The bride wore black (14 page)

Wanger started to have ants in his pants, to squirm around trying to keep the mouthpiece silenced and at the same time signal, "Trace this! Trace this!" to his superior.

The voice was almost telepathic. "Yeah, trace this, I know," it observed dryly. "I'm getting right off, so don't waste your time. Now, just in case there are any doubts

in your minds, and you want to pass me off as a crank, the note pinned to the Moran kid's quilt read, 'You have a very sweet child, Mrs. Moran. I am leaving him where he will be safe until you return, as I would not want any harm to come to him for the world.' Miss Baker couldn't possibly know that, because you haven't given it out yourselves. Their radio's a Philco, he reads the Sun, I gave him scrambled eggs for his last meal, there were two moldy raincoats in the closet, and his whole cigar burned down without losing its shape, next to the chair he was last sitting in. You'd better let her go. Goodbye and good luck." Click.

The other phone on his chiefs desk was ringing at that very moment.

"A pay telephone in the Neumann Drugstore, comer of Dale and Twenty-third!"

Wanger nearly pulled the door off its hinges, left it open behind him.

Six minutes and eighteen seconds later he was panting his insides out into the face of a startled proprietor hauled out from behind the prescription counter. "Who just put in a call from that middle booth there, where the bulb is still warm?"

The proprietor shrugged with expansive helplessness. "A woman. Do I know who she was?"

Wanger's record on Frank Moran:

Evidence: 1 note in hand-printed capitals pinned to quilt on child's bed.

1 crayon-colored outhne drawing, probably an adult imitation of a child's handiwork.

Case Unsolved.

Part Four

FERGUSON

For the portent bade me understand Some horror was at hand

de Maupassant

Tl

THE WOMAN

I

T WASNT A WELL-ATTENDED exhibition, even as one-man shows go. Perhaps he hadn't made enough of a name yet. Or perhaps he had already made too much of a name in the wrong direction. For his work was not only to be met with here, in this gallery; you could also find it on every subway newsstand in town, nearly any day in the month, hanging diagonally downward from a little clip. For twenty-five cents you could take it home with you, and get not only the cover but a whole magazine full of reading matter behind it. And that, almost anyone in attendance at the gallery would have told you, was certainly success in the v/rong direction.

But there were a few who came just the same, not so much because it was his work as because it was an art exhibition. They were the usual types who never missed an art exhibition, no matter whose, no matter where. A scattering of the dilettantes, or, as they would have preferred to be known, the cognoscenti, were drifting super-ciHously around, simply to have something to chatter about over their next party cocktails. A stray dealer or two was on hand, just to be on the safe side if there was any interest shown in this particular talent. A couple of second-string critics were there, because of their jobs. The exhibit would get only a half column in tomorrow's

papers. Encouragingly phrased, perhaps, but only a half column.

Then there were the two visiting ladies from Keokuk who had come to this because they were starting back home tomorrow night and it was the only one available in the time left to them and they had to take in at least one art exhibit while they were in the city. Anyway, his name was a nice American name, easy to remember and tell "the girls" about back home when they attended their next Ladies' Thursday.

And then there was the professional art student. You could spot her in a minute just by looking at her. Here taking notes or something. The same type that sits down and copies Old Masters in the art museums. Intensely serious, a hungry look on her face, horn-rimmed glasses, lank bobbed hair under a dowdy tam-o'-shanter, oblivious of her surroundings, moving raptly from canvas to canvas, every once in a while jotting down some mystic abracadabra of her own in a cheap little ten-cent ruled notebook.

She seemed to have some inchoate critical canons of her own; she passed by still lifes, landscapes and groups with the merest of glances. It was only the portrait heads that drew her conscientious memorandums. Or perhaps that just came under the head of specialization; she was already too far advanced in her studies for fruit and sunsets.

She crept mouselike from room to room, standing back whenever somebody wanted to get a comprehensive look at one of the same subjects she had chosen. No one even looked twice at her. To begin with, the cognoscenti were so very audible that it was hard to be aware of anyone else while they were around. They saw to that.

