The Death Artist Page 13

  It was enough to send her reeling. Then something stirred near the back row of the auditorium, distracting her. Kate squinted into the grayness.

  A young man slowly made his way down the aisle. He stopped by the first row, leaned on his long-handled broom. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  She took him in: late twenties, sideburns like General Custer’s, a drooping mustache, sandy hair, handsome. “You work at the museum long?”

  “About six months. I’m an artist. Just doin’ this to pay the rent, you know, until the big show comes along.”

  “I’m sure it will.” Kate returned his smile, couldn’t help herself. His eyes were a cool sky blue. “What’s your name?”

  “David Wesley.” He extended a hand. “Hey, I know you. You’re the woman who did that series, Artists’ Lives. Really cool. I’ve got your book, too.” He got shy a moment, or pretended to. “I’d, uh, love to show you my paintings sometime.”

  “I’d be happy to do that. You should send me slides of your work.”

  The artist beamed.

  “Do you happen to work here on Sundays?”

  “ ’Fraid I do.” He sighed, brushing the sandy hair off his forehead. “Sunday through Thursday you can find me here pushin’ a broom, polishing floors, like that. Exciting, huh?”

  “So you’re here for the Sunday events?”

  He looked down at his heavy work boots. “I’m usually gone before they start. I finish at five.”

  “What about last Sunday? Elena Solana.”

  “I read about what happened. Bummer.”

  “So you were not here.”

  He scratched his ear. “Actually, I was.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t normally stay for the events.”

  “Well, I happened to meet her when she came in, Elena Solana. She was a fox, you know. So I hung around.”

  “And you stayed through the performance?”

  “Yeah. Thought I’d get lucky.”

  “And you did?”

  “Not.” He shook his head. “She blew me off. Said she was tired.”

  Kate waited a moment, but he offered nothing else. “You know, I’m thinking about a new art book, maybe even a new TV series. I should see your work.”

  “Anytime.”

  Kate pulled out a pad and pen, handed them over. “Write down your address and phone number.”

  The young artist was so excited he could barely write. Kate watched him grip the pen so tight his knuckles went white. He’d leave a perfect set of prints. But how to get it back from him without getting her own all over it? She plucked a tissue from her bag, dabbed at her nose.

  “There.” The guy offered up the pen, the pad, and a dazzling smile.

  Kate scooped the pen into the tissue before he noticed. “Great,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  16

  Outside, the sun was glinting off the glass and steel of Fifty-seventh Street buildings, blue sky and puffy white clouds a reassuring sign that spring might actually make an appearance.

  Kate zigzagged through a parade of women with shopping bags from Bendel’s and Saks, past window displays of rare estate jewelry. Last week, it might have distracted her. But not today.

  She should get that pen to the lab, and had to follow up on those date books from Mills and Perez. But right now she needed to clear her head. To think. And she knew just the place to do it.

  Raphael, Rubens, Delacroix.

  Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt.

  Room after room of great paintings.

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Kate nodded at a guard, smiled, moved into a room of Baroque painting, her attention drawn by Poussin’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, the figures frozen in action like actors on a stage. Poussin, she knew, actually worked from modeled clay figures that he moved around a small stagelike setting of his own creation.

  At the moment it was too reminiscent of another artist—one who peopled his re-creations with the dead.

  Damn it. Would she ever be able to view art without thinking of his brutal and sadistic replicas?

  In a side room, a small show of prints by Edvard Munch, etchings of his most famous work, The Scream, a woodcut called Anxiety—stark-white faces against a black ground—and two lithographs Kate knew well: Funeral March, which looked like a mass of dead bodies; and Death Chamber—a group of mourners, all in black, standing or sitting, mute and solemn.

  She thought about that last year—her father fighting to die, but somehow living past the stroke that had left half his body paralyzed, his speech slurred. The father she had so feared—and, yes, loved—replaced in those last months by some frail, almost gentle stranger. Who would believe that this sickly old man—the man she cooked and cleaned for after her mother died—could be capable of such cruelty, of the beatings he rained on his young daughter? And why? A dozen or more years on a shrink’s couch and Kate was still not sure. Did he blame her for the loss of his wife? Didn’t he know that his wife was also her mother?

