Pursued by Shadows (10 page)

“Listen, in a case like this, the less use you are, the better. Believe me,” said John, picking up her hand from the table and giving it a squeeze. “Are you surviving?” he asked gently.

“Surviving what?” she asked, with blank-faced innocence. “Starvation? Not very well. Otherwise—”

“Harriet, be serious for once, will you? I meant are you surviving today, as you damned well know. Are you—” He paused, unable to ask if she was hiding grief behind that impenetrable wall of brittle gaiety.

“Oh that,” she said, waving her other hand airily in front of her face. “You mean coming back from trying to rescue an old friend from certain death and discovering another old friend dead on the living room carpet?” Her green eyes moistened. She took a gulp of wine and smiled. “Under the circumstances, I'm surviving very well. You see—” She paused to give him another watery smile. “Considering the circumstances, if I may go back to them, it doesn't seem likely that you had anything to do with his death. I mean, unless he died because he fell down my stairs. That doesn't seem likely, though. Is it?”

Sanders, who had been mulling over how Guy Beaumont had met his end all evening, shook his head. “I don't think so. I'm sure he didn't hit his head—and even if he had, it's unlikely that he'd wander around for an entire week without noticing anything. And then walk into your place and drop dead. Although it can happen.” He shrugged his shoulders uneasily, as if it hadn't quite managed to convince himself. “But I'm not sure I understand your point.”

“If he died because you hit him,” she said, staring down at the table and speaking in a lifeless monotone, “not in self-defense, but in a rage, even if you were defending me, what's that going to do to you? And to your position? I'm not sure you'd survive that. And then you'd be one more victim of that self-indulgent, spoiled monster. I couldn't stand that. So I'm assuming,” she said, looking up again, “that someone else did it. Someone else he wound up to a rage. And because I'm selfish, that doesn't really bother me.”

John shook his head. “I wish you'd step back and try to see this from another perspective, Harriet. I know you think Beaumont died because he was part of some chain of male violence that stretches from here to the back of beyond. Okay—these things exist, I agree, but they're not that neat and predictable. My gut instinct tells me he was killed for some totally commonplace reason. My gut instinct and the fact that your apartment was searched. Not trashed in a rage, but searched. Like, for example, greed.”

“Greed?”

“Simple, old-fashioned greed, my darling. Not because some man was inspired to violence by his example. Why else the frantic search through your art books and your freezer? He—or she—was looking for something valuable. Believe me.”

“I'll try. You mean like a painting. A skinny painting, that is.”

“A painting valuable enough to kill for. Do any of Beaumont's fit into that category?”

Harriet shook her head. “I wouldn't have thought so. But couldn't he have been murdered by one of his victims who also wanted to extract a little profit out of the whole mess?”

“You do have a fondness for complicating things, don't you, Harriet?”

It was past ten o'clock before the telephone rang in Amos's apartment. Jane reached for it, but Amos was there ahead of her, frowning. She drew her hand back, leaving it for him to answer, dancing with impatience at the time it took to get the receiver into her own hand.

“Who was that?” snapped Lesley.

“Just a friend. I've borrowed his apartment. And his phone. Where have you been? I've been frantic.”

“I'm sorry, but I couldn't call. Yesterday or the day before. There were—uh—reasons. Everything's all right now but it's too stupid and too complicated to explain over the phone. What's wrong?” Lesley's voice was sharp with nerves. Then as Jane poured out her tale, a veil dropped over Lesley's features. They became frozen, expressionless, except for a tiny frown between her brows.

“They're sure that's who it is?”

“Positive.”

“When did it happen?”

“I haven't the slightest idea. Today, I suppose. Or maybe last night. Mum saw it on the news.”

“Where are you, Jane? And are you well hidden?”

“Look, it's better if you don't know where I am.”

Lesley thought of the lazy, confident male voice that had answered the telephone, and her nails dug into her palm in a spasm of possessiveness. “What do you want me to do?”

There was an even longer pause. “Go ahead,” said Jane at last. “Since you've made it that far okay. Just act natural. But be careful.”

Oh, God, thought the young woman as she dropped the receiver back down on its cradle. Her stomach twisted into agonizing cramps. Natural. Be careful. Sure.

The question was, is it easier to be careful here or in New York? No one seemed to notice her here except in a vague, pleasant, friendly sort of way. She had presented herself as a reporter, following the Erie Canal, gathering pictures and folksy anecdotes for a travel article; she had tried out her newly minted cover story very cautiously, first on the bartender at the motel and then on the owner of the little restaurant she had stumbled on in her explorations. Neither of them seemed to find anything odd about it. Apparently lots of people were interested in the Erie Canal. Slightly emboldened by her success, she decided. She would stay.

