False colors (7 page)

"Maybe it tells you but it hasn't spoken to me yet."

"I know just how the painting left here. Under a natural mink clutch cape. I thought she was swaggering more than usual when she walked out. I remember thinking to myself, there goes that cat in mink."

"If I had thoughts like that, I'd try to forget them."

"I'm talking about Kay Raymond, Interiors."

"So I gathered. Just because she's a smooth looking dame, you suspect her."

"Just because she's a smooth looking dame, you don't. Oh, Pete, she has to be the thief. There are five people who've been after that painting. Ludwig Lassiter, and the two men who beat you up last night, and Nick, and Kay Raymond. She's the only one who would have a bobby pin. Perfectly logical."

"Maybe you have a slight case, but what do we do about it?"

She said firmly, "You call on her tonight, and get that painting back."

"Me?" I said, in horror.

"Certainly. And you have to do it tonight, before she can get rid of it or anything."

"Hmm," I said thoughtfully. "Me." When you came right down to it, the prospect of calling on Kay Raymond wasn't really horrible.

"She'll know you suspect her, but she won't dare refuse to see you. She'd be afraid that would make her look guilty. But if I went, she'd probably yawn in my face and shut the door."

"What do I say to the dame?"

"Oh Pete, how do I know? What does a man say when he wants to get something out of a woman?"

"You're asking the wrong guy. What I say usually gets a big round no."

She said impatiently, "You'd better start learning what to say. And that Raymond creature ought to be an easy person to practice on."

"I would think," I grumbled, "that she's more in the nature of a post-graduate course. However. . ."

We went into the office and looked up her address in the phone book. Her residence was listed as the Rittenhouse Arms, one of the big new apartment hotels on the square. I told Nancy I would give it a try, and headed for the place.

The elevator let me out on the sixth floor of the apartment building and the operator showed me where to go. As I rang the bell beside her door I was feeling a bit foolish. After all, I couldn't rush in and turn her place upside down looking for the stolen painting. And I didn't have any real facts I could use to bully her. All I could do was hope that the girl would make a mistake that could be turned against her.

The door opened a couple of inches and showed me a dark eye and eyelashes about the size of palm fronds. A voice with cracked mandolin chords in it said, "Yes?"

"Hello, Miss Raymond," I said. "May I talk to you for a few minutes?"

"Well, it's Peter Meadows," she said. Her tone seemed to pat me on the head and put me in a junior size playsuit. "Isn't it late for you to be on the town?"

"I often get daring and stay up until midnight. I want to talk to you. About that stolen painting."

The door opened wider. She was wearing a pale red housecoat that fit closely at her slim waist and flared out in a wide skirt. The material looked thin and glossy, and where it touched her

body it gave the impression of firelight on bare flesh. Her hair made a black silk backdrop for her face and white throat. There was a bobby pin holding the hair back from each of her temples.

Her lips moved in a small crimson smile and she said, "Was it really stolen? I thought you and Miss Vernon and the painter staged the whole thing. It seemed like such a cute promotion stunt."

"No," I said, "it was just a plain old case of larceny. I thought you might be able to help me pin down the thief. In fact—" I took a wild guess "—you were standing rather close to the light switch when somebody turned it off. Maybe you can remember who it was."

"I'm sure I can't help, but come in."

She moved away from the door and I walked in. There was a short hallway leading to the right and left, and Miss Raymond turned to the right into the living room. I gave the door a shove to close it and followed her. The living room walls were pale yellow and the furniture was black and there was a creamy-white rug on the floor. The windows were draped in a darker yellow than the color of the walls. Here and there were plants with shiny leaves in black-glazed jars. The walls were bare except for a couple of African masks left over from somebody's bad dream.

"You like my masks?" she said. "That one is a portrait of a Nigerian queen, probably of the Benin kingdom about four hundred years ago. And this is an animal mask from the Ivory Coast. The natives believed that if you wore it, the spirit of the animal moved into your body. I think it represents a leopard."

I wondered if Kay Raymond had ever put it on. I didn't think it would do a thing for her. She didn't look very tame even without a leopard mask. "Lot of superstition," I said.

