by Janet Goss
Now I had to wonder: Was her reaction a harbinger of her panic disorder? I’d invited her back repeatedly, but she’d always had an excuse to remain at home.
“How’s the driving coming?” I asked her. “Are you still Acting As If?”
She sighed. “I’m trying. But now that Angus’s cast is off, I’m back in the passenger seat more often than not.”
“Just make sure you take a trip on your own every day,” I said. “Even if it’s only a mile or two down the road. Inure yourself.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m inuring.”
I heard a ping coming from my computer and went into the bedroom to check my in-box. Billy’s Sunday puzzle had at last arrived. I opened the attached document, sent it to the printer, and rushed back to the kitchen so Elinor Ann wouldn’t hear the whir of the machine.
I was too late. “What’s that sound?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Oh no. Why do I get the feeling this has something to do with your youthful friend?”
As soon as I glanced at the printout, I groaned. Many of the boxes in the grid had been shaded so that gray, somewhat lopsided plus-sign shapes were scattered across the page. When it came to crosswords, I was a purist. The only thing I hated more than shaded boxes was the addition of circles to individual squares.
I skimmed the clues and groaned louder. There was, come to think of it, one thing I found even more heinous than circles: cross-referenced clues. This puzzle was loaded with them.
16-Across: With 7-Down, clue for 13-Across.
53-Across: With 44-Down, clue for 39-Across.
Swell.
Cross-referencing clashed with my solving style. I liked to start at the first clue and sweep my way diagonally across the page. But in this puzzle, the only way to figure out the words that made up the themed clues would be to solve the surrounding fill.
To my relief, Billy had made those clues extremely easy. In no time I discovered that 16-Across was GAME SHOW, and 7-Down was PHRASE, which made the themed clue in 13-Across CIRCLE GETS THE SQUARE. And the combined clues for 39-Across, STIEGLITZ and PALETTE, meant that answer was BLACK AND WHITE.
Aha. Crossword terminology. And each of the paired clues for the themed entries comprised… crossed words; hence the gray shading.
Clever.
Never thought I’d say this, but your puzzle just proved there is justification after all for cross-referenced clues. Diabolically brilliant, as usual, and the inclusion of interesting fill words like “McJob” and “Bichon Poo” will only serve to burnish your reputation.
If anything, some of the clues for the fill might be just a little too gimme-ish. How about “7th Avenue venue, briefly” (as opposed to “Controversial flavor enhancer”) for MSG? Or “Lost ’70s cause” (as opposed to “Pitcher’s stat”) for ERA? Still gettable, but a bit meatier than your current fallbacks. Happy to supply more suggestions if you’re amenable.
I have a feeling you’ll be buying me that brunch in a matter of weeks!
I figured it couldn’t hurt to remind him—or myself—about the brunch, and the new ground rules for our relationship. But even if Billy were to suggest an impromptu liaison, I’d be much too busy to consider it. Between Hank’s balusters and my three-Hannah debt to Vivian, I’d be painting late into the evening.
She’d asked me to work with several colorful pairs of Acme cowboy boots dating from the 1950s for the next series, which ruled out Dinner as my model. The boots, however, would make wonderful vases. I decided to run over to the Korean market on First Avenue and pick up a few bouquets for inspiration.
By the time I returned home, the message light on the answering machine was blinking.
“Hi, sweetie. It’s your big brother. I’m looking into flights for Dad’s birthday and had a quick question about your schedule that week. Oh well. No need to call back—we can discuss it next Thursday night. See you then!”
Next Thursday?
I looked at the calendar hanging over the stove. Of course—the Outsider Art Fair. Tom-Tom had given Hank that pair of tickets to its opening night party as a Christmas gift.
