The Art of Death (15 page)

Bettina Lazare, literary agent extraordinaire, was in a bad mood. A very bad mood.

She had lost less than two pounds eating only hard-boiled eggs for three days. She hated eggs.

The heavy ivory necklace her scout had found in a vintage store was spectacular but no one, not even the most sycophantic member of her staff, had noticed it.

The cowlick that was the bane of her existence kept popping up despite massive applications of sprays and potions. It spoiled her intricately cut and perfectly styled hair by giving it the appearance of a rooster’s ass. Before the day was over, she’d have a well-chosen word or two with her overpaid stylist.

Yesterday, the illiterate author of an ethnic cookbook -- a cook who couldn’t actually cook and an author who couldn’t write but whose TV fame generated its own publicity -- had been charged with fraud. The sordid story was splashed all over the tabloids and Twitter. The publicity might spike sales for ten minutes but then sales would fall through the floor, ensuring the permanent loss of the advance on the second book.

The ghostwriter of a book about FBI incompetence was refusing to turn over the manuscript unless her name appeared on the cover and her percentage of royalties equaled the putative author’s percentage.

Ten minutes ago, she learned that the famous teenage victim of an abduction and five-year imprisonment in a chicken coop whose story would earn a place on the best-seller list had signed with another agent, an old rival she despised.

To top it off, in two minutes she was meeting with Madeleine Harrod. She’d never heard of the woman before, an aspiring author living in flyover country who claimed to have three great proposals for books.  

The only reason she granted the interview was a letter of recommendation from one of her current authors, Alexandra Royce Wright. She read it again. “Madeleine’s a great friend of mine. More important, she’s brilliant, the female polymath of the modern age: a fine painter in oils, an award-winning forensic artist, and the founder of a successful scientific toy company. I hope you’ll give her a hearing. I’m sure you’ll find her a profitable addition to your stable.” Other letters had flooded in too: from an art dealer named Babette Fouré, a physician named Dr. Anthony Beltrami, a prosecutor named Ned Harrod (a relative?), and an art critic named Dr. Beatrice Eagleton.

In Mrs. Wright’s letter, the word “stable” struck Bettina as hilarious. The Lazare Group didn’t breed horses, only horse’s asses. Most of her “authors” wrote as if mucking out a stall.

Furthermore, Alexandra’s recommendation itself struck her as odd. Authors never recommended someone who might become a competitor for the very limited number of people able or willing to read anything longer than a 140-character tweet. Nevertheless, sometimes pigs’ ears could be made into silk purses. A literary agent never knew.

Strangely, she was seeing both women back to back. Perhaps as great friends they were traveling together.

Adjusting the ivory necklace to hang just so on her enormous bosom and adopting her most gimlet-eyed stare, Bettina buzzed her assistant to show the Harrod woman in. Bettina remained seated, grasping her teacup with both hands so there could be no handshake. People were germy.  Hygiene, she found, was a great excuse for not extending courtesies to people who needed to know their place.

“Have a seat, Miss . . . ,” she said when the Harrod woman walked in, pretending to hunt for the name in a folder. “Oh, here it is, Miss Harrod.  Is this your first time in New York?”

Madeleine did her best not to look offended. “No. I’ve been here many times, mostly on business, sometimes for a show. Your office is amazing, by the way. The black-and-white photographs, these guest chairs.”

Bettina eyed with pride the bright red upholstered chairs perched on what looked like upside-down wire wastebaskets in polished nickel. “You ever heard of the designer Platner? He’s dead now, but in the Sixties he designed these chairs. Balenciaga used them last year at a runway show in Paris. Imagine, five-thousand-dollar guest chairs at a fashion show! And the photos are all from 1900. . . . But you’re not here to admire my office. How do you know about me?”

“I saw Lexie’s book. I didn’t read it, sorry to say, it’s not that interesting, but I saw your name in the acknowledgements and thought if you like what she has to say, you’ll love what I have to say.”

“So,” Bettina mused, reaching for Alexandra’s letter of recommendation, “the two of you aren’t really friends?”

Madeleine caught herself. “I didn’t mean that. We’re friends. Then I searched out other books you rep and lots of them are mostly pictures, like that cookbook by what’s her name, the housewife, so . . . .”

“So, you thought my standards weren’t that high.”

“Oh, no,” Madeleine protested, wondering if she dared dab away the little beads of sweat that had popped out on her temples. “No. You do a great job. I just thought you and I are probably more alike than you and those other authors, so you might want to hear what I have to say.”

