Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  “Yeah, fine.”

  I didn’t really think that he wouldn’t show up. But I wanted to make absolutely sure.

  “Great,” I said warmly. “I can’t wait to talk about all of this. And I won’t say a word to anyone at the gallery.”

  He looked stricken, understanding perfectly the threat I was hanging over his head.

  “You won’t. Will you?”

  “Not now I know we’re meeting up later,” I said, smooth as vinyl. I looked at my watch. “Shit, I should be going.” I gave him a big grin. It was supposed to be reassuring; I hoped it didn’t come out too synthetic. “Seven. At the Ludlow. Don’t be late.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said as seriously as if he were swearing on a rosary.

  With a brief wave, I headed past him. After a few steps I turned and looked back. He was staring after me.

  “Strawberry Fields is that way,” I called, pointing. “Just follow the path round.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right.”

  If you don’t know already, I thought to myself as I watched him walk away.

  Don was almost too laid-back to live. I found myself wondering whether he actually had a pulse; he reminded me today of a hibernating bear. It was an appropriate comparison on many levels. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he turned out to live in a cave: I’d heard there were some capacious ones in Central Park. It would have to be roomy. Don was about as big as a grizzly.

  I couldn’t decide whether his temperament was similar. Grizzlies were supposed to turn nasty if you messed around with them (well, so did I, for that matter). Still, they weren’t known for garotting their victims. They just broke your neck with one casual backhand swipe. Looking at Don, it seemed to me that this would be his preferred method of approach. I couldn’t see him bothering to find a piece of wire and attach toggles at either end to make a garotte.

  There was a catch in this piece of deduction, though. Don was no fool. We had worked out a way to rig one of my mobiles so it seemed half-crashed into the uprights in the first-floor gallery, and, when he chose to be, he was completely on the ball. By the end of our conversation I was full of excitement about how it would look. He had a very sharp tactical mind. Which would mean that he was more than capable of deciding to garotte someone precisely because anybody looking at him would assume that it was the last thing in the world he would do—just as I had. With hands like Don’s, who needed a piece of wire?

  I found it hard to fit Kate’s name into this picture. I kept calling her “someone.” It helped to keep my head clear. I thought of her, walking out of the bar that night, flashing a smile back at us, her orange-red hair clashing so brightly with her knitted scarf and scarlet trousers, and something grabbed my heart, squeezing it tightly. I had hardly known her, but she had been so alive, so vital, that you felt you could warm your hands at her as if she were a fire. I wondered again who she had been going to meet that evening.

  “Sam? You OK?” Don ambled over. We were standing in the upstairs gallery, its floors now restored to shiny glossed perfection, its walls mercifully clean and white and empty. Don still couldn’t talk about it without swearing, though. I sympathised. It couldn’t have been much fun cleaning all that up.

  I snapped back to the present. “Fine. Just imagining how it’ll look, hanging there.”

  “Real nice,” Don said with satisfaction. “Well. Cigarette time. You wanna come back down, get a coffee or somethin’? It really bugs me to be up here right now. I keep seeing those fuckin’ paint streaks all over the fuckin’ floor.”

  “OK.”

  We clattered back down the stairs, all the way to the basement and through its meticulously organised storage rooms to the big space at the back which was Don’s territory. It opened out onto a small yard. Since he could smoke with impunity here, this was prime real estate and he guarded it well, repulsing any attempts by co-workers to nip down for a quick fag. Apart from a large quantity of half-opened packing crates, containing the latest installments of yBa meisterworks, and quite a few canvases stacked with their faces to the wall which I assumed were Don’s own oeuvre, the room was luxuriously furnished with no less than three broken-down and battered loungers of various types, the kind specifically designed for men to slump in while watching sports on TV. Some even had springs sticking out, which gave me a nostalgia rush for my own sofa. I felt more at home here than I did in Nancy’s pretty little flat, which was a sad observation on my home-making skills.

  “You don’t mind the smoke, right?” Don said, rolling himself a cigarette and slumping his huge frame onto the largest of the Eaze-E-Boys. It creaked but held.

  I shook my head.

