Mitchell Smith (54 page)

She had, when she’d finished, seven flowers sketched and jotted, heavy-headed, rising, nodding out of a slow tornado of leaves. No single piece of draftsmanship was fine, but the slight, indicating lines seemed to work well enough together.

Ellie thought she would paint the flowers and their leaves full out, the few lengths of visible stem, and only mark the canvas around them with broad, scurnbled drifts of lawn green. Painting background didn’t interest her.

She felt she wouldn’t see the flowers as clearly, if there was solid color behind them. She didn’t want to pretend the flowers hadn’t been painted.

She decided to do the scumbling in a dark yellow green, but didn’t bother with it, now. She was too busy.

She mixed her medium, with more copal than she usually used, set the cup aside, then squeezed out a blob of flake white, smaller turds of cadmium red, alizarin, yellow ochre, viridian, venetian red, cobalt, Prussian blue, French ultramarine, burnt sienna, ivory black, cadmium yellow, lemon yellow and burnt umber-most of which, she wouldn’t need. She used a small springy-bladed patette knife to mix a dab of black with the viridian, one to four, mashed and mixed it to a shade of light pine, thinned it only slightly with a few drops of medium, dipped in a sable filbert number three, and painted the rare appearances of stem, very pleased with such a soft, smooth, creamy green, almost asparagus. Very pleased.

She painted the lengths of stem to be visible only here and there through the small thicket of leaves, the weighty blossoms, but still, she felt, important as slender pillars to support the plants, to keep her from making leaves and blooms where no stems could support them.

These stems painted, slim and stalky, rising in divergent angles up the canvas, Ellie squeezed a long fat worm of more viridian across the palette, over an old dry smear of tangerine. Squeezed out more black alongside that, and mixed it in with her narrow knife-not wanting the mixture quite perfect, wanting slight streaks of forest.

Streaks of black.

She painted her leaves this dark, thick, smooth and solemn green with a sable five, and felt it was now their natural color.

She’d sketched the places for the paint to go so well, the paint no longer had to go there, but could fall to this side and that side, wherever it wanted. Where one leaf joined another, Ellie joined them, and painted them together with a stroke, smearing here and there to show their motion in the wind. She thought her weakness might become her strength, and what she found difficult to draw separately, she might find easier if drawn together in a mass meant to be moving.

It took half the night for her to paint her leaves, remembering to accent the darker green with lighter green and occasional narrow edges of butter yellow, because of the lamp she painted by. The painting would live under cooler light.

At almost quarter to three, Ellie stopped painting, left her brushes in turpentine, then went to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, peed, and shit small. After she washed her hands, she went back to the kitchen, and ate the rest of the Hiiagen-Dazs, except for a small bite. She put that in a saucer for Mayo.

Then she painted the blossoms.

Cadmium yellow and lemon, mixed and slightly thinned, painted with a sable four. Ellie twisted her wrist slightly to the left finishing every swift, small stroke, so the yellow barely folded back on itself at the paint’s upper edge-brighter yellow left to rise up through this color less lustrous. Each petal was made in one short stroke, and she was pleased for any imperfection to become the petal’s. She mixed venetian red with cadmium for a duller, deeper orange-yellow at the blossom’s outer edges, where the petals hid been soaked in sunlight, beaten by weather.

Ellie painted petals from flower top to flower top as her hand moved across the canvas, favoring no blossom over the others. She painted left to right, then started left to right again, lower, painting in the yellow where it was needed, shifting to a thinner brush for delicate radiant lines of sienna, borders of flake white marked with umber, sometimes, on blossoms’ bottom edges. Several times, she thought of stopping and standing back to look, to rest, and decided not to. She was afraid to lose what she had.

She finished her flowers a little before seven, and erased what sketch marks she still could see-Mayo, Clara’s arm and knee-then used her palette knife with lemonviridian, to describe on the primed canvas where no flowers were, broad bands of deep yellow-green-dark grass’s color when late sun shone on it. She scurnbled those edges with her big brush, clouding the color away into the primer dun.

Then she walked back around the couch to take a look from fifteen feet away.

They were flowers, rich in yellow, greens and gold.

