A Brush With Death (10 page)

“Possibly in Ms. Painchaud's apartment,” John said, and told him about the phone call. “We'll have to have her followed too."

“You think men grow on trees? I'll check her alibi for the time of Latour's murder. Of course Bergma will try to cover for her. She must have been at that museum Christmas party too."

“Maybe not at six-thirty,” I reminded them eagerly. “Jan Bergma was organizing it. She could have arrived later—after she'd knifed Latour and stolen the paintings.

“Women don't usually use knives,” Gino said, while wolfing down his meat. “Not in North America anyway. Poison, guns nowadays, but a knife...” He stopped and took a loud crunch of pickle.

“She must be Bergma's girlfriend,” I decided. “She works for him—it's logical. That'd explain the painting. Latour did it for Bergma."

“Why didn't he give it to him?” Gino asked.

“Maybe it was going to be a Christmas present."

“Yeah,” Gino said, “but Bergma arranged to give him a Persian knife first."

“The paint was dry, and the picture was dusty,” John said. “Latour did his Christmas painting early, if that's what it was all about."

Gino listened sharply, while still wolfing down his meat. “And if she's Bergma's lady, how come she has the hots for our John?” he asked, with a sly grin at me. “She must be a nympho, you lucky bastard; Weiss."

John refused to look at me. I didn't like the way this whole investigation was going. It would end up with John dating her to get a look around her apartment. I put my wits to work and said, “What we'll have to do is slip away from the Art Nouveau opening tomorrow night and search her apartment."

“She's home now,” Gino grinned. “I bet you could get into her bedroom without too much trouble, Weiss. I'd be only too happy to volunteer for the job, but the lady seemed to prefer you. Don't worry, Cassie,” he added with a lecherous grin. “I won't let you get lonely."

“You can call me Newman,” I suggested, to cool his ardor. “I've noticed ladies like that macho touch.” He reached out and grabbed my hand, smearing it with pickle juice. “Newman it is. New man, get it? Ha ha. Just kidding, Weiss."

“We'll hit Ms. Painchaud's apartment tomorrow morning while she's at work,” John said. I breathed a big sigh of relief.

“Too bad,” Gino said, and winked at me. An end of meat escaped his lips and dangled over his chin. He stuck out his tongue and rescued it with a flip, like a frog picking a fly out of the air. “Ben has the best damned smoked meat in the whole world,” he said, and grabbed his pickle.

I tried to ignore him. It's disconcerting to watch an animal eat. “What do you think Bergma will do when he finds his box is gone, John?” I asked.

“I don't know. Did you put the bug in his office phone, Gino?"

“Of course I did. Did you bug his house phone?” John nodded.. “Then we'll soon know who he calls,” Gino said, and patted his stomach. “I think I could handle another. How about you, Weiss?"

John squeezed my hand under the table. “One's enough for me.” He smiled a smile that spoke of more than food.

“Maybe I better not either,” Gino decided. “Angelina's serving cannelloni. Her pâté stinks, but she uses Ma's recipe for her pasta sauce."

“Did you get your mother's dishwasher?” I asked.

“I did, and you wouldn't believe what they soaked me for it. There's going to be an installation charge on top of that, and the bastards won't install it Christmas eve. I wanted to see Ma's face Christmas morning.” He looked like a little angel when he said that. I almost liked him, till he added, “At least my dad'll get stuck for the installation charge. Plumber
and
electrician. Ha!” He laughed raucously.

He was still laughing when he put on his parka and left. Maybe because he had stuck John with the bill.

You're probably wondering if John stayed overnight. He didn't, and what we did before he left is not much of a part of this story. I told him I had given Mom the bad news about Christmas. We talked about the case and Christmas mostly. He absolutely forbid me to buy him a Christmas present, except a token. I didn't argue too much because money was tight with me. Of course I did the “gentlemanly” thing and insisted he not buy me more than a token either, thus banishing my hopes for an engagement ring.