  Still, there had been no question that she would be the one to dispense the pills, keep his ever-deteriorating body clean, empty the bedpans, rub ointment on his bedsores, and, eventually, inject the lethal dose of morphine into the vein of his right arm.

  The next room was all Titian and Veronese, large-scale paintings, grand and ornate. Kate was immediately reminded of the master’s late, great masterpiece, The Flaying of Marsyas, and with that, the body of Ethan Stein.

  Damn.

  Kate turned, practically bumped into a young man—worn leather jacket, shaggy hair, in need of a shave. He smiled.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  She watched him a moment, wondered, Was this the sort of guy Elena went for? Bohemian, not bad-looking if he was cleaned up. It was funny, Kate couldn’t remember ever meeting a serious boyfriend of Elena’s, or even hearing about one. Sure, she knew some of her friends, mostly artists and poets, and there was mention of a filmmaker boyfriend once, but never again. Odd, thinking about it now, a girl like Elena, pretty, smart, not gay. At least not that Kate knew of—though that was something she might need to find out for sure. Could a woman have killed Elena? It hadn’t occurred to her before this moment. The statistics, she knew, said nine out of ten violent crimes against women were committed by men. At least they used to be. She’d have to ask Liz if that had changed in the last ten years.

  Kate cut through several rooms, stopped in front of Daumier’s most famous painting, Third-Class Carriage, a dark, brooding piece, stripped of color—figures in a railway car thrown together by circumstance, emotionally distanced, each of them isolated, lonely; the central figure, a hooded old woman, staring out at Kate with blind eyes. The one-eyed Picasso winked in her mind, and then Elena’s bloodied cheek, then the creepy graduation photo.

  That’s it. What she needed to do: Go through Elena’s photo albums, see if that photo had been plucked out.

  On St. Mark’s Place it could be 1965. Kids in bell-bottoms—tattoos on their arms rather than painted flowers on their faces—hung out in groups, smoking, laughing, more than a few seriously stoned. Wasn’t it a school day, Kate wondered—or were they past school age? To her, not one of them looked over fifteen.

  She spotted the two uniforms as soon as she turned onto East Sixth Street—one on the corner, the other right at the doorway to Elena’s brownstone. Kate showed him her temporary ID. He barely blinked.

  Bessie Smith played quietly in the background. Elena twirled around the room in a long multicolored embroidered skirt. “I love it.” She spun again. The skirt flared out above her knees.

  “Oh, you should’ve seen me,” Kate said. “Probably the worst bargainer ever. I swear this woman must’ve seen me coming. I was so busy trying to impress her with my Spanish that I think I ended up paying more than double what she originally asked. I’m sure by now they’ve got my picture up in every Mexican shop—with ‘sucker’ written across it.”

  Elena laughed. “Hey, try you
r Spanish on me—maybe I can get even more out of you.”

  The smell of death still lingered in the hallway. Kate glanced up toward the ceiling as if she could see right through the two floors. But the apartment, she knew, was empty now. No Elena twirling in a Mexican skirt.

  She took the stairs slowly. Now that she was here, she was in no hurry to view the scene.

  The police tape easily ceded its hold on the door, sliding to the floor, and lay there like a limp yellow snake.

  Kate pulled on a pair of latex gloves and one more time went through Elena’s apartment. Traces of gray fingerprint powder still clung to the window ledges. The bold cotton print fabric on the couch was rumpled, the block of foam exposed. Did the tech boys do that, or had it been like that? Kate couldn’t remember.

  In the tiny kitchenette, the utensil drawer was half open, the contents removed. On the walls, the bloodstains had turned brown; in the cracks between the floor tiles, almost black.

  Elena’s computer table was empty of everything but New York dust. Kate felt dizzy, realized she’d been holding her breath since she took that first step into the apartment.

  She stared at the scene, tried to reenact what she saw that night: Elena’s body slumped on the kitchen floor, all that blood . . . suddenly more real, more alive than any crime scene photo.

