False colors

by Powell, Richard, 1908-1999

  "Let him alone," the voice said. "I'll take over."

  It was a wheezing voice, with a noise in it like gravel crunching underfoot. I swung my head from side to side and traced the voice to the doorway. Sheldon was standing there. His face was the color of an old slice of egg, but his blue eyes looked like the eyes of a baby reaching for a new toy.

  "You wasn't taking over so good out there," Joe growled.

  "You want to argue, Joe?" Sheldon said. He made an airy gesture with his right hand. There was a flat gray automatic in it. "I told you to leave him alone."

  Joe's head turned slowly away from me, like the turret of a tank, and he stared at Sheldon. His big fists clenched once, relaxed. "All right," he muttered, and took a few shuffling steps out of the way.

  I backed up and let the wall iron the creases out of my wobbly legs. The blur was gone now. I took a quick look around the room. Nancy was in a straight chair near the doorway. There was a gag in her mouth, and ropes were biting into her slim ankles and waist. Her hands were tied behind her. Her cheeks were wet and big polished tears were threaded on her eyelashes. She gave her head an angry shake and flipped off the tears and tilted her head to look at me. You might have thought she was trying to smile.

  Kay was in a chair beside her, roped up like a rug in a de-

  livery truck and with a loop around her waist binding her to the chair. Her black hair was spilling over her face and half veiling her eyes. I caught the glitter of her eyes, and they weren't crying or smiling. They looked like the eyes of a trapped leopard. There was a heap of what might have been old clothes in a corner. They weren't moving. I could make out patches of skin and rumpled black hair on which blood had dried. There were ropes on the bundle. It was Nick Accardi and the ropes might mean he was still alive. Lassiter was flat against the wall across the room. His big body seemed to have shriveled inside his clothes, and he was shaking.

  As I watched, he pushed himself away from the wall and rubbed a hand over his face and said weakly, "You're not going to let him just stand there, are you?"

  "Why rush things?" Sheldon said.

  "That's what you said when he drove up to the house," Lassiter complained. "You were going to find out how much he knew, and either send him away or put a bullet in him. But you said there wasn't any rush. You could handle it. You almost let him wreck everything."

  "Pete's an interesting guy," Sheldon said, looking at me almost fondly. "I sold him too short. But I won't do it again."

  I said hoarsely, "The cops know I suspect you two. Why don't you all beat it while you can? Knocking off a few more people won't help you."

  "Joe must have shaken your brains loose," Sheldon said. "Are you forgetting our talk in the trophy room? You haven't told the cops anything. In fact they're even chasing you."

  Lassiter said, "What brought him out here?"

  "He discovered the body," Sheldon said. "Just what I didn't want him to do. You see, Pete," he said, waving his automatic at me, "I wanted the police to find the body. It was nicely staged for them. I didn't want you knocking down the scenery. So I called the cops without giving my name and told them I had heard shots in the neighborhood."

  "Why did you shoot the guy?" I said. "He wasn't on your trail."

  Sheldon chuckled. "Oh yes he was, although he didn't know it. As a matter of fact I didn't know it either. He had gone plodding to every big store in the city. He had that piece of blue-green silk I used on Kay. He asked the stores if they had ever carried material like that. Just the sort of dull thing the police love to do. It almost paid off for him. He found a department store buyer who got a bolt of the stuff a couple of years ago. She remembered one of her salesgirls had sold the entire bolt to one customer. But the salesgirl was away when McCann called. She wouldn't be back for a week. So McCann had to wait to get the name of the customer. He thought it would be Nick Accardi. But I was the one who bought it, of course."

  "Don't be too sure you're in the clear," I said. "He kept a notebook."

  "That's how I found out about the store angle, Pete. I checked his notebook. I took out every page that mentioned the blue-green silk. And I took the piece of silk he had."

  I had been coaxing him to talk for a special reason. In the trophy room I had told him about answering the door at Nancy's house with McCann's revolver in my hand. Maybe Sheldon had forgotten that. Or maybe he hadn't asked himself what I did with the gun. I had shoved it in my right-hand trouser pocket. It was still there. I felt its weight against the tense muscles in my leg. If I could sneak it out, things might look better. But Sheldon already had an automatic in his hand, and he hadn't looked away from me for a second. A grab for my pocket now would be suicide. I had to keep him talking and hope that something would make him turn away.

