The Girl From Nowhere (13 page)

FIFTEEN

Surprisingly, or maybe
not, I slept well. It was waking up that was the hard part, with my arms wrapped around Sandy and the D train pressed up against her ass. I savored the situation for as long as I dared, then rolled out of bed. Sandy was lost to the world.

It was already after ten o’clock. I pulled on some clothes and headed for La Bonbonnière to pick up coffee and a repeat of those egg-and-bacon sandwiches. At the corner of Hudson I passed a guido in a Jets jacket and cheaters, surrounded by cigarette butts. I told him to say hi to Joey for me.

“Fuck you,” he said.

I got an extra coffee and handed it to him on the way back.

“Fuck you,” he said again.

Sandy was still sleeping, so I ate both sandwiches. Waiting for her to wake up, I went around the corner to Gristedes to grab some groceries. There was a greaser on that corner too, probably another of Garofolo’s stooges. He had a newspaper and was pretending he could read.

When I got back to the apartment, the phone was ringing. Sandy was in the bathroom and the shower was running. I picked up the receiver and heard Langham’s voice. He asked if Sandy was there. I told him she was in the shower. He asked if she could hear me from where I was? I said I didn’t think so.

“Good,” he said. “Can you meet me at the Konstantin Gallery at noon?”

I asked why.

“No questions,” he said. “Can you be there? Alone?”

“No Sandy?”

“No Sandy.”

In the grocery store I had discovered I was almost out of cash, so I went to the top-loading safe I kept under the floorboards in a walk-in closet to replenish my wallet from the bills stashed there. This was also where I kept a .38 semiautomatic, and I thought seriously about wearing it. I don’t like to carry heat, but someone had tried to ventilate me outside the Whitney and—call me superstitious if you like—I took that as an omen. I was about to remove the gun from the safe when I heard Sandy’s voice behind me.

“Who was on the phone?” she asked.

Her voice came from an angle that told me she probably couldn’t see into the closet—at least not at that moment. Just my butt sticking out.

“It was just Janice,” I improvised, hurriedly closing the safe, spinning the dial, and replacing the floorboards.

There are some women who look like shit when they wake up. Sandy wasn’t one of them, especially not wrapped in a bath towel. I sat with her, drinking coffee and doing some more gawping. I was putting off telling her that I was going uptown, but she seemed to read my mind.

“You’re acting like you’re sitting on needles,” she said.

“I’ve got to go uptown.”

She wanted to know why.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Is it anything to do with the stalker? Or poor Paulie?”

“Poor Paulie was a stalker too, remember? And he maybe packed a gun.”

Now we were back to tears again. I told her to pull herself together. She seemed shocked, and I thought she was going to throw a tantrum, but instead she thanked me.

“You’re right,” she said.

I told her I needed to get going. She asked if she could come with me. I told her that she had to stay put—that she’d be safe in the apartment because Garofolo had at least one goon posted outside. She said she’d be okay. I left the apartment and headed toward 8th Avenue to pick up a taxi. Garofolo’s sentry was where I had left him.

“Next time,” he said, “I take sugar. A fuckin’ shitload of sugar.”

The Lucas Konstantin Gallery was in the Pringle Building on West 57th Street. There were a dozen galleries scattered between the third and seventh floors. Most of them were what’s known in the business as secondary-market dealers, meaning that they traded in the work of blue-chip artists, preferably dead, with brand recognition that came with solid cash value established by previous sales, especially at auction. Lucas Konstantin, by contrast, was a primary-market dealer, meaning that he took risks on unknown and lesser-known artists and made it his business to create and then build their reputations. In his field, he was one of the best in the city. Artists in his stable had acquired significant followings among the more adventurous kinds of collector and museum curator. One of these artists was Matthew Ripley, the asshole who had challenged me to make a life drawing at Jilly Poland’s loft. His pop art–derived popsicles didn’t push any boundaries, but they looked contemporary, they didn’t require deep contemplation, and they sold like bubble gum.

The moment I stepped into the gallery, I understood why Langham had asked me to meet him there. The walls were hung with half a dozen large canvases by Ripley, all of them naked women astride motorbikes. The choppers varied from painting to painting. One was a Harley, another a Ducati, a third an AJS, and so on. The nudes were all representations of a single person. She was outlined with orange, violet, and indigo calligraphy, her flesh represented by pigment laid on in creamy impasto, the highlights shell pink and primrose, the shadows cobalt and ultramarine. They were slick and sexy likenesses of Sandy Smollett.

I was furious—enraged at Ripley and even more so at Sandy. What the fuck was going on? I felt as if my fantasies had been raped. I wished I had worn my .38 so I could have shot the paintings full of holes.

“You’re going to burst a blood vessel,” said a voice behind me.

Langham.