“We ain’t never going to find your brother in this crowd,” Hank said once we’d made our way past the scrum at the entrance to the art show. I could hardly disagree. It seemed every New Yorker with a penchant for theatrical makeup and complicated hairstyles had squeezed into the catacombs-like space. One hapless dealer, set up near the endless line for the coat check, stood with his arms spread in front of his tabletop display of eerie, head-shaped urns in a valiant attempt to prevent them from becoming a pile of worthless shards. When a chubby downtown doyenne in Madame Butterfly whiteface bumped into the table, he let out a terrified shriek.
“Maybe there’ll be more room around the corner,” I said, craning my neck for a glimpse of Tom-Tom’s shock of white hair.
The crowd was sparser in the second aisle, but only marginally—the difference between, say, a five thirty northbound 6 train and a five forty-five. Full-body contact with strangers was the rule, not the exception. Despite the overwhelming heat, I was relieved to have the protection of the shearling coat I’d just treated myself to, courtesy of Graciela’s largesse.
Miraculously, Hank managed to commandeer an empty stretch of wall. Exhausted and damp, I leaned against him and pulled out my cell phone.
“I hope you’re not at the show yet,” my half brother said when he picked up. “Oh dear. You are, aren’t you? I can hear the clamor of the arrivistes.”
“Why didn’t you warn me it would be so packed?”
“I thought I had. But don’t worry. It invariably thins out after a couple of hours.”
“A couple of hours?” Hank and I exchanged glances. “Tom-Tom? I don’t think we’ll be able to hold out that long.”
“Don’t worry—I’m on my way. My driver just turned left onto Fifth in front of the Pierre—try to enjoy yourselves until I can meet up with you.”
“Tell your driver to run the yellow lights.”
“I already have, sweetie.”
Hank eyed me warily while I returned my phone to my purse. “It won’t be a couple of hours,” I told him. “More like twenty minutes, I’d say.”
“That’s a relief. Guess we might as well try to see us some art while we wait.”
As usual, there was some wheat amidst the chaff. A spectral portrait of a woman in an empty, moonlit room made me long for more discretionary income. And one of my favorite crazed geniuses, A. G. Rizzoli, had a booth dedicated to his meticulous drawings of imaginary palaces. As we made our way from booth to booth, I kept my hand on the back of Hank’s jacket and let him lead the way through the crush.
When he rounded the third corner, he stopped dead. “Would you look at those,” he said, pulling me around to his side and pointing to the end of the aisle. “They look just like Dinner!”
The woman in front of him—a PETA activist, judging from her rubber messenger bag—turned to give him a withering glance. “You’re sick,” she hissed.
But I was the one who felt sick all of a sudden. There was a reason the paintings looked like Dinner, of course. They were Dinner.
The press of people seemed to be thickest in front of the display, which was topped with three-foot-high red letters spelling out “HANNAH.” Below them, all fifteen portraits from the hat series were lined up in rows of five, and dozens of my other canvases hung on the adjacent walls.
Suddenly, the din of the crowd was replaced with a buzzing noise inside my head.
But Graciela’s voice penetrated the drone.
“… And she’s positively mad for Cool Ranch Doritos!” I heard her say, just before I burst into uncontrollable peals of laughter.
Hank seemed to sense something was wrong, as opposed to hilarious. He put his arm around my waist and began to steer a path against the incoming tide—which parted readily when confronted with a cackling madwoman, mascara-blackened tears streaming down her face.
When we finally made it
past the show’s entrance and out to the elevator, its doors opened to reveal my half brother.
“What in the world happened to you?” he said, whipping out one of his Irish linen handkerchiefs and dabbing at my eyes. By now my laughing jag was subsiding, but I couldn’t seem to form a sentence.
Hank laid a hand on Tom-Tom’s arm. “Give us a few minutes,” he said. “We’ll be in there.” He tilted his head in the direction of a door marked STAIRS, and we proceeded toward it, while my baffled brother pressed his handkerchief into my hand before joining the line of people waiting to enter the exhibit.
We had the landing to ourselves. We sat down on the top step, and Hank waited while I cleaned myself up as best I could. By the time I finished, Tom-Tom’s handkerchief was soggy and gray.
“Mind telling me what was so funny back there?”
