We found Billie asleep under a pile of filthy blankets and newspapers. I put Dash on a sit-stay off to the side so that she wouldn’t wake up, see him, and get frightened. I called her name four or five times before she stirred. Slowly, a hand wrapped in rags pushed up a corner of the blanket, and I could barely see a face deep under the covers looking out at me.
“Are you Billie?” I asked.
There was no answer.
“I’m looking for the Billie who found a man lying on the pier a few weeks ago, the Billie who told the cops there was someone on the pier. Was that you?”
Still no answer. But the cover stayed up.
“You’re not in any trouble. I can use your help if you know anything or if you know another Billy who might help me. It’s worth a nice meal, if you can help.”
The cover dropped.
By now I was freezing. I didn’t know how these people survived outside in such cold weather. Of course, not all of them did.
I tucked a couple of bucks under the blanket, then stood there like an idiot waiting for a response.
Chilled and frustrated, Dash and I headed home, stopping to pick up the photos I’d taken at the pier and at Cliff’s loft on the way.
Why didn’t homeless people flock together, like birds? Or sleep together for warmth? Then maybe someone would know Billy Pittsburgh’s whereabouts. I felt stupid spending my time looking for him; I even began to wonder if Mary Perry really knew Billy.
Sometimes the homeless talk like the Alzheimer patients I worked with at the nursing home, stringing things together that they hear and talking about them as if they were real, adding parts of TV stories and overheard conversations to their own experiences.
I felt as if I were in a fog, too. So when I got home, I went straight up to my office, where I have an oversize blackboard I picked up at the flea market on Greenwich Avenue. I began to list the people in Clifford’s life and to think about what each stood to gain from his death.
Dennis Mark Keaton, aka Dennis Mark Rosenberg.
Gain: one champion basenji, Magritte. Will he do anything Clifford didn’t do, e.g., hire him out at stud? How much could you make doing that anyway? Find out. Loss: one best friend with whom he was possibly (hopelessly?) in love.
Louis Lane, aka Leonard Polski.
Inherits a previously worthless, now valuable art collection. Could there have been a long-term plan at work here? After all, Louis had hooked Cliff up with Veronica. Were there hard feelings, oops, between the lovers? A desire for revenge? A need for money? Loss: the love of his life? Or not.
Veronica Cahill.
Lots of SoHo galleries had closed and lots of others were in financial difficulties, so … Did Louis and Veronica, old buddies, team up? If yes, how could this connect with where the murder took place? If they planned to kill Cliff together, then use the murder to increase the value of his work, how did they know he’d be on the pier that night?
Why was I doing this? The man was killed at four in the morning on the Christopher Street pier, where he had gone with his dog to get lucky. Boy, did he not get lucky! The best I could hope for was a witness—talk about getting lucky—and one who was sane and sober enough to have gotten the license plate number. Fat fucking chance, as my grandmother would have said if there had been a Yiddish equivalent. Like on top of everything else, the guy would have had to have a pencil and paper.
I added the next name.
Morgan Gilmore, Magritte’s handler.
Gil and Cliff argued about whether or not to breed Magritte, but what could Gil gain from Cliff’s death? He didn’t inherit M. Did he think he would? Is there more to this picture? Would Dennis keep up M’s career, or was Gil now out of a job?
Adrienne Wynton Cole, Cliff’s mother.
She gets the dough. But it was probably hers in the first place, and she probably has a ton more. Mothers don’t usually murder their children by running them over. They do it slowly, using guilt and disappointment. Even if she didn’t accept her son or really know him (what else is new?), she lost her son.
Peter David Cole, Cliff’s brother.
He would have gotten the dough if Adrienne had kicked off first. If Cliff was in his early thirties, his mother was probably somewhere in her fifties or sixties. Even if she would now leave everything she had to Peter, he’d have a pretty long wait. Not a terrific investment, killing your brother and waiting twenty-plus years for the payoff, unless she prefers a charity of some sort, other than her own son. That probably depends whether she approves of Peter David. Have to meet him. Maybe at the opening? Loss: his brother.
I began to think about Lillian and all the times I felt like strangling her. But I’d never actually do it. Even though you probably get angrier at your family than at anyone else, they’re your history, too, the people who know every stupid story about you since day one.
Okay. Check out the lover. And the gallery owner. Hey, what they do is exploit artists, isn’t it? Maybe murder comes under the heading of exploitation, furthering his career. After all, his stuff wasn’t worth much when he was alive, was it? Check prices.
I tacked the photos onto the wall, lonely shots of the pier, Cliff’s art, even his unmade bed, images to haunt me as I tried to make sense of what appeared to be a senseless crime.
I decided to check the main house before getting ready for the opening. Not bothering with a coat, I grabbed the keys off a hook in the kitchen and ran across the snow-covered garden, Dashiell leading the way straight to the Siegals’ back door.
I unlocked both locks, stomped the snow off my boots, pulled the door open, and followed Dashiell inside. Once indoors, I signaled Dashiell to sit and watch me, then gave him the hand signal for go find, a flat, open hand first touching my right eye, then sweeping out forward as far as I could reach.
