He was still staring at me wildly.
“OK, I had green hair,” I said with resignation, realising that I was going to have to embarrass myself. In for a penny and all that. “And a dog collar. You always used to make a joke about it.”
He had meant well, though. That was why I didn’t mind reminding him. My punk phase hadn’t lasted long, but it had been full-on at the time. Jon’s brow cleared.
“Sam? Sam! My God! How are you?” he said, recognition dawning. He hugged me, then drew back to look me up and down. “Well, I can see for myself. All grown up and comparatively respectable! I remember that green hair as if it was yesterday…. Didn’t you and Kimmy once dye hers red in the bathroom sink? Her mother was furious with you.”
I winced. Maybe I had made a mistake initiating this whole old-school reunion thing with the entire staff of Bergmann LaTouche listening in, their ears flapping, pathetically grateful for the tiniest distraction. I was just glad Hugo wasn’t there. He would have bombarded Jon Tallboy for humiliating pieces of information about me and employed them for his own amusement at my most vulnerable moments.
“I should have known straight away,” I apologised. “I was staring at you for ages, sure I knew you from somewhere.”
“It’s been a long time,” Jon said, waving away this apology. “And I didn’t recognise you either…. My God!” he said fondly. “To see you all grown up—the last time I saw you, you looked like Return of the Living Dead.”
I thought it best to interrupt these reminiscences before they became terminally embarrassing.
“How’s Kim?” I asked.
“Oh, good, good. She’s got this trendy downtown life, working as a waitress in some restaurant in the East Village—that’s where she lives. You should get in touch with her.”
“I’d love to. I was meaning to look her up.”
At least something had gone more easily than I expected today.
“So you’re showing here? That’s wonderful!” Jon Tallboy was looking positively cheerful. Nice to have someone actually perk up when they remembered me, rather than holding up a crucifix and starting to babble the Lord’s Prayer. Or maybe at this unpropitious moment he was simply milking any piece of good news for all it was worth. I could scarcely blame him.
“It’s a group show,” I said self-deprecatingly, not wanting him to think I was elevated above my station. Maybe in twenty years, if I were lucky, I too could have my own one-woman show here. Why, perhaps someone would even break in and daub “Whore” and “Slut” all over my pieces. I brightened up at the prospect. At least that would imply that I was still enjoying an eventful sex life at nearly fifty.
Unfortunately Jon Tallboy had followed me a short way along the track of my mental processes and stopped dead at the point where we reached the connection between the one-woman show and people trashing it. His face fell. This wasn’t just a metaphor; his skin sagged visibly as his smile drooped and faded.
“This is such strange timing,” he said, looking helplessly over at his wife. “I don’t know what to say.”
I too looked at Barbara Bilder, and was taken aback. Up until now, despite her distress, she had basically been projecting friendliness, as if she felt that through all this trouble she was at least surrounded by people who meant well. Now, for the first time, I had a hint of what she could be like when a situation did not please her. The shiny brown eyes had become as flat and cold as if she were trying to bounce me off her stare, away from her and her husband. It wasn’t that she disliked younger artists; she had been perfectly nice, if disoriented by Stanley’s bizarre timing, when we had shaken hands. I decided that she must be jealous of Jon.
The impression that she was physically repelling me was so strong that I nearly took a step back. I had thought she was charismatic when she entered the room, but that was nothing to the effect she was projecting now. I got the message. Jon Tallboy was completely off-limits.
It was a blow, considering my well-known weakness for grey-haired corduroy-wearing father figures. I would just have to bear up bravely and try to forget him.
“Today is like riding a roller-coaster,” I said to Laurence a short while later. “Just when you think you’ve finally oriented yourself the ground drops away and you’re screaming all over again.”
“Tell me about it.” He still looked terrible. “I still can’t get over Stanley. ‘Let’s try for a happier note,’” he repeated, incredulous. “It was frightening. I’ve never realised before what people mean when they say someone came apart at the seams. You could practically see him unravelling before your eyes.”
