“Well,” he hedged, “I didn’t exactly say that, but you can tell them we have evidence to the contrary.”
“Goddammit, Harry, you sound like a lawyer. Speaking of which, I need to call Gerry Weinstock and remind him to bring the will out with him tomorrow. I’m going to be in charge of Jackson’s estate, and managing it will be a big job.”
“You can handle it, Mrs. Pollock,” he assured her with complete confidence.
After a stop at home for lunch, Steele returned to the station to find a note on his desk. All it said was “Petrillo O+.” Cross off suspect number one, and that takes care of the whole list—Pollock, Kligman, Ossorio, Dragon, and now Petrillo. The investigation had just hit a wall.
Forty-five.
The Fitzgerald family had decided to visit Guild Hall’s annual invitational exhibition by artists of the region—which was, as usual, a reflection of the cultural center’s split personality.
At one extreme were the conservatives, an odd-bedfellows mixture of wealthy summer folks and old-family locals who resisted change in all things cultural as well as social, political, and gastronomic. When they attended any of Guild Hall’s many arts events, they wanted music you could hum along to, poetry that rhymed, movies and plays with plenty of laughs and happy endings, and pictures of familiar scenery, attractive people, pretty floral arrangements, and thoroughbred animals.
At the other end of the spectrum were the radicals who believed that the old barn needed a thorough airing out. They wanted fare that challenged rather than satisfied—progressive jazz, Beat poetry, Brecht and Beckett instead of drawing room comedy, experimental cinema, preferably European or Japanese, and abstract art, the more incomprehensible the better. Ever since 1949, when the spatter-and-daub school first invaded, the landscapists and flower painters had been on the defensive and were not beating a quiet retreat.
Trying to please as wide an audience as possible, Guild Hall’s beleaguered administration was engaged in a perpetual balancing act, nowhere better illustrated than in the annual invitational. Dubbed the Art Wars by the Star’s art critic, the show always provoked heated debate between the Old Guard and vanguard factions and their fans. “So far at least,” wrote the critic, “all the bloodshed has been verbal. There will be violence, but it will exhaust itself in a few well-worn phrases, such as every museum guard knows by heart.”
Unaware of the long-running controversy, Nita, Fitz, and TJ visited Guild Hall with open minds and eyes recently opened by Ossorio. As they entered the lobby, which also served as the theater’s foyer, they had a choice of turning right or left into one of the two flanking galleries. The double doors on each side were open, revealing tantalizing glimpses of the delights inside—or the horrors, depending on which side, literally, you were on.
To the right, the smaller of the two galleries—another bone of contention—was devoted to representational paintings, punctuated by the occasional marble portrait bust or piece of bronze garden statuary. To the left, the larger room held the big, bold canvases and sculptures made of welded metal, found objects, and other unconventional materials that prompted the traditionalists to utter those well-worn phrases.
In search of the Pollock painting they had been told would be there, the Fitzgeralds turned left. It was immediately obvious why the abstractionists had been given the larger room—some of their things were enormous. Sprawling along one wall was Ossorio’s four-part construction, its sections joined by copper piping and decorated with lively swirling threads of black paint over multicolored backgrounds. James Brooks’s piece was a scroll-like canvas, some eight feet long, into which he had soaked diluted paint instead of brushing it on. In fact the image was actually the back of the canvas, not the painted side. His wife, Charlotte Park, had submitted a more modestly scaled effort, a mere five by four feet, in oil paint applied with brushes in the traditional way, which was nonetheless just as abstract, equally improvisational, and even more colorful.
Bracketed by a dynamic Lee Krasner collage, nearly seven feet tall, composed of shredded canvas and black photographer’s backdrop paper on top of one of her recycled 1951 paintings, and an even taller abstraction of energetically brushed, fragmented forms by Willem de Kooning—Pollock’s Springs neighbor, drinking buddy, and rival for the title of America’s Number One Action Painter—was the Pollock. Whoever had hung the exhibition, which opened the day before the accident, must now be aware of the irony of that juxtaposition, as was nearly everyone who saw it. On one side of the Pollock was the heir to his legacy, and on the other, the inheritor of his mantle.