Dashiell headed for the front room. We always started downstairs and worked our way up. I followed along behind, making sure the doors were still locked, no windows had been broken, no gas was leaking, no pipes had burst. Dash made sure no one else was in the house.
Downstairs was where a burglar would be most likely to break in, even though some preferred access from above, coming from the roof of another building. In some places in the city, you could travel an entire block by running across the roofs.
In New York City, most accessible windows had bars on them. But Norma wouldn’t hear of it. “They’re ugly,” she’d said when I suggested that window guards would help safeguard the house. “I will not live in a jail. That’s why you’re here.” I was in no position to argue.
I followed Dashiell, telling him he was a good boy, checking to make sure the shutters were closed in the front of the house and open to let light in in the rear, those windows that faced the cottage. The thermostat was set at sixty so that the old house wouldn’t take too bad a beating contracting and expanding as the weather changed.
We finished at the top without finding a single thief hiding under any of the beds or in the closets, double-checked the front door, shut off the lights, and let ourselves out the back.
Once, the first winter I was here, Dashiell had started to pace and whine, going to the living-room window that faced the main house and coming back to poke me with his muzzle and look into my eyes. I had taken my gun from the shoe box in the bedroom closet, and we had gone across the snowy garden in silence, my heart pounding as I opened the back door. Five minutes later we were face-to-face with the intruder, a homeless woman who had broken one of the front windows to get in from the cold. She was nestled under three blankets in the spare bedroom, trying to get warm.
This time, everything was as it should have been. By the time we got back to the cottage, stopping briefly to race around the big oak, it was time to get ready for the opening. I had planned to soak in the tub until I was as wrinkled as a shar-pei, but I couldn’t. I was too excited about the thought of possibly meeting the killer in an hour or so and the question of whether or not I’d know him—or her—when I did.
/> In the Village, if your sweats are clean, you’re dressed up. SoHo is another story. Not wanting to stick out like a bulldog at a field trial, I put on my long black coatdress with matching pants, wound my hair up, and clipped it at the back of my head. Then I stood by helplessly as most of it worked its way out of the barrette. Looking as if I’d just been Marlene Dietrich’s stand-in in Morocco, I called my dog, and together we headed downtown to see if anyone smelled like a killer.
12
He Raised His Lovely Eyebrows
The big black dot was nowhere in sight, and the floor of the Cahill Gallery had been painted iridescent chartreuse. The walls, still white, were hung with Clifford Cole’s paintings, which gave me the same kind of pang I got when I thought about my father not living long enough to see his grandchildren. Then again, who ever said life was fair.
Despite the fact that this was a posthumous show, the mood was festive. Artists turned out in great numbers, as they always do for openings—and the free food and booze—and there were an unusual number of collectors, especially for the shrinking art market of the nineties. There was press, too, so there would be, it seemed, even more articles in the papers and magazines about the young artist who died so tragically just as his tremendous talent was about to come to light.
God, did schmaltz sell. Then again, lurid sex crimes also sold. It was just a matter of time before the rest of the story came out, which would drive the prices even higher than the schmaltz had already done. Louis Lane was going to end up a rich man.
Dennis was in the back, with Magritte.
“Honey, you look sen-sa-tional!”
“Yeah. Yeah.” I leaned in as if to kiss his cheek. “What have you learned?” I whispered.
He leaned closer. “Well, apparently blue eye shadow is back!”
“Dog people,” I explained.
He rolled his eyes. “And Lois is here.” He indicated the location with a tilt of his head, and I turned to get a look at the new owner of the collection, prepared to loathe him on sight.
“She’s doing an interview,” he sang. “Does anyone ask me—” he began, but I cut him off.
“I’ll see you in a bit,” I said, leaving quickly and pushing through the crowd with Dashiell at my side.
Leonard Polski was a few feet away from where I had been standing with Dennis, talking to someone who was taking notes. I squeezed in close enough to hear some of the bull he was tossing around, sure I’d be hearing about his always having had faith in Cliff’s ability, about how he encouraged him to try his last series of grayish, oversize paintings where images took several canvases to be completed, and, richest of all, how pleased he was that Magritte was found and how much he loved the little dog.
What I heard surprised me. Even allowing for the distortion of the tape recording, this was clearly the same voice that left the warm and funny messages for Clifford that I had heard last night. That was as I had guessed. The rest was not.
Louis Lane was speaking softly about the rise of hate crimes, the resurgence of Nazism in the new/old unified Germany, the racial cleansing in Bosnia, and the rise in gay bashing here at home. Then he began to talk about Clifford, his painting as a kind of journal writing on canvas, the curiosity that drove him into his own psyche to troll for powerful material, his feeling that if he touched upon the things he felt deeply about, his paintings would touch others in some powerful way even though each person’s history was unique and even though Clifford’s own story was not fully expressed, just alluded to mysteriously. That, he said, the mysterious quality of Clifford’s work, was what he, Louis, loved best.
