Nobody’s Perfect by Donald Westlake

“Oh, sure.” Kelp then looked slightly pained and said, “Maybe the other guys could do some of that, huh? I spent more time in cars the last two months than A. J. Foyt.”

“Oh, naturally,” Dortmunder said. “We’ll all take our turns.”

“Good,” said Kelp, and then there was a little silence.

Dortmunder sniffed. He rubbed a knuckle against his nose. He hitched his pants. “Kum, kak,” he said, and coughed, and cleared his throat.

Kelp said, “What?” He was leaning forward, looking alert and helpful.

“Urn,” said Dortmunder. He stuck his finger in his ear and jiggled it, looking for wax. He took a deep breath. He put his hands behind his back and clasped them together tight. “Thanks, uh, Andy,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” Kelp said. “Don’t mention it.”

Chapter 8

“That’s pretty good,” Dortmunder said.

Griswold Porculey gave him a look. “Pretty good? Dortmunder, I’ll tell you what this is. It’s a work of genius.”

“I said it was pretty good,” Dortmunder said.

They were both right. The nearly finished painting on Porculey’s easel was an incredible piece of work, a forgery so brilliant, so detailed, that it suggested true genius perhaps did reside within the unlikely corpus of Griswold Porculey after all, just as genius has so often in the past chosen other unlikely vessels for its abode. The paint-smeared hand holding the paint-smeared brush, the bleary washed-out eye observing the work, these had turned a lumpish array of pigment into a painting Jan Veenbes himself might have been proud to claim.

Tacked and taped on the wall to Porculey’s left were nearly two dozen representations of Folly Leads Man to Ruin, ranging from full-size photographic reproductions to reduced-size copies torn from art books. The differences in color and detail among these many imitations were enough to discourage the most determined copyist, but somehow Porculey had maneuvered this minefield and had made so many right choices that Dortmunder, looking at the almost-completed work, thought he was seeing an exact duplicate of the painting in Arnold Chauncey’s sitting room. He wasn’t, of course, but the differences, though pervasive, were minute.

Porculey was contemplating now that darkness in the lower right, where the road curved away and down a dim slope. This was the most difficult part because it was the vaguest, with the least specific detail and yet it was far from being a featureless wash of umbra. It was a peopled gloom, its obscurity filled with faintly seen writhings, hints of grotesquerie, suggestions of shape and form and movement. Porculey’s brush moved cautiously over these deeps, touching lightly, pausing, returning, moving on.

It was early April, three weeks since Kelp had finally found the killer, and Dortmunder was back in this garret-boutique for the first time since that night in December when Porculey had thrown such cold water on Kelp’s original idea. Dortmunder had wanted to return, several times, to see for himself what Porculey was up to, but his exploratory phone calls to the painter had received unrelenting negatives. “I don’t want a lot of amateurs breathing down my neck,” Porculey had said, and when Dortmunder had tried to point out it was his own neck that was being breathed down, and by a professional killer at that, Porculey had merely said, “I’ll call you when there’s something to see,” and had hung up on him.

So it came as a surprise this morning, and a very happy one, when Porculey himself had gotten in touch, calling Dortmunder at home and saying, “If you still want to see what I’m doing, come along.”

“I will, right away.”

“You can bring your partners, if you want.”

But Dortmunder hadn’t wanted; this painting was too important to him, and he preferred to see it without a lot of conversation going on all over the place. “I’ll come by myself,” he said.

“Up to you. Bring a bottle of wine, you know the stuff.” So Dortmunder had brought a gallon of Hearty Burgundy, some of which Cleo Marlahy had at once poured into the usual disparity of drinking vessels, and now he stood holding his white mug of wine and watching Porculey’s brush make small tentative decisions on the surface of the painting. In the last four months, it seemed, laboring away in his shopping-center sanctuary, Porculey had been bringing forth a miracle.

Which he was willing to talk about. Stepping back from the easel, frowning at that troublesome darkness in the lower right, he said, “Do you know how I did it?”

