by P. J. Tracy
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Monday funeral.’
‘I wish to God we didn’t have to go to this one.’
36
Diane hurried away from a cluster of admirers when Grace, Harley, Roadrunner, and Annie entered the art gallery, gliding toward them on a cloud of white silk.
She embraced them all, then took both of Grace’s hands in hers and stepped back, smiling. ‘You dressed up.’
‘Only for you.’ Grace smiled back.
‘Huh?’ Harley frowned at Grace’s trademark black jeans, T-shirt, and duster. ‘What are you talking about? That’s what she wears every day.’
‘Harley, you are such a cretin,’ Diane scolded him.
‘I keep telling him that,’ Annie said.
‘She’s wearing the Moschino T-shirt,’ Diane pointed out. ‘And if that isn’t dressing up I don’t know what is.’
Harley leaned over and peered at Grace’s T-shirt. ‘Looks like Fruit Of The Loom to me.’
Diane shook her head in bemused exasperation, then looked from one to the other. ‘You didn’t have to come tonight. I know how bad things have been.’
‘Sugar, are you out of your mind? Have we ever missed one of your openings?’ Annie asked. ‘Besides, this is just what we needed.’
Roadrunner nodded. ‘Yeah. Especially after the thing at the mall today.’
Diane took his hand and squeezed it. ‘Just let that all go for a couple hours. And I have something that I think will help.’ She raised her hand and a uniformed waiter came over with a tray of champagne.
‘I love this woman,’ Harley said, taking a glass from the tray and draining it, then grabbing another. ‘Where’s that sack-of-shit husband of yours?’
Diane waved a hand vaguely toward the crowd at the buffet table. ‘You know Mitch. Doing what he does best. When I left he was selling the most expensive piece here to some poor man who bought his last painting in a gas station parking lot.’ She sighed and glanced fondly over at Mitch. ‘It’s distracting him, anyway. He needed that.’
She turned back to them with a regretful smile. ‘I have to go mingle now, but please stay as long as you’d like. Eat, drink, be merry, and leave when you have to. It means the world that you all came tonight.’
She held Grace back when the others made an immediate beeline for the buffet table. ‘How are you holding up? This has to be worse for you than anyone else.’
Grace reached out and gave her a hug. ‘I get by with a little help from my friends,’ she quoted the Beatles. ‘Just like always.’
Gino and Magozzi parked in a pay-box lot and walked the last block in the cold, looking like a couple of B-movie mobsters in their flapping trench coats.
The Acton-Schlesinger Gallery was housed on the top floor of yet another renovated warehouse very much like the Monkeewrench building, and only a few blocks away. A brass plaque at the entrance of the building informed visitors that this had once housed a clothing manufacturer that specialized in men’s undergarments.
Gino was sullen and defensive as he and Magozzi entered the vacuous downstairs foyer, no doubt anticipating the pretentious snobbery and general nostril-gazing he was certain he would be subjected to from the crowd upstairs.
‘With that kind of attitude, you are going to get snubbed,’ Magozzi admonished him.
‘You just wait and see, Leo. I’ve been to stuff like this before with Angela and if you aren’t pale as a ghost, emaciated, and dressed head to toe in black, they won’t give you the time of day.’
‘You’re going to see what you want to see,’ Magozzi sighed. ‘Me, I’m just looking forward to seeing what kind of woman married a neurotic mess like Cross.’
The gallery space was vast and spartan, with gleaming blond floors and vaulted bare-beamed ceilings that glowed with soft track lighting. Abstract art hung from steel partitions that were arranged in labyrinthine fashion throughout the space. Elegant patrons with elevated chins and ennui-filled eyes milled through the maze like well-dressed rats, sipping pink champagne from crystal stemware.
An attractive young woman dressed in the requisite black uniform greeted them with a tray of champagne flutes. Her face had a fresh innocence to it despite the generous application of white powder, and the smile was demure, although the effect was mostly lost behind blood-red lipstick. To her credit, she didn’t bat an eye at their rumpled suits that were beginning to look slept in. ‘Welcome, gentlemen. May I offer you some champagne?’
