The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  Paire felt as if she should be formal with them, but wasn’t sure what title to ascribe. What do I call them? she wondered, Police, or detectives? “I work here,” she said, trying to sound calm but coming off scared just the same.

  “You can’t be here, it’s a crime scene!” the dark one barked.

  She hadn’t expected so much anger.

  The Nordic one walked up to her and flashed identification: NYPD DETECTIVE molded in brass, with an unlikely duo on New York’s crest—two historic characters in a coonskin cap and feather headdress. Paire wanted to leave, but she worried that the same way running can trigger hunting behavior in a predator, walking out the front door would mark her as a suspect in the crime.

  Mayer needed to see her there. She needed to hug him and prove her allegiance. He wouldn’t be thinking of this as a good thing, but Rosewood was right—this robbery would be the best thing that ever happened to him. He’d never have to worry about the weirdos again, and never have to bat away Abel Kasson’s unwelcome solicitations. But today, she just needed to comfort him.

  “Wait,” said the blond, “You really work here?”

  She faked entitlement. “Of course I do. Why else would I walk straight into a crime scene? Where’s Mayer?”

  The empress was missing from the rear wall, leaving a vast expanse of white plaster. Three Rosewoods were missing, including one of the smilers. The thief had left HERO in the front window.

  From behind the back office door, Paire overheard a third policeman say to a colleague, “Caught fuckin’ on the boss’s desk.”

  A fourth voice said, “He was the boss.”

  The detective in front of Paire called to the back of the room, “Shut up!” Then to Paire, he said, “You probably shouldn’t be here.” His voice lost its abrasion, and that alarmed her even more.

  Something was wrong. A coldness crept through her. Panic gave way to numbness. Whatever was behind the desk drew her. Her arms dropped to her sides, and she moved toward it.

  The detective tried to block her path with wide arms, the way she had effectively sealed off the Hall of Human Origins. “I can’t let you back there,” he said. His widespread arms stopped her for a moment.

  Paire dawdled, swaying on her heels. She needed to ask something that would give her an excuse to linger. She could have made an observation, something to prove that she belonged here. They took the Qi would have been the most obvious one. Instead, something in the man’s tone—but worse, some smell in the air—made her ask, “Was someone hurt?”

  Two steps to the left and she saw it. Behind the desk, a dark hump stretched out on the floor. Just the contours stood out first. Then pant legs and men’s shoes. Paire made a noise she’d never made before. A pitiful squeak. Something much more appropriate to Katie Novis.

  She lunged toward the desk. The detective blocked her, yet despite his size he struggled to keep her back. She recognized the shoes now. Two-tone wing tips, way too formal and way too expensive for Rosewood. Pinstripe trousers. She had seen Mayer Wolff wearing these just yesterday, when she came in to start her shift with Lucia. Mayer had seemed buoyant. When he left, he had told them, but more told Lucia, “I’ll see you later.”

  Paire shifted in the opposite direction, breaking right. This time she was too quick for the detective to stop her, and she escaped his blockade.

  “Don’t!” he warned. He snatched at the air, but wasn’t fast enough to grab her arm.

  She ran toward Mayer, but as she rounded the desk, another figure on the floor stopped her.

  She saw the legs first. The desk had hidden them. Women’s legs. Lucia’s tone, tanned dancer’s legs, bent at uncomfortable angles. Her feet were bare and still. Her cheek rested flat against the wood floor, and one eye stared at the rear wall, its lid slightly drooped. Her mouth had frozen agape, so Paire caught a glimmer of silver from the braces. Lucia wore the same crème cocktail dress she’d had on when they closed the gallery together. A bullet hole as wide as a coffee mug ruptured the freckled skin between her shoulder blades.

  Chapter 15

  Rosewood didn’t come home for the rest of the week, nor did he answer his phone. Paire didn’t work, because she didn’t have a place to work anymore. She missed a few classes, and muddled through homework. Her professors understood, and let her out of a few exams.

