I knelt on the pier and opened my arms for Dashiell, folding him to my chest as he came for his hug. I slipped the Minox out of my pocket and photographed the leash and collar where it was before untying it and stuffing it into my pocket with the camera. Dashiell danced around for more praise, which he got as I checked the area as carefully as I could and then headed for home.
If the collar and leash Dashiell had found were Magritte’s, then Clifford had definitely taken him along to the pier. But why? As a pickup aid? Lord knows, more people talk to me when I’m with Dashiell than when I’m alone. So was Magritte tied to the fence while Clifford had sex? If you took a rough count of the condoms that littered the pier, it was certain that, despite the weather, Clifford wouldn’t have been the only one having sex out here.
I needed to talk to Louis Lane and see how they were getting along. Was it spite that brought him here, or hunger? And what about all that money? Why did he come out here with so much cash in his pocket? Did he simply have so much he was careless? The money in so many pockets back at the loft would lead me to think that might be the case.
Suddenly, I was famished. Craving a ham and melted brie on sourdough bread, I headed for Anglers and Writers, across from the ball field.
New York’s laws prohibit animals on public transportation and in places where food is served, but since Dash, who schmoozes the old people at the Village Nursing Home when I am between cases, is a registered service dog, and perpetually in training, the restriction doesn’t apply to him.
Being a detective is a lonely life, but at least I never have to eat out without a date.
8
You Don’t Really Belong in This Family
Getting into bed with the copy of Clifford Cole’s will, gallery contract, address book, and a yellow highlighter looked to be the most promising evening I’d had in a long time.
The original will, which dated back to when Clifford was in his mid-twenties, was mostly the legal jargon that makes what should be three or four sentences go on for pages. Most people that young don’t write a will, especially if they don’t have kids. Unless their money is family money, and part of the deal when they get it is that it stays in the family.
In the original document, Clifford left everything to his beloved mother, Adrienne Wynton Cole, and, should she predecease him, to his beloved brother, Peter David Cole. This could mean that his father had already died when the will was written or that the money came from his mother or her family in the first place. Of course, once he had the money, in whatever form he got it, lump sum, generous allowance, untouchable trust where he could draw a set amount of the interest, or whatever, no one could require him to leave it to a person of their choosing. So he was either young or very honorable, or both. Or perhaps no one he preferred to leave the money to had yet come along. Follow the money. It was the first law of investigation work.
I turned to the next document, one of two codicils, both much more recent than the original will. It left the little African basenji, Ceci N’Est Pas un Chien, who apparently was not yet a champion, to Dennis Mark Rosenberg, aka Dennis Mark Keaton.
People are usually most defensive, my shrink used to say, about things that hit too close to home. Now, Rachel, she’d say after an outburst of denial, what’s really going on here?
Of course, Dennis could dislike Louis for any number of other reasons. It’s not uncommon for people to be jealous of their best friend’s lover. I wondered if Dennis and Cliff had been lovers before Louis came onto the scene. Or even afterward. I checked the date of the codicil, but it turned out the one I had just read was the second. Perhaps when I checked to make sure I had everything ready to be copied I had gotten them out of order. The first of the two codicils was two years old, and left Clifford’s entire artistic estate to Leonard Polski, aka Louis Lane. The Magritte codicil was dated a year and a half ago, five and a half months later.
If Cliff wasn’t accepted by his family, he still kept faith with them financially. He probably knew he had to anyway. His will would be contested if he didn’t, that is, unless he had been leading one of those normal lives your well-meaning relatives always tell you about, a life with a spouse of the opposite sex and children.
Dennis thought Cliffs “problem” was a problem for his family. Had they told Cliff, the way families do, that he could change if he wanted to? Had they offered to pay for therapy?
Would they have wanted either Magritte or Clifford’s paintings? I wondered if his mother or his brother would have come to his show, had he lived long enough for the gallery to actually install it.
I thought about the coolness in his paintings, perhaps because he felt apart from his natural family, felt Magritte, of rising son, and his other heirs, Louis and Dennis, were his real family. If he left the paintings to Louis, he must have felt good about the relationship, at least at the time the codicil was written.
I picked up the gallery contract. How much of the post-eighties art world bust of the pay-the-piper nineties was reflected in Clifford Cole’s contract with the Cahill Gallery I didn’t know. I had never read a gallery contract before. I knew that a lot of the SoHo galleries had closed, and the remaining ones were often empty, run by people as desperate as the woman who had followed me around the Dots installation at Cahill earlier in the day. I have always found it amusing when someone tries to talk you into buying a so-called piece of art that costs more than your yearly gross.
There were still some wonderful things to see in the downtown galleries, works like Clifford Cole’s that would linger in memory, where the range and ability of the artist actually merited the space his work occupied. Unfortunately, much of what was on display for eighties prices made me want to call the bunko squad. But there’s no such thing, other than for forgery, in the art world. It’s not a crime to produce derivative, dull, or simply poor “works,” as the contract calls what the artist produces. It’s simply a matter of taste.
