Murder For Art’s Sake Page 5

  “Well,” Cook said, “fifty grand is a good deal of grand, isn’t it?”

  Shapiro agreed that it was. He said, “Let’s see if we can find Gay Street, Tony.”

  Tony Cook looked at the watch on his wrist and, in sympathy, Nathan Shapiro looked at his own. It was almost six o’clock. The working hours even of policemen are stipulated, although the stipulation does not always hold. Quite probably, Tony Cook had a date. He was unmarried and of an age for dates. Shapiro himself thought wistfully of Brooklyn. If he left Gay Street for tomorrow, he could get home in time to walk the dog before he and Rose had dinner. If he said now, “O.K., Tony. Tomorrow will do,” he and Rose could catch a movie. Probably Shackleford Jones had shot himself because he had “run through his talent.”

  In the back of the head? With squabs waiting, champagne chilling, in the refrigerator?

  “You’re pretty sure it wasn’t suicide, aren’t you?” Detective Anthony Cook said, in the car.

  When a question waits an answer the answer sometimes helps.

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Aren’t you, Tony?”

  Cook worked the car from the curb into the only lane the towering crane left open in East Eighth Street. Then he answered.

  “Yes,” Cook said, “I guess I am, Lieutenant. Where the hell do you suppose Gay Street is?”

  They went north in University Place, west in Ninth Street. At the tangle of streets where West Ninth encounters Sixth Avenue and gives the whole thing up, they found a traffic cop. When in doubt, ask a policeman. This one pointed and described.

  Gay Street runs a crooked block between Christopher and Waverly Place. It is very narrow and one-way and barely that. There were signs which read: No Parking Any Time. Cook pulled the car half onto the sidewalk, behind a truck which did not believe in signs.

  The building was a three-story one, and once had been a private house. On either side were taller buildings which had never been anything but tenements. There were buttons for three bells in the dim vestibule, and they had names in slots beside them. One of the names was “Rachel Farmer” and when the button was pushed there was a distant, buzzing sound. After a lapse of time there was a harsh and immediate buzzing which emanated from the door.

  They climbed a flight of narrow stairs and found a door at the end of the corridor. There was no name on the door. Shapiro reached out to knock on it and it opened before he touched it. He looked down at the man who had jerked it open.

  The man was slight and not much more than five feet tall. He had soft, yellow hair which, by Shapiro’s prejudices, needed cutting, but which became the slender, blue-eyed man, who wore shorts and a polo shirt and who had the legs and the torso to suit both. Built like a featherweight in fine condition, Shapiro thought. Except that nobody had been hitting him in the face.

  Shapiro said, “Miss Farmer in?”

  “In,” the man said. “But I doubt if she’ll want whatever it is.”

  He had an unexpectedly deep voice. There was a suggestion of British clipping in his speech.

  “Police,” Shapiro said. “Want to ask—”

  “About Shack Jones,” the man said. “Apparently walked into something. Rache did. Like her, y’know.”

  He unhooked the guard chain and opened the door and turned to call, “Got company, my girl.”

  Then he walked away from them into a square room with floor to ceiling windows at the end of it.

  Rachel Farmer stood on a wooden platform by one of the windows and had apparently been looking out of it. She turned to face the small graceful man and the two detectives and said, “You two again.”

  She seemed entirely unconcerned by the fact that she was wearing nothing at all. Naked, she seemed even taller than she had in black sweater and slacks. She had small, high breasts and a very slender waist and no hips to speak of and entirely admirable legs. She might walk like a man, Anthony Cook thought, but she certainly did not look like one.

  “What do you want now?” Rachel Farmer asked, her tone entirely conversational.

  “A few things have come up,” Shapiro said. He paused. “If you want …” He hesitated.

  “We know you’ve got a beautiful body, m’dear,” the yellow-haired man said. “Put something on it, there’s a girl.” She looked at him in apparent surprise. “Embarrass your guests,” the man told her. “Expect people to wear clothes, policemen do.”

  She said, “Oh—that,” and looked down at herself. Then she said, “If you say so, Max,” and stepped off the low platform and walked across the square room to an open door and went through the doorway. She was still unconcerned. She acceded gracefully to the prejudices of policemen.