  She attended both funerals. Mayer had a closed casket, Lucia open. The embalmers put on rouge, which Lucia never wore.

  Paire drank quite a bit.

  Whenever she returned to the apartment in Brooklyn Heights—Rosewood’s apartment, really—she felt like she was breaking into a tomb, stewing in the smells of unwashed underwear and the coal mine odors of her school charcoals. She kept the lights on at night. Within a week her bedsheets were coated with a gritty film, and she tossed uncomfortably in the whipped tousle of fabric instead of sleeping.

  Sometimes she threw spasmodic fits that came and went like afternoon thunderstorms. Tears and plenty of screaming. Neighbors pounded on the wall until she quieted down. Once, she wailed long enough to get the hiccups.

  Paire missed everything about Rosewood, even the simple warmth of his body. But she was also afraid to see him. The next time they saw each other they would have to address the consequences of what had happened. Rosewood had planned everything to the last detail, and he seemed so sure of himself when he left in his janitor’s uniform. Given how that evening played out, Rosewood might blame Paire for endangering him as much as she had blamed him for his recklessness.

  More than anything, Paire wanted to confirm that the shootings had been accidental. She didn’t know how she would cope with her role in two deaths, but it would be some comfort if the tragedy had been unintentional. She couldn’t believe Rosewood would have gunned them both down in cold blood. He had turned down a career in the military, a life of violence, to be an artist. Artists don’t kill people, she told herself. Well, there was Caravaggio. And she’d heard a theory that British painter Walter Sickert had been Jack the Ripper. How well did she know Derek Rosewood, anyway?

  Rosewood was probably suffering worse than Paire, grappling with the complex regret of the deed and relief at having survived it. At least, this is what she wanted to believe. When she saw him, they would comfort each other. One couldn’t simply right the wrong of murder—and as she voiced the word in her head, the deed attained the necessary gravitas—murder—but by having her co-conspirator in the same room, she would at least feel less alone in the act. Her guilt would be somewhat alleviated by distributing the onus of blame.

  For all she knew, Rosewood might be hurt, even dead. In a place like New York, it would be hard to imagine that someone could find a corner to die where the body wouldn’t eventually be discovered. Then again, Rosewood had navigated them to the abandoned City Hall subway station. An entire subterranean network sprawled underneath Manhattan. But if he’d been hurt, the police would have found his blood at the Fern.

  Paire wanted to know he was safe. And although she would be too ashamed to admit it aloud, or even dwell on it in her mind, she wanted to see the Empress Xiao Zhe Yi. She wondered if the portrait had made it through all this without injury.

  To protect himself, Rosewood might have destroyed any evidence linking him to the crime. Paire imagined the empress engulfed within the snake-tongue flames of a landfill bonfire, and it made her nauseous.

  The student center had one of the last pay phones in the city, and she tried Rosewood’s cell whenever she passed by, hoping that calling from a different number would have made it safe enough from him to pick up. The calls never connected.

  Since her professors had given her a temporary reprieve from schoolwork, she had more idle time to dwell on her predicament. The police hadn’t talked to her since they let her go from the Fern that morning. Eventually, they would come around. They would find it interesting that she lived with famed street artist Derek Rosewood, someone who coincidentally was exhibiting at the very gallery where she worked. Bells woul
d ding in their heads.

  The press gave the killings some attention, but it wasn’t a big enough story to draw more than passing curiosity. Fine arts just wasn’t front page news, even when you threw theft and two bodies into the story. This relieved her.

  Paire weighed her options. She might run away herself. She wouldn’t be as successful at hiding as Rosewood. A world traveler with installations in twenty-three different cities, he could have abandoned the empress in a dumpster and flown to Bhutan, for all she knew. Being a leader in an underground movement might have earned him enough contacts to remain underground. Paire had moved to New York and changed her name, but she didn’t have Rosewood’s connections. She’d never been outside the United States. She thought about another massive city where she could lose herself among the millions. Maybe Los Angeles. She found herself thinking about this option the way a tongue probed a canker sore.

