Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  Good, Shane thought. Asymmetry is an interrogator’s friend.

  Shane wheeled himself down the ramp from his spot at the bar and over to where the couple stood. He extended his hand which they, each in turn, shook weakly without speaking.

  “I’m Shane Hadley,” he said. “And I presume that you are Vernon LaVista and Fiona Hayes. Thank you so much for coming here to meet with me for a bit. I realize the nature of the place may surprise you, but I can vouch for its decency, the integrity of its spirits, and the honesty of my fellow ex-policeman and bartender, Pat Harmony.” He gestured toward the bar and Harmony offered an anemic finger-wriggling wave in their direction. “Please join me.”

  Shane turned and headed back to his regular place, followed by the couple who still had not spoken and who continued to explore the ambience with swivel-necked doe-eyed wonder. It just wasn’t the kind of place that they imagined still existed in this town. How had this place managed to withstand the onslaught of rampant gentrification and warp-speed development smack in the middle of the financial district? It felt almost like a mock-up scene for a movie set in an earlier epoch, maybe a leftover from the old Robert Altman’s Nashville movie that was still reaired occasionally late at night on an old movie channel.

  Shane motioned for his guests to sit beside him at the bar and ramped himself up to his spot.

  “Look,” he said, “there is only one question here of interest to anyone, I suspect including you and the dead artist’s circle of acquaintances. Was Bechman Fitzwallington murdered? If so, who did it?” looking directly into the eyes of Fiona Hayes. “Was he murdered and did you do it or do you know who did?”

  “Really, Mr. Hadley,” Vernon finally broke the couple’s silence, “we are artists, not assassins. We would hardly have the necessary skills for such a thing even if neither of us was particularly troubled by Bechman’s death. He was after all a thoroughly unlikable son-of-a-bitch.”

  Something less than a ringing denial but spoken convincingly enough on its surface.

  Fiona, still a little wide-eyed and swivel-necked, not quite yet assimilating completely the incongruity of the situation said, “Surely, Mr. Hadley, you have learned that Bechman Fitzwallington did not leave behind many admirers. I’d venture that you’d have a lot of trouble finding a single person in the local art community who mourns his loss. He was an evil man. An evil man!”

  The intensity of Fiona’s statement struck Shane.

  He queried, “Evil?”

  “Evil,” Fiona replied with conviction and without elaborating.

  “So, is an avenger of evil among his acquaintances?”

  “Look,” Fiona continued, engaging Shane’s eyes directly now, “I think it very likely that someone hastened the old man’s death and avenging evil would have been a perfectly defensible motive. But there could have been other motives. I have no idea about that. However, I do know that the art world in this town and the world in general are better off without him. It would seem to me that this dead dog should be permitted to lie without any excessive probing of the matter. What’s the point?”

  “You mean apart from the fact that murder is a crime? And we, the societal we, tend to frown on condoning transgressions of our laws. Would you agree that such an attitude toward human behavior usually serves us well?”

  “Afraid we artists aren’t so skilled at philosophical debate,” Vernon interjected. “Not very interested in such things either. Art, Mr. Detective, is a different idiom. If looking for something nefarious in the web of events and people surrounding Bechman’s death gets your rocks off, then go for it. But I’m afraid we can’t help you out. And I’ve got other rocks to tend to.”

  Vernon slid down from his stool and took Fiona’s arm to assist her dismount. They said nothing more and left Wall Street and Shane Hadley with no farewell, fond or otherwise.

  Bloody hell! Shane thought. I thoroughly blew that.

  Pat Harmony had freshened Shane’s glass of sherry unbidden and the two men locked eyes for a second before Pat moved to return the sherry to its private space. Shane sipped at the wine and mused. That woman knows something that could either help to clarify this matter or complicate it further. That much is obvious. But not a chance in hell for me to find out what that is now. If there ever was a chance, I have summarily blown it. I’ll need more potent ammunition than suspicion to convince Hardy and his people to open a real investigation. And that may be what it takes if there is to be any hope of getting to the bottom of this. Sherlock Shane indeed!