  “Posing for me,” the yellow-haired man said. “Rather an abstracted type, at best. And used to nudity, of course.” He shook his head, apparently at himself. “Mincing word, ‘nudity,’” he said. “My name’s Maxwell Briskie, by the way. Painter of sorts. Doing some sketches of Rache.”

  He pointed toward a chair which faced the platform on which Rachel Farmer had been standing. There was a drawing pad lying on the chair. “Here. I’ll show you,” Maxwell Briskie said, and walked across the room. He moved with quick grace. He came back with the sketch pad.

  He had, in what Shapiro took to be charcoal, drawn a woman. Shapiro guessed he had drawn a woman. But the woman was attenuated beyond belief and even, for that matter, beyond Rachel Farmer. She appeared, also, to have two faces, pointed in different directions.

  “Preliminary, of course,” Briskie said. “Just roughed in. May not come to anything.”

  He is, Shapiro thought, amused. My expression, Shapiro thought, is no doubt amusing in its bafflement. But he did have her standing there so that he could draw a picture of her. She —

  Rachel Farmer came back through the door, which presumably led to her bedroom. She wore a thin silk robe, belted around her slender waist. It was obvious that she wore nothing else. She had only one face.

  She walked to them, taking long strides, indifferent to the fact that with each stride the robe parted from long legs. She took the sketch pad from Maxwell Briskie and looked at the drawing. She said, “Watch it, Maxie. You’re getting representational,” and handed the pad back to him.

  “And,” she said, “you owe me ten dollars.”

  Briskie slapped a flat hip pocket of his shorts. He accentuated an expression of surprise at the negative result. She pointed with her left thumb toward the ceiling.

  “And miss the fun and games?” Max Briskie said. “Not likely. Always wondered about the third degree.” He looked at her reflectively. “Rubber hoses, I shouldn’t wonder,” he said. “Always brings out the sadist in me, m’dear.”

  She sighed, making a point of it.

  “He’s impossible,” she said, and turned to Shapiro. “Always has been. What do you want now? If Shack’s sketch is gone, somebody else took it. Anyway, you took my key.”

  “Two keys,” Shapiro said. “To the studio. To the apartment. About the apartment. Did you plan to have dinner—or supper—with Mr. Jones there last night?”

  “He was dead last night. Are you crazy, man?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “He was dead last night. But perhaps he didn’t plan to be, Miss Farmer. We rather think he was expecting a guest. Was it you?”

  “No. I already had a date. With Mr. Lathrop Vance, if you want to know.” She spoke the name as if it must inevitably have meaning. To Shapiro it had none. He said, “Did you keep the date, Miss Farmer?”

  “If it’s any of your business, yes. We went to the St. Regis. We danced. What made you think I’d get cooped up with poor old Shack? Watch him fuss around with his cooking?”

  It was a day of tangents. Shapiro, tempted, took the one offered. He said, “He liked to cook?”

  “He made a thing of it. He was—what’s the word, Maxie? Goo something.”

  “Gourmet, I expect,” Max Briskie said. “The old boy did spend a lot of time fiddling around in his kitchen. Spanish period since he got b
ack from Spain a while back. Things with octopus in them, from what I hear. Have octopus in his frig, Captain?”

  “Lieutenant,” Shapiro said, and added the rest of it. “No. Squabs. And champagne.”

  The result of this was unexpected. The slim, graceful little man looked away from Shapiro and seemed to look into the distance. He said, “Hm-m-m. Squabs, was it?” as if the word “squabs” had some special meaning.

  “Yes, Maxie,” Rachel Farmer said. “The little birds Dotty does so well.” There was, it seemed to Shapiro, amusement in her voice and, at the same time, sympathy. She turned from Max Briskie and looked at Shapiro. She was of a height to look at him levelly.

  “Does it matter who was going to have dinner with him last night? Or a late supper with him?”

  “I don’t know,” Shapiro said. “I don’t know at the moment what matters. We’re just checking things out.”

  “You people go to a lot of trouble, don’t you?” the tall dark girl said. “Because a man gets fed up with being alive. Or have the police got another idea, mister?”

  Shapiro did not answer directly. He turned to Maxwell Briskie, who still seemed to be looking at something far away.

