SoHo Sins (21 page)

Her look turned withering again. “You told me not to tell him. I didn’t.”

“Good.”

“I always do what you say.”

“Do you really? Why?”

“Because we’re a couple now, numbskull.”

“Oh right. How could I forget?”

The waiter came, saving me from further reproach. As we made our way through the meal, I kept the conversation on other topics. It was too soon to confront Missy over her lie. In time, Hogan’s work would show exactly who was covering for whom. Obviously, Melissa could not have borrowed the laptop on the weekend before the shooting, because my e-mail message from Mandy was sent on the very morning of the murder—a Wednesday. I doubted that Mandy would use one of Philip’s precious desktop systems, rigged as they were with elaborate security codes. Too complicated, and sure to tick Philip off. More likely, Melissa had simply been told by Paul to backdate her story, if anyone stumbled across the machine. Meaning that he, not Mandy, had given it to Missy—after, not before, the murder. That, or the girl had taken it upon herself to protect someone else.

After dessert—one of Melissa’s favorites, tarte tatin with crème fraîche—she put her hand on my left arm. Automatically, I pulled away, knowing how vivid its defects would be under her inquiring fingers.

“Don’t,” she said. “I want to feel it.”

“Touch the good one. I’ll make a really hard muscle for you.”

“No, this one. It’s part of you, too.”

Melissa’s hand grasped the flattened remains of my elbow and pulled the dead limb forward until it lay on the table. Then slowly, searchingly, her fingers moved up the useless forearm, darting suddenly to squeeze the flesh between the ruined joint and my shoulder.

“It’s just like grandma’s arm up there,” she said. “I like how it’s all spongy.”

“You have unusual taste,” I said. “No one’s ever told me that before.”

“They’re just ignorant then.”

I touched her cheek lightly with my right hand. “You’re a screwy kid,” I said.

She made a face. “I’m not so screwy. Not like you.”

Her hand slipped down to my forearm, lingering. “Was it always like this?”

“No, not always. When I was young I had two regular arms, just like all the other stupid boys.”

“What happened?”

“I grew up.”

“Don’t joke.”

“Let’s forget it. It’s not a very entertaining story.”

“I’ll decide. I’m your best friend now, don’t you know? Tell me, please.”

I had no choice. Melissa had the gift of getting whatever she wanted from me, because she asked for it so unabashedly. So I told her the old, boring tale of how, as a young man starting out in the gallery business, I worked for Paulette Mason—one of the first dealers in SoHo. We were doing a show of a soon-to-be-famous Australian sculptor whose work consisted of granite slabs, four inches thick, angled and propped against one another in a stark, cantilevered geometry. Each work required exact placement of its elements, in a specified order, at just the right moment. The resulting configurations, though cockeyed and asymmetrical, stood precariously fixed. That was the power and mystery of the work—its apparent danger, tamed and frozen in place. The slabs’ hairbreadth balance between stability and instability, order and chaos, was our prime selling point.

That week, an installation crew had worked for three days with jacks, block-and-tackle, and winches. Finally everything was ready for the Thursday opening. On Wednesday night, after Paulette had gone off to dinner with a client from Los Angeles, I stayed to send faxes and photocopy the shipping orders and insurance forms. As I was about to leave, around nine, I noticed a scrap of packing tape on the floor among the parts of
Stone Assemblage #6
, a seven-foot-high, 1,200-pound stack. Without thinking, I reached in to grab the scrap of rubbish, and slipped.

“Oh, shit,” Melissa said.

I didn’t dwell on the rest. How the sculpture collapsed on itself and my body, pinning me to the floor. As the stone plates slammed down, they broke both the upper and lower bones in my arm, and reduced my elbow to powder. The only bit of luck I had was that the weight acted as a makeshift tourniquet; my arm was too compressed to bleed lethally.

“Did you scream?” she asked. “Did you cry?”

“Who knows? I passed out for a while. When I came to, I sure as hell yelled. Some of it in words. But no one was around to hear.”

In fact it was not until twelve-thirty that the building’s night watchman checked the gallery door. I had a lot of time to think as I lay on my back, trapped by the metal. Mostly I thought about the pain, though from time to time I considered how lovely death would be when it put an end to all my thinking and feeling—when I became utterly absent, as though I’d never existed. In a moment of lesser agony, I remembered standing on a street corner in Paris once with Nathalie, waiting for a taxi in the rain. Only that, out of all our years together—not the passion or the fights or the innumerable parties. Just a random incident, on the Quai du Louvre in front of the Samaritaine department store, the two of us wet and laughing.

