The First Mystery Novel

by Howard Mason

  “You have nothing to fear from me, Lurie. I don’t say that as a friend, but I say it.”

  “I understand your resentment,” said Lurie. “I have to be certain now that we will remain partners—to the very end.” Astorg nodded patiently. “I would have preferred to operate alone,” continued Lurie. “Personally, I don’t mind the risks and all the profit is better than half. You were eager to participate, Jonas. I take the liberty of reminding you of that. You argued very convincingly that I didn’t have the resources, reputation and standing to work alone on such an involved operation.”

  “You didn’t tell me that the paintings were forgeries,” said Astorg.

  Lurie smiled. “Only that they were stolen. The exact degree of dishonesty is unimportant, I think.”

  “You also didn’t tell me that the end of it would be a murder.”

  “The end of it?” repeated Lurie. He sighed. “How I wish that were true! By the way,” he added delicately, “I don’t like to pry, but what if you have to account for your presence on the Edgerton estate that fateful evening?”

  “What about you?” demanded Astorg. His voice rose to a strident pitch. “I had a reason to go. I was suspicious of you. I was beginning to suspect the paintings. I wanted to talk to Simon alone. That’s why I went to the house.”

  “By an odd coincidence,” said Lurie, smiling broadly, “that is the exact explanation that I myself have prepared.” He went on gently. “The police might believe one such story; two of them would be ridiculous. You see, Jonas, it would be pointless to try to shift the burden of guilt.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Astorg. “I don’t know how.”

  Lurie laughed out loud. “I didn’t think you did.” He went out to his car and drove swiftly to Molly Dann’s house. At the intersection he saw Sully in a parked car. He drove past slowly, giving the chauffeur a chance to notice him, then parked and walked back.

  Sully’s report was discouraging. “Not a sign of him. He ain’t showed.”

  Submerged in thought, Lurie twisted a thin overhanging branch from a tree and idly swished it against the trunk. “Chances are,” he reflected, “that he’s drunk by now, perhaps helpless in some saloon.”

  “I’d be glad to help him,” said Sully.

  “He’s a creature of habit.” Lurie was still apparently thinking out loud, but Sully’s sharp little eyes were focused on him and the chauffeur was paying close attention. “He’ll be cautious just until liquor relaxes him. Then he’ll drift back into the usual pattern and start making the same old rounds.”

  “I know a few of the joints he likes,” volunteered Sully.

  Lurie nodded. “Don’t ask questions,” he warned. “Just drift around.” He gestured toward Molly’s house. “Is the girl still home?”

  “Been in all day,” said Sully. “I ambled by a little while ago. She was in the yard.”

  “I’ll wait here for a while, then I’ll go to the gallery,” said Lurie. He walked back to his own car in the covering shadows of the houses and posted himself behind the wheel, slumped down in the seat so that he was barely visible. He saw Sully’s car go past and watched the diminishing taillight until it disappeared.

  Chapter 24

  In the bleak, shabby back room of the Santa Monica police station the painting was vastly incongruous. It stood on an easel improvised from two time-worn chairs, with powerful emergency searchlights focused on it, the elegance of the portrait somehow heightened by these lurid effects.

  It was a three-quarter portrait of a young woman in a feathered negligee, the collar drawn up to frame the lovely, fragile face.

  Lieutenant Ives stood off in one corner of the room, leaving the main target area free for Blaise, Lucas Edgerton and Wesley Corum. Edgerton, who looked completely baffled, was standing away from the portrait while Dr. Corum held a powerful magnifying glass to one section after another. Blaise, on his knees, was examining the back of the canvas. In another chair, from which the painting was not even visible, sat Victor Grandi. He looked very cheerful, as if enjoying the floundering perplexity of the others.

  Edgerton was the first to speak. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said emphatically, “but that’s a Renoir.” As Blaise straightened up, shaking his head, Edgerton shouted, “God damn it, Blaise, I’ll buy the painting just as it stands.”

  “That would be foolish,” said Grandi quietly.

  “Do you think it’s a fake, Mr. Grandi?” asked Ives.

