SOME DEAD GENIUS

by LENNY KLEINFELD

  The younger drone started to speak, as Dale pulled out his ear-buds—

  “—tective Bergman and this is Detective Dunegan. We’re looking into possible connections between the Art Critic murders and Laurie Desh.”

  The floor tilted. The air turned gray. Dale struggled against a barrage of urges to moan, puke, flee, faint. Managed to squelch them.

  But a fart snuck out. A long thin staccato blattering that rose in pitch to somehow sound like a frightened question-mark.

  Forty-Seven | 2012

  Troy left Thalken’s Corner early, around one-forty A.M..

  Most nights Troy hung out till the bar closed. Tonight he got chased out by a fantastically edible young thing he’d been looking forward to feasting on.

  She’d been fine during the part where they were nameless strangers on adjoining stools.

  She’d been fine during the part where nameless strangers became Larissa and Troy.

  Then came the part where Larissa found out the name that came after Troy was Horowitz, yes that Troy Horowitz, the sculptor, and Larissa told Troy how much she loved his work and wanted to know if he was freaked out by this whole Art Critic thing, did he think JaneDoe was The Art Critic, did he know JaneDoe, what do other artists think, are all the artists leaving town or barricading their homes and carrying guns?

  Larissa was panting to talk about the stuff Troy and his friends had been talking about, constantly, repetitively, obsessively, pathetically, masochistically, banally and frighteningly, for weeks, so now the mere mention of the topic filled Troy with an unnerving schizo blend of boredom and dread.

  He glanced at his watch, put down an extra ten for the bartender and stood up.

  Larissa rotated her stool so she was facing Troy. Gazed up into his eyes. Purred, “Leaving?” Not a question. An offer.

  An offer of the meal Troy had spent the last hour coaxing onto his plate. And, gazing down at Larissa’s plummy lips and buttery cleavage, one he deeply craved.

  But he knew what she’d keep talking about between courses. All night. And maybe at breakfast.

  “Nice meetin’ ya,” he sighed, and left.

  As Troy went out Thalken’s front door and down the steps he suffered a twinge of non-buyer’s remorse.

  First, because he’d violated the lesson his forty-three years on Earth had taught him about sex: you don’t regret the things you did do nearly as much as the things you didn’t do.

  Second, because Bobby and Gerd had been killed while they were home alone. Troy was going home alone, when Larissa would have made an annoying but succulent human shield.

  But, Troy reminded himself for the billionth time, unlike Bobby and Gerd, his place had steel doors, motion detectors, floodlights, and alarms that would blast sirens while silently summoning security goons. He’d gone whole hog eight years ago after the place had been burgled, a load of expensive tools stolen. Back then the converted body shop had just been his studio, but since his divorce it was also home. A much safer one than the house he’d shared with The Bitch and The Brats, and just a two-and-a-half block walk from a neighborhood bar where Troy was the star regul—

  “Freeze,” a harsh hiss from a huge guy who surged out of a narrow dark walkway, stuck a gun in Troy’s face and clamped a crushing hand on his throat.

  Troy gave a tiny nod.

  The man was wearing a nylon ski mask. Thank God. Robbery.

  The huge mugger yanked Troy into the walkway and shoved him against the wall.

  “Stay quiet, you don’t get hurt.”

  Troy nodded again. Just cooperate—Gloves! Why’s a mugger wearing latex gl—

  A startlingly beautiful light flashed in the gun barrel and Troy’s brain stopped.

  • • •

  Many months ago Troy Horowitz and JaneDoe had been the finalists in the contest to become Tesca Target Number Three.

  Financially, Horowitz was the better prospect. But he lived in a fucking fortress. The only place Tommy saw to nail Horowitz was walking home from the corner tavern where Horowitz hung, late, four-five nights a week.

  Tommy didn’t like clipping people outdoors. Never knew who was watching, who might come by.

  So JaneDoe got the nod.

  But things had changed.

  So here Tommy was, out-fucking-doors, whacking some genius whose art he never even had a chance to stock up on.

  Tommy pulled the dead sculptor’s jaw down and stuck a souvenir miniature of the Hancock Building in his mouth. The base was too wide to fit, so the building had to go in upside down.

  Looked like crap. Pissed Tommy off. Had an urge to take his Hancock Building and go.

  Couldn’t. Even if this one wasn’t up to his usual standard, it got the main job done.

  Soon as those cocksucker retard cops find this they’ll know The Art Critic ain’t JaneDoe.

  And they will get the hell off her doorstep.

  Forty-Eight | 2012

  Mark just barely recognized Dale Phipps from his driver’s license photo; his face looked like it had been pranked by a horror movie make-up crew.

  But it was Phipps who was shocked by Mark and Doonie. He blanched and blew a fart.

  That happens. Even to people who aren’t guilty of something worth arresting them for.

  Phipps gave an apologetic nod, and ushered the cops into his office. He invited Mark and Doonie to sit as he hurried behind his desk like a man seeking safety behind a moat. Obviously nervous. But not interestingly.

  Cops are connoisseurs of nervous. This was garden-variety. Except maybe for Phipps keeping his left hand in his pocket the entire time, even after he sat.

  Soon as his butt landed in the chair Phipps blurted, “Is there some connection between Laurie’s death and the Art Critic murders?”

  “The profession of all three victims,” Mark replied, giving no sign Phipps had just goosed the Nervous-ometer by trying to find out what the cops knew. “Did Laurie Desh and JaneDoe know each other?”

  “Not that I was aware of. But young artists go to a lot of the same parties, bars—and openings, if only for the free wine and snacks.”

  “Was there anyone who had a reason to want Laurie Desh gone?”

  “Nobody.” Phipps massaged the brow above a bulging bloodshot eye. “As I told the detectives back then.”

  “Everybody pisses somebody off,” Doonie insisted. “Any jilted exes?”

  Phipps shook his head. “Not far as I knew. But we didn’t see much of each other the last year-and-half of her life.”

  “After she blew you off and went with the Jacob Ruby Gallery in Manhattan?” Mark asked, hard, to see what brand of nervous it provoked.

  “Yes, after that,” Phipps answered. “And yes of course there were some hurt feelings at fir—”

  “And some lost profits,” Mark cut in.

  “See,” Doonie amiably pointed out, “Laurie did piss somebody off.”

  “I—” Phipps stopped, reset. “You’ve obviously read the file, so you know what I told the detectives. Of course I was upset, but not for long. What Laurie did was business as usual.” Phipps looked at Doonie, then at Mark. “I did not kill Laurie Desh. You know that, because you know I was with my girlfriend when it happened.”

  “And girlfriends never lie,” Mark said.

  “She’s an ex-girlfriend now. Ask her again.”

  “Good idea,” Mark said. “Did you know Robert Gilson or Gerd Voorsts?”

  “Everybody knew Bobby. I never met Voorsts.”

  Doonie asked, “Did Laurie Desh know them?”

  “Bobby, for sure. I have no idea if she knew Voorsts.”

  “Do you know of anyone,” Mark asked, “who knew all three? Someone Desh, Gilson and Voorsts had in common?”

  Phipps blatted out another weak fart. He blushed, his rashes glowing darkly. “Sorry.”

  “We’re professionals,” Mark assured him. “So you do know someone?”

  “What? Um, no, I, I can’t think of anyone.”

  “
You had this expression like you did.” Not exactly; it was the fart.

  Phipps shook his head. “No, no one, at all—I cannot help you there, honest,” he apologized, holding out both hands in an instinctive gesture of sincerity.

  It was the first time Phipps’ left hand emerged from his pocket.

  Mark and Doonie’s eyes snapped to that hand.

  There was no weapon in it. And no middle finger, except for a squat stump, and the fingers next to it were failed pretzels.

  Phipps reddened and he yanked both hands down behind his desk.

  Christ. The skin, the eye, the fingers—Phipps was probably nervous around anybody, let alone cops… And yet he was prospering in a business that was all about personal contact. “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Phipps,” Mark said, pretending he was done.

  “Anything I can do.”

  “And,” Mark gestured at the well-appointed office, “congratulations on the way you’ve rebounded from bankruptcy.”

  Phipps gave a modest duck of the head. “Thanks.”

