The Death Artist Read online

  “Oh, brother. After all these years must I remind you that although I may shop, lunch, and party with the upper classes, I am merely trespassing among them? At heart, kiddo, we’re two of a kind.”

  Liz gazed intently at Kate. “My dear friend. Look at me, look at you—then look around. I’m the only woman in this room wearing a color, for Christ’s sake! And this orange blouse is one hundred percent poly.” She got her fingers on the edge of Kate’s sleeve. “Cashmere, right? Ralph Lauren or Calvin what’s-his-face? And don’t lie—I’ve been through your closet. Me? I can’t even remember the last time I ate in a restaurant where you don’t pick up your food on a tray.”

  “Lizzie, if you won’t stay with me, you have to promise to spend at least half your time with me, two or three dinners a week—just the two of us.” Kate riffled around in her buttery leather bag. “Here. Keys to my humble flat. My extra set. All yours. Come and go as you please. Cadge food from my fridge. Wear my Calvin what’s-his-faces.”

  “You know, I’ve always wanted a twenty-room penthouse overlooking Central Park as my own little pied-à-terre.”

  “Twelve rooms. Please. Not twenty.”

  “Twelve lousy rooms.” Liz dropped the keys. “Forget it.”

  “Okay. I’ll throw Richard in. Wear my clothes. Sleep with my sexy husband.”

  Liz’s fingers curled around the keys. “Now you’re talkin’.”

  2

  The computer’s screen-saver, blinking dollar signs—a humorous gift from a client—scattered iridescent green light onto the stacks of legal briefs, affidavits, and letters that loomed over Richard Rothstein’s sleek Knoll desk like scale models of a high-rise apartment complex. Behind the piles of work—past, present, and future—were framed photos, advertisements for the good life: a man and woman on the porch of an obviously high-maintenance summer home; the same couple in formal dress, dancing, faces pressed cheek-to-cheek; the woman, alone, a studio portrait, perfectly lit, dark hair sweeping just below a slightly too-strong jaw on an otherwise striking, intelligent face. Beautiful? He thought so.

  Just the other day seeing Kate in action at the Museum of Modern Art, lecturing on Minimal and Conceptual art, of all things, he could not stop thinking: She’s mine—this brilliant, gorgeous creature—all mine. I’m the lucky guy who gets to go home with her.

  He couldn’t help but smile.

  Richard and Kate. Kate and Richard. On top of the world.

  And who’d have believed it? Richard, the Brooklyn boy, son of Sol, apple of Edie’s eye, first in his class at CCNY. Ten years ago he’d been a successful lawyer making plenty of money. Then came the professor of African American studies, Columbia University, accused of reverse discrimination for his vociferous lectures, particularly the ones with that nasty anti-Semitic bias. Naturally, no one wanted to touch the case. Even the ACLU had hesitated. Richard Rothstein had not. The case was national news for six months: “Jewish Lawyer Defends Black Prof’s Right to Free Speech.” In the end, Richard had prevailed, as had his client, reinstated to his lectern, fueling the fires of hate.

  That was his most famous case. His most lucrative? Keeping the CEO and senior partners of a very well known Wall Street brokerage firm out of jail, proving, against all odds, that it was not insider trading that had made the men their personal millions, but simply “coincidence.” For that bit of brilliant legal maneuvering Richard received his usual fee plus a seven-figure bonus, which he and his legal partner, the one who specialized in real estate, plunked down on an assortment of then-depressed New York City properties. Only a few years later, with the economy booming, they sold the land to a hungry real estate developer, and Richard’s seven-figure investment quadrupled. Then a keen money manager took the profits and made Richard Rothstein richer than most men ever dreamed possible.

  It was soon after that that Richard took on the small case that came with a different sort of bonus: the chance to interrogate a young policewoman, Detective Kate McKinnon. He’d never forget her strutting down the courtroom aisle, all legs and attitude, tossing the long hair out of her eyes as she answered his questions.

  The affair did not actually start until two months after the trial—Richard had to work up his nerve. His nerve? Richard Rothstein? “One of Manhattan’s Ten Most Eligible Bachelors,” cover story, New York magazine, fall 1988. But Officer McKinnon was something new for the handsome attorney.

