Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 1. Whole No. 344, July 1972

The Haunted Portrait by Lawrence Treat{© 1972 by Lawrence Treat.}

Can the oil portrait of a murdered woman be haunted? Can such a painting somehow identify her killer? Actually call out the murderer’s name? Point to the murderer with a hand that moves? A living, moaning, accusing portrait?...

Dr. Guy Nearing, curator of the museum, could not tear himself away from the portrait that, in its way, was more mysterious than the Mona Lisa...

Sometimes I watch a guide bring his group into Gallery 18, in the East Wing of the museum. Usually they are a mixed group of sightseers, and they come to see this particular canvas. They stare at it and mutter to each other. Then the guide speaks.

“The picture you’re looking at,” he says, “is a portrait of Evelyn Anders, and it was painted shortly before her tragic death. The artist is Swithin St. John, and this is considered his masterpiece.

“I call your attention to the eyes. Please notice the way they follow you no matter where you go. You can’t escape them. They watch everybody who comes into this room, and it’s said that they’re seeking out her killer and will accuse him when he comes into this room. If he is here now—”

The crowd giggles nervously. There is something about the eyes. They were painted with a mixture of oil and luminous paint, and the effect is eerie.

“It is also said,” the guide continues, after the crowd has become quiet, “that she will actually speak. Others maintain that her hands will move. Please study the hands.”

They are worth studying. They seem restless, as if they had something to do but were not sure what. They appear to have a life of their own.

“Employees of the museum were the first to hear the sounds. They usually occur towards late afternoon, shortly before the museum closes, but they have been heard at other times, too. Please listen.”

The people in the group strain their ears. Hearing nothing, they look at each other sheepishly, as if they had been duped. But sometimes they catch the sound of a moan. It may be faint and far off, but it is unmistakable. The crowd gasps, scarcely able to believe. Occasionally a woman, oversuggestible, screams. The group stands there for a moment or so — the people are too stunned to move; then, as if released from a spell, one person after another starts to leave, to find his or her way to the main exit and to the fresh air outside.

Usually, however, there is silence, and after a few moments the guide continues: “It is believed, too,” he says, “that Mrs. Anders wrote the name of her murderer, here on this canvas, and that some day the name will emerge in letters of blood. Or perhaps, as in the Bible, a hand will appear and write upon the wall: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. Does anyone see the words?”

The guide is laughing at his little joke. Then he turns and crosses the room. His shoes make sharp taps on the polished wooden floor.

I am Dr. Guy Nearing, curator of the museum, and at first I am delighted. A haunted portrait? Great — a happening! It should pull in the crowds, and it does. At one dollar a head.

But as time goes on I begin to dislike the crowds. They come to scoff, or else to stare at what they consider a freak. For me, however, it is something quite different. I find myself engrossed by it — whatever it is. Late afternoons or early evenings, after the museum has been closed to the public, I wander over to Gallery 18, and I look. I think of the few bits and pieces of the story that I know from having read the newspapers, and I am disturbed.

One night last March, Mrs. Ewald Anders, wife of a wealthy real-estate man reputed to be a front for the Syndicate, was stabbed to death while lying in bed. Her husband was away at the time. An undetermined amount of cash and about $20,000 worth of jewelry were taken, and the original assumption was that a cat burglar had climbed up to Mrs. Anders’ bedroom on the second floor, and when she woke up and saw him, he knifed her in panic and fled. But the autopsy showed that she had taken several sleeping pills and that it was almost impossible for her to have awakened. It followed that the robbery therefore was a blind, and that the crime was deliberate murder. The police leaned to the theory of a hired killer. Still — why?

Swithin St. John, who painted the portrait, is Ewald Anders’ half brother. They had the same mother — witness her fondness for the two stilted, exotic names. Swithin, Ewald — what a pair! At any rate, Anders gave Swithin the portrait commission. Over the years Anders had supported his half brother and even arranged for a couple of one-man shows which, for some reason, had been flops. Thus the name of Swithin St. John was hardly known until he did the portrait of Evelyn...

