Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

  The art critic lit a cigarette with steady hands, and no waver in the flame. “You’re reopening the old case?”

  “It was never officially closed.” Riker fumbled in his pockets for a pack of cigarettes, and then a second thought stopped him. His own hands were not so steady before that first drink of an evening. He had missed his breakfast beer and worked straight through his lunch beer. “Markowitz never believed Oren Watt was the killer. And as I recall, sir, neither did you.”

  Still no response from Quinn. The man seemed bored by it all. What the hell was going on behind that mask?

  “Both killings had the same method,” said Riker, “if you consider the old double homicide as performance art. Do you? The body parts in the first-”

  “The bodies were arranged as artwork,” said Quinn behind a haze of curling blue smoke. “I see the association, but I don’t know that it’s a strong one.”

  “Well, a killer has his own style. It’s what we call his MO-modus operandi. Now Andrew Bliss is saying an artist killed Dean Starr. Could he be right? Could you call this an artist’s style, the way the murder was done?”

  Quinn’s eyes followed the twisting plume of smoke. “The majority of artists in this town are mediocre hacks. Most of them have no style at all.”

  “Did you send that letter, Mr. Quinn? You see, twelve years ago, everyone was so sure we had the right man. It was such an ugly murder-everyone in this town wanted to believe Oren Watt did it-except Markowitz and you.”

  “Sorry, Sergeant. I didn’t write that letter.”

  “Do you know anyone else who thought Watt’s confession was a fake?”

  “Aubry’s father, for instance? No. My brother-in-law believed Oren Watt was the killer. He was rather unhappy when Watt’s psychiatrist started hawking drawings of his child’s body parts. But he’s gotten on with his life. When Watt was released last year, Gregor never even commented on it.”

  “Mr. Quinn, I need to identify the new player, the one who wrote this letter. What about Aubry’s mother, Sabra? Do you know where we can find her?”

  “No idea. I haven’t seen my sister in years.” His eyes ceased to follow the smoke and suddenly locked onto Riker’s. He leaned forward. “You always believed Oren Watt killed my niece. Have you questioned him about Dean Starr’s murder?”

  “No.”

  “Interesting. And what about Koozeman?”

  “I haven’t even talked to him. I have a direct order to stay away from the principals in the old case. And I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this conversation to yourself.”

  “Understood, Sergeant.” As Quinn sat back in his chair, his eyes never leaving Riker’s face, it was clear that he understood on many levels. If the wrong man had been sent to the asylum, if the butcher had been at large all this time…

  Riker lowered his eyes to keep Quinn from dicking around in his mind. “I just follow orders, sir. I’m only a working stiff.”

  “I suspect you’re much more than that. Markowitz thought very highly of you.”

  Riker studied his hands. If Markowitz had such a high opinion, why hadn’t the old bastard shared more of the case? Ah, Markowitz, always holding something back, even holding out on his own men.

  Riker retrieved the plastic evidence bag and held it up to Quinn. “This letter says there’s a link between Starr and the old murders. I need that link.”

  Quinn was silent, eyes drifting to that place beyond focus where the thinking is done. Then he waved one hand to show that he had come up empty of possibilities.

  Riker looked at his wristwatch, and reset it to the time of the wall clock. He pulled a small notebook and a pen from his shirt pocket. “Just for the record, sir…” Every move, every word conveyed the tired resignation of endgame. Riker’s eyes were cast down as his pen hovered over the open notebook. Then he looked up at Quinn, with the pretense of an afterthought. “What if Oren Watt was the wrong man? Suppose Dean Starr was the one who slaughtered your niece? Oh, Christ, the things he did to her. ‘Slaughter’ is the only right word for it, isn’t it, sir? Who could blame you if you stabbed the sick bastard with an ice pick?”

  Riker waited on a sign of damage from his salvo, some emotional disturbance in Quinn. Had he been hoping for fresh tears? No, he never wanted to see a sight like that one again. But there should be something-jangled nerves, if not tears-and there was not. He had just bludgeoned this man with the worst memory of his life, and all for nothing.

