The Death Artist

by Jonathan Santlofer

  “Better get it to the lab,” said Mead.

  “I also have these.” Kate laid out the blurry Polaroid, the collage, the enlarged fragments of the Madonna and Child, explained how they were sent to her, what she thought they meant.

  “Why you?” asked Brown.

  “That I don’t know.”

  Mead’s mouth had gotten even tighter. Is this why the chief of police had sent her to him—for baby-sitting? “You show these to Chief Tapell?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well . . .” He sucked his teeth again. “We’d better get a tap on your phones—and a guard at your place.” He scribbled a note.

  “Tapell’s already seen to that,” said Kate.

  “If McKinnon is right,” said Brown, “we should be talking to everyone in the New York art world.”

  “I agree,” said Kate. She offered up a Gallery Guide. “A list of every gallery and museum in the city, by area.” She nodded at Mead. “I’d send uniforms around for statements from every one of them.”

  “Would you?” Mead gave her another lipless smile. “Well, thanks, McKinnon. But let’s just pinpoint the obvious first. That okay with you?”

  “I think we should do them all,” said Brown, flipping through the Gallery Guide.

  “Maybe you’ve got the time to question every little art world gofer.” Mead tugged at his bow tie. “But I’m dealing with a dozen other cases and don’t have the manpower.”

  “Look,” said Kate. “I’m here to help, not hinder. But you’ve already got three bodies. You really want to go for four?” She glanced at Brown and Slattery. “I can start with the staff of the Contemporary Museum, because I know them.”

  “I already got statements from them,” said Slattery. “Since that was Solana’s last stop.”

  “Good work.” Kate offered the young detective a smile. “But if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk with them, too.”

  First one painting, then another fills the small screen, each somewhat fragmented, all intensely colored.

  The camera pulls back, reveals the paintings on a museum wall, a woman walking slowly down a ramp, white silk blouse, black slacks, hair loose around her shoulders.

  His breath catches in his throat.

  “Les Fauves,” says the striking woman on the screen, an earnest look, eyes on the camera, warm, inviting, intelligent. “That’s French for wild beasts.” She smiles.

  He smiles, too. Wild beasts. He likes the sound of that.

  “And it was not a complimentary term,” she says, eye-brows arched. “It was attached to a group of artists—Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet—simply because their work was different, uninhibited. So different that the paintings were put into a room all by themselves, isolated from the more conventional art at the Parisian Salon d’Automne in 1905. The paintings were so bold, so . . . powerful that they actually incited fury in others.”

  Different. Uninhibited. Isolated. Oh, God, how she understands him. “Yes,” he whispers at the small screen. “I hear you.”

  “ ‘Color for color’s sake,’ said the painter André Derain.” She gestures at one painting, then another. “You see, it’s all about color—heightened, exaggerated, distorted. Gaudy purples, bright pinks, acid greens, blood reds.”

  Blood reds. It brings him back to Ethan Stein, the floor of the artist’s studio. So beautiful.

  “My name is Katherine McKinnon Rothstein. And this is . . . Artists’ Lives.” The camera zooms in for a close-up.

  He moves in, too, skin picking up electric static from the TV screen, so close he believes he can smell her perfume, feel her incredible warmth.

  He freezes the frame.

  Kate’s smiling face hovers, a shimmering pixilated-dot screen of color, more Impressionist than Fauve.

  He slides his cheek against hers.

  15

  Schuyler Mills, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, had a headache. Was it the fact that no one—absolutely no one—at the museum appreciated him? Or was he just light-headed from skipping one too many meals and overdoing it at the gym this week? He flexed his biceps, pleased. Wouldn’t his high school chums be surprised! Lardo, they used to call him. Well, forget that. There wasn’t an extra ounce of fat on Mills’s six-foot frame.

  Now he checked his reflection in the glass as he headed into the museum, straightened his blue-and-red-striped tie. He looked great. Distinguished, too, with his prematurely gray hair.

