Vanishing Act

by Seth Margolis

  “My work in progress,” she said without irony. The white canvas was covered from top to bottom with black type. Joe D. dutifully began to read: This is dummy type, it read. For design purposes only. It is intended to show the position of type for size and layout. This is dummy type, for design purposes only…Joe D. read it twice before realizing that the message repeated itself over and over again, perhaps a hundred times. He wasn’t quite sure how to respond, but Joanna Freeling’s expression, confident but expectant, indicated that a response was called for.

  “Interesting,” he managed. Whenever he and Alison visited galleries, he noticed that she always responded to the most outlandish works—the blank canvases, the collages of shattered pottery, the S&M compositions—with a judiciously intoned “interesting.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” Joanna said, again assuming the compliment. Like the first time he’d seen her, at Samson’s funeral, she was dressed in black. This time, instead of a dress, she wore a sleeveless black T-shirt tucked into black jeans. Both served to emphasize her small but appealing figure, and her pale but not unhealthy complexion. Joe D. guessed that she was in her late twenties, perhaps early thirties. She had a thin, delicate nose, a small, roundish mouth with pale lips, and big, very dark eyes. Her thick black hair was cut short, giving her an almost pixie-like quality. She looked vulnerable and impervious at the same time, as if she possessed some superhuman power only she knew about. She was undeniably attractive, but not in an obvious way. Her appeal became apparent only gradually, but once recognized, it was erotically insistent.

  “I’m applying the finishing touches, as they say. I have an opening in three weeks at the Artists Space.”

  She picked up a tiny brush, dipped it into a small jar of what looked like black ink, and began dabbing at the canvas, filling in the lettering where gaps were evident.

  “I use a stencil to create the lettering,” she explained. “Please, have a seat.” She waved her brush at a black metal folding chair nearby. Joe D. remained standing. “But there are always gaps. This is my least favorite part, as you can imagine. But part of what I want to say has to do with exactness. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Interesting,” Joe D. offered a second time. Joanna Freeling clearly enjoyed having someone watch her at work. He was aware that he was witnessing a performance, and decided to get down to business. “Were you and your uncle close?”

  She answered without breaking off from her work. “Not really. He never understood what I was trying to do.”

  Joanna made this sound like a devastating failure on his part.

  “And yet he left you a nice chunk of money in his will.”

  “So I understand.”

  She sounded surprisingly nonchalant about so much money. “Thirty-two million is a lot of money, considering you weren’t close.”

  “It is a lot of money, but not to Uncle George. Anyway, it’s thirty-four million. The market was up yesterday.”

  Joe D. had to smile. “But the money must mean a lot to you.”

  She continued to focus on her painting. “Money isn’t what I’m about.”

  A statement, Joe D. thought, that only a very wealthy person could afford to make. “Do you support yourself by painting?”

  “Yes.” Then she added, almost blithely, “plus I have an income.”

  “From George Samson?”

  She dabbed at a capital D. “That’s right.”

  Joe D. walked over to a stack of paintings leaning against the wall and flipped through them. They were similar to the one Joanna was working on, black type covering white canvases. One contained the repeated message, If the subway stops between stations, do not get off the train. Wait for the conductor to give instructions. Another canvas repeated this message, but in Spanish. This has been a test of the emergency broadcasting system, began another.

  “It’s all about messages,” Joanna offered cryptically, joining him at the stack of paintings. “About the messages we receive from society.”

  He considered using interesting a third time, but thought better of it and changed the subject.

  “When did you last see your uncle?”

  “I don’t know. A few weeks ago? Longer?”

  She was standing uncomfortably close, Joe D. realized, and took a step back.

  “Did you have plans to see him?”

  She shook her head and took a step towards him. “No.”

  He thought about the G on the cabdriver’s fare sheet. “The night he was killed, you had no plans to see him?”

  She frowned. “Look, I don’t know what Mona told you…”

  “She didn’t tell me anything, other than that you were mentioned in the will.”