She yawned and stretched sinuously. "I wonder," she said. "Well, let's discuss your problem. I really can't remember where the light switch was, so perhaps I can't help much."

"Who was standing near you when the lights went out?"

"The room was so full of people, I wouldn't have any idea."

"Whoever turned out the lights also jammed the switch with a bobby pin."

She stroked the hair beside one of her temples, touching the bobby pin lazily. "That sounds like a woman, doesn't it? Or like a man trying to throw suspicion on a woman. Now where does that leave us?"

The faint smile on her face annoyed me. A well fed leopard might play with a small worried rabbit like this. To get anywhere at all I had to throw a scare into her. Since I didn't have any facts, that meant inventing some. "There was a strand of hair caught in the bobby pin," I said.

The smile flickered, like a candle flame in a draft. She sat on one side of the couch and motioned to me to sit at the other end. "Blond, I hope," she said. "I'm always inclined to suspect blondes."

"The crime laboratory at City Hall is going to check into it."

"So if anybody happened to lose a bobby pin and someone else picked it up and jammed the light switch with it, she'll be suspected, will she? I do hope you won't get yourself into any suit for false arrest."

That sounded promising. She was taking me seriously enough to let the claws peep out. "We have more to go on than that," I said. "There were fingerprints on the strip of canvas that was left on the stretcher."

She made a quick impatient gesture with her right hand. "Let's see now," she said. "There must be quite a collection. Your fingerprints, and Nancy Vernon's, and the painter's. In fact I might even have straightened the painting once during the evening."

"Miss Raymond," I said, "you're thinking too fast."

She sat up and said, "I don't know what you mean."

"You get your answers out before I ask the questions."

"What questions are you talking about?"

"To start with, you wanted the stolen painting. You wanted it badly enough to try to buy it before the show opened, and by the way it wasn't in that newspaper photo. It seems that you were standing near the light switch when the lights went out,

and that you may have lost a bobby pin with a strand of your hair caught in it and that your fingerprints may be on the strip of canvas left on the stretcher. I haven't asked you to explain any of those things, but you've already done it. Have you the answer to one more question?"

Her eyes looked as if they belonged in one of those African masks. "It had better be a good one," she said.

"It's the best I can think of. Where's the picture?"

Her body twitched and then her left hand lashed out and slapped me. It was a queer kind of slap. It was awkward and didn't sting the way I expected. She jumped up and pointed to the hallway. "Get out," she said. "Get out right now."

I stayed on the couch and grinned up at her. She was a good actress but she hadn't rehearsed this role. She had made one mistake by getting in her alibis too fast. Now she had just made a series of little mistakes that added up to a big one. I hadn't noticed them when they started but they had caught my attention at last. I said, "When did you turn into a southpaw?"

"Did you hear me say to get out?"

"Something's wrong with your right hand, isn't it?"

"I'm going to call the night clerk."

"Tell him to get the cops. I'd like them to take a look at your right hand."

"There's nothing wrong with my right hand," she said furiously.

"The first time I mentioned fingerprints, you made a quick move with your right hand. I didn't click on it then, but what you did was pull it back out of sight. You slapped me with your left hand. It was a poor job because you're right handed. You pointed toward the door with your left hand so you could keep on hiding your right. Let's take a look at it."

She gasped, "I think you're crazy. I—"

I came off the couch fast, grabbed her wrists. She started to kick me in the shins and I gave a quick wrench and yanked her right hand out into view. There was a small adhesive bandage on the index finger. "See?" I said. "You hurt that finger, didn't you?"

"I've got a blister! Let me go!"

She was still trying to kick me down to size. She had a nasty technique, too. Instead of kicking straight out with her toes she was kicking sideways, trying to catch me with the high heel. One kick flamed across my ankle. I fell back onto the couch, dragging her with me. For a moment things were lively but I hung onto her wrists and pinned her down.

I said breathlessly, "That painting was slashed from the stretcher with a razor blade. Whoever did it had to work fast and in the dark. I'm guessing it was a double-edged blade. Shall I yank off that hunk of bandage and see if it covers a blister or a razor blade cut?"

