The Death Artist (16 page)

Perez laughed too loud, too long, too hard.

Kate collected the photo from the floor. “Is this someone applying to clean the rest rooms, or is he just trying to prove he knows how to use one?”

“Artists,” said Perez, almost sneering. “So many out there, and all of them looking to be famous. Perhaps you’d like to use him in your next book.” He arched his dark eyebrows.

“I suppose I could devote a chapter to bathroom art, trace it back to Duchamp’s famous
Urinal.
But I’d rather leave all that
heady
stuff to curators, like yourself.” She smiled. “How’s your exhibition going?”

“Delayed. I’m trying to get it on track.”

“I’ll bet that’s a lot easier without Bill Pruitt breathing down your neck. Oh, God, I can’t believe I said something so tasteless. Forgive me.”

“No need to apologize to me.” The young curator tried to suppress a smile.

“It’s just that I know Bill had rather conservative tastes.”

“I’ll say.”

“You know, Raphael, with Bill Pruitt gone, and Amy Schwartz stepping down, well, the museum is going to need a lot of new direction.”

The curator sat up like an eager puppy.

“You should give me an account of everything you’ve worked on for the past month–and I mean everything, your entire schedule, day and night. The board should know who is working hard–and who isn’t–if you know what I mean.”

Perez nodded his head like a puppet.

“I know,” said Kate. “You can Xerox your date book for me.”

“I use a Palm Pilot and, unfortunately, delete the prior week. But I’ll write it all out for you, everything I worked on.”

“Make sure to account for your nights, too, any dinners with collectors or artists, any nights spent working here or at home, even if it was just thinking about museum work.”

“The past month only?”

“I think that would do to give the board an idea, don’t you?”

Perez nodded again, drew a hand through thick black hair set off by a shocking streak of white just to the side of his widow’s peak.

“By the way, I hope you got to talk with Elena, meet her the night she performed here. She is–” Kate took a breath, fought to keep her voice even. “–was an extraordinary person.”

“I’m afraid I had to leave right away,” said Perez. “A dinner engagement. A couple of artists I know. I went to their studios, then we ate in a little dive on East Tenth Street.”

Four blocks from Elena’s apartment, thought Kate. “There are so many wonderful little restaurants down there. Where did you eat?”

“Let me think . . .” He tilted his head one way, then the other, the white streak flipping back and forth like a cartoon question mark. “Oh, yes. It was called Spaghettini.”

Kate made a mental note. The fact is, she knew the place, pictured the tiny garden in back, remembered drinking cheap red wine there with Elena, both of them digging into bowls of pasta. “You see, Raphael, that’s a perfect example of the kind of information you should write up for me to take to the museum board. Dinner with artists. Totally work-related. So just jot it all down. The date, who you were with. Where you went. Like that.”

“I’ll have it for you right away.”

“Good,” said Kate.

The Contemporary Museum’s auditorium was down a wide flight of stairs that an artist had currently transformed by coating every inch of it with gold-leaf paper. A comment on consumerism–making the ordinary–a staircase–extraordinary? Or just gilding the lily. Whatever, thought Kate, it was glorious.

Now Kate stood on the stage looking out at row after row of empty upholstered seats. It was here that Elena gave her last performance. She tried to reconstruct the last minutes of that night. Richard, back to his office to prepare a brief. Willie, home to paint. Elena, she remembered, wasn’t in the mood to go out. A kiss good night, and that was it. The End.

It was enough to send her reeling. Then something stirred near the back row of the auditorium, distracting her. Kate squinted into the grayness.

A young man slowly made his way down the aisle. He stopped by the first row, leaned on his long-handled broom. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

She took him in: late twenties, sideburns like General Custer’s, a drooping mustache, sandy hair, handsome. “You work at the museum long?”

“About six months. I’m an artist. Just doin’ this to pay the rent, you know, until the big show comes along.”

“I’m sure it will.” Kate returned his smile, couldn’t help herself. His eyes were a cool sky blue. “What’s your name?”