I stare at it in the dim light of the closed gallery. The eyes, gleaming, iridescent, gaze back at me. I want to leave, but I cannot. The painting has a strange obsessive quality, a latent sexuality that somehow the artist’s brush has brought out. I realize that over and above the legend and the publicity that have made the painting notorious it is unquestionably a masterpiece.

I keep asking myself why. What precise quality, what shade or flush of emotion has lifted this portrait out of the ruck and made it so magnetic, so outstanding? For, as surely as I stand here in the empty museum, St. John has communicated something deeply human in Evelyn Anders.

It bothers me. It keeps bothering me. I can’t let it go. I come here at night, not because I believe a painting can tell me anything about a murderer, but because I am haunted by it, by the subject. I stand here and I think of her as if she were still alive. I begin to wish that some harm would come to her — she seems almost to be asking for it — and I have an impulse to lash out and end forever this unnatural spell.

But I do not move away. Instead I turn on my flashlight and slide the beam slowly along the length of her arms. I feel as if I were caressing her, and the thought horrifies me. I focus the light on her painted eyes. They are silvery and lustrous, but they are also tragically sad — as if they had glimpsed her ultimate fate.

Finally I turn away, shaken, for I have learned something I wasn’t supposed to know. But what? What dark secret? Whatever it is, it remains in some lower segment of my brain, pressing in, torturing me, but never coming to the surface.

Back in my office I sit down shivering. I take a drink, but it does no good. I leave the building. Dewey, one of the night watchmen, says good night to me, which is my first normal experience of the evening. It does not help. I go out to my car. Although the night is warm I feel so cold that I turn on the heater as I drive home.

I think of her the next day and I decide I must find out who killed her. Absurd? Of course. I admit it. Nevertheless I ask questions and I set about finding out all I can about her, about her husband and about St. John. The next day I manage to bring St. John to my office and lead the conversation around to Evelyn Anders.

He talks freely. He says she was obsessed with death, that she had little to live for. She had no children to occupy her thoughts and time, and her husband’s extra-marital affairs were too flagrant for her to ignore them. Yet she was dominated by him and felt emotionally suffocated.

St. John breaks off abruptly and taps his fingers nervously on the arm of his chair. He is trying to tell me something that he fears to utter. He wants to blacken Ewald, wants to implicate him in a murder, but dares not. He is secretive, cryptic, oblique.

St. John’s hate is obviously bitter and venomous, but he tries to control it. When he praises Ewald, the words stick in his throat. He manages to say that Ewald has charm, that women fall for him — beautiful women like Marguerita, the Spanish dancer known as La Flama, whose troupe is performing here this season. But in the middle of reciting Ewald’s charm St. John blurts out that La Flama is more in love with Ewald’s money than with Ewald himself.

St. John, I feel, is being pulled in opposite directions. He longs to accuse Ewald, but is afraid to, for Ewald supports him and St. John needs that monthly stipend. Besides, he can’t forget that Evelyn was murdered by a killer who scaled a high wall and climbed a drainpipe in order to reach her room. St. John himself would never be safe. Not if he accused his half brother of murder. But what if the painting itself makes the accusation — is that St. John’s subtle, devious method?

We talk of the portrait. I admire it, I praise its technique, and I say that only a painter who was in love with his subject could have achieved such a masterpiece.

St. John grows livid. “In love with Evelyn? Me?” But the very intensity of his denial convinces me that he was.

He gets up in a fury. He can no longer restrain himself and he spews out his hate. He says Ewald was always sly, shrewd, dishonest. All he ever thought of was money and how to get the better of people. Ever since he and Ewald were children, Ewald managed to put the blame on St. John and take the credit for himself. Ewald lies, steals, kills. Even when Ewald finances exhibitions for St. John, Ewald managed to sabotage them at the same time. He ordered the gallery to cancel its advertising, and he arranged for devastatingly bad reviews.

After a while St. John calms down. He is aware that he has told me either too much or not enough, and he is still fuming when he leaves. I realize he’s playing some kind of deep game, which leaves me in confusion. I decide that Ewald, with his underworld connections, would just as soon have had his wife killed as bother to divorce her. But I’m convinced that St. John had an affair with Evelyn and couldn’t trust her with the secret. And if Ewald found out it would mean the end of St. John’s allowance, if not of his life.

