The Genius

by Jesse Kellerman

  “Thirty dollars.”

  Sam said, “I really hope he picked something good.”

  I had to laugh when we got back three adults for the five thirty showing of Because of Winn-Dixie.

  As we passed the concession stand, I spotted Gudrais at the back of the line, and a jolt of excitement cut through me. It took a concerted effort not to turn and stare at him, or to tackle him right then and there. For a brief moment, I felt intensely possessive of him, as though, having lost Victor Cracke as a medium, I could now vent my creative will through the manipulation and capture of a pedophile. Rage and vengeance, tempered with victory, the thrill of knowing something he did not. It was not a simple emotion, but the best word I can come up with is zealotry. He was mine and I knew it.

  And then, just as suddenly as it had come, the feeling passed out of me, replaced by disgust. This night wasn’t performance art. It was real. He was real. This place—an overheated multiplex—the unglamorous chase— Sam—these things were real. The auditorium was packed with real kids, and I saw the look on Sam’s face, and her thoughts jumped into my head. Freddy Gudrais’s choice of movie wasn’t whimsical or random. It was appallingly true to form. He was here for the crowd. He was as real as he had ever been, real enough to put his hands around someone’s throat. I sobered up and did my best to put myself aside.

  We wanted to keep an eye on him, so the three of us spread out: I in back, Stuckey toward the middle, and Sam down near the front-left exit. It was an imperfect solution but it would have to do. Our primary goal was still to get Gudrais to relax and enjoy his soda.

  He came in as the ads ended and the theater began to darken, and I saw his shape glide into an empty row on the right side of the theater—closest to me. He was slightly behind me, which made it hard for me to look at him without being obvious. I tried to pace myself, glancing back and then away. When he was out of my sight I imagined all sorts of horrible possibilities. Old black-and-white photos of mangled bodies kept filling up my mind.

  The movie was a big hit. There was laughter; there were tears. I can’t relay the plot because I spent most of its 106 minutes checking my watch, waiting for permission to look back. Gudrais gradually sank down into his seat, until all I could see was the top of his head, his hair so black and glossy with pomade that it reflected the screen’s shifting blues and whites. Rationally I knew that I wasn’t doing a thing; I couldn’t really see him, his hands, anything other than that crescent of hair. But I hoped that my presence would somehow radiate out and encircle the families sitting around him.

  The credits rolled; I looked back; he was gone. I waited until I saw Stuckey stand, and then all three of us went up the aisle.

  As we’d hoped, he had been a bad citizen, leaving behind a wax cup full of melting ice and an empty container of popcorn with a napkin crumpled inside. Sam let out a happy yelp. Stuckey went out to the car and came back with a forensics kit. He put on gloves and crouched down and began to put things in bags. Then he stopped and sniffed near the popcorn container. He tweezed out the napkin. “Boy oh boy.”

  “What.”

  “Smell that?”

  I detected corn and salt and artificial butter, but above all something evocative of an overused swimming pool, equal parts sweat and chlorine.

  “That,” said Stuckey, “is semen.”

  BY THAT SUMMER I had long given up on my stolen artwork, and so I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from Detective Trueg.

  “Well,” he said, “we found your stuff.”

  “Where?”

  “eBay.”

  Trueg couldn’t take all the credit, he confessed. Since his second son went off to school, his wife had had too much free time on her hands; in her boredom, she had become something of an auction junkie. Tired of her blowing money on Smurf mugs and secondhand pashminas, Trueg had put her to work, giving her copies of missing art and telling her to be on the lookout. Just between us, he considered this nothing more than a way to make her feel useful and to prevent her from buying crap. In three years she had never found anything. But lo and behold, she had unearthed some suspiciously Crackean work indexed under Art > Drawings > Contemporary (1950-now).

  The seller’s handle was pps2764 and he was in New York, New York. The rotating photo gallery showed a half dozen drawings along with assorted close-ups.

