The Play of Light and Shadow & Writing (7 page)

“
The Professor’s theory was close to
accurate,” Darnell said. “After killing Derek, Carol went into the
office, hid the disk until she’d have time to erase it, and then
went back to the party.”

“
What was on the disk?” Marjorie Gaines
asked. Her usually crisp tone was subdued by the gravity of the
day’s events.

“
A picture Derek took of Carol ducking
into the closet a few minutes before you and Dr. Gaines brought
your guests in here.

“
She was a thief but not a killer—not a
deliberate one anyway. When we saw her after she’d strangled him,
she was pretty well out of it. It looked like she was upset about
the theft, but it was the killing that chewed at her.

“
After Dr. Gaines won the auction, she
must’ve partnered with Derek. They knew each other from his visits
here with Alexis. She socialized with them. I don’t know how
intimate they were—she’s not talking till she gets lawyered-up. But
they were both ambitious. She needed him to create a diversion so
it’d look like Marchand pulled off the theft. Derek either got
greedy or decided he needed an insurance policy. So he snapped a
picture of Carol to give him a hold over her. When he went out to
the deck, she followed him and they argued about it. She tried to
get the disk away from him and Derek resisted. But Carol’s a strong
girl—she’s an athlete, remember. Derek wasn’t. She got angry and
panicked and wound up strangling him. She took the disk and hid it
in the office till she could wipe it. There was no time to get rid
of it—too many people around, and she was rattled.”

“
The theft,” Gaines said hoarsely. “How
did she manage it?”

“
Partly by feeding the notion that Paul
Marchand was the thief. I’ve said all along I don’t think Marchand
exists. There’s no police record, and my guess is that Riveau made
him up. He was ambitious, too, determined to make a name for
himself as an artist. But he needed money to support himself. He
engineered the thefts and the sales that got him the money, and
then created Marchand as a defense. That didn’t work and he went to
prison. You said he was something of a head-case to begin with.
Maybe prison made him worse and he began to believe his own
fantasy. Whatever, he wrote about Marchand in his journal, and art
collectors and dealers believed him. Maybe Carol discovered that in
her research and kept it from you.” He shrugged. “Whether
Marchand’s a myth or not, the outcome in this case is the
same.

“
Think back to what you told me.
Lakehurst suggested the party as a deterrent to theft, and as your
assistant, Carol certainly knew that. Carol recruited the student
hostesses and came up with the idea of having them dress alike to
give her some camouflage.”

He shifted his gaze to Marjorie. “Derek
persuaded you to let him take pictures of you and the girls, Carol
being one of them. You went into the gallery, Derek shot the
pictures, and then hustled you out of there. Carol hung back and
nobody noticed.”

“
Hold on,” Gaines said. “Alan and I saw
them come out.”

“
You saw a bunch of women, all dressed
alike, all but one with dark hair like Carol‘s. Did you count
them?”

Gaines hesitated thoughtfully. “No, I didn’t.
Alan and I were talking.” He paused. “But we inspected every inch
of that room before we locked it. Carol wasn’t in the closet or
anywhere else. You saw that yourself.”

“
She was in there,” Darnell insisted.
“We forgot to look up.”

“
What does
that
mean?”

“
This room has a pretty high ceiling,
doesn’t it?”

“
So?”

“
The closet has a high ceiling, too.
I’ll remind you again: Carol’s an athlete—a championship swimmer.
This morning Derek mentioned she’s also into
rock-climbing.

“
She knew the schedule and that you’d
bring your guests into the gallery shortly after the photo session
was finished. She got into the closet before we checked the room,
climbed the ladder, stretched out, and walked herself up the wall
out of sight. The closet’s narrow and she’s a tall girl, so that’d
be easy. She was dressed in black, and the light in the closet
creates a glare you can‘t see past. She went far enough up the wall
so she wouldn’t be seen if anyone bothered to look up. No one
would’ve thought to. She’s strong and has enough stamina to stay
stretched out like that for several minutes.

