Strong 03 - Twice (6 page)

She got up and walked toward the window, looking out onto the cityscape, leaning her head against the cool glass. After a tense minute, she gave a little laugh.

“What?”

“I was just thinking, at any given moment I could be watched by the FBI, Jed McIntyre, and Dax Chicago … all at once.”

“I resent being lumped in with that crew, I’ll tell you that,” said Dax, appearing at the door on cue like a bulky apparition. He walked into the office and stood next to Jeff.

“Not very good company, is it?” said Jeff, patting Dax on the back.

The buzzer on the intercom sounded.

“Jeff, there’s a Detective McKirdy on the phone for you,” Rebecca’s voice announced over the speaker.

“I got it,” Jeff said as he moved toward his desk and picked up the line.

“Hey, Ford. Rough night?” he said into the phone. He laughed lightly after a pause and said, “Well, you’ll never guess who just stopped by my office.”

Lydia looked at Dax and said, “Let the games begin.”

T
he woman was afraid, small, cowering in the shadows. Lydia could practically see her chest heaving, could almost hear her ragged breathing. The woman, her skin gray, her face bleeding from a gash under her eye, clung to the tatters of her clothes as she tried to look around a concrete wall, tried to see without being seen. But she couldn’t quite commit herself to the action, as though she’d really rather not know what was on the other side of the cinderblocks. Maybe it was just as well, because on the other side of the canvas world was carnage. The sky was painted a churning of red and black, the streets were washed in blood. Bodies writhed in pain, disemboweled, decapitated, clawing at the earth. Some figures were engaged in violent sexual contact, others in the throes of death and murder … and it was hard to tell the difference. The detail was intricate, a screaming mouth, a bleeding eye, a man inserting a blade between a woman’s legs, a woman ripping the heart from her own chest. Reigning over it all, two towering black wraiths, the shadows of their ghoulish fingers leaking in the black clouds in the sky, the blood on the earth. The canvas was gigantic, nearly seven feet tall and ten feet long. Julian Ross called it a self-portrait.

Something about Julian Ross’s artwork had always resonated with Lydia. Standing now in front of the giant canvas in the white SoHo gallery space, the sounds of light traffic carrying in through the open door, the sunlight washing through floor-to-ceiling windows
onto the bleached wood floors, Lydia was moved again by what she saw. What hung before her was the work of a victim, someone haunted, someone
hunted
. Whether she was chased by demons inside her mind or by demons that lived and breathed in the real world, Julian Ross was on the run. Lydia could relate.

“That’s bloody awful,” said Lydia’s shadow.

“It’s art,” said Lydia briskly, annoyed with him for always being right behind her, invading her space and her thoughts. Dax was so close she could smell the peppermint on his breath.

He snorted. “Art … as if any hack who puts a brush to canvas is an artist. That’s rubbish.”

She ignored him, hoping he would go away and let her think. After a moment he walked a loop around the gallery and found a place standing outside the door, legs apart, arms folded.
My bodyguard
, Lydia thought, wanting to scream and throw things at him like a toddler having a tantrum.

“Why did you want to come here?” asked Jeffrey. She’d persuaded him to come with her to the gallery that displayed Julian Ross’s most recent work on their way to meet Ford McKirdy at a diner on West Fourth Street.

“I just wanted to get a sense of what she’d been painting recently. This one,” she said, pointing to the tag beside the giant canvas, “was finished about two months ago.”

“It’s intense,” he said, regarding the painting before him. “Not the work of a stable person, if you ask me.”

Lydia nodded. “But not necessarily the work of a murderer, either.” She pointed toward the cowering figure behind the cinderblock wall. “Julian Ross sees herself as a victim.”

“Maybe so, but her husband is the one spread all over the bedroom walls.”

Lydia nodded again, not quite sure how to respond to a statement like that.

“Can I help you?” asked a smooth male voice from behind them.

They turned to see a suave, tall, dark-skinned Latino with a slick of black hair that flowed to his shoulders. His lips were a warm, full pink and his liquid brown eyes spoke to Lydia of salsa dances under a full moon, scandalous assignations, and sangria. He wore a pair of black linen pants that draped elegantly from his thin hips and a white silk shirt unbuttoned to reveal a hairless chest. He extended a manicured hand to Lydia. “I am Orlando DiMarco and this is my gallery,” he said, looking straight into her eyes.

