“Nothing like that,” I said, hastening to disabuse him. “Ever hear of an artist named Lily Lucerne?”
Darryl audibly relaxed. “Sure. Photo-realist. Protégé of Bechtle, studied with him at State. Very big with the objectivist crowd.”
“Know anything about her personal life?”
“Not really. Married to a business type, I think. She doesn’t hang out with the trendettes, that’s for sure; sort of a recluse, in fact.”
“Ever hear anything scandalous about her?”
Darryl scoffed. “It’s pretty tough to be scandalous in this town, Marsh. Of course if she could document it, being a virgin would make her a sensation.”
“This is more along the lines of her husband spending some time in jail. Her ex-husband, I mean.”
Darryl perked up. “I never heard anything like that. Is it true? What for?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I could hear the calculator begin to click. “Well, it would certainly raise her prices if it was—collectors love the hell out of scandals. I know a man in Sausalito who collects inmates’ art exclusively.”
“We’re talking about Lily Lucerne,” I reminded him. “You wouldn’t happen to know where she lives, would you?”
“No idea.”
“Do you know which gallery shows her?”
“Let me think. The Grasshopper, I believe,” Darryl said after a moment. “That’s on Post, just east of Union Square.”
“Do you know anyone who works there?”
“Only the owner,” he sniffed royally. “Will she do?”
“Which is who?”
“Giselle.”
“Giselle who?”
“Just Giselle. She came over as an Air France stewardess, then married some hotel money and decided to do something with it more uplifting than a lifetime of plastic surgery.”
“Do you suppose she’d tell you how to get in touch with Lucerne?”
Darryl snorted impatiently. “I gave their last show a minor rave. The question is, why should I ask?”
“Because sooner or later you’re going to piss off another macho Michelangelo and he’s going to come after you with his chisel.”
Darryl got off his high horse. “I’ll get back to you. The Survival Research opening is at seven, if you change your mind.”
I pressed the button to free myself from Darryl, then dialed the Central Station.
“I was just about to call you,” Charley said when they tracked him down. “The lab found prints on those pages you gave me.”
I voiced my guess. “Some of them belong to a guy named Lucerne.”
Charley hesitated long enough for me to know my hunch was wrong. “Who’s Lucerne?” he asked carefully.
“Just a shot in the dark. I guess she uses a nom de brush.”
“Am I supposed to understand this?”
“No, you’re supposed to tell me whose prints they are.”
“There were several prints but only one that we could ID. Female.”
“You sure?”
“The lab boys seem to be, but maybe you’d like to discuss it with them. I’m sure they enjoy being double-checked by an amateur.”
“Sorry, Charley. Which female?”
“Someone named Gillis.”
“Margaret?”
“Wrong again.”
“Jane Ann?”
“That’s the one. Good thing it was Twenty Questions.”
I swore. “That’s the only one they matched?”
“That’s it. Just a minute, I’ve got an address for her somewhere.”
“That’s all right, I know how to find her. Why did she pop up on your computer?”
“Juvenile thing. The court record’s expunged, but the prints are still in the machine. You know her?”
“She’s Bryce’s stepdaughter.”
Charley’s interest was confined to a grunt. “I still don’t understand it, but I promise I’ll buy the book you write the minute it comes out in paperback.”
The phone rang six seconds after Charley had hung up in the middle of my disclaimer.
“You’re in luck,” Darryl Dromedy gushed. “Lily Lucerne is meeting a prospective buyer at the Grasshopper tonight at six. Japanese, of course—needs something to perk up his homes in Maui and Gstaad.”
“So do I just show up?”
“I’ve paved the way with Giselle, but you’re on your own with Lucerne. From what I hear, she’s a tough cookie.”
“Cookies crumble,” I said, then walked up to the Caffé Trieste. Along the way I thought about what Charley had said about me writing a book about the Chatterton case. By the time I had finished dinner I had my notebook out and was making an outline of the week’s events, under the heading Chapter One.
