Death Wore a Smart Little Outfit

by Orland Outland

  “Wannabes. Groupies. Assorted hangers-on.”

  “Your kind of people. You handle that end.”

  “Hmph!” Doan snorted.

  “All right. The cops, bless ’em, have arrested an artist because the killings look like some kind of artistic protest against modern art. Now, I ask you, is that obvious or what? So if it’s an artist, it’s a frustrated, second-rate one.”

  “Stan is a genius.”

  “Fine, fine, for the sake of argument, we will assume nothing I say can possibly apply to Mr. Parks. A critic? I doubt it. Any critic worth his salt can destroy a reputation without lifting a finger. Now, that leaves us with dealers and collectors. Aha! People with a financial interest. Are you following me?”

  “Every step.”

  “Collectors might kill artists to raise the value of their works.”

  “So might a dealer.”

  “Very good. It’s a little transparent, a little cynical, a little too ... ridiculous? I like it.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “We’re not just talking about greed here,” Hart continued. “We’re talking about desperation. Someone who needed the profit a dead artist’s works would fetch.” He leaned back, satisfied with himself. “There you are. Find somebody associated with the dead artists - their dealers, their collectors.” He rose up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, the Simpson defense team is calling.”

  “Et tu, Brute?” Doan asked, but Hart only smiled.

  “All right, be a love and call me if you think of anything else. And I may call on some of your legendary private detectives, though I have a pretty good opinion of one certain police detective. I might even be...willing to do a few more divorce cases.”

  Dollar signs glittered in Hart’s eyes. “Doan, my resources are at your disposal.”

  “Really, darling,” Doan insisted to Stan through the jail’s waiting room glass, “this is for the best.”

  “Swell. And how much longer do you think I can save myself for you in here?”

  Doan made an unpleasant face. “I’ll talk to Luke and see what he can do about getting you a room of your own, all right, angel?”

  “They’re called cells, light of my life.”

  “Yes, yes. But this really is the best place for you. No one can accuse you of anything while you’re in here.”

  Stan narrowed his eyes at Doan. “Got a question for you. What if, as long as I’m in here, no one else gets murdered?”

  Doan smiled. “I have that all taken care of.” He rose. “Have to go acquit you, love. If it helps, I got a message from Binky on my machine, and she’s on to something. So just you hold tight. Kiss, kiss.”

  Binky was on her couch when Doan let himself in.

  “You know,” she said as soon as the door shut, “you’re absolutely right.”

  “Of course I am,” Doan said, coming into the living room. “What am I absolutely right about this time?”

  “Someone is framing Stan.”

  “No? Really? Do tell.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it as soon as you make us some coffee.”

  “Why me? No, never mind, I know. I’m the maid. Fine, I’ll bill you for this whole afternoon.”

  The doorbell rang. “Get that, will you?” she said, lost in thought.

  Doan gritted his teeth and started to say something, but he’d already noticed that his retorts were having little or no effect on Binky. “Fine,” he said darkly, opening the door to find KC.

  “Keep her occupied, would you, so she’ll stop making these unreasonable demands on me.”

  “Hi,” Binky said, sitting up. “Do you have a pen and some paper?”

  Doan looked at him and rolled his eyes. “Told you.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” she announced.

  “Good thing,” Doan responded. “For a minute, I thought you’d had a stroke, and that as far as you were concerned you were a child back in the family bosom with a hundred servants to do your every bidding.”

  “I went to that gallery today.” She gave the details of her afternoon.

  “How hideous,” Doan cried. “Let me get you that coffee.” There was little in the world that could arouse Doan’s sympathy, but when a friend suffered a shock to the sensibilities, he was all comfort and solicitude. “Did she make you look at this stuff, too?” he asked with distaste, holding with his fingertips a flyer she’d brought back from the gallery, announcing a big to-do that night for a big-name East Coast artist.

