Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  “Knock yourself out, counselor,” SalomeMe’s parting shot as she got up and left her lawyer to seethe alone without another word.

  The truth shall make you free. Those biblical words circled the official seal of the Christian college where Holden received his undergraduate degree. He believed those words; they had shaped much of his life. With all due credit to Rev. King, Holden believed that those words had bent the arc of his lifeline toward justice.

  But nothing was true about this woman. If there was anything remotely authentic about her, it was hidden somewhere deep beneath the pierced and tattooed façade and its accompanying pseudo-personality. And now he discovered that even her claim to be the dead artist’s daughter was a lie. He deeply regretted that he had not paid closer attention to the risk he was taking before getting involved with SalomeMe, or whatever her true name was. Nothing about her was as it seemed. So far, what verifiable truth he knew about this woman did not make him free. It did exactly the opposite.

  Holden decided to make a sincere effort to locate any additional information that bore on his client’s parentage before informing the court of the DNA results. That would have to happen sooner or later, but if he could buy a little time, maybe he could uncover some new information that would be relevant. Parker Palmer and his society lawyer friend did not seem to be too anxious to press their suit. Well, ok then. He would look for other truths, beyond the basics of human biology, those less quantitative and more tenuous” facts” upon which the resolution of a case often turned. Although disturbed by the unanticipated DNA results, disappointed at the implications of that snippet of unimpeachable information, he wasn’t yet willing to relinquish his undying confidence in the power of truth.

  Hardy Seltzer sat in his office, looking out his window at the activity in the courthouse square. He was thinking about the information that he had been able to glean from the Internet and from some mildly revealing interviews. He was trying to make sense of it, figure out how the pieces fit together, if they did. He was focused on his assigned job, to clarify the circumstances of Shane’s abduction and finger the culprits. It looked like a work of rank amateurs in broad daylight that was obviously aborted before accomplishing whatever the goal was; it should be an easy problem to solve. However, from what he had discovered so far, that didn’t appear to be the case. It was complicated. He suspected that down the road, there might well loom an intersection with Shane’s efforts to prove a murder and identify the murderer. That was fine with Hardy.

  But, for the time being, here’s what he knew. Shane had been abducted in broad daylight at the corner of Church Street and Printers Alley, just whisked into a van and away. Amazingly, although it was a busy time of day, no reliable descriptions of his abductors could be elicited. Shane was subsequently released, deposited unceremoniously in Shelby Bottoms, after the public uproar from the Tennessean article that Hardy had planted, apparently aborting whatever the original plan of the abductors had been. Shane had been obviously drugged and remembered absolutely nothing from the moment he was taken from Church Street into the van until he was recovered in Shelby Bottoms. Shane had been phoned at Wall Street by someone whom he thought was the ceramics woman, Fiona Hayes, and asked to meet her immediately at his Printers Alley flat which was the reason he was at the spot where he was nabbed. Did the young ceramicist set up the whole thing? Why? Fingerprints of the Chicago hood, Dudley (the Dude) Sysco, were found on Shane’s wheelchair and the Dude’s explanation for that inconvenient fact was something considerably short of convincing. The Dude was in Nashville at the time, was a known lowlife for hire, and almost certainly had some connection with the crime.

  Marge Bland had been a valuable resource. She recognized the picture of Sysco as one of the three men she had seen together at TAPS. She had also spent some time rummaging through old credit card receipts at the bar and had finally concluded that one of the other men was Mace Ricci, who had visited TAPS several times prior to the meeting of the troika. She remembered him—unusual name, didn’t sound like a local. And he looked like a cop. Hard to explain that, but it’s just one of those things. Cop is more than an occupation; it is a persona that is difficult to hide.

