by Sara Gran
I figured that, despite turning her back on me, Alicia was a good judge of people.
“What was the whole bullshit story you didn’t need?” I asked her.
“Just bullshit,” she said. “That he collects classic cars and that the Lincoln was SO SPECIAL and we were SO SMART to salvage it. Well, it’s not so special, and of course Romeo knew that. Everything and anything about a car, Romeo knows. I knew that too. That’s all I remember,” she said.
“Do you think he was a local?” I asked.
She thought for a second and said, “Yeah. He seemed like he lived here. Said he was just driving by and found the cars. That part seemed true.”
I let her go but kept my knife high and ready and said, “Address, please.”
She went to the kitchen to get the paper. I kept a close eye on her. I wasn’t sure which of us would win in a knife fight. But she came back with a registration paper with a name and address written on the back.
“Copy it,” I said, gesturing with the knife. She copied the name and address onto a piece of paper and handed it to me: 2567 College Drive.
“Word to the wise,” I said. “That car was used in vehicular attempted homicide in Oakland yesterday. The cops’ll come around soon. So get your shit together.”
“Shit,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. I liked her. “Sorry about all this.”
“Yeah, it’s OK,” she said, although it wouldn’t be wise to say anything else to a crazy woman holding a knife in your house. “No problem.”
I left and drove to the address Alicia had given me for “Albert Holiday.” Just as Alicia suspected, the address didn’t exist. I took College Drive until it ended in the desert. It was part of a subdivision that looked like it had been built of Legos and dropped into the desert, which was maybe not so far from the truth.
The last house on the last strip of College Drive was 1082. There was no 2567 College Drive. I parked and jumped the fence and walked around the house to see what was behind 1082, the last house on the street.
Behind the last house on College Drive was the desert. The vast expanse of underworld in between the meadows and the angels.
Up above, on the edge of the desert and the suburbs, a hawk was flying high in the air. Close on its tail was maybe a crow, maybe a raven. The crow or whatever it was was trying to get the hawk to leave. He kept diving at the hawk and giving her what looked to be a peck or two before the hawk would fly out of the crow’s line of attack. But then the hawk would start to circle again and the crow would attack again and it would start all over again.
The first time, and the second and the third, the hawk did nothing. But after the fourth time the hawk flew up high, higher than the crow could fly, and then with what I figured was just about everything the hawk had she came down plumb-line straight to the crow and hit it with such force it tumbled down out of the sky, bracing itself just before it hit the desert floor.
I don’t know if the crow was dead.
But you could be damn fucking sure he wouldn’t be bothering the hawk anytime soon.
CHAPTER 8
THE MYSTERY OF THE CBSIS
* * *
Los Angeles, 1999
When I left Carl’s studio the fog had cleared up and the sun was shining on Venice. I didn’t know exactly what Carl and Merritt had been to each other. Or if Carl had been anything at all to Merritt. But I knew that Merritt occupied a lot of mental and emotional and maybe spiritual real estate in Carl.
I left my car in front of Carl’s house and walked down to the boardwalk. About half the shops were closed. I called the Richter Agency from a pay phone on the boardwalk. Phone booths were becoming rare, but I didn’t trust cell phones and the rates in my room were painfully high. The lowering sun gave the phone booth a warm yellow glow. I put in three quarters to start.
I asked to speak to Frank Richter. No one would say yes and no one would say no. I didn’t blame them. It was like calling up Procter & Gamble and asking to speak to Procter. I was persistent and got bumped upstairs a couple of notches. More quarters. More people saying “That won’t be possible, but . . .”
Every time, I said the same thing: “Tell him I’m a friend of Constance Darling’s.” Some people knew who that was and some did not—less at the bottom, more as I inched up toward Richter himself. People like Constance and me existed on a need-to-know basis.
Finally, five dollars and fifty cents in, I got a man on the phone who seemed to be at the top of the mortal heap.
“I can’t promise that Mr. Richter will be in touch,” he said. “But I will try my best to deliver the message.”
He didn’t ask for my number. We both knew that if Mr. Richter wanted to talk to me, he would know how to find me.
* * *
I stopped off at an office supply store and bought an expensive, official-looking notebook with complicated columns to keep track of my hours. Then I went to a pawn shop on Santa Monica Boulevard and bought a slide projector for thirty dollars and a decent-looking hunting knife for ten. After that I got fish cakes and pad thai from a Thai restaurant next to the pawnshop and took it all back to my room.
In my room I ate and recorded my hours thus far in the expensive notebook with descriptions of what I’d done with those hours (“11:50–12:30—buy notebook + pens”) and then I set up my slide projector to shine on the door and turned out the lights and looked at slides of Merritt Underwood’s paintings. There was a set in Adam’s file.
Like Carl’s work they were, as far as I could tell, paintings of nothing. Just colors, mounded up on the canvas. But while Carl’s paintings seemed quiet and sly, Merritt’s howled. I could see why they’d be hard to sell. Piles of red and black paint yelled at you, accused you of a crime you may or may not have committed. Nightmares bloomed. Buried memories were revealed. There was no defense. They weren’t things you’d want in your house.
* * *
That night I woke up at the edge of night and morning for no particular reason. The best hour of the old day and the worst hour of the new one. No reason I could name, at least.
I lay in bed and thought about how much better life was the last time I was in Los Angeles. How, in the days in between meeting Constance and moving to New Orleans with her, I’d been so full of hope I’d trembled with it. So full of hope it felt like I’d swallowed the sun.
Finally I got out of bed, and when I did I saw that something had been slipped under the door to my room: a piece of creamy white, heavy, deeply textured paper, cut with a sharp edge into a five-by-eight note card. Across the top FRANK RICHTER was printed in black ink, all capitals, in a squarish font; underneath was his logo, an all-seeing eye, never closed, never at rest. Underneath was written, by hand, an address in Malibu and a time—4:44 p.m., the day after tomorrow.
There was no RSVP.
If Richter invited you, you went.
* * *
The next day I had breakfast in a café on Vermont and then looked in a bookstore for a while and bought a paperback true-crime book. I hadn’t spoken more than four words to anyone since I’d met with Carl three days ago, and my tongue felt stiff and fat in my mouth. After breakfast I drove up to meet Linda Hill in her white Spanish-type house in the Los Feliz hills near Griffith Park. Her name was in the file as a KA; she’d run an art gallery that had represented Merritt for years.
Linda Hill was about fifty and had long gray and blond hair. San Francisco was famous for its hills. I felt like the fact that Los Angeles was just as hill-blighted was some kind of national secret. Why were the Los Angeles hills so arcane, so occulted to the world outside? People talked about Los Angeles as if it were New York spread out and deformed, melted like hot cookie dough on a pan. I didn’t know until I got there that the city was a web of mountains and valleys and canyons, starting out wet and cool and drying itself out into desert as it headed east, unlike anyplace else on earth; a maze of dead-end streets that were never parallel and curved in and across themselves like snakes.
There was an energy to Los Angeles that was sharp and would cut you if you didn’t recognize it. Every grain of sand in the beaches and desert buried under the city was a little razor, ready and willing to wound.
But if you saw it for what it was, I was learning, you could maneuver in between the knives and glide through the city, like a needle in a record. You just had to keep your eyes open for synchronicity, and never expect kindness. Just shut up and be grateful when it appeared.
* * *
I sat with Linda Hill on her deck on the hill, surrounded by bougainvillea and jasmine. Hummingbirds buzzed in and out of the flowers. A jade plant bloomed under the bougainvilleas. I’d never seen a jade plant bloom. I didn’t know it was possible.
“He said he tried to help Merritt?” Linda Hill said. “Huh. That is not my recollection. Carl helping Merritt? I don’t know. Maybe. It could have happened.”
“So what is your recollection?” I asked.
“Well,” Linda said, “my memory is that Carl was— Do you know artists? Do you know what they’re like?”
“I don’t know,” I said, although I was pretty sure I did, and I was pretty sure they were exactly like everyone else, only more so. “Tell me.”
“Well, there’s a cycle they go through,” Linda said. “They have their heroes, you know. You go to art school or you do your work or whatever and you find inspiration from people—from artists who are already working, who are a few steps ahead of you. But then,” she said, one eyebrow raised, “an artist, he—or she—has to grow up. They have to make their own work. When Carl got out of school, Merritt was who he wanted to be. Merritt was who he wanted to attach himself to. And Merritt—he was dumb enough to think that meant Carl wanted to be his friend.”
“He was wrong?” I guessed.
Linda let out a long and cynical laugh.
“Carl didn’t want to be Merritt’s friend, no. He wanted to devour him, and spit out his bones. Merritt’s problem was that he wasn’t interested in things like that—star-fucking, power plays, psychoanalytical warfare. Merritt, how can I put this—well, I’ll use a cliché: Merritt had some joie de vivre. He wanted to be this big art star, and for a long time, he was. But he didn’t care about other people. Not in the way that people like Carl care. I think Merritt was like you.”
“Like me?” I said, confused.
“Like how you obviously don’t care what I think about you,” Linda said. “And I mean that as a compliment. It’s refreshing. That was Merritt. He was not engaged in petty crimes against other artists. That was not his thing. Merritt was in a war with history. And I would argue that in his war with history, Merritt won. He’s gone, but his work will stay. I have about two hundred grand of my own money in his art, you know. A good chunk of my retirement fund. Anyway, he didn’t get into that scene. Carl may have had it out for Merritt, but Merritt didn’t care about Carl. Most artists, they’re like crabs in a barrel.”
“What?” I said. “What about crabs?”
“It’s an expression,” Linda said. “Crabs in a barrel. One tries to get out, presumably to some kind of a better life, and the other crabs will pull him back down. They actually do this, you should see it sometime. It’s really pretty extraordinary. Although, who knows, maybe the crab majority knows something the escapee doesn’t. Anyway, artists can be like that. You stay with your peer group. Life pushes you down into the barrel. Life does not push you toward the original idea, toward the breakthrough. It pushes you to what’s marketable. What’s mediocre. It pushes you to be Carl. But Merritt wouldn’t let that happen. He just didn’t have it in him to be mediocre. Everyone else was kind of racing to the bottom, but he just wouldn’t go along. And, you know, that makes it better for everyone. It really does.”
I verified the basic chronology with Linda: Merritt went to art school in the early seventies, finished in the late seventies, and by 1980 was poised to become the next big star. Then his work took a turn for the dark, his demons got the better of him, and his reputation started to head downhill, along with the price of his work. By the time he died in 1995 he was on the margins of the art world, not entirely out of it, but no longer at the center.
I showed her the photo from Merritt’s file. She smiled when she saw it.
“That is Merritt to a T,” she said. “That look. I wish I had a copy.”
“I’ll make you one,” I said. “If I can. Who do you think took it?”
Linda turned the photo over, saw nothing, shrugged.
“Probably Ann,” she said.
“Ann?” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “Carl didn’t tell you about Ann? Ann Davidson?”
“No,” I said. “Could you tell me about Ann?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll tell you about Ann.”
Linda told me about Ann.
“Wow,” Linda said. It seemed to make her a little sad. “Well, Ann Davidson was an artist and for a few years there, she was a very big deal. That sounds horrible. I mean, hopefully everyone’s a big deal to someone. But Ann was a big deal in the cultural sense.”
“She was a painter?” I asked.
“She was an artist,” Linda said. “She could absolutely paint. She was a wonderful painter. But her heart was not really in painting. She made these sculptures—she made them out of things like oil barrels and suitcases. She called them her hives. Little beehives. I didn’t represent her, but I loved her work. And we were friends. Now, Ann, she really hit the sweet spot. Good work that was also commercially viable. And a lovely person, to boot. I mean, look, I’m sure she was crazy on the inside. They all are. That’s what makes artists wonderful. But whatever kind of crazy she was, she transformed it all into her work. That’s the best kind.
“But back to Merritt—they really fell for each other. They were going out for like two years. Three? Four? I think they really loved each other, honestly. But, then, you know, they were both difficult. They never lived together or anything like that. I don’t know if they were exclusive. I mean monogamous. It could have been like an open thing.”
“How were they both difficult?” I asked.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I don’t know what was caused by the alcohol or what was a result. But he almost seemed— I don’t know if this was some kind of, you know, psychoanalytic death drive thing or he was just a fuck up. Or maybe he just couldn’t handle the attention. I really don’t know. But he’d get a good thing going and then he’d screw it up. Do you know about the teaching thing? At USC?”
I did not know; Linda told me.
“So someone gets him a job teaching at USC. When I say ‘gets him a job,’ I mean—I mean Merritt is a man who didn’t file a tax return for ten years. Someone from the IRS came to his studio. They were going to take his paintings. So not the world’s most responsible man.
“So he shows up, starts teaching—I came by one day and it was wonderful. Merritt had the biggest heart. He’s telling the kids they’re wonderful, they’re perfect. He’s telling them, you know, paint from your eternal soul. Paint from the part of you that never dies. He’s bringing in all these guest lecturers—I think he got Schnabel to come in. Ann, of course. I think maybe even Basquiat before he died. Cy Twombly came by one day, spent the whole day with the kids. I think he even did a sketch in class. It was the eighties. But then he never did, you know, the real teacher things. He would die if he heard me say that. Of course he thought what he was doing was teaching. I mean he was actually teaching, right? Conveying knowledge to his students. Of course, that isn’t what they pay you to do. And he didn’t do anything else—didn’t do the paperwork, didn’t file grades, which he thought was obscene, grading someone on their art. His word—obscene. So of course he was fired. But you know, I heard that a bunch of the kids, after Merritt left, they left school and never went back. He ruined it for them. In a good way. They just left and made art for the rest of their lives. That was what an enormous kind of a person he was. Just huge.”
Linda smiled. You could tell
she missed Merritt.
“So what happened to Ann?” I asked.
“Well,” Linda said. “She became huge herself. Not just art-world huge. She was very pretty, a very attractive woman, and the world wanted her. She did a Vogue spread. People wanted to take her picture. People wanted her to model things.”
“How was Merritt with Ann’s success?” I asked. “Was he jealous?”
“Oh no,” Linda said. “He loved it. Loved to see her career take off like that. She was the one who was not always so thrilled with it. I think. I don’t know. She’d gone from doing these little shows, where ten or twenty people would show up, to this whole universe of fame, and I’m not sure that really interested her.” Linda made a face. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be so negative. It was just the last thing we talked about. I shouldn’t let one bad day color the whole thing.”
“Talked about it when?” I asked, still not entirely sure what it was.
“Well, Ann and I had dinner at Musso & Frank’s about a month before she died—twenty-four days, actually—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “She died?”
“Oh God, yes,” Linda said. “Sorry. God, I didn’t mean to bury the lede there. Yes, Ann died. A car accident.”
“Like Merritt?” I asked. I felt like I’d fallen behind.
“Well, they were both car accidents,” Linda said. “This is Los Angeles. That’s how people die. Did you ever go to an emergency room here? In LA?”
I had, and I knew what she meant. You’d wait eight or ten hours because a new car accident kept taking your place in line. But Linda said they weren’t related. Ann died two years before Merritt. She died in a drunk driving accident on Hollywood Boulevard.
“I mean, she was the drunk one,” Linda clarified. “Horrible.”
“Wow,” I said. I let that sink in for a minute and then: “So you were saying. The last conversation you had with her.”