The Death Artist Page 22

  And it’s a birthday card.

  Now all he has to do is find someone who’s having a birthday.

  27

  The midday light played across the tenements and projects as Floyd Brown turned the car onto Avenue D. “So, McKinnon. Anything in particular we’re looking for?”

  “Anything incriminating,” said Kate, trying to avoid the question.

  “You wanna be more specific?”

  “Just a routine search,” she said, pushing the car door open, coming face-to-face with a youngish black man, his hair wild and matted. “Beautiful lady . . . how you doin’ today?”

  “I’m doing just fine,” said Kate, peeling off a couple of dollar bills.

  Brown took her arm roughly, steered her toward the building. “Why’d you give that man money? You John D. Rockefeller, giving handouts to the poor?”

  “I just haven’t been called beautiful in a while; is that okay with you?”

  Brown shook his head. “People like you just don’t get it.”

  “People like me?”

  “That’s right. Rich people. White people. Liberals. You think you’re helping that man? You’re helping him all right—helping him stay just the way he is. But as long as it made you feel good, that’s all that matters, right?”

  “You missed your calling, Brown. You should have been one of those Sunday-morning TV evangelists.”

  “The black man doesn’t need you to do for him what he can’t do for himself, McKinnon. Every time you give a handout to someone who should be doing for themselves, you’re keeping him down.”

  “Okay, you’ve got me. I admit it. Guilty as charged. Third-degree white liberalism.” Kate thrust her hands toward Brown, her wrists together. “Cuff me, Officer.”

  The super told them that Trip had just gone out, handed over the keys to his place. Kate and Brown made the four-flight climb.

  The place was empty. Stale cigarette smoke hovered in the outer office. Kate got a look at some of those invoices Damien Trip had been trying to shield—all for videos or video equipment. Nothing incriminating. Still, she pocketed a few, then rummaged through Trip’s art cards. No more Ethan Stein reproductions.

  Behind that second steel door they found a huge white-washed space, windows boarded up, dead quiet. In the center, a professional-style video camera was trained on a king-size bed with rumpled lavender sheets, flanked by a couple of halogen lights on stands.

  What Kate was looking for, hoping not to find.

  Tucked into a corner was a beat-up wooden table stacked with cassettes and magazines; beside it, two televisions with VCRs beneath them.

  “Looks like Mr. Trip’s taste is not exactly literary,” said Brown, plucking copies of porn magazines from the table—Amateur Couples, Young Virgins, Swinging Times.

  Kate held her breath.

  Brown handed her a pair of latex gloves, pulled on a pair himself before lifting a spoon from the table, which he dropped into a plastic bag. Next he bagged the contents of an ashtray. From under the bed, Kate retrieved a syringe. Without speaking she handed it to Brown.

  They worked in silence, moving about the room taking samples like astronauts on the moon.

  Down a hallway, a tiny bathroom. The blue-green water in the toilet might have been disinfectant, but more likely it was mold; the sink was slick with hair and grease. The medicine cabinet’s mirror was cracked. Inside, Kate found a few promising vials, which she bagged.

  Behind a half-wall, Kate and Brown discovered metal bookshelves crammed with cassettes. She plucked one out. On the cover a blonde displayed silicone-enhanced breasts. She tugged out a few others—Thighs Wide Shut, The Bitches of Eastwick, The Return of the Pink Pussy—all courtesy of Amateur Films. Students of film, all right. Another time, another place, she might have laughed. But not here, not now, knowing what she was looking for.

  Brown, cradling an armful of cassettes, said, “Let’s take a look, see what we find.”

  Kate sucked in air, wanted to stop him, but how could she?

  Without speaking they hauled dozens of cassettes beside the TV sets. Brown loaded the VCRs.

  The videos were a bit grainy, the color off. Familiar, thought Kate. Too familiar.

  Both televisions were going. Five minutes on fast forward to view a sixty-minute film, Kate hardly breathing.

  Fifteen minutes and several cassettes later, she saw Janine Cook, naked except for a pair of thigh-high black boots, whipping some middle-aged fat guy in a leather hooded mask. Kate slowed the film.

  “That’s Elena Solana’s friend Janine Cook.” Kate stared at the screen. “Wait a minute. That guy—” She hit fast forward, but nothing much changed, more whipping, red welts appearing on the guy’s mushy chest.

  “What is it?” asked Brown.

  “I can’t be sure,” said Kate. “I mean, with the hood and all, but—Jesus—I think it could be Bill Pruitt!”

  Brown came in for a closer look.

  Kate hit reverse, watched as the guy pulled the hood off—a nanosecond of film time—just before the tape went blank.

  “Was it him?” asked Brown.

  They played that split second over and over. “I think so,” said Kate.

  “Well, that could definitely be the hood we found at his place.”

  “What about the watch and ring he’s wearing? We can get the film enlarged.” Kate thought a moment. “Pruitt wore a Yale ring. And we should have information on the watch somewhere—if he was wearing it when he died.”

  “Personal effects went to his mother.”

  “Right. Then we can check the ring and watch through her. That would confirm it.” She peered at the film, now playing in slow motion, Janine’s whip looping lazily through the air. “The guy’s got an appendix scar. We can check Pruitt’s medical history, see if he’s had his appendix out—or ask the ME.”

  One more time, Kate watched those fractions of a second when the man pulled off the hood. “I’m pretty sure it’s him,” she said.

  Brown removed the cassette, bagged it, wrote COOK, then PRUITT? across the top. “This could tie Trip to both the Solana and Pruitt murders,” he said.

  Kate’s mind was racing. She had to talk to Janine Cook. But first she had to watch more of these damn films, and she knew it. She sat back, lit a Marlboro, said a silent prayer—maybe this is all she would discover.

  But no. It took only five films and twenty minutes for her to see what she did not want to see. She jerked forward, slammed the stop button.

  Brown looked at her, then at the blank screen. He knew the answer, but asked anyway, “Solana?”

  Kate just barely nodded. Then, quietly: “Do you mind if . . .”

  Brown got up, moved away.

  Kate started the film again. Elena in front of the bed. The one right there, halfway across the space.

  This time it was all too clear. Kate could almost imagine that Elena was here in the room with her, not just on that small screen with bad color, bad lighting. Elena smiling, maybe nervous. Not the usual porno queen come-on, but it was her all right. Kate had trouble locating her feelings. But when she did, she realized that what she felt was nothing.

  And then Elena started undressing, swaying, almost a dance, peeling out of her skirt. Jesus. The Mexican skirt. A throbbing had started in Kate’s head. Still, she forced herself to watch. Elena’s movements seemed unbearably slow, as though time itself were drunk. Five excruciating minutes, an eternity until Elena was naked. Kate hit the fast-forward button. Now Elena was on the bed, and the shadowy figure of a man joined her. Kate slowed the film to normal speed. The man was Trip—who looked at the camera while Elena performed oral sex, and smiled that rotten choirboy smile.

  Another hit to fast forward. Elena and Trip, fucking. The camera zoomed in on Elena’s face, eyes closed, head back. Closer now. Perspiration on her brow. Lips parted. Kate stared at the image until it dissolved into an abstraction—a blur of dots.

  “Was that Trip?” Brown helped her to her feet,
started to bag the video.

  “Yes.” Kate reached for the video with a shaking hand. “Wait.” For a moment she was sure she would hurl it against the concrete wall, watch it shatter to pieces. But she didn’t. She’d caught sight of the title: Lace Is More. Mulled it over. “It’s like the famous Bauhaus expression, ‘Less is more.’ ”

  “Meaning?”

  “We’re looking for an artist, remember? Or someone pretending to be. Trip was an art student as well as a film-maker.” Kate thought it through. “ ‘Less is more’ was not only the credo of the German Bauhaus movement, but it was picked up again here in the States by Minimal artists. It became their motto. Ethan Stein was a Minimal painter. Maybe this could hint at something with Stein, too.”

  Kate suddenly felt sick, managed to make it down the hall to the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face, avoided looking at the moldy sink, which would surely make her vomit. She wanted to scream, to punch someone, kick something. And she did. The wall, then the wooden vanity supporting the sink, which splintered. Small bags of white powder tumbled over her feet; disposable syringes clattered to the floor.

