Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  Blythe wanted a cigarette. She had quit the habit a couple of years earlier, but the desire for a smoke was as strong as it had ever been, and she occasionally yielded to it. She rationalized that an occasional cigarette was surely harmless, and it could sometimes take the place of food. Food was a major issue for Blythe. When she first quit smoking, she gained weight and hated herself for it. Blythe Fortune had taken the never too rich or too thin New York dictum to heart, and while her considerable financial assets did not yet reach the level she aspired to, she dealt with the thin part of the equation with near-religious zeal. She would, by damn, be enviably New York thin no matter what! If the occasional cigarette helped out, all the better. Efficient. She liked efficiency, two birds, single stones kinds of things.

  She admired her sharp cheekbones and pencil thin silhouette in the mirror over the small writing desk as she retrieved a cigarette from her stash in the desk drawer. She glanced at her computer screen on her way to the river-view balcony, her usual smoking spot; she never smoked inside the apartment. She sat down in front of the computer and read the new email.

  To: bfortune@galleriasalinas.com

  From: btherault@galleriasalinas.com

  Subject: Bechman Fitzwallington

  Yes, Blythe

  I heard of BF’s demise and am pondering what that means for the gallery. Are you free tonight? We could talk over dinner. There is some info you don’t have. Could be substantial $$$.

  Bruce

  Some info I don’t have, wrote the ever-provocative Bruce Therault. Blythe walked to the balcony and lit the cigarette. She leaned on the balcony rail, she inhaled deeply and relished the familiar sensation of warm smoke suffusing her lungs. She pondered her partner’s suggestive message. She was used to Bruce’s fondness for what she thought of as mysterious opacity in his emails, but the practice still frustrated her. She fished her cell phone from a jacket pocket and rang Bruce.

  “Blythe, my love, thanks for calling so promptly,” Therault answered, noting the caller ID and dealing immediately, as was his custom, with the matter at hand. “An early dinner at the bar at Felidia, okay?”

  “Sure, Bruce,” Blythe answered. “No hint about your mysterious info?”

  “All in due time, my love. All in due time.”

  He ended the call.

  Bastard, Blythe thought. She stubbed out her smoke and went back inside. She was not fond of mind games. She felt a spark of anger. If it reached a flashpoint, the meeting with Bruce was likely to be less than optimal. Her labile temper got in the way occasionally.

  It was a nice evening. She would take a leisurely stroll for the few blocks up Sutton Place to Fifty-eighth and across to Third Avenue, where awaited the lovely restaurant, her often exasperating business partner, and very likely an ice-cold, bone-dry martini. That should calm things down.

  “What were you and Hardy talking about?” KiKi asked Shane.

  They sat on their balcony as the day faded toward black. KiKi drank liberally from her bottle of Voss sparkling water, and Shane, realizing he had overdone the sherry a bit, had made a pot of coffee and nursed a cup, black. He was drifting back into sobriety as the day drifted toward night.

  “Well, KiKi, it seems that the artist, Bechman Fitzwallington, was discovered dead in his Germantown home this morning, and Hardy has been assigned the task of determining whether his demise merits investigation as a possible murder. We were exploring that question.”

  “And did you arrive at an answer?”

  “Not exactly,” Shane replied. “Something doesn’t feel right to me, and I think to Hardy as well, but there are some potentially unpleasant consequences of dealing with it as a murder. And there is no clear yes or no answer or if there is we haven’t figured it out yet.”

  “Aren’t there always unpleasant consequences of dealing with murder? If you mean politics, well, since when do you let politics decide what you do?”

  Shane thought that KiKi sounded like she was itching for a fight, and that took him by surprise. He was in no mood for a fight. He was never in the mood for a fight with KiKi, because those were fights he was destined to lose, and he studiously avoided engaging in unwinnable battles. His wife did not, as a rule, pick fights. Something was troubling the good Dr. Karpov, and it probably had nothing to do with him.

