Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  “Athena Golden, Mr. Ricci,” Athena responded, “I own this gallery.”

  Defining the territory.

  “So I’ve been told,” Ricci responded. “So I’ve been told.”

  He turned and milled about the room, perusing the various art pieces on display. He was drawn to a display case of hats, for some reason. He stood looking at the collection of lady’s hats with apparent interest.

  “Hats,” he said, “are hats art? I didn’t know.”

  “Depends on the hats. Depends on the hatter. The hats you see there are indeed art. They are my creations. My little contribution to the world of art that sustains me.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Pardon my asking, but have you a special interest in lady’s hats? I must say I would not have predicted that.”

  “Just didn’t expect to find a bunch of them in an art gallery,” he responded. “But what I wanted to talk with you about is the recently deceased Bechman Fitzwallington. I believe you and my employer have done some business with his work?”

  “Assuming you are employed by the Galleria Salinas, the answer is yes.”

  “And are some of his unsold works in your possession?”

  Cop-talk.

  “I will be happy to discuss this matter with Blythe Fortune, my colleague at the New York gallery. I am frankly surprised at your sudden appearance here, Mr. Ricci, and am more than a bit suspicious of your motives. Now, if you will excuse me, I have legitimate business to attend to. You may show yourself out.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Ricci said. “I sense I haven’t presented myself very well. Maybe we could start over? The last thing I want is to offend you.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Ricci,” Athena walked to the door and held it open for a less than gracious exit of Mr. Mace Ricci.

  Ms. Golden went immediately to the phone and called the number she had for Fitzwallington’s daughter. Better firm up that connection. They had spoken a couple of times since her father’s death, but nothing had been accomplished. There was no answer. She left a voice message.

  Shane Hadley sat at his newly reconfigured spot at the far end of the bar at Wall Street nursing a glass of Lincoln College sherry and pondering how he had decided to approach the Bechman Fitzwallington problem. He was waiting for the first of the two appointments he had made for the afternoon and enjoying for the moment the nostalgia of the occasion, the first time he had used his Wall Street office in several years. Those years had seen major changes in his life but, excepting the fact that its proprietor had visibly aged, and not that well, Wall Street was pretty much like Shane remembered it.

  Strategy. Shane had decided to start by talking with a few potentially critical players. He had a list of four people that he thought he should probably interview face to face. He wasn’t really setting out to solve a murder but rather to determine whether there had been one. He was intrigued by that challenge and thought that it might require a somewhat different approach than when homicide had already been firmly established.

  So, Shane Hadley awaited the arrival of one who had adopted the unusual moniker, SalomeMe, not quite sure what to expect. From Hardy Seltzer he had a clue that this was not your usual grieving daughter of the recently deceased, and some hint that she was personally a trifle eccentric, but Shane was anxious to see this young woman for himself and to form his own opinion of her person and of her relationship with her late father.

  It was almost half an hour past the agreed-upon time. Not a punctual type, Shane thought. Might not show up at all. She had sounded reluctant on the phone and was less than impressed with Shane’s ambiguous professional definition. Retired metro detective, an admittedly anemic title, didn’t seem to carry a lot of weight with the likes of SalomeMe. In fact, Shane sensed that this woman was not all that fond of the men in blue and their colleagues, even the legitimate ones.

  Finally, she showed up. Later, Shane thought that SalomeMe might have played better as a no-show, a role with which she was probably familiar.

  “So,” she said, striding across the room to the bar where three men sat quietly drinking, “which one of you dudes is the retired cop guy?”

  No one responded. The bartender, Pat Harmony, limped over to face the visitor. She leaned toward him over the bar. Major portions of her substantial breasts bulged above a scanty tank top. A red and magenta serpent wound about her neck and headed south wending its way through her cleavage and disappearing toward a southerly destination Harmony was not inclined to speculate about.

