Riker was seated at the desk in Mallory’s office. “She’s out.” Now he looked up and whistled. “That’s a great haircut, Charles.”
Charles agreed. He was very pleased with himself today. Mallory’s hairstylist had convinced him that giving more volume to his hair would call attention away from his large nose. The man had cut his locks with the skill of a sculptor, and the effect was striking. Charles thought it highly unlikely that his nose could be minimized by a blow dryer, but he had managed to sustain this fairy tale all the way from Fifty-seventh Street to SoHo. And he had yet another reason for good spirits. He had something to contribute to the case.
“But where did Mallory go? I have good news.”
“She’s at the Koozeman Gallery.” Riker removed a carton from the desk and settled it to the floor. “The mayor ordered us to take down the crime-scene tapes. Seems they were getting in the way of the television crews. God forbid a homicide investigation should hold up a television shooting schedule. Get this, they’re doing a documentary of the old murders, and Oren Watt is the technical advisor. They want to reenact it in the Koozeman Gallery.”
“What uncanny timing.” Charles was staring at the cork wall. It was a bizarre combination of Mallory’s ultraneat positioning and Markowitz’s sloppy handwriting, interspersed with bloody photographs of footprints and articles of clothing. It was almost a chessboard.
“Yeah, those television jackals move fast,” said Riker.
“But it’s the wrong gallery. The murders were in the East Village location.”
“Charles, it’s only television. No one expects real. So what’s the good news?”
“I found Andrew Bliss.”
“Nice going. Where is he?”
“At Bloomingdale’s.”
“You think he might be there for a while?”
“I know he will.”
Riker was rising from his chair when Charles waved him to sit down again. “No, there’s no hurry. He’s there for the long haul. You see, my hairdresser—Mallory’s hairdresser—is having an affair with an off-Broadway set designer whose brother is one of Bloomingdale’s executives. They were talking on the speakerphone while I was having my hair cut. According to the brother of the Bloomingdale’s man, Andrew Bliss outfitted the roof as a luxury campsite. Then the chairwoman of the Public Works Committee sent out a press release declaring Andrew Bliss an artwork in progress. And an ACLU attorney is meeting with the store’s law firm to discuss freedom of speech versus liability. Bliss has already done his first press interview. Now he’s an official performance artist.”
“Oh, great. Another performance artist.” Riker began to push the telephone buttons. “Let’s see what we’ve got on the little bastard.”
While Riker was talking to the desk sergeant in the East Side precinct, Charles turned his attention back to the cork wall. All but a few of the pictures and reports belonged to the old murders of the artist and the dancer. As he walked the length of the wall, he was aware of the father’s brain merging with the daughter’s. Here was Louis Markowitz’s mania for detail matching Mallory’s obsession with neatness. Every bit of paper was equidistant from each other, but the significance of some items should be beneath Mallory’s contempt for the small details. And she usually tossed out whatever did not agree with her.
Riker held the telephone receiver in the crook of his neck as he tapped his foot and played with his pencil, all the signs that his call had been placed on hold.
Charles continued down the length of the wall. The fine detail work was already falling away. Louis Markowitz’s influence was passing off. Most of Louis’s paperwork had related to Aubry Gilette. Now Charles encountered a smiling publicity photo of Peter Ariel, the artist who had died with the young dancer. All that accompanied this photo was a medical examiner’s report.
After a few minutes’ conversation, Riker put down the phone, and none too gently. “We can’t touch Andrew Bliss. No interviews, nothing. Bliss’s personal shopper signed a charge for the merchandise. Then his lawyer showed up with a check to cover damages to a roof staircase.”
“But surely this is criminal trespass.”
“The store isn’t filing a complaint. They like the little guy. He’s their most loyal shopper. And he’s good for a five-minute spot on the evening news.” Riker put his feet up on the desk and slumped low in his chair. “I don’t understand this, Charles. I thought the guy was a professional art critic, and now he’s a damn performance artist.”
“Well, there’s quite a bit of crossover in art. Artists sometimes write art criticism the way authors review books by other people. No reason why a critic shouldn’t make art.”
“But isn’t that a conflict of interest?”
“Perhaps, but crossover is common practice. Take your most recent dead artist, Dean Starr. As you know, that wasn’t the name he was born with. His—”
“Starr is an alias?” Riker pulled out his pen and notebook and scanned the first page. “All the identification on his body was in that name.”
“Sorry, I assumed you knew.” Charles retrieved his discarded newspaper from the wastebasket and opened it to the obituary columns. He tapped the boxed mention of former art critic, current murder victim, Dean Strvnytchlk. “That’s it. Under his original name, he used to publish a rather bad magazine of local art coverage. He was the chief art critic. He also contributed reviews to local tabloids.”
Riker stared at the obituary. “How do you pronounce that?”
“Too many consonants. You’re on your own.” Charles opened a desk drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors. “If you followed the art news, you would have seen a review of his own show written under his real name.”
“The bastard reviewed himself? You’re kidding me.”
