Pursued by Shadows

by Medora Sale

  “Brown hair. Green eyes. Thin. She was worried about you.”

  “Omigod. Harriet. With everything else going on, I’d forgotten. I wrote her on Saturday morning before I was sure . . .” Her voice trailed off uncertainly. “I asked her to come down because I was scared. I suddenly thought that I knew nothing about you and—”

  “No one knew where you were except me ? Your classic ax murderer? I’m flattered,” he said, his eyes crinkling with amusement. “What made you change your mind?”

  “I don’t know—perhaps I haven’t. But you seem to be too competent and sane to be an ax murderer. Not that I’m an expert, of course. Anyway, as soon as I mailed the letter I realized it was stupid. There was nothing she could do.”

  “She came down and she brought someone,” he added, with a wary expression. “Big guy. She called him John and he looked like a cop.”

  “Oh no,” said Jane, in a despairing voice. “I never thought for a minute she’d call the cops.” She sank back in the chair in an attitude of exhausted hopelessness. “And now they know I’m here.”

  “She was worried,” he repeated. “I think that was all. And she may know you’re here, but no one else does. Except, of course, that bastard antiques man Harmon. And the cop, if he was a cop, wasn’t here officially. I drifted by the police department this afternoon to say hello to everyone—and all they knew was that you were a missing person whose friends were looking for you. Nothing about cops from anywhere.” His voice had turned brisk and cheerful, trying to energize her. “Is it that important, the thing you had in that briefcase?”

  She pushed herself out of the chair and walked slowly over to get her purse. “I think it must be,” she said. “I never realized it when I took it. I just thought Guy owed us something, me and Agnes, and I figured I could raise a bit of money on it.” She took out her wallet and extracted the newspaper clipping that described the death of Malcolm Whiteside. “There. They gave me that in London. They said he was mixed up in it.”

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  Jane shook her head. “I don’t know. Some man. He just walked up to me in a restaurant. But he knew me. And he knew I was involved. And then he said he could find us any time he wanted. But stupid me—I figured I wouldn’t have to worry once I got over here. How wrong could I be?” She smiled ruefully. “And then getting Lesley to take it to New York—I wasn’t thinking. And now what’s happened to Lesley?”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t worry about her. She’ll be lying low somewhere. If there are people out there looking for you and for that leather case, it makes sense to lie low.”

  “But why hasn’t she called?” said Jane fretfully. “I told her to call and let me know she was all right. You know, Lesley’s not very—she gets upset easily,” she added, with hesitation. “She’s had a bad time the last few years. Maybe something has happened and no one can get in touch with me. No one knows I’m here except Lesley.”

  “Then why don’t you call your mother?” he suggested. “If your sister’s in trouble, wouldn’t she call her?”

  Jane reached for the telephone with a worried frown.

  “Why couldn’t I just have given my statement to you?” asked Harriet, once they had ordered.

  “I’m not sure that it would have been totally acceptable under the circumstances. Too many people seem to know about us,” said John, with an air of studied cheerfulness. “It would look strange, that’s all. But don’t worry about it—you were out of town when it happened,” he added unnecessarily. “So really what you had to say wasn’t much use to anybody except as background. Have some wine.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” said Harriet wryly. “I like not being any use. And yes, I’ll have some wine. Although I’m not sure it’s a great idea when you haven’t eaten since breakfast and it’s”—she looked carefully at her watch—“well past nine o’clock at night. I’m whimpering with starvation. I wish they’d hurry with the soup.”

  “Listen, in a case like this, the less use you are, the better. Believe me,” said John, picking up her hand from the table and giving it a squeeze. “Are you surviving?” he asked gently.

  “Surviving what?” she asked, with blank-faced innocence. “Starvation? Not very well. Otherwise—”

  “Harriet, be serious for once, will you? I meant are you surviving today, as you damned well know. Are you—” He paused, unable to ask if she was hiding grief behind that impenetrable wall of brittle gaiety.

  “Oh that,” she said, waving her other hand airily in front of her face. “You mean coming back from trying to rescue an old friend from certain death and discovering another old friend dead on the living room carpet?” Her green eyes moistened. She took a gulp of wine and smiled. “Under the circumstances, I’m surviving very well. You see—” She paused to give him another watery smile. “Considering the circumstances, if I may go back to them, it doesn’t seem likely that you had anything to do with his death. I mean, unless he died because he fell down my stairs. That doesn’t seem likely, though. Is it?”

  Sanders, who had been mulling over how Guy Beaumont had met his end all evening, shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m sure he didn’t hit his head—and even if he had, it’s unlikely that he’d wander around for an entire week without noticing anything. And then walk into your place and drop dead. Although it can happen.” He shrugged his shoulders uneasily, as if it hadn’t quite managed to convince himself. “But I’m not sure I understand your point.”

  “If he died because you hit him,” she said, staring down at the table and speaking in a lifeless monotone, “not in self-defense, but in a rage, even if you were defending me, what’s that going to do to you? And to your position? I’m not sure you’d survive that. And then you’d be one more victim of that self-indulgent, spoiled monster. I couldn’t stand that. So I’m assuming,” she said, looking up again, “that someone else did it. Someone else he wound up to a rage. And because I’m selfish, that doesn’t really bother me.”

