Restoration Heights Page 10

  She looked up and smiled; her hair fell away and Reddick could see a mottled bruise beneath one eye.

  “I will, thanks.” He smiled back, not looking at the black eye, not reacting to it. He wandered among the unfamiliar bottles. She returned to her laptop, swayed half-heartedly to the beat of the electronic music thumping through the store. Perhaps Tyler had only lingered to chat her up.

  But what about her eye? And the other stops, the envelopes?

  He took another lap around the store and approached the counter.

  She noticed his empty hands. “Did you need some help?”

  Playing timid at Clean City hadn’t worked. He drove the lane. “You know Tyler and Ju’waun, right?”

  It was a wild shot, but it scored. She looked confused but answered straight. “Yeah.”

  “I thought I saw Tyler in here earlier.”

  “Yeah, actually, sure. He and Ju’waun stopped in. How do you know them?’

  “From around the neighborhood. Did they just come in to chat?”

  “What do you want?” She was getting nervous. She kept glancing under the counter—an alarm button, perhaps, but he wasn’t sure what he had said to spook her. If she was already faltering, then maybe he should push.

  “Or maybe they have better taste in liquor than I do.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “How did you get that black eye?”

  “That is none of your fucking business.” It was a harder reaction than he expected, driven by fear. He lined up another improbable shot.

  “Did Tyler hit you?”

  “I said none of your fucking business, asshole.” A miss. Her hand followed her eyes beneath the counter. It might not be an alarm—it might be a weapon.

  He was suddenly almost as nervous as she was, and tried to rope the conversation back. “I just want to know what they were doing last Sunday night.”

  She said a name, asked if this person had sent him, but her voice was shaking and thick with emotion—the name came out garbled.

  “Who?” he asked. “Gene? Eugene?”

  His confusion gave him away—once she saw he didn’t recognize the name her mood changed. She was suddenly confident, became irritated and dismissive. “Get the fuck out of my store.”

  “I’m trying to figure out what happened last weekend.” Vague, still hoping to knock some stray detail loose.

  She wasn’t having it. She came around the counter and charged him, started shoving him toward the door, a little harder with each sentence. “You creep. You fucking asshole.”

  “If you’re in trouble I could help you.”

  “You can’t help me. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” They both knew it was true—only she sounded relieved.

  He opened the door. “You could tell me.”

  “Get the fuck out of my store.”

  Eight

  It took over an hour to reach the Upper East Side. He rode shoulder to shoulder in the afternoon crowd, the train floor treacherous and filthy with tracked snow, the riders unzipping coats and shedding scarves in the stale body heat. When he finally got above ground the cold air was a relief.

  Sarah was waiting inside a coffee shop, where they had agreed to meet. He saw her through the window, in a shin-length camel coat, her ropy braids bunched around its daunting fur collar. She waved and came out, gestured at her massive cup.

  “Did you want anything?”

  He was still wired from his adventures that morning and said no. The gallery was a few blocks away, and they started walking. “Thanks again for doing this,” he said. “I would have been fine on my own.”

  “I already told you, I wanted to see my friend. You’re a convenient excuse.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Ha ha. I forget how sensitive you are. I’m helping you, remember?” At the intersection they circled wide to avoid an icy pool of filthy water, and paired back up on the opposite sidewalk. “So this is about Buckley’s girlfriend?”

  “Fiancée. Like I said yesterday, I definitely saw her outside my building the night before she disappeared, and Buckley was such a dick about it that it made me suspicious.”

  “And based just on that, you’re bouncing around the city asking questions?”

  “It’s weird, I know. At first I just assumed—find whoever she went with, and that would be the end of it.”

  “And you think that was Franky?”

  “It must have been. But I’m not sure that’s the whole story anymore.” He thought of Tyler’s route through Brooklyn, the liquor store woman’s unprovoked fear—discoveries too unformed to share. “I thought that if I could come up with something on my own, without the police... I don’t know, they would have to believe me. And how could the Sewards be upset if I helped them? But if it turns out she left with Buckley’s friend...” He shook his head. “I just need more information.”

  “You want to know what I think?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think you’re bored.”

  It wasn’t what he expected. “What?”

  “What did you do all morning?”

  “Today? I—I went to the park, shot basketball a little bit.”

  “All day? In the driving snow?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “You worked on this shit, didn’t you? I could see it in the way you came into my studio yesterday, like you were finally interested in something. Invested. I’m thinking, he wants to talk about art. I have a studio full of horse dicks, what could be more interesting than that? But no, that wasn’t it.”

  “Sarah, you know I like your work.”

  “I’m not fishing for a compliment here.”

  “I know that.”

  “Although it probably wouldn’t hurt to tell me you like my coat, you know.”

  “Wait. I did notice it.”

  She cut off his reply with a laugh. “I’m teasing you, Reddick. Let me finish. You know I have a little brother, right? Well, when he was a kid he tried everything—sports, music, all the usual hobbies. I had art, you know, so he thought he should have something. He was okay at all of it, but none of it really grabbed him, nothing stuck, and he just kind of shuffled around the house like Lurch or something. You know who Lurch is, right?”

  “You’re not that much older than me.”

  “Just checking. Anyway when he was about seventeen or eighteen he started playing that video game, what’s it called, Warcraft. World of Warcraft. And it was like something just flipped on inside of him. He went to online forums and talked about the game, he had composition books jammed with notes about it, strategies and tactics and, god, I don’t even know what all. And at first my parents and I, we’re like, he’s a good-looking kid, he has friends, why is he spending all his free time at a computer with people he would never know in real life? He would be online with a group of thirty strangers and be the only black kid, you know? It was just so eccentric, and we had never thought of him that way. But it changed him, having a passion. For the better. Gave him a drive and purpose that you could see in the way he carried himself, that grounded him. And in the end it didn’t matter if we couldn’t understand why he liked it, why he wanted to do it, because we were just happy to see him doing something, happy to see him more than half-awake.”

  Reddick absorbed this for half a block, then, “Finding out what happened to Hannah isn’t a computer game.”

  “Are you going out of your way to misunderstand my point, here?”

  “I think so, yeah.” They both smiled and she winged him with her elbow. “Seriously, though,” he continued, “if I didn’t think this was important, that a life was at stake, I wouldn’t be here right now. But I understand what you were trying to say. And thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. This is it, by the way.” They stopped in front of a bras
s-rimmed glass door. “Oh, one thing I forgot to mention yesterday, about Franky and Buckley. There were other rumors, too. That maybe Buckles wanted more out of that relationship than he was getting.”

  It took Reddick a second. “Are you saying Buckley is in the closet?”

  “Not exactly, and if it was just that I wouldn’t mention it. What I think—and the reason I’m bringing it up—is that he was crushing on his friend pretty hard, and Franky took advantage of it. Buckles brought out his cruel streak.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that Franky seemed to enjoy having that over his friend’s head. He thrived on the one-sidedness of it, the power.”

  “Buckley really lets Franky walk all over him?”

  “At least back then he did. Whether it actually was because he was infatuated with him, I couldn’t say. But that was the rumor, and it makes as much sense as anything else.”

  They took the elevator up to the gallery. Heinrich was a blue-chip franchise with a split identity. One space in Chelsea aimed at the under-forty crowd, highlighting prospects and a handful of older artists who were pacing the trends, and another space here, in an Upper East Side high-rise, catering to safer taste. Contemporary artists inspired by Modernist abstraction, neofiguration. Photographers with one or two images you knew like your own hand.

  They asked at the desk for Aliana, who emerged from a set of offices in the rear. She had brown hair and olive eyes, her face prep-school fresh and boyish. She looked familiar, from parties, maybe, or openings, but they had never been introduced. She and Sarah hugged, exchanged pleasantries, before Aliana turned to him.

  “You must be Reddick,” she said, extending a calloused hand. “Come on, let’s get away from the desk and find someplace quiet.”

  The space was subdivided, maze-like—they went into a smaller gallery in the back. The walls were hung with garish nudes—prurience dressed up as social critique. Sarah wrinkled her nose.

  “Looking at these paintings is like being yelled at by a very dull person,” she said. Aliana and Reddick laughed. “You know? A shallow idea isn’t improved by volume.”

  Aliana didn’t seem to mind the criticism—she was obliged to hang the work, not like it. “There’s a photography show in the front gallery I think you might like. We could relocate if you want?”

  “You know what? I’ll go myself. I’m sure Reddick would prefer to have you to himself anyway. Just come get me when you’re done.”

  “I’m fine either way,” he said, but she was already half-gone.

  Aliana watched her leave. “It’s great to see her. I know breakups suck, but I’m happy she has free time again.”

  “Breakups?”

  “She didn’t tell you? Her boyfriend—her ex, I guess—moved back home a couple weeks ago. He hated his job, couldn’t get enough freelance writing gigs, was sick of paying his dizzying rent. He had barely been here a year. This town, man—it has a shell, and some people just bounce right off of it.”

  “I guess you’re right.” He thought of Gastonia, his old neighborhood—the mill houses cloaked in beaten siding, guarded by chain fences so worn they wobbled like nets. The way life there was reduced to work, getting it, keeping or losing it—status and hope measured in dollars an hour, in cents. Dreams were an indulgence of childhood, to be discarded before puberty. To chase them meant exile. “I don’t think I could ever go home.”

  Aliana seemed to grasp the force behind his declaration, to share it. “I sometimes wonder, maybe some other city? It’s not like it’s either here or home, you know. There are other places, other progressive towns where I could be happy. But once you’ve been here awhile, leaving just feels like giving up. I’m too stubborn for that.”

  “You and me both,” he said.

  “Anyway, what is this about, again?”

  He told her as much as he had told Sarah, in case they compared notes later, then flashed the photo. “Was this taken here?”

  She glanced at it and answered immediately. “Oh yeah, totally. That’s from the opening of our Richter drawing show in November. Buckley and Hannah.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “Well, Buckley is a Seward. So yeah. His mother knows Jan—Jan Heinrich, the owner—from way back. Jan’s father helped Mrs. Seward build part of the family’s collection. They don’t buy from us a ton, we aren’t really in their wheelhouse, but they are around a lot. Jan gives them advice. Sometimes they cut him a check for it. Hannah is missing?”

