Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  DEADLY ARTS

  A Shane Hadley Mystery

  Ken Brigham

  Secant Publishing

  Salisbury, Maryland

  Copyright © 2020 by Ken Brigham

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise — without prior written permission from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations for purposes of review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Secant Publishing, LLC

  615 N Pinehurst Ave

  Salisbury MD 21801

  www.secantpublishing.com

  978-1-944962-67-8 (paperback)

  978-1-944962-69-2 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020904842

  To the remarkable Zeitlins

  By Ken Brigham

  The Shane Hadley Mysteries

  Deadly Science

  Deadly Arts

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chapter 1

  It was not a new thought, but it had grown more urgent over the years, now requiring, demanding, action. Why this particular night? Hard to say. If the required action was to have any real impact, then the time was short, the window of opportunity rapidly closing. But so what? The end result would be the same regardless of who seized responsibility—Mother Nature or someone else. What difference did it make?

  To the intruder, it made all the difference in the world. The aging artist might be dying, but the intruder could not allow him to die with his evil unexposed. Mother Nature was being too kind to the old man, allowing his life to just slip away, peacefully, no punishment for his lifetime of heinous sins. The intruder would see to it that at least some degree of justice was done. Sins, once committed, cannot be undone. There must be consequences.

  The intruder approached the Germantown house in the early hours, knowing the back door was never locked. The night was deathly quiet, the intruder thought, walking resolutely around the side of the house and entering the rear door—a person with a purpose. It was a noble deed, the intruder believed, a blow stricken for a right cause.

  Like the larger outside night, inside the house was hauntingly still. Some pale rays from the street lights outside leaked into the empty hallway, giving the intruder barely enough illumination to find the door to the old man’s bedroom and enter it. He lay in the darkness as quiet as the night, on his back, covered by a thin blanket. The intruder crept to the side of the bed and gently peeled back the blanket and top sheet. The artist did not move. Working quickly, the intruder folded the bedclothes neatly and placed them at the foot of the bed, exposing the naked old man.

  The noble deed was easily done. Perhaps Fate shone favorably on one so determined to wrest a modicum of justice from the natural course of things.

  The night was deathly quiet as the intruder left the house and returned home, mission accomplished. It had been a restless evening until now. For the rest of the night, the intruder would sleep soundly, the untroubled rest of an innocent.

  Chapter 2

  By the time Hardy Seltzer arrived at the scene, a modest crowd had gathered in the street in front of the house. Since the gentrification of the area of North Nashville historically known as Germantown, the graciously decaying ancient brick house that had served as both residence and studio for the artist with the unlikely name, Bechman Fitzwallington, for longer than any of the present residents of the area cared to remember, was, like its single resident, a curious anachronism.

  Although he would have chosen different words to describe his reaction, the whole area was a curious anachronism to Detective Seltzer. The North Nashville where he grew up, granted a good bit deeper north than Germantown, was nothing like the teeming den of metrosexuals this area had morphed into. Hardy liked it better the way he remembered it.

  He ducked under the yellow crime scene tape and climbed the short flight of stairs. The front door was open and some uniformed cops were milling around. Since it wasn’t technically a crime scene (after all dying wasn’t always a crime; it was more often a perfectly respectable mode of what Hardy’s Oxford-educated friend Shane Hadley might have described as shuffling off this mortal coil), no murder scene investigation had begun. Even though Hardy was assigned to murder detail, he had not been sent there to formally investigate anything. His immediate superior, Assistant Chief Carl Goetz, had just charged him with rendering an informal opinion about whether there was enough evidence to indicate anything nefarious about the artist’s sudden demise, before the powers-that-be decided whether to define this as a crime. Bechman Fitzwallington was well-enough known both locally and in the New York art world that news of his death would be news enough, and any hint of foul play would unleash a veritable media feeding frenzy. That would not please the city fathers. They much preferred to perpetuate the illusion that Nashville was a safe, vibrant, and creative community and that Nashvillians, even those in the north part of the city, were peace-loving folk who did not, unlike earlier denizens of that area, frequently bump each other off.

  “Where’s the stiff?” Hardy asked the uniformed officer guarding the front door.

  “Bedroom,” he answered.

  “Anything funny about it?”

  “Didn’t see anything but haven’t talked with the neighbors yet. Guy that called 911 lives next door. He’s around somewhere. Skinny kid. Hasn’t said much.”

