The Genius (44 page)

The bottom line is, while I’ll do my best to keep you entertained, I’m writing this to get down the unvarnished truth, and even if I’ve summarized, I haven’t flat-out lied.

Now, if I’m keeping track of my story—and really, you have no idea how difficult this is, keeping everything straight—there are several outstanding questions. There’s the question of who jumped me and stole my drawings, if not Kristjana. There’s the question of how Marilyn and I turned out, what happened to Sam and me, the question of Frederick Gudrais, and finally there’s the question of Victor Cracke. Let’s go one by one, and let’s start with our killer.

HE HAD A RECORD, and not a short one.

“Assault, assault, animal cruelty, loitering, indecency, public drunkenness, sodomy, assault.” Sam looked at me. “That’s just the early work.”

“Before he fell under Monet’s influence.”

She smiled sweetly. “You’re a twit, you know that?”

“Where is he now?”

“His last conviction was in”—flipping pages—“1981. Aggravated sexual assault. He served six of a twelve-year sentence. Well, that’s a crying shame. These days they’d take a DNA sample, it’d be mandatory. I guess he’s either slowed down in the last twenty years or gotten smarter.… But it’s academic. First let’s find out if he’s even alive. I have a last known address for him out on Staten Island, and the name of his parole officer.”

In his most recent mug shot, Gudrais was smiling mightily, a five-hundred-watt leer that would have creeped me out even if I hadn’t known who he was. His date of birth was May 11, 1938, which made him over forty in the photo, yet his skin was surprisingly smooth, like he’d never worried about anything in his life. We scanned the image and sent it to James Jarvis, who once again confirmed that we had the right man.

When we spoke to Gudrais’s parole officer, she jumped to his defense, swearing up and down that Freddy had been out of trouble for years, that he was employed and living quietly right where his record indicated. She also told us something surprising: Gudrais had a daughter.

“My understanding of the situation is they aren’t on too good terms,” said the PO.

At this point, I assumed we would go storming in like gangbusters. Sam was far more circumspect. To begin with, there was nothing we could do with Jarvis’s testimony. At that time, New York had a five-year statute of limitations on rape—one of the shortest in the country and a justifiable source of outrage for feminists, who would manage to get the law changed the following year. But when Sam started building the case, she was forced to admit to Jarvis that he had no recourse; his portion of it was closed and buried. I had an idea that we could call him as a character witness—an anti-character witness, really—but she said that whatever he offered would likely be thrown out as immaterial or speculative.

“So then what good is it?”

“It’s good for convincing some important people to get on board with this.”

Staten Island gets a bad rap. In its defense, I would like to point out that the Verrazano is actually quite beautiful, my candidate for the most attractive of all the borough bridges. In certain lights, from certain angles, it resembles the Golden Gate, which is high praise indeed. And if you set aside the landfills and strip malls, a reasonable portion of the island itself is pastoral: quaint brick homes, baseball fields limned in hoarfrost; a Rockwellian vision of Real America. I remarked upon this to Sam, busy angling the heating vents behind the steering wheel to dry-roast her fingers.

“It’s Staten Island,” she replied.

Last week of February, half past six on the morning of a vicious cold snap, winter’s final twist of the knife. The sun rose on neighborhoods shaking themselves awake. Scarved children waited for schoolbuses. A few joggers tried bravely to keep their footing on icy sidewalks. Windshields needed scraping; dog urine polka-dotted lawns. We headed first to the main police station, near the ferry terminal, where we were met by a lieutenant who shook hands with Sam and said that he knew her dad and was sorry. She nodded politely, though I saw her holding herself in place. That she could still get upset five months later probably comes as no surprise to most people who have lost a parent; but it made me aware of how little sanctity I had in my life.

They gave us an unmarked car and a cop named Jordan Stuckey, and the three of us drove to the neighborhood where Gudrais lived, at the southeastern edge of the island. Gray sand fronted the gray, windswept Atlantic. Along the beach ran a picket fence, most of it rotted or torsioned into oblivion. The local architecture consisted of bungalows. To me, it evoked Breezy Point. Sensing that Sam felt the same shiver of similarity, and that it bothered her, I withheld comment.

