Strawberry Tattoo (20 page)

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh yes you do.”

There was no point going carefully with Don. Subtlety he would ignore, if he chose to, with sublime unconcern. Now his grin widened still further.

“Well, OK,” he said, lying back on the Eaze-E-Boy. “Since you bullied it outta me. Kate had a tattoo. Just here.” With a smirk, he tapped what looked like the hollow of his right hip, just inside the bone; I couldn’t tell exactly through the folds of the dungarees, but it was near enough.

“So?” I said.

“It was a strawberry. A little strawberry tattoo with one bite taken out. Now ain’t that funny? Killed in Strawberry Fields—with a strawberry tattoo right next to her pussy….” Don’s grin was of shit-eating dimensions now. “Wait till the newspapers get ahold of
that.”

I went upstairs, on the prowl for fresh company. And with perfect timing Laurence came out of the security door that led to the offices just as I reached the first-floor landing. Laurence was the opposite of Don in every conceivable way. No lying around on an Eaze-E-Boy for him, perfecting his smoke-ring technique and letting the world go by. He looked as if he had the world settled firmly on his shoulders. The big, heavy, black-framed glasses made the face behind them seem fragile, the thin beak of a nose hardly able to support them. Even his head was ducked forwards as if pulled down by their weight. There were dark circles under his eyes and a snowstorm of dandruff on the shoulders of his suit.

“Hey!” he said, brightening up somewhat on seeing me. I approved of this reaction.

“I was coming to see if you were around,” I said. “I’ve just been talking to Don about the installation.”

“Oh, right. How’s it going?” This was more perfunctory than it should have been, but I let it pass.

“Very well. He seems to know his stuff.”

Laurence snorted. He disliked Don so much that he couldn’t admit to any of his merits.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve got to go have a word with Stanley. Then do you want to go out and grab a coffee?”

“Sure. Won’t Carol mind, though?”

Laurence shot me a sharpish look. But: “She’s off in DC for the rest of the day,” was all he said on the subject.

“I’ll go and say hi to Suzanne while you find Stanley.”

“OK.”

We crossed through into the gallery. Laurence headed off towards Stanley’s office at the far end; I wandered round the desk to see if Suzanne was in the workroom behind it. There was no one there. Idly I sat down in front of her computer and started leafing through an issue of
ArtFinder
which boasted a long and, naturally—it was its house style—incomprehensible article on Barbara Bilder’s oeuvre. Tiring rapidly of this, I turned to a copy of the
New York Times
magazine, neatly stacked underneath it, which offered a long interview with the artist at home. I had clearly stumbled on Barbara’s latest collection of press cuttings.

I skimmed the second article. It was recent, dating back only three weeks, obviously to coincide with the opening of the exhibition, and the tone was politely respectful. Barbara was photographed with Jon, his arm around her. The article was titled “Domestic Pleasures” and concentrated on Barbara’s love-life rather than her work. I was not surprised, somehow, to learn of the affair she had had, while at art school, with an eminent artist twice her age, whose marriage had never recovered from the blow; nor of the long-term liaison she had then had with the gallery owner who had made her name by showing her work when she was a young unknown.

Five years ago the gallery owner had died of a heart attack. His wife, in an act of revenge, had promptly sold all his Bilders at a rock-bottom price in an attempt to bring down the market. It had worked. Barbara’s career had been in limbo for a while, out of the current fashion. Then she had met Jeannette LaTouche—the article implied that Barbara had carefully planned the encounter—who had promptly signed her up at Bergmann LaTouche. Now she was selling steadily, and certainly the list of her paintings in various museums and private collections was impressive.

All this took a good three pages to relate. It finished on a high note: Barbara’s whirlwind romance with Jon Tallboy. I was amused to read that the latter had mysteriously transmogrified, with his crossing of the Atlantic,
from the deputy head of the art department at a sixth-form college into a noted British art critic and sought-after teacher. Also, according to the article, she and Jon had met at the home of mutual art-loving friends, when I happened to know that he had been bringing a group of kids to the gallery where she was showing and bumped into her in the coffee shop. Anyway, it had been love at first sight. Barbara was quoted as saying that they had been two magnets snapping together. They had left their respective spouses almost immediately and Jon had come to New York. “No regrets,” he had apparently told the reporter. “My life only really started when I met Barbara.”

Kim’s existence was not even mentioned. One assumed that Jon had not told the reporter that he had a daughter. And judging by Barbara’s behaviour on the matter to date, she would scarcely have brought the subject up herself. I found myself hoping that Kim hadn’t seen this article.

“Hey!” Suzanne said from behind me. “You want to do some data entry forme?”

I swivelled round on the chair, taking her in. Only Suzanne could carry off a tweed two-piece suit without looking like a pudding in a sack. She was carrying a big box file, shiny and new, which she dropped on the desk next to me.

“Updating Barbara’s cuttings,” she said in explanation. “I had to do it anyway, but there’s so much coming in now I’m getting swamped.”

“Oh really?” This recurring press motif was becoming ever more insistent, like a snatch of melody heard for a fleeting moment in the first movement which, by the third, had turned into the theme. “I forgot to get the
New York Times
this morning.”

“Be my guest.” Suzanne retrieved it from the bookshelves behind her and let it fall heavily in front of me.

“Jesus.” It was nearly the same size as the UK
Sunday Times.
“This is just the normal weekday edition, right?”

She looked surprised.

“Yeah.”

“It’s just so huge.”

“It’s all ad space,” she said dismissively, extracting one of the many sections with the ease of long practice and handing it to me. “There you go, page three.”

“‘Imagine: Death in Strawberry Fields,’” I read. “God, what a headline.”

