Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 (11 page)

All that changed as Whitey flicked a switch, and the yard was suddenly as bright
as a department-store window.

Beneath the trees and bushes were flowers of every shape and color. And next to
every plant stood some variety of garden gnome. There were so many it took an
effort to focus on any in particular, but I soon discovered they were all
different. They were fat, thin, tall, and short. They were colorful and drab,
shabby and rich, male and female. Most wore peaked hats, but others had fedoras,
Stetsons, even football helmets. If Hobbs noticed the one with the deerstalker
and meerschaum pipe, he did not react.

Along with the usual garden tools, some gnomes had fishing poles, golf clubs, and
hockey sticks. One had a lawnmower. One rode a bike. One hung by his legs from a
tree limb. One had green skin and the almond eyes of a Roswell alien. One looked
like Elvis and another like Marilyn. This place put the Lafarge yard to
shame.

If Grandma had seemed pleased before, she was now floating on a cloud.

 
Hobbs was quiet on the drive to 221B.

“Not a bad night,” I said. “You solved two cases.”

“Hm,” he said. “Perhaps.”

“I wouldn’t worry. I think Whitey is through stealing garden gnomes. With the
dough he’ll make working for you, he can afford to buy them. And you’ll be
pleased to know I’m taking your advice about Candy. Cute as she is, it’s
pointless to date a woman with the wrong initials. She and I are through.”

“That is uncommonly sensible of you, Doctor. I suspect my company has been a good
influence on you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

“It will be hard on the poor girl, though, losing a fellow as loyal—and
self-sacrificing—as yourself.” With this he turned and delivered a broad wink.
He knew.

“Damn you, Hobbs. How did you figure it out?”

Hobbs shook his head. “If I explained all of my methods to you, Doctor, you would
soon deem them commonplace.”

I pulled over to the curb. “Give, or you’re walking home.”

Hobbs sighed. “Very well. But when you submit this adventure to
Ellery
Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
you must promise not to reveal my secrets of
deduction.”

I held my left hand out of sight and crossed my fingers. “Deal.”

“It was elementary,” he said. “I eavesdropped.”

Copyright © 2012 by Evan Lewis

Art by Jonathan Santlofer

 
Author of
five crime novels, including
Anatomy of Fear,
which won the 2008 Nero
Wolfe Award, Jonathan Santlofer has also appeared (as editor, contributor, and
illustrator) in several anthologies. Recently, his work was included in
New
Jersey Noir,
edited by Joyce Carol Oates. He’s just completed a new
thriller novel, and he serves as program director of Crime Fiction Academy, the
only writing program exclusively devoted to crime writing in all its forms
(www.center forfiction.org/crimefiction).
 

 
Nature
mort.
That’s French for still life, you know, like paintings of apples and
oranges and dead rabbits.
Nature mort. Dead nature.
Pretty cool, right? I
learned that in art-history class but don’t get much opportunity to use it, like
what am I going to say, Hey, I saw this awesome
nature mort
the other day?
Right.

That’s where I met Elise, in art-history class. It took me a month to
get up the nerve to speak to her; she was so beautiful. I’d see her across the
auditorium, her whiter-than-white skin picking up light from the projector,
incandescent, and I’m not showing off or being pretentious, like some of Elise’s
friends say about me. People with artistic temperaments are always misunderstood. If
you want to call me high-strung and crazy because I’m artistic, that’s
your
problem. If I had to describe myself in one word I’d say . . .
sensitive.
And you’ve got to be sensitive if you’re going to pick up on things like light and
color and form, right? I mean, that’s what being an artist is all about.

So,
Elise. I’d wait after class just to bump into her, try to touch her without her
noticing, though after the third time she did.

“Excuse me,”
she said,
narrowing her blue eyes, like the blue in old paintings, lapis lazuli, which is a
mineral they discovered in Egypt and that artists in the Middle Ages would grind up
and use as pigment, a really intense blue,
galvanizing
you might say. For
weeks after that I imagined bumping into her again and saying, “You know, your eyes
are the same color as lapis lazuli,” and I finally did say it, though it turned out
I was wrong. Sort of.

Some people call me a dreamer, which is fine with
me—you’ve got to have your dreams, right? Mrs. Goldblatt, one of my high-school
teachers, an old lady who smelled like mothballs, said I was histrionic, and I
looked it up.
Histrionic: deliberately affected.
Like she was saying I was
some sort of drama queen, which I’m definitely not. I’m quiet and shy and polite,
just ask my neighbors, some of whom were quoted in the newspapers, and one who
actually said exactly that—
Oh, he was a nice quiet young man—
which was the
only true sentence in the entire article.

Art history was the only class I
shared with Elise, because she was getting a degree in art education while I was
getting my masters in painting, on full scholarship I might add, because I didn’t
have any money, though lately I’d started making some because of Frank, my art
dealer, who specializes in plundering graduate art departments and finding really
talented students, like me, to show in his hipper-than-hip Chelsea gallery.

