A Brush with Death Page 8

  “Why didn't he give it to him?” Gino asked.

  “Maybe it was going to be a Christmas present."

  “Yeah,” Gino said, “but Bergma arranged to give him a Persian knife first."

  “The paint was dry, and the picture was dusty,” John said. “Latour did his Christmas painting early, if that's what it was all about."

  Gino listened sharply, while still wolfing down his meat. “And if she's Bergma's lady, how come she has the hots for our John?” he asked, with a sly grin at me. “She must be a nympho, you lucky bastard; Weiss."

  John refused to look at me. I didn't like the way this whole investigation was going. It would end up with John dating her to get a look around her apartment. I put my wits to work and said, “What we'll have to do is slip away from the Art Nouveau opening tomorrow night and search her apartment."

  “She's home now,” Gino grinned. “I bet you could get into her bedroom without too much trouble, Weiss. I'd be only too happy to volunteer for the job, but the lady seemed to prefer you. Don't worry, Cassie,” he added with a lecherous grin. “I won't let you get lonely."

  “You can call me Newman,” I suggested, to cool his ardor. “I've noticed ladies like that macho touch.” He reached out and grabbed my hand, smearing it with pickle juice. “Newman it is. New man, get it? Ha ha. Just kidding, Weiss."

  “We'll hit Ms. Painchaud's apartment tomorrow morning while she's at work,” John said. I breathed a big sigh of relief.

  “Too bad,” Gino said, and winked at me. An end of meat escaped his lips and dangled over his chin. He stuck out his tongue and rescued it with a flip, like a frog picking a fly out of the air. “Ben has the best damned smoked meat in the whole world,” he said, and grabbed his pickle.

  I tried to ignore him. It's disconcerting to watch an animal eat. “What do you think Bergma will do when he finds his box is gone, John?” I asked.

  “I don't know. Did you put the bug in his office phone, Gino?"

  “Of course I did. Did you bug his house phone?” John nodded.. “Then we'll soon know who he calls,” Gino said, and patted his stomach. “I think I could handle another. How about you, Weiss?"

  John squeezed my hand under the table. “One's enough for me.” He smiled a smile that spoke of more than food.

  “Maybe I better not either,” Gino decided. “Angelina's serving cannelloni. Her pâté stinks, but she uses Ma's recipe for her pasta sauce."

  “Did you get your mother's dishwasher?” I asked.

  “I did, and you wouldn't believe what they soaked me for it. There's going to be an installation charge on top of that, and the bastards won't install it Christmas eve. I wanted to see Ma's face Christmas morning.” He looked like a little angel when he said that. I almost liked him, till he added, “At least my dad'll get stuck for the installation charge. Plumber and electrician. Ha!” He laughed raucously.

  He was still laughing when he put on his parka and left. Maybe because he had stuck John with the bill.

  CHAPTER 8

  You're probably wondering if John stayed overnight. He didn't, and what we did before he left is not much of a part of this story. I told him I had given Mom the bad news about Christmas. We talked about the case and Christmas mostly. He absolutely forbid me to buy him a Christmas present, except a token. I didn't argue too much because money was tight with me. Of course I did the “gentlemanly” thing and insisted he not buy me more than a token either, thus banishing my hopes for an engagement ring.

  I slept in the next morning and went shopping in the early afternoon for John's token. It is very hard to find a meaningful token for ten dollars, the sum agreed on. In fact, it's pretty well impossible. I had to exceed the limit to buy him a book on Van Gogh. It had plentiful reproductions and talked about the artist's life as well. I hoped John didn't already have it. One of the nice things about giving books is that you have a brief enjoyment of the gift yourself before wrapping it. And as usual, I ended up being sorry I had to part with it. Van Gogh was truly a unique artist. He invented a style and made it so much his own that even an artistically illiterate person like myself could identify his work. I could not always tell a Raphael from a Botticelli at a quick glance; Tintoretto, Titian, and Caravaggio are melded into one grandiose swirling canvas in my mind, but a Van Gogh was like a Modigliani. Nobody else could have painted it—except of course a master forger.