“How are we alike?”

Madeleine tried to smile. “We’re both well-dressed, well-spoken, self-employed. People are a little afraid of us. Some are jealous.”

“Is that right?” Bettina asked checking her watch as if time were short. “Let’s hear what you have to say. Better still, let’s see what you’ve got. I’m just a simple gal, you know, very visual, so as they reportedly say in Missouri -- or is it Mississippi? -- show me.”  

“I have three.” From her Louis Vuitton briefcase, Madeleine extracted the first folder. “I paint in oils. I sell nationally. I’ve been featured in
Wallpaper
and interviewed for
Art in America
. My subjects are mostly taken from history. I paint their expressions to reflect the emotions they were experiencing at the moment of death or maybe a few seconds afterward.” She fanned out a dozen photographs of her paintings, then tried to hand Bettina a page of text. When Bettina didn’t reach for it, Madeleine placed the paper as close to her as she could get it. “The way I envision it, the righthand page of the open book shows my painting in full color, the opposing page contains my preliminary sketch and my notes about the subject: who it is, why the person interests me. As you can see, I write well. And the subjects are fascinating.”

Bettina glanced at the photographs and the page of text as if they were sheets of old newspaper smelling of long-dead fish.  “What else have you got?”

“Don’t you want to discuss these a little? Maybe take some time to see how good the paintings are? I can tell you about the subjects.”

Bettina raised her eyebrows as if deeply offended at such a foolish use of her time.

“Oh, okay,” Madeleine said. The reception she was getting was so cold her fingers felt frost-bitten. She extracted a second folder. “I’m a forensic artist, trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at Quantico. I’m sure you’ve heard of the FBI academy. Many awards. One of the top ten forensic artists in the country. I’ve put faces on unidentified skulls, hundreds of them, most leading to identification of the victim. One was a girl I actually tried to save from drowning when I was only eleven. My story -- all those stories, I thought, would be very interesting to . . . .”

“I don’t think so. Not my thing. I really hate dead people. And the third proposal?”

Madeleine sighed. “There’s a Tombstone Trail in northeastern Indiana. Old cemeteries, graves of famous people -- .”

“In Indiana there are famous people? Don’t tell me.”

“Well . . . yes, some. Have you heard of Gene Stratton Porter?
Girl of the Limberlost
?”

“Yes, but I don’t want to hear about old Gene again. Uuugly woman. Oh, so boooring.”

“How about James Dean? He’s buried in Fairmont, Indiana.”

“Cool. But the point is, he’s dead too. No, the Tombstone Trail won’t do. Too parochial. Too limited. Your paintings of dead people won’t do either. The subjects aren’t well enough known, and as I said, I hate dead people. A few articles in glossy magazines doesn’t a reputation make. And those awful skulls -- way too morbid.” Bettina shoved the mess of papers back at Madeleine. “I take it that’s all you’ve got.”

“With the popularity of ghost stories and vampires and zombies and such, why are these dead people not just as exciting?”

“Skulls and tombstones and historical figures are dead. Vampires are alive. Not the same thing at all.”

Choking on unspoken retorts, Madeleine fell back in the guest chair. “Really?” she murmured. “You don’t like any of my ideas? Surely they’re as good as that stupid cookbook I saw or Lexie’s fascinating little contribution to the remainder shelves.”

“So your ambition is to outdo the housewife or your good friend Alexandra. Is that it? You’re trying to use me for revenge.”

“Of course I’m not,” Madeleine cried.

Bettina smiled crookedly. “Trashing my authors . . . now how is that going to help you?”

“Oh,” she protested, “I don’t mean to sound like I’m trashing them. My ideas are just better, that’s all.”

“That’s as may be. But you don’t have a national platform, not like the victim of a horrific tragedy that’s captured the headlines or an international spy who swears to spill all of Putin’s secrets. Alexandra at least was listed in Forbes’ Forty Under Forty. That’s how I came across her. Without the pre-publicity that the author has generated on her own, the books are too hard to sell. They’ll lose money. So,” Bettina said, slamming back in her chair and laughing heartily, “get yourself on TV some way, like the housewife who can’t cook but writes cookbooks. Or get yourself embroiled in some national scandal, preferably with a politician whose career is ruined as a result, and we’ll talk again.”

Madeleine, for once, was out of words.

