He was silent for a moment, then rolled up closer to the door, exciting a smell of someone who’s been days since his last wash. “Is this a hypothetical question, or do you know of such a painting? If you’re talking about the post office mural, it’s a waste of time. It was destroyed before anyone but a few had a chance to see it.”
“Anyone but a few?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Lowenstein, were you one of these few, by chance?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I was. Now allow me to ask you a question, since I was kind enough to answer yours. What were you doing with Levette’s portrait, the one of the girl? Did it belong to you?”
“It was Patrick Marion’s, something he inherited. The sitter was his aunt.”
His mouth dropped open slightly as he pondered the connection.
“Mr. Lowenstein, did I hear you right? Did you say you saw the Asmore mural in the post office? The Magazine Street post office?”
“Is that where it was?” He looked down at his hands in his lap as if the answer lay there. “Well, if you say so. You know everything else.”
“Do you remember what the painting showed?”
“What it showed.” Not a question, but a statement: “What it showed.”
“The subject matter. Asmore received a WPA commission to paint a mural showing the history of transportation in America, but he created something else, something so controversial that the community acted quickly to have it destroyed. What I’m curious to learn is what he painted to bring on such a response.”
“You’re like a child with all your questions. You know how children pepper you with questions? ‘Why is the grass green?’ ‘Where do the stars come from?’ That’s you.” He pushed back from the door and wheeled down the hall, making noise as he went. “Now excuse me, please. I have a masterpiece to hang.”
First came footsteps crossing the brick walk of the cloister, then the sound of someone crying. I sat up in bed, pulled back the curtains and looked out at the garden. “Not you again,” I muttered.
It was six o’clock in the evening, early for a visit from Lowenstein, let alone a ghost, and I’d just awakened from the most satisfying nap of my adult life. At the front of my brain floated puffs of cloud and gray matter, but at the rear, back there in all the fabulous cobwebs, a small light shone on the fresh memory of a dream: Rhys Goudeau and I in my Biloxi hotel room, making love with the windows open to a Gulf breeze.
Head dull and heavy from sleep, I grabbed the handle of my trusty Pete Rose and let it direct me outside. “Sally, what’s wrong?” I said. “Anything I can help you with?”
She had found her way to the garden bench. Her shoulders were shaking as she wept into a wad of napkins. “He fired me,” she said with a shout, and the weeping came louder. “Oh, God, what am I going to do?”
“He fired you? That mean old bastard fired you, too?”
“He did it. Gave me my check and said there wouldn’t be another. Got me to give him my keys back.”
I looked toward the house and the dark windows along the lower gallery. “Wait here, Sally. I’ll go have a talk with him.”
“Ain’t going to do any good.” And the noisy tears came again. “Why, he’s the orneriest man alive, Mr. Charbonnet. The absolute orneriest man alive.” Coming from Sally the word sounded this way: “Awnyeriest.”
I went to him despite the warning, lugging the bat with me. From behind me Sally called in that crazy voice, “You come back here, Mr. Charbonnet. You can’t talk to that man. That man is awnyery…”
I could feel heat dumping color in my face even before I shouted his name past the screen. When he answered, he did so without the aid of his wheelchair, shuffling across the polished floor with one hand touching the wall for balance, the other gripping the pajama bottoms at his hip as if to stave off pain. To complement the rumpled flannel bottoms, he was wearing a white button-down dress shirt and leather moccasins with fat winter socks. The shirt looked neatly pressed, no doubt by Sally. “How do you live with yourself?” I said as he came toward me, raising my voice in an approximation of rage. “Now it’s the maid you fire. Wasn’t the nurse enough?”
“Since when are my affairs any of your concern?”
“Since your housekeeper ruined my nap with her crying, that’s when.”
“Mr. Charbonnet, I’m so sorry your nap was interrupted, especially at this hour of the day when all the rest of humanity is enjoying precious sleep. But I’m going to have to ask you to step away from that door.” He pointed a finger. “You leave me no choice but to call the authorities.”
