The Genius

by Jesse Kellerman

  This time I found it myself, although I did make several wrong turns. I knocked and footsteps came swiftly, making me wonder if he had been malingering to draw sympathy.

  “Yes?” The woman who answered wore a gray pantsuit, a black cotton blouse, simple silver earrings in the shape of fleurs-de-lis. I recognized her as the younger daughter, much better looking in real life than in her photo, which made her seem like the Captain of the Debate Team. Had she been there the entire time?

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Ethan,” I said.

  “Can I help you, Ethan?”

  “I was just here,” I said. “With your father. My car didn’t pick me up. Would you mind if I came in for a moment to ask him for—I need a number, so I can—I can get back home.” I paused to appreciate the inanity of the preceding paragraph. Not lost on her, I noticed.

  “I live in Manhattan,” I added.

  From inside, McGrath called, “Sammy?”

  “Is that him? Tell him I’m here. Ethan Muller.”

  The woman gave me another quick up-and-down. “Hold on,” she said, and closed the door in my face. A short while later she returned, smiling apologetically. “Sorry. He hates solicitors.”

  (Did I really look like a Jehovah’s Witness?)

  “I don’t know what it is about Breezy Point,” she said, allowing me inside, “but we have a hard time getting taxis out here. They think it’s in Jersey or something. I’m Samantha, by the way.”

  “Ethan.”

  “There’s a neighborhood guy who drives a cab.” She dialed for me and handed me the phone.

  “Thank you.” I let it ring ten times. “I don’t think he’s picking up.”

  “Sammy.” McGrath’s voice crawled down the stairs. He sounded half dead.

  “Coming.” To me: “If you can wait a few minutes I’ll drive you to the subway.”

  I told her that would be fine and sat down at the dining-room table. Samantha went into the kitchen. I heard her draining a pot into the sink. She emerged with her hands in a dishtowel and set a glass of water in front of me before proceeding upstairs.

  Alone, I went into the kitchen. Samantha didn’t seem to be much of a cook. A mop of spaghetti dripped from a colander in the sink. Nearby sat an unopened jar of marinara sauce. Saddened by the sorry state of her dinner—or was it his, or both of theirs?—I poured the sauce into the empty pan and put it over heat.

  Upstairs, I heard Samantha arguing with her father, the words indistinct but the tone clear enough: pleading, and failing. Amazing how much you can tell about a song without understanding the lyrics; the frustration she sang broke my heart a bit, and mine is a heart not easily broken, not when it comes to fathers.

  As I listened to her, the same thought kept occurring to me: if I were her, I would’ve left a long time ago—had I bothered to go upstairs at all. I thought about my own father, sending me imperious messages via Tony Wexler. Your father wants. Your father would like. Your father would prefer. What a nightmare my life would be if my family couldn’t afford intermediaries.

  Upstairs, I heard Samantha say, “Dammit, Dad.”

  The sauce began to bubble. I stirred it and lowered the flame.

  She came downstairs half an hour later, apologizing. “He’s in a mood.” Then, noticing the saucepan, “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “It’s better warm.”

  “He says he’s not hungry.” She rubbed her forehead. “He’s very stubborn.”

  I nodded.

  She stayed in that position for a moment longer: heel of hand ironing her brow, her fingers curled like a shell. She had a lovely pouting mouth, and her cheeks were brushed with freckles subdued by office work. Did she run a shipping center? Was she in publishing? Administrative assistant at an investment bank? I decided I wasn’t giving her enough credit. She was, I decided, the kind of girl who had made good on her parents’ hard work. Probably she was a social worker.…

  As I watched her calm herself down, the similarity between her and her father sharpened. What I had earlier interpreted as intensity I now understood as stoicism. Upstairs, her father began to cough and there was almost nothing on her face—just the slightest strengthening of resolve, the slightest narrowing of the eyes and tightened jaw. She was hardly the most glamorous woman I knew, but standing there, unconcerned with what I thought of her predicament, she had an unvarnished quality that I found oddly attractive. I didn’t meet many girls-next-door.

  She said, “I’ll take you to the train.”

  We walked to the parking lot. Her Toyota had a police placard in the windshield.

  “You’re a cop,” I said.

  She shook her head. “DA.”

  During the short ride we fell into conversation. She laughed—a big, snorty laugh—when I told her about her father’s first phone call.

  “Oh boy,” she said. “That thing again, huh. Well, good luck with it.”

  “With what.”

  “He said you were helping him out.”

  “That’s what he told you?”

  “I take it you don’t agree.”

  “I’d like to help him,” I said. “I can’t. I spent a fair amount of time explaining that to him.”

  “He seemed to think you were very helpful.”

  “If he says so.”

  She smiled. “Sometimes,” she said, “he gets ideas.”

  At the subway I thanked her for the ride.

  “Thank you for coming out,” she said.

  “You’re welcome, although I really don’t know that I’ve done anything.”

  “You’ve given him something to do,” she said. “You don’t know how much that’s worth.”