  The art critic wore the trace of a smile, as if to say he understood and there were no hard feelings. Then he absently touched one finger to the scar above his moustache.

  The Koozeman Gallery had the proportions of a modest gymnasium. High bare walls glistened with the sheen of a recent whitewash. The floors had been waxed and now were beaded with the spilled wine of reporters.

  The press corps was feeding by the back wall on the far side of Dean Starr’s coffin. Mountains of food were laid out at long tables and lit by ceiling track lights, as though the Fourth Estate might ever have trouble locating the staples of caviar, smoked salmon, and a spectacular array of strange but edible objects skewered on toothpicks. Glasses were filled by gallery boys in bow ties, black pants and starched white shirts. They passed among the throng of reporters, carrying magical, inexhaustible wine bottles. The tone of the babble was jovial, all liquored up for the show.

  The night’s main attraction sat on a long pedestal at the center of the large room. The white coffin wood was covered with four-letter words and bad drawings of obscene gestures. One small and gangly man stood behind a lectern near the casket. He seemed too young for vestment and a clerical collar. Horn-rimmed glasses greatly magnified his eyes. His gaze was fixed on the bare surface of the lectern as he tried to pretend this funeral service was not odd and unseemly, even by New York standards.

  Rows of empty benches were lined up in the staggered height of bleachers at a sporting event, and this, J. L. Quinn pointed out to Sergeant Riker, was not far from reality. The art critic and the detective nodded to the little minister as they approached the coffin together.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” said Riker, as he looked over the scrawled writing on the white wood, and then walked around it to read all the obscene words on the other side. “Damn kids.”

  “Oh, no,” said the critic. “You don’t understand. This is art. See?” He pointed to the lower right-hand corner of the coffin. “That’s the vandal artist’s signature. You might recall the name from Andrew Bliss’s column. Later on, they’ll dump Starr’s body into a pine box and auction off this one.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No, I can’t do that. I have no sense of humor.”

  Riker looked down on the remains of Dean Starr. “Pretty messy corpse.”

  Quinn leaned over the edge of the casket to study the face of moles and pockmarks, the thickened body straining at the buttons of a purple leather jacket, thighs threatening to split the green leather pants, creating the illusion of life in the stress of dead cow’s hide.

  “Actually Starr looked about the same when he was alive,” said Quinn. “I would’ve expected an autopsy to do more damage.”

  “Well, the chief medical examiner was out of town, so we got the discount version. That’s why my partner’s picking up the paperwork to have the autopsy done over. So the guy was always that ugly? Is his hair supposed to look like that?”

  “Yes. It’s a neo-Mohawk. They had to trim the spikes to fit the coffin. You’re not really getting the full effect.”

  “But this is no punk kid. This guy’s gotta be what?”

  “Fifty-two years old.”

  They took their seats in the bleachers, sitting front row center and facing the remains of Dean Starr. Beyond the coffin were twenty feet of empty space and a pure white wall. A few people, clutching black-bordered invitations, filed past the deceased. Their heads turned briefly to look at the carnage of the food tables by the back wall. Perhaps deciding the refreshments were not w
orth the battle, they chose seats in the middle rows.

  Riker’s head swiveled slightly to admire a passing wine bottle in the hand of a gallery boy. He turned back to the white wall and sucked in his breath as he recognized Avril Koozeman, the gallery owner, a bald, heavy-set man in a dark suit.

  What the hell?

  Koozeman had suddenly appeared at the center of the blank wall beyond the coffin.

  Where did he come from?

  Koozeman was walking toward the coffin with enough momentum to suggest to Riker’s cracking brain that the man had just walked through that solid wall. Now the detective was torn between giving up drink and the longing for a triple shot of whiskey to make this idea go away.

  As the gallery owner came closer, Riker focussed on Avril Koozeman’s small, regular features, an ordinary face but for the black, unruly eyebrows tangling above his small gray eyes. The man carried his bulk in a way that alluded more to prosperity than to overeating. Koozeman leaned over the coffin and stared at the corpse for a moment. His expression was inappropriately cheerful.

  Riker took out his notebook and leafed through it, as he leaned closer to Quinn. “He owned a piece of the dead artist, right?”

