Monster

by William Young

Gage Square had sprung up in what had once been a run down, forgotten part of the city's dead industrial district. In the city's manufacturing prime, the area had housed all manner of industries, churning out as much pollution into the air and nearby river as it did steel and refined materials for the rest of the country. That had changed decades earlier, with factories boarding up with increasing frequency until there was nothing left but soot-covered buildings, broken windows and "No Trespassing" signs. It had only been in the last decade that state and city agencies had acknowledged that heavy industry would not return to life ont those sites and allowed the owners sell amid promises of forgiveness for whatever toxins they had sown in the earth the previous hundred years. Those wastes would be forgotten, left to whatever cleansing action time and nature could devise.

  That had led to the quick selling of the majority of the riverbank to developers who believed covering the area in concrete and top soil and turning it into high tech offices, an outdoor mall and artist's community would bring in middle-class leisure money and the patronage of the wealthy. To most people's surprise they were right on both counts, and in a handful of years the rail lines had been ripped up, the factories razed and everything replaced with revolving-door Internet companies, specialty boutiques, trendy restaurants and an art gallery.

  Nick normally had little use for the area. It was pricey and catered to a class of people that, even if he had wanted, he could not join as a mere newspaper reporter without inconveniencing a credit card. This was the area where once-were and would-be rich Internet types worked and schmoozed, where client-hungry attorneys plied the bar scene for potential contacts, and the generically wealthy spent Friday and Saturday nights with their wives, not the place where college crowds were found swilling beer and looking for hook-ups. Sarah, on the other hand, loved it. She found the oddity-laden boutiques and the galleries a perfect way to while away a sunny Saturday afternoon with her friends, and many of the items that decorated their apartment had been found in them, purchased with plastic and paid for in monthly installments.

  Nick jerked the car into a parking space and stepped out into the evening sunlight. He reached into the back seat of the car and pulled out the jacket for his tux, which he had been told was necessary for the evening, and walked around to Sarah's door. Normally, she'd have already piled out onto the street, but Nick knew from years of dating her that when she wore her finest she expected to be treated as more than just his girlfriend. He pulled the door open and extended a hand inside to her.

  "Allow me," he said with a little bit of a flourish.

  She took his hand and stepped out. He leaned in close and kissed her lightly on the lips after she pushed the door closed behind her.

  "Hey, don't smudge my lipstick," she said.

  Nick shrugged. "I couldn't help it."

  She smiled and he took her hand for the walk to the Serafim Gallery to see Josh Sammers' latest collection. Sammers, as Sarah had explained to him after he told her of their press passes to the show, was the city's premier artist, which meant he was able to make a living selling paintings to downtown corporations and suburban collectors without having to punch a time clock. All this success, however, had come after a sit-com set decorator had bought several of his pieces and used them in a hugely successful show that had abruptly ended when the cast banded together and demanded salary parity after season three, had been refused and replaced by a newer set of unknowns that the audience rejected. The show and everybody with it was forgotten within two years.

  Sammers now worked in themes, and this collection being unveiled tonight was titled "Lost." His first collection, which had gained him some small amount of fame in the local art circles, and a brief appearance at a New York City gallery, had been a collection of thirteen oil on canvas paintings, the theme being "Disciples." The paintings had nothing to do with the Apostles, but had created a back page stir in some art magazines that had allowed him to sell the entire collection over the course of a couple of months to collectors speculating on his future success.

  Not that any of that meant anything to Nick. Until Monday past, he had never heard of Sammers and wouldn't have cared if he ever had. Nick, as he reminded Sarah while they were dressing earlier in the evening, was only going to the opening because he had received a press pass that entitled him to free drinks and food. The opportunity to meet some more of the art crowd he was trying to infiltrate for his story was merely a bonus.

  The Serafim Gallery had nothing to do with angels. There were none to be found amid the maze of tall white partitions that were placed throughout the room to funnel the crowd this way and that. Like many of the galleries in Gage Square, the Serafim Gallery was austere with pale walls, a hardwood floor and a variety of tables upon which were sculptures, ceramics and other hand-crafted knickknacks considered to be art. Upon entering, Nick immediately set upon the nearest bar for a martini. He handed a glass of wine to Sarah and the two of them submerged into the crowd.

  Nick was unsure what to make of the paintings. Most of them were a collage of black, gray, red and green, some of them with no distinct subject and many of them with barely discernible wraith-like figures in some sort of torment obscured by sheets of what Nick assumed to be toxic rain from some science fiction novelist's imagination. After several paintings, Sarah broke away from him to talk with someone she recognized from the art community and Nick headed back to the bar for a new martini.

  As he turned away from the bar and pulled an olive off the plastic sword with his teeth he heard his name called out from over his shoulder at a decibel level perfect for piercing the conversational buzz. He turned.

