The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Christopher Finch
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
PO Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781611099713
ISBN-10: 1611099714
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012922331
For Linda
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
About the Author
ONE
That was a tough year to be a New Yorker. The city was so broke there was a rumor going around that the mayor had been spotted on the Bowery, cleaning windshields at stoplights in the hope of scoring a nickel, or maybe a nickel bag. A garbage strike had turned the sidewalks of swank Upper East Side neighborhoods into urban compost heaps, heady with Camembert rinds and doggy bags chauffeured home from La Cote Basque. A turf war in the schools had black parents in dashikis and white teachers in high dudgeon slinging around words that don’t show up in vocabulary tests. There were riots in Bed-Stuy, the South Bronx was a war zone, and a heroin epidemic was spreading like PCBs in the Hudson River. Central Park after sundown was a place you didn’t go unless you had a thing for the taste of your own blood, but if you wanted to get mugged that could be arranged just about anywhere. It didn’t help that the City’s Finest were on a job slowdown, which meant that they spent less time responding to 911 calls, and more time padding their paunches at Famous Ray’s Pizza. There were more than eleven hundred murders in New York that year. Even Andy Warhol got himself gunned down. But, hungry for another fifteen minutes of fame, he hung on to defy the statistics.
I mention Andy because my office was on Union Square, a few doors from where Val plugged him. The Heartland Credit Union Building was an anonymous structure that attracted tenants seeking anonymity—unfrocked dentists, myopic eye doctors, low-life lawyers, assorted quacks, polyester-suited real estate shysters, vodka-soaked teachers of English as a second language, masseuses and manicurists with interesting sidelines. My hutch was on the third floor. If you cracked the solitary window open, you were overwhelmed by the aroma of sweet-and-sour pork deep-fried in peanut oil that should’ve been thrown out before Mao set out on the Long March.
It was one of the first uncomfortably hot days of the year—one of those May mornings when a tropical front breezes into town unannounced, like that cousin from Miami you hoped had lost your address. I was sitting at my desk, wallowing in this rank fragrance, indulging in my first toke of the morning, and trying to hear the daily napalm atrocity report on WBAI above the traffic and police sirens, when the phone rang. It was an attorney who identified himself as Joseph Bledstone of the firm Bledstone & Crimmins. He didn’t beat around the bush.
“Mr. Novalis, I understand you were fired from your position as an investigator with the DA’s office?”
No argument from me.
“Possession of marijuana. I presume you’re clean now?”
“Whiter than the driven snow,” I said, taking another hit.
Bledstone telegraphed his opinion of my attitude by pausing for a long beat.
“You were an investigator for the DA’s fine art fraud detail?”
“I was the fine art fraud detail.”
“Which means that you dealt with what kind of matters?”
“Fakes. Misrepresentation. Manipulation of auction prices. Is that the kind of malfeasance we’re talking about?”
“Not precisely. I take it that you have a sound general knowledge of the inner workings of the art world.”
“You mean, like how artists get screwed by dealers?”
“I mean, can I presume you are familiar with the art world’s social mores?”
“You mean, who’s fucking who?”
“Among other things.”
This was beginning to sound interesting.
“Perhaps you’d better fill me in.”
“Mr. Kravitz will brief you himself. Mr. Gabriel Kravitz. He’ll be expecting you at his apartment in the Altamont Towers at six thirty.”
Bledstone had nothing more to say, so we left it at that. I called Mike Pearson at the Post and asked if he knew anything about someone called Gabriel Kravitz. Mike said he’d check the morgue and get back to me. He called half an hour later, distracting me from the Yellow Pages where, in a desultory way, I was looking up companies that install room air conditioners, paying particular attention to ads that said, “Nobody Beats Our Rates.”
“Steve on the business desk was able to help me out with your Mr. Kravitz. He served in the Pacific—made captain. When he was discharged, he came home to Cleveland, where his family owned a small construction business. He made his first fortune cashing in on the postwar building boom—those ticky-tack estates they built on swamps in the boonies—but he hit it big-time when Ike signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act into law. Kravitz got contracts to construct sections of interstates all over the Midwest. He’s also the man behind Tomma-Hawk Motels. A couple of years ago, he made an unsuccessful bid to buy the Cleveland Indians, though why anyone would want to own those bums is beyond me. Mr. K’s first wife—the proverbial high school sweetheart—divorced him, and presumably lived very comfortably ever after. About three minutes later, he married a former Miss Cuyahoga County, wherever or whatever that is. That was in 1949. These days, Mrs. K pops up on the gossip pages from time to time. Seems she travels with a faster crowd than her hubby and likes to throw his money around. We had a picture of her a couple of weeks ago, at some art opening, in a slinky white number with a double dip neckline. Nice build. Name’s Marion.”