  “How did you get into the esthetic impact consulting business?”

  Bingo—another gassy blat.

  Phipps covered his mouth with his undamaged right hand, through which he murmured, “Sorry, I’m—too much coffee this morning—sorry.”

  “Hell,” Doonie confided, “had a partner with your same coffee troubles, only worse. Eight hours a day stuck in a car with him playing trombone. Closest I been to shooting a fellow officer.”

  Phipps searched for an appropriate response. Settled on, “Oh.”

  “So,” Doonie urged, “you were saying how you got to be a, watchamacallit?”

  “Esthetic…” He sighed. “Interior decorator. Well…” As Phipps struggled to answer that simple question his eyes darted back and forth, which gave the bulging one a fishlike quality. “…After my gallery went bust—”

  Mark’s cell rang. “Excuse me.” He took the call. “Bergman… Right. We’re on our way.” He hung up. “Thank you for your cooperation,” Mark stood. Promised Phipps, “We’ll talk more soon.”

  • • •

  Doonie waited till they were walking down the hallway, out of earshot of Phipps’ office, before asking, “Something good?”

  “For JaneDoe, yeah. For the sculptor who just turned up dead, no.”

  “There an Art Critic signature?”

  “Looks like.”

  “So JaneDoe’s off the hook… And you two…” Doonie grinned in happy anticipation.

  Forty-Nine | 2012

  21-year-old Dottie Lang and Maxx, her terrier mutt, were having a totally usual walk when Maxx went gonzo yappy and tried to charge up a walkway. Dottie figured he’d spotted a rat. She had no intention of chasing rats anywhere, forget in that narrow dark passage between two grungy old buildings.

  But Maxx’s terrier-berserker switch had been thrown. He kept lunging back toward the walkway, manically scrabbling at the sidewalk, growling and whipping his head back and forth. Dottie was afraid Maxx was going to break his neck or at least rip out a toenail. She surrendered, and Maxx dragged her to something almost as gross as a live rat.

  Dottie jerked to a halt. Began to back away. Stopped. Stared. With that thing in his mouth, it took a moment. But she recognized him; Troy, that sculptor dude who always sat on the end stool at Thalken’s, hitting on anything with big boobs, so he’d never talked much to Dottie—holy shit! Troy was an artist. So this must—

  Dottie yanked out her cell and took a picture.

  Came out dark. She pressed Low Light and got a couple of better shots.

  Then she hauled Maxx out to the sidewalk and called 911.

  The dispatcher offered to stay on the line with her until the cops arrived. Dottie said that’s okay, hung up, and started posting.

  After uploading twice, Dottie froze: She could’ve sold these pictures.

  Too late. Her life had been You feel it, you message it. Her thumbs ruled.

  So what. This works. These pictures were totally viral. Maybe historic. Tonight she’d be on TV, rocking the news.

  And OMG, Maxx was gonna be a hero.

  Dottie’s thumbs galloped back into action.

  Fifty | 2012

  They had just pulled away from the Tree Studios building when Mark realized what the finest part of the day was going to be.

  Doonie noticed Mark trying not to grin. “What?”

  “JaneDoe won’t be off the Art Critic hook unless she has a solid alibi for this murder.”

  It took Doon maybe two seconds. He loosed a pleased, wicked moan when he got there: JaneDoe’s alibi would be provided by her 24/7 CPD and FBI surveillance teams.

  Okay, back to work. “Assuming the Art Critic didn’t fuck up this time and leave his home address,” Mark said, “we need to go at Phipps again, soon.”

  “Yeah, he sure as shit was holding back.”

  “Not just about Desh,” Mark noted. “First fart came when he heard we were Homicide, second came when I asked if he knew someone connected to all three vics.”

  “Uh-huh,” Doonie nodded, “and the third fart was when we asked how he got from being broke to sitting pretty. So we look at his money—”

  Doonie’s cell rang.

  “Dunegan… Thanks, Loo.” He snapped the phone shut. “Husak sent us something.”

  Doonie used the dashboard-mounted laptop to open Husak’s email.