“Go ahead and call them. You’ve kicked everyone else out. Why not add your sleepy tenant to the pile?” He now was only a few feet away from me, squinting as he checked to make sure the door was latched. “If you can afford to buy a painting as pricey as Beloved Dorothy,” I said, “I’m sure my paltry rent check can’t mean much to you. But what about your obligation to Sally and the nurse? Not that I liked the nurse. You owed them something, didn’t you?”
“Take a deep breath, Mr. Charbonnet. You’re on the verge of apoplexy. And on my doorstep, at that.”
He unlatched the door and nudged it open, and I hesitated before stepping inside, although I was probably no less surprised than he seemed to be at having invited me in.
“Leave your weapon at the door,” he said.
I followed him, defiantly bringing the bat with me. We went into a large room crowded with books and paintings, and he pointed to the chair in which he wanted me to sit. “Would you like a drink, Mr. Charbonnet?”
“Nothing, thank you.”
He was standing at a butler’s tray holding liquor bottles. “I’m having cognac, my evening ritual. I was just sitting down to one when you… well, how shall I put it… when you came a-calling.”
Snifter in hand, he lowered himself into a wing chair so old and worn you could see through its fabric to a subcutaneous layer of moss stuffing. He put the moistened end of a cigar stub in his mouth and chewed on it. “I recall this flaw in your character from the last time we talked,” he said. “You like to make assumptions, don’t you? You like to size up a situation and deliver your verdict, regardless of the facts.”
“The facts?” I said. “Which facts are those?”
“The facts as you see them, not necessarily as they are.”
“How about this for a fact?” Feeling absurd even as I did it, I lifted the bat out of my lap and held it out in front of me.
Hanging on the wall directly behind Lowenstein was a pair of nearly identical Drysdale landscapes depicting the Louisiana bayou, and randomly scattered next to them were New Orleans scenes by Robert Grafton, Louis Oscar Griffith, Clarence Millet and William Woodward. Yet another wall held more Alberta Kinsey oil paintings than I could count in a glance, the most impressive of them showing the interior of a Royal Street antique store, circa 1930. I took pride in being able to attribute the works to specific artists, my recent refresher course in southern art history having served me well. The one place that wasn’t covered with either paintings or books was the most conspicuous of all.
“Something fall off the wall?” I said and nodded toward the vacant space above the fireplace. “Now that you have me here would you like some help in hanging Dorothy?”
“I didn’t buy the Asmore. Whatever gave you that impression?”
“Don’t do this, please. I know better. I clearly saw Lucinda Copeland—”
“Miss Copeland was returning a painting—a painting I’ve owned for more than twenty years. Not that it should be any of your concern, but I’d put it up for sale at the recent Neal auction and it failed to meet the reserve, and a modest reserve it was at that.” He sighed in a way to show disappointment. “Again, Mr. Charbonnet, why would you think it was I who bought the Asmore?”
“Well, you liked it so much.”
“Levette was brilliant, incapable of making a bad picture. But what does that have to do with anything?”
“Tommy
Smallwood didn’t buy it.”
“Are Tommy Smallwood and I the only collectors who qualify in your estimation as potential buyers of important southern pictures?” He choked out a laugh cloudy with phlegm. “You entertain me. You really do.”
“Why is the space above the mantel empty?” I said. “What went there? Was it the painting you just tried to sell at auction?”
He sipped his drink and kicked the end of his cigar with a thumbnail. As before, when he came to see Beloved Dorothy in the garçonnière, Lowenstein was protective of every word that passed from his mouth, and he seemed unwilling to part with information, no matter how insignificant, unless I was prepared to give up something in exchange. “Six months’ rent in advance,” he said. “You offered three, as I recall.”
“Six months? Six months and what do I get?”
“I’ll take your questions and let the girl stay on.”
“Sally?”
He nodded.
“In that case I’ll drop a check off later tonight.”
