by Medora Sale
“Jesus, Dubinsky.” He stalked back to his desk, sat down, and took the lid off his coffee. “I gave him a shove. He only went down a couple of steps. Think of it as preventing the commission of a felonious assault through the use of judicious amounts of force. Considerably less than the prick deserved. Anyway, I was out of town when he bought it, remember.”
“Yeah—well, it’s got nothing to do with me,” said Dubinsky. “They made that pretty clear. The preliminary report on the autopsy is in.” He grinned. “You want to know how he died?”
“How,” said Sanders flatly. “Someone scare him to death?”
“No,” said his partner, “he drowned.”
“Drowned?” spluttered John, spilling coffee on his notebook as he reached for the telephone.
Half an hour later, Sanders was in Jerry’s Grill, making his way past business types doing late breakfast deals toward a green-jacketed back and a cap of glossy black hair on the other side of the room. “What in hell do you mean—drowned, Melissa?” he said loudly. The room was silent.
“Just that,” said the diminutive pathologist, waving him into the chair opposite her. “He died because his lungs contained water instead of air. Simple principle. Not difficult to understand. You ordering something?”
“In Harriet’s apartment? On the living room floor? He drowned? My God, Melissa, she doesn’t even have a goldfish bowl in there.”
“I’ll have a honey bun, Jerry,” Melissa Braston called over to the gloomy owner of Jerry’s Grill. “Hot, with butter. And more coffee. And I don’t know about Harriet’s living-room floor—that’s not my department, as they say. She a friend of yours?”
“Stop being so bloody discreet, Melissa. You know damn well she is.”
Melissa Braston gave him a sly grin. “Well—maybe. Maybe not on her living room floor, that is. The body shows clear signs of having been shifted around. Lots of fresh bruising, consistent with being dragged from one place to another, if you like, and then left to dry out on the floor.”
“Now that’s a brilliant deduction, Melissa. Since he was found on the second story of a building that hasn’t been under water recently. So what happened? Did he trip and fall into the lake? And someone with a bizarre sense of humor fished him out and stuck him in Harriet’s apartment?”
She shook her head. “He drowned in someone’s bathtub or sink or maybe even laundry tub. And it was unlikely to have been accidental unless he got his kicks from taking baths fully clothed with his wrists tied. Not a sexual perversion familiar to me, but who knows? If that was what gave him his little thrills, I’m not surprised that he drowned. But of course it doesn’t explain how he climbed out of the tub and walked into the living room. I leave that to you.”
“In a bathtub, with his wrists tied?”
“Yes. Very tightly. Couldn’t be clearer. He might as well have had a little note pinned to his chest explaining it all for overworked and harassed pathologists. Rope marks on the wrists and the composition of the water in his lungs. It’s been purified and treated. Tap water.”
“Maybe he stumbled into someone’s swimming pool.”
Melissa shook her head and took a buttery mouthful of hot roll. “Sorry. Won’t fly,” she said, as she swallowed. “Not enough chemicals and extra junk like that. Just nice, normal, chlorinated tap water. All the little thingies have been killed off.”
“Drowned,” muttered Sanders. “Jesus. I thought he looked soggy, lying there on the floor.”
“That’s unkind,” said Melissa. “He’d really quite dried off by the time his body was brought in. Have a Danish. Join me.”
“When did he die?”
“Not that easy to say,” Melissa said. “Under the circumstances. But probably not much more than forty-eight hours before they put him on ice. And probably not less than thirty-six. Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday noon are your outside limits of probability, I’d say.”
“Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday noon. That’s awkward.”
“Nothing I can do about it, love. And something else. He has some very shallow knife marks on him. As though someone had been playing around with a knife before he got the bright idea of dumping him in the bathtub. Or wherever.”
“Have they gone over the apartment?” asked John wearily. It was only slightly after ten when he got back to the office, but he felt as if he had already worked several full days without a break.
“Pretty much,” his partner admitted.