Clifford’s first contract was surprisingly short and simple, free of the jargon of wills, mortgages, and divorce documents. The gallery would determine the price, and the artist could not sell comparable works for less. The gallery would receive 50 percent not only of the price of works sold at the exhibition it would install but of any sales made by the artist from his studio that were a direct result of the representation and the exhibition at the Cahill Gallery, and even any nonrelated sales made out of the artist’s studio for the duration of the agreement, which was one year. It was sort of the same deal real estate brokers love home owners to sign, stating that if the owner sells his home during the time of the broker’s contract, even in cases where the broker has done nothing but sit on her ass and never advertised or shown the house, she will still receive 6 percent of the sale price. Nice work if you can get it.
The Cahill Gallery got first pick of all of Cliff’s art, which meant that Cliff—now Louis—couldn’t sell anything without giving the Cahill Gallery half the money, even if they never gave Clifford a show. I wondered what Leonard Polski would do with his inheritance. I hadn’t seen most of the paintings. They were draped and standing in a huge storage closet opposite the den, and the light in the closet didn’t work. Next time I’d bring a flashlight and look at the rest of Leonard’s loot.
I flipped through Clifford’s address book. There were lots of names of galleries, other places he had probably sent a padded manila envelope with his résumé, slides, SASE, and lots of hope. I liked his work a lot better than much of what I see in SoHo, but there was no way I could judge if it ever would have become hot enough to sell. Often that has as much to do with an artist’s life or who he knows as it has to do with his ability or originality.
I wondered if Clifford had gotten depressed about his inability to sell his “works.” He had probably been elated the day he signed the contract. That had been November 16, which would mean he had been working on things for his show since then. There had been no date set, no promise of how soon it would be or how many of his works would be
included. Most shows were up for a three-week period, during which there would be an opening, often stacked with the artist’s friends and sometimes, like the invitations, paid for by the artist. But then you had the chance to hope, and who could put a price tag on what that was worth? There might be a sale, a visit by a critic, a positive line in the press. You might, after all, have a chance.
Peter Cole did not live in Fort Lee, but Woodcliff Lake. I found Morgan Gilmore’s number, too. He lived in Greensboro, North Carolina. I marked it with the highlighter, then put it on the nightstand with the rest of the papers.
In the morning, I’d try to reach Louis Lane. After that, I’d start looking for Billy Pittsburgh, who, I suspected, was using a name other than the one he had been given as a child.
What did it all mean, all this name changing? I had even done it myself.
When I took Jack’s name, I had thrown away my own. I had detached myself from my past and my family. When we split, I chose to keep his name, not my own, even though I had used it for less than a year. I had set myself adrift. I had even rejected my profession, taking a job with the Petrie Detective Agency on lower Broadway, run by two brothers, Bruce and Frank.
I didn’t actually meet the older Petrie, Bruce, until I had been working at the agency for two and a half months. He was obsessed with electronic equipment for both surveillance and criminal activities. Every few months or so he’d surface from his windowless back office and show us the specs on the latest eavesdropping equipment, voice-changing telephone, letter bomb scanner, or microcamera in a key chain.
It was Frank who had hired me to work as a junior undercover agent trainee, meaning I would do the same work as the regular agents but for much less money, because, as he so wisely explained, what if you’re following a guy and he goes into the men’s room and there’s another way out? And when I presented the same scenario with a woman being followed, he had shoved some papers around on his desk and said he couldn’t sit around all day and waste his valuable time arguing with me, there was work to be done, and did I want the job or not? I said I did. When I got home, I called Lili.
Why do you want to put yourself on the outside looking in? she asked, one of her usual rhetorical questions. No, she said, changing her mind, for you, that would be an improvement. You won’t have time to press your nose against the glass. You’ll be too busy looking inside other people’s garbage cans to even wonder about how normal people live. You don’t really belong in the family, she said.
Family, Dennis had said, oh, you know.
Frank Petrie had put a tail on me right after he’d hired me, a real geek.
Hey, you never know, the Pinkertons could have sent me to find out all his secrets.
The tail was so ugly, you couldn’t miss him from a mile away. It did not require a genius to figure out what was going on. I called Frank.
“Next time,” I told him, “send someone less memorable.”
“Good work, kid,” he said. “You might not be a total loss after all.”
Now, why couldn’t anyone in my own family ever say anything that supportive!
9
You Can Never Be Too Paranoid
I woke up to the sound of my own voice coming from the office. I hadn’t remembered to turn down the volume on the answering machine, which I leave on high during the day so that I can monitor calls from anywhere in the house. Living in this city, you can never be too paranoid. At least that’s what my shrink always used to say.
The next thing I heard was Dennis.
“Rachel, it’s Dennis Keaton. Please call me. I have something important to tell you.”
I picked up the phone. “Hey.”
“Have you seen the Times?”
“Not yet, Dennis. I was asleep.”
“Oh. Sorry. I forget other people do that,” he said.
Great. My mother had been reincarnated as a gay guy.
“Can you hang on?” I asked.
“The C section,” he said. “Page nineteen. I’ll hold.”
I went downstairs, opened the front door, and sent Dashiell for the Times.
