Painting With Fire (19 page)

Chapter
41: The Showdown

Tom was busy getting ready for his first show, “Burnt.” He wanted to make sure he agreed with the curator’s work arranging the art and photos before it opened, but the only time they allowed him to stop by was hours before the show, so it was not like there was time to change anything anyway. The organizers said they didn’t want to bother him since he was in bad health.

“I hate that I have no control over anything,” he said. “Damn hotshot photographer’s in charge.”

Claudia helped him hobble out of the car on his crutch and walk up the ramp to the museum. Inside, everything was painted white and brightly lit. The photos of his paintings had been blown up ten feet high and were in order of when they were shot. You could see the angel’s face degrade, become covered in black soot and curl up and shrivel into nothing. At the end of the exhibit, there was a pile of the burnt canvasses surrounded by a velvet rope, intertwined with yellow police tape.

“Fucking joke.” Tom hobbled over, ripped the police tape off and threw it in the black
trashcan in the corner. “That’s my contribution.

“I can’t really take any credit for this.” Tom sat down on the bench, stared at the pile and sighed. “It’s all the work of a freak accident, isn’t it? Sure, the photographer did a great job capturing it, but still, did I ever have any real talent?”

She winced as she sat down next to him and her arm around him. It still hurt to sit, but she did it anyway to be near him.

“Of course, you have talent,” she said. “Don’t make me slap you. It was the photographer and the rest of us who got lucky. If it weren’t for the freak accident, no one would have seen that painting other than a handful of people.”

“The newspapers love it, don’t they?” The gravelly voice behind them made both of them jump an inch off the bench.

Stan walked up dressed like a cop trying not to look like a cop in a pin-striped suit with boxy shoulders and crooked iron lines. Professional attire didn’t seem to suit him as naturally as a uniform.

“What, are you my personal bodyguard now?” Tom said.

“No, but it wouldn’t hurt to hire one.” Stan’s eyes scanned the room.

“It’s nice to have the suspect’s face capturing the public’s interest.” He nodded his head toward a ten-foot-tall photo of Alice’s face curled up on a black and blue canvas. “It means I get a lotta anonymous calls. Somebody even thinks Angel is crazy enough to show up tonight. Most of these people are totally off their rocker though. One of ‘em asked me to arrest their cat for stealing. But who knows? Maybe the cat did have a thing for shiny objects.”

“You always say it’s not your investigation,” Claudia said. “Then why do you spend so much time talking to us?”

“It’s really the FBI and DEA’s investigation. And I don’t like the way they’re taking their sweet-ass time.”

“I don’t like the way you are taking your own sweet-ass time,” Tom said. “I don’t understand how you could have interviewed her after the murder on the corner and not known.”

“It’s not enough to know who did it anymore. You have to have overwhelming, indisputable proof,” Stan said. “They call it the ‘CSI effect.’ The public expects us to have this amazing forensic evidence, DNA, blood specks, the smoking gun. But the fact is Alice almost always knows her victims. She gets to ‘em. She’s a serial killer who kills with simple tools. There’s never a smoking gun. It’s a clever pattern. She killed Dave with drugs, but the defense would call that a suicide. Your case is strong, but it’s a fire she didn’t even set. With the Jackson guy, it was a shovel. But there are no prints on it. If she had any bloody clothes in her apartment the fire cleaned ‘em out.

“What about Janice?” Claudia said. “Wasn’t there some evidence there that
didn’t get destroyed? Her apartment wasn’t completely gutted like ours was.”

“Alice
used a crystal vase to kill her, but she’s the one who gave her the flowers,” Stan said. “So what would prints prove, even if we could find them in the middle of a fire scene?

“The only thing we’ve got is testimony from you two and the Kevin kid.”

“You’d think that would be worth a lot,” Tom said.

“It’s worth a lot as long as the three of you are alive,” Stan said.

“But she wouldn’t try to take us out after all the publicity, would she?” Tom asked. “She’s a drug dealer, not a psychopath.”

“
My guess is she’s both,” Stan said. “You know that saying, if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life?”

“Are you working tonight?” Claudia asked.

“Not technically,” he said. “But I’m going to go brief security anyway. Good luck tonight.” He turned and walked away.

“And here I am thinking he just showed up to buy some of my work,” Tom said in a dry, sarcastic voice.

Claudia exhaled and stood up. She couldn’t take sitting anymore. Tom slumped forward and watched as a group of men and women dressed in crisp white shirts and black bow ties entered the room pushing carts full of tiny circular pieces of meat and cheese topped with mysterious green tufts.

“Maybe now is not
the time to be in the limelight.” He sighed.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “You’ve waited your whole life for people to appreciate your art.”

The women began stacking the clinking glasses in a pyramid on a white-table-cloth covered table near the end of the exhibit. Their heels made clop, clop sounds as they shifted and stacked the glasses. Claudia shifted uneasily on her feet and glanced over, almost expecting to see Alice.

“It’s not my art,” Tom said. “Maybe we should just go home. I don’t belong here.”

“Tom, you are the most talented person I know,” she said. “I’ve believed in you from the start. You have to stay. You can’t live your life in fear and give up what you’ve always wanted.”

“Dude, they are dressed better than I am,” he said, tugging at the collar of his spotless white shirt.

It was true, so she didn’t say anything. She looked down at her brown, flowing dress, borrowed from a friend. The shoes were a little too big, but Claudia didn’t care. Tom didn’t feel like shopping on crutches and she didn’t feel like leaving Tom.

The people, most dressed in black and white, started to trickle in. Tom kept sitting there like a part of the exhibit, a broken down, hobbling artist after the fire. Claudia helped him to his feet and guided him to a chair at the tall table in the corner and parked a glass of white wine in front of him. She took his crutch away and
stacked it against the wall.