  I said, "McCann might have told some of the other detectives about his case. You'd better start worrying about that."

  "I'm not worried," Sheldon said. "He was a lone-wolf type. He wanted to break the case by himself and get all the credit."

  "How come you were at Nancy's this morning?"

  "Jealous, Pete? Relax. I wasn't there overnight. I was watching her house this morning hoping Nick would go for a walk. But instead, McCann came up to the place. When Nancy

  opened the door he pushed right in and caught Nick eating breakfast. I wasted a few minutes trying to decide if I could afford to let Nick be taken. I figured it wasn't a good idea. The door was open and I walked in. Nick was in handcuffs and McCann was just going to phone for the wagon. Well, that was that."

  "What's the matter? Don't you like using the word murder? You murdered McCann and shot Nick. Is he dead, too?"

  "I didn't shoot him and he isn't dead. I had to clip Nick on the side of the head to shut him up. I was a gentleman, though, Pete. I didn't hit Nancy. And I can tell you it was hard to handle her. I wrapped her up and tied Nick and went through McCann's notebook and found what a good idea it had been to shoot him. Then I phoned Lassiter and told him to throw Kay in a car and bring it around to the back street."

  "How did you get Kay off guard?"

  "Why all the yackety-yack?" Joe growled. "Why don't we get it over with?"

  "Pete's been very busy on this case," Sheldon said. "Naturally he's curious. Our friends here grabbed Kay last night, not long after you were in their place. Lassiter lighted some papers in a wastebasket outside her rooms, and when the smoke got thick he yelled fire. She ran out and Joe took her lovingly into his arms."

  "Lovingly!" Joe said. "I'd sooner wrassle a wildcat."

  Lassiter said in a shaking voice, "I set the girl up in business and gave her everything she wanted, and all the time she was looking for an excuse to kill me. And I never knew it."

  "You knew she was double-crossing you about that forged Van Gogh," Sheldon said.

  "That was different," Lassiter said. "I asked her to get it and didn't explain why. Women are curious. I thought she was merely keeping the picture to try to figure out why it was valuable. So I agreed that you and I ought to give her a little fright, and at the same time bring Nick into it and scare him out of town."

  "Sheldon wasn't going to give her a little fright," I said. "He

  was going to kill her. But Nick got there too fast. You stayed downstairs and phoned up a warning to Sheldon when Nick came. If Nick had come two minutes later, he'd have found a corpse."

  Sheldon yawned and said, "Why do things halfway? The girl was becoming too dangerous to handle."

  I said, "After the strangling job you went right over to Nancy's, didn't you? How did you manage to keep your hands off her throat?"

  "Don't be silly," Sheldon said. "There's no sport in killing for the sake of killing. There has to be danger, to make it worth while."

  Lassiter said, "Wasn't there enough danger to satisfy you when Meadows came here? Why didn't you shoot him?"

  "Pete wasn't dangerous when he got here," Sheldon said. "He was a frightened lamb, and I was tempted to pat his fleece and let him go. But he kept insist
ing you were a crook, Lassiter. I tried to argue him out of it, and finally he said he'd prove it by the paintings you sold me."

  "Ridiculous," Lassiter said in a scared voice. "You know better than that, Sheldon."

  "You know better than that," Sheldon said playfully. "Guess what, Pete? The first time I bought a painting from Lassiter, he did pull a fast one. It was so obvious that I spotted it. After I talked to him about it, I was sure he would never try again. But you worried me, Pete, when you claimed my collection would be full of fakes. So I decided to let you have a look. Quite a collection, isn't it?"

  I started to put my hands casually in my trouser pockets. Sheldon looked quite alert, though, and I ended by merely hooking a thumb in each pocket. "Your collection's all right," I said.

  "What made you wake up all of a sudden in the Picasso room?"

  "I woke up before then," I said. "I began counting how much your paintings were worth. The total was too high. You couldn't have afforded to buy everything. How many of your pictures are hot, Sheldon? How many did you steal?"

  Sheldon thought a moment, and said, "About two-thirds of them. But they're only hot in a way, Pete. People don't know I have their originals and that they have forgeries."

