First Gravedigger

by Barbara Paul

  “You mean the four hundred thousand you had to pay out to those people Mr. Wightman cheated. Peg calls them ‘the greedy children.’ I think it was magnanimous of you, Earl—not exposing Mr. Wightman, I mean. Exposure would ruin a man in our business. Any man. Even you.”

  And that was June Murray’s clever little way of letting me know she knew why I hadn’t exposed Wightman. Subtle, huh? Her expression gave nothing away, but she’d made her point: the squeeze starts here. One damn thing finishes and another begins.

  “All right, June,” I sighed. “Start looking for a new line we can carry. But not memorabilia, please.”

  Her victory smile was dazzling. “I’ll get on it right away. It’s the right step to take, Earl. You’ll see.”

  “Sure.”

  “And don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of everything.”

  I’ll bet you will. “Good girl, June.”

  She threw me an odd look and left.

  First Peg pressuring me about Wightman, now June using her knowledge of my double-dealing to blackmail me into letting her encroach upon my authority. And another one at home giving me a hard time every time I turned around. I was beginning to wish Charlie Bates would come in and free me of all my women.

  Wightman I wanted to save for myself.

  My new secretary looked up from the phone. “It’s the guard at the front entrance. He says a Lieutenant D’Elia wants to come in.”

  I groaned to myself. “Tell him okay.” I couldn’t very well refuse him admittance. “I’ll be in the showroom.” Maybe I could avoid him that way.

  Duprée Day was fast approaching. The security guards had been provided with the names of the dealers and museum representatives who were authorized to examine the chair. We were auctioning some other good pieces on the same day to take advantage of the enthusiasm generated by the Duprée.

  When I got to the showroom I groaned again. There was Lieutenant D’Elia, scrutinizing the object of everybody’s concern. Speer’s had gotten a lot of good publicity because of that chair. (Even the morning paper had realized something unusual was going on; they’d printed a picture of the chair on the front page, bumping the usual photos of cute kids and puppies.) But I could have done without D’Elia’s attention.

  “Hello, Lieutenant. What do you think of it?” The friendly approach.

  D’Elia dragged his eyes away from the chair. “Frankly, I don’t know what to think of it. It’s a pretty chair. The paper said the bidding would start at three hundred fifty thousand dollars. Is that right?”

  “That’s right,” I smiled. “That’s only the starting point, of course. The very least I expect is five hundred thousand.”

  He turned his gaze back to the Duprée. “Half a million dollars.” He thought about that a minute and then abruptly turned his back on the chair. “Why, Sommers? Why is one chair worth half a million dollars?”

  “Because it’s a rare work of art,” I said simply. “Art isn’t confined to easel paintings, Lieutenant.” I picked up one of our brochures from a table. “Here, this will tell you something about Duprée. Unfortunately there isn’t much of his work around. That’s one reason this piece will go so high.”

  “Half a million,” D’Elia muttered as he took the brochure. I didn’t tell him I thought the final figure would probably be between six and seven hundred thousand. It might even reach eight. Too high, I told myself sharply. Mustn’t indulge in wishful thinking.

  “Will the chair end up in a museum?” D’Elia wanted to know.

  “Almost certainly. Both the Metropolitan and the Louvre are determined to get it. But there might be a dark horse bidder.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I mean an agent in the employ of some eccentric individual collector whose greatest pleasure in life is outbidding museums.” I shuddered. “The Duprée could end up in a vault in Saudi Arabia.”

  D’Elia looked as if he thought that might be a good place for it. “I wanted to ask you, Sommers. Have you heard from Wightman lately?”

  I started to say no when the import of what he was asking hit me. “Why, Lieutenant! You mean you don’t know everything that’s going on here? What happened to your sources of information?”

  He shrugged. “We know you went out to San Francisco in January. We know you talked to Wightman.”

  “But you don’t know why, or whether we’ve talked since.” And it’s bugging you. “No, I haven’t heard from him. I went out to suggest a business deal but we couldn’t agree on terms. I’ve had no reason to talk to him since then. Why do you want to know?”