Magozzi and Gino looked at each other. The prospect of an alcoholic beverage had them both salivating.
‘Billecart-Salmon,’ she enticed.
‘I guess that’s supposed to be good, huh?’ Gino asked her.
‘Better than good.’
He looked back at Magozzi. ‘We on duty?’ he whispered.
Magozzi bit his lower lip. ‘Not in an official capacity, I don’t think.’
Gino beamed at the young woman and took two flutes. ‘You are an angel from heaven. Bless you, my child.’
Her demure smile broadened to a grin. She seemed grateful to have found two patrons who wouldn’t have apoplexy if she broke character. ‘Anytime. I’ll keep my eye out for empties.’
‘You know, this place ain’t so bad after all,’ Gino said, smacking his lips and surveying the surroundings. ‘Best-tasting champagne I ever had, even if it is pink.’
Magozzi savored the glowing warmth of carbonated alcohol hitting his bloodstream fast. The feeling was vaguely familiar to him – he’d experienced it once or twice about a thousand years ago – it was called relaxation. He took another sip. ‘I suppose we should make the rounds.’
Gino drained his glass. ‘I like it here on the periphery. Let’s just stay here and get bombed, let Halloran take over when he gets into town.’
They indulged their wishful thinking for another minute, then entered the fray, pausing briefly at the first wall of Diane Cross’s paintings, all distinctively styled black-and-whites like the abstract in Mitch Cross’s office, and the ones hanging in MacBride’s living room.
Magozzi nodded to himself, understanding that marriage and friendship would explain the display of such works, much as a parent hangs the crayoned renderings of a beloved child on the refrigerator, but not understanding at all an entire exhibit of such careless starkness in a gallery as prestigious as this.
He apologized mentally to Vermeer and van Gogh, masters of light and color, for a world that now paid homage to chic over genius.
The Monkeewrench crew wasn’t hard to spot in the sea of sleek fashionistas. Grace MacBride and Harley Davidson, engaged in a private conversation at the moment, most closely resembled the gallery’s majority of denizens. Both of them could have passed for either patrons or artists, she in her black duster, he encased in enough black leather to dress a rodeo.
Annie stood a few feet away, coquettishly deflecting the attentions of a handsome young man in a vintage tuxedo. Somehow she’d found the time and change of wardrobe to magically transform herself into a semiformal butterfly adorned in diaphanous, hand-painted chiffon. Magozzi remembered what Espinoza had said about her clothing budget, and he believed it.
Roadrunner, obviously suffering from sensory overload, hovered alone against a far wall in his perennial Lycra – formal black for this occasion – shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. He offered them a weak wave, then went back to his pacing.
Gino shook his head in genuine sympathy. ‘Poor guy looks like an antelope in a pack of lions.’
‘Where’s Mitch?’
Gino didn’t hear him. ‘Annie is the only one who looks like she’s having fun,’ he sighed.
‘I think she always has fun. So Mitch – he’s the only missing person.’
Gino tore his eyes away from Annie and cocked a thumb toward a linen-covered buffet table groaning under the weight of sushi and floral arrangements. ‘There he is.’
Magozzi saw him then, next to a tall blond woman in a white silk gown. There was no question s
he was the artist – adoring fans clustered around her, vying for audience, and she graciously attended them all while managing to cosset her husband like a cherished pet.
So that was Diane Cross. The artist, the star, and obviously a doting wife. Not a ten-star stunner, maybe, but attractive in that wholesome, athletic sort of way so many Midwesterners aspired to.
The girl who’d greeted them appeared miraculously with a fresh bottle. ‘Don’t look so surprised,’ she laughed, refilling their glasses. ‘I told you I’d keep an eye out for empties.’
‘Well, cheers to you,’ Gino said. ‘Do you think you could fill up my friend over there, too? The tall skinny guy?’
‘Sure.’ She drifted away toward Roadrunner and Gino gave Magozzi a wink.
‘I’m going to make my way over there, see if Super Geek had any more luck tracing those e-mails.’
Roadrunner almost looked grateful when Gino approached him, then his face twisted in confusion, remembering that he was supposed to be taking sides. ‘Detective,’ he said warily.
