Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

  “And artwork.” She was staring at his face. “Where did you get that scar? Did a woman give it to you?”

  “Charles Butler gave it to me.”

  Was he being sarcastic? No, he was serious. “Why?”

  “You’ll have to ask Charles.”

  The curator for a New Jersey bank’s art collection looked down at his red ticket and asked the computer software king, “Would you be interested in trading my football arena filled with marmalade and great white sharks for your mile-long line of bustless but sexy blondes?”

  Quinn watched her walk away from him. It seemed she was always doing that. She walked past a neighborhood junkie, apparently uninterested in his unlawful act of demonstrating a drug fix for a small group of well-dressed out-of-towners.

  One of the nicely dressed people obligingly held a lighter under the junkie’s spoon as the man filled his needle with a liquefied dope. The junkie expertly tied the elastic cord around his upper arm to make a vein bulge out. And now he inserted the needle, and the spectators watched him fly away to the land of Wynken, Blynken and Slow Death.

  This was not the first junkie Quinn had seen up close.

  He had seen Oren Watt outside the gallery on the night Aubry died. He had only taken note of the dark glasses and the bizarre mouth. All the other features had been wiped out by the headlights of three police cars, all trained on Oren Watt. His limbs had been jerking to a music of the mind with only half its notes intact. Between his lips, his tongue had darted in and out like a small pink mouse, keeping the rhythm of his spasms, as Watt’s feet tap-danced in codes of pain. He had fallen to the ground, and then scrambled back to his feet.

  “What a trouper,” one cop had called out.

  “Encore,” yelled another.

  And Oren Watt had done his junkie’s song and dance one more time.

  Quinn, Markowitz and Riker had been passing by the drug addict and his art critics in blue uniforms when Quinn brought the parade to a halt. He had pointed to the junkie, and Markowitz shook his head, saying, “Not enough blood on him.”

  Quinn remembered looking down at his own clothes that night, the blood on his shoes and pantlegs. And the policemen and technicians filing past them, going to and from the gallery, all had blood on them.

  Koozeman jerked his head to the sound of her voice. She smiled. It had taken less than twenty minutes to instill this lab-rat reflex in the man.

  “Miss Mallory.” His smile was forced this time.

  “Just Mallory is fine. I suppose your next opening will be an Oren Watt show?”

  “No. I told you I don’t handle him, and I never will. The television people only rented the gallery for the shooting. Just business. Nothing to do with art, really.” He was perspiring, and his hand went to the knot of his tie, unconsciously working it loose.

  Feeling the heat, Koozeman?

  “Don’t you think Oren Watt is a genius?”

  “Of course not,” said Koozeman. “He knows nothing about art, and it shows. He could never work outside that narrow market of ghoulish souvenirs. The drawings are poor by any standard. If you’re thinking of investing-”

  “No, but I am interested in art-more and more every day,” said Mallory. “The most fascinating piece of art I ever saw came out of your old gallery in the East Village.”

  “But you would have been a child when I was in that location.”

  “I was. All I have now are the photographs of the artist and the dancer when the butcher was done with them. I study them every day, every damn day. I can’t stop looking at them. I’d say there was a dark genius to the arrangement of the bodies. Wouldn’t you?”

  “In the context of the crime, perhaps-”

  “But Oren Watt is no genius, is he?”

  Koozeman’s forehead was filmed with sweat. And now, not wanting to lose the momentum of a hit-and-run, she went off in search of Charles Butler. She had a few questions for him, too.

  “The scar? Quinn told you about that?”

  “He says you did it.”

  Charles took Mallory by the arm and led her to the only corner of the room unpopulated by tickets or patrons.

  “I’ll tell you some other time, all right? Here,” he said, presenting her with a red ticket. “A souvenir.”

  Mallory looked down at her ticket. “I can’t believe you paid good money for this.”

  “I didn’t. Koozeman would never insult me that way. He gave me an obscene discount. I think he wants to cultivate me for the A list. I hope you like it. Dean Starr’s idea for this one was an elephant museum. His plan was to reenact all the elephant jokes with stuffed elephants. The real thing. Only dead.”

  “Charles.”

  “Oh, lighten up. It’s only a joke.”

  “So, that wasn’t really one of his numbers.”

  “Oh, yes it was-one of his best.”

  She smiled at him. It was one of those rare smiles, not meant to convey anything threatening or sinister, but only the pleasure of the moment. And to think he had bought that pleasure with an elephant joke.

  Then the moment was over, the smile was gone. “Quinn thinks these tickets were Koozeman’s idea.”

  “Well, that would only fit if it was a joke. He’s always been a man of extremes. But he-”

  “Maybe it was a joke. I’ll bet you even money that Koozeman was surprised when some of the tickets actually sold the night of the first show.”

  “No bet, Mallory. I’m sure you’re right. Koozeman does have an interesting sense of humor. Let me see if I can guess where you’re going with this. You think Koozeman was setting up Dean Starr to look like a fool in public, am I right?”

  She nodded. He continued. “When Starr was a critic, his writing showed a lack of native intelligence. Odds are the joke would have gone over his head. So the scheme would suggest some animosity, a-”

  “A falling-out among killers?”

  “That’s reaching, Mallory.”

  “Not really. Koozeman still owns the old gallery in the East Village. He rents it out through a real estate agent. According to the agent, he put both of the galleries on the market this morning. He’s planning to liquidate and run.”

  “That theory won’t hold up,” said Charles. “He’d be running very slow, given the current real estate market.”

  “He’s greedy. He wants to leave, but he can’t let go of the money on the hoof. The tickets are worth money, but only if he sells them fast. It all hangs on money, the old murders and the new one.”

  She seemed so comfortable inside of Koozeman’s skin, it seemed a shame to point out the obvious flaw in her logic, which was also the flaw in Mallory. “You always force everything to a money motive. And I blame this on your father. That was his all-time favorite, wasn’t it? But twelve years ago, most people just looked at the evidence of butchery and said, ‘Psycho.’”

  “Charles, twelve years ago, Quinn didn’t buy the psycho theory. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  As J. L. Quinn approached them, Mallory turned and glided away. The critic stopped and watched her back for a moment. Then he smiled at Charles. “She asked you about the scar?”

  “Yes, but I put her off.”

  “You must tell me how you did that. I’ve never met anyone more tenacious than Mallory.”

  “It’s an old magic trick.” Charles pulled a coin from his pocket, displayed it in his spread hand, and then made a fist. “You do it with distraction, replacing one thing with another.” When he opened his fist again, the coin had become a twenty-dollar bill.

  “I’m in your debt, Charles.”

  “Good. Perhaps you could explain something to me. I understand you think the tickets were Koozeman’s idea. I like that theory. It suits Koozeman. But it doesn’t explain why people are actually buying the tickets. They’re all grown-ups. Not a four-year-old in the pack.”

  While they discussed the big production of the little tickets, Charles took slower, more careful measurements of the man who might be stal
king Mallory. Jamie Quinn was a cool one, and always had been. Charming manners and eyes that chilled. As Quinn had once instructed him in the art of fencing as a child, he now guided Charles Butler through the unfathomable.

  “So, it’s just business? If you don’t have the talent of an artist, you can make do with the talent of a businessman. Close?”

  “Yes, Charles, it’s very close.” Quinn pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “But why not carry it just a bit further?”

  “Somebody makes it, somebody else sells it, and some other somebody buys it.”

  “Yes, go on.” Quinn lit his cigarette, disregarding the laws against smoking in public buildings.

  “So the sellers and the buyers are cutting out the middleman. They’re cutting out the artists.”

  “And so a new order replaces the old, entrepreneurial talent supersedes artistic talent. Superb reasoning, Charles, as always. My compliments.”

  The hidden door in the wall opened a crack, and a hand deposited a standing ashtray on the floor next to Quinn. The door had closed again before Quinn looked down at the ashtray. He seemed to take its presence for granted as he deposited an ash. So Quinn knew about the door and never thought it worth mentioning to Mallory.

  “If this movement ever caught on, what would happen to the real artists?”

  “You mean,” Quinn corrected, “the artists of the old order.”

  Charles sensed that roads of deep feeling and roads of conversation were merging here. Perhaps in Quinn’s mind the farce was already a sad fait accompli.

  “Some will drown and some will be absorbed,” said Quinn. “Others will become accountants, perceiving accountancy as a related field. And it is.”

  “Is that woman sucking on a rat?”

  “Yes.”

  The performance artist nibbled on the rat’s ear, basking for three seconds in J. L. Quinn’s glance as he turned around to confirm that she was indeed sucking vermin. Then the performance artist jammed the rat back into her sleeve and hoped it would suffocate. Nasty creature. It gave her the creeps.

  She turned her attention back to the blind portrait artist. He had misplaced his white-tipped cane and was currently at her mercy in his quest for directions to a drink. He was a sour man, not at all the cheerful cliché she had anticipated.

  “I think it’s so brave of you to go into portraiture without being able to see the model.” She stretched out one foot to nudge his fallen cane against the wall. “It’s a new frontier, isn’t it? I mean, working with color you can’t even-”

  “Could you point me toward the bar?” His voice was plaintive, whining.

  “I give you so much credit for being blind.”

  “Being blind is a pain in the ass. Could you-”

  “And all that corporate grant money. I was wondering how you pulled that off. I had a double mastectomy. Do you think I could use that as a-”

  “Point me toward the bar, you moron.”

  She obligingly turned him around and gave him a push in the direction of a blank wall, and the blind portrait artist promptly smashed into it.

  Koozeman leaned against the back wall, eyes trance-gazing on the line of Mallory’s cheek. His mind was completing a pratfall that had begun twelve years ago. If she turned now, if she saw what she had done to him.

  He took his seat on the platform. A woman was standing before his chair, inquiring about a ticket.

  “What? Number fourteen? Just a moment.” Koozeman squinted at the sheet of paper in his hand and simultaneously appraised the value of the diamond bracelet on the woman’s arm. “Oh, yes, fourteen. Mr. Starr’s idea for that one is a big red wheel a quarter mile across. It’s being airlifted by a blimp, you see? And it’s absolutely useless because it has no reason to be there, but there it is.”

  Off to one side, Mallory suddenly appeared. She was watching him sweat. Now she came closer, walking slow. What beautiful green eyes, eyes of an assassin. A muscle in his chest constricted. Her voice was soft in the mode of casual conversation.

  “I understand you still write art reviews. Charles gives you a lot of credit for never reviewing your own stable of artists.”

  “I try not to be obvious.”

  “Now that artist who died with Aubry Gilette-Peter Ariel? Before Ariel was one of your artists, you trashed his work in a review. I read it. Pretty brutal stuff.”

  “Peter’s work improved considerably over the next season.”

  “Then it’s lucky you didn’t kill him earlier.”

  “What?”

  “Quinn tells me your reviews were better at killing emerging talent than nurturing it. I suppose it’s wise to stick with what you know best-the butchery.”

  And now she looked down at her empty hand. She turned around, head bowed, searching the ground for something lost. She slowly walked away from him, her eyes scanning the floorboards.

  Sweating profusely, Koozeman rose from his chair and walked around to the back of the platform. He pressed his hand to a place on the wall, and the hidden door swung open.

  A minute after he had closed the door behind him, two muffled, angry voices were bleeding through the wall.

  Mallory kept her eyes to the floor, looking everywhere for the lost red ticket, her gift from Charles. He would be hurt if he thought it meant so little to her that she could lose it so easily. Though this was true.

