JONATHAN KELLERMAN. A COLD HEART

Low output meant no resale market.

Low demand for her work eliminated one possible motive for murder: someone trying to up the value of an investment because dead artists often fetch higher prices than live ones. That only applied to artists who mattered. As far as the art world was concerned, Juliet Kipper had never existed, and her death wouldn’t elicit a blink.

No, this one had nothing to do with commercial intrigue. This one was personal.

A bright killer. Forward-thinking and outwardly composed, but inside . . . rage tempered to something cold and measured.

When he’d first called me, Milo had called it a “weird one,” but the killer wouldn’t see it that way. To him, twisting a wire around Juliet Kipper’s neck would seem eminently reasonable.

I had a beer, thought some more about Julie’s luminous paintings and snuffed-out talent, and got on the phone.

The Lewis Anthony Gallery was listed on Fifty-seventh Street in New York. The woman who answered the phone enunciated the way clippers snip through cuticles.

“Mr. Anthony passed several years ago.” Her tone implied knowing such should be a prerequisite for American citizenship.

“Perhaps you can help me. I’m looking for works by Juliet Kipper.”

“Who?”

“Juliet Kipper, the painter. She was represented by the gallery several years ago.”

“How many is several?”

“Ten.”

She snorted. “That’s an eon. Never heard of her. Good day.”

I sat there wondering what it would be like dealing with that kind of thing, full-time. Growing up with a head full of beauty and the gift of interpretation, being told how brilliant you were by the people who loved you—getting hooked on the oohs and ahs—only to enter what passed for “the real world” and learn that love didn’t mean a damn thing.

Julie Kipper had faced a frigid universe that regarded the gifted as fodder.

The kindness of strangers, indeed.

Despite all that, she’d reached deep within herself again and produced works of transcendent beauty.

Only to be garroted and laid out and posed in a filthy bathroom.

Finding the person who’d done that suddenly seemed very important.

It wasn’t until hours later—after finishing and mailing reports, paying some bills, making a run to the bank to deposit checks from lawyers—that something else hit me about Julie.

A gifted, damaged soul snuffed out violently, during the first blush of comeback.

The same could be said about Baby Boy Lee.

I compared the two cases. Both had been Saturday night, back-alley killings. Five weeks had lapsed between them. Neither Milo nor Petra—nor anyone else—had seen any link because there were no striking similarities. And as I checked off the differences a nice-sized list materialized on my scratch pad.

Male vs. female victim.

Late forties vs. midthirties.

Single vs. divorced.

Stabbing vs. strangulation.

Outdoor vs. indoor crime scenes.

Musician vs. painter.

I decided I was being overly analytic; no sense calling Milo. I went for a forty-minute run that challenged my heart and lungs but did little to clear my head, got back on the computer, and searched for murders of creative types within the last ten years.

Despite setting that arbitrary limit, a lot of extraneous material cropped up: scads of dead rock stars, mostly, almost every demise self-inflicted. The West Hollywood stabbing death of Sal Mineo, too. That had gone down in 1976, well before the one-decade cutoff. Mineo’s murder, long a subject of film-biz intrigue and believed to be related to his homosexuality, had turned out to be a street burglary gone really bad.

The actor had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe that’s how Baby Boy—and Julie—would shake out.

I kept searching and refining, ended up, hours later, with four possibles.

Six years ago, a potter named named Valerie Brusco had been bludgeoned in an empty field behind her studio in Eugene, Oregon. I found no direct reporting of the crime, but Brusco’s name came up in a retrospective of Pacific Northwest ceramic artists, written by a Reed College professor, in which her violent end was noted. This one had been solved: Brusco’s boyfriend, a cab driver named Tom Blascovitch, had been arrested and charged and incarcerated. But murderers get out of prison, so I printed the data.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *