Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  Given his circumstances, Shane was not at all sure how he would deal with the logistics essential to explore whatever these people had to add to his nascent pot of information. He still wasn’t all that mobile. He would need to think about that. Hardy Seltzer came to mind.

  Shane was starting to miss the help and the companionship of his re-discovered friend and colleague. That had been true since the Bonz Bagley case—that case was a kind of rebirth for Shane. But the feeling was gaining momentum. Shane was starting to doubt whether the solo route would be as interesting as he originally thought it would be. Camaraderie was important to most cops. Even though Shane, in his prime, was considered to be a “private man,” that was more a carefully nurtured perception than his personal reality. No matter. At least for now Hardy was strictly off-limits. Sherlock Shane Hadley was going it alone.

  Chapter 10

  On rare occasions Sally May Farmer extricated herself from the confines of her meticulously constructed and maintained alter ego, abandoned for an evening three of the cardinal principles that had guided her life since adolescence, and went to bed early, sober, and alone.

  There was a ritual. She undressed, scrubbed her face free of all traces of her habitually excessive makeup, and stood naked before a full-length mirror. She then removed each of the jeweled rings from their pierced sites—ear lobes, eyebrows, nose, lower lip, tongue, left nipple, an insinuatingly outie umbilicus, and the right labial fold of her vagina. Only the tattoos remained as indelible vestiges of the other woman who could not be erased completely. She heaped the mass of jewelry into a ceramic dish on her dressing table and regarded her largely unadorned body in the mirror for a few minutes. She often wept quietly at these times as she stood alone, naked … vulnerable. Eventually she sighed deeply and went to bed.

  On these rare occasions she was often visited by the ghost. He came in the deep of night and again touched her, often roughly. She felt the long-familiar parchment texture of his dry bony hands on her thighs and breasts and was at once revulsed and aroused. The dream could last the entire night. She often awakened the next morning tangled in the bedclothes from the violent thrashing about—writhings of both agony and ecstasy—and drenched in cold sweat. She invariably awoke with renewed loathing for the ghost and the man. But, oddly, the bond endured. It might even have been strengthened by their secret. Humankind’s most powerful and enduring emotions are, after all, love and hate.

  Why? Why, even rarely, with full knowledge of the consequences of what she was doing, issue an open invitation to a visitation by the ghost? Sally May Farmer pondered that question as she reassembled her alter ego the next morning. She rationalized that now the invitation would fall on dead ears and she would be finally free of the dread that visited her all those years in the night, free to experience a periodic escape from the pretense without resurrecting the evil that drove her to seek refuge in an invented life. Apparently not.

  So, Sally May Farmer carefully reassembled the invented woman who gave her the strength necessary to venture into the real world. She could only view reality from a false face through artificial lenses. Thank you, Daddy.

  Chapter 11

  Blythe Fortune and Bruce Therault met once in a while for lunch at a little unpretentious French restaurant on First Avenue, just around the corner from Blythe’s building. They always ate at the bar. The reason for these meetings was to catch Blythe up on Bruce’s business plans for the gallery. The current topic was the art of the recently deceased Bechman Fitzwallington.

  “Who in bloody hell is Mace Ricci?” asked Blythe.

  Blythe had returned Athena Golden’s call and was as baffled as the Nashville woman by the sudden intrusion of this completely unknown ex-cop into the Fitzwallington matter.

  “You don’t need to worry about him,” Bruce responded. “He’s my guy. He’s sizing up the lay of the land down south.”

  Blythe had often thought recently that Bruce was becoming less and less forthcoming about what he was doing for the business and she worried about that. The gallery had always dealt with midlevel artists—up-and-comers, solid performers with a following, that sort of thing. Blythe didn’t have the chops or the desire to deal in the high rollers, compete with the big galleries. And the model had worked OK for them … not great, but OK. They had made a few bucks on Fitzwallington’s stuff before his obvious decline. The chance to make a few more bucks on his unfortunate demise was certainly appealing. But Blythe worried that Bruce had an agenda that might put her gallery at risk. She loved that gallery. She loved the art. She recognized that they had to make money or go out of business. But her passion, what drove her, was the art.