  Joanna thought about this for a bit, then, mercifully, returned to her canvas. “The police seem to think it was a hijacking, but if it wasn’t, then I’d say you should take a good hard look at Mona Samson.”

  Ah, Joe D. thought with satisfaction, the mudslinging has begun.

  “She’d do anything for money, you know. She was born dirt-poor. In Mississippi somewhere.”

  “I didn’t notice an accent.”

  “She lost that on the way.”

  “On the way where?”

  “On the way to becoming Mrs. George Samson, queen of New York society. You might think her ancestors came over on the Mayflower, the way she talks. One thing you can say about Uncle George, he never made any bones about his roots. I think he was proud of them in a way. It was Mona who pushed him onto the charity circuit.”

  “Sounds like you don’t like her very much.”

  Her brush froze for a moment, then resumed its dabbing at the black lettering. “Let’s just say we share a mutual dislike. She disapproves of me, and I of her. She cannot stand it that George’s only relative is an artist.” Joe D. saw her grin slightly at this, as if she relished calling herself an artist and equally relished the effect it had on her aunt.

  Joe D. reminded Joanna of her relatives in Brooklyn.

  “Oh, them,” she said with a shrug. “George had nothing to do with them. Though I think he might have been amused at the fuss they made about his funeral.”

  “What kind of fuss?”

  “It seems one of them—a second cousin, I think—found out that George was going to be cremated. That’s a no-no to Orthodox Jews, apparently. They protested to Mona, who’s not even Jewish, for god’s sake. I think she was afraid of negative publicity—you know, ‘Society queen shuns husband’s poor relations’—so she gave in.”

  “Mona wanted him cremated…”

  “That’s right. She’d have probably skipped the funeral altogether if it wouldn’t have looked bad. Anyway, I’m the only family George was in touch with. Mona’s probably got loads of family—‘kin,’ I believe they’re called—back in Dixie, but she won’t have anything to do with them.”

  “After Mona dies, who inherits her money?” The brush froze momentarily a second time. “I do,” she said evenly, then resumed painting—or dabbing. “The shares are held in trust for me. She gets the income while she’s alive, but she can’t invade the principal.”

  She has a pretty firm grip on financial reality for an artist, Joe D. thought. “How much was your uncle paying you, before he died?”

  “He didn’t ‘pay’ me anything.”

  “But you said you had an income.”

  “That’s different. Uncle George established a trust for me. I receive the dividends, which amount to about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, give or take.”

  Trust fund or not, it still sounded like she was on her uncle’s payroll. “So the thirty-two million—sorry, thirty-four million—will mean quite an increase.”

  “I have no plans for it. I won’t move. I won’t stop painting. Perhaps I’ll give more to charity.”

  Joanna Freeling struck Joe D. as unbearably smug. He supposed you had to have a lot of confidence to spend all day stenciling gibberish onto canvases and then calling yourself an artist. Or p
erhaps this really was art. But weren’t artists supposed to be chronically insecure? Maybe if she veered away from her “messages” into a new type of art she’d lose some of her smugness, and maybe that’s why she never created anything different.

  “What were you doing Wednesday night?”

  “Ah, the cloak-and-dagger stuff!”

  Joe D. waited for a reply.

  “Actually I was at home.”

  “Alone?”

  “No, I was with someone.” Joe D. was about to ask for more specifics when she added, with, he thought, some relish, “My lover.”

  “Does he live here with you?”

  “He has his own place. But he stays here now and then.”

  “Mind if I ask his name?”

  “Howard Lessing.”

  Joe D. pulled a small pad from his pocket and wrote down the name. He asked for Lessing’s telephone number. Joanna gave it to him with some impatience in her voice. “He’s a writer,” she volunteered. “Very talented.” He thought he detected an ironically lascivious tone here.

  “Did you know that your uncle had affairs?”

  “You saw my aunt. Wouldn’t you fool around?” she said by way of answering.