  “Let’s go to your office.”

  I led the way. Inwardly I was exulting; promoting June had been the right move. Now that she had a vested interest in Speer’s, she wasn’t going to blab to the police or anybody else about everything that happened here.

  When we were in my office D’Elia said, “All right, I’ll tell you. It was Wightman who was my ear inside this place. He contacted me right after Amos Speer’s murder. He was convinced you were responsible.”

  It was Wightman? It wasn’t June?

  Double blow: “He thought I killed Speer?”

  “He thought you engineered it. Hired someone to do it. Wightman had no evidence, of course. But somehow he’d found out about your, er, friendship with Mrs. Speer and anticipated your taking over the directorship of the business. That gave you a strong motive, of course.”

  I was so stunned I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  “You and Wightman never got along, did you?” D’Elia asked rhetorically. “It seemed clear to me that Wightman’s accusation was motivated by spite. Rather waspish man, isn’t he? But when everything he predicted would happen did happen—your marriage to Mrs. Speer, your taking over the business—well, then I began to take him more seriously.”

  “You mean now you think I did hire someone to kill Speer?”

  “I mean it’s a possibility we have to consider.”

  “Double talk. Lieutenant, I don’t even know how to go about hiring a killer. What do you do, advertise for one? You’re wrong, you’re dead wrong. Why are you telling me about this now? Speer’s been dead for over a year.”

  “The Duprée chair. The last day Amos Speer ever spent in this gallery, he told his secretary he’d just found a genuine Duprée and then he said something rather strange. He said, ‘I’ve got Sommers now.’ His secretary mentioned this odd association of ‘Duprée’ and ‘Sommers’ to Wightman. Wightman interpreted it to mean there was something fishy going on in connection with the chair, and somehow you were connected with it.”

  “He would. That’s Wightman to a T—always looking for dirt.” So June and Wightman were in cahoots even that far back. She hadn’t gossiped to the police the way I’d thought, but she was still in that bastard Englishman’s camp.

  D’Elia said, “What did Speer mean, ‘I’ve got Sommers now’?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t even know he did say that. You got it third hand, remember. Lieutenant, you’ve got to understand about Wightman. He likes to make trouble. The man is just plain bad news.”

  D’Elia was nodding his head. “That was the impression I got. Especially when no Duprée chair was offered for auction. Speer’s secretary very conveniently didn’t remember the conversation, so I more or less decided Wightman had made the whole story up. Then one morning a year later I open the newspaper and there’s a picture of a Duprée chair on the front page. And the story says it’s being offered for auction by none other than Speer Galleries. Why so long? Why did you wait a year before auctioning the chair?”

  I sighed, knowing this part of it was hopeless. “If you were a lover of antique furniture, Lieutenant, maybe I could make you understand. I just couldn’t bring myself to let it go. You have something as special as that Duprée, you don’t give it up in a hurry. Oh, I knew I’d have to sell it eventually—it belongs to the gallery, not to me. But I kept putting it off. I hate to see it go now. I’d buy it for myself if I could.�
�

  I couldn’t tell whether he believed me or not, and that was ironic: it was the only thing I’d told him that was true. “Where did the chair come from?” D’Elia wanted to know. “Another dealer?”

  “No, it belonged to a housewife in Beaver Falls. A Mrs. Percy. She didn’t even know the chair was valuable.”

  “So Speer was able to get it cheap?”

  “Hardly,” I said dryly. “He paid her three hundred thousand for it.”

  “So where do you come into the story?”

  “I made the find. I went to Mrs. Percy’s house to look at a table she wanted to sell and just happened to spot the Duprée in another room. I gave her a small deposit to hold the chair until Speer could get out there and take a look himself. The rest is history, as they say. So I really don’t know why Speer would have said he’d ‘got’ me—he was quite pleased about the find. In fact, he’d promised me a bonus. I don’t think you appreciate how rare a find it was.”

  “You can prove legal ownership of the chair, I presume.”