  Five original drawings by famous artist VICTOR CRACKE. The pages go together. [One of the close-ups displayed a seam between two drawings.] Cracke’s work inhabits the shadowland between Expressionism and abstraction,yet this is no mere recapitulation of shopworn modernisms, rather a deliberateact of stylistic bricolage that incorporates the most striking elements of Pop and contemporary figuration.

  The paragraph continued on in this dreary vein, concluding,

  I have more of these for sale if you are interested.

  What bothered me most about the description was not its wordiness or its limp bunches of artspeak. What bothered me most is that I had written it. With the exception of the first two and the last sentences, the text had been lifted verbatim from the catalogue copy I’d written for Victor’s show.

  Also insulting was the price being asked. So far only one person had expressed enough interest to bid, and, as there were only six hours left on the auction, his offer of $150 looked like it would carry the day.

  On the bright side, anyone could Buy It Now for $500.

  I decided that it would be better not to tell Kevin Hollister about this.

  Trueg said, “The first thing I’d like to do is get ahold of the drawings and confirm that they’re for real.”

  “And that Kristjana didn’t draw them.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I mean. It would be pretty dumb of her to keep making copies, though. She sounded pretty scared the last time we talked to her.”

  I said that I didn’t think she would stoop to eBay to promote herself.

  Trueg laughed. “Bear in mind also that it might be a third party. Can you think of anyone else we should be talking to?”

  I almost suggested that he call Jocko Steinberger. But that wasn’t his style. He was more the self-pitying type. There were, of course, plenty of other people angry at me, and plenty of those people could draw—not as well as Kristjana, but at this point I made myself no guarantees. “You really think there might be another forger?”

  “Did you think there’d be a first?”

  I admitted that he had a point.

  “Let’s say we check him out and he seems to be for real, enough that we want to get to know him a little better. We make contact with him, make it sound like we’re interested in buying a lot more, get to him that way. Failing that, we can go after his account information, although that’ll take longer, cause we’ve got to go through the legal channels.” He paused. “I hope you realize how lucky this is. Most of what we go after we don’t find, ever. You really oughta thank the god of your choosing that this guy is such an idiot.”

  I offered to Buy It Now.

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “That bid is me.”

  THE PARTY THAT SHOWED UP at Freddy Gudrais’s door on a late May afternoon included two uniformed Staten Island cops, Sam, detective Richard Soto, and—way in the background—me. I had been allowed to go along for the ride, although it had taken a lot of strenuous lobbying. Nobody wanted an art dealer interfering, it seemed—Sam included.

  “It’s not safe,” she’d said.

  “What’s unsafe about it?”

  “We’re dealing with unknowns.”

  “But what, specifically, are you worried about.”

  She didn’t answer me. Perhaps I should have known then that something was different, that her silence marked the beginning of a new phase of the investigation. At the time I was too excited by the prospect of an arrest to understand that the professionals had begun to take over and that I was slowly being shut out.

  THE LOCK TURNED and the door whined and there he was: a skinny old man in a billowing workshirt,
his cheeks sunken and unshaven, one gnarled hand on the edge of the door and the other on the jamb, his left thumbnail nearly gone, replaced by a clump of scar tissue. Close-up, he appeared less well preserved. He looked us up and down. Then he smiled, and the change it brought over him was remarkable. He spoke like we were a group of old friends, fishing buddies or a reunited bowling team.

  He said, “Am I gonna need my coat?”

  Soto said, “That depends on how easily you get cold.”

  The cops followed Gudrais into the apartment, which was dim and overheated. Sam and Soto and I stepped inside, lingering near the door, as though to go any farther would be to poison ourselves with his air. A television sat opposite a folding chair. On the floor was a tray with a chipped mug and dozens of coffee rings. It was a sad room.

  As they led him out, Gudrais said, “I’ll prolly die first. Ever think of that?”

  Sam said, “Next time I have a drink, Freddy, I’ll drink to your continued health.”