  Richard had tried to woo her with a series of expensive dinners—Lutèce, the Four Seasons, La Côte Basque—but it was a free opera in Central Park, Tosca, and the champagne and caviar and fancy French pastries that he’d brought for their picnic dinner that finally did the trick for Kate. For Richard it was watching Kate eat just about everything—so unlike the anorexic model types he was used to dating. That, and the easy way they talked, and the fact that they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. By the fifth date—a pizzeria in Queens, which Kate had chosen as an antidote to all those upscale eateries—Richard asked her to marry him and she said yes in between bites of pepperoni pizza.

  And Kate had been good for him, had surprised him, too, the way she had taken to their new life, earning her Ph.D. in art history while completely reinventing herself, becoming a fixture on the New York social scene without losing her social conscience or her chutzpah—as his mom would say—along the way.

  Yes, they were a good team, he and Kate. Though lately she’d begun to balk at one too many client dinners. Still, she knew how to put on a good show—even if she’d rather be out there hustling for Let There Be a Future, or figuring out ways to help artists pay the rent.

  Richard tapped the sleep button on his computer; the dollar signs disappeared faster than profits on junk bonds in a bear market. He scrolled down a computer page of numbers for what seemed like the umpteenth time that day. Once again, the numbers did not make sense.

  He pushed back from the desk, leaned into his plush office chair, massaged the back of his neck, but could not relax. He flipped a switch. Hidden quadraphonic speakers filled the office with his own private Billie Holiday concert.

  “Good morning heartache . . .”

  No, not what he had in mind. Another button. This time it was Bonnie Raitt, giving them “Something to Talk About.” Better.

  Still, those numbers on his computer screen that refused to make sense nagged at him. Was it too late to call Arlen? The old man usually worked later than he did. He checked his watch. Already past seven.

  Dinner. Damn.

  He’d completely forgotten. Even if he left now, he’d be late.

  A quick call to Bowery Bar. A message—he’d meet Kate later, at the performance—though he realized, as soon as he hung up, that he did not have the theater’s address.

  He turned back to the computer, hit print.

  Maybe he should pay Bill Pruitt a visit. But that idea struck him as even worse than sitting in a dank downtown theater watching some deranged performance artist nail his penis to a table—no way he could sit through anything like that. Again. Still, for Kate he’d do it.

  Pruitt. How the hell had that guy insinuated himself into the Contemporary Museum? He’d actually had the nerve, the audacity to be condescending about Richard’s art collection, which, damn it, anyone who knew anything knew was one of the best contemporary collections in New York, maybe the country. Today, at the museum’s board meeting, it was all Richard could do not to leap out of his seat, reach across the table, grab the guy by his double chin, and squeeze the life out of him.

  Just thinking about Pruitt made Richard’s neck muscles practically go into spasms.

  He yanked the page of numbers out of his printer so fast the last few columns smudged.

  Willie nodded in time to De la Soul’s beat while he slipped into his new black leather jacket. William Luther King Handley Jr., Willie to his contemporaries, “Li’l Will” to the few remaining old school chums (a nickname tagged on in the eighth grade when he’d reached his full height of five feet six), and recently, �
�WLK Hand,” the signature he used on his funky mixed-media canvases, could not decide if wearing his pricey new jacket was pushing it a bit too far for some East Village art performance. Fuck it. He could dress any way he damn pleased. Anyway, he’d combined it with his usual black jeans, the frayed cuffs of which grazed his clunky black Doc Martens. The other high-priced item—the Yohji Yamamoto white shirt, which showed off his clear amber skin (from his mother’s side of the family) and green eyes (a genetic hand-me-down from his long-lost ancestor, John Handley, the white plantation owner from Winston-Salem)—was a gift from Kate, who would be happy to see him wear it. Kate, who was worse than his own mother when it came to how he dressed, if he was eating right, sleeping enough. Kate, who’d written about him in Artists’ Lives, made sure he was part of the PBS series, who’d gotten the first curators and collectors into his studio; and Richard, who’d actually bought the first painting, giving it, and Willie, the necessary stamp of approval. Mentors. Collectors. Surrogate parents. Kate and Richard were all that. And more.

