The Death Artist

by Jonathan Santlofer

  Trip exaggerated a yawn.

  Kate couldn’t decide if it was an act, or if it was the grass that was making him so zonked out.

  Trip slid into a seat beside the big desk, propped his feet up, popped an unfiltered Gauloise into his mouth, lit it. “So, uh, what about this . . . memorial?”

  “A few friends want to put something together,” said Willie. “We thought you’d like to be included.”

  “Oh . . . sure,” said Trip, picking a piece of tobacco out of his stained teeth. “Put me down, man . . . for anything. I’m, like . . . there.”

  Kate looked past Trip to a heavy steel door. “Is that where all the creative juices flow?”

  “There’s nothing going on at the moment,” said Trip, suddenly coming to life.

  Kate felt like bounding across the room, smashing right through that steel door as if she were Superman. But no. If Trip was her man, she had to play it cool. Knowledge was power, and right now she didn’t feel like giving any of it away.

  Trip pushed himself up from the desk. “It’s getting late. I’ve really got to get going.”

  “So soon?” asked Kate.

  “Appointment,” said Trip, stabbing his cigarette out.

  “We’ll be in touch,” she said, sliding the Ethan Stein card into her bag.

  “What?” Trip’s eyes darted from Kate to Willie, then back to Kate.

  “About the memorial.” Kate smiled.

  “Oh. Right.” Trip hustled them toward the door. It closed behind them, accompanied by the sound of sliding locks and dead bolts.

  “Did you know Elena was making a CD?” Kate asked, as she and Willie headed toward the car.

  “She mentioned it. But that was a while ago.”

  “Who was she making it with?”

  “My friend Darton Washington.”

  Kate remembered the name now from the phone list. “Was it ever finished?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m sure, if it was, I would have heard it.”

  Why hadn’t she heard about it? Kate would have to find out.

  But first, Janine Cook.

  The young woman looked almost comfortable on her velvet couch, in her almost penthouse apartment on almost Park Avenue.

  She was good-looking—dark brown skin, chocolate eyes, straightened hair done up in a bouffant. Her black leather micromini covered the top six inches of her fishnet stockings, and her tight cream-colored sweater, which was making a display of her nipples, still could not mask the fact that there was something decidedly mannish about her—the deep voice, tough mannerisms—that reminded Kate of the actor Jaye Davidson, the one in The Crying Game.

  It had been some time since Kate had seen her, but still, she was struck by how much older, harder, Janine looked.

  What exactly could have been the basis for the friendship between Janine and Elena?

  Willie settled into a shiny leather recliner.

  Kate took stock of the apartment, the furnishings—the couch was top quality, the rug looked authentic Persian, the wineglasses stacked on the built-in bar appeared to be crystal. “Looks like you’ve done well for yourself,” said Kate, smiling at the young woman.

  Janine said, “Uh-huh.”

  Kate tried again. “Your place is beautiful. Did you furnish it yourself?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Janine’s purple-lidded eyes narrowed.

  Kate took a breath. “Just that either you or your decorator has wonderful taste.” Another smile. “Me, I have to depend on a decorator.”

  “Yeah. Well, my decorator fuckin’ died. So I had to do it all by my lonesome. Sad, huh?” Janine leaned back on the couch, eyed Kate across the marble slab of coffee table.

  “Look, Janine, we’re all hurting,” said Kate quietly.

  Janine closed her eyes, her hard edges momentarily blurring.

  Elena’s hair in pigtails; Janine’s in cornrows. The jump rope snagging on broken concrete. So little sunlight able to penetrate row upon row of ugly buildings that made up that damn housing project in—what’d they call it—the courtyard? What a laugh.

  “Elena was a real good friend to me,” said Janine.

  “I’m sure she was,” said Kate softly. “So help me out here, okay?”

  Janine opened her eyes. There were tears in the corners.

  “Can you tell me anything that might make sense of why this happened?”

  Janine turned away, chewed the purple lipstick that matched the color of her eyelids. “What’s to tell?”

  “Come on, Janine,” said Willie. “Elena told you stuff. Girlfriends, and all that. Is there anything?”