  “Most likely,” Harmony said, “all of us dudes are cops, some retired, some not. But you no doubt are looking for Mr. Shane Hadley. He’s at the end of the bar. Can I get you a drink?”

  Shane looked at Ms. SalomeMe as she walked over to where he was parked atop the newly constructed platform that brought him to bar height while seated in his wheelchair. She took the stool next to him. She was about what he had expected from Hardy Seltzer’s description. And, Shane thought, she was surely old enough to know better than the persona she had chosen to project. The very unreality of it! He was certain that this woman was going to great lengths to hide whoever she really was from others and probably, he imagined, from herself. So, this would be hide and seek with a woman whom Shane decided on the spot to think of as just SM.

  “So,” says SM, obviously addressing Shane but staring straight ahead at the array of bottled spirits lining the back of the bar, “what business does a retired cop have digging into the circumstances of my dear daddy’s leave-taking of our fair planet? Doesn’t retired mean what it says?”

  Leave-taking, Shane thought. An unusual choice of words for such an agonizingly hip young woman. He was reminded of conversations from his Oxford days, the Brits’ way with language that had so attracted him. Something incongruous here. Better pay attention!

  Ignoring her questions, Shane said, “I understand from my colleague, Detective Seltzer, that you were, shall we say, less than fond of dear daddy. Is that correct?”

  “Actually, an understatement,” she replied, “I hated the old bastard’s guts!” Then an aside, “With good reason.”

  “Really?” Shane did not miss the aside.

  “Tell me, Mr. Retired Detective with the fancy accent,” she said, “exactly what are you trying to find out and what have I got to do with it? What am I doing here anyway?”

  Shane didn’t answer but swirled his glass of sherry and pondered how to proceed. SM had shown up, at least, but whether their meeting was likely to be worth the effort for either of them remained to be seen.

  “Would you like a glass of very good sherry?” Shane asked after a long pause.

  “Sherry?” she replied. “How quaint! Bartender,” she called over to Pat Harmony who leaned against the back bar trying hard to appear uninterested in the exchange between Shane and the strange young woman. “How about a bourbon and branch water?”

  “Coming up,” Harmony poured a generous portion of whiskey, added a scant dash of water and handed the drink to her across the bar.

  “What I’m interested in determining,” Shane now addressed his guest directly, “is whether your father was murdered or left the living world with only the aid of Mother Nature. What do you think?”

  SM took a long swallow of her drink and sat the glass on the bar with a decided clunk.

  “Afraid I can’t answer that for you Mr. Retired Detective. Mother Nature was doing a pretty good number on him for a while now, so she might not have needed much help. But if help was needed there would have been no lack of anxious volunteers. Dear daddy, you see, was a real piece of shit.”

  “So, you didn’t kill him?”

  “Not in any obvious way.”

  “What about an unobvious way?”

  “Always a possibility, I guess.”

  “Do you inherit his paintings?”

  “Bet your ass, I do. And I understand they’re worth a lot more dough with him dead, too. How about that for good fortune? Rid of the old bastard and making
money on the deal.”

  “Maybe good fortune…or maybe motive?”

  “I guess you could think of it that way. But I certainly didn’t not kill him for lack of a motive. I’ve got motives to burn. Been accumulating them for a lifetime.”

  Shane winced at the excruciating double negative. He was not fond of SalomeMe on this their first meeting, but he thought that if she killed her father by either obvious or unobvious means, she was probably cleverer than an initial impression would suggest. The pre-emptive strike of her paradoxical offense/defense against the possibility would be a complex strategy for such a woman. But it was entirely possible that lurking behind her elaborate façade was someone altogether different. People, like things, Shane mused, are not always what they seem.

  Chapter 9

  “Sherlock Shane Hadley, my man,” exclaimed a tall man as he entered Wall Street and made a beeline directly to the end of the bar where sat the retired detective fondling his glass of wine.

