Color Blind (28 page)

B
oyd Werther’s memorial service was an art world event—artists, dealers, curators, and collectors out in full force, endless speeches and praise for a man Kate knew most envied for his fame and fortune, all of them decked out in their high-priced black duds. Kate didn’t hear much of what was said, the thought that somehow she might have led the killer to Werther weighing heavily on her conscience.

She could not stop thinking about the emergency squad meeting she’d attended just before the service, or get the crime scene photos of Boyd Werther’s studio out of her mind. But it was not the horrific pictures of Werther that kept replaying; it was the ones of the killer’s paintings lined up neatly on one wall as if he were giving himself a one-man show. But for whose eyes? Had he set it up for Werther—or the police who he knew would be cleaning up the mess? Kate wasn’t sure.

Especially after the newest revelation: her own name among the scribbled borders of the psycho’s paintings. That had been a shock. What possible connection could he have to her? Kate had no idea other than the fact that the newspapers had played up her involvment in the case. Freeman believed the psycho might have been watching her on TV, and Kate knew it was a possibility—the interview she had done with Werther had aired only a few days ago. The thought of this creep holed up somewhere, watching her and writing her name over and over chilled her.

Blair Sumner elbowed Kate as another artist took to the podium and began to praise the dead artist.

“Was he really such a saint?” Blair whispered.

Kate took a moment before she answered. “No, but—” The pictures of Werther—sliced, covered with blood and paint—sparked in her mind. “He was very respected,” she said softly.

“Diplomat,” said Blair.

According to Freeman, the killer’s ritual was changing; something must have triggered the attack on Werther, and then his assistant; plus he hadn’t bothered to clean up, had left saliva on the paintbrushes that could easily be tested for DNA. Not that the cops had anything to compare it to. Not yet. But why so sloppy? Did he want to be caught?

Grange was in Washington enlisting more agents, while Tapell was busy manning the local troops. Now, practically every division of the NYPD would be involved in the hunt.

Kate glanced up at the podium, a young woman trying hard to control her tears. “I was Boyd’s assistant for the past two years.”

The other assistant, thought Kate. The lucky one.

“Boyd Werther taught me so much. To be completely obsessed with your artwork, to be focused and fixated on every detail.”

Obsessed. Fixated.
The words triggered the earlier squad meeting, which replayed in Kate’s mind.

“I don’t think Werther was necessarily the obsession,” said Freeman.

“Who then?” asked Perlmutter.

Freeman looked at Kate. “Sorry, but your name is in his paintings, and he chose an artist you know. It doesn’t take much for these guys to fixate. Sometimes it’s as simple as someone they pass in the street, and sometimes it’s Jodie Foster. You are, after all, a minor celebrity.”

Kate shivered and Blair stroked her arm. “You okay, darling?”

“Fine,” she said, though she was lying. Crime scene photos of Werther’s slashed paintings, names of colors that the psycho had painted on them, some right, many wrong, flickered in her brain.

Identification.
That’s what it was all about. Kate was sure of it and had told the squad. Color blind. They were looking for someone color blind. Kate could almost imagine the psycho’s game, quizzing Werther about color, disputing the answers, finally killing the man in a rage.

Werther’s lucky assistant covered her mouth as she began to cry, and Kate was reminded of another new addition to the psycho’s paintings—crude, tiny pencil drawings of faces with tape across the mouth drawn into empty spaces. Freeman had suggested they might be self-portraits.

Is he mute as well as color blind?

“Kate?” Blair was tapping her on the shoulder. “Kate.”

“What?”

“It’s over, darling.”

“Oh.” Kate hadn’t seen or heard any speakers after the assistant, nor could she remember the girl leaving the podium.

“I’m worried about you,” said Blair, taking her arm. “Shall we go?”

“I’d like to hang around a few minutes. Out of respect for Boyd.”

There was a spread of wine and cheese, like an art opening, but Kate had no appetite, and after a few minutes she was sorry she hadn’t left with Blair. She was eager to get going when Vincent Petrycoff, Boyd Werther’s art dealer, snagged her.

“You wouldn’t consider parting with one of those two large Werthers you have in East Hampton, would you?”

