Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  KiKi had left for work, and Shane sat in the living room of their Printers Alley flat with his laptop positioned, appropriately, in his lap. He was thinking about the Fitzwallington case. Hardy Seltzer had given everything he had on the case to Shane, either hard copies or by email, and Shane was sifting through it. There wasn’t much. In fact, Shane’s Wall Street interviews were as enlightening as most anything Hardy had given him.

  Except perhaps the hastily taken unprofessional series of pictures of the death scene that Hardy had taken with his iPhone. It was a far cry from having an actual crime scene to observe, but it was all he had. There was no crime scene investigation because it had been assumed that there was no crime and so no crime scene to investigate. Just the innocent death of a sick old man. But something about the photos displayed on Shane’s computer screen troubled him. He sat staring at the screen for a while without being able to put his finger on exactly what the problem was. But even from the pictures of the scene, Shane somehow knew, or felt sure anyway, that the scene was not as innocuous as it seemed at first glance. He wasn’t sure whether the vibe was electronically transmissible, but he was feeling something akin to it.

  It was a Monday morning, approaching ten o’clock, the time when Mike Borden, the physical therapist who came every Monday to inflict as much pain as possible on his paraplegic client, was due to arrive. Shane considered a nice glass of sherry to help prepare him for the weekly ordeal. He wheeled himself over to the bar and was reaching for the case that held his Oxford sherry glasses when he remembered his promise to himself and to KiKi that he would try to curtail his drinking. Starting at ten AM would be hard to define as curtailing. He wheeled back, empty-handed, into the room and sat staring out the large front window and thinking again about solving murders.

  As memories of some of his most interesting cases sauntered across his mind, Shane thought, as he had often thought, that the old saw, dead men tell no tales, just wasn’t true. It was probably coined by a Chicago crime boss in the twenties as a justification for ordering the enforced demise of potential police informers among his minions. But it just wasn’t true. Dead men often tell tales if one pays attention. He called up Hardy’s pictures of the Fitzwallington death scene on his computer screen. It seemed to be the picture of the dead old man that kept reverberating about in Shane’s head. Why? Just a mustachioed old man, quite naked, appearing to rest quietly in his bed. But there was something about the picture that screamed murder to Shane. For the life of him, he couldn’t tell what it was.

  He was sitting there lost in thought when the speaker buzzed from the street entrance to their building. Shane and KiKi’s flat was on the second floor (first floor European), and visitors gained entry by pressing the button opposite the names of the occupants which buzzed an intercom in the appropriate one of the six occupied floors. The occupant then answered and if agreeing that the visitor was to be admitted, released the front door lock by depressing a button located just beside the intercom, went to the elevator, and released the access lock for the specified floor. In Shane and KiKi’s case, the elevator opened directly into their living room so that controlling the behavior of the elevator was important to them. Shane did all of those things when he recognized the voice of his physical therapist, Mike Borden, although Shane didn’t go about the tasks with much enthusiasm. He liked Borden OK he guessed, but he had trouble separating the person of the slick-headed, muscular, virile man from his role as Shane’s clearly sadistic tormentor. Shane was not fond of pain. He was especially disliked the trite no pain no gain mantra of which Borden seemed inordinately fond. Shane was much fonder of sherry than of pain. And he probably preferred pain to over-worn mantras related to the subject.

  Borden strode from the elevator and flung the gym bag that Shane thought was probably his constant companion onto the living room floor.

  “Shane, my man,” Borden said, reaching to grasp Shane’s hand with his usual vice-like grip. “How the hell are you?”

  Although he had never inquired, Shane wondered about the contents of the ever-present gym bag. Granted, Borden would occasionally extract a couple of broad elastic bands from the bag to use during the sessions with Shane. But the bag was big enough to contain the essential workout gear for a modest size gymnastics team. What was in there?

  “Apart from having essentially no use of my lower limbs,” Shane answered, “I am doing tolerably well.”

