The Polka Dot Nude (19 page)

I jiggled Drew’s elbow. “Excuse me, but could I use the bathroom?”

She didn’t show alarm, or anything but slight annoyance. “Just down the hall,” she said motioning. When I left, she was still extolling the virtues of Matisse. Brad angled himself so that she had to turn her back to the hall to talk to him.

Her bedroom was another marshmallow world, all white on white, but the three paintings there were smaller and less well executed than those in her living room. I took a quick peek under her bed and in her clothes closet, finding not a single speck of dust, and a fortune in designer labels, respectively, but no painting. The bathroom was tiled in dark burgundy tiles, and had more towels than the linen department of Bloomies, but it didn’t have any paintings. Fresh flowers were the artwork in there.

When I returned, they had got down to haggling over the Matisse. “It’s a fine painting, but I always had a weakness for softer, pastel shades,” he said, hinting to hear whether she had a pastel polka dot nude without quite saying it.

“I don’t have anything like that at the moment. Leave me your address in Ireland, Tim, and I’ll let you know if I come across anything. Meanwhile, about the Matisse . . .“ It seemed her reluctance to sell had been overcome.

I assumed Brad would now back out gracefully, but he said, “What are you asking for it?” His eyes caressed the nude’s outlines, and Drew slanted a calculating glance at his profile.

“If I’d been able to get authentication papers with it, I could name my own price,” she said ruefully. “Of course there’s no doubt as to its authenticity,” she added hastily. “It’s signed—you can see for yourself. A man of your knowledge in these matters, Timothy, wouldn’t have to look at the signature. The museums, however, like to have their paintings documented, so I could only sell it privately. That cuts down the price to a really ridiculous one, but you have to realize you’d have trouble if you planned to resell.”

There was a longish silence. My shoulders tensed, but when Brad spoke, he said, “Oh, I’d never sell the likes of this lady,” in his best Barry Fitzgerald brogue, I looked at Drew, and saw a small smile settle on her lips. She looked like a cat heading for the cream jar. “Where I’d put her is in my bedroom, alongside my Bonnard,” Brad decided.

Drew looked indecisive. “I’m tempted to let it go. It’s rare to find a true appreciator. You’d be surprised how many people only buy as an investment. Well, to name a figure—say, sixty-five thousand,” she suggested, rather tentatively.

“It’s the lack of documentation that bothers me a little,” Brad said. “Who did you buy it from, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Unfortunately the previous owner is dead. I picked it up at an estate sale in Florida two years ago. The woman only had two decent paintings—the majority of the sale was jewelry, so that the art buyers weren’t out en masse. I confess I only paid twenty-five thousand myself. It was Mrs. Julien Fairchild,” she said, and looked closely at Brad.

“I’m not familiar with the name,” he admitted. “I don’t follow the American art dealings closely at all. I know what I like, as folks say, and that’s good enough for me.”

“This is a beautiful painting.”

“No question of it, but the price . . . Say I give you fifty thousand cash on the nose for it. You’ve doubled your profit in two years.”

“I’m sorry, Timothy. I turned down that price two months ago. I couldn’t let it go for less than sixty thousand.”

“Fifty-five,” he countered.

After a very brief consideration, she said, “Agreed!” and shook his hand. “It is lovely, isn’t it?” She smiled fondly at the painting as they went on talking for a few minutes.

“I’ll make it easy for you,” she said. “I’ll wrap it up myself and ship it to Ireland for you, no extra cost. We ship many of our paintings abroad. The sheiks are snapping up everything. We wrap them well in moisture-proof, damage-proof containers. It’ll save you carting it off to Kentucky. I’ll register and insure it, of course.”

“I have a fancy to take it home with me to my hotel room tonight,” he said.

“There’s the matter of payment . . ."

“You’re right, of course. Why should you trust a stranger? I’ll have the certified check at your gallery in the morning. Could you take the picture there, to save me coming here for it? Say, ten in the morning.”

“That will be no trouble at all. Now let’s celebrate with a drink!”

A bottle of champagne was already nestling in ice, with two glasses on the table beside it. Delighted with her sale, Drew had no aversion to producing another glass. I sat silent as a jug while Drew and Brad carried on a bantering flirtation. Before we left, he had a date to meet her for dinner the next evening at Le Pavillon d’Antibes. I assumed he had no intention of keeping this date, or he would have chosen a place where he wasn’t recognized at a glance as Brad O’Malley.