“And found anything? You know, if he drowned in Harriet’s bathtub, there’d be hairs, something, in the tub, in the drains.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, for chrissake, did you find any?”
Dubinsky shook his head. “Lots. All of it brown. Everybody who’s ever been in that apartment has brown hair. You. Miss Jeffries. Beaumont. All somewhat different colours and textures. It’s all down at the lab and it’ll take time. No hair in the kitchen or darkroom sink.” He shrugged. “I can’t see her having anything to do with it, though. After all,” he went on, as though Sanders were disputing his every word, “he was big, well-muscled. There were bruises on his head and shoulders, hair torn out. That sounds to me like someone held him under the water and waited for him to drown while he struggled. Someone strong. Or maybe two people. And then dragged him up a half-flight of stairs from the bathroom to Miss Jeffries’s living room and dumped him there. Of course there are the knife marks,” he added doubtfully. “Miss Jeffries is strong enough for that.”
“For chrissake, stop calling her Miss Jeffries. You make it sound as if you’re about to charge her.”
Dubinsky turned to stare out the window, apparently lost in thought. “She could have hit him on the head and knocked him out, and then tied him up, sliced him up a bit for the hell of it, dragged him into the bathtub, filled it up with water, and held him under. It’s afterward that’s hard to imagine.” He stopped for a moment. “Getting him out of the bathtub and up the stairs before the two of you went off to New York. I don’t think she could have done that by herself. And who would have helped her? You were under my nose all day Tuesday and you would have been pressed for time to drown him, move the body, drive to wherever in hell you were, and check in by seven forty-five. Which you did, according to the hotel. Even if, for some weird reason, you wanted to throw suspicion on her by murdering him and stashing the corpse in her apartment. And supposing she didn’t object.”
“Jesus,” muttered Sanders. “Keep on like this and you’ll give me an ulcer. What’s the state of things now?”
“We have a report on the brother. Nigel Beaumont. McNeill went over him and his apartment with four guys. There was a lot of hair and crap in the bathtub drain there too—they’re looking at it as soon as they’ve finished the stuff from Miss Jeffries’s bathtub—”
“My hair got precedence?”
“You’re damned right it did. If they find Beaumont’s hair in Miss Jeffries’s—Harriet’s—drains there’ll be hell to pay and you know it.” He picked up some paper and began half-reading, half-talking. “Interviewed Nigel Anthony Beaumont, and all the usual crap. On Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of May, the subject claimed he worked late, went directly from his office to a restaurant, where he met a female companion. They visited the theater—you don’t want to know exactly which production, do you?—went to another restaurant for a drink—name, address—and then went back to his companion’s apartment on Vaughan Road—her name, address—where he spent the night. On the morning of the twenty-seventh, he went straight from her place to work and stayed there all day. Guy had given him the theater tickets, and so he figured his brother had someone coming over and wanted to get rid of him for the evening. The female companion, by the way, confirms all of this, and we have people out checking the restaurants and his office.”
“How did it strike McNeill?”
“Well—you know McNeill. He wouldn’t believe
his own grandmother, basically. But he thought that the story might be true.”
Sanders shook his head. “By the way, has anyone tracked down the little prick who lived with Beaumont in London? Bellingham? He keeps turning up one way or another. One more person we ought to see.”
“Before we do that, no one’s been out to take a statement from his agent yet. She probably knows something useful. McNeill’s doing the rounds of the rest of Beaumont’s friends—trying to find out what he was doing after he got off the plane from London. He can do Bellingham.”
“The agent it is, then,” said Sanders. “I gather she’s a bitch on wheels.”
Sanders gave the massive Georgian house on Dunvegan Road a sour look as they pulled up in its driveway.
“What’s your guess? Is all this paid for?” said Dubinsky, taking in, with one sweep of his expressive eyes, the house, the landscaping, the dark blue BMW, and the little red Lamborghini parked directly in front of them. “I didn’t realize art galleries coined that much cash.”
