The Girl in the Face of the Clock (13 page)

He handed her a white business card with his phone number, then said good-bye.

Jane waited for a few minutes until she was sure he had gone, then slowly made her way outside to Perry Mannerback's waiting limousine.

“I'm so sorry about this, Jane,” said Perry, patting her hand as she got in beside him. “So very sorry.”

Jane nodded. No wonder Lieutenant Folly was suspicious of Perry—Perry was the obvious suspect and he wasn't exactly acting like an innocent man. Jane searched his face for some clue. Perry looked away.

Following the hearse with Aaron Sailor's casket, they drove in silence to the quiet cemetery in the Bronx where Irving Berlin, Fiorello La Guardia, and Bat Masterson were buried. Aaron Sailor was laid to rest beside Jane's mother, a few green hills away from the mortal remains of his parents.

Jane and Perry Mannerback barely exchanged ten words on the drive back into Manhattan. When Leonid pulled the limousine up in front of her brownstone, Jane didn't move to get out.

“You don't have to come back to work until you're ready,” said Perry. “Take a week. Take two. I'll just have Fripp send you your check.”

“Perry—”

“No, no, I insist.”

Jane swallowed hard.

“You've been incredibly kind to me, Perry, which makes what I need to say very difficult. I don't think I can go on working for you.”

Perry looked genuinely surprised.

“You're quitting? You can't quit. I need you.”

“You don't need me at all. I'm not doing anything.”

“Yes, you are. You're doing a great deal.”

“Like what?” asked Jane.

“You're guarding me. And assisting. You could have bought that clock in Seattle for me if Willie the Weasel hadn't beaten us there.”

“I'm sorry, Perry. It isn't right. This isn't what I want. This isn't what I do.”

He didn't say anything right away, just sat there. Jane bit her lip. Taking the job with Perry had seemed like such a smart idea two weeks ago. It didn't seem so smart now.

“There's nothing I can say to convince you to stay?” he asked in an earnest voice. “I'll give you a raise.”

Jane shook her head. It wasn't fair to continue working for Perry just to spy on him. Jane hadn't meant to like him, but she did. She also didn't trust him an inch.

“I don't understand why you want to give me so much for so little in return,” she said. “You're acting like you feel guilty about something.”

“No, that's not so,” protested Perry too quickly, his voice too loud. “I don't have anything to feel guilty about, nothing at all.”

“Why was my father calling out your name in his coma?”

“I don't know,” said Perry, looking away.

“Why won't you tell me about the woman in the painting?”

“Never met her. Don't know who she is. Don't know her at all.”

Jane opened the door and got out of the car.

“Thanks for everything, Perry.”

“I'm very sorry,” he said in a quiet voice, without looking up. “Truly. Very sorry.”

Then the car drove away.

It was only a bit past two o'clock in the afternoon. What do you do after you bury your father? Jane wondered, as she trudged up the steps of her brownstone and opened the front door. She wasn't hungry. It would hardly do to go to a movie. Jane wished she could go back to work right now, but that was impossible, too. Fight directing wasn't something you could do by yourself. It could take months to line up a job. Until then it would be the unemployment office. Or temp work.

Wearily, Jane climbed the four flights of stairs to her apartment. When she got to the fifth-floor landing, something looked wrong. The door to her apartment was partially open. The doorframe looked like something had crashed into it.

Jane pushed open the door all the way and stared into a shambles. It took her several more seconds to make sense of the picture, to understand what had happened.

While she had been burying her father, someone had broken in and turned the place upside down. She'd been robbed!

“So, what you think?” asked Imre Carpathian, studying the eight-foot-high twisted mass of metal, rubber, and polyvinyl chloride piping.

The crazy old artist had changed out of the flamboyant outfit he had worn to the funeral. He was now dressed in his work clothes—a torn T-shirt and khaki pants that were so covered with paint they could serve as a color chart. His long gray hair was speckled with patches of blue. His bushy black eyebrows cried out for gardening.

“Very interesting,” said Jane diplomatically.

“I call it
Burden of Capitalism in New York, Number Three,
” said Imre, giving his creation a few miscellaneous whacks with the large hammer he was holding.

“So you sold the first two? That's great.”

“There are no first two,” said Imre. “I'm starting at number three.”

“Are you allowed to do that?”

Imre looked over at her as if she were out of her mind.

“I am artist,” he declared, indignant. “I can do anything I want.”

Jane smiled and felt herself relax a bit. It had been a horrendous afternoon.

As if her father's funeral and quitting her job with Perry hadn't been enough, she'd then had to endure the shock of having her apartment violated, deal with the police about the break-in, and wait three hours for a locksmith to come and fix her door. The burglar had used a crowbar. The repaired doorframe and door now sported eighteen-inch steel anti-jimmy guards and a new deadbolt lock.