‘You look like you’re about as happy to be here as I am.’
Roadrunner twirled his glass between his fingers nervously. ‘Yeah.’
‘Any new progress on the e-mails?’
‘No.’ His eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘Are you playing good cop now?’
Gino laughed. ‘No, I’m always the bad cop. But I’m off-duty, sort of. From now on, you’ve all got your own personal police protection, courtesy of MPD. We’re just filling in till the swing shift gets assigned.’
Roadrunner looked alarmed. ‘You mean . . . you’re tailing us?’
Gino shrugged good-naturedly. ‘Surveillance, protection – either way you look at it, everybody’s safer.’
Roadrunner frowned at him for a minute, then sighed. ‘Okay. I guess that makes sense, from a cop’s point of view.’
‘Only view I got, buddy. So you get dragged to this kind of stuff often?’
‘Pretty much. Courtesy to Mitch and Diane, you know?’
‘What do you think of the art?’
He shrugged in halfhearted apology. ‘Hey, I don’t know shit about art. Coming to the shows always makes me feel like an idiot.’
‘Well, if any of these people came to your office to see your work, you’d make them feel like idiots, so then it’d be even.’
‘Yeah, I guess so.’
Harley appeared from out of nowhere, which was hard to believe, given his mass. He placed himself between Roadrunner and Gino like a protective father defending his son against the neighborhood bully. ‘You checking up on us, Detective?’
‘Basically. I was just telling Roadrunner here, we got a car on each of you from now on.’
Harley looked Gino hard in the eye. ‘So you’re covering Grace?’
‘You bet.’
‘Well, I sure as hell hope you’re better at covering her than you were covering the goddamned Megamall.’
Gino glared at him. ‘You’re pretty fucking mouthy for a guy who doesn’t have an alibi for any of these murders.’
‘And you’re pretty fucking self-righteous for a guy who knew the last two murders were going down and didn’t stop them.’
Gino looked down into his glass, blowing out a silent whistle, counting to ten. ‘Okay, buddy,’ he finally said, ‘I’m a little buzzed right now, and I’m guessing you are too, which is why you forgot this whole shitload of a case is messing up your doorstep as much as ours.’
Harley glared at him for a minute, then slowly his shoulders slumped and he deflated like a spent balloon. ‘I didn’t forget, Detective,’ he said quietly. ‘Christ, we’re never going to forget. That’s the problem. Grace still blames herself for Georgia and now she’s taking the hits for these, too. We’re worried about her and it makes us crazy. Jesus, what a fucking mess.’
Gino eyed him speculatively. It hadn’t been an apology exactly, but it was close enough. ‘Fucking mess. I’ll drink to that.’ He lifted his flute and acknowledged Harley with a slight nod before draining his glass. ‘You know what? These damn glasses are too small.’
Harley nodded. ‘Sit tight. I know where they keep the bottles.’
Ten minutes and almost a bottle later, Gino was starting to think that Harley wasn’t such a bad guy after all – in fact, they seemed to have a lot in common. They both hated abstract art, liked pink champagne, and loved to eat. Roadrunner seemed pretty decent, too, especially for a techno-wienie.
They were all standing shoulder to shoulder in front of a painting of bold, distorted strokes that stretched upward like chunks of pulled taffy, trying to make sense of it.
‘So what do you think this is supposed to be?’ Gino asked.
‘Hell if I know,’ Harley said. ‘Black-and-white shit. I think they’re supposed to be people.’
‘They’re clothespins,’ Roadrunner said with great certainty.
‘Nah,’ Gino disagreed amiably. ‘Gotta be people. See the legs? And those fat globs of paint on the bottom are feet. Besides, why would anybody do abstracts of clothespins? They’re already abstract, aren’t they?’
Harley finished off the rest of the champagne straight from the bottle. ‘Good point, Detective.’
‘You have to wonder if they’re supposed to be anything,’ Roadrunner said, slurring his words slightly. ‘What if all this contemporary art stuff was just a scam? What if they just pour a bunch of paint on a canvas and hope it turns into something some pseudo-intellectual art critic says is profound?’