  MARILYN AND I DIDN’T SPEAK for several months following her return from Europe. She made herself so busy with work that it was impossible to get her on the phone, or, at least, impossible for me. I’m sure that relevant people had no difficulty getting through. After sending her that first couple of e-mails, I decided that my prodding was worsening things. She was not afraid to make demands. If she wanted to hear an apology, she’d let me know.

  Late that summer—about two weeks after the Gudrais trial hit the papers, deep into a heat wave—my cell phone rang. “Please hold for Marilyn Wooten,” said the voice on the other end. That’s what they do when the president calls you.

  It was an inopportune moment for her to invite me to lunch: I was standing in the middle of the gallery, my sleeves rolled up, overseeing the installation of a menacing eight-foot sculpture of a bag of organic lettuce. I wanted to request a postponement, but I understood that if I didn’t go now I might never see her again.

  Nat had grown into autonomy nicely; lately, in fact, he had begun to chafe under my authority. I put him in charge, hopped in the shower, and taxied to an uptown brasserie, one of the old haunts, far from Chelsea and the possibility of running into anyone.

  I got out of the cab feeling drugged, my shower having done little except prime me to sweat again. Marilyn of course was coiffed and polished and dry and svelte and smooth. She kissed me on the cheek and I bathed momentarily in sandalwood and jasmine. I told her I was happy to see her looking good. I was. I could feel happy for her because I no longer desired her—missed her—loved her—you choose. The point is: it was so far gone as to evoke a sense of nostalgia.

  For the better part of an hour, we talked about who was up, who was down, the latest scandale. As always, she provided most of the fodder. I served as her foil, stippling the narrative with nods and commentary. I hadn’t been making the rounds, and so I had a hard time keeping up with her. Between stories she downed a steak and pommes frites; over dessert she lit a cigarette that the waiter imperiously commanded her to extinguish. She snorted and ground the butt out on her breadplate.

  “Congratulations,” she said.

  I looked at her.

  “On solving your mystery.”

  I shrugged. “Thanks.”

  “Why didn’t he just plead guilty?”

  “I think he thought they would take pity on him because of his age.”

  She snickered. “Clearly his lawyer forgot that we live in a youth-worshipping culture. Did you go to the trial?”

  “All ten days.”

  “Really? Then why didn’t I read about you?”

  “I was in the audience.”

  “They didn’t call you to the stand?”

  “They didn’t need to,” I said. “Actually, my name never came up.”

  “Not once?”

  “Not once.”

  “Well,” she said. “That’s a shame.”

  I shrugged. “It is what it is.”

  “You don’t get some sort of municipal commendation.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Then I guess you’ll have to settle for the satisfaction of a job well done.”

  I nodded.

  “Personally, I never found that worth very much. Was it interesting, at least?”

  “It was mostly very technical.”

  “Oh gawd. That’s not interesting at all.”

  “Not especially,” I said. Here I lied to her, not out of malice but because I knew that what I considered interesting would likely set her eyes spinning. But I’d learned some very interesting things, to me anyway. I learned that Freddy Gudrais wore a size-eleven shoe, the same size as the cast taken from the scene of Alex Jendrzejewski’s abduction. I learned that shortly after the final murder, the murder of Abie Kahn, Freddy Gudrais had been arrested on an unrelated charge; I learned that he had served four years, and that he’d earned his release about eighteen months before the assault on James Jarvis. I learned that our partial fingerprint was intact enough to yield a match, and that your average juror finds DNA evidence remarkably convincing.

  I learned that following a brief second prison stint in the mid-70s, Freddy Gudrais had fathered a child. Right around the time I was born, in fact. I found it interesting to note the appearance in court of a tight-lipped, lank-haired woman clutching a Naugahyde purse. She looked considerably like Freddy Gudrais, same pointed chin and wide mouth; aside from the press and me, she was the only person to come every day. Several times Gudrais looked back at her, but her expression never changed, and when they announced his conviction on four counts of homicide, one count not guilty, she stood up and walked out.