  “Yes, fifty percent of all sales.”

  Koozeman walked to the bleachers and smiled benignly on Quinn, who nodded in reply. The large man snapped his fingers and two gallery boys ran up to him with trays of wineglasses in three of Riker’s favorite colors: red, pink and white. Riker accepted a glass, following Quinn’s lead and choosing the red. Koozeman was still smiling as he turned and walked over to the feeding frenzy on the far side of the room.

  Riker shook his head. “I don’t get it. Starr was a real moneymaker for Koozeman, wasn’t he? What you call a hot property?”

  “The hottest,” said Quinn, tasting the wine and approving it.

  “So why is he smiling?”

  “Well, he has an inventory of work. After Starr died, Koozeman raised the price two hundred percent. Of course he’s smiling.”

  And now, another man, slender and slow-footed, made a more ordinary entrance, not emerging from a wall, but by the more conventional front door. An escaped shock of light brown hair hung over one eye, and his tie had gone awry, but otherwise, his well-styled clothes put him in the same species as J. L. Quinn. He seemed to drift toward the coffin by accident. In a confusion of manners, he sighed at the little minister and waved to the corpse.

  Riker was watching the man and flipping through his notebook. “Should I know that guy?”

  “That’s Andrew Bliss,” said Quinn. “The art critic who wrote the review on Starr’s death.”

  “Not one of your favorite critics?” Riker made a note.

  “Actually, he writes very well, but he always waits until the other reviews are in, and then he goes whichever way the wind blows. That’s why his last column was so unusual.”

  Riker found the background sketch in his notebook. According to the bio, Andrew Bliss was forty-eight years old, but the detective was looking at the face of a boy. This illusion was helped by Bliss’s large blue eyes and full lips. Riker felt suddenly uncomfortable. Old children were wrong in the world.

  “And how did Mr. Bliss feel about the dead artist? Was he-”

  Conversation broke off as a gallery boy replenished Riker’s wine. He looked down at his glass, and Quinn graced him with a smile.

  “It’s because you’re with a critic. The boy won’t allow your glass to go even half-empty. He could be fired for that.”

  Riker stared into his wine and wondered how his own religion would square with the gallery philosophy, for he believed it was a sin to allow a glass to remain half-full.

  He looked back to the second row where Andrew Bliss was seated. And now Riker noticed that Bliss’s gray hairs were fast overtaking the light brown. As he stared at the man with the young face and the old hair, Riker noticed the reddened nose. Broken veins? The slackness of the jaw, the slow-moving eye which was not obscured by strands of hair, all were familiar signs he remembered from his own shaving mirror.

  So Andrew Bliss was a drunk.

  “How did Bliss and Starr get along?” He chugged back his wine, and in sidelong vision, he saw a gallery boy snap to attention.

  “Hard to say,” said Quinn. “I only saw them together one time. Andrew seemed a bit tense at the gallery opening.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were at the gallery that night.”

  “Ah, but you knew, didn’t you, Riker? I’m not exactly a low-profile guest at a function like that. And now you want to know if I was there when he died. Do you know the exact time of death?”

  “The jerk who screwed up the autopsy didn’t get the stomach contents. We know he was alive at seven-thirty, and the security guard found the body at ten-fifteen.”

  The gallery boy was back and weighting down Riker’s glass again.

  “I was there until eight o’clock,” said Quinn. “I never saw anything suspicious, unless you count the artwork.”

  Riker tipped back his glass, the sooner to forget Koozeman’s walk through the solid wall. He might need reading glasses, he would cop to that, but there was nothing wrong with his long-distance vision. And what about the myopic hundred guests at the Dean Starr show? “I still can’t believe Starr got stabbed in a room full of people and nobody saw it.”

  “Well, Koozeman’s patrons are a rather self-absorbed group,” said Quinn.

  The reporters were being led away from the feeding tables by Avril Koozeman. He was flanked by gallery boys holding wine bottles as lures. Bearing full glasses and paper plates filled to overflowing, the ladies and gentlemen of the news media settled into the remaining seats.

