Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

I did all those banal things one does when one first sees a friend horribly dead. I fell to my knees, staring in disbelief that she actually was deceased. I finally got up the courage to take her un-charred wrist in my own hand to prove to myself that indeed there was no pulse. I stood up, then felt a wave of nausea, ran to find the lavatory, spilled out what little food remained undigested in me from lunch, then sat down, took deep breaths; then, still not in the least bit calm, I dialed for the police.

  In the minutes before they arrived, I calmed enough to bring myself to get up and go look at Ottilie again. For the first time I noticed the subject of the landscape askew in her grotesquely ultimate grasp: a landscape of unearthly beauty.

  It depicted two dark, forested shorelines surrounding the clear, unruffled water of a sheltered bay at twilight. To one side, riding low in the tide, lay an island, and asymmetrically placed upon it, a copse of trees shaped into a deep green dome. The sun had already set behind the opposite shore. The outline of pine trees was most defined at the painting’s right side. The sky was a quiet majesty of grays shot through with husky violets and magentas.

  Besides what it portrayed, this three- by five-foot tempera possessed in every square inch that ineffable Chasian quality—it was a masterpiece of haunting remembrance which I couldn’t for the life of me precisely remember.

  Little wonder she had gone to it last. As though to tell me—might she still have remembered in her last moments that I was still to arrive?—take this painting of all of them. This is my best.

  But as I heard the police sirens pull up outside the building and saw the scarlet glare of their rooftops reflected outside the gallery windows, I also had another impression, that the index finger of Ottilie’s outstretched hand pointed—pointed straight at that eerie little island in the painting, as though it somehow would explain her death.

  That moment, I vowed to purchase the landscape, no matter the cost. I also vowed to find out what Ottilie had meant by that final gesture.

  *

  To my surprise, the police scarcely questioned me. I suppose my shock at Ottilie’s death and at having to find her dead was still quite apparent. To my further surprise, however, it seemed to me that they were barely intent on investigating her death at all.

  True, photos were taken of the death scene. Chalk marks were laid down upon the carpet and on the wall, outlining her position and that of several objects—the wineglass, one of her shoes, the broken heel of the other. The gallery was closed the following day, and later in the afternoon, three of us—Auburn Anders, the gallery owner, Susan Vight, his assistant, and myself—were collectively questioned at the gallery, although it struck me, in the most perfunctory manner.

  Did Ottilie Chase have any enemies? Detective Compson asked.

  None that any of us knew of.

  Had she any close friends?

  Again no. And of close friends, none besides ourselves.

  Any family?

  I recalled that her mother lived in Portland, Oregon, but I was, I admitted, unsure whether or not she was still alive.

  Any recent relationships with men?

  Not since a year ago, Susan Vight informed us, when Ottilie had stopped seeing Anthony Eldridge. He was a Wall Street lawyer, several years her junior.

  Had she been depressed lately?

  Here Auburn and Susan exchanged glances and said, yes, of course, Ottilie had been depressed. But that was in no way unusual for Ottilie. After all, it had been five years since her last previous exhibit. She’d naturally been anxious that this show might fail, although clearly this third—and now last—series of “Imaginary Landscapes” was the best and best received to date.

  Susan offered her belief that Ottilie was worried about more than the reception of her work. Ottilie had not completely gotten over her separation from Eldridge, Susan thought. I countered that as well as their emphasis on her depression—for I could easily see that Compson was leading up to a verdict of a suicide, which I didn’t in the least subscribe to. I repeated to him my phone call earlier the previous day with Ottilie and how bright and charming, how not at all depressed, she had seemed.

  Auburn and Susan again exchanged glances, but this time neither commented or contradicted me.