  “Of course. We don’t keep valuable papers in the files—they’re all in the bank. You’ll need Peg McAllister’s signature to see them. I’ll have my secretary show you to her office.”

  For reasons of his own D’Elia accepted his cue. “Well, good luck on the auction. When is it?”

  “In four days.” I opened the door for him and told my secretary to take him to Peg’s office. Then I went back into my own office and quietly collapsed.

  I thought I’d handled it all right; D’Elia seemed satisfied. It was a good thing policemen weren’t as objective as they were supposed to be. D’Elia hadn’t liked Wightman, and that had worked to my advantage. That sonofabitch was behind all my troubles—he’d known about Nedda and me, he’d gone to the police and accused me of murder, he’d blackmailed me into making good on his lousy deals—I was so angry I was shaking. I’d have to stop thinking about Wightman, just put him out of my mind until after the auction. Then I’d give my whole attention to finding a way to make him pay. And pay. And pay some more.

  It took me nearly an hour to calm down to the point I could concentrate on work again. I was just about ready to call it a day when the phone buzzed.

  “M. Guicharnaud to see you.”

  René Guicharnaud was the representative the Louvre had sent to bid on the Duprée. “Ask him to come in, please.” Our code phrase for “Open the door for him and be extra polite.”

  M. Guicharnaud waited until the secretary had withdrawn and then came straight to the point. In careful and reluctant English, he told me my Duprée chair was a fake.

  CHAPTER 13

  It was the corner blocks that had first tipped M. Guicharnaud off, those wooden wedges inserted into the corners of the chair seat to strengthen the frame. They were too large. I’d known Duprée had used small corner blocks, and the blocks in my chair looked small enough to me. But then I hadn’t had two authentic Duprée chairs on hand to establish a basis for comparison. Guicharnaud did. He went on to find a few other questionable things—traces of a glue that may or may not have been contemporary, a suspiciously small amount of wood shrinkage for the supposed age of the chair, etc. One such matter might be dismissed as an individual aberration from what could be expected; but put them all together, they spell fake.

  Who had built the fake Duprée? And what had gone so wrong that the imitation ended up languishing in the back bedroom of a tract house in Beaver Falls? We’d probably never know. The chair wasn’t totally worthless, but we’d recover only a fraction of the three hundred thousand it had cost. Famous fakes always had a certain curiosity value, and this fake had already earned its place in history as the chair that made a fool out of Speer’s. This one was going to be hard to live down.

  Nedda responded in her usual sensitive way. “How could you be so stupid?” she asked wonderingly. “Earl, how could you be so stupid?”

  “Don’t blame this one on me,” I growled. “It was your dear late husband who shelled out three hundred thousand bucks for an imitation, not me.”

  “Only because you didn’t have three hundred thousand.” She went out of the bedroom and came back immediately with a check in her hands. “I found this among Amos’s papers. It’s a check for five hundred dollars made out to Eleanor Percy—that’s the woman in Beaver Falls Amos bought the chair from. Earl, you tried to get the Duprée for yourself.”

  I put on an expression of indignant anger. “That check wasn’t even cashed—it was a deposit. To hold the chair until dear Amos could decide what he wanted to do.”

  “Bullshit,” she said bluntly. “You must think I’m a fool—agents don’t make deposits for the galleries out of their personal accounts. You tried to cheat us out of what you thought was a lot of money.”

  That regrouping of forces rocked me more than her accusation. You—Earl Sommers. Us—Nedda Speer, Amos Speer, Speer Galleries. “If that’s what you think,” I said carefully, “why did you wait until now to spring it on me?”

  “Because everybody steals. I thought if you were in charge, you wouldn’t need to anymore. But this fake Duprée changes things. I’ve suspected for some time I made a mistake—Earl, you’re not right for the job.”

  “Which job?” I asked. “Director of the galleries or Mr. Nedda?”

  “No one held a gun to your head,” she said evenly. “You made your choices too. But you not only fooled me, you fooled yourself as well. Earl, you’re always telling me I don’t really see these marvelous chairs that set you all atwitter. But you looked at that phony Duprée every day for nearly a year and didn’t see a single thing to make you suspicious. You’re supposed to be an expert, Earl.”

