SoHo Sins (3 page)

“But he did love her, in his way,” I said. “I’ve known the two of them since they met at Bernar Venet’s loft here in SoHo years ago. Sure, I was with Philip a few times when he played around—at the last FIAC in Paris, or whatever. But that doesn’t mean he’d have Mandy killed.”

“You’d be surprised, Jack. People do some pretty awful things to get rid of partners who hold them too close, too long. You ought to know.”

The May afternoon rain had turned to a fine, whispering mist. “I suppose so,” I said, “if I let myself think about it.”

We walked in awkward silence for a moment.

“SoHo,” Hogan said. “You’d think with all the art deals being done down here they could get some decent asphalt on the streets.”

My friend is not particularly sentimental about 19th-century cobblestone roadways and cast-iron facades.

“Relax, Hogan, you’d never be happy in this neighborhood.”

“Is anyone?”

I turned up the collar of my raincoat. “A lot of people seem to like it. Historic shells, long open floors, thin interior columns. Great for lofts, galleries, fashion boutiques.”

“Spare me your real estate pitch.”

“Anyhow, it’s moody in its way, don’t you think?”

Hogan grunted his response. “Sure. Most of these buildings were sweatshops, weren’t they?”

“You could put it that way. Some of the galleries still are.”

“Your buddy Philip has his own sweatshops in Asia. Kids with thin, nimble fingers cutting silicon circuits for pennies an hour. And he deals with a lot of tough freight haulers to get his products shipped cheap. For some of his dad’s old-school cronies, a fat contract with Oliver Industries could be worth a courtesy hit, a little lethal favor among friends. Maybe that’s what the O-Tech ads mean when they brag about ‘global reach.’ ”

I did my best not to hear him. You can’t deal successfully in art if you dwell on where the money comes from and how it gets made. I concern myself with my clients’ tastes and credit ratings, not their ethics.

We turned onto Prince Street and made our way past the sidewalk vendors selling jewelry, stolen art books, incense, and fake designer handbags. Their tables, piled with goods, were wrapped in sheets of plastic as they waited in vans or doorways for the soft rain to pass. At the corner of West Broadway, I waved Hogan into the stainless-steel elevator and keyed the top floor.

“Look,” he said as we rode quietly up the eight floors, “it wouldn’t even have to be that complicated. Who actually saw Philip in L.A.? Some hotel flunkies who wouldn’t know him from Adam—just the name on the credit card. And the business meeting? One plant manager with stock options, who depends on Philip for every knee-sock his kid wears to soccer practice and every hope he’s got of paying someday for UC Berkeley. The plane ticket could have been used by any dutiful yes-man with a passing resemblance to the boss. And frankly, to my eye, these corporate types all look alike. That leaves your pal Philip completely covered, if he decided to stay here and take care of some messy business at home.”

The elevator opened directly onto the Oliver apartment, where spare, angular furniture caught the light from two walls of windows. Ahead, we could see the long slash of West Broadway and the trees below Canal and then, rising beyond a smattering of Tribeca buildings, the white, immensely tall Trade Towers partially lost in the clouds of a low sloppy sky. On our right, the apartment’s west bank of glass, dulled by its anti-UV glaze, looked out over rooftops thick with wooden water tanks, clustered halfway to the Hudson.

I didn’t care for the feel of the Oliver place in this rain-gray light. Still, everything inside was the way I remembered it: a Corbusier pony-skin chaise longue, a Bendtsen sofa, a Mies coffee table, four Breuer “Wassily” sling chairs in chrome and black leather, a tall Noguchi floor lamp made of white paper.

I went over to the switch panel. “OK?”

“Sure,” Hogan said.

I twisted two knobs and the track lights came up, throwing the paintings—a Kline, a Pollock, two Rauschenbergs, a Johns, a Warhol “celebrity” portrait of Mandy—into vivid, irreverent color. Hogan stared briefly at a Giacometti sculpture by the zinc-and-lacquer bar.

“And I thought
you
were thin,” he said.

“It’s a piece personally selected by Mrs. Oliver,” I told him. “Poor Mandy never saw a modernist cliché she didn’t love.”

