The Death Artist (4 page)

But Willie’s other genetic gifts–the full lips and perfectly straight white teeth–were distinctly his real father’s, or so it would appear from the man’s only known photo: a smiling, handsome African American in U.S. Army fatigues, taken somewhere in Asia, or was it Africa? Either way, the man had never returned.

The fact that Willie’s parents hadn’t actually married made no difference to Willie’s mother, Iris. The photo, in a gilded Woolworth frame, had maintained a place of honor next to Iris’s bed in the crowded South Bronx tenement shared by Willie, his brother, baby sister, and grandmother, as long as Willie could remember. Six months ago, Willie had moved the three women into a garden apartment–which he paid for–in a middle-class Queens neighborhood, and the framed photo had been resurrected in Iris’s new bedroom.

Willie’s success came as a surprise to Iris. Not from any lack of faith in her son, but because she didn’t know that kind of thing was possible. Willie knew she was proud of his making good, selling his pictures for big money. But Willie kept the exact prices (which had recently hit six figures) to himself, because Iris might see that as prideful and not quite Christian, though he couldn’t explain it to you unless you’d grown up in his family.

Then there was Henry. Willie’s big brother. His “lost” brother. That’s what Iris called him:
lost.
Still, every few weeks he managed to find his way to Willie’s place, needing money for a fix. But Willie didn’t want to think about Henry. Not now.

“I want to be an artist.”

The words fluttered in the narrow hallway of the Bronx railroad flat, forever after to be associated with the scent of his grandma’s lavender powder and the Lysol Willie’s mother seemed to spray or wipe on everything.

“A
what
?” his mother said.

“An artist.”

“What does that mean? An
artist
?”

Willie couldn’t come up with an answer, had no idea, just a feeling. But, man, what a feeling. To be drawing, making lines into something, seeing the images come together, giving them life, getting lost way inside his head. Maybe it was just a world he created on paper, but plenty far away from the lousy world of the Bronx tenement.

The memory faded, replaced with another, the argument he had had with Elena, just the other day.

“I’m sick and tired of being referred to as a
black
artist. I’m an artist! Period.”

“Look, Willie. It’s not a good thing to deny your blackness. Impossible. Hey, I’m a Latina. And a performance artist. And a woman. That’s who I am. It defines me.”

“Deny my blackness? Are you kidding? Look at my work. It’s a classification, see? A category. One of the best
black
artists. A goddamn qualification! Like my art is something less, like there are different rules or separate criteria for artists of color
–
like I can’t compete with white artists in the white art world. Don’t you get that?”

He still believed he was right, but wanted to patch things up. After all, Elena was his best friend, more like a sister. He’d see her tonight, could fix the argument then.

Willie shut off the television and stood in the silence. He was gripped by a sudden unease, a nonspecific gloominess about the evening ahead.
What is it
? He rolled his shoulders inside the leather jacket, tried to toss it off. Whatever it was, he’d soon forget it. After all, dinner with his three favorite people–Kate, Richard, and Elena–no way he could be depressed or anxious around that trio.

But out on the street, as he headed toward the East Village, there it was, this time as if someone had spliced microseconds of a movie into his brain–

An arm slicing through space. A twisted, screaming mouth in close-up. Everything blood red. Then black.

Willie sagged against the street lamp, gripped the cool metal for support.

His mother, Iris, used to say he could feel things before they happened. But it had been years since he’d had one of these visions.

No. Too many days alone in the studio. That’s all. He just needed to get out more.

But once Willie crossed Broadway, the scene shifted to boutiques and contemporary art galleries jostling for space, and inconceivably stylish, good-looking people taking themselves very seriously in their studied black costumes.

One of them, a youngish man, hair stripped Harlow-white, with an inch of black roots that matched the perfect two-day stubble on his thin cheeks, called out to Willie.

