Strawberry Tattoo (13 page)

Barbara stared at him, unable to speak. There was a long pause, which Frank finally broke.

“Well, congratulations,” he continued. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Sort of the art and the critical response at the same time, right? They say it’s getting harder and harder to be original, but you certainly managed it, Ms. Bilder. I’m real impressed.”

Another silence fell. The detectives by now were looking a little puzzled; from their point of view, Frank had made a pleasant opening. Why we were doing frighteningly realistic impressions of Lot’s wife in return—we might lack the salt but we had the frozen-into-pillars part down perfectly—was a mystery to them. At last Laurence, his voice high and shaky, sounding as nervous as a pubescent, broke in:

“The show has been
vandalised.
It’s not supposed to be like this. The red
paint is
graffiti.
Someone trashed the show last night. That’s why you guys are
here
, OK? We called you in.”

Thurber had remained impassive all through Frank’s praise of the show, and her expression didn’t change a whit as she assimilated this new information. Frank’s eyebrows rose slightly, but that was all. It was true about New York cops being battle-hardened. If I’d just committed
a faux pas
like that I would have run screaming from the room.

“I see,” said Frank, adjusting with praiseworthy ease to this new perspective. I wondered whether, in the car afterwards, he would bang his head repeatedly against the dashboard, muttering “Shit! Shit!”, or whether he just took this kind of thing in his stride.

“Well, that’s very interesting,” he said. “Though we don’t know anything about a call?” He looked at Thurber to double-check this. She shook her head slowly. “I guess that means I have a few questions to ask you, Ms. Bilder.” He nodded at the nearest word on the wall, which happened to be “Whore.” It recurred with unnerving frequency. “Who would you say really doesn’t like you? Enough to do this to your show? Or maybe I should say, is there someone who doesn’t like you—and really,
really
didn’t like Kate Jacobson?”

He looked round our blank faces. “That’s why we’re here,” he explained. “We’re from Homicide. Manhattan South. Investigating the murder of Kate Jacobson.”

There was total silence. Then Carol said angrily:

“The
what?
Don’t be ridiculous!”

“We’ve been informed that she was an assistant here,” Thurber said, her flat lifeless voice as uninterested as if she had been reading the shipping forecast. “She was killed last night. Her body was found this morning in Central Park.” She looked up to see the effect this information had on us. Her eyes flickered from one face to the other, while her expression remained as deadpan as ever.

“She’d been strangled. Well,” she added precisely, “garotted. In Strawberry Fields.”

Half an hour later I was pacing the downstairs gallery, back and forth, back and forth across the concrete floor, feeling like a criminal in an over-generous cell. As much of my fist as would fit was stuffed into my mouth, and I was biting down hard on the knuckles. If Laurence had offered me an antidepressant, despite my recent bold words, I’d have grabbed at it. As a second best, however, the sensation of gnawing at my own flesh was strangely relaxing. At least, as the New Agers said, it concentrated one in the moment.

Shock had never taken me quite this way before. But then I was jet-lagged, in a strange country, marking out with my feet the territory in which I was supposed to be having a big career break in a week’s time. It was no wonder that I felt disoriented. Add to that the factor of not really knowing any of these people, and it was like being thrown onstage, and expected to act in an unfamiliar, constantly shifting mix of farce and tragedy. The effort had put a severe strain on my usually solid nerves: it was either start to cannibalise myself or burst into psychotic high-pitched laughter.

Carol had asked me if I wanted to sit with Barbara and Jon in her office while the three of us were waiting to be interviewed by the police. I couldn’t fault her professional hospitality. It was just that I preferred to chew my fist in decent privacy. And I didn’t much fancy being left alone with Barbara and Jon, trying to make conversation while the former shot
dagger-glances at me every time the talk shaded around my previous acquaintance with the latter.

Thurber and Frank had commandeered Stanley’s office and were taking statements from everyone in the gallery, one by one. (It was impossible not to notice, as a sideline to the main action, how easy it was to take over Stanley’s office. A strong-minded child of six could probably have strolled in here and demanded it.) The cops who had been called about the vandalism had eventually turned up and been promply dispatched again by Thurber. It was a homicide investigation now.

Carol was in there with them now, having naturally gone first, and the rest of the staff had retreated to their own offices in various states of shock. Laurence had been very badly hit by the news of Kate’s death; or maybe I noticed his reaction more because I had been with him when he had heard. I had thought he was going to faint. If I’d known him better I would have slapped him round the face. As it was I had to help him to his office and hope he would get a grip before the summons came from Thurber and Frank. He was shaking like a sapling in a hurricane and I doubted that the two Valium he had popped—so much for trying to cut back—would help with his lucidity.

I was just working up a nice rhythm—teeth into knuckles echoing the tread of my feet—when Jon Tallboy came hurrying down the stairs. On his bottom half he was wearing old chinos which hung in over-loose folds around his stork-like legs. With the corduroy jacket and tattersall shirt, he looked like an absent-minded professor. All he needed was a pipe.

“Just getting my coat,” he called over his shoulder. “I think I left it down here.”

Removing my fist reluctantly from my mouth, I dried it on my sweater.

“Sam!” Jon Tallboy said hurriedly, advancing towards me. “I just wanted to snatch a word with you—” He shot a rather hunted glance over his shoulder. “Here you go.”

He pulled a wallet from his jacket and extracted a card, scribbling something on the back of it.

“Kim’s number,” he explained. “And there are my and Barbara’s details as well.”

“Thanks.” I took the card. “Do you mind my asking why this is such a coat-and-dagger operation?”

Haha, how very amusing I was. I needed to get that fist back into play, or very soon the psychotic laughter would be rearing its crazy head again.