“Very good. And make it out to me this time. There’s no reason to involve High Life.” He waited a moment, then said, “To answer your question, Mr. Charbonnet, the painting I offered to sell occupied a place in a bedroom upstairs. That is until last month when I thought to see what it might fetch at auction. Do you know the artist Noel Rockmore, by chance? Or hasn’t he rated an entry in your precious art books yet?”
“Noel Rockmore,” I replied, practically reading text from memory. “Noel Rockmore, originally from New York, the son of artists, was best known for his portraits of the jazz musicians at Preservation Hall, painted in the early sixties.”
“Your memorization skills are superb. And although every jot of this painting came from Rockmore’s brush, it wasn’t from his musician series.”
“Was it the nude showing the woman with enormous fake breasts?”
Lowenstein smiled. “While you’re correct in identifying the painting, I would strongly suggest to you that Saki’s breasts, however large, were not fake. I knew the lady, you see. She came by her assets naturally.”
I sat looking at him for a minute. “I was in the gallery at Neal when it came up on the block. It’s a fine painting. I’m sorry it didn’t attract a buyer.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’d lost sleep the night before, upset about losing her. The odd thing is, I rarely even visit the bedroom where I’ve kept her all these years because I struggle to get up the stairs. It was wrong of me to offer to let the painting go—wrong at any price. I might have learned from previous experience.” He glanced at the fireplace and the blank space above it. “Care to venture a guess?”
I walked to the hearth and stood staring at the wall. The color of the plaster where the painting once hung was a shade lighter than the area around it. The size was considerable: when framed, the painting would’ve come to about thirty inches by forty-four inches. I tracked back to recent auction sales and several possibilities came to mind. “Was it by a southern artist?”
“Of course. Look around you. Every painting I own is southern. Critics call it micro-collecting, when the collector can’t see beyond his small purview. But what else, I ask, should I have hanging on my walls?” Another bout of phlegmy laughter. “Pictures of the California coast? Scenes of the Brooklyn Bridge? Old Mexico?” He shook his head. “You won’t find any of that here.”
“The painting you sold? Was it nineteenth or twentieth century?”
“Weren’t there southern artists practicing the craft in the eighteenth century?”
I was becoming annoyed, even as I was closing in on the answer. “Would you just give me the century, Mr. Lowenstein?”
“Nineteenth. But late nineteenth.”
“Were there people in it?”
“Yes, it was populated with several dozen people, although I never actually bothered to count. Animals, too. A mule as well, if my memory serves.”
I returned to my chair and sat down. “So is it a fact that you were related to the painting’s original owner, the one who himself bought it from William Aiken Walker?”
“Ah, yes, that would be my grandfather. Touché, Mr. Charbonnet. Touché.” He put his cigar down, the snifter next to it, and gave me loud applause. When he was finished, he said, “I must say, that Tommy Smallwood bought my grandfather’s cotton kingdom, and that it now hangs in his home, inspires in me a wild spirit of pyromania.”
“Burning the man’s house down seems a little extreme. Whatever happened to throwing eggs and wrapping the trees in toilet paper?”
He stood to pour another drink, the effort causing him to groan. He began to speak again only after he’d turned his back to me. “I’ve made some unwise choices of late, Mr. Charbonnet, choices that now threaten my security. Like many an investor I played the markets hard and recklessly in recent years. At some point I’m afraid I contracted the dotcom disease.” He let on a rueful smile. “Most were start-ups. I bought into the fiction. Do you see where this is going?”
“I do.”
“I’m quite a sizable chunk in arrears.” His second glass contained twice as much cognac as the first. He disposed of it quickly. “I suppose it was inevitable that it come to this. I’ve been in decline—rapid, steady decline. First went my health, now the money. To be honest, I don’t know which is worse.”
“So you’re selling off your collection to cover your debts.”