  She drifted near a small cluster of people and glanced up to see a blind man delivering a lecture to a stone pillar, as the surrounding people, including Charles, politely watched on.

  “You’re showing your ignorance, Mr. Butler,” said the blind man to the pillar. “Sabra was overrated. Women will always hold an auxiliary place in the art world. They haven’t sufficient power of personality to create meaningful work.”

  Mallory backed up a few steps to the spot where she had seen a dead fly. She scooped it up and pitched it into the blind man’s wineglass and continued scanning the floor for her lost ticket.

  The small group surrounding the blind man wondered, each one, if it might be rude or, worse, politically incorrect to mention the dead bug in his glass. Wouldn’t that call attention to his blindness?

  Ah, too late.

  A small group of prospective ticket buyers had collected around the chair on the platform. Koozeman was unresponsive to any of their questions. He had a red ticket in his teeth, and the number was just visible. When the matron from Ridgewood, New Jersey, consulted the sheets in Koozeman’s lap, she found the line giving the artist’s idea for that number. The original description had been a reconstruction of elephant jokes, using dead elephants. How amusing. All but the heavily underscored word “dead” had been crossed out with the line of a pen.

  Dead?

  She stared into Avril Koozeman’s unblinking eyes for a full minute more. Then her own eyes drifted down to the small spot of blood on his chest, and she began to shriek. Four gallery boys converged upon her with the mistaken idea that she had run out of wine.

  Her hands fluttered, and she nearly dropped her glass. She turned in time to see a young blond girl disappear into a solid white wall. The matron put her glass on the floor, and then she put herself down beside it.

  Behind the wall, Mallory ran down a narrow corridor and collided with a gallery boy, knocking him to the floor. “Did anyone come this way?”

  “No, ma’am.” On hands and knees he scrambled after a rolling wine bottle. “I didn’t see anybody.”

  “Could anyone have gotten past you?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.” He got to his feet and slapped at the dust on his black pants. “I just came back from the main room.” He was staring at the wine bottle in his hand. “Damn, the label is torn.”

  Mallory turned back the way she had come. With the brightness of the gallery behind the seamless door, one shining point of light stood out from the rough boards. She put her eye to the pinhole. It gave her a view of gallery patrons gathered near the wall.

  “This hole?” she prompted t
he boy, who had come to stand beside her.

  “The peephole. Yes, ma’am, that’s so we don’t open the door and jostle a wineglass in someone’s hand. You could get fired for that.”

  She reentered the main gallery and grabbed a cellular phone from the hand of a collector, disconnecting his call and giving curt instructions to the operator. As she came closer to Koozeman’s body, she noticed the ticket number was forty-four. Her lost ticket.

  Koozeman left the gallery in a zippered body bag. Heller and his forensic team stood with Jack Coffey and Mallory at the far end of the room.

  “Well,” said Heller, “the wound is from the front. That usually means it’s someone the victim knew, but under these circumstances, anyone could have gotten close enough to kill him.”

  Charles Butler joined them. “Actually it could-” Mallory took his arm and walked him away. “Charles is a little drunk,” she said over one shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”

  “I’m not drunk, and you know it. I was just going-”

  “You were going to tell them about the door in the wall. I don’t want you to do that.”

  “But you know it could have been Oren Watt.”

  “No, Charles. It couldn’t. Don’t muddy up the water, okay? I want you to go home now. It’s going to take a few hours to clean up loose ends and do paperwork.”

  “But you must-”

  “Good night, Charles.”

  This time Riker heard her coming up behind him with the tap of high heels. He turned around to the rare sight of his partner stalking across the roof in the soft rustle of black silk. An ancient schoolboy’s drill of lines crowded his mind with images of the tiger “burning bright in the forests of the night.”

  He smiled. “Mallory, I wish I’d memorized more poetry when I was in school. ‘Dynamite’ just doesn’t do you justice.”