  “You’re a painter, Mr. Briskie,” he said. “You knew Mr. Jones’s work?”

  For a moment, Briskie seemed to stay at whatever distant point he had gone to. But then he came back and looked up at Shapiro and said, “Yes. I knew Shack’s work.” He paused. “Some of it was rather good,” he said, and paused again. “All right,” he said, “a lot of it was damn good.”

  “Had it fallen off lately? I mean—” He searched his memory. “Had he been repeating himself, would you say? Run out of new ideas?”

  “Ideas” was not the right word. He remembered. “Conceptions?” he said.

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “Something somebody said.”

  “Somebody was nuts, Lieutenant. Last two or three years Shack was almost as good as he thought he was. Which says one hell of a lot. Somebody’s pulling your leg, Lieutenant.”

  Shapiro did not doubt that somebody had. It would be interesting to find out who. He wasn’t, of course, the man to find out. But he would have to have a try at it.

  “Mrs. Dedek said something of the kind,” Shapiro told them both. And Rachel Farmer said, “What it comes to, Myra’s a square. A square bitch in a round hole.”

  Max Briskie’s blue eyes narrowed as he looked up at the tall thin girl, and vertical lines appeared in his smooth, wide forehead.

  “You don’t agree, Mr. Briskie?” Shapiro said.

  “That she’s a bitch? No argument. But I’d say she knows her business. Which is knowing what collectors will buy.”

  “Have you asked dear Myra?” Rachel Farmer said, with evident meaning in her tone. But what the meaning was was not evident. So Nathan Shapiro said, “Asked her what, Miss Farmer?”

  “If she was the guest you think Shack was expecting, of course.”

  She was impatient with him.

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “She says she wasn’t, Miss Farmer. And you say you weren’t.”

  “Whoever it was,” Max Briskie said, “didn’t get to eat the squabs. Or drink the champagne. Heard that Shack was dead. It was all over this part of town. And in the afternoon papers. And on the radio. So considered it a broken date. What difference does it make?”

  “I don’t know that it makes any,” Shapiro said. “We like to fill in all the gaps. What we’re supposed to do, Detective Cook here and I.”

  “This,” Briskie said, “is getting to be a dull do. You promised rubber hoses.”

  Shapiro managed to smile faintly as he shook his head. And he thought the flippancy forced, as it had not been before.

  “So,” Briskie said, “I’ll go up and get your tenner, Rache, darling.”

  He turned as he spoke and walked toward the door. He had the balance of a featherweight fighter. He opened the door and went out, without looking back.

  “Poor Maxie,” Rachel Farmer said. “He lives upstairs, you know. He and his wife. Dorothy Goodbody, her professional name is. Almost a head taller than him. You’ve heard of her?”

  Shapiro shook his head.

  “Writes songs,” Rachel Farmer said. “Some of them have gone over. I’ve been up to dinner with them a few times.”

  Nathan Shapiro was beginning to expect non sequiturs from the tall girl. He said, “Have you?”

  “Three times, exactly,” Rachel Farmer said. “Twice we had squabs. Dotty’s very fond of squabs, mister.”

  V

  It was late when Nathan Shapiro got home to Brooklyn, and walked familiar blocks from subway station to apartment building. But the day holds long in June, and the sunlight still slanted on the sidewalks. The people who walked the sidewalks were familiar people; were reasonable people, reasonably dressed. This did not, of course, mean that they were better people than the strangers on Eighth Street, Borough of Manhattan—more moral or necessarily more law-abiding or, come to that, more universally heterosexual. Shapiro said, “’Evening, Abe,” to a swarthy round man who was, as everybody knew, a bookie. He did not say anything to, or even give a policeman’s hard-eyed look at, Angelo Bertilotto, who was widely, and to the police unfavorably, known as “Bang-Bang Bertie.” “Bang-Bang” was not, at the moment, wanted for anything.

  He said, “’Evening, Rabbi” to Rabbi Isidore Goldberg of the congregation of which he was himself a not particularly assiduous member. He said, “How’s it going, Terry?” to the blind newsdealer on the corner and Terence Corrigan said, “Nothing to complain about, Nate.” Shapiro bought a sports final and glanced at the headlines as he walked the last half block. “WELL-KNOWN PAINTER SUICIDE,” he read. The headline was below the fold, but it was a two-column line. Shapiro was mildly surprised at the descriptive words.

