by Ken Brigham
If you imagine the artist’s life as filled with free-wheeling, unstructured, carefree, impulsive, and irresponsible days and nights spent biding time while awaiting the arrival of the muse, you would find the life of Parker Palmer severely disappointing. PP’s life was structured almost to the point of compulsion. At 6:30 AM he sat in a wicker chair on the rear deck of his Edgefield area house cradling a large cup of French press prepared coffee in his right hand, a copy of the day’s Tennessean resting in his lap. He had arisen at five, gone for his habitual morning run during which he picked up the morning paper, returned home, prepared the coffee and positioned himself in his customary morning spot on the deck. He would spend precisely thirty minutes there and then repair to his upper-level studio and paint for four hours. Happened like that every day. No waiting for the muse. No pondering the meaning of art, his or anyone else’s. No elaborate plans for what his next work would be. His chosen job was art but that didn’t change the fact that it was a job. PP’s Scottish heritage had taught him that when you have a job you best be about it.
“Holy shit!” he said aloud. “What in hell got into Richelieu Jones?”
Parker knew the hatter the same way that almost any long-time resident of the city did—who the man was and something about his shop which had become a local attraction. Occasionally he would stop by the shop during one of his frequent walks through the city to chat a bit with the Francophilic hatter and marvel at his creations. Parker didn’t wear hats and didn’t admire them particularly, although he had painted hats atop some of his more fanciful portraits of imaginary ladies.
PP had noticed that Jones seemed to be evolving into a caricature in recent months. Parker thought it may have started with the French thing that had come to obsess the old guy. His hat designs had taken a very strange turn and the man himself seemed to have followed them, or led them, not sure which. Anyway, PP thought the hatter seemed more distracted lately and would occasionally talk nonsense. But Parker Palmer was still surprised at the newspaper story. What possible connection could the hatter have had with Billy Wayne Farmer? But then old BF had a way of pissing off people whom he didn’t even know. So maybe this was just a consequence of the old man’s malignant aura. Ah well. Rest in peace Billy Wayne, my man…rest in peace at last.
The part of the extensive and colorful display that most caught Hardy Seltzer’s attention was the stylized tombstone outlined in black with RIP BF scrolled across it in brilliant red. The scene covered an entire wall and really was best described as a display. It was, technically anyway, graffiti, but much more carefully done than the spray-painted figures on the walls of abandoned buildings downtown. The Jones guy had spent some time and effort depicting his antipathy toward the artist on the walls of the old guy’s house. His message was clear and forcefully done. Hardy was no expert, but he thought the hatter’s handiwork might even be, ironically, art. Live by the sword, die by the sword, Hardy thought.
He was remembering his visit to the Fitzwallington place to help corral Richard Jones and get him safely ensconced in a place appropriate for his condition. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have responded to such a call, but since he had been involved in the investigation, such as it was, of Fitzwallington’s death, Hardy volunteered to accompany the guys in blue to the scene. He wasn’t sure why he volunteered. Maybe hoped he would discover something relevant to the demise of the old artist. He didn’t and hadn’t thought much more about it until he opened the morning paper and confronted the story. It was a strange story. Seemed like everything about Bechman Fitzwallington was strange.
Hardy sipped at his third cup of coffee. He wondered whether Shane was as interested in this “case” as he had seemed to be at first. Hardy hadn’t talked with Shane since then. Probably should give him a call. Couldn’t hurt to at least find out what the ex-detective was up to. When Shane Hadley was up to something detective-wise there was a better than even chance that, sooner or later, it would involve Hardy Seltzer.
Blythe Fortune was not an early riser and generally refused to check her emails until after she had consumed at least two cups of coffee and had sat for half an hour watching the sun rise over the expanse of East River that she viewed from her wall of living room windows. But, for some reason, she awoke earlier than usual this morning and immediately opened the message from Bruce Therault. It was a short, urgent note with a scanned copy of the Nashville Tennessean story about the Mad Hatter of Music City’s vandalization of Bechman Fitzwallington’s home attached. She printed out the document, made coffee and sat at the wrought iron table on her deck rereading the story, absorbing the morning sun, and wondering whether there was any reason to be concerned about what appeared to be a minor incident happening a thousand miles to the south of the most interesting city in the world where she lived and mingled with a stratum of society that was probably not represented in the place where this “Mad Hatter’s” caper had occurred, the same place where Bechman Fitzwallington had lived, died, and hopefully left a cache of paintings that stood to make a considerable amount of money for her gallery. She wasn’t sure why Bruce’s email sounded so concerned and would discuss that with him, but she saw no reason to worry herself about it.
Of course, it was obvious now that Bruce had information that she did not have and was probably better off without. Was there something about these mysterious investors that Bruce had told her a bit about that made this incident more significant than it appeared to Blythe? Not her problem. Up to Bruce to deal with it. Just get her the paintings and she would organize her contacts and get the damn things sold, get this whole Fitzwallington thing finished up and taken to the bank. Her better angels were enthralled with the art for art’s sake thing, but, as with most everything else in the city, esthetics and money were, like energy and mass, convertible entities. And the conversion process tended strongly in the direction toward money.
