by Ken Brigham
“Geez Louise,” Alpha EMT wheezed to his partner as they climbed into the ambulance cab and cranked up the siren. “What the hell is that guy’s problem?”
Katya Karpov raced the Boxster out Broadway toward the university hospital. She knew she was driving way too fast, but she didn’t care. She desperately wanted to be there when Shane arrived at the ER. She knew better than to get in the way of the professionals who would be caring for her husband, but she needed to hold him, touch his body, assure herself that he was breathing, that he had a pulse, that he was alive. Hardy Seltzer had said that Shane was alive but he also said that her husband was disoriented, apparently drugged. Alive is good but there are degrees of aliveness. Katya needed the one hundred percent alive version of the man she loved more than anything else in the world.
Chapter 22
“Exposed?” Hardy Seltzer was genuinely puzzled by Shane’s single word explanation for his unshakeable conviction that Bechman Fitzwallington had been murdered. “Are you sure there aren’t some lingering effects of the drug, Shane? Some residual influence on your thought processes? I mean, exposed? What kind of an explanation is that for a conclusion that flies in the face of all the evidence?”
It had been three days since Shane was extracted from a tangle of an unspecified but no doubt certifiably indigenous species of flora in Shelby Bottoms and eventually delivered to the university hospital. He had spent two of the intervening days recovering from what the tox analyses of his serum defined as a rather high dose (or doses) of the drug Midozalam, a major effect of which was amnesia. Shane had absolutely no recollection of his little misadventure beyond being wheeled into a strange vehicle on Church Street in front of Sam’s Sushi, blindfolded, and jabbed in the arm with what felt like a needle. Zilcho after that until he awoke in a hospital bed being fawned over by his lovely wife, onlooked by a bevy of what appeared to be health care professionals of various sorts.
Except for the gap in his memory, Shane felt that his brain was working perfectly fine now. His interest had returned to the Fitzwallington case. Either Seltzer was humoring him in light of this recent episode, which both Seltzer and Katya seem to think was clearly life-threatening, or Hardy’s interest in the case was also rekindled. Shane believed that his single word explanation for his conviction that this was a murder case was both adequate and precise.
“Yes, exposed!” Shane said.
“Sorry to be dense, Shane,” Hardy responded. “But I really don’t understand.”
The two men sat on the Printers Alley deck facing each other, as usual, and each, also as usual, fondled an expensive glass filled with Shane’s private and quite illegally obtained sherry. Shane paused for a moment and then wheeled abruptly about and through the French doors into the flat. A few seconds later, he returned to the deck with his laptop computer, opened it, and booted up.
“Perhaps,” Shane said, “you will more easily grasp the visuals.”
Shane fiddled with the computer a moment and then turned the screen toward Hardy. Displayed on the screen was a less than technically perfect photograph of an old man with a bushy moustache fading from white to the ivory color that emerges with age. The man was completely nude and lay supine on a bed, uncovered…exposed; the dead artist Bechman Fitzwallington in all his postmortem glory lying there before God and everybody.
“Exposed,” Hardy said. “And?”
“Do you recall the weather during those few days?” Shane asked.
“Not specifically,” Hardy answered. “We’ve had nice weather of late.”
“Actually, there was a cool spell that lasted a few days around that time. I conclude from this photograph that the deceased did not go to bed on a cool night nude and completely uncovered with his hands carefully folded across his chest. That doesn’t fit the circumstances. Not only did the murderer leave this unmistakable evidence of his or her participation in the artist’s demise, but there is symbolism here.”
“Symbolism?” Hardy was trying to keep up with Shane’s reasoning.
“Exposed,” Shane said. “Exposed,” he repeated. “There is something important about the life of Bechman Fitzwallington that is not general knowledge. The murderer was party to that information; perhaps it was even the motive for the murder. But at the very least, the murder scene was certainly staged with the intention of stimulating the interest of a curious observer in the artist’s history.”