  But Willie’s other genetic gifts—the full lips and perfectly straight white teeth—were distinctly his real father’s, or so it would appear from the man’s only known photo: a smiling, handsome African American in U.S. Army fatigues, taken somewhere in Asia, or was it Africa? Either way, the man had never returned.

  The fact that Willie’s parents hadn’t actually married made no difference to Willie’s mother, Iris. The photo, in a gilded Woolworth frame, had maintained a place of honor next to Iris’s bed in the crowded South Bronx tenement shared by Willie, his brother, baby sister, and grandmother, as long as Willie could remember. Six months ago, Willie had moved the three women into a garden apartment—which he paid for—in a middle-class Queens neighborhood, and the framed photo had been resurrected in Iris’s new bedroom.

  Willie’s success came as a surprise to Iris. Not from any lack of faith in her son, but because she didn’t know that kind of thing was possible. Willie knew she was proud of his making good, selling his pictures for big money. But Willie kept the exact prices (which had recently hit six figures) to himself, because Iris might see that as prideful and not quite Christian, though he couldn’t explain it to you unless you’d grown up in his family.

  Then there was Henry. Willie’s big brother. His “lost” brother. That’s what Iris called him: lost. Still, every few weeks he managed to find his way to Willie’s place, needing money for a fix. But Willie didn’t want to think about Henry. Not now.

  “I want to be an artist.”

  The words fluttered in the narrow hallway of the Bronx railroad flat, forever after to be associated with the scent of his grandma’s lavender powder and the Lysol Willie’s mother seemed to spray or wipe on everything.

  “A what?” his mother said.

  “An artist.”

  “What does that mean? An artist?”

  Willie couldn’t come up with an answer, had no idea, just a feeling. But, man, what a feeling. To be drawing, making lines into something, seeing the images come together, giving them life, getting lost way inside his head. Maybe it was just a world he created on paper, but plenty far away from the lousy world of the Bronx tenement.

  The memory faded, replaced with another, the argument he had had with Elena, just the other day.

  “I’m sick and tired of being referred to as a black artist. I’m an artist! Period.”

  “Look, Willie. It’s not a good thing to deny your blackness. Impossible. Hey, I’m a Latina. And a performance artist. And a woman. That’s who I am. It defines me.”

  “Deny my blackness? Are you kidding? Look at my work. It’s a classification, see? A category. One of the best black artists. A goddamn qualification! Like my art is something less, like there are different rules or separate criteria for artists of color—like I can’t compete with white artists in the white art world. Don’t you get that?”

  He still believed he was right, but wanted to patch things up. After all, Elena was his best friend, more like a sister. He’d see her tonight, could fix the argument then.

  Willie shut off the television and stood in the silence. He was gripped by a sudden unease, a nonspecific gloominess about the evening ahead. What is it? He rolled his shoulders inside the leather jacket, tried to toss it off. Whatever it was, he’d soon forget it. After all, dinner with his three favorite people—Kate, Richard, and Elena—no way he could be depressed or anxious around that trio.

  But out on the street, as he headed toward the East Village, there it was, this time as if someone had spliced microseconds of a movie into his brain—

  An arm slicing through space. A twisted, screaming mouth in close-up. Everything blood red. Then black.

  Willie sagged against the street lamp, gripped the cool metal for support.

  His mother, Iris, used to say he could feel things before they happened. But it had been years since he’d had one of these visions.

  No. Too many days alone in the studio. That’s all. He just needed to get out more.

  3

  Crosby Street was clogged with traffic. Horns blared; a cabbie shouted obscenities at workmen tossing bales of fabric remnants out the back end of a truck angled across the street like a train wreck.

  But once Willie crossed Broadway, the scene shifted to boutiques and contemporary art galleries jostling for space, and inconceivably stylish, good-looking people taking themselves very seriously in their studied black costumes.