  One thing that did not emerge at trial—or at any point, for that matter—was the true nature of Victor and Freddy’s acquaintance. Soto questioned Freddy about it. He had to consider the possibility, for instance, that Victor had aided and abetted. All Freddy would say is, “I ain’t seen him in years.” Another time he mentioned offhand that he had bought a car with money Victor had given him. Soto asked why Victor had given him money. And Freddy, who never seemed to get upset, not even when the gavel came down, laughed and said, “Cause I asked for it.”

  These were things that interested me, but they would not interest Marilyn. We all have our private causes, and it’s the job of the person who loves you to pretend to care. Marilyn wasn’t that person anymore.

  I said, “It wasn’t like you see on TV.”

  “Mm. And the lawyer? She’s well?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “I’m glad you’re glad.”

  She smiled. “I’m not going to get into a bowing match with you, darlin.”

  “We’re going to Ireland sometime in the fall.”

  She recommended a hotel in Dublin and told me to use her name. “Thank you.”

  “I hope you have a wonderful time.”

  I nodded.

  She said, “I’m going on vacation, too, you know.”

  “I thought you’d already taken a vacation.”

  “A vacation that long demands another vacation. A brief one, anyhow. Kevin and I are going to Vail for a week.”

  Now it was my turn to smile. “Just the two of you?”

  “Well, he does have a fairly large posse. But yes, I suppose that at certain key moments we will be alone together.”

  I couldn’t help myself: I started to laugh.

  “Be nice,” she said. Then she began to laugh as well. We laughed and laughed and I handed her the remainder of my strawberry zabaglione, which she polished off in three bites. Then she lit another cigarette. “I’ve decided to take on Kristjana.”

  I looked at her.

  She shrugged. “It was at Kevin’s request.”

  “I didn’t realize they were acquainted.”

  “Oh yes. She’s been working for him for a while now.”

  “Working how.”

  “You know, his Great Paintings thing?” She spoke through smoke: “After Jaime Acosta-Blanca ski
pped town Kevin had to find someone else and I suggested her. He asked her to make some copies of the Cracke drawings and what she did impressed him, so he hired her. Apparently they’ve grown quite close. I think he might have fucked her, actually… But. That’s neither here nor there.”

  I said, “Kristjana’s a lesbian.”

  “Says you. Anyhow it’s all very cordial.”

  “Madam.” The waiter was strangling on rage, leaning over the table and goggling at her half-finished cigarette. “Please.”

  “We’ll take the check,” she said, handing him her credit card and waving him away. As he stormed off, she took a last drag and dropped the smoldering remains into her water glass. She sighed. “They’re ruining my city, Ethan.”

  “I didn’t realize they’d given you the keys.”

  “Honey,” she said. “I make the keys.”

  DETECTIVE TRUEG spent more than three months establishing a rapport with pps2764 in New York, New York, and by that November they had him in custody.

  “Sometimes we get our man,” he said. “You know a Mr. Patrick Shaughnessy?”

  It took me a moment to place the name. “From Muller Courts?”

  “The very same.”

  “But he’s the superintendent,” I said, as though that made a difference.

  “You should of seen the look on his face when I badged him. Whoo, he looked like he swallowed a sack of rats. At first he claimed he got the drawings from somebody else. Pretty soon, though, he’s saying, all right, it was him, but—hey—after all, he was taking back what rightfully belonged to him. He says you ripped him off cause he had the drawings first. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries to come at you with a lawsuit.”

  Sure enough, a few weeks later a process server showed up at the gallery. I called Sam, who offered to recommend a real lawyer.

  TRAVEL AND ITS ATTENDANT STRESSES provide a good litmus test for the viability of a relationship, and so I suppose it’s no surprise that shortly after we got back from Dublin, Samantha and I split up. Apparently my narcissism finally wore her down. Among other things, she told me that I was lost and that I needed to get ahold of who I was.