Murder For Art’s Sake Read online

  Shapiro did not know.

  “I’m not an expert,” she said. “Certainly not a critic. Did Bill suggest I am?”

  “You’ll have opinions. Informed. Mine aren’t, you see. I’m over my head.” He paused and looked down at the East River. The tug was still huffing its barge toward Hell Gate. Against the tide, probably, Shapiro thought.

  “My wife and I,” Shapiro said, “have a painting in our apartment. A portrait of my father. He was a rabbi. I’ve been looking at it for years and thinking—oh, that it was a pretty good picture of my father. Looked a good deal as he looked. Last night I really looked at it.”

  “Yes,” Dorian said. “Things happen that way. Shack’s studio is downtown, isn’t it?”

  “West Village. In something called Little Great Smith Street. I could have a car sent over.”

  “We can use mine,” she said, and got up and walked toward a telephone—flowed toward a telephone and used it to ask a man named George to have her car brought around.

  “Let’s hope he did date them,” Dorian said. “It’ll only take me minutes to change. I can’t go around outside in slacks.”

  Shapiro thought she could—and very well, too. But he did not say so. It was none of his business.

  VI

  He must remember, she told him, driving a big Buick expertly down Fifth Avenue, that she could only give him an opinion. Actually, the opinion would be no better than his own. Essentially no better.

  “It’s something you understand,” Shapiro said. “Something I don’t at all. I told you, I don’t even know what I like.”

  “Or,” she said, “haven’t confidence. Oh, I’ve seen a good many —you intolerable bully!” The last was to a bus which had turned into her path without signaling any such intention. “Pictures. I like to look at them. Some I like a great deal and some only a little and a great many not at all. It’s just—I don’t know what it is. Oh, you can explain it, one way or the other, to yourself afterward. But that’s after the fact, not the fact itself.”

  “There aren’t standards?”

  “Those are after the fact, too. Oh, daubs. Daubs are another matter. A man can’t draw, and that’s that. Can’t use color, and that’s that. Of course, intentional distortion—that’s another matter, too. And not everybody sees colors the same—” She blasted on the Buick’s horn to interrupt herself. A young man with very long hair had walked in front of the car, and against the lights. Instead of jumping at the horn’s warning, he slowed his already sauntering pace to glare at Dorian Weigand and Nathan Shapiro.

  “Perhaps,” Dorian said, “he’s thinking himself a poem.”

  “Or,” Shapiro said, “where his next fix is coming from. We may as well go through Ninth Street, Mrs. Weigand.”

  “Policemen,” Dorian said, but the derision in her tone was entirely friendly. “Always thinking the worst of people.”

  She turned the Buick into Ninth Street toward Sixth.

  “I almost wouldn’t marry Bill because he was a policeman,” she said. “Because it was his job to hunt people down. That was quite a while ago, of course. I was—it doesn’t matter.”

  Lights stopped them at Sixth Avenue. Lights released them into Christopher Street. Shapiro gave directions, then hoping—but doubting—that they would prove accurate. They got the Buick to Little Great Smith Street. It was hot in the studio.

  “Bad for his paintings,” Dorian said. “Pigments—canvases too, for that matter—like an equable climate. He probably couldn’t afford air conditioning. Although a good many painters—”

  “He could,” Shapiro told her, and found air conditioners—one in a window at the end of the room; another, larger, let into a wall. He turned them on and the room began to hum.

  Dorian went from easel to easel.

  “This one isn’t finished,” she said of one. “Was he working on it when he was killed, do you know?”

  Shapiro did not know. If she meant at the precise moment he was shot, he thought not. “Apparently on this,” he said, and walked to the easel to which Jones had thumbtacked drawing paper on which to sketch an attenuated woman (or plucked ostrich). Dorian looked at the sketch for some seconds. Then she nodded. “He could draw,” she said. “What I meant by intentional distortion.” She nodded again. “Could have been a good fashion artist,” she said. “Women impossibly long and skinny. Of course, they would need to have clothes on.”

  “Is this one finished?”

