by Susan Daitch
“But you don’t know who he is?” The coroner put his hand on Dr. Korenev’s graceful arm. Though he’d been called in the middle of the night, he only had eyes for the forensic marine biologist. She was the reason he wanted us to depart, having seen all there was to see. Ashby wasn’t the only one who had fun on the job. The unnerving narration of the degraded state of the ambiguous body was, for the coroner, a kind of love poetry, a proposal of a puzzle the two of them could ponder together.
“I can’t give you a name, no,” I repeated.
“You wanted to know if this young lady could identify the victim,” he said to Demetrius. “She’s unable to. Now I’ll have to ask you to leave.” The coroner pointed at the door with his scalpel as if he had work to do which, in fairness, he kind of did.
I didn’t mind being evicted, but Demetrius wanted to stay for the coroner’s report. I had seen a mutilated dead body before, and felt that I didn’t belong on the edge of the dock, that the cranes were closing in on me. I waited outside the tent, Demetrius thinking that I couldn’t handle the sight of the costumed corpse. Well, he was right, but not for the reasons he thought. We trudged back to the car.
“So now there’s a body, but his death can’t necessarily be connected to Claiborne’s,” he said.
“How many bodies would be dressed like a member of a seventeenth-century Spanish court tonight?”
“It’s morning.” He had no answers.
“I’ve noticed. Okay to that cup of coffee now.”
Back in the car, Demetrius picked up the pictures from where I’d left them on the seat.
“Someone is telling you, ‘We know you. We know who you are and where you live.’ ”
Once again, this was not reassuring news.
“And is very quiet. I didn’t hear anyone at the window.”
“You can’t stay there alone.”
“So spend the night.”
Demetrius’s eyes lit up.
“I have a couch.”
Though, in all honesty, I wasn’t sure I was going to make him use it.
“It’s still night for me. I don’t sleep,” I explained.
Chapter 5
We started out in my garden. There was a superfull moon, augur of the Perseid meteor shower that appears mid-August. Demetrius was a feral-cat magnet. They emerged from my neighbor’s concrete-and-Astroturf yard, from the empty lot, from who knows where.
“You have a way with animals,” I said.
“There were a lot of them in my life. My mother was an animal trainer for Barnum and Bailey. She wanted to be a vet, but when the family moved from Trinidad there was no money for college. I didn’t see her very much, but I don’t think she particularly liked the circus. Lots of white freaks of all kinds. The circus can be a cruel place. I lived with my grandmother in the Bronx.”
“What about your dad?”
“Unknown. Some Dominican guy. Our neighbor was like a dad to me. He raised a baby panther in his apartment and an alligator in his bathtub. Omar and Ollie. I used to take care of them from time to time.”
“I remember that guy on the news.” It had even made the television news in Rhode Island when I was in high school.
“Yeah, he got busted, which was probably a good thing. It’s only a matter of time before wild animals have to be themselves, one way or another, and they can’t be themselves in a project in the Bronx. His apartment smelled like shit, but I used to enjoy visiting him. One afternoon it was raining, and I thought it would be cool to take the gator out for a walk. There was a kind of a rope leash hanging up in the kitchen, so I lassoed it around his neck, strolled down the hall and into the elevator. One floor down, it dawned on me that this was a really dumb idea. If Ollie was hungry, I had absolutely no place to run to. I quickly pressed the button to go back up, but elevators don’t automatically go in reverse, so I had to wait till we got to the basement, then go all the way back to the fifteenth floor. When the doors opened at the basement, some lady carrying her laundry freaked out and started screaming. I’ve always been afraid she was the one who called the police, and it was inadvertently my fault that the party ended. My neighbor was so distraught at losing his animals that he would barely speak to me or to anyone. Then I worked at the Bronx Zoo. Zookeepers make shit, so I applied to the police academy, and that was that.”
He moved in closer, put his arm around my shoulders, but I shifted away slightly. Nelson Algren said never to sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than yours, and that’s what I was thinking. Ex-officer Pitt, the rescue knight, had problems of his own, and mixing our two batches of anxieties would create a junk pile neither of us would be able to climb out of.
