“You can’t do that,” Stephanie whispered, closing the curtains again behind them. “Kenzo’s not here, clients have’ta use the Dunkin’ Donuts down the way. Kenzo’s gonna…”
Chapter Forty-seven
Fred said, “I’ll square it with Kenzo.”
“What can I do for you?”
Fred sat. “When do you expect him?”
“He said he’d be here—what time is it?”
“Quarter of two,” Fred said.
“Then he’ll be here,” Stephanie said. She removed the gum from her mouth and dropped it out of sight on her side of the desk. A metallic ping followed. “There’s green tea while you wait, if you want some,” she said. Her sidelong glance took in the hotplate in the corner of the waiting area, on a table with mugs and a green cardboard box of teabags.
Fred shook his head.
“You didn’t make an appointment.”
“Kenzo and I have other business.”
Could it be that Stephanie still didn’t recognize him? He hadn’t even changed his clothes since yesterday. She’d seen him three times; here twice. Yesterday she’d had her knee in his crotch and was doing her best to get him into Arthur’s bed.
“Coffee.” The woman from the room back of the back room stood in the doorway, wrapped in the sheet, her bare feet poking out beneath it. On one bare shoulder a bouquet of blue tulips.
“Green tea’s what we have,” Stephanie said.
“Where is he?” the woman demanded. “Also, no. I will not drink green tea.”
“He’s supposed to be here. He’ll be here.”
The women was not dressed, the hair unsettled. She was probably—Kim might estimate her as “yay by yay”—but Fred’s guess was somewhere shy of forty.
“I can be useful,” Fred volunteered. “Either mind the store or do a coffee run. Whatever.”
“I could use coffee,” the woman said. Stephanie made no move to surrender her position. “Driving since Godknows, and where is he? Who are you?”
“I go for coffee,” Fred decided. “If I’m going to Dunkin’ Donuts, you want something to eat? You?” He extended the offer to Stephanie. At the last moment he’d had the presence of mind not to use her name.
“If they have any kind of sandwich wouldn’t make a cat sick,” the woman in the sheet said. “Starting with not tuna fish.”
“I’ll have tea if I want something,” Stephanie said.
“What’s in the coffee?”
“Ice. Lots of ice. Cream. Sugar.”
“Right.”
Stephanie said, “Anyone asks, you went down the Dunkin’ Donuts to use the men’s room. Right?”
“Understood,” Fred said. He had an ally now, or at least an accomplice.
When he returned the woman from the back room was standing by the desk, wearing sensible grownup clothes that a sensible grownup woman could have described easily. A skirt, blue. A shirt, white, with short sleeves. The tulips had disappeared. She still looked not much shy of forty, with her hair brushed and some attention to the face. Fred said, “I figured roast beef. Everything else seemed like it must be processed to where it isn’t food any more. This is iced coffee, though they call it something else. They wanted to throw hazelnut flavoring in it…”
“Give me the damned coffee,” the woman said. “What do I owe you?”
Exactly half the women in the world would take offense unless he told them. Fred let her find the appropriate bills and change in the wallet she took from a small shoulder bag. In the same gesture she had pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a lighter.
“Kenzo doesn’t let you smoke in here,” Stephanie protested.
“He can tell me himself,” the woman said.
“What is it from New York?” Fred said. “Five hours?” The woman looked at him more carefully than she had when she was counting money into his hand. “Saw the car,” Fred explained. “New York plates. What you said, I figured…”
“Unless you have a flat,” the woman confirmed. She took one of the chairs and spread out the meal Fred had brought, looking it over with distaste.
Fred said, “I’m not from around here. Our friend at the desk…”
“Stephanie,” Stephanie said.
“Stephanie,” Fred went on, “from that warm voice, is from down south.”
“Newport News,” Stephanie said. “Navy brat.”
“The tulips are Kenzo’s work,” Fred said.
The woman looked up from her sandwich and told Fred, “A: It is not your business where I am from. B: The tulips are my business.” She took a bite of the sandwich, considered it, chewed, swallowed, and wrapped the remainder in its paper. She stood, leaving it on the table next to the drink. She went into the back room and returned in a minute with the overnight case. She told Stephanie, “I’m going to the house.”