They were plants even more than flowers, untidy, odd, and gorgeous, the blossoms sagging slightly to the right, unbalanced with the green, but beautiful, the heavy blossoms weighting the leaves like rough medallions-hammered out of brass and thrown down among them.

Ellie stood and looked for a few minutes, then said to Mayo, asleep in the easy chair, “I’ve seen worse than that growing in the ground,” and went to the bedroom to get dressed, fairly pleased with herself. She thought she’d give the picture to Audrey Birnbaum. She was afraid if she ave it to Connie, it would only remind her of the

. 9 dinner never served.

Ellie felt fresh and fine on the tram, as if she’d slept all night. Her breasts were less swollen, no longer sore, and she had no cramps, only a mild tightness high in her pelvis sometimes, as she walked. The morning was cool, and clear as water, the mist and rain all done. She was wearing her old brown tweed suit, the skirt a little short for-fashion, now, with a pumpkin silk blouse and foulardall easy, warm, and comfortable, except for the shoes she was wearing, and they’d be O.K. if she didn’t walk a lot.

As the car swung up, paced its cables over the river-the river glittering, glistering, flashing in sunshine belowEllie thought that she might have slept after all, and been dreaming Tommy was dead-or she’d gone crazy and imagined it, and was about to make a fool of herself meeting people from the Squad, going down there later, and talking about Tommy being dead-having Leahy look at her as if she were out of her mind, and glance over her right shoulder, and when she turned around, there would be Tommy. “What’s going’ on?” he’d say. “Are you kidding’me?-Is this supposed to be funny, or what?”

“I dreamed you were dead. Killed in the subway . . .”

“Listen,” he’d say to Leahy. “-This isn’t funny! You hear this shit

… from my own partner? She’s worn out! -You’re worn out, honey.

Besides, if I’m dead, I want a couple weeks off. We both want a couple weeks off, startin’ with not going’ out to look at some friggin’ boat, see if it has an anchor there. - - .”

There was no reason that couldn’t happen. No ood reason it couldn’t be true…. Ellie reached out ang put the palm of her right hand against the tram-car window.

Cool and hard. Standing between her and the morning air. Between her and all the distance down to the river below. -This is real, she thought, even though it lets light through. It’s much more real than Tommy….

At the Manhattan station, Ellie trotted down the stairs, looked for a cab, then walked a block south and climbed into an empty waiting at the light. The cabbie, a tall Haitian woman, didn’t want to go crosstown-said she was heading for Kennedy-and got snotty, Ellie showed her shield, and advised the woman to move her ass.

At Broadway and Eighty-seventh, Ellie stopped the cab, paid the woman but didn’t tip her, got out, and walked down the two blocks west to Riverside, to the Donegal. She went up the steps, then through the door into the entrance hall. There were ranks of mailboxes and intercom buzzers on both side walls, and it took her a minute or two to find the one labeled Superintendent, on the far left of the bottom row, left-hand wall, She pushed the buzzer, and waited. After a while, she pushed it again, but no one answered. She pushed it a third time, and while she was waiting, a very old man in a dark gray Chesterfield coat came out through the inner door with a dog on a leash. The dog was a puppy, looked like a Kerry Blue, and was very lively. It was dancing, excited to be going out.

Ellie smiled at the old man, managed to reach the door before it closed behind them, and walked into the building. There was a staircase on the right, and she went down one flight, saw a green steel door labeled Furnace, walked down the corridor past two doors with no labels, then saw one on the other side of the hall with a peep, and a small card with Walsh printed on it.

She rang the doorbell, waited, rang it again, and heard a chain lock rattle. The door swung open, and a short, muscular man in his sixties, with white, crew-cut hair, stood staring at her. He was wearing blue jeans, a blue workshirt. Eyes blue as well-washed out.

“You’re not a tenant,” he said.

“No.” Ellie took her shield and ID from her purse, and showed them to him. “-I’m a police officer.”

The white-haired man looked at her ID, started to step out into the hall, then changed his mind. “You want to come in?”

IL

WROOPMW

“That’s right.”

“O.K.” He stepped back to make room for her. “I’m the super, here.”

“Walsh?”

“Emmett Walsh-right.”

Ellie walked into the apartment entrance way. It opened into a small, neat living room. Two windows across the room were open onto a redbrick air shaft.

