The Polka Dot Nude

by Joan Smith

  I batted my eyes furiously and said, “Heaven can wait."

  The sun filtered through leafed trees, tracing patterns on the grass beyond the window. I was mentally justifying and rationalizing my desire to play truant. After all, Drew Taylor was Rosalie’s daughter—a part of Rosalie’s life. And it was just possible that Brad knew a few details I’d missed too, since he must have done some minimal research.

  “The trip wouldn’t be a complete waste of time,” I said.

  “Thank you. It’s nice to know my company isn’t totally without merit.”

  “Of course not. You must know a few things about Rosalie that I don’t.”

  His ardor was quickly sinking to annoyance. “You’re making me quiescent again, Audrey,” he warned.

  “Go home and get ready, Brad. I have to change.”

  “I guess you won’t want to travel in your only decent—” I stopped him with a gimlet eye. “Ahem. In your nice white suit,” he finished, and left, rather quickly.

  That sounded like tacit acknowledgment that he didn’t object to being seen with a woman in jeans and a T-shirt. I phoned Simcoe to tell him we were leaving, and put my white suit in a hang-up bag to take along, in case we went out that night. The precious research I put in a clothes closet with blankets on top of it. After I flung a nightie and toilet articles into a hand bag, I locked the front door and went out to his car.

  CHAPTER 12

  “You’re prompt,” Brad complimented, when he joined me five minutes later. “I see you’ve reverted to your Raggedy Ann style.”

  “I’d rather be comfortable than stylish.”

  I made myself comfortable in the car while Brad stashed our bags and took over the chore of driving. “What do you suppose Drew’s doing with Rosalie’s pictures—if she even has them, I mean?” I mused.

  “She must have them; they weren’t at Hartland.”

  “Just because I didn’t see them doesn’t mean they weren’t there, in the attic or some place.”

  “You can take it from me, they weren’t there. Gone, vanished, the lot of them,” he assured me.

  His air of concern certainly revived a former suspicion. “You were there! You broke into her house and searched it. Brad, was it when you were at her funeral? You were there too, weren’t you, when you told me Sean had fallen out of a tree?” The questions tumbled out in my excitement.

  “Where’d you get that idea?”

  “You were on TV.”

  “Damn, I thought I ducked the camera.”

  “I thought it was you. Since you’re not writing your book, maybe you can give me some details for mine. About the funeral, I mean.”

  He looked uncomfortable with the subject, but obliged me. “There wasn’t much of anything unusual. There was a bird in the church. I noticed it soaring high up in the vaulted arch. It was touching, somehow. I pictured it being Rosalie’s soul coming to her own funeral. The restless spirit free from its mortal cage at last, to soar into the delirious blue.”

  I made a disparaging face. “Was the ceiling of the church blue, or did it have a hole in it?”

  “You have a very literal, unpoetic soul, Audrey. I saw it as a symbol. A little symbolism doesn’t do an opus any harm.”

  “I’ll let Mason deal with the mumbo-jumbo. What kind of a bird was it?” It was a fact that the bird was there after all, and if some deluded reader wanted to make a symbol of it, it was up to him.

  “A swallow,” he said, and immediately changed the subject. “I bet Lorraine channeled the pictures out to Drew in New York over the years, and Drew sold them. If the paintings Rosalie did in France were all as good as your nude, she might have passed them off as originals. Don’t laugh!” he objected, when I snorted in derision. “It would be easier than you think. Most of those artists are dead now. Some of the work was actually done at the artists’ own studios, with their materials. Matisse, Léger, Braque, Rouault—she mentioned them all in her diaries”

  “She even said that Braque thought her painting of a peasant boy was a Picasso!”

  “The experts often spot a forgery by the materials used, but if she worked in their studios, with their canvas and paints . . . Of course that wouldn’t apply to all her works—your pointillist one, for instance. Both Pissarro and Seurat died around the turn of the century, but some of the others might pass examination.” He stopped, frowning.

  “Rosalie signed the pictures in her own name. At least she signed mine.”

  “Apparently she didn’t sign the one Braque mistook for a Picasso. Not that it would be impossible to change the signature. It’s probably that telltale signature that had Drew worried about your painting—or maybe it’s the fact that it’s posing as a late-1800s piece. The pigments wouldn’t match that era. It could be proven a phony by chemical analysis.”