  “KiKi, love of my life,” he said, “so tell me what’s happening in that magnificent brain of yours.”

  “Outliers,” she said, heaving an uncharacteristic sigh.

  “Outliers?” he asked.

  “You know,” she continued, “observations that aren’t what you expected. Why do those things seem more important than the observations that confirm your suspicions?”

  “Like the dog that didn’t bark, you mean,” Shane harkened back to a telling observation by his favorite detective.

  “Something like that. Just today, I was reviewing some data from our long-term brain function study and pondering some outliers. Your reference to Bechman Fitzwallington reminded me of that because a lot of the outliers are artists.”

  “Well,” Shane responded, “I guess artists tend to be outliers in more ways than one. Are you saying they are smarter than the rest of us?”

  “That’s the interesting thing,” KiKi said. “Some have way better brain function and some way worse. Outliers in both directions.”

  “So you have a dog that didn’t bark and a dog that barked too much. Hmmm. I guess either one could be a critical clue. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps it’s the fact of an outlier, that an aberrant observation exists, that is the clue rather than the direction of the aberration.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking, but it troubles me. I even wondered whether there is something like a variability gene. An enzyme or something that exaggerates normal variability in a few people and so creates these pesky outliers. That sounds pretty strange to my brilliant geneticist colleague. But I still wonder about it.”

  Shane sighed, “Does everything have to be explained by genes?”

  “I don’t think so,” KiKi answered. “But I may be in the minority among my hard science friends.”

  “Not a bad place to be,” Shane replied. “I find that I identify more easily with the less popular positions on many things. As I say that it sounds undemocratic, but the emotions of the masses can be frightening…and not uncommonly wrong-headed.”

  “I suppose you’re right, but forever swimming against the current can be exhausting.”

  “Doing anything forever is exhausting, my love. Except, of course, loving my beautiful and brilliant wife.”

  She smiled.

  “To minorities,” Shane said, lifting his coffee cup and clinking her water glass.

  “Indeed,” she said, “to minorities indeed.”

  Hardy Seltzer was cold. The autopsy room at the city morgue always chilled him to the bone. It chilled him because the actual temperature was kept way below anything even remotely comfortable for living humans and also because just being in that place, the palace of the dead, chilled his soul. In spite of that, Detective Seltzer made a habit of attending the autopsies that were in any way relevant to his cases. The reasons for that were complicated. They included a need to convince himself of some concern for the departed. He needed to believe that there was something humane about what he was doing, even when the humanity of the players involved could be seriously questioned. His part in the big picture, maybe less than noble, was still necessary. And it was more than a job. A calling? Maybe.

  That’s what Detective Hardy Seltzer was thinking as he stood shivering next to the dead body of Bechman Fitzwallington. The remains of the artist were being unceremoniously carved up into their component parts by Harry Jensen, an annoyingly garrulous faux Irishman whose position as Davidson County coroner granted him license to mutilate the bodies of his fellow humans who were unfortunate enough to turn up dead. Dr. Jensen enjoyed his work. Detective Seltzer did not enjoy observing the spectacle. The coroner was well-aware of that fact, and h
e sometimes worked more slowly than necessary just to annoy Seltzer.

  “So,” Seltzer said, “what do you think?”

  “Entropy,” Jensen said, “the inevitable consequence of human biology’s programmed obsolescence.”

  “You mean like natural causes? You don’t see any other explanation?”

  “Natural causes,” the coroner harrumphed. “Such an inelegant phrase. And so imprecise. But, yes, I’d say natural causes as the term is commonly used is as good an explanation of Mr. Fitzwallington’s demise as we dare venture to postulate at this point. It appears to have been a timely death.”

  “No chance of foul play?” Hardy wanted to be sure he understood exactly what Jensen was saying.