‘That’s exactly what I think,’ Harley started to say, but then a stunning blond in a tight black dress sidled up next to him and touched his arm. ‘Is this your work?’
Harley concentrated hard to keep his jaw from falling open. ‘Uh . . . no.’
‘Oh.’ She looked around uncomfortably, searching for a polite way to extricate herself from her obvious mistake.
‘It is a . . . moving piece, though, isn’t it?’ Harley added quickly.
Roadrunner and Gino pretended to ignore the exchange, but they were both smiling smugly.
‘Oh, yes! I think it’s incredible!’ the blond gushed with renewed interest. ‘Whoever did these is quite talented. So what’s your interpretation of this one?’
Harley leaned back on the rundown heels of his motorcycle boots. ‘Well, I think it’s a poignant representation of the contemporary dichotomy between homogeneity and global diversity.’
Next to him, Roadrunner bent forward and coughed into his hand, stifling a laugh. Gino looked away.
The blond’s eyes brightened in admiration. ‘I can see that. You know, with the contrast between the black . . . and the white.’
‘Exactly. A bold statement. Black. And then, white. I think there are some racial undertones, too.’
‘I still think they’re clothespins,’ Roadrunner said quietly.
The blond frowned over at him, crinkles of irritation creasing her forehead. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said they’re clothespins. Black and white clothespins,’ Roadrunner repeated.
She nodded. ‘I see your point. The clothespins represent rural artifacts in a complicated world . . .’
‘And I think they’re people with teeny-weeny heads and big fat shapeless feet.’ Gino upped the stakes.
‘Okay. I could see that, too. The suggestion of motor function overriding mental function as a general condition of mankind; the rigidity of the torsos and the emptiness of the background hinting at a paralysis of spirit that has rendered life meaningless . . .’
‘A combined representation of paganism and Judeo-Christianity enveloped in hopelessness.’ Harley gave a sage nod.
The blond looked as if she’d just had an epiphany. ‘Perhaps it’s trying to talk to us about being spiritually bereft.’
Gino’s eyes were watering from the effort of holding back his laughter. He looked into his empty glass. ‘My major concern at the moment is the fact that I’m alcoholically bereft. If you’ll excuse me?’ He turned and sought out th
e girl with the tray; Roadrunner examined his options and decided to take up his old station by the far wall.
Across the gallery, Magozzi had waited to approach Grace until she was alone – a window of opportunity that had proven to be rare as hen’s teeth. He shouldn’t have been surprised – aloof, dark-haired beauties were universally alluring to men, whether your passion was art or punk rock or reading back issues of Field & Stream during half time. And if you were clueless to the fact that this particular beauty had a very nasty temper and a loaded Sig lodged under her armpit, she probably seemed like fair game.
She watched him approach, her expression absolutely neutral. They stood there and stared at each other for a moment, then Magozzi said, ‘There are some things I need to ask you.’
‘I was alone at the office. No witnesses. No alibi.’
‘I know. It wasn’t that.’
‘What, then?’
Magozzi looked around, hesitating, stalling. ‘It’s not that easy. I shouldn’t be talking to you at all.’
‘Because I’m a suspect?’
‘Something like that.’
She didn’t say anything; she just stood there waiting, not helping him at all.
‘Can I give you a lift home?’ he finally asked. ‘We could talk on the way.’ When she didn’t answer right away, he added, ‘It’s important.’
She thought about it for a minute. ‘I’ve got my car. You can ride along if you want.’
‘Give me a few minutes. I’ll meet you downstairs.’
Magozzi made a quick circuit of the gallery and finally found Gino just coming out of the restroom. ‘Hey, buddy.’ Gino slapped him on the back. ‘You taken a leak yet? They got phones in there, right on a little table with curvy legs . . .’
‘I’m going to ride home with MacBride.’
Gino blinked once, then tried to lower his brows in a scowl, but champagne spoiled the effort, leaving one brow up so he merely looked whimsical. ‘You’re gonna date a suspect?’
‘It’s not a date.’
Gino tried to absorb that, tucked his lower lip inward. ‘You gonna look under her skirt?’
Magozzi covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head. ‘Look, Gino, you don’t know where I am, you don’t know what I’m doing, okay?’