by Ken Brigham
“The paintings are secure, Mr. Holden,” SalomeMe bristled. “They have been accumulating for the past several years in a carefully climate-controlled storage facility to which I have exclusive access. I long ago determined to reveal their location to no one and see no reason to change that decision. For your information, I would include you among those with no need to have knowledge of the paintings’ location.”
“I’m perfectly happy to be among the excluded ones,” Holden responded. “However, I must warn you that a judge may have a different opinion. To protect the paintings with a court order may require specifying their location, I’m not sure. We’ll cross that bridge if we have to.”
“Why do I need a court order? They’ve been resting there perfectly happy for several years now.”
“Perhaps,” Holden smiled, “but the situation has changed, right? Interest in your father’s art seems to have taken a rather dramatic turn for the better … or at least more lucrative. Your situation is more complicated. The scent of money always brings complications. But for your changing circumstances, I would not have had the pleasure of making your acquaintance. Now would I?”
Having neared the limit of her less than generous attention span, SalomeMe said, “Whatever,” fishing a pack of cigarettes from her purse as she rose to leave the office.
“I’ll be in touch,” said the lawyer, smiling and conjuring up his most lawyerly tone of voice.
The artist Parker Palmer had discussed Billy Wayne Farmer’s paintings a couple of times with a friend of his who was a lawyer and a prominent member of the Nashville Arts Commission. Palmer had wondered whether there wasn’t some way to divert some of the proceeds from sale of the paintings to support the local art scene, especially talented young artists. He would love to see something of social value to come from the old guy, even if he had to die for that to happen.
Palmer knew from personal experience that it was devilishly difficult for even the most talented young artists to stay committed and focused for long enough to realize their potential. One could only balance the necessary shifts at a MacJob with growing one’s artistic gifts for so long before sleep deprivation and other ravages of age and experience led to a divergence of life’s available roads, forcing a choice between art and sustenance that universally favored the latter. Biology had its imperatives. At Palmer’s insistence, his friend had gone to the trouble to file a lawsuit against the Fitzwallington (Farmer) estate claiming the paintings were not the rightful inheritance of SalomeMe (nee Sallie May Farmer). Although Jay Combs was certain that the suit would be dismissed, SalomeMe was anxious to get the show on the road, and Jimmy Holden advised her that irrefutable evidence that she was the sole heir of her artist father’s estate would accomplish that.
Jimmy Holden was doing the best he could to get the show on the road. And so, samples from the young woman and her alleged father wound up in a commercial laboratory housed in a renovated Victorian house nestled among a row of flat-roofed, single-story doctors’ offices on Hayes Street. There, white-coated technicians would isolate DNA and subject it to the technical genius of an exorbitantly expensive machine called a DNA sequencer, thus establishing with scientific certainty the nature of the biological relationship between the two people who provided the samples. It had been only a few years since this procedure supplanted blood typing and other much less precise methods for establishing parentage. This use of the technology had nothing to do with the reasons it had been developed. Those reasons were much more grandiose—exploring the language of God, one lyrically-inclined prominent scientist had called it. Science marches on with both intended and unanticipated consequences. The Fitzwallington legacy would be among innumerable others to benefit from the halo of discovery.
Hardy Seltzer had given Shane the phone number of the skinny kid with the port wine nevus on his face who lived next door to the Fitzwallington house and had been the first person, except, presumably, the murderer, to have observed the artist dead. Shane had called him and arranged for the two of them to meet that afternoon at his Wall Street office. Shane should probably have talked with the kid earlier, but he had slacked off on the investigation some while waiting for his conviction that the artist was murdered to crystallize. Now that he was convinced, Shane was ready to move more aggressively. He still had the problem of convincing Hardy that this was a murder case with enough credibility that Hardy would have another serious go at persuading his department brass. It had to come to that sooner or later, and sooner would be the considerably better option.
As he maneuvered his wheelchair up the Church Street sidewalk toward Fourth Avenue, Shane was thinking about Richelieu (nee Richard) Jones. It was the Mad Hatter’s no-doubt mercury-induced erratic assault on the Fitzwallington house and several members of the Metro police force that had convinced Hardy that the artist’s death was not an open-and-shut case after all. But if Jones had any connection to the old guy’s demise, Shane could not, for the life of him, see what it was. Maybe the skinny kid would have some information that would help, but Shane doubted that there was anything new to learn about the hatter. Just another Fitzwallington hater who happened to live in the area, Shane thought. The fact that Jones’s brain cells had been pickled beyond recognition by breathing in too much mercury was no doubt adequate to explain his erratic terminal spasm of violence. There was no obvious rational explanation for the outburst, but behavior driven by pickled brain cells had no need to make sense. Pickled brains don’t play by any ordinary rules. There was not much unexplained in the tragic story of the Mad Hatter of Music City. He lived, he made hats, he found out just enough about his genes to cause him to make a really bad decision, and then he breathed mercury for a while, went mad, and died in a blaze of infamy. Tragic, and more melodrama than was necessary, but explicable. No obvious dangling loose ends to pick at.