Oliver Pratt-Smythe, Willie’s least favorite artist in New York–which was saying a lot. He and Willie had been a double bill in a London gallery a couple of years earlier. Pratt-Smythe, the more seasoned of the two, and the more savvy, had arrived two days before Willie and had covered the gallery’s floor with horsehair. Planting himself in the center of the space at a large noisy sewing machine, he would spend every day running horsehair through the machine making–what? Willie never could figure it out. About the only thing Willie could plainly see was that it was virtually impossible for viewers to reach
his
work without plowing through foot-deep horsehair, clumps of which had adhered themselves to the heavily encrusted surfaces of Willie’s paintings. For months afterward, Willie was plucking the stuff out with tweezers.

Now he nodded without enthusiasm, taking in the careful paint smudges on Pratt-Smythe’s otherwise brand-new black jeans. Odd: the guy was not a painter.

Without being asked, Pratt-Smythe started ticking off accomplishments. “Having a show in Düsseldorf,” he said, a look of world-weary ennui in his flat gray eyes. “Didn’t you get the announcement? No, well, gee, I’m sure I sent you one, but you’ll get one for my New York show, which is all set for November–the best month–
and
I’ve got an installation I’m trying to get together for Venice–the Biennale, you know.”

“More horsehair?” asked Willie. “I saw a couple of nearly bald ones the other day, thought of you.”

“No,” said Pratt-Smythe, without a trace of a smile. “I’m into dust now. Been collecting it for months. I mix it with my saliva and spread it into biomorphic patterns.” He picked at his dirty fingernails, looked bored, and asked, “And you?”

“I’ll be there, too,” said Willie. “In Venice. I’m bringing an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner, setting it in the space, leaving it on all day, seeing what it collects, displaying that as my art. Hey, maybe it’ll be your dust.”

For a split second Pratt-Smythe looked alarmed, then he allowed the tiniest grin to crack his tight lips. “Oh, I get it, man. You’re having me on. Good one, man.”

“Yeah.” Willie grinned back.
“Man.”

“So I guess, you’re, uh, showing . . . what?
Paintings
?” Pratt-Smythe said this as if he were discussing not only the lowest form of art, but the lowest form of all human expression.

“Yeah,” said Willie. “I’ll be showing
paintings
–about
thirty
of them–in my
one-man
show at the Museum of Contemporary Art this summer.”

Willie turned away, left the other artist on the corner of Prince and Greene Streets, trolling for someone–anyone–on whom to lay his current CV.

Willie slung his leather jacket over his shoulder as he jogged between the two-way traffic on Houston, past Great Jones Street, heading into the East Village. He turned onto East Sixth Street, where the dozen or more Indian restaurants dispersed the scent of curry and cumin into the warm evening air, then jogged a half block to Elena’s three-story raggedy-ass tenement.

A note, scribbled on cardboard, was Scotch-taped to the front door:

“Oh, great.” Willie shook his head. Elena, he thought, has got to get out of here. The East Village renaissance is, like, over. He tried giving the old wooden door a shove. It groaned open.

Inside, the place smelled musty and just a bit off, as if maybe the super hadn’t been dealing with the garbage–as usual. The front hall was lit with a dim yellow bulb.

At the second-floor landing the smell was stronger; at the top of the stairs it was downright pungent. At Elena’s door, Willie knocked. “Elena? You in there?”

Kate locked the Club across her steering wheel. Richard would go nuts if he knew she parked the Mercedes right on the street, in the East Village, no less. But to Kate, a car was a car, and she’d only be a few minutes, pick up the kids, then hook up with Richard at Bowery Bar, put the car into a nice safe lot.

She started up the stairs at her usual determined pace, half her mind looking forward to the evening ahead, the other half still back at the Four Seasons with her pal Liz.

And then there was that smell . . .

Kate’s mind was suddenly filled with a rush of images–images that had lain dormant for a decade:

A homeless man found under molding cartons.

A suicide that the young detective McKinnon discovered hanging from an attic beam almost a full two weeks after the knotted sheet had stopped all air and blood to the brain and heart.

Prying up floor planks of that oh-so-innocent-looking young man’s basement apartment to discover the two bodies in advanced states of decomposition.