  One rowdy press photographer in the back row yelled, “Bring on the noise!”

  The minister cleared his throat, and tapped the microphone on the lectern.

  Riker was feeling the ten cups of coffee drunk before all the wine was slugged back. Seeing no signs with familiar men’s room symbols, he pressed his legs together as he leaned close to Quinn and whispered, “So where is the can?”

  The minister’s voice was amplified in volume, but carried little weight with the crowd as he began to speak over the babble of conversation. “I’m afraid I know very little about Mr. Starr. I’m told he’s only been an artist for a short time. I know nothing about his life before that. Perhaps I may call on others to help fill in the gap.”

  Riker’s I-got-to-pee-or-die body language was escalating with the crossing and recrossing of his legs.

  Quinn inclined his head toward Riker. “Sorry?”

  “Where is the toilet?” Riker spoke with the slow careful enunciation of foreigners and drunks, and in a volume to be heard above the minister, who was making his second appeal.

  Quinn pointed to a hallway off the main room. “It’s that way, first door to your right.”

  Quinn turned back to the second row and nodded a greeting to Andrew Bliss. It was a courtesy of long acquaintance, but not friendship. He noticed that Bliss was not his usual twitchy self today. In fact, the man was so inebriated, it could only be inbred good manners that kept him from sliding to the floor.

  “Hey, Bliss,” called one of the reporters from the back row. “Loved the art terrorist column. How come you didn’t throw in the old Oren Watt murders?”

  Ever the chameleon, Bliss’s complexion changed from a rosy, sotted flush to a pale cast of clammy skin, perhaps the better to blend in with the dead man. Summoning a burst of energy, Bliss gathered up his raincoat and fled the gallery with unnatural speed.

  Now Quinn displayed that flicker of emotion that Riker had been hoping for in the restaurant.

  He resumed his mask and willed his mind to other things-the increasingly rowdy guests and the little minister, who solemnly shook his head, taking this afternoon’s entertainment far too seriously from Quinn’s point of view.

  A young woman entered the gallery and set off a flashbulb in the camera of a drunken, yet discriminating
photographer in the bleachers. The light show spread across the rows in a chain of pops and blinding lights, accompanied by the music of low whistles.

  She was tall, and it took Quinn’s eyes a while to travel over all of her. The black leather running shoes were top-of-the-line. Though he could not see the back pocket of her jeans, he knew it would bear a designer’s name. A long black trench coat was draped over the shoulders of her blazer, which was cashmere, and her T-shirt was silk. He would bet his stock portfolio that her curls were styled in a Fifty-seventh Street salon, but not dyed there, for this was that most unusual creature, a natural blonde in the spectrum of burnished gold.

  In every other aspect of her, a lifetime’s experience in stereotyping humans had failed him. He could not hazard her occupation or her exact status in the world. All he knew for certain was that her eyes were green, and if it was true that one could read another’s soul by the eyes, this young woman didn’t have one.

  She sat down next to him. Her perfume was expensive and discreet.

  He knew they had never met; one did not forget such a face. Yet she was familiar.

  Riker was back from the men’s room and tugging on his sleeve. “Be careful of that one. She carries a big gun.”

  Quinn smiled indulgently.

  “Okay, watch this.” Riker leaned across his person to say, “Hey, Mallory. You got the paperwork on the stiff?”

  She reached into her blazer, which had an inside pocket. The garment was obviously tailor-made. Women who bought their clothes off the rack were denied such pockets. And now her upper body was turning toward him, her hand pulling out folded sheets of paper, and he could see the large gun in her shoulder holster. She ignored him, passing the fold of papers across his body as though he were merely an inconveniently situated object.

  And now he placed her, but he had to travel back many years to do it. She was the child of Special Crimes Section.

  He had only seen her on a few occasions in Inspector Markowitz’s office. All those years ago, he had found it amazing to see a little girl moving in and out of discussions of murder. She had been stealthy, appearing suddenly, lighting by the desk to hand Inspector Markowitz a stack of printouts, and then off again, later returning to Markowitz to wheedle money for the candy machine. In passing, the child had glanced at the art critic, found him uninteresting, and passed on.