Catalogue Raisonne (23 page)

“The county?”

“Near Picton.”

“You're alone then tonight?”

She drew back at that, turtling into her shoulders with a sharp glance. “Meaning what?”

“I mean, Rick's not coming over?”

“Please. Give me a little credit.” Her eyes at my cheek and temple again. “Did he do that?”

“With a little help.” Reflex machismo. One two-hundred-and-sixty pound bouncer not quite sufficient to lay me low.

She smiled faintly and shook her head. And then seemed, in an instant, to go all wobbly, her body seeming to shiver and sway like a Jell-O tower before flopping down on the couch. She pushed off her shoes and put her head back, eyes at the ceiling. “Have a seat,” she said.

But she was in the middle of the couch, too little room left on either side. I brought over one of the kitchen chairs. She turned her head on the couch and said in a tired voice, “Please. I've done the cop interview. Take the rug. It's vaccumed at least. Finally.”

I sat down cross-legged on the floor, then, reminding myself a little too much of a student at the feet of a guru, I stretched out my legs to
one side. Leaning on the bad hand first, which I corrected fast. I didn't know how to start.

“Er, how did it go today?” I said finally.

“Oh, great.” She ducked her head away, but then turned back quickly. Perhaps not so much from a willingness to let me see her eyes as from an unwillingness to let mine out of her sight. “Great. They put my brother in a hole and then they threw dirt on him.”

“I'm sorry.”

Which softened the glare in her eyes a bit, not much. Grey, almost colourless eyes.
Painter's eyes
, I found myself thinking. Nothing to warp the outside colour. Collide with and change it.

“Look,” she said. “I'm really not up to the hostess thing right now. To tell the truth, I'm hardly ever. Grab a beer if you want.”

“Do you want one?”

“Me? Yeah, sure. Why not?”

Sipping on the beers – no toast – we talked a bit more comfortably. I asked about the guitar leaning in the corner.

“Robert's,” she said. “Everything musical is. Even all the tapes. I'm sort of non-musical. It's funny. I mean, I listen to it a lot – especially when I'm working – but I don't care that much what's playing. Apart from country, I mean. And even then sometimes. It's just background for my eyes. Hands.”

She nibbled at an edge of her forefinger, working off a ragged bit. Something very mouse or rat-like in her face as she did this. The thin sharp nose, small quick teeth – wide, somewhat glassy eyes. She stopped after a bit.

“I don't really miss him yet. You know? I'm afraid I won't. Growing up, I just remember being embarrassed by him mostly. I'd be talking to some hot guy, and there'd always be this moment when he'd smirk, like he had something on me, and he'd say, “You're Robert's sister, right? I used to dread that moment.” She looked out the window. Street lights by the insurance/school yard, fuzzy blooms in the black square. “And wait for it too, sometimes. It meant that particular episode was over. Stop trying, Claudia. Your turn.”

She leaned her head back on the couch and I realized she meant it. It really
was
my turn.

“I've been finding out some things at the gallery,” I said.

“Bzzt. Wrong answer. I don't want to hear another fucking word about that place. And how's your beer? Mine's dry.”

Out at the fridge, I felt the pressure building in my chest, behind my eyes. Familiar. But what to do with it this time? Just leave? She'd just buried her brother, but you couldn't have a conversation where one person was doing all the shoving. Not with this girl, especially. I went back to the living room with the beers, determined to give it one last try.

“Listen,” I said in a tone that brought her head up, the glare out again. “I don't know what you think of me and it doesn't really matter. But I have been finding out some things. Doing some digging. Since . . . Monday night. Remember, you're the one who told me about someone calling from the gallery.”

“Calling
Robert
.”

“Right. And that started something. Maybe it would have started anyway, I don't know.”

She puffed out her lips and blew air through them. An exaggerated sigh, strangely spoiled-sounding. It didn't seem to fit her.

“Okay. We'll do the job thing. You show me yours, I'll show you mine. Me first! Mine's easy.” She jumped up. Had she done a line? “Piccone fired me. I have no ass.”

She turned to show me. She was exaggerating again. The forms may not have been hypertrophic, but they were definitely there. Clearer in the dress than in the baggy black.

“You're underselling yourself.”

“I'm not
selling
anything.”

She flopped down on the couch again, sagging like a punctured balloon. Death seemed to be working like Ramon's stepped-on coke: short peaks, followed by long flat spells.

“Well, at least I'm getting a better reception than I got the other night. I'm glad of that anyway.”

“I'm glad you're glad. Look at it from my side,” she said, without a hint of pleading. “Robert and I don't talk much. Or I don't listen well anyway. But I do catch enough about this wizard chess player he works with, a ‘fascinating colleague'” – she did a painfully good Robert,
though it didn't seem to pain
her
. “Exactly the kind of geek I'll steer clear of, I'm thinking. And that's about the end of it. A few bits more about a ‘fiendishly good' plan to steal some art. Geek talk. Harmless. And then my idiot brother shows up with Paul Klee in his briefcase, you right behind. Hnh?”

“And you thought what?”

“I thought,
wizard
, right.”

Which was all pretty much what I'd seen in our first meeting. Suspicion of the guy who might be piggybacking on a wanker's
jeu d'esprit
, spotting in hare-brained fantasy the possibility of a mule.

“You say you're a lousy listener?” I said.

“I am.”

“Well get better. Fast.” Armin talk. And looking to one side, avoiding the voodoo glare I could feel even in profile, I started in before she could interrupt. Sketching in what I'd learned. The Klee safely back on the walls, as she'd seen herself. No sign-in in security – nothing strange there. But when asked by the cop, the director fine with Robert waltzing in at midnight with his sister's painting. Leaving it in a back gallery? Little things, some adding up, some not. Art rental and Piccone in a huff. I didn't mention her own “Adjusted” series, the sales record I hadn't found yet. Suspicion definitely a two-way street, always. Spaces in the vaults. Ending with my discovery of the Gallery Rentals scam. My masterpiece.

