The Mystery of Sinister Scarecrow - M. V. Carey [42]
“It was burned,” said Jupe. “I found a few bits of canvas in the fireplace. I have them in a paper sack in the kitchen. The painting you see is the one that was taken from the museum today. How strange that you didn’t miss it when you identified the other pictures at the harbor tonight.”
“I — I was upset,” said Malz.
“No, you weren’t,” said Jupe. “Actually, you did spot the picture here earlier this evening. You couldn’t fail to spot it. That unfaded strip of wallpaper around the frame is a dead giveaway. That’s what tipped me off to Mrs. Chumley’s involvement in the robbery. It showed that a smaller painting was now hanging on the wall and protecting less of the wallpaper from fading. I knew the original Vermeer was smaller than the student copy. So I deduced Mrs. Chumley now had the painting from the museum—
which she could only have gotten by being in league with the Burroughs couple.
“You had to have seen
the picture was smaller, Mr.
Malz. You had to have known
it came from the museum.
Yet you said nothing.”
“I was too disturbed by the
robbery to notice anything!”
said Gerhart Malz.
“On the contrary,” replied
Jupiter. “You were amazingly
calm after the theft. People
who have been bound and
gagged and locked in closets
aren’t usually so calm. So I
started to wonder about you
— and the painting.”
“I — I was upset,” said Malz again.
“After Mrs. Chumley fled, I examined her picture closely. The paint on the canvas is still a bit tacky. It hasn’t dried to the hardness that old paintings have.
“Mrs. Chumley didn’t notice. She probably never handled the picture herself. And Burroughs and his wife were too busy to notice.
“Mrs. Chumley risked everything she had for the original Vermeer. Perhaps she was tired of living in someone else’s house and looking after someone else’s family.
She wanted something really first-rate for herself. What she got was a forgery!
“And since she got a forgery, Mr. Malz, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that many of the pictures stolen today are forgeries — excellent copies done by a man who can imitate the style of any painter?” Jupe caught his breath and went on. “You were going on vacation on Friday. I think you were going to take the genuine masterpieces with you and leave forgeries in their places. After today’s theft, you wanted to keep things calm. You didn’t dare draw attention to Mrs. Chumley’s smaller painting.
Someone might notice it was a fake instead of the original.
“When the other paintings were retrieved from the Burroughs couple, you didn’t dare report the Vermeer missing. You’d have started a hunt for it that would have ended here in Mrs. Chumley’s room. You knew you could slip the original Vermeer back into the museum. With luck, no one would be the wiser. No one would have any reason to suspect the authenticity of it or the other pictures.
“But you haven’t had luck. Now the pictures will all be examined by experts.
You’ll be exposed. Where are the original paintings from the Mosby collection? In the apartment you keep in Santa Monica?”
Chief Reynolds went to the picture hanging over the mantel. He touched it, looked at his fingers, then turned to Malz. “We’ll get a search warrant,” he said.
Malz glared at Jupe. “You rotten kid,” he said.
Jupe ignored him. “It’s ironic,” he said. “Burroughs and his wife went to endless trouble to commit their crime. And what they got was a beautiful collection of fakes.
But how could they have known that a master forger had been there ahead of them?”
Chapter 23
Mr. Hitchcock Reads The File
“IT IS REASSURING WHEN justice triumphs,” said Alfred Hitchcock.
The famous motion picture director sat in his office with a file that Bob had given him open on his desk. He nodded approvingly at The Three Investigators. “You are to be congratulated,” he said. “Not everyone would have suspected that two sets of criminals were working on the same crime at the same time. Of course the methods differed greatly. However magnificent the