  That, she said, probably depended on how far he had planned to go with it. It might be a preliminary sketch for a painting, a way of fixing a composition in his mind. In that case, he might have finished with it.

  She was standing in the chalked outline of a body. She looked down at it and at the floor around it and stepped out of the outline.

  She stopped again in front of the unfinished painting. She went around the studio, looking at paintings displayed on easels, sliding paintings on stretchers out of racks. At some she looked for minutes; at others she seemed hardly to look at all. She took two canvases of approximately the same size out of a rack and propped them side by side against the wall and looked from one to the other.

  “He did date them,” she said, without turning from the paintings. “Most of them, anyway. These two are four years apart. The more recent this year.”

  “And … ?”

  She turned from the paintings. She said, “Myra Dedek is a professional, Nathan. It is her business to know paintings. I’m a cartoonist and when I run out of ideas I do small watercolors. Mostly pictures of what I can see out of the apartment windows. I was doing the barge when the desk called to say you were downstairs. A barge inching against the tide. Trying to get some feeling of the tug’s effort. Getting nowhere with it. Not my métier, painting isn’t. I told you that.”

  “But… ?”

  “Say I don’t agree with Myra,” Dorian Weigand said. “I think he was painting better this year than he painted four years ago. And don’t ask me why I think that. Do you ever read art criticism? Or music criticism, for that matter?”

  “No.”

  “Mostly,” she said, “the words they use don’t really fit what they are writing about. Or it seems to me they don’t. Words are about concepts—about emotions, ideas. Paintings—paintings are just there. When you try to talk about them, and it’s the same when you try to write about them, you—oh, make up allegories. And try to impale the intangible on word spikes.”

  She was, Shapiro thought, talking at least partly to herself. Her precise meaning floated a little beyond his reach. But so many things did.

  “Bill,” Dorian said, “gets hunches. Perhaps that’s partly what I’m trying to say.” She looked at Shapiro intently. “I think you do, too,” she said. “Things look a certain way, but you don’t accept that way. Or—do accept it. Not because you can prove or disprove it. Wait—”

  He waited.

  “I’ve read the stories about this case. It looked like suicide, didn’t it? You can’t prove it wasn’t, can you? But you have a hunch it wasn’t. And you try to back up your hunch?”

  “It comes to that, sometimes.”

  “I like this one,” she said, and pointed to one of the canvases. “I like it better than the one he painted four years ago. Much better. So, I can say it’s stronger than the other. Or more alive than the other. Or that the composition is more assured. And all I’m saying is that I like it better. Somebody else might not.”

  “There wouldn’t be general agreement? Among people who know about things like this?”

  For a moment, then, she closed her green eyes, and drew her eyebrows a little together, so that vertical lines formed on her forehead. She opened her eyes.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think there would be, Nathan. I think most people who are interested in painting, and who have seen a good many paintings, would agree with me. That Shack was a good painter and getting to be a better one. Working out a style which was only his style.” She smiled suddenly. “That’s my
hunch, Nathan,” she said. “For what it’s—”

  She broke off, and Shapiro, who had heard it too, turned with her to face the door to the studio, in the lock of which somebody had just turned a key. Rachel Farmer coming back to have another try at studio-lifting?

  The woman who came through the door she had opened with one of Shackleford Jones’s widely distributed keys was as unlike Rachel Farmer as a woman could well be. She was short, almost dumpy, and she took little steps into the big room and looked around it like an uncertain bird. Her hair was a somewhat unconvincing auburn and was very tightly curled. She had large blue eyes and she peered through them as if she needed glasses. She was well into the room before she saw the two who were looking at her. Then she said, “Oh!”

  She stood for a moment and peered at them, and Shapiro thought that peering did not help her very much. She came on toward them until she was quite close. Then she said, “Hello,” apparently to both of them, and stopped and looked up at Shapiro.

  “If you’re Mr. Osgood,” she said, “how did you get in?”

  “You expected a Mr. Osgood to meet you here?”