“The Post has ‘Who Killed the Redhead?,’” Suzanne said grimly. “Enough to make you want to do some strangling on your own account.”

I dropped the paper for a moment and stared at her.

“Suzanne, who do you think killed her?” I said, unable to stop myself from asking.

Her face hardly changed. Laurence’s reaction to the news of Kate’s death had been to go to pieces, but Suzanne was made of the opposite material. She was as groomed as ever, the blond hair pulled back into a smooth pleat, her nails perfectly French manicured. Now she looked me straight in the eyes, her own clear and focused.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “But I will.”

“Do you mean—”

But just then a door opened and closed, and footsteps could be heard on the parquet floor. Laurence came out of the back part of the gallery. On his heels was Stanley, and looking at him I was irresistibly reminded of the dupe in a Ray Clooney farce, the one who, unaware that his wife is cheating on him with the vicar and the village policeman simultaneously, is forced by her to hide in cupboards, jump out of windows and dress up as his own sister visiting from Australia under a series of increasingly bizarre excuses. He had exactly the same dazed expression.

“Oh, Sam!” he said, catching sight of me. “Nice to see you! Glad to see you haven’t been—what I mean is, that you still feel comfortable coming in here—well, that sounds strange—that is, you’re quite safe here, you know.”

Laurence and Suzanne stared at him as incredulously as if he had just been beamed down from Planet Gaffe. I had a good deal of difficulty keeping my own face straight.

“Thank you, Stanley,” I said demurely. “So you don’t think I need to get a handgun?”

Stanley looked horrified. “Oh
no
, absolutely not. No need. An isolated incident. The park is still very rough in places.”

“What about the graffiti in here?” Laurence said coldly. “Are Sam’s sculptures going to be as safe as she is?”

“We’re stepping up security. You know that, Laurence,” Stanley said firmly. Beaming at me reassuringly, he smoothed back his hair with both hands. They came away shining slightly with grease, making its resemblance to butter still more pronounced. His silk tie was dotted with a bright pattern of tiny paintbrushes which stood out prettily against the dull charcoal of his suit, and the polished shoes on his small feet shone as black and glossy as a pair of beetles. Next to his impeccable tailoring, Laurence looked like he had been sleeping rough for days. I noticed that the latter’s eyes were rimmed with red.

“Well, I must get on,” Stanley said. “So much to do.
Au revoir.”
He flashed me a smile, showing perfectly capped teeth, and bustled away towards the staircase. Laurence’s expression was sardonic.

“Au revoir,”
he mimicked. “That’s about a third of the entire French Stanley knows.”

“What’s the rest?”

“Bonjour, mais oui
and
encore du vin,”
Laurence snapped, taking his glasses off to polish them.

“That’s a pretty good French accent,” I approved.

“Went to school in Paris for my formative years. Dad’s a diplomat,” he said shortly. “You still want to get some coffee?”

“Just let me have a look at this first.” I skimmed the article about Kate. It was padded out with statistics about the success of the famous zero-tolerance policy: Central Park was much safer now; New York’s murder rate had fallen drastically in the past few years. It managed to reduce Kate to a mere blip in the figures. A quote from Carol informed us that it was a shocking tragedy and that Kate had been a wonderful person and valued employee. A large picture of this paragon, her hair falling in a torrent of curls around her face, looked out at me from the centre of the page, her smile candid and confident. Police were pursuing their investigations.

The graffiti attack at the gallery was alluded to, but rather obliquely. Maybe they were worried about Bergmann LaTouche filing a lawsuit.

“They don’t mention Kate’s tattoo,” I said, handing the paper back to Suzanne.

There was a crash beside me. Laurence had dropped his glasses.

“How did you know about the tattoo?” Suzanne demanded as Laurence stooped as clumsily as a stork to pick them up. Without them his face looked as exposed and defenceless as a perplexed child’s, his eyes blinking fast without the glasses to shield them.

“Don told me.”

Suzanne’s grunt of disgust was covered by Laurence, who exclaimed, straightening up:

“The tattoo! Shit! Don’t you see, Suze? It was a strawberry!”

“So what?”

“Strawberry Fields!” Laurence said impatiently.

“My God.” She stared at him. “You think it was deliberate? I mean, killing her there?”

“Who knew about the tattoo?” I asked.

Suzanne looked at me. “Practically everyone at the gallery,” she said. “Well, maybe not Carol and Stanley. But she showed most of us when she got it done. And Don would have known, obviously, because of…” Her voice tailed off. “Please God, let no one who knew her leak that to the papers,” she said finally.

“Fuck someone who knew her, what about the autopsy?” Laurence was inexorable.

“Oh God …”

“And Don told you?” Laurence said to me. “People tell you things, don’t they?”

“Mother confessor,” I said lightly.

“Yeah, right.”

“Or maybe you just ask the right questions,” Suzanne said.

I shrugged, feeling uncomfortable. Looking up, I realised why. I didn’t like the way Suzanne was staring at me.

“You ask a lot of questions,” she commented. It wasn’t a statement; there was something interrogative about the way she said it which indicated clearly that an answer was required.

“Do I?” I said rather feebly, hoping to stall her.

“Yes,” she snapped back.

I shrugged. “I’m just trying to get a fix on things here,” I said, determined not to let it sound like an excuse. “Wouldn’t you, in my place?”

Now it was she who shrugged, and I had to admit she did it a lot better, that Gallic background paying off big-time.

“Whatever,” she said, turning away. It was a dismissal, and not a friendly one. Apparently I had trodden on Suzanne’s toes. Well, if that were the case I couldn’t blame her for getting cross. Those snakeskin courts must have cost a fortune.