  Knowing that Van Gogh had been in an asylum, I could easily see, or imagine, the evidence in his tortured brushstrokes. I read about his mental illness, the fits of depression that coincided with letters from his brother Theo bearing bad news. When Theo was worried about money, Vincent tried to kill himself to ease the financial burden. I think he was overwhelmed with guilt. His having been a minister suggested that he had a very active conscience at least. It was nothing new for genius to be allied to madness. He sounded terribly dependent, not only on Theo's money, but on his emotional support.

  It seemed so unfair that Vincent had always been poor, paying seventy cents a day for a little cramped room in an attic. Toward the end of his life, he had painted seventy paintings and done several drawings too in a seventy-day period. At the going rate of upwards of fifty million per painting, he earned over three and a half billion dollars in a little more than two months. That must be more than Michael Jackson makes. And the poor devil died by his own hand, stony broke in a stifling attic. They laid his coffin on a billiard table, which sounded pathetic. There was a picture of his modest little headstone in the cemetery at Auvers. Theo's was beside it just months later.

  It seemed almost obscene that people were buying Van Gogh's pictures now for such wild sums of money. And that Latour and Bergma were exploiting him was even worse. There was a moral repugnance in it. Vincent was such a good, simple, idealistic man. I felt a new eagerness to catch the crooks in honor of his memory. Some few characters have that ability to reach out and touch our hearts. This was becoming more than a case; it was a crusade.

  When John came to the apartment that afternoon, I was still reading. I hastily stuffed the book under the sofa and opened the door. I had got so carried away I hadn't even fixed my hair or put on any makeup.

  “What's new?” I asked, after he had taken advantage of my lipstick-less lips.

  “In the case, you mean? Well, for starters, Denise has an unlisted phone, so we didn't get into her apartment. Gino s looking into her address. A pretty dull morning."

  “You might as well have spent it with me."

  “You needed your beauty sleep. Oh oh, I better rephrase that. You said you were tired from staying up late studying— and of course dating other guys,” he added with a dark look.

  “Thank God my exams are all over,” I said, and hastily offered coffee, before he reopened that particular can of worms. He followed me into the kitchen while I put on the kettle;

  “Did Gino have any luck finding out if Hot Buns has an alibi for six-thirty the night before last?” I asked.

  “The people at the hotel say she arrived early, before seven, to help Bergma. That makes it pretty tight. We didn't like to question her. She's one of the best leads we've got so far. I'll do some discreet quizzing tonight and see how things stand with her and Bergma."

  I tried not to resent Denise as I filtered the coffee and took it into the living room. I thought about the case and said, “Has Gino learned anything from the bugs on Bergma's phones?"

  “Nothing. The guy hasn't tried to get in touch with whoever called him, or vice versa. It's all business. Bergma hasn't been any place except to his own house and the museum, so they haven't met."

  “You know where the partner could meet Bergma without arousing any suspicion is at the art show opening tonight. There'll be tons of people there. If Bergma hasn't been in touch with him, he must be getting very jumpy. We figure he killed Latour for Jan Bergma. They've got things to talk about. Like the paintings, and where they are, and how they're going to unload them."

  “If they have them,” John
added doubtfully. “Bergma told the caller ‘They're gone.’ That doesn't sound as if the caller knew. One of them damned well knew, and was trying to con the other."

  “Bergma's returning to the Netherlands in January. He's got to meet the guy before then and clear things up. I know if it were I, I'd go to the opening tonight."

  John nodded, interested. “We'll watch and see if any of the customers make Bergma especially nervous. See if he goes off into any private corners with anyone. I'll take my Bic-Pic along. Maybe Interpol will recognize the guy. I might recognize him myself."

  “It'll be tricky using your lighter. There won't be any smoking allowed."

  “I don't have to know that. In France they smoke their heads off nearly every place but in church. It's only in the States that you can't smoke."

  “And Canada. They're becoming rabid here. My uncle tells me they'll soon be having smoke police in Toronto, and you know how he loves his stogies."