  "Very neat," I said. "A guy sends a fine painting to Lassiter to be restored or cleaned, and he has a copy made and sends back the copy. Pictures always look different after restoration or cleaning, so the owners don't spot the switch."

  "That only accounts for some of them," Sheldon said. "Lassiter has quite a knowledge of the forgery racket. He turned up a number of good forgeries and sold them to me, together with the addresses of the people who owned the originals. Then I picked the right moment to play burglar, and switched the forgery for the original. You played burgler in Lassiter's house. Exciting, isn't it?"

  "What's the good of your collection?" I said. "You don't dare let anybody see it."

  "I don't invite people in to see the cups I won in sports, or the medals I got in the war. But I still enjoy them. I only wish I could hang around awhile after I die, to watch what happens. It should be the biggest riot in art histoiy. To make things more interesting, I've left half the paintings to the Academy of Fine Arts and half to the Philadelphia Museum of Art."

  The thumb of my right hand touched the butt of the revolver. If I could slip my hand into the pocket, we might get that riot under way sooner than he planned. At the moment, Sheldon was dangling his automatic at his side, but he was watching me. I didn't think I could beat him to the first shot.

  I said, "Didn't you see me getting suspicious as we went through your collection?"

  "Frankly, no. I'll give you credit, Pete. You caught me off guard. I didn't think you'd catch on until I showed you the last room. You know, the room I said had only one painting in it.

  "What room is that?"

  "This one, Pete."

  "What painting are you talking about?"

  "Show it to him, Lassiter," Sheldon said.

  Lassiter walked to the table like an old man who needed a cane. There was a framed painting, face down, on the table. He lifted the thing. I couldn't help being startled. There were the swirls and eddies and lightning bolts of color that began all the trouble. It was the forged Van Gogh. But the forgery was still covered by the chrome yellow and vermilion and ultramarine blue and oxide of chromium Nick had thrown on the painting. Lassiter's hand shook as he held it up. I glanced at the two girls. Kay's eyes looked blank and hopeless. Nancy seemed to be straining forward against the rope that bound her waist to the chair. She was staring at me, eyes wide, as if trying to tell me something.

  Sheldon said, "I decided not to trade this in for the original. It has a sentimental value for me. I'm going to hang it all alone in this room."

  Lassiter said in a quavering voice, "I hope you'll stop collecting paintings now, Sheldon. It's too risky. Everything may fall down about our ears if one of the forgeries which I sent back to the owner is discovered. That would make everybody who dealt with me suspicious. Things almost came out when Mason Dawes lost his nerve. And now with this Accardi affair—"

  "It's just getting interesting," Sheldon said. "I wouldn't want to stop now."

  "Of course he wouldn't," I said. "The more dangerous it is, the better Sheldon likes it. When he was in Africa, he liked having the animals hunt him. He's had people hunting him lately, and that's the biggest thrill of all."

  "Pete has a point," Sheldon said. "There's nothing like a manhunt. Especially when you're on both ends of it."

  Joe Molo swung his head slowly from side to side on his thick neck, like an animal trying to pick up a scent. "You kidding?" he said. "What's the fun in having cops on your tail?"

  "Don't argue with him, Joe," Lassiter said.

  "I don't think Joe can argue," Sheldon said. "He hasn't moved that far in the scale of evolution."

  Joe stared at Sheldon with his bulging eyes. "Is that a crack?"

  "Maybe you'd consider it a compliment," Sheldon said.

  "Just so it ain't a crack," Joe growled. "Now let's get this business over with."

  Sheldon had glanced away from me twice to look at Joe. Not for long enough, though. I needed a couple of seconds to grab for the gun. If I stirred Joe up a little more I might get them.

  "Joe," I said, "no matter what happens here, this business won't be over. Sheldon will find some way to keep it going."

  "I don't get you," Joe said.

  "Let's start with the hanging of Mason Dawes," I said. "Sheldon used a piece of blue-green silk. An ordinary guy would have burned the rest of that silk. But not Sheldon. He saved it. He used another piece on Kay and deliberately left it in her apartment. He got a thrill out of the danger that someone might connect the two cases."