Those were the things that occupied Shane’s mind as he waited for the light to change and then wheeled himself across Fourth Avenue and turned into the alleyway behind the bank that some city planner with a sense of humor had named Wall Street. The Wall Street bar was half a block down the alley, and Shane was about halfway there when he felt someone behind him take hold of the handles at the back of his chair and so take control of his forward motion.
“Off to the office, are you?” said a voice that Shane had heard only once before.
Shane craned his neck around to confirm that he was being pushed by a somewhat familiar nondescript man in a cheap suit.
“My people think, detective, that you may be spending far too much time at the office. You should seriously consider abandoning your lately discovered interest in the art world and retreating to that cozy nest in The Alley with your lovely doctor wife. Neither you nor the lovely Dr. Karpov is likely to experience any long-term pleasure from your art interest,” the man leaned over Shane and spoke directly into his right ear.
Before Shane had a chance to respond, the man laughed quietly, gave the chair a shove toward the bar and disappeared into the modest crowd of people just getting off work and heading home or to wherever people go to amuse themselves for a while on the way there.
If the man who called himself Damian Saturn intended to frighten Shane, he failed. Shane was not frightened. He was curious, but not frightened. In fact, more than curious, he was intrigued. He would need to see what he could find out about the mysterious Damian Saturn, whoever he was. Maybe Hardy could help.
It was just past five o’clock, and the Wall Street bar was much busier than Shane expected. Except for his special place and the adjacent stool, all the seats at the bar were taken, and people were standing two deep around most of the bar as well. Most were regulars who were at least vaguely familiar to Shane, but there were also some strangers. As usual, he wheeled past the other patrons without acknowledging them and hoisted himself up the ramp coming to rest at his reserved spot, the terminal seat at the bar's far end. He set the brake on his chair and thought. Random thoughts for a few minutes: the pointlessne
ss of idle conversation, especially when lubricated by alcohol; how little people in general valued time; left to their own devices, why people congregate into groups. Shane didn’t really understand any of those things. He was genuinely puzzled by them. That fact was unrelated to his injury. There was a lot of human behavior that he had never understood, including the tendency of his fellow human beings to kill each other.
The skinny kid with the purplish blotch stopped dead in his tracks upon entering the Wall Street bar. He stood there just inside the door looking anxiously, wide-eyed, around the room. Shane hadn’t warned the young man that there were likely to be a lot of people at the bar, and the kid was obviously surprised. Shane often thought that the complexity of most situations was directly related to the number of people present per unit of space and it appeared that this situation was going to support that view; it was more complicated than he thought it would be. Finally, Shane looked over toward the door, spied the young man with the purple blotch and motioned him over toward the far end of the bar, waving his hand vigorously in the air like he was hailing a cab in New York. The kid got the message and joined Shane, taking the stool that the bartender, Pat Harmony, had reserved expecting that Shane had a business appointment scheduled because he usually did when he showed up at this time of day.
The kid was really skinny. Like a hair’s breadth short of skeletal. He could easily have been taken for a recent escapee from a war-torn country somewhere in the third world from which he had fled with the aid of an exorbitantly priced pirate who had taken his money, eventually deposited him barely within the borders of the U S of A and wished him well. He was nervous.
“I’m Issy Esser,” he said.
“Shane Hadley,” Shane replied, rotating toward the young man and extending his hand.
Shane had not told Issy Esser that he was a detective, but he also did not disabuse him of that conclusion. The kid was probably too young to know anything about Shane’s previously highly publicized exploits. Except for the wheelchair, Shane probably seemed like any other cop to the kid. That was fine. Maybe preferable to the actual truth about the situation.
“So,” Shane said, opening with the basic question that he was determined to answer. Although he seriously doubted that this kid knew the answer, Shane wanted to see how he reacted. “Who killed Bechman Fitzwallington?”
“I didn’t know anybody killed him,” Esser answered, still a little shaky but maybe less so. “I thought he just died. He certainly didn’t seem well lately. I wasn’t particularly surprised that he died.”
“Let me rephrase the question, Issy,” Shane used the young man’s given name to inject some familiarity into their conversation and also to savor the sibilance. “Who do you think might have killed Mr. Fitzwallington?”
“Well,” Issy replied, “if you mean who had the opportunity, the list is a long one. If you mean motive, well, there seemed to be a lot of people who didn’t like him. But it was strange. A lot of them continued to drop by his place fairly often. I would see them come and go. Most of them didn’t stay very long. Like they were doing a duty of some kind and just wanted to get it over with. Except, of course, his daughter. She often stayed a while.”
Shane took the small leather-bound note pad from his shirt pocket along with a pen, opened to a blank page and wrote something down there. He kept the notebook on the bar to his left, away from the side where Issy Esser sat, shielding what he wrote. Issy was making no attempt to see what Shane wrote. Issy just seemed like he wanted to end this conversation as soon as possible. He had ordered a beer when he first arrived and was drinking it rather quickly, Shane thought. Shane didn’t offer to share his precious sherry with this guy. Shane did not like to waste his special wine. It would surely be wasted on Issy Esser.
