The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  “You haven’t told her?”

  “No. She doesn’t need to know. The painting was burnt, the art historian is dead, and she told the insurance adjuster she had no doubts about the painting’s genuineness. She has no evidence and has already undermined her own credibility by lying to the insurance company. She’s not in danger.”

  “So what is it that’s making you think you want to be a detective again instead of a nice, boring personal security consultant?”

  I ignored him but, as usual, that made no difference.

  “Well, maybe it is the boredom. Ah, but then why don’t you just go risk your life rock climbing or skydiving or hang gliding, in your usual way?”

  He didn’t really expect an answer, which was good because I couldn’t give him one.

  four

  I wore a light linen suit. It was going to be a hot one today: only ten-thirty and already in the high eighties. I opened all the Saab’s doors and windows and waited while the oven heat gushed out. A small redheaded woodpecker, a male with black body and white stripe across its back and wings, was thwacking its beak industriously against the siding under the eaves. No doubt the resonant drumming would sound impressive to the brown females in the area and they could take turns feeding him when he was too addled to catch beetles.

  I left the air-conditioning off, the windows down, and enjoyed the fat heat that snaked through the car as I drove.

  What kind of car did Michael Honeycutt, banker, drive? What did he look like, how did he sound? I wanted to see him, to weigh the fabric of his suit, smell his cologne, judge his haircut, watch his body language, listen to the way he shaped his vowels.

  One of the first times I had been called on the carpet as a police officer had been back when Denneny was still a lieutenant, back in the days when he could still tremble with fury, or laughter, or worry for one of his people. I couldn’t even remember the details of the incident; all I remember was him pacing up and down his office, shouting at me: “You can’t just break in and start banging heads, Torvingen! Knowing isn’t good enough. You need proof, because our justice is legal justice, not street justice.” So I would need to assemble my proof, I would need to bide my time. Besides, while personal indicators would tell me things that no dossier could, they would also give me nothing like the whole story.

  People are twisty animals. I have met unpleasant men and women whom I do not like because I suspect they are at heart cruel, or take absolutely no joy from life, or believe some sections of society are little better than vermin and should be exposed at birth; but I have trusted some of these same women and men with my life because they have learnt to bind their natural inclinations with cages of rules and ethical behaviour that I know will hold and guide them under almost any circumstance. Equally, I have met people whom I have liked instinctively, on sight, but would not trust because they have never been tested, not even by themselves, and have never had to formulate rules to get by. Think about two young adults who go to college. One is brilliant, a genius who floats above her colleagues like a cirrus cloud, the other is merely a plodder: dogged, determined, competent. Throughout their education, the genius has always been able to leap obstacles as though they’re not there while the plodder has, through necessity, learned patiently to climb walls. One day, say in the second year of their Ph.D. programme, that genius will come across a wall so high even she can’t jump it. But she doesn’t know how to climb. The plodder, on the other hand, rubs his hands, checks his equipment, and starts hammering in the first piton. Who do you think will reach the top first?

  So although there were certain things I could only learn about Michael Honeycutt by meeting him face-to-face, there was a great deal I could find out by looking at his track record, his habits, and his job.

  At the Ponce de Leon branch of the Fulton County Library I parked carefully under the pathetic sapling in the middle of the lot. Better than nothing. There was a minivan four spaces down. The sliding door was open. A man was lying back in the driver’s seat, eyes closed, keys dangling from the steering column. Probably waiting for his wife. It would be so easy to slip into the passenger seat, break his neck with one twist, bundle him into the back and drive away. Less than forty seconds. No witnesses. People are so stupid.

  “Anthony,” I said to the plump, balding man blinking in the sunshine leaking through the enormous skylight over the reference desk, “I need some information on Massut Vere, investment bankers.”

  He sighed—he always sighed and acted like a fifty-year-old who had been forced to get out of his cosy fireside armchair and shuffle off in his slippers on some unpleasant errand, even though I doubted he was a day over thirty—and repeated, “Massut Vere.”