“I’ll tell Kenzo,” Stephanie said.
“Kenzo is not coming near the house. I’ll call. Or come back. Tell him not to call me. We don’t know…There’s going to be a thousand people…”
She picked up the drink and marched out, swinging the case.
Fred said, “I’ll take some of that tea.”
Stephanie shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She walked to the hot plate and poured water into a kettle out of a bottle. “He’s usually not this late,” she said.
Fred was telling her, “I’ve got time” when Kenzo walked in, banging the door open, his face thundery, tossing keys across the room, saying “I didn’t get the fucking…” until he saw Fred and choked off.
“You remember Fred,” Stephanie said. “He’s the guy I told you, I thought he was Arthur, was at Arthur’s yesterday when I didn’t find Arthur?”
“Dimwit,” Kenzo said. He stood in front of Fred, breathing hard, rippling with the pheromones of violence. “He was here two days ago. Asking about some painting.”
His fists bunched at his sides. Ripped black denims; biker boots. Buckles, no spurs. “You’re in my business,” he said. The hands moved toward Fred’s throat, fluttered, then hung back. Stephanie, at the hotplate, uttered a small squeak.
Fred said, “I’m interested to see that painting we talked about. Did something jog your memory, Kenzo?”
“I’ve been upstate,” Kenzo said abruptly, directing the words to Stephanie, and ostentatiously disregarding Fred. “All the way to Colebrook. I am beat. I’m going to wash up.” Kenzo walked out of sight, through to the back of the shop.
“You still want the tea?” Stephanie asked. “Listen, I’ve seen Kenzo like this. He looks like he’s in control, then all of a sudden…”
“Sure,” Fred said. She hovered next to the hotplate while the kettle warmed. Kenzo was gone for five minutes, long enough for Stephanie to get through the entire tea-bag ritual.
Kenzo came in again, saying, “So she’s been…”
Stephanie cut him off. “She’ll call, she said.”
“Like fuck she’ll call,” Kenzo said. “I’m going over. Well, or I would if I had…” He looked in Fred’s direction and clamped his jaws.
Fred said, “We have a common interest. I don’t know how to say it any plainer. I want a good look at that painting. We can take it from there. I’m not a dealer. I do represent a collector. He could be interested. But I have to see it.” He drank green tea from a mug that said, in a not-very-Zen way, starbucks.
“Come here again, I’ll break your neck,” Kenzo said, crossing the room to stand menacingly at Fred’s knees. “That’s a promise.”
Chapter Forty-eight
Fred said reasonably, “Step back, Kenzo. If I stand up with you on top of me, we’ll start breaking stuff. It’s your stuff…”
Kenzo paused before he stepped back, tardily measuring Fred’s heft, and the likelihood that he could move quickly
and painfully. Fred, standing slowly, concluded, “It looks like you have nothing to sell. You went to pick it up and it didn’t show. When it does turn up, you have my number. Stephanie, thanks for the tea.”
He stepped out into the hot mall. That should be Kenzo’s truck, parked with its nose nudging the plate-glass window of the shop: a blue nose with its bumper liberally dented. Blue Dodge pickup with some years on it, a Harley chained in the bed, with a ramp tucked in beside it—as useful as the dory towed behind the schooner.
“Not exactly my business,” Fred mused, walking to his car. “But if I’m going to be a citizen of the world and not a goddamned loner for the rest of my life, at some point I should figure out an honorable way to alert the Nashua D.A: Take a look at Kenzo’s pickup. He’s had time to wash it, but you can’t get everything. See if there’s hair or blood, or prints that match Zagoriski. Run our friend Stephanie from Newport News, with that red wig on, in front of the barman at the Moonglow Lounge. Is this the ‘gorgeous redhead’ you saw leaving the place with Z a couple nights ago, propping him up?
“Meanwhile…an exercise for the memory.”