“Barbara is a wonderful woman,” Jon Tallboy said devoutly. “But she’s just a little jealous. Maybe that’s putting it too strongly—”

I didn’t think so.

“She just—you know, of course, that I left Kim’s mother for Barbara,” he said. “That’s why I came to the States. And Barbara—well, it’s not exactly—I don’t want to give you the wrong idea—it’s just when Kimmy came over to visit me, I think Barbara was a little reminded of, you know, my life before meeting her. Kimmy’s quite like her mother—so—anyway, she’s obviously very upset at the moment—Barbara, I mean—and I didn’t see any point making it worse by talking about—she finds it difficult sometimes—but I’m
sure,”
he continued with more aplomb, finding himself on safer ground, “that Kim would love to see you. You must give her a ring. And maybe we could meet up. You, me and Barbara, I mean. She loves to meet younger artists, give them a helping hand. She’s so generous,” he finished, with nary a hint of irony.

“Right,” I said carefully, thinking that Jon Tallboy was just like Humpty Dumpty: when he used a word it meant only what he wanted it to mean.

“I must be going,” Jon said hurriedly. “I don’t want to leave Barbara waiting by herself. So we’ll be in touch?”

He smiled at me, a warm, friendly smile marred only by the fact that his eyes didn’t focus on me for more than an instant, darting away nervously to the direction of the staircase. I didn’t remember him being so weak. Or maybe Barbara brought it out in him. The next moment he was retrieving his coat from Java’s desk and hurrying back upstairs, the leather soles of his shoes flapping on the metal staircase in his haste to rejoin his wife.

I looked down at his card. It announced that he was a critic for
ArtView.
I knew it, vaguely. One of those unbelievably glossy magazines, heavier than most coffee-table books, which only American money and advertising can afford to produce. Back in the UK he had been an art teacher at the local comprehensive. Marrying Barbara had certainly taken
him upmarket. Perhaps he considered free will had been a small price to pay for it.

I shoved the card into my pocket and debated what to do next. I had to be on hand to talk to the police, but they would be working their way through the entire staff, so there was no great urgency. I would doubtless come bottom of the list. Plus, as they said over here, I was starving. I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock. No wonder. I’d picked up a very indifferent bagel for breakfast before I caught the bus, but that felt like aeons ago now. And as soon as I realised I was hungry my stomach started turning over like a combine harvester getting ready to sink its teeth into some wheat.

There must be somewhere close by I could get a sandwich. And at that thought my stomach went into roaring overdrive. It would start to eat my intestines if I didn’t feed it now. In a second my hand was on the door latch. I turned it, half-expecting alarm bells to burst out as I did so, and opened the door. Outside it was as bright and sunny as it had been a few hours ago. I had noticed before that when a murder happens an incidental effect—once you’ve had time to take in the news—is surprise that the world is still going about its business: the rain hasn’t started bucketing down in empathy, and people aren’t rending their clothes in mourning on the streets.

I stood for a moment on the pavement, orienting myself, a rush of relief spinning through me at my temporary escape. SoHo seemed like a trendier Bond Street: warehouse-sized galleries interspersed with expensively artistic designer clothes shops which I Must Not Enter At Any Cost. Across the street was what looked like yet another gallery. But, as I watched, a couple of people emerged from its dark façade carrying enormous polystyrene cups, tiny trails of steam emerging from the hole pierced in the top of each one. The black clothes they were wearing were a perfect backdrop for the fragile little curls of steam. It was a pretty effect. I headed over the road and went up the steps.

Inside it was like a Covent Garden café—the Café Casbah in its glory days—stretched out into hyperspace. There were the same black-framed
tables, the same aspirant artworks on the walls, the same pretty but ineffective waiting staff, the same blackboard with tasty-yet-healthy-sounding specials chalked up in swirly handwriting, the same cards on the notice-board advertising macrobiotic Jungian workshops and colour therapy flat-shares. There was even the same marble counter stacked with layers of tempting baked goods. A Covent Garden eaterie would not label almost everything either fat-, dairy- or egg-free, however, nor would it offer seventeen different kinds of coffee, some of which probably took longer to order than they did to consume.

Still, it was with an odd sense of familiarity that I had to repeat my simple order—a mocha coffee and a large piece of carrot cake—three times to the young man behind the marble counter, who was twirling his dreadlocks and staring dreamily at his admittedly charming reflection in the framed poster on the far wall. Dimwit would-be models-slash-actors were the same all over the world.

Dreadlock Boy finally managed to fiddle boyishly with the terrifying complications of the coffee machine, producing my mocha with an air of shy triumph. The tip of his tongue protruded between his lips with concentration as he cut my cake. Bless. I looked around to see if there was a table available. I thought I could see someone waving from the far corner, and headed in that direction. If they weren’t hailing me I would look an idiot, but in a strange town that never worries me too much.

Suzanne and Don, an unlikely combination, were sitting together. So much for my furtive escape from the gallery. Suzanne was staring at the glassy brown surface of a cappuccino whose foam had melted a long time ago, completely untouched. And indeed Suzanne looked incapable of consuming anything. As far as I knew she hadn’t cried at the news of Kate’s death. Instead it seemed that she had retreated far into herself. She moved like a puppet whose strings were being pulled from high above, and her gaze was infinitely detached, registering everything but hardly reacting to it, as if storing it up for processing later.

It was Don who had been waving at me. There were two empty plates stacked in front of him, but he still fixed his stare on my carrot cake as I
put it down with the single-minded attention of an ape eyeing the last fairy cake at the chimpanzees’ tea party. He seemed determined to be cheerful; perhaps I was being unfair to attribute this to a wish to prove his toughness in the face of sudden, violent death. But I didn’t think so.