  “Corporate structure, personnel, specialist interest, political flavour, anything that would give me a feeling for what kind of institution they are. Pay particular attention to any mention of a man called Michael Honeycutt.”

  “When do you need it by? Yesterday, I suppose.”

  I didn’t smile; Anthony thought smiles frivolous and out of place in a library. “I’ll be here for forty minutes or so.” He would have a first cut for me in less than half an hour. The more he looked forward to a task, the more he grumbled.

  At the New Fiction section I skimmed the rows of E. Annie Proulx, Anne Rice and Robert James Waller and moved on in disgust to Non-Fiction. There was a new biography of Albert Murray that looked interesting. Farther down was something called Gender Critique in Body Modification. Helen had said something about that performance artist being into “gendered body art,” so I picked it up. I took those and a text on cults to a carrel and started flipping through. An index can tell you a book’s parameters. Everything I looked up in the Murray was there: Romare Beardon, Malcolm X, Count Basie, Ralph Ellison, The Omni-Americans, Wynton Marsalis, geopolitics. The cult book, on the other hand, was less promising: Cohesiveness, Conditioning, Controlled Drinking, Conformity…. The body modification volume had something it called a hyperindex, no doubt put together by someone who thought they were designing a web page. I flipped through charmingly obtuse text and stomach-churning graphics.

  After half an hour I took the Murray and bod-mod books to the reference desk. Anthony was presiding over a pile of books, catalogues and printouts looking sour: his version of smug complacency. “These you can check out”—he pointed to the books—“these you can keep”—a handful of still-warm photocopies—“and this is a list of files, some of them more general than I would like, that I’ve pulled from a quick electronic search. Just two references to Honeycutt.”

  I didn’t thank him—he would start to stutter—but I would as usual send a cheque for the library’s Children’s Books fund that was Anthony’s particular passion. Maybe I’d put that one on expenses.

  I stared past my monitor and into the back garden. A chipmunk picked up an old, old pecan, threw it down in disgust. Two cardinals trilled liquidly at each other, bright red against the emerald green. One of the neighbour’s cats slunk belly down through the grass towards them. Snakes in fur coats, Dorothy Parker had called cats. Sometimes I could see why.

  Anthony’s references had not been much help. I had tedious details about Massut Vere, who, despite the unlikely name, were one of the oldest and richest merchant bankers in the South, with interests in everything from tobacco, cotton and railroads to bioengineering, cable television and pizzas. Michael Honeycutt had been with them for just under two years, coming to the company from a bank in California. There was a small black and white photograph that could have been anybody.

  The cat stopped, twitched its hindquarters to and fro, and pounced; not at the birds, but something hidden in the grass. Probably a shrew. The garden teemed with them. They dug burrows all over the lawn and if you crouched motionless on the grass, sooner or later you would hear them rooting about under what was left of last year’s leaves. They were always there, even in the rain. Shrews can’t store or metabolize fat. If humans ate proportionally as much as a shrew,
we would have to consume the equivalent of two pigs, thirty chickens, two hundred pears, three pineapples, and twenty bars of chocolate every day. Busy life.

  I turned off the computer. Time to go to the second leg of my plan.

  I called Eddie, the special assistant and researcher to Elaine Merx, a popular columnist at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

  “Hello, Eddie.”

  “Aud. Good to hear from you. And how are you?”

  “Good.”

  “Let me guess, you want some help on something.”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s a new restaurant I’ve discovered. The Horseradish Grill….”

  “Anytime after next week.” It would be expensive—it was always expensive when he picked—but the food would be wonderful, the service even better, and we would both enjoy ourselves immensely. I have known Eddie for a long time. “I want to know everything about two different people. Charlie Sweeting, who lives—”

  “In his seventies? Lives off Ponce? I know Charming Charlie. And the other one?”

  “A banker with Massut Vere, Michael Honeycutt.”

