“It’s not what you know…”
“Exactly.”
“Then what’s your assessment of Joanna’s talent?”
Rose hesitated. “Between us?”
Joe D. nodded.
“She’s awful. Awful. I’m taking my entire three weeks’ vacation during July so I won’t have to look at those dreadful …things every day.”
“Did you have any choice in whether to exhibit her?”
“Oh, there’s always ‘choice.’ No one from the Alliance told me I had to show her work. It’s all very discreet. You know, would I mind taking a look at the portfolio of a very talented young artist who just happens to be related to our biggest benefactor. It must be like when the Mafia asks you for a donation to the Daughters of St. Cecilia or something.”
“What do you know about Joanna?”
“Her background, you mean?”
Joe D. nodded.
“Actually, we’ve spent quite a bit of time together. I usually do that with the artists we feature here. I need to publish a short bio for our catalogs. But it also helps us hang a show properly if we have a feel for the artist’s personality. At first I dreaded spending time with Joanna. I didn’t like her paintings and I usually find that if I don’t like someone’s work, I don’t like their personality. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t like having her forced down our throats. But there is something compelling about Joanna.”
Joe D. thought he knew what she meant. “It’s her confidence. It may be a mask, but it’s hard to resist.”
“Exactly. It pulls you in, and pretty soon you’re seeing things through her eyes. She’s had a surprisingly rough life, you know. Her father died when she was a little girl, in a car accident, I think. Her mother died of cancer just six or seven years ago. They never had much money. Her uncle only acknowledged her after both her parents were dead. Before that he wanted nothing to do with her. Some sort of family feud, I think.”
“He didn’t talk to any of his family.”
“From what I gather, Joanna basically threw herself at her uncle’s mercy. She’d just graduated from college; Carnegie-Mellon, I think. He set her up in that enormous loft of hers, and I suppose he gave her enough money so that she didn’t have to work. The irony is, she might have been better off with a job. She’s got a lot going for her, and if she didn’t have a rich uncle she might have found out what she’s good at. It certainly isn’t art.”
“Did she describe her relationship with her uncle?”
“I gather it wasn’t too smooth, but then they’d only met seven years ago. She tended to condescend to him, I think. Talked about him as if he were some sort of baboon who just happened to make a lot of money. It’s one of her least attractive qualities, this superior attitude. It’s also unwise to bite that hand that feeds you.”
Rose Dixon escorted Joe D. back through the gallery. “The artist who created these doors? He spends up to six months on each one. This is his first major show, and he’s well into his forties. He works as a bicycle messenger part-time to support himself. I think about him whenever I’m tempted to feel too sorry for Joanna Freeling.”
Joe D. agreed that she was hard to pity. “Have you sold any?”
“Two, actually. Not enough for Paco to quit his messenger job, but the show has a few weeks left to run.”
They shook hands near the entrance. “We’re planning a big opening bash for Joanna this summer. Underwritten by you-know-who. Maybe I’ll see you then.”
Joe D. laughed. “Somehow I don’t see her inviting a private detective who’s been nosing around her life. But if she does, I’ll be there.”
Eight
Joe D. walked uptown from the Artists Space. Soho became the Village at Houston Street, then the Village dissolved into Gramercy Park, which tapered into Murray Hill. Eventually he reached Midtown and then the Upper East Side. Home. He hadn’t planned on walking the entire way, but the succession of neighborhoods exerted an irresistible pull. He was still new to the city, which had always seemed like another planet to him, though he grew up just sixty miles away. New York was everything that Waterside, Joe D.’s hometown, was not: big, sophisticated, sometimes dangerous, often impersonal, lively, frenetic, walkable. He’d always figured that Manhattan would be an easy place to get to know, with its orderly grid of streets and avenues. But the grid masked a very subtle pattern of neighborhoods and neighborhoods within neighborhoods. Within five blocks of Joe D.’s apartment were five dry cleaners, three newspaper and cigarette stands, two diners, three pharmacies, two Korean markets, two video stores, and restaurants of half a dozen cuisines. The stores you selected from among this vast local choice were the real determinant of which neighborhood you lived in. It determined the faces you saw every morning, the blocks that became so familiar you recognized every stoop, every window box. It determined the likelihood, even, that fate would send a stray bullet or a homicidal maniac in your direction. When he moved in last fall, Joe D. thought he’d never feel comfortable. He was beginning to think he was wrong.
