“Oh, I’m sorry, is he a problem?” I asked, looking down at Dashiell.
“Not unless I sleep with him,” Louis said. He sighed, looked away, and then took a small sip of wine.
He was tall and slender, young, about twenty-eight, I guessed, with lovely olive skin, thick, dark hair, an angular face, almost but not quite too delicate, like a swarthy Montgomery Clift. His eyes were dark and intense. He was the kind of person that gave you chills when he looked at you. No wonder poor, pale, cloddy Dennis was jealous. I wish I looked half as pretty as Louis Lane.
“Was it unusual for Clifford to stay at the studio?” I asked after a moment of silence. “Had you had some sort of argument?”
“No, he was painting, he said, and he wanted to stay with it. He sometimes did that for several nights in a row, just went with it. But this time …”
“Yes?”
“He sounded tense that night, Rachel, not high.”
When he said my name, it felt the way it does when a lover whispers your name during sex. He was good, this Louis Lane, a sort of work of art himself.
“When the painting was going so well that he couldn’t stop working,” Louis continued, “he’d be on a high, he’d sound wonderful, excited, energetic. But Tuesday night, he sounded, I don’t know, funny, like there was something he wasn’t telling me.”
“And you didn’t ask?”
“We tended to give each other a lot of room in that area, Rachel. I knew he’d tell me when he was ready. He always had.”
I wondered what Leonard Polski had invented, besides his name. I wondered if he had murdered his lover.
Never assume, meaning never assume anyone is innocent until you’re absolutely sure who’s guilty. You could get killed that way.
“So you have no guess as to what happened, as to why he ended up on the pier?”
“Not a clue.”
“Well, thanks, Louis.” I took a card from my pocket. “Here’s my number, in case you think of anything else you want to tell me, anything at all.”
“Research. Interesting. I can’t imagine how you do whatever it is you do do,” he said. “I don’t know what happened that night, and I wouldn’t know where to begin to find out.”
“What do you do?” I asked him.
“I teach high school Spanish.”
Unless he had a relativo rico, there was no way Louis Lane could afford his Gucci loafers on a teacher’s salary. No fucking way.
“Well, I can’t imagine how you—or anyone—does that. So I guess we’re even.”
He smiled and showed me his perfect, even white teeth.
“Dennis doesn’t want to believe that this is a hate crime,” he said. “But what else could it be?”
“That’s what he hired me to find out,” I said, looking up into Louis’s fathomless dark eyes. “I was hoping to find a witness, actually.”
He raised his lovely eyebrows. “Really?” he said.
As far as I was concerned, it was definitely a hate crime. The question was, personal hate or random hate?
At the foot of the stairs I stepped aside, and Louis walked ahead of me into the gallery, head high, posture perfect, his hair looking as if he had never even heard of a sandstorm.
I began to walk around and look at the paintings. I passed several of the ones I had seen at the loft. There were a few pieces of sculpture, too, painted wooden pieces. I stopped to look at one, a life-size Magritte, and found myself walking circles around it in the company of a woman my sister would describe as perky and a short-waisted, stocky man wearing gray sweats, red-faced and moist, as if he had just stopped in after a long run.
“Isn’t this divine,” the woman said. “God, it’s sold!” I looked at the title card and saw she was right. Next to the price of $8,000 there was a red dot.
“Eight thousand,” I said aloud, to no one in particular.
The guy in sweats whistled, one long, bright, clear note, and shook his head.
I turned to look at him, but all I saw were his broad shoulders and his back as he moved off into the crowd. Eight thousand, I thought, watching him disappear. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.
I looked back at the price and the red dot. Clifford must be rolling over in his grave. Actually, Dennis had said the body was cremated, and I wasn’t sure one could still do that under those circumstances.
“What’s your breed?” the perky woman asked. “Are you in basenjis?” And then she sort of squealed. She had apparently just noticed Dashiell. The funny thing about pit bulls is that sometimes they sort of disappear. Dashiell, who went everywhere with me, had a way of blending in so that, despite his formidable size, he often wasn’t even seen, for example, lying next to the table at a restaurant. Until we got up to leave.
