behind the right ear?”

  “You and Doc Simpson,” Jacobs said. “Could have managed it. Used his thumb on the trigger. Didn’t want to see what he was doing to himself. Happens that way. You know that, Nate.”

  “Contact?”

  “You and the doc. So he didn’t want to feel it against his head. Suicides do funny things. You know that, Nate. Take a man decides to cut his throat. Half the time he makes a couple of false starts before he gets his nerve up.”

  “The gun?”

  “All right. Smudges. What we usually get off a hand gun. Ballistics has taken it along. You’re in late on it, Nate.”

  Nathan Shapiro said, “Yeah,” and looked again around the room. It was cluttered with canvases with paint on them. They were stacked against the walls haphazardly. They were in grooved racks. They were on easels scattered around the enormous room. The easel nearest the chalked outline which showed where a man had fallen and where he had died had a sheet of drawing paper tacked to it, and there were black marks on the paper’s whiteness. Vaguely, distortedly, the marks seemed to add up to the sketch of a woman. A very peculiar looking woman, certainly. All height; no width. Perhaps not a woman at all; perhaps a plucked ostrich. Shapiro shook his head with no hope that shaking would clear it. It was entirely beyond him and he had every expectation that it would remain there.

  He tried, with no special success, to avoid looking at the paintings which were in sight. Looking at them would, he realized, only make bad matters worse. He had never realized there were so many possible colors or that they could be so bewilderingly spread on canvas.

  “Supposed to be paintings,” Jacobs said. “Make any sense to you, Nate?”

  “No.”

  “School my kid goes to,” Jacobs said, “they have what they call ‘Art.’ Give the kids paints and paper and tell them to go at it. Listen, Nate, Junior’s only six. They let him bring home one of his pictures and you could tell right away it was a picture of a cow. God knows where he ever saw a cow, but you could tell it was a cow.”

  “Central Park Zoo,” Shapiro said. “They’ve got a cow there, Jake.”

  He looked again at the easel in front of which, at a guess, Shackleford Jones had been standing when he decided to shoot himself. The longer he looked at it, the more easily Nathan Shapiro could understand what had driven Jones to his irrevocable decision. My God, Jones had probably thought, I did that. And went and got a gun.

  “His revolver?” Shapiro asked.

  The check on that wasn’t completed. Jones had had a pistol permit, and Records would come up with the serial number and match it with the gun which had been on the floor. And the pathologist would get the bullet out of what had been a painter’s brain and, if it was not too battered by the bone it had crushed, Ballistics would use a comparison microscope. But it was a hundred to one Shackleford Jones had used his own gun to fire a bullet into his own head. A thousand to one, Lieutenant Myron Jacobs figured it.

  “Some of these young docs,” Jacobs said.

  Shapiro did not reply to that. Shooting one’s self in the back of the head was, after all, doing it the hard way. Holding a revolver at some distance from the head would be doing it the chancy way. But with a man who thus used paint on canvas, sketched on white paper, almost any other idiosyncrasy was possible. Even to be expected.

  “We’re about finished,” Jacobs said, and watched the fingerprint men walk the long length of the room.

  “Apparently nobody ever dusted the damn place,” one of them said, in passing. “Prints all over everywhere.”

  “You boys have fun,” Jacobs said, and turned back to Nathan Shapiro.

  “You, too, if you figure you’ve got to push it around,” he said. “You and your side-kick. New in Homicide, isn’t he?”

  “Name of Cook,” Shapiro said. “Transferred from the Bronx. Broke the Burnside kill. More or less by himself, apparently. Yes, we’ll look around a bit more. Not that we’ll turn up anything. He live here?”

  Shackleford Jones had not been supposed to live in the studio loft. There are laws governing such matters. For some years painters had been protesting, singly and in groups, the enforcement of those laws. They had also been circumventing the laws.

  “No gear,” Jacobs said. “There’s a cot back there behind things”—he pointed back there behind things. “Nothing to prove Jones used it. What this dealer of his says, he’s got a place over on East Eighth Street. It’s being checked out.”

