The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues (3 page)

“Not bad, Dickory. Imaginative, even creative; but you still have a lot to learn about being observant. Think of it this way: if Manny Mallomar walked through that door in bare feet, wearing a dark blue suit, sunglasses, and makeup, how would you recognize him?”

“Fat.”

“Are you sure he’s fat? He could be padded.”

Dickory was tiring of the game. “I would recognize Manny Mallomar by the thick roll of fat at the back of his neck, by his fat fingers, and by his fat thighs that make him stand with his feet wide apart.”

“You are an apt pupil.” With that, Garson left the room. He told her to come down to the studio for the third question when she had finished unpacking the costumes.

Costumes? Why would a painter of distinguished men and wealthy women keep such a gaudy wardrobe, Dickory wondered. Were they really costumes, or were they disguises?

Arranging painted fans and junk jewelry in the last drawer, Dickory thought about the third question. She knew what it would be, and she knew that she was being given time to think about it.

What was the one word that described Garson?

Dickory pictured his regular, expressionless features: blue eyes; blond hair, longish and styled; thin lips that never smiled; fair skin, unwrinkled, slightly blotched. Voice: flat, almost bored, except when he spoke of art or Isaac. Size: tall, but not unusually so; lean. Clothes: starched shirt tapered to cling to his slim waist; sleeves rolled high on taut, tanned arms; tailored blue jeans, tight-fitting. He probably worked out in a gym to keep in such fine trim.

“Trim,” that was a good word. At least it was better than “phony.”

“Come on down,” Garson called. He had a fresh drink in one hand, a paintbrush in the other.

“Dissipated,” Dickory thought, descending the open staircase. Then she remembered what he had said about the Mallomar descriptions. There was only one thing about Garson that could not be disguised: the tremor in his right hand.

Once again Dickory stood under the immense skylight. Garson was painting at one easel, the other easel was covered with a red velvet drape. What she had thought was a man sitting in the chair was not a man at all, but a life-sized artist’s manikin dressed in jockey silks.

Dickory watched Garson lay a rosy glaze on the cheek of the distinguished, gray-suited lawyer. His brush was sure and steady; his hand no longer shook. Rejecting the word “hand-tremor,” she was now confronted with another hyphenated word: “third-rate.” Garson was a third-rate painter. Although competent, the portrait he was painting said nothing about the lawyer, nothing about the artist. It was a slick and shallow illustration. Perhaps “slick” was more charitable than “third-rate,” or should she return to “trim”?

“Ready for the last question?” Garson stepped back to squint at his canvas. “Now, in one word and only one word, describe. . . .”

A bell rang. “Excuse me,” Dickory said. She hastened out of the studio and down the hall stairs, thankful that one of her duties was to open the front door to strangers.

A little man in black scampered through the front door and into Mallomar’s apartment. His overcoat, over-long and overlarge, surrounded him like a carapace. Beady eyes darted suspiciously between his wide-brimmed hat and upturned collar. He seemed to move sideways, like a crab. No, “crab” sounded too threatening for that inconspicuous little shrimp.

“Who was at the door?” Garson asked.

“Shrimp,” Dickory replied.

Garson nodded, intent on his canvas. “That’s the other new tenant.” Suddenly he spun around. “Did he tell you his name?”

“No, not unless his name is Out-of-My-Way-Punk.”

Garson threw back his head and crowed a cheer that sounded like “yee-ick-hooo,” then raced around his studio looking for something called a mahlstick. Thinking he had lost his senses, Dickory pretended to search.

“Ah, here it is.” He walked toward her, holding the long aluminum rod with a balled end that easel painters use as a handrest when brushing in fine details. Raising the mahlstick high into the air, he brought it down with a light tap on Dickory’s shoulder. “Dickory Dock,” he announced solemnly, “I dub you Apprentice to Garson.”

Dickory looked puzzled.

“You’re hired, Dickory. The name of the little man you so accurately described is Shrimps Marinara.”

3

Apprenticed and awarded the keys to the house, Dickory was set to the task of cleaning the taboret that stood next to the velvet-draped easel.