I didn’t want to be the kind of person who would push Demetrius away, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that someone was watching and taking pictures. Ashby got off on someone—i.e., me and/or Calvin—walking in on his risky liaisons. The voyeur, if he was still watching me, wasn’t harmless, could turn out to be Freddy Krueger, and left no trail in the backyard, or the front of the building, or anywhere he had been. The second image I couldn’t get out of my head was the lifeless body dredged up in the Navy Yard. I shifted back toward Demetrius. I wanted to forget all of the above. Despite what I said and thought, I kind of did have a rescue-knight fantasy, though I know you can’t rely on them. In my experience, no one can really save you when you’ve been accused of murder or are under serious suspicion, and someone is out to get you, whether it’s the victim’s sister or the real murderer himself or a ghost taking pictures with a cell.
Demetrius didn’t seem to notice that I’d put my hand on his leg. He did what a lot guys do when they’re a little nervous and they don’t want to cede the floor, because they don’t really know what will happen if they do. He kept talking.
“My first case with Garfield, before we were homicide detectives, was a bust on a madam who claimed she was a Communist, the last of the Communist madams. I didn’t know that was a thing, that there were Communist madams. Her business was very high- end—Wall Street brokers, investment bankers, that sort of high roller—and she saw her organization as a way of fleecing the one percent. She called herself a destabilization artist. She insisted that she was in no way a sex capitalist. Garfield, who was with me at the time, responded, ‘So what have you got here? A food co-op? Where’s the quinoa?’ ”
“What a wit. More fun than a barrel of monkeys.”
“You have to overlook what he says sometimes, because he was right. She wasn’t spreading the love around in terms of sharing profits with the girls. Some Communist, as I understand it.”
“So she was more like an apparatchik.”
I liked the idea of a destabilization artist. What could I say about my job that was interesting? Describing the sensuality of dipping a pure red sable brush into brilliant viscous cerulean blue just made from ground cobalt mixed with oil sounded arcane and corny. We were both quiet, then he leaned in closer. A man who had arrested a Communist madam intimidated me, but right out in the garden bit by bit our clothes came off. The rescue knight looked pretty good naked, and the horrors of the night receded.
In the city, you are never alone. You hear the muezzin call from a nearby mosque, a passerby has the ringer on her cell turned up as high as possible, and it’s playing the theme from The Godfather, someone is yelling at her boyfriend to watch himself when that girl with way cut-out jeans jaywalks right past, to say nothing of your neighbors screwing their brains out. We heard it all. I live in a neighborhood of destabilization artists, but I’m as good at it as the next person.
There is some comfort in pulling the covers over your and someone else’s head, the two of you against the world. The illusion that you’re keeping everyone out.
In fairy tales, the rescuee got into her jam because of a transgression on the part of a parent, someone wasn’t invited to a party, someone ate another’s property, all the sins of one generation were asked to be paid by another. I didn’t like the idea
of rescue debt. It’s bad enough that I’m the kind of person whose bank account the week before payday is nothing but zeros, and I am not referencing the candy bar. I couldn’t sleep.
While Demetrius was a ridge of blankets, I got up walked to the kitchen, where my laptop still lay, and googled “Roy, NYU law, copyright infringement.” Nothing. There was only one record of a Roy anyone, ever, at NYU Law, and that was Roy Nakamori, who was certainly not the Judge Bean of Jacky’s Fifth Amendment. It was 4 A.M., but I called Marnie. No answer. I texted. Waited. Then finally got back into bed and fell asleep.
—
My backyard cats are most vocal in the morning. After I fed them, I made espresso from my battered old machine and sat in the garden. Demetrius got up a few minutes later, commenting on fancy coffee. My dad had a machine just like this in his trailer adjoining the yard. If you want to see fancy coffee, Ashby was a much better example. He had a Nespresso machine, the Bentley model, if there was one, and a rosewood box full of the jewel-colored pods that went into the thing. They are surely shining to this day in a landfill somewhere up the Hudson. Still, Ashby always offered me a cup whenever I got into work. He had his moments, I suppose. I made eggs with fresh basil and sliced habaneros that managed to grow in that not very sunny backyard so many cats called home.