The message light was blinking when he entered the apartment. In the past, the steady red light had been a reproach to him each time he opened the front door. Blinking, it made him feel productive, necessary.
He pressed the “play” button. “This is Seymour Franklin. Please call me as soon as you can.” Franklin then gave a number that Joe D. didn’t think was his office. Strange, since it was only 4:00.
Joe D. decided to change before returning the call. Alison had urged him to invest in a few suits, but Joe D. insisted on wearing his “regular” clothes on assignments. He usually wore a white or blue button-down shirt when he was working, along with a pair of black or blue jeans. He took off the white oxford he was wearing and put on instead one of the faded T-shirts he favored.
Franklin answered after three rings. “Have you made any progress?” he asked after Joe D. introduced himself.
Joe D. filled him in, wondering if Franklin would consider what he’d learned “progress.”
Apparently he didn’t. “That’s nothing new,” he said dismissively. “Mona is a cold bitch and that Joanna Freeling is a no-talent slut.”
The was a bitterness in Franklin’s voice that Joe D. hadn’t heard before. “What’s going on?”
“I’m fired, that’s what. Mona Samson sent her legal goons over to my office this morning to escort me off the premises. Apparently she didn’t have to wait for the will to be probated to start exercising her control. The bitch.”
Joe D.’s first thought was mercenary: Would this mean the end of his job too? “What does she have against you?”
“Against me personally? Only that I’m a grubby merchant who she had to rub shoulders with once in a while at retail industry charity events. Mona wants to wring every last cent from Samson Stores, even if it means damaging our long-term prospects. We need to be investing in store remodelings, better inventory systems, new point-of-sale technology. That takes cash. George knew this. Wall Street knows it. But not Mona. She’s interested in jacking up the dividend to support her life-style.”
“There must be enough money already.”
“For people like Mona there’s never enough. She pays more for a single dress than most Americans make in a year. She employs more household staff than the average small business. George used to complain that she bought antiques the way some people buy lottery tickets. Compulsively. Even with four houses, there aren’t enough rooms for all the crap she buys. George told me she wanted a place in Paris. Maybe she needed someplace to stash her loot, I don’t know. George put his foot down.”
“So she had you fired to jack up the dividend to buy more dresses and antiques?” Joe D. was a bit skeptical. “As the owner, couldn’t she just, I don’t know, order you to raise the payout?”
“She knew I’d fight her. I never even kowtowed to George, and he was notorious for his short fuse. Mona’s greed gets in the way of everything. It’s not necessarily a question of needing it, mind you
. It was a question of keeping score, of money for money’s sake. Now that she’s in control she’s cashing in. And I’m out.”
Joe D. took a deep breath. “Does this mean that you want me to stop?”
“On the contrary. Now more than ever we need to find out who killed Samson. My contract has two years left on it, so I’ll be able to afford you, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
That was exactly what Joe D. was wondering.
That night Alison prepared her Frigidaire Surprise, which consisted of everything in their refrigerator not yet in an advanced stage of decomposition, sautéed in olive oil and tossed on whatever pasta they had lying around. They opened a bottle of white wine and even lit a candle.
“It’s good tonight,” Joe D. said after a few bites. “The bits of moo shoo pork you threw in really make a difference.”
Alison smiled. “I wish I had time to do some real cooking.”
“This is real,” Joe D. protested.
“Real what?”
This stumped him. He left the table and retrieved a piece of paper from his office, which during meals was relocated from the dining area to the living room couch. He handed it to Alison. “Recognize any of these names?”
She glanced over the list. “This one’s head of a big insurance company, I don’t remember which. Other than that…who are these guys?”