Last night while I was sleeping, my cell mate set fire to my hair. When he assured the guard it was an accident, he was routinely believed.
Homage to Hammurabi, p. 192
14
Although the sun was about to stage its exit, a swarm of conventioneers still littered the environs of Union Square, thronging to Macy’s, massing in the Neiman Marcus rotunda, exclaiming over the fabulous new Nordstrom, marveling at a thousand kinds of perfume and a hundred makes of shoes, loading up on merchandise they could buy for half the price in Des Moines or Columbus, wondering how to get a cable car from there to Fisherman’s Wharf, telling themselves it had to get warmer tomorrow, all under the life-numbed stares of two score ladies and gentlemen whose annual incomes wouldn’t have covered the cost of the contents of a single shopping bag in sight.
Outside the Grasshopper Gallery, a crowd of tourists eddied among and around each other, angling for a better view. Since the object of the exercise was intriguing to me as well, I decided to join the throng.
The entire front of the gallery was open to the street, an expanse as wide as a double garage, the heat lamps in the ceiling the only concession to the out-of-doors. But it was the interior of the space that caused all of us to gape the way kids used to gape at the sight of Mantle and Mays before TV made even heroes common.
A triumph of trompe l’oeil, nothing inside the gallery existed in more than two dimensions—the window looking out into the verdant garden, the rubber plant rising out of the colorful ceramic pot, the lighted EXIT over the rear door, the neon coals in the fireplace, even the fire extinguisher—all were products of objectivist art, rendered more real than reality on a series of floor-to-ceiling canvases that ringed the room without a break. Even the woman in the back—seated demurely at a writing desk, smiling expectantly at those of us who dared peer gingerly into her superreal domain—would maintain both her pose and her poise forever.
There must have been a sensor of some kind wired into the doorway, because when I walked beneath the heat lamps and crossed the slate-black threshold, a hidden door in a wall painted to look like a bookcase opened at the rear of the showroom and a young woman hurried out to greet me.
“May I help you, sir?” Beneath the wild outpouring of her hair and above the pulpy pomegranate of her lips, her eyes were exactly as expectant as those of the acrylic woman who remained seated at her desk.
I dredged both a posture and accent from the latitudes of my youth. “This here gallery is quite a place, young lady,” I enthused. “You sure had me fooled, especially that there mirror.”
I pointed to the canvas to my left, the one that so precisely duplicated the opposite wall it seemed to contain a real reflection. “A man could get real discombobulated around here, especially if he was likkered up. What do you call these doodads, anyhow?”
The woman smiled, though less spectacularly than before she’d encountered my drawl. “Photo-realism. It’s breathtaking, isn’t it?”
“I never seen nothing like it, though I’ve seen a billboard or two that made me look a second time.”
She remained saleswoman enough to smile. “Are you a collector, by any chance?” From her tone, I would more likely be a monk.
I shoo
k my head. “Not yet, anyways. What I am is a trucker.”
Her regard for me, moderate at best, plunged to zero. “I see. Well, you’re welcome to look around. If we can be of assistance, please let us know.”
She started to turn away. “How much is that one?” I asked quickly. I pointed to the rubber plant.
“That’s one of our best buys. Only four thousand.”
“Dollars?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“No wonder folks take up this line of work, making pictures of things that are already there. Me, I prefer the squiggly ones, the pictures of things that can’t be seen.”
The ripe lips pursed. “Expressionism is nice, but there’s room for other points of view as well,” she commented frostily. “Many of us feel expressionism is too … sauvage for the eighties.”
“Sure. I can see that. Folks like to know what’s what. Not many chances being taken these days.”
“That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. If you’re in the market for something more in your price range, there’s a printshop down the street that—”
“What’s your name, young lady?” I interrupted.
Unaccustomed to assertion, for the first time she seemed off-balance. She touched her neckline and her hair to make sure her allies were still in place. “Joy,” she said.