At seven thirty A.M. we parked outside a squat apartment building and left the heat running. I had been relegated to the backseat, and as a result had to content myself with secondhand reports from Stuckey, who used a pair of binoculars to keep watch on Gudrais’s front door.

It was a waiting game. Acording to his PO, Gudrais worked at a bicycle shop a mile and a quarter up the road, where he fixed broken chains and so forth. Once arrested, he could be forced to give a DNA sample, but in rather a catch-22, we had to have something tangible on him in order to arrest him in the first place. Since the law allowed us to collect whatever he discarded, we hoped that one such item—a cigarette butt, a coffee cup, a tissue—would yield a usable profile. The important thing, Sam said, was maintaining the chain of custody in order to demonstrate that the DNA belonged to Gudrais and not someone else.

By eight thirty, all our coffee was gone. Sam, looking through the binoculars, said, “He looks good for his age.”

“Let me see.”

“Don’t pull.”

I let go of her elbow.

“I think he dyes his hair,” she said. Maliciously, she handed the binoculars to Stuckey, who said in his rumbling baritone, “He’s not just the president, he’s a member.”

“Excuse me,” I said from the backseat. “Hello?”

“Keep your pants on,” Sam said.

I sat back with an angry grunt. From what I had been able to see, Gudrais was tall. He walked at a brisk clip, and although the heavy coat he wore made it impossible to draw firm conclusions, he seemed well proportioned. The tail of a bright blue scarf flew out behind him as he bent into the wind.

“I guess he walks to work,” said Stuckey.

“In the snow,” Sam said. “Uphill both ways.”

We followed at a distance, Sam on the binoculars as Stuckey crept forward, pulling over when necessary. Gudrais mostly kept his hands in his pockets, according to Sam, who gave me the play-by-play of his twenty-two-minute commute. It was incredibly stultifying: “Now he’s pulling his coat closer. Now he’s cricking his neck. Now he’s looking across the street. Oooh, there’s a sneeze.” She was rooting for him to have a cold, to blow his nose and chuck away the tissue, preferably onto the sidewalk. But other than that first sneeze, he appeared the picture of health, and by the time he arrived at work and disappeared inside, we had gotten exactly nothing.

The morning crept by.

“He might go out for lunch.”

They brought in pizza.

Midway through the afternoon, he stepped out and started across the street before changing his mind and going back to work.

"This is really boring,” I said.

"Yup." "Yup.”

On his walk home, Gudrais stopped at a corner market, emerging with a single plastic bag. He went straight to his apartment, and we saw the light of a TV come on.

Sam handed me the binoculars. “Knock yourself out.”

“Thanks so much.”

That was how the next day went, too. If you need to reexperience it, I recommend that you go back two pages and read the foregoing.

At the end of our second day of surveillance we lingered outside his building, I on the binoculars, Sam and Stuckey trying to figure out an easier way.

“Friday’s trash day.”

“That might be our best bet.”

“Mm.”

“At least we get tomorrow off.”

“You know what, though. I think—”

“Guys,” I said.

“I think maybe—”

“Guys. He’s coming out again.”

The binoculars once again were taken away from me. I swore, but Sam was too busy watching Gudrais lope over to the bus stop.

“All
right
,” she said. “Now we’re talking.”

We tailed the bus up Hylan Boulevard, past Great Kills Park to New Dorp. Gudrais got off and walked three blocks to Mill Road and the movie theater. As soon as he went inside we hurried to the ticket booth, where a blank-faced teenager sat snapping gum. Sam asked for three tickets to whatever the man had bought tickets for, please.

“Thirty dollars.”

Sam said, “I really hope he picked something good.”

I had to laugh when we got back three adults for the five thirty showing of
Because of Winn-Dixie
.

As we passed the concession stand, I spotted Gudrais at the back of the line, and a jolt of excitement cut through me. It took a concerted effort not to turn and stare at him, or to tackle him right then and there. For a brief moment, I felt intensely possessive of him, as though, having lost Victor Cracke as a medium, I could now vent my creative will through the manipulation and capture of a pedophile. Rage and vengeance, tempered with victory, the thrill of knowing something he did not. It was not a simple emotion, but the best word I can come up with is zealotry. He was mine and I knew it.