  "Nick Case, yes?" a woman Nick didn't recognize said as she walked a few more steps to him. "How are you doing? I wouldn't have expected to see you here."

  Nick looked into her gray eyes and then, absently, down the length of her black dress and the slit running up her left leg. He swallowed the olive after two quick chews.

  "Yes, hi," he said, pausing to look at her face again and suddenly remembering from where he knew her. "Ms. . How are you?"

  "Sophia, please. I'm fine," she said, tipping a small amount of white wine into her mouth. "What are you doing here? I didn't get the impression that you were an arts reporter."

  Nick steadied his glass in his hand and nodded sheepishly. "I'm not. My boss figured somebody might as well come and check this out, so he chose me since I've been working on that art collecting story."

  "Oh, yes, and how is that coming?"

  Nick nodded. "Slow. I don't know a lot about art, so it could be a while. I think I was one of the few people in college who got through without having to take a fine arts appreciation," Nick said, taking a sip from his glass. "It only goes to show you what you never thought you'd need to know can come back and bite you later on."

  Sophia smiled and nodded. "Well, I'd heard you'd been visiting quite a few galleries over the last few weeks. Are you becoming a convert?"

  Nick shrugged. "Hard to say. I'm one of those people who think art is something I can't do if I wanted to. A lot of what I've seen looks like stuff I wouldn't want to do. I'm learning, though."

  "Not enough, apparently. I'm sure another one of those will help you appreciate what's in these paintings," Sophia said, nodding toward Nick's drink. "Have you been out to see anybody's private collections, yet? I know that's part of what you wanted to do when you stopped by my gallery."

  "As a matter of fact, I was out to see Bill Maxell's collection just the other week," Nick said, taking a sip from his drink and watching over the brim to see Sophia freeze her expression for a split-second. "Nice stuff, I guess. He seems really passionate about it."

  Sophia smiled and set her drink down on the edge of the bar. She opened up a small purse that hung from her left shoulder and pulled out a silver cigarette case, snapped it open and lit a cigarette. She exhaled a thin steam of smoke to her left and closed her purse back up.

  "Yes, he does have some nice work," she said
after pulling the lipstick-stained cigarette from her lips. "And he throws wonderful parties."

  She tapped some ashes onto the hardwood floor. "I'm sure I'll talk to you later, Nick."

  She turned and walked away from him into the crowd, her perfectly fitted dress clinging to her curves as she slipped into the crowd. She stopped part way into the mass of people, took a drag from her cigarette, and turned to look at Nick with what he thought was either a dismissive smile or a femme-fatale come-on. He took a deep gulp from his martini and looked around the room for Sarah. She was standing amid a group of people who appeared to be trying to look like artists, each with either long hair, a Van Dyke, excessive sideburns or some added colorful demonstration to the standard black tuxedo. One wasn't even wearing a tuxedo but was instead dressed entirely in black with a bolo where a tie should hang. He nodded and laughed at something and tipped his glass of champagne salutarily to someone Nick couldn't see.

  Nick began to walk to the first painting when a disturbance by the front door caught his attention. Just inside the gallery stood Viet Nguyen, one of the staff photographers for his paper, dressed in black slacks, a cotton polo shirt and carrying an excessive bag of photography equipment. He was nodding and talking quickly, pointing around the room and gesturing upwards with his palms. He shrugged and then saw Nick standing behind the man holding the guest list.

  "Hey, Nick, they don't want to let me in," Viet said, his voice softening as if he were trying a last pitch for mercy. "John said he wants some photos for the Saturday Who's Who column."

  The man with the list turned over his shoulder and looked at Nick suspiciously.

  "He's with you?" he asked.

  Nick nodded and pulled a business card for inside his tuxedo. He handed it to the man. "Yeah, I'm Nick Case with the Evening Times. He was supposed to come with me, but you know newspapers." Nick made a contrite expression.

  The man looked down at the business card and handed it back to Nick. "Okay, I guess it's okay."

  Viet smiled and thanked the man. He walked up to Nick as Nick took a few steps away from the door.

  "So, who'm I supposed to shoot, anyway? John said it was going to be some high class type thing," Viet said as he shifted his camera bag on his shoulder.

  "Fuck if I know," Nick said. "I'm really only here for the cocktails."

  Viet looked at his watch and then around at the crowd. "Well, I can only be here for a half-hour then I got to split, so we need to find the important people so I can get out of here."

  Nick motioned for Viet to follow him and they walked over to the group of people Sarah was laughing along with. Sarah caught Nick out of the corner of her eye and turned to face him.

  "How're the drinks?" she asked before squinting curiously at Viet. "I've met you before, you're -- wait, don't tell me -- you're Veet?"