  • 7 •

  It had been a long time since I’d ridden the subway. Growing up, public transport was off-limits; I took cabs or cars or, when accompanied by Tony, a 1957 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith chauffeured by a silent Belgian named Thom. I can’t call Tony’s fear of the MTA entirely illegitimate. Think about what New York City was like back in the 1980s, and then put me—an underweight white preppie with anger issues—on one of those filthy, ungoverned trains, and you have real reason for concern. Of course, blanket restrictions on my freedom made me all the more likely to buy a token or, if I felt particularly rebellious, jump a turnstile. Viva la revolución.

  The ride home took ninety minutes, plenty of time for me to think about my conversation with McGrath and its implications for me, thoughts I shared with Marilyn the next night over dinner at Tabla.

  Her initial reaction was to giggle.

  “You took the subway?”

  “That wasn’t the point of the story.”

  “Poor baby.” She stroked my cheek. “Is your tender flesh sore? Can I order you up a poultice?”

  “I’ve taken the subway before.”

  "You’re so easy. You might as well have a big button on your chest. ’Push me.’ ”

  “Did you listen to anything I just told you?”

  “I listened.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m not surprised. You will recall, darlin, that I warned you. I said it on opening night: your artist is a baddie, you can tell by his relish in depicting pain.”

  “The fact that he drew pictures of the victims means nothing,” I said. “He could have seen them in the paper and copied them.”

  “Did they print them in the papers?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But whatever the case may be, the piece as a whole is enormous. It contains all sorts of things, all sorts of crazy scenes, and plenty of them are recognizable. We’re not ascribing Yankee Stadium to him, but it’s in the drawing.”

  “Is it?”

  “Either it or something that looks a lot like it.”

  “So, there you go,” she said. “There’s your defense.”

  “It’s not a defense—”

  “You know, I love that you’re solving a murder mystery. That’s what we need around here, a good murder mystery.”
>
  “I’m not solving anything.”

  “Personally, I can think of a few people I’d like to kill.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Or have killed.” She took a huge swig of wine. “I’m sure I wouldn’t want to do it myself. I’m more of a big-picture kind of a gal, wouldn’t you agree?”

  I said nothing, swabbing my bread in olive oil until it disintegrated. “Stop brooding, please,” Marilyn said.

  “Do you really think he killed them?”

  “Who cares?”

  “I do.”

  “Why in the world would you care about that?”

  “Put yourself in my position,” I said.

  “All right,” she said. She got up and made me switch chairs with her, put a finger to her temple. “Mm. No. I still don’t care.”

  “I’m representing a murderer.”

  “Did you know that when you took him on?”

  “No, but—”

  “Would knowing that have stopped you?” she asked.

  I had to think about that one. Even if Victor Cracke was a child-killer, he would hardly be the first artist to misbehave. The greatest outsider artist of all time, Adolf Wölfli, spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital after being arrested for molesting girls, one as young as three. Taken as a group, nonoutsider artists don’t fare much better on the Model Citizen Scale. They do wretched things to themselves and to others: drink themselves to death, shoot themselves, stab themselves, destroy their work, destroy their families. Caravaggio killed a man.

  How surprised could I be that Cracke—by most descriptions completely asocial—had a worm-eaten soul? Wasn’t that the point? Part of what attracts us to artists is their otherness, their refusal to conform, their big middle finger stuck up in the face of Society, such that their very a- or immorality is what makes their art artistic rather than academic. Gauguin famously called civilization a sickness. He also said that art is either plagiarism or revolution. And nobody wants to be remembered as a plagiarist. Starving painters console themselves by thinking of a day in the distant future when their crazy behavior is admired for being ahead of its time.

  But more important, I had divorced Victor Cracke the person from the work. It therefore didn’t matter how many people he’d killed. In appropriating the art, I made it my own, transforming it into something larger and more significant and more valuable than he had ever intended, just like Warhol did when he elevated soup cans to iconic status. That Cracke had physically created the drawings seemed to me a rather minor quibble. I owned his sins no more than Andy owned the sins of the Campbell’s corporation. That I even paused to consider the question of morality made me feel incredibly stodgy and retrograde. I could hear Jean Dubuffet rolling around in his grave, flabbergasted and scorning me in French for swallowing bourgeois norms.

  “Look at it this way,” Marilyn said. “Whether he did or did not kill anyone, the very suggestion ups his mystique. Spin it right and you have a new selling angle.”

  “Bars on the gallery door?”

  “Too kitschy.”

  “I was joking.”

  “I’m not. You have to regain your sense of playfulness, Ethan. This whole experience is making you very serious, and it’s bad for you.”

  “What’s playful about rape and murder?”

  “Oh, God, please. That’s just another way of saying sex and violence, which is just another way of saying mass-market entertainment. Besides, let’s remember that you don’t know the truth yet. He could have seen the pictures in the newspaper, like you said. Go investigate or something.” She smiled. “Ooh, I just love that word. Don’t worry, this’ll be fun.”

  I WENT TO THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY and spent four hours with microfiche. Not knowing what kind of news Victor Cracke preferred, I checked the Times and all the tabloids for the weeks surrounding the murders, whose dates I obtained from McGrath.

  “Any word on that drawing?” he asked when I called.

  “Which drawing.”