“Is it heartless to put away a meal that starts with bean soup and ends with baklava when you have recently discovered a corpse in your living room?” Harriet pushed aside her coffee cup and looked inquisitively at John. She had had too much wine, she decided. He had better drive.

“Not at all,” he said. “Tragedy is always associated with enormous banquets and nonstop consumption of food and drink. Anyway, I'm glad you don't seem to be pining away because of what happened to Beaumont,” he added cautiously.

“Now that's heartless, John Sanders, but appropriate, I suppose. I can't say I am pining. I was surprised to find him there, and upset, but not brokenhearted. Is that what you wanted to know?” At that her eyes seemed to cloud over, shutting him out again, and her face lost its look of enforced cheer. “Underneath all this bravado there's a fluttery feeling in my chest that I think is fear, and I know that awful face is going to haunt my nightmares for a while,” she added. “Poor bastard. I wonder if anyone will be brokenhearted. Except Nina, of course.”

“Nina?”

“I told you about Nina Smithson.” Harriet blinked and tossed her hair back out of her eyes, suddenly almost herself again. “His agent. She's going to get it right where it hurts, in the wallet. I expect she'll be carefully disarranging her golden locks in grief until she can find another
enfant terrible
the art world to promote.”

“That's remarkably catty, Harriet,” said John. “Even for you. So while you're in this mood,” he added, “tell me more about Beaumont. Not you and, but just Beaumont. How famous was he? And all that.”

“Famous,” she said, leaning forward just slightly drunkenly and letting her hair fall down over one green eye. “That depends on what kind of fame you mean. When I first met him, eons ago, I was just barely starting out in photography—doing everything and anything that came my way—dogs, children, two-bit weddings, you name it. He was a terribly important personage in the inner arty circles in town. He was certainly not successful in the crude or financial sense at that point. He had a job teaching at the art college, and was the focal point of a group of artists and would-be artists who were convinced that his place ought to be next to the Archangel Michael up in heaven. He was, in short, a minnow in a birdbath. Unfortunately for him, he thought the birdbath was the world and he was the biggest fish in it.”

“And you went out with him?”

“Not yet. Don't get impatient. He was, as he confided to me with adolescent charm, running his paint-stained fingers through his auburn—well, brown, actually—curls, still trying to find a medium. He thought maybe photo collage could be his thing and he attached himself to me so he could pick my brain and skills. I didn't realize that at first, of course. It took me at least two or three days to figure it out,” she said wryly. “Anyway, around that time someone introduced him to Nina Smithson, who had a gallery and badly needed new artists to peddle. Well,” Harriet went on, spreading her hands wide in an exaggerated gesture of infinite possibility. “Nina took one look at all this garbage that Guy had piled up over the years and the bells went off in her head.”

“She thought he was a genius?”

“Not on your life. No flies on our Nina. She saw fabulous commercial possibilities in him if someone with a strong hand—”

“Nina?”

“Of course—guided him in the right direction. My God, at that point he was still involved in the happening-in-the-park school of art, can you believe it? No money in it, no joy in it, just a sense of smugness and adulation from a tiny group of unimportant, arrogant, sycophantic peers. Like that little twerp who broke into my bedroom the other night looking for Jane. Peter Bellingham.” She snatched up her glass and drained it, her eyes exploding with sparks of fury. “Do you know that Peter had the nerve to grab me at a party once and lecture me about my responsibilities to Guy? My sacred responsibilities to his talent and all that sort of crap. And then, after I threw Guy out he came over to explain to me that poor Guy was so torn by the conflict engendered by his infidelity that he had been unable to control his massive soul and spirit—or some shit like that—and that was why he hit me. And so I should understand and take him back.” Harriet shivered and then wrapped her arms angrily around her chest. “If poor Guy hadn't just bought it on my living room floor, all this really would be funny.”

“What kind of art did he go in for?” asked Sanders firmly, determined to keep her thoughts away from the inert mass in her apartment.

“Well—it's what I call the corporate oil school, which annoyed the hell out of him, but that's what it was. He did these enormous, spectacular, brightly coloured canvases that you could use to cover half the lobby of the National Widget Building.”

“Abstracts?”