  “Some good things about you Brits,” he observed.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, “you’re going to say the beer now.”

  “Not that flat stuff.”

  “Bitter,” I corrected.

  “Yeah, it is. No, I like Belgian beer.”

  “Blonde?” I suggested, naming the main type of beer.

  He gave me a shit-eating smile.

  “Those too.”

  “There’s always Suzanne,” I pointed out, deliberately stirring. “One Belgian blonde, to order.”

  Don’s grin faded. “Yeah, right. Whatever.”

  “You guys don’t get on?” I stirred my coffee.

  “Yeah, you could say that. She’s smart, though. I’ll give her that,” he said grudgingly. “No dumb blonde. Too fuckin’ bad.” He tapped down the tobacco and lit the roll-up in one swift, habitual movement. Then he didn’t say anything for a while. I was getting the hang of this, but it was tough going. Don, as Tom would have said in one of his drunker cod-Irish moments, was a terrible man for the pauses.

  “She been talkin’ to you?” he said finally.

  I blinked. “Well, we don’t semaphore each other, if that’s what you mean,” I said carefully.

  “You know. I mean, sayin’ stuff about me.”

  “Don, I only got here two days ago and since then Kate’s been killed,” I emphasised. “There hasn’t exactly been much time for idle gossip.”

  I was pleased with this evasion. I was honing my ability to tell the truth without answering the question.

  “Yeah, that’s one big goddamn mystery,” Don observed. “Kate whacked and some creep throwin’ paint all over the place. Damned if I know what it’s all about.”

  I didn’t like the fake-casual way he said this. My eyes narrowed.

  “You don’t seem to care much about what happened to her,” I said, drinking more coffee. “I thought you guys had a thing once.”

  “See?” Don observed. “I knew people ‘ud been talkin’. Jesus. Women. You ever try keepin’ your mouths shut just to see what it’d feel like?”

  “Bollocks.” I couldn’t be bothered with this. “Don’t give me that shit. You know perfectly well that men gossip just as much as we do. You’re just jealous because women tell each other all the juicy details. And anyway,” I said, stretching a point to annoy him further, “it was Laurence who told me.”

  “Laurence,” Don snorted. “Laurence wanted to get into her panties himself. That’s why he cain’t even give me the time of day.”

  He grinned at me slyly. I was dying to point out that Don had, as he would doubtless put it, pussied out of getting into Kate’s panties; but discretion won out.

  “I like Laurence,” I said rather feebly instead, feeling somehow that he needed defending.

  “Oh, he’s OK. For a geek. Smart boy, though,” Don said casually. “He’s goin’ places.”

  He fell silent again, and I waited with him, sensing there was more to come.

  “Kate was cool,” he said finally. Talking to Don was like having a TV in the room which fizzed into life only in fits and spurts. I would lose transmission for a while and then, just as I was thinking the signal was gone for good, it would click back on to issue another laconic statement.

  “No BS about Kate,” he reflected. “What you see is what you
get.” He looked down at his fingers, their motion on the Rizla paper ceasing as if by their own will. “I mean,” he corrected himself slowly, “what you saw was what you got.”

  He looked shaken. Sometimes the reminder that you have to use the past tense will do that; it’s the moment the news sinks in for good. I pressed hard on this opportunity.

  “Suzanne thought she was going to meet her ex-boyfriend that evening,” I said. “Someone called Leo.”

  “Leo,” Don said very drily. For a moment I thought this was going to be his only comment; then he added: “Man, that guy is not good news. Take it from me.”

  “You know him?”

  Don shrugged. “He’s around the neighbourhood, y’know? Yeah, I know him. He’s a piece of work.” Don took a drag of his roll-up, looked at me assessingly, decided I wasn’t likely to be too shocked, and mimed rolling up his sleeve and injecting into the crook of his arm.

  “He’s a smackhead, right? I knew that. Suzanne told me already.” I hadn’t reckoned on the two-countries-divided-by-a-common-language thing. His stare became bewildered.

  “He does heroin,” I corrected myself.

  “The big H. Not a good idea, man. Don’t say I haven’t had my moments. But still.”