“They’re the directors of the New York Art Alliance. They were with Samson the night he was killed.”
“You think one of them’s involved?”
“I don’t know if anyone’s involved, other than some thug after a couple of bucks. But I have to assume it’s more complicated than that. Otherwise I’d be out of a job. As for these guys, who knows? I have an appointment tomorrow with the head of the organization, Stuart Arnot. Maybe he’ll be able to shed some light on Samson’s mood that night, his relations with the other directors.”
“Such a busy detective. Have some more Surprise.”
Later, in bed, Alison read that morning’s newspaper while Joe D. started in on Alison’s paperback of Bonfire of the Vanities. After a few pages he put it down. “You know, maybe it’s time to think about a larger place. Now that I have some real work, this apartment’s feeling kind of cramped.”
“It’s nice to hear you sounding optimistic,” Alison said, without turning away from the paper.
“Well, we can’t live here forever, not with me working on the dining room table.”
Alison said nothing, which was always a bad sign.
“What’s bugging you?”
“Nothing,” she said, but the two syllables told him something was wrong.
“Alison, what’s wrong?”
She waited a moment, then put down the paper. “You really want to know?”
She issued this as a challenge. He knew that if he answered, he’d have to lie, so he said nothing.
“How can you talk about moving when we’re not…”
He could finish the sentence for her, and wished he’d never brought up the topic of a new apartment.
“When we’re not even married,” she finished after a short, emotional break.
“Why do the two things have to be connected?”
“You know they are.”
He did. The subject of marriage simmered just below the surface of their relationship, invisible but threatening, like high blood pressure. He could feel it assert itself whenever they had an intimate moment or an angry argument.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t bring up the subject until we were living together for a year,” Alison continued. “But then you talk about getting a new place like we were roommates or something, and I can’t help it.”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” he offered weakly.
She got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. “I’m too old to be living with someone.”
The bathroom door closed between them. Alison was thirty-seven, Joe D. just thirty-two. The age difference meant a lot to Alison, but not to him. He found Alison the most attractive woman he’d ever known. He still couldn’t get used to her. Some nights he’d awaken and roll over and just stare at her in the shards of neon light leaking in through her curtains. He loved the way her face looked at these times, planes of shadow, sharply defined angles, soft, textured skin. Joe D. had first met Alison in the summer, when her face was slightly tanned, and small freckles dotted her nose. Now she’d lost her tan and he thought she looked even better, her pale complexion accentuating the luminous green-brown of her eyes, the fullness of her lips, the rich red-brown of her hair.
It was kind of ironic, her wanting to get married. When they first met it was Joe D. who pursued her. She had flinched from every emotional advance until her resistance just eroded. Now that she’d surrendered, however, her need for reassurance, for commitment, was almost overwhelming, and Joe D. found that he was the one flinching.
Alison’s father had left her mother for a much younger woman when Alison was in college. She always blamed this for her skittishness about relationships, her reluctance to plunge in and, once in, her fear of being abandoned. But Joe D. suspected it went deeper. He figured there was something about being an only child, the seesaw of smothering attention and loneliness, that made her approach every serious relationship with a self-defeating skepticism.
Sometimes he thought he should just swallow hard and marry Alison: He loved her, and when he thought about his future, which was something he did often lately, it always included her. So why couldn’t he do it? Damned if he knew. He had his own brand of skepticism, he supposed. His parents had never divorced, but they hardly had a close relationship. Their most typical form of contact had been a kind of half-serious bickering that Joe D. and his younger sister, now a nurse on the Island, had often joined. Then, almost fifteen years ago, his father, a Waterside cop, had been shot in the stomach during a bank robbery by an amateurish but desperate junkie. The bullet pierced his small intestine, which was reparable, and shattered his lower spine, which was not. His father had been confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and the bickering turned from half-serious to completely bitter. Joe D. had read somewhere that people tend to marry a version of their most difficult parent. He recognized this as pop psychology, but still occasionally wondered which parent had been the most difficult, his father, whose moods had grown darker every year, or his mother, who sparred with his father but basically put up with his torment year after year, swallowing her frustrations, but making herself an object of pity and source of guilt in the process. Was Alison a version of either of these two people? And would marriage mean adopting one of these roles himself? Pop psychology, true—but it was almost irresistible.
