The Death Artist Page 18

  She stared at the Xerox in her hand—the halo, wings, the red marker, HELLO. But nothing else would register. Those twenty seconds of film were seared into her brain.

  Elena did not look as if she was under any pressure to perform. Nor was she alone.

  What is it? Some kind of porno tape? Maybe a home movie, something Elena had made with a boyfriend? That was the most plausible excuse Kate could come up with. But then, how would he—whoever he is—get it to send to her?

  The list of Ethan Stein’s sexual paraphernalia flashed in the back of Kate’s mind, then Pruitt’s sadomasochistic leather mask and his porno tapes.

  Kate didn’t like making any connection between Elena and those two—conscious or otherwise. Until she knew exactly what it was, she was going to keep the knowledge of this tape to herself. She’d rather not read all about it in the New York Post.

  She needed some answers.

  Willie. She had to see Willie.

  23

  To Kate, Willie’s studio was like a lab, a haphazard, slovenly one, but a lab nonetheless. A long table covered with dozens and dozens of half-squeezed-out paint tubes, brushes of every size, palette knives, bottles of oil, turpentine, varnish, and resins.

  “You mind if I keep painting?” Willie dragged his palette on wheels—a converted tea cart covered with a thick slab of glass, half of which was encrusted with anthills of dry and semidry mounds of oil paint—toward the painting he was working on.

  “Not if you don’t mind me watching.” Kate plucked a couple of oily paint rags off an old upholstered chair.

  “Careful. There might be paint on that chair.”

  Kate shrugged. Her clothes were the last thing she cared about at the moment. She regarded his large, unpainted canvas, the rough indications of form sketched in charcoal. “Is this piece for a particular show?”

  “If I finish it—for the Contemporary show this summer.” Willie squeezed blobs of red and white paint onto his glass palette. “My two pieces for the Venice Biennale were shipped off the other day. You’ll be there, won’t you? In Venice, I mean.”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  “Great.” Willie swirled a stiff white bristle brush through the creamy red paint and titanium white, the two colors momentarily married into a wavy motif of stripes before each ceded its own identity to form a lush pink. “I’ve been trying to make sense of it, of Elena’s death,” he said.

  “I’m not sure that’s possible.”

  “For me, the only way I can make sense of anything—and maybe this sounds wrong, or pretentious, I don’t know—is through my work.”

  “Artists are always trying to fix their broken worlds with art,” said Kate. “And you’re lucky to have it, your art. Believe me.”

  Willie drew his loaded brush onto the canvas, gracefully at first, then scrubbing up and down, back and forth, working the paint into the canvas rather than onto it. A face began to take shape. “Maybe it’s that I’ve been trying to make up for something, how I grew up, you know, like I could fix everything by being an artist.” He laid his brush down, unscrewed a bottle cap, poured a thick unctuous liquid into a wide-mouthed bottle. Linseed oil. Kate recognized it from its golden color and particular smell, oily and sweet. Then he added damar varnish, pale yellow, like white wine; a drop of cobalt drier; then, finally, turpentine. With the wide-mouthed cap back on tight, he gently shook to create an emulsion.

  It really is a lab, thought Kate. She’d seen him do this before, and other painters as well, this creation of an artist’s painting medium; the particular blend they mixed up to add to their paint or dry pigments to help them create the effect they were after—slick or dry, fat or lean.

  “Pretty idealistic, huh?” said Willie.

  “Idealism is a good thing, Willie.” Could Kate possibly hold on to her own?

  Willie poured a bit of the newly mixed medium into a clean metal can, dipped his brush into it, and this time when he laid brush to canvas, the paint glided on, translucent, luminous. Then, with another brush, he outlined the pink form with jet black, stood back to study it a moment, then grabbed a rag and wiped it out, though traces of black remained in and around the pink oval—ghostlike features of what had been, instant pentimento.

  Kate was fascinated by the process, always had been, by this magic known as painting. It was the first time in days that she’d felt anything other than pain or anxiety or suspicion.

  “But there’s no way I can fix what happened to Elena with my art. So, it’s like, making art has no purpose anymore.” He suddenly stopped working, dropped the brush onto his palette.

