The Infinite Blacktop

by Sara Gran

  I got the impression Anderson liked arguing with people. I guessed he would refer to it as “locking horns” or “going mano a mano” or “duking it out.”

  “What do men do?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I knew. They did what women did, but worse, and thought murder was a good way to solve problems.

  “Good question,” Anderson said. “You have to realize, I’m speaking strictly in the mythopoetic realm here. In real life, men and women aren’t that different anymore. But in our fantasies, you know, we’re MEN.” Anderson made a weight lifting–type gesture and laughed. “And as men, we have this burden, you know, of trying to separate right from wrong. When to use force and when to seduce. Well, I don’t know why I’m trying to make it a male thing. I guess that’s just how we all thought of it. I’m sure my wife wouldn’t agree with that. Anyway—”

  Anderson made a gesture for more beer and someone brought us more beer, like magic.

  “—Merritt wanted to make something meaningful and so did I, and so we fought, because we thought that was what men did. We didn’t know how else to show that we loved each other. Now I know better. Now I tell the people I love that I love them. I tell the people I hate that I hate them. Life is much better this way. Easy to do when you have a million bucks in the bank. Not so easy to do without it.”

  I was getting a little drunk from the beer and I thought Anderson was probably right. I’d done well with telling the people I hated all the ways in which I hated them, even with nothing in the bank. Not so great with telling anyone I loved them. I’d said it a few times and it had never ended well.

  I’d never said it to Constance. She knew anyway. I knew she did.

  “So who else was at that party?” I asked. “Anyone in particular fight with anyone else?”

  “Honestly, it was not an exciting night.” Anderson sighed, wrinkled his brow. Something a little bit broken showed on his face and I could tell he’d gone over that night, his last night with Merritt, a million times. “My wife at the time, Trina, she was there. Merritt. Paul, of course. Jenny O’Donnell, she was always around back then. A bunch of kids from my studio. These two girls Paul picked up in Hollywood, they were from Argentina. The stained-glass guy, what’s-his-name. A couple of other people, but we hardly knew them. No one important. Not unimportant existentially. Unimportant to our little scene.”

  “So there were no fights?” I asked again.

  Anderson frowned. “Not that I remember. Listen, I was drunk. I mean I GOT drunk. There’s a lot I could have missed. Merritt changed after Ann died. He was quieter. But quieter for Merritt—I mean, he started off LOUD. Quieter, smaller Merritt was still very, very big. Still caused all kinds of trouble.”

  “Can you kind of track the night?” I asked. “Can you tell me what you remember?”

  “Sure,” Anderson said. “Merritt showed up around nine. Maybe ten. I don’t remember what—I mean if we had plans or if he called first or just showed up. Like I said, we did this almost every night. Joan Shapiro—I think she was still there from the previous night. My wife did not like that. Trina. Mike Kelly came around. Ray. Merritt came around a little later.”

  “Did he come alone?” I asked.

  “No,” Anderson said. “Not alone. With some girl. Some actress. Rebecca something. They seemed to be having fun. Nothing serious. I don’t think Merritt was serious about anything after Ann.”

  “Did you know Ann?” I asked.

  “Know her?” Anderson said. “I introduced them! Ann and Merritt. I gave Ann her first show. Little group show I put together in Venice. She was a genius, and I’m very proud to say that I was, as far as I know, the first person to say that out loud. She was from this little town in Mississippi. Missouri? Still in art school. We showed her first Beehive piece. That was what she called them—Beehive #1, Beehive #2, and so on. This one had actual bees in it—somehow she, I don’t know. Preserved bees. Formaldehyde or something. Smart as a whip. Enormous talent. And boy, did she have opinions. Didn’t care about, you know, the art world or the oil crises. But get her started on bats or Freud or the history of the flower business. STRONG opinions. She was probably the most curious person I ever met.”

  “So why did you and Merritt fight?” I asked. I’d finished my lunch and felt pleasantly high from the meat and the fat and the beer. It was the most relaxed I’d been since I’d come to Los Angeles.

  “Because, as talented as that SOB was—and boy, was he ever talented—he didn’t want to play the game. He didn’t want to duke it out. He didn’t want to fight for his place in the world. He thought it was beneath him to worry about whether his work sold, if it got reviewed. And you know, it probably was. But that’s what the world needs.”

  “People who stand by their art?”

  “Oh, no,” Anderson said quickly. “We’ve got enough of those. People who want to keep everything pure and contained and then no one ever sees it. No no no. We need people who’ll do what’s beneath them in order to do what needs to be done. People who have vision and are unwilling to let the mediocre steal that vision. People willing to get down in the mud and fight. Because, you know, the bad guys are winning.” I thought we were both a little drunk now, because I was starting to agree with him. “They’re winning every fight, all the time. We, people like you and me, we’ve totally conceded the lower three chakras. The whole bottom triangle. You and me and Merritt and Ann—the good guys—we gave up too easy, moved on to the higher chakras. We gave up the war. The good guys, we don’t need to elevate. There’s enough of us up there. We need to crawl down in the mud, and plant some lotus seeds.”

  “So that’s what you fought about that night?” I asked. “Lotus seeds?”

  “No,” Anderson said. “Actually, I don’t think we did fight that night. Not that I remember. We did have a heated discussion about politics. Merritt didn’t care about politics. I think that’s disgraceful. I think it’s your civic obligation to be utterly fucking furious about politics. Anyway, we did talk, but no big fights. In fact, I don’t remember any big fights that night. Not even with Carl. Maybe a little fight.”

  Something pierced through my haze of beer and meat—at first I thought maybe it was a ray of sunlight from outside the restaurant, or a blast of cold air from the vent.

  But then the feeling, which at first I thought was just a little shiver, didn’t stop.

  Instead it grew.

  And it grew.

  “Carl and Merritt fought a lot?” I asked.

  “All the time,” Anderson said.

  “About lotus seeds?” I asked.

  “Fuck no,” Anderson said. “About art.”

  “And?” I said. There’s always an and.

  “And I don’t know what else,” Anderson said. “There is no and. I don’t know what happens when other people are alone.”

  I thought that was a pretty profound statement, but I put it aside and asked a dumb question.

  “So what did they fight about that night?” I asked. Because now I was sure—they fought that night.

  “According to Carl,” Anderson said, “they fought about politics.”

  “Politics?” I repeated. It was another dumb question. I was getting good at them. He’d just said Merritt didn’t care about politics.

  “That’s what Carl said. But look, when artists fight, it doesn’t matter what they’re fighting about,” he explained. “Paint. Women. Politics. They’re really only fighting about one thing. The same thing. The only thing men ever fight about. Women, too, probably.”

  “So what are they really fighting about?”

  “What we’re fighting about,” Anderson said, “is who’s better. That’s all that matters to artists. We pretend to be decent people, or at least interesting people, but we’re not. All we care about is one thing: being the best. All the crazy stuff—the drinking, the sleeping around, and the going after money, being little bankers—that’s what they are now, little bankers, little painting hedge fund managers—all of it
is just so we can keep working. Eating, breathing—all so we can keep working. So we can be better. So we can be the best. And luckily,” he said, a giant grin spreading across his giant face, “I am.”

  * * *

  That night I dreamed about Ann. I imagined her standing far in the distance on a kind of dream highway. The road was perfectly straight and long, with no cars. Ann stood at the horizon, in a sharp and shiny black suit from a film noir, one arm bent, one finger curled to invite someone forward. She smiled a smart, crooked smile.

  I woke up at 4:44 in the morning with a dark, wet feeling. I lay in bed and I couldn’t sleep.

  Usually solving a mystery brought on a nearly-giddy feeling, a feeling of rightness and satisfaction, almost like happiness. A sense that the world was right on its axis. But now I just felt dark and sad.

  I lay in bed until I was sure of what I wanted to do. I thought of Ann and Merritt and soon my face was hot with tears. I thought of what was lost without them. I thought of the holes in the world that they could have, should have, filled. The seeds they planted and those they would have planted, had they lived.

  Finally I was sure. I stopped crying, got up, made some coffee in the little hotel coffee maker, got dressed, left my hotel, got in my car, and drove to Carl Avery’s house in Venice.

  Carl wasn’t home. The lights were out and there was no car in the driveway. I sat on a broken chair on his porch with my .45 and waited.

  It was a cool night but not cold. Los Angeles was darker at night than any big American city I’d ever been to. After an hour a raccoon ambled its way across the yard, stopping to dig for a root or a mushroom only to leave off in the middle and waddle its fat little ass as far away as it could get when a car approached.

  The car was Carl’s. He parked the car, got out, and clumsily made his way to the door. Good. He was a little drunk. That should help. He stumbled up to the porch.

  “Hello Carl,” I said.

  He gasped and dropped his keys. “Whoa,” he said. “Wait. Are you that detective girl?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

  He looked at me as if he didn’t know why I was there.

  “What are you doing there?” he said. “I mean here.”

  “I’m here,” I said, “to talk about the night you killed Merritt.”

  Carl froze in place, and sobered up fast. His face went through at least three quick permutations: shock, fear, shame.

  I probably didn’t need to, but I pulled out the .45 and pointed it at him.

  Carl sighed and shook his head and looked utterly disgusted. I wasn’t sure who he was so disgusted with—me or himself or the world as a whole.

  “OK,” he said, drunk again. “You might as well come in. But put that thing away.”

  “OK,” I said.

  I went in.

  I did not put that thing away.

  * * *

  Inside we sat where we’d sat last time. Carl stared at all his half-done paintings. I couldn’t quite read his face at first. I’d had many denouements in my life but I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen a murderer like Carl. Usually they denied it or started justifying it or cried. Carl was quiet and still.

  Carl looked at his paintings. I looked at Carl. I’d had weeks with the case and an hour with the raccoon to think about my angle and it was time to try it out.

  “Merritt ruined Ann’s life,” I said. I didn’t believe it. But I was pretty sure Carl did. “He might not have exactly murdered her, but—”

  “Oh, right, sure. He killed her,” Carl said, looking at his paintings. But he said it with a strange little snort, a kind of horrific mirror image of a laugh. “He ate away at her. She gave him chance after chance and every time, he broke her heart. Every year she became a little less. He chipped away at her until there was nothing left.”

  “That’s where people like us come in,” I said—us gentle men and women, us defenders of honor, us cops who chase down pirates. “People like Ann need to be protected.”

  “No,” Carl said. “You mean monsters. Horrific, unforgivable monsters.”

  He kept looking at his paintings. I looked along with him, trying to see what he saw. All I saw was paint.

  “That’s what I told myself,” Carl said. “To cover up my jealousy. My loneliness. I wanted what Merritt had. I wanted to BE Merritt. So I made him into this shitty person. I mean, he was a fuck-up. I didn’t make that up. He was a disaster. Jesus. That was because he was an artist. All artists are fucking disasters.”

  He made a gesture with his hands. It indicated something like look around, this room, this house. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to see. But what I did see was an orderly studio and an orderly house and paintings stacked neatly against the wall. There were no disasters. No messes. Maybe Carl meant that he was never really an artist. Or maybe he thought this was a disaster.

  I’d planned to draw a confession out of Carl by pretending I agreed with him. Pretending I saw things how he saw them.

  But Carl didn’t need me to do any of that. His confession had been waiting.

  All I had to do was let him let it out, not stop him.

  “Yeah,” Carl said bitterly. “That’s what I told myself. If I didn’t save Ann, no one would. Merritt used her. He emptied her out like . . . like an ATM. He just took. Took and took and took. Merritt ruined her. Ruined her life. She was dead less than ten years after meeting him. That’s what I told myself. That getting rid of him was this noble fucking deed.”

  Carl made another ugly sound.

  “I just wanted him dead,” Carl said. His face was sad and haunted in the dark and hard to look at. Hard to see. “He was better and he was always going to be better. I did love Ann. I did have feelings for Ann. Some kind of feelings that were, if I am to be believed about anything, ever, real. They seemed real to me. When I saw her with Merritt—it was like proof. The ultimate proof.”

  “That he was a better person?” I guessed.

  Carl looked at me like I understood nothing.

  “That he was a better painter,” Carl said. “Everything about her was . . . Ann was perfect. She was like the ultimate fucking prize.”

  I’d never met Ann, of course, but I knew that wasn’t true. None of us were perfect. No one was complete. People weren’t designed to be pure; everyone needed parts of everyone else: money, time, sex, labor, tears, attention. We were all filthy; all contaminated by each other. Ann had needed all of those things. That was what ruined her. That was what ruined all of us. There is no escape from the pain of other people. They would ruin you and you would ruin them.

  Not that it mattered now.

  “I was an idiot,” Carl said. “After the party at Anderson’s, I knew he wouldn’t go out the next day. Merritt. He’d be sleeping, or too hungover to drive. And I knew that to get over it, he’d have another drink—you know, hair of the dog. And of course, one drink would be four, and then five.

  “It was all on impulse,” Carl said, seemingly in shock at his own ability to murder. “I planned it all in about three minutes, and then went through with it before I could stop myself. We’d gotten in that fight, the night before. I told him, straight up, ‘You killed Ann.’ And he said, I remember exactly, ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.’ ” Carl made an indignant little sound in his throat. “No idea?! I knew Ann first. No, not really. But I knew her work first. I knew her work before we even met.”

  It was too late to explain to Carl that it wasn’t a numbers game. That it wasn’t a game at all, at least not the kind with points and a score. But I said nothing and let him fill the silence.

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he said. He quoted Merritt again: “I had no idea what I was talking about?! Like I’d never even known her? I just couldn’t—it was just the last straw. Merritt always thought he was so much better than me. So much better than everyone. And he was. As an artist. But as a person? Fuck him. Just fuck him and fuck that. I couldn’t be a better painter, but I could be a bet
ter person. Or so I deluded myself. Deluded myself to justify the wound to my ego. He’d ruined her life. Who knew who else’s? Who would be next? He wouldn’t stop. He’d just suck the life out of some other girl. So I just . . . decided. I don’t know. I didn’t even decide. I just did it.”

  Carl looked at me and as he told me his horrible story I could feel and see something draining out of him as he admitted the enormous awfulness of what he’d done. When I’d caught him at the door he’d looked kind of like a man; now he was looking more and more like a corpse; like an animated, moving corpse, come to visit from the land of the dead.

  “Of course I see now,” Carl went on, “that it was all just horseshit. Just horseshit and jealousy. But at the time. At the time I worked myself into this . . . moral indignation. I just felt in some inarticulate way that it was the only thing to do. That I’d be doing the world a favor by getting rid of him. That’s what I was building toward, all those years. Only one of us could live. So I planned it all out just like that. I knew he’d sleep late, so I called him late, about four—late enough for him to be up and have a few more drinks. I said some stuff, stuff about Ann. About his career. Then I gave him time to drink. Time to get dumb. I called back at six. That time I really just let him have it. We got into all of it—Ann, fame, money, everything. I goaded him into it—he said he would meet me down in Venice at eight that night. I knew he’d just stay home and drink until then. So I went up to his house, went up the driveway, and cut away at his tires. I had this little knife with me, a kind of bowie knife, and I just cut, cut, cut. Never all the way through. There’s a whole system. I found it in a book. A detective novel. I was so angry I barely remember doing any of it. I mean, I did do it, I know that. But I was in such a rage—it was like I was someone else.”