  Bloody hell, Shane, what in heaven’s name were you thinking?

  Chapter 14

  If the value of art is determined by the same demand/supply formula that holds sway in the general marketplace, the death of an artist reduces the value to a single variable.

  The denominator is fixed. The value (read selling price) of a given work is completely determined by the demand. There would never be another authentic painting by Bechman Fitzwallington. Zilcho for the supply side. It was whatever it was and if you were interested in establishing the magnitude of the supply, you only needed to locate and inventory whatever paintings the old guy did while he was among the living. That number in hand, you just need to manipulate the demand to control the selling price.

  But, if you are working on the business side of the art world, you know that, although the demand is regularly manipulated, that is generally done by people with influence in that world who are not controllable by you and your business guys. You just have to guess where to place your financial bets and hope for the best. You win some, you lose some. It’s not an investment strategy for the faint of heart (or light of pocketbook). However, on rare occasions the payoff is, as every venture capitalist anxiously anticipates, unexpectedly extraordinary.

  Thus, when Bruce Therault read the belated New York Times obituary for Bechman Fitzwallington, he choked on his hot coffee, spitting a large mouthful into his lap, staining his gray silk dressing gown and causing painful stinging sensations in the inner aspects of his thighs.

  “Oh shit!” he said.

  The Fitzwallington obit was written by the legendary Times art critic, Arturo Carbone. Mr. Carbone was generally recognized as the most influential critic of the past three decades. Talk about manipulating the demand side of the market value formula! Old Arturo, at the stroke of his pen, could move the needle either up or down in logarithmic leaps. And he was incorruptible. Numerous attempts had been made over the years to explode that persistent myth without the slightest hint of success.

  After reciting the metrics—birth and death dates and locations, parents’ names and occupations, name of his sole surviving blood relative, etc.—Carbone’s obituary launched into a thoroughly uncharacteristic two paragraphs of praise for Fitzwallington’s distinctive art. He waxed eloquent about the artist’s unique approach, his special choice of medium, his skill at composition, and his extraordinary esthetic. The usually reserved critic concluded that, “Bechman Fitzwallington’s paintings deserve a place among the best of modern works by an American. He is unquestionably the most underrated artist of his generation.”

  “Holy shit,” exclaimed Therault aloud, ignoring the burning sensation in his inner thighs. “We could be sitting on the mother lode!”

  His cell phone suddenly blared the smoothly syncopated tones of Marvin Gaye belting out his classic, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”.

  Therault was fond of the message but thought the tune cliché. He retained the ringtone for its message. He was not opposed to cliché if it served a purpose.

  Arturo Carbone’s obituary of Fitzwallington triggered a transcontinental avalanche of clichéd ringtones that disturbed the morning quiet time of Blythe Fortune, Athena Golden, SalomeMe, and several other parties with lingering or suddenly rebirthed interests in the dead artist and his work. Amazing how the slightest whiff of a possible windfall can amp up the cliché traffic in the cat’s cradle plexus of human connections.

  The Nashville Tennesse
an reprinted the slightly belated New York Times obit verbatim. Although he knew precious little about the forces driving the art world, the potential significance of the piece did not escape Hardy Seltzer. This was bound to focus renewed attention on the artist and the circumstances surrounding his demise. Seltzer feared that this was likely to be a pot of trouble that he could not possibly avoid. He needed to get on top of this before it lodged itself in the craws of his perpetually antsy and overreacting superiors, exaggerating their anxiety and precipitating a tirade aimed, no doubt, at Seltzer. Better check in with Shane. That was probably overdue anyway.

  When Shane Hadley’s cell phone chirped unimaginatively, he had just read the piece in the Tennessean and was about to open a related conversation with KiKi. They had finished their light breakfast and were nursing a second cup of coffee. They had chosen that morning to take their coffee and pastry on the deck of their flat that overlooked the alley. It was a lovely morning. Shane contemplated the angular geometry of the sunrise shadows splayed across the Printers Alley floor and pondered the implications of what was likely to be an explosion of interest in Fitzwallington for his floundering investigation into the artist’s death.