“Oh lord no. Nothing like that. It was a kind of neo-realism. He would do scenes that were vaguely suggestive of the aims and ideals of the company he was painting them for. Only it wasn't their actual aims he encapsulated. His job was to clean up the image. You know, like painting a flock of doves with olive branches in their beaks for a weapons manufacturer, only he was a little more subtle. He'd do a beautiful, undisturbed bucolic scene for some heavy equipment manufacturer, implying that this is what they really went in for, not ripping the landscape to shreds. Hell—go look at one and you'll see what I mean. They're all over the place. Ghastly. He also did some very nice, somewhat derivative pen and ink things. Nina sold piles of those in the gallery. And prints. He liked etching—all that acid and stuff appealed to the macabre in him.”

“What about other people's work?” said Sanders.

“Other people's work? What do you mean? What did he think of it? With his ego, not much. He had very little room for the appreciation of the talents of others.”

Sanders shook his head.

Harriet frowned in puzzlement for a moment and then nodded. “Ah—you mean stealing it? Are we talking imitations—he lived on them—or literally?”

Sanders nodded. “I think I probably mean literally.”

“Like forging paintings?”

“Did he ever try it? If one of his own paintings wasn't worth
that
much, maybe someone else's paintings were.”

“He did copies,” said Harriet. “A lot of artists do. He said it gave him ideas on brush stroke and colour. And since ideas were what he was kind of short on, he immersed himself in copying from time to time. But he never tried to sell the copies as originals that I know of. He never did them to size—or at least, I never saw one that was done to size.” She stopped for a moment, twirling her coffee cup around and staring at the pattern it made. “But, you know, I suppose Guy could have been a successful forger. Because he was technically so good. A flawless craftsman, a badly flawed artist. And not particularly moral, either.”

Friday morning, and Ed Dubinsky was sitting sideways behind his desk, hands clasped behind his head, feet stretched out, a portrait of total relaxation, except that every line of his elongated body screamed irritable impatience. “Good morning,” he said. “Nice of you to drop in.”

John looked at his watch and flopped down in a chair. “I've been having breakfast with a major witness. What's new?”

His partner hoisted himself up in his chair and gave him a long speculative look. “What's your exact involvement with this mess? Personally, I mean. They're nosing around.” He jerked his head in the direction of the door. “You know. Discreet like.”

“Damn,” said Sanders. He stood up again, thrusting his hands in his pocket, and walked over to stare out the window. “It's nothing. It's peripheral, that's all. Nothing to do with me. Except that it's awkward as hell. I didn't feel like spending the night hanging around the apartment watching them find my prints on everything.”

“Did you know him?”

Sanders paused, glanced at Dubinsky, and then turned back to the window, unable to look his partner in the face. “I met him once, briefly. For two or three minutes. A week or two ago,” said John, knowing that although this was true in letter, perhaps, it lied rather spectacularly in spirit.

“And at that time you threw him down a set of stairs,” said his partner. “Miss Jeffries has given me a statement. A full statement.”

“Jesus, Dubinsky.” He stalked back to his desk, sat down, and took the lid off his coffee. “I gave him a shove. He only went down a couple of steps. Think of it as preventing the commission of a felonious assault through the use of judicious amounts of force. Considerably less than the prick deserved. Anyway, I was out of town when he bought it, remember.”

“Yeah—well, it's got nothing to do with me,” said Dubinsky. “They made that pretty clear. The preliminary report on the autopsy is in.” He grinned. “You want to know how he died?”

“How,” said Sanders flatly. “Someone scare him to death?”

“No,” said his partner, “he drowned.”

“Drowned?” spluttered John, spilling coffee on his notebook as he reached for the telephone.

Half an hour later, Sanders was in Jerry's Grill, making his way past business types doing late breakfast deals toward a green-jacketed back and a cap of glossy black hair on the other side of the room. “What in hell do you mean—drowned, Melissa?” he said loudly. The room was silent.

“Just that,” said the diminutive pathologist, waving him into the chair opposite her. “He died because his lungs contained water instead of air. Simple principle. Not difficult to understand. You ordering something?”

“In Harriet's apartment? On the living room floor? He drowned? My God, Melissa, she doesn't even have a goldfish bowl in there.”

“I'll have a honey bun, Jerry,” Melissa Braston called over to the gloomy owner of Jerry's Grill. “Hot, with butter. And more coffee. And I don't know about Harriet's living-room floor—that's not my department, as they say. She a friend of yours?”

“Stop being so bloody discreet, Melissa. You know damn well she is.”

Melissa Braston gave him a sly grin. “Well—maybe. Maybe not on her living room floor, that is. The body shows clear signs of having been shifted around. Lots of fresh bruising, consistent with being dragged from one place to another, if you like, and then left to dry out on the floor.”