Mrs. Wilcox, my cleaning lady, was due at one thirty, so I took the afternoon off and went to see The Producers for the second time. Came out humming “Springtime for Hitler,” and hummed it all the way to my apartment on West 12th Street, then took a shower, and wasted some time choosing between the suit and the sport coat. I decided on the sport coat. I tucked the stub of a joint into my wallet for emergencies, rode an 8th Avenue local up to the Museum of Natural History, then walked a couple of blocks south to the Altamont Towers. If you fancied living on Central Park West, but didn’t want to associate with the showbiz trash that infested the Dakota, the Altamont was for you. There were a few professional suites leased to high-end shrinks and dermatologists. The rest of the building was occupied by well-heeled families with tasteful summer homes in potato fields off the Montauk Highway—not too vulgarly close to the beach—and kids at Dalton and Riverdale.
The doorman didn’t like me. I could tell by the way he checked out my hair. Its length was modest by the standards of the Electric Circus or Filmore East, but to a doorman at the Altamont Towers I looked like Mick Jagger, or maybe Janis Joplin. He stopped just short of patting me down, reluctantly consented to announce me, then summoned a flunky in a red vest, who had been polishing the brass fittings in the lobby, and instructed him to take me
up to Mr. Kravitz’s penthouse. This kid, who exuded all the charm of a dented spittoon, led me to an elevator that carried me to the floor marked P1. He let me out into a short corridor with a sinister Rothko on one wall and a single door.
As the elevator closed behind me, a maid in uniform opened the door. I told her I was Alex Novalis. She asked me in and conducted me into a sitting room furnished with an eclectic mixture of Empire gilt and ormolu and Milan midcentury modern. It was not what I had anticipated, and the same went for the art on the walls—a couple of late Picassos, a Braque papier collé, a Matisse from his cute-girl-in-harem-pants-and-nothing-else period, but also a big Lichtenstein Ben-Day dot panel, and a Jasper Johns flag. An inflated silver vinyl Warhol pillow floated against the ceiling near a gilded wood chandelier. There was no getting away from Andy that year.
The maid told me Mr. Kravitz would be with me in a few minutes, and asked if I would care for a Coke or some water while I was waiting. I asked for water. She disappeared, and I became aware of a woman sobbing. The sound was faint, and at first I thought that it might have been produced by a television in another room, but it soon became apparent that this was the real thing. A door opened, and a woman in a nurse’s uniform appeared, carrying a towel. The sobbing became louder for a few seconds, as the nurse saw me and hesitated before closing the door behind her. She said, “Excuse me,” and hurried off in the direction in which the maid had disappeared. Seconds later, the maid reappeared with my water.
I asked if everything was all right.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said in a lightly accented voice, “I don’t understand.”
Since that got me nowhere, I asked if I could use a bathroom.
Bathrooms are inordinately important to the rich. That’s why they have so many in their homes. They are shrines where body and soul can be purged after a hard day of arbitrage, or strategic downsizing.
The one I was directed to was an expensively retrofitted example of the haute CPW genre. The designer had had the good taste to retain the tiny hexagonal floor tiles that can be found in many New York mansion blocks of a certain age. The furnishings, however, were somewhat more recent. The lavatory was truly a throne, its bowl and cistern encased in creamy porcelain. It was complemented by a matching washbasin and bidet, both sporting gold fittings. Most remarkable, though, was a shower cabinet enclosed in frosted glass. It served as a screen onto which were rear-projected schools of fish scudding about in some blue lagoon. As best I could tell, this projection had somehow been triggered as I entered. Now, as I approached the shower to get a better look, a panel of the glass screen began to glide silently open. This, I told myself, was a trip. Apparently, I had interrupted some photoelectric beam that instigated this magic. There, before me, was another set of gold handles. The temptation was impossible to resist. I reached out and gave the nearest one a gentle tug. A trickle of water splashed down from the showerhead, and with it came a cockroach of suitably majestic proportions. Upon hitting the marble floor of the shower, it gathered itself together with great dignity, and scuttled to the drain into which it disappeared.
When I got back to the sitting room, Gabriel Kravitz was waiting for me. He was a tall man, about fifty years old, lean and handsome in a Henry Fonda-ish kind of way, with a full head of graying hair, and the eyes of someone who was not accustomed to taking no for an answer. He wore a business suit that said, “I travel first class—got any problem with that?” and he was glaring at his watch. I had the impression that it was accustomed to being glared at. In his right hand he was holding a lowball glass heavy enough to work out with and containing something that might have been an old-fashioned. He didn’t ask me to join him in whatever it was he was drinking, just waved for me to sit down, and took a seat himself. The sobbing continued in the background, but it didn’t get billing.
“I’d like to see your license,” he said.
I took it out of my pocket and handed it to him. He glanced at it and passed it back.
“How come they granted you a license after your conviction?”
“The charge was reduced to a misdemeanor. I took the test, I paid the fee, and anyway, I have connections.”
I got the impression he liked at least the last part of that answer. He lit the first of the Marlboros that he would chain-smoke over the next hour or so.
