by S. J. Rozan
“The ones who forget,” she instructed me, “are ADD types. A lot of them self-medicate with drugs, and they kill like scratching an itch. Who remembers an itch after you scratch it? They have buttons and they kill when they’re pushed. Then they stop until they’re pushed again.”
“Sam self-medicates with booze, and he thinks his buttons are these high-stress events. Getting out, his opening.” I wondered if Sam was thinking, Hey, yo, I’m sitting right here.
“Sam,” Cromley spoke as though I’d missed something right in front of my nose, “doesn’t have ADD. He’s more OCD. I mean, have you actually seen his work?”
“He went to my show,” Sam stuck in.
“Oh, yeah?” Cromley’s gaze didn’t leave me. “Then you should know what I’m talking about. You can see obsessiveness in the paintings.”
“You can see violence, too.”
“That’s a load of crap! Anybody with a brain would know that’s allegorical! Idiots who take it literally…” Cromley blew out a breath. “The OCD serial killers, on the other hand”—if I didn’t learn this, it wasn’t going to be her fault—“elaborately plan their murders. That’s as important as the actual killing. In fact, the crime can be considered to include the entire process, starting from choosing a victim. Sometimes they take trophies. Because they like to remember.” She finished with an air of triumph.
“What if they’re drunk?” I asked.
“You can’t plan if you’re drunk.”
“You can kill.”
“Only clumsily. You can’t carry out a plan.”
“Is that why you’re helping Sam get drunk in the middle of the day? So he doesn’t kill anyone? Even though he thinks it’s when he’s drunk that he does kill?”
“Fuck you!” Cromley flushed a bright purple-red, probably a color she had in a tube of paint somewhere. “Sam can drink whenever he wants. And he’s not a killer!”
“He went to prison for it.”
“That was completely different!”
“Sam?” I said. “Are you buying this?”
“Ellissa knows a lot,” Sam murmured, not looking at either of us. “But I still think—”
“He still thinks it might be him and he’d feel better if you produced some evidence that it isn’t!” Cromley snapped. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be doing? So why are you standing here?”
Because you didn’t offer me a seat. “Actually, Sam hired me to prove it is him.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, whatever. Go do it.”
“I need to talk to Sam. Before he gets any more loaded.”
“I’m fine,” Sam said. He put down his beer to prove it.
“Good. I wouldn’t want you to get so crocked you went crazy and murdered your buddy here.”
“Don’t make jokes about that.” Sam paled. “Ellissa helps me. I wouldn’t hurt her.”
“How do you know? Last night you were trying to tell me you’re so crazy, you have no idea when, why, or whether you hurt anybody.”
“Stop that!” Cromley jumped up as Sam melted into the couch. “Who the hell are you to call Sam crazy? Just because you don’t get him? His head’s in a different place. Somewhere people like you don’t understand.”
“I don’t give a damn where his head is,” I said. “He hired me to prove he’s a serial killer, even though there’s not a single shred of evidence that he might be. That’s crazy.”
“Why are you doing it, then? Why don’t you just go away and leave him alone?”
I caught the fearful widening of Sam’s eyes when she said that.
“Because,” I said, “if he’s right, he’s even crazier.”
7
I made it clear to Sam that my first choice would be to talk in his studio next door, but Cromley rose irritably from the couch, saying, “He doesn’t like to be there all the time. Go ahead, talk. I have work to do. I can’t hear when I’m working anyway.” She stomped over to one of the easels and started setting out tubes of paint.
“Sherron is coming,” Sam said over his shoulder to her. “With some collector. Maybe I should be there.”
“I can’t believe how you bend over backwards for that witch. We wouldn’t have expected you to do that, you know. We’d have been much nicer.”
“I know. But Peter said—”
“Oh, screw Peter.” Sam flinched when Cromley said that. She went on, “And screw Sherron. She knows to come here if you’re not there.” Cromley found a palette board and started jabbing it with colors.