Starting again from the Moonglow Lounge, he set out to repeat the sequence Tippy’s directions had led him on the previous night—in fact, early this very morning. This was proving to be a long day. The outskirts of Nashua were as anonymous as any landscape he had encountered in southeast Asia, but the mind and the memory had managed to hold onto useful signposts nonetheless.
Fred pulled in behind the red Camaro with New York plates. Tippy’s car, once a light blue, almost as trampled and generic as Fred’s own, still sat in the driveway, with a note under the wiper Fred took a moment to read, Sorry Mrs Z I cant aford the tow. Ill get it out of hear. Please dont tow me. T. A. with a nose-less frowny face.
The woman stood in back of the building up to her knees in the brittle canes of long dead plants and vigorous new green weeds. The plot of land separating the Zagoriski house from its neighbors was small, but so overgrown that it provided cover. She seemed dazed, gazing around this mess, until her eyes met Fred’s. “Zag changed the locks,” she said. The keys she dangled from her hand, she tossed into the undergrowth. “Our happy home,” she said.
“Mary Zagoriski,” Fred said, “I’m Fred Taylor. I…”
“He thought I was going to what? Sneak in while he was in class? Or at the Moonglow? Sneak in and rob what’s mine?”
Fred said, “Did you have a chance to start what you have to do downtown? You were still married to him, yes?”
Mary Zagoriski nodded. “Till death did us part. They don’t know how to find me,” she said. “Kenzo had to…Zag didn’t know either. He would have tried to…I called him Zag. He hasn’t touched the garden. He changed the locks. Front door and back. I tried them both. What do I have to do, get a court order to enter my own home?”
“That’s kind of the long way around,” Fred said. “With your permission…”
“You’re with Kenzo?” she asked.
“The last thing Kenzo said to me was, ‘Come here again, I’ll break your neck. That’s a promise.’”
“So you’re not with Kenzo. Or not any more. I’m…I had roses back here.”
Fred picked up, “With your permission, I can get you into your house in forty seconds. There’s not even an alarm.”
“How do you have a key? Fred is your name?”
“No key,” Fred said. “All I need is your permission. Do I call you Mary?”
“OK.” She nodded.
Fred walked back through the weeds and opened the trunk of his car. “People use credit cards,” he said, “but it’s hard on a credit card, and I don’t use them anyway though I should. If I’m going to be a man of the world. This putty knife…” He opened the screen door and applied the tool to the space giving access to the back door’s latch. “Not even forty seconds,” he boasted. “It’s all yours, Mary.”
Fred stepped back. Mary hesitated under the overhanging roof and said, “I go in alone.”
“Sure,” Fred said.
“I don’t know what you want or why you’re here. Thank you, I guess. Wait, do you mind? You know my name, you seem to know the situation, so…wait…I’ll be back.”
An aluminum lawn chair amongst the undergrowth had enough of its webbing left for Fred to open it under an apple tree and sit. Birds had been taking advantage of the general neglect. They objected noisily to Fred’s presence. It was twenty minutes before Mary came out again carrying a kitchen chair. She set it in the weeds next to Fred. “He’s wrecked the inside too. People don’t change,” she said. “That’s useful, I guess. It helps me hate him. Helps me not care so much what happened to…Not keep imagining…We talk out here. Tell me what you want. I have to go downtown, introduce myself, identify Zag’s body, start that whole thing. My lawyer says I have to.”
“I’ll leave the putty knife,” Fred said. “A present. Lock up while you’re out. Word gets around fast a house is empty.”
“There’s stuff missing. I don’t think it was Tippy. Zag must have been selling…Tippy left me her keys. Kitchen table. The girl renting upstairs. If you believe that. People don’t change. I was Zag’s student too. He had this golden…and I loved him. He loved me, I know, but his attention…People don’t change. Locks change. Zag saw to that. There’s stuff missing he must have sold, but he couldn’t pay the goddamned telephone bill. The phone’s been disconnected.”
“You’ve got family in the area,” Fred started.
“No. Twenty minutes,” Mary said, looking at her wristwatch. “No. Wait.” She went into the house again and came out with the three framed reproductions of samplers Fred had seen in what Tippy called the living room. She propped them against the trash cans next to the back door. She kicked through their glass a couple of times. “OK,” she said, taking her seat again.