  And then there was Bruce Therault. From the Internet, Hardy had learned that Therault was a mid-level real estate developer in New York and was a partner in the Galleria Salinas, the Upper East Side gallery that was making a serious effort to connect with the Bechman Fitzwallington paintings. Hardy had found an old NYT article by an investigative reporter that implied a connection of the real estate developer with organized crime, but there was no follow-up to the story that he could locate. When Hardy mentioned Therault’s name to Wilton Argent, Nashville’s version of a drug lord and the city’s best effort at a connection to big crime, Hardy had the distinct impression that the name was not unfamiliar to Argent but was unable to get anything approaching a specific response.

  Hardy decided that his next step should be to talk in person with Fiona Hayes. If she was responsible for making that phone call to Shane at Wall Street, the event that triggered the whole episode, then she must at least have information about who was involved even if she hadn’t done anything else. She must know something potentially important. He had also begun to wonder whether she had some connection to the weird Moleskin emails. It hadn’t been difficult to trace them to a computer at the Nashville Public Library. One of the librarians vaguely remembered a young woman whom he had not seen before coming in a couple of times, using a computer for a few minutes and then leaving. The librarian could not remember anything more descriptive than that she was a young woman who was not a regular visitor to the library. Why Fiona Hayes would do that, Hardy had not a clue, but then this case from its beginning had been chock-full of unexplanations.

  Seltzer also placed a call to the hotel where Mace Ricci had stayed. He was told that Mr. Ricci had checked out a couple of days earlier, paid the bill in cash, and left no trace of his having been there.

  Hardy decided to drop by Wall Street in the afternoon, hoping to catch Shane. He would like for them to compare notes.

  Shane was, again, staring at the image of a completely exposed and quite lifeless body of Bechman Fitzwallington on his computer screen and thinking. He was sure that the fully exposed body, the bedcovers folded neatly at the foot of the bed, was a statement of some kind almost certainly made by the murderer. What was there about the old artist that needed to be exposed? And how had the deed been done? The most obvious means of killing a frail old man in his bed would be suffocation with a pillow, and one of the pillows from the bed had fallen to the floor on the right side of the bed. Is that what happened here? Possibly, but not all the known facts supported that.

  Shane would try to arrange separate meetings with Parker Palmer and Fiona Hayes at Wall Street, hopefully, this afternoon. In the meantime, he was constructing three hypothetical scenarios in his mind, each starring one of the three suspects. The key elements were, as always, motive, opportunity, and mental state. The principal facts he had to work with were: the Hayes woman’s vehement hatred for Fitzwallington; the daughter’s potential monetary gain coupled with her obvious contempt for her father; and the new information from KiKi’s DNA data that the two outliers in her brain study, Palmer and Fitzwallington, were blood relatives. There was also the lawsuit by Palmer challenging the legitimacy of SalomeMe as a Fitzwallington heir and the old man’s genetic anomaly that might have made him sterile.

  A story was assembling itself in Shane’s mind. He would see what he could elicit from meetings with Fiona Hayes and Parker Palmer, and then decide about a time and place for another visit with SalomeMe. He also needed to do some additional background research on the not-so-young woman with the odd pseudonym. Shane had thought in the past that when a case had too many loose ends to make any sense of, a solution could sometimes be found by tying all the loose ends to each other.

  Shane reached both Fiona Hayes and Parker Palmer by phone on the first try, and both
agreed to meet him at Wall Street later in the afternoon. Shane holed up with his computer and set about finding out anything he could about SalomeMe, nee Sally May Farmer.

  The paucity of information on the Internet suggested that the target of his searches had apparently kept a pretty low profile over the years. Most of what was there was connected to her artist father. She had indeed been raised by Billy Wayne Farmer as a single parent after her mother died in childbirth. The two of them had migrated from Clarksville to Nashville when she was only two and had lived there ever since. There was some ill-defined association of Sally Farmer with Fiona Hayes beginning when they were quite young. More recently, Shane discovered from available court records that Bechman Fitzwallington as Billy Wayne Farmer had filed papers to adopt Sally May Farmer, now known by her chosen moniker, SalomeMe. That legal action had been filed only a week before Fitzwallington’s demise, and no action had been taken on it.