  She stopped dressing with her usual flair. Since the crime, she chose muted greens—a color that made her feel safe. The color that had made Katie Novis feel safe. No faux fur, no leather pants. She left the peacock vintage apparel at home, and tried to be as inconspicuous as possible.

  Paire spent Memorial Day weekend suffering under the year’s first heat spike in the city.

  To pass time, she leafed through all of Rosewood’s personal belongings in the closets. Eventually, she dumped out the boxes and cluttered the floors. Ostensibly, Paire tossed through his personal effects to find clues to where he might have gone. But she ended up combing through everything to better understand the man she had been living with. She flipped through scrapbooks and tossed them aside. She read a stack of letters from his father, General Grant Rosewood, surprised that Rosewood would have kept them. Each letter was a handwritten novella, a stack of paper so thick that, folded, barely fit into the envelope.

  His father had an authoritative editorial voice. Most of the letters accomplished two things—reporting on the weddings, deaths and ailments of immediate relatives, and urging Rosewood to stop embarrassing the family with his artistic endeavors. After a while, they all read the same. Disappointment committed to the page. More interesting than the letters were the envelopes. On each one, along with the cluster of stars-and-stripes stamps, a return address in Virginia.

  Chapter 16

  By nine in the morning Virginia was too warm for a jacket. The sky seemed overly expansive without the skyscrapers. Fresh off the train, sun lightly toasted Paire through the glass of the taxicab.

  In the mirror back on Pierrepont, she had rehearsed her story for General Grant and Bethany Rosewood, memorizing each fictitious detail that made it seem plausible—when the baby was due, who her doctor was, that sort of thing.

  She chose Saturday morning to visit them. Hopefully, the parents would be sympathetic to a young girl coping with an unplanned pregnancy. If the General stayed consistent with the tone of his letters, he’d want to preserve his family’s honor and tell her where to find their son.

  The neighborhood had been built exclusively for the military. Most of the houses were brick buildings modeled after colonial Williamsburg. The Rosewood house was like many others in the neighborhood, a three-story brick fort with no decorative moldings, no architectural accents. The kind piggy number three would have slapped up to keep out the wolf. She wondered if this was the military’s way of designing suburbia: pragmatic homes with equal plots of grass in front and the identical swing sets for the kids in back. Two rows of mottled sycamores lined the street, towering over a sidewalk that no one seemed to use. Aside from the occasional silhouettes in the windows, she didn’t see or hear anyone. No car motors growled, no kids screamed, no pets yapped at the back doors waiting to empty their bladders in the back yards.

  Paire hopped out of the cab and strode to the front door. She trembled with anger but not fear. She worked to muster up the necessary emotion—tears—to sell her fake pregnancy to the Rosewoods, and managed to produce a narrow streak down her cheek. She rang the doorbell, once, twice briefly, then longer the third time, until she heard a rustling somewhere in the brick box, the shuffling of someone trying not to be heard. Her finger rode the buzzer for a half minute longer. Somewhere upstairs a face flashed in a window, but when she looked up it retreated from the glass.

  “Hello!” Paire called, politely at first. She brazenly repeated in a sing-song voice, “Helloooooo?”

  More shuffling from upstairs. Whoever was up there didn’t want to be disturbed. Then it struck Paire that it might not be the General up there. No self-respecting military commander or his attorney wife would be driven into hiding by a twenty-year-old girl. Only an overgrown boy would hide like that. Derek Rosewood was up there.

  Paire seethed. His parents were obviously absent. And if he wasn’t man enough to answer his own door, she would go in and get him. The garage next to the main house was open, and Paire rummaged through it until she found the right tool to gain entry. It wasn’t like her to break into a house, certainly not a military home, but she didn’t second-guess herself. Fleeting thoughts merely ran through her, such as, If I’m arrested, would I go to regular prison or military prison?