“Not at all. There’s historical precedent—Walt Whit-man once reviewed his own work anonymously.” Charles carefully cut the obituary from the paper, trying to make straight edges so as not to annoy Mallory with an imperfection. “Starr’s gallery dealer, Koozeman, is also a critic. He writes a regular column for an international art magazine. Oh yes, it goes on all the time.”
Charles tacked the obituary on the cork wall below the medical examiner’s preliminary report on the death of Dean Starr. And now he noticed the next item on the cork wall was a blank sheet of paper. On closer inspection, this paper covered a photograph. He turned to Riker. “What’s this about?”
“Mallory did that for you. It’s the crime-scene photo of the old double homicide. She covered it over because you knew Aubry.”
Charles and Riker exchanged a look which acknowledged that neither of them had believed she was capable of this delicate courtesy.
Mallory paused near a pile of the television crew’s paraphernalia. Quinn watched as she neatly snatched up a clipboard. Anyone might have believed it belonged to her as she studied the pages on her way out the door.
He caught up with her on the street outside the Koozeman Gallery. “Hello again.”
She nodded, acknowledging that she recognized him, but not that she was particularly pleased to see him. She turned away and walked down the street.
“I wonder if you could explain something to me.” He walked beside her, matching his steps to hers. “The drawings of the bodies? Oren Watt has been selling them for years, and I still can’t believe he’s being allowed to profit on murder.”
“He gets around the profit-on-crime laws because he was never brought to trial.” One hand shaded her eyes from the light of the noonday sun as she looked up at him. “But your family lawyer would have told you that.”
It was impossible to miss her suggestion that he was making up useless small talk. And of course, he was.
A warm breeze ruffled a bright silk banner overhead, and he could follow the wind down the SoHo street with the lift and swirl of similar banners which hung out over the sidewalk to advertise galleries and trendy boutiques.
He was walking faster now, to keep pace with her, and casting arou
nd for some bit of unfoolish conversation that might hold her attention for a while.
Mallory broke the silence. “Did you know Koozeman scheduled another show of Dean Starr’s work?”
“Yes. I thought it might be going up today. I was surprised by the Oren Watt drawings.”
Her face was telling him she didn’t think he was all that surprised, and he wasn’t. She quickened her steps, putting some distance between them. He walked faster.
“Koozeman never handled Oren Watt before,” he said, in self-defense. “So, it is odd.”
“Koozeman says he’s not handling Watt.” She consulted the stolen clipboard as she walked. At the top of the first sheet was a network logo followed by a schedule of places and dates. “He says it’s a temporary installation. The television crew rented the space for the day.” She made a check mark by the Koozeman Gallery and this day’s date. “The Dean Starr show goes up in three days. Do you know why Koozeman’s so hot to have another showing of Starr’s work?”
“He’ll want to take advantage of the publicity on the murder. Also, he has to unload the work as fast as he can. It’s such a crock, it even strains the credulity of the amateur collector.”
“What about the artist who died with Aubry? Was he any good?”
“Peter Ariel? Well, for a dead junkie and a third-rate hack, he had one hell of a run on the secondary market. But what a critic thinks of his work doesn’t matter.”
“Explain.” It was an order.
He obliged her. “Collectors don’t listen to art critics anymore. They listen to their accountants, who tell them how the artist is doing in the primary market. Then, they can make projections on the staying power in the secondary market.”
“What is this, Quinn? Are we talking art, or stocks and bonds?”
“Same thing. The actual art means very little in the greater schematic of finance. The initial buyers paid a low price for Peter Ariel’s sculptures. After his death, the work was worth a small fortune on the resale market. The early resale buyers were ghouls who collect souvenirs of messy homicides. The amateur collectors misunderstood, bought the work at the inflated price, and held on to it too long. Once the ghoul market was saturated, the price declined to the cost of the artist’s materials.”
She stopped walking, and he stopped. By only standing there, she was tethering him to the same square of the sidewalk. “You never mentioned any of this to Markowitz, did you?”
Now how did she manage to frame a question as an accusation? “No, I didn’t. The focus was always on Aubry, not Peter Ariel.”
She resumed her purposeful walking, and he kept pace with her, still tethered. “There was another artist mentioned in Bliss’s review—Gillian, the vandal artist. What do you know about him?”
“He has an exhibition of photographs in a gallery at the end of this block. You might find it diverting.”
“Photography? I thought vandalism was his style.”
“Wait till you see the photographs, Mallory.”
They entered the Greene Street gallery by way of a narrow stairway to the second floor. The rough steel door opened onto a large white space filled with light from loft windows lining the street front. People were milling around, some looking at the photographs on the wall. A man stood by a desk, holding sheets of slides to the light. Done with one sheet, he tossed it onto a pile at his feet and went on to the next.
Quinn pointed to this man. “Some artists spend a hundred hours on a single painting, and the gallery director spends a minute looking at twenty slides of their work. Occasionally, I time them. Call it a hobby. This man’s about average, a minute an artist.”
They drifted to the collection of photographs on the near wall. The work was an amateur’s effort in bad lighting, with no eye for composition. The first photograph was of a crack in an old statue. Gillian’s signature was printed in the fresh wound. All the rest were much the same, differing only in the statuary. Each work of art was harmed by a chip or a crack and signed by the assailant.