  “Cheerio,” he answered after checking caller ID and noting that it was Hardy Seltzer. “To what do I owe such an early morning call, Hardy? Perhaps something to do with the content of our fair city’s morning journal?”

  “Could be trouble for me,” Hardy replied. “Have you discovered anything interesting about the old guy’s death? Is there any inkling of murder as a possibility? Please tell me no.”

  “I fear I can’t yet respond to the question so decisively, my man. Still trying to get my mind around the cast of characters. An interesting lot as you suggested.”

  “If this thing from the NYT causes as big a stir as I’m afraid of,” Seltzer sounded more than a little anxious, “any hint of possible foul play will no doubt attract more attention than will benefit anyone, especially the police force.”

  “Did I not know better,” Shane responded, smiling to himself, “I would think you were attempting to influence my investigation. Surely not. Surely not. Tell you what, my friend, why don’t you meet me around five this afternoon at Wall Street and we’ll compare notes and thoughts.”

  “Sure, Shane. I’ll do that, but this day could bring some surprises that may not be pleasant.”

  “See you at five,” Shane replied. “Ta-ta.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Hardy tolerated Shane’s affected Anglicisms but was not amused by them. He generally chose to ignore them as much as possible.

  KiKi was engrossed in the Op-Ed page of the paper. When she realized that Shane had ended the call, she looked up.

  “I gather that was your pal Hardy Seltzer,” she said. “A trifle early for him to call. Something to do with your dead artist?”

  “Well,” Shane replied, still looking absently at the sun-shadowed alley geometry, “it’s likely that, at the very least, the New York Times has decided to make a very troubled young woman exceedingly rich. It should be interesting to witness the consequences.”

  “And at most?”

  “At most, the promise of wealth may flush out the scoundrels in this saga. There are so many possible scoundrels.”

  “The young woman…you mean the daughter?”

  “Yes. The notorious SalomeMe.”

  “The obituary says that she is his only blood relative. I presume that means sole heir?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “How certain is his paternity?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t know that anyone has questioned that. I suppose the stakes may be high enough now to raise the question. Why do you ask?”

  Katya had avoided getting involved in this discussion up until now. She had strained to keep the interface between biology and crime distinct, the barrier intact. But her resolve was feeling a little shaky at that moment. After all, professional and personal passions were both part of who they were, each and together. She surely didn’t intend to risk the integrity of their relationship. Nothing was more important than that.

  And she did know some things about Bechman Fitzwallington’s biology that might be important to Shane’s criminal investigation. But she wasn’t sure about revealing things that maybe should stay confidential. True, the subject was dead now, and the potential relevance to a crime might negate the confidentiality requirement, but still…

  “Well,” Katya replied, obviously hesitant, “I’ve avoided telling you that Fitzwallington was a subject in our brain health study. He dropped out a couple of years ago, but we had accumulated a good bit of data before then. He was one of the outliers I’ve been stewing about.”

  Shane was surprised that KiKi hadn’t told him this before now. Sometime very early in their relationship, they had shared an explicit vow of complete honesty and, at least for Shane, the sin of dishonesty included omission as well as commission.

  “A trifle late for you to reveal this little tidbit, don’t you think? What else have you been concealing?”

  “Shane,” Katya replied, “don’t get your knickers in a knot.”

  She had passively absorbed some of Shane’s frequent Anglicisms and they slipped into her conversation if she didn’t pay close attention. She was aware that Shane was jealous of such phrases as the one that had just now escaped her too inattentive lips. She desperately wished that she could retrieve it.

  “My knickers, if I wore such, would be just fine, my dear,” Shane said, making no attempt to disguise his displeasure. “And, if you insist on using such quaint English metaphors, you should at least respect their gender specificity.”

  The word that came to Katya’s mind was insufferable. Shane was the dearest being on the planet to Katya, but he could be, on occasion, insufferable. This seemed to be such an occasion. She refused to take the bait.