  “So,” Blythe responded, “exactly what is he doing down there?”

  “Just firming up connections,” Bruce replied. “Determining how many paintings there are, their quality, and establishing our exclusive claim to them.”

  “And?”

  “Well, it appears everything is moving in the right direction,” Therault said. “There is one possible complication.”

  “And?”

  “There is a local retired cop who seems intent on determining that old BF was murdered in spite of everything pointing to natural causes for his death. That’s a problem for us.”

  “How so?”

  “Well,” Therault sighed and gulped a deep slug of his Manhattan, “if it’s a murder case, they will confiscate the paintings until God knows when—but certainly until the bump in their value has disintegrated and we are left with no added value from Fitzwallington’s death. Pisses me off to think about the possibility.”

  “Well, not the end of the world.”

  “Maybe.”

  Therault drained his drink and ordered another. He was not a man at peace this noon and that was obvious to Blythe Fortune.

  “You see,” Bruce said, “this is not just about our gallery.”

  “Really?” Blythe responded. “Then what is it about?”

  “Well, Blythe,” Therault began hesitantly, “I’ve tried to spare you the gory details about some things. But perhaps it’s time you became acquainted with some activities and interests of our investors.”

  Blythe was not sure that she liked the sound of this, but she listened.

  “Yes, go on.”

  “You see,” Bruce continued, “our investors have interests in other galleries as well, modest shops like ours that deal in mid-level art and have persisting needs for operating capital. There are several of them scattered around the country. So, they have considerable experience with this sort of thing business-wise. That is an asset for us of course.”

  “I see. And who are these mysterious investors? I should have asked that question earlier I suppose.”

  “I think, Blythe, that you need not know more about them right now. That’s my end of things. However, you probably should know that this Fitzwallington matter fits their business plan.”

  “Business plan? How so?”

  “Death tax collectors. That’s how I think of them. As you know, the death of a successful artist usually jacks up the prices for his works by twenty percent or so for a few weeks before the market settles down again—the death tax. Well, these business guys are speculators and they see that as a financial opportunity. They go looking to invest in galleries that represent aging or ill artists who fit the model. By avoiding the big-name guys, they can operate under the radar, so to speak, and still make a decent profit. That’s why they sought us out. So, we owe our capitalization to old BF as well as a substantial amount of our profit over the past couple of years. With more to come if things work out as planned.”

  “Why operate under the radar, Bruce?” Blythe asked, fearing an answer that she would not find pleasing. “Is this sort of thing legal?”

  “As far as I can tell,” Therault answered, polishing off his third Manhattan, setting the glass firmly on the bar, and looking directly into Blythe Fortune’s questioning eyes. “As far as I can tell.”

  Chapter 12
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  MUSIC CITY HATTER GOES MAD

  The glaring headline on the front page of the morning Tennessean and the accompanying three-column story was read with varying degrees of interest and understanding by several of the people with connections to the Bechman Fitzwallington matter.

  The story recounted a bizarre incident in which one Richard (Richelieu) Jones, self-styled Mad Hatter of Music City, proprietor of a venerable hat shop on Eighth Avenue, who resided in a nice Germantown apartment, was apprehended after breaking into the vacant former home of a neighbor, the painter Bechman Fitzwallington, and painting graffiti on the walls, messages to the effect that the house’s former resident was a skinflint, a cheat, a charlatan, and a fake. When apprehended, Mr. Jones was irrational and somewhat combative and was armed with a handgun although he did not discharge it. He was taken by the police to the university hospital emergency room where he was evaluated and admitted for further observation and tests.

