Harmony In Flesh and Black

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Decisions must be made, Fred knew. The important thing was to keep himself and Clayton out of this. With the man dead and Fred caught unexpectedly with his cooling meat and listening for company, the first thing he did was to remind himself of the large horizontal stain of comparative cleanliness on the wall in the front room, where the newly exposed roses were pinker and more hopeful, marking the place from which Clayton’s purchase had come the afternoon before. In Molly’s house, at this minute, was a painting Fred had brought from here. Anyone with half an eye would see that something was missing.

  “Beautiful,” Fred said.

  Unless more fruitful lines of inquiry opened, the cops were going to put together the beaten corpse and the absence on Smykal’s wall, which would match a painting on Clayton’s, in case unhappy future accident should tie Clay to his alias, and lead a team of inquiry to his doorstep. Fred rearranged some of the larger crotch-art photos so that the painting’s former home was covered by Smykal’s crasser, more direct, more vulgar predilection.

  * * *

  Cambridge is a city. People go in and out of buildings all the time. Nobody notices, maybe. But Fred had been at or near Smykal’s apartment three times in less than twelve hours, and he’d just not ten minutes ago held the downstairs door open for a smiling young man and his bicycle. He’d asked for Smykal’s stuff, using his name, at Kinko’s—and Smykal’s name was about to be a household word. For all the normal inattention of the human witness, Fred tended to stand out. He looked like something Max Beckman had painted, Molly said, walking into a Glackens picnic: a large, hard-looking, crew-cut man whom someone must have seen, more than once, entering the building—most recently at about the time Smykal passed over.

  Fred looked at the terrain and listened. The body had been dead for over an hour, in his judgment; if sirens had been alerted, they would have been here already.

  He’d come for a letter, and he might as well take a look, since there was not going to be another opportunity.

  I’ll give it seven minutes, Fred thought. After that, Clay’s on his own.

  Fred moved with practiced silence, touching nothing with his skin, using his handkerchief to shift anything he had to move. The pockets of Smykal’s clothing were explored first, since Smykal lay on his back and his coat had fallen open. The limbs moved easily, not yet acknowledging the diligent messengers of death that tell you, Stiffen up. The meat sighed involuntarily when moved, as new-made bodies do. Smykal had nothing Fred wanted in his suit coat or in his other pockets, except for the Kinko’s receipt in his wallet, which Fred took in order to deep-six it. It was just as well that Clay’s letter wasn’t on the body: soaked with Smykal’s fluids, it would complicate the painting’s provenance more than it would help it.

  Aside from studio and sitting room, the apartment had kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, everything thick with greasy dust. The bathroom doubled as a darkroom. Tub and sink were full of trays, which had been knocked about, as if the discussion that Smykal had ultimately lost in the studio had started here. The room was fixed with red light and festooned with strings and clips for drying prints.

  Smykal’s bedroom was so filled with offal it was difficult to get into. The papers on and in the desk were in disarray, tending to be bills. Fred went through them, finding nothing—neither the letter he wanted nor any sign of Clay’s payment. The single bed was unmade. A green blind on the room’s only window was nailed down so it could not be lifted to let light in, or air. Dirty clothes bulged in a bag on the painted brown wood floor. Other dirty clothes hung in the closet.

  Fred checked the bureau. The open top drawer held a busted gold watch and chain, collar tabs, stamps, cuff links, a class ring from Boston College, odd things there wouldn’t be names for, knickknacks, and a tin box whose cover showed lavender lozenges. It shook like lozenges. The rest of the drawers held only clothes. Soiled garments were in the upper drawers, clean in the lower. Smykal had a migratory system to eliminate the need for washing machines. Fred realized, looking up from his search, that only the cool glass over the dresser, a mirror that one could tip, was almost clean.

  Smykal’s phone sat on a bedside table. The man evidently had not read in bed but had used a good deal of Kleenex, which he scattered around the room in stiff wads. Smykal had favored khaki blankets and sheets of a compromised gray. There ought to be papers. If the man had been as obsessive-compulsive as all photographers—or pornographers—must be to be successful, he should have kept files of annotated prints and negatives, records in general. On the room’s apparently Oriental rug, next to the dresser, Fred found corner indentations and an oblong shape delineated by a lesser degree of ground filth, suggesting the shape of an absent file cabinet.

  Whoever took the old man out, Fred thought, took out a box also.

  It was the likely place for Clayton’s letter.

  Fred studied the situation. “All this sex,” he muttered. “That and the dope and the smell—everything about him—the guy had a million chances to rub someone the wrong way.

  “It’s not your business, Fred,” he told himself. “At least, so far. Let’s keep it that way.”

  With each moment the possibility of his being discovered increased, and that would complicate things. He must get outside and signal Clayton Reed to maintain that neither of them had been here, until and unless it became impossible to deny.

  Fred looked down once again at Smykal’s grotesque corpse: seedy, shabby, sliding into full decomposition.

  “Farewell, then, little one,” he said.

  To get out by the back door, Fred had to pass through the kitchen, whose smell was more intense but different, going colder, heavier. It had settled to waist level, like a fog. Unwashed dishes leered in the sink. Almost-empty cans and jars bulged in crammed garbage bags under the sink: offensive heaps of semi-abstraction without conviction or purpose.

  Fred checked the fridge (sour milk and unused film), the stove, and a bookshelf that served as pantry for cornflakes, mustard, canned peas and corn, and boxed puddings you mix yourself. Bottles of port and sherry lurched on the bottom shelf, jostling against nasty special gilded glasses. No letter, and no sign of Smykal’s supply of sweet white powder, either. Like as not, what Smykal had decided to do with Clayton’s money was stick it up his nose; the absence of a stash was suggestive, like the absence of the money itself.

  “They’ll find cocaine in him. If we’re lucky, the story’s going to be cocaine,” Fred said. “A drug buy or bust or rip-off. It’s how they’ll have to read it.”

  Even if the man had had not a friend in the world, and even if his neighbors had hated him, his body and its immediate circumstances were going to be, very soon, in the public domain. The cops soon would know too much about Smykal.

  Fred had done what he could without making things worse. The letter was a lost cause.

  He took the back way out and watched the street, sitting in his car in the dusk before dawn, before he drove away.

  5

  To Molly’s question, mumbled sleepily as she made a place for him in the bed, Fred answered only, “No, I didn’t get it.” He had showered and slipped in beside her, not wanting to alarm her. He did not want to lay his worry on her unless events made it unavoidable, mostly because he was reluctant to bring an ugly murder to her bed. He’d seen worse things than Smykal, living or dead. Having done what he could, he put it away until he had to take it on again.

  Clayton he’d called right away, from a pay phone after he left Smykal’s, waking him up to tell him, Do not mention Smykal to anyone, for any reason, until we talk. Don’t telephone his number. We’ve got trouble. He had not decided how much he could say to Clayton, but he was determined to get the painting out of Molly’s house this morning. That would mean driving into town.

  So Fred was drinking coffee in Molly’s kitchen when she came in, and looking at the painting Clay had got them into, which was propped against the oven.

  “Sorry,” Fred said. “My Saturday is scre
wed. I’ve got to spend time with that little lady.”

  “It’s hard to imagine what that poor girl will find to do in Clayton’s house, hanging around in her birthday suit,” Molly said.

  This was not really fair. Clay had been a widower since long before Fred first met him and they started working together; and he remained a devoted husband to his wife’s memory. She, a Stillton, from one of the Boston families whose names and wealth are coextensive with the towns on the North Shore, still gazed in moist rapture from a silver frame in Clayton’s study. But nothing in Clayton’s manner, nor his social interests, now distinguished him as one for whom an intimate relationship with another human, female or male, was possible. That was a closed chapter for him, something he had done and finished with.

  On the rare occasions when he made a reference to his past history—speaking with Fred perhaps on a late evening when both were tired from some project—Clay would suggest the vestiges of a truly bewildered confusion, as if, in marriage, he had awakened in bed one morning surrounded by large, damp clockwork.

  But when Clayton ran his hands with tenderness along the contour of a frame or laughed over the juxtapositions of forms and colors in a painted image, Fred thought he saw the man who had had the capacity to court, and marry, and stand by a young wife while the cruel surprise of a wasting illness carried her off.

  You had to work at it to see it now, though, and you couldn’t always summon the patience. Molly, perhaps on Fred’s behalf, had far less patience with Clay’s foibles and mannerisms. But Fred suspected that Molly, being a direct sort, was imagining herself in the position of this naked, unnamed model, hanging around in Clayton’s house while he failed to remember that manners are a flimsy substitute for conversation and the rough give-and-take of affection.

  Fred had been staring at Clay’s new picture for a half hour. Looking at it now, he figured there might be fifteen Americans who could have painted in that manner, at that time, that well. The drawing was well schooled. There was no fudging at joints or appendages. The paint was handled with confidence but without that bravura or show-offishness that could be so tiresome in work from the period. The painter had considered, and rejected, the daubery of the impressionists, but you could see that he was familiar with them because of the way color found its own shapes in the reflected image in the mirror. The painter could be direct and subtle, too, both in the same picture.

  Because he had made what could be a big mistake, Clay was going to be reticent about the unsigned painting in order to save face and seem somewhat intelligent. He’d keep his knowledge to himself. Clay’s task would be proving what he knew, making it stick. The missing letter had to do with this aspect of the matter. The letter must provide the equivalent of a clear title.

  An unsigned painting of whatever quality is trouble. If you don’t know who did it, you have to start by figuring out the author. Even once you yourself are satisfied that you know what the painting is and who it is by, you still have to demonstrate those things in a way that will satisfy the scholar who knows that painter best.

  When you go to “the guy” (also called the expert) who is the authority on a particular painter, it helps if you can give the history of the picture, where it’s been, who owned it before, where it was exhibited, how it got from there to here. It’s like a title search. If the object is of special purported value, and there’s a big hole in the record, it can be as much of a problem for a picture as it is for a house. And a picture is harder to follow into the past than a house, being more portable.

  Fred left Molly’s at about eight, with the painting in a green garbage bag to protect it from the cold drizzle that had elected to fall on Arlington. He tuned the radio to programs divulging local news, but there was no report about the body ticking on Turbridge Street, preparing to make a most unseemly noise. Fred listened for it but kept it otherwise out of his thoughts. He’d done what he could.

  The road was wet and empty, the trees dripping with rain and pink and white blossoms. What he regretted most was Sam. He’d had to tell the boy last night, before he left for Cambridge, that he likely couldn’t come to his game this morning. Sam had stared at him, disappointed and suspicious, not mollified when Fred told him that Clayton Reed had messed up something that he now had to go out and try to fix. Sam had said only, “Would you turn off the light, Fred, so I can sleep?” Fred had suspected that under the covers Sam was wearing all his clothes.

  His route took him past the damp lawns of Arlington, obediently edged with daffodils and tulips, then down Fresh Pond Parkway and along and across the Charles. Beacon Hill was almost deserted this early on a Saturday morning. It looked like what it wished to be, a piece of London, but steeper.

  Fred parked in the spot Clayton owned beside the row of houses and let himself in. Clay heard him arrive and came spiraling down into the office. Fred was taking the picture out of the green bag. Clay looked at it, gloating. It burned into the room and made Clay smaller.

  “She’s not a bad little painting, is she?” Clayton said. “But what did you mean this morning on the phone? What did Smykal say? What’s happening? What do you mean, there’s trouble?”

  Clayton Reed was wearing the red satin bathrobe he called a dressing gown, which signaled that he was in a state of leisure. He wore it on top of, not instead of, his clothes, omitting only the suit jacket. Fred kept a chair empty next to his desk for Clayton’s visits, but Clay wouldn’t sit this morning. Fred had picked up a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee to keep warm on the hot plate and was having some of it, but he didn’t offer Clay any since Clay did not approve of stimulants. It was barely nine o’clock.

  Clay tapped his fingers on Fred’s desk, waiting for Fred to rise to the challenge in his questions. “Whatever the trouble that man claims, I must have that letter.”

  Fred did not normally lie to Clay without good reason. But given that there’d been nothing on the radio concerning Turbridge Street, he couldn’t count on Clay to act the part of innocence unless he was kept ignorant.

  “Forget that either of us has ever heard of Smykal. It’s important, Clay. Smykal did not answer his door,” Fred said. “I sat out front in my car, watching the street for his return. Suspicious activity began around his building, which I thought might generate a crowd and involve me and therefore us and our business. Smykal’s dangerous, and you are going to be hurt if we get caught near him. We must keep a low profile. So I left. The main thing is the Heade. Let’s not compromise that.”

  “Speaking of trouble, I might as well tell you,” Clayton Reed said. “It’s all I can concentrate on in any case. We are in trouble. Serious trouble. We are about to lose the main objective. I cannot think about that horrible man, not now. As far as the Heade is concerned, the sharks are gathering.”

  Fred took a drink of his coffee and waited. Things were going to keep getting worse now, as he had feared.

  “Albert Finn is in town,” Clay said.

  “Shit,” Fred said. “Sir Albert.”

  Finn’s presence so close to their quarry could represent disaster.

  “I ran into him at the Ritz bar after you and I talked by telephone,” Clay said. “I called you from the Ritz, if you remember? I was obliged to drink with the man, at his expense. I am certain Finn is onto something. He wouldn’t come up just for the affair at the Gardner.”

  “Did Finn mention the Heade?” Fred asked.

  “Of course he didn’t mention the Heade,” Clayton said, exasperated. “Any more than I would signal interest in it myself. Finn says he’s here for the Gardner benefit, to help console them for their carelessness in having all those paintings stolen. You know his cheery laugh.”

  March 18, 1990, had been a black day in Boston’s cultural history, when thieves in uniform, after gaining access to the museum by appealing to the humane sympathies of its guards, had made off with a select group of paintings, including a Manet—the best piece in the collection—two of the three Rembrandts, and Vermeer’s The Concert.
There wasn’t a Vermeer left in town now, other than the one Clayton suspected lay waiting for him, asleep in the hay.

  “Makes sense that he’d come for the benefit,” Fred said. “He loves an admiring crowd of the unknighted.”

  “Then he said that if I was going to the preview at Doolan’s this afternoon, he had nothing important to do, and if I wouldn’t drive on the wrong side of the road, he’d ride with me and keep me company.”

  “Whoops,” said Fred.

  “I couldn’t say I didn’t care what was at Doolan’s,” Clay said. “That would tip him off. So I must take him with me and trust he’ll get so mired in admirers that I can look surreptitiously at the Heade. I’m not happy about this. I don’t know how one of Finn’s hangers-on could miss the reference you discovered, Fred, in the archives, which any fool could find—that is, I mean to say, the archives’ microfilms exist in duplicate in all the major cities in the country. It’s not as if we have exclusive access.

  “The man’s no scholar. He’s a showman,” Clay continued.

  Whereas Clayton Reed studiously cultivated the art of the low profile, Sir Albert Finn accomplished his ends through a mastery of self-promotion. Clay twitched and fretted and started the speech he frequently rehearsed in preparation for the day that would never come, when he would be called on to give the keynote address in the roast of Albert Finn, his nemesis.

  “His books litter the world’s coffee tables. His students and former students fan out across the globe disguised as curators, critics, researchers, and gallery personnel. Major collectors buy nothing without his nod. The sticky strands in the web of favors, alliances, and enmities in the art world, both academic and commercial, invariably lead in his direction. He is the Moriarty of art history.”