First Gravedigger (18 page)

“I want to work as your assistant,” June called from the bathroom. “Hal Downing was an errand boy because Mr. Speer made him into one. What the job is depends on the people involved.”

I lay on the bed and watched her at the bathroom wash basin, scrubbing at a lipstick smear on the white collar of her dress. I'd been in a bit of a hurry this time. “I didn't know I needed an assistant.”

June laughed. “‘You do, you know. There are a lot of small decisions and detail work I could take off your hands. I'm already doing some of it.”

And I hadn't even noticed, shame on me. “And lose the best secretary a man ever had?”

“Anybody can type and take dictation.” She came out of the bathroom, looking at the dress collar in a different light. “It's not coming out.”

“I'm sorry. Didn't mean to get carried away.”

She gave me a small smile. “You're a musser, Earl.”

“A what?”

“A musser. You enjoy mussing me up.”

I didn't like that. “I don't see how you can say that. It wasn't deliberate.”

“Not consciously, perhaps.” She went back into the bathroom and resumed scrubbing at the collar.

Don't you just love it when someone drops a line like that on you and then walks away? I resisted as long as I could and then said, “All right, I'll bite. What do you mean, not consciously?”

“I mean you have some subconscious need to see me at a disadvantage.”

I lit a cigarette. I didn't understand her strategy. Here she'd just asked me for a promotion and now she was following up by pointing out some serious flaw in my character. “You misjudge me,” I said coldly.

I could see her shrug, as if it didn't matter. “You do need an assistant, you know.” She slipped the dress over her head and came back into the bedroom. “I can read figures, Earl. I know Speer's isn't doing as well as it should. Part of the trouble is that you've assumed too big a burden. You've never delegated any of your authority. And I'm the logical one to help carry the load.”

I lay on my back and blew smoke at the ceiling. She was right, in a way. I could use some help, but help from someone I knew I could rely on. I didn't trust June Murray one inch. On the other hand, June's silent partnership with Leonard Wightman just might be something I could exploit. If June were promoted and made to feel important, she might give me the line I needed to get that bastard. “All right,” I said, deciding. “You've got the job.”

Whatever her strategy was, it worked.

The Egyptian horror sold in San Francisco for a healthy profit. None of the other chairs did.

We weren't losing money on the chairs; it was just that I'd been counting on a much higher return than we were getting. All of Wightman's victims had been paid off except for two holdouts; Peg assured me they both were just haggling and would come around in time. Selling off the chairs did have one advantageous side effect: things were more pleasant at home. Nedda saw my moving the chairs out of the Fox Chapel house as a concession to her.

Now that Wightman's sucker list was virtually cleared up, I could start thinking about my own. And what I started thinking was that maybe I'd panicked for no reason. It'd been almost three months since Wightman's detective must have completed his investigation of me, but I still hadn't heard from a single one of the people whose ignorance I'd turned into a profit for myself. Not one nasty letter from a lawyer, not even one phone call. Nothing. For a couple of months I'd lived in daily fear that I'd hear from some disgruntled seller who'd say, “Hey, that bowfront chest you told me wasn't a Sheraton—whaja sell it for?” But it didn't happen. And if it hadn't happened by now, it wasn't going to happen. I was safe, I must be. I didn't need to pour a lot of Speer Galleries money into those idiots' bank accounts. All I had to do was keep calm and make rational decisions.

But money was still the problem. We just weren't making enough of it. Even without the payoffs, the picture didn't look good. What I needed was one big sale, one that all by itself would keep us out of the red. It'd have to be a biggie, all right. I'd have to sell something rare and dramatic and highly, highly desirable.

The time had clearly come to auction the Duprée chair. It galled me—god, how it galled me! But I was going to have to do it. I knew I was lucky to have that ace in the hole, but I hated giving the Duprée up so soon. Less than a year I'd had it—not nearly long enough. There's just no way to explain what having a chair like that means.

