“I still don’t buy your explanation about Drexler,” I told her. “What if I had punched him out or something? He’d be better off than he is now.”
“I didn’t know Paulie was going to kill himself,” she said. “I thought there was no reason you would ever find out who he was. He was a sweet guy except that he had a couple of sexual hang-ups.”
“Just a couple? He may have been a sweet guy, but I’m pretty sure it was Paul Drexler who tried to break into my apartment last night, and he’d already paid yours a visit. I still don’t get why you had to lay that shit about Drexler on me. The scarface guy in Little Italy would have been enough to hold my attention. Why unload that other crap on me?”
“I wanted you to see how scared I was.”
“You’re a fucking liar. I ought to throw you out on the street.”
“Okay—there was a bit more to it than that, but what I said is true—I didn’t want Joey on your back, and I didn’t want you tracking down Paulie and beating him up or something. It wouldn’t have helped anything. I had spoken to Joey and told him that Paulie was stalking me . . .”
I interrupted.
“Another lie!”
“Call it any way you want to call it.”
She was mad now.
“Joey said he’d take care of it, but when I caught Paulie jerking off in my room in the middle of the night, I got scared again. When I told you the story at the diner, I honestly didn’t know if he was still stalking me or not—and I began to wonder if Joey was involved in some way. He has keys to that apartment, or at least Shirley does. That must have been how Paulie got in that night—and yesterday too.”
“You mean you think that Garofolo might have ordered Drexler to sic himself on you?”
She shrugged and sobbed some more. I didn’t tell her that I’d already confronted Garofolo with that idea, but I asked if she knew any reason why Garofolo might have done that. She shook her head. No. Right—and the Tooth Fairy is in an S&M relationship with the quarterback coach of the Dallas Cowboys.
“I needed your help,” she said, “but I didn’t want to drag you into the whole fucking mess—can’t you understand that? Now I don’t know what to think.”
It was time for a judgment call. I gave her a hug. I mean, what are a couple of lies between platonic friends?
Sandy slept in the bed again. I couldn’t sleep, so I spent some time gawping at her, wondering how far I could trust her and trying yet again to make some sense of the whole mess. And I thought she was the one lost in the woods! I took a shot at the old Hansel and Gretel routine, trying to follow a trail of breadcrumbs that hopefully would lead me out of the Schwarzwald, but those damn Abingdon Square pigeons had eaten every last morsel.
I gave up, rolled a joint, lit it, and went back to gawping at Sandy Smollett as she slept. Her face was as peaceful as if she didn’t have a care in the world. The dope kicked in and, after a while, I made my way to the sofa and turned on the TV without sound. Forbidden Planet was playing, and there was Anne Francis in one of those primly sexy outfits that girls used to wear in Hollywood movies if they happened to live sixteen light-years from Earth on the planet Altair IV. But I knew it was really Sandy Smollett, and no one could tell me otherwise.
I woke suddenly to find Sandy standing by the sofa, gawping at me. She had on a nightgown but, silhouetted against the glow of static from the television, she might as well have been naked.
“I had a bad dream,” she said.
I asked her what it was about.
“Someone was stalking me.”
“Anyone we know?”
“Just someone. I couldn’t see his face. He was in the shadows. I’m scared, Alex.”
I led her back to the bed and sat down next to her. We stayed there for a while, not saying much, then I got up to go to the sofa.
“Don’t leave,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Your boss was serious, and he’s a serious man.”
“Really—don’t go. It’ll be okay. I need your warmth.”
“Not possible,” I told her.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “If I wanted to seduce you, do you think I wouldn’t have done it by now?”
I had no answer to that.
“Just get into bed with me,” she said, climbing between the sheets and patting the pillow next to her. “I’ll make sure nothing happens.”
How could I refuse an invitation like that?
FIFTEEN
Surprisingly, or maybe not, I slept well. It was waking up that was the hard part, with my arms wrapped around Sandy and the D train pressed up against her ass. I savored the situation for as long as I dared, then rolled out of bed. Sandy was lost to the world.
It was already after ten o’clock. I pulled on some clothes and headed for La Bonbonnière to pick up coffee and a repeat of those egg-and-bacon sandwiches. At the corner of Hudson I passed a guido in a Jets jacket and cheaters, surrounded by cigarette butts. I told him to say hi to Joey for me.
“Fuck you,” he said.
I got an extra coffee and handed it to him on the way back.
“Fuck you,” he said again.
Sandy was still sleeping, so I ate both sandwiches. Waiting for her to wake up, I went around the corner to Gristedes to grab some groceries. There was a greaser on that corner too, probably another of Garofolo’s stooges. He had a newspaper and was pretending he could read.
When I got back to the apartment, the phone was ringing. Sandy was in the bathroom and the shower was running. I picked up the receiver and heard Langham’s voice. He asked if Sandy was there. I told him she was in the shower. He asked if she could hear me from where I was? I said I didn’t think so.