  “Amos Speer thought it was genuine,” I said defensively.

  “Yes,” she answered softly, “and that made all the difference, didn’t it? Amos had a reputation as a man you couldn’t fool—and when he agreed the chair was a Duprée, it didn’t even occur to you to question his judgment. Even though you already had evidence he could be fooled. He never found out Wightman was stealing from him. And he never knew about us.”

  “You’re sure about that, are you?” I said sardonically. “Wightman knew.”

  That stopped her. “Wightman knew?”

  “He not only knew, he told Lieutenant D’Elia.” I let myself enjoy the moment of discomfort that little revelation caused her.

  But she shook it off. “So they knew, so what. The point is, the galleries aren’t doing well enough to absorb a three-hundred-thousand-dollar loss right now. Something has to be done.”

  A seven-hundred-thousand-dollar loss, I silently corrected her. Three for the chair, four for Wightman’s victims. “You’re about to bust out with a suggestion, I can tell.”

  “Damned right I am. You need a financial advisor, Earl. Someone versed in the economic realities of profit and loss.”

  So here it was. “Someone like Arthur Simms?”

  She didn’t bat an eye. “Arthur can help us. He can find ways to get the galleries back on the right track again.”

  Greedy Nedda, wanting everything, wanting it all her own way. “Tell the truth, Nedda. You want to run the galleries yourself.”

  She looked as if she didn’t believe her ears. “What did you say?”

  “It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? To run the whole show yourself? Playing queen over an antiques empire. But it’s not play, Nedda—you don’t even begin to understand what’s involved. You could no more run Speer’s than you could swim the English Channel underwater.”

  She stared at me incredulously for a long time, then barked a short laugh and became suddenly furious. “Earl, you fool—why do you think I married you? I married you so I wouldn’t have to run the galleries!”

  Now I was the one having trouble believing what I was hearing. “You married me—”

  “To get a director for Speer’s. Amos was getting old and I wanted to have someone ready to take over. Better than putting in a stranger I couldn’t contro
l.”

  “And me you can control. I see.”

  “I’m not sure you do, but it doesn’t matter now. Now all I want is for you to let Arthur Simms come in and find out what’s going wrong. A simple, straightforward business procedure. When you’re in trouble, you call in an expert. Earl, you need an expert.”

  I’d been sitting on the side of the bed; now I stretched out on my back and stared at the ceiling. “You’re right, Nedda. That’s exactly what I need. My wife’s lover watching every move I make.”

  Nedda laughed, a harsh sound. “Don’t take that superior line with me. A man who’s having an affair with his secretary? Honestly, Earl, how middle-class can you get?”

  I was sitting up again, staring at her in astonishment.

  “Of course I know about it,” she snapped. “I keep telling you I’m not a fool. I know about it and I’d laugh if I weren’t so disgusted. Your secretary! Who ends up getting a promotion out of it. You can watch that story on any soap opera. Earl, I didn’t shame you by carrying on with, with a tennis pro. But you have no more style than to get involved with your secretary. You embarrass me.”

  This was unreal. In spite of myself I started to laugh. “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. You don’t object to my having an affair so long as the woman involved meets with your approval? Is that it?”

  “It’s so trite,” she objected. “The whole damned affair is a cliché. June Murray is a cliché. Look at her—the perfect secretary, the office wife, the provider of all comforts. I’m surprised other secretaries haven’t drummed her out of the corps. And you played along with it—why? Did it make you feel important? Command and it shall be given?”

  “Nedda,” I said abruptly, “do you want a divorce?”

  She took her time answering. “I’ve been thinking that might not be a bad idea,” she said slowly.

  “Fine,” I said, stretching back out on the bed. “The price is Speer Galleries.”

  Shocked, she came over to the side of the bed. “Are you insane?”

  “Never saner. You want out of the marriage? That’s what it’s going to cost you. We’ll make some sort of arrangement so you and the new boy won’t go hungry. But the galleries are mine.”