Hardy was having trouble concentrating on Shane’s monologue. Seltzer had to address the larger issue of the safety of the city’s streets. The department was getting a lot of negative attention in the press and elsewhere after the audacious daylight downtown abduction of Sherlock Shane Hadley. People were concerned for their safety. So, truth be told, Hardy Seltzer was much more interested in discovering who had abducted Shane, the reasons for it, and bringing the culprits to justice than he was interested in the demise of Bechman Fitzwallington. Although he suspected strongly that the two events were related, he intended to focus on Shane’s abduction. That was, to Hardy, his most immediate priority. If in the process of tugging that thread, the whole mystery unraveled, that would be fine. If not, they could worry about whether the old artist was murdered and if so, who did it later, after there was enough assurance that the streets were safe to quiet the attacks on the competence of the police force.
Seltzer had grilled Shane as aggressively as he thought was likely to be useful. But Shane remembered nothing, absolutely nothing, about his abduction. Hardy had followed up the license plate number of the van, which also yielded nothing of use—rented van, paid cash, untraceable fake driver’s license. The van had not been found, probably dumped in the river or something. A thorough search of the South Nashville address pretty much confirmed that Shane had been held there but no clues to his captors. No fingerprints, no neglected scraps of anything that might lead to identification of any specific person. Despite the less than sophisticated method of Shane’s abduction, the place where they held him looked like a pretty professional operation. As did the way he was released, which also left no traceable connections to the responsible parties. The crime scene people were still working over the wheelchair, but not much hope of finding anything definitive.
“So,” Shane said, “given the evidence, is your department ready to investigate this murder as it is accustomed to investigating such misdeeds?”
“Don’t think you can count on it, Shane. I’ll relay your notion to the powers that be, but you have to admit that you don’t really have anything solid. And, you surely understand that the department’s priority has to be solving your abduction, identifying the culprits, and bringing them in. You’ve seen the papers. The media are all over this, and we, the department, which means me for one, are taking a lot of heat for not keeping the streets of the city safe.”
“Surely,” Shane replied, “you perceive that we are debating a single problem, not two separate ones. There is no doubt but that my alleged abduction was connected, intimately connected, to my conviction that the artist was murdered and my attempts to prove that was the case and identify the responsible party or parties. As is generally true of criminal activities, there is a puzzle to be solved. I am quite sure, my man, that once we have enough of the pieces of the puzzle identified, we will begin to assemble a single picture that integrates what might appear to be separate events.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Hardy said. “But I’m up to my ass in casual observers and my efforts have to go toward satisfying them. I’ll talk to the boss and get back to you. Meantime, you do what you need to do, but first, be sure your brain is working at a hundred percent. Katya should be able to help you with that.”
“My brain is working just fine, my friend,” Shane responded. “Fortunately, since there is a murder to solve. That is an activity with which my brain is intimately familiar.”
“Solving murders,” Hardy mused. “I used to do that back before I became the puppet of city politics. I liked my job better then.”
“One
chooses one’s poison,” Shane replied.
Hardy Seltzer did not believe that he had chosen the events and people who caused him the most trouble, his poison. But he didn’t say so. What the hell did Shane Hadley know about it?
The problem with maintaining a significant cocaine habit is that you can’t do it without getting your hands dirty. The supply chain tends to be short. As a user, you can’t avoid contact with the serious crooks who control, among other things, the source of your chosen drug. And, depending on a number of undefinable variables, that means that sooner or later you wind up being one of the things that they control. Of course, one does not like that, but what does one like better, cocaine or what seem like relatively minor concessions necessary to keep your lifeline open and in working order? Most times, that is nolo contendere— no contest.
While she was completely aware, both when high and during the diminishing times when she was not, that Lucifer held the mortgage on a large part of her soul, she did not believe that the mortgage covered the entire property. She made the concessions necessary to supply her habit, but she honestly believed that she retained an element of personal integrity. She was bad, okay, but not thoroughly so.
