A Long Line of Dead Men

by Lawrence Block

Page 6

 

  "Its beginning to sound like a circus. "

  "Well, if you hired me youd get a much lower profile. I dont even have a PI license, let alone influence in high places. Any investigation I might mount would have to proceed at a relatively slow pace, and I dont know how much of a factor time might turn out to be. Have you discussed this with any of your fellow members?"

  "I havent said a word to anybody. "

  "Really? Thats a surprise. I would have thought… Oh. "

  He gave a long slow nod. "The clubs not a true secret society, but weve certainly kept it a secret from the world. Nobody else knows we exist. " He took hold of the glass of brandy. "So if theres a killer," he said evenly, "it would almost have to be one of us. "

  5

  "God, its such a guy thing," Elaine said. "Thirty-one grown men sitting around wooden tables eating meat and checking for chest pains. You can just about smell the testosterone, cant you?"

  "Im beginning to understand why they didnt tell their wives about it. "

  "Im not putting it down," she insisted. "Im just pointing out how intrinsically masculine the whole thing is. Keeping it all a secret, only seeing each other once a year, talking solemnly about Important Subjects. Can you imagine the same club composed of women?"

  "It would drive the restaurant crazy," I said. "Thirty-one separate checks. "

  "One check, but well make sure it gets split fairly. Lets see, Mary Beth had the apple pie ? la mode, so she owes an extra dollar, and Rosalie, you had the Roquefort dressing, which is an additional seventy-five cents. Why do they do that, anyway?"

  " Split checks item by item? Ive often wondered. "

  "No, charge extra for a tablespoon of Roquefort. When youre paying twenty or thirty dollars for a meal it ought to include whatever salad dressing you want. Why are you looking at me like that?"

  "Because I find you fascinating. "

  "After all these years?"

  "Its probably abnormal," I said, "but I cant help it. "

  * * *

  It had been late afternoon by the time I left the Addison Club. I walked home and took a shower, then sat down and went over my notes. Shed called around six to say she wouldnt be getting home for dinner. "Ive got an artist coming at seven to show me his slides," she said, "and Ive got my class tonight, unless you want me to skip it. "

  "Dont do that. "

  "Theres some leftover Chinese in the fridge, but youd probably rather go out. Dont throw out the leftovers, Ill have them when I get home. "

  "Ive got a better idea," I said. "I want to get to a meeting. You go to your class, and meet me afterward at Paris Green. "

  "Deal. "

  I went to the 8:30 meeting at St. Pauls, then walked down Ninth Avenue and got to Paris Green around a quarter after ten. Elaine was on a stool at the bar, chatting with Gary and nursing a tall glass of cranberry juice and seltzer. I went to collect her and he laid a hand on my arm.

  "Thank God youre here," he said archly. "Thats her third one of those, and you know how she gets. "

  Bryce gave us a window table, and over dinner she told me about the artist whod come around earlier, a West Indian black who was the superintendent of a small apartment house in Murray Hill and a self-taught painter.

  "He does these village scenes in oil on masonite," she said, "and they have a nice folk-art look to them, but they left me underwhelmed. Maybe Ive seen too much of that kind of thing. Or maybe he has, because thats the feeling I got, that his source of inspiration wasnt his own childhood memories as much as it was the work of other artists hes been exposed to. " She made a face. "But thats New York, isnt it? Hes never taken a class or sold a painting, but he knows to bring slides. Who ever heard of a folk artist with slides? I bet you dont get that crap in Appalachia. "

  "Dont be so sure. "

  "Youre probably right. Anyway, I told him Id keep his name on file. In other words, dont call us. I dont know, maybe hes the long-lost bastard son of Grandma Moses and Howard Finster, and I just blew the chance of a lifetime. But I have to go with my instincts, dont you think?"

  They had served her well over the years. When we met I was a cop with a brand-new gold shield in my pocket and a wife and two sons in Syosset, and she was a young call girl, bright and funny and beautiful. We made each other happy for a few years, and then I drank my way out of my marriage and the police department and we pretty much lost track of each other. She went on doing what shed been doing, saving her money and investing in real estate, keeping fit at the health club, stretching her mind in night school.

  A couple of years ago circumstances threw us together again, and what wed had was still there, stronger than ever and richer for the years wed lived through. At first she went on seeing clients and we both pretended that was okay, but of course it wasnt, and eventually I bit the bullet and said so and she admitted shed already put herself out of business.

  We kept inching closer and closer to marriage. Last April shed sold her old place on East Fiftieth and picked out an apartment in the Parc Vend?me and wed moved in together. It was her money that bought the place and Id refused to let her put my name on the deed.

  I paid the monthly maintenance on the apartment and picked up the checks when we went out to dinner. She covered the household expenses. Eventually we would put all our money together, but we hadnt gotten around to that yet.