  When Nathan Shapiro opened his apartment door he knew they were having a goulash for dinner—the special goulash, made to Rose’s grandmother’s recipe. He knew Rose had walked the dog because the dog was on a forbidden sofa. She got down hurriedly when Shapiro went into the living room. She went under the sofa.

  Rose came in from the kitchen and said, “Another long day, darling,” and he bent down to kiss her. He had to bend some way down because Rose Shapiro was a small woman—a small, dark woman, neatly made. It occurred to Shapiro that if he had to write a description of his wife for circulation to other policemen (which he would never need to do), he would use almost the same words he would use if he described Myra Dedek. “Five feet four.” That would do for either of them. “Black hair, dark brown eyes.” That described them both. “Weight: 115.” Perhaps “118” would be more accurate for Rose Shapiro, but one does not weigh people with one’s eyes. Nor, actually, does one describe them with one’s words.

  “Tight mouth.” That would do for Myra Dedek. It would not for Rose, whose mouth was tender, full-lipped. There were laughter crinkles at the corners of Rose Shapiro’s eyes. Myra Dedek’s face looked as if it had been freshly ironed. Rose’s soft black hair was short and it seemed to fluff of its own accord. Probably she had just washed it under the shower. She would, Shapiro thought, look better than Myra Dedek did in a perfectly cut blue silk suit. But they did not run to suits like that on what a policeman made, even when the policeman had, by some fluke, been promoted to lieutenant. Even when a policeman’s wife teaches school.

  “Same woman,” Rose said. “I know you’re late, but it hasn’t been that long. So that you’d forget what I looked like. Sit down and take your shoes off.”

  He sat down, but did not take his shoes off. He did take off his suit jacket and unstrap the shoulder holster, which his gun made heavy. Rose took the holstered revolver and put it on the shelf where it lived when it did not live against the lean chest of Nathan Shapiro, detective lieutenant assigned to Homicide, South.

  She brought him a stemmed glass of rather sweet red wine, which was all his stomach would withstand. She made herself a martini, and rub
bed a twisted lemon peel around the edge of the chilled glass. They sat side by side on a sofa which faced the small, non-wood-burning—non-anything burning, except electricity—fireplace. Above the fireplace was a portrait, in oil, of Shapiro’s father, Rabbi Emmanuel Shapiro.

  “That,” Nathan Shapiro said, and raised his glass to the portrait of his father, “is representational.”

  “That is Papa,” Rose said. “And very like him, darling. The skullcap’s not quite straight, but anybody’d know it’s Papa. You’ve been looking at it seven years.”

  Shapiro continued to look at the portrait. The painter had signed it; signed it in the lower right-hand corner. The signature was clear and precise. “I. Blum.”

  “Would you say Isaac Blum was a good painter?” Shapiro asked his wife.

  She shrugged her shoulders slightly. Then she shook her head.

  “No, I don’t suppose I would,” Rose Shapiro said. She looked at the portrait and shook her head again. “It looks like Papa,” she said. “The eyes are like his were. Good eyes, weren’t they, Nathan?”

  “He was a good man,” Nathan Shapiro said.

  “That,” Rose said. “Certainly that. More than that, of course. A scholar. A learned man. Without being at all a ’shiva bucha.”

  Not a “dimple-fingers.” Not a Jewish scholar whose soft hands touch nothing more harsh than pages of the Talmud, than ancient books and manuscripts of exegeses.

  “An intelligent man,” Rose added. “A man who served. Isaac Blum painted his portrait because he loved him, Nathan. Looked up to him. It was Isaac’s way of showing that. Does it matter that he wasn’t really a good painter?”

  Nathan Shapiro shook his head. He continued to look at the painting of Rabbi Emmanuel Shapiro, who had been a scholar and a man of quick and subtle mind. And a man to be loved by those of his congregation, including Isaac Blum, who had been a cutter by trade and worked on Seventh Avenue. Shapiro sighed and thought, like father unlike son. A son who is really good only with a gun.

  “You’re like him, you know,” Rose told her husband, knowing he would not believe her. “Drink your wine, darling. The goulash will dry out.”