So, she hit the send button without hesitating and also without a thorough consideration of the potential consequences. Since she was guessing at the detective’s email address, she would not have been surprised if the message had bounced back—no such address. But it didn’t. Her guess was from what little she had been able to learn of the investigation. She had the detective’s name and imagined an email address—just [email protected], coupling the detective’s first initial and surname with an acronym for Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. She had taken some precautions. She was using a computer in the public library that couldn’t be traced to her. And she had worded the note to leave the impression that it came from someone less educated and less sophisticated than herself. She wanted to deliver the message, but she desperately wanted to keep her personal distance from any of this. Granted her central nervous system was not exactly at its drug-free baseline at the time, but she honestly believed when she moved the cursor to send and clicked the mouse with a decisive flick of her left forefinger, that she was catering to the better angels of her nature. She felt good about that. Those guys had been sorely neglected of late.
It was never a good idea to discuss anything of substance with Assistant Chief Goetz late in the day. Hardy Seltzer knew that. It seemed as though the daytime hours eroded away any façade of amity that might have developed during whatever his boss’s after-hours pursuits were, exposing something raw and primitive that was not fertile ground for a meaningful conversation. However, it was late in the day when Hardy returned to his office from meeting with Shane, and he felt some considerable urgency about revealing Shane’s exposed theory of Fitzwallington’s death. The door to Goetz’s office was ajar. So, Seltzer took the chance. It was a bad idea.
“So, let me get this straight,” said the Assistant Chief, sarcasm oozing around the edges of the words. “You want me to suggest to the chief that we divert the entire resources of the department to investigating a theoretical murder based on a single photograph of a naked dead man when the coroner and you yourself have concluded that the old man died of natural causes. I wouldn’t do that if Sherlock Holmes himself appeared, incarnate, and suggested it. You are too taken with this ex-detective. He’s no longer of any use to us. He has, in fact, turned out to be a royal pain in the ass. Shane Hadley should be off-limits for you except in the investigation of the perpetrators of his abduction. That is the crime you are to solve, and I don’t really give a tinker’s damn whether or not that solution has anything to do with the old artist who, according to every professional opinion that I’m aware of, just up and died when his time came.”
“That’s about what I expected you would say,” Hardy responded.
“Then, why the hell bring it up?”
“Not sure. Maybe just getting all the cards on the table.”
“Hmmmph,” Goetz puffed, “better get a more careful look at your cards. Pick out the useless ones and discard them. Don’t waste my time, Seltzer. Bring me something real.”
“Yessir,” Hardy sighed as he left the office and returned to his desk.
Hardy booted up his computer and called up his email. There were 150 unread entries. He didn’t make a very serious effort to keep up with emails. Most of them were useless and they could take up a lot of time if you got too tied to them. He casually scrolled down the list, still distractedly thinking about his next move in trying to solve Shane’s abduction. He probably would not have noticed a particular message except for the strange name of the sender—Moleskin, like those cute little notebooks that literary types have allegedly used for generations to record their private thoughts.
Mister Detektiv. It was an outside-inside job. Be lookin for connexions between CROOKS (big letters for big crooks). Good luck, Moleskin.
That was it. Had to be referring to the Hadley thing. What else could it be? And Moleskin was trying too hard to sound stupid. Probably an English professor too thinly and not very cleverly disguised. Like, Detektiv? Give me a break. Anybody who couldn’t spell detective wouldn’t have called themselves Moleskin. Much too sophisticated a moniker for an illiterate.
Hardy printed out the message, folded it, and slid it between the pages of his pocket notebook. Could be something. And he was desperately short of clues to guide his next move. Shane might be able to help with the interpretation. No doubt he would have something interesting to say about the message. Goetz just didn’t understand about Shane. Most people didn’t.
