by Richard Vine
She smiled. “Ciao, Jack,” she said, kissing my cheeks. “What is the name of your friend?”
“This is Hogan. He’s kind of a cop.”
“Yes, of course. Philip told me. You want to know if I maybe killed his old wife. A very reasonable question. I think she wished, naturally, to murder me if she could. So why not wonder the other?” She put her hand out to Hogan.
“You have a gorgeous smile,” he told her, and pressed the back of her hand to his lips.
“Grazie. Please come up. I am sorry for the such long climb.”
We followed her four flights up the steep concrete stairs. I had the feeling that Hogan, who kept glancing up at Claudia’s fluid hips as we ascended, would have gladly done any number of floors.
At the top landing a corridor led past stacks of scrap lumber and discarded machine parts to a paint-splattered door scrawled with a flamboyant gold “Claudia.” The whole building smelled faintly of turpentine.
Claudia pushed the door back and motioned us through. Just inside was an L-shaped kitchen with a service island. Two bottles of red wine sat on a wooden table improvised out of sawhorses and a length of plywood covered with an ivory-hued bed sheet. A vase of fresh flowers stood between the bottles.
“Sit, sit,” Claudia said, waving us toward several folding chairs by the table. “Be comfortable.”
Hogan and I eased into the unstable seats.
“Jack, please, would you open for me?”
I clamped one of the wine bottles under my limp left arm and uncorked it, while Claudia went to a cupboard and brought out black olives, two cheeses, and a round loaf of bread.
“Fresh baked,” she said. “From two blocks, very near.”
I poured wine into three straight-sided glasses.
“To all our friends,” Claudia toasted, “living and dead.” Strangely, it was a salute I had heard Hogan use.
“You understand, Claudia,” I told her, “we’re not here just for a visit. Hogan has some unpleasant work to do. He might have to ask you rude questions.”
“But why?” She looked Hogan in the eye. “I did not kill Amanda. I liked her a great much. And I did not ask to Philip that he kill her.”
“What did you ask him to do?” Hogan said.
“Just to leave her.”
“To Mrs. Oliver,” he said, “it might have amounted to much the same thing.”
“It was not so easy for Philip also.”
Hogan nodded, with an expression that looked almost like sympathy. “All right, let me guess. He told you he would walk out on her, once a few important matters got settled—with his company, and between him and Mandy.”
“Yes.”
“But every time one thing got settled, something new came up.”
“Yes.”
“The art collection, the houses, the investments.”
“Many such things.”
“Until finally you got fed up and said you couldn’t take it anymore.”
“I told him I would not be his little art whore.”
Hogan studied his wine for a moment. “When was that?”
“Last week, before he left for California.”
Hogan slugged down my short pour of wine. Claudia, perfectly calm, slowly sliced two pieces of cheese onto a wedge of warm bread and handed it to him. She refilled his glass. All the while, Hogan’s eyes followed her skilled hands, darting away just once, when her head turned, to take in her swelling form.
“My friend wants to learn a bit more about you,” I said. “Can we look at your work?”
“With pleasure. Whatever you like.”
I topped off Claudia’s glass and mine, and we all walked into the studio. Paintings leaned in stacks against three of the walls. Pinned on the fourth wall was a loose canvas, its surface dense with the stylized carnal tanglings that had gained Claudia her nascent celebrity. The oversized studio had north light from a row of windows set high up under the fifteen-foot ceiling.
“I work on a new series,” Claudia said. We paused before the unstretched canvas, and she tilted her head from side to side as she studied it. “Do you think it’s alive, Jack?”
“Definitely.”
“Yes, it’s the only thing that matters in art.”
“Or in people,” Hogan added.
Claudia turned to face him. “No, some people are much better dead. In Italy we have much history, and we know the value of killing.”
“Anyone you’d care to nominate?”
“More than one. The men around Philip. Those consiglieri at his office.”
“What’s wrong with the men at his office?”
“They hate me, they’re evil. They try to make him—how do you say?—a hostage, a caged padrone.”
I stepped away from the interview scene, passing a cart loaded with paint tubes, brushes, rags, a coffee can jammed full of stir sticks, and several paint-thinner tins. Here and there, metal columns sprouted braces that triangulated up to the ceiling beams. As I made my way back to the kitchen, I caught sight of a mattress on a low pallet, facing a small TV with a rabbit-ear antenna. Bricks showed under the corners of the bed platform, and I tried to imagine Philip Oliver stretched out there, fidgeting as he waited for Claudia to come out of the shower with her skin moist and her black hair dripping. I wondered if he hung his hand-tailored English shirts in the same closet with her vintage bellbottoms and Chloé tops. Then I remembered, perversely, that he had told me once, in meticulous detail, about her penchant for La Perla lingerie.
At the table, I opened the second bottle. I could see Claudia and Hogan, vivid as miniatures, perfectly framed by the high steel-frame archway.
“You wish to question me, no doubt. I feel pleased to tell you whatever I know.”
“How often did you get together with Philip?”
“At first, once every two of weeks. Soon, twice the each week. Now almost all days.”
“A smart man, your Philip.”
