by FRANCES
For a moment she thought that she still was not heard. She began to go down the steps. But then, from two floors below, she heard a door slam open and the banging of feet on the stairs.
Still holding to the stair rail she sank down to sit on the top step.
The man who ran along the corridor below and then up the stairs toward her was thick-set. He wore a white shirt open at the neck. When he was halfway up the staircase toward her he stopped and said, “What’s the matter, lady?” He spoke loudly. He almost shouted the words.
She gestured behind her with her free hand and then, slowly, pulled herself to her feet.
“Mr. Jones,” she said. “In there.” Again she gestured toward the open door of the fourth-floor loft. “He’s—he’s dead! He’s—” Her voice broke off, and she stood against the wall to let the thick-set man go past her. Then she spoke again, her voice low, shaking, but audible. “He’s killed himself,” she said. “Shack’s shot himself.”
Then, leaning against the wall, she began to sob.
II
Detective Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro looked around the enormous room and realized that he was entirely beyond his depth. This did not surprise him; he was accustomed to his inadequacy and only astonished that it was not universally recognized. Captain William Weigand, in command of Homicide, South, should have been the first, after Shapiro himself, to realize his subordinate’s limitations.
“Looks like suicide, Nate,” Weigand said that June afternoon. “Precinct’s satisfied. M.E.’s man isn’t. Angle of entry apparently. So it comes through ‘suspicious death.’ You can have Tony Cook.”
Detective (1st Grade) Anthony Cook had some difficulty in finding Little Great Smith Street, and poked the police car into numerous wrong turnings before he did. Cook had recently been transferred from a precinct squad in the Bronx, for reasons which baffled him. He knew every byway of the Bronx precinct. Little Great Smith Street, indeed! The whole of Greenwich Village, for that matter. A region in which there was an intersection of West Fourth and West Twelfth streets, by all that was holy!
Shapiro sighed his sympathy and thought wistfully of Brooklyn, where he had first walked a beat. And where, for his money, he should still be walking one. The Police Department of the City of New York was clearly out of its collective mind. Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro, by all that was holy.
“Might try the next left,” he said to Detective Cook, and Cook said, “You’re the boss,” and tried it. He had to nudge the curb of a narrow street so that the mortuary van could inch past. The driver of the van jerked a directing thumb, pointing behind him. Beyond a jog, police cars clogged the street, which had jogged itself a change of name from “Albert” to “Little Great Smith.” The lab truck had had to park on the sidewalk. Cook edged the squad car in behind it.
The loft building the cars clustered in front of listed considerably to what Shapiro took to be the west. But the three flights of stairs they climbed listed to what Shapiro took to be the east. They also creaked. Doors of two of the lofts they climbed past had lettering on them: IMPERIAL NOVELTIES, INC. That was the first floor. PERMA-SNAPS. That was the second. The third floor of the loft building—a building which should, Lieutenant Shapiro morosely thought, have been condemned twenty years ago—was unoccupied.
The door of the fourth-floor loft was half open. A sheet of paper was tacked to it, and on the paper, climbing up it, lettered in black, was the single word “Shack.” At least, the word looked rather like “Shack.” Printed, Shapiro thought, by a child. Probably a somewhat backward child. He pushed the door farther open.
The room was enormous; the room was the whole floor. A skylight slanted over half of it. No sun shone through the skylight. Of course—north light. The room was unexpectedly cool. Because sunlight did not reach into it? No. The unpartitioned room was air-conditioned. Shapiro had had a room air conditioner installed in his Brooklyn apartment and it had been expensive as hell. What it must have cost to air-condition this space—fifty feet wide by a hundred deep, at a guess—baffled the easily baffled mind of Nathan Shapiro. More, he thought, than the whole of the building was worth. In the approximate center of the loft a single wooden column held the ceiling up. For the moment, Shapiro thought. The supporting column listed, like everything else.
There were a good many men in the room and they were doing familiar things. One man held a sketch pad and penciled rapidly on it—he was making a plan of the room. Two men were dusting for fingerprints, dusting a wooden chair and a wooden table deep in the room, and the sills of windows which, at the far end, let in a little of the afternoon’s sunlight. Precinct and police lab were doing their job, whether or not it was a job worth doing. Lieutenant Myron Jacobs, of the precinct detective squad, stood at one side of the room, under the skylight, and looked thoughtfully at the floor.
Shapiro walked over to him and Jacobs quit regarding the floor and regarded Nathan Shapiro; looked up and down a long thin man with a long sad face and sad brown eyes. He said, “So you got it, did you, Nate?” and Shapiro said it looked like it, his voice as sad as his face. He looked again around the room and sighed. He looked down at the floor, and at the chalked outline marking what once had been a man. There was a good deal of blood on the floor within the outline and beyond it. The blood had seeped into the cracks between the floor boards and congealed there.
“Behind the right ear,” Jacobs said. “Gun on the floor where it would have been. Thirty-two revolver.”
“Behind the right ear?”
“You and Doc Simpson,” Jacobs said. “Could have managed it. Used his thumb on the trigger. Didn’t want to see what he was doing to himself. Happens that way. You know that, Nate.”
“Contact?”
“You and the doc. So he didn’t want to feel it against his head. Suicides do funny things. You know that, Nate. Take a man decides to cut his throat. Half the time he makes a couple of false starts before he gets his nerve up.”
“The gun?”
“All right. Smudges. What we usually get off a hand gun. Ballistics has taken it along. You’re in late on it, Nate.”
Nathan Shapiro said, “Yeah,” and looked again around the room. It was cluttered with canvases with paint on them. They were stacked against the walls haphazardly. They were in grooved racks. They were on easels scattered around the enormous room. The easel nearest the chalked outline which showed where a man had fallen and where he had died had a sheet of drawing paper tacked to it, and there were black marks on the paper’s whiteness. Vaguely, distortedly, the marks seemed to add up to the sketch of a woman. A very peculiar looking woman, certainly. All height; no width. Perhaps not a woman at all; perhaps a plucked ostrich. Shapiro shook his head with no hope that shaking would clear it. It was entirely beyond him and he had every expectation that it would remain there.
He tried, with no special success, to avoid looking at the paintings which were in sight. Looking at them would, he realized, only make bad matters worse. He had never realized there were so many possible colors or that they could be so bewilderingly spread on canvas.
“Supposed to be paintings,” Jacobs said. “Make any sense to you, Nate?”
“No.”
“School my kid goes to,” Jacobs said, “they have what they call ‘Art.’ Give the kids paints and paper and tell them to go at it. Listen, Nate, Junior’s only six. They let him bring home one of his pictures and you could tell right away it was a picture of a cow. God knows where he ever saw a cow, but you could tell it was a cow.”
“Central Park Zoo,” Shapiro said. “They’ve got a cow there, Jake.”
He looked again at the easel in front of which, at a guess, Shackleford Jones had been standing when he decided to shoot himself. The longer he looked at it, the more easily Nathan Shapiro could understand what had driven Jones to his irrevocable decision. My God, Jones had probably thought, I did that. And went and got a gun.
“His revolver?” Shapiro asked.
The check on that wasn�
�t completed. Jones had had a pistol permit, and Records would come up with the serial number and match it with the gun which had been on the floor. And the pathologist would get the bullet out of what had been a painter’s brain and, if it was not too battered by the bone it had crushed, Ballistics would use a comparison microscope. But it was a hundred to one Shackleford Jones had used his own gun to fire a bullet into his own head. A thousand to one, Lieutenant Myron Jacobs figured it.
“Some of these young docs,” Jacobs said.
Shapiro did not reply to that. Shooting one’s self in the back of the head was, after all, doing it the hard way. Holding a revolver at some distance from the head would be doing it the chancy way. But with a man who thus used paint on canvas, sketched on white paper, almost any other idiosyncrasy was possible. Even to be expected.