“Tiddlywinks at the culture club,” she said.

“More than that,” I said. “Even if you buy their reasoning – and in certain moods I might – it's still more.”

She smiled wearily. No boost left in the lines. “Listen. I was a pretty good listener, wasn't I?”

“You did fine.”

“I don't mind talking about this shit. It takes my mind off . . . a bit anyway. Just as long as you don't start drawing lines between this fiddling in the gallery and what happened to Robert.”

“What if there is a line?”

“You think there is?”

“I don't know.”
There's a space, but I can't really feel it yet.

“Do you have any
reason
to think so?”

“No. Not really.”

“Then don't.”

I nodded. I'd accept this for now, since it was obviously non-negotiable.

“The cops are calling it death by misadventure. That's my brother in a nutshell. Missed adventure.”

“He was young.”

“Oh yeah, and like we're old. Mr. and Mrs. Maturity.” Again that flat smile, weary, which
did
make her look old. If there was something adolescent about Claudia's thin body, a spidery girl whose gangly limbs seemed to move in jerks, there was something older, worn-down about her face. “I don't think he ever believed he had any power over anything. It was always something hare-brained. Taking a famous painting as a ‘
jeu d'esprit'.
Getting drunk and doing a stuntman's leap off the Skyway. Pretending he was an international art thief. Pretending he was a summer jock. I think it was exactly what the cops said it was. Death by missed adventure. Yup, that's my brother.”

I could feel our meeting winding down. The beers were empty and wouldn't be replaced. Claudia would sleep soon, and should. I didn't know what I would do. Somewhere out there was Angela, returning home from her Thursday class to find the apartment empty.
Was lunch a cover then?
I drew shapes on the vacuumed carpet, pulling my finger dark against the nap to make circles, squares. Smooth-rub them out again. Claudia was watching me. Frowning. Lines gathering in her face, as if her weariness was forming itself into a question.

Even before she spoke, I heard the chord – unsought this time, truly out of the blue – and knew that she was beginning to trust me. Or getting tired of not trusting. I knew that touch-down feeling too. But I would wonder later if everything that was about to happen could really be traced back to someone – not for long, but for long enough – getting too tired to doubt.

She sighed deeply. Not the pampered sigh, but the long emptying exhalation of someone taking the plunge.

“I painted the fucking thing, okay?”

“What?”

“The Klee Robert took. It wasn't Klee. It was mine.”

“D
o you paint?”

“No.”

“Then you don't really mean
how
.”

I did mean exactly that. Even now, my thoughts reeling at the edge of a sudden drop, I was aware of the need to push back against the constant shoving, stand firm against the bullying.
If it's this hard when she's tired. . . .

“Sorry,” she said, seeing some of it in my face. “It's just that you get sick of non-artists asking you how you did things. Like you'd say to a surgeon, How. I've got a few spare minutes.”

I was dizzy with it, running. Mouse in a maze, sniffing cheese everywhere, bumping walls. How she must have felt that night. Alone in her knowledge, or –

“Does Rick know?” I said.

“He saw what you saw. But Rick's funny.” Not the word I would use, ever. “He has these little routines, layers. Stupid on the surface. Then smart underneath. Then underneath that, stupid again. It's hard to tell which side is on the bottom.”

“Can't keep his eyes open . . . until he grabs you from behind.”

“That's it.”

“Okay. So we'll hope he's no smarter than he looks. What do you mean exactly, you painted the Klee?”

“Here. Come with me.” She didn't take my hand, but she leaned down and touched it so I'd follow her.

Down the hall, past the bedroom where I'd seen Rick and across from the bathroom, was a second bedroom. I hadn't even noticed it that mind-fogging night. Claudia turned on the light. A chaos of art and art supplies, waist-high drifts of it in places. Like the jumble in the gallery basement, but even less ordered and with less walking space left over. In one corner, under some of it, I could make out a single bed.

“Robert always said he slept on the couch.”

“He did. I told him I needed my studio and he went with that. Believe it or not, though he tried hard not to let on, he actually did know the difference between walking and talking.”

Brushes, paint tubes, rags. Old clothes, paint-smeared. Stretcher slats, a roll of canvas. Pictures torn from newspapers and magazines, perhaps books, littering the floor, making a kind of crisp surf sound, autumn leaves, as you took a step. The picture on the easel was getting blotted out with thick grey paint, a first coat – recycling the canvas, or abandoning an idea and starting again from scratch. Some stretched canvases leaning inward looked ready to go, or done but not showable. The finished ones hung on the walls, or more often, leaned against them or the bed. Anyone looking at them, I thought, would see that she had talent, intelligence, abundant drive – but somewhere her art had gone off the rails. Or hadn't got on them yet. The profusion in the room suggested ideas tossed at a dartboard . . . some of them landing within the scoring rings, some of them way off – none of them truly intentional.

She picked out a couple of the finished canvases and leaned them against her legs, facing me.

“What do you think?”

“Honestly?”

She made a face. “No. Flatter me and waste my time.”

I looked at the paintings. They belonged to her “Adjusted” series, parts worked out meticulously, others rough or still in-progress. Mrs. Soames's
mixed-up girl
was, honestly, the first phrase that came to mind. But that may have been partly stalling.

“They're good. But I think I like ‘Two Figures' better.”

“Really?” She seemed perplexed as well as pleased.

“Yeah. I mean, nothing against Rubens, but why bring him in if you've already got your own thing happening?”

“You
sound
like you paint.”

“I don't. But four years walking around an art gallery, you pick up things. Leafing through books too, in the beginning.”