Death of an Art Collector Page 2

  “It just shows that she has good taste.”

  “But you clearly don’t think the same about her creations or her toenails,” Lily said. “I saw you give them the once-over with raised eyebrows.”

  “Well, you have to remember that I am not qualified to discuss the quality of a given work of art or anything to do with women’s fashions or cosmetics, so what I believe really doesn’t count for anything.”

  “You are being far too modest. And whatever you may think about Zondra’s talent, or her garb for that matter, I can tell you that behind that eccentric facade of hers is a very decent, talented individual whose real name happens to be Angela Baxter, originally of Altoona, Pennsylvania. But that is not for publication.”

  “Understood. Arthur Wordell is certainly one very dour specimen,” I said, shifting gears.

  “I can’t say that I know him very well, Archie, but I agree that he hardly qualifies as ‘Mr. Sunshine.’ I have only met him at all because of his daughter, Nadia. She and I have served on a couple of boards together.”

  “So Miss Wordell, like you, gets involved in good works?”

  “Nadia is a fine young woman, Wordell’s only child, and a somewhat late-in-life arrival. And she puts up with her father’s moods and eccentricities, which I have been told are numerous.”

  “Is Daddy Wordell married?”

  “He has been legally separated for several years now. You may recall reading that he and Alexis Evans Farrell Wordell—and yes, she always uses all four names—got into a messy fight over money. She made a lot of demands, most of which he acceded to, but she kept upping the ante and asking for more.”

  “The man would seem to have plenty to give, though.”

  “No question whatever. His wealth is sizable and inherited; his New England father made his money, tons of it, in the shipbuilding industry. It was once said that at least one out of every three merchant vessels sailing on the Atlantic at any given time was built by Elias Wordell.”

  “I gather Arthur has had to keep upping the ante to keep Alexis happy.”

  “To a point, and with increasing reluctance. But where he drew the line is when she began suggesting—and none too subtly at that—that she was entitled to a portion of his art collection upon his passing.”

  “That really had to frost the old boy.”

  Lily laughed. “That is putting it mildly. I don’t closely follow the adventures of the Family Wordell, but the last I heard, Alexis was still trying to pry a good-sized portion of Arthur’s collection out of him, and he was fighting like crazy to keep her from getting so much as a single canvas.”

  “Who do you think will win that battle?”

  “I have only met Alexis on one occasion, and based on that brief encounter, I found her to be a tough cookie. Having said that, however, I think this is one battle that she’s likely to lose.”

  “You mentioned earlier that Wordell is eccentric. In what ways does that manifest itself?”

  “Most of what I know about him I’ve learned from his daughter,” Lily said. “For instance, even though he is as rich as Croesus, he chooses to live relatively simply, given his wealth. Nadia says he owns a town house in the East Eighties that sounds like it’s no bigger than the one where you and Nero Wolfe reside, and only a few pieces of his priceless art are on display there. She tells me that the rest is in storage.”

  “So the man is wealthy but definitely weird.”

  “There is more, Archie. He maintains an office, if you can term it that, in a nondescript Midtown building. According to Nadia, he has two rooms, sparsely furnished, about twenty floors up in an aging and not very well-maintained building just north of Times Square and slightly east of the Theater District. She says her father likes it because he’s got some good views down on what he calls ‘busy, hectic New York, with all of its sounds and smells and crowds.’ ”

  “Does he have some sort of staff there?”

  “If you want to call it that. One elderly woman who takes dictation and answers his phones—when she’s there. And before you ask, I have no idea what Wordell accomplishes in this so-called place of business.”

  “With his dough, he doesn’t have to accomplish a blasted thing, my dear. Ah, for the life of an eccentric. Remember, I do work for one.”

  “Yes, but Nero Wolfe acts positively proper compared to Mr. Wordell.”

  “I am not even sure why I’m bothering to ask about the man,” I said.

  “I was wondering that myself, Escamillo.”

  “For a reason I’m not able to put into words, I find myself wanting to know more about those folks who were at our table tonight.”

  “Or were you really fascinated by the comely Miss Nadia Wordell?” Lily posed, arching an eyebrow.

  “Well, I did happen to notice her, but only in a dispassionate way.”

  “You, dispassionate, when it comes to attractive women? Are you trying to make me choke on my drink?”

  “All right then, let the record show that I made note of Miss Wordell’s visible attributes, but after all, I am a detective, thereby trained to be observant. And as I just said, I really was intrigued, not just by Nadia, but by everyone at the table.”

  “Overall, they seemed a pretty normal bunch to me,” Lily said.

  “I am not sure I agree, my love. Let us start with Mr. Mason, for example. The man redefines a mope. He barely spoke a complete sentence all evening, just sat there with his arms folded and with his face set in a glower—not unlike the behavior of the aforementioned Mr. Wordell himself.”

  “But there is definitely a reason for that, as I suggested to you earlier. Roger Mason feels that he has been undercut and insulted by Wordell’s appointment of that advisory board, or whatever he’s calling it,” Lily said. “After all, Mr. Mason has good credentials, having been the director of two or three art museums up in the New England states.”

  “Is Mason married?”

  “Divorced for many years, which may or may not mean that he’s hard to get along with.”

  “True. But one thing we do know is that the gentleman’s psyche has been badly bruised. Does he have to share his misery with a roomful of people who presumably have come to celebrate the new museum? For that matter, why did he bother to show up at all tonight?”

  “Perhaps to protect his position with Wordell, however shaky it is, and to keep an eye on that trio of new advisers who he feels are undercutting him.”

  “One of whom is Faith Richmond, she with the oversize glasses that make her eyes look as big as basketballs,” I observed. “Maybe she’s trying to be intimidating.”

  “Faith? Not really,” Lily said. “Oh, she can be strong-minded, but then, as the biographer of several nineteenth- and twentieth-­century artists, she has never been shy about stating her opinions, not all of them positive, regarding their work. And her books have been generally well received in the arts community, or so I have been told.”

  “If not necessarily by the artists she writes about?”

  Lily laughed. “Faith has never been one to let criticism faze her. I heard a talk she gave at a luncheon a couple of years ago in which she told us that one cubist painter she had been critical of in her book about him was so upset that he mailed her a caricature of herself in which those magnified eyes you referred to were covered by a blindfold. The caption read ‘Do not put your Faith in a blind woman.’ ”

  “At least the painter has a sense of humor.”

  “So does Faith, for that matter,” Lily said. “Her response to his drawing of her was a sketch she did and mailed to him, with copies sent to the newspapers’ arts critics. In it, he was depicted as a robot—all square corners as befits cubism—with a caption reading ‘Hardly what one would call a well-rounded individual.’ That got her some mentions in a couple of the papers.”

  “Nice to know there’s some puckishness
in these artsy sorts. I certainly didn’t see much of it tonight. Some of the men seemed awfully fawning around Wordell—Wolfe would call them sycophants.”

  “I must say that being around your boss is doing wonders for your vocabulary, although I did not sense a lot of fawning at the dinner myself.”

  “What about Henry Banks, who was soothing Wordell by telling him not to take the unctuous master of ceremonies too seriously? Or Tatum, that prof down at NYU, who cozied up to the famous collector, telling him that he was a ‘man of mystery’ by keeping people guessing as to where his art would go. And that tall drink of water Sterling also jumped in, urging Wordell to respond to the applause with appreciation. I would call all of that fawning.”

  Lily responded with a sigh. “I feel, my dear Escamillo, that I have made a mistake by dragging you here tonight. I should have learned my lesson by this time. For years, I have hauled you along to all manner of arts events—gallery openings, lectures by and about artists, even that auction where I was fortunate enough to buy a Fernand Léger. And you always went along, albeit I suspect reluctantly. It’s clear that you are not comfortable around these people, and I guess that is understandable.”

  “If I may continue dissecting the assemblage, exactly what was Tatum’s role? He is not one of that board of advisers.”

  “Ah, yes, Boyd,” she said. “Besides being a professor of considerable repute at New York University, he, like Faith, is something of a writer in the field of art and art collectors, and for some time now, he has been trying hard to get Arthur Wordell to agree to a biography.”

  “To be written by Tatum, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “I suppose that would explain at least some of his rather fawning nature,” I said as I took a sip of my drink and set it down. “I am sorry to act like such a grouch, my dear, but something just didn’t feel right to me tonight. Maybe it’s something I ate, although I can hardly complain about the dinner that the Waldorf served us. I hereby promise not to be such a crank.”

  “Bravo—that’s the spirit! Changing the subject slightly, what do you think of the new Guggenheim’s architecture?”

  “Unusual, to say the least. This guy Wright is famous, from what I’ve heard over the years, so maybe I have no business being critical of his work.”

  “You certainly were not critical of his granddaughter when you met her.”

  “Huh?”

  “It was two or three years back, at a party we went to after the New York premiere of that Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic, The Ten Commandments. Surely you can’t have forgotten the evening.”

  “I remember that party, all right. It was quite a bash, as I recall. A ‘Hollywood Comes to New York’ event.”

  “Then you must remember a fetching actress from that film who was at the party, the one you couldn’t take your eyes off, Anne Baxter by name. I seem to recall you spent some time talking to her in close quarters.”

  “I was just being … social.”

  “Very social, I would say, and I know that you can’t help being who you are. Anyway, she is the granddaughter of the great architect himself. Artistic talent must run in the family.”

  “It must. Did I really seem enchanted by the lady?”

  “I can’t believe you have forgotten. I admit to being jealous of her for a full minute, but then my better self took over. Let us order another drink,” Lily said, covering my hand with hers, “and we’ll talk about something other than the comely Miss Baxter, like whether the Rangers have any chance whatever to win that elusive Stanley Cup this season.”

  Chapter 3

  For at least two weeks after that dinner at the Waldorf, I gave no thought whatever to the Guggenheim Museum, Arthur Wordell, Frank Lloyd Wright, Anne Baxter, and the worlds of the fine arts and architecture in general. Maybe Lily was right that I was so far out of my element in that milieu that it had turned me into a misanthrope. During those days, I was busy working with Wolfe to crack the case of an Upper West Side widow’s missing federal bearer bonds.

