First Gravedigger

by Barbara Paul

  It was a fauteuil, an upholstered armchair with open sides. The gilded wood, the broad back, the elaborate ornamentation, the basically squarish silhouette all screamed Empire at me. Flattened, outsplayed arms rested on armposts that took the form of winged sphinxes. The faded dark satin seat cover was split with age. (Unimportant, since the material could hardly be the original covering. It couldn’t possibly be. Could it?)

  But it was the variations from the norm that excited me. The paneled back curved more than the strictures of the period permitted. A gilt ormolu mount hid a joint on one side of the chair; the one on the other side had fallen off years ago. That didn’t matter—I was sure the ormolu had been added later by someone other than the man who made the chair. But what decided it for me were the legs. They were unusually slender but needed no supporting stretchers—indicating good strong mahogany underneath all that gilt. Legs that were graceful and light in a period that demanded massive, Rock-of-Gibraltar furniture. I was sure I was looking at a Duprée chair.

  Duprée had been a French cabinetmaker who hadn’t paid adequate attention to the politics of his time. Napoleon had wanted to surround himself with furnishings that suggested permanence and grandeur, to lend authenticity to his upstart regime. So he demanded classical motifs and anything else that could link him to the historic past. As a result most Empire chairs were heavy, stiff, formal pieces resembling thrones. Made for show instead of comfort. Duprée had been one of the first cabinetmakers summoned to participate in this artificial image-building, but when he didn’t follow the party line he found himself out on his ear. Duprée had loved graceful furniture more than he’d respected the Emperor’s glamorized view of himself.

  Consequently there were no more than a dozen authenticated Duprée pieces in existence. Duprée had not been as popular in his own time as the lesser talents employed by Napoleon, and for that reason he hadn’t been imitated. If the chair looked like a Duprée, the chances were it was a Duprée. I ran my fingers along one of the arms. If I was right, I had a small fortune under my hand.

  “I’m almost afraid to ask,” I said. “Do you have the rest of the suite?”

  Mrs. Percy looked as puzzled as I’d known she would. “What suite?”

  “These pieces were all made as parts of suites,” I lied. “There should be at least four more pieces—three identical chairs and a settee or sofa. Perhaps a footstool.”

  Mrs. Percy shook her head. “It was my mother’s odd chair. It didn’t match anything.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said soberly. “We’d be interested in a complete suite. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of your tracking the other pieces down?”

  She wasn’t particularly disappointed because she hadn’t really expected anything. “Not a chance in the world. Mom said she bought it at a second-hand store when she and Dad first set up housekeeping. It was just her odd chair, that’s all.”

  That must have been quite a story, how a rare Empire chair came to rest in a second-hand store in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. “Too bad this piece of ormolu is missing,” I said, not mentioning that I would take the other one off as soon as I got the chair home.

  Mrs. Percy shrugged philosophically. “I didn’t think it was worth anything. I think Mom only paid four or five dollars for it.”

  I sighed, like a man giving in to temptation. “It’s worth a great deal more than that. Look, Mrs. Percy, I’ll buy the chair from you myself. I collect chairs. I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it.”

  “Five hundred dollars!” Her eyes were wide. “For that?”

  I laughed. “For that. In spite of the missing ormolu, the chair’s a good example of its kind. And I don’t have one like it in my collection.” Neither did anybody else I knew. “It’s worth five hundred to me. What do you say?”

  She was all smiles. “I say yes!”

  I made out a check for five hundred dollars. Amos Speer would have paid at least three hundred times that. I knew of only one sale of a Duprée chair in my lifetime. The Louvre had bullied or seduced or blackmailed a small French museum into giving up its one claim to fame. The amount paid, if I remembered correctly, had been just over two hundred thousand dollars. But that was a good twenty years ago, long before the current boom in antique furniture. On today’s market the Duprée would go for twice that, I felt certain.

  “You don’t have your mother’s sales slip, do you?” I asked Mrs. Percy. “Then I’m going to have to ask you to sign a legal form. All it says is that you have ownership free of encumbrance—that you’re legally entitled to sell the chair.”