As she walked back, she noticed the curved, black sequined back of an elderly lady pushing a walker, with a slim woman in a simple
, black dress holding her arm.

“My God, it’s Doris!” Claudia said. “Hey, Doris. It’s amazing to see you out of the house.”

“This is my daughter,” she said. “She came back to take care of me after the fire. Isn’t it great? I’m not a shut-in anymore.”

By the time Claudia got back to the table, Tom was smiling up at three beautiful women circling around him.

“It’s shame we won’t have the pleasure of seeing the original work. I know what she’s done, but she looks so beautiful, so innocent. I’d love to pose for you.” The woman in the short, black satin dress bent forward as she shook Tom’s left hand. It was like she had gift-wrapped all her best parts in the tight, shiny fabric. “I’m sure it’s been very hard.”

“Yes, it has,” Tom said, keeping his eyes on hers.

Another woman in a black and white striped dress handed him her card. “I understand you’re not actually married.”

“No. My God.” Tom said. “I know who you are. I’ve waited years to meet you. I love your work.”

“You know, I can’t help but notice that that cast is awfully boring,” she said, touching his shoulder with a small delicate hand. “Maybe we can go somewhere private later and I can paint on it and maybe some other places, as well?”

Claudia’s face drained of all color as she walked over there. She put her arm around Tom’s neck and nuzzled her face into his ear.

“Flirting is fine, but I can’t stand it when a woman touches my man,” she whispered. “She touches you one more time like that, and I might just kill her.”

He smiled and sighed. “I love you too, baby.” She could smell scotch on his breath.

James, the photographer, arrived and started drinking with Tom. He was a tall, lanky man with glasses and a slouch in one shoulder where the strap usually cut in from his camera bag.

“I just like to sit here and observe the reactions to my work,” he said, shrugging.

Claudia wondered if he was self conscious without being able to hide behind his lenses, if he felt as hollow as Tom about the dozens of people coming up to him and shaking his hand. But that didn’t seem to be the case. He stood tall with his chest puffed out, in an exaggerated gesture of pride.

“Amazing work,” a man spat out over the noise, into his ear. “How you were able to capture these kinds of images in those lighting conditions against the blaze of the fire is just amazing from a technical standpoint, as well as an artistic one.”

“I know, I know.” James smiled and ran his hand through his thinning hair.

Tom was slamming back the drinks now. He had moved past the glasses of wine and on
to whiskey. He was spinning the little red straw, chasing the ice cubes in his glass and laughing to James.

“What does all this mean?” Tom slurred into the photographer’s ear. “Is success in art just an accident? Is it just a matter of the right people saying your work is worth looking at? I guess I should thank you for getting their attention.”

James just smiled slyly. He studied Tom for a moment and squinted to focus his eyes, after a few drinks of his own.

“My work is no accident,” he said. “And neither is yours. Buddy, you gotta learn to sell yourself.”

“I don’t want to sell myself,” Tom said, slapping his hand on the table.

“Tom, are you supposed to be drinking lik
e this when you are taking painkillers?” Claudia asked. “Let me take you home.”

She brought him his jacket and his crutch. It wasn’t even that late, only 8 p.m. according to her watch. But Tom didn’t need any more drinks.

He lurched forward from the table and leaned heavily on his crutch. She walked him to the steps and helped steady him as he lowered his leg down each step. He sat down on the bottom step with his bad leg stretched out in front of him like a stiff, overstuffed carnival prize.

“Wait and I’ll pick you up,” she said, walking briskly toward the parking lot. Her heels scraped against the cement in a steady rhythm. Her right shoe kept slipping off her heel. Claudia wanted to sprint but didn’t want to twist her ankle.

She started her car and felt ashamed to be driving such a lowly vehicle to such a highbrow event. They should have rented something fancier or shown up in a limo. What kind of rising star in the art world comes to his show in an old, rusted Nissan?

As she rolled up to the front steps, she couldn’t help but curse. Tom was nowhere to be seen. She flicked on the hazard lights and waited.
She wondered if he had snuck off with the woman in the satin dress. She looked for him in the dimming light.

But then she saw his shadowy silhouette hobbling on the other side of the road staring at something off in the distance.

She got out of the car to help Tom get into the passenger side.

“That SUV. I thought I saw her get in that SUV.” He pointed down the street.

“You’re drunk, Tom,” Claudia said. “Get in the car.”

“She looked different. Dark hair. Maybe I’m imagining it, but she walks like that.”

Claudia instinctively reached into her pockets to grab her phone but her palms slid over the empty curves of the brown dress. She had been so busy gathering Tom’s belongings and getting him out the door, she had forgotten her own coat with her phone in it. A nervous feeling sank into her stomach.

Before she had time to ask for his, she heard the roar of a large engine and saw the Chevy Suburban with black tinted windows accelerating down the street at about 80 mph straight at them.
She darted up the stairs back toward the gallery. Tom hobbled as fast as he could but fell flat on his face against the steps. She ran back down and pulled him up as fast as she could. Her heels loudly scratched the cement.

All four wheels screeched and struggled to stay on the ground at the same time as the
Suburban
swerved toward them.

The SUV slammed into the Nissan, crunching it into
a twisted hunk of metal coming right at them. It climbed most of the stairs, then stalled at the top, inches away from where Tom and Claudia crouched behind a pillar and screamed.

Alice stiffly lif
ted her head and stared at them. Her eyes were open wide with surprise. They all wondered how the hell she had missed. As she moved her arm to shift into reverse, little flecks of glass and drops of blood slipped off, like rubies and diamonds.

Two men watched from the sidewalk. One of them was taking video with his phone. “Mother fucker,” Claudia shouted as she pulled Tom to his feet. “Call the police.”