  Auburn then said something he recalled as having bothered Ottilie greatly. About a year and a half ago, he’d hung two of her newer temperas in a group show here at the gallery—mostly, he admitted, to test the marketplace and to get her to show them all. One painting had been sold to a small museum in Massachusetts, a sale that cheered Ottilie a great deal; the other had been sold to a man who’d bought it as a twenty-fifth anniversary gift for his wife. The woman had had an immediate and violent aversion to the landscape, and shortly afterward had filed for divorce. The man somehow blamed Ottilie’s work for the ruination of his marriage. He’d even attempted to sell it back to the gallery—which was most unusual. As Ottilie was out of town at the time and Auburn could not authorize its repurchase without her consent, he’d asked the man to wait until she returned. Instead, the customer told Auburn he’d keep the painting, then had it destroyed. Even that didn’t end the matter. Since then, he’d sent strange and quite nasty letters to both Anders and to Ottilie, in care of the gallery. One letter reached her only a month ago despite Auburn’s efforts to not let any more get through, and it had upset the artist greatly; upset her more than the revelation that her work had been destroyed.

  She began to talk wildly, saying she ought to destroy all her work herself. It was only with the greatest of persuasion and the utmost tact that Auburn had been able to convince her otherwise—and to allow her to go along with the expected opening date of the exhibit. Still, Ottilie remained anxious, he said. In one conversation she’d had with the gallery owner, she’d gone so far as to declare that her paintings were cursed. When Auburn tried to reason with her, Ottilie had become vague, evasive, ambiguous, and yet defensive too. All he’d been able to get out of her was the odd belief that she’d somehow or other managed—through her art—to unmake human happiness, when all she’d wanted was to increase it.

  All three of us felt guilty to one degree or another for Ottilie’s death: Auburn for persuading her to have an exhibit she was otherwise set against. Susan for leaving her alone in the gallery that night. And me, for—well, look how late I was.

  How Compson reached the conclusion he did, I still cannot fully fathom, but our testimony convinced him to reach a temporary finding of death by suicide, following acute professional and personal depression. When I attempted to point out how many easier-to-take, less hideous poisons than Prussic acid existed on the market for the potential suicide, the detective frowned, but said nothing else. When I went on to say it seemed to me—the discoverer of her corpse, after all—that she’d been pointing to a possible clue in that final, grasped-at painting, the policeman actually glared at me, then asked if I was suggesting that foul play was involved. Of course I was suggesting it, I replied. Compson responded that if he were to open a homicide investigation, I would be the primary suspect.

  I remained undaunted by this news. But Auburn and Susan made me drop my request.

  *

  The exhibit reopened the following day, and I promptly purchased the landscape.

  I also decided to do a bit of investigating myself. Toward this end I asked Susan Vight to photocopy for me the names of the guests who’d signed into the vernissage, the names of any who’d called or written in about the show, and the gallery’s usual mailing list.

  The most obvious name present on the final list but not on the other two, and especially not on the list of guests attending the opening, was of course Anthony Eldridge.

  I also spent time probing Susan and Auburn’s memory, searching for hints of anyone who might have attended the opening night but not signed in. Each recalled several people, but they could neither recall nor had ever known their names.

  It was very likely that someone who’d attended the vernissage had later returned on so
me pretext and somehow managed to slip Ottilie the poisoned drink. I was also fairly certain that the landscape she’d grabbed at—which I now owned—would in some way implicate her murderer.

  Because of these beliefs, I went to the gallery almost daily looking for clues within the painting itself, which would remain on public display several weeks longer. This had a side benefit. Susan and Auburn would be able to tell me if anyone had spent longer than usual looking at that same painting, or had offered to buy it, or even had returned often to stare at it.