  He fell silent again, and instinct told me not to break it. Don issued his communiqués up to a point and no further. He was the type of guy who loves gossip but prefers to sit in a group of people who are catching up on the latest information, giving little away himself but storing up everything for future use. To talk too much himself would be to compromise the macho image. So I concentrated on my coffee, making a mental note to ask Kim about Leo. She had been cagey on the subject before, but now I was armed with this piece of information, I might be able to use it as a lever to prise up a little more.

  It’s complete nonsense about curiosity killing the cat. I’m positively blooming with health.

  I decided to give Kim a ring this afternoon. Maybe we could meet up later on, after I had seen Lex. She and I had barely scratched the surface of all the catching up we had to do, and I sensed it would take a good deal of time for us to readjust to each other—or rather the new, improved, nearly-thirty-years-old versions of ourselves. The mixture in Kim of what she had been, all that we had in common, and what the years and living in New York had made of her, went very deep; it wasn’t just a fragile layer of sophistication through which I could break, like a thin sheet of glass, to find my friend again, perfectly preserved as she had been the last time I had seen her. Doubtless she was feeling something similar about me.

  I realised I hadn’t said anything for a long while; but then neither had Don. He seemed quite content, however, lying back in his lounger blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. Well, he had earned his leisure time: apparently he had been up till nearly midnight cleaning the paint off the floors and walls. I had to admit that he was restful company when silent. It was just on opening his mouth that the problems started. Well, he wasn’t the first man I’d met with that particular fatal flaw.

  “So,” he said at last. “You seeing someone?”

  Everyone seemed to ask this question over here. It was that famous New York directness. They thought beating around the bush was some kind of S&M practice.

  “Yeah. He’s an actor. He’s coming over for the opening.”

  “That’s not till the end of next week,” Don observed. “Gives you a bit of time to fool around.”

  “Right. I hadn’t thought of that,” I said coldly. “How silly of me not to have started already.”

  I was scarcely a diehard romantic, but the hardbitten cynicism with which Don had said this was not appealing. Every time I was feeling at ease with him, he would throw in something that set my teeth on edge.

  “I’m going to go and say hi to everyone upstairs,” I announced, standing up and putting down my mug. “Thanks for the coffee. So we’re sorted for the installation?”

  “For now, sure. You’re gonna be here when we take ‘em up, right?” he said, nodding at the opened crates in which my mobiles lay, looking like huge ball bearings with skin eruptions.

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t look surprised,” Don said. “Lots of artists cain’t be bothered.”

  “What about Barbara?” I asked.

  “Oh, she’ll be here when they come back all right.” He pulled a face. “And I bet she’s over at the restorer’s right now, buggin’ her to hurry up. Even though there’s only a week left to go.”

  “With the exhibition? They’re going back up, the paintings?”

  “Sure thing. Haven’t you seen the newspapers? Splashed all over the arts section. She’s got more publicity than she can handle.”

  “Apparently it’s been on the TV news a lot as well,” I said slowly, thinking of the kids in the park.

  “You kiddin’ me? It’s got everything. Pretty girl like Kate, strangled in Strawberry Fields, no less—and then the gallery trashed—shee-it, if that’s not news I don’t know what is. We had people swarming all over here yesterday afternoon when the news got out. Journos. Carol had to do interviews all evening.”

  He grinned at me. “We’re in the eye of the storm,” he said, drawling out “eye” into a long lazy “aaah.” I had to admit I liked his accent.

  “Why is it particularly special that she was found in Strawberry Fields?” I asked. Everyone seemed to be making such a big deal out of this.

  Don looked at me. “Well, shee-it,” he said, spreading his arms wide. “John Lennon—peace, love and understanding, man, all that—and then some chick gets herself killed in there. It’s kind of ironic, right?”

  There was a sly expression on his face, however, which indicated he wasn’t saying everything he knew. His blue eyes were wide and somehow mocking as they fixed their gaze on me.

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?” I said, staring right back at him.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh yes you do.”

  There was no point going carefully with Don. Subtlety he would ignore, if he chose to, with sublime unconcern. Now his grin widened still further.

