“Sorry it took so long to get together,” said Kipper. “What can I help you with?”
Milo said, “Is there anything about your ex-wife we should know? Anything that would help us figure out who strangled her?”
Putting emphasis on wife and strangled and watching Kipper’s face.
Kipper said, “God, no. Julie was a wonderful person.”
“You’ve maintained contact, despite the divorce ten years ago.”
“Life took us in other directions. We’ve remained friends.”
“Other directions professionally?”
“Yes,” said Kipper.
Milo sat back. “Are you remarried?”
Kipper smiled. “No, still looking for Ms. Right.”
“Your ex-wife wasn’t her.”
“Julie’s world was art. Mine is slogging through bond prospectuses. We started off in the same place but ended up too far apart.”
“Did you study painting in Rhode Island?”
“Sculpting.” Kipper touched the face of his watch. The timepiece was thin as a nickel with an exposed skeleton movement. Four diamonds placed equidistant around the rim, crocodile band. I tried to estimate how many paintings Julie Kipper would have had to sell to afford it.
“Sounds like you’ve been researching me, Detective.”
“Your marriage came up while talking to people who knew her, sir. People seem to know about your artistic origins.”
“The Light and Space bunch?” said Kipper. “Sad crowd.”
“How so, sir?”
“Maximally self-labeling, minimally talented.”
“Self-labeling?”
“They call themselves artists,” said Kipper. New edge in his voice. “Julie was the real thing, they’re not. But that’s true of the art world in general. There are no criteria—it’s not like being a surgeon. Lots of pretense.”
The brown eyes shifted down to his oversized hands. Square fingers, glossy nails. A well-tended hand. Hard to imagine it working a chisel, and the look in Kipper’s eyes said he knew it. “That was my story.”
“You were pretending?” said Milo.
“For a while. Then I gave it up.” Kipper smiled. “I sucked.”
“You were good enough to get into the Rhode Island School of Design.”
“Well, what do you think of that?” said Kipper. Another layer of silk had been peeled from his voice. “Like I said, there are no criteria. What Julie and I had in common was we both won awards in high school and college. The only difference was, she deserved hers. I always felt like an impostor. I’m not saying I’m a total boob. I can do things with wood and stone and bronze the average person can’t. But that’s a far cry from art. I was smart enough to realize that, and got into something that fits me.”
Milo glanced around the room. “Any artistic satisfaction in this?”
“Not a whit,” said Kipper. “But I make a fortune and indulge my fantasies on Sunday—home studio. Most of the time my stuff never gets out of clay. Smashing it can be quite cathartic.”
His face remained unlined, but his color had deepened.
Milo said, “How did your ex-wife feel about your switching careers?”
“That was years ago, how can it be relevant?” said Kipper.
“At this point, everything is, sir. Please bear with me.”
“How’d she feel? She hated it, tried to talk me out of it. Which tells you something about Julie—her integrity. We were living like paupers in a hovel on the Lower East Side, doing odd jobs. Julie tried to telemarket magazine subscriptions, and I did janitorial duty in the building to make the rent. The day I got into finance was the first time we could count on a stable income. And not much of one, at that. I started off gofering for chump change at Morgan Stanley. But even that was a step up. Now we could buy food. But Julie couldn’t have cared less. She kept yelling at me—I was talented, had sold out. I don’t think she ever forgave me—not until she moved out here and looked me up and we reconnected. At that point, I think she could see that I was really happy.”
“You moved here first.”
“A year before Julie. After we divorced.”
“And she looked you up.”
“She called my office. She was really down—about failing to make it in New York, about having to draw stupid newspaper ads. She was also broke. I helped her out.”