  The visitor wore spanking new yellow work boots and gray striped overalls decorated with random splotches of brightly colored paints. His arms were bare. His large hands were also paint-spattered. Shane noticed that as the man’s large right hand slapped Shane on the back forcefully enough to make an impression.

  Must be Parker Palmer, Shane’s second appointment of the afternoon. Shane didn’t know Parker Palmer but that was the name of one of the local artists that Hardy Seltzer had suggested that he might want to talk to. So, the appointment was made and conspicuously kept. Shane had been warned that PP was not the shy and retiring sort.

  “I am Shane Hadley,” Shane responded. “And I gather that you are Parker Palmer. We talked on the phone, but do I know you in some other context?”

  The familiarity of the visitor’s greeting was perplexing. Shane had done a bit of research on the artist, seen photos of his brightly colored and intriguingly distorted versions of people, famous and not. There was also the impression that Palmer was a garrulous sort, a kind of man-about-town who tended to churn up a hefty wake.

  “Of course, I know you,” Palmer said. “Hasn’t been all that long since the newspapers were full of your exploits, my man. I was a big fan. And then you disappeared.”

  “I prefer,” Shane replied, “to think of myself as having withdrawn rather than disappeared.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, what do you want from me? Must say, I was surprised by your call.”

  “Bechman Fitzwallington,” Shane intoned, deliberately infusing the words with their conspicuously invited melodrama. “What do you know of the circumstances of his recent demise?”

  “Billy Wayne Farmer,” Parker Palmer responded, ignoring the pretentious nom de artiste, pulling a long serious face, and gesturing with his left hand, “long outlived anything of value that he brought to the society that so handsomely rewarded him. Should have kicked off a long time ago if you ask me.”

  He sounded serious.

  “Not a private sentiment of yours, I gather.”

  “You gather right, my man,” Parker Palmer responded. “You see, Billy Wayne Farmer was a fake, Mr. Hadley, starting with that godawful name he invented. When he first made the Nashville art scene, he seemed okay personally, a yokel from the boonies hoping to make it in the big city. But his art? Totally baffling to most of us what the fuss was about. When the NYC folks got interested, old BWF became intolerably taken with himself. He expected the rest of us struggling artists to idolize him and I guess we sort of did that, primarily because he had figured out how to make money and we were trying to sort out what his secret was … get our hands on the formula for the special sauce. But he just counted his dough and basked in the attention. Never lifted a finger to do anything for the rest of us. Couldn’t have cared less.”

  While Shane had had little direct contact with artists, or perhaps because of that, he admired them for what he thought was their (he might have called it) aesthetic dedication. He thought them much less concerned about professional logistics than the beauty and integrity of their work, that they were not salespersons but rather expected the quality of their work to sell itself. Parker Palmer was apparently a moderately successful artist who seemed to belie Shane’s imagined stereotype. Parker Palmer was an unapologetic salesman.

  “And what did you expect of him?” Shane asked.

  “Human decency … and respect for the profession,” PP replied.

  “And when those were not forthcoming,” Shane continued, “why keep up the connection? I understand that you visited with him fairly often.”

  “Morbid attraction, I guess.”

  “How morbid?”

  “A person needed to nurture a more than a healthy amount of morbidity to keep up any connection with the old guy.”

  “There seem to be several people who were capable of nurturing such morbidity,” Shane said. “Help me out here, Mr. Palmer. This guy up and dies for no apparent reason. He is constantly surrounded by people who appear to have hated him with some vehemence and who had ample opportunity to assist his demise. How about a motive?”

  “Clear the decks? Cut out the competition? He distorted the local art scene rather than enhancing it. I don’t know a single Nashville artist who wasn’t anxious to see him out of the picture, so to speak.”

  “Will anyone profit directly from his death?”

  “I can think of three if he left any significant number of paintings that can be sold. His art had been popular enough for a while that his death will bump the price of his final works for a bit.”

  “Three?”