  Janine’s jaw went rigid. “You a cop now, Willie?”

  Kate touched his arm to silence him. “Look, Janine, it’s just that we all want to know what happened. Don’t you?”

  “And what—exactly—do you think I can tell you?”

  “You lost a friend,” Kate said, her voice cracking. “But I lost a daughter.” Now there were tears in Kate’s eyes.

  That seemed to do it. Janine actually laid her hand on Kate’s, cried, too.

  “Janine,” said Kate, patting a hand with purple-pink fingernails long enough to scare a bobcat. “Was Elena still involved with Damien Trip?”

  Janine nodded, but seemed to toughen with the sound of his name. “I saw them together, yeah, about a week ago.”

  “A week ago?” said Kate. “Are you sure?”

  “If they were still together,” said Willie, “then Trip lied.”

  Janine eyed Willie, then Kate. “You already talked to Trip?” She drew a breath, her eyes suddenly fearful.

  “It’s okay, Janine.” Kate threw Willie a look.

  “Elena’s dead,” said Janine. “I don’t want to talk about her anymore.” She turned away, but Kate could see she was fighting some real emotion. She tried putting her arms around the girl, but it was no good. Janine shrugged her off. “I can’t help you.” She stood, tugged her mini over her thighs. “I don’t know nothing about it.”

  “I asked you not to say anything.” Kate smacked the elevator button. “Were you intentionally trying to screw things up?”

  “Sorry.” Willie looked down at his shoes.

  “I’m taking you home.”

  Willie blinked. A woman, struggling. A huge, dark room. Murky water oozing up between rotting floorboards. He squeezed his eyes shut, but it was still there. Shadows and moonlight. A man and a woman, fighting. The woman turning, her face pulling into focus. Kate.

  “Willie? Willie.” Kate shook him. “What’s the matter?”

  Willie had fallen back against the elevator wall.

  “Jesus, Willie. Are you okay?”

  Willie rubbed a hand over his face. “I had another flash.”

  “Well, you’re under a strain,” said Kate.

  “You were in it, Kate.”

  “In what?”

  “This last one. This flash, or whatever it is. You were there.”

  A light rain dappled the car’s windshield. Inside, Kate and Willie sat silent.

  She lit another Marlboro, cracked the window, felt the wind and rain on her face. A memory—another rainy day—floated into the back of her mind.

  “I have a story about visions,” said Kate. One she had tried to forget, though lately it had been gnawing away at her all over again. “It was a long time ago. When I was on the Astoria force. My last case, though I didn’t know it at the time. A runaway. It seemed routine.” Kate stared through the wind-shield, the rain heavier now.

  Now it was another rainy day, and a different set of wind-shield wipers dragged and squeaked.

  Kate lit a Winston, checked the handwritten map beside her, picked up speed at the junction of Queens Boulevard and Twenty-first Street. Please make me wrong about this one, she thought, squeezing down on the accelerator. The monolithic apartment buildings slid by like a movie. The deserted oil tanks, her next landmark, then a turn onto the nearly deserted street that led to the Astoria dump.
r />   I KNOW WHERE SHE IS BECAUSE I KNOW WHERE I PUT HER.

  The words, just below the map, in a looping script and red Magic Marker, looked as if they’d been written in blood.

  Young Detective McKinnon ’s palms were sweaty as she brought her car to a stop just beside the large rusting Dumpster. She drew her gun. Her boot heels crunched in the pitted gravel as she got a foothold on the side of the Dumpster, pulled herself up.

  That naked battered angel on top of wavy black plastic, aluminum foil fanning out from behind her head.

  What was it about that last case that kept nagging at her? Kate stared at the rain, the wet road, the blur of the traffic lights. “The department had brought in a psychic,” she said to Willie. “I listened to her. We spent almost two weeks following dead-end leads based on dreams and flashes and ESP. Maybe it was just easier to let someone else do the work. I was busy. Too busy. By the time I got back to the case . . . it was too late.”

  “We all make mistakes,” said Willie.

