by Sara Gran
The look on his face was a cynical kind of almost-smile. It said a few things at once: first, Stop taking my picture. The second thing was harder to put into words. I looked and I looked and finally I figured it was something like: This is all so fucking ridiculous. But at least we know it.
I wondered who the we was—who took the picture.
I put that photo aside and propped it up on the alarm clock next to my bed. I probably would’ve slept with him in real life if I’d had the chance.
Also in the file was a list of KAs—Known Associates. That would be where I would start.
There was also a note in the file from Adam Dubinsky’s first meeting with Merritt Underwood’s father.
Hired Richter Agency. No results.
The file also had a few personal items from Merritt. I couldn’t make heads or tails of Adam’s organizational method. Along with obviously important things, like a timeline of Merritt’s death and the list of KAs there were receipts from dry cleaners and a take-out menu from a sushi restaurant on Ventura Boulevard.
In the back of the file there was a big envelope full of other envelopes. A note on the outside of the outer envelope explained: MAIL 7/11/95. It was the mail that had come to Merritt in the days right before and after he died. Most of it was unopened. Water bills. Bank statements. I guessed Merritt wasn’t the type to open his mail promptly. Even the mail from before his death was probably never seen. Ads, bills, and a card from a dentist who wanted Merritt to come in and get his teeth scrubbed.
And a letter. Not to Merritt; from him. It was addressed to a man in New York City named Jacob Heartwell and had come back to Merritt, stamped RETURN TO SENDER. NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS.
Merritt had decorated the outside of the envelope with sketches of plants and flowers and insects. I opened it carefully, feeling a tiny bit of electricity as I read a letter written for someone who wasn’t me. The letter was hand-written on lined paper with holes for a three-ring binder. The letter was three lines.
You are my friend.
I love you.
I miss you.
That night I walked down Sunset Boulevard through Hollywood and West Hollywood to Beverly Hills. I kept walking. The sidewalk ended and soon I was up in the hills, walking down the side of the road, hoping not to get hit by a Porsche. In the hills people started screaming at me from cars. I’d forgotten that walking in Beverly Hills was a sexually deviant action. Maybe it was a fetish. Maybe some rich LA man would offer me money to watch me walk.
Somewhere a few miles west, if I were to keep walking, down at the very end, was Frank Richter, the richest, most successful PI in the world, and his information empire, a veritable high-rise beehive of detectives. Or maybe more like a nest of wasps. They said Richter had files on more people than the FBI. They said he knew when a pin dropped in Juneau or a baby cried in Brooklyn. No one I knew had seen him in years. The rumor was that since his last wife left him—his fifth, and the fifth to leave—Richter hadn’t left his house on the edge of a cliff in Malibu. He saw almost no one and left the day-to-day running of his agency, now the biggest in the world, to a team of lackeys, yes-men, and minions. It was easier to get a meeting with certain presidents than Richter.
But he would see me. I was sure of it.
Car after car of men yelled at me, until, long after dark, I turned around and walked back to my room.
* * *
The next morning I made an appointment to meet a man named Carl Avery at his house at noon. Carl was the first KA of Merritt Underwood on the list: peer, friend. Carl was handsome with a few days’ worth of stubble and big blue eyes and, judging by the size of his house in Venice, a pile of money.
Venice was cool and foggy and smelled like the ocean. Carl was tall and gaunt with a giant, dull aura that made him even bigger. Merritt had been large, too, according to the file: a bit over six feet and close to two hundred pounds. I figured Carl for the same height, thirty pounds fewer. I made a note to research the ratio of human size to artistic accomplishment.
He opened the door wearing blue jeans and a loose button-down shirt, frayed around the edges. He was barefoot. His hair was short and thick and black, with gray around the temples.
“I thought this was all over,” Carl said, looking unhappily at me, after a long explanation of my presence at his door. “I thought everyone had given up.”
He sounded like he was running low on patience. Weren’t we all?
“Well Mr. Dubinsky,” I said, “the first detective. I mean the second detective. Mr. Dubinsky wanted me to tie up some loose ends.”
We sat in Carl’s studio, a large loft-like structure attached to the back of the house and flooded with light. The light in Los Angeles seemed like it was bought and paid for, like it was something the residents were entitled to. On the walls was a series of paintings that I figured were his that made no sense to me. They weren’t beautiful. They didn’t make me feel anything at all. At least he was trying. Although what he was trying I wasn’t entirely sure. Art was a mystery to me, one I wasn’t interested enough to solve.
“So how is it that you knew Merritt?” I asked. “Through the art world?”
I didn’t know if there was any such thing as an Art World but it felt like a good segue. At twenty-eight I was still working on questioning people, on listening to them tell me the words that could pierce through their armor; on listening to what came out through the holes I’d pierced.
People wanted to tell you the truth. They just didn’t want it to be true, and they didn’t know they wanted to tell it.
“Yeah,” Carl said. “I mean, we were with the same gallery for a while.”
“Merritt was a painter?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
“Yes,” Carl said. “Very sculptural. Very three-dimensional. He did these huge canvases. That’s—well, that’s one reason things got hard for him. No one could deal with these huge creations. These giant, dark canvases . . . They were like a storm. Like a hurricane. Brilliant. But no one wanted to buy them.”
“Was Merritt a good painter?” I asked.
“Well, yes,” Carl said. He frowned and looked confused. “Very. But does it matter?”
“Everything matters,” I said. “Until we know otherwise.”
“Hmm,” Carl said. He furrowed his brow. His face was long and thin and he had the kind of wrinkles down his cheeks that could easily be knife scars. “He was very good,” Carl said. “Probably the best of us all.”
“So you said that was ‘one reason’ things got hard for him,” I asked. “The big canvases. What were the others?”
Carl let out a long attenuated sound from his throat. “Merritt was a difficult person,” he finally said, with something like admiration. “We were very close at one point. I loved him. I loved him very much. He was like a brother to me. An older brother. But he was hard to love.”
“You said you were very close at one point?” I said. I ignored the bit about him being hard to love, which described everyone, ever. Hard to love was a pretty good definition of humanity in general. “When was that?”
“When I was younger,” Carl said. “Like, ten years ago? He was on a jury—I was in art school, we had a little senior-project show, Merritt was one of the judges. This was when he was at his peak. Fame-wise. The Untitled days.”
“Untitled?”
“The Untitled paintings,” Carl explained. “Those were Merritt’s best work. I’m sure you know them. You just don’t know you know them. They’re like air. Just part of the cultural landscape. Anyway, I was enormously flattered that he would choose me. For the show. It was a huge deal for me. We became friends.”
“Tell me about Merritt,” I said.
“He was one of the greatest artists of his time,” Carl said, without hesitation. “Maybe my time, too. And I wouldn’t be anything without him. Well, I don’t know about that. But I don’t know who I would be. He gave me my first big break. And a number of breaks after that. Without Merritt I’d pr
obably be selling shit on the boardwalk. And he was smart. He was probably the smartest man I ever met, in some ways.”
“What ways?”
Carl frowned. He thought about it. Really thought.
“He saw things,” he said. “Things other people didn’t see. Connections. Relationships between and among ideas. The themes of things. That was his strength.
“When he was younger, he had these amazing ideas about painting. He was one of those boy wonders, you know. Got out of art school and he was already a star. Already had a gallery lined up, already selling. But, you know. Artists are difficult. It isn’t an ordinary life. You have to hold yourself together, and he didn’t. I’m barely doing it myself. You want success and then success comes and it isn’t what you think it is.”
“What did he drop?” I asked.
Carl looked at me.
“You said he didn’t hold himself together,” I said. “What didn’t he hold?”
“Huh,” Carl said. “You certainly take things literally. Well, Merritt’s work stopped selling, for one. He dropped that—making money. Untitled, you know, those canvases were . . . they were luminous. They were beautiful. Merritt understood color like no one else. But then every year after that—the next show sold less, and the next less, and so on. It wasn’t that the work wasn’t as good. It was better. Better than anything he’d done before. Maybe better than, you know, anyone has done before. But it was dark. Hard to sell. And Merritt himself—you know, he was not such an easy sell anymore. That was something else that he couldn’t hold on to. He became difficult. Everyone wanted him to return to the Untitled days. That’s what they always want you to do. Be young again. Be a child again. We have this cultural prejudice about growing up. But Merritt grew up, and he grew into something strange and dark. Something beautiful. He would fight with people over the silliest things. He drank, he did a lot of coke, but the real thing was that he would just lose it. Just self-destruct.”
“Self-destruct how?” I prodded.
Carl sighed a few more times. A young woman with very long brown hair came into the room and told Carl, “He’s on the phone for you.”
Carl sighed again.
“Can it wait?” he asked.
The woman shook her head. Carl went to take his call. I did nothing. When Carl came back he’d had time to come up with an anecdote and he told it to me.
“Here’s an example of Merritt in full self-destruction. Just prime death drive. He was on the way out. This was not long before he died. I hadn’t spoken to him in a while. I tried, but. So I heard he was broke and I had my dealer, Dennis Schmidt, try to help. So he, Dennis, sets a meeting for Merritt and this rich collector. Hollywood type, and I’m not telling you his name. But a very, very wealthy man. So they meet for a friendly drink at the Chateau Marmont. The point of these meetings—you know, these people spend a lot of money for these paintings. They are not cheap. And one thing they ask for, in return, sometimes, is a little time with the artist. I don’t know. It’s ridiculous, but I do it. Maybe I shouldn’t. But I do.
“So Merritt meets this guy at the Marmont. And apparently Merritt got very drunk. And apparently the guy—I mean, I know this guy, he is not a bad guy—this guy had some ideas about art that Merritt didn’t like.
“So Merritt, who is desperately broke and calling in every favor he has for a sale, for a loan, for any money at all, which I did, which I did for him—and was very happy to do—Merritt strips off his clothes, jumps in the pool stark naked, and then shits in the pool. Sorry. Then he gets out, puts his clothes back on, invites the guy to take a swim, and leaves.”
Carl let out another long sigh.
It didn’t sound so self-destructive to me. I guess it depended on who you thought your self was and what exactly you would be destroying. Was your self the part of you that wanted to make money? Merritt sounded pretty ready to destruct that. But maybe his self was really the other part—the part that wanted to go swimming.
“I mean, if he hadn’t had the accident, or whatever it was,” Carl went on, “I don’t know what would have happened to him. Past a certain point, nothing ever panned out. Past another point—probably the shitting-in-the-pool point—no one even wanted to meet him. He would say something horrible, show up late, drink too much, insult their taste in art. It stopped being fun. It stopped being cool. You would think people would care about the work. You’d think that would be the thing. But you would be wrong. That’s, like, half of what they care about.”
Carl looked at nothing and sighed.
“Merritt stopped being marketable,” Carl said, as if confessing. “I kind of took his place with that. Being marketable. Being the thing of the year. The flavor of the month. Not the career I wanted, but here we are.”
“Do you think someone killed him?” I asked.
“God no,” Carl said right away. “I think he was wasted and fell off the road.”
“Do you think Merritt will be remembered?” I asked.
“God yes,” Carl said just as quickly. “Look, I’ve told you all the reasons he was difficult. I haven’t told you—because you didn’t ask—why I loved him. Because I did love him, very much. Merritt had, when he was younger, the biggest heart of anyone I ever met. And that came through in his work. And even later, as he got darker, as life turned him darker—somehow that always came through in his work. His heart. It wasn’t obvious, it wasn’t easy to see at the time, but in retrospect, it was always there. That was always the main thing about Merritt. Everyone thought his late paintings were shit. Well, not shit, just not as good. But they weren’t shit. They were better, maybe. Harder. Like I said, they didn’t sell. But what sells isn’t always good. Those two things don’t really have anything to do with each other. Lord knows I know THAT as well as anyone.”
I wasn’t sure if Carl genuinely loathed himself or was just being politely self-deprecating. I guessed the first.
“So what happened to him?” I asked. “Why did he become so difficult?”
Carl shrugged. “He came from a decent family, you know. Surgeons, I think. Grew up here in LA. I mean, artists; there’s always some kind of fuck-up. You don’t do this unless you have some kind of chip on your shoulder. You don’t do this unless you have something to prove. So what was Merritt’s particular, you know, psychoanalytic quirk that made him what he was? I don’t really know. I don’t think he ever knew, either.”
Merritt’s father was a psychologist and his mother was a dentist. In my notebook I wrote upgraded to surgeons.
I showed Carl the photo of Merritt. The one of him lighting a cigarette.
“Well, that’s him all right,” Carl said.
“So who do you think took the picture?” I asked.
Carl shrugged.
“I have no idea,” he said. “I doubt it matters. It’s just a photo. I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything at all. Now, I’m sorry, but I really have to go.”
We made our pleasant goodbyes and Carl went to the kitchen and I left.
In front of Carl’s house I got out my notebook and wrote: Picture matters. Picture matters very much.
CHAPTER 7
THE CASE OF THE INFINITE BLACKTOP
* * *
Oakland, 2011
I woke up an hour later in the stolen Nissan. I went through the whole mental ritual again: Where was I? What was I doing? Who was I, exactly?
Accident. Car. Lincoln. Claire DeWitt.
I checked my phone. Claude had texted me the registration address for the Lincoln. It was in a shitty part of Las Vegas near the strip. I knew it well from the Case of the Golden Eggshell, a short little case where, in less than two days, I found out who’d stolen the gold and why. It wasn’t money. It’s never money. It’s always one of three things: anger or love or both.
I sent out little tentacles of consciousness through my limbs.
Pain. Exhaustion. Broken things and sickness and more pain.
If you want to live, some voice in the base of my skull sa
id, you get up. Now.
I pushed away all my pain and self-pity, all my exhaustion and sorrow. I pushed away everything except my sheer will to live—that will that had left me so many times before. But now it burned bright enough I thought we might burn down the whole fucking world together, my will and I.
I started the car, swallowed two more pills without a drink, and started to pull out just as the radio crackled with news: the cops had found the Lincoln again. A patrol car had spotted it in the northern end of Oakland and they were following it north.
Now I was wide awake and everything was crystal-clear and focused in high-definition.
I swung the car around and headed back toward Berkeley.
I caught up with them where Albany meets El Cerrito. It was barely dawn. I drove along a parallel road for a few blocks hoping I could see the cops or the Lincoln but I didn’t see either until I sped up and then ran a red light at Central Avenue.
There was the Lincoln.
I wished I was better at math. I was going about fifty and the Lincoln about sixty. How much faster would I have to go, and exactly where would I turn, and precisely what moment would I need to jump out of the Nissan if I wanted to turn right and stop the Lincoln in its tracks and catch the driver?
I heard a painful crash from what I thought was the next avenue over. I made the next right and turned the corner and saw the source of the sound and braked: the cop car had crashed into the Lincoln, like the Lincoln had done with me. But the unstoppable iron-framed Lincoln pulled away and tried to keep going. It got about fifteen feet before the car died. The driver got out and ran.
He was a full block ahead of me, and he was running and I was driving.
I couldn’t get a good look at his face. All I could see was roughly what Daisy Ramirez had told me: white hair, pale skin, narrow face, slim frame, wearing a button-down shirt and jeans, couldn’t get a good look at his shoes.
It could have been Jay Gleason.