  “A fake?” Grandi gave the painting a glance, then turned his imperturbable gaze back to the Lieutenant. “In my opinion it is a great work of art. Unfortunately, such a work of art, if it is by Paul Weldon, is worth only a few hundred dollars; if by Auguste Renoir, many, many thousands.”

  “Well, which is it?” asked Ives wearily.

  “In my opinion,” replied Grandi, “this painting is a genuine Paul Weldon.”

  There was a grunt from Edgerton and the technician turned to him politely. “Yes?”

  “What’s wrong with it?” demanded Edgerton.

  “Very little,” said Grandi, with a smile. “It is perfect. Perhaps too perfect.”

  “You mean,” said Edgerton scornfully, “that it’s better than Renoir.”

  “In some ways,” said Grandi. “However, I would not attack it as a forgery, because what I tell you is founded on instinct and such evidence, in a court of law, is not admissible.”

  “What do you think, Dr. Corum?” asked Ives.

  “I agree with Grandi,” said Corum slowly. “I wouldn’t know how to prove it, but something about it is wrong.”

  “Perfect answer from an expert,” said Edgerton insolently. “Turn it inside out, magnify it a thousand times and you still won’t know what he really thinks.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve seen the painting, Dr. Corum?” asked Blaise suddenly.

  Corum flushed. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just asking,” said Blaise.

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” said the harassed critic.

  He was about to turn away, when Ives stepped up. “In that event,” he said harshly, “I’ll ask the question.”

  Corum wavered, as if debating the nature of his reply, then said firmly, “I have never before seen that painting.” He turned to say this directly to Blaise. Looking past him, Blaise could see the detective’s curious stare.

  “When we talked about the forgeries,” said Blaise, “You marveled that there should be a painter around with skill enough to make a Renoir portrait. You definitely said ‘portrait’ though at that time none of us knew whether the forgeries were portraits, still lives, landscapes or murals.”

  “I knew of the painting,” admitted Corum grudgingly. “I had not seen it, but I knew that it existed and that Nathan Ordmann was buying it.”

  “You didn’t think it was worth mentioning?” asked Blaise.

  “I did not,” was Corum’s reply.

  Ives changed the subject abruptly. “Well, as it stands, there doesn’t seem to be any way to prove just what that painting really represents.”

  “Not without Paul Weldon,” said Blaise.

  “I’m going home,” said Lucas Edgerton. “If the rest of you want to chase your tails around in a circle, that’s all right with me. I’m leaving. Come on, Corum,” he said, almost in the manner of giving an order, and the critic nodded. “You coming, Victor?” he then asked Grandi.

  “If these gentlemen have no further questions,” said Grandi politely.

  “I’d like you to make some analyses of the paint and canvas,” Blaise started to say, but Edgerton cut him off at once.

  “Victor is busy. He works for me and he’s got my work to do.” He looked steadily at Blaise. “So, if I’m not mistaken, have you. I’m not paying you, and paying your expenses, to play around with the police. Goo
d night,” he snapped, and slammed the door. The others followed more gracefully.

  Ives turned off the lights focused on the painting. “Where are we?”

  “Do you think I’m crazy?” asked Blaise.

  “I’m not sure I care.” The detective was staring at the door. “For a while,” he said, “Edgerton was seething to run down the forgeries no matter whose reputation was splintered in the collision. Now he’s running full speed astern. Is he always that unpredictable?”

  “Stronger minds have buckled in trying to dope out Lucas Edgerton,” said Blaise. “My guess is that he’s had a chance to think. He owns more than a hundred Renoirs. The story of these forgeries could ruin the market.”

  “What about justice? Twenty-four hours ago he was bleating for action, vengeance, anything!”

  “Those are intangibles,” said Blaise. “Money is something else again. You can stack it up, bury it in vaults, get a lot of pleasure out of it.”

  The phone rang and Ives reached the desk in two steps. “Ives talking,” he said, and then, “Yes, Bonner. Go on.”