  In the bedroom, she found what she had come for—three small photo albums, two on a shelf beside a stack of poetry and art books, one on Elena’s dresser. Two were filled with travel photos—one a trip to Puerto Rico, the other Italy. The third album was all childhood photos, nothing recent. There had to be another.

  And if it was not here, the murderer must have taken it.

  Kate forced herself to go through dresser drawers, the closet, but found no other photos, no original of that graduation photograph, only pieces of Elena—a blouse here, a printed T-shirt there—memories strong enough to rip her apart. And they would if she weren’t focused on the fact that he had been here, too, moved through these same rooms, touched the same clothes.

  Kate could almost feel him in the room with her now, watching, smirking, his presence palpable. She was suddenly aware of her breathing, the quiet, and then something moving, ever so slightly, behind her. She froze. Her skin prickled. But when she turned it was only a pigeon on the window ledge.

  She let out a breath.

  But a second later, there it was again, nothing specific this time, just a feeling, as if he had tapped her on the shoulder, said, Look here, and here.

  Kate shivered.

  In the living room she stopped a moment, picked up the Marilyn pillow. The faintest whiff of patchouli, Elena’s perfume, sent her reeling. Another minute in this place and she would break into pieces.

  She was thankful for the smell of stale cabbage that permeated the hallway—anything to extinguish that killing patchouli.

  She’d like to get out of here, but not yet. She needed to talk to Elena’s super. According to the uniform who took the man’s statement, he wasn’t around the night of the murder, but still he could have some useful information.

  Kate sidestepped four rusting trash bins. Two without tops, overflowing with malodorous garbage, practically blocked all entry to the basement apartment. She squeezed through, but a good-sized swatch of the fine gray fabric of her blazer impaled itself on a jagged edge of the trash can.

  “Damn.” She leaned hard on the metal bell, thought it was either pitched for dogs’ ears only or, more likely, dead.

  She knocked. A few flakes of glittery blue-black enamel fluttered to the concrete like swooning drag-queen moths.

  Nothing.

  Another knock. The only response a few more flakes of falling paint.

  There was a hole where the doorknob ought to be. Kate bent for a closer inspection, thought it looked like a mouth without dentures, pieces of the metal lock sticking out. She riffled through her bag—comb, cigarettes, lighter, perfume, Tic-Tacs—came up with a metal nail file, probed around in the hole until she heard a click, and the door popped open. Breaking and entering—something the young Detective McKinnon had always been good at.

  “Hello?” Kate called into the semidarkness of a hallway littered with old newspapers, empty six-packs, a large bag of kitty litter, an open metal toolbox, a stack of skin mags, Roach Motels. She stepped over them, turned into what appeared to be a combination living room/bedroom with a lumpy pink-striped mattress on the floor, a couple of folding chairs around a fifties-style card table. Across the room, Jenny Jones baited her audience on the twenty-eight-inch Sony Trinitron.

  When the black-and-white cat rubbed against her ankles, Kate leaped, almost screamed. “Oh, kitty, you scared the shit out of me.” She took a breath, petted the cat, but as she straightened up, she caught the faintest glimpse of something massive and colorful just off to her right.

  Then came the shove, and the gray-beige walls, Jenny Jones, the floor, all were coming at her fast. Kate got an arm out, grabbed on to something soft and fleshy, gripped hard, and pulled. The large, colorful thing—which smelled like weeks-old Campbell’s chicken noodle soup—went down as

  Kate found her balance. It—the thing—hit the faded linoleum floor with a loud clunk, sputtered like a dying diesel engine, and farted.

  Kate stabbed her heel into the back of a neck like a Goodyear tire, yanked the hippo’s flabby arm up and under his scapula—though she couldn’t be sure there was any bone beneath the layers of fat.

  Now she took him in: a good three-hundred-pounder in a parrot-patterned shirt.

  He yelped like a pup. His breath, even from a few feet away, like aged farmer cheese, was giving his fart some stiff competition.