“Roy G. Biv,” Garson said when he opened the taboret drawers to show her where the pigments were stored. That’s all he said: Roy G. Biv. He said nothing more about the artist who painted at that easel nor why the canvas was covered, and Dickory did not ask. That Roy G. Biv was an artist with messy working habits was obvious from the scruffy brushes stiff with paint and the haphazardly squeezed tubes that lay in disarray, uncapped and oozing, on the dirty cabinet top.

Dickory found the matching cap for a tube of cadmium orange and screwed it on tightly, then Naples yellow, while Garson applied glaze upon glaze to the lawyer’s handsome face. Unlike Roy G. Biv, Garson was extremely neat; his working area, clean and well-organized.

For the next several days Garson neither spoke nor acknowledged Dickory’s presence as he painted the uninspired portrait. Dickory capped and recapped the same tubes of cadmium orange and Naples yellow. Every evening she left the second taboret clean, only to return the following afternoon to a sticky, smeary mess.

No stranger came to the door; the telephone did not ring. Except for Manny Mallomar swearing at Isaac Bickerstaffe, who was helping him move some heavy filing cabinets into the downstairs apartment, the afternoons were silent. Oppressively silent. At one point Dickory almost started a conversation with the manikin seated in the chair before her, the larger-than-life jockey in orange and yellow silks.

Cadmium orange. Naples yellow. Roy G. Biv was painting the jockey, but she had yet to see either the artist or his canvas that was hidden under the velvet drape.

Dickory did meet a familiar figure leaving the studio when she arrived one day—a balding, sour-faced man with blubbery lips. Only after some effort did she recognize him as the lawyer in Garson’s painting, who had come for his last sitting. His ugliness had been well-disguised by the artist’s brush.

“What time is it, Dickory?”

Surprised to hear Garson speak, Dickory looked at her bare wrist. “I don’t know. I pawned my watch to help pay the electric bill.”

“Just as well,” he said, adding a glaze of shadow to firm the lawyer’s lips. “It was an ugly watch anyhow.”

Garson did not speak again until the middle of Friday afternoon. “Almost finished,” he announced, stepping back from his canvas. “Come take a look.”

Dickory glanced at the lawyer’s glowing face. “Almost finished,” she agreed, and returned to Roy G. Biv’s messy taboret. It was the kindest opinion she could give of the third-rate, no, fourth-rate painting. Head down, she could hear Garson swishing his brush in solvent; she could feel his critical stare.

“You’re a strange one, Dickory,” he said evenly. “Unreachable—wait, that’s not the right word.”

Dickory waited. What was the right word for her? She wished she had been able to wash her hair that morning, but the kitchen sink was full of dishes and her sister-in-law’s uniform was soaking in the tub. Anyhow, “dirty hair” was two words. So was “ragged fingernails,” “roundish face,” “flattish nose.” Nervously she screwed a yellow cap on an orange paint tube.

“I have it; I have the word for you, Dickory,” Garson said at last. “The word for you is ‘haunted.’ ”

Haunted? Dickory looked into the tall oval mirror that stood on bracketed feet in a corner of the studio. A haunted face framed by dirty hair looked back at her.

“Haunted,” Garson repeated. “Haunted by self-doubt. Haunted by some tragedy. A haunted angel from another world. You are a Piero della Francesca angel.”

That was someone else she had to find out about, Piero della Francesca, along with Roy G. Biv.

With a tiny brush and a steady hand, Garson painted a carnation in the lawyer’s lapel. He did not use his mahlstick. Perhaps he kept the mahlstick only for tapping apprentices, Dickory thought.

“Of course, a little self-doubt is a good thing if you want to become an artist, a good artist,” Garson said. “Makes you work harder. Work and study, experimentation, devotion—that’s what you need to develop a style of your own. You can learn techniques, but no one can teach you style.”

Dickory had no intention of learning Garson’s slick style, but she was learning about paints by watching him and cleaning up after Roy G. Biv. She seemed to be the only one in her class without a working knowledge of art materials.

“What I can teach you is how to observe,” Garson continued. “How to see through frills and facades; how to see through disguises. How to see with an artist’s eye. And the simplest way to teach that is to play our little game.”

“Describing?” Dickory asked, hoping it was not her turn to give the one word for Garson.

“That’s right, describing. From now on I want a description of every person who visits Manny Mallomar. You can use more than one word, if necessary, but always remember to look beyond the disguise. And get their names, too, if you can. Understand?”