  “Shane,” she said, summoning her most authoritative voice, “I didn’t tell you about this earlier because I am honor-bound to respect patient confidentiality and also because I didn’t see how any information we had about his biology would be relevant to your investigation. I may have been wrong about that.”

  Shane didn’t react. He was pouting. Even small lapses in their commitment to complete honesty threatened him. He was sometimes fragile. Especially since the accident.

  Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. A delivery truck lumbered noisily down the alley. Shadows shrank as the rising sun’s angle with the buildings lining the alley sharpened. Shane wasn’t sure exactly what troubled him so—the Fitzwallington thing? Something not quite defined with KiKi? The goddam wheelchair? The accretion of years of constant reminders of his lack of independence—death by a thousand cuts? The aging artist appeared to have enjoyed a peaceful exit, whether natural or not. Shane envied that.

  Finally, Shane spoke, picking up on Katya’s last statement. “You said you might be wrong about that. What do you mean?”

  “It may not mean anything, but from what you say, the daughter seems to be a central character in the saga.”

  “That’s true, even more so if there turns out to be a lot of money involved. She is his only heir as far as I can tell. So?”

  “Mr. Fitzwallington carried a genetic trisomy, three sex chromosomes instead of two, XYY. Although men with the XYY syndrome are not uniformly sterile, their incidence of sterility is higher than normal. Any chance Fitzwallington is not this SalomeMe’s father after all?”

  “Meaning that unless the old guy left a will, she wouldn’t inherit the paintings. Now that would be interesting. We could get DNA from the autopsy, I presume. I guess we’d also need the same from the daughter to test for paternity. Is that right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Such a request might be informative. If she knows he is not her father, she would probably resist providing the material necessary to prove that. Not sure what all this says about a possible murder. I suppose that if she discovered this only recently, she might
have felt the need to hurry things along so she could claim her inheritance before this became more general knowledge. That could be a motive. Don’t you think?”

  “You’re the detective, my love,” Katya finished her cup of coffee, stood up, and bent down to kiss the top of Shane’s head. “I have a job to get to.”

  Katya retreated to their bedroom at the rear of the flat to complete her morning toilette and don her doctor/scientist persona, ready herself for the day ahead. She desperately hoped that she had not betrayed her profession by revealing the information to Shane. She was not at all comfortable trying to straddle the interface between biology and crime and wasn’t sure she was capable of doing it well. Katya was not in the habit of attempting things that she was not confident she could do well. She was troubled.

  Pat Harmony unlocked the cabinet that served again as the special abode of Shane Hadley’s prized sherry, removed the bottle, and limped slowly over to the end of his bar where Shane sat lost in his thoughts. Harmony filled the freshly polished glass that he had put at Shane’s place earlier to about an imagined one-quarter mark, recorked the bottle and headed back across to replace it in the cabinet.

  “Just leave it out, Pat,” Shane patted a spot on the bar beside his glass. “And burnish another glass, please. Hardy Seltzer is supposed to drop by.”

  “You got Hardy to drinking sherry?” Harmony asked, grinning broadly. “Never woulda thought it. Son-of-a-bitch.”

  “I prefer to think that our friend discovered the pleasure of sherry for himself, but perhaps I was an accessory.” Shane took a sip from his glass and sighed quietly. He was very fond of the wine, perhaps too fond.

  It was a little past five and a few of the regulars started to wander in. Since Shane had reappeared there, always positioned at his specially constructed space at the end of the bar, he was acknowledged by the other patrons, nodded to, but they generally gave him a pretty wide berth. The policemen, of course, knew who he was, were at least familiar with the legend, but in the Wall Street setting, they kept a respectable distance. He was often joined by another person with whom he conversed intently, appearing to be conducting business of some sort. The other patrons sometimes wondered what business, but they didn’t inquire. After all, they just came for a drink and some idle chatter. The Shane Hadley legend allowed as how he was not given to idle chatter.