Death Wore a Smart Little Outfit

by Orland Outland

  “Most people with any knowledge and appreciation of art would be appalled at the notion of being aggressive salesmen.”

  Charles smiled. “Some companies need knowledgeable salesmen. Others only need good salesmen who can be taught the buzzwords.”

  Alholm smiled. “Go on.”

  “I’ll finance the gallery. You provide the merchandise.”

  “And your cut?”

  “Fifty percent of the profit.”

  Alholm leaned back in his chair. “That’s not a very good business deal. I open a gallery, do extra work, and so I make a few extra thousand off each deal. So what, if I’ve got to give it to you?”

  “You’ll have to adjust the prices accordingly in each direction.”

  “Forget it. My artists are accustomed to quick return on their works, on an escalating scale. No way I’m gonna get them to take less.”

  “Lie.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Sell something for ten grand. Tell your artist it went for seven five. Give him his cut of that, take your proper cut, give me my proper cut. Then we divide the other two point five in half.”

  “And when he reads in my newsletter that it went for ten?”

  “Tell him you listed the sale price higher than it went for to increase the value of that and future works. Tell him it means you can sell the next one for ten.”

  “And then sell it for twelve five. Lie to the artists. Lie to the buyers. Lie to the newsletter readers.”

  “Exactly.”

  Then they began to laugh. “But listen: Better than owning a gallery ...”

  Fate could not have thrown two more amoral souls together in any more harmonious convergence. They made more money than either of them dreamed possible. Soon they were selling works for twice what they told the artist they were selling for, and a day that made them less than ten thousand dollars each was a slow one indeed.

  Alholm hadn’t meant to kill Terence Yellen. But Terence had found out that Alholm really had been selling his works for the price listed in the newsletter, and was demanding his share of the money. The argument in Yellen’s studio had become heated, Yellen had slapped Alholm, Alholm had punched Yellen and sent him flying onto one of his glass-shard canvases. He had not been unmoved by the sight of the dead man, the man he had just killed. Actually, he had enjoyed it.

  Charles was horrified when Alholm told him that evening. Their game had moved into a whole new level, one he had not been prepared for. But he had been exposed to Alholm for too long, for even as he recoiled from the picture of the dead man that Alholm had so graphically presented, a part of him was calculating. One possibility followed another, falling neatly into place.

  They went back to Yellen’s studio and appropriated the finished works. No one knew of their existence but the two of them and the dead man; they were able to sell these last works for outrageous prices to buyers who asked no questions regarding the legality of the deal.

  Charles picked the next victim, thrilling with the power he held over these men, the power to play God and choose who would live and who would die. He chose Hartley, the sculptor of plaster people, because he’d made fun of Charles’s nose one day in the gallery. He told Alholm to begin reserving Hartley’s incoming works. When they had a sufficient number of them, Alholm killed him.

  Charles must be given credit, in his own way. For he was a genius now, albeit an evil one. The first death had given him the idea for combining the artist and the work at the scene of the crime, to make it look like a series of murders conducted by a sensibility driven mad by modern art. The joke made Alholm fall out of his chair laughing. The withheld works went the way of those of the first dead man, for a fortune, of course.

  They’d thoroughly enjoyed killing Mark Pillson, the performance artist. As a performance artist, there wasn’t a lot of money to be made off him, but Alholm had made the one mistake of his career several years earlier when he’d signed Pillson to a five-year contract as his exclusive agent, back when the NEA Four were getting a lot of attention. His success, however, was not as immediate as Alholm had hoped. Pillson had been whining about Alholm’s not putting enough energy into promoting him, and he had become a bother. They’d had a good time constructing the elaborate setup of televisions, VCRs, and generators, especially since money had been no object, and there was no shortage of street people who’d hoist things about, no questions asked, for the right amount of money.