  Seltzer started down the hallway toward the bedrooms. He was struck with how shabby the place was. Paint was peeling from the walls, and watermarks on the ceiling indicated a need for long-overdue maintenance. That seemed odd for an apparently famous artist whose paintings, according to what Hardy had uncovered in his brief search of the Internet, had sometimes sported six-figure price tags. He must have brought in enough dough to live comfortably. But this guy had been subsisting like a refugee. Maybe artists did that sort of thing, deliberately contrasting their lifestyles with those of the people around them. Maybe that was part of their marketing strategy. Seltzer had no idea if that was the case. How the hell would Detective Hardy Seltzer, who had barely eluded the common fate of his deep North Nashville youth, know anything about how artists behaved? However they lived, it seemed to him that they died pretty much like everybody else.

  The naked, cold, blue remains of Bechman Fitzwallington appeared to corroborate Hardy’s internal speculation about how artists died. Vocation and pretentious name be damned, it was a corpse not unlike the countless such remnants of humanity that had been the focus of Seltzer’s chosen profession for something in excess of twenty-five years. Another stiff.


  The body lay uncovered on a brass-framed bedstead. The hands were folded across a generous expanse of stomach, and a hint of a smile tugged at the corners of a mouth that all but disappeared beneath a big bush of ivory-white moustache. Seltzer thought that recently dead people often appeared to be smiling. When he mentioned that once to Doc Jensen, the coroner’s response was that as rigor mortis set in, there was often a contraction of the face muscles creating a sort of grimace/smile, set in stone once the process completed its task of transforming pliant human tissue into a rock hard stiff. Made sense to Seltzer.

  “Anything been touched?” Seltzer addressed the rookie cop who had been assigned to babysit the scene until some decision was made about whether to investigate further.

  “Not since we got here.”

  “So, what do you think, officer?” Seltzer continued. “Do you see any reason to suspect that we are looking at anything other than an old man who died in his bed without assistance from any of his fellow humans?”

  “Except he’s naked.”

  “Old guy. Lives alone. Maybe a commando sleeper. I hear artists can have some unusual habits.”

  Seltzer looked carefully about the room. Everything appeared to be in order. No sign of a struggle. No blood. It looked for all the world like the old guy had just taken off his clothes, lain down on his bed, and died without making much of a fuss about it. Not a bad way to get the job done when the time came.

  “Detective Seltzer.” Sue Smathers, another junior officer whom Hardy vaguely recognized, appeared at the door to the bedroom and called to him.

  “Hi, Sue,” Hardy responded. “What’s up?”

  “We have the fellow who discovered the body and called 911 upfront. And the old guy’s daughter has shown up as well. Do you want to talk with them?”

  “Sure,” he responded, “I’ll just be a few minutes here and then I’ll come up. Can you put them in separate rooms and have somebody babysit them until I get there?”

  “Right,” she said and headed back down the hall.

  Seltzer stood at the door to the bedroom and surveyed the scene again. “Did this guy just up and die, or did he have some help?” Seltzer asked himself. The scene looked so damned normal, ordinary even. An apparently extraordinary man who lay dead in an ordinary bed in an ordinary room in an ordinary house. Maybe incongruent, but a crime? Hardy Seltzer would need some different information if he was to reach that conclusion.

  The skinny kid who hadn’t said much wasn’t a lot of help. The kid was himself an aspiring artist and often dropped in on Bechman Fitzwallington, hoping to learn something about how to make it in the art world and maybe even to wangle an entrée into the commercial side of the profession. The old artist seemed to have welcomed the visits of the young man from next door, although it wasn’t clear exactly why. The old guy had apparently been of little artistic or commercial help to his neighbor.

  “Did Mr. Fitzwallington have many visitors?” Seltzer asked.

  The young man was probably thirty. A port-wine nevus spread amoeba-like across the center of his forehead, one tentacle extending along the right side of his nose. He was strikingly thin, and except for the deep red birthmark, his skin was pale, tending toward ash gray. He did not look well and fidgeted as the detective interviewed him.

  “Oh, yes,” the young man answered. “A lot of people were in and out. Some of them I recognized as other artists in the city. Some I didn’t know. He was quite famous, you know. A wonderful artist. And a very nice man. His daughter is here. She came to visit him a lot and would know better than I who his other visitors were.”

  “Yes, I’ll talk with her,” Seltzer answered. “I’m sure I’ll have more questions for you later, so if you’d give the officer here your name and contact information, I’d appreciate that. Also, here’s my card.” Hardy slipped a business card from his shirt pocket and handed it to the young man. “If you think of anything else that might interest us, please call me.”

  Seltzer didn’t really expect the young man to call, probably hoped he wouldn’t. But, hey, you do the drill, right?