Lydia smiled and shook his hand but didn’t offer her name. He released her hand a moment later than was appropriate and glided past her. He removed the information tag from the wall beside the painting and replaced it with one that read
SOLD
.

“Unfortunately, this piece was sold this morning.”

“Bad news travels fast,” said Jeffrey.

Orlando gave Jeffrey a cool smile. “But there are many more interesting pieces in the back I can show you, if you like.”

He was handsome and sexual in a very effeminate way, not as though he were gay but in the way of European men. As if he were more in touch with his emotions and less afraid to show them than an American man. She could sense that he was highly temperamental. It was something in the shape of his eyes, the warmth of his hand, and the sway of his hips that communicated to Lydia that he would be an earth-shattering lover.

“Are they recent?” Lydia asked.

“Yes, of course. One of them she turned in just a few days ago. Of course, it may be her last for a while. So, it’s particularly valuable,” he said matter-of-factly. “Follow me.”

She turned around to tell Dax they were going in the back, but he was already right behind her.

The room behind the gallery space was bigger than Lydia had expected. There were hundreds of shrouded canvases leaning against the walls like ghosts. The lighting was dim and the air cooler than it had been in front, she imagined to preserve the artwork. A light and
not unpleasant scent of paint and linseed oil permeated the room. In the back she saw a large black lacquer desk with a computer, a credit card machine, and stacks of files. She also noticed a framed picture, a close-up of Julian Ross smiling radiantly, her cheeks flushed from the sun, a wisp of dark hair blown in front of her eye. She looked happy, in love. Lydia glanced over at Orlando DiMarco as he climbed up on a chair to remove a shroud from the largest canvas in the room, and wondered.

“You carry Julian Ross’s work exclusively?” she asked, as he struggled with the far corner of the sheet. Jeffrey moved in to help him, but Orlando waved him away.

“Well, mostly,” he said. “Though recently I have started to feature other artists. There has always been enough demand for Julian’s work, but she hasn’t been as prolific in recent years.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“She was happy,” he said almost sadly, and the shroud dropped to the floor.

A monster stared out at them, trapped in Julian Ross’s canvas. It was a face divided in half. On the right, the canvas was dominated by the features of a handsome young man, his mouth drawn into a twisted sneer. He had a shock of blue-black hair and one clear green eye, in which there was the reflection of a beautiful woman. The figure posed in the reflection of his eye, naked, her arms bent lifting her hair off her neck, her breasts pushed forward. On the left, it was the same face but age had warped the features, the hair had grown long and gray, twisted into shabby dreads, his teeth brown and sharp. His mouth was drawn into the same sneer, but a trickle of blood trailed from the corner of his mouth. In his eye, the reflection of the same woman, mutilated, her body opened and innards escaping, hung from the black branches of a great oak tree. The detail of the face and the images dancing in his eyes was exquisite, every line, every shadow, every muscle defined by the deft hand of a gifted, accomplished artist. It was remarkable.

All four of them stood there looking.

“What did she say about it?” Lydia asked finally.

“Nothing. She had it sent by messenger. I called her and she never returned my call,” he said, and sounded bitter.

“Who is it?”

“Look closely.”

She examined the detailed facial features of the man and at the woman reflected in the green pools of his eyes.

“It’s her,” said Lydia. “It’s Julian Ross.”

“The woman?” asked Jeffrey, looking more closely at the reflection in the monster’s eyes.

“Both,” answered Lydia. She walked over to the desk and picked up the picture she had seen there. Orlando looked uncomfortable but didn’t protest. She held the picture up for Jeffrey and the features were undeniably similar to the man in the painting.

“What did she call it?”

“He Has Come for Me,”
he said, shaking his head. “I think it’s her most disturbing work. Though I can’t say why. There’s just something so
fearful
about it.”

“How well do you know her?” Lydia asked.

Orlando reached out and took the photo gently from Lydia’s hand. “Who are you?” he asked, suspicion creeping into his voice. “You’re not here to buy art.”

“No,” said Jeffrey, holding out his private investigator’s identification. “Eleanor Ross has asked us to find out what happened to Julian’s husband. I’m Jeffrey Mark and this is Lydia Strong. This is our associate Dax Chicago.”