  To all but the second question, the answer was no. Of course many people offered to buy it. That was easy enough to explain. Ottilie’s death had been reported in all the daily newspapers. The New York Times ran a four-column obituary, with another two columns assessing her place in contemporary art, and naturally both mentioned the exhibit. Her death also drew the curiously morbid, who probably wouldn’t have dreamed of otherwise coming. The gallery was packed day and night. By the end of the first week, all the landscapes had been sold—three to museums, the remainder to private purchasers. It was Ottilie’s greatest triumph. People who’d known her for years all felt it necessary to make an appearance at the gallery, almost as though it were an adjunct to a memorial. Almost all of them seemed to go out of their way to mention this fact to Auburn or Susan, who carefully, politely (following my request) took down their names and addresses. The list of suspects grew.

  I began to realize why Detective Compson had not even begun to investigate: It appeared more difficult than ever to find some clue, some lead, even a hint of one, with so many possibilities and so little to go on really, and with so much attention still focused on Ottilie.

  Then I had a break. One evening I’d come to the gallery quite late, and Susan Vight immediately signaled me over. Anthony Eldridge had arrived, at last, and was still there. Still there and still so distraught that although we’d never before met (Ottilie had mentioned my name, he said), Eldridge allowed me to take him out afterward for a drink. At one of those seedy but quite good Manhattan gin joints made famous by various authors that happened to be located around the corner from the gallery, he began to speak about Ottilie, led on by my sympathy and by his own need to talk. This is what he told me.

  “I loved Ottilie. I never met a woman more to my taste in every way, and believe me, I’ve had my share of women.”

  I didn’t doubt Eldridge. He came from a moneyed old family in New England and possessed a fine figure and what generally these days passes for a handsome—though to me quite character-less—face.

  “In every particular it seemed but one,” Anthony now clarified, “we agreed, Ottilie and myself. But that was an important one—her painting.

  “Of course I knew Ottilie was a serious artist when I met her. That was part of her attraction. For a year or so that wasn’t a problem. Ottilie moved into my duplex, but retained her studio. She went there regularly, almost nine to five, daily, and spent after-hours and weekends with me. It was a good schedule for both of us.

  “About a year and a half ago she began to change. At first I thought that she’d fallen out of love with me. We’d been together a while, and I wanted to make it official. To announce our engagement.

  “Ottilie put me off. She said she wanted to complete enough work for a new exhibit. That was very important to her. And I understood why.

  “It was around then that the incident with that fool Lawrence happened. Did you know that he bought something of hers at the gallery during a group exhibit, then wanted to return it, and when he couldn’t, destroyed the painting he’d bought? That incident disturbed Ottilie very deeply. It was a great shame too, really, because I’d finagled for months to get her out of her studio for a few weeks and down to Barbados. It was to be our first vacation together, and I hoped a sort of honeymoon preview. Away from her work, I assumed, Ottilie would be more relaxed and far more receptive to the idea of announcing our engagement. And it almost worked. It would have, except that the day we returned, it was directly into the storm Lawrence had caused. So my plan for calming her down went right out the window.

  “It was also about then that Ottilie began to express doubts about her work. She’d hardly said anything before, so I was rather surprised. But when I tried to humor her, asking why she was so anxious, Ottilie became vague—which you know was not at all like her. She did tell me that the new paintings ‘weren’t right,’ that they were strange, almost as though done by someone else’s hand. Those were her exact words, in fact.

  “Odd, isn’t it. Ottilie worked partly from memory, you know. But mostly she worked from her imagination. She claimed she’d never seen the original of most of the landscapes she painted in this third series. Some people who did recognize them, however, and there were a few even among our acquaintances, all said she had captured the appearance of those places to perfection. All emphasized how perfectly she’d succeeded in capturing the light for each specific time of year and day.

  “I’m certain you’ve noticed that each painting was given a dated title—‘July 14th, 1935, a quarter past noon’; or ‘April 8th, 1971, nine forty a.m.’ Ottilie was convinced those times absolutely belonged to each painting: She told me that the dates and times arrived in some inscrutable mental fashion simultaneously with each image. She came to believe that no landscape could exist without the exact time and date. But while that made her secure in some respects, it also frightened Ottilie, contributing to her increasingly bizarre idea that some other hand than her own was wielding the palette and brush.