  “Glad to hear it, Shane. Now let’s get down to business. And give me some real effort today. Don’t concentrate on the pain. It will hurt. You know that. But, no pain, no gain.”

  Shane cringed.

  It was most unlikely that these three men would be together at all, and even more unlikely that they would be getting out of a rental car in the parking lot of an out-of-the-way B-grade First Avenue bar early on a sunny Nashville afternoon. Even in broad daylight, emanations from the huge TAPS sign drenched the men, the car, the entire parking lot, in a color akin to Harvard crimson. The crimson was probably appropriate, at least symbolically, but none of the three was even remotely connected to the venerable Cambridge university. Only one of them had attended college at all, and he graduated at the bottom of his class at CCNY. These men were not intellectually inclined.

  Mace Ricci had discovered the bar in his efforts to absorb some local color by visiting establishments on the margins of the city’s respectable society. He concluded early on that you were not likely to learn anything authentic about the town by haunting the glitzy places downtown. What you would find there would be cowboy-booted denim-skirted fake blonde Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, or Loretta Lynn wannabees posed carefully on bar stools, anxiously awaiting discovery by an imagined roving talent agent. Or some serious country music fans who had spent most of a year’s earnings from the corn crop on a week in the epicenter of their preferred music genre who were hanging around NeoNashville places—Lower Broad, The Gulch—where they thought they might catch a glimpse of one of their idols. Unlikely, but most people from out-of-town didn’t realize that the real stars were probably either reviewing their investment portfolios with a broker at a posh country club bar or resting quietly on the teak deck of their McMansion overlooking Old Hickory lake, nursing a generously poured glass of Gentleman Jack.

  These three men had some business to discuss, and it was business that they did not wish to share accidentally with any significant eavesdroppers. So, they wanted to meet at a place where there were not likely to be any significant eavesdroppers, and Mace Ricci thought TAPS was just the ticket. He doubted that anyone significant was likely to frequent TAPS. He was almost right.

  They entered the place and sat at a small round table in the southwest corner of the room that was surrounded by four chairs. Since the only other customer in the place was a solitary man sitting at the bar and staring at an afternoon edition of Headline News playing on an aging TV that hung precariously above where he sat, Mace Ricci did not think it a serious breach of etiquette for the three of them to occupy a table meant for four. Truth was, any serious breach of TAPS etiquette would probably have to involve the use of either firearms or sharp objects; house rules didn’t cover seating patterns. It was that kind of a place.

  Of course, Bruce Therault and Mace Ricci knew each other, but neither of them knew the third member of their trio. He had just shown up and sought them out. He claimed to have been hired by some of the major investors in Galleria Salinas and sent to Nashville to represent their interests. He also claimed that his name was Damian Saturn, which the other two men thought highly unlikely. Both Therault and Ricci wondered why the investors would send someone else when the interests of the gallery were already well-represented by the two of them. They were anxious to hear Saturn’s explanation.

  “What chardonnays do you have by the glass?” Bruce Therault was the first to speak to the slightly disheveled fortyish waitress who sauntered over to take their orders, removing a pencil from behind her ear and concentrating on a small avocado green order pad
rescued from a pocket somewhere deep in her pleated skirt.

  Making no effort to obscure a deep impatient sigh, she replied, “We got Bud and Bud Light, sweetie.”

  She had, quite pointedly, set the tone for the encounter.

  “No hard liquor, either?” Therault continued, undaunted.

  “Green Jack and Red Dewars,” she said.

  “Dewars neat, a double.” Therault succumbed to the dictates of availability without pursuing the matter further.

  “Same,” said Ricci.

  “Same,” said Saturn.

  The waitress didn’t write the orders down. She walked over to the bar, spoke briefly with the bartender, and returned shortly to the table where the three men sat, placing the three glasses of blended Scotch whiskey on the table, in the process rattling the several ice cubes in each drink. The men stared at their glasses and then at each other in unison as though their movements had been choreographed but decided not to attempt to define the word neat for their charming waitress. It just didn’t seem to any of the three men like an interaction worth prolonging. And they had things to talk about.