“Yes, that was the plan. I offered to rent the garçonnière for the same reason. Nothing personal, Mr. Charbonnet, but it’s nearly killed me to have to share my home. Obviously I’m the shadowy, private sort. Renting out the rooms seemed the least painful way to raise cash.” He finished off the drink and placed the snifter on the floor at his feet. “The Walker performed well enough to keep some creditors away—I netted about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But the Rockmore disappointed. I could sell them all and easily wipe out my debt, but that isn’t going to happen. Don’t be alarmed if in the next few weeks you encounter a for-sale sign hanging on the front gate. Given a choice between sacrificing the house or the collection, I give up the house.”
“You’d give up the roof over your head before your paintings?”
“Sure I would. I won’t let them go. They have been good company—the best company of my life. I will not allow them to be desecrated at more public sales.”
“Where do you intend to live, Mr. Lowenstein? That is, if you do elect to part with this place?”
He seemed to have no answer. He shrugged. “A barn, a lean-to, an abandoned shack in the Lower Ninth Ward. I’ve even considered a large storage unit—but one that’s climate-controlled, of course, to keep from exposing the paintings to the elements. I suppose it really doesn’t matter where I end up, as long as my paintings are with me.”
“Considering your financial problems this might seem like an insensitive question. But if you do sell the place… I mean, what about our arrangement? What about the rent I just agreed to pay you in advance?”
“Not to worry. I’ll reimburse you with proceeds from the sale. Or you can contract with the new owner to rent the garçonnière. I can’t imagine their not wanting to keep you. You would be taking a bite out of their mortgage, after all. Besides that, having you on the property has kept the ghost away.”
I looked at him and his face showed no evidence that he was joking. On the contrary, he appeared to be quite serious. I cleared my throat. “I don’t think it’s smart to pay all that rent when I can’t be certain I’ll be allowed to stay on here.”
“You’re right. But you have no alternative if you intend to make your stand for the maid.” Even as he spoke, I could hear a back door opening. It was Sally, returning from her interlude in the garden. Lowenstein glanced over his shoulder, in the direction of the hallway. “Mr. Charbonnet, this interview is over.”
He was struggling to stand again when she entered the room, trails from her tears still marking her face. It occurred to me that I’d been set up, that sh
e and Lowenstein had schemed to liberate me of advance rent. But Sally didn’t seem capable of such deception. We exchanged smiles, sad ones, and I offered to let her have my chair. “I was just leaving,” she said in a voice weakened by crying. “It was nice to know you, Jack Charbonnet.”
I glanced at Lowenstein. He seemed to be waiting for me to make a decision. “Sally,” I said, “there’s good news. Mr. Lowenstein tells me he’s changed his mind about your employment here. You’ve decided to keep Sally on, haven’t you, sir?”
“As a matter of fact, I have,” Lowenstein said, then lifted his empty glass to toast. “Sally, congratulations, darling, you’re back on the payroll. I apologize if I’ve been… well, unfeeling. You go home now and I’ll see you first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Lowenstein.” She began to cry again, in her loud, theatrical way. She threw me a wave as she raced off down the hall.
“You’re leaving now, Mr. Charbonnet,” Lowenstein said. “But next time—and I’m sure there will be one—please remember to leave the baseball bat behind. All assumptions, too, if you would be so kind.”
He rested a hand on my shoulder and guided me to the hall, then latched the door shut as soon as I stepped outside. “Drop your rent check in the mailbox. And do it tonight, as promised. If I consider another reduction in staff, I’ll be sure to check with you first. Good evening, Mr. Charbonnet.” He smiled now, exposing a set of dentures nearly as gray as his face. “As always, it was swell.”
It was hot outside, but Mom had insisted on making gumbo. A big pot of the stuff was waiting on the stove when I arrived at the old house in Riverbend and sat at the kitchenette table and drank from the glass of peach tea she’d poured for me. The air was heavy with the smell of roux and I thought of Tommy Smallwood and wondered what kind of man sat in his bathroom crying over a painting at four o’clock in the morning. It was seafood gumbo—Dad’s favorite—and Mom served it from a ceramic tureen. She made sure I got plenty of shrimp and crabmeat and she served the rice on the side so that she could put more gumbo in the bowl.
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