“Something does,” said John. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
The housekeeper ushered them into the den to cool their heels for a good ten minutes before Nina Smithson vouchsafed an appearance. The room was bare of reading material; there wasn’t even an old copy of Time or Maclean’s lying around. Dubinsky examined the paintings (with an eye to fraud) and Sanders amused himself by staring out the window at their car.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” said a cool voice behind them. “This is my morning for the gym and I just got back. I hope you aren’t going to take long. I do have a business to run.”
Nina Smithson was dressed in a blue linen suit, the kind that has “do not touch” written invisibly all over it, and the interview was apparently to take place standing, in deference to Mrs. Smithson’s immaculate and as yet unwrinkled clothing. Dubinsky sighed and took out his notebook. Sanders wondered what kind of gym, and exactly what she did while she was there. He had a sudden vision of her lifting three hundred pounds without disturbing a lock of that flawless hair and shook his head.
“I understand that you were Guy Beaumont’s agent,” he said.
“That’s right,” said Nina, in speech as crisp as her clothing. “And The Smithson Gallery is the country’s principal source of Beaumonts.”
“How well did you know him?”
“Is this a ‘check one of the above’ sort of question?” she asked. “Then I’d have to say extremely well,” said Nina. “Probably as well as anyone. As you may know already, he’d been living in London in my Chelsea flat and painting for the last year or so. He and that girl.”
“By ‘that girl,’ are you referring to Miss Sinclair?” asked Sanders. “Do you happen to know where she is? We’d like to interview her.”
She shook her flawless head and her golden cascade of hair swished gently before returning to its place. “Not the faintest idea. In fact, I was looking for both—or either one—of them before—uh—this happened. I had a new commission for Guy. But I couldn’t find them.”
“I take it that the gallery’s a very prosperous concern, Mrs. Smithson,” said John, looking around him.
Nina broke into a peal of laughter. “You take it wrong then, Inspector. It does well, but not this well. I’m sorry, I thought everyone knew. This,” she said, with a shrug of the shoulders that encompassed house, clothes, decoration, the lot, “is good old Marco’s money.”
“Is that Mr. Smithson?”
“It was. Not that he was, of course.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Smithson. Or even Marco, as far as that goes. I never knew his name or where he came from. I assumed it was somewhere around Albania, or perhaps Turkey.” With a vague wave of her hand, she dismissed the geography of Eastern Europe and the Middle East as some unknowable mystery, like the outer reaches of the universe. “Wherever it was, the people there called him Marco; but he admitted to me once that even that wasn’t his name. It was probably his code name in some terrorist organization. He wasn’t a particularly nice or honest man.” She smiled, and apparently having decided that she was enjoying herself, sank down in a comfortable chair, linen skirt and all. Dubinsky discreetly poised himself on the edge of another chair. “Smithson he got from the Smithsonian Institute. Someone took him there when he first came to North America and he was very impressed. All those complicated machines and things. But all this—house, cars, objets d’art—is because of Marco.” The smile that accompanied these words was sardonic. “He was a developer in the golden years when developers made all the money they wanted.”
Dubinsky opened his mouth and Sanders raised a warning hand to forestall his interrupting the narrative.
Nina paid no attention to their pantomime. “When I met him, I was eighteen; he was thirty-five and rich. And a brute and a slob, of course, but a very rich one. He died when I was thirty-five. I always liked the symmetry of it; and I like the fact that Marco’s money ended up funding an art gallery. He had the taste and discernment of an alcoholic sewer rat, and would have considered the gallery a total waste of hard-earned cash.”
It sounded like a speech she had given many times before and loved reciting. “So where does Beaumont fit it?” asked Sanders abruptly.
“Guy? Well, once I got rid of Marco—”
“Got rid of him?”
“Or he died, I should say. Although I suppose to some extent it was my fault. He smoked, drank himself into a stupor every night, ate like a pig, screwed everything in sight, and worked like a demented ant until he dropped dead. A better woman than I,” she added with a sorrowful smile, “might have been able to stop him. I didn’t really try.”