“We’re about finished,” Jacobs said, and watched the fingerprint men walk the long length of the room. “Apparently nobody ever dusted the damn place,” one of them said, in passing. “Prints all over everywhere.” “You boys have fun,” Jacobs said, and turned back to Nathan Shapiro.
“You, too, if you figure you’ve got to push it around,” he said. “You and your side-kick. New in Homicide, isn’t he?”
“Name of Cook,” Shapiro said. “Transferred from the Bronx. Broke the Burnside kill. More or less by himself, apparently. Yes, we’ll look around a bit more. Not that we’ll turn up anything. He live here?”
Shackleford Jones had not been supposed to live in the studio loft. There are laws governing such matters. For some years painters had been protesting, singly and in groups, the enforcement of those laws. They had also been circumventing the laws.
“No gear,” Jacobs said. “There’s a cot back there behind things”—he pointed back there behind things. “Nothing to prove Jones used it. What this dealer of his says, he’s got a place over on East Eighth Street. It’s being checked out.”
Nathan Shapiro mentally noted an address on East Eighth Street. It would be a place to go to duplicate effort. It was a nuisance to come in four hours late. Late, a Homicide man was supposed to find things others had missed. Such a supposition in relation to Shapiro was, he knew, absurd. Because a man has been lucky once or twice and is good with a gun—that much Nathan Shapiro would grant himself—people get confused ideas.
“I’ll poke around a while,” Shapiro told Lieutenant Myron Jacobs. “How’d he get a pistol permit?”
Jacobs had no idea. Probably Jones had had an in somewhere. Could be he had persuaded somebody that the contents of the studio had monetary value. Jacobs looked around the room. “Jeeze!” he said. “Nothing more to do here I can see. You’ll lock it up when you’re ready? Snap lock.”
Shapiro gloomily thought that he was ready then. All that mattered was already in hands more capable than his. He said, “O.K., Jake. We won’t be long.”
He went down one side of the long loft and looked at pictures, and Detective Anthony Cook went down the other.
One canvas Shapiro stopped in front of in bewilderment had two horizontal black lines parallel on it. That was all there was on it. Looked like a section of railroad track, as much as it looked like anything. But another, this one on an easel, was a tangle of shapes, done in bright colors. The shapes had, so far as Shapiro could see, no coherence and no meaning. But Shapiro stood in front of the easel for several minutes because somehow there was a challenge in what he looked at—an inexplicable excitement in what he looked at.
In the lower right-hand corner of the canvas, which was large, the word “Shack” had been lettered. The lettering was as primitive as it was on the door. The painter’s signature, presumably. Did the fact he had signed it mean that he had thought it finished? Nathan Shapiro shook his head and sighed and turned to look at the outermost of several canvases stacked against the wall.
Here was another tangle of shapes and colors, but this time it vaguely suggested something to the sad-faced man. He stood and puzzled his mind with it and, unexpectedly, words came into his mind. “Wreck on the Jersey Turnpike,” the words were. But there was nothing in what he saw to picture a pile-up of varicolored trailer trucks. It merely felt like that. He tilted it toward him and looked at the painting behind it. This one was framed and there was a typed label on the bottom of the frame. “#37. Still Life.” That was what was on the label. And after the words “Still Life” there were figures. The figures were “4,500.” A price? If so, presumably one cypher had accidentally been added. And a comma used instead of an intended period.
This painting was perhaps of a vase of flowers, but, if so, a vase listing to an impossible degree. And beside it—surely not an egg? A flower vase which had laid an egg? A green egg with white spots on it?
There was, Shapiro realized, no point whatever in going on with this. It became increasingly more probable that Precinct was right; that a man named Shackleford Jones who had hoped to be a painter, and had the money to buy canvases and paints, had looked around his barn of a studio and had seen what had come of his hopes and had, understandably, shot himself in the back of the head.
Shapiro looked around the room and for a moment the room seemed almost vocal with shape and color. For that instant he felt that he could almost understand what the room was saying. Which was absurd.
If the paintings in the room were speaking, trying above the uproar of their own colors to explain themselves, they spoke now only to Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro and Detective (1st Grade) Anthony Cook. The rest of the policemen had gone about more reasonable activities. It was high time, Shapiro thought, that he and Cook followed a good example.