And then, just as suddenly as it had come, the feeling passed out of me, replaced by disgust. This night wasn’t performance art. It was real.
He
was real. This place—an overheated multiplex—the unglamorous chase— Sam—these things were real. The auditorium was packed with real kids, and I saw the look on Sam’s face, and her thoughts jumped into my head. Freddy Gudrais’s choice of movie wasn’t whimsical or random. It was appallingly true to form. He was here for the crowd. He was as real as he had ever been, real enough to put his hands around someone’s throat. I sobered up and did my best to put myself aside.

We wanted to keep an eye on him, so the three of us spread out: I in back, Stuckey toward the middle, and Sam down near the front-left exit. It was an imperfect solution but it would have to do. Our primary goal was still to get Gudrais to relax and enjoy his soda.

He came in as the ads ended and the theater began to darken, and I saw his shape glide into an empty row on the right side of the theater—closest to me. He was slightly behind me, which made it hard for me to look at him without being obvious. I tried to pace myself, glancing back and then away. When he was out of my sight I imagined all sorts of horrible possibilities. Old black-and-white photos of mangled bodies kept filling up my mind.

The movie was a big hit. There was laughter; there were tears. I can’t relay the plot because I spent most of its 106 minutes checking my watch, waiting for permission to look back. Gudrais gradually sank down into his seat, until all I could see was the top of his head, his hair so black and glossy with pomade that it reflected the screen’s shifting blues and whites. Rationally I knew that I wasn’t doing a thing; I couldn’t really see him, his hands, anything other than that crescent of hair. But I hoped that my presence would somehow radiate out and encircle the families sitting around him.

The credits rolled; I looked back; he was gone. I waited until I saw Stuckey stand, and then all three of us went up the aisle.

As we’d hoped, he had been a bad citizen, leaving behind a wax cup full of melting ice and an empty container of popcorn with a napkin crumpled inside. Sam let out a happy yelp. Stuckey went out to the car and came back with a forensics kit. He put on gloves and crouched down and began to put things in bags. Then he stopped and sniffed near the popcorn container. He tweezed out the napkin. “Boy oh boy.”

“What.”

“Smell that?”

I detected corn and salt and artificial butter, but above all something evocative of an overused swimming pool, equal parts sweat and chlorine.

“That,” said Stuckey, “is semen.”

BY THAT SUMMER I had long given up on my stolen artwork, and so I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from Detective Trueg.

“Well,” he said, “we found your stuff.”

“Where?”

“eBay.”

Trueg couldn’t take all the credit, he confessed. Since his second son went off to school, his wife had had too much free time on her hands; in her boredom, she had become something of an auction junkie. Tired of her blowing money on Smurf mugs and secondhand pashminas, Trueg had put her to work, giving her copies of missing art and telling her to be on the lookout. Just between us, he considered this nothing more than a way to make her feel useful and to prevent her from buying crap. In three years she had never found anything. But lo and behold, she had unearthed some suspiciously Crackean work indexed under Art > Drawings > Contemporary (1950-now).

The seller’s handle was pps2764 and he was in New York, New York. The rotating photo gallery showed a half dozen drawings along with assorted close-ups.

Five original drawings by famous artist VICTOR CRACKE. The pages go together
. [One of the close-ups displayed a seam between two drawings.]
Cracke’s work inhabits the shadowland between Expressionism and abstraction,yet this is no mere recapitulation of shopworn modernisms, rather a deliberateact of stylistic bricolage that incorporates the most striking elements of Pop and contemporary figuration
.

The paragraph continued on in this dreary vein, concluding,

I have more of these for sale if you are interested.

What bothered me most about the description was not its wordiness or its limp bunches of artspeak. What bothered me most is that I had written it. With the exception of the first two and the last sentences, the text had been lifted verbatim from the catalogue copy I’d written for Victor’s show.

Also insulting was the price being asked. So far only one person had expressed enough interest to bid, and, as there were only six hours left on the auction, his offer of $150 looked like it would carry the day.