  She looked for a ladder but instead found a toolbox, and lugged it to the back of the house. A sliding glass door marked the entrance to the Rosewoods’ kitchen, locked but without the bars she’d find over the doors in Brooklyn. Likely, they never thought someone would have the balls to burgle a general’s home. She would go through the back entrance, just as Rosewood had suggested when they planned the Fern robbery. When she looked up, Paire caught a slightly longer glimpse of a familiar face.

  Paire might have used the spring baton but she had left it in New York. From the box, she pulled out a large wrench, a foot of solid steel, and wielded it in front of the glass door, invigorated by the promise of destruction. She felt the foolish and furious sensations of having been duped, and ached to smash something. If this was what it took to rouse that little squirrel from the tree, so be it. Paire wound up, arcing the wrench over her head and shutting her eyes so glass pellets wouldn’t fly into them.

  “Stop!” Rosewood yelled from upstairs.

  Paire froze midswing. When she opened her eyes, the business end of the wrench was an inch from the glass.

  He hung out of the upstairs window. Neither of them acted surprised to see the other. Rosewood seemed to have aged ten years in the past few days. The first thing she noticed was that his head was completely shaved. Another cheap disguise, she thought.

  “Are you stupid? You’re going to break the glass,” he said.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Jesus Christ. Hold on.” He vanished from the window, and appeared at the kitchen door a minute later. He wasn’t happy to see her, and didn’t pretend otherwise. “Get inside.”

  Paire heard a fleck of the general’s genes in his bark.

  The most off-putting thing for Paire was that there was little different in his manner. He spoke to her as if nothing awful had ever occurred. She had worried that confronting Rosewood might unleash his inner savage, but he was the same man she knew, with the puffy lips and brimming confidence.

  Paire had the upper hand, and they both knew it. She made herself comfortable on a kitchen stool and leaned on the butcher-block counter, twirling the wrench on its head while she stared him down. If things got ugly, she would use the wrench as a club, and aim for his knees.

  “I was going to tell your parents I was pregnant,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Thought they’d feel sorry for me and help me find you.”

  “Well, you’re out of luck. They’re away.”

  “Away at the grocery store, or out of town?”

  “Business trip for my dad. My mom tagged along.”

  “Happy coincidence,” she said.

  “No coincidence. They didn’t want to be in the same house as me. But to their credit, at least they didn’t turn me away. Or turn me in. Why are you here?”

  Paire was c
oy. “Aside from the baby?”

  He was angry, and an explosive look of potential retaliation flared in his eyes. “Are you fucking stupid? Imagine if you broke a window and the cops came. The two of us would be in a police report together. Someone would get to thinking.”

  He was acting like this was still part of the plan, like they’d worked this all out in New York. Her blood heated and her palms felt steamy. She tightened her grip on the wrench. “Do you even give a shit about what you’ve done?”

  “You have no idea how much of a shit I give about that. This has ruined me,” he said, achingly. He looked at Paire with the same hatred she had reserved for him, as if she had pulled the trigger.

  He slouched more than usual, and ambled over to another stool, far enough away from Paire that they couldn’t touch each other, even if she reached for him. He seemed strung out, sleep deprived. He spoke languidly. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone.” Until this moment, Paire had held out a micron of hope that someone else had charged into the Fern and shot Mayer and Lucia. She’d been hoping it had been Lucia’s husband. Rosewood’s confession dashed her hopes.

  “Then why’d you bring the gun? Why would you bring that fucking gun?”

  “To scare people in case I needed to.” Back in his home state, some of his southern accent returned. “You didn’t tell me there’d be people there. There shouldn’t have been people there.”

  “You think I knew there would be? Christ.” He had crow’s feet, and she’d never seen wrinkles on him. His obvious stress made her dial back her indignation. “How did it happen?”

  Rosewood let out a deep, regretful sigh. “It happened fast. I was already in there. They came through the front, kissing. Lucia was the one who saw me, but Mayer rushed me. He didn’t know it was me until he got close. I pulled the gun to scare him, but he didn’t stop. It just went off. Scared the shit out of me. I didn’t mean to squeeze the trigger. It was all reflex.” His hands raked his thighs, and Paire wanted to believe he was telling the truth.