Strawberry Tattoo (43 page)

“Dad,” she said, her voice flat, utterly toneless, as if she were trying out for the first time a word in a language she had never heard before.

Jon Tallboy didn’t answer her. He was breathing; I could see the shallow rise and fall of his chest. But apart from that he was motionless, as if the machine that moved him had broken down.

Kim’s head turned towards me. She stared at me and I braced myself for the choice she was about to make between me and her father. All my
emotion seemed to have drained away; I felt as empty as an upturned bucket. I tightened my grip on the filing cabinet. Against it was propped one of Don’s canvases, the one that had been whirling in front of me as Jon’s arm cut off the blood flow to my head. Slowly I leant down a little way and looked more closely at the big red arrow pointing to the woman’s backside. Through the bright scarlet paint I could see that it was made of lined paper. And it had “READ ME” written on it in black marker. I caught a fingernail underneath it and peeled it off. It came away all in one piece, and underneath there was writing on it. As I straightened up, Kim finally spoke.

“Your
neck
,” she said, sounding stunned. “Your poor
neck
—oh, Sam …”

And in a rush she was by my side, her arms around me, holding me up. I wrapped my own around her with more gratitude than I had ever imagined I could feel. Kim tightened her grip, taking my weight easily, her strong body a prop for me to lean on. I let go completely. One of Kim’s hands closed over the back of my head, easing it down, resting it against her. My eyes closed and I realised that I was crying into her shoulder. Each sob caught at my bruised throat with a spasm of pain. But I couldn’t stop, not for a long time, not until other people came running down the stairs and piled into the room. Not until Jon Tallboy, like a reanimated corpse, finally stirred, pulling himself up to a sitting position to slump, arms wrapped round his head, blood from his eye sockets trickling down his cheeks.

“The so-called white man has stolen our heritage! It says so right here, people! Let me tell you how Esau, for a piece of meat—”

“FAGGOTS are pro-FANE! FAGGOTS are pro-FANE!”

The first man broke off and glared at the second. They were supposed to be a team, but they had no coordination. Faggot Guy seemed incapable of letting Piece of Meat Guy get on with his Bible reading. Maybe he was jealous of his colleague’s outfit, a red silk military jacket, tied at the waist with a wide gold fringed lamé belt, worn over baggy blue silk trousers. On his head was a little red toque set at a fetching angle. I might have thought that Faggot Guy’s interruption had been meant to make some kind of point about the campness of Piece of Meat Guy’s outfit if Faggot Guy himself hadn’t been dressed like an expensive biker queen, head-to-toe gold-studded black leather with a big gold medallion at his forehead like a Village People wannabe. Took one to know one.

Piece of Meat Guy adjusted his toque and started again.

“Esau, for a piece of meat—”

“LESBIANS are pro-FANE!” Faggot Guy cut in, his voice cracked with belief. “LESBIANS are pro-FANE!”

“Aren’t these Farrakhan guys the business?” Kim said to me
sotto voce
.

“Do they always talk across each other?” I asked. “And if he’s going to say faggots, why doesn’t he say dykes? I mean, at least it would be logically consistent.”

A guy standing next to us hushed me disapprovingly. There was only a handful of spectators gathered on this street corner in the middle of Times Square, and most of them were unashamed kitsch-collectors like ourselves. It was just my luck to be next to the one person who was taking this seriously.

“Brothers! Sisters!” Piece of Meat Guy shouted through Faggot Guy, who was beginning to sound like a broken record. “Listen up, now! ESAU, FOR A PIECE OF MEAT—”

Just at that moment a police car shot past, its siren going full blast, deafening everyone temporarily. We were clearly destined never to hear about Esau and what I remembered as having been a mess of pottage. Not that I fancied arguing the toss with Piece of Meat Guy, who was having a bad enough day of it already.

I stared behind him at the giant video screens at the far end of Times Square, stacked one on top of each other up the side of a building. The displays were ever-changing, an endless, unstoppable parade of advertising, the quality sharp as crystal. On the top perched an enormous cutout of a coffee cup with a constant head of steam, swirling up and away into the clouded sky with infectious enthusiasm. A perfect
Blade Runner
moment, from the luridly dressed crazies in front of us to the latest in technological displays above our heads. To my left three bands of mandarin-orange tickertape wrapped another endless stream of figures round the top corner of another building. Everything in New York moved fast and dragged you right along with it, hurrying you up so that you didn’t have time to look down at your feet and see how dirty the pavements were, how poor and ragged some of the people, how scummy this area still was despite the famous musicals that were playing all down the street.

Kim and I started up Broadway, neither of us speaking much. The streets were crowded and noisy and lurid and what we had to say to each other was too private to be shouted. It was hard enough just to walk side-by-side without people elbowing one of us out of the way. As Broadway widened still further into Columbus Circle my sense of smell alone would have told me we had reached Central Park by the rich ripe scent of horse
sweat and droppings. There were three carriages pulled up on the further side of the roundabout, each with a docile horse nibbling at straw, their heads ducked almost sheepishly, as if they were only snacking out of boredom because business was slow. One carriage was straight out of a fairy tale, painted white and lined in sky blue, all its trimmings picked out in the same colour. Cinderella meets My Little Pony. Even the two plastic buckets of horse feed slung beneath it were the same sky blue. A couple of pigeons fluttered down and perched on the rims of the buckets, pecking at the feed.

“I thought we could walk up to the Met,” Kim suggested as we crossed into the park. She set our path up the wide avenue. “Have you been there yet?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Conversation tailed off. Neither of us wanted to be the first one to mention what had happened the night before last.