  Alholm had killed Mortimer Arbuthnott not for amusement but out of necessity, as he saw it. Arbuthnott had also discovered Alholm’s pricing scheme, but feared Alholm’s power in the art world. So he had withheld work from Alholm for months, claiming he was blocked. When he had sufficient stock, he sold them to Le Gallerie. When Alholm had gone there for a party being held to celebrate a show by an artist he wanted to make his own, he’d seen Arbuthnott’s pictures and come close to apoplexy. He’d purchased them all on the spot.

  He’d gone to Arbuthnott’s, pretending to be unaware of his duplicity. Arbuthnott had shown him the note from Stan, and Alholm promptly killed him and easily arranged things to implicate Stan. He thought Stan would be considered a likely candidate to go around killing artists, working as he did slowly but surely while Arbuthnott and his ilk made their fortunes sometimes literally overnight.

  With four dead, a fortune made, and a murderer under arrest, Alholm decided that this scheme, which he thought of as his own particular work of art, was over. He looked back upon it with enormous satisfaction, and was eager to sit down with Charles and hash out a new one.

  And then Charles had lightly passed on the news that not only had he kept a paper record of every one of their transactions, from the largest sale to a secret buyer to the purchase of the TVs and VCRs for Pillson’s death, but that his goddamned no longer senile wife had gotten hold of them. “But not to worry,” Charles had said, “because she was just using them to make sure I didn’t try to get any money out of her in the divorce, and one thing is sure now, I don’t need her - ”

  Alholm punched him then. Then helped him back up. “Now, Charles, partner, old friend, no hard feelings, all right? Let’s sit down over here, have a cigar, and figure out how we’re going to kill your goddamn wife.”

  In a more tolerant world, wherein sexuality would be irrelevant, Doan would have been a general. If there was one thing he was capable of, it was marshaling resources. While the city had its own command center for dealing with Eleanor’s kidnapping, Doan was not content to sit idle and wait for them to figure it out. As a consequence, his own apartment was now a command center for a very different set of forces.

  There were probably no lesser number of maps with pins, jangling telephones, and people running in and out at the latter location than there were at the former. The difference was that at Doan’s, the maps were store-bought MUNI Transit maps, the phones were cellular, and the people consisted of our cast and various sources of information, the variety of which never ceased to amaze Luke.

  Doan’s command center had been set up the same afternoon as Eleanor’s disappearance. Doan’s immediate suggestion of his own apartment had thrown Binky’s mind off the case momentarily. After all, she had been friends with Doan for six months now and still hadn’t seen his apartment. She voiced her objections to this plan based on her certainty that someone as irresponsible as Doan must have an awfully small apartment, though she didn’t put it quite like that.

  Luke assured her that there was no problem there, with a bit of a smile she didn’t like. She unraveled the mystery of that smile when she arrived at the apartment that afternoon, bringing office supplies. The address on Polk had made her wince. No doubt poor Doan, for all his multitudinous little incomes, had to rent a rat trap above one of those porno parlors, and that was why he spent so much time at her place. She resolved to be extra nice to him today and not say anything mean about his enforced squalor.

  Polk, however, is a very long street. Much to her surprise, she realized her cab was skirting
between Russian Hill and Pacific Heights. Rich people in San Francisco are pathological about their heights; they all live in Pacific Heights or Laurel Heights or Presidio Heights. The very presence of a speed bump outside one’s door is excuse enough to proclaim one’s neighborhood Something Heights.

  When the cab stopped before one of the most handsome prewar buildings she’d seen on either coast, she checked the address above the door twice against her scrap of paper. Sure enough, there next to a buzzer, was the name McCandler. Sure enough, Doan’s voice answered the apartment phone, “First Precinct.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I’ll explain later,” he said, hanging up and buzzing her in.

  Upstairs, the great oak door swung open. The exquisite wood floor was covered with Oriental rugs, which were in turn covered with papers and people. The leather sofa in the living room was monopolized by more people quarreling over contradictory notes. The kitchen held three Braun coffeemakers going at full steam, emptied as fast as they were being filled by a sweet-faced girl with a tattooed, shaved head.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Soheila. I’m from Death’s Head Temporary Services. Here, let me take that stuff.”