I looked out the front window, but the street, as far as I could tell, was empty. Business as usual, but then if someone was taking pictures of me, what was usual and typical? A Korean couple collected ginkgo nuts from the ground. They moved steadily in an intent, concentrated manner, making their way down the opposite side of the street. The trees’ fan-shaped leaves turn golden, and every autumn a few elderly people sweep through picking up the nuts, the ones still whole that haven’t been stepped on. If you squished one underfoot, the aroma was rotten and volatile, but boiled and rendered properly the nuts were said to have miraculous medicinal properties. The gilded trees lined my block. The couple stopped and looked at my building—at least, it seemed to me they did.
A man pushed a supermarket cart filled with emerald-green plastic bottles that he would trade in for nickels. For some reason he collected only the green ones, not the clear, and no cans. He made his way methodically from building to building, from trash barrel to trash barrel. When he got to mine, he went through the motions of looking for empties. Though I don’t drink soda, people toss bottles and cans on their way down the street. He wore a gray tracksuit and silver Nikes. With one hand stuck in a torn pocket, he could be snapping pictures using a phone hidden within. It was possible. But then he turned and waved at me, a wiggling sort of wave, one finger at a time.
“If he wants to be unnoticed, he’s not doing a very good job of it,” Demetrius said.
“He could be hiding in plain sight.” I tried to defend myself.
“The problem is, Stella, only three people had the security code to your studio: you, Ashby, and Fieldston. They have alibis. You don’t. As far as we know, you were in your studio. Garfield believes you were involved in the theft, and now there’s a body.”
“Where was Fieldston?”
“With his wife, though Garfield says your boss no doubt had to pay someone to marry him.”
“It was the union of two fortunes.”
“Remind me to check the society pages.”
“Where did Ashby say he was?”
“With a friend.”
“Yes, but where?”
“At the other guy’s apartment.”
“Can you prove he was there, or do you know this just because the friend swears it’s so? And how long did Ashby know this friend?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Did Garfield really go to Princeton? Is that why he hates me? I didn’t go to Princeton.”
“Yes, he lasted one semester. I don’t think he could make the leap from Canarsie, but he’s still angry about it. He’ll tell you it was like being accepted but not invited. The invitation says, ‘Please come,’ but no one will unlock the door for you, so you wait out in the cold as long as you can stand it, wondering what the hell you did wrong. He hates working out of the Nineteenth Precinct. He feels it’s a city he doesn’t recognize, one big gated community for billionaires, with a shift to white-collar crime that is not our province. He worries the beat cop in that part of the city is going the way of the typewriter and, worse, that such a shift is actually logical. His wife suffers from severe depression. Most days she can’t get out of bed, and Garfield feels acid eating away at him but doesn’t know what else to feel except pissed off. His children and grandchildren live in Arizona, and he hardly ever sees them.”
“I’m sorry for him, but that doesn’t make me guilty.”
“If someone else had the security code, how did they get it?”
I may have left the door open. The screaming sounded serious. Sometimes the door swings shut behind me, sometimes it doesn’t.
“The door was shut when the police arrived. Remember, we followed you upstairs to your studio.”
I had no answers. Demetrius took the pictures to be dusted for prints. It was a simple procedure, and he could easily get lab technicians to run the prints for him. My guess was that whoever was taking my pictures wasn’t an amateur, and there would be no prints. He could still get that done, and told me not to stay in the apartment alone. I wasn’t planning to, though I was worried about the cats.
My phone vibrated with a text from Marnie: Home. Roy dreamy.