  Viet laughed and shook his head. "Close, it's Viet."

  She nodded and feigned slapping herself on the forehead for her faux pas.

  "Viet needs to know who the semi-famous and connected are. He's got to take some photos for Saturday's who's on the town column," Nick said.

  "Well, Josh Sammers is the guy all in black right behind me, and everyone around him is a local artist," Sarah said, nodding over her shoulder. "And just about everyone else is probably some sort of dilettante or collector, so just about anybody, I guess."

  Nick cocked his head towards Viet. "Sounds like good advice to me. I'll tell you if I run into anyone in particular that would be good to get."

  Viet pulled a camera out of his bag, slid on a flash and moved behind Sarah to take pictures.

  "Well, I'll let you get back to your hobnobbing," Nick said. "I should probably mingle around and see if anyone's talking about that art theft from the other week."

  Sarah grabbed his hand and squeezed it once. "I'll talk to you a little later, then."

  He winked and turned back to where the walls had been set up for the paintings' display. The first one was large, three feet by four feet, and predominantly gray. There appeared to be dark shadows cast by people not within the frame of the painting, all of them long, slender and coming to points where the top of a person's head would be. In the upper right quadrant was a willowy, off-white person-thing that appeared to be sitting on the ground cradling its head. Scattered across the painting and obscuring everything was what appeared to be a charcoal-gray rain downpour. He took a couple of steps back from the paintings and tried to look at it as a whole, concentrating on no one part.

  It didn't appear to have anything hidden in it other than the theme, which Nick thought would have been displayed on a neatly typed index card taped to the wall nearby but wasn't. He tilted his head to the one side and then the other and then took a sip from his drink.

  "What do you think so far?" asked an older gentleman wearing expensive glasses and holding a gin and tonic in his hand.

  Nick turned and looked the man square on. "I don't know, yet. I'm not sure what it's about. I don't know what feeling I'm supposed to be getting."

  The man furrowed his brows for a moment and looked at the painting. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small brochure, opened it up, and scanned the page.

  "Innocence, it says here," he said, looking up from the page and back at the painting.

  Nick nodded mock-thoughtfully and looked back at the painting. "Well, maybe, I guess."

  The man smiled. "My name's Delbert Royallson," he said proffering his hand.

  Nick shook it. "Nick Case, nice to meet you. How are you connected to this whole scene?"

  "I bought his first painting several years ago before he started made a name for himself on that TV show," Delbert Royallson said, leveling his voice to disguise what he felt must certainly seem as important to the rest of the people gathered there. Nick got the instant impression that Royallson thought it was he who had made Sammers work worth collecting and, as such, was some sort of Christopher Columbus of the local art scene.

  "Are you going to buy any of these?" Nick asked.

  Delbert Royallson shrugged and took a sip from his drink. "I haven't decided, nothing really reaches out and grabs me. I like most of it, but it'll take a while for something to boil to the top, if anything does. None of his last collection did anything for me, but this one seems different, inspired in a darker, more sinister way."

  "How do you mean?" Nick asked.

  "This is much different, more abstract than his other stuff, not that it's abstract art of any sort," Royallson said. "It's sort of like he's tapped into something that wasn't there a few years ago. Perhaps an alter-ego. He seems rejuvenated," Royallson said as he turned to Nick and nodded. "It was nice meeting you."

  Nick nodded his head back and watched as Royallson ambled along the crooked corridor of movable walls. Nick pulled a brochure off a stack on a low vase stand and opened it to the listing of works. Sammers' work consisted of "Innocence," "Virginity," "Belief," "Trust," "Faith," "Self," "Identity," and several other similar themes. He shoved the brochure into a waist pocket and merged back into the crowd. Sarah was still talking with Josh Sammers except now they were alone and he was bent over slightly with his mouth closer to her ear as if they were exchanging confidences he didn't want overheard. Nick shrugged it off and snaked through the crowdlets of people to where Viet was standing twisting off a lens from his camera.

  "Well, Viet, anybody here?"

  Viet tilted his head to the side and shrugged slightly.

  "Beats me. I never heard of any of these people," he said as he pulled a new lens out of his bag and fixed it to his camera. "I hope somebody at the paper knows. I'm just going to dump them on layout and let them figure it out."

  "You might as well have drink before you split; they're free."

  Viet shook his head. "Can't, I still have another assignment then I have to get back and soup these up. You have one for me."

  "Okay, I will."

  Viet clipped out a short laugh and smiled. "A couple more people and I'm out of
here."

  "See you later, then, I'm back to the bar," Nick said, turning on his heel and striding toward the bar.