As we went down the elevator I said, “Why on earth did you buy that Matisse?”

“You didn’t find the nude in her bedroom, did you?”

“Of course not, but her selling you a Matisse doesn’t prove she stole my nude.”

“If the signature’s been changed from Rosalie to Matisse, it’ll prove something.”

“Yeah, it’ll prove Barnum was right. I bet my nude’s down at her gallery, hidden in a back room somewhere. Fifty-five thousand dollars, Brad. Are you sure you’ll be able to get it back? You can’t stop payment on a certified check.”

“She won’t dare cash it when we’re finished with her. She’ll be happy to hand over your polka dot nude, just to keep us quiet. Want to go out and celebrate?”

“Celebrate what? So far we haven’t done anything but waste fifty-five thousand dollars.” This was intended as a comment only, not a refusal to go out. Brad decided to take offense. He was stiff and quiet for a while. When he drew near to Central Park West, I said, “I might as well go to my own apartment. Do you mind driving me across town?”

“I thought we’d go to my place first. You left your bag there,” he reminded me, but in a careless way, not showing any disappointment. He was probably delighted he’d be getting home early enough to call Rosalie Wildewood.

“I can get it tomorrow. I have lots of clothes at home. Shall I meet you at the gallery at ten?”

“It’ll save driving over to pick you up.”

Brad offered not a word of discouragement to my plan. The car slid up in front of the dilapidated brownstone duplex. “I’ll go in with you to make sure you haven’t been taken over by squatters,” he offered.

At my door, he waited just inside till I turned the lights on. “My God, you’ve been burgled here, too!” he exclaimed.

I looked calmly at the welter of confusion. “This is the way I left it. I packed in a bit of a hurry. I’ll tidy it up now. Thanks for the lift. For everything, I mean.”

“You’re welcome.” He stood with his arms folded on his chest, which gave him an air of permanence as though he meant to stay an hour or two. There was an angry question in his eyes, and a stubborn set to his chin.

“See you tomorrow,” I said, edging him toward the door. “Goodnight.” I softly closed the door. The Gucci loafer didn’t slide in to hold it open. The Gucci loafer was probably on the gas pedal, rushing toward Rosalie Wildewood.

CHAPTER 15

I turned and looked at my apartment with the eye of a disinterested observer. You could tell to look at it the person who lived here had an ego the size of a pea, and the domestic instincts of a hobo. There was no reason it had to look like a garage sale, just because the carpet was nylon, instead of one hundred percent wool, hand knotted in the Orient. I should have gotten busy and cleaned it up, but first I wanted to do some thinking. I personally can’t think when I’m dressed up in a white suit that wrinkles if you look at it. I got into my thinking clothes, jeans and a jersey, sat on the sofa with my knees pulled under me, and thought about the situation.

My typewriter ribbon suggested the polka dot nude had been shipped to Drew Taylor at her apartment. It wasn’t at her apartment, and I didn’t think she’d had time to sell it. It had to be at her shop. All I had to do to get it back was to get into her shop—tonight—and retrieve it, and I’d save Brad fifty-five thousand dollars. Better yet, I’d show him that while he was an ineffectual dilettante, I was an achiever. I might live in a pigsty; I might not get six-figure advances for my books, but I was more of a man than he was. My shriveled ego demanded some satisfaction, and the author of two preteen mysteries knew what was required of her heroine. I was scared stiff, but my conscience was already dulled from my former breaking and entering of Brad’s cottage.

The trouble with breaking into her gallery was that I couldn’t do it from the front, where I’d be seen, and I was scared out of my gourd to go into some back alley alone at night. I didn’t own a gun, or even a can of Mace. The preferred accomplice for the job was a strong man, but Garth was in Greece—though he might possibly be back by now. He knew clever lawyers, which would come in handy if we were caught. And he wasn’t a chicken by any means. Helen would never marry a chicken. But Garth would be all for handing the affair over to the authorities; he’d want me to get a search warrant and sensible things like that. Upon further reflection, I was coming to convince myself Garth wasn’t so great after all. He didn’t own a restaurant, Rosalie Wildewood didn’t call him “Darling,” and he didn’t have much of a sense of humor either. What I needed was a very brave fool. What I needed was . . . Jerome Hespeler.