“You are very kind, Mr. Hogan.”
I followed their conversation distantly, absently, as I slowly sampled Claudia’s cheap wine. Only a few words eluded me.
Had she ever seen Philip become violently angry?
No, he was a dear, sweet man—especially now that his mind was falling to pieces.
Wasn’t that just an act?
Not at all. Philip never pretended with her; he came to her bed in order to be true to himself, for the first time in his life.
Had she ever actually met his wife, Amanda Oliver?
Only once, yes, when for some reason Mandy turned up, trailed by a video cameraman, at the opening of a group show that Claudia was in at Roebling Hall. It was not a place one expected to see the great lady, who seemed shocked to find herself confronting the something something of her something husband.
How did the meeting go?
She had called Claudia a “minor media slut” (as Claudia repeated, not for the first time evidently) and left quickly with her handsome something friend still running the video camera.
As the wine began its subtle work on my brain, I forced myself to listen more closely.
“Have you visited the Oliver loft in SoHo?” Hogan said.
“Why would you ask this when Jack is right here? Would I lie? Even if I had done the worst, I would not be the foolish girl enough to fall into an ignorant trap.”
“So the police might find your fingerprints in the apartment? That wouldn’t be a surprise.”
“I am not so proud of how Philip and I met, or the things we had to do to be together. But love must find its way. It must.”
“And you loved Philip enough to take chances together?”
“Think what you like. Have you not felt some great awful passion, Mr. Hogan?”
“Once or twice.”
“And did feeling it mean you would kill?”
“A fair question. If they ever find Jack here dead, you’ll know the answer.”
Claudia tossed her hair slightly, puzzled but not backing down
. “You tease me,” she said.
“That makes us even, Miss Silva.”
She turned slightly toward Hogan. The two, holding each other’s eyes, exchanged minute smiles.
11
Alone at Claudia’s makeshift table, I was watching it happen again, the old inexplicable business between Hogan and women.
What is it with this guy? To me, he’s just an average-looking man, of middling height, with so-so charm. But for a great many women of various classes and ages, Edward Hogan is an unexpected lothario, capable of exerting a gravitational pull. Maybe it’s the equation of baldness with sexual vigor; maybe his ladies are slightly awed to meet a man of such calm, polite demeanor, who, as he leans close to peer into their eyes, reveals a handgun strapped to his rib cage.
In any case, Hogan never lacked for confidence. Once, and once only, I asked him about his technique. All he could say was: “Hey, I know how to listen. It counts for a lot.” No doubt. But once he gets his answers, I’ve noticed, his attention quickly shifts elsewhere.
Right now, though, the full force of Hogan’s mind was focused unwaveringly on Claudia. He was sorry to have to ask, but he needed to know where she was last Wednesday, the day of the murder.
“I was here. Working in the studio.”
“Alone?”
“Completely. That is the only way to work.”
As Hogan shifted minutely toward her, his voice lowered and slowed. “A woman with your looks,” he said, “is alone only by choice.”
“Thank you, yes. But I choose solitude often.”
“A pity.”
“No. I have, of course, many admirers—always. But not so many are kind gentlemen like you. Or like Philip.”
“So tell me why you want this lonely life.”
“It is not so lonely, since Philip. For the work, yes, it’s necessary to be alone. This is what I do, who I am.”
Hogan dipped his head an inch or two. “At least you know what you need,” he said. “And how to get it.”
With that, they seemed suddenly to remember themselves—and me. Hogan nodded and Claudia led him back through the archway. By the time they returned to the kitchen, I half expected the two of them to be bathed in love sweat. Hogan slid Claudia’s chair from the table and stood waiting. As soon as she settled into her seat, he took his place across from her. She refilled his glass. They looked at each other and drank without speaking.
In the midst of this flirty rigmarole, they both turned to me. I had to say something.
“You must have some idea,” I said to Claudia. “Some idea who would want Mandy dead.”
“Oh, yes, I have thought. Philip’s ex-wife, for one—the mother. She hated Amanda always. Or those awful men around him—the company liars—they could perhaps wish it, so they get more control.”
“Why his first wife?”
“Because, with Amanda dead, half of everything Philip owns goes back to his child. To a thrust, for when the girl turns twenty-one.”
“The word is ‘trust.’ ”
“Is it? Good, I learn: a trust.”
“And if Philip died, too?” I asked.
“Then everything. It is one of the many things we discussed. One of the plans he had to make before he could divorce again.”
“You talked about his death? Philip looks awfully healthy to me.”
“You are not a doctor. The special ones, at the big ugly hospital, they say his head will kill his body very soon.”
“Would anything change if the two of you got married?”
“Then the young girl, Melissa, would get only a half.”
“That’s still a fortune.”
“Still, yes. Philip felt much badness about how he once treated Angela and the baby—when he left to go to Amanda years ago.”
“And what about other girlfriends?” Hogan asked. “Any around who might resent Philip’s new plans with you?”
“You don’t know Philip. He is not the kind of man to cheat on his lover.”
“Just his wife.”
“This is normal.”