“That’s a real pretty name. It suits you.”
“Thank you.”
“Well, Joy, when I said I was a trucker I believe you took me to say I drove ’em. But what I meant to say was that I own. ’em. Thirty-four rigs as of this morning. Tanner Trucking, out of Fresno. Hell, if you’ve ever shipped any pictures from here to L.A., we probably hauled ’em for you.”
Joy had become considerably more attuned. “We do lots of business in Los Angeles—the film community is a particularly important market in our business—so perhaps you have indeed ‘hauled’ some for us.”
As amazing as evolution itself, her hand crawled forth and found a purchase on my arm. “You know, Mr.… Hammer, was it?”
“Tanner.”
“You know, Mr. Tanner, the most amazing thing has just occurred to me.”
I rolled my eyes in a lascivious whirl. “What might that be, young lady?”
“Do you know what some of the very first canvases we carried in the gallery depicted?”
“What’s that?”
“Trucks!”
“You’re joshing.”
“I’m not,” she countered happily. “May I show them to you?”
“Well, I don’t know if—”
“It’ll just take a minute. You’ll be stunned, I’m convinced.”
“But—”
She held up a hand to silence me, then hurried behind a folding screen and plucked a white phone off the wall, dialed a number, and spoke softly and urgently. A second later she was at my side. “Juan will bring a sample for you momentarily.”
This wasn’t where I wanted us to be. “What kind of truck is it?” I asked dubiously. “Mack? Pete? Kenny? What?”
Joy frowned. “Why … I’m not sure. I didn’t know there was that much … selection in trucks.”
“Young lady, there’s as much different between trucks as there is between that little black dress you’re wearing and a set of Osh-Kosh B’gosh with a full bib.”
With that, Joy found a need to search the gallery for another customer. It was only when she didn’t find one that she turned her blue eyes back to me. “Isn’t that fascinating.”
“Listen,” I said quickly. “While we’re jawing, I wonder if you’ve got something that Wanda June might like in the way of art.”
“And who might she be?” Joy seemed leery of the possibilities.
“My dearly beloved, of course. Whenever I take a trip to the big city, I always bring something back for Wanda June. Kind of a tradition, if you know what I mean—I get a new eighteen-wheeler, she gets a new stove. Or whatever. That’s what brought me in here in the first place, to be honest about it.”
Joy pretended she was giving it some thought. “Well, let’s see now. What are her interests? Maybe that would help us decide what’s best.”
I grinned. “Not trucks, that’s for sure.” I paused to think. “The only thing Wanda June likes more than spending money is tending her garden. She lives out in her potato patch, which is what I call it, from sunup to noon, all summer long. I’ve et more zucchinis than Iacocca’s got cars.”
Joy was nodding excitedly. “I think we have something she’ll love. One of our very best artists specializes in portraits of fruits and vegetables. Her accuracy and enhancement is amazing. And her palette, well, they look fresh from the garden. It’s uncanny.”
“Sounds like just the ticket,” I said, trying to match Joy’s level of commercial ecstasy. “Forget the trucks; let’s see those puppies. Have old Juan haul ’em out here.”
Joy hurried to the white phone and issued rapid-fire instructions. As she did so, the door in the bookcase opened and a young Chicano came into the gallery carrying a canvas the size of a beach towel. Schooled in the Grasshopper’s sales techniques, he propped the canvas on the floor but kept its back to me, so I couldn’t see the art quite yet. Only when Joy joined us did Juan unveil the masterpiece.
With a practiced twist of his wrists, the huge painting pivoted on a corner, and there it was. Twice true size, even more daunting than in real life, the front grill and fenders of a big Mack diesel, fire-engine red and trimmed in brilliant chrome, shimmered like a mutant jewel in the artist’s reproduction of the noonday sun. Joy could not have been more pleased had we been gazing on a Rembrandt.
“It’s a truck all right,” I said dubiously.