  He hadn’t expected her to know the Sewards firsthand. He had to be careful. “It looks that way. But listen, can you not mention that I was here? The company I work for does a lot of business with them.”

  “Of course, yeah. They’re my boss’s friends, not mine. If you’re cool with Sarah you’re cool with me.”

  “Can you tell me anything about Hannah and Buckley’s relationship? Were they jealous, argumentative, anything like that?”

  “I didn’t spend a ton of time with them or anything. So I’m not the best source for that kind of information? But at our events they seemed great. She was kind of standoffish. But as a couple totally normal.”

  “Standoffish how?”

  “I don’t deal with the clients, generally. I make sure the shows get hung, the art gets in and out the door safely, you know, that the gallery functions in the literal—I mean the physical—sense. But I’ve been here awhile now, so we do have a few clients that I know well, and they’re all megarich. Maybe not Seward rich, but still. And their attitudes run the gamut, you know, from being comfortable with the difference between us to being not-so-comfortable.”

  “And Hannah wasn’t comfortable.”

  “Exactly. She was one of those people who seem to feel like they should maintain some kind of distance, like they have to prove themselves. It’s a tough type to work with—it’s easier to deal with someone who is certain that they’re better than you than it is to deal with someone who feels like they ought to be, but has some doubts. Hannah was a doubter. She could only be so friendly, or else we might find out that she was really one of us, and not one of them. When someone is acting like a jerk it’s usually just because they’re insecure, you know? So Hannah was like that.”

  “She seemed fake?”

  “Fake is too negative, like she was just shallow. I would say more...like she was acting. Which, considering that family, is understandable. I’m not sure many people are prepared for that life.”

  “And it was that obvious?”

  “When she was in here it was. They aren’t perfect, and I’m no great fan of the point-one percent—except that my job basically depends upon them—but one thing they are not is insecure about their status.”

  “I don’t suppose you have any idea how they met?” Reddick asked.

  She laughed. “No way. Like I said, it’s not like I really know them.”

  “Yeah. So you wouldn’t know what she did for work, then.”

  “No clue. But I wouldn’t be surprised if her only job was Buckley.”

  “What do you mean? That she was with him for his money?”

  “I couldn’t say. But just imagine if you were marrying into a family like that. You’d have to love your job to want to keep it.” She glanced around the gallery, as if wondering whether her own career would have been worth holding on to. “Anyway. When was she was in your building, again?”

  “Sunday night.”

  “Okay. Because the last time I saw her was maybe...three weeks ago? Just after New Year’s, at a holiday gala thrown by another dealer. Jan had a plus-one and took me. Sounds crazy, I know, but that old queen loves me, and everyone else has a family they’d rather spend time with. Anyway I was there, dress and makeup and the whole femme deal, but still feeling really out of place because it was mostly people like the Sewards. Big art world money. And Buckley got into this huge fight wi
th some guy that night.”

  “Really?”

  “It was a formal party, so the whole thing was very hushed and furtive. But Buckley looked pissed. Face was red. I gathered the guy was a friend of his, too.”

  Reddick did a quick image search of Franky Dutton and showed her the results. “Was this the guy?”

  “Yep. Definitely.”

  “Do you know what they argued about?”

  “No idea. But that guy left early. It seemed pretty serious.”

  “And everyone saw this?”

  “I wouldn’t say everyone. But a few people, yeah.”

  “Okay.” He extended his hand. “I won’t take up any more of your time.”

  She shook it, but waved away his concern. “It’s no big deal. Sarah is one of my all-time favorite people and I’m happy to do her a solid. Plus it’s a slow couple of weeks right now before we start ramping up for spring, so I could use the diversion.”

  He thanked her again and they walked back to the reception desk. Sarah was chatting with the assistant who sat behind it.

  “Well,” she said when they entered, “did you two crack the case?”

  Reddick felt himself blush. “She was helpful, yeah. Thanks for bringing me here.”

  “You owe me one, now.”

  “That sounds ominous,” Aliana said.

  “Oh he won’t like it one bit.” She turned back to Reddick. “I’m going to make you come by my studio and talk about art with me. There’s still a painter in there somewhere, and I’m going to find him.”

  He hugged her goodbye, shook Aliana’s hand again and left.

  * * *

  He went home and transferred his notes to the map. It had become a nest of names and arrows and notations, his first sketched intuitions reinforced with facts. He made food and brought it back into his room, trying to see what connected the kid at Clean City to the liquor store woman, to Buckley and Franky. He sat with it for half an hour. There was something there.

  He changed his clothes and went to the Y.

  There was a game beginning to take shape, all familiar faces, familiar teammates and opponents. He slapped five and bumped shoulders. No Derek. He texted him and he replied that he was out for the night, on a date. With a girl, he said, you should try it sometime. They’re just like guys but they smell better. Reddick replied with a string of emojis, friendly and noncommittal, his brief afternoon with Sarah lingering.