  “No, I got out just in time. Didn’t even have to buy anything, thank God. But at least we got a clue. Which I’m going to pass on to Luke, just as soon as I finish this cup of coffee…”

  “Ummm ...” Doan interrupted her. “Maybe you shouldn’t do that,” he said, allowing the flyer to come closer to his person as he examined it.

  “What? Why not?”

  “Well, what can he really do with that, after all?” he began to rationalize. “Wouldn’t he need a court order to make the gallery owners tell him who bought all the dead man’s work? And even if he found out, that might tip the killer off to the fact that the cops were on to him.”

  Binky regarded Doan suspiciously. “What are you up to, Doan?”

  “No good,” KC decided.

  “You’ll see. just ... just keep that little tidbit to yourself for a while, okay?”

  “Doan ...” she began to protest.

  “Until tomorrow morning,” he said, half asking and half declaring.

  “Until tomorrow morning,” she caved in.

  “Good. That’s settled. Now, anyone for more coffee?”

  Doan was a law-abiding citizen, sort of. That is to say, he abided by laws that made sense to him. Laws against robbery, arson, rape, and such seemed eminently sensible. Laws against murder seemed sensible, too, unless it was someone really awful you were killing, like a robber, arsonist, or rapist, and in that case you should be free to do a little justice. Laws against breaking and entering made sense, too. But he wasn’t really planning to break in anywhere, after all, just...sort of...get in under false pretenses. But it was all to free an innocent man, after all, and he wasn’t really going to take anything, just...sort of...look around.

  After leaving Binky’s, his plan percolated in his mind. As soon as Binky had reported her failure to extract a name, he’d known that he’d have to get into Le Gallerie on his own to find out who’d purchased Arbuthnott’s last works. The only problem had been timing, but the flyer had solved that problem. Once home, he’d called Art.

  “Talk to me,” Art answered the phone.

  “Art, my love, did you by chance get an invitation to a ...”

  “Yes,” Art cut him off. “If it is within one hundred miles of here, I got an invitation.” Doan heard Art grunt as he hoisted a box full of unopened mail onto his desk. “Where?”

  “Le Gallerie.”

  Art began to shuffle through the box. “I’ll find it. What’s up?”

  “You’re taking me there tonight, a party for Claudius Brautwurst.”

  Art laughed. “You’re kidding, right? That’s better than John Sex.”

  “No, that’s his real name. And with a name like that, how could he be anything but an artist?”

  “Or an accountant. Or a popcorn magnate. Here it is. Ugh!”

  “What?”

  “Someone spilled coffee all over ... oops. That’s one of Claudius Brautwurst’s paintings, printed on the cover of the invitation. Sorry.”

  “No problem.”

  “Are you sure we have to go? Can’t I send you as my emissary?”

  “No, Art. I need you there with me. You’ve got to point out all the incredibly rich collectors to me, help keep me sane in the midst of all those horrible people and, at a certain time in the evening, cover for me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re better off not knowing. That way, if I get caught, you can honestly admit you had no idea what I was up to.”

  “Doan, if my not
buying your items anymore has gotten you in some kind of financial trouble, let me know. Please, don’t turn to a life of crime. I’d have no one left to amuse me if you went to jail.”

  “I have no intention of leaving you unamused. I’m just going to find a way to take a peek at their client register and see who bought out the last works of Mortimer Arbuthnott the Third, artist and victim of the SoMa Killer.”

  Art digested this. “You think someone killed him to make the value of his works go up?”

  “It’s the first clue we’ve had, and there’s no time to waste. I’ve got the most adorable little thing waiting for me to get it out of prison, and time’s a’wastin’. Pick me up at seven, will you, there’s an angel.”

  Doan and Art arrived fashionably late at the gallery, which was a warehouse one could conceivably say had been converted, if one counted the addition of track lighting and a deafening sound system as sufficient redecoration, and if one appreciated the ambience of the grease and oil stains on the concrete floor, the lingering particles of some industrial fiber (that got Art sneezing immediately), and several pieces of heavy machinery that had been left by the previous tenants. Ambient house music burbled like aural bubble bath in the background.