  If only the museum would understand his worth. Not that anyone ever had. Even back in art school it was the other students, the ones who could dazzle with a quick splash of paint, that got the professors’ attention. Probably why he switched to art history.

  Schuyler passed through the reception area not bothering to say hello to that new girl they’d hired—the one with the pierced nose, lip, and God-knew-where-else. Whose decision had that been? And then, to make matters worse, he stepped into the elevator at precisely the same moment as his colleague, his junior colleague, Raphael Perez. He couldn’t believe his poor timing.

  The two men just barely nodded at each other.

  Mills smoothed back his hair; Perez played with a set of keys in the pocket of his sleek Andrew Fezza blazer.

  “New jacket?” Mills asked.

  “Yes.” Perez ran his long fingers along the double-breasted lapels. “If you must know. Brand-new.”

  “So that’s where you were all day yesterday, shopping.”

  “I was busy,” Perez hissed through tight lips, “with art business—outside of the museum walls. I do not subscribe to that curious old notion that a curator should spend his days locked in an ivory tower. There’s a fabulous world out there: young artists, new things happening. But I don’t imagine you know about that—or care to. You’re too busy, what—reading?”

  “You would if you could,” said Mills. “No, I was writing. Comments for my talk at the Venice Biennale. I want to say something meaningful about American art today—not simply spout New Age rhetoric.” He smiled, mean.

  Perez stared at the floor-indicator panel, spied Mills’s reflection in the polished steel doors. He felt like smashing the man right in his arrogant face, but wouldn’t dare. He’d caught a glimpse of Mills in a polo shirt, the bulging muscles; and though Raphael Perez, at twenty-seven, might have almost twenty years on the man, Mills, he was pretty sure, was stronger. Damn it. He sneered a smile at his colleague.

  The elevator doors opened. The two men hesitated.

  “After you,” said Perez.

  Schuyler Mills sauntered ahead of him thinking that was exactly the way it was and always would be: Raphael Perez after him.

  Kate pushed through the elegant smoked-glass doors at the Fifty-seventh Street entrance to the New York Museum of Contemporary Art—the last place she had seen Elena alive.

  She wanted a thorough accounting of everyone’s whereabouts for the past week. But how to get it? Sure, she could ask them outright—Where were you the night that so-and-so died?—but she’d learned from experience that it was better to get an answer without asking a question, to get someone talking while she figured out their weak spot, what they wanted and what they thought she could do for them.

  The multipierced receptionist, hunched over a biography of Frida Kahlo, immediately sat up straighter as Kate entered. Kate offered her a smile, moved quickly past the bronze wall plaque, which listed, among other patrons, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Rothstein.

  Now, in the hallway, twenty, maybe thirty feet, a bowling alley of pure heavenly white, all six feet of Kate had suddenly become diaphanous. Cool fluorescent tubing created the illusion—the work of an artist, not an architect. Some people hated it. Kate loved it. Here, she was Tinker Belle, floating.

  The main exhibition space, with its vaulted ceiling and white-tiled floor, had the look of an ultramodern swimming pool, minus the water.

  For a moment, Kate thought they must be in between shows. Then she spotted the practically invisible white papers, individua
l squares of toilet paper, pinned to the museum’s enormous white walls.

  On closer inspection, each had a word—love, hate, life, death, power, weakness—scribbled, in what appeared to be ballpoint pen, in the center of the squares.

  Minimal? Conceptual? Disposable? All three, thought Kate, sniffing at the one-ply tissue. And unscented.

  “Kate!” Senior curator Schuyler Mills strutted across the highly polished museum floor. The toilet paper flapped on the walls. “I’m so glad you’ve stopped by.” He smiled broadly, then rearranged his features, frowned. “I tried to catch you at Bill Pruitt’s memorial, but—” The curator leaned in, whispered, “Was he drunk, or what?”

  “What do you mean, Schuyler?”