Mallory looked bewildered for a moment, but made a quick recovery. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Vandalism of priceless art? Yes. There’s a more interesting show in the next room.” He took her arm and guided her into the adjoining gallery space.
“At least it doesn’t smell,” said Mallory, counting the spilled garbage cans. There were twelve in all, contents strewn about the floor. He led her down a clear passage, sans garbage, saying, “I want you to know that the garbage was authentically spilled, and not purposefully arranged this way. The artist is a purist. He has integrity.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Yes, but it’s also true.”
Other people stood in ones and pairs, inspecting garbage spills. One young man, wearing the art student’s slashed-at-the-knee-for-no-good-reason blue jeans, was standing in the corner making notes on the half-eaten guacamole which he had found in the garbage spill that he was fondest of.
“So why doesn’t it smell?” she asked.
“The gallery owner thought it might put off the paying customers. It’s coated with resin. The artist didn’t like that. He wanted it to rot naturally.”
“Naturally—he’s a purist.”
“Now you’ve got it, Mallory.”
“And that show in the front room, the vandalism?”
“All the statues are from the Greek collection of a major museum, and they don’t want to encourage any more of this. The museum director gave me a ‘No comment,’ but I noted all the statues had been removed. When they go on display again, there won’t be any trace of the damage.”
“I bet they bought out the show.”
He nodded. “You’re right, they did. This show will close as soon as their check clears the bank. They were very good-natured mugging victims. Rumor has it they ransomed the negatives, too.”
“I just can’t believe this,” she said.
“New York City. What’s not to believe?”
Twenty minutes later, Quinn was sipping espresso under the green awning of a sidewalk cafe on Bleecker Street and ferreting out Mallory’s tastes in art. It seemed she only liked minimalism, and only because it was neat and clean, not cluttered with tony metaphors and messy paints. She had no use for any extraneous line or shape.
When she was done, he said, “Well then, why not take a blue pencil to James Joyce, edit out all the extraneous stuff that doesn’t really further the plot? Most people don’t understand the metaphors anyway. So we could probably whittle Ulysses down to a manageable short story.”
He was smiling now, because she was smiling, and he was helpless to do otherwise. He wondered where she had learned that beguiling trick. An old memory brought him up short, as he realized she was perfectly mimicking the smile of the late Louis Markowitz. He was startled, but also confident that it did not show.
He continued as though nothing had happened, as though he had not just seen a ghost. “And then we’ll have literature that’s more accessible to a thirteen-year-old subnormal. Why make people reach for art, when they can pick it up off the floor?”
Her hand went up to say, Enough, I get the point. He went on anyway. And so began Mallory’s first lecture on the other language, the metaphor of subject, the symbolism of object, the poetry evoked by color and shape, by texture and line, what was said by the immediacy of a single violent stroke of a brush or the subtle shading of a pencil.
And then she asked, “So where’s my metaphor in the garbage and the vandalism?”
“All right, you win.” He sensed that winning was the main thing with her, the very key to her. “You’re still planning on attending the ball tomorrow night?”
“Yes, and I still need an interview with Gregor Gilette. You’ve got that covered, right? He’ll keep it quiet?”
He smiled and let her take that for a positive response. “But you must let me help you with something else. The opening for the next Dean Starr show is by invitation only. I could have Koozeman invite you.”
“I don’t need an invitation—I’m the police. Riker says you weren’t planning to review the first Dean Starr show. So I have to wonder why you were there that night.”
Like Riker, she had saved her best cut for last. Her style, however, was a departure from her partner’s—not a blunt and clumsy accusation, but a trap. She only stared at him now, defying him to lie to her and try to get away with it.
“Riker was right, I never review hacks. A bad review is counterproductive. Repetition of the name is fame in New York City. I only went to the opening for the food and wine. It’s so rare to find hors d’oeuvres served in galleries anymore.”
“Seriously.”
“Seriously, Mallory, you can hardly believe I went there to appreciate art.”
The woman ceased to drag her rolling wire cart, which was partially covered by a tarp. Tired, she leaned on the cart handle as she watched the art critic leaving the Bleecker Street cafe with the young blond woman. Quinn held open the door of a small tan car. The young woman disappeared into it and drove off. Now he crossed Bleecker Street and approached the woman with the wire cart. He looked into her eyes, where it was winter of weak iris skies and clouding cataracts. He nodded to her, and a bit of paper passed from his hand to hers as he passed her by.
Her palsied hand jolted the cart. Trembling fingers pulled back the tarp as the woman peered inside it, eyes fixing on a tea tin, believing she had heard a thought. Snow drifted through her mind and she lost the threads to where she was and why she was. The dead child’s brains gently remembered for her. “Move on,” urged the voice from the tin. The woman nodded and moved on down Bleecker Street.
She seemed a collection of things found and put together. Her four skirts were a concert, whispers of dead leaves shushing along toward Lafayette and turning south on that street. Her head of iron-gray hair wobbled on a slender bird’s neck. She crossed wide Houston with her free hand tucked in, giving one arm the appearance of a useless wing, atrophied or broken.
Killing Critics Page 8