The Brass Go-Between

Chapter eleven

Frances Wingo was prompt. She knocked on my door at two thirty-five the following day, Thursday, which meant that she had flown by private plane or had caught the one o’clock shuttle from Washington and that it had had no trouble landing and that taxis had been plentiful at LaGuardia.

“Come in,” I said.

“Thank you.” She came in, carrying with some difficulty an inexpensive man’s two-suiter in her left hand. A striped blue and white raincoat was draped over her right arm.

“Heavy?” I said, reaching for the suitcase.

She let me have it, a little reluctantly, I thought. “Heavy,” she said. I turned in the room, wondering where to put the suitcase, which seemed to weigh between 55 and 60 pounds. I finally decided to put it in the tub in the bathroom. Before I put it there, I weighed it on the scale. Fifty-eight pounds.

When I came back out she said, “Why there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s because it would be the last place I would look if I were looking for it.”

“Aren’t you going to count it?”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Did you look at it?”

“Yes.”

“Pretty?”

“Not particularly.”

“Since you don’t care much for money, maybe you’d care for a drink.”

“I think I would.”

“Bourbon or Scotch?”

“Bourbon.”

“Pick out a chair,” I said. “Or the couch. They’re all about the same.”

“Thank you.” She draped her raincoat over a wingbacked chair and sank into it. She wore a blue dress that was neither too complicated nor too simple, blue shoes that seemed to both match and complement the dress, and in her lap she held a blue purse that seemed to be made of the same leather as the shoes. When I turned from mixing the drinks she was slowly surveying the room and she managed not to grimace at the prints on the wall which had been supplied by the color-blind management of the Adelphi.

“Horrible, aren’t they?” I said as I handed her a drink.

“A bit.”

“The management’s choice.”

“Not yours?”

“No. I’m still hung up on Maxfield Parrish.”

“He was 96 when he died. In 1966.”

“Do you like Parrish?” I said.

“No. Do you?”

“Probably because I know I shouldn’t.”

“Double reverse snobbism.”

“Really? I never thought of it like that.” I was seated on the couch opposite her. I put my drink on the glass-topped coffee table and lit a cigarette. “I’m sorry you couldn’t make it for lunch.”

She didn’t bother to make an excuse. “Will you get it back today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Haven’t they been in touch with you again?”

“No.”

“Will they?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you plan to do, or do you believe in plans?”

I took a swallow of my drink. “I’m going to rent a car. I don’t own a car, you know. I’m going to rent a car and drive to the third Howard Johnson on the Jersey Turnpike. I’m going to check in by six o’clock this evening accompanied by fifty-eight pounds of used tens and twenties. I will sit by the phone until they tell me what they want me to do. Then I will do precisely that because if I don’t, I could wind up just like your husband. Dead.”

She was either a very good actress or she didn’t know what I was talking about. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me, Mr. St. Ives. What does my husband have to do — or what connection is there between his death and the shield?” There wasn’t a blink, or a tremor, or even that oversupply of calmness which most good liars have. She merely sat there, a politely interested look on her face, as if she had just asked whether I thought she should take the four or the five o’clock shuttle back to Washington.

“Your husband was an addict. A junkie. He didn’t die from the wreck he was in. He died from a massive overdose of heroin.”

That didn’t bother her either. She smiled slightly; it was a cool, almost pitying smile. “You seem inordinately interested in my husband, Mr. St. Ives. Why?”

“Maybe I’m interested in knowing what kind of man would marry someone like you. Or rather, what kind of man would you consent to marry. Somehow a junkie doesn’t fit.”

“Is it really any of your business?”

I put my drink down on the glass-topped table with a clatter. “You’re damned right it’s my business. One person has already died because of this shield, two if you count his wife who hanged herself. Now with your husband dead from an overdose of heroin, I think the score is now three dead and I don’t want me to make it four.” I purposely left out Spellacy although his death would have helped to run up the total.

“You do become belligerent, don’t you?”

“It’s only one of many failings.”

“You should try to correct it.”