“Is he OK?”
Laurence shrugged indifferently. “Who’s OK? Carol sent him to his office and he’s probably on the phone to his shrink right now, popping Prozac like breath-fresheners.”
We were following Barbara, Jon and Carol as they toured the gallery, examining the damage to the paintings at close range. I was tagging on because my usual morbid fascination with disaster and destruction wouldn’t let me leave until I had sucked the situation dry and spat out its bones.
“I would take another antidepressant, too,” Laurence said seriously, “but it wouldn’t do anything. I’m too wound up. Besides, I’m trying to cut back.”
“God.” I was finding this hard to believe. “And you guys call me an alcoholic when I have an extra margarita. What a bunch of drug snobs you are.”
“Look, Barbara,” Carol was saying as she indicated a particularly disfiguring streak of paint over one of the canvases. “It’s not wonderful, OK? This is oil-based. That means trouble getting it off. There’s some hope, because of that fixative you always use. But I don’t want to be too optimistic. It’s not really my field.”
“If they’d only used water-based paint!” Barbara said plaintively. “The difference it would have made!”
“No point expecting this scum to be considerate,” Jon Tallboy said, stooping to clasp his arm still tighter around his much smaller wife. “We can just thank God it wasn’t an aerosol spray.”
Barbara shivered. “I can’t even think about that,” she whispered.
“I wonder why it wasn’t,” I said sotto voce to Laurence. “Much easier to use.”
“Yeah, but these splashes make much more of a statement,” he said, with a partial resumption of his mocking tone of yesterday. “I mean, you can just throw this stuff around as crazily as you want. It looks much angrier.”
“It certainly does.”
“No, I see exactly why they chose this medium.” Laurence was getting into his stride. “It says rage to me, it says uncontrolled, it says blood on the walls—”
His voice was rising dangerously high. Carol swivelled her head and shot him a furious glance. Meekly he subsided as she turned back and said reassuringly to Barbara:
“I’ll be calling in a specialist restorer right away. I know just the person. Maybe she can even drop by this afternoon and give us a first opinion.”
“That would be wonderful,” Barbara said sincerely. “Please let me know straight away what she says. I’ll be sitting by the phone.”
“Of course. Barbara, I want to assure you that we will do everything we can to track down the person responsible. Even if it is a member of my own staff.”
“I’m sure you will, Carol. I have complete faith in you.”
Barbara was being surprisingly docile. No, on reflection I wasn’t that surprised. She was a sensible woman; throwing a tantrum now wouldn’t have helped, apart from giving her and everyone else a headache. This way she was surrounded by people reassuring her, ready to attend to her every need. Much more pleasant.
The small phalanx—Queen Barbara, her consort, chief advisers and courtiers—proceeded downstairs to survey the situation there. I swallowed hard. It was definitely worse down here. The vandal had obviously started on the ground floor, which had received the whole first flush of energy and enthusiasm for the task at hand. Upstairs, for all its crimson paint splashes, did not look like a
slaughterhouse. This did.
The door buzzer sounded. Carol, probably relieved to have something concrete to do, went over to the intercom by the door herself instead of despatching Laurence. After a brief colloquy she unbolted the door and drew it open.
“Come in, officers,” she said politely.
A man and a woman strolled in as slowly as if they had all the time in the world. As Carol closed and locked the door behind them, they paused and looked around, sizing up the scene. I stared at them with great interest, never having seen plain-clothes American police officers before. I was already garnering details to report to Hawkins, a friend of mine who’s a DI on the Flying Squad.
They seemed to know exactly how far they could push the concept of plain clothes without actually abandoning all the rules completely, like schoolkids modifying their uniforms by unbuttoning their shirts or hiking up the skirts while still being able to protest, with an air of injured virtue, that they were conforming to all known regulations. Both of them were big and chunky, the woman’s hair caught back so tightly from her head it accentuated the squareness of her face, which was so marked I could have plotted the ninety-degree angles at each corner with a protractor.