The canvas itself, titled Search, was modest by Pollock standards—only about five by seven feet—but it overflowed with the turbulent energy for which he was famous. After years of simply numbering his paintings he had recently gone back to naming them at the request of his dealer, Sidney Janis, who had a hard time keeping track of the inventory, since the artist started a new Number 1 each year. And titles, Janis had persuaded him, made the paintings easier to sell.
Search was dated 1955. Although most exhibition-goers didn’t know it, this was the last canvas Pollock had ever painted, more than a year earlier.
As they had been when confronted with Number 1, 1950 at The Creeks, Fitz and Nita were initially perplexed, and they were not alone. Another couple was also pondering the composition, an amalgam of several techniques, each vying for dominance. Areas of raw canvas were stained with thinned black enamel, a tactic Pollock had pioneered and Brooks had adopted. Touches of brushed-on green danced around the edges and filled in some of the gaps, while others were in-painted with a rusty red that looked disconcertingly like blood. The whole thing was overlaid with blotches of thick white oil paint that appeared to have been applied straight from the tube. Desultory trickles of black enamel had been poured on top, almost like an afterthought. It seemed that Search was an apt name for it.
“I don’t understand the title, much less the picture itself,” said the man to his wife. “What’s it supposed to mean?”
“What does it mean to you?” came a youthful but confident voice, and the couple turned to find that their questioner was an eight-year-old boy, who was about to give them an art appreciation lesson.
Forty-six.
Before returning to the cottage, Fitz and Nita decided to pay a call on Chief Steele in the hope that Hector Morales had nailed Petrillo. Unfortunately the news was not good, except for Petrillo.
“His blood doesn’t match,” they were told, “and in any case Hector found no wounds on him. I’m afraid we’re stymied.”
“With Pollock out of the running,” said Fitz, “if it’s not someone who had a personal connection to Metzger, like Kligman and Petrillo, or one of Krasner’s sympathizers, it could be a total stranger who just happened on her in the dark and assaulted her, maybe tried to rape her and got scared off when she started to choke. Either a local or a transient who’s long gone and we may never be able to identify.”
“There’s only one way to move this thing along,” Nita proposed, “and that’s to make the information about the skin fragments public. If we let it be known that Metzger’s killer can be identified by claw marks and a matching blood type, maybe we can flush him out. Especially if it’s someone from around here.”
Considering his brief but revealing experience with the local community, Fitz had a very pertinent question. “Would the Bonackers turn in one of their own?”
Steele took his time answering. “That’s a hard call. They’re a self-protective bunch that don’t take kindly to snitches. They perfected the code of silence during Prohibition, when the rumrunners were the backbone of the Bonac economy, but I think they’d draw the line at harboring a killer. If we follow Nita’s advice, I guess we’ll find out.”
“I don’t think Mike would keep quiet if he thought somebody he knew was guilty,” said TJ. Evidently the Collins boy had confided to him that he and Jackson were pals, and
that he was really broken up about his death. “Right now everybody thinks Jackson killed her, so he’d want to clear his buddy’s name.”
“That’s a good point, TJ,” said Steele. “Well, I’d better set the wheels in motion. Can’t wait for the next edition of the Star, so we’ll have to rely on word of mouth. And I know just the mouth.” He flipped on the intercom and buzzed the clerk out front.
“Fred, I’ve got a job for you. Get on the horn to Millie over at the Sea Spray. Tell her you just found out that Metzger wounded her killer and the cops are looking for a man with deep scratches on his face or arms. Tell her Pollock’s definitely been eliminated. Don’t say anything about the blood type, just the claw marks from Metzger’s fingernails. No such marks on Pollock, you can tell her.”
He flipped off the intercom. “In case you haven’t actually met her in person, Millie Dayton is the Sea Spray’s switchboard operator. That news will be all over Bonac before dinnertime, I guarantee.”