  “Did you know any of his girlfriends?”

  “You assume there was more than one?”

  “You know otherwise?”

  “No, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume there was a whole string of them. In any case, no, I didn’t know his girlfriends, plural or singular.”

  No one did, Joe D. thought morosely. He’d checked with Samson’s secretary, Felicia Ravensworth, earlier that day. She was being retained by Samson Stores to help smooth the transition to the new CEO. After that, she was on her own. Felicia had seemed appalled at the idea that her late employer would cheat on his wife. “He didn’t fool around,” she said earnestly. “And believe me, I was in a position to know.” Felicia was a short, heavyset woman who appeared to be one of the few women on Samson Stores’ executive floor to take advantage of the employee discount; her dress had a polyester sheen, a cloying faddishness that Joe D., inured to the pricier goods of Alison’s store, spotted instantly. Photos of her husband and children littered the top of her desk. Joe D. doubted very strongly that Samson had been having an affair with his secretary, although if he’d been searching for the polar opposite of his gauntly sophisticated wife, he’d have found it in Felicia.

  Samson had been remarkably successful at keeping the identity of his girlfriend a secret, unless of course someone knew more than they were saying. “Think hard,” he told Joanna. “Your uncle showed no particular affection for anyone in particular?”

  “He wasn’t the type,” she said drily.

  She stepped back a few feet from the canvas and cast an appraising glance at it. “Finished,” she said with satisfaction. She looked at Joe D. “This can be really exhausting, you know. Physically and mentally.”

  Joe D. imagined file clerks and telephone operators felt the same way about their work.

  She walked him back to the door, affording him a second look at the cavernous loft. Roller skates would be handy here, he thought. Or a golf cart. Interestingly, the vastness of the space didn’t overwhelm Joanna. If anything, it flattered her, heightening, in contrast, her self-possession. How unlike the diminishing effect of Samson’s huge library on Mona.

  “Here’s a card. If you think of anything else I should know, please call.”

  She walked to within three inches of him and took the card. “I may stand to gain financially from my uncle’s death,” she said, looking directly into his eyes. She made financially sound like a word you’d use to describe an advanced stage of cancer. “But money is not what I’m about.”

  Joe D. couldn’t help glancing around the gigantic loft. In a city where space is the most precious of commodities, Joanna Freeling was sitting on a gold mine. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and left.

  Joe D. found a pay phone on the corner of Grand Street, and managed to extract from the operator the address of the Artists Space. It was just a few blocks away, on West Broadway.

  The gallery occupied the entire ground floor of an old industrial building. A huge plate glass window offered a view of the immense, whitewashed space within. Joe D. opened the front door and immediately noticed a sign on the wall just to the left of the entrance.

  THE ARTISTS SPACE

  A NOT-FOR-PROFIT GALLERY

  FUNDS PROVIDED BY:

  THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE

  HUMANITIES

  AND

  THE NEW YORK ART ALLIANCE

  Joe D. couldn’t help smiling. It looked like Joanna Freeling’s upcoming gallery debut was being financed by her late uncle’s pet charity. He’d debated whether or not to bother talking to someone at the Artists Space. Now he knew he had to.

  He walked over to what looked like a receptionist’s desk. Actually it was a white Formica countertop with a huge and luxurious arrangement of flowers on one end. He wondered, briefly, who paid for the flowers, the National Endowment or the Art Alliance. Behind the counter, perched on a barstool, was a woman. It took Joe D. a few seconds to reach the reception area, and she’d surely heard him open the door, but she didn’t look up from a magazine she was reading until Joe D. said “Excuse me.” She read a few more lines and then glanced up at him.

  I’d like to buy every painting in the gallery, he was tempted to sneer. “I’d like to speak to the director of the gallery.” Her hair was jet black and cropped to look like a silent film star’s. Standing, her black dress probably came no lower than six inches above her knees; sitting, it just barely made it over her hips. He handed her a card.

