Kaminsky left it at that. He had the statement typed up, and Chris signed it. The inspector thanked him for his cooperation and dismissed him with the usual caution not to leave town until the matter was cleared up. It was obvious to both of them that Chris couldn’t support his account of his whereabouts during the period when the killing must have occurred. The time of death had yet to be officially determined, but the corpse was fresh when the medic examined it. Dead not more than two hours was his guess.
Meanwhile a homicide detective had been interviewing Breinin. This thankless task was given to Anthony Falucci, a veteran interrogator with a mild manner that concealed a razor-sharp instinct for obfuscation, mendacity, and all manner of cover-ups. His questions were not audible through the interview-room door, but Breinin’s answers were, much to the amusement of the cops in the hallway.
“I was in studio all day! No, idiot, not League studio, my studio! Is there I paint my pictures. Alone? Of course alone! With pittance I get from League, you think I can afford assistant? What is corroborate? My wife has job, my daughter has school, they cannot what you call vouch.”
The artist made no secret of the fact that he harbored a grudge against Benton. His statement reiterated the censorship of his mural, for which he held Benton responsible, and the deep-seated animosity that had led to his ejecting him from the classroom the previous week. These facts were embellished with many colorful epithets in two languages.
Eventually, under Falucci’s persistent probing, Breinin constructed what amounted to an alibi. He remembered that he emerged from his studio—the converted front parlor of his Bethune Street apartment—at around four thirty, after the sun had set and he’d lost the light. His daughter was home from school, and they’d had a cup of tea in the kitchen and chatted until about five. Then she got busy with her homework while he cleaned his brushes and puttered around the studio. His wife returned from work at five thirty as usual, and the family had dinner together before he left for the League at seven, which was after the body was discovered. He would not have had time to leave home, go to the League, kill Benton, and return before his wife got home.
“Of course he has only his family to back him up,” said Falucci, as he handed the signed statement to Kaminsky, “and the murder weapon belongs to him. You should have heard him, Jake. He was actually proud that it was his knife—what did he call it? Oh, yes, here it is, a kinzhal—we found in Benton’s chest.”
“I did hear him, loud and clear, when we first questioned him,” Kaminsky recalled. “He called it the perfect weapon for revenge. Gray said it was kept in the studio prop cabinet, under lock and key. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a skeleton key that opens all the cabinets, so anyone with keys could have access. We need to check on that. And since Breinin’s only there once a week, other teachers must be using it, too.”
“Breinin had the motive,” said Falucci, “but if his story checks out, he’s in the clear. I’ll interview the wife and daughter this evening. Gray had the opportunity—he’s in the building, can open the cabinet, is going up there anyway to set up for the class at seven—but why would he kill Benton? Okay, the guy was making a pest of himself, but that’s not reason enough.”
Even though Chris had seemed entirely honest, Kaminsky knew better than to accept his story at face value. “Could be there was something going on that Gray didn’t mention? He told me he’s training to be a muralist. That’s kinda outside my area of expertise, but I bet you don’t just walk out of art school into a career. You’d need recommendations, maybe an apprenticeship, to get started. He said he hopes his teacher, Laning, will help him, so maybe he approached Benton as a potential mentor. Suppose Benton saw his work, didn’t like it, told him so, and threatened to derail him when the time came. Look how he sabotaged Breinin.”
“So how does he get Benton up to the top floor?”
“He has a locker up there. Maybe that’s where he keeps his stuff, not down on the first floor. Easy to find out. He could have arranged to meet Benton up there so he could show him what he was working on. Benton says it’s a load of shit, and he’s gonna blackball him. Gray gets sore and beans him.”
Falucci liked that line of reasoning. “Maybe he hit him too hard, and that’s actually what did him in. Or he had a heart attack as a result. How old did you say Benton was—late seventies, right? Anyway, he’s dead, and Gray has to think fast. He remembers the knife, fetches it out, sticks it into Benton to make it look like that’s what killed him. The autopsy should tell us whether he was alive or dead when he was stabbed.”