Jerome and I had gone to high school and college together. We two introverted misfits were good, old friends. Jerome ran a children’s bookstore that stocked my preteen mysteries. Compared to him, I was a roaring success. He admired me, and would give his bifocals for a chance to break and enter with me. He was about the only man I could phone after ten o’clock at night, too. I called. Jerome was at home, and yelped delightedly that he’d be right over.

I did a quick cleanup of the pigsty, and met Jerome at the door within half an hour. Jerome wears the aforementioned bifocals and is only an inch taller than I am, but his arms are strong enough, and he’s really quite ingenious. I outlined my problem to him, with many interruptions.

“You really met Rosalie Hart. Wow, what an experience, Aud.”

“It’s her daughter’s gallery I want to break into.”

“Breaking and entering—just like TV.”

“Except if we get caught, we go to a real jail.”

“We might be on TV.” He beamed foolishly. “Your publishers would get us out of jail—wouldn’t they?”

“They’d probably love the publicity. And I’m not the real thief.”

Once he was convinced I was a victim, we discussed ways and means of getting into the gallery. Jerome used to drive a taxi before he got to be manager of the bookstore, and knows every street and alley in New York. What we decided to do was drive past the gallery, looking for the closest alley. He’d park his Volkswagen Beetle in the alley, and we’d go scouting from there.

He had the foresight to bring a toolkit containing things like hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, and two flashlights. The closest alley to Drew’s gallery wasn’t even on the same street, but around a corner. He drove down to the end of the alley, turned off the lights, and parked. We slipped out and went hand in hand along a narrower passage till we came to a strip of land about four yards wide, with a fence at the side.

“The gallery is the third shop from the corner. We’ll have to hop that fence, and maybe another,” Jerome whispered. “There might be dogs,” he added, with a certain relish. If a Doberman pinscher came baring his teeth at me, I meant to retire at top speed; but till I saw whether or not we had dogs to contend with, I didn’t confess it. We clambered over the fence. From there, it was surprisingly easy. There was no other fence. There were two doors. The last, according to Jerome, was Drew’s. It was locked by an old-fashioned padlock. I held the flashlight while Jerome unscrewed the whole mechanism from the door. After that, there was nothing to do but walk in. Our flashlights showed us a narrow passage into a storage room.

“There might be an alarm system,” was Jerome’s next effort to give me a heart attack.

“I doubt it. Her stuff is hardly worth stealing. Wouldn’t we have heard it anyway?”

“It wouldn’t ring here—it’d ring at the police station. Let’s see, the closest station is five blocks away. We have less than ten minutes, Audrey,” he said calmly.

“You take a look in the next room. I’ll look here.”

He already knew what we were looking for. I went with him, to make sure the area he was searching was the same room Brad and I had seen that afternoon. It was Drew’s office, and large enough that the painting could be concealed somewhere. While he looked there, I went back to the store room.

It was littered with old wooden frames, some of them heavily carved. There was a table holding cans of gold spray paint and other, nonaerosol cans, along with brushes, old rags, hanging wire, and a few tools. This was where Drew mounted the canvases onto frames for display.

Against one wall stood some garish abstract expressionist paintings like the ones in the front gallery. I began lifting them aside, one by one, with a definite feeling of repetition. One explosion of lines after another. My ears were perked for the keening of a police siren. That’s what I was listening for—a loud noise from the distance. I hardly paid any attention to closer, smaller sounds. At least that’s my excuse. When the man came silently up to the back door, I didn’t hear a thing, not so much as the padding of a foot. The first intimation that we had company was the turning of the doorknob. My heart jumped into my throat. I turned off my flashlight and stood shaking in my Adidas. Jerome! Had he heard the knob turn?

It was dark in the room,
really
dark, no moonlight or anything. I couldn’t see who had come in, but I knew from the way the floor moved that it was a fairly big man. A policeman? A henchman of Drew’s? Some other quite disinterested criminal, like a murderer or rapist, maybe? I didn’t move a muscle—I didn’t swallow, I don’t think I breathed—while the man tiptoed past me, into Drew’s office. He knew we were here—he’d have seen that the lock was taken off the back door. Since he knew we were here, and wasn’t afraid, he obviously had a gun. And unless TV lied, police didn’t enter the scene of a crime in this surreptitious manner. They kicked in doors and yelled, “Freeze!” The man was not a cop, so by induction he was a robber. Great—Jerome was going to end up with a bullet in his chest because I wanted to impress Brad O’Malley.