It must have given her some comfort, when everything else in her life was disrupted and marred, to surround herself with the safest forms of radical art. Once the split came and Philip turned up in public for the first time—flagrantly—with Claudia on his arm, Amanda went immediately to her lawyer and laid claim to the SoHo loft and its blue-chip contents, saying Philip could take his collection of works by “emerging” talents and his little Wop artist-cunt (if I recall her words correctly) and haul them all to some unheated walk-up in Brooklyn for all she cared.

Of course, none of that kept Amanda from taking her man back every time he stumbled home or from putting on a good act for the family court judge, so that they could continue to have visits from Philip’s preteen daughter, Melissa, beloved by them both.

“Cruise around,” Hogan said. “Tell me if anything seems strange.”

I went first into the kitchen area, a 20-foot-deep alcove of pearwood cabinets and sweeping granite counters anchored by a Viking stove and a chrome refrigerator that could have serviced a five-star restaurant. The appliances were spotless from lack of regular use, since Mandy and Philip did not keep a full-time cook in the SoHo pied-à-terre. This was their “bohemian” getaway, after all, where Mandy could play at art patroness while Philip was at his midtown office, knitting the world together with fiber-optic cable and piling up his millions. On the far side of the wall was the exercise room, stocked like an upscale spa with resistance machines, a treadmill, and a StairMaster on which Mandy was forever striving, Sisyphus-fashion, to climb her way back to a lost youthful figure.

“Try this,” Hogan called. He was standing by the Eames lounger and ottoman, rotating the chair slightly from side to side. “This is where she took it, you know.” I glanced down at the assemblage of bent cherrywood and black leather that itself resembled a semi-reclining body. There was a blood smear on the headrest and, below, a much larger stain on the kilim.

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Sit in it. Go on. Everything’s dry now, and the police techs have been all over the place for two days.”

I eased myself into the shallow leather pocket, Mandy’s favorite resting place. Here she would read art books by herself in the afternoon, or lean back, hooting, waving a vodka gimlet, when someone amused her at one of the couple’s parties. From that perspective, I saw the whole stretch of living space gradually merge, through the west windows, with the troubled sky over the rooftops. Behind me, I knew, was the corridor to the home office and the two matching bedrooms.

It was all strange, from my point of view. The deep stillness, the emptiness of the place, Mandy bleeding and dead. Meanwhile, Hogan moved through the white-cube spaces, among the sleek furnishings, like a bird dog in corn shocks, his bald pate glinting under the track lights. His shoulders were hunched with the old compelling intensity. I could feel his mind working from across the room.

“She was sitting like you are now,” he said, “with her back to the hallway. Whoever shot her came from behind and leveled a nine-millimeter at the center of her skull. You see what that means, don’t you?”

Yes, it was clear. Either she didn’t realize the person was there at all—a sneak intruder—or else it was someone she knew well and trusted, maybe someone she expected to come and lay a hand on the nape of her neck and massage all the day’s tension away.

“Which reminds me,” Hogan said. “How come, with all this premium merchandise on the premises, there’s no doorman, no security camera?”

“That’s the way the tenants want it. Casualness is part of what we’re selling here. The hip downtown lifestyle, you know. SoHo cool.”

I didn’t bother telling Hogan that Philip, acting through Bernstein, was a relentless negotiator, even with me. By my calculation, there was no sense wasting money on a door staff and closed-circuit video for an eight-flat where rent from the best apartment was locked in for a decade, with small biannual increments, at ten percent below market rate.

“Besides, when evidence crews don’t leave the floor open, it takes three separate keys to get in here—one for the outer door, one for the elevator, one for the loft. Nobody enters by chance. As for street-level security, I’m sure stores on the block have cameras. Maybe some of the bars too.”

“A lot of good that did Mrs. Oliver.” Hogan glared around at the empty apartment. “All right, Jack. Take a stroll through the rest of the place. See if it speaks to you.”

I knew what to expect in the back of the Oliver apartment. The first bedroom was Mandy’s, a low, wide room with two walls of walk-in closets and a platform bed flanked by cube-shaped tables, one still stacked with monographs on Matisse, de Chirico, Miró. A door, standing open, gave onto the mirror-lined bathroom with a sunken marble tub. I went through, glancing at the racks and shelves of scented unguents, and opened the opposite door into Philip’s bedroom. There was nothing much to see, just an extra-wide bed under a black coverlet, two recent issues of
Artforum
, and the thin plasma screen of a wall-mounted TV.