“I’m going to kill the bastard,” I began. “I’m going to . . .”

Langham touched me on the arm and told me to calm down.

“Sandy didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

That shut me up for long enough to wonder why I was so angry at Sandy, but then I thought of Danny Fraser’s painting, and Yari’s photographs, and the man hanging in Sandy’s apartment, and her soiled panties beside him on the floor, and the tacky stage at Aladdin’s Alibi with its absurd backdrop, and the sleazy comedian who fouled the air between acts. I started yelling again. Then I saw, standing next to Langham and looking astonished, the trim, dapper figure of Lucas Konstantin, a guy I knew and liked.

“It’s always a pleasure to see a strong reaction to an artist’s work,” he said.

I ignored this and turned to Langham.

“Aren’t you fucking angry?” I demanded.

“Yes, but not at Sandy,” he said. “I’m sure she is not even aware of the existence of these tasteless monstrosities. I’m sorry, Lucas, but it’s true—Ripley is both depraved and a mediocrity, and you know it.”

Langham turned back to me.

“I’ll tell you how he made them. He has drawn Sandy a number of times at Jilly’s loft, so he’s familiar with her body and has plenty of studies of it—okay?”

That got me riled again.

“And like many of us,” Langham continued, “he sometimes takes photographs of the models, which he brings back to his studio to work with. Meaning that he probably has ample material on which to base the facial likenesses. In other words, Sandy probably doesn’t know a thing about these paintings.”

I saw that this was a plausible explanation and chilled a couple of degrees, then asked Lucas, “How long has Ripley been working on these?”

“I can’t tell you precisely,” said Lucas. “Ripley works fast—very
alla prima—
and these paintings were commissioned. I never saw them till they arrived at the gallery. I was contacted by an attorney from a law firm called Lucking, Thorpe, & Lucking who informed me that they represented a client who had commissioned these paintings from Matthew. Until then I knew nothing about them. I was to get my usual percentage, but there were stipulations. The name of the client would remain secret, and the paintings would be shown in the gallery—a solo exhibition—immediately. It meant that I was forced to postpone a first show by a young artist from Boston, but I have my overheads to consider. I almost forgot—it was stipulated that there would be no opening reception.”

“And—let me guess—you received your commission in cash?”

“Let’s say that funds were discreetly transferred and leave it at that. By the way, you’re only just in time to see the paintings. The show went up yesterday evening, it comes down today at five o’clock, and the paintings are to be removed.”

“Ripley was here to hang the show?”

“Of course, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me anything about his mysterious patron. He claimed that he had no idea who it was—said that, like me, he’d dealt with the man’s attorneys.”

“And did he say anything about the model?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“So who has been to see the show?”

“I wasn’t able to promote it, so the only people to have been here are those who happened to come through the gallery today—off-the-street traffic, I suppose. I’ve seen maybe a dozen people, but I’ve been in my office most of the time.”

“Anyone unusual?”

“Not especially. There was one well-dressed older man I’d never seen before who asked about prices. He spent a long time looking at the work. My secretary told me there was also a hideous-looking fellow with a scarred face and a bandaged hand. I think he must have just wandered in. We get all sorts.”

He nodded toward a smartly dressed blonde seated at a desk near the entrance.

“This man with the scarred face,” I asked her, already knowing the answer, “what kind of scars?”

“Hideous,” she said. “Like he’d been in a fire. Or acid maybe, like someone had thrown vitriol in his face like you read about.”

Langham and I left the building together.

“You understand why I asked you not to bring Sandy,” he said. “I knew it might be distasteful for you—Ripley’s work is so vulgar to begin with—but I thought it best you were aware of this. I hope too that you’re beginning to trust me a little. I think we both have Sandy’s interests at heart.”

“Do
you
have any idea who commissioned these paintings?” I asked. “Is Garofolo involved in all this shit?”

“I haven’t the remotest idea,” he said.

“Is there some Mr. Big lurking in the background?”

“I’m as much in the dark as you, dear boy.”

I had no idea whether to believe him or not. The way I felt at that moment, I would have liked to have dragged him into a public toilet and beaten the crap out of him. It might not have helped, but it would have made me feel better.

“And what about this freak with the scarred face?” I asked. “The one who came to the gallery this morning. You know who that was, don’t you?”

“The other man who’s been stalking her? The one you saved her from?”

“What would he be doing at the gallery? How would he know about these paintings?”

Langham shrugged.

“What’s your theory?” he asked.

“Do I have one? It’s like everything else. It doesn’t add up.”

“Should the police know about all this?”

“What would we tell them? There’s a mysterious collector? There’s a man with hideous fucking burns on his face? They know about him anyway—and what does it add up to?”

Langham told me he was going to catch a breath of fresh air in Central Park and invited me to join him. I told him I had to see a man about a rottweiler.