  She signed. The five hundred dollars wasn’t anything like what she’d been expecting for the writing table, but it’d help keep the wolf from the door a little longer. I’d written “Duprée chair” in the space labeled description, confident that Mrs. Percy’s paperback would contain no mention of this little-known cabinetmaker’s work. I handed one carbon of the form to Mrs. Percy. Now it was official: the chair was legally mine.

  “Want me to help you carry it out to your car?” Mrs. Percy offered.

  I suppressed a shudder. “No, I’ll send someone out here to crate it.” It would have to be at a time when I was home to accept delivery. “Saturday morning. Mrs. Percy, don’t move the chair back to the bedroom. And keep the kids off it?”

  She laughed naturally for the first time since I’d met her. “Don’t worry, Mr. Sommers. I’ll protect your five-hundred-dollar chair.”

  My four-hundred-thousand-dollar chair. I said goodbye and went out to my car. When I’d driven around the corner I let out a yell of triumph that made an old man on the sidewalk jump.

  A Duprée chair! You pay five hundred dollars for the privilege of seeing a Duprée chair. As far as its real value was concerned, four hundred thousand might even be a conservative estimate. I stopped at a drugstore and used the pay phone to call the packing and delivery service I’d been using in the past.

  It was an easy enough procedure. Speer would send me on an evaluation, I’d buy the piece cheaply for myself, and then turn in a negative report. People who weren’t collectors were easy to fool. I’d started dealing for myself when I first realized I was under consideration as the eventual director of Speer Galleries. Such appointments carry certain perks, such as being allowed to buy a slice of the business. A small slice, in my case—more like a sliver. But even a sliver would take more funds than I could beg or borrow. So a little illicit dealing was helping build up the old bank balance. Not that it would matter now; my fair-haired-boy days were over. Not all the china in China would get me a piece of Speer Galleries now. But a genuine Duprée for only five hundred dollars? Only a fool would pass that up. Directorship or no directorship.

  I laughed all the way back to Pittsburgh. Amos Speer had sent me on what he thought was a time-wasting expedition and had handed me the find of my life. Of course, if he ever found out what I’d done, what I’d been doing for the past few years, I’d be over my head in hot water. I might even go to jail. But I always chose my sources carefully; people who had good pieces in their homes always got a straight report. But the Mrs. Percys of the world—well, they were ripe for the picking. I couldn’t even feel sorry for them. Mrs. Percy had looked at that Duprée all her life and had never really seen it. She deserved what she got.

  Tuesday started off better. I got in early, even though I’d been working at Alice Ballard’s estate until after midnight. The cataloguing was coming along; and when June Murray told me Speer wasn’t coming in that day, I was able to relax a little.

  But not for long. When I first got in I’d found a note on my desk saying Hal Downing wanted to see me. Downing was Speer’s personal assistant. His was a catchall job; he did whatever Amos Speer told him to do. The note bore yesterday’s date and a time notation of 8:15 P.M. So I wasn’t the only one who’d worked late last night.

  You don’t go running after lackeys in any business, so I pushed the note aside and got down to what I’d come in early for, which was a
session with Eckhardt’s Pennsylvania Clocks and Clockmakers. Alice Ballard had had a clock that I was fairly sure was late seventeenth-century, but with things the way they were at Speer’s I’d better be damned sure instead of just fairly sure. She’d also had twenty-three other clocks, over half of which dated from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And by her bed I’d found a lighted-dial digital fast and slow time-scanning deep-tone alarm with LED dimmer switch. Old Alice had been a lady conscious of time.

  I got in almost a full hour before a tapping at the door interrupted me. “Ah, you’re here,” said Hal Downing. “I was looking for you yesterday afternoon, Earl. You weren’t in your office.” Accusingly.

  “I’m allowed out once every week. What’s the problem?”

  “Didn’t you find my note? I have to talk to you.”

  Hal’s perpetual put-upon air irritated me. “So what’s the problem?” I said again.

  “It’s the listings you’ve turned in for the Alice Ballard auction brochure. I’m getting it ready for the printer and—”

  “But I haven’t finished cataloguing yet.”