  “Well, drowning in his bathtub? Come on.” The curator bit his lip. “I guess I shouldn’t say that. Forgive me.” He went uncharacteristically solemn. “Oh. I hope you got my card. I am so sorry about Elena. She was such a talented girl. We had the nicest conversation just before her performance. Poor kid was a bit nervous. I gave her a glass of brandy—you know, the stuff I keep on hand to ply generous museum patrons, like yourself.” Another smile.

  “Did you speak to Elena after her performance?”

  “No. I went directly up to my office for a little catalog editing.” He paused. “I often work at night.”

  “It isn’t lonely?” she asked, thinking, Can anyone verify that?

  “I like the quiet.”

  Kate could easily picture the curator, all alone, in his office, his nose buried in a book. He didn’t seem to have much social life outside of museum and art functions. She shifted gears. “Did you know Ethan Stein?”

  “Horrible,” said Mills, shaking his head. “But no, we never met.”

  “I wonder”—Kate tapped her lip, formed her question carefully—“if he was still doing minimal paintings?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You didn’t follow his work?”

  “I’m not particularly interested in Minimal art.”

  “No?”

  “No. I like art with more life in it.”

  “But you have to admit Stein made a contribution to the movement.”

  “I suppose.” Mills shrugged.

  “And you never included his work in a show, never visited his studio?”

  “I already told you, Kate. His work didn’t interest me. No.” The curator’s lips twisted into a suspicious smile. “You’re starting to sound like a cop. The role hardly suits you, Kate.”

  “Really?” Kate laughed. “You mean you don’t see me as the Angie Dickinson type—tough, beautiful, not a hair out of place?”

  “Angie who?”

  “Next you’ll be telling me you never heard of Cagney and Lacey.”

  “Are they TV characters?” The senior curator sneered. “I never watch television. Never. Oh. Except for your wonderful series. Of course.”

  “Of course.” Kate tilted her head, threw Mills a skewed look.

  “No, really. I did. And it was wonderful.” He smoothed back his hair. “Normally, I have neither the time nor the patience for most popular culture.” He sniffed. “If you ask me, it’s destroying the civilized world. A disease that won’t go away. Like herpes!”

  “A lovely analogy, Schuyler. Is that Proust or Molière?”

  The curator did not smile. “I am simply trying to uphold a tiny fragment of taste and intelligence in this declining culture of ours.”

  Kate’s eyes fell on one of the fluttering squares of toilet paper.

  “I had nothing to do with that!” Schuyler’s lips turned white, the words barely able to squeak through. “This exhibition came to us via an independent curator. I am not, I’m afraid, the museum director.”

  “Perhaps you will be now that Amy is leaving.” Kate laid her hand on the arm of his blue blazer. “You know,” she said, “I could speak to the museum board on your behalf.”

  “Would you?” Mills’s stiffness melted.

  “Sure. Give me your schedule for the past month. That way I can not only be up on what you do, but can let them know how hard you work—which I’m sure you do.”

  “You have no idea,” he said. “The work is my life. I’d be happy to write something up for you.”

  “Oh, don’t go to any trouble, Sky. Just Xerox your date book.”

  * * *

  Raphael Perez plucked a four-by-five color transparency from the mess on his desk, held it to the light—a man licking the very obvious sweat from his own armpit—and placed it on one of several stacks of slides, transparencies, and photos. It was time he’d gotten this damn exhibition finished and on the museum walls—and if Bill Pruitt hadn’t fought him it would have opened when it was supposed to—a full year ago. Now Perez worried that “Bodily Functions”—which he was absolutely sure would put his name on the art map—might just be a tad out-of-date when it finally opened in the fall. He prayed the art world’s notoriously fickle fascination would hold. Of course, in the end, it would hardly matter. Curator at the Contemporary was just the beginning. Now, Director . . . He rolled the title around in his mind while offhandedly glancing at another possible contender for his show. In this one, an eight-by-ten color glossy, a young man was perched naked on the toilet, his face contorted with obvious effort. Perez tossed it to the floor. If he had the time or the energy, he’d have torn it to pieces and flushed it down the toilet, just for the irony.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” said Kate, leaning into Perez’s office, taking in the young curator’s straight nose, full lips, eyes fringed with dark lashes.