  “Pleased to meet you. Have you seen Doan?”

  “In the bedroom. Coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Jamaican Blue Mountain or Kona?”

  “Whatever’s ready now, please.”

  She took her cup back to the bedroom and found Doan on the bed with Luke, poring over a list. “And how are we all doing this afternoon?” she asked icily.

  “Oh, hello,” Doan said without looking up at her. “Why don’t you give that stuff to Soheila and get some coffee?”

  “Already done.”

  “Well,” Doan said to Luke, “then that leaves the galleries Alholm dealt with, the artists’ lofts to which he had keys, Charles’s warehouse, and his cabin up in the woods.”

  “I’ll dispatch the men. Hi, Binky.” He gave her a quick kiss on his way out. “Gotta go.”

  “Now then,” she demanded, “how about you fill me in?”

  Doan gathered his papers together. “Sure.”

  “Death’s Head Temporary Service?”

  “Uh-huh. Some groovy kids who can type and file, and couldn’t live on bicycle messenger wages. ‘Service with a Snarl,’ they promise. They all go to Le Club; they’re my biggest fans. Here I am at last with a position, however temporary, of responsibility. How could I resist helping them out?”

  “And the maps?”

  “All the places in the city where Charles and Alholm could be hiding Eleanor, that’s one color pin. Then we substitute another color pin for each of those when we’ve looked there. That’s what Luke’s off to do now. The avenues of escape we’ve sealed off, another color pin. It’s so exciting!”

  “You’re not taking this very seriously.”

  Doan sobered. “This is terrible, and I know it. Eleanor is old and frail and she’s in the hands of psychotics. I also know that if she lives, she’s going to want to make an adventure of this, and if she dies, she’s going to want her last thought of me to be that I’m doing something like this. I’m doing everything I can, and I have a miraculous constitutional makeup that does not allow me to get depressed. Consequently, it’s behavior as usual.”

  She blushed. “Sorry.”

  “No problem.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  “You can help Soheila answer the phones. Look, I’ve got to go follow a lead now, I’ll see you later.”

  “Hey. Wait!”

  “What?”

  “Explain this apartment.”

  “Oh, this,” dismissing it with a wave. “A gift from a man who has forgotten me completely by now. It’s only a payable to his accountant. And I just furnished it over the years with little gifts.”

  “Roche-Bobois leather sofas are not little gifts.”

  “There are men in this world, my dear, who quite literally make enough money in the blink of an eye to pay for such trifles. I simply must go.”

  “Wait again. I nearly forgot.” She pulled out a check and handed it to him with a smile. “Your maid’s pay.”

  Doan returned her smile. “Thanks, love. Rescued from the edge of poverty again.”

  KC was appointed the bringer of good news to Stan, Doan being too busy to even stop and celebrate his beloved’s release.

  “Free!” Stan shouted on the steps of the jail, laughing and throwing his head back, the wind blowing his hair about as he let the sun dance on his face. KC felt a pang. It was small wonder that forceful Doan had fallen for such an elemental being. He himself could never attract anyone like Doan. He stopped short. Why would someone like himself, eminently sane and responsible, want to attract anyone like Doan anyway?

  “How’s Doan?” Stan asked.

  “He’s currently running the San Francisco Police Department,” KC said, not without a bitterness that Stan failed to catch.

  “That’s my Doan! I tell you, if l hadn’t met him, and all this had happened, I’d still be in prison. You can bet on it.”

  “Anyway, what do you want to do, now that you’re free? Hey, let’s go get a beer, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure. I just want to be home early, so I can call Doan and tell him you got me home safe and sound.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  “Yeah! Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “You sure? You’re acting kinda weird.”

  “You know, Cosmo tells girls they’re not supposed to abandon their friends just because a man comes along. The same ought to apply to men, don’t you think? Besides, Doan didn’t exactly do all this single-handedly. Some other people helped.”