I
know some people think I’m sensitive because of my leg, but it’s not really my leg.
I’ve got spina bifida, which is something you’re born with, like my spinal column
didn’t exactly grow right, so I limp. A little. It’s not so bad and I get to take
pain meds, which is cool, because the limp throws my body out of whack and I’m like
a bundle of aches and pains but I never complain because what’s the point, right?
Who’s gonna listen? So I’m not a work of art, big deal. Plenty of girls like me
anyway. This one girl—I can’t remember her name, but she had long brown hair and was
pretty except for a mole on her cheek which
she
thought was sexy and made
even darker with an eyebrow pencil, which was like totally insane if you ask me,
highlighting an imperfection like that—she said the reason some girls liked me was
because they want to mother me, but I don’t know about that, because my mother sure
as hell didn’t want to mother me, but that’s
her
problem, right?

So,
okay, I’m not perfect, but Elise was. Well, almost perfect. Except for her eye. I
couldn’t see it from across the auditorium or even that time I bumped into her and
she said,
Excuse me,
or the times I’d follow her from class all the way to
her apartment. And it didn’t show up in any of the hundreds of pictures I took of
her because they were all too far away, and most people didn’t even notice it, and I
didn’t either, not at first, because she
was
beautiful, what you’d call a
real head-turner; like, we’d be walking down the street and guys would do a double
take to get another look at her—and I knew they must be thinking:
What’s so
special about him?
They didn’t see my artistic soul, but they didn’t see
Elise’s eye either. And really, it wasn’t much, just this tiny little imperfection,
a zigzag streak of dark brown in the white of her left eye, a
flaw,
she
called it. No big deal, right? But . . .

Like this one time—after we’d been
together a few weeks—Elise made me watch this old movie with Jack Nicholson and this
actress whose name I forget, but it took place in San Francisco, in Chinatown, and
at one point Jack’s in bed with the actress and they’ve just had sex and he’s
staring into the actress’s face and he says, “Your eye,” and she says, “What about
it?” and he says, “There’s something black in the green part of your eye,” and the
actress says, “Oh that, it’s a flaw in the iris, sort of a birthmark,” and the
reason I know it by heart is because Elise played the scene over and over and over
and mouthed the actress’s words while I watched her with the light from the TV
screen playing over her beautiful incandescent face, the whole time thinking,
It’s just not fair, this beautiful girl ruined by this flaw,
and next
thing I know the words are tumbling out of my mouth. “Your eye, your
flaw,
it’s a damn shame,” and Elise gets all cold, her lapis lazuli eyes like icy daggers,
and says, “Like
you’re
perfect, with
your
leg,” and believe me,
that really hurt, but I laughed because I didn’t want to show her how bad it made me
feel and I said I was sorry and that she was beautiful, and she said, “You know how
many guys I could have?” and I agreed. I mean, Elise could have any guy she wanted,
but she chose me because of my sensitive nature and because I’m an artist and
because I put her on a pedestal and because I thought she was perfect. Well, almost
perfect.

We were together for eight months, one week, and two days, and during
that time I made, like, two or three hundred sketches and paintings of her. You
could say she inspired me. Then one of her stupid girlfriends said the only reason
Elise liked me was because she got off on me making all those paintings of her,
because she was vain, and when she told me that I told Elise to get rid of her
girlfriend, and she did.

It took me awhile, but eventually I got Elise to give
up all of her friends, because I wanted it to be just the two of us, you know,
artist and model. She was my muse. I’d say, “Baby, I’m gonna make you famous—I’m
gonna make you immortal,” and she loved that. And it was true.

I made all
sorts of paintings of her, wild expressive paintings and ones that were delicate and
pristine. I painted her life-size on huge canvases, and painted the individual parts
of her body—her breasts, legs, arms, and hands—in closeup and sharp detail on
smaller ones. But the more I painted her, the more I wanted her to be perfect and
the more that eye of hers started to drive me crazy and I couldn’t stop thinking
about how she’d look without that nasty flaw.

Sometimes we’d just be sitting
around and I’d look over at her wanting to drink in her beauty and then I’d see it,
the flaw, and it would ruin everything. I mean, like would the Mona Lisa be
beautiful with a pimple on her cheek? So who could blame me for what I did?

I
was planning an entire exhibition of my Elise paintings and I told Frank, my art
dealer, and he was cool with that. I’d already put a lot of drawings of Elise on my
Facebook page and there were, like, tons of comments about how good they were and
how beautiful Elise was, which was cool, but of course I never showed her flaw in my
artwork.

