Color Blind (14 page)
Brown rubbed both temples with his fingers, a headache setting in. If McKinnon were there, he’d be asking for a couple of Excedrin.
He knew what the operations chief and Tapell were going to saythat Homicide would have to double up on cases, stay on top of everything, that the cases were already costing the NYPD and the city more than they could afford in manpower, and that it was his job to get resultsno matter how short of staff.
Another thing he knew: That there was no way McKinnon was going to stay away from her husband’s case. The woman was like a dog with a bone. And she’d been right about Brown tooif anyone ever did anything to his wife or daughter, he
would
rip their heart out.
H
e peers across the dimly lit room to the pictures he has cut from his books, some bought, others stolen, thumbtacked to the wall. His little shrine of greats: a horrific Francis Bacon, the central form, a man, surrounded by a flayed body, muscle, bone, and viscera stretched and exposed; de Kooning’s
Woman I,
all breasts and teeth and wild brush strokes, a document of what the artist must have done, he believes, to a woman, which both chills and excites him; three Soutines:
Carcass of Beef, Flayed Beef,
and
Side of Beef and Calf’s Head,
wild bloodbaths that he presumes were the painter’s fantasies. He has no idea that Soutine based the series on Rembrandt’s classical
The Slaughtered Ox
of 1655, hanging in the Louvre, in Paris.
He tries to remember them from before, when things were different, when he was different, before the accident, when he’d first seen all of these works in an exhibition called Expressionist Painting, at the museum on Fifth Avenue. What interested him then was the way all of the artists had approximated flesh with pigment. All day he had looked and lingered, wanting so badly to touch the thickly painted surfaces, or lick them, though he didn’t darehe could feel the guard’s eyes on his back. But then, on his way out, when he spotted the exhibition catalog with its cover picture of Soutine’s
Carcass of Beef,
he had to have it, and slid it under his shirt and walked as naturally as possible out the front doors and down the enormous staircase, the whole time holding his breath while that raw Soutine image burned against his flesh, and into his heart.
Now he tries to recall the exact coloration of the Soutine painting. Was it mostly scarlet and maroon, with touches of melon and cerise? He considers bringing the reproduction with him next time, to check it out, but it’s too precious to carry around, he couldn’t risk that.
He glances back at the wall, toward the corner, where the light is bad, at one more picture that he both loves and detests, another Francis Bacon,
Two Figures,
from 1953, a painting in black and white and gray, which remains unchanged for him, which is why he loves it, but which evokes the most horrific day of his life and brings the accident back all too vividly. He keeps the reproduction on his wall, somewhat apart from the others, in the corner, where the light is dim, and it is almost lost to the shadows.
The paintingso much like his memory, it is uncannydepicts two gray figures on a white bed against a black wall in a violent, sexual frenzy. Of course he has no idea that Bacon borrowed the image from a black-and-white photograph made in 1887 by Eadward Muybridge, of two men wrestling nude. Perhaps if he knew this fact he would be even more drawn to the painting; might even think the artist clairvoyant for transforming the two men into what looks, to him, like an event from his life.
He looks away from the reproductions, rubs his eyes, and sets the magnifying glass back over that
New York Times
article, which mentions the wife, Kate, and her TV show, and though it’s been a long timehe stopped watching after the accidenthe has to admit that aside from his crayons, the television was his best buddy, always on when she was there and even when she was not.
He thinks it might be nice to have a TV again to keep him company, plus he could watch her, Katherine McKinnon, Kate, the art
her-story-n,
and hear what she has to say. Yes, a television would be a really good idea, and he still has most of the money he took off the women, and more that he’s earned and saved over the years.
He steadies the magnifier above the newspaper over Kate’s face. He feels like he knows her, or should, and thinks he will make it his business to do just that. “What do you think, Tony?”
She’s grrrrrrrrreat!
“You bet,” he says, and reads a bit more. It says the man, Richard Rothstein, lived on Central Park West, in one of the best buildings, the San Remo.
If the man lived there, then obviously the art
her-story-n
lives there too.
Maybe he should visit her?
He stares back at the art
her-story-n
. In the photo she appears to have really nice hair. He shuts his eyes, tries to remember, then simply assigns it a color:
Tumbleweed? Mahogany? Sepia?