  Shane had developed the habit of wheeling himself up the Church Street hill to Wall Street at five o’clock most afternoons. He liked habits. They were security. But five o’clock on this particular afternoon found him sitting on the deck of his apartment well into a third glass of sherry, trying with all his might to ignore the lingering severe pain in his legs expertly inflicted by the virile Mike Borden and, between surges of activity in the bundles of pain fibers traversing his spinal cord that ferried signals to the conscious parts of his brain, trying to think about the Fitzwallington affair. Fitzwallington murder, he was now willing to label it although still not sure why he was so convinced that it was other than a natural and inevitable event given that he was dealing with a human being. We all die one way or another.

  Shane had the computer in his lap displaying once more the pictures of the Fitzwallington death scene that Hardy Seltzer had taken on his cell phone. He stared at each of the photos between grimaces of pain and generous swallows of sherry. His cell phone chirped an announcement of a call from Detective Seltzer.

  “Hello, Hardy,” he said, absent his usual friendly cheer.

  “So,” Hardy replied, “I’ve just talked with Doc Jensen, and apparently he has some additional and startling news about or dead artist friend. Some additional analyses of autopsy samples. May not have been murder at all, Shane.”

  “Lead poisoning? I wondered how long it would take him to figure that out. The information was all there and easily available. Fitzwallington used an old formula house paint for his work. That’s on his website and Wikipedia page. Old formula house paints contain large amounts of lead. And, your pictures of his house show peeling paint on ceilings and walls. No doubt old paint. Quite possibly lead-containing paint. I’m not at all surprised that the old guy’s tissues contain high amounts of lead. I’m only surprised that Jensen went to the trouble to get the information and have the measurements made. Perhaps I underestimate our voluble doctor of the dead.”

  “So,” Hardy replied, “if you knew all that, why didn’t you tell me earlier so that we could wrap this puppy up once and for all.”

  “Because I am quite certain that Mr. Fitzwallington was murdered, regardless of, or possibly even related to, the amounts of lead that had accumulated in his aging body.”

  There was a long silence. Seltzer was trying to digest what Shane had just told him and to make sense out of it vis-à-vis the information from the coroner. Hadley was trying to think of some way to justify what he had just said to the detective without knowing exactly the source of his quite firm conviction that the artist was murdered. The answer was right there in the pictures of the death scene. He was certain of that. But he hadn’t yet put his finger on exactly what it was. After thinking it over, Shane decided that his only recourse was delay. He would figure out the answer sooner or later, and he had to keep Hardy from ending the investigation until then. He needed more time.

  “Would you care to share the reasons for your conviction?” Hardy was starting to think that his friend was losing his edge. In any investigation, you can’t just write off the obvious so that you can chase a pet theory. That’s basic stuff. Investigation 101. Pay attention! The obvious is sometimes true. Probably true most of the time.

  “I’m afraid that I am not yet prepared to do that,” Shane replied. “But, all in due time, my man, all in due time.”

  “Due time is getting pretty close, Shane. I ‘m not prepared to carry on this ruse with the department brass for very long.”

  “Perhaps it won’t be long, Hardy. I mean not long before I can convince you that this is a murder. It may well take some time to identify and apprehend the culprit. But first things first.”

  “If the boss finds out about the lead data, he’ll inform the higher-ups and we may be out of business anyway,” Hardy said.

  “So, don’t tell him.”

  “I won’t, but I wouldn’t trust Doc Jensen to keep it quiet. I’ll ask him to, but you know how much he likes to talk.”

  There was another pause, longer than the last one, but neither man hung up the phone.

  “Another thing,” Seltzer finally broke the silence. “I don’t think we should meet very often right now. Might give the wrong impression … well, maybe the right impression with the wrong result. But if you’re going to be at Wall Street most afternoons, don’t be surprised if I drop by. And Shane, I need to know what you know if I’m to be of any help.”

