The room was silent, it was as if the air had changed its character and would no longer carry sound. Time too became something other than itself, it congealed like stanched blood and ceased to flow. Eyes flicked back and forth from Brandenburg to Augie, from Nina to the painting. And in that long suspended moment a sick certainty was growing like a cancer in Claire Steiger. Secretly she glanced to her left and to her right; there were strangers there. There were strangers everywhere, and she was sitting here without her husband. Her hand rose slowly to her mouth as if to hold her insides in. She spoke softly and she looked in no particular direction. "Kip," she said. "It was Kip, wasn't it?"
Peter Brandenburg stood up slowly. His eyes were riveted straight ahead, still locked in a futile stare-down with the painted parrot. He didn't raise his voice.
"He said everything was taken care of. He said everything was just as it should be."
The security guards moved unhurriedly toward the critic, and the critic made no move to elude them. But he didn't like to be touched, he pulled his elbows back and made it clear he would go without resisting.
The auctioneer pounded the gavel and pounded some more, but it was a long time before order was restored.
47
"It was Nina who figured it out," said Augie Silver.
They were sitting at Clay Phipps's-their home while their own house was being rebuilt. It was a steamy evening at the beginning of July, the air smelled of closed, defeated flowers, and the ceiling fans turned lazily, heavily, seemed at every moment to be winding down. Joe Mulvane, his blue shirt splotched with sweat, leaned forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees. Claire Steiger sat on the sofa with her legs tucked under her; her dandelion hair was round, her face was round, her curled body was relaxed in comfy circles. She was vacationing at the Flagler House, recovering from many disappointments, and yet she seemed serene. Clay Phipps had had his living room painted; gone were the lewd, accusing rectangles where Augie's pictures had been hung; gone with them seemed to be Phipps's penchant for self-blame, the nagging self-disenchantment that led him to do things that were blameworthy.
"Really it was Reuben who figured it out," Nina said. "The way he seemed to know it would come down to that painting."
Augie nodded. There was wonder in his face like the wonder of seeing the full moon lift red and mottled from the Florida Straits. "Yes, that was remarkable," he said. "But the real breakthrough-that was yours."
Joe Mulvane leaned forward a notch farther. "Excuse me," he said, "but I guess the detective's always the last to know: What was the breakthrough?"
Nina paused, savored the moment. She'd gotten younger in the last couple of weeks. Her skin had healed, her husband and her life were safe; she'd been swimming every day and she was full of joy. "You know how it is," she said, "when you lock yourself into a certain way of looking at a problem? The way, after a while, you're stuck with that approach, whether it gets you anywhere or not? Well, we'd been assuming all along that whoever wanted to hurt Augie was trying to drive the prices up, so they could sell. Then, the night of the fire, the timing of Brandenburg's article, it suddenly dawned on me that the plan was to drive the prices down, so they could buy."
" Then sell," put in Clay Phipps.
"At a vast profit," Augie added. "And very soon, so Kip could meet his July first obligations. The choreography had to be quite precise. When Kip set the fire, he timed it so the auction would happen before the news of my death had reached New York. Peter buys low, then I'm dead, and boom, prices go crazy. They turn the pictures over almost immediately."
Mulvane considered. "But at the beginning, with the poison tart-"
"At that point," Augie said, "things were simpler. Kip was working alone then. His plan A was to kill me far enough ahead of the auction so he'd make his money on the pictures Claire had."
The dealer shook her head in self-reproach. "I encouraged him. I'm the one who planted the idea that, handled right, the auction could bring in enough-"
Augie reached over and patted her knee. "Claire, Claire, you're my agent, don't ever blame yourself for jacking up my price… But anyway, when the tart killed Fred instead of me, Kip started getting worried that he was running out of time, that he needed a different strategy. That's when he persuaded Brandenburg to come aboard."
Claire Steiger frowned. "Another thing I did," she said. "Threw the two of them together."
The others let that pass.
"The turquoise ragtop," Nina said. "Kip drove it, but it was rented with Brandenburg's I.D. Brandenburg didn't own paintings, we had no reason to put him on the list of names to check."
"And the picture on the license?" Mulvane said.
"When someone looks as rich as Kip, clerks don't check things very closely," said Claire Steiger. "Besides, there's a more than passing resemblance between them-that same kind of constipated preppy handsomeness. Probably that was part of the attraction."
"Attraction?" said Clay Phipps. "Don't tell me they were an item."
"Oh, God no," said the agent. "Nothing so straightforward as that. But I think there's no question that Kip had him in some crazy kind of thrall. Maybe it was in some way sexual. Probably it was. But who knows what that means between a straight, stiff, married man and a cold-fish eunuch who can't even bear to have a friend pat him on the wrist?"
There was a pause. The ceiling fan turned slowly, heavy air seemed to spiral down from it like something solid. Outside, sagging fronds scratched sleepily against tin roofs.
"I can see it," Claire went on. "Long close talks in the locker room after a good hard game of squash. Kip starts talking about business, about deals-he makes it sound extremely exciting and adventurous, amoral, heroic. I can see Peter being totally mesmerized, aroused in his way, at the idea of dealing with deeds rather than words for a change."
"Not to mention," Augie said, "having Kip bankroll him with borrowed funds so he could finally make some money to go with his clout."
"Yes," said Claire. "I imagine the thrill wears off having one without the other. And if you think about it, Peter and Kip made a formidable team: a critic with an incredible ability to manipulate the market, a wheeler-dealer with an incredible ability to manipulate the critic."
"So say they'd pulled it off," said Joe Mulvane. "What then?"
Claire shrugged. "Peter-who knows? Maybe he'd have run off to Tahiti, the south of France-"
"Maybe he thought," Clay Phipps put in, "that Kip would run off with him."
"He might have thought that," said the agent. "Kip wouldn't be above leading him to think it. But I can't imagine it would've happened. They would've had to hide the partnership, of course. And if Kip had raised enough to buy his way out of bankruptcy, he probably would have had some new stationery printed up and gone back into business."
The mention of bankruptcy made Claire think about her beach house. Her eyes went vague and she stopped talking. But the sadness seemed to pass right through her, she held it no tighter than the sun holds clouds. She'd put herself through this a thousand times and had finally realized, what the hell, it was a wonderful house but it was just a house. She began chatting again as though someone had asked her a question, though no one had.
"And me, I'm starting over. Fresh. The big apartment-gone. The Sagaponack house-gone. I'm moving the gallery to a smaller space, I'm getting rid of all the debt that asshole got me into-"
"But you know, Claire," said Clay Phipps, "some of that debt went for very worthy causes."
"Like?"
The host decided not to mention how much of it had gone toward his own quite affluent retirement. "Like fifty grand of it," he said, "saved Ray Yates's life."