“I’ll work on it this Fall. You think group therapy might help?”

“I’m sure it would do you a world of good.”

“You knew he was an addict?”

“Yes,” she said. “I knew. It would be most difficult not to know.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“I never inquired.”

“How’d he pay for it?”

“May I have one of your cigarettes? I quit smoking three years ago, but—” If this was a crack in her composure, it was a small one. She sat in the wingbacked chair, the barely tasted drink on a table, her hands folded over the blue purse in her lap. I rose and offered her a. cigarette and lit it for her. She inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke out in a thin stream.

“Silly, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Wanting something like that suddenly, wanting it so bad that — well, never mind.” She inhaled some more smoke and blew it out. “I’m going to tell you about my husband, Mr. St. Ives. I’m going to tell you about him because I don’t want you poking around in my life. There are too many snoops abroad in the land today who seem bent on destroying privacy. I resent it. I wholeheartedly subscribe to the right to be let alone, as someone phrased it several years ago. So after I tell you about my husband, I sincerely hope that you will do just that — let me alone.”

She paused, as if expecting me to assure her that I would take the next plane to El Paso and never come back once she had told me about her husband. I only nodded.

“My husband, before he became addicted, was not only a brilliant artist, he was also — or could have been — one of the nation’s leading museum directors or curators. He studied with Paul Sachs at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard in the early 1940’s. He was very young then, no more than a precocious sixteen or seventeen, and in 1943 he joined the Marines and saw action as a combat artist, I think they called them, at Iwo Jima where he did an unusually good series of water colors which were reproduced in Life and which brought him nationwide attention. After his discharge from the Marines he was offered a post as director of a small but good museum in the Midwest. From there he went to a better position in Chicago and then to New York as head of a private museum. It doesn’t matter to you which one, does it?”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

“We met here in New York at some party. I had wanted to paint, but I wasn’t good enough to be good and I had enough sense to realize it. So I did the next best thing. I turned to museum work. George was extremely helpful. He was painting almost every spare moment that he could find and he was good. Terribly good. Some of his friends who had seen his work begged him to hold an exhibition, but he always refused, claiming that the time wasn’t quite right. When I finished my studies we were married and I was appointed director of a small museum here in New York — largely on George’s recommendation. A few years later the offer came from the Coulter Museum. He turned it down.”

“He?” I said.

“Yes. They wanted George. He recommended me. Strongly. And with a few misgivings on Mr. Spencer’s part, I was hired.”

“Why did he turn it down?”

She shrugged. “He’d decided that he no longer was interested in museum work. He wanted to paint full time. I agreed, of course, and we moved to Washington. The salary was more than adequate and for a while things worked out quite well.”

“Then what?”

“George went into a deep depression. He stopped painting, drank too much, sometimes disappeared for days at a time. Finally, about a year and a half ago, he told me that he was addicted to heroin. I don’t know when it really began; he would never tell me.”

“How big was his habit?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. How much did it cost him a day?”

“Toward the end it was around two hundred dollars.”

“Where did he get it?”

“He sold his paintings. All of them, one by one. They brought very good prices. As I said, he was brilliant.”

“But he finally ran out of paintings.”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“I gave him money.”

“For how long?”

“Several months.”

“Until it ran out?”

“Yes.”

“Then?”

“Then one day he said that he didn’t need any more money. That he’d found a private supply of heroin.”

“When was this?”

“Two months ago, perhaps two and a half months.”

“How many people knew about it?”

“About what?”

“His addiction.”

“Not many. His doctor. A few old friends who’d moved to Washington when Kennedy was elected. Mr. Spencer. I told him; I thought it only fair.”

“What did Spencer say?”

“He was most understanding and sympathetic. He even offered to pay for George’s treatment in a private sanitarium.”

“What happened?”

“George refused.”

“What did Spencer say then?”

“Nothing. He never mentioned it again.”

“And that’s all who knew — a few friends and Spencer?”

“Yes.”

“There was somebody else,” I said.

“Who?”

“The guy who furnished the private supply.”