Alison returned from the bathroom and switched off her reading lamp. She got back into bed, her back turned away from him. After a few moments he turned off his light and shimmied over to her. “I love you,” he whispered into her ear, then nuzzled the back of her neck, which he knew she loved.
“I get so scared,” she murmured. He could feel her shiver. “I have this fear that you’ll leave.”
“I’m not leaving, Alison.”
“Not today. Not even soon. But a year from now, two years. When I think about it, about your leaving…”
“I’m not leaving,” he repeated. But her body didn’t relax until nearly fifteen minutes later, when she fell asleep. Joe D. lay awake, wishing there was some way, other than the way she wanted, to reassure her.
Nine
The New York Art Alliance was headquartered in a huge limestone building just off Central Park West. It bespoke money rather than art, and was decidedly better kept than its neighbors, even in this well-kept neighborhood.
Joe D. opened the heavy wrought iron and glass front door and entered an imposing lobby. He noted the sweeping staircase, the immense crystal chandelier, the lustrous marble floor—but failed to spot a single painting or other piece of art. Off to one side, through an open door, he saw a woman sitting behind a wooden desk. He cro
ssed the lobby: The sound of his heels on the marble floor echoed sharply throughout the two-story entryway.
“I’m looking for Stuart Arnot,” he told the woman. She was pretty and preppy and probably vastly underpaid. But something in her confident-bordering-on-smug expression told Joe D. that she was highly gratified to be working in such close proximity to the art world, if not to art itself.
She smiled and picked up the phone. “A Mr. DiGregorio to see Mr. Arnot,” she said. A moment later she replaced the receiver. “Mr. Arnot’s secretary will be down for you in a few minutes. Won’t you have a seat.” She gestured towards a sitting area adjacent to her desk.
Joe D. decided to look around instead. Her desk sat at the front of a semicircular room, off of which were several small but elegantly appointed offices. As Joe D. passed each office, its inhabitant looked up at him, rather startled, he thought, as if unaccustomed to visitors. Like the receptionist—like the building itself, for that matter—they were a well-groomed bunch, male and female, with the self-satisfied air of people who were enormously pleased to be just where they were.
“Where do they keep all the paintings?” Joe D. asked the receptionist when his tour was complete.
She looked understandably put off by the question. “We support the arts,” she said, as if this were self-evident. “We don’t actually display art. The Alliance develops programs for art education in the public schools, tours of our museums…” She said “our museums” as if she and her coworkers were part-owners “…Lecture series, multimedia presentations. That sort of thing.”
“Was George Samson a major contributor?” Joe D. asked. She seemed about to answer when another woman appeared in the doorway.
“Mr. DiGregorio? I’m Estelle Ferguson, Mr. Arnot’s secretary. Won’t you come this way?”
Estelle Ferguson was somewhat older than the receptionist, but just as tastefully turned out. She too exuded an air of satisfaction, as if she were pleased and relieved to be able to earn money while keeping brute commerce at arm’s length. She wore an off-white silk blouse and a fashionably short black skirt. Alison had told him once that of all the parts of a woman’s wardrobe, the shoes were the best mirror of personality. Estelle Ferguson’s shoes were on the flat side and perfectly polished, more sensible than fashionable. Joe D. followed her back into the entryway and up the wide marble staircase. She walked briskly, her left hand gliding along the thick marble handrail, which she had to know was immaculately clean. At the top of the stairs she turned left and led him down a long, narrow corridor, at the end of which was a small sitting area and a secretary’s desk. She knocked softly on a polished mahogany door and opened it without waiting for a response. Joe D. entered the room. “Mr. Arnot,” she said, motioning across the room. Then she shut the door behind him.
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