“I’m a collector,” I told her.
I lied quickly and easily. Frank always assured me it was a useful skill, not a character flaw.
“Oh, I am too, in a way. I collect basenjis. I have eleven. Four are Magritte get,” she said with great pride.
If I were a dog, my brow would have wrinkled and my ears would have gone up. A dog’s get are his offspring. I had been told that Magritte had never been bred.
“Really,” I said. “Did you get the dogs from Cliff?”
“Oh, I didn’t buy the dogs. My Tiffany was bred to Magritte. She had a dog and three bitches.”
“I see. Is this recently? I mean, are the puppies for sale now?”
“Oh, no. Are you looking for a basenji?” She looked down at Dashiell. Actually, she didn’t have that far down to look. She was about five feet tall, sort of tightly packed, with the kind of hair and makeup I used to see on my Upper East Side dog-training clients. “They’re wonderful with other breeds,” she said, hoping to make a sale. Who’s lying now? I thought. Most basenjis aren’t even good with themselves. Magritte was a miracle of good temperament, partly good breeding and partly because Cliff had trained and socialized him so well. “Melisand is due in heat soon,” she said, “and I was thinking of breeding her back to Magritte. She’s his daughter, out of Windy Moment. That’s Tiffany. I could put you on the wait list,” she said, arching her neat eyebrows.
Exactly what I needed, an inbred basenji.
“Um, who have you dealt with for the breedings?” I asked.
“Gil, of course. I’ve known Gil for, what, seven years, ever since I got into basenjis. He’s fabulous. I wish I could get him to handle one of my dogs, but he’s much too expensive for me.”
“Morgan Gilmore? I heard so much about him, uh, from Dashiell’s handler, but I never met him. Is he here?”
She took another look at Dashiell, frowning. Of course, pit bulls are not AKC-registerable dogs, so if she knew the difference between a pit bull and an Am Staff, she would have wondered what the hell I was talking about. UKC handlers would be totally unlikely to also work at AKC shows, and if Dash had a handler, which he didn’t, he probably would have no idea who Morgan Gilmore was.
“He’s over there, see, red shirt, ponytail?”
“Great chatting with you,” I said, and headed back to Dennis.
“Here,” I said when I had squeezed through the crowd and arrived at his side. I handed him Dashiell’s leash. “I’ll be back soon and explain.” I signaled Dashiell to wait, and began shoving my way to where Morgan Gilmore was standing.
When I got close enough to eavesdrop, I pretended to study out, damned spot, which hung starting to his left and continuing down that wall. He was talking to two men about Westminster, which was now only a few days away. It is always held on the second Monday and Tuesday of February, and the hound group goes up on Tuesday. Since Magritte had been found, he would, of course, be shown. I couldn’t hear everything, only snippets. “… the best front of any dog on the circuit today.” “Schedules are never a problem—” “—with that topline! Please!” “—very typey …” “—the epitome of his breed.” All the usual dog show bullshit.
“Hi,” I said when
I could finally get his attention. I was now close enough to see that he was one of those guys who have five o’clock shadow by ten-thirty in the morning. He was oddly shaped, tall and thin, but you could see the bulge of a potbelly pushing out his shiny red shirt, as if he had swallowed a casaba melon whole. His hair was seriously receding, but he had let the back grow long, and he did indeed have a ponytail. And he wore a string tie and cowboy boots. My guess was that they were his signature.
“Uh, what’s her name,” I gestured into the center of the gallery, “Tiffany’s mom—”
“Aggie?”
“Right! Aggie said you might be able to help me out. I have a basenji bitch,” I said. Morgan Gilmore’s smile cranked up to 150 watts, and he hunched his shoulders and head toward me in a mockery of sincerity and interest. “She’s pointed, of course. She just needs one more major”—I bet he never heard that before man, if he could toss it, so could I—“but I think I’d like to breed her this spring”—I took an audible breath and let it out, the way you breathe when you’re twelve if someone mentions the name of a rock star—“to Magritte. He’s got the best front. Just perfect.”
