“Yes.”
“You remember Paul?” he asked abruptly.
Oscar remembered Paul Munson as a handsome, sweet-natured kid. Bright enough, but not the flaming meteor he’d become to his father since his plane had crashed sixteen years ago. Odd to think Paul would be nearing forty if he’d lived. “Rick reminds me of Paul,” he said as he buttered a piece of crusty bread. “Same eyes.”
“They are nothing alike,” said Jacob, anger in every syllable. “Paul had an eye for art.”
“I meant in looks,” Oscar said mildly. “Same shade of brown. Besides, aren’t you being a little hard on the boy? He’s only been here three months.”
“Three months, three years, it wouldn’t matter. It’s his mother’s fault. Suzanne turned her back on the gallery.”
Oscar occasionally had trouble remembering that there were two older daughters, Suzanne and Marta. He vaguely recalled that both had earned doctorates in other fields, but Jacob almost never spoke of them. All his pride had been bound up in Paul and when Paul died, Paul’s friend, Benjamin Peake, had become his surrogate.
“She made him a photographer. She made him a-” His voice dropped lower-“a Schwulen.”
“A what?” asked Oscar.
The old man’s face twisted with shame. “A faggot.”
Oscar ate silently. There were so many different sexual proclivities in the art world that he was surprised that Jacob could still be homophobic. Or did tolerance stop when it touched him personally?
“He was with the janitor that night. In his bedroom.”
“So what’s the big deal, Jacob? It’s not the end of the world.”
“Only the end of my line,” Munson said bleakly, drawing his fork through the sauce on his plate. “The end of the gallery.”
“Oh, come on, Jacob. If the boy doesn’t work out, Hester will keep things going. And it’s crazy to think she had anything to do with Shambley’s death. When Sigrid and I left Wednesday night, you and Hester were planning to share a cab back uptown.”
“She got out at East Forty-ninth. Said she was meeting someone at the Waldorf. Yesterday when she came back from the police station, I made her tell me who. It was Benjamin.”
Oscar stopped cutting his lamb and started to wonder if Jacob were experiencing the beginnings of senility. His voice was gentle as he asked if Jacob had forgotten that Hester and Ben-?
The art dealer interrupted with an impatient wave of his hand. “It wasn’t about sex, Oscar. Wednesday night, Roger Shambley accused Hester and Ben of passing a piece of forged art through the gallery. Yesterday I asked Hester of this. First she said no; then she said there was no way Shambley could have proved it.”
He pushed his plate aside with most of the food still untasted. “She may be a woman, but she isn’t that stupid, Oscar. Shambley wouldn’t have had to prove anything. A gallery’s word is its bond and if that word becomes a lie-”
He gave a palms-up gesture of hopelessness.
Sigrid arrived at the gallery with Jim Lowry shortly before three. The soft-voiced receptionist informed them that Mr. Munson had not returned from lunch and that Miss Kohn, as they could see, was busy at the moment but if they wished to wait?
“Yes,” Sigrid said and Lowry took a guide sheet from a nearby stand.
“Notebook pages?” he asked sotto voce. “Twenty-three hundred a sheet? Who’s Ardù Screnii? Never heard of him.”
Stunned, he began to circle the airy showroom, peering first at each matted and framed drawing and then at the price Kohn and Munson was asking for it.
Sigrid pretended to study the drawings, but she chose those that would give her reflected views of Hester Kohn, presently occupied with two customers. The dealer wore hot pink today and a chunky pearl-and-gold necklace.
From the conversation which floated through the nearly deserted gallery, Sigrid soon gathered that the man and woman were a husband and wife from Chicago and that he was a commodities trader. She also gathered that they expected more from an Ardù Screnii drawing than pure aesthetics.
“Of course,” she heard Hester Kohn say, “you have to realize that the bottom line is whether you like a work. I mean I can’t tell you something’s going to go up.”
“Yes,” the man nodded sagely. “Yes, I know that but-”
“I can tell you how some things have gone up, but if you’re buying one of these purely as an investment-”
“Oh, no, we love art,” said his wife, a dark, intense woman in her early thirties. “Of course, my decorator’s going to kill me. My taste is changing. Growing. I was always so-um-traditional, you know? And here I came home with this huge modern canvas and my decorator wouldn’t let me hang it in the bedroom. Said it defeminized the room-it’s all traditional antiques, you know? So I put it in storage. But if I get one of these Screniis, then it’s coming out of storage. I don’t care what the decorator says.”
She was struck by a sudden thought. “I forget. Screnii was Albanian, wasn’t he?”
“Bulgarian,” said Hester Kohn.
“Oh, good!” said the woman. “I’ve always believed in the Bulgarians.”
By way of the reflective glass, Sigrid saw Hester Kohn smile politely.
The man chuckled, even though he wasn’t quite ready to give up the practical. “Still, a Screnii is an investment, isn’t it? And a lot more fun than soybean futures.”
There was a contemplative pause.
“Not that I’d even know what a soybean looked like if I came face to face with one.”
“Aren’t they like guyva peas?” the woman asked brightly.
Hester Kohn shrugged.
“Ah well,” said the man, “what does it matter as long as I can buy low and sell them high? Now, I think my wife and I are going to have to do a little commodities trading on which one of these Screniis we want.”
Ardù Screnii had died in the midsixties, Sigrid knew. He had eked out a living by teaching an occasional course at Vanderlyn, and Nauman was a little bitter that Screnii had never been able to sell one of his major paintings for more than fifteen hundred dollars during his lifetime.
As the two clients left, promising to come back the next day with their minds made up, Sigrid and Lowry approached Jacob Munson’s partner. “Miss Kohn? We have a few more questions.”
Hester Kohn sighed. “Yes. I was afraid you might.”
When Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters returned to the Breul House, the docent on duty at the door informed them that Detective Albee could be found in the attic.
“Where’s Lowry and the lieutenant?” they asked after they’d climbed to the top of the house and heard about Dr. Ridgway’s discovery of the satin glove case in Shambley’s briefcase.
“Over at Kohn and Munson Gallery,” Elaine told them. “What’s up?”
The two women listened intently as the men described how Shambley had bought two posters at the Guggenheim on Wednesday morning, posters Bernie Peters thought he remembered seeing.
“I haven’t found any references to Léger in his papers,” said Dr. Ridgway, “but I’ll keep it in mind.”
The three detectives went down the back stairs, avoiding a group of twenty or so young women to whom Mrs. Beardsley was giving a tour of the house.
In the basement, it took Peters a few minutes to regain his bearings, but he soon went to a box in one of the storage rooms and plucked out the rolled posters, still in their plastic wrap. He slit the paper on one of them and backrolled it so that it would hang straight.
It was just as the small illustration promised: a cubist depiction of two figures that, except for their vivid red and blue colors, reminded Elaine of the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz.