The Stargazey (14 page)

“
If
they invite me to dinner.”

“Of course they will.”

“Am I so irresistible?”

“No. But you're a source of financial gain for them and of ego gratification for the artist.”

“And just how big will their financial gain be?”

“I can't say. But considering the gallery's in Mayfair, home of pricey hotels, swank restaurants, Jaguar and Roller showrooms”—Jury looked around—“and exclusive men's clubs, I expect we're looking at something in the thousands.”

“What do you mean
we? I'm
the one looking at it. Helping out Scotland Yard is expensive. I'm not Robin Hood.”

Jury went on, ignoring this. “Just don't sit around making things up the way you usually do. And after you get yourself in good with the Fabricants and their resident painter, I might just have you go along to talk with Mona Dresser.”

“Mona Dresser. That name seems to ring a bell. Where have I heard it?”

“She was an actress. A great comedienne.”

“Of
course.
My mother was a huge fan—”

“Yours too?” Jury smiled. “So was mine. I bet they would have liked each other, your mum and mine.”

Melrose nodded but said nothing. For a few moments they ate in silence. Then Melrose asked, “What do you mean I shouldn't make things up the way I usually do?”

“You know, like the antiques appraiser. Talking about Turkey rugs and so on.”

“Well, how else was I going to convince people?”

Jury smiled. “All I'm saying is, don't start in on some baroque tale about your years in Paris and art school and countless hours spent at the
Musée d'Orsay studying the Impressionists. That's all. Look, why are we arguing about this?”

“Well, we're not
arguing.
You said I make up baroque tales about things. So do you.”

Jury looked surprised. “
Moi
? Never. I don't have the imagination to do it.”

“No? What about Jimmy Poole?”

Jury frowned. “Who?”

Melrose pointed a finger. “You see,
you see
? It was such a lie you can't even remember the name! Jimmy Poole was your fictitious little childhood friend who stole things and whom you told Emily Louise Perk all about!”

Jury sat back, shaking his head. “
Good lord!
Emily Perk—that was a decade ago. How can you still remember?”

“Accomplished liars always remember. It's time for our sweet.” Melrose had taken a coin from his pocket and flipped it now.

“Heads,” said Jury.

It came up heads. Melrose said, “Okay, you get first choice.”

“I say . . . treacle tart.”

“And I say some kind of pudding.”

As if they had suspended all thought of murder and war, the two sat quietly until Young Higgins approached with the tray. He removed their plates to a side table and set dishes of pudding and custard before them with a trembling hand.

Melrose said, “I win, it's Spotted Dick!”

Jury shook his head. “You don't win. You never said Spotted Dick.”

“We didn't establish any rules. And you should have objected when I said ‘some kind of.' You can't object now.”

Jury took out his billfold, thumbed out a tenner, slapped it down. “You're a stickler for details.”

“I should think you would be too, you being a policeman.” Melrose held the ten-pound note up toward the light of a wall sconce, snapped it.

“Oh, very funny,” said Jury, slapping down the hand that held the note.

“One can't be too careful, can one?” Melrose folded the note and pocketed it. “Let's assume these people at the gallery—”

“Fabricant. Sebastian and Nicholas. They're the owners of record, although I'd be surprised if Mum hasn't chipped in a few quid. I get the impression she has the money. I also get the impression she's extremely clever. Smarter than her sons. She's in her seventies, but she's a hand-some woman. Doesn't show her age.”

Melrose spooned custard over a bite of pudding. “well, there are some people, some women, who seem to flower in their seventies.” He ate the bite of pudding. “Look at Agatha.”

Jury laughed. “Talk about flowering.”

B
yten o'clock the following morning, Melrose was standing outside of the Fabricant Gallery, admiring the painting—a single painting, made more effective by its not having to share the limelight. That is, Melrose
appeared
to be admiring it, since the picture had blessed little about it to admire. It looked like a poor Picasso spin-off, body parts roving all over the canvas instead of being collected into one (or perhaps two) ordinary-looking people.