Fred said, “Kenzo came in the shop after you left. It looks like he didn’t find it.”
Mary said, “If you’re waiting for me to say something…”
“I’ll back up,” Fred said. “First, I apologize for being clumsy. I can say I’m sorry for your loss, let the chips fall where they may. Why I’m here is why I was at Kenzo’s. It’s a small thing next to a man’s life, even though…well, I’ve got nothing useful to say about that. I met your husband once. I’m interested in seeing a painting that used to be in this house.”
“I don’t…” she started.
“Give me a few of your twenty minutes,” Fred said. “The man I work for collects paintings. He’s in Boston. Out of the country at the moment. I came into the story backwards and I haven’t even seen the painting Kenzo was looking for. I’ve heard about it, and I’ve seen copies of details. I don’t know who the rightful owner is, and I don’t even know if it’s what I think it might be. From what I saw…”
“What you saw,” Mary repeated dangerously. “What did you see?”
“Details from the painting, used as the basis for tattoos. A local guy, a genius, Arthur Schrecking…”
“I know Arthur,” Mary said. “Go on.”
“I liked what I saw. I wanted to see the rest of the picture. When things started happening, I started to feel not only interested, but responsible in a way. Though I can’t tell…Anyway I see from the commotion that two other people want to find the picture. Kenzo is one. The other one is a New York dealer, Lexington Orono. Lexington has to be related to Glendon Orono, of the Pieper and Orono Galleries. You’re familiar…”
“I know the gallery,” she said.
“Lexington Orono says he has a photograph,” Fred said.
“Not unless he has a spy camera. I’m fourteen kinds of idiot, but I’m no fool. I’ve got the one Polaroid, and I never let it out of my hand. Go on. However you know he’s after the painting, you know he’s after it.”
“He is,” Fred sai
d. “With a briefcase full of quit-claim deeds for people to sign.”
Mary said, “What I agreed with the old man, Glendon Orono. Lexington’s the son. After I showed the old man the Polaroid he said he wasn’t interested. It didn’t look like much. There’s no market for old masters. He couldn’t tell anything from a Polaroid anyway. He doesn’t have clients for it. It’s the wrong size. People resist religious subjects. It’s not signed. An anonymous picture, there’s no way to sell it. Still it might have some interest from a decorative point of view. If it’s as old as it looks. No museum would touch it, but there are collectors, people he advises, rely on his taste and judgment, even everything there is going against it, he’ll offer me, if I can get the picture to him, he has a chance to look at it under his lights, he can’t make any promises, as much as twenty thousand dollars.”
Chapter Forty-nine
“Now the son of a bitch is running around behind my back trying to find it? Trying to buy it?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Fred said.
“Where is it?”
“That’s the question.”
Mary said, “I walked out of here with nothing. I’d had it. You don’t need the story. Whatever, behind my back. But I knew. The Camaro was mine. Is mine. He had his own. I don’t see it. Some clothes. We’d work the rest out. Then I found out, I talked to Zag a couple of times, him saying how much he’s changed and wants me back, he loves me still, I still have tender feelings for him. Meanwhile he’s mortgaged the house and he’s in debt and since we’re married I’m in debt at the same time, and I know half of what I walked out on is mine, but he says…”
“I can hear him say it,” Fred said. “Whoever walks out, all bets are off.”
“You did spend time with Zag,” Mary said. “Then, after I’d been on my own long enough to see I could, I didn’t need him, I wanted to start a business. That means I have to have a credit rating, and that means…so I started thinking. Even the equity in the house, if we sell, if I can make him sell, when you put that up against the other debts he has, and some other debts he told me about I won’t go into, which as far as I am concerned are his problem, he’s welcome to them. I started thinking, I’m in New York, I have an idea to get started, and I remembered the wedding present, this ridiculous painting his uncle brought over before the war and gave us, when we got married, and told us it should be worth something if we ever needed to sell it. Like a fairy story. We believed that fairy story as much as you believe the other fairy stories.
A Paradise for Fools Page 23