The Girl From Nowhere (2 page)

“Just a friendly offer. I’m the big-hearted kind of private eye. You’ve got my office number there, and my home number.”

Then I thought, “How dumb was that?” As if I didn’t have troubles enough without telling this flake she should call me. She was nice to look at, though, even if the little mascara she wore had streaked from her tears.

As if she could tell what I was thinking, she said she’d better go to the bathroom to clean up. When she left, I found myself thinking about the big questions again—and those two shiny blades. I didn’t notice how long Sandy Smollett had been gone until the waitress put the tab in front of me. I paid and went to check out the ladies’ room. Nobody there. I saw how easy it would have been for Ms. Smollett to exit the bar without me witnessing her departure. It was no skin off my schnoz anyway. It was about then I realized that the Band Box had emptied out. Not knowing where to go or what to do, I took a seat at the bar, ordered another Dewar’s, and asked the bartender who had won the game.

He favored me with one of those withering bartender looks that conveys the pity you might extend to some extraterrestrial hillbilly who has wandered in from a trailer park on a frozen rock somewhere in the exurbs of the asteroid belt.

TWO

There was a
new artists’ hangout in town—a bar called St. Adrian’s, located in the Broadway Central Hotel. Once one of the smartest joints in Manhattan, the Broadway Central was now a welfare flophouse. A few years later, it would collapse, just like that, without warning, all over the sidewalk—a couple of residents were killed but the rescue workers found a kitten alive in the rubble. The tabloids would have a good time with that.

The day I encountered the girl in the white dress, I had a date at St. Adrian’s with Murray, my accountant. Murray hung out with artists because it was better than hanging out with Marion, his old lady. To justify time spent socking back manhattans at the Cedar and Max’s Kansas City, and now St. Adrian’s, he did artists’ taxes in exchange for their work. I guess he genuinely liked the stuff, because he hung onto it and ended up with a collection to rival that of any of the dentists who repaired artists’ molars and took paintings and prints as payment. I hadn’t filed with the IRS for three years, so Murray was doctoring my returns in reluctant gratitude for my having explored the possibility that Marion was having an affair with Herbie, his partner. To his disappointment, she wasn’t.

It was still daylight when I got to St. Adrian’s and the place was close to empty. Jimmy the bartender passed on a message that Murray would be late. Normally I would have been pissed off about that, but from the moment I walked into the place, taxes were the furthest thing from my mind. St. Adrian’s was hung with paintings that had been bartered for booze, and facing me as I entered was a large one I had not seen before, a female nude. Photo-realism was brand new at the time—I don’t think the moniker had even been coined yet—but this was an early example of said genre. Every follicle and freckle was faithfully rendered with an airbrush, but the follicles and freckles were not what you noticed. As an example of full-frontal nudity, this painting reached new heights of explicitness. It was life-size, and the model was portrayed straight on from a low angle. She was half seated, half reclining on a bare wood floor, legs splayed. She rested on her elbows in such a way that her smallish breasts were thrust forward and upward. Extreme foreshortening—the kind you get when a camera zooms in on its subject—made the image highly confrontational. The most shocking thing about the whole composition, however, was that the face was all too familiar. It belonged to my new friend, Sandy Smollett. Nothing else about the painting remotely recalled the girl in the white dress, except maybe the pose. That reminded me of the way she had sprawled on the sidewalk while I was attempting to hail a taxi.

I asked Jimmy whose painting it was. He told me it was by Danny Fraser. That was a surprise. I knew Danny. He had always been a faithful, even slavish, follower of the abstract expressionists. Seems he had figured it was time to move on. He lived a couple of blocks away so I decided to pay a visit. I told Jimmy to let Murray know that I’d call him the next day.

I rang Danny from a pay phone at the corner of Houston. He said he was working and he didn’t seem too enthusiastic about being interrupted, but I told him I had seen the painting at St. Adrian’s and knew of a collector I thought might be interested in his new work. That did the trick. It usually does.