  Eventually we would get married, too, and I wasnt sure why it was taking us so long. We kept not quite setting a date. We kept letting it slide.

  Meanwhile, she had opened a gallery. First shed gone to work at one on Madison Avenue with the intention of learning the business. She had an argument with the woman who ran the place and quit after two months, then got a similar job downtown on Spring Street. She didnt much care for the artwork in either establishment; the photo-realists at the uptown gallery struck her as sterile, while she saw the commercial can-vases at the SoHo gallery as cliche?d and cloying, a high-ticket equivalent of Holiday Inn seascapes and bullfighters.

  More to the point, she found the business itself unpleasant, the snobbery, the petty jealousies, the relentless courting of investors and corporate collectors. "I thought I quit prostitution," she said one night, "and here I am pimping for a bunch of bad painters. I dont get it. " She went in the following morning and gave notice.

  What she wanted, she decided, was a sort of cross between a gallery and a curiosity shop. Shed stock it with things she liked, and shed try to sell them to people who were looking for something to hang on the wall, or place on the coffee table. She had a good eye, everyone told her that, and shed taken more courses over the years at Hunter and NYU and the New School than your average art historian, so why shouldnt she take her best shot?

  It turned out to be easy to get started. There were a lot of vacant storefronts in the neighborhood that season, and she checked them all out and charmed the owner of a building on Ninth and Fifty-fifth into giving her a good lease at a reasonable rent. Over the years shed packed a locker in an Eleventh Avenue warehouse with things shed bought and tired of; the two of us went through it and filled the back of a borrowed station wagon with prints and canvases, and that gave her enough stock to open.

  Toward the end of her first month of operation she paid a second visit to the Matisse show at the Museum of Modern Art and came back wide-eyed. "Its an exalting experience," she said, "even more than the first time, and I was completely blown away, but you know what? I realized something. Some of those early paintings, the portraits and still lifes. If you take them entirely out of context, and if you forget that they happened to be painted by a genius, youd think you were looking at something out of a thrift shop. "

  "I see what you mean," I said, "but isnt that a little like looking at a Jackson Pollock and saying, My kid could do this?"

  "No," she said. "Because Im not knocking Matisse. Im putting in a word for the anonymous unheralded amateur. "

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean
context is everything," she said.

  The next day she beeped TJ and hired him to mind the store while she hit every thrift shop she could get to. By the end of the week she had covered most of Manhattan, sorting through hundreds and hundreds of paintings and buying almost thirty, at an average price of $8. 75. She lined them up and asked me what I thought. I told her I didnt think Matisse had anything to worry about.

  "I think theyre great," she insisted. "Theyre not necessarily good, but theyre great. "

  She picked out her six favorites and had them framed in simple gallery-style black frames. She sold two the first week, one for $300 and one for $450. "See?" she said, triumphant. "Stuff em in a bin at the Salvation Army at ten bucks apiece and theyre thrift-shop art that nobody looks at twice. Treat them with respect and price them at three to five hundred and theyre folk art, and people think theyre a steal. I had a woman in just before closing who fell in love with the desert sunset. But this looks like paint-by-number, she said. Thats just what it is, I told her. It was the artists favorite medium. He worked only with paint-by-number. What do you bet she comes back tomorrow and buys it?"

  It was getting on for midnight when we left Paris Green and walked home on Ninth Avenue. There was rain forecast but you never would have known it. The air was cool and dry, and there was a breeze off the Hudson.

  "Hildebrand gave me a check," I told her. "Ill deposit it in the morning. "

  "Unless you want to use the ATM. "

  "No, I want to go straight home," I said. "Im a little tired. And I want to go over my notes some more before I go to sleep. "

  "Do you really think-"

  "- that somebodys been knocking them off like clay pigeons? Im not supposed to know yet. I was hired to find out, not to make up my mind in advance. "

  "So youre keeping an open mind. "

  "Not entirely," I admitted. "Its hard for me to get away from the numbers. There have been too many deaths. There has to be an explanation. All I have to do is find it. "

  We stood at a corner, waiting for the light to change. She said, "Why would anyone want to do something like that?"

  "I dont know. "

  "If they were all in college together, and they raped some girl at a drunken fraternity party, and now her brothers getting revenge. "

  "Thats pretty good," I said.

  "Or its her son, and his mother died in childbirth, so he wants vengeance, but he also has to find out which of the men is his father. How does that sound?"

  "Like a Movie of the Week. "

  "I guess the killer would have to be one of the survivors, huh?"

  "Well, I dont think its one of the victims. "

  "I mean as opposed to-"

  "- somebody from outside," I said. "Thats Hildebrands fear, of course. Thats why hes had to keep his suspicions to himself. He would have liked to voice his concern to a fellow member, but suppose he picked the wrong one to confide in? According to him, nobody on the outside even knows that the club exists. "