“
After we left, she came down the wall,
opened the door, ran out—wearing slippers that wouldn‘t make any
noise on a marble floor—removed the painting from the stretcher,
then ran back to the closet. But coming down or going up the wall,
she made a couple of mistakes. She either bumped or rested her knee
on the edge of the shelf, disturbing the dust. She stepped on the
vacuum hose, too, or accidentally kicked it. When we looked in the
closet this morning, the nozzle was on its side. After the theft,
it was face down on the floor.”

“
I saw her in the crowd when we came
in,“ Marjorie said. “Surely someone would have noticed if she were
already here.”

“
The door opens inward from the
hallway. Carol ran to the door and positioned herself so she’d be
behind it when it opened. Nobody was focused on the door; they all
wanted to see the painting. As everyone filed in, Carol stepped out
and, to all appearances, was part of the group.”

“
What put you onto her?” Warner
asked.

“
Partly it was the Professor’s remark
about hiding something in plain sight. Mostly it was your
technician‘s arthritis and the way he brushed off his pants when he
stood up.

“
After we discovered the painting was
missing, Carol sat on a bench. She moved stiffly, like someone in
shock—or like someone with cramped muscles or whose knee or foot
hurts. At first I thought she was just upset the way everyone else
was. When I saw the mark in the dust on the shelf, and later saw
her rubbing her knee, I realized she’d either hurt herself and was
massaging the knee or was trying to get the dust off her slacks
before anyone noticed it. Forensics should be able to confirm that
the dust in the fabric came from the shelf. There might even be
fibers from the slacks on the wood.

“
The Professor’s remark confirmed what
I thought all along: that someone other than Marchand stole the
painting. It narrowed the list to someone who had regular access to
the office. Well, that meant either the Gaineses or
Carol.”

“
The painting,” Lakehurst said. “Did
she tell you where it is? Have you recovered it?”

“
No to both questions, but I’m pretty
sure it’s in this room.”

Like automatons, everyone looked at the
walls.

“
Where?” the art dealer pressed. “Are
you saying she tacked it to the back of one of the other
paintings?”

“
No. She didn’t use tacks. What
she
did
use caused another
mistake.”

“
Damn it, where is it?”

Darnell wheeled to face him, his eyes
angry but his voice low and even. “You mean the painting
someone
died
for?“

Lakehurst turned away sheepishly. The others
stirred uneasily at the reminder.

“
It’s in the closet, where she left
it.” Darnell met our collective incredulity with cool gray-blue
eyes. “She couldn’t sneak it out of here under her sweater, and the
theft required someone familiar with the house who could come and
go as she pleased, someone who had access to the gallery. All she
had to do was hide it. When everyone was convinced Marchand was the
thief, she’d sneak it out of the house.”

“
Could she have rolled it up and put it
into the vacuum hose?” Marjorie asked.

“
No. That was one of the first places
we looked,” Warner said, then turned to Darnell. “What’d you mean
about tacks and a mistake?”

“
When the Professor and I looked for
Derek upstairs, I noticed the posters in Carol’s room weren’t
tacked to the walls. That meant some sort of adhesive, maybe
double-sided tape. But there’s another sort of adhesive. It’s like
putty so it won’t damage the posters—or the walls—if you decide to
remove it. It’s blue.”

“
The smudge on the closet wall,” I
said.

“
Right. Carol
could
conceal the adhesive. It’s packaged as a
flat rectangle. You tear off what you need. After she grabbed the
painting, she went back to the closet, climbed the ladder, and
pasted it high up on the wall inside. It’d be hard to see even if
anyone bothered to look. When she climbed down, she accidentally
smeared some residue from her fingers on the wall. She wouldn’t’ve
had time to clean it up. She had to get behind the door before Dr.
Gaines opened it.”

Lakehurst and Gaines were already at the
closet, both peering inside and looking up.