“David Wesley.” He extended a hand. “Hey, I know you. You’re the woman who did that series,
Artists’ Lives.
Really cool. I’ve got your book, too.” He got shy a moment, or pretended to. “I’d, uh, love to show you my paintings sometime.”

“I’d be happy to do that. You should send me slides of your work.”

The artist beamed.

“Do you happen to work here on Sundays?”

“ ’Fraid I do.” He sighed, brushing the sandy hair off his forehead. “Sunday through Thursday you can find me here pushin’ a broom, polishing floors, like that. Exciting, huh?”

“So you’re here for the Sunday events?”

He looked down at his heavy work boots. “I’m usually gone before they start. I finish at five.”

“What about last Sunday? Elena Solana.”

“I read about what happened. Bummer.”

“So you were not here.”

He scratched his ear. “Actually, I was.”

“I thought you said you didn’t normally stay for the events.”

“Well, I happened to meet her when she came in, Elena Solana. She was a fox, you know. So I hung around.”

“And you stayed through the performance?”

“Yeah. Thought I’d get lucky.”

“And you did?”

“Not.”
He shook his head. “She blew me off. Said she was tired.”

Kate waited a moment, but he offered nothing else. “You know, I’m thinking about a new art book, maybe even a new TV series. I
should
see your work.”

“Anytime.”

Kate pulled out a pad and pen, handed them over. “Write down your address and phone number.”

The young artist was so excited he could barely write. Kate watched him grip the pen so tight his knuckles went white. He’d leave a perfect set of prints. But how to get it back from him without getting her own all over it? She plucked a tissue from her bag, dabbed at her nose.

“There.” The guy offered up the pen, the pad, and a dazzling smile.

Kate scooped the pen into the tissue before he noticed. “Great,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”

Kate zigzagged through a parade of women with shopping bags from Bendel’s and Saks, past window displays of rare estate jewelry. Last week, it might have distracted her. But not today.

She should get that pen to the lab, and had to follow up on those date books from Mills and Perez. But right now she needed to clear her head. To think. And she knew just the place to do it.

Raphael, Rubens, Delacroix.

Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt.

Room after room of great paintings.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Kate nodded at a guard, smiled, moved into a room of Baroque painting, her attention drawn by Poussin’s
The Rape of the Sabine Women,
the figures frozen in action like actors on a stage. Poussin, she knew, actually worked from modeled clay figures that he moved around a small stagelike setting of his own creation.

At the moment it was too reminiscent of another artist–one who peopled his re-creations with the dead.

Damn it.
Would she ever be able to view art without thinking of his brutal and sadistic replicas?

In a side room, a small show of prints by Edvard Munch, etchings of his most famous work,
The Scream,
a woodcut called
Anxiety
–stark-white faces against a black ground–and two lithographs Kate knew well:
Funeral March
, which looked like a mass of dead bodies; and
Death Chamber
–a group of mourners, all in black, standing or sitting, mute and solemn.

She thought about that last year–her father fighting to die, but somehow living past the stroke that had left half his body paralyzed, his speech slurred. The father she had so feared–and, yes, loved–replaced in those last months by some frail, almost gentle stranger. Who would believe that this sickly old man–the man she cooked and cleaned for after her mother died–could be capable of such cruelty, of the beatings he rained on his young daughter? And
why
? A dozen or more years on a shrink’s couch and Kate was still not sure. Did he blame her for the loss of his wife? Didn’t he know that his wife was also her mother?

Still, there had been no question that she would be the one to dispense the pills, keep his ever-deteriorating body clean, empty the bedpans, rub ointment on his bedsores, and, eventually, inject the lethal dose of morphine into the vein of his right arm.

The next room was all Titian and Veronese, large-scale paintings, grand and ornate. Kate was immediately reminded of the master’s late, great masterpiece,
The Flaying of Marsyas,
and with that, the body of Ethan Stein.

Damn.

Kate turned, practically bumped into a young man–worn leather jacket, shaggy hair, in need of a shave. He smiled.

