Death Will Help You Leave Him (19 page)

“This too I tell myself,” Luz said, still troubled. “But we still do not know why Frankie died. Someone jealous might hate me too. Someone with a secret might think I knew it.”

“All the more reason,” Barbara said, “for us to go on trying to find out what really happened.”

“And until then, Luz,” I said, “please be extra careful. I don’t want anything to happen to you.” I meant to say “we.” Really.

Barbara couldn’t stay out of work indefinitely, so Jimmy agreed to come and look at paintings with me in SoHo. He waited till she wasn’t around to suggest we combine it with a trip to Coney Island Avenue. We both knew Barbara thought she was Wonder Woman, and we didn’t want to risk her confronting the Gaglia brothers, in case they turned out to be dangerous.

“Do you think Luz knew about Carola and the baby?” I asked. We emerged from the subway at Spring Street into a blindingly bright day.

“She said she didn’t.” Jimmy looked dazed and a little cross, like a bear coming out of hibernation. “But if she did, it’s another motive for her.”

“You can’t believe Luz killed him. She couldn’t. She’s too— too—” I fumbled for a word and came up with a lame one. “Too nice, dammit.”

“Hi, I’m Bruce, I’m susceptible,” Jimmy said.

I elbowed him in the gut.

“Smile when you say that,” I warned him. “Creep.”

“Asshole.”

We grinned at each other. For a moment, we were eight years old.

On a Tuesday afternoon, the galleries were empty, but the restaurants were packed. Locals, not tourists, wearing black like a uniform.

“Doesn’t anybody in this city have a day job?” Jimmy demanded.

“Why, you want to be special? Times have changed. Look at all the laptops and cell phones.”

“I don’t see how they can get any work done, cramped together elbow to elbow like that.”

“So maybe the laptops are just props and all they really do is schmooze,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

Jimmy’s brow furrowed.

“They might spill coffee on their laptops.”

I hooted. Trust Jimmy to champion the hardware.

“Look, that must be it. That’s her painting in the window.”

Displayed behind sparkling plate glass against a white velvet backdrop was a companion piece to the one we’d seen at Carola’s. Same bay window, same red fire engine. But in this one, everything else was gray. Rain streamed down the windowpanes, each drop meticulously detailed. Gloom shrouded the street outside. Carola had managed to paint the very air dreary.

“Wow, this is technically brilliant,” Jimmy said. “No wondering whether the artist knows how to draw. Depressing, though.”

“She kept the cheerful one at home,” I said, “where the kid could see it. Let’s go in.”

The cavernous warehouse space had the usual high white walls and glossy wood floor. Overhead, a tangle of pipes receded into shadow. Track lighting made the paintings glow. A small desk to the left of the door held oversized postcards of some of the paintings in the show and a laminated catalog identifying the works displayed. The chair behind the desk had rolled back three feet, as if its occupant had gotten up in a hurry, leaving a pink cardigan slung over the back and a half moon of red lipstick on a cardboard coffee cup on the desk. Taped music played, repetitious and probably electronic. I found it disturbing. The paintings matched.

Jimmy peered at the largest canvas.

“Hard to believe she can do cheerful,” he said, “looking at this. I’ll have to take your word for it.”

In the same meticulous style, Carola had rendered a crucifixion scene. Some of the details could have come from a Renaissance painting. The crowd of men and women with their bright clothes and anguished faces. The theatrical composition. The irrelevant life-goes-on elements: two little boys scuffling, a bedraggled mutt stealing a hot dog. Yes, a hot dog. Not too many of those in the sixteenth century. And in the distance, bathed in light and untouched by the drama in the foreground, not a medieval Italian walled city, but Manhattan. What really socked the viewer in the eye, though, was not the New York skyline. It was the figure on the cross: a woman.

Jimmy’s lips pursed in a low whistle. He shook his head.

“I’m surprised the Church isn’t picketing outside.”

“Hey, it’s a SoHo gallery, not St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I bet the Church doesn’t even know this painting exists.”

“Let’s see the rest of them,” Jimmy said.

We circled the gallery. I wanted to stop and stare at each one. I also wanted to close my eyes and not look at all. But Jimmy’s comments drew me on.

“She’s gender reversed the saints,” he said. “Arrows, that should be Saint Sebastian.”