They wore their down-at-heel clothes and apparent lack of physical fitness with such nonchalance that it made their presence more impressive than if they had been smart and super-energetic. Briefly they shot glances around the gallery, checking out their surroundings as comprehensively as if they were shooting photos of the crime scene. The woman said in a flat, uninflected voice:
“Hi. I’m Detective Thurber, and this is Detective Frank. You must be Ms. Bergmann.”
“That’s right.” Carol drew a long breath. “I’d better introduce you around.”
“Please,” Thurber said.
A woman of few words was somehow more impressive than an equally taciturn man. Carol seemed unusually rattled.
“This is Barbara Bilder,” she said, indicating her. “She’s the artist currently showing here. Her husband, Jon Tallboy. And this is Laurence De-bray, one of our assistants, and Sam Jones, who’s about to take part in our next group show.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Detective Frank, nodding generally to us all. “I gotta say, ma’am,” he continued with increasing animation, addressing Barbara, “this is some show you got here. Usually I don’t go so much for modern art, but this is pretty powerful stuff. Really makes a statement you can’t ignore. I guess you’d call this deconstruction, right? Where you do the paintings and then trash them yourself?”
Barbara stared at him, unable to speak. There was a long pause, which Frank finally broke.
“Well, congratulations,” he continued. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Sort of the art and the critical response at the same time, right? They say it’s getting harder and harder to be original, but you certainly managed it, Ms. Bilder. I’m real impressed.”
Another silence fell. The detectives by now were looking a little puzzled; from their point of view, Frank had made a pleasant opening. Why we were doing frighteningly realistic impressions of Lot’s wife in return—we might lack the salt but we had the frozen-into-pillars part down perfectly—was a mystery to them. At last Laurence, his voice high and shaky, sounding as nervous as a pubescent, broke in:
“The show has been vandalised. It’s not supposed to be like this. The red paint is graffiti. Someone trashed the show last night. That’s why you guys are here, OK? We called you in.”
Thurber had remained impassive all through Frank’s praise of the show, and her expression didn’t change a whit as she assimilated this new information. Frank’s eyebrows rose slightly, but that was all. It was true about New York cops being battle-hardened. If I’d just committed a faux pas like that I would have run screaming from the room.
“I see,” said Frank, adjusting with praiseworthy ease to this new perspective. I wondered whether, in the car afterwards, he would bang his head repeatedly against the dashboard, muttering “Shit! Shit!”, or whether he just took this kind of thing in his stride.
“Well, that’s very interesting,” he said. “Though we don’t know anything about a call?” He looked at Thurber to double-check this. She shook her head slowly. “I guess that means I have a few questions to ask you, Ms. Bilder.” He nodded at the nearest word on the wall, which happened to be “Whore.” It recurred with unnerving frequency. “Who would you say really doesn’t like you? Enough to do this to your show? Or maybe I should say, is there someone who doesn’t like you—and really, really didn’t like Kate Jacobson?”
He looked round our blank faces. “That’s why we’re here,” he explained. “We’re from Homicide. Manhattan South. Investigating the murder of Kate Jacobson.”
There was total silence. Then Carol said angrily:
“The what? Don’t be ridiculous!”
“We’ve been informed that she was an assistant here,” Thurber said, her flat lifeless voice as uninterested as if she had been reading the shipping forecast. “She was killed last night. Her body was found this morning in Central Park.” She looked up to see the effect this information had on us. Her eyes flickered from one face to the other, while her expression remained as deadpan as ever.
“She’d been strangled. Well,” she added precisely, “garotted. In Strawberry Fields.”
Half an hour later I was pacing the downstairs gallery, back and forth, back and forth across the concrete floor, feeling like a criminal in an over-generous cell. As much of my fist as would fit was stuffed into my mouth, and I was biting down hard on the knuckles. If Laurence had offered me an antidepressant, despite my recent bold words, I’d have grabbed at it. As a second best, however, the sensation of gnawing at my own flesh was strangely relaxing. At least, as the New Agers said, it concentrated one in the moment.