  “Hmmn.” A long drawn-out contemplation as he tick-ticked at his keyboard. “Ah. Hmmn. There’s a fair amount here. And some of the information on Charming Charlie isn’t in the electronic archive, so perhaps you should come down and take a look. I’ll be here until seven tonight.”

  “I’d like to come now if it’s convenient.”

  “Of course.”

  I found my way around the big AJC building on Marietta Street and to Eddie’s cubbyhole with the ease of long practice.

  “Aud, lovely to see you!” There was no way to describe Eddie’s voice except to call it lugubrious. He was almost six feet tall, built like a dancer, with tight nappy hair and mournful brown eyes that could light up with bright, clean joy at the slightest provocation. We hugged. “You look…” he tilted his head to one side, “engaged.”

  I lifted my eyebrows.

  “As in engaged with life, rather than engaged to be married.”

  “I’m trying to find out who burned someone to a crisp in Inman Park last week.”

  “A crusader at last.”

  “At last?”

  “Don’t tell me it’s for the money, or for the thrills and spills that you’re taking on a drug case.”

  “It’s not a drug case.”

  “The police found cocaine.”

  “Yes.”

  “But it was a white boy art historian who died and not some crack dealer.”

  “Eddie…”

  “Sorry. It’s a habit I get into around here, pointing out the obvious. So, you think Charming Charlie, and Honeycutt, patron of all the most boring Big Culture groups in the city and darling of the downtown gallery owners, are involved in this nondrug drug murder?”

  “Darling of downtown galleries?”

  “Oh, indubitably. Take a seat.” Click. “Top bidder for this jade piece in November.” Click. “Purchaser for an undisclosed price of not one but two Fabergé eggs.” Click. “This rather indifferent sculpture by a local artist.” Click. “Owner of these recently discovered Roman coins. Hmmn.”

  “What?”

  “Remarkably catholic, don’t you think?”

  “Explain.”

  “Most collectors have a specialty, a burning passion: silver snuffboxes of the seventeenth century, British Commonwealth stamps pre-World War II, that kind of thing. These items don’t seem to have anything in common.”

  “Are there more?”

  “Many.” He clicked through the rest: a ten-inch jewel-encrusted icon; a rare stamp; a pair of Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz (“There are at least six pairs of those floating around that I know of,” Eddie said); a messy explosion of an oil painting by someone I’d never heard of…. “He has bought these over a period of just two years.”

  “How much has he spent?”

  “Some of the prices were not officially disclosed, but at a conservative guess I’d say somewhere between twelve and fifteen million. That’s all of them. You want to see them again?”

  I nodded. Fifteen million. Fifteen million on such a wild collection that was part odd, like the painting and sculpture, but mostly precious. “What else?”

  “He goes to dozens of fund-raising balls, dinners and speeches. He is a member of the Chamber of Commerce and two or three other professional organizations. Gives parties. He’s not married but often photographed in the presence of beautiful young women from Atlanta and from out of town.”

  “Gay?”

  “Don’t think so. There was a rumour last year that some old girlfriend was threatening to sue him for battery and emotional abuse but that the case was settled before it got to court. He’s forty-two—”

  His photographs showed a lean, tanned, smiling man with short dark hair and wire-framed glasses. “Older than he looks.”

  “Indeed. Previously employed by California Mutual Holdings and, before that, Bay Banking. No arrests here or in California. Not even a parking ticket. House in Marietta, one on Lake Lanier.”

  “Tell me about his job.”

  “Vice president, but I don’t know what of. Several articles mention meetings with foreign business managers, and I think he was involved in helping North Carolina get that BMW plant. Travels to various offshore tax havens such as the Bahamas, Bermuda, and—three times last year—the Seychelles. Also flies to Mexico and Los Angeles fairly regularly.”

  “Give me the names of the galleries he patronizes most.”

  “Easy. Cess Silverman at Hye Galleries.”

  I frowned. Cess Silverman. “Isn’t she one of Georgia’s Democratic Party movers and shakers?”

  “The same.”

  I thought for a while but could not make any of it hang together. “How about Sweeting?”

