Color Blind (21 page)

M
ichelle Lawrence, School of Visual Arts.

Marilyn Lincoln, the Studio School.

Mark Landau, the Art Students League.

Michelle Lawrence and Marilyn Lincoln were questioned by detectives who interrupted art classes, leading each of the young women into similar hallways reeking of turpentine and linseed oil.

Neither of them had recently given away or sold a painting, nor did they recognize the painting left at the latest crime scene the detectives showed them, nor was either of the young women considered a real suspect, as the cops were fairly certain they were looking for a man.

When questioned about boyfriends, Michelle Lawrence started to cry about a recent breakup from her Advanced Painting instructor, Harvey Blittenberg, a man more than three times her age, who was subsequently queried but released when he produced his teaching schedule (mostly night classes), none of which he had missed except when he was in the sack with Michelle and, more recently, after their breakup, in bed with yet another young woman student, who vouched for him. One of the detectives asked what the hell a man of sixty-plus was doing carrying on with his twenty-year-old students, and Blittenberg answered, “Why not?” adding, “God bless Viagra.” As Harvey Blittenberg was overweight and balding, the detectives didn’t get it; but then, neither detective had ever been a young woman art student in thrall to an older artist teacher—despite the fact that the guy’s art career had been pronounced DOA nearly two decades earlier.

According to Mario Fiorelli, the Oil Techniques instructor at the Art Students League, Mark Landau had missed his last two classes. Fiorelli, a seventy-four-year-old native of Orvieto, Italy, trained in the age-old technique of Florentine underpainting—which he had been proudly passing on to his students—was surprised that Landau had not shown up or called, as Landau was, in his words, “a conscientious
studente
and a very pleasant and quiet young man.”

Fiorelli identified the painting from the Mona Johnson crime scene as almost certainly a painting made in his class, and very probably the work of Mark Landau.

Within hours, troops were assembled, a squadron of SWAT-trained cops decked out in Kevlar vests and polystyrene hoods. The police were not taking any chances. If Mark Landau was their man, they had to act fast—shock and awe the prescription of the day.

Now, with guns and clubs and Mace and gas, the cops went into formation—three cops at the front entrance, three at the rear fire escape, weapons ready—while the SWAT team leader, a short burly man with iron-heeled combat boots, kicked down the door of Mark Landau’s East Village apartment.

A
moon landing, that’s what it reminded Kate of.

Landau’s body was on a slab at the morgue, and Crime Scene had already gone over his place. The Special Crime Scene Unit had been dispatched, and though Brown’s murder squad was exhausted, they were all hanging around to see what, if anything, might turn up.

Now Kate and the squad were huddled in the hallway outside of Landau’s apartment, all of them crowding around a monitor, angling for a view of the small screen.

Inside, technicians in protective suits and hoods to guard against the UV light from the cathode-ray camera were scoping out the place in search of human fluids that neither the eye nor the normal crime scene chemicals might detect, the camera transmitting its findings directly to the monitor in the hall, its blue light floating over floors and walls, every so often sending up a white flare that would alert one of the suited technicians to scrape a sample for the lab.

When the technicians emerged a half hour later, Kate’s eyes were stinging from staring at the screen.

The technician pulled off his hood and goggles. “Plenty of samples,” he said. “Might all belong to the vic. But if we’re lucky, your unsub is a secretor. We’ll freeze ’em up and see what we get, but it’ll take a few days.”

“We’ll need those results to go to Quantico,” said Grange, pulling on gloves, and bagging his shoes. He turned to his agents, Marcusa and Sobieski. “Follow up on that.”

They nodded in unison.

Kate pulled on gloves too, as did Brown and Perlmutter.

Grange turned toward Kate but spoke to Brown. “Why is she here?”

Kate looked past Grange, at Brown, and answered the question: “
She
is here to examine the victim’s paintings.”

Grange scowled and thumped into the apartment.

L
andau’s small apartment was dark, dust motes dancing drunkenly in the air, walls crowded with paintings, more stacked against baseboards, one on an easel.

Kate took in the half-finished still life on the easel. “There’s the same kind of underpainting here as in the crime scene painting,” she said to Brown. “Let’s bag one to be sure.”

The room was warm, but Kate was shivering. She moved from one painting to another, careful to step around dark bloodstains on the floor.

They had all viewed photos of the crime scene, the butchery performed on Mark Landau’s body. But it was his face that lingered in Kate’s mind, sweet, young, like so many runaways she’d chased after back in Astoria. She was thinking that right now what she wanted most was to find the creep who had done this and do him some damage. Funny, she thought, what it took to galvanize her; what it took to make her want to catch this creep as much as she wanted to find the person responsible for Richard’s murder—an equation she hadn’t ever thought possible. A kid. That’s what it took. It was always the kids that got to her.

“Have Landau’s classmates at the Art Students League been checked out?” asked Perlmutter.

“Doubtful he’d hunt someone so close,” said Grange. “Doesn’t jibe with the MO. More likely, the killer’s a stranger who ingratiated himself with the victim. Came back with him to his apartment, killed him, took the painting.”

“Detectives from General have been interviewing every kid and instructor,” said Brown. “One girl from Landau’s class says she talked to a guy who was outside the building that day, sketching. Girl says the guy wasn’t a regular. She’d never seen him before.”

“Description?” asked Perlmutter.

Brown referred to his notes. “Twenties. good-looking. Her exact words: ‘So cute.’ ” Brown frowned. “They put her together with a sketch artist, but she couldn’t decide if his face was long or round, and no distinguishing characteristics, except that he was wearing sunglasses.”

“Anyone else see this guy?”

“So far, no,” said Brown.