  Athena Golden sat at the writing desk nestled into a far corner of her gallery, laid her copy of the morning newspaper aside, and stared at the small painting with BF boldly smeared across the bottom right corner. She pondered the odd story about the hatter. Athena thought of her hat-making as an art form, quite different from the commercial monstrosities produced by the guy with the shop. Of course she knew of the Mad Hatter of Music City, had seen examples of his creations online and occasionally on the head of a sartorially adventurous local citizen, but she had not met him until the previous day when he brought the little painting that he claimed was an early work of Fitzwallington to her, requesting an appraisal. He left the painting at the gallery for a few days to give her time to establish its value.

  Athena thought that “Richelieu” Jones’s behavior the previous day seemed strange at the time but she hadn’t thought more about it until reading the story in the Tennessean. The small dark man wearing a lavender fedora and carrying an unwrapped oil painting under his left arm like a schoolbook just strode into the AvantArt gallery late in the morning and ambled about for a while, apparently studying the art pieces hanging on the gallery walls. He stood for some time gazing at the display case of hats. He did not speak until Athena approached him.

  “How may I help you?” she asked.

  “Bonjour, madam,” he replied, doffing his lavender hat and bowing slightly. “I am Richelieu Jones and I wish to know the value of this painting.” He shifted the painting from under his arm and showed it to her, holding it shield-like with both hands in front of his chest. “Are you able to establish that? It is an original painting by Bechman Fitzwallington, given to me by him many years ago.”

  There was slight tremor in his voice, and he seemed to have trouble holding the painting steady. His gaze darted randomly about the room as though he was expecting an intruder but was unsure when and from what direction the intrusion would come.

  “I’m sure I can get you a reliable appraisal,” Athena said, looking directly at him and trying without success to engage his eyes. “It may take a few days. Are you aware that the artist recently died? That could affect the painting’s value.”

  “So I am told,” he replied.

  He handed the painting to her and without saying anything more, turned on his heel and left the gallery.

  Reflecting on the encounter, Athena Golden thought the man’s behavior strange, very strange indeed. Strange but with no inkling of any potential for violence. There was nothing about her encounter with Richelieu Jones that would have led her to expect anything like the story in the newspaper. Something seemed wrong about him. But not that wrong.

  Shane Hadley and Katya Karpov sat, as usual of a morning, at the table in the front room of their Printers Alley home, nibbling on brioches that KiKi had picked up the previous evening from Provence, the elegant little shop that was a convenient stop for her on the way home from work. They were sipping coffee and scanning the morning Tennessean. As always, KiKi got first dibs on the front page while Shane absently perused the sports page, a habit from long ago when he had a passing interest in some of the local teams.

  Shane was looking at the sports page but he was thinking about the death of Bechman Fitzwallington, still puzzling over the as-yet empty space between his feeling about that and the available facts. When KiKi held the front page toward him and read the headline, he was startled.

  “Isn’t this your friend with the hat shop?” she asked.

  Shane took the paper from her and scanned the story.

  “Indeed it is,” he answered. “How strange. He had seemed a little spacey lately, and his creations have taken a turn toward the strange, bizarre really. But I didn’t see him often enough to know whether something more serious was going on.”

  He handed the paper back to KiKi and she started to read the story.

  Shane watched his wife’s emerald green eyes moving back and forth across the newspaper. So many things about her were beautiful. He remembered the first time he had spotted her strolling about a courtyard at Oxford. Dumbstruck was what he felt, and he was dumbstruck all over again every day that they were together since.

  KiKi lay the paper aside, sipped at her coffee and said, “What possible connection could your hatter friend have had with that artist?”

  “There is, in fact, a connection,” Shane replied. “An admittedly tenuous one. Richard Jones apparently made a hat for the artist many years ago, before Fitzwallington was ‘discovered’,” gesturing the punctuation, “and he paid for the hat with one of his paintings. Richard had only recently rediscovered the painting and displayed it in his shop. He was not happy to have the painting in lieu of cash at the time, but, as I told him, the painting may well be worth a great deal more than the hat, especially since the artist’s recent demise.”

  “Hmmm,” KiKi responded. “Did you know he was a neighbor of the artist in Germantown?”

  “No clue,” Shane said. “I had no idea where Richard lived.”