  “Not based on what I see here,” Jensen replied. “There could be something in the brain, but we won’t know for sure until it is sufficiently preserved to slice open and view its interior. The exterior of the brain didn’t look particularly suspicious, just looked like an old brain. But there could be some secrets inside. And of course, I’ll review the microscopy of some selected tissues. And we’ll have the lab run some toxicology screens. But, my dear Detective Seltzer, I will be surprised indeed if we uncover any serious suspicions of malfeasance. Does that frustrate your finely-honed investigative instincts?”

  Seltzer ignored the coroner’s question.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Seltzer said, “how did you deal with SalomeMe? How’d you get her to agree to the post?”

  “Ah, my good detective,” the coroner replied. “As much as I would adore attributing that accomplishment to my native charm and exceptional wit, I cannot take the credit. It was quite strange, in fact. She called from her home to say that she had changed her mind and now agreed to the autopsy. I even asked her to come in to sign the permission form, and she agreed. Just blew in, signed the form, and was off again to wherever the be-inked ones gather to amuse themselves with explorations of the outer boundaries of acceptable behavior.”

  “Strange, indeed,” Hardy thought.

  Hardy decided to stop for a beer and to touch base with Marge Bland on his way home to his East Nashville apartment. The seedy bar previously known as the Dew Drop Inn had recently gestured to the city’s rampant gentrification by renaming itself TAPS. Otherwise, it hadn’t changed much. Marge still worked the afternoon shift at the bar. Hardy maneuvered the government-issue post-mature LTD down the hill toward Broadway and turned left into the small parking lot that was now bathed in neon red radiating from the spanking new giant TAPS sign. He wondered at the all caps, wondered if the name was an acronym for something. He’d try to remember to ask Marge.

  Three men sat at the bar. They didn’t seem to be together, just guys who happened to wind up sitting next to each other. They were strangers to Hardy, although he thought that one of them looked vaguely familiar, like someone he might have seen in a crowd someplace. They were dressed too well for regulars, but it was harder to identify the regulars lately. The complexion of the Nashville population was changing as all kinds of people wandered into the city looking for something most of them would not find because it wasn’t there. Some of these neoNashvillians gravitated to places like TAPS thinking to discover some authenticity that was buried too deep beneath a dense layer of neoNashvilliana to be accessible to strangers. People who came to the city wasted a lot of time and energy searching for the substance of a myth that, if it ever existed, had long since fallen victim to political realities, wrecking balls, and the profit motive.

  Hardy took the seat that Marge Bland kept reserved for him at the end of the bar. With a carefully practiced flick of her slim wrist, Marge slid a frosted Pilsner glass of Bud Light down the bar that came to rest directly in front of him. He lifted the glass, tipping it toward Marge, and took a long swallow.

  Marge was occupied resupplying the drinks of the three strangers and making small talk with them. The TV above the bar was tuned to the local news, and Hardy looked at it for a few minutes as he waited for Marge to finish shaking it for the paying customers. There was a segment on the discovery of Bechman Fitzwallington’s dead body and some footage of the exterior of his home with the yellow crime scene tape. The only statement about the cause of death was a quote from the Chief of Police who said that there was no evidence of foul play but that a preliminary investigation was underway to determine whether that was a possibility. Hardy’s name was not mentioned.

  I should call Shane, Hardy thought.

  Chapter 6

  Bechman Warren Fitzwallington, nee Billy Wayne Farmer, was born in 1929 in Clarksville, Tennessee, the only child of a house painter father and a homebody mother who worked occasionally as a housemaid.

  Shane Hadley read from the artist’s Wikipedia entry. He had awakened early, got out of bed without waking KiKi, and wheeled himself up to the front of the flat. He made a pot of coffee and fired up his laptop, basically biding his early morning alone time by exploring at least superficially the person of Bechman Fitzwallington. He had no real purpose in mind. It was just that since the artist seemed to be a current topic of interest, he decided to see what he could find out about who the man had been.

  Shane learned some interesting things about the artist from Wikipedia and from the www.bechmanfitzwallington.com web site. The name change was interesting, especially the strikingly pretentious adopted name vis-à-vis the strikingly ordinary actual one. It wasn’t clear when the name change occurred or whether the change had been made legal or was more like a nom d'artiste. Shane thought that names often said something important about the persons who owned them and wondered whether Billy Wayne Farmer suffered an identity crisis somewhere along the way to where he wound up.