So — did St. John kill her, or did Ewald Anders? And what does La Flama know about it?

I decide I have to see her, so I buy a ticket for her next performance. It is in one of the smaller theaters, and I watch her in fascination. She is wearing black tights. She seems weightless. She whirls across the stage like a living flame, she seems to soar, to float, and she finishes in an amorous swoon. She is beautiful, and at the end of the evening I go to the stage entrance. I send my card in, my official one as curator of the museum, and I’m told that La Flama will see me.

I go into her dressing room. She is sitting in front of her mirror, and she turns around to greet me. I can sense some of the passion and excitement that she conveyed while she was performing onstage, but now it is muted. To my surprise she speaks English with no accent, and I compliment her on it.

“Ewald has had me take lessons,” she says. “He does not like a—” She bites her lip and turns away. She has almost said wife, and is angry at herself for the near slip. “He does not like a friend to have a foreign accent,” she says.

“You have a good ear,” I say. “Even with lessons very few people can wholly overcome an accent.”

“Very few people are like me,” she says imperiously. “I was born a peasant and could neither read nor write until a few years ago. Now — why did you wish to see me?”

“I wondered if you could tell me anything about the portrait that St. John did of Evelyn,” I say. “There are—” She interrupts. “What would I know of that?” she says. “I do not like this conversation. The subject is unpleasant.”

“Exactly,” I say. “And that’s why—”

She interrupts again. “I have no more time,” she says. “Ewald is waiting for me. Please go.”

I leave. I realize I should not have spoken to La Flama. My interest in the portrait is something I should have kept to myself. Evil surrounds that painting, permeates it. I ought not to subject other people to the spell.

I recall the circumstances under which Ewald donated the painting. I knew who he was, because part of my job is to obtain gifts and loans for the museum, and to accomplish that I have to know about every wealthy collector in the country. And Ewald Anders, with his fifty millions or more and a valuable art collection, was a name I knew well.

“Dr. Nearing,” he said to me over the phone some four months ago, “I’m Ewald Anders. I want to donate some paintings to the museum.”

“We’d be most grateful,” I said, and we made an appointment.

Ewald’s reputation was unsavory, and I was of course aware of it. He placed rackets money, mostly in real estate, and people were afraid to bid against him.

I expected a tough overbearing man, but Ewald was small-boned and delicate. Nevertheless he had a quality that made me keep agreeing with him. And I’m not a yes-man.

“You’re wondering what I’m going to offer you, and why,” he said. “But I guess you know something about my collection.”

I nodded.

“I want you to exhibit a portrait of my deceased wife. My half brother, Swithin St. John, painted it.”

“If I may see it—”

“You don’t have to see it,” he says. “Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of other paintings go with it. Take it or leave it — which?”

“I’ll take it.”

“Naturally. I’m sure you know how my wife was killed. Everybody does. Well, Swithin painted her portrait just before her death. I didn’t get it until afterwards — he claimed he had to put in some finishing touches. Well, I want it out of the house.”

I nodded again.

“Let me tell you something. My wife was the kind of woman who practically begged to be hurt. You’ll find out what I mean when you see the painting. Well, there’s a story going around that I had something to do with her death, but when people see her face they’ll realize why she was killed. She begged for it. Whoever went into her room and took her jewels saw her lying there and stabbed her. He couldn’t help himself.”

“I’m anxious to see that picture,” I said.

Anders’ eyes bore into me. “You’ll hate it,” he said...

The legend that Evelyn Anders would identify her murderer began shortly after the portrait was first exhibited. A clever publicity agent can plant stories like that and, once planted, they flourish. But when I heard reports of sounds, of the moaning of a spirit in agony, I had my doubts and I decided to investigate.

One night I take a flashlight and go through the dimly lit halls to Gallery 18. The low-watt ceiling bulb catches the painted eyes and makes me uncomfortable. Resolutely I take down the painting. Its gilt frame is heavy and it thuds to the floor. Dewey, the night watchman, hears it. He comes thumping through the galleries and arrives out of breath.