“And what about Ms. SalomeMe, Issy? I found her an interesting specimen.”
“Yeah,” Esser said, “she is a piece of work, alright. I didn’t know her well, but I wouldn’t trust her. And she didn’t get along with her father. I occasionally went over there and overheard some pretty vehement stuff going on between them.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Mostly her yelling obscenities at him. I did hear her say once that she ought to do away with him.”
“You mean like kill him? Or just disown him?”
“I have no idea what she meant, but it sounded pretty serious and potentially violent to me.”
“Okay. Sounds like Ms. SalomeMe deserves some additional attention. Who else?”
“Most of his other visitors were local artists. I did see that hatter guy who shot up the place the other day come by occasionally, but not often. And he never stayed long at all. Maybe the painter Parker Palmer, although he seems like such a happy-go-lucky sort of guy. Hard to think of him doing anything violent.”
“What about you, Issy? You seem to have had more contact with Fitzwallington than most anyone else.”
“I did spend some time with him,” Esser responded. “I was trying to get him to help me with my art. He didn’t help much, though. He did have me pose for a painting once a while ago. I didn’t like the painting, very abstract. Not sure why he needed anyone to pose for it. Whatever he meant it to be, it didn’t look like a person.”
Shane wrote some more in his little notebook and put it back into his pocket. He finished his glass of sherry. Issy Esser drained the last of his beer.
“I may want to talk with you again,” Shane said.
Chapter 20
Harold Werth bought the language of God description of the human genome that his former boss had championed (he even wrote a book by that title), but Werth, a committed atheist, didn’t think there was anything divine about it. Werth sincerely believed that the human genome was the ultimate explanation of humanness. Once the genome was sequenced, the human codex was in hand. We had the transcript, the complete biologic narrative, and the challenge was to understand what it meant. There was no need to imagine a God to accomplish that. The human intellect, diligently applied, would eventually figure it out. That conviction was what drove Harold Werth during his far too few waking hours.
“You know, Harold,” Katya said, “I really worry about this thing with the hatter, Richard Jones. It keeps me up at night. It seems a pretty straight line from giving him the ancestry information through his unfortunate mercury exposure to his death in a paroxysm of violence and mayhem. We lit the fuse. I’m afraid our concern for human beings is in danger of been buried under the avalanche of science and technology. Don’t you worry about that?”
Katya had summoned Werth to her office because she really needed to discuss this issue with someone. Although she didn’t always agree with Werth’s world view, she had a lot of respect for his intellect and the depth of his understanding of science.
Werth’s large head bobbed slightly to and fro; his eyes stayed fixed firmly on an imagined spot on the floor before him. “How could we have known how that guy would react to the information? A very unusual reaction, you must admit.”
“Well,” Dr. Karpov responded, “we knew he was an outlier. Maybe we should have dealt with him differently.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t worry very much about that sort of thing. I guess I think that if we could figure out how to organize the information avalanche into some configuration that made sense, our concern for human beings would take care of itself. Should be an easier problem if we had all the parts and assembled them correctly. I’ll grant you that we may have gotten beyond our headlights, the science has moved so fast. But we just have to be patient. It will all come together at some point. Even the outliers. We’ll get a handle on them eventually.”
“Patience!” Katya hissed. “Patience! Tell that to Richard Jones.”
“You’ll no doubt think me a callous bastard to say so.” Werth’s head bobbed slightly faster and with a slightly longer arc; he still stared at the floor. “But there are always casualties of progress. The unfortunate Mr. Jones may be one of those … colla
teral damage, the warmongers would call it.”
“You are a callous bastard, Harold,” she said, looking directly at her colleague’s bobbing head. She didn’t smile.
Shane did not expect the phone call from Fiona Hayes, the ceramicist and childhood friend of the dead artist’s daughter. Not after the distinctly unproductive meeting with her and her significant other at Wall Street earlier. No one had ever called him at Wall Street and so he was doubly surprised when Pat Harmony answered the ring of the landline behind the bar, brought the wireless receiver over to him and said “It’s for you,” as though Shane regularly received calls at the bar like detectives in old TV shows. He certainly wanted to follow up with the Hayes woman, but he was sure that initiating the interaction would fall to him. The vaguely familiar female voice speaking to him through the landline at Wall Street was certainly unanticipated.
Shane was surprised that the well-toned, sharp-tongued, and rather tightly wound young woman wanted to meet with him, and he was also surprised at her suggested meeting place, his Printers Alley apartment. But that suited Shane fine since he was about to leave for home anyway, so they agreed to meet there in half an hour. Neither Shane Hadley nor Fiona Hayes would keep the appointment. Shane’s attempt to work his way there from the Wall Street bar where he had just bid adieu to the pleasantly sibilant Issy Esser would be unexpectedly interrupted; the caller who proposed the meeting had never intended to be there.