I glanced at him quickly, lowered my eyes and slowly lighted a cigarette. “That should clear up the whole case,” I said carefully, though I didn’t believe it. I still couldn’t tag Cambelli as the murderer.
“It should,” Grady put in. “But a couple of things have happened, Mike. You remember that big statue outside Schweingurt’s office?”
I nodded. He meant the Athena goddess. “It was to be delivered to the Lexington Foundation Museum,” I said.
Grady moved his head at Reilly. “Tell him, Reilly,” he said.
Reilly said, “The statue was delivered to the Lexington Museum the day after the murder. It was stolen from the museum that night!”
“Stolen?” I snapped. “People don’t steal something like that. They’d need a derrick. It weighed a ton!”
He lowered his eyebrows. “Just the same, it was either stolen or picked up its skirts and walked out of the place. It’s gone!”
Grady interrupted. “Tell him where the old gal went when she picked up her skirts.”
Reilly’s expression didn’t change. “To Mexico!” he said.
I didn’t say anything for a minute, dropped my cigarette into an ashtray beside my chair and picked up my drink. I couldn’t catch up with them and asked simply, “Mexico?”
Reilly bobbed his big head up and down. “The insurance company that covered it picked it up in a museum in Mexico City and flew it back to New York. And all this in a week . . . It doesn’t seem on the level.” He cocked his head to one side and looked at me narrowly out of his left eye. “Cambelli told us that Schweingurt hired you for a job the day he was murdered. We wondered if there is some information that we haven’t run across yet. Something you may know.”
I took a drink from my glass, made a face and glanced up at him. “About Cambelli having the Dionysus statuette in his room – did you get a tip on that?”
He raised his bushy brows, still looking at me with narrowed eyes, and said. “Yes. As a matter of fact, we did. Why?”
“From whom?”
“I don’t know. It was one of those things.”
“I see,” I replied slowly. “Do you know if this Dionysus statue was an original?”
“Yes, it was an original. A guy named Bramble from the Lexington Museum said it was an original. He’s supposed to be an expert on that sort of thing.”
“Was it broken?”
“No . . . I’m sure it wasn’t broken. Dr Bramble would have remarked about that, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I guess he would have.” It occurred to me that Dr Bramble had insisted that Schweingurt’s Dionysus had been an original; but later that had been broken. I had seen the broken tip of the staff near the scene of the murder. I was sure of that. So another statuette had been switched in its place – possibly the original for the copy – and I wondered when this had been done.
The man who had posed as Leiderkrantz may have actually brought the original from Europe, switched it for a phony after I lost him that morning and brought the copy to Schweingurt. But he couldn’t have made the switch with Cambelli, because I had seen Cambelli in the galleries during that time, cleaning the Athena statue. Still, the original Dionysus had turned up in Cambelli’s room. He was either working with someone else, someone besides Leiderkrantz’s impostor, or the statuette had been planted on him to frame him for the murder.
Reilly suddenly said, “Are you holding out on us, Mike? That would be bad. You’re liable to lose your license if we catch you holding out on us.” His heavy, black eyes were smoldering.
I poured another drink.
I said, “I’m not holding out anything, Reilly. I’m in the dark. There’s an answer some place, but the Cambelli kid isn’t it. You don’t believe Cambelli is the murderer, do you?”
He moved his big shoulders and looked up. “I think maybe he was in on it. Where, I don’t know. But I think it was more involved than a robbery-murder job. It may be an inside job – which would mean Cambelli.”
I shoved the cork into the bottle and struck it with the palm of my hand. “This statue that was picked up in Mexico,” I said, “have you seen it since it was flown back?”
“No. It’s back in the Lexington Museum, as far as I know. Why?”
“You said yourself that something about that part of it didn’t seem on the level. It may be the clue we’re looking for. I think it would be a good idea to take a look at that statue.”
Reilly’s dark eyes brightened and he pushed himself from the chair. “You think we might find the answer there?”
I slipped out of the lounging robe and shrugged into a suit coat, strapped the shoulder holster under my armpit. “It’s just a hunch,” I told him. “Still, we may find something.”
The museum was a huge, impressive-looking brownstone between Fifth Avenue and Madison in the Sixties. The dull glow of a street light flickered dimly off the heavy iron bars at the windows; and here and there the motionless form of a statue was silhouetted against the darkened glass. A guard at the massive front door glanced at Reilly’s police shield, sighed wearily and said, “Another dick! What’re you guys doin’, holding a convention here?”
Reilly glanced at me over his shoulder, raised his heavy eyebrows and then walked into the building. Another guard led us through a dimly lighted hall to the rear.
Dr Homer Bramble’s office was not unlike that of Max Schweingurt. There were a large walnut desk, cases of richly bound books, a thick expensive rug, and odd bits of bric-a-brac, statuary, rock samples and the like. Bramble himself complemented the room. He was a tall, cadaverous-looking man in his sixties, with thick gray hair and piercing black eyes. He had a thin, tight mouth in a pinched, gray face; and his clothes, old-fashioned, of rich black broadcloth, were dust-flecked and ill-kept.
He fixed heavy black-rimmed pince-nez on his long nose as we came into the office, cleared his throat and stared coldly at us.
Reilly said brusquely, “I’m Lieutenant Reilly from Police Headquarters, Doctor Bramble. We’d like to see the statue you purchased from Max Schweingurt.”
“The one that was returned from Mexico City,” I put in meaningfully.
Bramble glanced at me, a wary sarcasm in his sharp eyes. He removed the pince-nez, letting it drop on the black silk ribbon that hung around his neck. “The museum is open at ten o’clock tomorrow morning . . .”
“I beg your pardon,” Reilly interrupted him, “I said we were from Police Headquarters.”
Bramble shrugged. “Very well.” He pressed a button on his desk, picked up a sheaf of papers and, ignoring us, hunched forward on his desk and began to study the papers intently.
In the tense silence I heard the faint sound of footsteps coming toward a door, not the door through which we had entered from the hall, but one to the left of Bramble’s desk. The others seemed to pay no attention, if they heard at all, and I looked at Bramble. In the light from the desk lamp, I saw his eyes darken and a tense expression came over his pinched face. His fingers turned white at the knuckles as he gripped the papers in his hand. I glanced back at the door. The knob turned slowly; then, before the latch clicked, the knob turned back again. The footsteps retreated almost soundlessly away from the door. I watched Bramble wipe a nervous hand across his forehead. The papers trembled in his fingers.
At that moment, the guard who had ushered us to see Bramble came into his office.
Bramble, looking up, said hoarsely, “Take these men to the Athena statue.”
I caught Reilly’s eyes and nodded significantly.