For all the crowded chaos in her studio and all her radiating, full-flood fury, the works-in-progress on Cromley’s easels appeared to me desiccated, spiritless. All larger-than-life heads of women, they stared straight ahead out of the canvas without emotion. Cromley’s style was realistic and carefully delineated, the photos she was working from pinned to the side of each easel. Her colors were off, in a way that should have been engaging: all a couple of ticks along the color wheel, so they were wrong, but balanced. But nothing about these paintings invited the viewer. They were distant, stifled, theoretical. A thought about a picture, it seemed to me, not the thing itself.
Sam turned back to me. “Come on, sit down. Have a beer.”
“Forget the beer.” But I did sit down. I glanced at Cromley, who was poking a canvas with a small stiff brush, her frown deepening as though the painting was disobeying orders. I said to Sam, “I need you to tell me everything you remember about the nights those women were killed.”
“If I remembered anything, I wouldn’t have come to you. I must have been drunk, I must have blacked out. I told you.”
“Maybe. But I bet you haven’t lost the entire day. I want you to tell me the last thing you do remember.”
Sam put his beer bottle to his lips, discovered it was empty. He lowered it but didn’t reach for another. “The first murder… that was months ago…”
“But it was the day after you got out. I’d think that would stick in your mind.”
He laughed. “Like Ellissa says, my mind is different.”
“Sam. Think.”
“Yeah. Okay.” The laugh flickered out. “I—I was at Peter and Leslie’s that night.”
“You remember that?”
“No, but I must have been. That’s where I went when I got out, until I found an apartment. That’s where the reporters all came. I didn’t want to talk to them, but Peter said I had to, that he’d help me. So we did, until I couldn’t take it anymore. I remember them all over the place, those reporters. But I think that was just the first day, I mean, the actual day I got out.”
“Where’d you sleep that first night?”
“In the guest bedroom at their house.”
“You woke up there the next morning? The day after you got out, the day of the first murder?”
He looked at me seriously, then nodded. “It was sunny. That room’s too bright in the morning. I hadn’t pulled the drapes when I went to bed because the cells don’t have drapes and I kind of forgot. After that day, I pulled them.”
“Then what?”
“Then what, what?”
“What did you have for breakfast?”
“Eggs.”
“Cooked how?”
“Scrambled. No, no, fried, that’s how Peter likes them.”
“He cooked?”
“Yes. No, Leslie did.”
“Who did, Sam? Peter or Leslie?”
“Leslie. Leslie cooked.”
“After breakfast? Did you go out?”
Sam scratched his forehead, then got up and opened a fridge half hidden under a table. “You want another beer?”
“I’m not drinking. Sam—”
“Out. Did I go out.”
“Did you?”
“I don’t remember!”
“Oh, leave him alone!” Cromley threw down a brush and rounded on me. “Is this the best you can do? This is how you investigate?”
Sam looked as though he’d like to run and hide behind her skirt, but
after a moment, new beer in hand, he came back and sat. “I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at me. “But I really don’t remember.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t respond to Cromley, who stood behind the couch, flushed and practically sputtering. “How long were you at Peter’s?”
“You mean, that day?” Sam wailed. “I said I don’t know! Why—”
“Sam! Knock it off. I mean, all told. Until you got your own place.”
“Oh. Oh. Sorry.” Sam’s thumb rubbed the cushion beside him, rhythmically working a single spot. “A couple of weeks. Maybe three. Peter helped me find an apartment. I wanted one in Queens near my old one, but Peter said not there. Not where—where Amy lived. He said we should look where the artists are, in Brooklyn. Because they’d accept me and it might be hard anywhere else. I’m a convicted killer, you know.” He looked at me with an odd kind of hope in his face.
“I know that, Sam. Go on.”
Deflated, Sam continued. “We found a basement apartment in Greenpoint. On a side street. So there aren’t so many cars, or people going by, all that talking, laughing, footsteps—”
I interrupted his agitated account of urban life. “So until you found a place, you stayed with Peter and Leslie?”
“Yes. Leslie didn’t want me there, but what could she do? Actually, Peter didn’t, either.”
“He said that?” That sounded unlikely.
“Oh, come on. He didn’t have to. Peter’s whole life got better with no crazy brother around. Big commissions. A-list parties, he used to tell me about them when he came up to visit. Him and Leslie, all lovey-dovey again. And suddenly, I’m baaaaaack, hiding in the closet when the doorbell rings.”