He decides on a mix of tumbleweed and copper, and spends a while trying to imagine it, what it would feel like, how the tumbleweed and copper strands would shimmer as they slid through his fingers, and he is instantly hard, and holding that thought in his mind works his hand into his pants and struggles to see the colors in his mind’s eye, as he comes.
Quieter now, he retrieves a pencil and tiny sharpener and hones the lead to a fine point, then starts to create the frame of his last finished painting, something he always doeshis
signature
.
For almost two hours he works on only one edge of the painting, writing and writing and writing, over and over and over, until he has created a band of dense graphite.
This, for him, is the easy part, the gravy, no concentration necessary, no test, no eyestrain, merely a repetitive act that calms and soothes him, that brings to each painting a private part of him, and his world; the frames, as it were, make him feel safe, bordering each of his paintings, holding them in, his friends embracing his images.
When he finally finishes the edge he puts the painting aside and studies the two other canvases he’s got on the wall, loosely tacked. One is not much more than a charcoal sketch of the still life of fruit he’s set up on a stand to work from, simple outlines of objects that he has drawn onto unstretched white canvas. Inside the apple shape, he’s written the word red; inside the pear shape, green. Just to be sure. The other canvas, of a city street, is a bit more advanced, parts of the charcoal shapes of apartment buildings with windows and garbage cans and lampposts already filled in with paint. In the half of the garbage can that is unpainted one can make out where he had written the word
silver,
though the painted half is a shocking pinkish red.
It’s grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat!
“Thanks, Tony.”
There is nothing like a friend, he thinks, an old friend.
He shuffles to his paint table, magnifier in hand, runs it over the numerous tubes of paint with their labels peeled off. The same is true of the pastels. No labels. Only the crayons still wear their thin paper skins.
It’s a test, you see. Always a test.
Testing testing testing…
He scans the crayons beside the naked paint tubes, selects the blue crayon he is after, sets the magnifying glass aside, and brings the crayon very close to his face and squints before placing it in the center of the glass palette. Then he squirts out small samples of oil paint from various tubes until the blue crayon is surrounded with dozens of possibilitiessmall blobs of infinite color and variety.
Testing testing testing…
Which one is it?
He dips the edge of a paintbrush into one of the blobs, brings it close to his eyes for inspection, then lowers it to his mouth, tip of his tongue flicking paint-soaked bristles ever so lightly, taste buds exploding like a small nuclear reactor as he loops his tongue over lips and inside his mouthoily linseed, acidic resins, caustic turpentine, and chemical compound pigment mixing with his saliva.
Mmmm…blue.
He believes he can actually taste the blue sky that he remembers only vaguely, or the ocean.
He stares at the name “cerulean” on the crayon’s wrapper, moving the crayon beside this blob of oil, then that one, the one he has tasted and decides, yes, absolutely, that is the onethe right color bluechooses a clean brush, dips it into the blob of pigment and starts painting in the sky part of the city scene where the word
cerulean
has been written.
Testing testing testing…
He seems quite pleased with his choice, a smile breaking across his face. He loves to work, to paint, alone in this small building, really not much more than one room with a bathroom, attached to Pablo’s Towing Station on a remote street in Long Island City. He pays no rent; Pablo is happy to have him around on off-hours, likes the idea that someone is here with a light on to scare away potential burglars.
While he works he wonders again about that dead man. Are the newspapers fucking with him? And he has a thought:
Why not fuck with them?
He lets the idea bounce around in his brain, and though it’s not so easy to concentrate with all the bits of songs and ads and jingles and announcers’ voices
Today it will be mostly sunny with a high of seventyGirls Just Wanna
Have Fu-unCoke is it!
he comes up with a plan. He doesn’t have to bring one of his own paintings. It’s the experiencethe learning and memorizingthat he is after, right? Of course.
He considers the plan, how to go about itand how it will throw them off. Naturally, he does not want to be caught. He needs to do what he does. Anyone can see that.
He thinks and plans while he paints, and finally the fully realized concept comes to him like the sun breaking through periwinkle clouds, bright yellow beams sparking in his brainhe will bring someone else’s painting! How smart is that?
“Brilliant,” he says in a high falsetto voice.
“Thanks, Donna,” he answers in his own voice.
Man, is he ever lucky to have friends like Donna and Tony to give him confidence.