“Oh — Dr. Nearing,” he says,

I have my flashlight trained on the back of the picture, and I motion to him. “Come here,” I say, “and look at this.” He does so, and I glance at him. “Well?” I prompt. “What do you think it is?”

“It’s some kind of a mechanism,” he says. “A spring. You can wind it up, and that thing—” he points to a small rasplike piece — “it rubs along the canvas and makes a noise. I guess that there diaphragm picks it up and magnifies it. That’s how the groans are produced.”

“Talking dolls use more or less the same mechanism,” I say.

Dewey makes no comment, but I realize he’s been much too clever in figuring out how this works. I decide to accuse him directly.

“Who pays you to wind this up?” I ask.

Dewey doesn’t answer. “I could fire you for this,” I remind him, “but if you tell me who it is, you can stay on.” Dewey isn’t sure he can trust me, but he has no choice. “Mr. St. John,” he mumbles.

I am not surprised. St. John has a good thing here. He constructed the groaning mechanism and he’d probably been responsible for the story of the portrait concealing a secret. The legend has made him famous.

I tell Dewey to hang the picture again. “No point in talking about this,” I say. “Let’s leave things as they are. Okay?”

“Yes, sir,” he says, and I return to my office...

A month goes by. The moans continue, although less often. I am told that La Flama has visited the museum several times, as have both St. John and Anders. All three come alone and study the portrait, but I neither see nor speak to any of them.

The crowds are beginning to thin out. I’m worried about the drop in attendance, and now that nothing has happened, people are losing interest in the portrait. But I am more fascinated than ever, and I try to avoid looking at the painting. But I cannot.

I visit it regularly, after hours, and one night I make a discovery that disturbs me. I have a flashlight with me, and in its oblique light I discern something pushing through the bluish background. A message? But it is still too vague.

I go there the next night, and the night after that, and gradually I can distinguish that yellowish letters are emerging, and that the second one is a W. There are three or four more letters, but whether the name will turn out to be Swithin or Ewald, only time will tell. And, while up to now no one else has noticed the emerging word, it will soon be all too obvious.

The museum has a photograph of the painting, which is routine with all exhibits, but I take a series of color films with my own camera. I hope that when I develop the roll I’ll be able to trace the day by day emergence of the writing.

I come home one night around midnight. A cop is waiting for me and he tells me they want me back at the museum.

“What for?” I ask.

“They’ll tell you when you get there.”

“Look,” I say. “I’m not going unless you tell me why. I don’t have to go, do I?”

“Mister,” he says, “aren’t you a little curious?”

I am, so I go with him.

There are a half dozen patrol cars in front of the museum and a couple of emergency vehicles. The cop I’m with takes me inside. There are more police in the lobby, and they ask me to wait for Inspector Rogers.

He is a dapper little man and he is strictly business. His voice crackles and his words bite, and the way he pronounces my name rubs me all wrong.

“Dr. Nearing?” he says. “Somebody hacked up the painting of the Anders woman, and we want to know who did it and why. So tell us.”

“Hacked it?”

“That’s what I said. Into ribbons. With a knife.”

I need time to think this out. I know why it was mutilated, but I’m not ready to talk about it. “May I go see the painting?” I ask.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Dr. Nearing, I’m running this and I ask the questions. So who would do a thing like that, and why?”

“What else happened?” I ask. “All these police, the cars outside — you’re not that interested in vandalism, are you?”

“A watchman got killed,” he says. “Knifed. Name of Dewey.”

Murder. That changes everything, and I withhold nothing. I tell Rogers about the groaning mechanism in the back of the picture and about the yellowish letters beginning to appear.

“I’ll send the pieces up to the lab,” he says. “They’ll put them together, and then they can bring out the full name. Just a matter of chemistry.”

“And then what?” I say. “St. John and Anders hate each other and each of them would love to see a murder charge brought against the other. The name you find will merely prove the existence of the grudge. So where will you get with your chemistry?”