I ate an olive and placed the pit in a little saucer by the empty wine bottle. “Claudia, my dear, you should write a lonely hearts column,” I said.
She tilted the second bottle in the direction of my glass. I covered the top with my hand.
“Prego,” she said. “Take, enjoy.”
I gave in and accepted another half-glass. As Claudia poured, I worked hard to keep my concentration. Her abundant, self-proclaiming body demanded full notice, and usually got it. Everything about her was bountiful, generous, flowing. No matter what she did, no matter how she moved, you were aware first of her breasts, her white skin, her thighs. You could easily see how a man of Philip’s age, or any age, would be intensely drawn to her scented flesh and tender care, to long slow hours in these casually welcoming rooms. There was about her a sense of arrival, of journey’s end. Fortunately, I was no longer susceptible to such treacherous myths.
“But Amanda, for one,” I reminded our hostess, “might not have agreed with your view.”
“No, she did not. She said she was going to take away the one thing Philip loved truly. His company.”
“Did he tell his top brass about the threat?” Hogan asked.
“Top brass? What is ‘top brass’?”
“Those men around him—his false consiglieri, as you call them.”
“Of course. They had to prepare, to protect. Like a war. They were making ready a big lawyer fight.”
“You seem to know a lot about Philip’s business.”
“No, nothing. I am too much like my father.”
She laughed bitterly, but the humor was clearly lost on Hogan. He didn’t know what it meant for an old-fashioned museum director, especially a European intellectual like Enrico Silva, to face the transition to market-driven arts management.
“My father calls himself a ‘displaced person,’ ” Claudia told Hogan. “You know what this means? Like a refugee. A man without a home or a future.”
“Because he’s lousy at business?”
“It is too cruel. When he was my age, Papa wrote a book on Fra Angelico. Three hundred pages. Such beautiful pictures, such beautiful words.”
“And now?”
“He only raises money. Without rest.”
“Like most people, one way or another.”
“He is not like most people. He should spend his time to think, to write, to make fine shows of the very best works—to be a man of culture. Isn’t that why they hired him?”
I shook my head. “No, Claudia, they hired him for the semblance of those things. In order to attract trustees and big-money sponsors to the museum.”
“It’s not fair. They want him to make a new building, to think a budget for ten years ahead, to be a ‘pro-active manager.’ You know what this is, this ‘pro-active manager’?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s something Enrico will never be.”
Hogan leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “If you married Philip Oliver, it would make your father’s life a lot easier,” he suggested. “He could be a man of culture again.”
Claudia drew back slightly. “What do you say by this?”
“How much longer until Papa is due to retire?” Hogan asked.
“Seven years.”
“A quick answer. You must have given his situation some thought.”
“Now you talk like a stranger, like a policeman,” she replied. “It’s a pity.”
Hogan laughed to himself. “I’m not suspicious by nature,” he said. “Just by experience.”
“There, you see, Hogan is more European than he knows,” I joked awkwardly. I had that anxiety you get when you’re caught, a third party, in the middle of an old lovers’ spat. “Let’s just finish the wine,” I said, and poured all around.
Claudia looked hard at Hogan. “You can ‘check me out’ all you want,” she offered. “Come back here whenever you like. Talk to everyone who knows me. In the end, you will d
ecide I tell truths. I love my father, and I love Philip Oliver. Those are my crimes. Of everything else I am not guilty.”
“I’m glad,” he answered.
“Are you? Somehow I doubt.”
“No, it’s true. It’s my fondest wish to find you, to find anyone, truly innocent.” Hogan forced a mild laugh. “At least it would break the monotony.” He raised his glass, waiting for us to join him. “Buono, salute. To the health of our friends.”
“And the death of our enemies,” Claudia added.
“I like this girl,” Hogan said, turning toward me. “She reminds me of my Marine drill instructor.”
We drank down the last of the wine.
12
A couple days later, Hogan and I went to see Philip at his office on 55th Street. The building lobby was two stories high and clad in green marble. A girl at the solid mahogany reception desk sent us up the express elevator to the forty-fifth floor. The doors opened onto another counter and another sleek business-suited woman. She smiled up at us from beneath an enormous Oliver Technologies wall logo, its stylized “OT” glistening in hand-polished brass.
The greeter, her brown hair pulled smartly back, told us we were expected, and to please follow her into a conference room. She made it a pleasure to comply.
“Coffee, gentlemen?”
“Black,” Hogan said. “A guy could get drowsy in the hush of this place.”
The girl smiled. “No danger of that once Mr. Andrews arrives.” She went to the head of the room’s long wooden table and pushed a button. “You’ll be meeting with the executive staff.”
“We don’t want to bother anyone,” Hogan said. “We just came to talk to Mr. Oliver for a few minutes in private.”
“I’m sure Mr. Andrews will take your wishes into account.”
A cart appeared at the door, maneuvered by a young man in a gray smock and dress slacks. He drew coffee for us from a towering silver urn perched on the white-skirted cart. Without a single word, without eye contact, he left.
A moment later, a man wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and a dark pinstripe suit walked swiftly into the room and seized first my hand and then Hogan’s.