  “Yes: The lovely daughter known mainly to herself as SalomeMe, who will presumably inherit his remaining works as his sole heir; Athena Golden, proprietor of the Nashville gallery, AvantArt; and Galleria Salinas, the New York gallery that handled some of his work, which is operated and perhaps owned, I’m not sure, by a stereotypical East Sider who goes by the unlikely name of Blythe Fortune. I must add that these people would have only a brief bump in their profits. Although the value of art is, like the value of most things, what someone will pay for it, Billy Wayne’s art will not have any staying power in the market, especially his later works. So, one could argue that we other artists might gain more from his death in the long run than the middlemen.”

  More offensive defense, Shane thought. Too bloody many murderers and no bloody murder! Maybe he was wasting his time. OK. He had time to waste.

  “So,” Shane, tired of the banter, cut to the chase, “who did it?”

  “The smart money would probably be on the daughter,” Parker Palmer smiled. “Me? I’d stick with Mother Nature. She is surely the more dependable of those two. And we of the artistic persuasion overvalue ourselves and each other even when we misbehave, as we are prone to do. So, you’d have to do something worse than treat your artistic colleagues like pieces of shit to provoke them to violence.”

  “Well,” Shane replied, “thank you for meeting with me. You’ve been of marginal help in this little drama, but I appreciate the effort,” he proffered his business card. “If you think of anything else that might enlighten the situation for all of us, please call me.”

  “Yo, my man,” PP responded with a hearty clap on Shane’s shoulder. “Will do.”

  He arose from the barstool, strode deliberately to the door, and disappeared.

  Shane watched the tall man lope across the room, trailed by the comet-tail flash of his neon-yellow work boots that smeared across Shane’s retinae, the most enduring imprint of the odd encounter, as the door banged shut.

  The detective then returned his attention to the glass of sherry and for perhaps the first time in his life, thought seriously about the nature of art and artists. He seemed to be testing the waters of a strikingly strange world where illusion, not reality, was the essential element. These were not real people. This was not at all what he had expected.

  Well, there was one reality—the old guy was really dead. But who was he? And SalomeMe? Even the gangly Parker Palmer, glad-handing
salesman that he seemed to be, had an air of unreality about him, like he was acting a role. Who are these people? And how to navigate a world with no clear coordinates, locate anything close to true events? Answering the essential question here—was there a murder or not—was likely to require something more than the detective’s usual bag of tricks. And if the answer to that question turned out to be affirmative, then how the hell would the crime ever be solved?

  Verities, thought Shane Hadley, were the essential pieces of any crime’s jigsaw puzzle . Without the verities, there were no real puzzle pieces to assemble. And so … no solution. The files of unsolved crimes bulging the dusty archives of every police station in the known world were comfortably ensconced there for lack of verities. “Facts!” exclaimed The Great Detective. “I need facts, Watson. I cannot make bricks without straw!”

  Shane took the small leather notebook from his shirt pocket and opened it to some notes he had taken when Hardy Seltzer ceded the material on the Bechman Fitzwallington matter to Shane’s custody. Two more artists’ names—Fiona Hayes, a ceramicist who according to Hardy’s information tended to “keep to herself,” and Vernon LaVista III, a socially well-connected sculptor who worked mainly in bronze but had done some large marble commissions for the city’s public art program as well. They were both regular visitors to the deceased and according to the daughter were certainly not there to express their undying devotion to the old guy. Shane would need to talk with these two. And now there were the two gallery owners possibly implicated by Parker Palmer. Shane uncapped his trusty Waterman fountain pen, another relic of a past life, and wrote, Athena Golden (AvantArt Nashville) and Blythe Fortune (Galleria Salinas New York) near the bottom of the page. The ex-cop, Mace Ricci, might have more to reveal about the New York connection as well. Yes, he definitely needed another encounter with the Ricci character. He wrote Mace Ricci temporarily Nashville via New York.