Jon Tallboy was in custody, having confessed to the murders of Kate and Don. I had spent most of the intervening time being drugged with super-strong painkillers and having ice packs pressed to my throat to bring down the bruising, which was spectacular. I was wearing a polo neck and would be for some while to come. At least it gave me an excuse to go shopping. I had in mind some New York-style, black high-neck little sweaters which would go in a very Emma Peel way with my leather trousers. I’d just have to make sure no one in the changing rooms saw my neck, or they’d start screaming.

I fingered it absently and winced. It felt raw. Kim noticed my gesture.

“How’s the neck?” she said.

“Oh, OK. I’ll just have some spectacular bruising for a while. I thought I might say I’ve had a sex transplant and this is from reconstructive surgery on my Adam’s apple.”

She smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“I still can’t believe it,” she said. “I keep playing over the moment when I realised what was happening, just to convince myself it’s true.” She
looked at me. “He’s going to say Barbara knew nothing about the murders. Take all the blame on himself.”

My jaw dropped, which hurt my throat considerably.

“You’re joking. The only reason I got myself in that mess was that we laid a trap for Barbara! How does he explain that?”

“Yeah, do you want to tell me about that, by the way?”

Kim and I hadn’t had a chance to talk about this till now.

“Oh.” I shrugged. “I was pretty sure it was Barbara. The more I thought about it, the more the financial advantage to her of the whole scandal seemed the strongest motive going. I did wonder about Carol, because of Kate’s plans to leave the gallery and take so many clients with her. But the way Kate’s death was tied in to the graffiti kept blocking me. I couldn’t see Carol ever doing that to her own gallery. And all these little things kept confirming the Barbara theory. She was the one who rang the cops about the graffiti so it would be public and linked to Kate’s death. Her sales hadn’t been so good before and now they were flourishing. I wasn’t sure whether she could actually have expected that result, though, till I spoke to Suzanne. She’d found out that twenty years ago, when Barbara had just started the affair with that gallery owner, the one who made her career, there was a break-in at her studio and her paintings were slashed. It looked as if it was the guy’s wife who’d done it. So it was completely hushed up, but he restored and sold all the slashed paintings for her—even put the prices up and let the buyers guess as to whether the damage had been done deliberately. It was a sales ploy.”

“God, that’s clever. Especially the keeping it quiet.”

“He had to. He thought it was his wife.”

“So that made you guys sure it had been Barbara.”

“Pretty much. But there wasn’t any proof. So we got the idea of setting her up. Suzanne told Barbara that she’d heard from me about Kate’s plan to start a new gallery with Stanley. The story was that before Kate was killed, she told me who the third investor was—trying to persuade me to come with her—and I was wondering whether to tell the police about it. I was only guessing that Barbara was the mystery investor, but it was worth
a try. There was nothing to lose. Suzanne said that she could tell it hit home with Barbara, though she hid it well. So she went on to the next bit: she said I might have been exaggerating, because I’d had a lot to drink, and she’d suggested I go to have a lie-down in Don’s old room.”

“Not a totally improbable story,” Kim commented.

“Always invent a lie that’s as close to the truth as possible. And Suzanne did a great job. Barbara fell for it. We were hoping she would follow me down to the basement and try to strangle me. Suzanne was keeping an eye on her, without seeming to, and she would have come after Barbara if she started downstairs, as a witness. Of course Barbara talked to Jon, but Suzanne didn’t make the connection. We were so sure it was Barbara … I was delayed because of that photograph, and by the time I got downstairs he was waiting for me.”

I looked at his daughter. “Even when I saw him I couldn’t believe it. We all underestimated Jon.”

“She planned it all,” Kim said. “I got that much out of him last night. We went out in the yard and talked. Carol sent Kevin down as well, to keep an eye on him till the cops arrived, but I made him and Lex wait inside so they couldn’t hear.” She shot a glance at me. “I thought it might be my last chance to talk to him alone for God knows how long.… Anyway, he said Barbara’s sales were falling badly. Then she came up with the idea of trashing her show to get publicity—only they realised they’d need the keys and the alarm code to the gallery. And Barbara knew that Kate wasn’t happy at Bergmann LaTouche, so she sounded her out. Kate told her about her plans to set up a new gallery and asked Barbara to come with her.”

“She was asking everyone,” I commented drily. “If Barbara wasn’t selling she wouldn’t have been much of an asset.”

“Barbara knows lots of people,” Kim pointed out. “She could have been very useful.”

I nodded. We were passing the lake now, its surface like an old mirror which, silvered with the years, blurs and softens everything it reflects. Only the water was the misty green of oxidised copper, the trees hanging
on its surface a brighter green, their edges clouding into each other like melting wax.

“So they strung Kate along,” I said.

“Barbara told her she’d come in with her as a partner.”

“But she didn’t have that kind of money, did she?”

“Barbara said she’d made some good investments and Kate believed her because she wanted to. Dad said it all spun out of control really fast. One minute he and Barbara were talking about vandalising the show and the next Kate was on board and Barbara was spinning her all these lies about investing in her gallery to get her to agree to hand over the keys and tell them the alarm code.”

I nodded. “‘And then it got even more complicated, because Don was working late and saw her trash her own paintings.”

“Dad said he couldn’t have brought himself to do it, poor sap. I bet she got a twisted kick out of it, too.”

“Did you read Don’s note?”

Kim nodded. The red arrow I had peeled off Don’s painting had turned out to be his insurance note. He had written it while waiting for Jon Tallboy to arrive with the blackmail money, then painted the back red and stuck it to his latest work-in-progress. That was typical Don: such an oblique way to do it, as if he were mocking himself for even taking that kind of precaution. The police hadn’t found it, though they’d searched the whole place thoroughly: but they would never have started picking bits off the paintings. It might have stayed there for ever if I hadn’t remembered last night that it was the same painting that I had seen just before I had found his body, the only one that had been turned around to face the room….