Forty-seven.
Saturday, August 18
With Jackson Pollock’s last will and testament in hand, Gerard Weinstock, Esq., knocked on Lee’s door at eleven a.m. He had driven out the evening before, directly from the office, but waited until he’d had a good night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast before confronting her. He had a pretty clear idea what she was going to propose.
Under the terms of the will, Lenore Krasner Pollock was Jackson’s sole heir and executrix. Not only did she inherit his entire estate, but she also had exclusive and absolute control over its disposition. Lee had persuaded Jackson that she was the only one who could be relied on to act in the best interests of his legacy, and he had gone along with her.
In spite of Weinstock’s expressed disapproval, there were no bequests to anyone else, which was bound to cause resentment when the will was made public. Adding insult to injury, in a codicil Jackson authorized Lee to lend (not give) some of his paintings to his brothers, leaving to her discretion which paintings (maybe none) and for how long (maybe never). There was no question in Weinstock’s mind that these terms would anger the Pollock family.
There was, however, an alternative provision in case Lee predeceased Jackson, or for some reason failed to qualify as his executrix. Jackson had insisted that if either of those things happened, his brother Sanford was to be the executor. But Lee had survived to inherit it all, and she wanted to move as quickly as possible to make her own will, one guaranteeing that no one in the Pollock clan would ever get posthumous control of Jackson’s estate.
As much as she understood the wisdom—indeed, as she saw it, the necessity—of doing this, it was causing her deep emotional anxiety. Writing a will meant acknowledging one’s mortality. Back in 1951 it had been hard enough for her to face the possibility of Jackson’s death, but it had been brought home to her when he fell off the wagon and couldn’t get back on. Without Dr. Heller to turn to, he had floundered.
When she realized she was losing him, she vowed she would not lose the paintings into which he had poured so much of himself. They meant more to her than financial security, far more.
She answered her attorney’s knock in a bathrobe and slippers. She had never been an early riser, though compared to Jackson, who hardly ever saw the morning, she was up with the sun. Today, dreading yet another difficult and painful chore, she was having a hard time getting started.
Before she could apologize or even greet him, Weinstock wrapped his arms around her with heartfelt sympathy.
“I’m so sorry, Lee, so sorry,” he whispered as she reciprocated, letting herself be comforted as much by his reassuring presence as by his embrace.
“I thought you’d never get here,” she scolded as he sat down, opened his briefcase, and laid the will on the kitchen table. “It’s been one disaster after another. First the accident, then the funeral—Mags has probably told you all about that—then the story in the paper about the Metzger woman being dead before the crash. Have you seen last Thursday’s Star?” Weinstock said yes, his wife had shown it to him.
“Thank God they’re not blaming Jackson for that.”
“Really? How so? From what the paper said, it seems . . .”
“Yes, doesn’t it? What other conclusion would you draw? But Harry Steele says he’s ruled out Jackson as the killer.” She couldn’t resist turning the chief’s report from provisional to definite.
Weinstock asked the obvious question. “If Jackson didn’t do it, who did?”
“The investigation is in progress, that’s all I know. Harry said he’d keep me informed. Meanwhile I have more important things to think about, namely the will, or rather wills. Jackson’s and mine.”
“I’ve already submitted Jackson’s for probate. I have to warn you, it could take a while. The art will have to be appraised, and there will be tax liabilities and other financial obligations. I’ll defer my fee until the estate is settled, and it will be nominal.
“Now, as to your will, if you hadn’t suggested making one right away I would have recommended it. The terms of Jackson’s will, naming you as sole heir, are now in force.” He opened the document and pointed out the provision he wanted to discuss. “But without your own will, if you should, ah, cease to be a qualified executrix, Jackson’s brother Sande would take over, and I know you don’t want that.”
“Damn right I don’t,” said Lee emphatically. “He has no idea how to manage Jackson’s legacy. The paintings would just be meal tickets to him. He’d sell them off to anyone, just to get enough money to put his brats through school, maybe hire somebody to run that crummy print shop of his.”