  A couple of weeks earlier, Kate had been lunching with Philippe de Montebello in the private dining room of the Metropolitan Museum, discussing the finer points of Vermeer, had been having tea with the latest Mrs. Trump, securing that million-dollar check for Let There Be a Future. Now she was not only skipping tea and lunch, she was ramming her four-hundred-dollar heel into some fat guy’s neck.

  “Name?” Kate laid a little weight into that heel, watched it disappear into the folds of yeasty flesh.

  He bellowed: “Johnson. I’m the fuckin’ super here! Wally Johnson. You’re breakin’ my fuckin’ arrrmmm.”

  “You always drop-kick your guests?”

  “Y’broke into my place, f’Christ’s sake!”

  He had a point. “NYPD,” she said, easing up on his arm a bit. She leaned closer, then pulled back. That breath. She managed to extract a promise from fat boy Wally that he would behave.

  “Why didn’t ya say so?” He rolled over, sat up, rubbed his arm, whined, “Jeesus.”

  “I knocked, called out. You didn’t answer.”

  “I was takin’ a dump, for Christ’s sake.” His eyes, tiny dark specks peeking through Venetian blinds of fat, assessed Kate skeptically. “You’re a cop?”

  “Working on the Solana case,” she said, liking the sound of it. She was pretty pleased with herself, too, taking down fat boy Wally with one arm. Thank God for her personal trainer. Of course, Wally was in maybe the worst shape of any person she had ever seen—alive. “Look,” she said, softening. “I’m not here to do you any harm—”

  “Y’already broke my fuckin’ arm.” He pouted.

  Kate resisted calling him a crybaby. “I read your statement. You weren’t here the night Elena Solana was killed, correct?”

  “I already told the other cops. I was at my sista’s, on Staten Island. She cooked spaghetti wit’ meatballs.”

  “Sounds delicious. But I’m looking for a little more than meatballs.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . . did you ever see her friends, Elena Solana’s—”

  “Hey, I don’t snoop.”

  “I didn’t say you did.” Kate softened her tone. “Look, Wally, you and I know that any good superintendent knows the comings and goings of his residents. It’s part of the job, which I am sure you do very well.”r />
  He rubbed his arm, said, “She had a few nigger boyfriends.”

  For a second, Kate thought maybe she’d break his other arm, but that wouldn’t get her any answers. “Tell me about them.”

  He shrugged. “What’s t’tell? One was small. One skinny. One big.”

  “How big?”

  “Like a bouncer, or a prizefighter, you know.”

  “What else?”

  “The little one had that hair, y’know, like, uh—”

  “Dreadlocks?”

  “That’s it. Dreadlocks. A young guy. He was here a lot.”

  Willie. “And the skinny guy?”

  “I only saw him couple a times. Looked like a junkie.”

  “And the prizefighter?”

  “Hasn’t been around awhile now. I guess, maybe they broke up. Boo-hoo, huh?” He grinned. Not a pretty picture: teeth the color of ripe bananas, a couple of black holes.

  “Could you identify any of them?”

  “The young one, the one with dreadlocks, for sure. Maybe the big guy. Maybe. I never got a real good look at him. But he was big, like I said. The other guy, the junkie, well . . . a junkie, you know.”

  Great. The only one of the three men Fat Wally could identify for sure was Willie, the one Kate already knew. It figured.

  “Oh.” Fat Wally leaned in a little too close. Kate took a step back from eau de halitosis. “There was this other guy, also kinda skinny, a white guy. Blond hair. Medium height. But slight, kinda feminine. Probably a fag, y’know.”

  “And you saw him . . . when?”

  “I don’t keep no stopwatch. A few times. In front, maybe, or ringin’ Solana’s buzzer. Maybe once or twice, the two of them goin’ out together, arm ’n arm.” He grinned. “Maybe he weren’t no faggot after all.”

  Outside, in the cold afternoon light, Kate assessed her losses—one very good pair of pants and one even better blazer; then assessed what she’d learned—three men, excluding Willie, had called on Elena regularly. A large black man and a skinny one. Also, a pale white guy.