The sun was well above the horizon now, silhouetting the Queens skyline and slashing a swath of orange across the river toward the Manhattan shore. Blythe really did love this place. Not so much the perpetual bustle, the complexity, but more the calm, simple, and exquisite beauty that appeared suddenly and without warning in the most unlikely places.
Chapter 13
Agnes, Katya Karpov thought, Agnes something. Starts with a C, maybe, not sure. Yes, that’s it, Courtland, Agnes Courtland.
Katya was trying to remember the full name of one of the clinical research coordinators for the aging brain study who appeared in her office at the beginning of the day unannounced, looking nervous, and insisting that she had some potentially important information that Dr. Karpov should know about. Katya knew most of the research coordinators by sight and by at least first name. She paid their salaries, but she didn’t work directly with them and so had to resort to deeper recall when the occasion required that she remember more detail about one of them.
“Good morning, Agnes,” Katya greeted the young woman. “Please come in and have a seat.”
“Thank you, Dr. Karpov,” the young woman responded, smoothing her blue scrub skirt as she sat down in the chair beside Katya’s desk.
“And to what do I owe the privilege of a visit from Agnes Courtland this morning?” Katya engaged her visitor’s eyes and tried to sound pleased with the young woman’s unexpected and unarranged visit to her office, but it took some effort.
As was true most days, the Karpov calendar was stuffed to the gills and this unplanned interruption would mean starting the day already behind schedule. But, Katya both knew and felt that paying attention to the real workers, the people who made the entire enterprise function, was at least as important as debating space needs with the dean, quibbling with senior administrators over next year’s budget, or holding one-on-one meetings with each of her forty-odd faculty to go over their mostly useless but required annual performance review forms. She’d get all of that stuff done, but first she would listen carefully to whatever Agnes Courtland had on her mind.
“Well,” the nervou
s young woman began, “I’m not sure if I should tell you this. You know, patient confidentiality and so forth. But I think you should know.”
“I guess since you felt strongly enough about it to go to the trouble of coming to my office this early in the day,” Katya tried to put her visitor at ease, “that you might just as well get it off your chest and trust me to deal with it properly. Don’t you think?”
“I suppose,” Agnes replied. “But I don’t want to put you in a difficult spot.”
“My dear,” Katya smiled, “I am often in a difficult spot. It’s part of the job. I am very familiar with difficult spots and usually do pretty well at extricating myself with minimal damage to all involved. Trust me, my dear. Trust me.”
“OK. What I think you should know is that the mad hatter guy that was admitted yesterday—there’s a Tennessean story about him this morning—well, he’s one of the subjects in the brain study. He’s one that I’ve been following, study subject number BS24. Of course, I don’t know anything about his test results, but the last few times I saw him in follow up, I thought he was behaving a little strangely. I just thought that if there was some reason that we knew about that might help explain his violent behavior, that someone in charge should at least know about it. So, I came to you. I hope that was OK.”
“You’ve done the right thing, Agnes,” Katya said. “Please don’t reveal this to anyone else. And trust me to deal with it. You needn’t worry about it any longer.”
Katya got up from her chair and took the young woman’s arm, gently ushering her toward the door. Katya really did need to get on with her duties for the day.
“Thank you again, Agnes. Rest assured that you have done well,” Katya said.
Agnes left. Katya Karpov closed her office door, went to her desk and removed the brain study datasheet from her top desk drawer. She ran a finger down the column of subject study numbers until she located BS24. She moved her finger to the right, along the corresponding row, digesting each datum. BS24 was one of the outliers. He was, in fact, one of the two subjects identified as artists (in his case artisan) whose brain function appeared to have worsened over the period of the study. And she now knew from the story in the morning paper that he lived in the same neighborhood as the dead artist. The dead artist, Bechman Fitzwallington, whom she had discovered, after getting permission from the appropriate committee to unblind some of the data, was the other downside outlier.
Were there connections among these apparently disparate facts that could help to explain the biology? And what about the ethical dilemma that had fallen into her lap? She couldn’t ignore that. Although her professional and personal lives since marrying Shane had sometimes abutted at the interface between biology and crime, she had tried to maintain the interface, keeping her and Shane’s professional passions separate from their personal ones. Now Katya might be forced as a moral imperative to invite exploration of a possible causative link between biology and crime in the unlikely person of the Mad Hatter of Music City. Not a pleasant thought. Too likely to distract attention from her real interest. But facts are facts. They must be dealt with.
“Dr. Karpov,” her secretary rapped gently on the office door and opened it a crack, “you’re late for the appointment with the dean. His office called and I told them that you were on your way.”
“Thank you, Lois,” Katya answered, forcing a smile. “To avoid impugning the ethics of a less than truthful secretary, I suppose I should do as you promised.”
Katya picked up a folder with a tab marked Dean Stuff and headed out.