“Sorry,” she said.

She watched him a moment, wondered, Was this the sort of guy Elena went for? Bohemian, not bad-looking if he was cleaned up. It was funny, Kate couldn’t remember ever meeting a serious boyfriend of Elena’s, or even hearing about one. Sure, she knew some of her friends, mostly artists and poets, and there was mention of a filmmaker boyfriend once, but never again. Odd, thinking about it now, a girl like Elena, pretty, smart, not gay. At least not that Kate knew of–though that was something she might need to find out for sure. Could a woman have killed Elena? It hadn’t occurred to her before this moment. The statistics, she knew, said nine out of ten violent crimes against women were committed by men. At least they used to be. She’d have to ask Liz if that had changed in the last ten years.

Kate cut through several rooms, stopped in front of Daumier’s most famous painting,
Third-Class Carriage,
a dark, brooding piece, stripped of color–figures in a railway car thrown together by circumstance, emotionally distanced, each of them isolated, lonely; the central figure, a hooded old woman, staring out at Kate with blind eyes. The one-eyed Picasso winked in her mind, and then Elena’s bloodied cheek, then the creepy graduation photo.

That’s it.
What she needed to do: Go through Elena’s photo albums, see if that photo had been plucked out.

On St. Mark’s Place it could be 1965. Kids in bell-bottoms–tattoos on their arms rather than painted flowers on their faces–hung out in groups, smoking, laughing, more than a few seriously stoned. Wasn’t it a school day, Kate wondered–or were they past school age? To her, not one of them looked over fifteen.

She spotted the two uniforms as soon as she turned onto East Sixth Street–one on the corner, the other right at the doorway to Elena’s brownstone. Kate showed him her temporary ID. He barely blinked.

Bessie Smith played quietly in the background. Elena twirled around the room in a long multicolored embroidered skirt. “I love it.” She spun again. The skirt flared out above her knees.

“Oh, you should’ve seen me,” Kate said. “Probably the worst bargainer ever. I swear this woman must’ve seen me coming. I was so busy trying to impress her with my Spanish that I think I ended up paying more than double what she originally asked. I’m sure by now they’ve got my picture up in every Mexican shop
–
with ‘sucker’ written across it.”

Elena laughed. “Hey, try your Spanish on me
–
maybe I can get even more out of you.”

The smell of death still lingered in the hallway. Kate glanced up toward the ceiling as if she could see right through the two floors. But the apartment, she knew, was empty now. No Elena twirling in a Mexican skirt.

She took the stairs slowly. Now that she was here, she was in no hurry to view the scene.

The police tape easily ceded its hold on the door, sliding to the floor, and lay there like a limp yellow snake.

Kate pulled on a pair of latex gloves and one more time went through Elena’s apartment. Traces of gray fingerprint powder still clung to the window ledges. The bold cotton print fabric on the couch was rumpled, the block of foam exposed. Did the tech boys do that, or had it been like that? Kate couldn’t remember.

In the tiny kitchenette, the utensil drawer was half open, the contents removed. On the walls, the bloodstains had turned brown; in the cracks between the floor tiles, almost black.

Elena’s computer table was empty of everything but New York dust. Kate felt dizzy, realized she’d been holding her breath since she took that first step into the apartment.

She stared at the scene, tried to reenact what she saw that night: Elena’s body slumped on the kitchen floor, all that blood . . . suddenly more real, more alive than any crime scene photo.

In the bedroom, she found what she had come for–three small photo albums, two on a shelf beside a stack of poetry and art books, one on Elena’s dresser. Two were filled with travel photos–one a trip to Puerto Rico, the other Italy. The third album was all childhood photos, nothing recent. There had to be another.

And if it was not here, the murderer must have taken it.

Kate forced herself to go through dresser drawers, the closet, but found no other photos, no original of that graduation photograph, only pieces of Elena–a blouse here, a printed T-shirt there–memories strong enough to rip her apart. And they would if she weren’t focused on the fact that he had been here, too, moved through these same rooms, touched the same clothes.