  John shook his head. “I wish you’d step back and try to see this from another perspective, Harriet. I know you think Beaumont died because he was part of some chain of male violence that stretches from here to the back of beyond. Okay—these things exist, I agree, but they’re not that neat and predictable. My gut instinct tells me he was killed for some totally commonplace reason. My gut instinct and the fact that your apartment was searched. Not trashed in a rage, but searched. Like, for example, greed.”

  “Greed?”

  “Simple, old-fashioned greed, my darling. Not because some man was inspired to violence by his example. Why else the frantic search through your art books and your freezer? He—or she—was looking for something valuable. Believe me.”

  “I’ll try. You mean like a painting. A skinny painting, that is.”

  “A painting valuable enough to kill for. Do any of Beaumont’s fit into that category?”

  Harriet shook her head. “I wouldn’t have thought so. But couldn’t he have been murdered by one of his victims who also wanted to extract a little profit out of the whole mess?”

  “You do have a fondness for complicating things, don’t you, Harriet?”

  It was past ten o’clock before the telephone rang in Amos’s apartment. Jane reached for it, but Amos was there ahead of her, frowning. She drew her hand back, leaving it for him to answer, dancing with impatience at the time it took to get the receiver into her own hand.

  “Who was that?” snapped Lesley.

  “Just a friend. I’ve borrowed his apartment. And his phone. Where have you been? I’ve been frantic.”

  “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t call. Yesterday or the day before. There were—uh—reasons. Everything’s all right now but it’s too stupid and too complicated to explain over the phone. What’s wrong?” Lesley’s voice was sharp with nerves. Then as Jane poured out her tale, a veil dropped over Lesley’s
features. They became frozen, expressionless, except for a tiny frown between her brows.

  “They’re sure that’s who it is?”

  “Positive.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. Today, I suppose. Or maybe last night. Mum saw it on the news.”

  “Where are you, Jane? And are you well hidden?”

  “Look, it’s better if you don’t know where I am.”

  Lesley thought of the lazy, confident male voice that had answered the telephone, and her nails dug into her palm in a spasm of possessiveness. “What do you want me to do?”

  There was an even longer pause. “Go ahead,” said Jane at last. “Since you’ve made it that far okay. Just act natural. But be careful.”

  Oh, God, thought the young woman as she dropped the receiver back down on its cradle. Her stomach twisted into agonizing cramps. Natural. Be careful. Sure.

  The question was, is it easier to be careful here or in New York? No one seemed to notice her here except in a vague, pleasant, friendly sort of way. She had presented herself as a reporter, following the Erie Canal, gathering pictures and folksy anecdotes for a travel article; she had tried out her newly minted cover story very cautiously, first on the bartender at the motel and then on the owner of the little restaurant she had stumbled on in her explorations. Neither of them seemed to find anything odd about it. Apparently lots of people were interested in the Erie Canal. Slightly emboldened by her success, she decided. She would stay.

  “Is it heartless to put away a meal that starts with bean soup and ends with baklava when you have recently discovered a corpse in your living room?” Harriet pushed aside her coffee cup and looked inquisitively at John. She had had too much wine, she decided. He had better drive.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Tragedy is always associated with enormous banquets and nonstop consumption of food and drink. Anyway, I’m glad you don’t seem to be pining away because of what happened to Beaumont,” he added cautiously.

  “Now that’s heartless, John Sanders, but appropriate, I suppose. I can’t say I am pining. I was surprised to find him there, and upset, but not brokenhearted. Is that what you wanted to know?” At that her eyes seemed to cloud over, shutting him out again, and her face lost its look of enforced cheer. “Underneath all this bravado there’s a fluttery feeling in my chest that I think is fear, and I know that awful face is going to haunt my nightmares for a while,” she added. “Poor bastard. I wonder if anyone will be brokenhearted. Except Nina, of course.”

  “Nina?”

  “I told you about Nina Smithson.” Harriet blinked and tossed her hair back out of her eyes, suddenly almost herself again. “His agent. She’s going to get it right where it hurts, in the wallet. I expect she’ll be carefully disarranging her golden locks in grief until she can find another enfant terrible the art world to promote.”

  “That’s remarkably catty, Harriet,” said John. “Even for you. So while you’re in this mood,” he added, “tell me more about Beaumont. Not you and, but just Beaumont. How famous was he? And all that.”

  “Famous,” she said, leaning forward just slightly drunkenly and letting her hair fall down over one green eye. “That depends on what kind of fame you mean. When I first met him, eons ago, I was just barely starting out in photography—doing everything and anything that came my way—dogs, children, two-bit weddings, you name it. He was a terribly important personage in the inner arty circles in town. He was certainly not successful in the crude or financial sense at that point. He had a job teaching at the art college, and was the focal point of a group of artists and would-be artists who were convinced that his place ought to be next to the Archangel Michael up in heaven. He was, in short, a minnow in a birdbath. Unfortunately for him, he thought the birdbath was the world and he was the biggest fish in it.”

  “And you went out with him?”

