Scarlet Night (19 page)

“It’s what you’re paying for,” Schweitzer said. “The private previews are in the first column, the dates of the auction in the second.”

“Admirable.”

“I took Miss D’Arcy to lunch, and I said I’d treat her information confidential, so that’s what I’m doing, right? It’s confidential information. She wanted to know if I thought Rubinoff was in trouble. I said it could be and that seemed fine with her.”

“You will of course add the luncheon to your bill.”

“The whole thing comes to about three hundred dollars, Mr. Romano. I don’t mind taking cash if you got it around.”

“I pay nothing without a record, sir. I have no wish to complicate the audits of the Internal Revenue Service.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Romano.” The detective was crestfallen. “If I can ever be of any service to you, I’d like to leave you my card.”

“By all means. And your statement.”

Andy Davis said: “I have a little something for you myself, Mr. Romano.”

Romano held up a finger to silence him temporarily. “Alberto, why don’t you take Mr. Schweitzer into the business office? Perhaps he would like his check now.”

“I can always use a buck,” Schweitzer said.

“We must remember that.”

When Alberto and the detective had gone off, Davis said: “I wouldn’t be surprised if you found a sketch for Courbet’s
Wrestlers
on that list. I remember it coming up in the last few months. Looks like they’re collecting athletes, wouldn’t you say?”

“It does seem to be going that way.”

“Want me to make a guess who he is?”

“You’re certainly entitled to, Andy.”

Davis glanced at Julie.

Romano said: “We are as one in this voyage of discovery.”

“G. T. Campbell. He’s an aging playboy who keeps from going to seed by pretending he’s a Rockefeller when it comes to art. He made a lot of money when he got squeezed out of his father’s business in Texas. Since then he’s come up north and gone into race courses, gambling, sports events. He owns a string of health clubs. His good deeds always have to do with athletic scholarships. I’ve got one more lead for you, if you want further confirmation: Leonard Kliegman. You know who I’m talking about?”

“It would be hard not to,” Romano said. He glanced at Julie.

She nodded, knowing that Kliegman was one of the most popular figures in the current art scene—he painted sporting events, jazz musicians, circus scenes, all the action stuff.

“I’ll bet you twenty-five cents he’s done a portrait of Campbell.”

Romano laughed softly. “Would you believe it, he has done that pen-and-wash thing—very effective, I must say—of certain members of the family? We all have interests in common, it would seem.”

Davis ran his tongue between his lips. “Never sat for him yourself?”

“No, but perhaps I should. Andy, have you any idea where this G. T. Campbell lives?”

“I don’t know his Manhattan address, but I know he’s got a place about fifteen miles up the Hudson. Ever hear of Maiden’s End?”

“No, but it’s a provocative idea. Forgive me, Miss Julie.”

She shrugged. She seemed to remember that Maiden was a proper name. She had been there a couple of times with Jeff. Several broadcast journalists lived there.

“He bought an estate up there a few years ago, proposing to race outboards on the river. He didn’t have them in the water when they outzoned him for noise pollution.”

“Oh, boy,” Julie said. “I’ve met him. At a dinner party once. He switched over to sailboats and sponsors a regatta every summer, right?”

“That’s the gentleman.”

Romano was making a steeple of his fingertips. “Does he have a family?”

“I don’t remember,” Julie said. “I mean I don’t think there was a wife that night.” What she remembered most about Campbell was that while he was dressed pretty normally, shirt, jacket, an ascot, he wasn’t wearing socks—just loafers on his bare feet.

Romano got up from his desk, a signal that seemed to work in moving people out. “When am I to see my Harnett, Andy?”

“Now he wants to see it. Yesterday it was sight unseen.”

“Dear friend, my trust in you is limitless. I am simply eager.”

Alberto took the two men downstairs, a custom of the house. Romano picked up the phone and said, “I’m glad you’re still here, Eloise. I want you to call the Metcalfe Gallery and find out if Leonard Kliegman is in town. You may say who it is that’s calling. If it can be arranged, I should like to have him to lunch tomorrow to discuss doing a portrait of me. Then come in and meet Miss Julie.”

Julie took the detective’s information to the desk where Alberto had stacked the auction records and began a search of the latest volume. Romano hummed softly as he removed and marked the tape of the conversation with Davis and Schweitzer.