Alone in the gallery, I made a list of all the banal moments that I hoped to live again, allowing myself to swear aloud after each successive entry. Coffee and morning brioche were part of the tally. So were socks in the dryer, dropping a token in a New York subway turnstile, turning on the lamp by my reading chair, Hogan’s bald head, an Air France boarding pass hand-stamped just before liftoff….I don’t know where the list might have ended, if the guard hadn’t come.

“Do you miss having your arm?” Melissa asked.

“No, not anymore.”

“That’s good, I guess.”

She was a very sharp girl, so maybe she understood that the loss belonged to me naturally now, like my name, because I had lived it all the way through, from beginning to end, without reserve.

“In a way, the accident made my life. Paulette’s insurance company gave me a very big payout. I used the stake to start my own gallery, and took a third of her customers with me. She’s never forgiven me. Still calls me names, in fact. Jack the Pirate and worse.”

“So mean.”

“She’s right about one thing, though—it changed me. Sometimes I hardly recognize myself anymore.”

“Changed you how?”

“In my head.”

Missy regarded me thoughtfully, quizzically.

“When you’re wounded, you scream,” I said. “When you’re not screaming, you whimper. Hogan taught me that. It’s the whimpering that no one wants to talk about later.”

“Well, I like you this new way,” Melissa concluded. “Otherwise, you might not be so nice.”

“Why’s that?”

“Most men aren’t. My mom told me.” The girl sat back, letting her voice drop to a whisper. “And she really, really should know.”

“Don’t say those things.”

“Lots of times she doesn’t come home at night. And there are always these horny guys hanging around.”

“She’s a single woman, Melissa. She has a right to some good times.”

“We used to have our own good times together—when Daddy was with us. Sometimes I get mad at him for that.”

“For what?”

“For going away and making my mother a tramp.”

When we got back to Wooster Street, Angela was still hard at work.

“Hello, my dears,” she called. “I’m nearly finished. Do entertain yourselves for a bit.”

She was gluing small sculptural fragments together with a syringe, the kind I’d seen her use to attach strands of real hair to the full-size figures. She wore a filtered mask that made her look like a surgery nurse. At least she had installed, at her own expense, a hooded fan to suck the resin fumes upward and disperse them from the rooftop—just one more toxin in the SoHo air.

“Where’s the computer now?” I asked Melissa.

“In my goodies box,” she said. “Want to see?”

We went into her room, away from the studio smells and glare. Melissa shut the door, and the light diminished by half. She plotzed on the unmade bed, among the tossed girl things, and reached underneath for the laptop.

“Come on, sit down,” she said. “I won’t bite.”

I sat beside her on the mattress, leaning close enough to see the screen as she booted up.

“I guess this is the part you’re looking for,” she said as she clicked on the “My Letters” icon.

“Exactly right, as usual.”

“Don’t tease me, Uncle Jack. I learned all about flattery last week. ‘When a person is confident, he or she doesn’t need to exaggerate.’ That’s what Mrs. Dorfman says.”

“She should know. Bradford pays her to be sure of herself.”

I reached over and flicked the keyboard with my fingers, scrolling down. The evidence of Melissa’s fib glowed at us both, a long trail of communiqués that ended mid-morning on the day Amanda was killed.

“I see you were wrong about when the laptop left Mandy’s place,” I said. “Unless you’ve been imitating her online for fun.”

Melissa laughed and began to close down the computer. As she folded the screen, the hem of her dress slid minutely above her knees. The black fabric was a little too light for the weather, slightly out of sync with reality, like the room itself.

“I just did what Paul asked,” she said.

“Be careful.”

“Of what?”

“Favors for Paul.” My hand brushed back a few stray strands of hair from her temple. “I put great faith in you, Missy.”

“You should. I’m very trustworthy.”

“When’s the last time Paul asked to see the laptop?”

“A few days ago. He keeps wanting to come over when Mom’s away, but I won’t let him.”

“Good for you.”

“He’s cute and mostly nice, but kind of scuzzy somehow.”