The gallery was located down a short street in the Shepherd Market section of Mayfair in Wl, one of the more expensive areas of London. It was here that wealthy tourists ganged together to take on London shopping and West End theater.

A door buzzer loud enough to broadcast a prison break sawed on Melrose's aching head (he shouldn't have helped put away that second bottle of Château Boring—the cheap thrills of cheap wine!), but the headache calmed down when there was a
click
and he was able to enter the quieter environs of a smallish room that served as a foyer, dimly lit. Through a white archway, he saw a long hall. The gallery was larger than it appeared to be from the outside.

No one came forward immediately to attend to him, for which he was just as glad. The carpeting and lack of custom were responsible for the hush that descended when he was in the presence of Art. He would not, however, faint (he hoped) as poor Stendhal had done after viewing too much of it.

The deep honey-colored carpet permitted someone to materialize eerily at his shoulder with no warning. “May I help you?”

Startled, Melrose jumped. “Oh, how do you do? Didn't hear you come up. I'm just having a look round.” He was speaking to an extraordinarily handsome, youngish man with coloring much like the carpet. Honey-colored hair and amber eyes in a handsome, high-cheekboned face, with a hardy build but an effete manner, which Melrose imagined the man might have cultivated because he was an art dealer. His hooded eyes and sleepy smile gave him a dreamy quality that set him apart from the pragmatic and utilitarian.

And he was pleasant enough. “Well, we're delighted you came in. Take all the time you like.” He waved a lithesome hand. The “we” in this case smacked of the Royal, as there was no one else backing him up here.

There appeared to be two rooms on the left in which the art was displayed, with a hall leading back past a large desk where the money changed hands. A computer sat there. The paintings hanging against the off-white walls were of quite different “schools” (whatever that meant) or influences or genres. Here was a still life of dew-beaded pears and apples. He had never had much feeling for still lifes, unless it was food that made his mouth water. He moved on to the next one, also a still life, but of flowers, a bowl of peonies; they too had beads of water clinging to their petals. Both paintings were arty and unrealistic, which seemed weird, since they were completely representational. But the only way those fruits and that flower could look as if they'd just sat out in a dew-filled early morning would be to have done just that. And obviously arranged on a cobalt blue platter or a mahogany table, that was impossible. Why was he bothering to sort all this out, for God's sake? And why didn't anyone ever paint a still life of a glass of port or a tumbler of whisky or a Diane Demorney martini? There was a challenge! It was Melrose's belief that martinis were beloved because of their aesthetic appeal: the clear lake-water look of the gin or vodka in the fragile, thin-stemmed glass, with a green olive bobbing in its depths or a curled sliver of lemon peel drifting on its surface. . . .

“Do you like this one, then?”

Melrose jumped again at the sudden appearance of the young man.

“You seem quite struck, quite smitten!”

“Oh. But one does, doesn't one?” That meant nothing, of course, but this gallery person would accede to just about anything, living as he did in the cradle of ambiguity.

The handsome dealer shoved his hands into the pockets of his wheat-colored deconstructed jacket (whose soft Italian lines Trueblood would gladly kill for) and cocked his head. “Umm. Yes, I expect you're right.”

Right? About what? It occurred to Melrose that they could hang about here all day trading meaningless words. “Are you Mr. Fabricant? I mean, as in the gallery's name?”

“Right. I'm one of two. My brother and I are co-owners. I'm Nikolai Fabricant. How do you do?” He thrust out his hand.

Melrose shook it and introduced himself—or what used to be himself—and handed the man his card. Nikolai (whom Melrose had already decided to call “Nick” at the earliest opportunity) Fabricant took it, looked at it deeply, mouthed a title or two, before he looked up, clearly savoring Melrose's presence. No matter what egalitarian beliefs people gave lip-service to, Britain could not erase (or eschew) class consciousness. Melrose said, with an apologetic brush at commonality, “It takes me rather a long time to view a painting.” Oh, how pretentious! What a snob! Yes!