  Nick took his new drink and reentered the display area for the paintings, walking half-way down the aisle and stopping before a painting that seemed to have a man clutching at his head and shouting with pain or rage while ragged ghosts encircled him. The man was standing in what appeared to be a vacant city lot, the buildings crumbling and the sky a dull, dusty hue of red Nick couldn't quite name. Standing next to him and staring at another painting was a tall, athletic black man with a short, close cropped haircut and the hint of a Van Dyke. His tux appeared too tight at the biceps and the chest, as if it were designed to show off his physique or the closest one to is size in a hurried, last-minute rental decision. The man caught Nick’s eye and nodded. Nick smiled and nodded back.

  "Hi," the man said, his voice mild and polite. He stuck his hand out and said, "Rich Tagget."

  Nick took his hand and smiled. "Nick Case, how're you doing tonight, detective? I don't believe we've ever met."

  The man's smile straightened out as he released Nick's hand. "No, we haven't. I'm good."

  "Are you a collector?" Nick said, motioning to the walls.

  "No, not really."

  "Me neither."

  "And what brings you out here, tonight?"

  Nick shrugged. "Probably much the same thing as you: collectors. I'm just trying to rub elbows with some of them and see if anything turns up."

  Detective Tagget paused for a moment and pursed his lips, looking Nick up and down with a very deliberate sweep of his eyes. He slipped his hands into his pants pockets, looked around for a moment and bent toward Nick.

  "I'll tell you what. Call me Monday morning around ten and I'll talk to you a little bit about something, okay?" Tagget asked.

  Nick nodded. "Sure."

  Tagget straightened up and stuck his hand out, again. "Nice to meet you."

  Nick shook it and said the same thing. Tagget walked into the crowd and stood near a group of people talking animatedly. Tagget affected an interested look and smiled slightly as another person in the group began talking to him. Nick could see the top of Sarah's head from where he stood, her blonde hair curving down toward the back of her neck. He couldn't see what she was doing or if she was still talking to Sammers, so he started walking through the crowd. As he closed in on Sarah, he could see she was standing in front of a desk. On the other side was Sammers, a box of chalks opened in front of him and a sheet of white paper spread out before him. He was furiously sketching what appeared to be Sarah, drawing quick, thick smudges of yellow and black onto the paper. He looked up at her for a moment, squinted, and turned back to the paper to make a few more additions. He nodded at something Sarah must have said, smiled and put the piece of chalk into the box. He rolled up the paper and slipped it into a drawer on the desk, wrote something on a small piece of paper and handed it to Sarah. She put it into her handbag and took a sip of her wine, said something else and sidestepped into the crowd.

  Nick curved his way around the crowd and met her on the other side of the wall-maze. She stopped and smiled at him.

  "Having fun, so far?" Nick asked.

  Sarah nodded. "You making any contacts?"

  Nick shrugged.

  "How many of those have you had?" Sarah nodded down to his drink.

  "A couple, three, I don't know. They're free, so I'm not keeping track."

  "I guess I'm driving."

  Nick nodded. "Yeah, prob'ly a good idea."

  "How long are we going to stay?"

  Nick turned his wrist over and checked the time. "Maybe another half-hour, I just want to mill around a little bit more. And have another cocktail."

  Sarah half-rolled her eyes. "Yeah, they're free. Get me a wine, I'll wait here."

  Nick returned and handed her a glass of wine. "I'll meet you over by the front door in thirty, okay?"

  Sarah nodded, smiled and turned into the crowd. He walked into the crooked row of paintings from the opposite end, pausing to glance at them while keeping his ear open to the muffled noises of the crowd. The conversations he could here were all about car leases, office politics and someone's recent separation. Nick sipped on his drink, staring down through the liquid at the three olives speared on a translucent spike. This is what he had always feared of high society, that it was as banal as every other society, just endowed with tonier locales and heftier bank accounts. There were no average people hefting mixed drinks in this crowd of black dresses and tuxedos. Even he was there only because of the power of the press to spread their names a bit more widely through the social circles that rippled outward from the city, letting the socialites know what the other socialites had been up to elsewhere.

  "So, are you planning on dropping by my gallery again, Nick?" said Sophia as she detached herself from a glob of the crowd and moved in front of him.

  "Sure, if you think you're up to talking about the art scene and all of that," Nick said, motioning with his drink to the crowd.

  Sophia smiled. "Of course, of course. You're not the type, I'm guessing, that would come by again because you saw something you wanted to purchase."

  Nick furrowed his eyebrows.

  "Just call it seller's intuition. You get a lot of people who just drop in a gallery to see what's on the wall calling itself 'art,' and then snigger about it after they walk out the front door," she said and took a pull from her drink. "Why not come by someday next week after I close for the day? That would be five o'clock."

  Nick nodded. "Sure, no problem."

  Sophia slipped back into the crowd and Nick checked his watch, gulped down the end of his drink, and walked over to the front door to await Sarah.

  NINE