To most people, a C section is a cesarean. If you live in New York City, it’s the arts section of the Times, the part your husband the dentist hands you while he reads the international, national, and local news and checks the value of his holdings in the business section. I found the article on page nineteen and picked up the cordless extension in the living room.
“So—‘Not the Death of Art. Murdered artist Clifford Cole’s works will be on display in his first one-man show this weekend at the Cahill Gallery in SoHo, a posthumous installation of the artist’s paintings, drawings and sculpture,’” I said, reading from the article that Dennis could probably recite by heart. “I guess Veronica Cahill finally figured out what installation is going to follow Dots.”
“What are you talking about, Rachel?”
“I stopped by the gallery yesterday, just to take a look, and they had this installation called Dots, the most god-awful stuff you ever saw. Well, no, I guess we’ve both seen worse. Anyway, I told the salesperson I sort of collected dog art, I had Dashiell there, and she failed to sell me a Clifford Cole. She said she didn’t know what the next show would be. But apparently Veronica Cahill figured out a good way to get some mileage out of the contract she signed with Cliff. The way it’s put here,” I said, referring to the article, “well, the notoriety will at least bring people in, maybe even critics. Death makes good copy, or so they say.”
“Do you believe this?” Dennis said. “‘An up and coming star of the downtown art world, cut down by human hatred just as his career was taking off.’ Where do they get this garbage? She never even guaranteed him she’d put one of his pieces in a group show. Now she’s his fucking patron. Excuse me while I go get a bag to throw up in.”
There was nothing but silence on the line for a long moment.
“Listen, Dennis, this is good, isn’t it? I mean, wouldn’t it be worse if no one ever saw Cliff’s paintings? They’re quite wonderful.”
He didn’t respond.
“Dennis?”
“You’re right, I know it, it’s just that …”
“I know. He didn’t get the support when he was alive, and he won’t get to hear the applause, right?”
“Right,” he said, “and someone else will get the money.”
“Louis.”
“Louis?”
“Louis.”
“I thought his family …”
“Louis.”
“Now I’m really going to be sick. Rachel, I bet Louis is behind all this publicity, this exploitation. I bet he engineered it!”
“It’s possible. It should certainly increase the value of his inheritance. Let’s keep our mouths shut and our ears open.” That’s the second law of investigative work. But I sometimes have trouble with the mouth shut part. I thought Dennis would, too.
“Dennis, don’t tell anyone you hired me or what I do.”
“Oh, God.”
“What? Or should I say who?”
“I told Louis.”
“Shit. Anyone else?”
“No. I swear.”
“Okay. Let’s keep it that way. I have to lie sometimes. Do you understand?”
“I never thought about it. I’m not exactly experienced in this sort of thing. Sorry. I’ll watch my mouth. I promise.”
“It’s my fault, Dennis. I fucked up. I should have told you. It just means Louis will be, well, more guarded with me.”
“You’re not thinking that Louis—”
“It’s possible. He did gain from Clifford’s death.”
“Not nearly what he lost.”
Now it was my turn to be silent.
“You’ll be there, at the opening?” he asked.
“Definitely. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Would you?”
“Clifford would kill me if I did, no matter what it took. Sorry I woke you, Rachel, but you said I could call anytime, and, shit, it’s ten-t
hirty.”
“No problem. I was up late reading Clifford’s address book. His brother Peter lives in Woodcliff Lake, by the way, not Fort Lee.”
“Same difference. It’s all Jersey,” he said.
“Dennis, while I’ve got you on the phone, I need to ask you something. You said Magritte’s collar and leash were missing, right?”
“Yes. They weren’t on the hook, and I didn’t see them anywhere else.”
“What did they look like?”
“Red leather, thin, buckle collar, not a slip, four-foot leash. Oh, and Cliff had hung a little bell on the collar. He liked the way it sounded when Magritte walked. Why?”
“Dashiell found them, on the pier. The leash was tied to the back fence, way low, buried in the snow. So he was there. Dennis, I’m sorry, but it looks as if Clifford took Magritte and went out to meet someone. Why else would he be on the pier at that hour?”
“You mean, he took Magritte out to help him hit on someone and then tied him up while he was having sex? That’s so cheap.”
“It’s done all the time, Dennis. Let’s get real here. Well, it may not be done all that often with a dog in tow, but guys are out there fucking in all kinds of weather and at just about any hour after dark. Am I right?”
“Okay, okay, I hear you. You’re right. The police are right. So he had Magritte with him, and Magritte carried on while Clifford had sex. Magritte wouldn’t have taken this lying down, you know. He had this thing about not being stopped from what he was doing. So if you took him out to walk, you better keep walking, not tie him up and fuck. That wouldn’t have been part of his agenda.”
“Dennis, I didn’t say Magritte was happy to be tied up on the pier. And I know you’re not happy to hear this.”
“Never mind that. We’re after the truth, aren’t we? So, the way I figure it, why take the dog? He only would have made a racket. He’d have sounded like he was being murdered. That’s just the way he was when he was thwarted. People think these dogs are quiet because they don’t bark. Trust me, they’re not quiet.”
This Dog for Hire Page 5