But Bettina wasn’t. She pushed her fashionable reading glasses up on her forehead and adopted a very serious expression. “Why do you fidget so much? Very distracting.” Before Madeleine could protest, the literary agent extraordinaire swung her chair so her back was to her visitor and buzzed her assistant to escort the woman out.

Dismayed, Madeleine gathered up her precious photographs and text. They were horribly creased and crumpled. Subdued, muttering a routine thank you, she hesitated at the office door, hoping to hear some encouraging response before she left. None came. She’d never experienced a setback like this before. It was shocking. Nevertheless, she pasted on a smile, as if the meeting had been even better than she hoped. 

Madeleine was so discombobulated by her interview with Bettina Lazare that she had almost crossed the reception area before she noticed Lexie Wright, who at a signal from an assistant was just getting to her feet. “What are you doing here?” Madeleine snarled.

Startled, Lexie responded in a soothing voice, “I didn’t know you were here, Madeleine.”

“I repeat, what are you doing here? Are you following me?”

Lexie smiled. “It’s none of my business why you’re here. The same is true in reverse, isn’t it? But I suppose we can both guess.”

With effort, Madeleine composed her face. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. New York affects me that way. . . . Want to have lunch?”

No, definitely not,
Lexie thought, but recalling Jessica’s advice to keep an eye on Steve’s first wife, decided to accept the olive branch. “Do you have a place in mind?”

“I thought I’d drop in at Bar 12-21 at Morton’s, just up 5th Avenue. I’m not in the mood for a big lunch. 1:30 suit you?”

“I’ll meet you there.” Lexie glanced at her watch. “I don’t know how long I’ll be with Bettina, though, so if I’m a few minutes late, you’ll know what’s holding me up.”

An hour later, Lexie joined Madeleine at the bar. After exchanging some meaningless pleasantries and insincere compliments on each other’s clothes and jewelry and then dithering over the menu and commenting on the other patrons, Madeleine once again pried into Lexie’s reason for visiting The Lazare Group.

Lexie chose her words carefully. “Bettina has an idea for a sequel of sorts to my book about entrepreneurship. That’s all.”

“Are you going to do it?”

Lexie sipped an iced tea. “Maybe. I’ve got a lot of other irons in the fire, so it would be tough, and books don’t earn that much money, even if they hit the best-seller list for a few weeks, as my first book did. How about you?”

“I made some proposals. Any one of them would be a best-seller, so Bettina’s very excited. She even offered me a far bigger advance than I ever dreamed of.”

Lexie kept her skepticism to herself. These days, advances were rare for established writers, non-existent for neophytes. “So what else is going on in your life, Madeleine?”

“Besides the books, you mean?”

Lexie nodded.

Madeleine told her about the one-woman show in Indianapolis, the purchase of a painting by a famous Hollywood director and the sale of six other pictures, and then the Directors’ Citation from the Association of Forensic Artists. She did not mention her troubles with Captain Ahab or her interview with Detective Powers.

Lexie made the appropriate murmurs of congratulations for her many achievements.

After their salads had been delivered, Madeleine resumed. “But the biggest thing in my life is redoing the whole farmstead. Have you ever constructed anything?”

Lexie told her about building the house she and Steve now shared.

“Then you know, Lexie, that everything’s a mess right now. But if anybody can get me to see beyond the mess to the final product, it’s Lefty.” She slapped her hand to her mouth in a pretense of embarrassment, simultaneously flashing a ring set with a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg. “I mean Steve, of course. He’s so wonderful! I’m told that the time he spends with me is unusual in the construction industry. I suppose it’s because . . . well, you know, because he once loved me and he’s a mensch; he doesn’t hold grudges. He talks to me like I’m a close friend, which is refreshing for divorced people, don’t you think? He told me all about the golf course project he’s undertaking in Hilton Head. You must be very excited about it too.”

Lexie murmured noncommittally. The last she’d heard, the golf course project was on hold, but she wasn’t about to admit that Madeleine might know something she didn’t about her own husband.

“Did Steve show you the fantastic collection of antique awls and hammers I bought for him at an auction? He was overwhelmed because anything connected with his work is important to him. He loves history. I don’t know if I should tell you this, but we used to give each other wonderful surprise gifts all the time. Some were little, like flowers, some were really special, like a weekend in the Bahamas. We were so in love then. . . . I’m sure he does that with you too. Surprise, surprise! And you appreciate that as much as I did, right? It’s so unusual for a man to be thoughtful like that.”

