The Death Artist (23 page)

“I did, but only with Elena. They were still friends.”

Kate picked at a hardened piece of paint on the chair’s arm. Okay, it was time. She couldn’t delay it any longer. “Willie . . .” She sucked in a breath. “Was Elena involved in anything . . . well . . . prurient?”

“Prurient?”

“You know, sex.”

“What are you getting at, Kate?”

“I saw a clip . . . well, maybe thirty seconds, of a film, of Elena, and it looked like it could have been a porno flick. I . . .” She pulled the paint off the chair, flicked it away. Her fingers were shaking. “It could have been a home movie. Probably was. But–”

“Whoa!” Willie expelled a breath, then thought a minute. “Home movie, you say? Maybe something she made with a boyfriend?”

“Yes. Exactly what I was thinking.”
Hoping.

“Well, there was this filmmaker guy. I met him a couple of times with Elena.”

“You remember his name?”

“Damien . . . something.”

Kate offered up Elena’s phone records.

Willie wiped his hands on a clean paint rag, took hold of the paper. “Trip. Here it is. D. Trip. Damien. He’s an NYU film student, I think–though a little old to be a student, if you know what I mean. Maybe a dropout.”

“How long did they go out, he and Elena?”

“A few months, maybe. Elena got kinda weird about him. And I know she was thinking about breaking up, ’cause she said so.”

“A film student?” Elena may have mentioned him one time, but that was it. Kate stood. “C’mon. Let’s drop in on them, Janine Cook and Damien Trip. If you tag along, it’ll make it seem like it’s just a casual visit.”

“Cool. I’m like your cover, huh?” Willie’s eyes sparked with excitement.

“This isn’t an installment of
Law and Order
, Willie. Just take your lead from me. And don’t say anything unless I ask you to.”

Traffic was backed up on Second Avenue. Kate and Willie inched along through the East Village.

It gave Kate time to take in places she and Elena had known together. A half dozen Polish coffee shops with signs left over from the fifties–Veselka their favorite, where a cup of coffee served as a chaser to enormous servings of cheese-and-potato pirogies smothered in fried onions and gobs of sour cream; St. Mark’s Café, a hangout for old beatniks and neo-ones with their sparse goatees and skinny tattooed arms. So many places, so many memories.

Finally, two blocks north of Elena’s corner, Kate managed to hang a right on Eighth Street, and the traffic cleared. It was a quick shoot from there–just four blocks–but the scenery changed as if a film editor had spliced together two different worlds. Here Polish gave way to Spanish.

“You sure the address is right?” Willie asked. “We’re gonna end up in the projects.”

“According to the phone company. What did Trip say when you called?”

“That he’d wait for us. He bought your idea–about a memorial service for Elena.”

Just past Tompkins Square Park, Kate caught a glimpse of a black awning with bold white letters spelling out SIDEWALK, and a window so densely packed with neon signs–Red Dog, Guinness, Rolling Rock–that it dissolved into a shimmering mass of artificial light.

“I had lunch there with Elena,” she said softly. “Couple of times.”

They were deep into Alphabet City now–the affectionate or not so affectionate sobriquet that distinguished Avenues A, B, C, and D–as if these less-than-modest, crowded streets weren’t worthy of actual names.

Avenue B was crowded–people ladened down with shopping bags, pushing laundry carts, scolding children. With the windows rolled down, bits of Spanish, Asian, and Arabic tongues zipped in and out of the car like a linguist with Tourette’s.

“The Poet’s Café is just a couple of blocks over. Remember when . . .” Willie’s voice trailed off.

Of course Kate remembered. She and Willie going to the café to hear Elena perform one of her latest pieces–a friend’s avant-garde poems set to electronic synthesizer music, Elena, singing, if you could call it that, an abstraction of vocal exercises so staggering the audience was held in thrall.

Kate lit a Marlboro, pulled the smoke deep into her lungs–no way she would be quitting anytime soon. At the traffic light she rolled her window down, blew smoke out, watched a Latino man and a black woman sweep sidewalks in front of a strip of three-story buildings, each painted a different pastel color–lime green, sky blue, cream. “You know, in its own way, it can be beautiful over here.”

“Yeah, I hear they say that about Watts, too,” said Willie.

Kate felt a rush of embarrassment. “I guess that’s one for you in the I’m-cool-and-you’re-just-a-naive-white-woman contest.”