  “Now you listen to me,” said Kate. “You may not be able to change what happened, but I can tell you that if Elena were here she’d tell you to keep painting. She felt like you do, Willie. Look: Your job is to make the best possible paintings. Mine is to find out what happened to Elena.”

  “Will you?”

  Kate sat back, was quiet a moment. “Yes,” she finally said. “I think I will.”

  Willie reached for another brush, examined its bent bristles, tossed it toward a large metal garbage can, and missed. The brush skittered across the studio floor. “And can you keep the cops off my back?”

  Kate reached into her bag, unfolded the police sketch she got from Calloway. “This should make you feel better. The man the police are looking for. He was seen entering Elena’s apartment building. Does he look familiar to you?”

  Willie eyed the sketch, then looked away. “I don’t actually know every black person in the city.”

  Kate blinked as if she’d been slapped. “Did I imply that?”

  “That sketch could be anyone, Kate.” He frowned, reached for a new brush, stabbed it into a coffee can filled with turpentine.

  Kate could see he was as touchy as she was these days. She let it go, opened her notepad, scanned Elena’s phone records, the names and addresses that had now been matched to the numbers. “Maybe you can help me figure out who a few of these people are.”

  Willie left the brush to soak, leaned over Kate’s shoulder. “J. Cook. That’s Janine. You know, Janine Cook.”

  “Of course.” A foundation dropout. A hard case even back in the seventh grade. A kid Kate never went to bat for. So why, even now, did she feel guilty? She couldn’t save them all. “Do you still see her?”

  “I did, but only with Elena. They were still friends.”

  Kate picked at a hardened piece of paint on the chair’s arm. Okay, it was time. She couldn’t delay it any longer. “Willie . . .” She sucked in a breath. “Was Elena involved in anything . . . well . . . prurient?”

  “Prurient?”

  “You know, sex.”

  “What are you getting at, Kate?”

  “I saw a clip . . . well, maybe thirty seconds, of a film, of Elena, and it looked like it could have been a porno flick. I . . .” She pulled the paint off the chair, flicked it away. Her fingers were shaking. “It could have been a home movie. Probably was. But—”

  “Whoa!” Willie expelled a breath, then thought a minute. “Home movie, you say? Maybe something she made with a boyfriend?”

  “Yes. Exactly what I was thinking.” Hoping.

  “Well, there was this filmmaker guy. I met him a couple of times with Elena.”

  “You remember his name?”

  “Damien . . . something.”

  Kate offered up Elena’s phone records.

  Willie wiped his hands on a clean paint rag, took hold of the paper. “Trip. Here it is. D. Trip. Damien. He’s an NYU film student, I think—though a little old to be a student, if you know what I mean. Maybe a dropout.”

  “How long did they go out, he and Elena?”

  “A few months, maybe. Elena got kinda weird about him. And I know she was thinking about breaking up, ’cause she said so.”

  “A film student?” Elena may have mentioned him one time, but that was it. Kate stood. “C’mon. Let’s drop in on them, Janine Cook and Damien Trip. If you tag along, it’ll make
it seem like it’s just a casual visit.”

  “Cool. I’m like your cover, huh?” Willie’s eyes sparked with excitement.

  “This isn’t an installment of Law and Order, Willie. Just take your lead from me. And don’t say anything unless I ask you to.”

  Traffic was backed up on Second Avenue. Kate and Willie inched along through the East Village.

  It gave Kate time to take in places she and Elena had known together. A half dozen Polish coffee shops with signs left over from the fifties—Veselka their favorite, where a cup of coffee served as a chaser to enormous servings of cheese-and-potato pirogies smothered in fried onions and gobs of sour cream; St. Mark’s Café, a hangout for old beatniks and neo-ones with their sparse goatees and skinny tattooed arms. So many places, so many memories.

  Finally, two blocks north of Elena’s corner, Kate managed to hang a right on Eighth Street, and the traffic cleared. It was a quick shoot from there—just four blocks—but the scenery changed as if a film editor had spliced together two different worlds. Here Polish gave way to Spanish.

