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  "Both Mr. Lassiter and that Raymond woman tried to buy it. And it's only logical to figure it was the one your pet thugs wanted."

  "But how can you connect Miss Raymond with the others?"

  "Because she wanted that painting before she came in here, and tried to pretend she didn't. I watched her. Any ordinary person would have looked at that painting first, because of its wild colors and because it's hanging in the most prominent place in the room. But she never even peeked at it until she studied every other painting first. She was covering up."

  "Maybe she was afraid you would do just what you did— raise the price on her. That would explain why she covered up her interest in that picture. As for her wanting that one before she came in, that's easy. She saw the photo in the newspaper and was attracted by one of the paintings. So she came in and tried to buy it. What's wrong with that?"

  Nancy giggled and said, "Take a look at the newspaper photo."

  I knew what she had in mind, but she was wrong. I got the newspaper and opened it to the third page and started to point out how plainly that weird painting showed up. I blinked. It didn't show up at all. I remembered, now, that it hadn't been lined up with the other Accardi paintings. It had been leaning against a tree, out of camera range, when the photographer took the shots.

  "See?" Nancy said, and giggled again.

  I refused to give her the satisfaction of an answer. She was a

  nice girl, but she could add to her charm by being wrong more often.

  6.

  At a lot of one-man shows, people drop in for a few minutes and then hurry out to get revived at the nearest cocktail lounge. That could have happened to us that night, but it didn't.

  The first arrivals wandered in and were slapped in the eyes by that weird Accardi painting, all by itself on one wall. Maybe they would have sniffed in disgust and moved on, but something else caught their attention. It was a neat little sign, announcing loftily: SOLD. Nancy had put it up just before the show opened. That seemed to insult everybody's intelligence. The first group of arrivals stayed around to complain about that painting to the next group. Pretty soon somebody began praising it, just to be different. Small arguments flared and spread like flames in dry grass. The arguments fanned out to take in all the Accardi paintings: "Brilliant . . . childish . . . great future . . . ought to hang the painter instead of the paintings . . . fine fresh outlook . . . worst insult to art since Duchamp put that moustache on the Mona Lisa . . ."

  One man bought a painting to prove he was right. Another bought one to prove somebody else was wrong. By nine-thirty we had sold five of the canvases.

  Of course not everybody was excited. Sheldon Thorp was drifting around the room as if looking for a place to take a nap. He paused beside me once and yawned and said that the most artistic things in the show were the price tags Nancy had lettered. Kay Raymond, Interiors, was floating around too. She had changed to a light yellow pleated frock and wore a clutch cape of natural mink around her shoulders. She seemed to be talking to quite a few people, and I got curious and listened. The girl

  had a lot of nerve. At my show, she was drumming up some interior decorating jobs.

  There was so much loud talk that for a time I paid no attention to an even louder voice. But finally I began catching the words. Somebody was pushing through the crowd, saying in an angry tone, "Where's this guy Meadows? ... I want to see Meadows. . . . Where do I find this Meadows?"

  I cut through the mob and saw a young guy facing away from me, repeating his question. I tapped his shoulder. He turned quickly. "Yeah?" he said. "Yeah?"

  For a moment all I could do was stare. I had seen him before: slick black hair, hot eyes, lean hungry face. That was the face in the two self-portraits hanging on the wall near me. It was another face, too. It was the one that had flickered briefly across the face of my television tube the night before. This was Nick Accardi.

  "All right," he snapped. "What's wrong with you, bud?"

  "Hello, Accardi," I said. "You're looking for me. I'm Pete Meadows."

  "Oh, you are, huh?" His voice was softer now, but it seemed to carry. People were stopping their own talk to listen. He backed away a step, looked me over. "You're the big promoter, are you?"

  I didn't quite know what to make of him. "Your show is a hit," I said. "Congratulations."

  "This isn't my show, bud. Who said you could put one on for me?"

  Before I could reply, Nancy popped out of the crowd and cried, "Why Nick! How wonderful you managed to get here!"