The first thing I noticed when I stepped out of the freight elevator and into Danny’s loft was that some serious money had been spent on the place since I had been there last. The floor had been polyurethaned and the old tin ceiling restored. There was now a butcher block counter in the kitchen and a restaurant-size refrigerator. In the studio area was a half-finished painting on a monster easel—another nude—and next to it, pinned to a sheet of particleboard, was a large print of the photograph he was working from. Not Sandy Smollett this time, but a sweet-looking redhead with ankles to die for.

Danny was cleaning his airbrush and squirting the cleaning fluid into a sink. The protective mask he wore while working dangled around his neck. A big, raw-boned Californian, he had moved east a few years earlier and had become a fixture on the downtown scene. I indicated the painting on the easel and asked how he had learned to paint like that. He told me that, back in LA, he had apprenticed as a billboard artist with Foster & Kleiser. That explained a lot.

“Not much to see here at the moment,” he apologized. “Nick’s got a couple of canvases at the gallery, but they’ve been moving fast. This collector of yours will have to get on the waiting list.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Does he have a name?”

I had a profile I called up on occasions like this. My imaginary collector was Rupert Nordhof, a commodities trader in Chicago who was married to the heiress to a pharmaceuticals fortune. Big apartment on Lake Shore Drive, country estate on the Apple River in Wisconsin. Good eye. A couple of stunning de Koonings, a big Rauschenberg combine, and so on. I brought the whole thing to life—the Warhol
Electric Chair
canvas in the master bathroom, the Rothko that matched the glory of a sunrise over Lake Michigan. I had to be careful not to get carried away. Bottom line, Danny was eager to meet Rupert next time he came to town.

He offered me a drink.

“By the way,” I said, casual as you like, “who’s the model you used for the painting at St. Adrian’s? She looks familiar.”

“Sandy something,” he said. “You may have seen her around. She’s a full-time model, I guess. I teach a life class at Cooper Union and that’s where I found her, which is about all I can tell you.”

He nodded toward a six-by-six camera on a heavy tripod.

“I shot her with the Hasselblad, trying out a lot of different lighting. She wasn’t into chitchat. Usually models like to talk, but not this one.”

“Maybe new to the racket?”

“No—I don’t think so. She didn’t have that uptight feel you sometimes get with girls who aren’t used to being looked at without their clothes on. In fact, she seemed almost more comfortable without them. You know—naked as nature intended.”

“You mean like innocent?”

“Yeah, maybe—but let me show you something.”

Danny grinned, walked over to a table, and picked up a magazine. I could see the title—
Vamp—
and the girl on the cover, and knew what to expect. “Volume One, Number One,” said Danny. “Have you seen it?”

I’d heard about it, but till then a copy hadn’t crossed my path. Danny thumbed through the pages for me. America had recently discovered pubic hair. For a price, you could ogle it onstage at the Biltmore Theater, where
Hair
had been playing to busloads of eager suburbanites wanting to sample the Age of Aquarius. And
Penthouse
had just arrived, a rival for
Playboy
,
with unretouched photographs that permitted female pudenda to be admired in all their bushy glory and variety. Bob Guccione had launched it in the UK, where pubic hair was invented, but now it was available at newsstands from Waco to Weehawken. Well, maybe not Waco.
Vamp
was the homegrown competition, rumored to have the backing of the secretive capitalist predator—as I fondly thought of him—Brady Kavanagh. He was a man with his fingers in so many meaty pies, from Wall Street to Hollywood, you wondered how he managed to tie his shoelaces. Probably paid someone to do it for him. Kavanagh was one of the most private public figures in America. What was known about him was that he had been born and raised in New York, in Hell’s Kitchen, a tough street kid with a head for numbers who somehow found his way to Harvard Business School, reputedly thanks to the intervention of some wealthy and influential patron. Back in New York, he established himself as one of the most cold-blooded sociopaths in the investment banking lunatic asylum. He became a specialist in hostile takeovers, a pioneer in the art of acquiring troubled industrial giants and then selling off their components at a profit, leaving behind empty shells. In short, the classic all-American success story.