  The artist’s daughter was a piece of work. Hardy guessed she was in her thirties and hopelessly suspended in a cocoon of perpetual adolescence. Too blond hair shaved on one side and streaked with a purplish color that Hardy had never seen associated with any kind of viable biologic organism. Multicolored tattoos with complicated designs but no apparent theme covered her body, most of which was exposed by an ultra-short skirt and halter top. She smoked a lavender cigarette with some determination, flicking the ashes on the floor, and dangled a platform sandaled (and elaborately tattooed) foot, oscillating it through a wide arc in front of her. She was unnaturally thin and probably pale-skinned, although it was hard to tell through the ink. Seltzer just didn’t get the ink thing that seemed to mesmerize the youngsters. And then there were the piercings—ears, nose, lip, tongue that he could see and no doubt multiple other sites that were barely hidden from view. Okay. He’d been there before.

  Hardy took his small pad from a shirt pocket and clicked the point out on his pen. He pulled up a chair and sat directly in front of the woman. He looked directly at her face, trying to penetrate the translucent glaze covering her olive-green eyes. Probably wearing green contacts. Another element of a façade meant to isolate her from whatever current realities were playing out in whatever space she occupied at any given point in time.

  “Your name?” Seltzer asked.

  “Salome.”

  “Salome who?”

  “SalomeMe.”

  “Not Fitzwallington?”

  She laughed, a sort of snorted snicker.

  “Do I look like a Fitzwallington?”

  “Hard to say,” Seltzer replied. “You would be the first living one I’ve seen.”

  She laughed again. This time with a bit more energy.

  “Oh, you mean dear Daddy,” she sighed. “Daddy’s been dying for a couple of years now, at least. Guess he finally managed to finish the job. About time, I’d say.”

  She flicked her cigarette butt on the floor and ground it out with the thick cork heel of her sandal.

  “I gather the two of you were not close,” Seltzer said.

  “Close!” she spat. “Dear old Daddy was someone you chose to get close to at your peril, Mister Detective. You can ask anyone who knew him. I kept in touch but from as far away as possible. He was my father, after all, even if I hated him. But then there was quite a long queue of Bechman Fitzwallington haters who kept coming around for whatever reason. He was like that. A morbid attraction. Like his art.”

  Hardy was pretty sure that what he saw in this tough young woman’s green eyes was hate, alright. She wasn’t faking that.

  “You say your father had been dying for a couple of years. What was wrong with him?”

  “Don’t know.” SalomeMe fished a pack of cigarettes from her purse, shook one out and lit it with a Zippo lighter, the unnecessarily exuberant flame nearly singing a purplish tress that fell over her forehead. “I think he had some high blood pressure, but he was taking medicine for it and it didn’t seem to be that serious.”

  Zippo lighter? Why not one of those little Bics? But then this woman provoked a lot of whys and why nots. A lot of unexplanations.

  “Was he seeing a doctor?” Seltzer asked.

  “There was a doctor that he’d seen who wrote the scripts for his blood pressure meds, but I don’t think dear Daddy saw him very often in person. Dear Daddy wasn’t fond of admitting that he needed anybody else’s help with anything, including his health.”

  “Did he have friends, acquaintances? Many visitors?”

  “Well, yes, he did,” SalomeMe answered. “Mainly other artists. They all hated him but kept up some kind of association. Artists are funny that way, at least the ones I have known.”

  Hardy asked, “When did you last see your father?”

  “I came by yesterday. He didn’t look good but not much worse than he’d looked for a wh
ile. He was up and around.”

  Deep drag on the cigarette, the smoke exhaled with some force toward the water-stained ceiling. Eyes rolling. Tired of this shit.

  “We about done here?” SalomeMe said.

  “I’ll need you to give me the name of his doctor and a list of the people that you knew he had regular contact with. I’ll most likely need to talk with you again, so I’ll need your contact info as well.”

  “Sure, honey,” affecting an incongruous drawl.

  “One last question,” Seltzer drew his chair closer and looked again directly into her eyes. “Any chance somebody murdered your father?”

  SalomeMe looked back directly at him and laughed. A hearty laugh that sounded as authentic as her hate had sounded earlier. For all the orchestrated externals, SalomeMe seemed to have trouble keeping up her façade of inscrutability. Must be hard to ink out feelings.

  She swallowed the laugh abruptly and said, “There is every chance of that, if you mean is there a likely killer. A lot of people would have been happy to do him in, given the chance. Including me. But from what I saw of him recently, what would have been the point? Seemed like he and Mother Nature were taking care of the matter without the need of any outside help.”

  “Your father was dying before your eyes, and you weren’t interested in knowing what was the matter?” Hardy shook his head, got up, walked over to a window, and looked out with his back toward SalomeMe.

  She lit another lavender cigarette and said, flicking the ashes delicately on the floor before her, “That’s correct, Detective.” She paused for a moment to relish the warm rush of smoke filling her chest and the gentle nicotine flush, then continued. “You obviously didn’t know dear old Daddy.”