  One of them, a youngish man, hair stripped Harlow-white, with an inch of black roots that matched the perfect two-day stubble on his thin cheeks, called out to Willie.

  Oliver Pratt-Smythe, Willie’s least favorite artist in New York—which was saying a lot. He and Willie had been a double bill in a London gallery a couple of years earlier. Pratt-Smythe, the more seasoned of the two, and the more savvy, had arrived two days before Willie and had covered the gallery’s floor with horsehair. Planting himself in the center of the space at a large noisy sewing machine, he would spend every day running horsehair through the machine making—what? Willie never could figure it out. About the only thing Willie could plainly see was that it was virtually impossible for viewers to reach his work without plowing through foot-deep horsehair, clumps of which had adhered themselves to the heavily encrusted surfaces of Willie’s paintings. For months afterward, Willie was plucking the stuff out with tweezers.

  Now he nodded without enthusiasm, taking in the careful paint smudges on Pratt-Smythe’s otherwise brand-new black jeans. Odd: the guy was not a painter.

  Without being asked, Pratt-Smythe started ticking off accomplishments. “Having a show in Düsseldorf,” he said, a look of world-weary ennui in his flat gray eyes. “Didn’t you get the announcement? No, well, gee, I’m sure I sent you one, but you’ll get one for my New York show, which is all set for November—the best month—and I’ve got an installation I’m trying to get together for Venice—the Biennale, you know.”

  “More horsehair?” asked Willie. “I saw a couple of nearly bald ones the other day, thought of you.”

  “No,” said Pratt-Smythe, without a trace of a smile. “I’m into dust now. Been collecting it for months. I mix it with my saliva and spread it into biomorphic patterns.” He picked at his dirty fingernails, looked bored, and asked, “And you?”

  “I’ll be there, too,” said Willie. “In Venice. I’m bringing an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner, setting it in the space, leaving it on all day, seeing what it collects, displaying that as my art. Hey, maybe it’ll be your dust.”

  For a split second Pratt-Smythe looked alarmed, then he allowed the tiniest grin to crack his tight lips. “Oh, I get it, man. You’re having me on. Good one, man.”

  “Yeah.” Willie grinned back. “Man.”

  “So I guess, you’re, uh, showing . . . what? Paintings?” Pratt-Smythe said this as if he were discussing not only the lowest form of art, but the lowest form of all human expression.

  “Yeah,” said Willie. “I’ll be showing
paintings—about thirty of them—in my one-man show at the Museum of Contemporary Art this summer.”

  Willie turned away, left the other artist on the corner of Prince and Greene Streets, trolling for someone—anyone—on whom to lay his current CV.

  Willie slung his leather jacket over his shoulder as he jogged between the two-way traffic on Houston, past Great Jones Street, heading into the East Village. He turned onto East Sixth Street, where the dozen or more Indian restaurants dispersed the scent of curry and cumin into the warm evening air, then jogged a half block to Elena’s three-story raggedy-ass tenement.

  A note, scribbled on cardboard, was Scotch-taped to the front door:

  INTACOM BROK

  “Oh, great.” Willie shook his head. Elena, he thought, has got to get out of here. The East Village renaissance is, like, over. He tried giving the old wooden door a shove. It groaned open.

  Inside, the place smelled musty and just a bit off, as if maybe the super hadn’t been dealing with the garbage—as usual. The front hall was lit with a dim yellow bulb.

  At the second-floor landing the smell was stronger; at the top of the stairs it was downright pungent. At Elena’s door, Willie knocked. “Elena? You in there?”

  Kate locked the Club across her steering wheel. Richard would go nuts if he knew she parked the Mercedes right on the street, in the East Village, no less. But to Kate, a car was a car, and she’d only be a few minutes, pick up the kids, then hook up with Richard at Bowery Bar, put the car into a nice safe lot.

  She started up the stairs at her usual determined pace, half her mind looking forward to the evening ahead, the other half still back at the Four Seasons with her pal Liz.

  And then there was that smell . . .

  Kate’s mind was suddenly filled with a rush of images—images that had lain dormant for a decade:

  A homeless man found under molding cartons.