  “Not yet. Don’t get impatient. He was, as he confided to me with adolescent charm, running his paint-stained fingers through his auburn—well, brown, actually—curls, still trying to find a medium. He thought maybe photo collage could be his thing and he attached himself to me so he could pick my brain and skills. I didn’t realize that at first, of course. It took me at least two or three days to figure it out,” she said wryly. “Anyway, around that time someone introduced him to Nina Smithson, who had a gallery and badly needed new artists to peddle. Well,” Harriet went on, spreading her hands wide in an exaggerated gesture of infinite possibility. “Nina took one look at all this garbage that Guy had piled up over the years and the bells went off in her head.”

  “She thought he was a genius?”

  “Not on your life. No flies on our Nina. She saw fabulous commercial possibilities in him if someone with a strong hand—”

  “Nina?”

  “Of course—guided him in the right direction. My God, at that point he was still involved in the happening-in-the-park school of art, can you believe it? No money in it, no joy in it, just a sense of smugness and adulation from a tiny group of unimportant, arrogant, sycophantic peers. Like that little twerp who broke into my bedroom the other night looking for Jane. Peter Bellingham.” She snatched up her glass and drained it, her eyes exploding with sparks of fury. “Do you know that Peter had the nerve to grab me at a party once and lecture me about my responsibilities to Guy? My sacred responsibilities to his talent and all that sort of crap. And then, after I threw Guy out he came over to explain to me that poor Guy was so torn by the conflict engendered by his infidelity that he had been unable to control his massive soul and spirit—or some shit like that—and that was why he hit me. And so I should understand and take him back.” Harriet shivered and then wrapped her arms angrily around her chest. “If poor Guy hadn’t just bought it on my living room floor, all this really would be funny.”

  “What kind of art did he go in for?” asked Sanders firmly, determined to keep her thoughts away from the inert mass in her apartment.

  “Well—it’s what I call the corporate oil school, which annoyed the hell out of him, but that’s what it was. He did these enormous, spectacular, brightly coloured canvases that you could use to cover half the lobby of the National Widget Building.”

  “Abstracts?”

  “Oh lord no. Nothing like that. It was a kind of neo-realism. He would do scenes that were vaguely suggestive of the aims and ideals of the company he was painting them for. Only it wasn’t their actual aims he encapsulated. His job was to clean up the image. You know, like painting a flock of doves with olive branches in their beaks for a weapons manufacturer, only he was a little more subtle. He’d do a beautiful, undisturbed bucolic scene for some heavy equipment manufacturer, implying that this is what they really went in for, not ripping the landscape to shreds. Hell—go look at one and you’ll see what I mean. They’re all over the place. Ghastly. He also did some very nice, somewhat derivative pen and ink things. Nina sold piles of those in the gallery. And prints. He liked etching—all that acid and stuff appealed to the macabre in him.”

  “What about other people’s work?” said Sanders.

  “Other people’s work? What do you mean? What did he think of it? With his ego, not much. He had very little room for the appreciation of the talents of others.”

  Sanders shook his head.

  Harriet frowned in puzzlement for a moment and then nodded. “Ah—you mean stealing it? Are we talking imitations—he lived on them—or literally?”

  Sanders nodded. “I think I probably mean literally.”

  “Like forging paintings?”

  “Did he ever try it? If one of his own paintings wasn’t worth that much, maybe someone else’s paintings were.”

  “He did copies,” said Harriet. “A lot of artists do. He said it gave him ideas on brush stroke and colour. And since ideas were what he was kind of short on, he immersed himself in copying from time to tim
e. But he never tried to sell the copies as originals that I know of. He never did them to size—or at least, I never saw one that was done to size.” She stopped for a moment, twirling her coffee cup around and staring at the pattern it made. “But, you know, I suppose Guy could have been a successful forger. Because he was technically so good. A flawless craftsman, a badly flawed artist. And not particularly moral, either.”

  Chapter 8

  Friday morning, and Ed Dubinsky was sitting sideways behind his desk, hands clasped behind his head, feet stretched out, a portrait of total relaxation, except that every line of his elongated body screamed irritable impatience. “Good morning,” he said. “Nice of you to drop in.”

  John looked at his watch and flopped down in a chair. “I’ve been having breakfast with a major witness. What’s new?”

  His partner hoisted himself up in his chair and gave him a long speculative look. “What’s your exact involvement with this mess? Personally, I mean. They’re nosing around.” He jerked his head in the direction of the door. “You know. Discreet like.”

  “Damn,” said Sanders. He stood up again, thrusting his hands in his pocket, and walked over to stare out the window. “It’s nothing. It’s peripheral, that’s all. Nothing to do with me. Except that it’s awkward as hell. I didn’t feel like spending the night hanging around the apartment watching them find my prints on everything.”

  “Did you know him?”

  Sanders paused, glanced at Dubinsky, and then turned back to the window, unable to look his partner in the face. “I met him once, briefly. For two or three minutes. A week or two ago,” said John, knowing that although this was true in letter, perhaps, it lied rather spectacularly in spirit.

  “And at that time you threw him down a set of stairs,” said his partner. “Miss Jeffries has given me a statement. A full statement.”