Joy’s glow quickly faded. “What’s the trouble, Mr. Tanner?”
“Well, it’s not that it’s bad, honey. Not at all. In fact that’s the best picture of a truck I’ve about ever seen, except for the ones that come with naked ladies hanging off them.”
“Then what’s the trouble?”
“To be quick about it, it’s the wrong truck, honey. See, I run Freightliner. And I tell my drivers I run ’em because dollar for dollar they’re the best rig on the road. So it would hardly do to set there with a big grin on my face beneath a pregnant version of one of the competition, just like nothing odd was going on.”
Joy had wilted. “I see.”
“Now, if this here truck artist would happen to have one of a custom Freightliner with the Cummins forty-four, we might be in business.” I took another look at the canvas. “But maybe not as big.”
“Well, I can certainly find out if he has one. Or perhaps he could do something on commission. If I could have the name of the hotel where you’re staying, perhaps I can get back—”
“I never spend the night, doll—Wanda June don’t like to climb in the four-poster without me there to warm it up.” I looked at my watch. “How about them fruits and such, honey? I got to get a move on.”
Joy glanced back at the bookcase, then nodded to Juan. “He’ll bring them right out.”
Juan departed with the Day-Glo Mack, and Joy and I found things to look at besides each other. In the next minute Juan was back.
“Here they are,” Joy enthused again.
And there they were indeed, a set of three paintings, tasteful and congenial arrangements of pears and apples, squash and peppers, cauliflower and tomatoes. The latter were particularly impressive—sliced, arranged in a circle on a gaily painted plate, they were so red and juicy I expected the canvas to start dripping momentarily.
“Now that’s more like it,” I said. “How much?”
Joy met my eye. “We can offer these at six thousand.”
“Each?”
“Each.”
“Hmmm. Those tomaters sure look good. Almost as good as Wanda June’s.”
“Don’t they?”
“So who did it?”
“What?”
“The artist. What’s his name?”
“It’s a she. Lily Lucerne
. A lovely woman. And so obviously talented.”
I raised a brow. “She around?”
Joy frowned. “You mean in the city?”
“I mean in the building.”
“Well, I … why?”
“Like to talk to her.”
“But why?”
“I like to look eyeball-to-eyeball at the people I do business with. Habit of mine. Took me a long way in the trucking business.”
Joy glanced back at the telephone. “This is most unusual. Generally, we—”
“Come on, Joyous. A minute of her time for twenty-four Gs? Not bad wages where I come from.”
“But she’s a very private person. I don’t know if she—”
“I’ll treat her like I would a pickup with a bad valve. Come on, honey. No artist, no art.”
Joy’s lips pursed, then spread with the élan of salvation. “As luck would have it, Ms. Lucerne was in the building only moments ago. If you’ll give me a second, I’ll see if she’s available.”
Joy nodded to Juan and both of them disappeared through the disguised door. A moment later I followed them and found myself in a warren of offices and storerooms that opened off a central corridor.
Juan had disappeared. The other people in sight were all gathered at the end of the hall beneath a sign that read EXIT, a real one this time. There were three women and a man, and one of the woman was Joy.
The man was Oriental, presumably the businessman out of Maui and Gstaad. He was holding the hand of an even smaller woman who was dressed in black slacks and turtleneck, with eyes and hair to match. The man bowed, said something I couldn’t hear, smiled, and bowed again. At that point I made a noise, and all of them turned my way.
“Mr. Tanner,” Joy said quickly. “You were supposed to wait in the exhibit hall.”
“No time, Joy. Got to wrap this up and hit the road to Fresno.”
“But—”
“Who is this?” the third woman interrupted. Her accent made her Giselle of the hotel money.
I started to answer but Joy spoke for me. “This is Mr. Tanner, Giselle. A trucking magnate from Fresno. He’s very interested in four of Ms. Lucerne’s pieces.”
Book Case Page 12