  "Let's just say I got here," he said.

  I told Nancy, "He was just asking who said I could put on this show for him. He didn't sound happy about it."

  "Not happy?" Nancy said. "Nick, you ought to be tickled to death! Your paintings were on sale at the Clothesline Art Exhibit and—"

  "Nobody had a right to put them on sale," he said. "I got be-

  hind in the rent and let the landlady keep them for security. I didn't say she could sell the things."

  "You didn't have to say so," I told him. "Your landlady had a bill of sale. Why don't you calm down? You're going to make out all right from this."

  "I'm gonna make out all right, the guy says. A lousy stinking cheating art dealer says I'm gonna make out all right. You—"

  Nancy cried, "You ought to be ashamed, Nick. I don't know what's wrong with you. Pete is doing you a favor and—"

  "You're a good kid," Nick said. "I like you. But this guy is playing you for a sucker. You don't know art dealers. They're all crooks. They all got angles." He turned to me and said, "Okay, bud, pull this junk down from the walls. I'm taking it away with me."

  The room was very quiet now except for the crackle of Ac-cardi's voice. People had moved back from us and formed a circle. It felt odd to face him like that. Maybe the guy he had fought last night had felt the same way I did, watching Ac-cardi staring at him from those hot black eyes. Maybe that was why he hadn't lasted long.

  "Let's go in my office and talk it over," I said.

  "Want your dough, do you?" he said. "Well, I brought it, all you're gonna get. The paper said you paid a hundred and fifty bucks. Here you are." He pulled out a wad of bills and threw them at my feet.

  "Don't be silly," Nancy gasped. "We've sold five of your paintings for more than a thousand dollars. It's all yours, Nick."

  "I don't want any part of it! Do you think I'd sell this junk you got here? It stinks. It's no good. I'll wait till I start doing decent work before I sell it." He swung around to me. "All right, bud, pick up that dough." He stepped close and grabbed the lapels of my coat. "Or would you rather have me stuff it down your throat?" he said softly.

  I don't know what made me do it. Maybe it was the garlic on his breath. "Why don't you try?" I said.

  He took a quick step back. If I had waited to see him start the punch I would never have seen it land. I didn't wait. I threw

  a roundhouse right. There were a lot of things in that punch: my forearm and shoulder and the swing of my body and all the piled-up anger at things that had gone wrong in the last twenty-four hours. It caught him on the cheekbone, slammed him back into the crowd. He bounced off people as if they were the ropes in a ring and charged at me. All of a sudden there were screams and a wild scramble and we both went down in a tangle of arms and legs.

  Then the lights went out.

  The place went nuts for a minute. I was trying to choke Ac-cardi and doing pretty well at it but then he managed to shout something and it wasn't Accardi at all but one of our leading art critics. This was a chance I'd been waiting for a long time, but I restrained myself. I merely bumped his head once against the floor, not hard enough to jar any of his screwy ideas loose, and let him go and wriggled away and got up. There was an awful lot of milling around and yelling, but some light was coming in from the shop and it helped me work my way to the switch in the exhibit room. I tried to flip the thing. It only moved halfway, and stuck. I worked on it for a few seconds and then felt something at
the base of the switch that was holding it back. I tugged at the object. It was a small stiff piece of wire, doubled on itself. I yanked it out and snapped the switch. The lights came on.

  The crowd began sorting itself out and calming down a little and then Nancy let out a scream. "It's gone!" she cried. "It's been stolen!"

  Something made me look at the wall where Accardi's nightmare painting had been hanging. The wooden stretcher was there, but now it only bracketed a neat rectangle of wall. The painting had been cut off it. It was gone. And so, a glance told me, was Accardi.

  I pushed through the crowd and went into the shop where Miss Krim had been stationed to greet visitors. She reported that Accardi ran from the exhibit room to the street just before the lights went back on. At that time she had been in the office, looking for a new fuse to replace the one which she figured had

  blown out. She hadn't noticed whether or not he had a rolled-up canvas. Of course she couldn't have seen the thing if it had been under his coat.