Morgan Gilmore beamed. “No problem,” he said. He reached two bony fingers into his breast pocket and withdrew his card. The logo was a beagle puppy sitting next to a cowboy boot. Talk about non sequiturs!
“Do you specialize in the hound group?”
“I’ll handle anything,” he told me, and for once I thought he was telling the absolute truth. “So, little lady, just call me when your girl’s cycle starts, and we’ll arrange everything. No problem.”
He had no questions to ask me. Not one. He didn’t even ask for a recent brucellosis test, the very least thing you’d want before any breeding, since brucellosis causes sterility in both dogs and bitches and is nearly impossible to cure. But, hey, this is not to say the man wasn’t careful. He probably only bred Magritte to “qualified bitches,” as the ads always say, “qualified” meaning he’d get paid in advance.
“Well, what about his show schedule and all?” I asked. “Will scheduling Crystal’s breeding be a problem?”
“Well”—he paused and laughed intimately, since we were such good friends—“you know basenjis. They can be a handful, can’t they? They don’t always get along that well, even males and females. I’m sure your, um—”
“Crystal.”
“I’m sure your Crystal is a dream girl, but I’ve seen some nasty bitches, and I can’t take a chance my little boy will get hurt.”
My little boy!
“So I just avoid the dangers of shipping, possible dogfights, or missed breedings because of Magritte’s show schedule. None of this is a problem,” he said smugly. “I bank his sperm.”
Bingo! I thought. Morgan Gilmore had just moved up to number one on my hit parade.
13
We’ve Locked the Barn
If you’ve never turned on a date with a detailed description of how semen is collected and banked, and you think you might like to give it a try, just say, “I was thinking of using frozen semen to breed my dog. Less hassle.” And when they ask the inevitable, just roll your eyes and say, “Don’t ask.” Human imagination always makes things more interesting than they actually are.
With Morgan Gilmore’s card safely tucked into my purse, I pushed and shoved my way over to the bar, snagged a glass of white wine, then shoved and poked my way back to Dennis. Before I got there, to retrieve my dog and tell my client the news, I overheard a voice so condescending and full of authoritative ignorance that it could only belong to a gallery owner. Veronica Cahill was briefing the press.
“—a little steep for someone who’s hardly sold, never had a show before, never been reviewed?”
“It might seem that way, but this is all there is of Clifford’s art, all there’s ever going to be.” Dramatic pause. Eyes lowered. “Forty-seven paintings and five pieces of sculpture. This is it.” She waved a careless hand to indicate the sweep of the gallery.
She was tall, about six feet one, what my grandmother Sonya would have called a long drink of water. But to an immigrant who lived where food was not plentiful, it would have been said with pity.
Veronica Cahill was anything but pitiful looking. She was stylishly slim and elegant, not poor and underfed. Her red hair, red from a bottle but nevertheless gorgeous, was cut short, boyish on someone else, but not on Veronica. Her features were slightly oversize—large eyes, long nose, wide mouth—giving her a dramatic look that the cropped hair, the makeup, the big jewelry, and the constant use of her large, long-fingered hands only emphasized. She had a ring on every finger, several bracelets that made noise as she moved, piercing hazel eyes that gave each and every one of us a turn. She was some piece of work, this Veronica Cahill.
“How did you discover Cliff?” someone asked.
“Oh, I’ve known Clifford for ages. I’ve been watching his art develop and waiting for a large enough body of work so that I could do this,” she said, once again gesturing around the room. She smiled for someone’s camera. She was wearing a short green silk dress to emphasize her legs, which, if she were lying down, would reach from here to Hoboken. And shoes I couldn’t sit in, let alone walk in.
I had lost the drift of the interview for a moment, but something brought me sharply back.
“—saw it all, that poor, dear thing. It’s lucky he didn’t get killed, too. You can see, in Clifford’s work of the last few years, how the image of Magritte, our Magritte, of course, not René, is used to express Clifford’s emotional turmoil.”