“People fall ill, accidents happen. If, God forbid, you were to pass away intestate, Sande would inherit.”
“Exactly, and that’s not going to happen. I want my brother, Irving, to handle the estate if, for whatever reason, I can’t. He understands what’s involved, and I trust him completely.”
“Have you discussed this with him?”
“Yes. We had dinner together in the city on Thursday night, and he agreed.”
Weinstock was making notes on a yellow legal pad. “He lives in Brooklyn, doesn’t he? Let me have his address and phone numbers, home and office, please.” He wrote down the information. “I’ll get in touch with him and arrange a meeting among the three of us at my office. Meanwhile I’ll draft something for you both to review before we meet.” He stood, and she walked with him to the door.
“By the way,” he remarked as he prepared to leave, “I saw your brother last Saturday night, only in passing. I didn’t recognize him at first—hadn’t seen him in a while—and by the time I realized who it was he was gone.”
“You mean in the city?” said Lee, assuming they’d bumped into each other on the street. “I thought you and the family were out here last weekend.”
“It was out here,” he explained. “Mags and the kids have been here since the beginning of August, but I’ve only been able to get away at the weekends. Last week I was preparing for a big court case—the one that kept me away from the funeral—and I had to spend Saturday at the office. I knew I’d be late, so I took the car in, grabbed a bite after work, and hit the road around seven.
“When I got to East Hampton I decided to gas up, so I pulled into that all-night filling station on the highway, just outside town. There was a car in front of me at the pump. I wasn’t paying much attention, but I saw the driver come out of the men’s room. He was holding a handkerchief to his face, so I couldn’t see who he was at first, but he took his hand down when he paid for the gas and I recognized Irving.”
Lee was incredulous. “Are you sure, Gerry? Absolutely certain?”
“He was standing right under the light. I started to get out of the car to say hi, but he hopped into his car and pulled away before I could. He was in a hurry.”
“But he doesn’t own a car,” she told him. “He used to have one, but he sold it last year.
And what the hell would he be doing in East Hampton all alone on a Saturday night? You must have been mistaken.”
Even as she spoke those words, Lee got an inkling of something amiss.
“What is it, Lee? Are you all right?” She had sat back down at the table and was looking off into space, focusing on something far away.
“I’m fine, Gerry, just confused. I don’t know what to think. I’ll have to ask him. Or maybe he has a double out here. You’ve got me all muddled.”
“Why don’t you call him? I’m sure there’s an explanation.”
“Of course,” she said, a bit vaguely. “That’s just what I’m going to do.”
Forty-eight.
Fred Tucker greeted his boss with a hearty “’Morning, Chief,” as Steele entered the station promptly at nine a.m. “Got a bite on your line already.”
“You don’t say? Boy, that was quick. What’s the story?”
“Charlie Osborne, the gas jockey over at Pratt’s Tydol station on the highway, called in to say he saw somebody with a face wound last Saturday night. Wants to give you the details in person.”
“Is he on the job now?”
“No, he works six to midnight on weekends. Says you’ll find him at home this morning.” Fred gave him the address, which was, not surprisingly, on Osborne Lane.
“Any other tips?” asked Steele as he prepared to call on Charlie.
“Not yet, but Millie only got the word out yesterday afternoon. Not everybody has heard yet.”
“You know better than that, Fred. There’s not a body aboveground anywhere in this town who doesn’t know what we’re lookin’ for by now.”
It was a short drive down Newtown Lane to the Osborne Lane turnoff, then almost as far as Cedar Street to Charlie’s house, number 84. Three decades ago Steele would have ridden there on his Indian motorcycle, cutting a dashing figure as the first—and only—member of the East Hampton Town police force. Now, nearing retirement, and with the Indian up on blocks in the garage, he was content to sit behind the wheel of his comfortable 1955 Ford Fairlane Crown Victoria, a recent acquisition that signaled his superior status.
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