  Blaise moved over to the desk. Ives’s aide, Sergeant Bonner, had been left at the Ocean Inn to handle the incoming calls, since Weldon and Blaise did not know each other’s voices. “Good work,” said Ives. “Now stay in the room until Blaise gets there.” He put the phone down. “Well, we’re in business,” he said to Blaise. “Weldon called. He wants you to meet him on the pier in Venice. He has two of the drawings and he’ll give them to you, with an affidavit, for five thousand dollars.”

  “That’s a fair, handsome offer. Do I pay it?”

  “Just meet him,” said Ives. “Leave the rest to me.”

  As they went out, Ives said, “I’ll sneak you back into the hotel and you can make a proper start just in case Weldon is watching the place.”

  “You think of everything,” said Blaise.

  * * * *

  Blaise drove to the pier conspicuously alone, left his car in the lot and climbed back up to the garish boardwalk. The smell of popcorn and spun-sugar candy mingled with the odors of broiling frankfurters and stale beer. The clattering rides, the strident voices of barkers and pitchmen, and the sharp explosions from the shooting galleries all blended into shattering dissonance.

  He didn’t see Ives or his men, and, as instructed, didn’t look for them, accepting Ives’s assurance that they would be somewhere around keeping him steadily under surveillance. He took up a post near the entrance to the pier, flanked by a cheery individual who was guessing ladies’ weights in a mildly lascivious fashion, and, on the right, a stout man in soiled surgical white, exhorting passers-by to visit his educational and thrilling demonstration of the horrors of dope on the human body and mind. A bored floozy in a wrapper, obviously Exhibit A or B, stood on a platform above him, helping out with encouraging smiles which proved that among the more unpredictable horrors of dope were very bad teeth. Across the way was Screamo, an amusement device consisting of two tiny cages attached to an enormous swinging and revolving pole. Eager adolescents crowded into this to subject themselves, at 25 cents a head, to experiments which if conducted in Germany under the Nazis would have put the operator into the dock at Nurnberg.

  Of the fugitive painter there was no sign whatever. Without conspicuously searching for them, Blaise was able to pick out Lieutenant Ives among the bingo players opposite and one door down, and Sergeant Bonner was at the frankfurter stand nearby.

  As the minutes crept by, Blaise found himself wondering if Weldon could have been somehow alerted by the substitution of Bonner for himself in their telephone conversation. He found comfort in Bonner’s methodical honesty. The Sergeant had reported that Weldon was drunk, only intermittently coherent, and had accepted Bonner completely. At any rate, Weldon was only a few minutes past due. He saw Ives leave his chair in the bingo palace and stroll down to the entrance to the pier, where he walked a few steps to the right and left. Then he came back scanning the establishments on both sides of the Midway. He passed Blaise with no more than a glance, continuing toward the ocean end of the pier. He made the fruitless round trip and took up his vigil again, this time at a “Ham and Bacon” wheel, standing at the semicircular counter so that he faced the entrance.

  It was the amusement center’s peak hour. The rides, some of them nightmare contraptions, swooped, dived, rolled, and swayed, battering their patrons to an ecstatic pulp, and the Midway resounded with screams of excitement and terror.

  It was Blaise who first saw the knot of people far out on the pier, huddled at the blank rail, peering down into the darkness below. It dawned on him gradually that there were no rides or games in this section and then suddenly he heard a scream that was not prompted by 30 cents’ worth of mechanized excitement. This one was the real thing. A long shrieking, chilling sound. He was running at once, as was Ives, and all over the Midway others detached themselves from groups to race out.

  Ives pushed through the crowd, Blaise following close. Fifteen feet below was a small car and beside it a boy in a flowered open shirt and a pretty, brassy girl in slacks and a sweater. “It’s a dead man,” she shrieked to those at the rail above. “It’s a dead man! In there! He’s dead!”

  Ives acted swiftly. Shouting to his aides to follow, he swung himself over the rail and dropped to the soft sand. Blaise reluctantly made the same leap and as he ran to the car he heard the thud of other landings. Bonner held the two who had discovered the tragedy; another detective chased away the curiously morbid types who tried to descend. Ives looked into the car, then opened the door, using a handkerchief on the handle. Paul Weldon was slumped over the wheel, the right side of his head all but shot away. His hand, palm up, was grotesquely open and the fingers were curled around the butt of a revolver. What was left of his face, looking up from the broken pose over the wheel, was oddly peaceful and in repose.