"Auch. His pictures are photographs, I tell you! It might as well be 1900. There might as well have never

been Picasso. His trees are simply trees. They don't belong in a frame, they belong out in the woods with the other trees. What is remarkable about a tree that looks like a tree?"

"How right you are, Herbert! Doesn't it turn your stomach?"

"Photographs!" repeated the male cognoscente belligerently, glancing around to make sure he was overheard.

"Snapshots," contributed the female as they strode on, outraged.

One lady from Keokuk who was slightly hard of hearing asked her companion, "What're they mad at, Grace?"

"Tliey're mad because you can recognize what the pictures are about," the other one whispered informatively.

The art student sidled inconspicuously by, without pausing before the scorned trees which should have been shriveled and sere by now, after the blast they'd received.

TTie cognoscenti had stopped and taken out their scalpels again, this time before a portrait.

"Isn't that too pathetic for words? He shows the part in her hair, the very shadow cast by her lower lip. Why bother doing a picture at all? Why doesn't he just take a living girl and stand her up there behind an empty frame? Realism T

"Or why not just hang up a mirror and call it Portrait of the Passerby? Naturalism! Bah!"

The art student came up in their wake and this time jotted down a note. Or rather, a pothook. The little lined blank book she was carrying bore four scribbled notations: "Black," "blond," "red" and "intermediate." Under "black" was a long perpendicular column of pothooks. Under "blond" there were only two. Under the other two classifications none at all, so far. She was evidently spending her afternoon taking a census of the types of

hair coloration to be found in a cross section of this particular exhibitor! Strange are the ways of art students.

The gallery was closing for the afternoon now. The stray dealer or two had gone long ago; there was nothing here for them. Good enough stuff, but why load up on it? The few remaining bitter-enders came straggling out. The cognoscenti emerged, still loudly complaining. "What a waste of time! I told you we should have gone to see that new foreign film instead." It was noticeable, however, that they had remained as long as there was anyone at all around to hear their pontifications.

The visiting ladies from Keokuk came out with a grim air of having done their duty. "Well, we kept our word," one consoled the other. "It's sure hard on your feet though, isn't it?"

The art student was the last one of all to leave. The notations in her little blank book now stood: black 15; blond 2; red 0; intermediate 1. Out of a total of eighteen portrait heads he had displayed, one conclusion was possible: the artist had a penchant for dark-haired subjects.

At any rate, she alone of all the visitors had an air of having put in a thoroughly satisfactory afternoon, of having accomphshed just what she had set out to do.

She buttoned her shabby coat close up under her chin and trudged up the darkening street, back into the anonymity from which she had emerged.

FERGUSON

ERGUSON HAD JUST FINISHED arranging his easel and canvas when the knock on the door came. "Be right with you," he said, and started laying out his oil tubes.

He didn't look like a painter. Maybe because they don't anymore. He didn't have a beard, or a beret, or a smock, or velvet pants. He knocked down a thousand a magazine cover. But in between he liked to do serious stuff, " for himself," as he put it. One whole side of the studio was glass the essential northern light. But that side didn't rise up straight like the other three walls; it slanted in at an angle, so that it was a cross between an upright wall and a skylight.

He went over to the door and opened it. "You the new model?" he said. "Come over here by the light and let me look at you. I don't know whether I can use you or not. I told the agency I wanted a "

He stopped faultfinding and held his breath. He had her over in the full glare of the skylight wall by now. "Sa-ay," he exhaled finally, between a long-drawn whistle and a reverent hiss. "Where have you been keeping yourself? Turn around a little, that's it. Maybe you don't fit the specifications for the ginger-ale spread, but, baby, I'm using you all right! You're just what I had in mind for that Diana-the-huntress thing, for myself. I think I'll

begin that, now that you've here, and the commercial can wait."

She was raven haired, creamy skinned, and her eyes seemed violet behind the imperceptible shadow line she had drawn around them.

"Who'd you work for last?"

"Terry Kaufmann."