He continues to paint in the area of sky where he has previously written the word
cerulean
with a furious back-and-forth stroke, bristles flaking off the brush, fueled by his idea until the entire sky is bright bright green, then stands back, snatches the cerulean crayon off the table and holds it against the painted sky, and squints so hard the tiny muscles around his eyes begin to ache.
He believes he got it right this time, though there is still a slightly nagging feeling that he could be wrong.
It’s Crrrrrrraaaaaaaazzzzy Eddie
The announcer’s voice is screaming in his head, but he has learned how to think over and under the jingles, ads, songs, and voices, and continues to concentrate on his plan. He has to figure out how and where to buy a painting.
And then, if he has enough money, he is definitely going to buy himself a brand-new television. To watch her.
B
ack in her home office, Kate tacked up the photographs of the three paintings from the crime scenes to the corkboard wall just above her desk. There was no question in her mind that they had not been painted by the same personthe two Bronx pictures with their bizarre color were nothing like the painting left at Richard’s crime scene.
Richard’s crime scene.
The words, so absurd no matter how many times she heard them or said them. Kate felt tears gathering behind her lids and quickly reached for the pack of Marlboros she had finally bought. She wasn’t sure if it was the act of smoking or the hit of nicotine that did the trick, but the deadly habit seemed to steady her.
Now she stared at the crime scene paintings through a gauzy veil of smoke.
What was it about that still life with the blue-striped bowl that continued to nag at her? Something to do with the way it had been painted and those naked patches of white canvas. Where had she seen white canvas used like that before?
Down the hall, in her library, Kate scanned the shelves crammed with hundreds of art books, hoping something would jog her memory. The two lowest shelves were filled with books devoted entirely to the research she’d done for her PBS series on color. Was there something in there that might help?
She skimmed the Albers book, and found nothing. Kandinsky. Nothing. Ellsworth Kelly, Gerhard Richter, Boyd Werther. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then the books on color theory. Again, nothing. Her frustration mounting, Kate scooped up an armful of exhibition catalogs, some of them going back over forty years, spread them out on the floor, and began to go through them slowly. It was almost an hour before she came across the one called
Coloration,
from 1973, and the two plates of paintings by Leonardo Alberto Martinilyrical abstractions made up of wavy color bands with intermittent stripes of white.
If her memory had not completely failed her, those stripes were not white paint, but unpainted canvas, a trademark of a once admired painter whom she had studied, albeit briefly, in graduate schoolone of those artists who had had his fifteen minutes of fame and then had precipitously fallen through the art world cracks.
Kate flipped to the front of the catalog, skimmed the essay, her eyes flitting over words and sentences until she found what she was looking for, the curator’s description of the paintings:
Martini’s use of bare canvas instead of white paint allows light to filter into his paintings almost magically. By laying in the paint with his foam-tipped brushes or pieces of neatly cut sponges so that the paint soaks into the canvas, the artist eschews brush stroke or mark, and allows the color to live, breathe, and speak for itself.
Kate’s body was tingling. This was it, the painting technique she had been trying so hard to remembera description that fit the still life with the blue-striped bowl perfectly.
But if she was right, what was a painting by Leonardo Alberto Martini doing at Richard’s crime scene?
Kate’s hands were shaking as she checked the statistics on the artists in the back of the catalog. Martini’s birth date put his age at just past sixty. Was he still painting? Exhibiting? Living in New York? Even living at all? Kate hadn’t seen a show, or read about his work in years. Of course she knew that many artists disappeared from the art world’s radar screen, though most continued to paint, eking out a living with carpentry jobs or adjunct teaching, anything that would pay their expenses and support their art habit. Real artists needed to create their work whether or not the art world paid attention, and Kate had always regarded Martini as a real artisteven if he had only briefly been a successful one.
Back in her office, fingers trembling a bit on the computer keys, Kate checked the Art Index, a site that kept records of exhibitions and artists. There was no record of Martini dying, or any record of an exhibition in the past twenty yearsno address, no telephone number, no gallery representation.
Why would a has-been artist want to murder Richard?
It made no sense.
Kate hurried down the penthouse hallway into the kitchen, pulled open drawers until she found the Manhattan telephone directory, practically tearing several of its thin pages, impatient to get to the name Martini. There were over two dozen, but no Leonardo or Leo, four with the initial L, three of them on the Upper East Side (an unlikely address for a starving artist), and one on East Tenth. Kate called them all, eliminating each in turn, saving Tenth Street for last.
