She pushed aside the dishes and opened her ubiquitous notebook. "You must have known Professor Quinn as well as anyone. Who'd want him dead? Leyden?"
"Because of that tableau you saw with Doris Quinn?"
"They did seem… intimate."
Nauman smiled at the chasteness of the term. "If Piers Leyden wanted Riley Quinn dead, it wouldn't be because of Doris. She was just extra protection."
"Against what?"
"Against what Quinn was likely to say about Leyden in his latest book." Nauman toyed with his mug, creating patterns of wet, interlocking circles on the wooden tabletop as he chose his words carefully.
"Riley was a bastard," he said slowly, "but he knew a hell of a lot about art trends since the war, and he didn't hesitate to make value judgments. If he said your work had merit, you'd stop having trouble getting a gallery to show it. If he said it was good, you'd start selling occasionally. And if he called it of lasting value, you'd sell things regularly, and people would come around to your studio begging you to accept their commissions."
"There's been so much crap floating around these past few years-pop, op, slop-that collectors with more money than confidence in their own taste depend on someone like Riley. It's similar to what Bernard Berenson did for Renaissance art. It's all very well to buy a trendy piece of art because it amuses you; but if a Riley Quinn approves, then it becomes a good investment, too."
"Like having someone tell you Picasso's going to be Picasso before he actually becomes Picasso, and the prices go up," Sigrid said thoughtfully. "And Quinn didn't consider Professor Leyden a Picasso?"
"You do have a talent for understatement," Nauman smiled. "Leyden's a good draftsman, and he knows more about anatomy and the way muscles work than most doctors, but he doesn't have much taste.
"Ordinarily that wouldn't matter," he added cynically.
"His things are probably better than many of Riley's pets, but Quinn and Leyden have always clashed-one oft hose natural antipathies-and Quinn was planning to put him down for all time in his new book. I suppose Leyden thought that bedding Doris would take the edge off Quinn's attack, make everyone think Riley Quinn was letting personalities influence his judgement. Which he was, of course, but not because of Doris."
"How will Quinn's death affect the book?"
Nauman's eyes narrowed, and his speech became telegraphic as his mind zipped through possibilities. "Final draft… on the other hand… intestate… and Saxer's hungry enough, God knows."
He sipped his ale moodily, and Sigrid struggled to catch up with him. Final draft-well, that was clear enough: the book was finished but not yet at the publishers. If Quinn hadn't left a will, that would make Doris Quinn his literary executor, too.
"So if there are things Piers Leyden wants changed, Mrs. Quinn can force Jake Saxer to rewrite those parts now?"
"That's what I said!" Nauman snapped.
Sigrid's eyebrows lifted. She saw this reaction frequently when decent people involved in an investigation suddenly realized that a person they knew had committed murder, and that they were being asked to help hunt that person down-to trap him, knowing that the guilty one might be a friend or colleague. With that initial awareness came anger, a reluctance to betray anyone and a shrinking away in distaste.
His reaction made Nauman seem human and vulnerable; and for the first time since meeting him, Sigrid was conscious of the man's age. He had such a forceful personality that she hadn't noticed it before. His white hair was not just the famous Nauman trademark; the lines in his face did not denote character only. They were milestones from days and months of living that added up to years. With an unexpected feeling of regret she realized that he was old-that his first recognized masterpiece must have been painted years before she'd even been born.
There were brown age marks on the backs of his hands. But even as she saw them she noted the vigorous body, saw that the fingers that steadied his pipe were sensate and strong; and when he laid his pipe aside and impatiently raked his thick white hair with those fingers, it seemed absurd to think of him as anything but ageless, no matter what the calendars said.
"So you think one of us poisoned Riley Quinn?" he asked, referring to the group detained earlier that day. "One of those six?"
"Eight if you count Harley Harris and Mike Szabo. I'm still not sure how Quinn's death would benefit Szabo, but from what Professor Ross and Miss Keppler say, he did have opportunity."
"Mike has a hot temper," Nauman objected. "Poisoning would be too deliberate for him."
Sigrid reserved judgment and asked, "If Janos Karoly was an important artist, why is his nephew working as a janitor?"
"Important artists come from all classes of society, Lieutenant, and they seldom make much money till after they're dead," Nauman said bitterly. "Then it's the entrepreneurs and promoters like Riley who cash in on their works. Do you know Karoly's paintings?"
Sigrid shook her head. "No. I think
I've heard the name, but you were right when you guessed that twentieth-century art doesn't much interest me."
Perversely he was pleased that she didn't apologize or make a pretense of excepting his work. He had always preferred indifference over the empty flattery of someone who hadn't the least understanding of what he was striving for. Open hostility would be even better because anger implied that the viewer took the work seriously enough to feel challenged by Nauman's assumptions.
Their waiter returned to clear the table, and by this time Sigrid was so used to the tavern's scruffy ambience that it didn't outrage her to see him use one corner of his dirty apron to wipe it dry before setting down the tray of coffee utensils.
Nauman stirred sugar into his cup, drew on his pipe and leaned back in the heavy oak chair. He hoped he wasn't getting pedantic. That was the danger when one was so innately a teacher; it was so hard not to lecture. Especially when one's audience was as receptive as this policewoman seemed to be.
"Janos Karoly," he said slowly, "was probably Riley Quinn's one foray into altruism. It turned out so profitably that it's always puzzled me that he never tried it again. Unless Mike Szabo's right, and it wasn't honest altruism.
"It all started after the war," He paused and looked at Sigrid's face. Only around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth were there faint beginnings of age lines. "The Second World War," he clarified carefully. "There had been a few abstract exhibitions before the war, but abstract expressionism didn't arrive until '46 and '47. Paris was still the international art center of the world, and everyone went there. The great, the near great and the merely hopeful-Soulages, Hartung, Poliakoff, Appel-and not just artists but critics and historians. Riley, too, clutching his discharge papers from the Stars and Stripes and looking for firsthand data for his postgraduate studies."
"Stars and Stripes was a military newspaper, wasn't it?"
"Right. He'd been one of the feature writers on the staff. That was before I met him, but we were all the same-lusty young cockerels playing King of the Mountain on the art heaps of Paris. Janos Karoly was there, and one of the more established artists. A fairly respected practitioner of tachism, though not really in the master ranks"
"What's tachism?" she asked.
"Literally it means spot painting. Refers to the way an artist puts paint on a canvas. Someone more calligraphic might brush on wide slashes and bands of color. A tachist adds spot to spot or wedge to wedge and-"
"I thought that was called impressionism," Sigrid objected. "Like what's his name? Seurat?"
"Seurat used very small pellets of color, and his pictures were all quite representational. Something like newspaper pictures built up of black dots. The tachists were abstract, and in the purest examples their pictures became loosely structured clusters and patches of color. They downplayed line to concentrate on color and texture.