JM03 - Red Cat (8 page)

“Why do you do it?” I’d asked.

“Do what?” Clare whispered into my neck.

“Why do you see me, when you’re married?”

Clare stiffened in my arms and let out a long sigh and otherwise didn’t move for over a minute. Then she took her hands off me and stepped away.

“Why do I cheat on him, you mean?” Her voice was flat and empty. I nodded and a grim little smile crossed her face. “All of a sudden you’re curious?”

“I’m just looking for some insight.”

Clare snorted. “Into what, for chrissakes?” She put on her sunglasses and buttoned her coat and said something else that the wind snatched away. Her face was rigid and the sun flared on her black lenses.

“You want to hear all the desperate details? Fine. He’s twelve years older than I am; his first priority is his business; I’m wife number three; and my best guess is he’s been fucking other women since before we were engaged. No one in particular, but a rotating cast of characters.

“There’s a certain type he goes for, a kind of well-bred shopgirl type, young, nicely schooled, a little arty maybe, but impressionable and deferential, used to keeping the customers happy. The girl who manages the art gallery he buys from sometimes, the fund-raising girl on the hospital committee, the one handling PR for the museum benefit— that kind. I was surprised when I found out— hurt, even— but it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into. I was working at Christie’s when I met him, appraising some prints he wanted to sell. He was married at the time and never made a secret of it.

“We don’t discuss it, but he’s discreet and I try to be too, and it is what it is— an arrangement that works well enough for both of us, at least for now. Not what I had in mind in high school maybe, but better benefits than at Christie’s.”

She’d stood with her hands in her pockets and said it matter-of-factly, like a slightly boring school recitation, and when she was through she’d turned up her collar and walked past me.

“I’ll be in the car,” she’d said.

* * *

“Shit,” I said to myself. My notes were stacked on the table from the night before and my laptop was still on, and for no other reason than that I didn’t know what else to do with myself, I took off my coat and started looking again for Holly Cade.

9

Despite my best efforts, and all the permutations of “Holly” and “Cade” and “Wren” and “Gimlet” I could think of, Google did no more for me this time than it had before. I made a peanut butter sandwich and went back to the MetroMatchPoint site and searched again for any postings from Wren. And came up just as empty. And then I thought about the names of the other characters in her plays, and about how many other aliases Holly might have used. I searched MetroMatchPoint for Robin, Lark, Helen, Cassandra, and Medea. There were no Medeas but plenty of the rest, though not one that sounded remotely like Wren. So back I went to Google.

It wasn’t quite dumb luck, but neither could I claim it was rigorous procedure or faultless logic either. It was a more oblique strategy that involved typing the names of Holly’s characters into Google and seeing what popped out. It took much sifting of chaff, but eventually I brought forth a kernel of wheat: Cassandra Z.

The connection was through Cassandra Zero, the doomed young daughter in Liars Club, and Orlando Krug, the man who’d owned the now defunct gallery in Woodstock where Holly had held her forgettable video show two years ago— the same Orlando Krug who now owned Krug Visual in the West Village, and who represented the work of a video artist by the name of Cassandra Z. Persistence and synchronicity— the detective’s best friends.

Cassandra Z had a low profile on Krug’s website: an entry on the list of artists that he repped, a one-line biography—“Cassandra Z lives in New York”— and a note, the only one of its kind on Krug’s site, that Cassandra’s videos were not publicly exhibited. “Viewing by appointment only, to qualified collectors.” Which perhaps explained why I’d been unable to find any reviews of her work. I wondered what qualifications Krug had in mind.

The handful of other references to Cassandra were in an art blog called Candy Foam, and in— of all places— Digital Gumbo: The On-line Journal of Emerging Video Arts. They were fairly recent, within the past eighteen months, and they started a ticking worry in me.

The first mention on Candy Foam was in the midst of a muddled, sophomoric thread on art and pornography, and whether these were mutually exclusive classifications. Someone calling himself BeatTilStiff offered up Cassandra’s work as an example of both, and triggered a long digression in which Candy and Beat— apparently the only parties to the debate familiar with her stuff— one-upped each other with bits of in-crowd arcana about the videos, all without actually describing what was in them. Candy and Beat were at it again a few months later in an exchange about the import of Cassandra’s work.

Candy wrote: “It’s her insight into sexual power politics, and her obsession with liminal moments and tectonic shifts— with those instances when control is abruptly transferred, when the dominant becomes the submissive, when denial becomes surrender, and language breaks down— when the whip changes hands, so to speak. And don’t get me started on the deconstructionist aspects…”

To which Beat replied: “Two words, Candy—‘forest’ and ‘trees.’ And as always, you miss the one while plowing into the other. You got the sex right, and the power, but the actual point escapes you entirely: Cassie’s doing noir porn, fucktard! It’s about hunger and voyeurism and inevitable doom and, above all else, PAYBACK. Check out her lighting! Look at her #5 and then at anything by Musuraca or Seitz. Go watch Out of the Past for shit sake! And BTW— you’re reading too much William Gibson again.”

To which Candy replied: “ESAD.”

The reference in Digital Gumbo was more straightforward. It was in a month-old issue, in a gossipy column called “Secondary Market,” and the columnist noted that two of Cassandra Z’s works—#3 and #8— were rumored to have changed hands recently, at six figures each. Whatever she was doing, people were paying good money for it.

* * *

I ran on Sunday morning, in a gritty wind I thought would sand the skin from my face. After a long shower and a bowl of oatmeal, I went out in it again and walked into the West Village. Orlando Krug’s gallery was on Perry Street, between an antique shop and a store that sold extremely expensive men’s pajamas, and behind a frosted-glass door with small black lettering on it. The inside was done in grays and whites and creams, and the interior designer had somehow made peace between the wainscoting and beadboard and William Morris rugs, and all the big flat-panel monitors mounted on the walls. There was footage of gray tenement rooftops playing on the screens, with pigeons that morphed occasionally into vivid tropical flowers. The air smelled of sandalwood.

A small, thin man sat behind a partners desk in the back corner. He was maybe twenty and his vaguely ferretlike face was covered in a neat three-day scruff. His hair was five shades of blond and arranged in careful chaos. He wore his French cuffs dangling but his blue shirt was well tailored and so was his look of boredom. He glanced up at me when I came in and went back to fiddling with his iPod. He looked around when I spoke, as if I weren’t the only one in the place.

“Orlando Krug?”

“No.”

“Is he in?”

“And you would be who?” His voice was nasal and arch, and as bored as his look.

“The guy looking for Orlando Krug. Is he in?”

The man shrugged. “No need to be grumpy,” he said, and he pushed away from the desk and went through a doorway in the back. He knocked at a door at the end of a short hall and opened it and went in. He came out a moment later and so did another man.

He was about sixty and tall, and his skin had the color and hard gloss of polished teak decking. He wore pressed jeans and a black sweater, and his white hair was cut very short. His brows were precise arches over wary blue eyes, and there was something in his gaunt face that reminded me of a monk. The abbot, perhaps, of a prosperous and deeply tanned order.

He had a deep voice and an accent that almost wasn’t there and that I couldn’t quite place. “I am Krug. How can I help you, Mr….?”

“March. I understand you represent Cassandra Z.”

Behind the desk, the blond man perked up. Krug glanced at him. “Ricky, make me an espresso, would you?” Ricky rolled his eyes but stood. Krug looked at me. “And one for you, perhaps, Mr. March? Ricky does quite a good job.” I nodded and Ricky disappeared. Krug sat behind the desk and waved me to the chair opposite.

“You’re familiar with Cassandra’s work?” he asked. His blue eyes were shining.

“Not familiar, but intrigued. I was hoping to learn more.”

Krug smiled. “Her work is indeed intriguing, Mr. March, though not widely known.” I nodded but said nothing. Krug kept smiling. “How did you become aware of it?”

I shrugged. “Idle chatter from informed people. A comment here, a comment there…eventually it adds up.”

Krug steepled his long tan fingers beneath his chin. “Indeed. What other artists do you follow, Mr. March?”

Ricky came in with two coffees on a small silver tray. I smiled more widely. “Eisner, Ditko, Infantino, Adams, Miller.”

Ricky set a demitasse cup in front of each of us, squinted at me, and left. Krug pursed his lips. “Comic-book artists.”

“I’m ready to broaden my horizons.”

“And you wish to start with video, and with Cassandra’s work?”

“I hear such interesting things about it.”

“From whom, Mr. March?”

