The Polka Dot Nude (18 page)

If ever a visit was calculated to activate my feelings of inadequacy, this was it. Helen’s condo was a slum compared to this. Even the showerhead got in on the act. It was brass-plated—or gold for all I knew—and had about a dozen choices of spray. My own had two, slow drizzle and off. I selected the massage button and stood under a swirling barrage of water needles, trying to relax as the water beat against my back and across my knotted shoulder blades.

I was tempted to climb back into my blue jeans for the trip to Le PavilIon d’Antibes. When you can’t compete, the next best way is to mock the competitor’s efforts. But my jeans were a mess from the trip. They looked as if I were still in them, every wrinkle and crease deeply set; so I wore the white suit again, with my hair hanging loose, falling straight as a ruler to my shoulders.

The face confronting me in the minor looked rebellious. There were circles under my eyes from the trip, and my hair looked awful. Did He who made Brook Shields make me? I tried to twist my hair up, but didn’t have enough pins to hold it. It only made me more annoyed.

“Now isn’t that original, we’re going as the Bobbsey twins!” I exclaimed, when I saw Brad had on a white suit too. Actually he looked fantastic. He had enough panache to wear the suit without looking ridiculous.

He refused to argue. “I can change if you like.”

A momentary weakness assailed me; for about thirty seconds, I wanted to stop being such a bitch. “I was going to do my hair up, but I didn’t have enough pins.”

His stiff jaws relaxed into an incipient smile. “Don’t change a hair for me.”

“I’m a mess, Brad. You won’t want to be seen in public with me.”

“I can probably drum up a few pins if you want to . . ."

Another spurt of anger came upon me. Not because he failed to disagree about my being a mess, but because of the pins. What was he doing with hairpins if he didn’t entertain women here—entertain them in a way that made them let their hair down? The unreasonableness of my anger only made me madder still.

“I won’t bother.” I flopped my hair back over my shoulder. “The place is probably dark anyway.”

It was still daylight outside, however. “It’s a bit early for dinner,” he mentioned. “Too bad we got dressed. There’s a pool on the roof.”

I widened my eyes in mock amazement. “You mean there’s none here, in your own apartment?”

If you’ve ever seen a woman defending her housekeeping to her mother-in-law, you know the expression on Brad’s face. I watched as it hardened to rebellion. “Just the Jacuzzi. I usually spend my summers at Martha’s Vineyard. My place there has a pool. I have a few calls to make. Do you think you could entertain yourself for half an hour?”

“Sure, just lead me to the games room.”

“Your game is writing. I thought you’d like to browse in the library, or try out the computer. You’ll be getting one yourself eventually, I imagine.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, but I’ll browse around the library.”

Rifling through friends’ bookshelves is one of my favorite things to do. You discover such interesting keys to a person’s mind by the books he keeps. Brad’s bookshelves were so organized and so broad in scope that they told me nothing, except that he was ashamed to have his Hume Mason works on display. There wasn’t a single copy in evidence.
The Art of Eliot
was there, in all its Moroccan-leather-and-gold-trim glory. There had to be one corner where he kept the tattered old paperbacks and clothbound ugly-but-wonderful books every writer I ever met keeps. In my own case this shelf was the most crowded in my apartment.
South Wind
was crammed in cheek by jowl with a cherished copy of the
Sheik.
Still a great read after all these years. There should be faded copies of old essays and poetry anthologies, of joke books and books of little-known facts.

A man who read as much as Brad O’Malley had to have a collection like that. He just had them hidden away behind a door, since they didn’t match his decor. I opened a few cabinet drawers and came across his cache. Tattered, dog-eared books—a wonderful collection of miscellany. The
DeQuincey Essays,
old English novels by women who called themselves Mrs. Oliphant, or Mrs. McStead, instead of using their own Christian names.. More than one by “An Englishwoman”—ladies who had traveled abroad to India and the east with their menfolk. Emily Eden was there. Rather a concentration of books by women actually.