I was ready for almost anything except what happened. Her body went soft. Huge crystal tears wobbled from her eyes. She turned her face away from me and pressed it against the back of the couch and began to cry.

"Come on, now," I mumbled. "It isn't as bad as all that."

"Oh but it is," she wailed. "I knew you'd suspect me. I knew you would! But I really didn't take the thing. Please believe me.

"But all those little facts put together made it look—"

"Of course they do! The minute everybody saw the painting was gone I started thinking of all the clues that would point to me. I don't suppose you're one of those insecure people who feel guilty when anything goes wrong. But I am. When I'm driving a car and a policeman blows his whistle I always think I've broken a traffic law. Even when I was a little girl I felt that way. If somebody lost a nickel I always had a horrible feeling that people thought I took it. But you can't understand that. You're big and strong and confident. You don't know what it's like to feel small and insecure."

Her face was still pressed against the couch. The words came out muffled but with those mandolin tones thrumming softly in them. My eyes began stinging a bit and my throat felt tight. "Sure I do," 1 said, patting her shoulder. "Lots of people have those insecure moments. But the way you kept hiding your right hand—"

"I'll show it to you," she said in a broken voice, lifting her face. "It is cut. When I came home tonight there was a package waiting for me and I used a knife to cut the string and it slipped and cut my finger. There!" She ripped off the tiny bandage and showed me the cut. "And all I could think of," she said, crying harder than ever, "was that it would look like a razor blade cut and it's been hurting just awfully!"

I was feeling badly about the way I had bullied her. She was just an unhappy kid, under all the gloss and glamour. "Now you stop worrying," I told her. "If you had been as frank as this at the start we wouldn't have had any trouble. Sorry I've been acting so tough."

She gulped a few times and tried to smile at me. The tears had matted her eyelashes into lovely little fishhooks. "I could see you getting more suspicious every moment. And it frightened me so."

I patted her shoulder again. My hand must have slipped because it ended up around her shoulders. I didn't mean to pull her toward me but somehow there she was in my arms. Her breath came in warm little puffs against my face.

"You don't have to be frightened," I said.

"I wanted so much for you to like me, Pete. Do you trust me a little bit now?"

I was going to answer but something interfered. It seemed to be a warm mouth, pressed against mine. Her body touched me here and there, and left scorched places on me. My fingers tingled from the electric feel of the housecoat sliding over bare flesh. My brain was cool and under control, but inside my arteries the corpuscles were screeching around corners on two wheels. I kept telling myself that this wasn't the girl I wanted to make love to, but I didn't have a very good audience. I thought desperately: What would Nancy think?

There was a noise a few feet away. It could have been a bomb going off or someone clearing a throat politely. I twisted around, looked up. One of my guesses was right but I would rather it had been the bomb. A moment ago I was wondering what Nancy would think. Now I could find out. There she was.

Before I could choke out a word Nancy said in a pleasant tone, "Nice work, Pete. She never heard a thing, did she? I could have taken the whole place apart and she wouldn't have known."

Kay Raymond tensed. One moment her body was soft and flowing in my arms and the next it was ready to spring.

I said dizzily, "How did you—"

"How did I find it?" Nancy said. "I just kept looking all through the place. Here it is."

She whipped out something she had been holding at her side and unrolled it quickly and flashed it at me. Lightning bolts of color glowed from the canvas: chrome yellow and vermilion and ultramarine and oxide of chromium. The Accardi painting.

Kay Raymond jumped up, glanced at a spot across the room. "You little sneak!" she cried. "Creeping into my apartmentl Crawling under my rugs—"

"Hold her, Pete!" Nancy snapped.

"Huh?" I said, dumbly.

"Hold her!"

I reached out stupidly and grabbed Kay. I didn't know the score or even what game we were playing. But I tightened my grip on Kay as she tried to wrench free. Nancy made a dive across the room. She dropped the rolled-up canvas and yanked up a corner of the big creamy rug and let out a pleased squeal and came up with another canvas. As she lifted it the thing curled up on itself but not before I had seen more swirls and slashes of chrome yellow and vermilion and all the rest.