"What's he trying to do, hog you all to himself?"

"Do you know him?" she asked.

"Sure I know the bum," he said jocularly.

She dropped her eyes momentarily, caught her lip between her teeth. Then she looked up at him with renewed confidence.

He was rubbing his hands exuberantly, overjoyed at this unexpected find. "Now, there could be only one possible catch. How's the figure?"

"Okay, I guess," she said demurely.

"Y'better let me see for myself. You can go in the dressing room there and hang up your things. You'll find the stuff I want you to put on all laid out in there. The gold bangle goes on the left arm, and hook the leopard-skin kilt so that the opening's at the side; your thigh shows through."

She moistened her lips. One hand went helplessly up toward her shoulder. "Is that all?"

"That's all; it's a semi-nude. Why? You've posed before, haven't you?"

"Yes," she said, face impassive, and went unhesitatingly into the dressing room.

She came out again, as unhesitatingly, but with her face held rigidly half-averted, in about five minutes'time. Her bare feet made no sound on the floor.

"Beautiful!" he said fervently. "Too bad those things don't last. In two years it'll be gone, as soon as they start dragging you around to cocktail parties. What's your name?"

"Christine Bell," she said.

"All right, now get up there and I'll show you how I want you. It's going to be a very tough pose to hold, but well take it in easy shifts. Crouch forward now, dead center toward the canvas, one leg out behind you. I want her to seem to be coming right out of the frame at them when they look at the picture. Right arm bent out in front of you, grasping something, like this. Left arm drawn back, past your shoulder. That's it. Freeze. Steady, now, steady. You're supposed to be stalking something, about to let fly an arrow at it. I'll put the bow in later; you obviously couldn't pose for any length of time holding it stretched taut, the strain would be unendurable."

He didn't speak anymore once he had begun to work. At the end of thirty minutes she moaned slightly. "All right, let's knock off for five minutes," he said casually. He picked up a crumpled package of cigarettes, took one out, tossed the package lightly over to her on the stand.

She let it fall to the floor. Her face was white with anguish when he turned to look at her. His eyes narrowed speculatively. "Are you as experienced as you say?"

"Oh, yes, I "

Before she could go ahead there was a sudden knock at the door. "Busy working, come back later," he called. The knock repeated itself. The girl on the stand made a supplicating gesture, said hurriedly, "Mr. Ferguson, I need the money so bad; give me a chance, won't you? That's probably the model from the agency "

"Then what are you doing here?"

"I was hanging around there trying to get taken on, but they won't take you on, they've got a waiting list this long, and I heard them telephoning to her to report over here to you, so I went downstairs and called her back from a public booth and let her think it was still the

agency. I told her it was an error, she wasn't wanted after all, and I came over in her place; but I guess she's found out since. Won't you try me at last, won't I do?" The pleading look on her face would have melted a heart of stone, much less an artist's susceptible one, always touched by beauty.

"Tell you better in a minute." He seemed to be having a hard time keeping a straight face. "Get back out of sight," he whispered conspiratorially. "We'll give it the old Judgment-of-Paris workout."

He went to the door, held it open narrowly, staring intently outside with critical appraisal. Once he turned his head and glanced over at the first candidate, cowering against the wall, arms crossed over her bosom with unconscious or was it unconscious artistry. Then he reached into his pocket, took out a crumpled bill, handed it through the door. "Here's your carfare, kid; I won't need you," he said grufl3y.

He went back to the easel with a suppressed grin struggling to free itself at the comers of his mouth. "There's even muscling-in in this racket," he chuckled. The grin overspread his features unhampered. "Okay, Diana, up and at 'em!"

He poised his brush again.

Corey, highball glass in hand, paused before the easel in the course of his aimless wandering about the studio, fingered the burlap carelessly flung over it. "What's this, the latest masterpiece? Mind if I take a look?"

"No, stay away from that. I don't like anyone to see my pieces before they're finished," Ferguson answered above the hiss of the seltzer water.

"You don't have to be bashful with me, I'm not a competitor. What I don't know about art would " The