  “He was right on time,” said Ives bitterly.

  “Suicide?” asked Blaise.

  “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

  Blaise nodded. “Very much.”

  Ives sat down on the running-board. Bonner could be heard giving orders for the dispatch of all the necessary agencies dealing with violent death. “Sure looks like suicide,” mused Ives. “Best-looking damn suicide I’ve seen in years.”

  * * * *

  In matters of death by shooting Lieutenant Ives had highly acute and sensitive critical faculties, tuned to detect the slightest deviation from absolute pitch. His first comment on the death of Paul Weldon was more than borne out by the technical evidence and by what was discovered on his person and in the car.

  In the trunk, loosely wrapped in brown paper, were the nine paintings missing from the Edgerton collection, and in Weldon’s pockets, with the small change, keys fitting the locks of the gallery itself and the vault.

  The gun in his hand, moreover, was a .38 Colt, consistent with that which killed Simon Edgerton.

  Weldon had apparently driven onto the beach some two blocks from the pier, as established by the markings, parked up close in the shadows and shot himself in the head. In the general pandemonium, including the blasts from shooting galleries, the single shot had been completely obscured. The boy and girl who discovered the body had been in search of a quiet place to pet.

  Ives announced these facts as they were brought to light with no apparent emotion. Blaise sat quietly in a corner of the Lieutenant’s shabby office, ignored by Ives and the stream of technicians who came and went. Finally Bonner brought in an elderly, bespectacled man in dark pants and bedroom slippers, the Sergeant carrying a heavy black wooden box with brass handles.

  Ives brightened at the sight of the newcomer. “Hi, Doc,” he said. “Thanks for coming out.”

  “Don’t mention it,” said Dr. Vollmer testily. “This body-snatcher,” he went on, indicating Sergeant Bonner, “dragged me away without even a chance to dress.” Bonner looked up
from his kneeling position. “Sorry, Doctor,” he muttered. He had the box open and carefully withdrew a large comparison microscope, a delicate and expensive masterpiece of the optician’s art. It had two separate sets of focusing wheels, two metal trays under different sets of lenses and binocular eyepieces. Bonner put this on the desk and Dr. Vollmer took off his coat, revealing a wrinkled pajama top. He took a white cardboard box from his pants and from this an ugly conical slug of lead. He used tweezers to transfer the bullet from the box to one of the microscope trays. “Where’s the baby’s brother?” he asked Ives, and the Lieutenant handed him an envelope from which he similarly extracted another bullet. He shifted the desk light to suit himself, then took off his glasses and bent over the microscope. As he brought one side into focus he manipulated the tweezers with his left hand. Satisfied at last, Dr. Vollmer gave his attention to the other side, similarly manipulating the bullet and the microscope. His forehead was beaded with sweat when he finally straightened up.

  “What’s the score, Doc?” asked Ives.

  “Dead heat,” announced the doctor. “Have a look,” he invited and Ives came around to peer through first one side, then the other, and finally both. Then he stood erect and beckoned to Blaise. “The one on the left,” he said, indicating the microscope, “is the slug we took out of Simon Edgerton. The other is from Weldon.”

  Blaise bent over the microscope. It was a powerful device, magnifying the scarred, blasted surface of the bullets enormously. He followed the detective’s procedure, examining first one and then the other. When he looked through both eyepieces, Dr. Vollmer slowly brought both bullets together until the view merged into one picture, then separated them. They were absolutely identical.

  When he stood erect, Ives motioned to his aide. “Okay, Bonner.” The Sergeant promptly started to pack the equipment and Dr. Vollmer struggled into his coat.

  “Well, you solved yourself a murder,” he said apathetically to Ives.

  “Looks like it,” said Ives.

  “You’ve got the right idea,” said the doctor. “Just lie down, take it easy, and wait for the criminal to shoot himself. It takes time, but it works.” Bonner was at the door with the heavy box and Vollmer moved that way.