A female nude, bristling with quills like a porcupine. The scene was one of those English tea parties you see in the movies. Edwardian or Victorian, whatever. The women were archers in frilly long dresses and big floppy hats.

“Here’s one with a man,” I said. “Oh, shit, I wish I hadn’t seen it.” The poor guy was getting castrated. “I hope I don’t dream about it.”

“Saint Agatha,” Jimmy said. “She had her breasts cut off. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I think it’s Frankie.”

I looked again, glad to focus on the face. Allowing for the agonized expression on a face we’d last seen embalmed into repose, it was him all right.

“Didn’t you and Barbara say she didn’t seem angry?” Jimmy asked. “Uh, I think we’ve found her anger.”

I backtracked to the crucifixion scene to peer more closely at the faces in the crowd.

“You know what? I recognize a lot of these faces from the funeral. Look, that’s Silvia and Massimo. The Roman soldier with the spear, that’s Cousin Vinnie. The women holding the mother up are Stella from the bakery and a couple of her gum-chewing friends. And who’s Netta supposed to be?”

“Red robe? Mary Magdalen. I think she’s pregnant, too.”

“Just the way we saw her,” I agreed. “Do you suppose these people have seen these paintings?”

“They would be ready to crucify her,” Jimmy said.

“She’s already done it. Portrait of the artist. The gal on the cross is Carola.”

“Maybe she figured they’d never know, since they never leave Brooklyn.”

“Frankie would have seen them,” I said. “How do you hide a body of work this big in a long-term relationship?”

“He probably didn’t care,” Jimmy said.

“She said he didn’t take her painting seriously.”

I squinted toward the opposite wall, far enough away I could have skated there if I’d had the skates.

“What are the rest of them about?” I crossed the room, Jimmy at my heels. “Not Bible stories. Fairy tales. Look at what she did with these.”

The biggest was a Rapunzel. She’d given it quite a twist. Rapunzel was still a girl, up in her tower with the fifty-foot hair hanging down. As I remembered the story, her father locked her up there. The prince used to climb up her braids to visit her. Nobody ever said it hurt. In Carola’s version, the guy must have weighed 250 pounds with his armor on. Tears of anguish sprang from the corners of her eyes as he tugged on the hair. In a minute, he’d either topple her or pull her scalp right off her head. It was Carola’s face again, and the prince was Frankie.

“Look behind her,” Jimmy said. “In the shadow inside the tower. A second guy is tearing off her dress.”

“Gee, do you think she’s making a statement?” I bent down to read the title card on the wall beside the painting. “She calls it ‘Rape, Puns, Hell’.”

“They’re not all fairy tales,” Jimmy said, moving on. “Here’s Lady Godiva— or rather, Lord Godiva.”

“Naked on a horse? Is it Frankie again?”

“Nope, wrong eyebrows. Lots of body hair.”

The people in the crowd were eating chocolate. Godiva. I got it.

“Humiliation as a spectator sport,” Jimmy said.

“We’re very proud to show her work exclusively.” The woman, the gallery owner or maybe the manager, came up behind us. She gazed at Carola’s paintings with proprietary satisfaction. Her expertly made-up face looked too old for the glossy blue-black of her hair. She wore flowing black drapery and a couple of pounds of the kind of art jewelry that sells for thousands at high-end craft fairs. It was different from Laura’s, the same way a Picasso is different from a Matisse. I bet they knew each other. “She sells well, so if you are interested in a particular work, you may want to look at the catalog. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me.”

“Do you have something that will match my couch?” That got me a haughty stare from the gallery lady. Some people can’t take a joke.

Since the whole place was far above my price range, and Jimmy wasn’t about to pay five figures to take home a bunch of Brooklyn Italians getting tortured, the sales pitch kind of drove us out of there. The midafternoon sun still dazzled. The restaurants had mostly emptied, and more people milled around on the street.

“On to Brooklyn?” Jimmy asked.

Anywhere but past Laura’s loft.

We turned back toward the subway. A block or two ahead, a crowd blocked the way.

“Some kind of street performer, maybe,” Jimmy said.

My bad luck. The street performers were Laura and Mac. They were putting on quite a show.

“So why do you bother to stay with me?” she screeched as I reached the back fringe of the crowd and peered over the dandruff-speckled shoulder of a Chasidic Jew with a black hat and sideburns nearly as long as Rapunzel’s braids. “If I’m so fucking lousy in bed, maybe it’s for the money!”