Shit. Dennis had told Louis, and Louis had told Veronica. Was that before he promised to watch his mouth or after?
“How do they know he was there? I had heard the dog was missing,” a pretty woman in skintight jeans asked.
“Oh, it seems Clifford’s friends have chipped in and hired a detective. A retired police detective. This is off the record, of course. It’s all very hush-hush,” she said to reporters from the Times, the News, the Village Voice, People magazine, and the New Yorker, according to the press badges I could see. “You know, so many of these cases go unsolved. Well, Clifford’s friends would have none of that. At any rate, Magritte’s collar and leash turned up at the pier. Poor thing. You know, it’s most amazing, his recovery. It was because of a tattoo—”
The note taking had taken on a furious pace when I decided the only rational thing to do was to find Dennis and murder him. As I began to work my way out of the group that had gathered around Veronica, I could hear her finishing her botched story about how the National Dog Registry works and I heard her say, “The little darling is here, if you’d like photographs.”
Somehow I knew it was Magritte she was referring to, not me, a retired police detective.
I decided to look at some more of the pieces, not wanting to find my face in Saturday’s paper, even as part of the background. My only hope now was that my fucking name wouldn’t appear along with the rest of the information I’d rather not have as public knowledge.
I decided to take a philosophical attitude.
A fuckup. How unusual.
The paintings were actually arranged intelligently, earliest to most recent. Unless you headed straight for the bar, you would see the few pre-Magritte paintings when you first came in. Next you’d see the beginnings of the flat technique, the texture of the canvas as part of the painting. The very early works looked more decorative, and though they were certainly beautiful, they didn’t have the punch of the post-Magritte paintings, nor the humor of the Magritte pieces. Our Magritte, not René. I was surprised to see the small painting of Magritte as an angel, talk about oxymorons, because it had to have been one of Cliff’s personal favorites, but then I noticed the “NFS”—not for sale—on the title card. That pleased me enormously. I loved the piece. It was as beautiful and perfect as an old miniature.
The alienation grew as you proceeded toward the later works, and then there was a sudden, harsh change with the appearance of the unt
itled “Uncle Miltie” painting and several other of these recent works, all in black, gray, and white or in grays with one startling touch of color. For example, there was one called s. b. that showed a street-tough boy, around twelve, in a dress. Everything else was typically male: dirty high-tops, one sock up and one halfway down, even the basketball steadied with one hand and poised on his hip. Everything was in shades of gray, except the basketball.
I looked around for les and mor. It should have been with this group of recent work, but it wasn’t. I wondered if Veronica deemed it too weird to include it. But certainly others were equally disturbing.
When I glanced around for Dennis, I panicked. I had forgotten that Dashiell was with him. If Dashiell showed up in the papers, I might as well be there too. It would kill the chance for me to work undercover again. This was serious. Deception was not only essential in this work, it was one of my favorite parts, sort of like improvisational acting, only sometimes life-threatening.
The photographers had finished with Magritte, and I got over there as soon as I could get through the crowd. If Cliff had only lived to see this day. Then again, had he lived, he might have gotten one piece in a barely advertised group show during the slowest time of the year, and three people, all relatives of the other artists, would have shown up. He wouldn’t have made a dime.
I got next to Dennis and looked around. Dash was nowhere in sight.
“There you are,” Dennis said, before I had a chance to say a word. “My friend Roger took Dashiell for a walk. You were tied up with Gil, and Dash kept looking at pedestals as if they were fire hydrants. Maybe he was just too hot, I don’t know. Rog should be back any minute. I hope that’s okay?”
That’s when it occurred to Dennis that it might not be okay. I could see the fear coming into his eyes.
“I did it again, right?”
But before I had a chance to describe the enormous knot in my stomach over the fear that a stranger had taken my dog and I’d never see him again (how could I be sure Rog wasn’t the murderer!), I was thrown onto Dennis and nearly knocked him down. It was just Dashiell’s way of telling me how happy he was to see me again. He often made his sentiments crystal clear with a head butt.
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