  “If she’d done a different imitation, I might still have it,” I said wistfully. “Wouldn’t you think somebody would have caught on before now, if Drew’s been doing this for years?”

  “We don’t know how long Drew’s been running her gallery. That’s one thing to find out. She wouldn’t risk selling to museums or well-versed collectors if there was something shady about her product. She’d probably try to get them out of the country, or deep in the heart of Texas, someplace out of the mainstream.”

  “How do you plan to extract all this from Drew? You’re obviously not going to tell her who you are.”

  “Why shucks, ma’am, I reckon I just blew in from Texas in my private jet,” he said, in a southern drawl. “Actually,” he went on in his own accent, “Texas isn’t out of the mainstream of art. All that oil money. We’ll snoop around her gallery and see what we can find. Maybe I’ll revert to my Irish brogue, become a wealthy Irish horsebreeder, stopping off on my way to Kentucky to pick up a bit of Yankee culture—French paintings—to take home to the ould sod with me.” He finished this speech in a very creditable brogue.

  “You do that well.”

  “That’s my real tongue. This phony American accent I use is becoming second nature now. I wanted to fit in when I came to the States, and worked hard to lose my accent.”

  “You’d make a good actor, with that facility for dialects.”

  “I hope so. I’ll have some acting to do with Drew Taylor. How’d you like to be my secretary?”

  “I don’t do accents. I can be your American hostess,” I said. I noticed he hadn’t suggested we pose as man and wife, and mentioned it, in an oblique way.

  “Drew’s a swinging single,” he told me. “She likes men. I observed her, discreetly, at the funeral. There’s no danger she’d recognized me. She didn’t even see me, with all the movie stars and moguls around.”

  It was a long trip, between six and seven hours, but through pretty countryside, with a stop for lunch along the way. It was four-thirty when we found Drew’s gallery and a place to park. Having seen the glamorous—and beautiful—Drew Taylor on TV at Rosalie’s funeral, I wanted to change and freshen up before going to the gallery, but there wasn’t time for it.

  We learned one important fact before we entered the door. The gold lettering on the black building front gave the opening date as three years ago. “Interesting, Ms. Andrews,” Brad said, nodding at it. “She’s a relative newcomer in the business.”

  “Is that my name—Andrews?”

  “Vivian Andrews.”

  “I don’t like Vivian. Make it Annabelle, or Charlene.”

  “We want an invisible name. I’ll call you Ms. Andrews. And you can tell me Mr. O’Casey.”

  “Faith and bejaebbers, I thought Sean was your son, not your da.”

  “You’re right—you don’t do accents. You’re from Kentucky. You met me here in New York, and are going to accompany me to your famous brood farm in Kentucky.”

  “What I don’t know about horses would fill a library.”

  “I’ll do the talking, and I hope Drew’s as ignorant as you."

  We walked into the gallery, where half a dozen original o
il paintings, none of them by famous names, were propped on easels around the walls of the room. There was no salesperson present, but within a minute a beaded curtain rattled and a woman glided forward. She wasn’t young, but not yet old either. Somewhere between thirty-five and forty—the right age for Rosalie’s daughter. A sleek wave of toffee-colored hair fell over her cheek in careful abandon. She had the arched brow, high cheekbones, and sculptured nose that suggested superior breeding. I felt intimidated even before she opened her mouth. I recognized the apparition as Drew Taylor.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, as she directed her dazzling smile to Brad.

  “You can,” he said, laying on the brogue. “I came looking for some paintings. If yours are as pretty as yourself, I came to the right place.” His brown eyes were all over her, and his smile was broad as it was lascivious. “You’re the prettiest picture I’ve seen since my plane landed.. . I’m O’Casey Castlecomer—the old country. You’ve heard of the O’Casey stables,” he said.

  Drew sidestepped the question. “Are you a neighbor of the Aga Khan? I understand he has a stud farm in Ireland.”

  “Not close neighbors to Ballymany. That’s in Kildare County.”

  “I confess I’m not an afficionada. I’m Drew Taylor, the proprietress here. What sort of pictures are you looking for, Mr. O’Casey? Is it something to do with horses?”