After phoning 911, Jane had called the number on the business card Detective Folly had given her. A police operator had patched her through to his cellular. Could this have something to do with her father's murder? she had asked, shaken. Why had this happened now?

Folly had been surprisingly kind. Apparently, it wasn't uncommon for burglars to go through the obituaries and hit apartments when they knew people would be off at funeral services. The detective assured her that it was just coincidence and said not to worry.

He must have spoken with the two uniformed officers who had shown up shortly thereafter because they treated her with a gentleness and tact that Jane didn't usually associate with the NYPD. They were puzzled, however, by the fact that nothing appeared to have been taken.

Probably this was because she had nothing worth stealing, Jane had said, but she began to wonder herself when the officers went through the apartment pointing out all the things that plugged into the wall. The television. The CD player. Even the answering machine. This was precisely the kind of stuff that a crackhead could sell quickly for cash. If the thief had been looking for money so desperately—her little flowered sugar bowl had been smashed and even the back of the sofa bed had been slit open—why hadn't he taken her gizmos and appliances?

“I'm glad you come for visit,” declared Imre, dropping his hammer and walking over to a table piled high with what looked like junk. “You want coffee?”

“Thanks. That would be nice.”

Imre pushed aside various bicycle fenders, wire spools, and sheet metal until he found a blowtorch and a battered old coffeepot. He took the pot over to a sink behind
Burden of Capitalism in New York, Number Three
and filled it with water, then lit the blowtorch and directed the flame at the pot.

“Real nice funeral today, yes?” he said.

“Yes,” said Jane. She hadn't told him about the break-in, only asked if she could come down. Imre had been right about what he had said this morning. It wasn't good to be alone on a day like this.

Imre Carpathian's loft on Broome Street was a vast, industrial-looking space with grimy windows and high ceilings broken up by cast-iron pillars and unpainted dry wall.

Jane had grown up in a similar space a few blocks away from here, but Aaron Sailor had finished their loft with the skill of the cabinetmaker's son that he was, and Jane's mother had filled it with beauty, music, and love—for the first years of Jane's life, at least. Imre's home looked like one of those hangars where they reassembled pieces of crashed airplanes. He had gotten the loft when SoHo was a desert of abandoned warehouses and factories, not the fashionable district it had become. Artists like Imre couldn't possibly make enough sales to afford places like this now. Looking around at his work, Jane wondered if he made any sales at all.

“So you going to take nice vacation now, yes?” asked Imre. “This is what Imre would do. Get away from city. Travel. Leave your sorrow behind.”

“No,” said Jane. “I couldn't.”

“Why not? You got passport?”

“Yes, but …”

“You don't got no money?”

“That's not it,” she said. Jane had been working since she'd gotten out of college and had a fair amount saved.

“So what's the big deal?” demanded Imre. “When was last time you give yourself vacation?”

“Do times when I was collecting unemployment insurance between assignments count?”

“No,” barked Imre, opening the top of the coffeepot to see how the water was doing. “You have no excuses. I say, get out of town. Get out of the country, if you can. You getting hungry maybe? What time is it?”

Jane looked at her watch.

“Almost seven,” she said, surprised. How had it gotten so late? Jane suddenly realized she hadn't eaten anything all day.

“Dinnertime already,” declared Imre, reading her mind. “Come, hold this.”

Jane walked over and took over blowtorch duty while Imre walked back to a cabinet and ruffled through paint tubes and chisels until he produced a menu from a Chinese restaurant.

An hour later, they were sitting in Imre's front living area on unmatched battered couches. Empty white cartons of chow mei fun, tai chen chicken, and shrimp with garlic sauce littered the orange-crate coffee table. They had switched from coffee to beer and Imre was telling stories about Aaron Sailor. Jane was laughing for the first time in several days.

“… and then there was the time Aaron did portrait of this Park Avenue lady, new wife of big real estate fellow. She's born in trailer park in Tennessee but already she's worked up through two millionaire husbands. Then she steals this guy from his wife. He is the real big time, worth megabucks. Aaron, though, he is sick of portrait game, is sick of being liar with his paint, making rich ladies look like they want to look—more thin, more pretty, and like they have more brains. ‘What they need is better plastic surgeon, not artist,' he would say, and I would tell him, ‘When are you going to be real artist, Aaron? When are you going to tell the truth?' So this day he finally does. He paints the lady's portrait, but instead of eyeballs, he paints big dollar signs.”

“You're kidding,” said Jane, putting a hand over her mouth to supress a giggle.

“Honest to Pete,” said Imre, solemnly holding up his right hand. “He delivers painting and woman goes crazy, and rich husband don't pay Aaron, tells him to go jump in East River. So Aaron takes painting and is walking down Park Avenue, when who should be walking up the other way but woman's first husband. He sees painting under Aaron's arm and recognizes ex-wife immediately from her dollar-sign eyeballs. Buys painting on spot for twice what first man was going to pay. This is how Aaron decides that maybe he can make living being real artist.”