  “But they don’t cost a life.” Kate tossed her cigarette out the window. “I nearly got him, too. There was a fingerprint on the girl’s backpack that didn’t match up with anyone’s—not the girl’s, her parents’, none of her friends’. I was sure we’d get him with that. I even bragged about it to a reporter.” Kate shook her head. “Damn vanity.”

  But Willie had stopped listening, scared now, running his fingers over the edges of that police-sketch portrait folded inside his jacket pocket.

  24

  He’s got to concentrate.

  But sometimes it seems like he becomes a totally different person, as though he were in a fugue state. He’s conscious, knows what he’s doing, and yet a whole piece of himself is missing.

  He shakes his head, arms, legs, needs to be wide awake, working. What it’s all about. The work.

  The game. The new rules.

  He just hopes she can keep up with him.

  Of course she can!

  “Shut up!”

  Even with the Walkman’s music pulsing through his ears, those damn voices have broken through.

  Failure!

  A word he’d heard so often growing up. And father, the word he associates with it.

  Your father loves you.

  That’s what his mother always said.

  His father, who convinced his young wife that their brand-new baby boy should be left to cry, not touched, never hugged. His mother said she would lie awake in bed and cry with him. One time his father came home early and his mother, she says, was coddling him, cooing and humming. His father went nuts. Beat them both. As further punishment, locked his mother in the bedroom for three days, the baby, only months old, left alone in the crib, crying and shitting all over himself.

  He swears that to this day he can remember the stink. The loneliness. The shame.

  Odd, how inflicting pain stopped his own. And the pleasure that accompanied it. Now that was a nice surprise.

  The envelope is just where he put it, the lock of hair intact.

  With precision and care, he lays a strip of masking tape along the edge of the hair, another piece on top of that, to create a sandwich, more tape to make a sort of handle.

  He’s already chosen the next image. And the addition of the hair will make a nice transition—a connection to his past work and a link to the new.

  He lays the clump of hair down onto the reproduction, tries it here, there, decides he will glue it right onto the woman’s head.

  This one’s not going to be so easy. A real teaser for Kate. She’ll have to work hard to figure it out.

  He plucks the hair off the image, whisks it across his cheek, over his eyelids, under his nose, breathes in what is left of the girl’s perfume, then ever so softly over his lips, into his mouth, sucking on it. Almost immediately he’s hard. If only that stupid girl could see him now. Well, he made the most of her, not that she cared, not that she deserved so much attention.

  Just one more dalliance before he sacrifices it.

  He unzips his pants, strokes the clump of hair across his scrotum, feels it tighten. Up and down his cock, just the hair, not his hand, no pressure, nothing obscene. Softly. Slowly. Up and down. Faster now.

  He pictures the girl dancing, nude, touching herself, as he comes.

  A moment later, he straightens up, feels a twinge of shame, pictures himself in a dark room, naked and alone, covered in shit, and crying.

  Enough.

  It’s time to work. He dips the clump of hair into alcohol. It must be clean, spotless.

  Two Hundred Sixty-seven Washington Street was an old brick structure, maybe once a printing house or small factory, now steam-cleaned, renovated into luxury co-ops. The breeze from the nearby Hudson River cooled the wide peaceful street. “Washington on Washington Street. Cool, huh?” Darton had said when giving Kate the address.

  Inside, the lobby was sleek, industrial high-tech; the elevator, huge, of polished steel, like a giant cage. Kate checked her reflection in the shiny metal, ran a hand through her hair.

  How should she handle him? A week ago, Kate had trusted people—something she had worked on for years. Now, she was thinking the way she had when she was back in Astoria—that everyone was guilty of something.

  The entire north wall of Darton Washington’s loft was floor-to-ceiling windows. The pale Naples yellow sunset dappled across the oversized black leather couches, two enormous rubber plants, and a handcrafted wooden table as long as a bowling alley surrounded by a dozen throne-like chairs that would look right at home in the Hearst Castle. But the loft’s most startling element was the enameled floor, bright red, and so shiny it cast scarlet shadows everywhere.

  Darton Washington leaned against a chair, smiling, handsome. “You like the floor? I took the idea from African ceremonial rooms.”