  “Ottilie was otherwise an unusually rational, even a logical woman. You knew her! High-spirited at times, yes, sometimes a bit distracted. But never, well…weird. Naturally I thought her explanations were a fabrication. Something meant to put me off from asking too much about her work, and afterward, to put me off from our wedding. I assumed it was all done to cover up her uncertain feelings about me. I continued to listen to her strange speech, but I have to admit, I ignored much of what she actually said, hoping she would become accustomed to giving up her independence in time to become my wife.

  “She didn’t. Instead she grew more anxious. She began to dread going to her studio every day. She began to fear facing her paintings. Yet once there, she remained later every day. Soon I was having to call her to prod her back home.

  “One evening Ottilie didn’t come home and didn’t answer after my repeated phone calls. I decided to go down to the studio and to instigate some kind of showdown. Now, of course, I see it was the stupidest thing I could have done.

  “I was right about her still being at work. I used her spare key to let myself in. The landscape she’d been working on was right there, facing me as I entered. It was one of her glorious, brooding panoramas, and although not completely finished, it already bore a date and time: November 18, 1991, five minutes after noon. And here’s the real surprise, I knew that place depicted. I also knew what the date and time stood for.

  “Ottilie had painted a section of the Adirondack Mountains where my father and a friend had earlier constructed and now co-owned a large hunting lodge. You probably wouldn’t know the exact area. It’s immaterial anyway. But we’d been going to the lodge since I was a small child and I knew it very well. It had once been an essential part of my life, but lately I’d not gone there and it wasn’t so much forgotten as no longer thought of. Oh, I was certain I’d never mentioned it to Ottilie.

  “I have to admit that at first, the date and time stumped me. Partly, I believe, because I was so utterly astonished to see the locale rendered at all, and then so accurately. However, once I realized how absolutely perfect the view was, next I saw how correctly lighted and shadowed it was for midday in late autumn, how subdued and yet totally right the colors of what leaves remained upon the trees were, how even the slate gray of the sky was correct: unquestionably exact.

  “I attempted to ignore the landscape and instead began to argue with Ottilie about her increasingly strange attitude and habits. Something in how
aloofly she had received me into the studio must have irritated me: I suddenly let go of all my bottled-up feelings, and I have to say in memory it wouldn’t have been very pleasant to witness.

  “Afterward, I sort of broke down. but Ottilie wasn’t angry. She’d been vindicated, you see. All she said to me was, ‘Now you understand, Tony. My painting is ruining me. It’s ruining us too.’ That was when I looked at the landscape again and suddenly realized the significance of that particular date and time.”

  Eldridge hesitated so long I thought I would never find out what he’d discovered.

  “You see,” he finally continued, “on that date, that year, I did something shameful. Probably the only act of my life I can honestly say I am ashamed of. One of the out-of-town guests at the lodge then was a business partner of my father’s from Utah. He was quite wealthy and was very free with his money. Like a lot of Westerners, he was loose with his cash, and he carried a great deal of cash on him at all times. And I happened to be particularly hard up. Desperate really. A typical adolescent stunt: I’d gotten a girl I didn’t really care for pregnant and had to buy her an abortion. I couldn’t let my family know. At any rate, an opportunity presented itself to me, and I stole an amount of money. Of course, the money was missed. Employees were questioned, the cash was never recovered, and finally, through the most circumstantial of evidence, one of the employees was blamed and fired.

  “That made me feel even worse. I could never return to the lodge without reliving my guilt. So I stopped going. I didn’t know how to pay back the man I’d stolen from later on without revealing why I was doing so. I thought of sending it anonymously to the fired employee instead, but I was never able to track him down. The time Ottilie had painted into the lower right hand edge of the landscape? It must have been the very moment I was in the guest’s room, the door ajar, so I could be certain no one else was upstairs or coming up, as I rifled his bureau drawer.