“My name’s Klein,” Ellie said, and turned back to shake hands with him.

He had small hands, and a thick, strong grip.

“Well … what’s the problem - -Was that you buzzin’ upstairs, by the way?”

“That’s right.”

“Well-I didn’t answer. If I was to answer every time some joker buzzed up there, I’d be going’ nuts. -They have a problem, all they got to do is give a phone call down here, or put a note inside my mailbox. All the regulars know about that.”

“That’s all right,” Ellie said. A toilet flushed in the back of the apartment, “-We need some information from you Mr. Walsh.”

Walsh shrugged. “Whatever … You name it. ” A young woman walked into the living room through a white-painted double door from the back.

Ellie saw a dining-room table through the doorway. The young woman looked Puerto Rican, mid-twenties. She was very plain, with a big Indian nose and a bad complexion. She was pregnant.

“My wife,” Walsh said. “Teresa-this lady’s a cop.

Detective Klein.”

“Hi,” Ellie said, and the girl smiled and nodded, apparently shy.

“We got some business here, honey,” Walsh said. “Why don’t you go watch TV, an’ we’ll go out an’ go for a walk in Riverside in a while. O.K.?”

“O.K.” The girl’s voice was hoarse. She smiled at Ellie, made a sort of sketchy curtsy, went back into the dining room and closed the double doors behind her.

“Hu,” Walsh said. “She had the flu, and that’s no joke, her condition.”

He seemed very worried about the girl.

“No-that can be serious,” Ellie said. “I just lost my partner.” She didn’t know why she’d said that, she hadn’t even been thinking about it.

“He was killed in the subway,” she said. It was as if her mouth didn’t care what she thought.

“Holy shit,” Walsh said. “I saw that on TV. -That was your partner?”

“Yes,” Ellie said.

“Why, you poor thing,” Walsh said. “Jesus-you should be in church or restin’ or something’. -You shouldn’t be out on the job, should you?”

Ellie felt like a fool talking to a super about Tommy being dead. Now that she’d done it, she didn’t like it. It made Tommy seem more dead.

‘-Well, I have some cases to work on.”

“I don’t care. They shouldn’t have you out workin’.”

Next, he’d be telling her to go in and watch TV. They’d walk in the park, later. . . . Ellie imagined herself walking in the park with the old man and his young wife.

She’d ask who owned the Kerry Blue, and hear the whole story-how the old man’s cocker spaniel had died after fourteen years, the old man sad, lonely. . . . How the man’s son, over his protests, had gone and gotten him the Kerry Blue puppy-younger than young, foolish and energetic. How the puppy loved the old man, but was wearing him out-killing him, really-with his constant leaping and playing, his need for long walks day and night in every weather. “Some things a man loses,” Walsh would say as they walked, “are natural things to lose-an’

it don’t do to replace ‘em in a hurry.”

“It probably wouldn’t have happened,” Ellie said, “-if I’d been with him.” She was suddenly embarrassed that the old man would think she was trying to act tough. “I don’t mean that I’m so tough,” she said. “-I just mean there would have been two of us.”

“I see what you’re sayin’,” Walsh said, and seemed uneasy. He looked around as if he wished his wife would come back. ‘-But you know, it don’t do no good to blame yourself for things you can’t help.”

Ellie didn’t know what to say after that. She felt herself blushing.

Making such a fool of herself in front of an old man who probably thought she was crazy. “I’m sorry,” she said, “_I had no business bringing all that up.”

“An’ why the hell shouldn’t you?” Walsh said, “-losin’ somebody like that.” He looked around for his wife again. “Listen, dear-miss-you want a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks,” Ellie said. “I need to use your phone. . .

“Go right ahead.”

“And I need the name of the man who manages this building-who owns it. .

. .”

“Well, now,” Walsh said, “-the owner is Terrace Associates, but the man you’ll probably be wantin’ to talk to is Mr. Simons; he’s vice president for residential properties.”

“You have his number?”

“I have his number.”

“I need his home number.” She looked at her watch.

“It isn’t nine, yet. He won’t be in his office.”

“Well … all right. I have it for emergencies-would this be an emergency?”

“Emergency enough,” Ellie said.