  Now that’s interesting, Shane thought. The woman was not actually Fitzwallington’s biological daughter, otherwise why the adoption thing? Was the suit filed by Parker Palmer not so frivolous after all? Where to tie up that loose end? Was it possible that Parker Palmer was, in fact, heir to the Fitzwallington paintings? Did Palmer know that? If so, now there’s a motive if there ever was one. Oldest motive in the book. Follow the money. The afternoon interview with Palmer should be at least interesting and possibly a breakthrough. Shane was starting to feel the old excitement that always came in the home stretch of wrapping up a case.

  “It wasn’t me,” Fiona Hayes said.

  Hardy Seltzer had gone unannounced to her Gulch apartment. She had answered the door and reluctantly invited him in. They sat in her living room on white leather Courvoisier style chairs facing an expanse of glass that opened onto a panoramic mural of the Nashville skyline. Her response to his question about the call to Shane at Wall Street was matter of fact and declarative. Although she was somewhat fidgety, not excessively so. Maybe a normal reaction to an unexpected visit from a police detective. Hardy didn’t read a lot into her apparent discomfort.

  “Why would anyone who would make such a call to set up Shane Hadley’s abduction, pretend to be you?” Hardy asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “No idea,” she responded. “Not sure why anyone would pretend to be me for any reason.”

  “The name Moleskin mean anything to you?” Hardy tacked suddenly to port.

  “You mean like the notebooks? Sure, I know them, even use one to keep notes for my work sometimes. What of it?”

  “I have a witness, employee at the public library, that may be able to identify you as the author of some thinly disguised emails to me related to the death of Bechman Fitzwallington,” Hardy shamelessly exaggerated the information from the librarian. “The emails were signed, Moleskin.”

  “Your witness is mistaken, detective. I don’t visit the library for any reason. I have a computer, and if I need a book, I buy it.”

  Seltzer was sure that the young woman was lying.

  “Ms. Hayes,” Seltzer looked directly into the woman’s eyes and infused his voice with as much gravitas as he could muster, “I can’t tell you how important it is for you to come clean with me. It would be wise of you to tell me anything you know that has any possibility of being connected to the abduction of Shane Hadley. My job is to assure that our streets are safe, and they won’t be considered safe until we apprehend the culprits who snatched Shane Hadley in broad daylight in the middle of the city. Surely you can see how important this is. Don’t you read the newspaper?”

  “You’re wasting your time with me, Detective. I am an artist. That is what consumes me. I have little use for the problems of our society except for the ones that respond to our aesthetic senses. And I rarely, for your information, read the local rag that calls itself a newspaper. Why would I?”

  Seltzer’s phone pinged, signaling a text message. Since he was making little progress with the haughty Ms. Hayes, he checked his phone. The text was from Goetz. Where are you? See me in my office as soon as possible.

  Fiona Hayes, obviously impatient with the shift in Seltzer’s attention to his cell phone, said, “Are we done here, Detective?”

  Hardy responded, pocketing the phone, “Apparently. But it seems to me very likely that this will not be our last meeting. I must say, Ms. Hayes, that I strongly suspect that you have not been completely honest with me.”

  Hardy got up and left without waiting for the young woman to show him out. He retrieved the aging sedan from the no parking zone in front of the apartment block, removed the parking ticket from under the driver’s side windshield wiper, stuffed it along with several others into the glove box, and headed for the station and what was certain to be another unpleasant encounter with his overwrought boss.

  On his way back downtown, Seltzer’s phone serenaded him with a full-throated version of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The caller ID said Issy Esser. Who the hell was Issy Esser? Hardy’s immediate inclination was to ignore it, but for some reason that escaped him, he answered the call.

  “Seltzer.”

  “Detective, this is Issy Esser. You said to call you if I thought of anything that might shed light on Mr. Fitzwallington’s death.”

