False colors (4 page)

Colors were spinning in front of my eyes. At first they blurred together but the spinning slowed down gradually and I could pick out chrome yellow and vermilion and ultramarine blue and oxide of chromium. They seemed to be painted on a phonograph record. The disk had a crack in it and I heard a tick each time the needle hit the crack. The disk slowed down more and more and became that weird painting of Accardi's. Just about the time I identified it, the thing turned into a jigsaw puzzle and somebody picked it and all the pieces vanished and I was staring into blackness again. The ticking from the cracked record kept on though.

My face hurt. Somebody was using it as the pivot for a seesaw. I moved a little and found that the floor was the seesaw, and my face was flat against it. I rolled over and managed to sit up. The cracked record ticked madly for a moment and turned out to be blood pulsing inside my head. I looked around and couldn't see anything but a couple of gray squares bandaged against the darkness. I crawled over the floor until I hit a wall and worked my way up it to a standing position and felt along the wall until my fingers touched a light switch. I nipped it up. Light jabbed needles of pain into my eyes. I located a door and opened it and stared at a piece of cardboard tacked on the outside. The name Accardi was lettered on it.

A few facts began limping back into my head. Somebody had been preparing a small accident for Nick Accardi and I had insisted on having it for him. Somebody wanted one of his paintings badly. The level of art appreciation among thugs must be quite low.

Since I had paid a steep admission price to get into Accardi's room, I figured I might as well look around. I closed his door

23

again. The two gray squares which I had seen through the darkness were windows. The room held a bed, bureau, two chairs and a washstand. The bedclothes had been ripped of} the bed and the mattress turned up. The door of a closet sagged open and things in it had been tossed around. The bureau drawers were open. The guys I had walked in on had obviously looked hard for the painting.

As a matter of fact there wasn't a painting in sight. An old easel stood in one corner, and some brushes and equipment filled a couple of shelves along one wall. I glanced over the stuff. There were tubes of pigment, but there was also a grinding slab, a muller, a steel spatula, some slightly roughened glass plates, and a container of poppy seed oil. That meant Accardi ground some of his own colors. I was mildly surprised. Not many painters today go in for that. You can get better effects when you grind your own colors, and you can be sure of what goes into the colors and how it will react over the years, but it's a lot of work and most modern painters don't want to bother. On one upper shelf I saw a lineup of wide-necked jars. Accardi kept his paints in them, covered with a little water, after he finished the grinding.

None of this interested me very much, and I didn't want to hang around to meet any more local art collectors. I switched off the light and left the room. Nobody came out to take a look at me as I wobbled downstairs. Perhaps they were used to guys walking unsteadily, and to sounds like the thud I had probably made hitting the floor in Accardi's room. I walked back to my place on Walnut Street and got in my apartment and showed my face to a mirror. It was a colorful sight. The bruises looked like old paint on a palette. My nose had bled a little but didn't seem to be any more off-center than usual.

I splashed water on my face and then got out a bottle of bourbon and treated myself to a solid one. It didn't seem to help my rocky feeling. I poured another jolt and lifted the glass and checked the distance to my bed and its direction. I tossed down the bourbon. It hit my stomach and sent a shock wave

tingling up to my head. The wave jarred something loose. It was a thought. Suddenly a couple of things were clear to me.

"That wasn't another guy's accident you just had," I told myself. "It belonged to you. Those thugs didn't know it but they probably had the right guy after all. Ten to one, you have that picture they want."

I dropped the empty glass and went lurching to the phone. It seemed like a good idea to call Nancy, and tell her that a one-man show of Accardi's stuff might draw the wrong kind of patrons. Of course I didn't know her number. I riffled through the phone book looking for Vernon. There weren't any Vs. There weren't any names at all. The pages were a gray blur. I picked up my phone and tried to dial Information but I couldn't find the right set of numbers.