  “Horses?” he asked, and laughed. “Ah no, those beauties can only be appreciated in the flesh. I’m here in America to pick up a mare from this lady’s father. The Andrews brood farm, in Kentucky.”

  “Miss Andrews, delighted,” Drew said. She reached to shake my hand, but the light in her topaz eyes was dimmed till she returned her gaze to Brad.

  “Aye, we’ll breed a race of winners with the mating,” Brad continued, laying it on thicker by the minute. “Between our two stables, how many Derby winners is it we’ve had, Miss Andrews?”

  “Three,” I hazarded, aiming for an impressive but credible number.

  A deep laugh shook the air. “She’s a great joker, Miss Taylor. Three! We’d have five out of Castlecomer, going back to my grandpa’s days.”

  My faux pas wasn’t much noted. Already Drew had a possessive arm on Brad’s sleeve, and was leading him to various easels around the room. Her long painted nails and ringed fingers winked under the lights.

  “This is a marvelously talented new artist I’m representing,” she said. I looked at a talented pattern of black lines of multicolored smear of pigment.

  “It’s lively, it is,” Brad said, but with little enthusiasm. “To tell the truth, it’s something more lifelike I'm looking for. Not so modern, if you know what I mean, but not old and dull either. My father, God rest his soul, had the gallery full of old Flemish things. The women look like witches, everyone of them, though he paid a fine pound for them in the old days. They’re worth something handsome now. My own taste is more modern.”

  “But you don’t care for abstract expressionism,” Drew said, nodding her head.

  “If I can’t tell what I’m looking at, I like to be able to make an educated guess at least. On the other hand, I don’t want any paintings of soup cans or hamburgers. The female figure is what I prefer,” he added bluntly. “God’s own finest creation, and if it’s an undraped figure, I have no objection at all to that.”

  Drew gave a very knowing smile. “I understand, Mr. O‘Casey."

  Brad placed a hand on her forearm and said, “Why don’t you call me Timothy. You know what I’m after now. Renoir, for instance, I call a painter.” His fingers tightened on her arm. She turned and slanted an encouraging smile up at him from the corner of her eye.

  "But he generally left the clothes on,” she pointed out.

  His eyes mentally stripped Drew of her clothes. “Too often,” he agreed sadly. “Modigliani would take them off, but he’s got a hard edge to him I don’t agree with. The old boys now, Reubens and company, they understood how to paint a woman. His colors were well done, soft and hazy, like the Impressionists.”

  We made a cursory tour of the shop, then we were ushered through the beaded curtain to view other paintings. I saw Brad’s head swiveling around, like my own, to see if my nude was amongst them. None of the names represented was famous enough to bother forging. There were no works by Rosalie’s friends. Brad took a quick look around and said, “Thank you kindly. I was just passing by and dropped in. I’ll walk along to the next place. Maybe you could recommend a reputable gallery to me? I don’t collect cheap paintings. I want a name that will hold up, an established name, but I want a picture that will give me pleasure too. It’s the taxes that kill us, you know. You’ve got to invest in something, and buying land hobbles you with taxes and poachers and tenants that don’t pay their rent.”

  “So wise of you.” She smiled. “You’ll be taking your painting back to Ireland with you, Mr. O’Casey?”

  “Timothy!” he reminded her, shaking a playful finger. “I will, yes. I’ll take it right home with me. Folks think there’s no art in Ireland, only because they never get a chance to see it. I can tell you, Lord Falkenburg has a dandy collection, and two or three others right there in Leinster close to home have got two dozen masterpieces between them. Nothing to match my family’s collection, of course,” he added proudly.

  Drew listened closely, then spoke. “I happen to have a few modern paintings in my own private collection,” she said hesitantly. “They’re not really for sale . . .“ she added with tantalizing uncertainty.

  “Then they’d not be much good to me. Could you name another gallery?” Brad asked.

  “I think you’d like them,” she continued. “I’m thinking of selling one or two, to make room for a new artist I’ve begun collecting. A German abstract painter—you wouldn’t be interested in him. Why don’t you drop around to my apartment this evening, Timothy?” she suggested.