  Hardy dredged up a vision of the skinny kid with the birthmark, Fitzwallington’s next-door neighbor. He was the one who had placed the original call about the artist’s death. Seltzer had forgotten the young man’s name.

  “Yes, Mr. Esser,” Seltzer replied. “What information do you have?”

  “Well,” the man spoke haltingly, “I’ve been thinking hard about the night before Mr. Fitzwallington’s death. I had trouble sleeping and was sitting on my balcony that overlooks the artist’s house. I heard voices. Loud voices, as though there was an argument. I’m sure one of the voices was Mr. Fitzwallington’s. I thought the other one might have been the artist Parker Palmer, but I’m not sure of that. Is this any help to you?”

  Hardy thought it just might be and replied, “Thank you so much, Mr. Esser. This could be some help, but we’ll need to meet with you and get a formal statement. Is that OK?”

  “Sure,” the man replied, “just call me when it is convenient.”

  Shane needed to know about this. If the information was true, it would be more relevant to the old guy’s death than to Shane’s abduction. Hardy was forbidden from pursuing anything about the artist’s mode of exit; he had ceded that territory to Shane. And it was clear that Shane had taken that bit in his teeth. As soon as Goetz was finished with his predictable rant, Hardy would escape and try to meet up with Shane. They needed to compare notes anyway.

  Chapter 27

  “Look, Blythe,” Bruce Therault wasn’t going to pull any punches in this conversation; the time for that was long past, “whether you like it or not doesn’t really matter anymore. You are going to have to either get on board with this or get out. Your choice.”

  They sat together at the posh bar in a five-star midtown hotel. This conversation was post two Manhattans (Therault) and one point five martinis (Blythe Fortune). Therault had laid out the situation for her as he knew it. The investors in Galleria Salinas had a connection with some organized crime outfit, and their investment in the New York gallery was only the first in a much grander scheme, probably at least national and perhaps international in scope. The enormously influential NYT art critic, Arturo Carbone, was an integral part of it. With the benefit of the critic’s vast knowledge of commerce in the art world as well as his ability to manipulate the value of art through his published critiques, the business plan was to identify struggling galleries that handled works by aging midlevel contemporary artists and inflate the value of their art. That might be especially effective if the artist was cooperative enough to die, an occurrence which would provide the occasion for the critic to review the entire body of their work. Therault suspected, but did not say, that the schemers they were dealing with were not above intervening in the course of human events to maximize the profitabil
ity of their enterprise. That may even have been a part of their business plan.

  Of course, choices would need to be carefully made, and the ruse used infrequently enough to avoid arousing suspicion. This was venture capital. They expected only a few of their investments to pay off. But property number one, Galleria Salinas, with its connection to the Nashville artist, looked like it could be a real winner. Everybody stood to gain from this. Bruce guessed that some mechanism for laundering ill-gotten gain from other sources was buried in the scheme, but he didn’t know for sure and didn’t mention that to Blythe. No reason to complicate this for her any more than was necessary. He had avoided learning anything about the details of this wrinkle in the plan since he wished to retain the potential for plausible deniability should the necessity arise.

  “Get out! What the hell do you mean get out?” Blythe exclaimed. “This is my gallery we’re talking about. I birthed this baby and invested my life in it. You think I’m just going to walk away from it?”

  “Blythe, my dear,” Bruce said, “you will agree to one of those possibilities for two reasons. The first reason is spelled out in the fine print of our contract with the investors; they have an unconditional option to take control of the gallery whenever they choose. Perhaps you paid too little attention to the fine print earlier. The second reason is that these guys play a brand of hardball with which you are likely unfamiliar and ideally will remain so. The wrong choice on your part could be hazardous to your health. Do you understand? Look, Blythe, your choices are limited to two possibilities. In or out!”

  Blythe stood up suddenly, knocking over her glass, spilling the remains of her martini in the process. “Godammit, Bruce,” she seethed, “I never agreed to any of this. I poured my soul into that gallery. It has become my life. You are doing your best to fuck that up, and I won’t stand for it.”