  “Well, OK,” he said, lying back on the Eaze-E-Boy. “Since you bullied it outta me. Kate had a tattoo. Just here.” With a smirk, he tapped what looked like the hollow of his right hip, just inside the bone; I couldn’t tell exactly through the folds of the dungarees, but it was near enough.

  “So?” I said.

  “It was a strawberry. A little strawberry tattoo with one bite taken out. Now ain’t that funny? Killed in Strawberry Fields—with a strawberry tattoo right next to her pussy….” Don’s grin was of shit-eating dimensions now. “Wait till the newspapers get ahold of that.”

  I went upstairs, on the prowl for fresh company. And with perfect timing Laurence came out of the security door that led to the offices just as I reached the first-floor landing. Laurence was the opposite of Don in every conceivable way. No lying around on an Eaze-E-Boy for him, perfecting his smoke-ring technique and letting the world go by. He looked as if he had the world settled firmly on his shoulders. The big, heavy, black-framed glasses made the face behind them seem fragile, the thin beak of a nose hardly able to support them. Even his head was ducked forwards as if pulled down by their weight. There were dark circles under his eyes and a snowstorm of dandruff on the shoulders of his suit.

  “Hey!” he said, brightening up somewhat on seeing me. I approved of this reaction.

  “I was coming to see if you were around,” I said. “I’ve just been talking to Don about the installation.”

  “Oh, right. How’s it going?” This was more perfunctory than it should have been, but I let it pass.

  “Very well. He seems to know his stuff.”

  Laurence snorted. He disliked Don so much that he couldn’t admit to any of his merits.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ve got to go have a word with Stanley. Then do you want to go out and grab a coffee?”

  “Sure. Won’t Carol mind, t
hough?”

  Laurence shot me a sharpish look. But: “She’s off in DC for the rest of the day,” was all he said on the subject.

  “I’ll go and say hi to Suzanne while you find Stanley.”

  “OK.”

  We crossed through into the gallery. Laurence headed off towards Stanley’s office at the far end; I wandered round the desk to see if Suzanne was in the workroom behind it. There was no one there. Idly I sat down in front of her computer and started leafing through an issue of ArtFinder which boasted a long and, naturally—it was its house style—incomprehensible article on Barbara Bilder’s oeuvre. Tiring rapidly of this, I turned to a copy of the New York Times magazine, neatly stacked underneath it, which offered a long interview with the artist at home. I had clearly stumbled on Barbara’s latest collection of press cuttings.

  I skimmed the second article. It was recent, dating back only three weeks, obviously to coincide with the opening of the exhibition, and the tone was politely respectful. Barbara was photographed with Jon, his arm around her. The article was titled “Domestic Pleasures” and concentrated on Barbara’s love-life rather than her work. I was not surprised, somehow, to learn of the affair she had had, while at art school, with an eminent artist twice her age, whose marriage had never recovered from the blow; nor of the long-term liaison she had then had with the gallery owner who had made her name by showing her work when she was a young unknown.

  Five years ago the gallery owner had died of a heart attack. His wife, in an act of revenge, had promptly sold all his Bilders at a rock-bottom price in an attempt to bring down the market. It had worked. Barbara’s career had been in limbo for a while, out of the current fashion. Then she had met Jeannette LaTouche—the article implied that Barbara had carefully planned the encounter—who had promptly signed her up at Bergmann LaTouche. Now she was selling steadily, and certainly the list of her paintings in various museums and private collections was impressive.

  All this took a good three pages to relate. It finished on a high note: Barbara’s whirlwind romance with Jon Tallboy. I was amused to read that the latter had mysteriously transmogrified, with his crossing of the Atlantic, from the deputy head of the art department at a sixth-form college into a noted British art critic and sought-after teacher. Also, according to the article, she and Jon had met at the home of mutual art-loving friends, when I happened to know that he had been bringing a group of kids to the gallery where she was showing and bumped into her in the coffee shop. Anyway, it had been love at first sight. Barbara was quoted as saying that they had been two magnets snapping together. They had left their respective spouses almost immediately and Jon had come to New York. “No regrets,” he had apparently told the reporter. “My life only really started when I met Barbara.”