  Mrs. Eleanora Winston, who lived in splendor in one of those elaborate nineteenth-century co-op palaces that line Central Park West, had always been careless with money, probably because she had always had so much of it, courtesy of her late husband from Pittsburgh, who had made it big in the steel business.

  One day, the octogenarian noticed that her bonds were missing, and she had no idea when she had last seen them. The police were not interested in the case, so one of Mrs. Winston’s daughters hired Wolfe, and by extension, me, to locate those missing securities, which added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  From the start, it seemed obvious to us that this had to be an inside job, despite the old woman’s contention that none of her offspring or their spouses could possibly have filched the bonds. No tradesman had set foot in the apartment in nearly a year, and the only domestic help was a maid nearly as old as her employer and who had been on the job for nearly three decades.

  That left two sons, their wives, two daughters, and their husbands. Eight suspects in all, three of whom—two sons and a son-in-law—had what could euphemistically be described as “money problems.”

  Through some grilling, first by me and then by Wolfe, we bore in on the trio, and ironically, the husband of the woman who hired us turned out to be the sticky-fingered one.

  In a piece of good news for the widow, he had not cashed in the bonds, which got returned to her intact. In a second piece of good news, at least for the thief, his mother-in-law did not press charges. As the best news of all, Wolfe got paid in full for his—and my—work.

  So, comfortable in the knowledge that our bank balance was once more at what I consider an adequate level, I sat at my desk in the office on a sunny morning nursing coffee after having been served Canadian bacon, an apricot omelet, and blueberry muffins by Fritz Brenner at my little table in the kitchen.

  The phone rang, which I answered in the usual way during working hours: “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

  It was Lily. “Do you have the radio turned on this morning, Escamillo?”

  I said no and could hear her draw in air. “Arthur Wordell died sometime last night. He fell to the ground from his office in Midtown.”

  “Are there any other details in the radio report?”

  “None. It said that the police are investigating.”

  “As of course they would be. I think I’ll make a call.”

  “Let me guess: you are going to telephone a certain Mr. Cohen at a certain metropolitan New York daily newspaper.”

  “As a mind reader, you are second to none.”

  “It has often been said,” Lily said. “Let me know what you learn.”

  I wasn’t sure why I cared about the circumstances of Wordell’s death, other than out of curiosity, given that I had recently met the man. But then, I am a detective, and that makes me inquisitive by definition. Using a number that I knew by heart, I dialed Lon Cohen at the Gazette and got the usual gruff “Yeah?” after one ring.

  “I haven’t heard one word from you since our last poker game,” Lon said after I had identified myself. “Are you sore about that big pot I won on that bluff?”

  “I was bluffing, too, and my guess is that you had the better hand anyway.”

  “You will never know. Okay, just what’s on your mind?”

  “I’m wondering what you’ve heard regarding Arthur Wordell’s demise.”

  “How is it that whenever there’s a high-profile death in this city that is the least bit mysterious, you and your boss get curious about it?”

  “Explain that ‘least bit mysterious’ part,” I asked.

  “All we know right now is that Wordell fell out of a window in his twentieth-floor office sometime after nine last night. What’s left of him was lying in a parking lot that borders three buildings in the middle of
a block just east of Seventh Avenue and three blocks north of Times Square. He was found about six this morning by a parking lot attendant coming on duty.”

  “There were no eyewitnesses?”

  “None. One man we spoke to, who also had talked to the cops, works as an accountant in a building that faces Wordell’s across that parking lot. He says Wordell—whose name he didn’t know until today—had a habit of throwing open his window, sitting on the sill with his legs dangling on the outside, and gazing at that part of the city he could see. The accountant said Wordell sometimes sat there for an hour or more, just staring and taking deep breaths.”

  “So it’s possible that he could have been doing that last night and slipped?”

  “Of course it’s possible. Hey—wait a minute, what is your interest in all this, gumshoe? Tell your old uncle Lon just what’s going on here. Do you have yourselves a client?”

  “We do not, Uncle Lon. Just chalk it up to my general interest in what seem to be unexplained deaths.”

  “Uh-huh. If that’s your story, by all means stick with it. Now if you will excuse me, we’re getting close to the deadline on our first edition.”

  “Before you go, what are the police saying about this?”

  “Not much. They don’t seem to think it’s a suicide. Right now, they appear to be going with the accidental death theory. Now I’ve really gotta go.”

  Ninety minutes later, I checked my watch and saw that it was time for our delivery of the Gazette’s first edition. Sure enough, it was out on the stoop. I brought it in and read the page one story headlined “Noted Art Collector Found Dead After a Fall.” The story, which had to have been put together quickly, added nothing to what Lon had told me. An unnamed police spokesman was quoted as saying, “We are looking into the death and will release more information if and when it becomes available.”

  I laid the paper aside and opened the morning mail, then set to typing the letters Wolfe had dictated yesterday. I finished the last one just as he walked into the office at 11:03 after his two-hour morning session with the orchids up in the plant rooms on the roof.