Kaminsky wasn’t buying that scenario. “That doesn’t account for the postcard. Maybe I didn’t mention that to you.” He reached into the case file, extracted the clear plastic envelope containing the card and handed it to Falucci. “The knife pinned that picture to Benton’s chest. No prints on it, unfortunately.”
The detective let out a breath, half whistle, half sigh. “What the fuck, an Indian attack? You saying whoever killed Benton stuck the knife through this before they stabbed him? What the hell’s it supposed to mean?”
“If you’re asking me the significance, I can’t tell you,” said the inspector, “but one thing it means is that the killer wanted to send a message. It also means that the stabbing wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment act. Look at the information on the back. It’s one of Benton’s paintings, and it’s called Retribution. Not just any old Benton painting, I’m sure of that.”
Falucci nodded. “Points right back to Breinin, doesn’t it?”
Twenty
The intercom on Kaminsky’s desk buzzed. When he flipped the switch, the clerk told him that a Stewart Klonis from the Art Students League was calling. “Put him through,” he said, and picked up his phone.
Klonis informed him of Bill Millstein’s fight with Benton in the cafeteria and provided the Millstein family’s address, 310 West Forty-Ninth Street, only five blocks from the Midtown North station house. Kaminsky relayed the background to Falucci and sent him to investigate.
There were twenty doorbells at the entrance to the five-story building. Falucci found the name Millstein, one of the few Jewish ones among the largely Irish roster. His ring brought no response. Fortunately he bumped into a gossipy neighbor, who told him that Mr. Millstein was at work, Mrs. Millstein was out, and she hadn’t seen the son for the past few days.
“Such a nice boy, so polite, not like the hoodlums around here,” the yenta said as she rolled her shopping basket toward the entrance to the brownstone next door. “For their elders, they got no respect. But he wants to be an artist, so meshuga. ‘What you gonna eat, paint?’ his papa asks him, but his mama says, ‘Let the kid alone, Sammy.’ She thinks he’s talented, whatever that means. So maybe he’s Picasso, but it don’t pay the rent.”
Falucci thanked her and said he’d come back later. “You should maybe call first,” she suggested, “they got a phone. In my apartment I can hear it ring, we got such thin walls.” He said he’d take her advice.
* * *
Back at the station, the Krons had arrived with Mrs. Benton, who proved to be as formidably distraught as Kaminsky had feared. Backed up by Felicia Fisher, his most experienced female officer, he steered the trio into his office as quickly as possible. Chairs had already been arranged for them, and Fisher guided Rita Benton to the one directly facing Kaminsky’s on the other side of the desk. Joe and Maria Kron sat slightly off to the side. Fisher asked if anyone wanted water or coffee, which were declined all around, then she stepped back and stood at ease by the office door.
Throughout the preliminaries, Rita kept up a steady stream of lamentations in Italian. Maria interjected soothing words, when she could get one or two in, but without effect. Kaminsky had no choice but to interrupt her.
“Please accept my sincere condolences, Mrs. Benton. Under the circumstances, your distress is understandable, but I must ask you to bear with me while I take so
me information from you. I don’t speak Italian, so I hope you’ll indulge me by answering in English.”
Rita wiped her eyes with a large man’s handkerchief, already quite damp and probably supplied by Joe, and squared her substantial shoulders. A heavyset woman of seventy-one, with short-cropped salt-and-pepper curls framing a face that still bore the evidence of youthful beauty, she was every inch the Lombardy matron. Although she’d arrived in New York as a teenager, her voice had never lost its thick accent, which could be sweet as honey or tart as vinegar, depending on her mood. Today it was not mellifluous.
“What has happened to my dearest Tommasso?” she demanded. “I cannot believe he is gone from me! I must see him or I will not believe it!”
“I have arranged that, Mrs. Benton,” Kaminsky told her. “Your husband’s body is at Bellevue Hospital, in the care of the medical examiner’s office.” He decided not to say it was in the morgue, which sounded so clinical and morbid. “You’ll need to make a formal identification. Officer Fisher and I will take you there, and your niece and her husband are welcome to come along. First, however, please sign this release”—he slid a form and a pen across the desk to her—“authorizing the medical examiner to perform an autopsy.”