Finally I must have dialed somebody's number by chance, because a voice started coming through the receiver. It sounded vaguely familiar and I introduced myself and tried desperately to explain that I had to talk to Nancy Vernon and tell her the show was off. The voice made some shrill noises that hurt my ear and I put down the phone to wait for the voice to shut up. Apparently I put the phone back in its cradle and broke the connection, because when I picked it up again all I could get was the dial tone. There was also a strong dial tone buzzing inside my head. I decided to rest a few minutes, and located my bed after a long search. It was rocking badly, like a rowboat in a storm, but I managed to crawl in without upsetting it. In two seconds I was asleep.

When I awoke, something cool and pleasant seemed to be patting my face. I opened my eyes and saw a curtain of bright hair shining in the sunlight coming through the bedroom window. The bright hair framed a girl's face. She was bending over me and patting my face with a damp washcloth. I closed my eyes and decided to dream on.

Somebody shook me and said briskly, "Mr. Meadows, I saw you open your eyes. Come on now. Sit up."

I peered at the speaker. Lost: one dream girl. This was Miss Krim, with her hair pulled back in a braid and her lips stitched

in a firm seam. She looked like a teacher working on a backward pupil.

"Please," I said weakly, "I'm not myself today."

"That would be an improvement," Miss Krim said.

"I think he's rather nice as he is," another voice said.

I looked at the other side of the bed. There she was again, golden hair and all. Unless my eyes deceived me, which was possible at the moment, it was Nancy Vernon. "Let me get this straight," I said. "Is my name Peter Meadows and is this my apartment?"

"He's still drunk," Miss Krim said.

"Don't be too hard on him," Nancy said. "I know there's an explanation."

"There certainly is," Miss Krim said. "It's an eighty-five proof explanation and it's called bourbon."

"I think he was in a fight," Nancy said. "That would account for the bruises."

"I think he was falling-down drunk. That would account for the bruises."

"But you said he has never been like this before."

"That's merely a guess," Miss Krim said. "Perhaps in the past he recovered more quickly."

I said, "I wish you two would leave the room if you want to talk about me behind my back. What are you doing here, anyway?"

"We are," Miss Krim said, "engaged in the task of bringing you to. I find it quite unrewarding."

"I've seen worse sights the morning after a college prom," Nancy said.

"You telephoned me last night," Miss Krim said. "It was not easy to understand your words, but I gathered there was some urgent need to get in touch with Miss Vernon and call off the Accardi show. Then the phone connection was broken. I tried to call back and kept finding the line busy. I telephoned Miss Vernon. As you know, she lives on Delancey Place quite near Rittenhouse Square. I told her you sounded sick or hurt. She walked down here and saw that the lights were on, but she

couldn't get an answer when she rang the bell. She called me back. I came down in the middle of the night, all the way from Chestnut Hill—you will find a bill for my cab fare on your desk— and got the spare key from the office and in company with Miss Vernon entered your apartment. Please note, in company with Miss Vernon. And—" she shuddered delicately "—we found you like this."

"Like this, huh?" I muttered, remembering how dirty and rumpled my clothes must be. I looked down at myself. "Where are my clothes?" I gasped. "How did I get into these pajamas?"

"Your clothes?" Miss Krim said. "I suppose they're in the closet or wherever you hang them. I don't know how you got into your pajamas. In fact I would rather not discuss anything as personal as pajamas."

"Don't you even remember getting undressed?" Nancy asked.

"No," I said, staring at each of them in turn, and feeling my face toasting.

"You were probably," Miss Krim said, "quite far gone at the time."

I pulled the sheet up around my neck and said hoarsely, "I'd like to be left alone."

"I ought to go down to the shop anyway," Miss Krim said. "It is nearly ten o'clock."

Nancy said, "Do you think it's all right for me to stay in the living room? I want to talk to him."

"You're perfectly safe," Miss Krim said. "Where Mr. Meadows is concerned, the only thing a woman risks losing is a little time."

They went out of the room and closed the door. I stared glumly after them. Things had turned out quite badly. Miss Krim would never believe that I had collected my bruises battling to save the Accardi paintings. Come to think of it, she would be right, too. I hadn't done any battling. I had merely let a guy pour punches into me until I spilled over. Maybe Nancy would believe my story if I told it straight, without any heroic touches, but it certainly wouldn't impress her. Well, we would

call off the show and I would say good-by to her and send her a couple of nice prints when she married Sheldon Thorp.