  Two photos of the vic. He had an entry wound in his forehead and a miniature Hancock Building in his mouth. The Hancock was inserted upside down, a slight departure from the signature. But that wasn’t why Husak had treated them to this preview.

  The photos weren’t police issue. They were on a Facebook page belonging to a 21-year-old waitress and her little dog, who’d just updated their status to: TODAY’S GRACE NATCHEZ GUEST STARS!

  • • •

  Dottie and Maxx had discovered the dead artist a few blocks north of Lake Street, a mile west of the Loop. The Market District, a semi-gritty neighborhood where produce distributors and light industry once thrived by servicing wealthy lakefront wards. In the 1970s its core businesses started going obsolete and belly-up. It made a comeback in the ’90s. Media firms spilled in from the Loop, bringing a sprinkling of trendy restaurants, edgy galleries and hipoisie bars. But there was no shaking off the ingrained drabness of side streets dominated by weary factories, warehouses and tenements that had been collecting soot since the first half of the previous century.

  At the moment, one side street was glamorized by a corpse, a herd of camera trucks, news choppers dancing overhead, and a gleaming limo waiting to spirit Dottie and Maxx away to a cable news bureau for their exclusive interview with Grace Natchez, who was on the phone in her dressing room in New York, raging at her field producer in Chicago to “get that little slut in the limo or my exclusive’s gonna be about as exclusive as a fucking toilet seat at the back end of a 737!”

  Dottie and Maxx were bathing in questions shouted by a phalanx of frantic reporters when Natchez’s field producer sidled up and whispered in Dottie’s ear: “If we don’t leave right now there won’t be time for our make-up genius to do you before you go on camera!”

  Dottie squealed a quick “G’bye!” to the press and plopped into the limo, just as Detectives Bergman and Dunegan walked past. They entered the police-tape perimeter around the entry to the fatal walkway, which the TV Stars had tented with blue plastic sheeting to shield the vic from cameras. Now that the whole world had already seen what was in his mouth.

  Under the tenting they found Wendy Hsu and Jim Montero hanging out with the guest of honor; this being Area Four, Hsu and Montero had been first in.

  “Troy Horowitz, 44, sculptor,” Montero informed Mark and Doonie. “Last seen leaving a nearby tavern at 1:40 A.M., presumably walking to his residence, a block north of here.”

  Mark and Doonie studied the Hancock Building insertion.

  Doonie said, “Exactly like his Facebook photo.”

  “No
w there’s a first,” Mark said. “But also, first time the toy was inserted upside down.”

  “Because the base is too wide to fit in the guy’s mouth,” Doonie shrugged.

  “First time the perp made that kind of mistake” Mark pointed out. “Also, the effect isn’t as—whimsical as the others.”

  “Everyone has a off day,” Doonie ruled.

  “Yeah,” Hsu chimed in, “I think it’s him again.”

  “Probably,” Mark said. “But it’s also the first outdoor kill—though that might make sense—the Critic’s a victim of his own success, every artist in town is too paranoid to let a stranger in.”

  “Especially Horowitz,” Montero said. “Tavern owner says Horowitz’s studio has security like a fucking bank. Street was the only place to get at him.”

  “Yeah,” Mark admitted.

  The variations between this and the other two kills were minor and explicable. This was The Art Critic. Not because that’s who Mark wanted it to be. But because that’s who logic said it was.

  Time to go find out if Deputy Chief Langan was into logic this week.

  Fifty-One | 2012

  When Mark and Doonie walked into Husak’s office he was watching TV with Special Agent Nick Rarey, the competent young Feeb who’d noticed the key detail missing in Mark’s account of how he ID’d the JaneDoe Barbie.

  At the task force meeting Rarey maintained the regulation FBI cyborg demeanor. Here by himself with no supervisor to perform for, the blond baby-faced agent came across like a precocious college kid who’d lucked into a cool summer job as an FBI agent.

  “Detectives,” Rarey grinned, giving a casual fist pump.

  Husak flung up a different gesture: a warning to not interrupt the TV.

  A cable newscast. The anchor, sharing the screen with a close-up of a dead sculptor sucking on the Hancock Building, was incredulously asking, “Police still won’t say if this is another Art Critic murder?”