  Nathan Shapiro mentally noted an address on East Eighth Street. It would be a place to go to duplicate effort. It was a nuisance to come in four hours late. Late, a Homicide man was supposed to find things others had missed. Such a supposition in relation to Shapiro was, he knew, absurd. Because a man has been lucky once or twice and is good with a gun—that much Nathan Shapiro would grant himself—people get confused ideas.

  “I’ll poke around a while,” Shapiro told Lieutenant Myron Jacobs. “How’d he get a pistol permit?”

  Jacobs had no idea. Probably Jones had had an in somewhere. Could be he had persuaded somebody that the contents of the studio had monetary value. Jacobs looked around the room. “Jeeze!” he said. “Nothing more to do here I can see. You’ll lock it up when you’re ready? Snap lock.”

  Shapiro gloomily thought that he was ready then. All that mattered was already in hands more capable than his. He said, “O.K., Jake. We won’t be long.”

  He went down one side of the long loft and looked at pictures, and Detective Anthony Cook went down the other.

  One canvas Shapiro stopped in front of in bewilderment had two horizontal black lines parallel on it. That was all there was on it. Looked like a section of railroad track, as much as it looked like anything. But another, this one on an easel, was a tangle of shapes, done in bright colors. The shapes had, so far as Shapiro could see, no coherence and no meaning. But Shapiro stood in front of the easel for several minutes because somehow there was a challenge in what he looked at—an inexplicable excitement in what he looked at.

  In the lower right-hand corner of the canvas, which was large, the word “Shack” had been lettered. The lettering was as primitive as it was on the door. The painter’s signature, presumably. Did the fact he had signed it mean that he had thought it finished? Nathan Shapiro shook his head and sighed and turned to look at the outermost of several canvases stacked against the wall.

  Here was another tangle of shapes and colors, but this time it vaguely suggested something to the sad-faced man. He stood and puzzled his mind with it and, unexpectedly, words came into his mind. “Wreck on the Jersey Turnpike,” the words were. But there was nothing in what he saw to picture a pile-up of varicolored trailer trucks. It merely felt like that. He tilted it toward him and looked at the painting behind it. This one was framed and there was a typed label on the bottom of the frame. “#37. Still Life.” That was what was on the label. And after the words “Still Life” there were figures. The figures were “4,500.” A price? If so, presumably one cypher had accidentally been added. And a comma used instead of an intended period.

  This painting was perhaps of a vase of flowers, but, if so, a vase listing to an impossible degree. And beside it—surely not an egg? A flower
vase which had laid an egg? A green egg with white spots on it?

  There was, Shapiro realized, no point whatever in going on with this. It became increasingly more probable that Precinct was right; that a man named Shackleford Jones who had hoped to be a painter, and had the money to buy canvases and paints, had looked around his barn of a studio and had seen what had come of his hopes and had, understandably, shot himself in the back of the head.

  Shapiro looked around the room and for a moment the room seemed almost vocal with shape and color. For that instant he felt that he could almost understand what the room was saying. Which was absurd.

  If the paintings in the room were speaking, trying above the uproar of their own colors to explain themselves, they spoke now only to Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro and Detective (1st Grade) Anthony Cook. The rest of the policemen had gone about more reasonable activities. It was high time, Shapiro thought, that he and Cook followed a good example.

  Cook was standing in the most distant corner of the room, near the narrow windows. One of them had an air-conditioning unit in it. There was a fire escape beyond the other. Cook was half hidden by an easel. He was holding a sheet of paper out in front of him and looking at it. When he realized that Shapiro was looking at him, he held the drawing sheet in one hand and beckoned with the other. Shapiro walked the length of the talkative room and looked at what Cook held out for him to see.

  What he saw surprised him. It was a sketch, in black and white only, of what was, recognizably, a woman—a naked woman. No woman had, Shapiro thought, ever looked quite like the woman portrayed in black charcoal on white paper. There was distortion in the drawing but there was some strange meaning in the distortion.

  “Looks like she’s flying,” Cook said. “Damnedest thing, isn’t it?”

  It was the damnedest thing. It was inconceivable that the man who had painted “Wreck on the Jersey Turnpike” had made this sketch. But in the lower right-hand corner there was a signature and the signed name was “Shack.” It was entirely the damnedest thing.