  Could be. He wound up at a very different place than where he started, and it was pretty clear from early on that his life path was not likely to be linear. It was not difficult to imagine a right angle-zig or a left-angle zag in his path, a Damascus road kind of epiphany, that suddenly altered his life course and perhaps, as Damascene epiphanies sometimes do, changed his name as well.

  Little Billy Wayne was apparently mesmerized by his father’s house paints and started messing with them from the time he was mobile enough to navigate the short path from the back door of his house to the paint storage shed. His father would leave cans containing small amounts of unused paint there for Billy Wayne to play with. The kid’s life direction appeared to have diverged from any reasonable expectation of him at the time of his first encounter with house paint. He became entranced with the colors, textures, and feel of that particular paint, and he never got over it. The love of house paint changed the course of his life, or so the Internet sources seemed to think.

  And that might well be true, Shane thought. Apparently the artist had used a paint formulated much like the house paint of his youth for essentially all of his work. The short period when he experimented with the oil and latex paints used by most artists, produced, according to Wikipedia, his least appealing pieces. After the brief foray into the more commonly used media, he returned to his house paint formula and stuck with it for the rest of his career; it wasn’t clear exactly what the formula was or where he got it from.

  Shane found all of this particularly interesting, although he had no idea why. After all, the nature of the man had little relevance to the reality of his current state unless one’s inclination toward things spiritual was greater than Shane’s. Once ended, lives could be interesting as historical artifacts, backstories, but dead was dead. His interest was in how the dead happened to arrive at that state—especially whether they accomplished the task with or without the aid of one or more of their fellow human beings—but not in what, if anything, happened to them before or after the terminal event. Truth be known, there were precious few living people who interested Shane Hadley and he had no interest at all in the imagined world of human spirits.

  The vibrating cell phone in his breast pocket broke the spell of Shane’s idle introspection. Caller ID announced Hardy Seltzer as the intrude
r. Shane had not known Hardy to be an early riser, and he had certainly never called Shane at this hour. Shane sounded surprised and genuinely concerned as he answered the call.

  “Hardy, my man,” he said, “are you alright? My impression has been that this hour rarely finds you conscious.”

  “Nothing’s wrong that a gallon of strong coffee couldn’t cure. I’m working on that. I meant to call you last night but got distracted.”

  “A pleasant distraction, one would hope,” Shane replied.

  Seltzer did not answer the implied question. He generally avoided answering questions about his private life from Shane or anyone else. He had his reasons.

  “Jensen did the postmortem on the artist last night,” Seltzer said.

  “And?”

  “To quote the coroner,” Hardy answered, making a feeble attempt to mimic Jensen’s faux Irish accent, “the cause of death was entropy, human biology’s programmed obsolescence.”

  “Natural causes.”

  “Right. Well, the results from cutting open the brain aren’t known yet, and they’ll do some microscopy and tox tests, but nothing suspicious so far.”

  “Hmmm,” Hadley mused. “How sure of that was he?”

  “Sounded pretty sure to me. Said he’d have a look at the inside of the brain, do some random microscopy and have the lab do a tox screen, but he expected those things would be negative. Jensen thought the artist was just an old guy who had reached the end of his rope.”

  “So, what will you do with this information, detective?”

  The hint of sarcasm in Shane’s emphasis on his title registered with Hardy, and he winced.

  “Look, Shane,” he said. “I don’t really have a choice. Goetz is getting grief from the higher-ups, including the chief, and God only knows who is breathing down his neck. Absolutely zero evidence of foul play? Cut and dried. As cut and dried as answers ever are.”

  “Of course, you are correct. But we both know something doesn’t smell right. Too many loose ends. Too much unexplained. Just too bloody much weirdness to write it off without further inquiry.”