The far door, I confirmed, connected with Philip’s office, a dim room aglow with computer monitors that Philip had left behind and Amanda had never turned off, flickering their bright, ever-changing Oliver Industries screensavers. Beyond that was a small room, stuffed with posters and randomly strewn CD cases, where Philip’s daughter stayed sometimes on weekends.

I took the corridor back, passing the suite of Kandinsky prints that were Mandy’s first proud purchase of high-modernist art. Ahead of me, Hogan’s thick shoulders and sleek head, perfectly illuminated, floated above the chair back as he reclined in the Eames lounger. I slowed down and treaded softly, stepping as the killer might have stepped, while I watched Hogan survey the living room. Soon I would be close enough to pat his bare dome.

“Tell me what you think,” he said, swiveling the chair unhurriedly around to face me.

“I think you make a pretty good target. Although, I have to admit, it would be a lot easier to shoot you from the back.”

“Why do you suppose Mrs. Oliver didn’t hear her assailant the way I heard you?”

“Well, it might be because of this.” I went to the east wall and pushed a button on the Bang & Olufsen unit. A Philip Glass choral piece filled the room with insistent violin strokes and bleating voices.

Hogan listened for a while, looking a bit like a human version of the RCA Victor Dalmatian.

“If she played that very often,” he said, “I might shoot her myself.”

“Maybe Mandy did hear someone, but had no reason to worry, no reason to turn.”

“Nothing’s been disturbed in the place?”

“No, nothing. Just me.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

That seemed unlikely somehow. It was more than just a matter of imagining, too vividly, what had happened at that juncture of corridor and open space. Something was off in the apartment itself. There were no signs of ransacking or theft, not so much as a broken wineglass. Yet the very normalcy of the environment felt bogus, as though the rooms were sworn to unwilling secrecy, the designer objects longing to reveal some rude, unspeakable truth.

“Tell me about Philip’s mistress,” Hogan said.

“That’s an awfully prim term for a girl like Claudia Silva.”

“Yeah, I’m an old-fashioned guy. Do you know her?”

I walked over to one of the Wassily chairs and sat down facing Hogan. His expression told me he was ready to take all the time necessary.

“Philip asked me to make an introduction. So I did.”

“You set him up with a babe who’s older than his daughter but way younger than either of his wives?”

“That’s right. Then you know about Melissa, the little girl from his first marriage?”

Hogan gave me a pitying look. “Did this Claudia Silva ever come here?”

There was a chord shift in the Glass composition, a major alteration in the flat aural horizon.

“Sure,” I said. “In those days, Phil and I used to tomcat around together a bit. Sometimes we’d hang out here, when Mandy was away in Europe. You can guess how it went.”

“No, not exactly. But I get the general drift.” Hogan put his feet up on the ottoman. “So Claudia would know the layout. Like where the bedrooms are and how the hallway opens onto the living room. She’d even know the position of Mrs. Oliver’s favorite chair.”

“I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

“All right, yes,” I said. “She’d know the whole place. Intimately.”

Hogan’s eyes focused on his cheap brown shoes, then on me. “Good times here while the wife was away?”

“Some girls, some drinks, some coke. The usual.”

My friend regarded me without any change of expression. “I guess it depends where you live.”

I was beginning to understand, firsthand, the vaunted Hogan interrogation technique. It was like talking to a therapist with a pipeline to the cops.

“I swore off all that stuff a couple of years ago.”

“Great, Jack, you’re forgiven. Anyway, it’s not your damned social life, or lack of it, that interests me now.”

“It’s a pretty dull story these days.”

“At least you’ve got your memories.” Hogan’s face shifted, becoming utterly serious. “Which is more than we can say for Philip, if the doctors are on the level.” He paused, allowing himself a half-smile. “Quite a change for you, Jack. Don’t tell me you got religion.”

“No, just a bad conscience. Does that count?”

“It’s a start.”

Hogan stood and walked over to the windows. The sky had darkened into evening, and the rain had stopped. The street lights were weak.

“Let’s get out of here,” Hogan said. “This place is like a crypt.” He turned to me. “You know you have to keep all this to yourself, right? Like always.”