  “Was there anything in particular we had to do this evening, Miss Andrews?” he asked me.

  “No, nothing.”

  “That’s fine then. If you’ll give me your address, I’ll stop by this evening.”

  “I’ll give you my card. Say, nine o’clock?” she suggested. She lifted a card from a brass salver on her desk and gave it to Brad. “You’d be paying cash, I take it?”

  “A certified check, if that’s good enough for you. I only have twenty-five hundred in traveler’s checks, but my bank will transfer some funds from home. I set it up before I left, to cover the purchase of the mare.”

  “That’ll be fine.” She smiled. “I’ll look forward to seeing you. Oh, and good-bye, Miss Anderson,” she added as an afterthought.

  Drew accompanied us to the door. As we passed beyond view, Brad handed me the card, which held the familiar address.

  “I have a distinct feeling Miss Andrews was not included in that invitation to view her etchings. I might as well have been invisible. It must be the jeans.”

  “Yeah, the lack of a y chromosome. I told you, she likes men.”

  “She’s too old for you, Brad.”

  He smiled in surprise. “Too old for a pathetic old creep like me?”

  “That one really hit home, I see.”

  “Nothing was said about your coming with me. Come along if you’ve a mind to.”

  “You can cut the brogue now,” I said irritably. “There wasn’t a sign of Rosalie’s paintings there. This is going to be a lot trickier than we thought.”

  “She has them at her apartment.”

  “How is Mr. Timothy O’Casey going to get a certified check from a bank?”

  “By opening an account in his name and depositing money.

  “How much do you figure we’re talking about?”

  “Something in the neighborhood of fifty thou will be her asking price.”

  “A mere bagatelle. You might be as well take two.”

  “Do you think people really buy those awful smears she had up on the stands?” he asked. “I could do better than that.”

  “A b
lind monkey could do better. If people don’t buy them, then she’s crooked for sure. I’d like to know her rent for that shop, and the apartment.”

  We came to a corner and waited for the light. “What do you want to do now?” I asked.

  “I planned to take you to Le Pavilion d’Antibes for dinner.”

  “Your French restaurant! Great! Is it fancy?”

  He turned a leery eye on my jeans. “We can go to my place to change.”

  ‘You have an apartment in New York?”

  “I live in New York.”

  “I didn’t see how you could possibly have time to teach literature, with all those quickie books you do.”

  “I used to teach. I gave it up when the demand for my books exceeded what I could supply on a part-time basis. Once I gave up the teaching, there was no reason to go on living in a small city, away from the action.”

  “Where’s your apartment? No, let me guess. Sutton Place?” He shook his head. “Park Avenue?”

  “Close, but no cigar. Central Park West.”

  I had already felt out of place in the expensive art gallery. I’d hardly said a word, I was so awed by Drew Taylor. Brad’s apartment would he equally intimidating—I knew it before I got into his car. I could almost feel my back arch in preparation of being uncomfortable. My conversation dwindled to monosyllables as we drew near. It disappeared entirely when the doorman bowed ceremoniously and greeted Mr. O’Malley with a touch of his cap. The marble-floored lobby, hung in wheat silk, didn’t do anything to revive my conversation. I felt as though I had hay stuck in my hair, to match my jeans and sneakers. Mixed in with my feelings of inadequacy was a burning resentment that Hume Mason’s sleazy writing paid so inordinately well. For some reason, Helen came to mind. Helen should be coming home from Greece this week. I’d have to call, and let her brag about the honeymoon.

  CHAPTER 13

  The apartment was all I feared, and more. We entered into a hushed atmosphere, the only sound the whisper of an air conditioner purring softly. A sweep of brown marble hallway stretched toward the horizon, terminating in a shattered statue of some Greek god, mounted on a big pedestal. I had the uncomfortable feeling of being in someone else’s church, not knowing quite what was expected of me. Maybe I should genuflect, or bless myself. I looked uncertainly at Brad, who had gone on to another archway and was waiting for me. He was very much at home, a full-fledged member of this temple to mammon. I waded through a Persian rug, eyes darting hither and thither to admire the room’s appointments. Even with one rug and the Barcelona chair missing, the place was fully furnished. Only the apartment’s vast dimensions saved it from being overcrowded.