Alberto returned just as Julie found what she was looking for. “I’ve got it!”

“The Michelangelo?” Romano said.

“Right.
‘Athlete—
drawing.’ Four hundred and seventy thousand dollars. Wow.”

“He will pay more for the Leonardo. Even in legitimacy, it would have been so, a lesser drawing by a greater artist. Pause and think of the scene that must take place—at Maiden’s End, I shouldn’t wonder now—Rubinoff’s arrival with
Scarlet Night
…”

“Something like what happened here?” Julie said. She wasn’t ever going to forget it.

Romano nodded. “But just suppose Campbell had already acquired the Michelangelo, a much more
macho
figure—so characteristic of him—it would be only human for him to be disappointed in the Leonardo. Rubinoff was wise to let the Michelangelo go.

“Just to keep things tidy, Alberto, see if you can discover from the dates what other auctioned works he may have been interested in at Bristol’s. We must have every documentation available to us. It would be too terrible if we had the wrong man.”

Julie looked up G. T. Campbell in
Who’s Who
and read the entry aloud. Andy Davis had paraphrased it.

Romano chortled. “So that’s where he got his information, from
Who’s Who.
What an accomplished fraud he is!”

Very soon Eloise came in with her shorthand pad in hand-filled with loops and lopes and squiggles. Julie envied her the skill. Romano introduced them and apologized for his morning distraction.

“Mr. Kliegman is in East Hampton for the summer,” the secretary said, “but they will try to reach him and call us back. Do you want the information on the Campbell Company now?”

She read from her shorthand in a singsong voice the story of a fight for proxy votes and the ultimate conglomerate takeover. Julie did not understand a lot of what was in between, but Romano listened carefully, nodding now and then at something he found significant. When she had finished, he said: “It sounds to me as though he wanted out of the business all along. I’m sure that’s what it means, but he was advised to hold out until A. M. and M. raised its offer. He was probably so advised by someone in consultation with A. M. and M. His holding out upped the market price of a very weak stock to everyone’s satisfaction. But he’s not a fighter, that boy. Andy was right.”

Eloise offered to work late transcribing the tapes.

“Perhaps you’d better, and have dinner here. I’ve promised André at least three appetites at table. Now, Miss Julie: that embattled Irishman—are you sure it’s worth the risk? Michael has a number of former colleagues among whom we might recruit more reliable assistance…”

Julie’s eyes must have conveyed her instant assessment of Michael’s former colleagues, for Romano backed down: “Mmmm. Perhaps we can manage with less professional skill, but I beg of you, weigh matters well before giving your trust. I must admit there is no zeal like that of the convert, but I should hate to have him jump aboard and sink us.”

O
’GRADY ARRIVED AT THE
Willoughby early. He was glad to get out of the house where the boys were sour and sullen. He was sure they blamed him because Tony Gatto had changed his mind about hiring them. That Ginni would have changed theirs about taking the job was unprovable. She had not called. Nor would he call her. He was resolved never again to crawl to her like a snake to a charmer. What he longed for, arriving early, was company of his own kind, a woman of simple faith like Mary Ryan. As for Julie Hayes, he wished he could make up to her in some way for his violent intrusion upon her premises. His mood was penitential, a feeling by no means unfamiliar, aware as he was of his strong inclination to sin.

His first thought when Mrs. Ryan called out to him to come in where the door was open was how three people were going to stand up in the place, never mind sit down to their suppers.

Strictly speaking, Mrs. Ryan did not have an apartment. She had managed to keep the room and bath, into which she had jammed almost forty years of living, while the Willoughby converted to larger and more expensive units all around. Her walls were hung with photographs—many of them inscribed—of actors and actresses who had themselves faded even more than Mrs. Ryan’s pictures of them.

“Before you sit down, Johnny, would you take Fritzie for a short walk? I was meaning to, but I didn’t have the time.”

O’Grady gave over the half pint of whiskey he had brought as a gift and took the leash from her hand.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Johnny,” she said of the whiskey, “but it’ll give us an appetite.”

Fritzie, much as he favored a walk, showed little inclination to go with O’Grady. As soon as the man reached for him, he scuttled under the daybed.