  He had a good headstart and there was no use trying to chase him. Besides, I wouldn't have known what to do if I had caught the guy. He wasn't likely to swoon if I laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. He was more likely to lay a heavy punch on my jaw. And, on top of everything, I was glad to get rid of that painting.

  Nancy came into the office, sniffling a little, and said, "Oh, it was so awful. Our lovely show was going so well and—what ever got into Nick?"

  "I haven't time to play twenty questions," I said. "We have a bunch of people on our hands who may be upset. Let's go back and say soothing things."

  I went back into the exhibit room and began apologizing to people. It turned out that no apologies were needed. The one-man show on the walls had been entertaining but the two-man show on the floor had been a smash hit. People hadn't enjoyed culture so much since that tenor walked offstage and let Carmen die with nobody to care. Everyone was talking a mile a minute, and the art critics from the papers were rushing around getting names and quotes, drunk with the knowledge that they were going to get on page one.

  The place didn't clear out until after eleven, and by that time all the Accardi paintings had been sold. Finally no one was around but Sheldon Thorp, Nancy, Miss Krim and me. Sheldon wanted to take Nancy out for a drink, but she said she would take a rain check. Sheldon left, and Miss Krim began closing up the place so she could go home too.

  "That was quite an evening," Nancy said. "Now what are we going to do about Nick and his painting?"

  "Personally," I said, "I plan to stay away from him. I think I used up my luck on that one punch."

  "I meant to mention that to you, Pete. Did you have to hit him? And so hard?"

  My biceps fluttered in pride. "If I'd given him a chance," I said modestly, "he could probably have hit me much harder."

  "But you're bigger than he is."

  "Bigger! The guy's a professional fighter! If I had given him the first crack, I'd still be crawling around trying to find where my head rolled. Why was he so sore at me?"

  "I don't know. I admit he gets angry too quickly. He sort of carries a chip on his shoulder."

  "That's no chip. That's a whole woodpile."

  "Well, anyway, what are we going to do about his painting?"

  "He can keep it as far as I'm concerned."

  She looked at me with her blue eyes as big as pansies. "But he didn't take it!"

  "Whoa. It's all right to defend the guy, but that's going too far."

  "I'm not defending him. He didn't take it. How could he? You were down there on the floor beating him up and somebody saw a chance to switch off the light and cut the painting off the stretcher and steal it. You admit he couldn't have turned off the light."

  "Maybe a friend did it for him."

  "Pete," she said seriously, "I'm really the only friend he has, and I didn't do it."

  "Then why did he run?"

  "Maybe he figured somebody would try to steal the painting, and so he broke away from you and hunted for the painting and found it had been taken. Then maybe he ran outside looking for the thief."

  "Nobody else had left, though."

  "But Nick didn't know that. He might have chased after somebody on the street. Then later he would be afraid to come back, realizing that he would look like the guilty party."

  "That describes him accurately. Those paintings he did of himself ought to be titled: 'Self-Portrait of a Guilty Party.'"

  "You make me furious! You're not trying to help at all. You just stand there acting superior, and tossing a bobby pin up and catching it. That's a silly thing to do. I wish you'd stop."

  "Huh?" I said. I looked down at my right hand. As a matter

  of fact there was a small bent piece of wire in it. "This is a bobby pin?"

  "Yes. What are you doing with it? With that ridiculous hair of yours you couldn't possibly use a bobby pin. And anyway only women use them."

  "I suppose I got it out of my pocket. Why do you suppose I had it there?"

  "Maybe you ought to ask a psychiatrist. It seems very odd that-"

  "Got it!" I cried. "This was jammed in the electric light switch, so the lights couldn't be turned on quickly. It took me a few seconds to get it out."

  "Ah-h-h," Nancy said happily. "That proves Nick wasn't involved. And of course it tells us exactly who did it."

  "Maybe it tells you but it hasn't spoken to me yet."