  “You sure the address is right?” Willie asked. “We’re gonna end up in the projects.”

  “According to the phone company. What did Trip say when you called?”

  “That he’d wait for us. He bought your idea—about a memorial service for Elena.”

  Just past Tompkins Square Park, Kate caught a glimpse of a black awning with bold white letters spelling out SIDEWALK, and a window so densely packed with neon signs—Red Dog, Guinness, Rolling Rock—that it dissolved into a shimmering mass of artificial light.

  “I had lunch there with Elena,” she said softly. “Couple of times.”

  They were deep into Alphabet City now—the affectionate or not so affectionate sobriquet that distinguished Avenues A, B, C, and D—as if these less-than-modest, crowded streets weren’t worthy of actual names.

  Avenue B was crowded—people ladened down with shopping bags, pushing laundry carts, scolding children. With the windows rolled down, bits of Spanish, Asian, and Arabic tongues zipped in and out of the car like a linguist with Tourette’s.

  “The Poet’s Café is just a couple of blocks over. Remember when . . .” Willie’s voice trailed off.

  Of course Kate remembered. She and Willie going to the café to hear Elena perform one of her latest pieces—a friend’s avant-garde poems set to electronic synthesizer music, Elena, singing, if you could call it that, an abstraction of vocal exercises so staggering the audience was held in thrall.

  Kate lit a Marlboro, pulled the smoke deep into her lungs—no way she would be quitting anytime soon. At the traffic light she rolled her window down, blew smoke out, watched a Latino man and a black woman sweep sidewalks in front of a strip of three-story buildings, each painted a different pastel color—lime green, sky blue, cream. “You know, in its own way, it can be beautiful over here.”

  “Yeah, I hear they say that about Watts, too,” said Willie.

  Kate felt a rush of embarrassment. “I guess that’s one for you in the I’m-cool-and-you’re-just-a-naive-white-woman contest.”

  Willie licked his pointer finger, scored himself an air point, laughed.

  But the charm Kate had just noted was coming up short. An empty lot with stripped cars abutted a crumbling wall with a mural that looked as though it had been painted by Diego Rivera on acid: a ten-foot-tall Jesus with bloody tears streaming through half-closed eyes. As they turned the corner, another mural. This one all colossal white and black skulls, crosses, and the words “In Memory of Those Who Have Died.” An image at once striking and chilling.

  Kate slowed the car to a crawl, tried to read the building numbers.

  “Three-something,” said Willie. “Keep going. Trip’s place must be near the end.”

  And it was. The very end.

  Kate parked right in front of the five-story gray brick building.

  Willie squinted through the windshield across Avenue D to the sprawling conglomerate of slab-like monoliths that could only be a housing project. “Looks like home to me.”

  The ground floor of Trip’s building was taken up by the Arias Spanish Grocery and a weathered orange awning that wrapped around the corner, FUCK YOU spray-painted on it in bright red.

  Above the door to the right of the grocery were about a half dozen buzzers. Their wires snaked up the front of the building like leafless ivy. A real do-it-yourself job, none of them identified. But no matter; the door was unlocked.

  The first-floor vestibule had that stale-cabbage smell that seemed built into these old buildings. The narrow staircase was steep, the layout of apartments—one front, one back—the same on each floor. On the first two the domestic sounds of kids and TVs blasting and Game Boys. On the third floor the apartments were boarded up. But on the fourth, it was another world.

  Here, there was only one door, and it was shiny structural steel plastered with enough stickers from alarm companies to give a third-story man serious pause. Someone had shoved a card—“Amateur Films”—into a tiny metal holder beside the bell.

  Amateur Films? The name resonated. Kate thought a minute. The stash of porno films belonging to Bill Pruitt. Coincidence? Maybe, but that old cop instinct was telling her it wasn’t.

  Kate leaned on the bell.

  The heavy metal door squeaked open.

  Damien Trip was maybe thirty-five, with the face of an angel: pale pale skin, silky blond hair, translucent blue eyes, and a Harrison Ford scar on his chin that added such a perfect combination of toughness and vulnerability, it could have been self-inflicted. A cigarette—which looked out of place on the cherubic face—dangled from his soft, full lips.