“More than you know.”

She looked at me expectantly.

“We’ll talk all about him some other time,” I said. “But right now I need the computer.”

“All right, just don’t tell.”

“It will be our little secret. You like secrets, don’t you?”

“Sometimes.” She lifted her head. “You know, that’s what Paul asks me, too.”

“Does he?”

Her voice grew softer. “You look kind of funny,” she said. “Are you OK?”

“Melissa, if Paul did something really bad, would you help me catch him?”

“Bad how?”

“I can’t tell you yet.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll do whatever you say, Uncle Jack. Just ask me nice.”

Standing, I slipped the laptop into its black cover and told her that I had to go.

“What’s wrong?” the girl asked. “Don’t you want to hang out?”

“I wish I could.”

“So, do. I’ve got tons of games and stuff here.” She put a newly manicured hand on my sleeve.

“I’m not feeling my best.”

“That’s silly. Why are you worried—because it’s a school night?”

“Yes, something like that.”

“I did my homework already.”

“Good. Now I have to work, too. With the laptop.”

“Just stay for an hour. You’re grown up; you can do whatever you want.”

I looked at her teasing eyes. “No, Missy, that’s just why I can’t.”

“Scaredy cat.”

“I am, yes. Sometimes, kiddo, fear is the best thing we’ve got.”

She curled her legs under herself and smiled, refusing to escort me to the door.

“Sometimes, but not always?”

Melissa frightened me in more ways than one, not least with her ease at deception. I was impressed how beautifully she had lied. Her style contained an implicit promise that, with a few well-chosen words, reality could turn into anything you wished.

I went to the door and pushed it open. “This time,” I said, “fear wins.”

Missy heaved an exaggerated sigh.

Turning, I walked quickly across the loft and let myself out with a small unacknowledged wave to Angela, masked and focused, still bent fastidiously over her handiwork.

After I turned the laptop over to Hogan, he began taking a very concentrated interest in Amanda’s boyfriend. Luckily, Paul soon invited us to a Ron Athey performance at
P.S. 122
. The East Village alternative space, a walk-up, had been partially filled with folding chairs facing a makeshift stage. The drama began before the show, as we were forced to wait in a holding area until each audience member had signed a release form, a formally worded slip of paper stating that we understood the “ceremony” we were about to witness involved blood-letting and voluntary pain. No government funds, we were assured, had been used for this production.

“What’s this crap about?” Hogan wanted to know.

“This artist had some flap with a city councilman, or some such thing, in Minneapolis. Endangering public health with HIV-tainted blood, wasting tax dollars on sicko, blasphemous art. You know, typical Middle American stuff. I’m sure Athey was deeply thrilled by the fuss. Now the warning is part of the act, the audience tease.”

Paul, wearing his reversed baseball cap, passed through the crowd with a video camera, panning the puzzled but determinedly cool faces.

“Glad you could make it,” he said without stopping. “Ron’s great, and Hogan here will get a taste of what PM Videos can offer.”

The next time we saw Paul was as we filed into the auditorium. He was stationed behind his tripod with the camera trained on the stage.

Once we took our seats, Hogan filled me in on his own latest activities—some of them anyhow.

“I went back to Claudia’s building in Williamsburg,” he said. “Knocked on every door.”

“Learn anything?”

“Enough. I found a young guy who keeps a studio there, two floors down. He’s in love with Claudia. From afar.”

“Only one in the whole place?”

“This one’s a doozy. He had lunch with her in Brooklyn at exactly the time Amanda Oliver was killed in Manhattan.”

“You’re sure?”

“May fourth. He planned the whole thing for weeks. Wanted to declare his passion.”

“Did he?”

“Yeah, and Claudia said, ‘Thanks a lot, but I’m taken.’ Broke the guy’s heart—but he remembered to get a receipt. From some Thai joint with a big pool in the middle of the dining room. The restaurant uses those machine printouts. Dishes for two, itemized, with a date-and-time stamp.”

“What did he save it for, his taxes?”

“Nope. He had it taped in a handwritten journal. Surrounded by the whole saga of his unrequited love, in detail. ‘May fourth: my long-awaited lunch with Claudia. I reveal my ardor to her, she rebuffs me, she will never be mine. Life is meaningless now. All is darkness.’ Crap like that.”