“Just leave that to us,” Rogers says.

I glare at him but he merely nods, thanks me, and trots off. Interview over. I stand there and think of what the loss of the painting means. Dwindling crowds, dwindling revenue. If only—

I get a brainstorm, and the idea is so good I don’t want to lose another minute. I go to my office and I call Jacobus.

Jacobus is a Dutch artist who does work for us. He was trained in the best European tradition. He knows paints and techniques. He can imitate a Rembrandt or a Velasquez or a Cezanne, and we use him to restore and touch up. He can duplicate a glaze or a varnish that was used 200 years ago, and do it in such a way that it will age at the same rate as the rest of the picture. So why can’t Jacobus reproduce the portrait of Evelyn Anders?

Over the phone at this hour of the night it takes him a minute or so to wake up. When I explain what I want he asks me if I have a color photograph. I say I have one that I took yesterday, but the film is still in my camera.

That’s fine with him. His hobby is photography. He tells me to bring the camera, he’ll develop the film, and he’ll have the duplicate portrait ready within a day or two. I bring him the camera, then go home to bed.

I wake up early and prepare my publicity release. I state that the painting was miraculously saved, that it will be on display later this week. I say that personally I don’t believe any name will appear, that I don’t think the secret of who killed Evelyn Anders is actually in the painting, but that nevertheless we, the museum officials, are watching the portrait closely.

I figure that my announcement will pull in crowds, and I arrange for extra guards to handle the expected mob. But what I don’t foresee is that Rogers will come down on my neck.

He doesn’t call me personally and doesn’t ask when I’ll be in my office. Instead, a police sergeant phones and informs me that Rogers is on his way and I’m to stay put.

He doesn’t bother even to say hello. As he walks through my doorway he’s asking me what the hell the idea is. I tell him I’m running this museum and I don’t have to explain anything to him.

“You’re trying to use a homicide to attract a crowd,” he says. “Suppose I call a press conference this afternoon and expose your publicity stunt and say we have the painting in the lab right now, and that you’re a fraud.”

I give in and tell him about Jacobus, and Rogers does a complete about-face. “I’d like to work with you on that idea,” he says. “But first, I’d better bring you up to date on where the investigation stands.”

According to Rogers, the killer managed to hide somewhere, perhaps in a closet, when the museum was cleared for the night. He waited until about seven o’clock before he went to Gallery 18. Then he took down the painting and began methodically to cut it up. He was doing a good job of shredding it when he heard Dewey approach. The killer probably stepped to one side of the doorway to Gallery 18. When Dewey came through, the killer knifed him without warning. No sign of a struggle. And when Dewey failed to report in at the conclusion of his regular round, the alarm was sounded, but by that time the killer had escaped. Unseen and unheard.

The police had taken the shambles of the painting and laboriously pasted the pieces on a new canvas. The area with the emerging letters was in ribbons, and it was impossible to develop the individual letters. Nevertheless, the laboratory men analyzed the paint scrapings. They are experienced at this — they are constantly analyzing scraps of paint collected from automobile accidents. They did it spectrographically and have discovered that, although the main background of the portrait was a Prussian-blue oil, the area where the letters were beginning to appear was a phthalocyanine blue, which has a tendency to oxidize after a few months of exposure to air. Furthermore, the phthalocyanine letters were painted directly onto the finished canvas, and not over-painted at any later time.

“Then you have St. John cold,” I say. “You’ve spoken to him, haven’t you?”

Rogers shakes his head. “Not yet. He left town this morning, but I’m having him brought back. I expect to talk to him later on today.”

“Well,” I remark, “he’s the only one who could have painted in the name, so it has to be Ewald’s. Right? He wouldn’t paint in his own.”

Again Rogers doesn’t answer. Instead, he asks a question of his own.

“Where is that reproduction of Jacobus’?” he says. “I’d like to see it.”

“It hasn’t come in yet,” I say. “When it does it will have to hang a few days. I can’t exhibit it until the smell of fresh paint goes away. And as for the name, all Jacobus can do is copy the blur that was there yesterday. And believe me, except for that one clear letter, W — it was just a blur.”