Sanders leaned against the windowsill and regarded her steadily, like an entomologist noting the characteristics of a new form of beetle.
She shifted uneasily in her chair, colouring under his stare. “Not that it was deliberate. But with his temper it was easier not to nag about the booze and the cigarettes and the weight and the girls and to avoid the explosions. When I look back at it,” she added thoughtfully, “I can see it was inevitable. Marco being what he was, and me what I am. If I had tried to fight it, I would have gone under with him. And there’d never have been a gallery, and several promising artists would never have had a chance. It was fate.” She shook her golden locks gently.
“And Beaumont?”
“Guy was my first big find. I exhibited him here, and then in Montreal and in London. He was sensational. I’m going to miss him,” she said with a sigh. “In more ways than one, too.” She raised a beautifully groomed eyebrow and flashed an instantly suppressed grin. “We had a little thing going for a while,” she said. “Not serious, but most enjoyable. We neither one of us took these things seriously. But I suppose you are more interested in what Guy had been up to lately. And that I cannot tell you, I’m sorry. He had been painting in London—”
“Had he done much work?” interrupted Sanders.
“As much as anyone would expect. A lot of small pieces, which went like beer at a ball game, some prints, and one big commission. He wasn’t suffering from a work blockage, if that’s what you mean. He was living in my flat, as I said, with that girl. I visited them on various buying trips, and they seemed happy enough to me. He had been complaining recently that he needed more money, and for some reason—perhaps because he felt the gallery wasn’t concerned enough about him—he didn’t get in touch with me on this trip home. I’m not sure why.” She spread her hands out helplessly. “And that’s it. I tried to contact him—I even pestered his old girlfriend to find out where he was—but no go. That’s all I know.”
“Did you get all that?” asked Sanders as they walked over to the car.
“Yeah,” said Dubinsky gloomily. “Most of it. Why do you suppose she was pouring out her life story to us at eleven in the morning? She doesn’t look the type, somehow.”
“There was a lot that we were going to find out anyway,” said John sourly. “She wanted to throw it in where we wouldn’t notice it.”
“Like the fact that she was screwing Beaumont?”
“And trying to get Harriet to find him for her. She must have been desperate to reach him.”
“But all that crap about her husband?” said Ed as he reversed out of the drive. “We didn’t need that.”
“It wasn’t so much what she said,” John pointed out, magisterially. “Were you looking at her? That was nerves. She was babbling. I’ll bet there’s some sweet scam going on in that gallery.”
“So? What’s new?”
“You mean you left an urgent message because you felt like having lunch? Look, Harriet—I know that food’s important—”
“I didn’t leave an urgent message. I left an important message—I didn’t want it getting lost in the shuffle somewhere.”
“Yeah—well, we don’t have a box to check off between urgent and routine. None of these subtle gradations you artistic types go in for. What are you having?”
“Soup and a pita with chicken,” said Harriet promptly. “And a beer. And then coffee and baklava, since Joe has the best baklava in twenty blocks. But I told him to wait until you got here, so take your time. You want the same thing?” she added without taking another breath. “Two, Joe,” she called over without a pause to the man behind the counter. “This is my territory,” she said blandly. “Here you eat my food.”
But it wasn’t until the honey-sticky plates of baklava were stacked and carried away that Harriet came to the point. She centered her coffee cup and looked over at John. “Okay. I had another encounter—this time on the phone—and I figured it might be relevant. My first impulse was to forget all about it, but then I realized that I ought at least to give you a chance to—”
“Harriet, what in hell are you going on about? Let go of that cup and tell me what happened as clearly as you can. You’re babbling.”
“Sorry,” she mumbled, turning pink. “This whole experience seems to have unhinged me finally. Here we go. Around ten this morning, I got a phone call from Peter Bellingham.”