“Yes.” To Dickory it seemed more like spying than a lesson or a game. But spying on whom? And for what purpose?

The doorbell rang only once that day. Dickory noticed Mallomar peering suspiciously through his half-opened door when she let his nervous visitor into the house.

“Turkey-necked Mr. Smith,” she reported to Garson.

“Very good,” he remarked sadly.

Greenwich Village sleeps until noon on weekends. Alone, Dickory walked through silent streets, past barricaded shops. But someone else was already in Cobble Lane when she turned into its narrow bend. A derelict, unshaven chin on his chest, sat sprawled on the stoop of the house opposite Number 12.

No longer a trespasser, Dickory resented the intrusions of the rude and ugly tenants, and now a filthy drunk. Unlocking the front door, she turned to give him a disapproving look, but the drunk, too, was asleep.

Although bleary-eyed, Garson was awake, slouched in a wing chair in the library. He waved his coffee cup at her to join him.

“There’s a dirty drunk outside,” she complained.

“Haven’t you ever seen a derelict before?”

“Sure, there’s always one or two asleep in our foyer, but that’s different.”

Garson shrugged. “Forget it, he’s not hurting anyone. Sit down, I have something for you.” He pushed an oblong box across the tabletop.

It was a wristwatch, tastefully designed, its clean and open face in ideal proportion to its wide black strap. Dickory buckled it to her wrist. “Thank you.”

“Don’t you like it?”

“Yes, it’s very nice.”

“Haunted Dickory Dock,” Garson said, studying her intently. “Now, let’s see. You have known another watch, a more beautiful watch, in that other world of yours.”

Amazed at Garson’s perception, Dickory had to admit he was right. “It was an antique. In an enameled case with roses painted on it. And it played a tune.”

Garson seemed interested. “Was it yours?”

Dickory shook her head. “It was going to be my high school graduation present. A few years back a student came into my parents’ shop, Dock’s Hock Shop. He wanted to pawn some art books, and that watch. My father said he didn’t buy books, and my mother said the watch was an antique—beautiful, but with no real value. I was in the store helping out that day, and I made a big fuss about wanting that watch more than anything in the world. So, my dad bought it and promised to give it to me if I finished high school. He had to take the art books, too. That’s when I decided to become an artist, after studying the books and. . . .” Dickory bit her lip. She was talking too much, and sharing her secrets.

“What happened to the watch?” Garson asked.

“Robbery.”

“And your parents?”

“Murdered.”

Garson stood up and walked to the door of his studio. He closed it, something he had never done before in her presence. “Do you remember the tune the watch played?”

Dickory sipped her coffee to compose herself and wet her dry mouth, then she whistled the tune.

“I know that song.” Leaning against the closed door, hands behind him on the knob, Garson softly sang the words:

“ ‘Oranges and lemons,’
say the bells of St. Clements;
‘You owe me five farthings,’
say the bells of St. Martins;
‘When will you pay me?’
say the bells of Old Bailey;
‘When I grow rich,’
say the bells of Shoreditch;
‘When will that be?’
say the bells of Stepney;
‘I do not know,’
says the great bell of Bow.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”

Another bell rang, the doorbell. The artist opened the door for Dickory, who slowly descended the hall stairs.

A hearty, middle-aged man asked to see Garson. Ruddy skin (no makeup) , thinning gray hair (his own) , no more than five-feet ten-inches tall, solid (no padding) , neatly dressed in a brown suit, brown polka-dot tie. Tomorrow he might wear a blue suit and blue tie, but they would still be flecked with cigar ashes; for, protruding from his mouth as if it were part of his face, was a half-smoked, well-chewed cigar.

Dickory asked his name.

“Joseph P. Quinn,” he said, shifting his cigar. “Chief of Detectives, New York City Police.”

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The Case of the Horrible Hairdresser

1

“I need the artist whose eyes can see through disguise,” Chief of Detectives Joseph P. Quinn said jovially. “I’ve given some thought to what you said at the Panzpressers’ party, and I’m here to test your theory. It’s my last resort.”

“Must have had too much champagne; I don’t remember what I said.” Garson seemed annoyed with himself for having confided in the police.