Not that making money for its own sake was the only thing that got Kavanagh’s rocks off. He had bought Bad Fruit Records just so he could produce a country-and-western album,
Mayhem Along the Mekong
,
that extolled the exploits of US Navy SEALs in Vietnam. For an encore, he took over the venerable Magnus Studios, pouring millions into reviving the bankrupt movie company’s fortunes, and launching a theme park on its former back lot. Kavanagh had even directed a couple of movies himself. Not the kind that garner Oscar nominations. More the sort that played on 42nd Street and at redneck drive-ins—make-out flicks with titles like
Orchard of Forbidden Fruit
and
Voodoo Blood Feud
about midnight encounters between zombies and underdressed teenyboppers. The likelihood that he was the backer of
Vamp
was hinted at by the fact that he was the subject of an interview in the first issue. He never gave interviews and was seldom photographed, but there on page eighty-two was a full-page picture of Kavanagh, buffed and tanned beside his Bridgehampton swimming pool. This was unprecedented for the man known to the media as The Invisible Mogul because of his perceived ability to pass through brigades of paparazzi
without triggering a single flashbulb.

There were neatly trimmed triangles of thatch dotted throughout, but otherwise it was the usual mix of tits, ass, cartoons, airbrushed profiles, and feature stories that promised more than they could deliver. Finally Danny arrived at something a bit less run-of-the-mill, a portfolio of black-and-white photographs by Yari Mendelssohn. Yari was hot shit in those days, sometimes rashly compared to photographers like Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton. His work had been exhibited at MoMA and those other “leading museums” you hear about, and his name had real resonance in the fashion and glamour worlds. Yari had a reputation for charming fashion editors out of the trees, where they are said to gather, and persuading Hollywood starlets to expose that extra inch of flesh—a feat that may or may not be so difficult to accomplish.

The portfolio consisted of a dozen pages of erotic mini dramas, like frames from some lost Luis Buñuel movie, a sequel to
Belle de Jour
perhaps. Beautiful and, in a couple of instances, grotesque women were captured in various states of undress. All showed at least a flash of topiary, in keeping with the new parameters of the industry. A near-naked woman crouched over a big view camera, her head hidden by a photographer’s cape, photographing herself in the mirror of a public restroom, a line of urinals reflected behind her. A blonde in stockings and a garter belt cuddled with a boa constrictor and a rabbit under a baby grand piano. A woman wearing nothing beneath an open fur coat, but holding a pistol, watched apathetically as another woman—this one in stiletto heels, a large floppy hat, and not much else—kissed a hotel bellhop. All were beautifully staged and lit, and displayed a blend of elegance and kinkiness that Yari Mendelssohn had down pat.

The most interesting photograph by far was on the final spread. The setting was what appeared to be the library of a very grand house, the kind that has floor-to-ceiling books the way your mother has wall-to-wall carpeting. The woman in the photo graph—there was nothing girlish about her—was sprawled in a leather-upholstered club chair in a slinky satin number, the skirt of which was hitched up just high enough to reveal the mandatory glimpse of pubic hair. She was generally disheveled. Her hair was a mess, and her dress strategically ripped to reveal one nipple. One of her wrists was fastened to a leg of the chair by a jeweled cuff and a length of fine chain. Standing beyond her, at a respectful distance, were two young women in cocktail dresses. They gazed at the woman in the chair admiringly, almost enviously, while she glowered defiantly at the camera. Her lips and chin were bloody, as if she had been slapped across the mouth.

This photo hinted at a richer and darker narrative than the others; it seemed to be snipped from a story in which the clues enabled the viewer to interpret the incident portrayed in contradictory ways. It was possible to see the woman in the chair as a victim, or as someone who was doing her own thing and didn’t give a fuck what anybody else thought. The respectful expressions of the witnesses in the library seemed to suggest the latter. The brazenness of the protagonist’s expression as she stared disdainfully at the camera put the observer in the position of feeling like the object of her contempt.

“You recognize her, of course,” said Danny.

For a few moments, I thought I must be mistaken—this could not possibly be the girl in the white dress, the artless-seeming creature I had encountered earlier in such melodramatic circumstances. Danny’s painting I could figure, but this was something else again. There was a chance resemblance, but that was all, surely? The more I looked at the picture, though, the more certain I was that this was Sandy Smollett. I found that radically hard to get my head around.

“Something, huh?” said Danny.

I didn’t disagree.