  “You said you’d send me a copy.”

  “Right.”

  But before I sent him anything, I wanted to see what I turned up on my own.

  And what I turned up confirmed my gut instinct: all five of the victims’ pictures had ended up in one paper or another. The similarity between the newspaper portraits and the Cherubs struck me as awfully close. Not just faces but positions and expressions. I made copies and took them back to the gallery for comparison. Lo and behold, they matched. Not perfectly— perhaps a little artistic license?—but well enough that I felt confident reporting to Marilyn that I’d found the originals.

  “Aren’t we resourceful?”

  I was grateful to her for sparing me the obvious follow-up question; I knew she was thinking it, because I was, too: why them?

  Plenty of people get killed in New York. Plenty of photos make the pages of its public records. In the first two weeks of August 1966 alone I counted three other murders—and those were just the ones gooey enough to make the news. But those boys had become the literal center of Victor’s universe, the impetus for a life’s work. Why?

  And another question poked at me: how had he connected the crimes? Not all of the articles referred to one another. Henry Strong wasn’t described as a murder, because at the time of his disappearance, no body had been found. To know that both he and Eddie Cardinale had been the work of one person, and that the same person had gone on to kill three more boys, a reader would have to be able to match up the victim profiles as well as similarities in the cases: the fact that all the boys had been strangled, for example. A person casually leafing through the paper would be unlikely to take notice unless he was particularly astute—or already aware of the common thread.

  Either of those conditions potentially applied to Victor, whom I imagined sitting alone in his cell of a room, afraid of going outside, brimming with conspiracy theories, tracing connections between the boys and himself, the boys and the federal government.… Maybe, by putting the boys around his central star, he hoped to insulate himself from whatever had taken them: a kind of burnt offering to a faceless killer… rocking himself to sleep, clutching his talismans, haunted by the notion that he could be the next victim… no matter that he was not ten years old, that he never left the building… no matter… he is frightened, so frightened…

  Far-fetched? Absolutely. But I badly wanted to believe he was innocent.

  Now I have another confession to make: while it’s true I wanted to protect Victor, this had more to do with me than with him. I felt for him, yes; wanted to shield his good name, yes. But my most pressing concern was that he become too real. When he had been nothing but a name, I could exert my creative power over the art, control how people read it. The more he made his presence felt, however—the realer he became—the more he excluded me. And I didn’t especially like the Victor who had begun to emerge: a frantic scribbling pervert, a cloistered maniac. Pure evil isn’t very interesting; it has no depth. Frankly, it conflicted with my vision.

  Not to mention that I was worried about the impact on sales. Who’d want to buy a drawing by a serial killer?

  AS IT TURNS OUT, a lot of people. My phone began ringing off the hook. Collectors I knew, others I knew of but had never met, and an assortment of unsavory types began leaving me messages or showing up to talk to me about Victor Cracke. At first I was pleased at the spike in interest, but after the first few calls I understood that they were less interested in the art than the sordid tale behind it. Apparently, having “sociopathic sex offender/ murderer” on your résumé was worth more than an MFA from RISD.

  Is it true he raped them, one man wanted to know. Because he had just opened up the perfect wall space in his dining room.

  I knew things had gotten out of hand when I started hearing from Hollywood. A well-known director of independent films called to ask if I would loan some of the pieces out for use as a backdrop in a music video.

  I called Marilyn.

  “
Oh, relax,” she said, “I’m just having a little fun.”

  “Please stop spreading rumors.”

  “It’s called creating buzz.”

  “What did you tell people?”

  “As much as you told me. If folks get overexcited, that says much more about them than about you, me, or the art.”

  “You’re letting the story get away from me,” I said.

  “I didn’t realize you had a copyright.”

  “You know as well as I do the importance of managing the discourse, and—”

  “That’s precisely what I’m trying to demonstrate, darlin: you need to stop trying to manage the discourse. Loosen up.”

  “Even if,” I said, “even if that’s true, I don’t need you spreading rumors.”

  “I told you, I—”

  “Marilyn. Marilyn. Shhhhh. Stop. Just stop doing it, okay? Whatever you want to call it, knock it off.” And I hung up on her, much angrier than I’d realized.

  From across the room, Nat gave me a look.

  “She told everyone that he was a pedophile.”

  He snickered.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Well,” said Ruby, “it kind of is.”

  I threw up my hands and walked to my computer.

  ABOUT A WEEK AFTER MY MEETING with McGrath, I still hadn’t sent him a copy of the drawing. When he called, I had Ruby and Nat stonewall him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Muller isn’t available right now. Can I take a message? Right. We have your number here already. I’m sure he’ll call you when he has a free moment. Thank you.” I felt nervous putting him off; I didn’t want to give the impression that I was scared. I wasn’t. Let me make that plain: McGrath didn’t scare me at all. He was old, he was retired, and he wanted to get Victor, not me; to him I was nothing more than a source of information. And since I had nothing to be ashamed of, not really, I might have decided to play along.

  Just because he hadn’t threatened me, though, that didn’t mean I had to go out of my way to help him. I decided that if he wanted to look at the drawing he could come to the gallery, like everyone else.