Porculey nodded. “I began,” he explained, continuing to brood at the painting as he spoke, “with research. The Frick has one Veenbes, and three more hang in the Metropolitan. I studied those four, and I looked at every copy of them I could find.”

Dortmunder said, “Copies? Why?”

“Every artist has his own range of colors. His palette. I wanted to see how Veenbes’ other pictures reproduced, to help me get back to the original colors in this one.”

“I get the idea,” Dortmunder said. “That’s pretty good.”

Cleo, sipping her wine and musing at Porculey and the painting as though she herself had invented both and was pleased with the result of her labors, said, ‘Porky’s had a wonderful time with this. He got to rage and carry on and throw things and make disgusting statements about art, and then preen himself at being better than anybody.”

“Better than most, at any rate,” Porculey said comfortably. His brush tip, having grazed briefly at his palette, darted out at the gloom again, altered it infinitesimally. “Because I did more than just dry research,” he went on. “I looked at the paintings, but more than that I tried to look through them, past them. I tried to see Veenbes in his studio, approaching the canvas. I wanted to see how he held his brush, how he stroked the paint into place, how he made his decisions, his changes. Did you know his brush strokes move diagonally upward to the left? That’s very rare, you might think he was left-handed, but there are two portraits done by his contemporaries that show him at his easel with the brush in his right hand.”

Dortmunder said, “What difference does it make?”

“It changes the way the picture takes the light,” Porculey told him. “Where it reflects, and how the eye is led through the story.”

All of which was over Dortmunder’s head. “Well, whatever you did,” he said, “it looks terrific.”

Porculey was pleased. Smiling briefly over his shoulder, he said, “I wanted to wait till I had something worth showing. You see that, don’t you?”

“Sure. And it’s just about done, huh?”

“Oh, yes. Another two or three weeks, probably no more.” Dortmunder stared at the back of Porculey’s head, then at the painting. “Two or three weeks? That’s a whole painting there already, you could fool a lot of people the way it is right now.”

“But not Arnold Chauncey,” Porculey said. “Not even for a second. I did some research on your customer while I was about it, and you chose a difficult man to fool. He isn’t just another culture merchant, buying and selling works of art as though they were coin collections. He’s a connoisseur, be knows art, and he certainly knows his own paintings.”

“You’re making me unhappy,” Dortmunder said.

Cleo, friendly and sympathetic, was immediately at his elbow, holding up the glass jug of wine. “Have some more,” she suggested. “Everything’ll work out. Porky’s doing you proud.”

“It isn’t Pork, uh, Porculey I’m worried about,” Dortmunder told her. “I got talked into another Andy Kelp Special, that’s what I’m worried about.”

“Seems like a nice fellow, Kelp,” Porculey said.

“Doesn’t he,” said Dortmunder.

Porculey stepped back to give his work the critical double-O. “You know,” he said, “I really am quite good at this sort of thing. Better even than those twenties. I wonder if there’s a future in it.”

“There’s ten thousand from us,” Dortmunder reminded him, “if the scheme works and we get Chauncey’s money. That’s the only future I know about.”

“Ah,” Porculey said, “but what if I took my knowledge of Veenbes, his subject matter, his palette, his style, and what if I did a Veenbes of my own? Not a copy, but a brand-new painting. Unknown old masters crop up all the time, why not one by me?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Dortmunder said.

Porculey nodded, thinking it over. “A lot better than drawing twenties,” he said. “Very dull, that was. No palette at all. A few greens, a black, and that’s it. But a Veenbes, now.” His eyes were half-closed, no longer seeing the semi-Veenbes in front of him. “A medieval convent,” he said. “Stone walls and floor. Candles. The nuns have just removed their habits… .”

Chapter 9

Eight days later, Dortmunder entered the main borough office of the Unemployment Insurance Division and waited his turn to be inspected by the guard just inside the door. The guard was examining the purse of a woman client in search of guns or bombs or other expressions of political discontent, and he was in no hurry to finish. Dortmunder was dressed today in dark green work pants, a flannel jacket and a heavy workman’s belt festooned with tools, and he was carrying a clipboard.

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