I showered and shaved and dressed and went into the living room. Nancy looked up at me with a bright smile. "I have breakfast ready for you in the kitchen," she said.

If a short fat ugly girl had gone to that much trouble for me, I would have been very pleased. But in this case it irritated me. Obviously the girl hadn't done it because she liked me. She was a Junior Leaguer playing at charity work, and I was one of the underprivileged. "I don't want breakfast," I said.

"Please, Pete. You're upset. I know Miss Krim said some sharp things to you. But she talks that way to cover up the fact that she thinks you're wonderful."

"This is killing my appetite for lunch too."

"If she were twenty-five years younger, I'll bet she wouldn't let another girl get your breakfast. Come on, Pete. I'm really a very fine cook."

She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the kitchen. There was hot buttered toast and an omelet and steaming coffee. She was not a fine cook. The toast had been scraped to remove burned places. The omelet was too dry. The coffee had the life boiled out of it. That cheered me up. This girl wasn't perfect after all. I began eating with a surprisingly good appetite.

"There!" Nancy said. "See how much better you feel? I don't think you take care of yourself properly."

I wondered if I could teach her how to make coffee right. On the other hand, maybe it would be better to leave her with that small appealing flaw. "It was very good," I said.

"Now tell me what happened last night. I know it wasn't just a binge."

I gave her the story straight, without trying to make myself look good.

"Why, you were wonderful I" she said at last.

"Have you been listening?"

"The way you stood up to those men was wonderful."

"I didn't stand up to them. I fell down."

"But you refused to tell them what they wanted to know."

"That's only because they didn't ask me. They were asking your friend Nick, and he wasn't there."

"What exactly were the words they used?"

I told her as much as I could remember, including the remark of one guy that Nick wasn't in a spot to play cute with him. When I repeated that to Nancy, she nodded thoughtfully. I said, "You're holding something out on me. You know something about Nick that you haven't mentioned."

"It's just a little thing. A while back he was in jail."

"Oh. A little tiling. Nothing but murder, I suppose?"

"Don't be silly. About five years ago he got in with a wild young crowd in South Philadelphia. They were driving one night and ran out of gas and found they didn't have any money. A gas station attendant wouldn't trust them for it, so they jumped him and swiped the gas. They were all caught. The police called it a holdup."

"Cops are narrow-minded that way. So he's an unlucky kid and society is to blame and—"

"Society is not to blame. Nick was to blame, and he knows it. He was in jail more than two years and now he's out on parole. Maybe those two men were threatening him with the police. He might have broken a parole rule or something."

"That's quite a remarkable statement," I said. "You wouldn't be likely to make it, if you were just guessing. So I have a hunch he did break a parole rule, and that you know about it."

"I wish you wouldn't be so horribly clever. You don't have to catch me up every time I make a slip. Well, all right, it's true that he could get in trouble with the parole office. But all he did was break a little technical rule and it really wasn't wrong at all. I'm not going to tell you what it was."

"There are several things you won't tell me about Accardi, aren't there? You wouldn't tell me why he didn't want you to mention his Garden fight, either. By the way, I guess I saw him on television last night."

"Television?" she cried. "But he wasn't to be on television! It was just an extra bout."

"The main fight ended in the third round so they brought on

the extra bout. One of the guys in it reminded me of those Ac-cardi self-portraits."

"Oh dear! Television! I hope it doesn't get him into trouble. He wasn't using his right name, was he?"

"No. So . . . wait a minute. Is that the way he's been breaking rules? Skipping out of the state to take fights, without an okay from the parole office?"

"Well, yes. But you can see it's only a little technical tiling. And it's the only way he could make a living."

"Why didn't he get permission?"

"A few months ago he did ask if he could take a fight in Trenton. The parole office started asking a lot of questions and Nick got angry and they turned him down, to teach him a lesson. So he swore he wouldn't ask them again."