“Now that's a brilliant deduction, Melissa. Since he was found on the second story of a building that hasn't been under water recently. So what happened? Did he trip and fall into the lake? And someone with a bizarre sense of humor fished him out and stuck him in Harriet's apartment?”

She shook her head. “He drowned in someone's bathtub or sink or maybe even laundry tub. And it was unlikely to have been accidental unless he got his kicks from taking baths fully clothed with his wrists tied. Not a sexual perversion familiar to me, but who knows? If that was what gave him his little thrills, I'm not surprised that he drowned. But of course it doesn't explain how he climbed out of the tub and walked into the living room. I leave that to you.”

“In a bathtub, with his wrists tied?”

“Yes. Very tightly. Couldn't be clearer. He might as well have had a little note pinned to his chest explaining it all for overworked and harassed pathologists. Rope marks on the wrists and the composition of the water in his lungs. It's been purified and treated. Tap water.”

“Maybe he stumbled into someone's swimming pool.”

Melissa shook her head and took a buttery mouthful of hot roll. “Sorry. Won't fly,” she said, as she swallowed. “Not enough chemicals and extra junk like that. Just nice, normal, chlorinated tap water. All the little thingies have been killed off.”

“Drowned,” muttered Sanders. “Jesus. I thought he looked soggy, lying there on the floor.”

“That's unkind,” said Melissa. “He'd really quite dried off by the time his body was brought in. Have a Danish. Join me.”

“When did he die?”

“Not that easy to say,” Melissa said. “Under the circumstances. But probably not much more than forty-eight hours before they put him on ice. And probably not less than thirty-six. Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday noon are your outside limits of probability, I'd say.”

“Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday noon. That's awkward.”

“Nothing I can do about it, love. And something else. He has some very shallow knife marks on him. As though someone had been playing around with a knife before he got the bright idea of dumping him in the bathtub. Or wherever.”

“Have they gone over the apartment?” asked John wearily. It was only slightly after ten when he got back to the office, but he felt as if he had already worked several full days without a break.

“Pretty much,” his partner admitted.

“And found anything? You know, if he drowned in Harriet's bathtub, there'd be hairs, something, in the tub, in the drains.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, for chrissake, did you find any?”

Dubinsky shook his head. “Lots. All of it brown. Everybody who's ever been in that apartment has brown hair. You. Miss Jeffries. Beaumont. All somewhat different colours and textures. It's all down at the lab and it'll take time. No hair in the kitchen or darkroom sink.” He shrugged. “I can't see her having anything to do with it, though. After all,” he went on, as though Sanders were disputing his every word, “he was big, well-muscled. There were bruises on his head and shoulders, hair torn out. That sounds to me like someone held him under the water and waited for him to drown while he struggled. Someone strong. Or maybe two people. And then dragged him up a half-flight of stairs from the bathroom to Miss Jeffries's living room and dumped him there. Of course there are the knife marks,” he added doubtfully. “Miss Jeffries is strong enough for that.”

“For chrissake, stop calling her Miss Jeffries. You make it sound as if you're about to charge her.”

Dubinsky turned to stare out the window, apparently lost in thought. “She could have hit him on the head and knocked him out, and then tied him up, sliced him up a bit for the hell of it, dragged him into the bathtub, filled it up with water, and held him under. It's afterward that's hard to imagine.” He stopped for a moment. “Getting him out of the bathtub and up the stairs before the two of you went off to New York. I don't think she could have done that by herself. And who would have helped her? You were under my nose all day Tuesday and you would have been pressed for time to drown him, move the body, drive to wherever in hell you were, and check in by seven forty-five. Which you did, according to the hotel. Even if, for some weird reason, you wanted to throw suspicion on her by murdering him and stashing the corpse in her apartment. And supposing she didn't object.”

“Jesus,” muttered Sanders. “Keep on like this and you'll give me an ulcer. What's the state of things now?”

“We have a report on the brother. Nigel Beaumont. McNeill went over him and his apartment with four guys. There was a lot of hair and crap in the bathtub drain there too—they're looking at it as soon as they've finished the stuff from Miss Jeffries's bathtub—”

“My hair got precedence?”