Right before it happened, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It was a really cold winter day, everything in the city icy and gray and
dead-looking, like the entire city was one big
nature mort,
you know, but
I’d created this special tour for Elise, which I called “icons of beauty.” I started
with an Egyptian carving of Queen Nefertiti, which was on loan from some German
museum, explaining that the name meant “the beautiful one is here,” and pointed out
how perfect Nefertiti was, and Elise knew the piece from art-history class but
didn’t know the meaning, which I’d Googled to impress her. Then I showed her a Greek
statue of Aphrodite, so smooth, and again, so perfect you could cry. After that,
Courbet’s “Woman with a Parrot” and a Picasso portrait of Marie-Thérèse and then a
Warhol “Marilyn” painting, pointing out that I’d read how Marilyn Monroe had had a
little nose and chin surgery to make her even more perfect, just to plant the idea
in Elise’s mind about being perfect, but really subtle—and the whole day I avoided
looking at Elise’s eye so my perfection tour wouldn’t be ruined, and when we got
home I told her she was as beautiful as any of those artworks, still careful not to
say anything about her eye, and she kissed me and we had sex, and afterward Elise
was lying there naked, with her eyes closed, and I studied every inch of her face
and body, ignoring the few moles and freckles that could ruin everything if I let
them, but I didn’t, and it was a pretty perfect moment until she opened her eyes and
I saw it, and the moment
was
ruined and I realized it would
always
be ruined, and that was it, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I put my hands around
her neck and she smiled until I tightened my grip, and when she started to struggle
I just stared at that flaw in her eye and kept squeezing tighter and tighter,
ignoring all the noises and ugly faces she was making until she finally stopped
moving.

Afterward her eyes were open and that damn flaw looked even bigger and
nastier, so I got some Krazy Glue and pasted her lids shut, which I once read is
what undertakers do so the eyes don’t pop open at funerals, or maybe it’s to keep
the bugs out, but it did the trick.

Then I carried her into my studio and laid
her out on the floor and spent time arranging her, one arm this way, another that
way, her legs just so, like an Ingres “Odalisque,” which are these amazingly
beautiful paintings where the girls are naked and all stretched out, but dignified,
which is the way I wanted Elise to look.

I mixed whole tubes of Rose Madder
and Alizarin Crimson with Naples Yellow and lots of Titanium White and swirled the
pigments together with linseed oil until I got the exact shade of Elise’s pale, pale
skin. Then, with my widest, softest sable brush I slowly began to cover her flesh
with a layer of paint, her pores soaking up the oil until it took on a beautiful
glow, even more perfect than it was in real life.

I worked for hours and
hours, drinking Coke and coffee to stay awake and popping Oxycodones when my back
and leg started to hurt, and it took a long time to cover every inch of her, adding
a darker tone for shadows and a lighter one along her collarbone and elbows and
knees and ankles. Then I painted her nails and toenails a pearly white and coated
the hair on her head with a quick-drying varnish until every strand looked carved,
like sculpture. Then, using really small brushes, I spent hours painting the most
perfect, most meticulous set of eyes on Elise’s closed lids, irises deep ultramarine
blue, which is the modern-day equivalent of lapis lazuli, the pupils a warm black,
and the whites a pure, clear, uninterrupted, dazzling white.

When I stood back
and looked at what I’d done I was amazed. Elise was finally perfect, and
flawless.

I wasn’t sure how long it had taken and I must have fallen asleep,
but when I woke up I was all hot and sweaty on account of my small apartment being
overheated, and I looked over at Elise all quiet and still and perfect, but noticed
there was, like, an odor, so I got her perfume, Clinique Happy, and sprinkled her
with it. Then I had a couple of cups of coffee and swallowed a couple more pain meds
but couldn’t sit still—I just had to show her off—so I called my art dealer, Frank,
and asked him to come by. He said he couldn’t come till the next day and I wasn’t
sure about the time anyway—the days were sort of merging with the nights—so I took
another pill and drank more coffee and worked some more, adding pinkish highlights
to Elise’s cheeks, which seemed suddenly paler, and painted super-realistic
eyelashes on the eyes I’d already painted, this time lash by lash, with the tiniest
brush I could find—and the oil paint and the Happy cologne created a sweet/sour
smell that was sort of intoxicating. Then I took an old two-by-four and sanded the
wood till it was smooth and painted elise, 2011 on it. I wanted to put the sign in
Elise’s hand, like it was part of the sculpture, but I couldn’t get her fingers to
move—they were stiff as rock, like real sculpture, which was pretty cool. I thought
about listing the materials too, like they do in museums, you know, like: oil paint,
varnish, Happy perfume, human being. But I didn’t, because I decided it would take
away some of the magic of the piece. By the time Frank showed up, some of the paint
was starting to dry and even crack in a few places, like around the knees and elbows
and on a few of Elise’s toes and I was busy adding a little linseed oil to the dry
spots when he finally made it up the five flights to my overheated apartment,
breathing hard, though I didn’t give him a chance to catch his breath because I was
so excited to show him what I’d done.