Rogers gets up and leaves. I have some outside appointments, so I leave, too, but I can’t get my mind off the Jacobus copy. Suddenly I wonder exactly what that photograph of mine revealed — the one I gave to Jacobus. For camera lenses sometimes bring out what the eye can’t see, and Jacobus undoubtedly reproduced whatever the camera revealed.

I phone my office. Jacobus has delivered the painting and it’s hanging where the old one used to. For some reason that information sets off a train of thought and now, perhaps for the first time, I think the case through, carefully and logically, and I conclude that there is only one person who could have engineered the murders of both Evelyn Anders and Dewey. But how to prove it?

I’m nervous. I think of Dewey last night. I wonder if it can happen again. The killer must have read that the picture will be shown soon. Does the killer believe that the original has been reconstructed, or does the killer suspect a hoax?

I phone my secretary and I order four of the guards to stay on after the museum has closed. I leave instructions for them to patrol in pairs and to be armed. My secretary suggests that we keep the lights on all night, but I veto the suggestion.

I return to the museum about 7:00 p.m. and immediately take a flashlight and head for Gallery 18. I don’t want the guards to know what I’m doing, so I take off my shoes and walk silently. As I go through the deserted rooms I realize that the guards are not too fond of patrolling. I see no one. I have an eerie feeling — the museum has never seemed so deserted, so utterly quiet.

I make the turn into Gallery 18. I see a figure in front of the Anders portrait. An arm is raised, a knife slashes down and glints in the dim light.

Perhaps I make a noise. More likely some sixth sense warns that figure in black. It turns, sees me. For a fraction of a second it hesitates. Then the figure launches itself at me. It leaps like a panther, silent and deadly. I yell, switch on my flashlight, and jump aside. The beam of the light is blinding. I throw the flashlight at the knife and start to run.

My yell has been heard. Somebody turns on the main lights, and the small lithe figure of a woman comes into view. She swerves, she is no longer bent on killing me. She has to escape, but the maze of galleries confuses her; she dashes to the left and finds herself at a dead end.

She whirls and speeds off like a projectile. Three guards are waiting for her. She leaps high — on the stage she seemed to have soared ten, fifteen feet, but it was an illusion. She hurls herself and lands squarely on a burly guard. The knife clatters, and three men grab La Flama and hold her down. She screams at them in Spanish. I turn around, head for my office, and call the police.

Later on I speak to Rogers. “I guessed it was La Flama,” I say, “because of the Dewey murder. He was old and slow, so why kill him when anybody could have easily escaped in the semidarkness knowing that Dewey’s identification would be shaky at best? But there was enough light for him to tell the difference between a man and a woman, and if Dewey had been left alive to identify the vandal as a woman, La Flama was lost. So she had to kill him.

“As for the murder of Evelyn Anders, here was La Flama with fifty million dollars at stake, and Evelyn in the way. La Flama could climb like a monkey. So — kill Evelyn, and Anders would be free to marry.”

Rogers agreed. ‘‘We’ve been looking for La Flama ever since this afternoon, when I spoke to St. John. He told me that Anders had refused to divorce his wife. She wanted a divorce, she wanted to be free of his domination, but he refused because she was his protection against designing women who wanted to marry him for his money. And La Flama was shrewd, designing, and ruthless.

“St. John had a strong suspicion that La Flama had killed Evelyn, but he had no evidence, no proof. So after the murder and before he delivered the painting, he painted in her name, hoping that between her guilt and her deeply ingrained peasant’s superstition she’d eventually get scared and give herself away.”

“But he didn’t paint her name in,” I say. “The letter was a W — remember?”

“A W is an M,” Rogers says, “when it’s. upside down. And that’s how St. John painted it — upside down. Because everything he ever did was evasive and roundabout. He was afraid to accuse La Flama openly — he could only bring himself to do it indirectly, upside down.”

“M? Of course! La Flama’s real name — Marguerita.”

And I make a notation on my pad to instruct Jacobus to paint in an M so that people can read it clearly. And when the meaning of the initial is revealed, won’t that increase our attendance!