I opened another cabinet door, and came across an even more surprising batch of books. These were brand new, and consisted of twenty or thirty thick paperback historical romances with passionate covers and the title in writhing gold letters—those sandwiches of sex and history that invariably hurtle to the top of booklists. Rosalie Wildewood’s
Love's Last Longing
is a good example. In fact, there were three of Rosalie’s earlier books here. My lips thinned in amusement to consider this ammunition. The intellectual lover of Popper and Eliot was a closet reader of women’s historical romance.

Further rooting discovered nothing else of interest. I never did find his Hume Mason books. I just went to the sofa and looked idly around at the library, and through the open door into the office. It was unreasonable for me to be jealous of Brad’s financial success. It never bothered me that other writers no more talented had achieved the rarified, seven-figure atmosphere. Brad had promised not to write his book on Rosalie, so why did it sting like a nettle that he had this fantastic apartment, his summer place at Martha’s Vineyard, his artworks, everything?

Was it that his material things removed him to that charmed circle beyond the touch of mere mortals like Audrey Dane? The only intersection of our lives was Rosalie Hart. If I hadn’t been doing a book on her, I’d never have met Brad O’Malley. His female friends would be models and actresses, successful designers and performers. Maybe a college professor or two, for variety.

The sun refused to set. It was still bright as afternoon, and it was nearly seven o’clock. Our appointment with Drew was for nine. How many phone calls was he making anyway? While I impatiently lit a cigarette, the phone in his office rang. I assumed it was an extension, and he’d answer it in another room. When it rang the third time, it occurred to me it might be a separate business phone, so I ran in and picked up the receiver. Brad must have lifted the extension at the same time. I heard him say “Brad O’Malley here.” I lowered the receiver, but before it reached the cradle, a woman’s purring voice stopped my hand.

“Darling, you’re back. It took you long enough!” My conscience went slack. I should have hung up, but I put the receiver to my ear and eavesdropped. That voice sounded vaguely familiar.

“How’d the interview go, Rosalie?” Another Rosalie! That name—a fairly unusual name, too—kept cropping up with monotonous regularity. I felt my scalp prickle, as the identity of the caller dawned on me. It was Rosalie Wildewood! Brad actually knew her! That’s why he had her books.

“You didn’t see me?” It was all I could do to keep from blurting out that I’d seen her. She looked marvelous, and I loved
Love’s Last Longing.

“I had to go to L.A. How’d it go? Did you get a good plug in for the latest book?”

“I was fantastic. At least everyone tells me so. Will I be seeing you tonight, darling?”

“I’m tied up tonight, Rosalie.”

“Did you have any success with Dane? Or need I ask?” she added, and laughed. “She
is
a woman, after all.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, very hurriedly.

“I’ll be out all day. Autographing sessions at Dalton’s and various shopping malls. Maybe we can get together for a drink after your dinner date tonight.”

“We’ll see. Bye.”

I waited for the click of Brad’s receiver. What I heard was his voice in my ear. “You can hang up now, Audrey.”

I set the receiver on the cradle, wondering if he really knew I’d been listening, or was only guessing. I felt a perfect fool, but before I had much time to think about it, he was at the door, with the keys jangling in his fingers. He looked wary—it would be the matter of his “handling Dane” that accounted for it. As Dane had “handled” him, however, I didn’t mean to rub his nose in it.

“It’s early, but we’d better go if we want to be on time at Drew’s place,” he said.

“I thought your office phone was probably a separate listing. When you didn’t answer, I just . . ."

“My life’s an open book to you now. I guess you figured out that was Rosalie Wildewood on the phone?”

“Yes. Odd you didn’t mention knowing her, when we talked about her earlier.”

“I had the idea you thought I was always bragging, so I kept quiet. I met her at a booksellers’ convention a few years ago. We see each other once in a while.”

“What’s she really like?” I asked, with all the enthusiasm of a groupie.

“She’s a smart lady. Good-looking, too.”

The car threaded slowly through the evening traffic to a side street on the Upper East Side. Le Pavillon wasn’t a large restaurant, but the dimness of the lights and the quantity of jacketed flunkies alerted me that it wasn’t cheap either. There was some obéissance to the French name in the fin-de-siècle elegance of chandeliers, red upholstery, and French paintings.

The maitre d’ made a fuss over Brad, and sent off a waiter to alert Chef Pierre
le patron
was here. I looked around the room while Brad and the sommelier discussed wines, and told him I’d have whatever he recommended. To betray the least interest in, or approval of, the place was unthinkable.