Willie licked his pointer finger, scored himself an air point, laughed.

But the charm Kate had just noted was coming up short. An empty lot with stripped cars abutted a crumbling wall with a mural that looked as though it had been painted by Diego Rivera on acid: a ten-foot-tall Jesus with bloody tears streaming through half-closed eyes. As they turned the corner, another mural. This one all colossal white and black skulls, crosses, and the words “In Memory of Those Who Have Died.” An image at once striking and chilling.

Kate slowed the car to a crawl, tried to read the building numbers.

“Three-something,” said Willie. “Keep going. Trip’s place must be near the end.”

And it was. The very end.

Kate parked right in front of the five-story gray brick building.

Willie squinted through the windshield across Avenue D to the sprawling conglomerate of slab-like monoliths that could only be a housing project. “Looks like home to me.”

The ground floor of Trip’s building was taken up by the Arias Spanish Grocery and a weathered orange awning that wrapped around the corner, FUCK YOU spray-painted on it in bright red.

Above the door to the right of the grocery were about a half dozen buzzers. Their wires snaked up the front of the building like leafless ivy. A real do-it-yourself job, none of them identified. But no matter; the door was unlocked.

The first-floor vestibule had that stale-cabbage smell that seemed built into these old buildings. The narrow staircase was steep, the layout of apartments–one front, one back–the same on each floor. On the first two the domestic sounds of kids and TVs blasting and Game Boys. On the third floor the apartments were boarded up. But on the fourth, it was another world.

Here, there was only one door, and it was shiny structural steel plastered with enough stickers from alarm companies to give a third-story man serious pause. Someone had shoved a card–“Amateur Films”–into a tiny metal holder beside the bell.

Amateur Films
? The name resonated. Kate thought a minute. The stash of porno films belonging to Bill Pruitt. Coincidence? Maybe, but that old cop instinct was telling her it wasn’t.

Kate leaned on the bell.

The heavy metal door squeaked open.

Damien Trip was maybe thirty-five, with the face of an angel: pale pale skin, silky blond hair, translucent blue eyes, and a Harrison Ford scar on his chin that added such a perfect combination of toughness and vulnerability, it could have been self-inflicted. A cigarette–which looked out of place on the cherubic face–dangled from his soft, full lips.

The blond guy Fat Wally had described.

Willie shook Trip’s hand.

A second later Kate did the same. “Kate McKinnon Rothstein. Elena’s friend.”

“Kate . . . McKinnon . . . Rothstein. Well . . . I’ll be . . . damned.” Trip’s words seemed to ooze out of him. “Elena talked about you . . . The perfect mom . . . is what she called . . . you.”

Was that a slight sneer on his full lips? Kate could not be sure. But the words–
perfect mom
–were so bittersweet, Kate felt a stab of pleasurable pain.

Trip squinted at her through the smoke snaking into his baby blues. He held on to her hand a few seconds too long. “I’ve seen . . . your book,” he said. “You’re like the . . . art goddess to the . . . masses.”

Yes, he was sneering. Kate was certain. But she smiled.

Then Trip smiled, too. A mistake. His teeth were the color of sand and dirt. The angel fell to earth. “Man, I . . . can’t believe it. Elena . . . gone.” He shook his head slowly, the smile fading. “I hadn’t seen her in . . . months . . . six months, easy.”

“How come?”

Trip ran a lazy finger across the scar on his chin. “We sort of . . . drifted apart.”

“Why’s that?” asked Kate.

Trip hesitated a moment, his eyes narrowed. Then he smiled that rotten-angel smile again. “Tell you the truth, all she ever talked about was this CD she was cutting, and . . . well, I got to feeling the damn CD was more important to her than me . . . you know? A real . . . career woman. Don’t get me wrong, Kate. I mean . . . I was real happy for her, but a guy can only take so much . . . you know.”

Willie glanced over at Kate, eyebrows arched.

Kate nodded at Trip, taking in what looked like a combination office and sixties crash pad: fuchsia walls; a beat-up imitation leather couch; a couple of old cabinets, one painted milk-of-magnesia pink, the other sky blue; a big wooden desk that looked like something out of a thirties gangster movie, covered with dozens of art cards, invitations to exhibitions, reproductions, invoices.

Another bell went off in Kate’s brain. She looked over at the cards, then tried to read those invoices upside down. Whom was she kidding? And without her reading glasses? Forget it.