  “I know, but Mr. Speer wanted to get started on it. It’d be easier to show you than explain. Let’s go to my office.”

  Hal Downing’s office was a windowless cubicle in the middle of the building. We squeezed in behind a worktable and Downing started showing me the layout for the printed brochure. After a while I began to see what the problem was. Downing talked all around it, but what it boiled down to was that the format for the furniture section of the brochure had been designed for a much lengthier listing than the one I’d turned in. That left lots of white space. A certain amount of white space was considered classy-looking, but my furniture listings took up only a fourth of each page. That was wasteful as well as amateurish-looking and meant Downing would be in trouble if he let it go to the printers that way.

  “Gee, Hal, that’s a toughie,” I said, not giving a damn.

  “The copy doesn’t fit the design,” he said mournfully.

  “Seems to me the design ought to be picked to fit the copy.”

  “Oh, Mr. Speer chose this one himself,” Downing said in a rush. “It’s one of the standard designs provided by the printer.”

  “I can see that, but why so many pages allotted for the furniture section? How many pages are there?”

  “Fifty.”

  I snorted. “Fifty! You might need fifty pages for Buckingham Palace, but for the Alice Ballard estate? Totally unnecessary. Just cut down the number of pages.”

  Downing looked as if he wanted to cry. “Mr. Speer insisted on fifty pages. He was quite clear about that, Earl. He said you loved writing up furniture descriptions and could fill up fifty pages in no time. I can’t change it—it’s got to be fifty pages.”

  So that was it. Somehow this screwed-up brochure was going to boomerang back on me. I should have guessed it. Speer wasn’t missing a trick.

  I looked at Hal Downing. “What do you suggest?”

  He picked up my original typed listings. “If you could just take it back and flush it out, I think we’ll be all right.”

  A beat. “Do what?”

  “Flush it out. Add more detail, expand your descriptions. You know—flush it out a little.”

  “How can I do that?” (With Drano?) “Everything that’s pertinent is already in there.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to tell you how to do your job.” Hal Downing could be obsequiously modest when he wanted to. “But you can flush it out a little, can’t you?”

  Did I have a choice? “I’ll give it a try, Hal.”

  He breathed a sigh of relief and handed me the typewritten pages. Jesus Christ, a fifty-year-old man who didn’t know the difference between flesh and flush.

  But a sharper man wouldn’t have made so good a lackey. This particular lackey had done his job and he’d done it beautifully, not even knowing he was a board piece in a game called Get Sommers. I went into the men’s room, stood in one of the booths, and seriously considered Hal Downing’s suggestion as to what I should do with the Alice Ballard furniture listings. No, better not.

  The only way to get any work done was to stay away from the office. I told June Murray I was going to the Ballard estate and left.

  I stayed away from the gallery the rest of Tuesday and all day Wednesday and Thursday. The cataloguing was pure pleasure; old Alice Ballard had gone for quality stuff every time. Well, almost every time. I’d done the furniture first, of course—pleasure before pleasure. But handling old Alice’s things gave me a satisfaction I knew at the time was dangerous: I was allowing myself to be lulled into a peaceful state of mind when I should be working full time at finding a way to hang on at Speer’s.

  So the end of the cataloguing was in sight. I’d had to take a couple of hours off Thursday afternoon to tend to some personal business; her voice had been icy when she’d called the day before to find out where I’d been hiding lately. But by late Thursday night I’d finished the entire estate except for Alice’s collection of glassware—which, fortunately, wasn’t a big one. Glassware was my weak spot. I’d taken some pictures and made notes, and Friday morning I went into the gallery to check the reference books.

  The first thing I saw when I sat down at my desk was a photocopy of the five-hundred-dollar check I’d made out to Mrs. Percy.

  The room insisted on spinning for a full minute. Then it sort of wavered in a seasick motion for another five. When at last both room and stomach settled down, I tried to think what to do.