Dinner was good, but no better than we’d had at Brad’s cottage, and certainly not as enjoyable. I kept harking back, in my mind, to the cottage, and to what Rosalie Wildewood had said. His “handling Dane” obviously meant getting at my research. “After all, she
is
a woman.” That was why he’d courted me, then. Not that I didn’t know it already, but to have others know was humiliating. I hardly even glanced at Brad. I felt the dark-eyed, handsome man sitting across from me was a stranger.

To break the silence, we reverted to the subject of Drew Taylor, and what we should do about getting back my painting.

“I hope she has the polka dot nude at her apartment,” Brad said. “We need some hard evidence. We can verify it’s the one that was stolen from your cottage.”

“Then what—we call the police?”

“We take it to an expert and get his verification that it’s not a genuine Pissarro, or whatever. That’s what she’ll try to pass it off as—probably a Pissarro. Then we call in the police to nab her books, and follow up on some of her other sales.”

“If she makes a regular business of selling Rosalie’s works for originals, the only one who can prove it is Lorraine Taylor, and they must be in on it together.”

“Your nude ties the racket to Rosalie. Even if we can’t prove where she got the other pictures, we can prove they’re forgeries. The signed names will give it away.”

This line of conversation got us through dinner. It wasn’t a very enjoyable meal, but at least I wasn’t bitchy. Brad invited me to the kitchen after dinner to congratulate Pierre, but I declined. I didn’t want to know anything more about him and his interesting, full life. It would only be that much more to regret after the affair was over. And it was so close to being over!

CHAPTER 14

We got into the car for the short drive to Drew’s apartment. At nine on the dot, the doorman announced us, and we were allowed to ascend to the penthouse, where a smiling Drew met us at the door. Her smile diminished when she saw I was along.

“Oh, Miss Andrews, you’re here too,” she exclaimed, letting her surprise show. She had a conscious air of doing it
on purpose, to make me feel unwanted.

I knew Drew hadn’t got herself rigged out in such an elaborate outfit just to show a client a picture. It was a sort of shift, slit from the guggle to the zatch. The material was a thick white crepe, edged in a gold key, Grecian ribbon. A heavy gold medallion, slightly smaller than a saucer, hung from a gold chain.

She led us into a large, square living room that was painted stark white, from ceiling to floor, where a white fur rug nuzzled our feet. The lamps were white; the sofas were white; any item, such as a table, that wasn’t white was made of glass, to show white on all sides. I felt as if I’d fallen into a very large glass of milk. It was a dazzling setting for the paintings that bedizened the walls. Ruby reds, sapphire blues, emerald greens, and vibrant golds glowed above their individual lights, the thick blobs of impasto creating an interesting texture. There was a good representation of modern artists, some of the same ones already met on Brad’s walls.

I recognized the style of Rouault, with thick leadlike lines of black. Drew’s Rouault was a clown. Léger was represented in a machine man. The fake Matisse was lovely, the largest of the lot, of a woman sprawling on a sofa by a wicker table, with pots of flowers behind her. We hardly glanced at any of them. While Drew led us around from painting to painting, our eyes scoured the walls for the polka dot nude. It wasn’t there. These other paintings were very likely the work of Rosalie, but the one we were after was not to be seen. While Brad chatted Drew up, I went close to the Rouault and examined the signature. If it had been altered, it had been so well done that the layman couldn’t tell. While they admired the “Matisse,” I began to figure how I could see the rest of the apartment. The bedroom, for instance, might have a few artworks.

“Ah, this one’s a lovely painting, it is,” Brad crooned in his best brogue. A fatuous smile dripped from his face.

“You have excellent taste, Timothy,” Drew congratulated. “You’ve chosen the prize of my collection. I hadn’t planned to sell it. It was the Modigliani I thought you might care for. Also a nude,” she pointed out.

I expected that whatever painting he showed an interest in would be one she didn’t want to sell, to raise the price.

Brad obligingly turned his eyes to the Modigliani, but was soon looking at the Matisse again. “That’s a nude and no mistake. A wonderful light, playful touch he has, Matisse.”