“And what kind of cases do you specialize in?” he asked.
“Cases that involve art world fraud are my field of expertise.”
“But you take what you can get—marital cases, missing persons…”
He’d done his research.
“What I’ve asked you here to talk about,” said Kravitz, “involves the art world, but not art world fraud—at least not in the sense you’re employing the term. It does, however, involve a missing person. Does the name Jerry Pedrosian mean anything to you?”
“He once threatened to throw me down a flight of stairs, but I didn’t take it personally. He talks that way to everybody.”
“So I’ve heard. Yet he seems to be highly regarded in some quarters.”
“As an artist? Some people used to think he was the hottest thing since painting by numbers, but his reputation has been slipping lately. I don’t think he sells much these days, though he’s probably made enough to be comfortable.”
“I gather you’re not impressed?”
“I’m not paid to be a critic.”
“But since you seem to know a good deal about art and the art market, you must have an opinion.”
I thought about it for a second or two, not wanting to say anything too nice.
“As a painter, Jerry Pedrosian has some modest talent. When it comes to chutzpah, he’s a genius. The best things he ever did were his happenings. Do you know about happenings? They’re events staged as works of art. People like Allan Kaprow and Red Grooms, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg—Pedrosian, too—would invite an audience and put on a show. But it wouldn’t be like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney on a soundstage at MGM. No straw skimmers and cute musical numbers. One of Pedrosian’s happenings involved the audience being taken into an industrial refrigerator hung with sides of beef, while a girl in leathers revved the engine of a Harley till the noise was deafening. Not your cup of poison, maybe, but Pedrosian is a showman and knows how to sell that kind of thing.”
Kravitz nodded, apparently unimpressed. He took a sip of his drink and paused, as if listening to something. The sobbing, perhaps.
“I’m not the collector in this family,” he said. “I did buy the Matisse that’s behind you—the girl with the vase of flowers—which is rather attractive, I think. Otherwise, my wife is responsible for what you see on the walls.”
“She has a good eye. Or good advice.”
“A good eye? Maybe. Nevertheless, she did buy several Pedrosian paintings some years ago, when he first attracted attention. We no longer own them. They were destroyed on my orders. I enjoyed watching them burn. To be blunt, though, I would have taken more pleasure in witnessing Jerry Pedrosian’s destruction.”
For a moment I thought he was trying to hire me as a hit man.
“Jerry Pedrosian,” he continued, “seduced my daughter.”
So that was the story.
“He has a reputation with women,” I said.
“My daughter is not a woman,” said Kravitz. “She is an eighteen-year-old girl. A freshman in college. Do you have any idea of Pedrosian’s age? He’s forty-three years old. He has a wife and four children.”
“He hasn’t lived with his wife in years. She took the kids to Oregon or someplace damp and depressing. I heard they were divorced.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better? Would you be happy to have your daughter involved with someone like Pedrosian?”
I assured him that I understood where he was coming from, and asked how this situation had come about.
“Lydia attends a college called Teddington, in Vermont. Perhaps you know of it? It’s celebrated, it seems, for its encouragement of c
ulturally adventurous activities. Lydia’s mother thought it would suit her sensibility. I would have preferred somewhere with a more rounded curriculum. The girl’s grades were good enough to get her into Radcliffe or Vassar or almost anywhere, but uncharacteristically, I caved in. I’m perhaps too fond of my daughter, and it was what she wanted. Teddington is an all-girls’ school. She had gone to an all-girls’ high school, Crufts, which, on the whole, had been a good choice. What could go wrong at an all-girls’ college? What could go wrong is that the faculty would invite scum like Pedrosian up there to conduct so-called experimental workshops. That was early in her first semester. I don’t know exactly what happened, or when, but Lydia started coming down to the city rather often, though we rarely saw her when she was here. She said she was conducting social experiments, but as far as I can gather, she was hanging out at so-called artists’ bars. Evidently, she was in contact with Pedrosian. She was sleeping with him. I suppose that was one of the social experiments.”
“When was her eighteenth birthday?” I asked.
“The week she enrolled at Teddington.”
“So, before she met Pedrosian?”
“Presumably.”
“So there’s not much that you can do about the situation, unless you hire a couple of guys from Newark to break his knees.”
“It’s crossed my mind,” he said, “and it may yet come to that.”
I asked him how he had found out about the affair.
“From her friend Andrea Marshall. A lovely girl. They’ve been best friends since kindergarten. Lydia tried to persuade Andrea to apply to Teddington. Luckily for Andrea’s parents she chose NYU. She has a nice little place in the Village—on 10th Street.”
I made a mental note of that. Not just a place in the Village. A nice little place in the Village.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Lydia’s best friend told you that Lydia’s having an affair with a forty-three-year-old lothario? That doesn’t sound like any best friend I ever heard of.”
Good Girl, Bad Girl (An Alex Novalis Novel) Page 1