  "I know just how the painting left here. Under a natural mink clutch cape. I thought she was swaggering more than usual when she walked out. I remember thinking to myself, there goes that cat in mink."

  "If I had thoughts like that, I'd try to forget them."

  "I'm talking about Kay Raymond, Interiors."

  "So I gathered. Just because she's a smooth looking dame, you suspect her."

  "Just because she's a smooth looking dame, you don't. Oh, Pete, she has to be the thief. There are five people who've been after that painting. Ludwig Lassiter, and the two men who beat you up last night, and Nick, and Kay Raymond. She's the only one who would have a bobby pin. Perfectly logical."

  "Maybe you have a slight case, but what do we do about it?"

  She said firmly, "You call on her tonight, and get that painting back."

  "Me?" I said, in horror.

  "Certainly. And you have to do it tonight, before she can get rid of it or anything."

  "Hmm," I said thoughtfully. "Me." When you came right down to it, the prospect of calling on Kay Raymond wasn't really horrible.

  "She'll know you suspect her, but she won't dare refuse to see you. She'd be afraid that would make her look guilty. But if I went, she'd probably yawn in my face and shut the door."

  "What do I say to the dame?"

  "Oh Pete, how do I know? What does a man say when he wants to get something out of a woman?"

  "You're asking the wrong guy. What I say usually gets a big round no."

  She said impatiently, "You'd better start learning what to say. And that Raymond creature ought to be an easy person to practice on."

  "I would think," I grumbled, "that she's more in the nature of a post-graduate course. However. . ."

  We went into the office and looked up her address in the phone book. Her residence was listed as the Rittenhouse Arms, one of the big new apartment hotels on the square. I told Nancy I would give it a try, and headed for the place.

  The elevator let me out on the sixth floor of the apartment building and the operator showed me where to go. As I rang the bell beside her door I was feeling a bit foolish. After all, I couldn't rush in and turn her place upside down looking for the stolen painting. And I didn't have any real facts I could use to bully her. All I could do was hope that the girl would make a mistake that could be turned against her.

  The door opened a couple of inches and showed me a dark eye and eyelashes about the size of palm fronds. A voice with cracked mandolin chords in it said, "Yes?"

  "Hello, Miss Raymond," I said. "May I talk to you for a few minutes?"

>   "Well, it's Peter Meadows," she said. Her tone seemed to pat me on the head and put me in a junior size playsuit. "Isn't it late for you to be on the town?"

  "I often get daring and stay up until midnight. I want to talk to you. About that stolen painting."

  The door opened wider. She was wearing a pale red housecoat that fit closely at her slim waist and flared out in a wide skirt. The material looked thin and glossy, and where it touched her

  body it gave the impression of firelight on bare flesh. Her hair made a black silk backdrop for her face and white throat. There was a bobby pin holding the hair back from each of her temples.

  Her lips moved in a small crimson smile and she said, "Was it really stolen? I thought you and Miss Vernon and the painter staged the whole thing. It seemed like such a cute promotion stunt."

  "No," I said, "it was just a plain old case of larceny. I thought you might be able to help me pin down the thief. In fact—" I took a wild guess "—you were standing rather close to the light switch when somebody turned it off. Maybe you can remember who it was."

  "I'm sure I can't help, but come in."

  She moved away from the door and I walked in. There was a short hallway leading to the right and left, and Miss Raymond turned to the right into the living room. I gave the door a shove to close it and followed her. The living room walls were pale yellow and the furniture was black and there was a creamy-white rug on the floor. The windows were draped in a darker yellow than the color of the walls. Here and there were plants with shiny leaves in black-glazed jars. The walls were bare except for a couple of African masks left over from somebody's bad dream.

  "You like my masks?" she said. "That one is a portrait of a Nigerian queen, probably of the Benin kingdom about four hundred years ago. And this is an animal mask from the Ivory Coast. The natives believed that if you wore it, the spirit of the animal moved into your body. I think it represents a leopard."