  “Of course. It was all arranged. As soon as I heard, I got my lawyer to call a lawyer in New York and he said Mr. Osgood would be the man. So I sent Mr. Osgood a telegram and he wired back all right and said that the studio would be the best place if I had a key to it and of course I did and—are you somebody Mr. Osgood sent instead?”

  On this one, Shapiro thought, everything seemed to begin in the middle.

  “No,” Shapiro said. “I’m not representing Mr. Osgood. He would be the man for what, Mrs. —?” He gave her a chance to give a name. She did not seem to notice the chance.

  “An expert, of course,” the plump little woman—the woman who wore a flowered summer dress which was entirely wrong for her—said, as one who says the obvious to the backward. “An appraiser. He’s famous.”

  “Jeremiah Osgood?” Dorian said.

  The dumpy woman turned toward her and said, “Of course. Who are you?”

  “My name is Weigand,” Dorian said. “Dorian Weigand.”

  “I never heard of you. One way or another I heard of a lot of his girls, but never about anybody named Dorian. What are you doing here, anyway?”

  With a glance and slightly raised eyebrows, Dorian passed it to Nathan Shapiro.

  “Helping me,” Shapiro said. “I’m Lieutenant Shapiro of—”

  “You don’t look like a lieutenant to me,” the woman said. “And I’ve got a nephew in the Air Force. He’s a captain.”

  “Not that kind of lieutenant,” Shapiro said. “Police lieutenant, Mrs. —?” She was “missis” from the ring on her left hand. Her finger had swollen into the ring.

  “Who do you think?” she said. “His wife, of course. Who would I be?”

  “Shackleford Jones’s wife?”

  “For twenty years. Of course, I was very young when we were married. Barely sixteen.”

  Shapiro a little doubted that, but his doubt was one which did not matter. He looked down at her. She must, he thought, have been pretty twenty years ago—twenty years and a good many pounds ago. That did not matter either, probably.

  “You came here to have Mr. Osgood appraise your husband’s pictures. I take it you don’t live in New York?”

  “I should say not. Two years of that was enough. And down here in what they call the Village, too. Riffraff. And from what I saw coming here in a cab it’s even worse now. A disgrace to America, that’s what it is.”

  “Where do you live, Mrs. Jones,” Shapiro asked, and rather expected that “God’s country” would be the answer. It was not.

  “Kansas,” Mrs. Shackleford Jones said, with righteous emphasis. “Emporia, Kansas. Born there and brought up there.”

  “Did you meet Mr. Jones there? Was he born and brought up there, too?”

  “Kansas City. The Missouri side. And it really oughtn’t to be called Kansas City at all. And in some ways it’s almost as bad as New York. Saloons and gangsters and …”

  Dorian had wandered deeper into the studio and was looking at more pictures. But she was, evidently, still within earshot of Mrs. Jones’s notably carrying voice. Dorian, just audibly, hummed a few bars from Oklahoma! “Everything is up to date in Kansas City,” were the words which went with the tune.

  “You met him there, Mrs. Jones? What’s your given name, by the way?”

  “Isabelle, if it makes any difference. No, he was on the road for his father.”

  “On the road?”

  “Taking orders. Learning the business. And—”

  “Orders for what, Mrs. Jones?”

  “Groceries, of course. His father was Jones and Hartnett. He was wholesale. And every two weeks or so he—I mean Shackleford, of course—would come around and take orders from Daddy.”

  “Your father is in the grocery business?”

  “Of course. He has a beautiful store. Cronin, Food Specialities. Better than Wolferman’s in Kansas City, everybody thinks. Maybe not as big but—” She stopped suddenly. “Why are you asking all these questions?” she asked Nathan Shapiro, who was not sure of an answer which would be adequate to her or, for that matter, to himself.

  “Your husband died violently, Mrs. Jones,” Shapiro said. “When that happens, it always brings the police in.”

  “Committed suicide, it said on the radio. And I wasn’t really surprised, living the way he did.”

  “When did you hear the news, Mrs. Jones?”