  “Brown!”

  Kate was actually smiling as she displayed the find. “A solid reason to pick up Trip.”

  Brown nodded, bagged the evidence. “You look like shit, McKinnon. Go home. I’ll put out an APB on Trip.”

  “I’ll go home,” she said. “After I see Janine Cook.”

  He wasn’t sure how much they knew, or exactly what they had found, but Damien Trip had a fairly good idea. Cunt. Fucking cunt.

  He hovered across the street, inside the bodega, sneaking peeks through the window, waited until Kate and Brown had left, watched their car slip around the corner. No question they were cops. He’d had her scent the other day. Now he had to think, decide which loose ends to tie up first. He had a pretty good idea where Kate would go, whom she would talk to. But he could deal with that. No problem.

  Kate gripped the videocassette hard. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  Janine Cook shrugged, waved a hand at the cassette. “You don’t like it, don’t watch.”

  “Janine.” She clutched the girl by the shoulders. The purple sequins on her skintight bodysuit felt like fish scales under Kate’s fingers. She didn’t have the patience to be subtle. “Do you know who this guy in the film is?”

  “Which guy?” said Janine, bored. “Which film you talking about?”

  Kate displayed the cover. “An S and M scene. You whipping a middle-aged man. He’s wearing a leather hood.”

  “Oh, right.” Janine faked a yawn.

  Kate wanted to slap her, but controlled herself, stayed calm. “I think that man is William Pruitt. He was murdered, Janine. Murdered. By the same person who murdered Elena. And you could be next.” Kate let that sink in for a minute. “You claim you were Elena’s friend. Well, be her friend, for Christ’s sake.”

  Janine chewed her lower lip like a little kid.

  “Did you know the man?”

  “No. But . . .” She reached for the arm of her velvet couch, seemed momentarily unsteady on her feet. “Damien filmed that scene personally. The guy gave him a wad of bills. Hundreds.”

  “Was it money for making the film, or—what?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw the guy before—or ever again.”

  Kate tried to think it through. Did Pruitt back Trip’s little video business, or was it a onetime thing? Did Pruitt start withholding money, and Trip lost it? Or maybe Trip was blackmailing Pruitt with the film? Her head was spinning. “Janine, did you know Elena was making films for Trip?”

  Janine nodded quietly. “She needed money.”

  That stopped Kate. Why would Elena need money? And if she did, why wouldn’t Elena have come to her? “Was Trip blackmailing her with the films?”

  “I don’t know.” Janine pulled away, knocked into the coffee table, sent a delicate glass vase crashing to the floor. Slowly she bent down, plucked up a longish shard of pale violet glass. “I know what you think.” She tilted her face to look up at Kate, her features twisted, fighting back tears. “That I’m a whore and she was an angel. That I was jealous of her—that I wanted to hurt her because she had it better than me. But it’s not true. I would never hurt her.”

  Kate reached out, but too late. The girl’s hand closed around the glass.

  “Oh, shit.” Kate pulled Janine close, cradled the girl’s arm. “Where’s the sink?”

  Janine nodded weakly toward a swinging door just off the entranceway to the fancy apartment.

  Janine leaned over the sink, crying softly. She stared at the dish towel Kate had wrapped around her hand; watched small spots of blood rise to the surface like water lilies.

  “How did Elena meet Trip? Through you?” Kate asked gently.

  Janine just barely nodded, tears staining her cheeks now as she talked. “Yes.” Janine winced. Those pink water lilies were starting to turn scarlet. “I tried to warn her, but—”

  “Any idea why Damien would want Elena out of the way?”

  “You think it’s my fault, don’t you?” Janine’s eyes searched out Kate’s. “I got Elena to Trip and now she’s dead. My fault. That’s what you think.”

  “I don’t know about fault, Janine, and I’m not in the business of blame, but—” The dish towel looked like a crumpled rose, bright vermilion.

  Kate found some gauze and wrapped it carefully around Janine’s hand, keeping it above her head. “So, tell me. Please. What was Trip’s hold over her—over Elena? Can you explain it to me?”