Athena Golden sat in the living room of her Green Hills condo nursing a glass of red wine and thinking. What was going on with the Fitzwallington paintings? She thought that there should have been some public announcement of their disposal by now and, since she had not been contacted by anyone, including, to her profound disappointment, the artist’s daughter. She was more or less resigned to the possibility that the New York gallery had successfully laid claim to them. While she had hoped to land at least some of the stash, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if her little gallery on the fringe of downtown Nashville failed to compete with the big city art scene. She wondered if Parker Palmer knew anything. She checked her watch. It wasn’t that late. She placed the call. He answered after three and a half rings.
“This is Parker,” the familiar casual lilt of his voice made her smile; Parker often affected people that way.
“Good evening, Parker. This is Athena. I hope I didn’t disturb you.”
“Not a problem, my dear,” Palmer answered. “What’s up?”
“I was just wondering, given that all has gone quiet on the Fitzwallington front, whether you had any idea what is happening with his paintings.”
“’Fraid not,” Palmer said. “I, too, am deafened by the sound of silence, but no idea why this hasn’t moved faster. I guess the Sherlock Shane episode may have distracted things. Hadley obviously had a bee in his bonnet about Billy Wayne’s death. Thought he was murdered was my impression. Also, although I don’t think it amounts to much, Jay Combs, the lawyer who sits on the Arts Commission and I filed a lawsuit questioning whether Sally May is the legitimate heir. Pretty much a frivolous suit. Long shot. We did it because there is no written record that anybody can locate that documents their relationship. I understand that Jimmy Holden, her lawyer, is getting DNA analyses that will nail it down. That should be available soon. They’ll probably dismiss the suit.”
What in God’s name possessed Parker Palmer to question the daughter’s paternity?
Athena asked, “Is there an inventory of the paintings?”
“Not as far as I know, at least not one for public consumption. But I understand that there’s quite a stash, hidden away somewhere in storage. I hope they’ve been properly cared for. If they’ve gotten moldy from a leaky roof or some such, that would be a fine kettle of fish, wouldn’t it? Have you had any c
ontact with the New York gallery?”
“Not lately. I tried earlier to open up that connection, but, like everything else related to those paintings, the connection went black.”
“Any follow-up sales of my stuff from the show?” After all, Parker Palmer was a salesman.
“A couple of the larger pieces went just yesterday. We’ll settle up in the next week or so.”
“Great.”
“Let me know if you hear anything.”
“You betcha.”
New York’s time was an hour ahead of Nashville’s and it was getting late, but Athena Golden rang the Galleria Salinas, the only number she had for Blythe Fortune. Athena recognized that it was unlikely that the phone would be answered at that hour, but she called anyway. After four rings, a pleasant female voice conveyed the business hours and address of the gallery and invited the caller to leave a voice message.
Blythe, this is Athena Golden in Nashville. I realize it’s late there, so not surprised you didn’t answer. Just wondering if you’ve had any news about the Fitzwallington paintings. The subject seems to have gone silent here and I continue to be interested in being involved in their sale if possible. Give me a call when you have a chance. Hope all is well there.
Best. Athena.
Probably a waste of time and effort, Athena thought.
Shane was suddenly wide awake at a very early hour. The broad expanse of windows in their bedroom that overlooked Third Avenue were matte black panels sprinkled with occasional reflections from the streetlights below. There was total silence for a long moment until it was interrupted by the reverberating chirp of a police siren and strobes of blue light flickering in the windows. KiKi slept soundly beside Shane, the soft rhythm of her breathing barely audible. KiKi was a marvelous sleeper.
Shane pushed himself up in the bed and reached for his laptop that he had left on the bedside table before going to sleep the previous evening. He had been suddenly awakened from a deep sleep by a compelling need to look again at the picture of a dead Bechman Fitzwallington. Was there something in the picture that he had missed? He fired up the computer and called up the picture. He stared at the naked and dead man, carefully examining the photograph as a whole, and then in detail, as close as he could get to pixel by pixel, desperately trying to discover something he had overlooked. Or was it something that wasn’t there?