“I don’t need your money, you overmedicated little twat!” Mac roared back.

Off her lithium would have been under-medicated. Too much antidepressant this time, then.

“Who are you calling a twat, you unmitigated cocksucker?”

“Who do you think?” Mac jeered. “The pathetic little bitch who begged me to give it to her not an hour ago.”

“You’re such a moron you don’t know faking when you hear it. That must be because that’s all you’ve ever heard from women. If we didn’t lie to you, your dick would fall off.”

Someone jostled my shoulder. A couple of Japanese tourists with cameras hustled their family away. I hoped the kids were too young to have learned much English yet.

Mac ran out of words and self-control at this point. With a wordless growl, he raised a meaty arm. I remembered that big fist. The crowd gave a collective gasp, as if at some daredevil high wire act. I started forward, shaking off Jimmy’s restraining hand on my shoulder. A couple of big guys who looked like construction workers got in ahead of me. They loomed up on either side of him.

“Take it easy, buddy. Leave the lady alone.”

Mac grunted and shook his head and shoulders like a dazed bull. Laura swung her hips past him, almost touching, like a toreador making a pass. Part of me admired her panache. Part of me thought she was crazy. I mean to provoke a maddened animal like that. I always thought she was crazy.

“Yeah, leave me the hell alone! I’ve had it, I don’t care what you say. I’m leaving.”

She thrust her way through the crowd. I needn’t have worried she’d notice me. Her attention was still focused on Mac. She looked back over her shoulder, her face ablaze with triumph at having the last word. She stepped into the street, stumbling on the curb, just as the light on the corner changed to green. A delivery truck rumbled past. Kosher chickens. It picked up speed as the light on the next corner changed and the cars at the other end of the street began to roll forward. Behind the truck, a little Honda Civic that had been blinded by its bulk gunned its engine and pulled out on the wrong side. I squawked out a warning. The crowd groaned, like when the outfielder catches the pop-up on the last out with bases loaded. Stepping out into the street, Laura walked right into the Honda’s hood.

Brakes squealed like hyenas as the impact flung her up into the air. Her body twisted with a corkscrew motion. What goes up must come down. I didn’t know I’d moved until I was sliding into home plate, desperate to interpose my body between hers and the unyielding pavement. She thudded down onto me. It knocked the breath out of me, but I was okay. And she landed soft. Sort of. More like a sandbag than a sofa cushion. But thank God, her head didn’t crack on the pavement.

I lay there with my eyes closed. The alarmed and angry cries of bystanders sounded far away. I could hear Jimmy, very calm, talking to the 911 operator. Laura mewed softly, her body lax against mine. Not unconscious, anyhow. If she’d broken anything major, I thought, she would have been screaming. My arms were wrapped around soft skin stretched over sharp bones. It felt like she had no intervening meat on her at all. Her warm breath panted against my left eye and blew up into my nostrils.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said.

“Smartass,” she whispered

“It’s one of my best qualities.” My hand trembled as I stroked her hair. I had scraped my arms raw from knuckles to elbow on the uneven pavement. With surprise, I noticed blood welling up in the grooves. I hadn’t felt a thing. A sore hip on my sliding side probably meant I’d be black and blue there by evening. “Jimmy’s calling an ambulance. All you have to do is hang on.”

Taking me literally, she clutched at my forearm. I winced but didn’t stop her.

“They’ll get tired of me at that hospital,” she said in a thread of a voice.

“What did you think you were doing?” I heard my scolding tone but couldn’t help it.

Her lips moved against my cheek.

“You think I don’t try to leave, but I do.”

“There’s got to be a better way than walking into traffic.” Anger boiled up in me. “You could have been killed!”

Her mouth quirked in a faint smile.

“That would solve the problem, wouldn’t it.”

“Don’t talk like that. Where is the sonofabitch, anyhow?” I looked around. Concerned bystanders stood all around us, but Mac wasn’t one of them. I could hear a siren wailing. The ambulance, a few blocks uptown and coming closer. A cop car had already arrived. Its roof lights whirling, it pressed close against the downtown end of the truck.

“He probably went home,” Laura said. “He isn’t much of one for hospitals.”

“And I am? Thanks a heap.”

“Don’t fight with me,” she said. “Not now. You could always make me feel better.”