“
There’s nothing there,” a crestfallen
Lakehurst said.

“
Got a flashlight?” Darnell
asked.

“
I’ll get one.” Gaines walked swiftly
out of the room.

We waited, tension thrumming like strung wire
in a strong wind. When Gaines returned, the flashlight was already
on. Darnell took it from him, played the beam up into the closet,
then ascended the ladder. A moment later he descended, the
flashlight clutched in one hand, the canvas dangling from the
other. Wads of blue adhesive clung to its corners.

“
My
God
!” Lakehurst exclaimed in a loud whisper.
“What was she
think
ing?”

“
Good question,” Darnell said. “You’ve
got a roomful of art worth millions—individual pieces that’d get a
hell of a lot more from collectors than anything Riveau did. So
why
Nomad
? The real question
is whether it was worth the risk.”

He looked at Lakehurst. “You said Riveau
painted over stolen masterpieces to conceal the works underneath
until he could find buyers for them, and that some of the paintings
were taken from his studio while he was in prison.”

Both Lakehurst and Gaines nodded.

“
I’m guessing here, but maybe Riveau
pulled off the thefts
after
he
got out of prison to recover the masterpieces he‘d painted over. He
used the Marchand myth as a coverup and to create the romantic
martyr image that boosted the value of his legitimate work. So why
did Carol steal
this
?” He held
up the canvas which hung somewhat stiffly, a flag defying
surrender, from his hand. “Possibly because in researching Riveau,
she discovered there’s something much more valuable underneath it
and used the myth herself to get it.”

Gaines closed his eyes. “I was right. That
painting is a curse.”

Agreement was as soundless as a shadow.

On Wednesday of the following week, Darnell,
book in hand, came into Culhane’s and, despite its being a quiet
evening, sat at the end of the bar. I put a Scotch on the rocks in
front of him.

“
Thanks, Professor.” He sipped it, then
lit a cigarette. “I got a call from Mitch Warner today.”

I leaned against my side of the bar.
“Oh?”

“
After they booked Carol, they gave her
some jail clothing. A policewoman kept an eye on her while she
changed. There was a pair of latex gloves stuffed in her underwear.
They had traces of adhesive on them. The cops broke her down and
she confessed.”

“
If I’d kept a closer eye on the
gallery, I could’ve prevented her from stealing the
painting.”

“
If she hadn’t tried for it then,
she’d’ve gone after it another time. Don’t beat yourself up over
it.”

“
It’s hard not to. If she hadn‘t gotten
the painting, Derek wouldn’t have died.”

“
You can’t be sure of that either. They
could’ve had a falling-out later on, with the same
result.”

A customer signaled for a refill, and as I
moved off to accommodate him, Darnell opened his book. When I
returned, he put it down and said:

“
They had
Nomad
x-rayed. Underneath is an oil sketch for
one of Monet’s paintings of the Japanese bridge.”

I briefly considered the legal
wranglings about ownership the discovery would entail for Barton
Gaines, and the irony of Riveau’s concealment of a masterpiece
beneath work he must have deemed slapdash, negligible. Then, still
unable to dispel feelings of unwitting complicity in the crimes, I
visualized
Nomad
: its
nightmare landscape, grotesque images, play of light and
shadow.

I wondered which of us—Barton Gaines, Charles
Riveau, or me—was the naked figure in the impassable terrain.

[*]
Peter Landesman, “A
20
^th
Century Master
Scam,”
The New York Times
Magazine
, July 18, 1999; pp. 30-37, 54, 58,
62-63.

Bonus Reading Matter

Sometime after “The Play of Light and
Shadow” was published, I learned that the editor/publisher
of
Mystery Readers Journal
, a
magazine that puts out themed issues, was for a forthcoming issue
looking for information about writers who specialize in mysteries
dealing with art. I wrote to her and explained that although I
don’t specialize in art mysteries, I had recently had one
published. She responded with a request for an article about it.
Hence, what follows.