“Sam!” Cromley said. “Stop it! It wasn’t even like that. You just think it was. And besides, you have your own apartment now. You’re an independent person. You don’t have to worry anymore about what Peter thinks. Or Leslie.” She perched on the back of the couch, glared at me, and began to rub Sam’s shoulders.
Sam looked unsure. “But Peter always… Sometimes it helps me to think what Peter would want me to do.”
“You’re an independent person,” Cromley repeated. “And Leslie? Please. She’s just a giant walking ambition robot. Nothing to do with you.”
Sam giggled at Cromley’s characterization of his sister-in-law. “That’s not nice. But anyway, if I’m killing skinny little blondes, she’s not my type.”
“Like me. I’m not your type, either,” Cromley said.
No, but you could rapidly become mine. “All right, Sam, let’s try last week,” I said.
Sam’s gaze stayed on the splattered floor. His fingers tapped his knee, fast and then faster. I was put in mind of a cat. Some cats, when you pet them, they might purr, but if the tips of their tails start to flick, you’d better notice. If you stop, fine. If not, a switch flips and you’re suddenly in a maniacal mess of clawing, snarling, biting fur. I wondered how close Sam was to his switch, and what might happen when it flipped.
“Sam?” I asked again, and he looked unhappily up at me.
He was saved by a knock on the door.
A short silence, then a second knock, louder. “Oh, crap!” Cromley got up. “It’s the Wicked Witch of the West.”
She threaded the narrow path to the door. I expected her to yank it open, as she had for me, but her bearing transformed when she reached it. Pausing for a moment, she smoothed her skirt and her hair. Then she reached for the knob and opened the door in a calm, almost welcoming manner.
“Sherron!” she said in a tone that I supposed was meant to convey pleased surprise but that, to me at least, sounded as saccharin as it did desperate. “Come on in.” She moved aside.
The woman in the doorway stood motionless, the way a prize stands on a pedestal when the curtain’s pulled back. As all-of-a-piece and elegant as Cromley was disparate and unkempt, the newcomer gave the impression the multicolored smears on the doorjamb had been deliberately applied to highlight her ice-white hair, her ivory skin, her black sweater and skirt. She also gave the impression that she knew full well she gave that impression. She turned down the invitation with a tight smile, arched her long pale neck to look right past Cromley, and said, in a clear, low voice, “Sam.”
Sam’s eyes flicked to Cromley, to the floor, to me. To Cromley again. Cromley flushed. Unsteadily, Sam pushed himself up from the depths of the couch. Cromley spun and marched back to her easel. With a longing look at the beer he was leaving behind, Sam followed Sherron Konecki out.
8
I followed, too. What was there to be gained by staying behind with Ellissa Cromley, with her wild rage and pinched paintings? In the corridor, the black-and-white woman raised an eyebrow at me, gave me a slow up-and-down. The only colors in her calculated composition—she wore tiny diamond stud earrings, carried a black suede purse—were the pearl pink of her lipstick and the glacier ice blue of her eyes. She didn’t object to my presence, but she seemed to be reserving that right.
Waiting a few steps down the hall was another man, a fellow with glasses, a bow tie, and a smile of boyish enthusiasm. He lit up when we came out. Sam, giving no one a glance, mechanically headed toward his own studio. After some fumbling at the lock, he pushed the door open and went in, the rest of us following, with me at the rear.
After Cromley’s studio, Sam’s was the relief of a silent empty sidewalk after the screaming of a cranked-to-eleven club. One of his diagnoses was OCD, and you could see it in the hyper-orderly layout of tables and easels; pads and pencils set out on tables; canvases squarely tacked on easels. Like some other outsider artists without technical training, Sam worked on unstretched canvas pinned to a backboard. In his case the canvas edges—there were three paintings underway—paralleled precisely the sides of the boards they were pinned to. Sketches taped to the wall hung parallel to each other, and the tape that held them followed their orientation, either long or wide. All of this seemed like it must be an old strategy of Sam’s, to try to feel like he had some measure of control.
Not a word was spoken until the woman in black had closed the door behind us. She gave a brief smile of territorial satisfaction as she looked around the room, then turned to me. “Are you a friend of Ellissa’s?”