Kate said: “So the killer steals one of Landau’s paintings to use at one of his crime scenes and to throw us off.”

“Almost worked—and it certainly wasted our time. Means our unsub is aware of us now, playing with us.” Gloom clouded Brown’s features. “The really sick ones always like an audience.”

“But why kill the kid?” asked Kate, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice. “Couldn’t he have gotten a painting without killing him?”

“Sure, he could,” said Brown. “But he likes the killing part. Needs it too.”

Kate thought about that, an idea forming.

“According to the coroner’s prelims”—Perlmutter referred to his notes—“time of death is sometime after Landau’s last class at the League. So it’s a good guess the killer picked him up near the school.”

“
Chose
him, more likely,” said Brown. “He got himself a victim and a painting all rolled into a neat package.”

“Poor kid,” said Perlmutter.

Agent Sobieski shrugged his cocky shoulders, and said, “One less faggot.”

Brown trained his eyes on him, said, “That was inappropriate.” He glanced at Perlmutter, then quickly away. But Kate caught it.

“Sort of reduces your chances for a date this Saturday night, doesn’t it, Sobieski?” she said.

The guy’s face turned red, but he didn’t say anything.

Nicky Perlmutter stripped off his latex gloves as though he’d been contaminated by the scene, and stalked out of the room.

W
hy would she do that? Try to hurt him?

Come on, baby, make it hurt so good…

Didn’t she understand that he needed to know? Maybe he should have waited until they were in bed and she was more vulnerable. But he couldn’t. The walk to her place had gotten him too excited.

He stands in the small bathroom, stares into the cracked mirror above the small two-faucet sink, runs his fingers oh-so-tenderly over the scratches on his face. The mirror’s jagged fissure bisects his face—divides his forehead, zigzags through an eye, along the right side of his nose, over his lips—to create two faces from one.

He blinks at his fractured face, the diagonal scratches along his left cheekbone, which he imagines to be shocking pink or maybe wild strawberry, and begins to probe, pick at them with his fingernails, gouging deeper, opening wounds so that now slender rivulets of blood follow the contours of his face—down his cheek, rounding his jaw, splattering like ruby raindrops onto the chipped porcelain sink.

For a moment he actually saw it: a flash of maroon.
Oh, God! Yes!

But seconds later, when he looks again, the sink is merely covered with ebony droplets, his cheek streaked with gray. He turns the cold-water tap, stares as inky whirlpools swirl around the basin and down the drain.

Still, it was a sign.

He glances up at his bisected face in the cracked mirror, throws icy water on his bleeding cheek, which only now has begun to throb.

He replays the chase in his mind. No way she could escape him, not with the lights out. Her feebly groping her way down the hall, while he was fast and sure, his night vision sharp.

He flexes a muscle, checks it in the mirror, the swelling flesh, veins that run through it, thinks he can detect the slightest trace of apricot, or maybe a hint of tickle-me-pink just under the pale gray.

Oh yeah, things are changing.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes…

He thinks of the girl’s hair. Definitely goldenrod. Maybe he should have tried to paint her. But he did, in a way.

This time had been good. He saw. He learned. Had not forgotten. He checked the painting at the right moment and saw that he had remembered it perfectly—the mint-green vase on a navy-blue cloth with three razzmatazz-red apples. Exactly as he’d seen it the first time in the boy’s apartment.

Even now, when he gazes at the piece of canvas that he has tacked to the wall, his most recent painting, he swears there is a magenta hue just visible in the wild finger painting he had created with the girl’s blood—and it all began with her, the art
her-story-n,
Kate, with her chestnut hair and blue blue eyes.

The Donna-voice says, “I don’t think her eyes are blue. I think they’re green.”

“You’re wrong, Donna. They’re blue. They have to be.”

Are they? Aren’t they?
He tries to remember. He once knew, didn’t he?

Maybe he’s just tired. He lays his head onto the arm of the beat-up couch to rest, but a song clicks in.
Wake me up before you go-go…

No way he can sleep.

He needs to work awhile, paint, no matter how tired he is, because he wants to impress her.

He selects one of his older, recently finished paintings, a still life, checks to see if the paint has dried, then gets his pencils and sharpener ready and starts to write the familiar names over and over, Brenda, Brandon, Donna, Dylan, and Tony, and then, without even realizing he is doing it, he starts a new name—Katherine McKinnon Rothstein—a bit crudely at first, but soon it flows—
Katherine McKinnon Rothstein, Katherine McKinnon Rothstein, Katherine McKinnon Rothstein—
until, like the other names, it becomes nothing more than a scribble, a blur, written over and over itself, the pencil point wearing down often, the only time he stops is to sharpen it, while he writes her name again and again, creating a lovely graphite gray border for his painting. It makes sense that she should be part of the work, and while he scribbles, an idea comes to him—a way to let her know.
Yes. She has to know. Has to remember.

With his pencil he draws the tiniest pictures into the few open spaces in his painting, and puts it aside, certain now that Kate will know him.

After he finishes he switches on the TV, and is happy to see Ricki Lake and cheers along with her audience at some fat girl who is on stage with Ricki next to some hulking guy with pimples on his face, who is crying. But it starts to make him sad and he switches to cartoons.

His eyelids begin to droop, fatigue finally settling in. He folds himself into a corner of the couch, and there, spotlit in the tender luminescent glow of the TV screen, thumb in his mouth, legs curled under him, he looks like nothing more than a sad scared little boy with scarlet scratches on his cheek. He giggles at the cartoons, prays the miracle will happen again so that he can see them in color, thinks about Central Park and the famous landmark building, the San Remo. Soon he must see if he remembers correctly—if the art
her-story-n’
s eyes are blue or green.