  Stan put his arm around KC. “Oh, hey, I’m sorry. I really appreciate everything you’ve done, all of you. And I’m not trying to ditch you or anything, it’s just that, well ...” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been in jail, you know, for a week.”

  KC lowered his head, feeling foolish. “Hell. I’m so stupid. Totally inconsiderate. After what you’ve been through.”

  “I mean,” Stan whispered, even though there was no one around, “you can’t do anything by yourself, you know? ‘Cause there’s always someone around. For a week, you know what I’m sayin’? So I’ve got other reasons for really needing to see Doan. See?”

  KC laughed, as Stan had intended him to. “I do see. But Doan is out right now, so we might as well get a beer and see if we can’t take your mind off your...pressing problem for a couple of hours. Okay?”

  “Okay. Hey,” he said, punching KC lightly on the arm, “you’re a pal. Let’s go.”

  Doan was wearing a dark blue Dior suit and a white satin blouse, with a liberal dousing of Joy. He was going out to the State Streets, an assemblage of warehouses as far as the eye can see, an area too depressingly reminiscent of his childhood hometown for him to confront it without being swathed in the armor of complete and total glamour.

  By one of those fortuitous miracles of which writers are so fond, the empty warehouse next to Charles and Alholm’s was occupied by a group of Doan’s friends, who had a band (Caring Dad Spanks and Cuddles, a name taken from a personal ad in one of the local gay newspapers) and lived there because a, it was free, as the owner didn’t exactly know anyone was living there, and b, they could play as loud as they wanted.

  Doan knocked on the little person door that was part of the big truck door. A disheveled character opened it some minutes later. “Oh, hi, Doan. Come on in. Jack’s not here.”

  “Hello, Tim. I’ll wait,” Doan said.

  The warehouse had plenty of skylights, a fact that was more distressing than cheering to the occupants, who were inclined to react to dawn by getting into rather than out of bed. Thus, they had cleverly rigged blackout blinds that could be opened and closed by means of a handle, which Doan now used to open them. Tim groaned loudly. “Do you have to?”

  “Yes. Look, dear, I need your help.” He filled Ti
m in on the essential details. “So I need to know if anyone’s heard anything unusual from next door.”

  “Umm, no. Not me, I’ve been asleep all day. But Jack’s been in and out today. If you want to wait for him.”

  Doan sighed. Seeing an old flame would not exactly be the perfect ending to this most imperfect day. How trying police work was! “Okay, I’ll wait.”

  He didn’t wait long. A tall, lanky redhead came in and stopped short at the sight of Doan, perched on a crate in the center of the room. “Hello, Jack.”

  “You never call,” he accused.

  Doan sighed. “What can I say? We’re just not...right for each other.”

  “You’ve been seeing Stan Parks.”

  “Oh, is it all over the place?”

  “And now it turns out he’s a murderer. See where leaving me gets you?” he ended with a slight smile, indicating that he knew Doan was right.

  “In all kinds of trouble, I have to admit. But, look ...” and he went through it all again for Jack. “Have you seen anything at all?”

  Jack thought a moment. “Yeah. Usually there’s a truck comes there in the morning and again in the late afternoon.” He thought for a second. “But I haven’t heard any today. Or yesterday either.”

  Doan got up - jumped up was more like it – with a chill. Eleanor and the killers could be in the very next building this very second. “A phone, love. Do you have a phone?”

  “Sorry. You’ve got to go to the corner for that.”

  “They could see me.”

  “I’ll go. Who do you want me to call?”

  “My place. The number’s…”

  “I remember,” he said, repeating that wry smile and causing Doan to melt.

  “Oh, Jack. If only you didn’t prize living in poverty and filth, we could have been so happy.”

  “If only you understood how I prize independence and time for creative endeavors. I’ll go make that call. What should I say?”

  “Ask for Luke Faraglione, and tell him to bring six squad cars, sirens off, and a warrant to the back door of the warehouse.”