  There was nothing much to be done, case-wise, so we played hooky in the afternoon and I showed John Montreal. Mount Royal, Place des Arts, Place Ville Marie, and Brother Andre's Shrine on the mountain left him blasé. What really impressed him was the subway, so clean and quiet and beautiful, with murals and assorted artwork at every stop. He also seemed to take considerable pleasure from the soignée women, whom I must admit do have a certain je ne sais quoi.

  To make up for his seeing Denise and my getting stuck with Gino that night, he was taking me out for a gourmet dinner first. Gourmet dinners and opening nights are to me what a canvas and a box of pigments must have been to Van Gogh. They make me a little crazy with joy.

  I vacillated between the chic new black pencil dress and a flame red little number with a sparkly top and bubble skirt worn to the McGill Christmas formal. John had already seen the black, so I chose the red. As I didn't have time to get to a hairdresser, I wore my hair up again. I love the big, dangling new earrings. For Christmas, Sherry gave me a pair I had been ogling all fall at Birks. They consisted of a cluster of rhinestones, weighing about four ounces each, that fell in a cascade of glitter two ‘inches below the ear. All this glitz called for extravagant makeup. I felt very French and sophisticated when John picked me up. He, in his Savile Row suit, looked dashing and debonair enough to please Robin Leach.

  John smiled appreciatively. “Am I back in Paris?” he asked. “The coeds didn't look like this when I was at college.','

  “I caused a few riots,” I said modestly.

  We went to the French seafood restaurant in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. The bouillabaisse alone is worth the trip. Fat black clams and assorted shellfish and other sea critters make it a meal in itself, although we managed to do justice to a coq au yin and a bottle of sauterne as well. I was too well fed and pleased with the world to let Gino bother me when he joined us later in John's room.

  Gino had been taking his Hugh Heffner pills and had made some pretense at a toilette for the occasion. He wore a nice tan camel's-hair coat, not his usual parka. The trousers of his blue polyester suit had a crease, and he wore a shirt and a tie. I think some color of socks other than yellow would have been an improvement, especially when his tie was red, but what the heck. The fumes of the sauterne were still with me, and I greeted him politely.

  “You look great, Newman,” he said, running his shifty little eyes up and down my body. “This is a real class lady you're lending me, John. Too had she's such a beanpole, or I might decide to cut you out entirely. Heh heh."

  John reminded me of a German shepherd, patronizing a smaller mongrel. He just grinned good-naturedly and said, “That'd learn me."

  “Is there any of that Johnnie Walker left?” was Gino's next sally. “I need something to take the smell of that garlic off my breath. Ma uses about a cup of garlic in her spaghetti. She crushes it to get the oils out."

  Mrs. Parelli's trick works very well. I could smell the fumes across the room. The Scotch didn't help a bit to hide it either. I insisted on sitting in the back seat for the trip to the museum. “You and John probably have things to talk about,” I said magnanimously.

  “You really got your lady trained,” Gino said approvingly to John.

  “Cassie knows her place,” he grinned. “Where else would a backseat driver sit?” His baleful expression as he tried to avert his nose from Gino's breath told me he understood my ploy.

  The elite of Montreal were swarming into the museum when we arrived. Montreal is one of the few cities where furs are not only ornamental but also useful. Even the men wear them. There was a lot of fur climbing the steps—mink, ocelot, wolf, a few leopards, and beaver, the latter mostly on the men. Once the furs were stashed, I ogled what the women wore beneath them. If I thought my red dress was going to rate a second look, I was mistaken. In the Christmas season, three-quarters of the women opted for red and rhinestones, or diamonds, depending on the bank balance. The men were all as carefully groomed as TV evangelists, with their blow-dried hair and expensive tailoring.

  A tall, gray-haired man in formal black evening wear headed up the reception line. I recognized Mr. Dupuis, the manager of the museum, from the newspapers. My eyes did not linger long on Dupuis. The fantasy beside him, also in black, was straight out of a French film. Had they imported Alain Delon for the evening? The man was tall, with a glossy head of black hair and that pale skin that suggests poetry and perhaps decadence, rather than ill health. His eyes were black and lustrous, fringed with lashes an inch long.