Cook was standing in the most distant corner of the room, near the narrow windows. One of them had an air-conditioning unit in it. There was a fire escape beyond the other. Cook was half hidden by an easel. He was holding a sheet of paper out in front of him and looking at it. When he realized that Shapiro was looking at him, he held the drawing sheet in one hand and beckoned with the other. Shapiro walked the length of the talkative room and looked at what Cook held out for him to see.
What he saw surprised him. It was a sketch, in black and white only, of what was, recognizably, a woman—a naked woman. No woman had, Shapiro thought, ever looked quite like the woman portrayed in black charcoal on white paper. There was distortion in the drawing but there was some strange meaning in the distortion.
“Looks like she’s flying,” Cook said. “Damnedest thing, isn’t it?”
It was the damnedest thing. It was inconceivable that the man who had painted “Wreck on the Jersey Turnpike” had made this sketch. But in the lower right-hand corner there was a signature and the signed name was “Shack.” It was entirely the damnedest thing.
What it came to, Shapiro thought, was that the man had been able to draw—draw with skill and imagination, so that what he sketched became more than, yet without essentially abandoning, what was real. And Nathan Shapiro, to his entire surprise, wished that he could take this sketch home to his Brooklyn apartment and hang it on a wall. Rose would not approve of the woman’s being naked, rather explicitly naked. But she would, as now he did, want to keep on looking at it.
“The rest of it I don’t get,” Cook said. “A lot of crazy junk, for my money. But this—”
He stopped and both men turned and faced up the long room. A key scraped in the lock and the lock clicked. The door opened, and there was no hesitancy in its opening. Whoever had used a key to open the way into Shackleford Jones’s studio did not expect to find anybody in it.
A woman came in and her movements, too, were without hesitancy. She did not look around the room; obviously did not see the men who, half hidden by easels, stood at the end of it. They stood very quietly.
The woman was tall and very thin. She wore black slacks tight on long legs and a black jumper, its turtleneck almost to her chin. She had black hair which drifted to her shoulders. She was, Shapiro guessed, over six feet tall. She was, he guessed, somewhere in her twenties. When she walked into the room h
er long legs took long strides.
She walked directly to the easel which had a chalked outline in front of it. She did not seem surprised to see an outline chalked there and if she saw the blood on the floor, and in the cracks of the floor, she paid no attention to it.
The drawing paper with the sketch on it of, perhaps, a woman who was all height and no width, had been thumbtacked to a board fitted into the easel’s frame. The tall, black-clad woman began to loosen the thumbtacks.
Shapiro moved then, his shoes making a harsh sound on the gritty floor. The woman turned, her right hand still holding at a thumbtack. Shapiro said, “Looking for something, miss?”
She turned away abruptly, as if about to walk toward the door, but then stopped herself and turned back to face the two men who walked toward her.
“It’s mine, mister,” she said. “He told me it was mine. Anyway, it’s me.”
The drawing sagged down from the easel board, only one tack holding it. Suddenly, Shapiro remembered it very clearly. In that moment he realized too, why, when the tall young woman walked with long strides into the room, he had thought there was something vaguely familiar about her. She had posed for the sketch. Presumably, and most understandably, she had come to tear it up.
“Who are you, anyway?” the tall girl said. She had, unexpectedly, a low-pitched voice.
“Police,” Shapiro said. “You posed for the drawing, miss?”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s me. And Shack said—” She did not say what Shack had said. Instead, she said, “He owed me for the posing time. So it’s mine, isn’t it?”
Which was somewhat bewildering. She implied, Shapiro thought, some correlation between money owed and the plucked ostrich sketch. Which was absurd. If she wanted to destroy it, keep it out of any possible circulation, that would have been entirely reasonable. Shapiro tried to keep his bewilderment from showing in his voice.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know whose it will turn out to be, now that Mr. Jones is dead. You knew he was dead when you came in, didn’t you?”