Orlando nodded, as if he weren’t surprised. Most people would have been at least annoyed, but he looked suddenly tired. Lydia saw him retreat into himself. He got that glazed-over look that people get when their thoughts have turned inward. He walked back over to his desk, placed the frame back in its place, and sat in the chair behind his desk.

“We have worked together for over twenty years. We were … we
are
friends,” he said, still looking at the photograph, and Lydia saw so much more than feelings of friendship there in his face.

“So you knew her when her first husband was murdered,” said Lydia.

He nodded. “She was acquitted,” he said, a little defensively. “She’s innocent … of that and of this. I’m sure of it.”

“How can you be so certain?”

He sat forward and looked directly at Lydia. She walked closer to him, while Dax and Jeffrey hung back a bit. Lydia sat down across from Orlando, returned his gaze. He sounded positive, as though there were not a doubt in his mind. But Lydia had to wonder, wouldn’t even the most loyal friend have his suspicions after the second murder?

“Because I
know
her,” he said, sitting back.

“So then, any thoughts on who would be motivated to murder Julian Ross’s husbands?” she asked, keeping her voice light and even. Here she saw his eyes shift, as if he were remembering something. Whatever it was, he didn’t share it.

“Someone who was stalking her, someone who wanted to hurt her, an enemy?” Lydia pressed. “Was there anyone she feared?”

Orlando shook his head slowly. “No,” he said, his voice harder, more certain than his eyes.

Lydia nodded now, thoughtful. She was reaching, probing, looking for something that might give her a map of Julian’s life, something that might lead her eventually to find out how it had fallen so horribly apart.

“You said she was happy. She was happy with her husband?” said Lydia. “She loved him?”

He shrugged. Again the shade of something across his face.

“Yes, she loved him. He gave her the thing she wanted most in life, her children,” he said quietly. “Lola and Nathaniel—she loved
them more than her art. She would
never
do anything that would take her away from them.”

It was an interesting answer. Interesting because of what he didn’t say. She had expected to hear how wonderful Richard and Julian were together, that she loved him more than life, that she could never hurt him. But he didn’t say any of those things.

“Was there trouble in her marriage? Were they having problems?”

He raised his hands and stood. His face had flushed and now there was anger in his eyes. “That’s enough. What you are looking for here, you will not find. She’s innocent. This I know for a fact.”

“You could only know that for certain if you know who killed Richard Stratton.”

Orlando looked stricken for just a second. But then he just shook his head and grew quiet.

“I don’t need to know that. I know Julian.”

Lydia looked back at the monstrous face on Julian’s canvas.

“But her art is so violent. Is it possible that there’s a side of her you never saw?”

He followed her eyes to the canvas and didn’t answer for a second. “I suppose,” he said, looking from the canvas to the photo in his hand. “There’s a side to all of us that no one ever sees.”

T
he basketball courts on West Fourth Street were packed as usual with mostly young black guys and a couple of white guys either playing hard or hanging on the fence watching. Most of the players had their shirts off and were sweating like it was July even though the air was cool going on cold. The bouncing ball and the short shrieks of rubber soles on the asphalt echoed off the concrete buildings and an occasional cheer rose up like a wave over the traffic of Sixth Avenue. Jeffrey watched a young man fall hard on the concrete with a groan trying to block another player’s shot and then bounce right up like
he was made out of rubber. He was back on his feet and running across the court.

“I remember what it was like to be young and in shape like that,” said Jeffrey.

“You’re not ready for life support yet, Grandpa,” said Lydia, patting his hard, flat abs.

“I’m just saying … you don’t get up from a fall like that and run a mile after forty, you know.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said with a smile. She liked to rub in their ten-year age difference whenever possible. He gave her a look.

Dax had left them suddenly after he received a mysterious call on his cell, so Lydia and Jeffrey proceeded to their meeting with Ford McKirdy alone. They entered the Yum Yum Diner on the corner and found a table toward the back of the converted trailer that stood next to a playground under the shade of trees. They slid into the same side of a red leather booth and Lydia started to flip through the mini-jukebox at the end of the table. The smell of coffee, grease, and cigarettes had worked its way into the walls and the leather seats. Lydia was suddenly ravenous, lost interest in the jukebox, and eyed the pie case, where cakes and pastries rotated enticingly on plastic shelves. The Yum Yum Diner was the kind of place that was just as packed at three
A.M
. when people were heading home from the clubs as it was on a weekday at lunchtime.