“You live here?”

Trip leaned past her, tamped his cigarette out in a large ceramic ashtray, which he shifted, ever so slightly, to obscure Kate’s view of those invoices. “We work here . . . mostly,” he said, in his slow-talking, dreamy way. “I mean, sometimes we . . . crash here. When it’s . . . real . . . late, you know.”

It was practically as if he was crashing now, or sleep-walking. That was it. Kate finally got it. The guy was
so
stoned. It didn’t match with the angel face or his super-preppy outfit–pink button-down shirt and pristine khakis. If he kept his mouth closed, the guy could be a walking Gap ad. “We?” Kate asked.

“My friend . . . partners.”

“Amateur Films.” Kate smiled, tried to make it warm, sincere. “What kind of films do you make?”

“Mostly . . . experimental.”

“Have you always made films?”

Trip eyed her suspiciously for a moment. “No . . . I went to art school. Thought I might be a . . . painter.”

“I went to art school, too,” said Willie.

“Yeah? Well, it didn’t do it for me. I, like . . . needed a bigger palette, if you, uh . . . get my drift.”

Filmmaker. Art student. Pornographer.
“Where’d you go to art school?” Kate asked.

Trip’s eyes narrowed again. “That’s . . . real . . . old . . . news. I mean, who cares?”

Kate scanned his desk, the art cards. “But you obviously still like art,” she said, reaching for a reproduction of a colorful abstract painting.

“Not really,” said Trip. “I get . . . dozens of these things. I must be on . . . a hundred mailing lists.”

Kate regarded the mass of cards, reached for another that had caught her eye. She flipped it over, saw the name in print: Ethan Stein, and the title,
White Light.
The card felt hot in her hand. “Ethan Stein? You know him?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Who?” Trip shrugged, glanced at the card. “Looks boring to me.”

Then how come he saved it
? “You mind if I keep it?” Kate asked. “I like the work.”

Trip exaggerated a yawn.

Kate couldn’t decide if it was an act, or if it was the grass that was making him so zonked out.

Trip slid into a seat beside the big desk, propped his feet up, popped an unfiltered Gauloise into his mouth, lit it. “So, uh, what about this . . . memorial?”

“A few friends want to put something together,” said Willie. “We thought you’d like to be included.”

“Oh . . . sure,” said Trip, picking a piece of tobacco out of his stained teeth. “Put me down, man . . . for anything. I’m, like . . . there.”

Kate looked past Trip to a heavy steel door. “Is that where all the creative juices flow?”

“There’s
nothing
going on at the moment,” said Trip, suddenly coming to life.

Kate felt like bounding across the room, smashing right through that steel door as if she were Superman. But no. If Trip was her man, she had to play it cool. Knowledge was power, and right now she didn’t feel like giving any of it away.

Trip pushed himself up from the desk. “It’s getting late. I’ve really got to get going.”

“So soon?” asked Kate.

“Appointment,” said Trip, stabbing his cigarette out.

“We’ll be in touch,” she said, sliding the Ethan Stein card into her bag.

“What?” Trip’s eyes darted from Kate to Willie, then back to Kate.

“About the memorial.” Kate smiled.

“Oh. Right.” Trip hustled them toward the door. It closed behind them, accompanied by the sound of sliding locks and dead bolts.

“Did you know Elena was making a CD?” Kate asked, as she and Willie headed toward the car.

“She mentioned it. But that was a while ago.”

“Who was she making it with?”

“My friend Darton Washington.”

Kate remembered the name now from the phone list. “Was it ever finished?”

“I don’t think so. I’m sure, if it was, I would have heard it.”

Why hadn’t she heard about it? Kate would have to find out.

But first, Janine Cook.

The young woman looked almost comfortable on her velvet couch, in her almost penthouse apartment on almost Park Avenue.

She was good-looking–dark brown skin, chocolate eyes, straightened hair done up in a bouffant. Her black leather micromini covered the top six inches of her fishnet stockings, and her tight cream-colored sweater, which was making a display of her nipples, still could not mask the fact that there was something decidedly mannish about her–the deep voice, tough mannerisms–that reminded Kate of the actor Jaye Davidson, the one in
The Crying Game.

It had been some time since Kate had seen her, but still, she was struck by how much older, harder, Janine looked.