More murmurs and a little frown from Lexie. She had no clue about the awls and hammers. Nor were little surprise gifts a routine thing. Maybe they should be.

“And he has the funniest stories about Todd and Sadie. Really, he has me in stitches. I think he’d fire Todd if he could. Todd’s always ‘just sayin’. And he pretends to know everything. That has to get old. And Sadie, he says, doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.”

“Todd? He loves Todd. Todd takes perfect care of everything,” Lexie protested. “Sadie too. Humor or not, I can’t imagine a kinder nanny.”

“I wonder. . . . Oh, never mind. It’s probably just one of those little things,” Madeleine said with a smug smile. “Steve can tell me what he can’t tell you. You know him.” Her tone suggested that Lexie didn’t know him at all. “Steve was always very private. And way too kind for his own good.”

Lexie had had enough. She was slow to anger but the torrent was building behind the dam, ready to deluge everything in its path. No one, most especially an ex-wife, dared claim to know more about her husband than she did. Lexie hadn’t intended to bring up anything Bettina had confided to her, but the dam burst without warning. “Tell me something, Madeleine. Why did you forge a letter of recommendation from me?”

Madeleine jerked almost imperceptibly. “What?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Bettina showed me. It wasn’t my letterhead, by the way. It wasn’t fine linen with engraving but thin paper with embossing.”

“So what?”

Lexie smiled, amused despite herself. “Because when I pointed it out, Bettina said she should have known I’d never use stationery like that. I think she’s more offended by your cheapness than your forgery.”

 “That bitch! How dare she?”

“Now she’s a bitch? I thought she offered you a big advance.”

“She did! Why did she show you that letter?”

“She didn’t intend to, I’m sure. She merely asked what I knew about your authorial skills and I said I didn’t know anything. So then she asked why I’d written the letter I did. I protested that I hadn’t written anything, so she showed me the letter that purportedly came from me. I must say, you’re a pretty skillful forger.”

“What do you expect? I’m an artist.”

Your bravado is disgusting, so how do I put this?
“The words you used to describe yourself astonished me. Are you really a brilliant polymath?”

“Other people say so. What else did Bettina say?”

“About what?”

“My proposals.”

“Nothing. . . . What were they?”

“I gave her three: my paintings, my . . . . Oh, you sly fox! Like I’d tell you so they could be stolen.”

Lexie closed her eyes in frustration. “It was an idle question, that’s all. Why forge a recommendation from me?”

Madeleine’s mood shifted abruptly. “How else was I to get a foot in the door?” she groused. “You have to know how hard it is. So you gave me a little help you didn’t know about. So what?”

“You were taking a big risk, you know.”

Madeleine giggled. “Nothing risked, nothing gained. No harm, no foul. So I hope you’ll overlook my little subterfuge.” She reached out her hands to grasp Lexie’s. “I want to be friends. We have Steve in common, after all. You have to admit, I’m doing him a big favor. And you too. The job at the farm is costing me a fortune and you’ll reap the reward.”

Lexie pulled away. “Business and favors are two different things. I suspect Steve will earn every penny you pay him.”

“Well, speaking of favors, I have one to ask of you. I hear you often fly by private plane.”

“Umm.”

“Is that the way you flew out this time?”

Lexie nodded.

“Well, then, how about letting me ride back with you. Commercial travel is such a pain.”

“That won’t be possible.”

“You just tell me when you’re leaving and I’ll be ready. I’ll accommodate you, Lexie.”

How generous of you
, Lexie thought.
You’ll accommodate me!

“I’ll make it easy, I promise,” Madeleine emphasized. “And you have to admit we’ll both benefit. You won’t have to be alone and I won’t have to go slumming at the airport with the unwashed crowds.”

Lexie smiled thinly to hide her indignation at the woman’s presumption. “Sorry, but it won’t work out.”

“Why, Lexie? You haven’t given me a reason. Don’t be vengeful.”

Without answering, Lexie abruptly called for her check, even though she hadn’t finished her Caesar salad.
It’s none of your business why I won’t let you fly with me, and, yes, I’m feeling a little vengeful, you disgusting piece of work. I’d rather be alone than with you.
After an awkward interval and an insincere farewell wish of “Good luck,” Lexie left with as much grace as she could.

A few minutes later, she bought a bottle of fizzy water and, shamelessly standing outside on the sidewalk, gulped down a Xanax.