He stopped me with a flourish of his hand. “Take it easy. I think we have plenty of time. Whoever he is, he is not aware we know he is not Leiderkrantz. He must have had some inside information to know that I don’t know Leiderkrantz by sight. But the Dionysus is worth a lot of money that I haven’t paid yet – sixty-five thousand dollars – and he’s bound to make a play for that. That’s why I say we have plenty of time. I don’t think he would turn the statuette over to me, and let me send the money to the European representative. That’s the procedure, of course, but if the guy’s a phony, he’ll make a play for the money, or part of it, anyway.”
“Unless the Dionysus is a phony,” I stated.
“A forgery?” he said and shrugged. “I don’t think so. It appears to be the original, though I can’t be positive by just looking at it. I’ll make tests and call in Dr Homer Bramble from the Lexington Foundation Museum. He’s an expert on this period of art. I wouldn’t want to judge the work solely on my own experience, though I do have an Athena outside by the same sculptor. In fact, it was the only one in the country until I got this Dionysus. If the two don’t compare, I’ll know the Dionysus is a forgery.”
I stepped over and rubbed out my cigarette on the ashtray, wondering above all else how Schweingurt was so certain that the man who had brought him the statuette was not Leiderkrantz. I took my gun from the pocket of my coat and put it back in its shoulder holster, ready to leave. But I wanted the full story before I started.
“How do you know he is an impostor?” I asked.
He took the cigar from his mouth. “I wanted to be certain,” he said, “so I deliberately called the Dionysus a ‘Bacchus’ sculptured by Orinaldi. The fellow corrected me. But Bacchus is the Roman name for the Greek god, Dionysus. An art connoisseur of Leiderkrantz’s caliber would have known that. Also,” he added, “there was never, to my knowledge, a sculptor named Orinaldi.”
I grinned because I couldn’t help it. But when I went out I didn’t think any part of it was funny, and I was glad for the opportunity to settle for a couple of knots on my head.
The Pittsfield Hotel turned out to be an excellent indication that Leiderkrantz was a phony. Schweingurt had sized the guy up right on that point. But Schweingurt had pressed his intuition too far when he claimed that our man would be back. From what I learned, I was pretty sure we would never see Leiderkrantz again.
No one by that name, according to the desk clerk, had checked into the hotel. There had been a man of Leiderkrantz’s description, however, who had checked in shortly before noon. But the clerk was pretty sure the man had come in from Chicago or Milwaukee, or some place out West. Not Lisbon.
If Leiderkrantz had registered under another name, it was logical that he would also falsify his address. I checked the bellhops.
The two bellhops on duty hadn’t recalled carrying any luggage with a Trans-Ocean Airlines tag; but one of them – a young blond kid with fuzz on his plump cheeks and a squeaky voice – remembered hopping for a short, stocky man, flashily dressed, with a dapper, rust-red mustache. The kid especially remembered the nickel tip the man had given him.
I called Schweingurt, learned that he was in conference with Dr Bramble from the Lexington Museum, then sat down in a leather chair in the lobby to wait for the man who had fitted Leiderkrantz’s description. After a while I got restless, went over to the cigar stand and brought a pack of cigarettes, went into the bar and drank two beers – all the time keeping my eye on the lobby, the entrance door and the room desk. When I finished the beer, I went back to the lobby, sat down, got up again and bought a package of chewing gum at the cigar stand. I was walking back to my chair again when the bellhop grabbed my arm and pulled me excitedly behind a huge potted fern.
“That’s the guy I meant,” he told me and pointed to a red-haired man stepping into the elevator. “That’s the bird from Milwaukee who checked in this morning.”
I glanced eagerly through the green fronds of the fern and growled out a curse. The man wasn’t Leiderkrantz. I turned to the blond kid, saw the disappointment on his cherubic face, tossed him four-bits and hurried out of the lobby. It was after five o’clock and I wanted to boot myself all the way cross-town for killing the whole afternoon. It might have been speedier at that. The taxi I grabbed was plenty slow, but it gave me an opportunity to try to figure out the puzzle.
No matter how I added it up, it wouldn’t make sense that Leiderkrantz – rather, the man who had posed as Leiderkrantz – would make the trip from Europe with the valuable Dionysus, risk exposure in order to deliver the statuette to Schweingurt, then disappear.
When the cab pulled up in front of Schweingurt’s place, I was drawing a blank all around, and still didn’t have any answers.
There were a green-and-white police car and an ambulance at the curb when I left my cab. A crowd of silent people stood in front of the art galleries, trying to peer through the huge front windows. A big, perspiring cop at the door was growling at them and endeavoring to move them away from the place. I flashed my shield at the cop, told him I was working for Schweingurt, and he let me through.
“You just lost your job, buddy,” he told me as I passed him.
Max Schweingurt was lying on the floor of the Grecian Court, at the foot of the Athena statue. A doctor from the Medical Examiner’s office was crouched over the body. Schweingurt’s hair was matted with blood and his head was twisted crazily so that his sightless eyes stared up at the statue above. He was very dead. There was a bright crimson stain on the base of the statue, near the foot of the goddess, that trickled down to the floor. Evidently Schweingurt had struck his head on the statue when he fell. I moved over to where a detective was questioning the dark-haired attendant in the gray smock. The attendant’s name was Maurice Cambelli, it developed.
The Medical Examiner got up from his crouch with a grunt and turned to the detective. He gazed down at the corpse and grunted again, running long fingers through his shaggy hair. “This man was dead before he hit that statue,” he said in a rumbling voice. “The right side of his head – where you see the blood – struck the base of the statue. But,” and he pointed to a livid mark behind Schweingurt’s left ear, “he was struck a much harder blow on the left side of his head before he fell. I’m pretty sure that first blow caused his death.”
“Hmm!” the detective murmured and he stepped slowly over to the corpse. “Murder!”
Cambelli gasped, repeating the word as if it choked him.
A police lab photographer took shots of the body before the Medical Examiner’s men removed it, and a fingerprint man studied the room as if trying to decide where to start dusting the place.
I said to Cambelli beside me, “Come on into Schweingurt’s office. I need a drink. And I think you do, too. Maybe we can find a bottle there.” He followed me into the office at the rear, nodding silently as the police detective warned him to stick around the building.
I closed the door of the office and Cambelli went over and took a bottle of Bourbon and a water glass from the bottom drawer of the desk. He poured a good triple shot into the glass, gulped it down, poured a lighter drink and handed the glass to me. I held it in my hand and sat down on the corner of the desk.
He told me he had worked for Max Schweingurt since coming from art school in Italy eight years ago. He wasn’t familiar with the Dionysus acquisition, he told me – Mr Schweingurt had been pretty secretive about it all – but he did know that the Dionysus statuette might possibly be a forgery. Mr Schweingurt had claimed it was, though Dr Bramble from the Lexington Foundation Museum was certain it was the original.
“Isn’t Bramble supposed to be an expert on that sort of thing?” I asked him.