Now Kate was taking the stairs two at time, stumbling over her heels, the stairwell a blur, that damn smell getting stronger, killing other senses: She heard nothing, did not feel the scrape to her hand when she tripped on the top step of the second landing, was blind to the blood surfacing on her palm, across her knuckles. But at the top of the third-story landing Willie came into sharp focus, slumped against the wall, his head forward on his chest.

Scraping her knees against dirty floorboards, Kate got a hand under his chin, lifted his head, listened–
Yes, he’s breathing
–fumbled in her bag for a mentholated Chap Stick, got it under his nose.

He blinked.

“Jesus–Willie! Are you all right? What happened?”

There were tears in his startling green eyes.

Kate followed his line of vision to the open apartment door. She turned back, gazed into his eyes, and in that one terrible moment she knew.

She pulled herself up and took the necessary steps toward the open door, that smell coming at her.

The Marilyn Monroe pillow was poking out from under the couch.
Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. Please. Please. Please. Let me be wrong.
Kate covered her nose with her arm, leaned against a wall for support, and then she was turning, taking in the dark vertical streaks and splatters of blood on the opposite wall, and lifting her feet from something thick and sticky on the floor, trying to make sense of the twisted leg jutting out from the space between the sink and the refrigerator. And then there was Elena’s face. Elena’s beautiful face–or what was left of it.

Kate turned away fast, spinning, heart pounding, the smell of death so thick it sucked the oxygen from her lungs.
No. No. No.
She squeezed her eyes shut. The bad scene hovered behind her. But no. She would not look, would not validate it.
Oh, God. This isn’t happening. I’m saving children now, not losing them.

She was glued against the wall, the ability to put one foot in front of the other impossible.

She was too late. Again.

Waves of impotence and despair rippled through her, explosions, like tiny firecrackers, jitterbugged all over her body–fingers, toes, arms, legs, torso. Her organs felt as though they were imploding and exploding all at once. For a moment Kate truly believed she would die.
Yes. Let me die.
Hail Marys, bits of the Lord’s Prayer, fragments of Sunday-morning service in Latin that she didn’t think she knew were buzzing in her head.

She swiped the tears from her cheeks, opened her eyes.

Just that one garish pillow out of place on a bare wood floor. The place was too damn neat, that was for sure. As if nothing had happened here. No blood on the living room floor or walls.

In the bedroom–How did she get there? She had no memory of moving. The patchwork quilt was folded neatly at the foot of the bed. Above it one of Willie’s early works, a small assemblage where he’d taken a page of Elena’s handwritten music, cut it up, rearranged the notes, glued and sealed them onto fragments of metal and wood, glazed over them so that you could just make them out. It was so damn beautiful, Kate was crying again, feeling as though her heart were being pulverized. She swallowed hard, looked away, noted that the gate on the tiny bedroom window was locked and secure.

At the doorway to the living room she hesitated, prayed. Maybe that fierce, punishing God, the one she was schooled on, would perform one of his miracles and it would not be Elena.

But no. Once again, he’d let her down. For even now, with the body so bloated with gases, Elena’s face was recognizable.

My God. How many stabs does it take to kill one girl
?

Kate fought the sickness rising in her, tried to count them, but couldn’t; Elena’s torn clothes were so blood-soaked that it looked like one huge wound.

Her eyes followed the vertical streaks of blood on the wall down to the floor where Elena had slid and bled to death.

Just a body.

Just a body.

Just a body.

A mantra Kate repeated to forget this was Elena, her little girl.
Just a body. Just a body. Just a body.
Again and again, in her mind, and aloud: “Just a body . . .” as she backed out of the apartment, careful not to touch anything, almost not breathing.

Outside, Willie sat on the front stoop while Kate finished calling the police. That vision he’d had earlier–the slicing arm, a scream–was
this
what he’d been seeing? He shivered, rubbed at his eyes with the arm of his leather jacket, caught a whiff of something sour. He sniffed.