But Fabricant was all for it. “As well you should. I wish more were like you. I'll let you alone.” Melrose smiled and nodded, and, as the other man slipped away over the quiet carpet, he turned to contemplation of a flagrant and amateurish J.M.W. Turner imitation: Venice's Grand Canal at either sunrise or sunset. The light in this work appeared gratuitous, seemed to explode at the end of the canal, in some poor, poor attempt to Turner-ize light. Still, it saddened Melrose, for it reminded him of Vivian's absence.

He moved on to the next painting, which he assumed had been done by the artist who had painted the one in the window. The only difference he could detect was in the rearrangement of body parts. The eye in the forehead here was drifting at the bottom. Ye gods, he hoped this artist's
were not the paintings he was supposed to purchase! He went closer to read the identifying card: no, the name of the artist wasn't Ralph Rees but Carol Brick. Carol had named her work
Afternoon in the Forest,
and the brothers Fabricant were asking two thousand quid for it. Melrose could hardly contain his shock and struck his palm against his head as if he would clear his eye and mind of this nonsense and come up with a more reasonable figure: say, twenty quid.
Afternoon in the Forest
? Carol, surely you got your little name cards mixed up, or the gallery people did. Now he felt challenged to see something woodsy in it, but try as he might he couldn't see a tree either in the body parts or in the bright, banal colors. That small purple thing could be a glass of port and that brown oblong a half pint. She should rename it
Afternoon in the Jack and Hammer.

He moved along. Once again he reared back, but for an entirely different reason: he had come upon what looked like an honest-to-God genuine painting. It was a small work, a scene from which it was hard to look away. Indeed, Melrose couldn't look away, though he wanted to, for it was unbearably sad: two women, dressed in dark gray, one old, one young, standing on a rocky shelf by the sea in what (given the light and water) seemed to be a calm that followed a tremendous storm. There was sea wreckage. The women were facing one another, or would have been had their heads not been bowed. The colors were astonishing. How much variance there could be in gray and brown had never occurred to him. He moved up to look at this card, hoping it might be Ralph's: no, again. It was called
The Storm,
and the artist was—

Beatrice Slocum.

Melrose stepped back a few paces, thinking surely his eyes had deceived him. Beatrice Slocum? It must be “his” Beatrice Slocum; how many could there be who were also painters?

He was simply stunned. She who had loved J.M.W., which was how she referred to Turner. He looked from
The Storm
to the Venetian scene and thought how very odd that the Venice painting was so clearly derivative and hers wasn't, not for all of her looking at J.M.W. Turner's paintings in the Tate.

He shook his head. Bea Slocum. White Ellie. Ash the Flash. He'd discovered she “painted” but had no idea she could turn out a work that
was superior to anything he'd seen so far. He hadn't seen Rees's paintings, but they'd have to be damned good to beat
The Storm,
which was selling for—he went to the card again—a measly five hundred quid. Only five hundred, while the dreadful preceding ones were being sold for thousands?

The shadow of Mr. Fabricant seemed to hover back in another room. He called it over.

“Found one you liked?”

“For starters, this one.”

“Ah, Slocum. Sweet little thing, isn't it?” Nicholas Fabricant cheerily agreed.

Melrose wanted to send a right to his jaw. How condescending could one be? He defended the painting. “I wouldn't say
that
about it. It's much too powerful. And I have a question: Why is this one going for only five hundred when some of these others, which do not appeal to me at all, and are not—you'll forgive me—nearly as good, why are they going for five times the amount?”

“Ah. Well, you know, it's supply and demand.” Fabricant peered more closely at the Slocum painting, a puzzled look on his handsome face, a look of
Could-I-have-missed-something
?

“Yes, I realize that. But that's only putting my question in another way.
Why
would there be a demand for this Brick person's work, or that sentimental and derivative depiction of Venice, over something like this?”

“Um. Carol Brick is extremely popular,” he said, still not answering.

“So is my dog, but that doesn't mean he can paint.”

Nicholas Fabricant was beginning to get defensive. “Well, you know, a painting appeals or doesn't appeal.”