  “Right, Hardy, my man. Right,” Shane replied. “In due time, my friend. In due time. Cheerio.”

  The conversation ended.

  Shane fired up his laptop and pulled up the pictures of the death scene again. He poured himself another glass of sherry and sat staring at the iPhone picture of a mustachioed old man lying in a bed, dead as a doornail, naked as a jaybird, innocent as a newborn babe. Probably a number of other tired metaphors would fit the scene. But tired metaphors weren’t going to answer the question that haunted Shane. He concentrated on the content of the picture, trying very hard to uncover what it was about the photograph that betrayed the criminality of the scene.

  It was just as he heard the garage door rumbling open and KiKi’s car thrumming into the garage below that it came to him. He wondered why it had taken so long.

  Chapter 19

  The matters of establishing legal ownership of the Fitzwallington paintings and deciding which of the two galleries was to have the privilege of selling them were heating up. Ownership seemed simple enough since the old guy had only one child who would be his sole heir. However, there was a problem. Her father had left no will that anyone had been able to locate, and SalomeMe had no proof that she was in fact Fitzwallington’s child. No birth certificate, no ancient dusty and yellowing family bible with several blank pages separating the Old and New Testaments bearing a diagram of the Farmer family tree. No document of any kind. She had never had any reason to doubt that she was his daughter, although there were times when he did not treat her as would have been appropriate for a father-daughter relationship. For legal reasons, the question had to be resolved. Of course, in the current scientific age, it was easy enough to do that.

  On the advice of her childhood friend Fiona Hayes, SalomeMe had hired a lawyer to help work through the situation that seemed to be developing more complexity than she had anticipated. The lawyer, chosen essentially at random from the phone book, was James L. (Jimmy) Holden. He had a single attorney practice with an office on Third Avenue, a block behind Shane Hadley and Katya Karpov’s flat in Printers Alley. James L. (Jimmy) Holden was glad for the business. He had plenty of time for the case and also realized that there was likely to be some free advertising associated with it.

  It was Holden who first informed SalomeMe of the need to document her parentage in order to claim ownership of the paintings. He had done his homework. He insisted that SalomeMe meet him in his office,
and she reluctantly agreed. When she went to light up one of her slender lavender cigarettes, Holden asked her not to smoke in the office. Contrary to her habitually rebellious behavior, she agreed to his request. As a result of being in a strange and unfamiliar place where she was denied the calming effect of cigarette smoke, SalomeMe was agitated and in no mood to deal with anything problematic. Or to deal with anything at all if it took very long.

  “What the hell do you mean proof?” exclaimed SalomeMe. “I sure as hell wouldn’t have put up with the old bastard all these years if he wasn’t my father. Proof? How about time in rank, equity, investment, that sort of thing. Proof my ass!”

  Holden was probably about forty, red-faced with a budding paunch about the size of an early second-trimester baby bump, and no doubt would start soon to lose his hair. He was not a jovial sort but was amused by his new client.

  “Well,” Holden said, “I seriously doubt that a court of law in this day and age would accept your generous investment of time in Mr. Fitzwallington’s person as proof of parentage. And, as lovely as your ass is, it is unlikely to play into the legal issues here.”

  “So what in God’s name am I supposed to do?” she asked.

  “Well, Miss Me,” he said, not quite sure how to extract a surname from the strange moniker and settling on the shortest option, “you are fortunate to live in an age of burgeoning science. Analysis of your and your presumed father’s DNA will answer the question once and for all. We should be able to obtain an appropriate sample from your father’s postmortem. I’ll check with the coroner, and we may need a formal request from you. I will also contact a DNA lab and confirm what kind of a sample they wish from you. This should be easily done although it may take a week or so depending on whether the lab has a backlog. In the meantime, we should seek a court order to assure that the paintings are secure. They are beginning to attract a lot of attention and we should be prepared for some of that attention to be less than well-intended.”