“That's a marvelous story, Imre,” said Jane, taking another swig from her bottle of Samuel Adams. “I've never heard that. Why didn't my father ever tell it to me?”

“Maybe because I leave out part where Aaron is sleeping with lady while doing portrait.”

“Oh.”

“Ladies all like him a lot,” said Imre, finishing his own beer. “He was lonesome for your mother. God rest her beautiful soul.”

Jane's hand went instinctively to the dragonfly on the ribbon around her neck. She hadn't bothered to take it off since the funeral this morning.

“So Aaron became real artist after that, though still liar,” Imre went on. “The paint is liar when things look like things, this is what I try to tell him—Aaron and me, we argue about this all the time. But at least he finally paints what he wants, not be whore for commissions. Too bad nobody wants Realism then.”

“Did you see his one-man show?” asked Jane.

Imre nodded and made a face.

“Uptown gallery,” he snorted, taking an angry chug from his beer. “All dealers are pigs, but uptown dealers are the worst. Greed on legs, I tell him when he wants to sign contract with that woman, but Aaron wouldn't listen. He found out.”

“What did he find out?”

“She was a pig.”

“Elinore King,” said Jane.

Imre nodded.

“Only interested in money, like she wasn't rich already. Lived in big apartment on Central Park West with big-money art on her wall. Aaron told me all about it. Rauschenberg. Jasper Johns. Cy Twombly. You know how much this shit costs? Millions! It's obscene. But still this pig woman needs to cheat artists out of every dime, make them pay for their own shows, steals the bread out of their mouths. Anything they sell, she takes it all. What a crook.”

Imre seemed to be looking around for a place to spit, but thankfully decided against it. The floor already had enough problems. It probably hadn't been refinished in a hundred years.

“Do you remember a big painting of a naked woman sitting on the stairs of Dad's loft with a handless clock between her legs?” asked Jane, her thoughts turning back to Perry Mannerback and his unconvincing denials.

“Yeah,” grunted Imre. “Best painting in show, the only one they sell, I think.”

“Do you have any idea who the model was?”

“Sure,” said Imre. “Is Leila Peach.”

Jane sat up.

“Leila Peach,” she repeated. “Who was she?”

“Oh, Leila, Leila,” said Imre, his face softening. “You don't remember Leila? No, I guess you were away at college then. She was subletting loft downstairs from Aaron, on second floor.”

“What was she like? Tell me about her.”

“Leila was pretty crazy girl,” said Imre knowingly. “Or maybe not so crazy. Leila knew what she wanted. She posed for everybody.”

“She was a professional model?”

“Leila did it for sport, not money, though I suppose she could use the bucks. She wanted to be part of the scene, you know? Her thing was sleeping with artists. She was
shtupping
half the artists in SoHo. Modeling was her ticket, easy way for her to get into their studios naked. She was involved with Aaron for a while, but then she dumped him for some rich guy.”

Jane was totally alert now.

“What rich guy?”

“Some big rich guy, I don't know,” said Imre. “Had something to do with buttons or something.”

Jane's heart sank. Perry Mannerback. Of course it had been Perry Mannerback. Jane didn't know why she should be disappointed or surprised, but somehow she was both.

“Where's this Leila Peach now?” she asked. “What happened to her?”

“She left town right after Aaron had his accident,” answered Imre, after draining the last of his beer and rising to get another bottle. “Moved to England.”

“Do you have a phone number for her?”

“No, but I give you her address if you want. She still sends me card every Christmas. Crazy girl, but sentimental that way. Always remembers nice big Hungarian genius, and why not?” His craggy face broke into a smile. “For a while there, I was
shtupping
her, too.”

It was well after ten p.m. when Jane got back to the apartment after the long subway ride up from SoHo. She turned the knob on the new deadbolt and locked herself in. At least the apartment was pretty much back together. She had straightened up while waiting for the locksmith. Yet everything seemed different somehow. Colder. The place was not the safe little haven it had always been.

Jane poured herself a glass of water—the Chinese food at Imre's had been too salty. Then she sat down next to the answering machine and listened to a series of condolence messages from acquaintances. The last message on the tape was an unexpected one.

“Hi, Jane, it's Valentine Treves,” said a gentle British voice.

For a moment the name didn't register, so lost was Jane in thoughts of burglary and death and Leila Peach. She took a quick breath. Valentine from the plane to Seattle. Her goofy poet.

“I read about your father in the paper. I'm very sorry. I'm about to go out of town again, but I wanted you to know that I was thinking of you. If there's anything I can do to help, please let me know. My telephone number is …”

Jane got a pencil, replayed the message, and looked around for something to scribble down the number on. The only thing she could find was the back of the scrap of paper that Imre had given her with Leila Peach's most recent address in London. Apparently, Leila moved around a lot. Jane sat chewing the eraser of her pencil for a minute, then dialed.

“Hello,” said Valentine Treves.