But when she punched the number into her cellular and an answering machine with one of those generic messages engaged, she immediately hung up. If it was Leonardo, and he was involved in the murder, what could she say that would not scare him off?
Besides, a bit more confidence that the still life with the blue-striped bowl had been painted by the artist would help her make a case for a search warrantand she knew just the man to help her.
L
eonardo Martini.” Merton Sharfstein held the photo of the still life with the blue-striped bowl below his beaklike nose and squinted over his half-glasses. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in some time.”
“But you’ve sold his work, haven’t you, Mert?”
“In the seventies, a few paintings, yes.” He continued to scrutinize the photo.
Mert Sharfstein had been a mentor to Kate, educating her on the ins and outs of the art world when she’d first started frequenting his posh Madison Avenue gallery as an art history student pursuing her Ph.D. more than a decade ago, and there were few people in the art world Kate respected more. Sharfstein had studied art history with all the greats, and now ran one of the city’s most admired and successful galleries, where he showed an eclectic mix of late-nineteenth-century and post-war modern masters, high-end objets d’art (Ming dynasty vases, sixteenth-century tapestries), as well as blue-chip contemporary art. His eye for quality and authenticity was esteemed not only in art circles, but at Interpol as well, which had, on more than one occasion, employed him on cases of international art theft and fraud.
“So what do you think?” Kate’s eyes darted from the painting to the art dealer, back and forth.
“It’s difficult to be absolutely certain in a photograph, but it appears to be sponged-on pigment and bare canvas used as white.” Mert ran his magnifying glass over the picture. “It certainly has the hallmarks of Martini’s painting stylethough the subject matter is entirely different.” The little man peered over his magnifier at Kate. “What’s this about?”
“If I told you, I’m afraid I’d have to kill you.”
“Very funny.” Mert’s eyebrows raised. “Don’t tell me you’re doing police work again, Kate. I mean, after the last time, I wouldn’t think”
“Mert, darling. Please. Don’t think.” Kate pecked him on the cheek, and laid the photos of the two Bronx paintings onto his Biedermeier desk. “What about these?”
“
Outsider art?
Sorry, my dear, but I have no patience for this sort of stuff, especially now that it’s being taken so seriously, competing with real art at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.” He sighed. “Can you imagine paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a sculpture made out of beer-bottle caps by some toothless backwoods hooligan when you could buy any number of exquisite drawings by a modern master for the same amount of money? Chills me to the bone.” He mimed a shiver. “These aren’t
yours,
are they?”
“No,” said Kate. “They belong to a…friend.”
“Well, I hope so.” Mert peered over his half-glasses. “I didn’t think you and Richard bought any of that tripe.” He stopped, a somber look coloring his features. “Richard had the most exquisite taste in art.”
“Yes,” said Kate, feeling an emotional rush that she could not afford. She quickly returned to the subject. “Is there anyone you would recommend I show them to?”
“The Department of Sanitation, perhaps?”
“Seriously.”
“Well, you could try one of the
merchants
who deal in this stuff.” He plucked the glasses off his beak and peered at the ceiling. “There’s that little
shop
that’s recently relocated to Chelsea, the Gallery of Outsider Art, though, if you ask me, it’s not nearly outside enoughperhaps New Jersey would be bestand naturally I have never, nor will I ever, step foot inside it.”
K
ate angled the Mercedes up the ramp. It was Richard’s pride and joy, though she had grown to love it, spoiled by its elegance and comfort, ease of steering, subtle leathera talisman, bringing back her husband all too vividly. She handed the keys to the attendant, hurried down the ramp and onto the street.
Tenth Avenue and Twenty-first Street. Heart of the Chelsea art scenean area Kate knew well.
Five years ago it was car dealers, enormous warehouses, and the occasional strip joint, the mostly deserted streets dotted with hookers of all ages and indiscriminate gender: young girls and boys, African American transsexuals in wigs and hot pants that sported telltale bulges of surgeries yet to comea veritable potpourri for the sexual adventurer; all of that now history.
The art galleries cometh.
Rough concrete floors. Sky-high ceilings. Hudson River views to die for. Fancy boutiques and restaurants. Slums converted to condos. Dog walkers. Tourists. Culture-vultures. Art lovers.