This worried me, because (a) when Marnie is on a tear she’ll sleep with anyone and not even remember a face, and (b) as with any text, you have no guarantee that the sender is the owner of the phone. It could have been a stranger who found or stole the phone. It could have been Roy himself. If that was his real name. And then there was his friend Luke. Whoever he was.
Chapter 6
The receipt was so ordinary. A rectangle of white paper. Oscar’s bold, neat handwriting pressed through. The name and address of the shop, and what had been purchased: white lead, five eight-ounce tubes at $135.55 each. Paid in cash. Someone had left it in my studio, and it had gotten mixed up with my things. In the Venn diagram of people I knew at Claiborne’s who would be in my workspace, and those who would buy rare oil paint from an obscure shop, one of the last art-supply stores left in the city, there were no overlaps. Of the rotating crew of artists who worked as art handlers, there was only one who possibly used traditional oil paint in his work from time to time, and he hadn’t been part of the crew that was involved in the high-security moving and uncrating of Las Meninas from the airport to the armored car to my studio. In fact, that particular art handler rarely even spoke to me. The others worked in clay, glass, wood, metal, electronica, acrylic paint, and all were unlikely Kronstadt shoppers, as was Calvin, who cleaned only when I was present; he didn’t have the security code. Kronstadt’s had no online presence, no website, no yelp reviews. Oscar was below such radar. He was too old to care. You either knew the place or you didn’t.
Whoever dropped the receipt might have done so while moving a body dressed in seventeenth-century finery.
I folded, unfolded, and refolded the piece of paper and stuck it in my back pocket before I realized that it might have contained fingerprints and DNA. Let me say this in my defense: I was traveling from the molecular world of color to the cellular world of criminal evidence. I’d arrived at the airport and discovered that I’d forgotten my passport. This transition was not automatic. In my rush to make the flight, some things, even very important and obvious things, got left on the kitchen table or on the seat of a cab.
There was a chance Oscar might have a record of the purchaser, though he or she paid in cash. The date was less than a week ago.
—
Kronstadt’s was a sliver of a store, one of the last in that part of lower Manhattan with any kind of lineage. There was a framed picture of Oscar’s father and Frida Kahlo above the cash register. He was known for mixing such impossible-to-find pigments as verdigris, made from copper
plates and acetic acid and used in the Middle Ages as a brilliant, though unstable, green. From him you could still get the banned Indian yellow made from the urine of cows fed only mango leaves in the Bihar province of India. This color was reportedly last seen in 1908. Oscar was rumored to have, in a safe, a store of Mayan blue, a color made with clay and indigo that was painted on human sacrificial victims hundreds of years ago.
There was one other customer in the shop when I entered, a man in a pressed black T-shirt and skinny jeans, his hair worn in a long skinny braid. He was the last person I wanted to see at Kronstadt’s—or anyplace, for that matter. If he turned around, I knew he had an eyebrow pierced by a thin gold rod. Masuji Lorillard, brown hair, blue eyes, tattoos of Rembrandt’s watermarks, of which he was an expert. If a Rembrandt drawing needed to be authenticated, Masuji was called in. For a period of time, he worked on a lot of Dutch drawings that Claiborne’s sold, and we worked together until the consignment was auctioned off. The watermark tattoos: a crowned falcon on one shoulder, and the profile of a jester on the small of his back. Rembrandt would have dived into a canal if he knew.
Once Masuji was called in for a project, it didn’t take long for him to be noticed. Ashby’s assistant, Sheilagh, had her eye on him and would turn up just outside my studio at odd times as if she was just passing by. Oh, Masuji, Mr. Ashby asked me to find you. If you have a few minutes…blah, blah, blah. Sheilagh would turn her back to me as if I didn’t exist, a not uncommon occurrence at Claiborne’s. (Which was one reason I defended Ashby. He would at least talk to me, even if I wore the wrong shoes, with no sense of irony.) Sheilagh ignored me as if I were a piece of furniture. One Thursday morning the elevator doors opened, and just as Sheilagh was about to enter Masuji put his arm around me and smiled directly at her. After that, I hardly saw her again unless I was in Ashby’s office.