“You're damned right it did. If they find Beaumont's hair in Miss Jeffries's—Harriet's—drains there'll be hell to pay and you know it.” He picked up some paper and began half-reading, half-talking. “Interviewed Nigel Anthony Beaumont, and all the usual crap. On Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of May, the subject claimed he worked late, went directly from his office to a restaurant, where he met a female companion. They visited the theater—you don't want to know exactly which production, do you?—went to another restaurant for a drink—name, address—and then went back to his companion's apartment on Vaughan Road—her name, address—where he spent the night. On the morning of the twenty-seventh, he went straight from her place to work and stayed there all day. Guy had given him the theater tickets, and so he figured his brother had someone coming over and wanted to get rid of him for the evening. The female companion, by the way, confirms all of this, and we have people out checking the restaurants and his office.”

“How did it strike McNeill?”

“Well—you know McNeill. He wouldn't believe his own grandmother, basically. But he thought that the story might be true.”

Sanders shook his head. “By the way, has anyone tracked down the little prick who lived with Beaumont in London? Bellingham? He keeps turning up one way or another. One more person we ought to see.”

“Before we do that, no one's been out to take a statement from his agent yet. She probably knows something useful. McNeill's doing the rounds of the rest of Beaumont's friends—trying to find out what he was doing after he got off the plane from London. He can do Bellingham.”

“The agent it is, then,” said Sanders. “I gather she's a bitch on wheels.”

Sanders gave the massive Georgian house on Dunvegan Road a sour look as they pulled up in its driveway.

“What's your guess? Is all this paid for?” said Dubinsky, taking in, with one sweep of his expressive eyes, the house, the landscaping, the dark blue BMW, and the little red Lamborghini parked directly in front of them. “I didn't realize art galleries coined that much cash.”

“Something does,” said John. “Come on. Let's get this over with.”

The housekeeper ushered them into the den to cool their heels for a good ten minutes before Nina Smithson vouchsafed an appearance. The room was bare of reading material; there wasn't even an old copy of
Time
or
Maclean's
lying around. Dubinsky examined the paintings (with an eye to fraud) and Sanders amused himself by staring out the window at their car.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” said a cool voice behind them. “This is my morning for the gym and I just got back. I hope you aren't going to take long. I do have a business to run.”

Nina Smithson was dressed in a blue linen suit, the kind that has “do not touch” written invisibly all over it, and the interview was apparently to take place standing, in deference to Mrs. Smithson's immaculate and as yet unwrinkled clothing. Dubinsky sighed and took out his notebook. Sanders wondered what kind of gym, and exactly what she did while she was there. He had a sudden vision of her lifting three hundred pounds without disturbing a lock of that flawless hair and shook his head.

“I understand that you were Guy Beaumont's agent,” he said.

“That's right,” said Nina, in speech as crisp as her clothing. “And The Smithson Gallery is the country's principal source of Beaumonts.”

“How well did you know him?”

“Is this a ‘check one of the above' sort of question?” she asked. “Then I'd have to say extremely well,” said Nina. “Probably as well as anyone. As you may know already, he'd been living in London in my Chelsea flat and painting for the last year or so. He and that girl.”

“By ‘that girl,' are you referring to Miss Sinclair?” asked Sanders. “Do you happen to know where she is? We'd like to interview her.”

She shook her flawless head and her golden cascade of hair swished gently before returning to its place. “Not the faintest idea. In fact, I was looking for both—or either one—of them before—uh—this happened. I had a new commission for Guy. But I couldn't find them.”

“I take it that the gallery's a very prosperous concern, Mrs. Smithson,” said John, looking around him.

Nina broke into a peal of laughter. “You take it wrong then, Inspector. It does well, but not this well. I'm sorry, I thought everyone knew. This,” she said, with a shrug of the shoulders that encompassed house, clothes, decoration, the lot, “is good old Marco's money.”

“Is that Mr. Smithson?”

“It was. Not that he was, of course.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Smithson. Or even Marco, as far as that goes. I never knew his name or where he came from. I assumed it was somewhere around Albania, or perhaps Turkey.” With a vague wave of her hand, she dismissed the geography of Eastern Europe and the Middle East as some unknowable mystery, like the outer reaches of the universe. “Wherever it was, the people there called him Marco; but he admitted to me once that even that wasn't his name. It was probably his code name in some terrorist organization. He wasn't a particularly nice or honest man.” She smiled, and apparently having decided that she was enjoying herself, sank down in a comfortable chair, linen skirt and all. Dubinsky discreetly poised himself on the edge of another chair. “Smithson he got from the Smithsonian Institute. Someone took him there when he first came to North America and he was very impressed. All those complicated machines and things. But all this—house, cars, objets d'art—is because of Marco.” The smile that accompanied these words was sardonic. “He was a developer in the golden years when developers made all the money they wanted.”