The shock must have registered on Kate’s face.

“Sorry if that sounds crass. I’m only asking because, as you know, all the new work was destroyed by the lunatic who killed poor Boyd, and so…um…there’s a shortage of uh, new work—”

“I have no intention of selling those paintings.” Kate glared at the art dealer.

Ramona Gross, head of Contemporary Art at one of New York’s leading auction houses, leaned in. “Awful,” she said, dramatically closing heavily shadowed lids and pursing her scarlet lips. “I mean, why destroy the man’s paintings? Who did
they
offend?”

“Me,”
sneered a twenty-something conceptual artist lately getting a lot of attention for her nude underwater performances. “Color-field painting? I mean, come on. Painting is like, dead.”

“No more dead than an Esther Williams movie,” said Petrycoff.

Enough.
Kate did not bother with good-byes, but hurried out of the chapel, anxious to get to her next appointment.

The crime scene photos of Werther’s studio continued to flash through her mind—particularly the way the psycho had brutalized both the artist and his work, yet took the time to line up his own paintings like a neat little exhibition.

Of course.
That was it. What he wanted. Why hadn’t she thought of it earlier? He wanted his own exhibition. Now she wondered if she could provide him with one. Would the squad go for it?

Kate checked her watch as the taxicab headed east. She didn’t want to be late for her appointment. If she was right about the psycho, and he was color blind, she wanted to know all about it.

P
rofessor Abraham Brillstein was a small stooped man with a large pointy nose, thinning gray hair slicked back, exposing gaps of pale white scalp, reddish-brown eyes magnified to the size of golf balls through Coke-bottle-thick glasses. Once the head of Mount Sinai Neurology, as well as having his own lucrative private practice, Brillstein had given it all up for research after a trip to Guam where he and a team of neurologists had gone to study a Parkinson-like disease called lytico-bodig, which in turn had led him on a pilgrimage to a remote group of Pacific islands, one of whose populations had an overabundance of color blindness. There, he’d discovered a lifelong obsession.

Kate took in the man’s office, windowless and gray, the perfect cell for someone studying lack of color.

Brillstein held up a half-finished glass of orange juice. “Imagine if this looked like nothing more than brown sludge. Bet you wouldn’t want to drink it, would you?”

“No,” said Kate, and she meant it.

“Think about it—gray roast beef; black tomato juice; black, tannish-brown bananas. Even musical tones can be translated by the brain so that music itself can become nothing more than a depressing, colorless experience.” He finished the glass of juice in a gulp, Adam’s apple bobbing in his thin, ropy neck.

“And all of that is possible?” asked Kate.

“In cases of complete cerebral achromatopsia, yes.” He locked her in his magnified glare.

“Translation, please?”

“Sorry.” Brillstein rapped a pencil against the edge of a desk crowded with stacks of papers, dozens of folders, small mounds of half-bent and tangled paper clips. “I am referring to an extreme form of color blindness that occurs because of an event—be it a disease or an accident. You see, most color blindness is congenital. You’re born with it. Not at all uncommon, particularly in men. Of course there are degrees of severity.” He started counting off on his slightly arthritic fingers. “You’ve got your anomalous trichromacy, the most common form of color blindness, where the subject may have some trouble discriminating between colors but still sees them. Then there is your red-green color blindness, deuteranomaly, which affects approximately five out of every hundred men, and protanomaly, which is referred to as ‘red-weakness,’ which affects about one out of a hundred. To a protanomalous viewer, any redness in color is perceived more weakly. A red traffic light could easily be mistaken for a yellow or amber one.”

“That could make crossing the street risky business,” said Kate.

“Indeed.” Brillstein pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and his eyes jumped another ten percent in magnification. “But complete achromatopsia, well, that is rare, and very severe, affecting oh, one person in say, thirty or forty
thousand
. It’s all a question of cones, you see.”

“The cones are what decode color in our eyes, as opposed to the rods, right?”

“Yes.” Brillstein smiled. “The rods, which do not provide color vision, are located at the periphery of the retina. The cones, our color receptors, are at the retina’s center. Cones come in three varieties, red, blue, and green, though I am speaking quite simply here.”