  “Ah,” he said with approval, “at least he knows how to collect.” He handed me a one-page printout.

  “This is his obituary.”

  “Yes. As a précis of his life so far, it’s hard to beat. We have them on file for all prominent Georgia citizens, updated every four months.” I wondered if they had one on me.

  I ran through it quickly. S. Charles Sweeting III. Born in Covington, Georgia, in 1922. Son of congressional representative S. Charles Sweeting, Jr. Purple Heart in World War II. Married Jonetta Marie Sturton in 1947. Three children…. Worked in radio. Inherited. Bought radio station. Bought second. Bought TV station. Divorced. Remarried. Patron of High Museum of Art, Atlanta Ballet, the zoo…“It all looks very straightforward. What’s not on here that I should know about?”

  “He’s said to have been a real son-of-a-bitch to his first wife. None of his children can bear to live in the same state as him. The closest is in Virginia, I think. He’s on the board of the TV station still, but can’t influence programming.”

  “Reputation?”

  “Straight shooter: worked hard for what he’s got, doesn’t take shit from anybody, gets what he wants when he wants it, no matter who he has to run down. And he’s run down quite a few. Earns a lot, gives a lot. What’s not on there are contributions, the very hefty contributions I’m pretty sure he makes anonymously to the Atlanta Society for the Deaf.”

  “If they’re anonymous, what makes you think he gives?”

  “One of his mistresses gave birth to a son after she caught measles while pregnant. The son was deaf; retarded, too, as I recall. I talked to one of the ASD’s finance assistants last year—you remember that piece the paper did on Southern noblesse oblige?—and he told me that every July for the last seventeen years they get a cheque for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They’ve come to rely on that money, but because they don’t know who gives it, they worry about the golden goose just…flying away one day. So they did some research on past beneficiaries of their services, looking for rich relatives, and my friend discovered that Sweeting’s son was born in July seventeen years ago. A big coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”


  I nodded. “You said he was a real collector?”

  “He buys publicly and in a big way, always makes sure everyone knows what he paid. Representational art: landscapes and portraits. Nothing more modern than the 1920s. He displays the art on his own walls—no bank vaults for Charlie Sweeting. He takes the same kind of pride in owning beautiful things as being a man of his word.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “Once. Briefly.”

  “Would you trust him?”

  He thought about that. “Sixty years ago he and his buddies would probably have spent their summers setting their hunting dogs on folks like me, but, yes, I’d trust him to do what he said he would do. Or to not do what he said he would not. His honour is who he is.”

  I sat on the deck sipping a Corona, watching the last bloody footprint of the sun fading from the sky, listening to the tree frogs and crickets, thinking idly that I really should cut some flower borders at the back one of these days.

  A murder, some cocaine, a fake painting. Sweeting and Honeycutt.

  Sweeting was ruthless, no doubt about it, but I agreed with Eddie: faking a painting did not fit his profile, nor did an anonymous murder. Which left Michael Honeycutt, as I’d known it would.

  Roman coins. Unmarried. Jade carvings. No parking tickets. Fabergé eggs. The Seychelles. Democratic Party. Cocaine. I could not see a connection.

  A huge barred owl ghosted silently across the garden to land in the pecan tree overlooking the deck. It turned its head this way and that, intent. Somewhere on the lawn a shrew crept through the grass in a desperate search for juicy insects to stoke its ever-needy metabolism. The owl focused for an instant, dropped into a shallow glide. It dipped once and I heard the tiniest squeak, then the soft wingspan and full talons were lifting over the hedge, blending with the darkness to the east.

  That night I dreamt of a man in a bathtub. He looked dead but he wasn’t, he kept sitting up. Every time he sat up, I hit him: palm strike to the nose, thud and splinter of bone slamming into his already dead brain; knife hand to the larynx, crushing it like cardboard; double fist to the temple, fingers sinking in to the second knuckle. But he kept sitting up. And then he smiled and opened his mouth, and out flew an owl, clutching a small jade statue in its taloned fist.