“It was his way of expressing not only his own alienation and the alienation all gay men feel, but a far larger issue, the alienation of the nineties, the understanding that we never really know each other, and the question of whether or not many of us care for each other.”
Of course, this made me wonder how well Louis Lane knew Clifford Cole, or why he thought this was a nineties concept. From the beginning of time, no one has ever known anyone. I mean, did Adam know Eve? I mean, really know her, beyond the biblical sense?
“He was very emotional,” he continued, “yet in the translation to canvas, a kind of artistic flatness took over. I think without that, he couldn’t have gone where he needed to go. The pain would have been too great. And in that, he was a strong voice for what is going on in the post-Bush era, the disappointment people feel resonating with the pain of childhood, as if Bush the father betrayed us just as our own fathers did.”
In action, how like an angel! To coin a phrase.
The reporter nodded and kept writing. Behind him, there was a triptych I hadn’t seen at the loft. In fact, looking around, I hadn’t seen much of what was on display. I guess these were the paintings from the closet. Looking at the one behind Louis, this one really was from the closet; it was a middle-aged man in drag, but in each of the three pictures he had his back to the viewer. What was weird is that it looked like early TV, like Milton Berle in drag. It was even painted without color, in black and white and shades of gray. This was neither genderfuck, where there is a devil-may-care mix of male and female, say a guy with a beard smoking a cigar and wearing a strapless gown, his chest hair poking up from the bodice of the dress, nor was it cross-dressing, where the aim is to pass for the opposite sex. This was broad burlesque, but somehow creepy.
The dress was a cheap housedress. You should see what guys wear when they do drag. You should have the money they spend. But this was a somewhat heavy guy in a woman’s cheap cotton housedress and a five-and-dime wig, ever so slightly askew, with a cigar in “her” hand. The cigar was the only thing to change in the three paintings. That is, in the third canvas, the ash was dropping onto the carpet. Unlike all the other paintings I had seen, this one had no title on the last canvas. In fact, when Louis moved a little, I saw that the card on the wall read “untitled oil on canvas.” It was dated this year. Perhaps it was the last series he had painted. Perhaps he never finished it.
I waited for the interview to end and introduced myself.
“Louis? Rachel Alexander. I understand Dennis told you he hired me to investigate Cliff’s murder?” I put out my hand. “Can we talk for a moment? Perhaps we can duck out into the stairwell. It’ll be more private there. And cooler.”
He nodded, and Dashiell and I followed him out the side door of the gallery and into the hall in the stairwell. Unfortunately, others had gone out there to escape from the crowd and the heat, but we brushed by them and went up a flight, where we could be alone.
“You don’t have a drink. May I fetch you one?” he asked in that lovely voice I had heard on the tape. “I guess I shouldn’t say fetch. That must be his job,” he said, indicating Dash with his wineglass. It seemed he had had a few before this glass. He stood a little too close, occupying some of the space I needed to have between me and any other being other than a baby, a lover, or a dog, but I didn’t want to back up because I thought it would put him off.
“I’m fine, Louis, thank you. I wanted to offer my sympathy on your loss. I understand Cliffs family hasn’t included you or any of Clifford’s New York friends in their plans. I’m so sorry about that, but it’s not an uncommon reaction, is it?”
He seemed taken aback at the abruptness and the personal nature of my question. This is definitely a problem I have. I am only semiskilled at beating about the bush.
“No. Unfortunately, it’s more commonly the rule than the exception.”
“Are they here? His mother? His brother?”
“I expect not. We’ve never met, but I did get a call from Peter yesterday saying the memorial service was this evening. In Virginia. I’d left a message for him on Monday, to tell him about the opening. So I don’t expect them here. More importantly, we won’t be there. I assume that was the point. He was very polite, of course. He said he’d come by the gallery one evening next week, after he returns from Frederick. Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? The
time to be supportive to Clifford is gone.
“So that family can and will handle things any way they like. I’ve talked to Dennis, and we’re going to have our own service in New York after the show closes, for Clifford’s real family.”
“What a good idea. So what’s your take on this, Louis? Do you agree with the police assessment of what happened to Clifford?”
“It makes no sense to me at all. Oh, please understand, I am perfectly able to believe a gay man would be mindlessly killed by a stranger for no reason other than that he appeared to be homosexual. But I cannot fathom what Cliff was doing on the pier at that hour. Or, to tell the truth, at any hour.”
Have you ever noticed that people who interject that expression, “to tell the truth,” are often lying?
“What I was wondering about, mainly,” I said, “was the same thing. The night of the murder …” He stiffened slightly at the sound of the word. “Where were you when Cliff left for the pier at three or four in the morning? Asleep? I mean, did he talk to you, say where he was going? Or why?”
“I told all this to the police,” he said. “We weren’t together that night. He stayed at his studio. He usually came to my place in the evening, and I’d cook for him or we’d go out, he’d almost always spend the night and then go back to the studio early in the morning, most of the time before I woke up. There’s living space there—he was living there before we met. But we—I should say, I—never stayed there. I have a sensitivity to paint. And I’m allergic to dogs.”
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