“Off to see the wizard,” she remarked as she breezed past her secretary, out the door, down the hall, and up a flight of stairs to confront face-on the person of the dean, a largely useless requirement of her position. Most of her duties were pleasurable, but some were endured rather than enjoyed. Meetings with the dean rarely left her feeling anything remotely akin to pleasure.
The eight finely toned limbs of Fiona Hayes and Vernon LaVista, III were still entangled from their previous evening’s bedtime activities when they were awakened by the glare of the late morning sun beaming through the east window of their loft bedroom nestled deep in the priciest section of the epicenter of Nashville renaissance known as The Gulch. They were both artists, but not the starving variety of the species. That fact was thanks to the happy accident of Vernon having been born into a family of old Nashville money to a socially preoccupied mother and a thoroughly self-centered father, both of whom much preferred lavishing him with a limitless supply of legal tender to the necessary inconveniences of any attempts at serious parenting. Their disappointment in their only son’s decision to take up sculpting as a vocation rather than a respectable career had not restricted the flow of cash in his direction. His parents might even have opened the cash spigot more generously in order to ensure that, despite his less than completely respectable choice of vocation, he could maintain a lifestyle that would not embarrass them among their friends at The Club.
Unlike her patron and lover, Fiona Hayes was the third daughter of artistically inclined parents (a painter and a cellist) and grew up on the northern fringes of what was now known as Germantown. Her formative years there predated the excessive gentrification of the area, and the Hayes ancestral home was too far north to be trendy anyway. Fiona’s painter father, of course, knew (and also of course loathed) Bechman Fitzwallington. However, Fiona, living in the same general neighborhood and sharing the fact that each of their fathers was a painter, befriended Fitzwallington’s daughter, Sally May Farmer, aka (currently) SalomeMe. The intensity of their friendship had ebbed in recent years as they took somewhat different routes toward maturity, but they remained friends. Fiona’s hatred of Bechman Fitzwallington, while influenced by that of her father, was greatly exaggerated by adolescent confidences shared with the daughter of the hated artist.
Perhaps influenced by the artistic miasma in which she was immersed as a consequence of her parents’ professions, Fiona felt compelled to identify for herself an artistic niche. She had no musical talent. She abhorred the technical simplicity and subjective value judgments inherent in painting, but she did consider herself a visual person. Fiona’s search for an art form that attracted her ended in ceramics, pots at first and then what she called tile paintings. These were big bas relief representations of stylized people with backgrounds meant to encapsulate the personal stories of the foreground figures. She enjoyed the physicality of molding the clay, firing and coloring the finished product. Her bold creations had achieved some local popularity, especially among businesses with large wall spaces and a yen for patronizing local artists.
Fiona and Vernon gravitated toward each other more because of their artistic interests and sexual availability than from personally directed passion—i.e., they did not fall in love. But they enjoyed each other and lived a comfortable and, in many ways, satisfying life—mornings at the gym, afternoons sculpting and making tile paintings in a studio space they rented just on the south edge of town, and evenings partying, visiting the growing number of excellent restaurants and trendy bars scattered about the city, and making love (or, in their case, more accurately, having sex). Vernon would occasionally visit Bechman Fitzwallington, paying homage to the Nashville art community’s most successful citizen. Sometimes he could talk Fiona into joining him for such visits, but her intense loathing of the old artist was difficult for her to hide, making such visits often less than pleasurable.
Fiona Hayes and Vernon LaVista, III were on the short list of people Hardy Seltzer had suggested to Shane Hadley that he might want to interview, and they had arranged to meet the ex-detective at Wall Street that afternoon.
Not my usual sort of customer, Pat Harmony thought, sizing up the couple entering his bar late in the afternoon, probably here to see Shane.
Not our usual kind of place, Fiona whispered in Vernon’s ear. They paused just inside the door to look the joint over.
The only customer at the bar was the guy at the end
in the wheelchair. Vernon recognized him from the old newspaper photographs from when the name Shane Hadley was a household word, at least in many area households. Vernon was an adolescent when Shane took the career-ending bullet, and, as is often true of adolescent boys, was lured by the violence to follow the stories in the paper. It was in fact his memory of those stories of Sherlock Shane that caused him to agree to meet with the ex-detective and to convince Fiona to join him. That the meeting was to occur in a downtown bar they had never heard of seemed odd to both Vernon and Fiona, but they were intrigued by the adventure of it. Fiona, more than Vernon, was also interested to know what the former detective was up to relative to the death of the old bastard, BF. So here they were.
Incongruous. That was the first word that came to Shane’s mind as he observed the handsome couple who stood hesitantly just inside the door to his Wall Street office looking more than a little self-conscious in their designer jeans and tasseled (his) or stiletto-heeled (hers) Italian leather shoes. Their pause at that spot was pregnant with incongruity, that asymmetrical sort of sensation which often leads one to ask What am I doing here? No doubt that question was troubling the brains of these two unlikely Wall Street guests.