“Good,” he said. “Can you meet me at the Konstantin Gallery at noon?”
I asked why.
“No questions,” he said. “Can you be there? Alone?”
“No Sandy?”
“No Sandy.”
In the grocery store I had discovered I was almost out of cash, so I went to the top-loading safe I kept under the floorboards in a walk-in closet to replenish my wallet from the bills stashed there. This was also where I kept a .38 semiautomatic, and I thought seriously about wearing it. I don’t like to carry heat, but someone had tried to ventilate me outside the Whitney and—call me superstitious if you like—I took that as an omen. I was about to remove the gun from the safe when I heard Sandy’s voice behind me.
“Who was on the phone?” she asked.
Her voice came from an angle that told me she probably couldn’t see into the closet—at least not at that moment. Just my butt sticking out.
“It was just Janice,” I improvised, hurriedly closing the safe, spinning the dial, and replacing the floorboards.
There are some women who look like shit when they wake up. Sandy wasn’t one of them, especially not wrapped in a bath towel. I sat with her, drinking coffee and doing some more gawping. I was putting off telling her that I was going uptown, but she seemed to read my mind.
“You’re acting like you’re sitting on needles,” she said.
“I’ve got to go uptown.”
She wanted to know why.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Is it anything to do with the stalker? Or poor Paulie?”
“Poor Paulie was a stalker too, remember? And he maybe packed a gun.”
Now we were back to tears again. I told her to pull herself together. She seemed shocked, and I thought she was going to throw a tantrum, but instead she thanked me.
“You’re right,” she said.
I told her I needed to get going. She asked if she could come with me. I told her that she had to stay put—that she’d be safe in the apartment because Garofolo had at least one goon posted outside. She said she’d be okay. I left the apartment and headed toward 8th Avenue
to pick up a taxi. Garofolo’s sentry was where I had left him.
“Next time,” he said, “I take sugar. A fuckin’ shitload of sugar.”
The Lucas Konstantin Gallery was in the Pringle Building on West 57th Street. There were a dozen galleries scattered between the third and seventh floors. Most of them were what’s known in the business as secondary-market dealers, meaning that they traded in the work of blue-chip artists, preferably dead, with brand recognition that came with solid cash value established by previous sales, especially at auction. Lucas Konstantin, by contrast, was a primary-market dealer, meaning that he took risks on unknown and lesser-known artists and made it his business to create and then build their reputations. In his field, he was one of the best in the city. Artists in his stable had acquired significant followings among the more adventurous kinds of collector and museum curator. One of these artists was Matthew Ripley, the asshole who had challenged me to make a life drawing at Jilly Poland’s loft. His pop art–derived popsicles didn’t push any boundaries, but they looked contemporary, they didn’t require deep contemplation, and they sold like bubble gum.
The moment I stepped into the gallery, I understood why Langham had asked me to meet him there. The walls were hung with half a dozen large canvases by Ripley, all of them naked women astride motorbikes. The choppers varied from painting to painting. One was a Harley, another a Ducati, a third an AJS, and so on. The nudes were all representations of a single person. She was outlined with orange, violet, and indigo calligraphy, her flesh represented by pigment laid on in creamy impasto, the highlights shell pink and primrose, the shadows cobalt and ultramarine. They were slick and sexy likenesses of Sandy Smollett.
I was furious—enraged at Ripley and even more so at Sandy. What the fuck was going on? I felt as if my fantasies had been raped. I wished I had worn my .38 so I could have shot the paintings full of holes.
“You’re going to burst a blood vessel,” said a voice behind me.
Langham.
“I’m going to kill the bastard,” I began. “I’m going to . . .”
Langham touched me on the arm and told me to calm down.
“Sandy didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.
That shut me up for long enough to wonder why I was so angry at Sandy, but then I thought of Danny Fraser’s painting, and Yari’s photographs, and the man hanging in Sandy’s apartment, and her soiled panties beside him on the floor, and the tacky stage at Aladdin’s Alibi with its absurd backdrop, and the sleazy comedian who fouled the air between acts. I started yelling again. Then I saw, standing next to Langham and looking astonished, the trim, dapper figure of Lucas Konstantin, a guy I knew and liked.
“It’s always a pleasure to see a strong reaction to an artist’s work,” he said.
I ignored this and turned to Langham.
“Aren’t you fucking angry?” I demanded.
“Yes, but not at Sandy,” he said. “I’m sure she is not even aware of the existence of these tasteless monstrosities. I’m sorry, Lucas, but it’s true—Ripley is both depraved and a mediocrity, and you know it.”
Langham turned back to me.
“I’ll tell you how he made them. He has drawn Sandy a number of times at Jilly’s loft, so he’s familiar with her body and has plenty of studies of it—okay?”