  Perez jumped up like a jack-in-the-box, pulled out a chair, nodded for the important museum board member to sit—all so fast, he actually created a breeze in his windowless office.

  “I was just walking through the exhibition,” said Kate, very nonchalant, “thought I’d say hello.”

  “How wonderful,” said Perez. “I hope you enjoyed the show. It’s such a commentary, don’t you think?”

  “I’d say . . . more sanitary than commentary.”

  Perez laughed too loud, too long, too hard.

  Kate collected the photo from the floor. “Is this someone applying to clean the rest rooms, or is he just trying to prove he knows how to use one?”

  “Artists,” said Perez, almost sneering. “So many out there, and all of them looking to be famous. Perhaps you’d like to use him in your next book.” He arched his dark eyebrows.

  “I suppose I could devote a chapter to bathroom art, trace it back to Duchamp’s famous Urinal. But I’d rather leave all that heady stuff to curators, like yourself.” She smiled. “How’s your exhibition going?”

  “Delayed. I’m trying to get it on track.”

  “I’ll bet that’s a lot easier without Bill Pruitt breathing down your neck. Oh, God, I can’t believe I said something so tasteless. Forgive me.”

  “No need to apologize to me.” The young curator tried to suppress a smile.

  “It’s just that I know Bill had rather conservative tastes.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “You know, Raphael, with Bill Pruitt gone, and Amy Schwartz stepping down, well, the museum is going to need a lot of new direction.”

  The curator sat up like an eager puppy.

  “You should give me an account of everything you’ve worked on for the past month—and I mean everything, your entire schedule, day and night. The board should know who is working hard—and who isn’t—if you know what I mean.”

  Perez nodded his head like a puppet.

  “I know,” said Kate. “You can Xerox your date book for me.”

  “I use a Palm Pilot and, unfortunately, delete the prior week. But I’ll write it all out for you, everything I worked on.”

  “Make sure to account for your nights, too, any dinners with collectors or artists, any nights spent working here or at home, even if it was just thinking about museum work.”

  “The past month only?”

  “I think that would do to g
ive the board an idea, don’t you?”

  Perez nodded again, drew a hand through thick black hair set off by a shocking streak of white just to the side of his widow’s peak.

  “By the way, I hope you got to talk with Elena, meet her the night she performed here. She is—” Kate took a breath, fought to keep her voice even. “—was an extraordinary person.”

  “I’m afraid I had to leave right away,” said Perez. “A dinner engagement. A couple of artists I know. I went to their studios, then we ate in a little dive on East Tenth Street.”

  Four blocks from Elena’s apartment, thought Kate. “There are so many wonderful little restaurants down there. Where did you eat?”

  “Let me think . . .” He tilted his head one way, then the other, the white streak flipping back and forth like a cartoon question mark. “Oh, yes. It was called Spaghettini.”

  Kate made a mental note. The fact is, she knew the place, pictured the tiny garden in back, remembered drinking cheap red wine there with Elena, both of them digging into bowls of pasta. “You see, Raphael, that’s a perfect example of the kind of information you should write up for me to take to the museum board. Dinner with artists. Totally work-related. So just jot it all down. The date, who you were with. Where you went. Like that.”

  “I’ll have it for you right away.”

  “Good,” said Kate.

  The Contemporary Museum’s auditorium was down a wide flight of stairs that an artist had currently transformed by coating every inch of it with gold-leaf paper. A comment on consumerism—making the ordinary—a staircase—extraordinary? Or just gilding the lily. Whatever, thought Kate, it was glorious.

  Now Kate stood on the stage looking out at row after row of empty upholstered seats. It was here that Elena gave her last performance. She tried to reconstruct the last minutes of that night. Richard, back to his office to prepare a brief. Willie, home to paint. Elena, she remembered, wasn’t in the mood to go out. A kiss good night, and that was it. The End.