She regarded the form with alarm, as if it were a poisonous snake. “It means you will cut into my Tommasso’s body! No, I could not bear that. Why would you do that?”
Now came the part he was really dreading. “Your husband did not die of natural causes, Mrs. Benton.”
She stared at him. “Not a heart attack? That is what I expect, he had one last year. He was pushing himself so hard, so hard. New York will kill you, I tell him, but he laughs, tells me not to worry, he can look out for himself. Old fool! He never looked out for himself, it was always me. Not to worry would be not to breathe!”
She had gone off track, and Maria reached over and patted her hand. “Take it easy, Aunt Rita. Let the policeman finish.”
He told her what they had found in Studio Nine, and she let out a wail of misery. “Gesù Cristo! Orribile, orribile! Who would do such a thing?”
“I promise you we will find out, Mrs. Benton, but we need the autopsy to determine the cause of death. We think he may have been hit on the head before he was stabbed, and it’s possible the blow killed him. Or he may actually have had a heart attack and been unconscious, or even already dead, when he was stabbed. Please let us have your cooperation.” He pushed the release form closer to her.
“Go ahead and sign, Aunt Rita,” prompted Maria. “They have to do their job.”
Silent now, she crossed herself and signed the form.
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Benton,” said Kaminsky, collecting the document quickly and concealing his relief as best he could behind his matter-of-fact demeanor. “Officer Fisher, have the desk call the hospital and let them know we’re on the way, and alert the squad car. You’ll go in it with Mrs. Benton and I’ll drive with Mr. and Mrs. Kron.”
“Yes, sir,” said Fisher, and left the room.
But Kaminsky did not make a move to leave just yet. He addressed all three of them.“One more thing before we go. Please tell me if you know of anyone with a motive to kill Mr. Benton. Anyone who threatened him, or had a grudge that made him, or her, seem dangerous. I understand he was a man who rubbed some people the wrong way. Did he antagonize anyone enough to provoke such an attack?”
“More than once I threaten to kill him myself!” said Rita with feeling. “We fight like cat and dog sometimes, then we make up. Yes, he could be impossible, but he was lovable, too. Nobody could stay mad at him for long.”
In his peripheral vision, Kaminsky saw Joe roll his eyes and Maria poke him in the ribs. He rose and moved around the desk to escort them to the cars.
“Well, please give it some thought. It was not a random attack, that much is certain.”
Twenty-One
An hour later Kaminsky returned from the morgue, having turned Rita Benton over to the personal care of Milton Helpern, the chief medical examiner, who assured her that he would handle the postmortem himself. Known as “Sherlock Holmes with a microscope,” Helpern was famous for getting to the bottom of the most mysterious cases of sudden death, whether from natural causes or foul play. Some of his notable achievements in forensic pathology, including his widely reported criticism of the John F. Kennedy autopsy, had recently been described in the rather gruesomely titled book Where Death Delights.
In his thirty-six years with the Medical Examiner’s Office, Helpern had performed thousands of autopsies and supervised thousands more. He assured Mrs. Benton that he would do only what was necessary to determine the cause of death, and his sympathetic manner helped ease her through the ordeal of identifying her husband’s body. Fortunately they had arranged for a windowed viewing room separated from the autopsy theater. Kaminsky was sure that if she’d been taken in to view the body directly she would have thrown herself on it.
Afterward she was returned to the custody of the Krons, who said they would take her back to the St. Regis and inform the two Benton children, who lived in Massachusetts. There was also a funeral to arrange, but not a burial. The Benton family plot was in Neosho, Missouri, but Rita had no intention of interring him with the relatives who had overtly disapproved of her. According to his wishes, she planned to have him cremated and to scatter his ashes on Martha’s Vineyard, where they had first summered in 1920, when he was wooing her. After they married in 1922, they spent every summer on the rustic island off the Massachusetts coast. For an artist so closely identified with imagery of the Midwest and the South, it seemed surprising that this Yankee stronghold was in fact the source of Benton’s Regionalist aesthetic, but he credited the Vineyard, as it was known, as the locale that inspired him to begin his study of the American environment and its people.