Kate glanced up at the low clouds that stubbornly refused to lift, then across the wide avenue at the black-and-silver New York icon, the Empire Diner, and felt a wrenching pang. How many times had she and Richard collapsed into one of the booths, exhausted from an afternoon of intense gallery hopping? No way she could possibly go there now, sit alone, sip coffee, pretend Richard were with her.
She walked another block, crossed Twenty-third Street, glanced up at the large corner wraparound windows of Kempner Fine Arts, where she had purchased the Warhol and Diebenkorn prints for Richard’s office; then just past it, at the Red Cat Restaurant, where Jimmy, the colorful, always attentive owner, would bring them on-the-house martinis, Kate’s vodka, Richard’s gin. Kate looked away, peered across Tenth Avenue at Bottino, yet another of the watering holes she and Richard had haunted, mainly the bar, when they were in the mood to meet and greet the art world denizens who seemed to live in the restaurant’s front room. Damn it, everywhere she looked, ghosts beckoned, igniting memories, shared conversations, foods they had eaten, wines they had sampledall of them tearing at her heart.
Tears were threatening. Another minute and she would be blubbering in the street. Kate quickened her step, practically running until she saw it, Herbert Bloom’s Gallery of Outsider Art.
Bloom’s gallery was the direct opposite of the spacious, minimal white cubes of the area’s contemporary galleries. A tiny space crowded with all sorts of primitive-looking paintings and drawings, double and triple hung, covering most of the walls, with more oddly handcrafted objects and knickknacks perched on sculpture stands and windowsills, crowding a desktop, others stacked along the baseboard.
A short man with huge glasses that dwarfed his face was engaged in a lively discussion with one of those well-groomed New York women of a certain age, the two of them bent over what looked like a small house either whittled or made entirely of finely put together pieces of jagged wood.
“You won’t find a better example of tramp art anywhere in the world,” Bloom said, making a grand sweeping gesture above the small piece, as if bestowing a benediction.
“Yes, it’s quite exquisite.” The woman lightly tapped the sides of her meticulously lacquered hair, which did not move. “Let me think about it.”
“Well, don’t think too long,” he said, removing the huge red-framed glasses that would give Elton John a pang of envy. He offered the prospective patron a sober look. “The market for outsider art is heating up as we speak.”
“Yes, I know. It’s just that my husband, well…I’ll let you know,” she said, and turned out of the gallery.
The dealer’s face fell. Husbands. Always a problem. But he perked up a bit when he spied Kate perusing his wares. “See anything you like?”
“Lots,” said Kate. “But I wonder, could you tell me something about these?” She laid the photos of the Bronx paintings onto the dealer’s crowded desk.
“Oh, well” His face fell. “
I
never sold them.”
“I know that. I simply wanted your expert opinion.”
He smiled at that. “Are they yours?”
“Um, yes. I purchased them at the Puck Building’s Outsider Art Fair a couple of seasons ago. I’d love to contact the artist, possibly buy another, but I’m such a ninny, I can’t remember who sold them to me. It’s embarrassing.”
“Not at all.” Bloom leaned toward the pictures, a bit more interested. “I’m afraid I don’t recognize the artist. Who did you say these were by?”
“That’s the other problem. They’re unsigned and I don’t know what I’ve done with the provenance.”
“
Provenance?
That’s hardly a word we use in the outsider market.” He peered at Kate. “Wait a minute…You’re that woman on Public TV, aren’t you?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“I knew you looked familiar. I thought you were heavily into high art, modernism?”
“I am, but I like outsider art too. In fact, I’m hoping to build a first-rate collection.”
Bloom licked his lips. “I can certainly help you there. But…”He eyeballed the Bronx pictures through his thick specs. “I’m afraid these are not ringing any bells. And you know, a woman of your taste should be collecting blue-chip outsiders like Henry Darger and Martin Ramirez.”
“Eventually,” said Kate. “But can you tell me a bit more about these first?” She tapped the pictures. “Would you agree they’re the work of a genuine
outsider
?”
“Looks it. But who can be sure? Nowadays there’s a never-ending debate about what
outsider
even means. Is it the work of some urban eccentric or a rural recluseor just someone with a serious mental problem who likes to paint? That’s what the serious collectors are into these daysthe truly
deranged
geniuses.” He corkscrewed his finger beside his temple. “Now, your artist here, well, the color is certainly bizarre, and there is a weird quality to the borderswhat is it? Some sort of code? His inner ramblings?”