  "Tell him he's crazy, Sheldon," Lassiter said.

  "He's not crazy," Sheldon said. "Pete, I'm going to miss you. You're the most dangerous thing I've ever hunted."

  "That guy?" Joe said. "I could snap his neck in my two hands."

  "There speaks the animal," Sheldon murmured. "Joe's the rhino type, don't you think, Pete? Can't do anything but lower lus head and charge."

  I said, "Joe doesn't get the fine points of this case. He doesn't know how cleverly you kept it going. Like slipping a piece of your silk into my pocket, last night at Lassiter's show."

  "What did you do that for?" Joe said.

  "I didn't want Pete to lose interest," Sheldon said.

  "And I'm willing to bet," I said, "that Sheldon suspected what Kay was up to, long before anybody else did."

  "Of course I did," Sheldon said. "It was obvious why she started playing up to Lassiter. It was fun to watch. In fact I rather envied Lassiter. It should make an affair quite interesting, if you had to watch out for a bullet or a knife every time a woman came into your arms."

  "You mean you knew that all along and never tipped off the boss?" Joe said angrily.

  "Why spoil a good manhunt?" I said. "Take yesterday, for example. This is guesswork but I'm sure it's right. Late in the afternoon Sheldon trailed Nick into South Philadelphia. He had a clean shot at him. But he only creased his arm with a bullet. That was deliberate. Sheldon wanted to keep the hunt going."

  "Look what we would have missed," Sheldon said, "if I had killed him then."

  "And take last night," I said. "Sheldon knew that Nancy and I were in your place, Lassiter. But he didn't warn you. That would have spoiled things again. And then when Joe chased me across the square, do you know what happened, Joe?"

  Joe had his head hunched between his shoulders. The banana-sized fingers clenched. He stared at me. His eyes had the mad look that was in the glassy eye of the Cape buffalo in Sheldon's trophy room. "I know, all right," he growled. "You slugged me. You'll pay for it."

  I began tensing my muscles slowly. "I wasn't the one, Joe," I said softly. "Sheldon hit you."

  For a moment there was silence. Joe swung his head ponderously toward the doorway, where Sheldon was lounging. Sheldon looked very happy
. There was a faint smile on his lips. He studied a spot in the air halfway between Joe and me.

  "Is that on the level?" Joe said.

  "That's right," Sheldon said, and yawned.

  Lassiter grabbed Joe's arm. "Forget it!" he cried. "It doesn't matter. It—"

  Joe didn't even look at him. He made a wide sweeping motion with the arm Lassiter had grabbed. Lassiter reeled back against the wall. The painting he had been holding hit the floor and skidded to a stop near Sheldon's feet.

  "You're crazy," Joe said in a flat voice, staring at Sheldon. "You'll get us all killed."

  For a big man Joe moved like a cat. He came around the table and threw himself at Sheldon. He wasn't fast enough. The flat gray automatic flipped up. Sound crashed and rolled in the room. The big lunging body jerked twice. Sheldon stepped aside and let him slam into the edge of the doorway. I grabbed for

  my revolver. My hand clamped on the butt, yanked hard. It caught in the pocket. Joe hit the floor and Sheldon wheeled and there I was frozen.

  Sheldon's blue eyes looked like sparks jumping a gap. His voice crackled. "Sorry, Pete. Gave you a chance. Knew you had McCann's revolver. It's been fun waiting for you to go for it. But you're too slow."

  He was going to take his time. His hand began a slow tightening that would send a slug plowing through me. Off to one side I saw Nancy's eyes. She must have known Sheldon had been waiting for me to go for the gun. Maybe its outline showed through my pocket. She had been trying to tell me with her eyes, but I hadn't clicked. I saw something else as I looked at her. Her legs weren't tied to the chair and she was jerking them back.

  "Sheldon!" I said.

  It stopped him for a second. Nancy's bound feet lashed out and hit him in the back. The shock spun him sideways. I yanked at the revolver, heard cloth tearing. Sheldon got his balance. He wheeled smoothly. He forgot something, though. He forgot Nick's picture on the floor. His foot hit the edge of it and he skidded and I got the revolver up and let him have it. I felt cool and impersonal and I counted four puffs of dust and lint as the bullets smacked into his coat.