  He noticed a trace of interest in her expression as she read his card, but she quickly suppressed it in the interest of cool. She slithered off the stool and ambled to the back of the gallery, where she opened a door and closed it behind her. Alone in the huge gallery, Joe D. started to stroll. The exhibit was called “Open Doors”—the name was stencilled on the wall above the receptionist’s desk, along with the name of the artist: Paco. No last name (or perhaps no first), just Paco. Paco had constructed a series of life-size doors, perhaps twenty in all. They were lined up along the gallery’s walls, looking almost functional. Joe D. tried to open one of the doors, figuring it was probably fake. But it opened to reveal a surprisingly realistic painting of a suburban backyard, recessed a few feet behind the door. There was a small patio with a table and chairs, a bicycle lying on its side, a small, neat garden, and, visible on the near horizon, several other houses with yards doubtless identical to this one. Paco was obviously a very accomplished painter. The landscape was extraordinarily well-executed and the perspective had been perfectly rendered to achieve an uncanny realism: Joe D. almost felt as if he could step through the door. He closed it and felt momentarily disoriented. Then he tried another. The contrast couldn’t have been more dramatic. This one was a recessed rendering of a long apartment-house corridor, lined with door after door. Again, Joe D. had the sensation of being able to step through the actual door into the artificial space. He closed this second door with a sense of relief, though he couldn’t help being impressed with Paco’s skill. The receptionist had returned to the exhibit area and was walking towards him, still in no apparent hurry. “Ms. Dixon will be right with you,” she said, then detoured around him and returned to her post.

  A moment later he heard footsteps. Ms. Dixon had emerged from the gallery’s only functional door (other than the entrance). She was a tall, very thin woman, in her thirties, Joe D. guessed. Her hair was curly and, in contrast to the receptionist’s, mercifully unruly. Her wide smile, as she approached Joe D., was another welcome change.

  “Mr. DiGregorio? I’m Rose Dixon, director of the Artists Space.” She extended a hand.

  Joe D. thanked her for seeing him.

  “Now, what can I possibly do for you?”

  “I’m looking into the George Samson murder.” He saw her eyes widen. “And I�
��ve just been talking to Joanna Freeling, Mr. Samson’s niece.”

  She took a deep breath. “We’d better talk in my office, if you don’t mind.”

  She led him back through the gallery to the door from which she’d emerged—Joe D. was almost surprised when she walked through it. It opened onto a short hallway, off of which was her small, windowless office. Posters of past exhibits lined the walls. Every horizontal surface was piled with books, catalogs, and papers. Her cluttered office made a sharp but pleasant contrast to the rather stark gallery. Rose sat behind her desk—a slab of Formica supported by two metal trestles—and he took the only other chair, across from her.

  “I thought George Samson’s death was random,” she said.

  “It probably was. I’ve been hired by his successor at Samson Stores to make sure.”

  “You don’t really suspect Joanna of having anything to do with it, do you?”

  Joe D. assured her he didn’t. “But I do need to know as much as possible about her relationship with her uncle.”

  “I still don’t know what that has to do with the Artists Space.”

  Joe D. liked Rose Dixon, but he thought she was playing dumb. She had an approachable, user-friendly face and big, bright brown eyes that seemed incapable of subterfuge. “Joanna told me she has an exhibit coming up here.”

  “That’s right. This summer.”

  “Summer must be your slow season.”

  She smiled, understanding where he was headed. “Actually, we get a lot of tourists during the summer months.”

  “But not serious collectors. I noticed your gallery is funded by the New York Art Alliance.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And their biggest donor is…”

  “George Samson,” she interjected. “Look, I know what you’re after. You’re trying to imply that Mr. Samson strong-armed us into exhibiting his niece.”

  “I was only trying to find out…”

  “Of course he did,” she interrupted a second time. “That’s the way the art world works. It’s no different from Wall Street or Hollywood or any other field.”