Today, he had on a coarse, brown, herringbone sport coat way too heavy for a California spring, a once-white wash-and-wear shirt and a green polyblend tie embroidered with blue dragons. His black hair was freshly cut in the usual style: long and shaggy on top, cropped tight at the temples. Sideburns, now snow-white, reached the bottoms of his fleshy ears. He called them his skunk stripes. The restaurant’s lighting was kind to his complexion, rendering some of the acne pits as craggy contours.
He said, “The artist’s name was Juliet Kipper, known as Julie. Thirty-two, divorced, a painter in oils. As they say.”
“Who says?”
“Arty types. That’s the way they talk. A painter in oils, a sculptor in bronze, an etcher in drypoint. Paintings are ‘pictures’ or ‘images,’ one ‘makes’ art, blah blah blah. Anyway, Julie Kipper: apparently she was gifted, won a bunch of awards in college, went on for an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and attracted New York gallery attention soon after graduation. She sold a few canvases, seemed to be moving forward, then things tightened up, and she ran into financial problems. She moved out here seven years ago, did commercial illustration for ad agencies to earn a living. A year ago, she got serious again about fine art, found herself gallery representation, took part in a couple of group shows, did okay. Last Saturday was her first solo show since she left New York.”
“Which gallery?”
“Place called Light and Space. It’s a cooperative run by a bunch of artists who use it mostly to showcase their own stuff. But they also support what they call distinctive talent, and Julie Kipper was deemed as such by their review committee. I get the feeling these people don’t earn a living by their art. Most of them have day jobs. Julie had to pay for her own party—cheese and crackers and cheap wine, a jazz trio. About fifty people drifted in and out during the evening and six of the fifteen paintings were red-dotted—that means ‘sold’ in art lingo. They actually put little red dots on the title tag.”
“Any of the co-op members twang your antenna?”
“They come across as a peace-loving bunch, nothing but good words about Julie, but who knows?”
Julie. Calling the victim by her first name early in the game. He’d bonded with this one. I said, “What happened?”
“Someone ambushed her in the ladies’ room of the gallery. After hours. Close confines—just a sink and a toilet and a mirror. There was a bump on the back of her head—coroner says not serious enough to knock her out, but the skin was broken and traces of her blood were found on the rim of the sink. Coroner’s guess is she was thrashing and her head knocked against it.”
“Anyone else’s blood?”
“I should be so lucky.”
“A struggle,” I said. “How big a woman was she?”
“Small,” he said. “Five-four, hundred and ten.”
“Any skin under her fingernails?”
“Not a molecule, but we did find some talcum powder. As in the stuff they use inside rubber gloves.”
“If that’s what it means,” I said, “it implies careful preparation. How long after hours did it happen?”
“The show closed at ten, and Julie stayed behind to clean up. One of the co-op artists helped her, a woman named CoCo Barnes. Who I don’t see as a suspect because A, she’s in her seventies and B, she’s the size of a garden troll. Just after eleven, Barnes went back to check and found Julie.”
“Is she hard of hearing, as well?” I said. “All that thrashing around?”
“No mystery there, Alex. The gallery’s one big front room, but the bathrooms are out back, separated by a solid-core door that leads to a small vestibule and a storage area that feeds to a rear alley door. Plus the bathroom door’s also solid. Top of that, there was music playing. Not the jazz combo, they’d already packed out. But Julie had brought a stereo system and backup tapes for when the band took breaks. She switched it on while they straightened. Barnes not hearing a thing makes total sense.”
The smiling woman brought shallow, round stainless-steel trays crowded with small saucerlike dishes. Basmati rice, lentils, green salad, okra, nan bread, tandoori chicken. A ramekin of mango chutney.