“Nothing. That’s just this… psychological tic I have. I guess you could call it a coping mechanism for dealing with shock.”
His concerned expression gave way to one of relief. “That’s good. I mean—that’s bad, but it’s better than what I was thinking. I was thinking you might be, well… pregnant or something.”
“Pregnant? Of course I’m not pregnant! I’m—I’m Hannah.”
“Who?”
“The artist. Who paints pigs. And is positively mad for Cool Ranch Doritos.”
“No kidding? You’re her? That really was Dinner?”
I nodded.
Now it was his turn to laugh. “Damn! You’re about to be famous!”
“Well, here’s the thing. It isn’t quite that simple. Hannah’s supposed to be an eighty-two-year-old resident of Maine who lives in a tar paper shack and eats squirrels she traps in the woods.”
He raised an eyebrow. “How’d that happen?”
“The woman I work for thought it would—I don’t know—add cachet, I suppose.”
Hank rubbed his temples, taking it all in. “Looks like she was onto something. That booth sure was packed. So… what’s the problem?”
“I’m worried our subterfuge might be construed as… fraud.”
“Fraud? Heck, that ain’t fraud. From what I seen, them paintings were the best thing in the whole show.”
“Thanks, but in case you haven’t noticed, I’m hardly eighty-two.”
“That don’t matter. If you say you’re Hannah, you’re Hannah, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
He stopped me with a look. “Dana, this here’s America. You can be anybody you want, long as you ain’t killin’ people or blowin’ stuff up. And… I ought to know.” He reached for his wallet and pulled out a driver’s license, but not his current one. This one had been issued in Tennessee—quite a while ago, judging by the picture of a much younger Hank in its corner.
He held out his hand. “Nice to meet you… Hannah.”
I absentmindedly shook it while continuing to inspect the license. “Nice to meet you, too.…”
Jefferson Davis Calhoun?!!
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DOUBLE JEOPARDY
“You can keep calling me Hank,” he said while I sat gaping at the license, my emotions ping-ponging between confusion and outrage. “I been him going on eleven years now.”
I looked into his eyes. “So… who are you?”
He met my gaze and shrugged. “Who are you? Dana Mayo? Or this Hannah lady?”
“But—”
But wait a second. This was different. Whatever Hank—no, J.D.—no, Hank—was involved in, I had a feeling it was a more serious transgression than painting under a nom de pinceau.
But what, exactly, was he involved in? Identity theft? Apparently. But what had necessitated the name change? Was he on the lam? If so, from what? Murder? Kidnapping?
Oh god. I so should have followed through with Tom-Tom’s suggestion at Christmas and conducted a background check.
I backed up as far as the wall would allow and handed Hank the license. “You need to explain what this is all about. Immediately.”
“That’s just what I’m planning on doing. But let me tell you right off the bat—there ain’t no stain on the name Calhoun. We’re just poor folks, that’s all. Never did have nothing. When my daddy died, all he left me was his truck.”
“The panel truck?”
He nodded. “Used to be his daddy’s. Soon as I got it, I started doing odd jobs here and there—painting, moving… whatever paid cash.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with—”
“I’m gettin’ to it. One day a guy hired me to clear out one of them self-storage units. Turns out when folks don’t pay their bill for a couple of months, whatever they got in there gets sold off to the highest bidder.”
“I thought about going to one of those auctions a while back. But then I heard you don’t get to look inside the units before you bid.”
“You sure don’t. I always figured you’d get stuck with a bunch of broken-down junk. But this guy I was working for decided he’d take a shot anyway. He laid out forty bucks and wound up with some fancy Art Deco bedroom set, and a whole mess of other old stuff, and he took it on over to the antique mall outside Knoxville and made himself a whole mess of money.”
“So you decided to do the same thing.”
“You bet I did. And I’ll tell you what—I wound up with more broken-down junk than you ever saw in your whole life. Don’t matter how busted a bike is, folks can’t seem to get rid of it. Or old newspapers. Or beat-up rugs full of holes. Once in a while I might make a buck or two off a set of tires or a baby crib, but it was rough going, that’s for sure. And then one day I got lucky.”