I slept in the next morning and went shopping in the early afternoon for John's token. It is very hard to find a meaningful token for ten dollars, the sum agreed on. In fact, it's pretty well impossible. I had to exceed the limit to buy him a book on Van Gogh. It had plentiful reproductions and talked about the artist's life as well. I hoped John didn't already have it. One of the nice things about giving books is that you have a brief enjoyment of the gift yourself before wrapping it. And as usual, I ended up being sorry I had to part with it. Van Gogh was truly a unique artist. He invented a style and made it so much his own that even an artistically illiterate person like myself could identify his work. I could not always tell a Raphael from a Botticelli at a quick glance; Tintoretto, Titian, and Caravaggio are melded into one grandiose swirling canvas in my mind, but a Van Gogh was like a Modigliani. Nobody else could have painted it—except of course a master forger.

Knowing that Van Gogh had been in an asylum, I could easily see, or imagine, the evidence in his tortured brushstrokes. I read about his mental illness, the fits of depression that coincided with letters from his brother Theo bearing bad news. When Theo was worried about money, Vincent tried to kill himself to ease the financial burden. I think he was overwhelmed with guilt. His having been a minister suggested that he had a very active conscience at least. It was nothing new for genius to be allied to madness. He sounded terribly dependent, not only on Theo's money, but on his emotional support.

It seemed so unfair that Vincent had always been poor, paying seventy cents a day for a little cramped room in an attic. Toward the end of his life, he had painted seventy paintings and done several drawings too in a seventy-day period. At the going rate of upwards of fifty million per painting, he earned over three and a half billion dollars in a little more than two months. That must be more than Michael Jackson makes. And the poor devil died by his own hand, stony broke in a stifling attic. They laid his coffin on a billiard table, which sounded pathetic. There was a picture of his modest little headstone in the cemetery at Auvers. Theo's was beside it just months later.

It seemed almost obscene that people were buying Van Gogh's pictures now for such wild sums of money. And that Latour and Bergma were exploiting him was even worse. There was a moral repugnance in it. Vincent was such a good, simple, idealistic man. I felt a new eagerness to catch the crooks in honor of his memory. Some few characters have that ability to reach out and touch our hearts. This was becoming more than a case; it was a crusade.

When John came to the apartment that afternoon, I was still reading. I hastily stuffed the book under the sofa and opened the door. I had got so carried away I hadn't even fixed my hair or put on any makeup.

“What's new?” I asked, after he had taken advantage of my lipstick-less lips.

“In the case, you mean? Well, for starters, Denise has an unlisted phone, so we didn't get into her apartment. Gino s looking into her address. A pretty dull morning."

“You might as well have spent it with me."

“You needed your beauty sleep. Oh oh, I better rephrase that. You said you were tired from staying up late studying— and of course dating other guys,” he added with a dark look.

“Thank God my exams are all over,” I said, and hastily offered coffee, before he reopened that particular can of worms. He followed me into the kitchen while I put on the kettle;

“Did Gino have any luck finding out if Hot Buns has an alibi for six-thirty the night before last?” I asked.

“The people at the hotel say she arrived early, before seven, to help Bergma. That makes it pretty tight. We didn't like to question her. She's one of the best leads we've got so far. I'll do some discreet quizzing tonight and see how things stand with her and Bergma."

I tried not to resent Denise as I filtered the coffee and took it into the living room. I thought about the case and said, “Has Gino learned anything from the bugs on Bergma's phones?"

“Nothing. The guy hasn't tried to get in touch with whoever called him, or vice versa. It's all business. Bergma hasn't been any place except to his own house and the museum, so they haven't met."

“You know where the partner could meet Bergma without arousing any suspicion is at the art show opening tonight. There'll be tons of people there. If Bergma hasn't been in touch with him, he must be getting very jumpy. We figure he killed Latour for Jan Bergma. They've got things to talk about. Like the paintings, and where they are, and how they're going to unload them."

“If they have them,” John added doubtfully. “Bergma told the caller ‘They're gone.’ That doesn't sound as if the caller knew. One of them damned well knew, and was trying to con the other."

“Bergma's returning to the Netherlands in January. He's got to meet the guy before then and clear things up. I know if it were I, I'd go to the opening tonight."

John nodded, interested. “We'll watch and see if any of the customers make Bergma especially nervous. See if he goes off into any private corners with anyone. I'll take my Bic-Pic along. Maybe Interpol will recognize the guy. I might recognize him myself."

“It'll be tricky using your lighter. There won't be any smoking allowed."

“I don't have to know that. In France they smoke their heads off nearly every place but in church. It's only in the States that you can't smoke."