“I appreciate that,” said Kate, trying to take it all in, watching the little man exchange his pencil for a paper clip, which he started bending out of shape. “The thing is, Dr. Brillstein, we’ve got a suspect who paints, but his color is all wrong, and he labels the colors incorrectly, and—”

“Oh, so you don’t actually
know
the subject?” Brillstein looked up from his fidgeting, his huge, distorted eyes on Kate.

“Unfortunately not.”

“Then how do you know he’s color blind?”

“Well, I don’t.” Kate plucked a paper clip off his desk and joined the doctor in his game of restless sculpting. “I just
feel
it. I realize that must sound absurd to a doctor, a scientist, but—”

“Not at all.” Brillstein smiled at her warmly. “Fact is that half of what a researcher does is go on instinct. Eventually one hopes that one’s instincts pay off, but we would never get anywhere without instinct and hypothesis and, as you say, a feeling.” Another smile. “So, please, tell me everything you know, why you have this
feeling,
anything that might help me understand what led you to this deduction.”

For the next twenty minutes Kate explained the oddly colored paintings, the repeated labeling, Boyd Werther’s murder scene and the labeling there, her experience in the Rothko Chapel, everything she could think of, complete with the crime scene photos of the psycho’s paintings and Boyd Werther’s studio that she’d brought along. “Again,” she said, summing it up, “I may be shooting in the dark here—no pun intended, Doctor—but the way this guy seems to be groping to learn about color is what struck me and led me to the idea that he’s color blind.”

Brillstein removed his thick glasses and rubbed his surprisingly small eyes. “Not a bad hypothesis at all, my dear.”

“Well, then, suppose I’m right, that he is color blind. Completely. What can you tell me?”

The doctor replaced his glasses, ran a hand over his slick balding pate. “Well, first of all, that he most likely suffered an accident—something that interrupted the neural path between his eye and the brain. Some sort of brain damage.”

Kate thought about that a moment. “And would that affect his behavior?”

“Absolutely. I mean, if your world suddenly went gray, I’m certain it would affect your behavior, would it not?”

“Yes, but I meant, more…pathologically.”

“Hmmmm…”Brillstein starting bending another paper clip. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that, but…you are talking about an artist, a painter. Think about it—bad enough to lose your ability to see color if you are, say, a businessman, but an artist, one whose entire life is wrapped up in color, well…”He shook his head. “It would be devastating, no?”

“Yes.” Kate stared at the gray walls, trying to imagine a colorless world.

“Color-blind people, the ones who are born color blind, are usually quite well adjusted because they have never known a world of color,” said Brillstein. “But for a cerebral achromatope, one who has lost that sense completely, well, that is something else entirely. He will always remain aware of the fact that he’s lost something incredibly precious, that he has lost color.” Brillstein sighed. “Imagine if suddenly everything you were used to seeing in color—the green grass, flowers, the blue sky—were all suddenly drained of color, simply dreary shades of gray.”

“Like a black-and-white movie?”

“Not nearly so good, or clear. With complete color blindness, visual acuity is also quite impaired.” Brillstein thought a moment. “I know of one case, a young woman painter, who had a motorcycle accident that rendered her completely color blind. Eventually she committed suicide. Her life was simply no longer bearable.” Brillstein removed his glasses and glanced up at the ceiling, then shook his head.

“What?”

“I was reminded of something, but…”He replaced his glasses. “I can’t think of what.” He shrugged and smiled sadly. “I’m getting old. What do they call it, a senior moment?”

“I have them all the time,” said Kate. “Listen, if it does come to you—whatever it is—would you call me? The NYPD are a bit stymied on this one.”

“Of course,” said Brillstein. “Where was I? Oh, yes. The loss of color. What can I say, for the totally color blind life can be not only difficult but…very sad.”

Kate tried to imagine the bright sandy beach below her East Hampton home, the glittering blue-green ocean devoid of color. But the thought only brought another sense of loss—that she would never again walk along that particularly beautiful stretch of beach with Richard. She quickly shifted gears. “What else? I mean, what else can you tell me about total color blindness?”