Shock had never taken me quite this way before. But then I was jet-lagged, in a strange country, marking out with my feet the territory in which I was supposed to be having a big career break in a week’s time. It was no wonder that I felt disoriented. Add to that the factor of not really knowing any of these people, and it was like being thrown onstage, and expected to act in an unfamiliar, constantly shifting mix of farce and tragedy. The effort had put a severe strain on my usually solid nerves: it was either start to cannibalise myself or burst into psychotic high-pitched laughter.
Carol had asked me if I wanted to sit with Barbara and Jon in her office while the three of us were waiting to be interviewed by the police. I couldn’t fault her professional hospitality. It was just that I preferred to chew my fist in decent privacy. And I didn’t much fancy being left alone with Barbara and Jon, trying to make conversation while the former shot dagger-glances at me every time the talk shaded around my previous acquaintance with the latter.
Thurber and Frank had commandeered Stanley’s office and were taking statements from everyone in the gallery, one by one. (It was impossible not to notice, as a sideline to the main action, how easy it was to take over Stanley’s office. A strong-minded child of six could probably have strolled in here and demanded it.) The cops who had been called about the vandalism had eventually turned up and been promply dispatched again by Thurber. It was a homicide investigation now.
Carol was in there with them now, having naturally gone first, and the rest of the staff had retreated to their own offices in various states of shock. Laurence had been very badly hit by the news of Kate’s death; or maybe I noticed his reaction more because I had been with him when he had heard. I had thought he was going to faint. If I’d known him better I would have slapped him round the face. As it was I had to help him to his office and hope he would get a grip before the summons came from Thurber and Frank. He was shaking like a sapling in a hurricane and I doubted that the two Valium he had popped—so much for trying to cut back—would help with his lucidity.
I was just working up a nice rhythm—teeth into knuckles echoing the tread of my feet—when Jon Tallboy came hurrying down the stairs. On his bot
tom half he was wearing old chinos which hung in over-loose folds around his stork-like legs. With the corduroy jacket and tattersall shirt, he looked like an absent-minded professor. All he needed was a pipe.
“Just getting my coat,” he called over his shoulder. “I think I left it down here.”
Removing my fist reluctantly from my mouth, I dried it on my sweater.
“Sam!” Jon Tallboy said hurriedly, advancing towards me. “I just wanted to snatch a word with you—” He shot a rather hunted glance over his shoulder. “Here you go.”
He pulled a wallet from his jacket and extracted a card, scribbling something on the back of it.
“Kim’s number,” he explained. “And there are my and Barbara’s details as well.”
“Thanks.” I took the card. “Do you mind my asking why this is such a coat-and-dagger operation?”
Haha, how very amusing I was. I needed to get that fist back into play, or very soon the psychotic laughter would be rearing its crazy head again.
“Barbara is a wonderful woman,” Jon Tallboy said devoutly. “But she’s just a little jealous. Maybe that’s putting it too strongly—”
I didn’t think so.
“She just—you know, of course, that I left Kim’s mother for Barbara,” he said. “That’s why I came to the States. And Barbara—well, it’s not exactly—I don’t want to give you the wrong idea—it’s just when Kimmy came over to visit me, I think Barbara was a little reminded of, you know, my life before meeting her. Kimmy’s quite like her mother—so—anyway, she’s obviously very upset at the moment—Barbara, I mean—and I didn’t see any point making it worse by talking about—she finds it difficult sometimes—but I’m sure,” he continued with more aplomb, finding himself on safer ground, “that Kim would love to see you. You must give her a ring. And maybe we could meet up. You, me and Barbara, I mean. She loves to meet younger artists, give them a helping hand. She’s so generous,” he finished, with nary a hint of irony.
“Right,” I said carefully, thinking that Jon Tallboy was just like Humpty Dumpty: when he used a word it meant only what he wanted it to mean.
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