“Aw, Fritzie,” Mrs. Ryan crooned, and then to O’Grady, a lament: “He’s not used to men. That’s the late Mr. Ryan there on the dresser.” She took back the leash and got down on her knees at the side of the bed while O’Grady edged around the armchair and television to get to the dresser: a sickly young face under a hat two sizes too big for him.

“Take it to the light,” Mrs. Ryan said.

“A fine-looking man,” O’Grady said heartily.

“It’s hard for me to believe that if he had lived he’d be seventy-six years old. To me he’ll be twenty-nine until the day I die.” She lifted the skirt of the quilted spread and peered under the bed. “Come out from there, you villain.”

O’Grady was thinking as he put the photograph back in its place that if there was, as he’d been taught to believe, the resurrection of the body, there’d be a conspicuous discrepancy between them when that time came. But then, you couldn’t have resurrection in any case without a certain amount of restoration. He returned to the door where it stood open. The bed ran alongside that wall. With his feet in the hallway, he knelt and spoke to the dog who, from what O’Grady could see, was behind a barricade of books, old shoes, and pocketbooks. “Do you want to go out or don’t you? You’ll have a long wait otherwise.”

Fritzie surrendered to Mrs. Ryan, who snapped his leash onto his collar. In the hall, with all the stubbornness of the dachshund side of him, he made a last stand and turned the whites of his eyes to O’Grady. O’Grady took a step back and lifted his foot. He had no need to plant it: Fritzie trotted to the elevator like a little gentleman.

They were at the first fireplug outside the Willoughby when O’Grady spotted Julie swinging briskly down the street. He had admired her walk the first time he laid eyes on her. He did not know how he felt about seeing her now. She would know her shop had been broken into, but if the knife hadn’t turned up yet, it might never turn up, and the lies he’d composed could go untold. He
was
glad to see her. There was a freshness about her that you could almost say came from the soul, unlike the tinseled beauty of some he knew.

“Hello, Mr. O’Grady,” Julie said.

“It’s much too crowded in her nest up there to be calling me Mr. O’Grady. How are you, well?” He shifted the leash and offered his hand.

The dog was trying to dance on his back legs. “Yes, yes, Fritzie. You’re a good dog,” Julie said.

“If you don’t come with us a ways, I’ll have to carry him,” O’Grady said.

“Come on, you spoiled beast,” Julie said. And when they were under way: “Isn’t it nice tonight? The humidity’s gone down.”

“There’ll be a grand sunset, and I see by the paper, near a full moon.”

“Do you always look in the paper for the phases of the moon?”

“I do, though I never thought about it till now.” O’Grady was struck with what seemed like a wonderful idea. “It’ll rise early tonight. I’ve a small car, and while it’s short on all other luxuries, it has a window on the sky. I was going to suggest when we go up that we all take a ride after supper. We might go along the river on one side as far as the Tappan Zee bridge and come down the other.”

Julie cast him a sidelong glance. It was wild, his making that suggestion—a ride that would bring them within a half mile of Campbell’s estate. Or could that be what he had in mind for reasons of his own? Did he know
Scarlet Night
was to go to Campbell? The strange blue eyes turned on her and then skittered away.

“All right,” Julie said.

He smiled broadly. “I was afraid you were going to say I could drop you home on the way.”

“It’s a beautiful drive,” Julie said, and went on calculatedly, “I’ve sometimes visited Maiden’s End. We have friends who live there.”

“Have you ever gone up on the river itself?”

“No.” The mention of the hamlet seemed not to have meant a thing to him.

“I’ve shipped out a couple of times from Albany and you come down in the morning mists and see all sorts of things—the heathen redskins whooping it up by the campfires. I mustn’t call them that anymore, must I? …You can see Benedict Arnold sneaking off and leaving West Point to the British…and George Washington himself going ashore with his men…”

“That was at Maiden’s End,” Julie said.

“I suppose Maiden was somebody in those days,” he said thoughtfully.

“Exactly.” By which Julie meant that O’Grady had not made the common mistake of taking the name for a condition. “The Maidens were Tories.”

“Aye. It’s them that has the money.”

“There’s the both of you!” Mrs. Ryan called at the top of her voice, having come out at the sound of the elevator’s stopping. “I was afraid you were lost, Johnny. I understand now.”