That got me riled again.
“And like many of us,” Langham continued, “he sometimes takes photographs of the models, which he brings back to his studio to work with. Meaning that he probably has ample material on which to base the facial likenesses. In other words, Sandy probably doesn’t know a thing about these paintings.”
I saw that this was a plausible explanation and chilled a couple of degrees, then asked Lucas, “How long has Ripley been working on these?”
“I can’t tell you precisely,” said Lucas. “Ripley works fast—very alla prima—and these paintings were commissioned. I never saw them till they arrived at the gallery. I was contacted by an attorney from a law firm called Lucking, Thorpe, & Lucking who informed me that they represented a client who had commissioned these paintings from Matthew. Until then I knew nothing about them. I was to get my usual percentage, but there were stipulations. The name of the client would remain secret, and the paintings would be shown in the gallery—a solo exhibition—immediately. It meant that I was forced to postpone a first show by a young artist from Boston, but I have my overheads to consider. I almost forgot—it was stipulated that there would be no opening reception.”
“And—let me guess—you received your commission in cash?”
“Let’s say that funds were discreetly transferred and leave it at that. By the way, you’re only just in time to see the paintings. The show went up yesterday evening, it comes down today at five o’clock, and the paintings are to be removed.”
“Ripley was here to hang the show?”
“Of course, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me anything about his mysterious patron. He claimed that he had no idea who it was—said that, like me, he’d dealt with the man’s attorneys.”
“And did he say anything about the model?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“So who has been to see the show?”
“I wasn’t able to promote it, so the only people to have been here are those who happened to come through the gallery today—off-the-street traffic, I suppose. I’ve seen maybe a dozen people, but I’ve been in my office most of the time.”
“Anyone unusual?”
“Not especially. There was one well-dressed older man I’d never seen before who asked about prices. He spent a long time looking at the work. My secretary told me there was also a hideous-looking fellow with a scarred face and a bandaged hand. I think he must have just wandered in. We get all sorts.”
He nodded toward a smartly dressed blonde seated at a desk near the entrance.
“This man with the scarred face,” I asked her, already knowing the answer, “what kind of scars?”
“Hideous,” she said. “Like he’d been in a fire. Or acid maybe, like someone had thrown vitriol in his face like you read about.”
Langham and I left the building together.
“You understand why I asked you not to bring Sandy,” he said. “I knew it might be distasteful for you—Ripley’s work is so vulgar to begin with—but I thought it best you were aware of this. I hope too that you’re beginning to trust me a little. I think we both have Sandy’s interests at heart.”
“Do you have any idea who commissioned these paintings?” I asked. “Is Garofolo involved in all this shit?”
“I haven’t the remotest idea,” he said.
“Is there some Mr. Big lurking in the background?”
“I’m as much in the dark as you, dear boy.”
I had no idea whether to believe him or not. The way I felt at that moment, I would have liked to have dragged him into a public toilet and beaten the crap out of him. It might not have helped, but it would have made me feel better.
“And what about this freak with the scarred face?” I asked. “The one who came to the gallery this morning. You know who that was, don’t you?”
“The other man who’s been stalking her? The one you saved her from?”
“What would he be doing at the gallery? How would he know about these paintings?”
Langham shrugged.
“What’s your theory?” he asked.
“Do I have one? It’s like everything else. It doesn’t add up.”
“Should the police know about all this?”
“What would we tell them? There’s a mysterious collector? There’s a man with hideous fucking burns on his face? They know about him anyway—and what does it add up to?”
Langham told me he was going to catch a breath of fresh air in Central Park and invited me to join him. I told him I had to see a man about a rottweiler.
I approached from the far side of the avenue to get the lay of the land. The Alibi was open, though it looked forlorn in the sunlight. A different Yul Brynner stand-in was guarding the door. As I watched—smoking a Gitane in a shady doorway—I saw a handful of customers arrive in threes and fours, all male and with that cookie-cutter, out-of-towner-dressed-for-the-Big-Apple look—probably playing hooky from the Gift, Games, and Hobbies Expo or the Corrugated Paper Goods Fall Fair.
As I contemplated such matters, a succulent brunette in a tight miniskirt asked for a light. For a moment or three, I took her for a hooker offering a blow-n-go quickie—a service readily available in that neck of the jungle—but the outfit, though sexy, wasn’t quite raunchy enough. There were no flags flying, no sartorial signals reminding the sucker where he’s supposed to put it.
“You a friend of Joey’s?” she asked.
“Joey being who?”
“The same Joey you went to see last night.”
“Oh, that Joey?”
“Yeah, that Joey. I brought you a drink last night when you were sitting ringside with your nose up Betty Boobs’s ass, and then I came to fetch you when Joey was ready to see you.”
The Girl From Nowhere Page 12