  Janine shook her head. “All I know is that Elena wanted to cut him loose, and he wouldn’t let her go. He had some sort of weird hold on her. I never understood it, exactly. But he just wouldn’t let go.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe because Elena was the best thing he’d ever had.”

  Kate finished bandaging Janine’s hand; the whole time her mind just wouldn’t stop: Trip and Elena making films; Trip and Ethan Stein going to art school together; Bill Pruitt starring in one of Trip’s porno flicks. It was all starting to swim around in her brain. She looked up at Janine’s hand. Blood was oozing through the layers of gauze.

  “Jesus. We’d better get you to the emergency room.”

  * * *

  Four hours at Lenox Hill Hospital for six lousy stitches. Four hours of rehashing the same information: Elena and Trip, his Svengali-like hold over her.

  Kate helped Janine out of the car, mindful of the fresh white bandage on the young woman’s hand.

  “Is there anyone I can call?” Kate asked, as the two women traipsed toward Janine’s high-rise building.

  “Yeah, you can call—I was about to say you could call Elena. Funny, huh?”

  “No,” said Kate softly. “I start to call her a half dozen times a day.”

  “After my brother died, I did that for almost a year. Even now, sometimes I forget. It’s like . . .” Tears were collecting in Janine’s large brown eyes. “. . . everyone close to me . . . dies.”

  Kate wrapped her arms around Janine, who leaned into her, crying like a little girl.

  Now what? Kate couldn’t just go home. Not when she felt like this, her mind still racing with pictures of Elena and Trip that she never wanted to see and thought she always would. She had to do something, see something, anything to wipe away those images. She needed to get away from it, think clearly.

  She got Richard on her cellular. “Would you consider taking a tired, middle-aged woman out for a movie and a burger?” She tried hard not to sound too needy, added a joke: “Who knows? You might even get lucky.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Give me her number.”

  Now that he had followed her here, he wasn’t quite sure what to do.

  He slipped through the crowd easily. He’d keep an eye on her from a distance, that was all. Inside, he ordered up a caffè latte and a croissant that didn’t look all that fresh, but he’d worked up an appetite, what with his extra-speci
al delivery to Elena’s pal, that big-mouthed whore, who would not have much to say for long. She didn’t deserve such a generous gift, but hell, that’s just who he was, a real generous guy. Dead or alive, they were all the same: goddamn motherfucking, cocksucking bitches!

  He steadied himself with a swig of lukewarm latte. He had to stay cool.

  The crowd along the sidewalk and clogging the wide stair-case leading up to SoHo’s Angelika Film Center was a Gallup poll fantasy: funky artists and fancy artists; Lower East Side granges and Upper East Side media planners; Wall Street execs and Madison Avenue publicists; gay, straight, undetermined, black, white, yellow, and every shade in between. They were all here. Why? Because the Angelika was an art house, one of the last of its kind, and new all at once. It was where you went if you were hip, arty—or trying to be; smart, cool—or trying to be; and still into real movies.

  Richard loosened his colorful silk tie as he finally made it to the tiny crowded box office at the top of the stairs. Kate waited on the side, desperately inhaling the last drags on her Marlboro.

  “It’s sold out,” Richard yelled over to her. “But that Danish film starts at the same time.”

  “Anything,” she said.

  Inside, the spacious Angelika lobby looked more like a fifties coffeehouse than a movie theater. If only those Westphalian ham and Brie sandwiches weren’t so pricey, and the espresso were more than mediocre. Still, the disparate New York crowd was chewing, drinking, laughing, and talking. The scene could have been an art film itself—one of those French existential numbers where there’s lots of activity but no plot.

  Kate leaned against Richard. He stroked the back of her neck. “God, your muscles feel like rock.”

  “I’m beyond tense. Hope I can sit through the movie. I already saw one today that I wish I hadn’t.” Images of Elena and Trip, on the king-size bed. She couldn’t stop it from playing. The best she could do was switch it to Janine whipping the fat guy, Bill Pruitt. She was about to explain it to Richard when a tubby blue triangle, topped by a mass of tangled curls, pushed through the crowd.