But once I'd made up my mind to let it go, I kind of looked forward to the excitement. What a fuss the Duprée would cause! I'd checked on the other known Duprée chairs and found there were only eleven of them—all in European museums. For a twelfth to show up on this side of the Atlantic-well, that would set the antiques world on its ear.
The Twelfth Duprée
, that's what our brochure would be titled. Earl Sommers of Speer Galleries is pleased to announce, etc. Every major dealer and museum in Europe and North America would be represented in Pittsburgh. Plus a few egomaniacal billionaire collectors. Yes, the Duprée would get me out of my hole. Selling it was the right thing to do, the right choice to make. That's all I had to do: keep calm, make rational decisions.

So then I made one totally irrational decision, one I'd postponed making because I knew what I ought to do but just couldn't bring myself to do it. I'd lost a lot of sleep because of it. Because of what? Because of an eighteenth-century porcelain figurine standing only seven inches high. The Meissen Leda.

I had in my possession, courtesy of Charlie Bates, a piece of hard evidence linking me directly to the murder of Amos Speer. I couldn't take it home; there was no place there immune to Nedda. I couldn't even bury it in the grounds; one of the gardeners might notice the earth had been disturbed and decide to investigate. I'd been keeping the Leda in the safe in my office—but all Lieutenant D'Elia had to do was get a search warrant and that would be the end of The Story of Earl Sommers, His Rise and Fall. Selling it was out of the question; I couldn't risk its being traced to me. The only sensible thing to do was smash it and scatter the pieces in the Allegheny River.

But I kept putting it off. The figurine was worth four or five thousand dollars, but that wasn't it. The Leda was such a lovely piece—the delicacy of the female figure balanced so exactly by the strength of the swan. A thing of beauty and a joy forever—destroying it would be sacrilege. But that wasn't really it either. The Leda certainly carried a lot of bad associations for me. It was the piece Amos Speer had used in the first step of a squeeze play he'd worked on me. And just as Charlie Bates had said, it was a “souvenir” of a murder. Besides, the word
porcelain
had virtually become synonymous to me with the word
Wightman
, a name guaranteed to bring a vile taste to any moderately sensitive person's mouth. But still I couldn't bring myself to destroy the figurine.

Simply because the Leda and I were both still here. In spite of all the bad associations, in spite of all the things that had gone wrong—the figurine and I had both survived. I was on pretty shaky ground and I could fall any time, but so far I was still on my feet. Speer was dead, Wightman was gone, and Charlie Bates was staying out of my life. I knew I was indulging in symbol-making, but the Meissen Leda had become my trophy of survival. I couldn't destroy that.

There was only one place I could think of where it ought to be safe: the Shadyside apartment I'd rented for meeting June. The place had a brick fireplace in the living room, so one day in late February I got to work. I pried bricks loose until blisters started to form on my hands. The metal box I'd carefully packed the Leda in was small, but it still took a lot of digging and gouging to make a niche large enough. I put in the box and mortared most of the bricks back into place. I cleaned up the mess and got rid of the leftover bricks.

When the mortar had dried, I went back with a shoebox full of dirt I'd burst my blisters digging up from the hard winter ground. I rubbed dirt into the mortar until it took on fairly much the same coloration as the rest of the fireplace wall. If you stood up close and squinted your eyes, you could tell the difference. But from a few feet back, the part I'd patched blended in nicely with the rest of the brickwork. The real test, of course, was June Murray's next visit to the apartment. June's eyes were always working; she didn't miss much. If she couldn't see the difference, then I could feel sure the hiding place was okay.

She didn't notice a thing. Or else she noticed it and didn't think it worth mentioning. After all, what was one more patch in a brick wall? One thing I did
not
have to worry about was her digging out the bricks herself to see if something valuable was concealed behind them. June didn't like getting her hands dirty.

In March I made a mistake. I sent Robin Coulter to another Mercer auction in New York.

This was the fourth she'd attended. By then the Mercer people had gotten to know her and they liked her style. They offered her a position, she accepted, and that was that.