  “It’s amazing,” said Kate, striding toward two WLK Hand assemblages on an opposite wall. “Willie’s pieces look fabulous here.”

  “He’s a genius,” Washington said, playing with the pencil-thin mustache that outlined his sensuous upper lip.

  Kate surveyed the adjacent wall, filled with a suite of Jacob Lawrence prints, a chronicle of the slaves’ experience from Africa to the American South. “These are marvelous.”

  “Yes. Simple, but absolutely on the mark,” said Washington, in a clipped, practically British accent.

  “Do you mind if I ask where you’re from?”

  “Harlem. But I don’t have to sound like it, do I?” Washington smiled again. “And you?”

  “Astoria—but I don’t sound like it either—I hope.”

  Washington laughed.

  “Whose are these?” She indicated four somewhat primitive-looking oils of black men.

  “Horace Pippin.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course.” She moved on to a series of photographs with accompanying text, minimal and elegant—a black couple in a doorway, at a table, in bed. Kate read some of the text. “Carrie Mae Weems?”

  “You got it,” said Washington. “One of my favorite Conceptual artists.”

  “They’re lovely. Moving, too.” Kate was impressed by Washington’s eye, but it was the small, almost white painting tucked into a corner beside that huge dining room table that caught her eye.

  “Ethan Stein?”

  “I’m surprised you recognized it. Not that many people know his work. He’s one of the few white artists I collect. I like the purity of it.”

  “Yes, it’s lovely.” Kate studied the painting, the overlay of white brushstrokes, the faint hint of a gray grid below. It was very much like hers—and also like the one in the blurry Polaroid—though, in fact, all of Stein’s paintings were similar. Still, it was enough to give her the creeps. “I have one quite like it.”

  “Do you?”

  “I bought it a few years back. When did you get yours?”

  Washington tugged at his shirt collar, which Kate would wager he had bought at one of those Big Man shops. He was six feet three, easy. And that sh
irt collar that was giving him trouble—Kate couldn’t even guess at the size. “Oh, a few years ago,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t buy another.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, as I said, I like it, and . . . I guess Stein’s market is about to go up. Sorry, that’s a bit tasteless,” said Washington. “So, you and Willie go way back?”

  “Yes,” said Kate, who had not failed to notice the man’s change of subject. She folded herself into one of the plush leather couches, took in the picture-window view—the Hudson River, New Jersey, lots of sky—tuned in, for a moment, to the spare, beautiful music being piped into the space with concert-like clarity.

  “Philip Glass,” said Washington, as though reading her mind. “One of the great modernist composers.” He slipped onto the couch opposite. “You’re surprised, huh? You figure a big ol’ black dude like me, hell, he’s gotta be listenin’ to Stevie Wonder or Bob Marley or some heavy-duty rappers, right?”

  “I hadn’t given it much thought, Mr. Washington, but Willie did tell me you represent some rap groups.”

  “I do. For the money,” said Washington. “Rather, I did. I’m on my own now. Left that autocratic music company, FirstRate, just a couple of weeks ago. Now I can pursue any kind of music I want to. Rap, pop, jazz, modern, classical. Anything.” He smiled. “I studied music and art in college. Didn’t think I had the necessary talent for art—at least my profs didn’t think so.” He smiled. “But I’m perfectly content pursuing music. Personally, I’m into Steve Reich, Glass, Meredith Monk, Stravinsky; Bach always.”

  “I’m a musical moron,” said Kate. “My idea of great is Mary Wells, Martha and the Vandellas, Sarah Vaughan, Ella.”

  “Not so bad.” He lifted a long cigarillo from a silver cup on the coffee table, placed it between his full lips. “You mind?”

  Kate pulled out a Marlboro so fast, he laughed.

  Darton slid a large cut-glass ashtray across the coffee table, offered Kate a light. She touched his hands—which were huge and beautiful—to steady the flame. “Thanks.”

  She exhaled. “I was wondering . . . about the CD you were cutting for Elena Solana—was it finished, or—”

  Washington’s smile faded fast. “No. It was never finished.”