A Paradise for Fools

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “I happened to still have in my bag the Polaroid, because I showed it to some people putting together one of these multi-family yard sales, in Nashua a couple years back, and they said they weren’t interested. Maybe forty-five dollars. That’s worse than not interested.

  “Don’t ask to see the Polaroid. I’ve learned my lesson; also it’s in New York. I won’t tell you where I live.”

  “How does Kenzo get into the mix?”

  Mary looked at her watch. “Kenzo was the only one left in town I’d talk to. Anyone else wanted to know where I was. Kenzo, before, when I was trying to…never mind…I thought it might make a difference if I got some ink. Zag wanted me to do it. To make me younger, I think now. The tulips. Even after everything else, I was touched. I knew this crowd, Kenzo knew them, I knew Tippy Artoonian, one of Zag’s students, was walking around with a thing on her she’d gotten…Anyway, I called Kenzo, told him I needed the painting. By now I couldn’t talk to Zag any more. Kenzo said he could get it, he knew where it was, who had it. It was out of the house. Nobody ever thought it was worth more than forty-five dollars, and even that was a stretch. Kenzo said he’d keep it quiet. I’d sell it, and it belonged to both of us? So I’d keep Zag’s half against what he owes me. And give something to Kenzo.

  “I was talking with Kenzo about it anyway, and next time I talked to him, he said Zag was dead. Also, because I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle that, I needed to find a lawyer. Kenzo told me last night when I called, he’d have the painting today, from the person who had it. I could pay him later. And it’s mine.”

  “Kenzo doesn’t have it,” Fred said. “He didn’t tell me. He wouldn’t tell me anything. He was telling that woman Stephanie, then clammed up when he saw I was in the shop.”

  “So he has it and he’s lying to Stephanie,” Mary said. “Or he doesn’t have it. Or he has it and he’s going to lie to me about it too. But why would he?”

  “Did you put Orono in touch with Kenzo?” Fred asked.

  Mary pulled her breath in, stood and stepped into the wreck of the back yard. She bent and pulled weeds.

  “Lexington Orono came to Nashua,” Fred said. “He talked to Kenzo about the painting. He talked to your husband. I know that because he recognized Zag’s photograph in the paper the day after he was killed.”

  Mary Zagoriski, her hands full of unwanted vegetation, said “Killed,” as if the fact of her husband’s death hadn’t occurred to her in so brutal a word. She carried the weeds to the trash area and dropped them onto the samplers. “Meaning Kenzo and Orono have an arrangement of their own,” she said.

  Fred spread his hands. “This painting is floating around the world without its dog tags,” he said. “How do you prove it’s yours?”

  “Or Orono and Zag had a deal,” Mary said. “Leaving me out, obviously. Because whoever walks out, all bets are off.” She pulled more weeds. “Or Kenzo and Orono and Zag together,” she said, “had an arrangement that doesn’t include me. That’s the idea? And if the kids are in the mix…”

  Fred said, “Rely on that. The number of loose ends—I try to look at evidence without forcing conclusions.”

  “Have you been to the Pieper and Orono Galleries?” Mary asked. Fred shook his head. Mary dropped her weeds on the pile and sat down. “I have time. First there you are, on the sidewalk at the street door, and already that’s meant to make you afraid. Bullet-proof plate glass, all that simplicity everywhere on the front of the building that says Money. You can’t just walk in, you have to ring a bell. Be admitted. So OK, it’s New York. You do that, the girl back of the desk, miles back, the other end of the marble room, the girl so beautiful the only reason she isn’t running for Miss America, she hasn’t got the hair. She looks at you like she’s ready to turn you down for the bikini wax.

  “You feel like they’re thinking, ‘If she had money, we’d know her. Since she doesn’t have money, why deo we want to know her?’

  “She knows you can’t afford to be in there.

  “There’s an acre of floor space. The day I was there, they had three pictures on the wall. Three. On all the walls in that whole room. I don’t know what they were. How would I know? A friend of a friend told me that’s where I should go, not a friend who could call over first and say I was coming. So I’m there cold. Me and the photograph in my bag. The place is already making me feel like a piece of crap. All I have is this crappy Polaroid of the painting the yard sale lady told me might fetch forty-five dollars if I’m lucky and she wants ten percent.

  “Up to now in my life, on the whole, I have not been lucky.

  “The beautiful girl looks at the piece of crap and asks me, ‘May I help you?’

  “I want to ask her, ‘The picture behind you that looks like the dog’s breakfast, he had it yesterday—how much you want?’

  “What can I lose? I’ve rehearsed. The one thing I know, this girl is here because of her legs and her breasts and her smile, and she hopes she lands a rich man coming in who wants a picture of the dog’s breakfast yesterday and something to go with it, looks good in an expensive outfit or outside it. I tell her my business is confidential. I’ll talk with a partner, or however I said it. I forget what I said.

  “I had dressed for this. She saw through it, but I had dressed for this. Even borrowed a handbag. Gucci.

  “She says everyone’s busy. Everyone’s away. Nobody’s here. I can make an appointment, but I have to tell her my business. The whole time there’s doors to offices, three of them, open, and men in suits inside at desks, on the phones, or reading papers, or one was on a computer, it’s like the bank if you go into a New York bank, not like in Nashua. In New York everyone’s important and busy. I tell her, this girl fifteen years younger than I am, I’ll take my business somewhere else, but I will not tell her what it is. That convinces her I must have something going, because it’s secret.

  “‘I will see if someone is available,’ she says. Any fool can see there’s three men available. She goes into the office in the middle, behind the painting of the dog’s breakfast second time around, which has a sign next to it Monet Nymphs. I wouldn’t want happening to me whatever happened to those nymphs. There’s two big comfortable chairs next to her desk but she doesn’t offer me a seat, I’m standing there and she comes right back with the tall young guy, it sounds like you’ve met him.”

  “Lexington Orono,” Fred said.

  “Who wants me to keep standing there while he asks me, like the beautiful girl did, ‘May I help you?’ meaning ‘Take off.’

  “‘Not here you can’t help me,’ I said. So this and that and the next thing and he takes me upstairs. He has an office up there. He’s young, he’s upstairs. I tell him my story—the uncle, the wedding present, that I told you—and I show him the photograph. He tried every way to get me to give him the photo to show to the very busy people downstairs too busy to come up and look, but I wouldn’t. He took a moment to look in a book or two back of him I couldn’t see, and another book, and said, ‘Wait,’ and was gone for ten minutes until he came back and took me downstairs to see the old man. I held on to the photo while the old man looked it over, and said what he said.

  “So I came away with that twenty thousand dollars in my head. And called Kenzo, to help me get hold of the painting.”

  “You must have said enough to let Orono know you didn’t have it,” Fred said. “Or enough so he knew to look for the painting in Nashua. You must have given him your name.”

  “How could I not?” she said. “All this commotion. Orono the son sneaking around and telling lies. Listen, that gallery, the overhead has to be twenty thousand a week. They wouldn’t do all this unless they thought…”

  “Good point,” Fred said.

  Chapter Fifty

  “I’m using up your twenty minutes fast,” Fred said. “I’ll run through what I know about where the pain
ting’s been so far, until it dropped out of sight. It was in Europe—maybe Poland? You’ll tell me—until Zagoriski’s uncle came to the US before 1939. He gave it to you and Zagoriski when you were married, whatever year that was, not important. It stayed with you, stayed in your house. When you walked out, that’s where it was. Am I right so far?”

  “Keep on.”

  “All this time, nobody worried about it. Arthur Schrecking sees it and likes it, in the room where Tippy Artoonian is staying. According to Tippy, Zagoriski gives it to her. This we can’t check with Zagoriski. Even if that’s what happened, your lawyer would argue, Zagoriski had no right to give away something that belonged to both of you. He’d argue that now Zagoriski’s gone, it belongs only to you.”

  “Did Zagoriski make a new will?” Mary wondered. She got up and paced in the yard, staying close.

  Fred continued, “I reckon once the painting’s out of the house, it starts moving around with the personal effects of recently graduated high-school students of no fixed abode. Since it’s still worthless it doesn’t much matter where it is, as long as whoever has it has a roof. We can argue that Kenzo had seen it. It may have been in his shop while Arthur was around. We know that Arthur based Tippy’s tattoo on a detail. But he’d have it all in his head, wouldn’t need to refer directly to the painting.

  “Next thing we know, Kenzo flies into a fit when he rightly suspects that Arthur has what these folks call a ‘thing’ with Tippy, who’s been working in his shop at the same time as having a ‘thing’ with Kenzo. Kenzo threatens Arthur, and Arthur moves out of Nashua, lock, stock, and painting. He has the painting with him. It’s not clear that Tippy gave it to him. Tippy doesn’t think that’s even an interesting question, not so far. But I can point out as a side issue that she can’t afford forty bucks for a recharged used battery, which she calls a new one. Arthur sets up shop under the radar in Cambridge. Even changes his name. Kim Weatherall drives him, and…”

  “Kim Weatherall?” Mary interrupted.

  “Sorry. She changed her name too. At Nashua Central she was known as Ruthie Hardin. She was known also…”

  “I know Ruthie,” Mary said. “She was another of Zag’s…students. It was like an illness with Zag. If that’s true, I was an illness with Zag, too. That he got over when he had to make room for the next infection. I won’t…”

  “…Ruthie was at Kenzo’s,” Fred said. “The with-it kids impatient to get into the world hung out at Kenzo’s. Until a few days ago the painting was in Arthur’s apartment in Cambridge. Under his bed. What Arthur thinks is that Eva heard him talking about it, recognized it must have value…”

  Mary stopped her pacing and squared off to face Fred, interrupting firmly, “Eva, now. God, all of them. Here’s what I don’t understand. With everyone in this business so far being a sneak and a snake and a god-damned liar and a traitor and a thief, what is your angle sitting in my yard that was, and talking straight? Don’t you want the painting too? That’s what you said. Don’t you also want to get it for less than it’s worth, whatever that is? Playing your game in my field while I’m blindfolded?”

  “I haven’t seen the painting,” Fred said. “What I want is to see it. If it’s properly yours, you should have it. If you want to sell it, you should have it appraised not by the person who wants to buy it from you or sell it for you—someone who has nothing to gain and who isn’t in league with someone who has something to gain—which leaves out a lot of people—and…”

  “Eva, you were saying…” Mary resumed.

  “The art world is a small world. The man I work with, the collector,” Fred said, “to finish that thought—if the time comes, once I’ve seen the painting, if you’d like to show it to him, I know he’d…”

  “This is pie in the sky,” Mary said. “It always was. I have to get a local lawyer lined up. My New York man made an appointment I have to keep. Eva, you said—There was an Eva in that class.”

  “That’s the one. I don’t know her last name. She lives with a woman named Beth, not from here. The idea is, if Eva ran off with the painting, she’s enough connected to Kenzo that she’d give it to him or sell it to him. She doesn’t know what it’s worth, but nobody else does either. Nobody even knows what it is. Nor knows where it is. Kenzo, when he came into his shop, but only after he’d seen me, said he’d spent the day driving north all the way to Colebrook. So chances are he was meeting up with Eva in Cambridge, and she gave him the runaround.

  “That’s the story so far,” Fred said.

  “I have to go,” Mary said. “I’d give you my number here, but it’s been cut off and I’m not going to pay the bill. I’ll give you my lawyer’s number in Nashua, the one I’m going to meet.” She led him to the driveway and pulled Tippy’s note from under the windshield wiper, tore it in strips and, consulting a card in her bag, wrote a name and a phone number. “My address in New York, I am not giving out. Write your name and the rest of it and drop it in the mailbox. If you find that painting, I hope you’ll tell me. Right now I have to deal with a dead husband and a new lawyer and a mortgage and an empty house and identifying a body and probably signing a thousand papers.”

  Fred said, “If the lawyer’s any good, he’ll stay with you for all this.”

  “And charge me,” Mary said. “Meanwhile, I don’t even know if Zag made a new will. After he changed the locks on my house! It’ll be me who has to arrange for the funeral. I’m bound to be in this house for the next couple weeks. If you find anything out, if you’re straight, tell my lawyer. The one I’m going to hire. If I have to find someone else—I’ll call if you leave your number. I don’t have time for this.”

  Mary Zagoriski backed out of the driveway in her red Camaro, squealing the tires like a hot-shot high-school boy.

  ***

  Fred took the strips of Tippy’s note. The one on that Mary had written her lawyer’s name and number went into his wallet along with the mailing address of the house he took off a mailbox already stuffed with circulars. So much domestic neglect. A mailbox grows weeds as fast as a back yard does. He took the obvious crap out of the box and dumped it into one of the trash cans. Once the obvious crap was gone there was nothing left but three issues of the Nashua Sentinel. The one on the bottom of the pile had Zagoriski’s face on it, along with the lie “Beloved teacher,” and so on. Mary wouldn’t want these, but she might need them for something.

  His own name, and Clayton’s address and number, he wrote on another strip that he put under the kitchen door where she ought to see it. On another strip he wrote—he might find a way to get it to her somehow, though it would be better spoken, and in person, Dear Molly, What I hoped, when I asked when you get off work, was to have dinner with you anywhere so I could hold your hands in the crumbs and say I’d love some day if you would do me the honor to let me meet your children. Fred.

  It was all wrong. He’d think about it, driving back.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  He beat the rendezvous at the shady spot next to the Charles Hotel by ten minutes. He’d nabbed a meter not far away. It wouldn’t start to apply until eight the following morning. The evening was blowing cool air from the river. It picked up enough dust and trash to lend a festive air to the wait. Fred had taken a bench. He had not overdosed on sleep the past few days. Kim approached alone, her black linen pants moving with almost military precision. Above them was a loose long-sleeved man’s white dress shirt.

  “He won’t know,” Kim said, noting Fred’s attention to the shirt. “Can’t show my tats in Harvard Square. Heidi lives around here.”

  Fred said, “The next thing is, we pay a call on Eva. How do we find Eva?”

  “You’re wrong,” Kim said. “The next thing is, where’s Arthur? Him and Eva. They’ve had six hours. Meanwhile I’m stuck in Cut - Rate - Cuts, welcoming the people, telling them good-bye, watching Heidi keep their tips. Where’s Arth
ur?”

  “It’s five after,” Fred said. “Arthur doesn’t keep tight to a schedule. You know where Eva lives? She lives with Beth, right? Where she works? What’s her last name?”

  Kim hadn’t sat down. She stood in the walkway looking here and there as they talked. “You’re wrong,” Kim said. “All this talk about money. That changes everything. You don’t know Arthur. He’s a baby. One time…and another thing. There he is. No.”

  “So we call him,” Fred said. “Wake him up.”

  “We do not call Arthur,” Kim said. “We go over there is what we do. Five minutes more, he’s not here, we go over. I’ve got keys. He’s sleeping? We wake him up. He’s sleeping with her? We wake them both up. He’s not there? We find that out and move on.”

  “We’ll give it five minutes,” Fred said. “But if the first thing on our minds is finding the painting…”

  “Which Eva was hiding for him,” Kim said. “You don’t see that? When Kenzo and them, and you, and this art dealer Oreo from New York, started asking about it. Listen, you don’t know Arthur. How women push him around. All he wants in this world is to set those paintings free, putting them onto people, like he’s doing with me. To get his revenge on Mr. Z.. That’s all he thinks about. And so there’s always been a woman to watch out for him.