  The blond guy Fat Wally had described.

  Willie shook Trip’s hand.

  A second later Kate did the same. “Kate McKinnon Rothstein. Elena’s friend.”

  “Kate . . . McKinnon . . . Rothstein. Well . . . I’ll be . . . damned.” Trip’s words seemed to ooze out of him. “Elena talked about you . . . The perfect mom . . . is what she called . . . you.”

  Was that a slight sneer on his full lips? Kate could not be sure. But the words—perfect mom—were so bittersweet, Kate felt a stab of pleasurable pain.

  Trip squinted at her through the smoke snaking into his baby blues. He held on to her hand a few seconds too long. “I’ve seen . . . your book,” he said. “You’re like the . . . art goddess to the . . . masses.”

  Yes, he was sneering. Kate was certain. But she smiled.

  Then Trip smiled, too. A mistake. His teeth were the color of sand and dirt. The angel fell to earth. “Man, I . . . can’t believe it. Elena . . . gone.” He shook his head slowly, the smile fading. “I hadn’t seen her in . . . months . . . six months, easy.”

  “How come?”

  Trip ran a lazy finger across the scar on his chin. “We sort of . . . drifted apart.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Kate.

  Trip hesitated a moment, his eyes narrowed. Then he smiled that rotten-angel smile again. “Tell you the truth, all she ever talked about was this CD she was cutting, and . . . well, I got to feeling the damn CD was more important to her than me . . . you know? A real . . . career woman. Don’t get me wrong, Kate. I mean . . . I was real happy for her, but a guy can only take so much . . . you know.”

  Willie glanced over at Kate, eyebrows arched.

  Kate nodded at Trip, taking in what looked like a combination office and sixties crash pad: fuchsia walls; a beat-up imitation leather couch; a couple of old cabinets, one painted milk-of-magnesia pink, the other sky blue; a big wooden desk that looked like something out of a thirties gangster movie, covered with dozens of art cards, invitations to exhibitions, reproductions, invoices.

  Another bell went off in Kate’s brain. She looked over at the cards, then tried to read those invoices upside down. Whom was she kidding? And without her reading glasses? Forget it.

  “You live here?”

  Trip leaned past her, tamped his cigarette out in a large
ceramic ashtray, which he shifted, ever so slightly, to obscure Kate’s view of those invoices. “We work here . . . mostly,” he said, in his slow-talking, dreamy way. “I mean, sometimes we . . . crash here. When it’s . . . real . . . late, you know.”

  It was practically as if he was crashing now, or sleep-walking. That was it. Kate finally got it. The guy was so stoned. It didn’t match with the angel face or his super-preppy outfit—pink button-down shirt and pristine khakis. If he kept his mouth closed, the guy could be a walking Gap ad. “We?” Kate asked.

  “My friend . . . partners.”

  “Amateur Films.” Kate smiled, tried to make it warm, sincere. “What kind of films do you make?”

  “Mostly . . . experimental.”

  “Have you always made films?”

  Trip eyed her suspiciously for a moment. “No . . . I went to art school. Thought I might be a . . . painter.”

  “I went to art school, too,” said Willie.

  “Yeah? Well, it didn’t do it for me. I, like . . . needed a bigger palette, if you, uh . . . get my drift.”

  Filmmaker. Art student. Pornographer. “Where’d you go to art school?” Kate asked.

  Trip’s eyes narrowed again. “That’s . . . real . . . old . . . news. I mean, who cares?”

  Kate scanned his desk, the art cards. “But you obviously still like art,” she said, reaching for a reproduction of a colorful abstract painting.

  “Not really,” said Trip. “I get . . . dozens of these things. I must be on . . . a hundred mailing lists.”

  Kate regarded the mass of cards, reached for another that had caught her eye. She flipped it over, saw the name in print: Ethan Stein, and the title, White Light. The card felt hot in her hand. “Ethan Stein? You know him?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Who?” Trip shrugged, glanced at the card. “Looks boring to me.”

  Then how come he saved it? “You mind if I keep it?” Kate asked. “I like the work.”