“And Canada. They're becoming rabid here. My uncle tells me they'll soon be having smoke police in Toronto, and you know how he loves his stogies."

There was nothing much to be done, case-wise, so we played hooky in the afternoon and I showed John Montreal. Mount Royal, Place des Arts, Place Ville Marie, and Brother Andre's Shrine on the mountain left him blasé. What really impressed him was the subway, so clean and quiet and beautiful, with murals and assorted artwork at every stop. He also seemed to take considerable pleasure from the soignée women, whom I must admit do have a certain
je ne sais quoi.

To make up for his seeing Denise and my getting stuck with Gino that night, he was taking me out for a gourmet dinner first. Gourmet dinners and opening nights are to me what a canvas and a box of pigments must have been to Van Gogh. They make me a little crazy with joy.

I vacillated between the chic new black pencil dress and a flame red little number with a sparkly top and bubble skirt worn to the McGill Christmas formal. John had already seen the black, so I chose the red. As I didn't have time to get to a hairdresser, I wore my hair up again. I love the big, dangling new earrings. For Christmas, Sherry gave me a pair I had been ogling all fall at Birks. They consisted of a cluster of rhinestones, weighing about four ounces each, that fell in a cascade of glitter two ‘inches below the ear. All this glitz called for extravagant makeup. I felt very French and sophisticated when John picked me up. He, in his Savile Row suit, looked dashing and debonair enough to please Robin Leach.

John smiled appreciatively. “Am I back in Paris?” he asked. “The coeds didn't look like this when I was at college.','

“I caused a few riots,” I said modestly.

We went to the French seafood restaurant in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. The bouillabaisse alone is worth the trip. Fat black clams and assorted shellfish and other sea critters make it a meal in itself, although we managed to do justice to a coq au yin and a bottle of sauterne as well. I was too well fed and pleased with the world to let Gino bother me when he joined us later in John's room.

Gino had been taking his Hugh Heffner pills and had made some pretense at a toilette for the occasion. He wore a nice tan camel's-hair coat, not his usual parka. The trousers of his blue polyester suit had a crease, and he wore a shirt and a tie. I think some color of socks other than yellow would have been an improvement, especially when his tie was red, but what the heck. The fumes of the sauterne were still with me, and I greeted him politely.

“You look great, Newman,” he said, running his shifty little eyes up and down my body. “This is a real class lady you're lending me, John. Too had she's such a beanpole, or I might decide to cut you out entirely. Heh heh."

John reminded me of a German shepherd, patronizing a smaller mongrel. He just grinned good-naturedly and said, “That'd learn me."

“Is there any of that Johnnie Walker left?” was Gino's next sally. “I need something to take the smell of that garlic off my breath. Ma uses about a cup of garlic in her spaghetti. She crushes it to get the oils out."

Mrs. Parelli's trick works very well. I could smell the fumes across the room. The Scotch didn't help a bit to hide it either. I insisted on sitting in the back seat for the trip to the museum. “You and John probably have things to talk about,” I said magnanimously.

“You really got your lady trained,” Gino said approvingly to John.

“Cassie knows her place,” he grinned. “Where else would a backseat driver sit?” His baleful expression as he tried to avert his nose from Gino's breath told me he understood my ploy.

The elite of Montreal were swarming into the museum when we arrived. Montreal is one of the few cities where furs are not only ornamental but also useful. Even the men wear them. There was a lot of fur climbing the steps—mink, ocelot, wolf, a few leopards, and beaver, the latter mostly on the men. Once the furs were stashed, I ogled what the women wore beneath them. If I thought my red dress was going to rate a second look, I was mistaken. In the Christmas season, three-quarters of the women opted for red and rhinestones, or diamonds, depending on the bank balance. The men were all as carefully groomed as TV evangelists, with their blow-dried hair and expensive tailoring.

A tall, gray-haired man in formal black evening wear headed up the reception line. I recognized Mr. Dupuis, the manager of the museum, from the newspapers. My eyes did not linger long on Dupuis. The fantasy beside him, also in black, was straight out of a French film. Had they imported Alain Delon for the evening? The man was tall, with a glossy head of black hair and that pale skin that suggests poetry and perhaps decadence, rather than ill health. His eyes were black and lustrous, fringed with lashes an inch long.