“I don’t think so. Bill Smith.” I gave her my hand, which she glanced at before she shook. I guessed she was used to greeting artists and didn’t want a paint smear on her cool, smooth palm.
“Sherron Konecki,” she told me. “From Lemuria Gallery.”
“I know,” I said.
I’d never met Sherron Konecki, legendary Ice Queen of the New York art world, but the moment I saw her in the doorway I knew who she was. Konecki had owned and run the Lemuria Gallery for fifteen years. From the beginning, she seemed to have a crystal ball, an uncanny eye for artists about to hit. She’d sign unknowns other galleries would have nothing to do with, give them shows, make contacts for them, lease them cars and studio space, and lend them money—but never, it was said, a sympathetic ear—and when these bleeding-edge newcomers exploded on the scene, Lemuria was their gallery and Sherron Konecki was their dealer. Those early picks turned out to be right so often that the cause-and-effect balance had shifted over the years. These days, being discovered by the Ice Queen and signed by Lemuria was enough, by itself, to sanctify a career.
“You know me?” she said, with an amused smile. “Are you an artist, then?” She was readying the brush-off.
On my no, a small cloud of disappointment passed over the bow-tied man’s face. Not hers, though. On hers, relief, like a swimmer finding the ocean clear of jellyfish. But following relief, suspicion.
“A collector, then? Or just a culture vulture?” She looked me over again, this time with the unmistakable implication that it might be a good idea for me to take a look at myself, too. Then she spun on Sam. “Are you letting people bother you? I told you I’d take care of people who want to see your work. You don’t have to talk to anyone you don’t want to.”
&nbs
p; “No, no,” said Sam. “He’s—”
“Sam and I go back a long way,” I interrupted. “I just stopped up to say hello.”
Konecki turned slowly back to me. “Really? And have you said hello?”
That I was now dismissed couldn’t have been more obvious, but I smiled. “Sam and I are getting reacquainted. He’s been away, you know.”
She arched an eyebrow while she decided how she’d deal with me, allowed a few more moments to tick by. Sam, not good with suspense, crossed the room to look out the open window. I got the feeling he’d have kept on going right through it if there’d been a fire escape to run down.
“Well,” the Ice Queen finally said. “A friend of Sam’s.” I wasn’t sure whether the edge of incredulity in her voice was for the notion that Sam had friends, or that I might be one.
The clarification of my status had a different effect on the bow-tied guy. He came happily forward and offered his hand. “Michael Sanger,” he said. “I’m so pleased to meet a friend of Sam Tabor’s! I’m such a huge fan of his.” He directed this expression of joy to me, Sam being as far away as he could get.
The Ice Queen stepped in to take charge of the situation. “Michael’s a collector,” she said. “He has an extraordinary feel for the new and important.” A flash in her blue eyes, and then she had no more use for me. She called, “Sam! Come and meet Mr. Sanger.” It was no suggestion, no invitation.
Sam, hearing it for what it was, turned immediately and trudged over. He shook Sanger’s hand without looking at him, let Sanger’s flood of praise wash over him without reaction. When Sanger asked, tentatively, almost reverentially, whether there was a chance Sam had new work and if so, whether he might see it, Sam didn’t respond. But Sherron Konecki lifted her chin, such a tiny movement it might have come from a dressage rider working a champion horse. Sam at once crossed the studio again, to stand and wait, expressionless, in front of an easel by the window. Sanger and Konecki walked over to where they could see the work straight on, so I did the same.
The painting-in-progress was larger than the other work of Sam’s I’d seen, maybe five feet on a side. The leafy branches of a maple tree cast shade on an emerald lawn and shadows on each other; through them, in places, translucent sunlight glowed with a radiance it was amazing to think had been made by mere paint. I was surprised, and impressed. This was better than the work in the just-opened gallery show, better than the sidewalk-art-fair paintings I’d described to Lydia: from six feet away, the picture was breathtaking. From six inches, where Michael Sanger was leaning in—I looked over his shoulder and then stepped back—the tiny battlefields, minute explosions, and agonized dying soldiers in swamps of ice and blood also took your breath away.