  Never let anyone tell you that names don’t mean anything. Claudius Brautwurst was just what the name implied. Beefy, admittedly, but in a most unappetizing way. His forearms were strong but pudgy, connected by thin elbows to strong, pudgy upper arms, and so on, so as to appear to Doan like a string of sausages twisted into the shape of a man. “You’re right,” he was telling someone as Doan and Art entered the gallery, “I am rude. And obnoxious. And drunk. You know what else I am? Brilliant. Rich. Hung like a horse.” Doan visualized this, based on the look of the rest of him, and decided celibacy had its appeal. “I have rights you don’t have, because of that. That’s life.”

  “You owe me a hundred free items,” Art hissed at Doan.

  “Mr. Mill!” a woman shrieked across the room from them, and began to fly toward them. She had the rictus smile and drawn neck tendons of the well-starved. Doan half expected her to take flight, go “awk awk,” land on Art’s head, and start pecking. “What a thrill!”

  Art smiled. “Thank you so much for inviting me.”

  Like Doan, a veteran of the cocktail circuit, his skills in such situations were great. “Such a pleasure to see all these new artists.”

  She began to quiz him in the most unsubtle terms about how much column space she could expect the next day, and Doan took advantage of this moment to steal off on his own. He marked the social architecture of the gathering: The young people in black, obviously the artists being presented along with Brautwurst tonight, were gathered around the nonfunctional machinery in the center, which on closer inspection was revealed to have been gutted and made into a bar. Along the walls, where the paintings were displayed a suitably alienated distance apart, were the guests this show was obviously meant for: silver - haired husbands and their tiny wives. Doan noticed that most of them had in attendance a third person, who he presumed would be their personal curator. He moved closer to one party to hear what sort of wording they used to justify their undoubtedly high salaries to their employers.

  “Sure, the Crash of ’29 caused the end of Modernism,” the man was saying, “as the big buyers were drained of assets in the Crash. The Crash of ’87, that’s a whole different story. Contemporary artists are seen as an investment now, which they weren’t seen as back then. They’ll tell you the bottom fell out of the art market in ’9O; that’s not true. It’s like an IPO, you just have to get in early. The resale value on a Brautwurst, for instance, well! A year ago, five thousand bucks for a big canvas; now, you could turn that same canvas around for, oh,” he whipped a calculator out of his jacket, “say, a hundred seventy five grand.”

  The wife grabbed the husband’s arm. “Get one. Now!”

  “Hold on!” the man went on, almost physically holding them back. “Forget Brautwurst. He’s old news, you missed the boat. Concentrate on these unknowns. Go to all these shows, buy everything by one particular artist that you can.”

  “Which one?” the husband asked.

  “Doesn’t matter. just get seen at these openings. Hire a press agent to get your picture in the papers. Get a reputation as a collector. You do that, then they’ll notice who you’re collecting, bam! Prices on the guy go through the roof. You sell half, you donate the other half to museums.”

  “Just…give them away?” the husband asked.

  The man put a hand on the husband’s shoulder and started walking him away from the old news. “Absolutely. Look, drop by my office tomorrow morning. I’ll show you how to use those donations to shave off all the taxes on all the profits you make on all the other stuff.”

  Good Lord, Doan thought, as he looked with new eyes at the third party in every scene and noticed the number of calculators being whipped out. They haven’t brought their curators - they’ve brought their accountants!

  “Crap!” he heard in Art’s unmistakable voice.

  “But ...” the hostess was spluttering, as a crowd drew around to hear the famous columnist.

  “Garbage. Look at all this!” he shouted, waving a hand around. “All these attractive, healthy, and well-to-do young people, with nothing but time on their hands, and what do they do with these gifts so rare in the world? This! This phony alienation, this fashionable disgust. These aren’t criticisms of mass culture, they’re not even ironic tributes to it. They’re part of it! You’re not mocking Michael Jackson or the Jetsons, you’re celebrating and affirming them and validating everything cheap in our culture.”