  A photocopy. That meant Speer was holding the check itself. (Of course it was Speer—who else? The man you couldn’t fool.) The check would be valid evidence in a criminal action against me. I couldn’t even claim I’d not realized the true value of what I was buying—I’d written “Duprée chair” on the legal form I’d had Mrs. Percy sign, and Mrs. Percy had a carbon. Every antique furniture dealer in the world dreamed of finding a Duprée—I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone I’d acted in innocent ignorance. If I’d met Mrs. Percy by chance and ended up buying her chair for a song, that would be one thing. But I’d gained admittance to her home as a bonded agent of Speer Galleries, and that made the difference between sharp business dealings and a felony. Speer had me right where he wanted me.

  But how? How had he done it? Was that whole Beaver Falls scene just another setup? A trap—and I had just waltzed in, so bedazzled by the Duprée I hadn’t thought to look out for tricks? But that would mean Mrs. Percy was in on it. Was she an actress Speer had hired as part of the con?

  No; that was paranoia talking. Mrs. Percy was no actress, I was sure of that. No one who knew the true value of the Duprée would have handled the chair as casually as she did. No, it was more likely that Speer had gone to Beaver Falls himself to check up on me. And that suggested he suspected I’d been buying valuable pieces cheaply on the sly and turning in false reports on them. Easy way to find out; I located Mrs. Percy’s address card and punched out her phone number.

  All I had to do was identify myself and she started talking. “Oh, Mr. Sommers, how can I ever thank you! If you hadn’t had second thoughts about that old chair—why, we would never have known how much it was worth! And they say there’s no such thing as an honest man. I told Mr. Speer you could have taken the chair for five hundred dollars and we’d never have known the difference. He—”

  “Mr. Speer himself was there?”

  “Why, yes.” She sounded puzzled. “Didn’t you know? He said you’d been thinking about the chair and wanted his opinion.”

  “I’ve been out of town,” I said smoothly. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to him.”

  “Well, you were absolutely right about the chair—it is valuable. Three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of valuable! I’ve never seen so much money all at once. Three hundred thousand for just a chair! I still can’t believe it.”

  Three hundred thousand dollars. He gave that fool woman three hundred thousand dollars. Amos Speer hadn’t gott
en rich by being generous. Maintaining a reputation as an honest dealer forced him always to pay a fair price, but the prices he paid were invariably in the bottommost range of “fair.” If he’d given Mrs. Percy three hundred thousand for the Duprée, that meant he expected it to bring in, at an absolute minimum, five. Five hundred thousand dollars, and I’d let it slip through my fingers. No, not exactly: I’d had it snatched out of my hands. Violently. By Amos Goddamn-Him-to-Hell Speer.

  “Mr. Speer said the chair was a real find,” Mrs. Percy chattered on. “You know, at first I thought he was talking about the table—the early American writing table, remember? But when I showed him the chair, he got downright excited.”

  I’ll bet he did. The old bastard probably peed his pants. He had a Duprée and what he needed to hang me all in one swell foop. He’d gone there to find out if I was cheating him out of a valuable writing table; the chair had been a complete surprise. It was an opportunity handed him on a silver platter, and Amos Speer had never been one to pass up an opportunity. Or a silver platter. Mrs. Percy ran down eventually and I was able to say goodbye and hang up.

  I’d been so cool, so sure of myself. And I’d botched it. At times the old man seemed omniscient—the man you couldn’t fool. I sat there for almost an hour, trying to think of a plan. But all I did was succeed in starting a good, strong depression. Why didn’t he send for me? When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I reached for the phone.

  June Murray answered. I had to clear my throat before I could say, “Is he there?”

  “Mr. Speer won’t be in today,” June said formally. “Who’s speaking?”

  She knew damn well who was speaking. “It’s Earl, June.”

  “Oh, yes. Mr. Speer wants to see you Monday morning, nine o’clock sharp. Don’t be late.”

  “Yes, teacher,” I said and hung up.

  So I was to have the weekend to panic, maybe to dig myself in a little deeper. The old crock must really be enjoying himself. I needed something objective to concentrate on, to get myself clicking again. Alice Ballard’s glassware collection.