On his desk Kaminsky found a note from Detective Falucci to say that the Millsteins were not home when he visited and that he’d go back later. Also that he’d interview the Breinin family after five thirty, when Mrs. Breinin was expected home from work.
There was another note informing him that while he was out a Mr. Lloyd Goodrich of the Whitney Museum had called and left his number. He flipped on the intercom and asked the clerk to call him back.
Goodrich’s secretary connected him immediately. “Thank you for returning my call, Inspector,” he said. “I understand you are in charge of the Benton investigation.”
“That’s right, Mr. Goodrich. Do you have information for me?”
“Frankly, I don’t know that I do, but Stewart—Mr. Klonis, that is—said you want to hear about anything that may have a bearing on the case. It’s just something that happened at the museum last week. At the time, I passed it off as a minor incident, but in light of what occurred, it seems worth mentioning. Of course it may have no bearing at all.”
Stop shilly-shallying, dammit, said Kaminsky to himself. Out loud to Goodrich he said, “And what would that be, sir?”
“Have you heard of an artist named Andy Warhol?” Kaminsky said he knew the name. It would have been an oblivious New Yorker indeed who didn’t know it, considering the publicity Warhol had received for his deadpan takeoffs of Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes, posterized portraits of celebrities, and grisly renderings of car crashes and other disasters. He was also getting plenty of ink for his coterie’s outrageous behavior, and especially their provocative movies, some of which had been closed down by the police for indecency. His so-called Factory on East Forty-Seventh Street, where the films were shot, had been raided more than once.
Goodrich told him about Benton’s run-in with the Warhol entourage. “Tom’s antipathy to Andy is somewhat ironic,” he mused. “He had a similar group of devoted followers when he, too, was a provincial transplant making his reputation in New York, and in their own way they were just as iconoclastic. They were fueled by whiskey instead of drugs, and they weren’t m
aking pornographic movies, though in some ways their art was equally controversial. But Andy is gay, and a couple of his hangers-on are transvestites. Tom couldn’t abide homosexuals, and he hated Pop art, which he thought was a corruption of his populist philosophy.”
“From what you tell me, the animosity was all on the Benton side,” said Kaminsky. “You say Warhol was making favorable comments about Benton’s paintings, and no one in the group was contradicting him?”
“I wasn’t there myself, but that’s what I was told by the guards. But, you know, or perhaps you don’t, Andy isn’t always sincere. At least one always has to wonder if perhaps he’s pulling one’s leg. He’ll say something like ‘I love that,’ and it makes you think, does he really, or is it an act? Most of the time he has a very bland affect, and even when he lights up he’s a dim bulb. To put it another way, he’s the static center around which his circle of manic misfits revolves. If he was praising one of Tom’s paintings, and the others were echoing him sarcastically, Tom would naturally take it as mocking. That would be sure to get his goat.”
“But then Benton would be the one with a motive for violence, rather than the other way around. You said he went after them in the gallery. Did he physically assault anyone?”
“No, the guards intervened before anyone got hurt, but he was using some very offensive language. There was a bit of pushing and shoving. I was told Tom went for Andy, and one of his boys got in the way before the guards broke it up. And one of the girls, a real one, that is, was screaming at Tom. She called him, please excuse my language, a scumbag and said he’d be first on the shit pile of men she planned to exterminate. She said she’d get him in the dark with a six-inch blade.”
“You mean one of them actually threatened him?”
“It all seemed almost amusing at the time. At first they were laughing at Tom’s bluster, which of course only made him more belligerent. Anyway, no real harm was done, and it gave the visitors something to talk about at their dinner parties. One of the guards got Tom to my office, and he blew off some more steam about the degenerate art world. Can’t say I completely disagree with him. By the time he calmed down, the Warhol party was long gone. I walked him out front and hailed a cab for him.”
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