  She had heard it the afternoon of the day before—Thursday. She had got a local flight out of Emporia to Kansas City; a nonstop flight to New York, and made it all—apparently including telephone calls and telegrams—by midevening at Kennedy International. She had been, Shapiro thought, brisk about it.

  “Whatever he left is mine, isn’t it? That’s the law. Not that I suppose all this—” she encompassed the big studio with a gesture of a pudgy hand—“is worth anything much. But Daddy said there wouldn’t be any harm in finding out. He said he’d read in the Star that sometimes people paid crazy prices for pictures. Pictures!”

  “So you decided to get an expert—this Mr. Osgood—to appraise your late husband’s paintings?”

  “Make an inventory,” she said. She looked around the studio, but made no movement to walk around it. “Probably a waste of time and money,” she said. “Anybody can see that. A lot of rubbish. And I told him, if he thought he had to draw pictures, one of the biggest card companies in the world was in Kansas City, and that somebody had to do their pictures.”

  “Card companies?”

  “Greeting cards. Mother’s Day and Christmas. And little poems on most of them. And the pictures are sweet—really sweet. But he said, ‘My God, Belle—’ he called me Belle—as if I’d said something silly. But really, I guess, he knew he wasn’t good enough to do pictures like they wanted.”

  “Probably that was it,” Shapiro said, and heard movement from the rear of the studio—movement and a small voice sound, which he did not attempt to characterize.

  Dorian walked toward them, and walked briskly, as if she had suddenly remembered an appointment.

  “I’m more convinced than ever about what we were talking about,” she said. “But you want to talk to Mrs. Jones, of course. And I’m really supposed to meet some friends for lunch.” She had moved so the short, plump woman was between them. And over Mrs. Jones’s curly head Dorian Weigand just perceptibly winked at Nathan Shapiro.

  She said, “Good-bye, Mrs. Jones,” and walked to the door. At the door she turned back. “There’s a picture back there,” she said. “In the second rack from the windows. Quite representational. It has a catalogue number on it, Nathan. Seventy-nine. I’m not at all sure, but I think it might interest you.”

  She opened the door and stepped into the doorway, but then turned back again.

  “I’ll be home by two,” she said. “If you want to telephone me, Lieutenant.”

  “She’s got a nerve,�
�� Mrs. Shackleford Jones said, her voice pitched to carry, Shapiro suspected, to the ears of Dorian Weigand, who was just closing the door behind her. The door closed behind Dorian with a perceptible snap. “Rummaging around here,” Annabelle Jones said, “as if she had a right. These —these things Shackleford did are mine, aren’t they? Whether they’re worth anything or not?”

  “Do you know if your husband left a will, Mrs. Jones? Leaving his pictures to you?”

  “What difference does that make? I’m his wife. I can prove I’m his wife.”

  Shapiro said he was sure she could. And asked again whether she knew if her husband had left a will.

  “It would be like him not to,” she said. “He never did anything like that right. He was scatterbrained.”

  “As his wife,” Shapiro said, “you have dower rights—not less than a third of whatever is realized. After taxes, of course. And after payment of whatever legal debts he may have left. And, I’d suppose, any contractual obligations he may have taken on. I’m not a lawyer.”

  “What you’re saying is, somebody is going to try to cheat me out of what’s mine.”

  “No. Only that there may be issues for the courts to decide. If a will isn’t turned up, the courts will appoint an executor, probably. And he will order an appraisal.” He looked down at the plump little woman. The vagueness, he thought, had gone out of her large, watery blue eyes.

  “They won’t accept what this Mr. Osgood tells them? If he ever shows up?”

  “If he’s qualified as an expert,” Shapiro told her. “But the courts probably will want someone demonstrably impartial. Not somebody you have employed.”

  “I’ll get a lawyer. I’ll see about this. I know how you people are here in New York. Daddy warned—”

  The ringing of a telephone cut through her words. The telephone was deep in the studio and Shapiro zigzagged between easels to it. He said, “Hello,” and was asked by a crisply speaking woman whether a Mrs. Jones was there. The voice added that Mr. Osgood had been trying to reach her at the Hilton because he had had to make a change —