“People who know.”

“I know all the people who know, Mr. March. If they know, it’s because I arranged for them to know. So if one of these people has referred you to me, please don’t be shy in saying.”

“And if they haven’t?”

Krug sighed. The lines on his face seemed to fold in on themselves and he looked like a dour walnut. “Then we can drink our coffee and discuss the work of any number of other artists.”

“But not Cassandra’s?” Krug gathered his brows in a look of minuscule sympathy and shook his head. “Interest alone doesn’t qualify me?” I asked.

“Cassandra’s work is very challenging, Mr. March— not easily accessible. A collector new to the medium, lacking the context…I would be doing you a disservice.”

I chuckled. “I’m grateful for your concern. Would money have an effect on my qualifications?”

Krug played with the thin gold watch on his thin brown wrist. “None, I’m afraid. Cassandra’s work deserves to be appreciated, not merely bought and sold.”

“I thought buying and selling was your job, Mr. Krug. Does Cassandra know that you’re so…discouraging?”

“These are her directives, I assure you.” His blue eyes were cold in his shiny face.

“Maybe I could talk to her about that.”

Krug sighed deeply and sat back in his chair. “The only thing Cassandra is more concerned with than how her work is disposed of, Mr. March, is her privacy.” He looked at his watch. “Now, if there’s nothing more…” He raised his cup.

“Just one thing: Do you still represent Holly Cade?”

Krug sipped at his coffee and never spilled a drop. One white brow rose minutely. “Holly who?”

“Holly Cade. She was part of a group show at your Woodstock gallery.”

Krug’s apologetic look was barely perfunctory. “I’m afraid I don’t recall the name.”

“No, of course not,” I said, rising. “It’s been a long time, after all.”

There was a health food store on the corner and across the street. It carried an amazing array of soy products, and its large window had an unobstructed view of Krug Visual. I browsed the spelt cereals and green teas for half an hour before Ricky came out. He was wearing a topcoat bigger than he was, and he headed east on Perry Street, struggling against the wind. I followed.

Ricky was a man with a mission, and the mission, apparently, was lunch. He turned on West Fourth Street and again on West Eleventh and went into a gourmet deli and spoke to the man behind the counter. He came out ten minutes later with a white plastic grocery bag and began retracing his steps. I came up beside him on West Fourth.

“That was good coffee, Ricky.”

He jumped. “Jeez!” he said. “I almost dropped the effing soda.”

“Sorry. I just wanted a quick word.”

Ricky drifted to the corner and stopped. His ferrety eyes narrowed. “A quick word about what? I’ve got to get this back to himself or never hear the end of it.”

“Cassandra Z,” I said.

Ricky put up his free hand and backed away half a step. “Forget it, Grumpy. I need this job. And even if I knew anything about her— which I don’t— why should I tell it to you?”

I shrugged and took my hand from my coat pocket. “For fifty bucks, maybe?” The bill was crisp and new. Ricky looked furtive and reached for it. I put it away. “On the other hand, you say you don’t know much.”

“If you’re looking for a name or phone number or whatever, I guess you get to keep your money. She’s too good to mingle with the help when she comes around. She only deals with O, and he plays her very close to the vest— especially since that other guy came in.”

“What other guy?”

Ricky looked at me and grinned nastily. “Looks like I know something after all.” His hand was out again.

I took out the fifty but held on to it. “What other guy?”

“O banished me to the back room, but I could hear. He was a lawyer type, and he worked for one of Cassie’s interview subjects. He wanted to get in touch with her, or for her to get in touch with him.”

“Interview subjects?”

Ricky looked impatient. “As in the titles of her videos— Interview One, Interview Two, and so forth— you know.”

I didn’t but I nodded vaguely. “What did he want to get in touch about?”

“He didn’t say.”

“And this was when?”

“A month or so ago.”

“You hear any names?”

“I don’t remember,” he said. He saw the look on my face. “No shit— I really don’t.” Ricky eyed my fifty. “So, how about it?”

“Nearly there,” I said, and took my other hand from my other pocket. “Anybody here you recognize?”

Ricky looked down at the photo and tapped a finger on the woman sitting at the edge of the group. “That’s her,” he said. “That’s Cassie.” I sighed. Holly. Wren. Cassandra Z. “Do I get the cash now?”