  His angry eyes swept the crowd. “You have the nerve to dismiss the old masters as irrelevant, while you enshrine Gilligan’s Island. You have the nerve to dismiss the classics of Western literature, while you bow down before Charlie’s Angels. Shame on you!” he shouted, masking the soft click as the office door shut behind Doan.

  On the other side, Doan smiled to himself. Art Mill was feeling better already.

  The room was not only devoid of filing cabinets, but of papers. There was a desk made out of a door laid on a pair of wooden horses, but as it was covered in graffiti, it was no longer a door on a pair of wooden horses but rather a work of art. There was a phone on one side, a personal computer on the other. Doan sat down at the desk in a chair that looked like the bastard child of a director’s chair raped by a leatherman’s sling. He turned on the computer and waited. He was presented with a baffling menu that gave him options for word processing, databases, accounting, and so on. Accounting seemed most likely to hold the information he was looking for. A dizzying array of possible files were presented for his inspection along with an option to copy these files to another disk. Mercifully, there was a box labeled Blank Formatted beside the machine, which he took to mean usable. Files called “SALES1” and “SALES2” made eminent good sense to him, and he copied them from the computer to the floppy disk, and then copied some more files for the hell of it, and kept copying until he was informed that he’d filled his disk. He turned off the computer, tucked the disk inside his purse, and hoped he could sneak out as easily as he’d snuck in.

  He was in luck. As he’d assumed, Art was long gone, waiting in the car for him. But Claudius Brautwurst was holding forth eruditely.

  “Fuck ’im! Fuck ’im! He wants to fuck with me, I’ll punch his fuckin’ lights out. Where is he? Where is he?" Cameras appeared from nowhere and began flashing to capture the sight of the great genius being held back from the door by one man while one on the other side tried to wipe the spilled wine off Brautwurst’s shirt. “I’ll make him cry. You bet your ass I’ll make him cry!”

  The pictures in the paper the following day caused a revival of interest in Brautwurst, who had been out of fashion for a month or so, and prices jumped on his works again. The husband and wife who had been talked out of buying any Brautwurst, of course, fired their accountant.

  Doan got into the
car and slammed the door with a groan. “Is even the most wonderful man in the world worth all this?”

  “You find anything?”

  “Yes and no. I never knew you were so passionate about art!”

  “I’m not. I got Anthony Chamberlain, our art critic, to write something I could memorize. Pretty damning stuff, eh?”

  “You bad man. Well, never mind all that for now. Let’s eat before I perish.”

  Hunger made them reckless, and they ended up at a new restaurant on Folsom in the heart of SoMa. The green floor, pink tables, black and white chairs, and loud synthesized music, combined with the standard-issue black and brown paintings on the walls were enough to dissuade Art’s appetite, but Doan pulled him on in. “Two, please. Come on, this is nothing after that depression factory,” he insisted as they followed the host to their table. “And right now, I don’t even care if it’s nouvelle, I’m starving. We’ll just order six of whatever we want.”

  Doan thought he had prepared himself for the worst by assuming nouvelle. Upon opening the menu, however, confusion set in.

  “What is this?” Art demanded to know. “Birth School Work Death, fourteen ninety-five; Loneliness and Shopping, thirteen ninety - five; Three Minutes to Midnight, twenty-one ninety-five?”

  There were no descriptions underneath these titles to indicate what one would be ordering. Doan caught a waiter. “Are you ready to order?”

  “Well, no. What’s Three Minutes to Midnight?”

  “An expression of grief, a feeling of emptiness, of hopelessness.”

  “That’s not terribly appetizing. I’ll take Love and Death.” He turned to Art. “It’s thirty bucks, so maybe there’s some food on the plate.”

  Their meals arrived quickly, to their dismay. Love and Death turned out to be a white plate with a small target propped up on it, a heart painted in the target’s center, next to a spent bullet lying on a bed of lettuce. “Could I get Roquefort?” Doan asked. The waiter gave him an affronted look and disappeared, not, presumably, to comply with the request.