  I was so smitten with his beauty that it didn't register for a minute when he introduced himself as Mr. Bergma. When it finally sank in, I pictured him in his red and black and white house and thought t was the wrong setting for him. He should live on the boulevards of Paris. It should be perpetually spring, with the lime trees in bloom, scenting the air. If he insisted on having a house, Versailles would do. A man who looked like that deserved to be surrounded by mirrors, the better to see him from all angles.

  His hand that held mine in warm embrace was also pale, with a masculine smattering of dark hair. An ornate gold ring with a green stone bedizened one finger. A glimmering wafer of gold watch peeped out from under his white shirt cuff. It came as no surprise that his accent was delightfully cosmopolitan, more French than anything else. It was a disappointment that he hardly glanced at me. His lustrous eyes were scanning the new arrivals. Perhaps for the man he had forbidden to call him?

  I continued down the line and soon regrouped with John and Gino. “Wow!” was all I could think of to say. “Did you get a load of that Bergma!"

  “As cool a cucumber as ever stepped out of the refrigerator,” Gino said. “I wonder where he got that suit."

  John gave a disparaging look. “Don't tell me you fell for that greaser."

  To call Jan Bergma a greaser was like calling Catherine Deneuve a bleached blonde. There may have been a daub of something on his hair, but it was hardly the paramount impression. John was just jealous, of course, so I raved on to reinforce this emotion. If I had to put up with Hot Buns, why should he get away with no more competition than Gino?

  “Let me have the job of watching Jan,” I begged. I called him Jan instead of Bergma to infuriate John.

  “I'd better circulate and see if I can find Denise,” he retaliated, and stomped off.

  Gino and I, awash in a cloud of garlic oil, watched Bergma for a while. It was a night right out of my dreams. Everyone was there—even the premier of Quebec, with his beaky nose and glasses. There were lots of politicians, financiers, people from the performing arts—actors, singers, a famous ballet dancer in a dress much like my own, and a gaggle of anonymous society people. The pop of flashbulbs and whir of TV cameras told us the press was them.

  “I should've sprung for a new jacket,” Gino said, looking at Bergma. “That'l1 teach me to spend my hard-earned money on a dishwasher. Did I mention I got Ma a dishwasher for Christmas?"

  “Three or four times, but don't let that stop you. Repetition is the mother of learning."

&n
bsp; “It has four settings. I got gold, to match her red kitchen."

  “That sounds—bright."

  When Bergma moved away from the door, I took a sharp look to see who he was with. Since it was the Minister of Culture, I acquitted him of being a murderer and took the chance to have a look at the exhibit. It was gorgeous. I'd return later to study it more thoroughly, but enjoyed a quick glimpse of the various displays. The jewelry was whimsical, with birds and flowers and animals fashioned of gold and gem stones. Cartier had some intriguing jewelry and small sculpture, and of course Erté was handsomely exhibited. What a genius! His fashion designs were extravagantly lovely. The twenties lived again in those elongated, ladies in sweeping robes. I wasn't mad about his new line of watches, but they were interesting.

  “What do you figure the watches go for?” Gino asked.

  “Over a thousand, I imagine."

  “What suckers! This little beauty cost me twenty-five bucks.” He proudly displayed an ugly hunk of chrome with many insets on the dial. “Never loses a minute:"

  Across the room, I spotted John and Denise examining a painting. I was gratified to notice John was keeping a close eye on me. He wore a pugnacious expression, but when he caught me looking, he turned and beamed an oily smile at Denise. Hot Buns was in white, a rather matronly and unattractive affair with a long,, boxy jacket that thoroughly hid her charms. Maybe the museum didn't want her to look like a hooker. From the neck up, she foiled them. The mane of red hair was frizzed to a fare-thee-well, and her earrings were even bigger and gaudier than mine. Waiters, decked out like nineteenth-century footmen for some unclear reason, carried around trays of champagne and hors d'oeuvres. Gino speared us a glass and a plate.

  “What the hell. This is costing John a bundle. We might as, well get his money's worth,” he said. He took a bite of one of the hors d'oeuvres and gagged. I was afraid he was going to spit it out on the floor. “What is this stuff?"