  Shane retrieved the newspaper and started reading the article more thoroughly.

  Katya poured herself some more coffee, stared toward the long room’s big front window, and contemplated outliers.

  SalomeMe did not feel well that morning. She often did not feel well in the mornings. That fact was usually explained by her behavior on the previous evening and was often magnified by her frequent insomnia. Despite all that, most mornings she dragged herself from her troubled bed, made a pot of strong coffee, and retrieved the newspaper from her front porch. On that particular morning SalomeMe sat at her kitchen table resting her throbbing head in her hands and staring blankly into the space before her as she waited for the coffee pot—which seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time—to wheeze its way through the agonal throes of the brewing process and signal that its task was complete. Her hand trembled some as she lifted the pot and poured the dark liquid into a mug. She sipped the hot coffee, relishing the searing pain as it washed over her tongue, scalded her soft palate, and burned a path down her esophagus.

  “Aaahh,” she said aloud and turned to the newspaper.

  Pain was SalomeMe’s long-nurtured friend.

  So, yet another Bechman Fitzwallington hater, she thought as she scanned the front page story. She recognized the small picture, apparently retrieved from the paper’s files, of a thin-faced man with a razor-sharp nose wearing a fedora and smiling for the camera. She had seen him around the neighborhood occasionally and knew that he lived in the area. She also was aware of his identity as the hat maker with the shop in town. She didn’t recall ever seeing him at her father’s house and was unaware of any connection between the two of them. But dear old daddy had a way of angering even people whom he hardly knew, so she wasn’t particularly surprised. Get in line, Mr. Richelieu Jones. When dear daddy chose to depart the land of the living, he left behind a very long queue of folks impatiently waiting their turn to have a go at him. Yes, Mr. Jones, just take a number and get in line.

  She lay the paper aside and nursed her cup of coffee
for a bit. That New York detective was supposed to come by her place later. She didn’t like Mace Ricci, but he seemed to be the best bet for extracting maximum dollars from the final works of Bechman Fitzwallington. Should be a sizeable sum. She smiled. Thank you, Daddy.

  Mace Ricci was not an early riser. He figured he had done enough of that when he was full time on the force so that since his retirement, he availed himself of every opportunity he had to sleep in. It was probably close to ten o’clock when he retrieved a local newspaper from a coin box beside the door and entered the diner a block up Union Street from his hotel. He sat at the counter, ordered black coffee and a bacon and eggs breakfast, and unfolded the paper.

  The headline about the hatter didn’t attract him until the name of Bechman Fitzwallington leapt at him from the text beneath. That caused him to read the entire account with some care. Anything newsworthy that involved the deceased artist interested him. There was always the possibility that such an item would have implications for what happened to those paintings. And he was determined to lay claim to those paintings. That was the job he had taken on and he took his job commitments seriously.

  What is it with hats in this town? Ricci thought. He was remembering the showcase of hats at the gallery he had briefly and unsuccessfully visited. He had to figure some way to follow up on that Fitzwallington connection. Could be trouble. And now another hat maker with some apparent beef with the dead artist. And this guy seemed to be totally off his rocker. The crazy ones can be a special problem.

  It appeared to Ricci that virtually everybody who encountered Fitzwallington wound up hating him. Something about the old guy seemed to have an organic link to the human dark side. He brought out the worst in people. That troubled Ricci. He feared that the growing list of serious haters of the old guy would feed the notion that the cause of his death might not have been as natural as originally thought. That was an especially troubling idea since that paralyzed ex-cop was digging into the matter. If he didn’t suspect foul play, then why was he wasting his time? Ricci could imagine the potentially valuable paintings getting tied up for ages in the legal morass that often complicated dealing with a dead guy’s estate in a situation like this. He was meeting with the daughter later and maybe she could be persuaded to speed up things, get the possession and disposal of the paintings resolved before the Hadley guy insisted on muddying the waters. Ricci was especially concerned about how his New York employer might react to any muddying of the waters. Not likely to be a pleasant experience.