Finally, I thought. By now my fingernails had left burgundy-colored half-moons in the palms of my hands.
“I kept showing up, and after a while I started to get pretty chummy with the auctioneer. One day he tells me about this old guy whose brother’d died up in New York City. Guy drove north, packed up the brother’s apartment, hauled everything down to Tennessee, and put it all into a storage unit earlier that year. Now that guy was dead, too. With no kin.”
At last I understood where his story was going. “And the brother’s name was Hank Wheeler.”
“Sure was.”
To hear Hank tell it, anybody would have recycled the name.
“First box I opened was nothing but a bunch of old paperwork. I’ll tell you, I sure wasn’t happy to see that. But I dug around a little and found a folder full of tax returns. The last year this guy filed, he made over two hundred grand. Well, I near about fell over when I saw that. And when I looked at what line of work he was in and read ‘contractor,’ I thought, heck—I could do that.”
My mind immediately returned to the switch-plate incident. “Guess it turned out to be a little more involved than you expected, huh?”
“Not really. I knew the job was more than slapping on paint and hammering nails. But Wheeler hired folks to do the hard stuff for him. There was piles of invoices from all sorts of specialists—plasterers, stained-glass restorers, you name it—and every last one of ’em charged a fortune. Not that old Hank minded. Turns out every time they’d send him a bill, he’d just turn around and charge his clients even more for the work they done.”
“Twenty percent more,” I said.
“How’d you know that?”
“My brother.” I remembered Tom-Tom railing against the practice—called ten and ten, for ten percent overhead and ten percent profit—when he’d had renovations done on his town house a few years back. No wonder Hank had encouraged me to double the price on those balusters.
“Ain’t that the sweetest deal you ever heard of? I couldn’t hardly believe what I was lookin’ at.”
I couldn’t hardly believe what I was hearing. “But—I don’t get it. If the real Hank Wheeler was dead, wouldn’t his clients and all those craftsmen have heard about it?”
“They knew all about it. That’s why I had ‘Hank Wheeler and Son’ painted on the side of the truck.”
“Ohhhh. An
d Son.”
“After that, I was all set. Made some calls and moved on up a week later. Hank Wheeler did some real fine work in this town. Folks couldn’t wait to hire Junior.”
Damn, I thought to myself. New Yorkers are so gullible when it comes to… brownstone whisperers. And I ought to know.
The door to the stairwell squeaked open, and Tom-Tom cautiously poked his head inside. “Is it safe to come in yet?”
“Be my guest. I’m fine.” I held up a sodden lump of cloth. “Your handkerchief wasn’t so lucky.”
He waved a hand in dismissal and extracted a pillbox from his jacket pocket. “Have a Valium. God knows you look like you could use one. In fact—have two.” He shook a couple of tablets into my palm, and I gulped one down, putting the other in my change purse for safekeeping. The way the evening was going, I had a feeling it would come in handy.
Tom-Tom took a seat and peered into my eyes. “That was quite the exit you made. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
My brain was so overloaded with new information about my boyfriend, it took a few seconds before I could recall the circumstances. “Oh, that. Uh—did you happen to notice the pig portraits in there?”
“How could I not? The mob around them was so dense, I could hardly squeeze past. I found them charming, actually—don’t you think they looked just like Dinner? And what a story about the artist.” He placed one hand over his heart, intoning, “A geriatric star is born.”
Hank chuckled. “That’s a fine way to talk about your kid sister.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“She’s the one painting ’em.”
Tom-Tom let out a yelp. “They’re yours? You’re—?”
My brother’s laugh has always been distinctive. When people first hear it, they often wonder aloud what happened to his beard and red suit. Robust ho-ho-hos echoed in the stairwell for the next few minutes.
“What in the world were you smoking to come up with a story like that?” he finally said.
“I didn’t come up with it. Vivian did.”