“Don't I even get a chance to match their offer?” I said when she told me.

“No point, Earl. My husband and I have been thinking about pulling up stakes for some time now. The Mercer offer just made it easy.”

“Are you that eager to get away from Pittsburgh?”

“Well, yes,” Robin laughed. “As a matter of fact, we are. Jim's caught in a dead-end job and I, well, I'm ready to move on, let's say.”

“Oh, let's do say that,” I answered sarcastically. “Speer's is honored to have been used as a rest stop.”

“If it's a rest stop, you've made it one,” she shot back. Now that she was no longer working for me Robin saw no need to keep up the pretense of friendliness.

“Speer's is ten times the size of Mercer's,” I said. “You've demoted yourself.”

“I don't think so. Earl, it's just not the same here since Mr. Speer died. You've changed the whole nature of the business—and not for the better. I'm telling you this for your own good.”

“Of course,” I murmured. “Why else?”

“We can't go out and deal the way we used to. Now we always have to keep in mind what
you
might like. I know of at least six good buys you turned down just because you didn't like those particular styles. Earl, that's no way to run a business!”

“How old are you, Robin? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight?”

“I'm thirty, but you don't have to be old and gray to know you can't run an antiques business as if it were a personal hobby. One reason I'm leaving is that I no longer believe Speer's is going to go on forever.”

“Why didn't you tell me all this sooner?” I said. “Surely you knew I'd have been delighted to let you tell me how to run the business.”

“And that's the other reason I'm leaving,” she blazed. “I'm sick and tired of trying to be nice to you. Earl, you're the hardest person to be nice to I know! You with your conceit and your roving hands and your self-indulgence—ah, what's the use.” She threw up her hands in surrender. “You hear what you want to hear, you see what you want to see. There's no talking to you.” Then Robin Coulter turned her back on me and walked away.

So goodbye, Bedroom Eyes. And to hell with you, you frigid little bitch.

CHAPTER 12

My announcement that a hitherto undiscovered Duprée chair would be offered in open auction on May first created a most gratifying furor. Requests for
The Twelfth Duprée
(our brochure) came pouring in, many of them from dealers and small museums that could never afford to be in on the bidding. They just wanted to know about the chair. The Duprée would be on display the entire month of April; the Metropolitan Museum of New York and the Louvre had been among the first to make appointments to examine it.

All this to-do meant extra security, extra insurance. The insurance man turned dead white when he learned I'd been keeping the chair in the Fox Chapel house for nearly a year. When I told him I'd put on an extra security guard, he just shook his head at me in disbelief. Oh well, the chair hadn't been stolen and it certainly was well protected now. Security guards stood twenty-four-hour watch in the showroom.

Even Nedda got caught up in the excitement. Since the beginning of the year she'd been taking little two- or three-day trips (“Just to get out of Pittsburgh for a while”). I wondered what Arthur Simms had been telling his wife to explain his frequent overnight absences. When Valentine came up with evidence that Nedda and her lover had registered as man and wife in a New York hotel, I told him to discontinue the surveillance. I had all I needed.

But with all the attention being paid to Speer Galleries because of the Duprée, Nedda started staying home more. She found success attractive, and I was beginning to look like a winner again. Nedda was one of those people who give you their wholehearted support every time you no longer need it.

“Who do you think will get it?” Nedda asked me one day in the showroom.

“Either the Louvre or the Metropolitan,” I said. “My money's on the Met.”

“Why?”

“Because the Louvre already has two Duprées and the Metropolitan doesn't have any. It's a matter of national pride, as well as a question of having the funds to stay in the bidding. The French will think they have a moral right to the chair because it's part of their artistic heritage. But the Met wants to be the only museum in this country with an authentic Duprée on display—and that's a powerful incentive. Besides, for sheer orneriness in expanding its acquisitions, nobody can beat the Met.”

The chair had occupied the place of honor in the Fox Chapel house for almost a year, but Nedda was looking at it as if she'd never seen it before. “How much will it bring?”