The Genius (28 page)

I said, “I’m looking for someone.”

“Yeah, whossat.”

I showed him the mug shots.

“Ugly bastards,” he commented as he leafed through them.

I said, “Do you mind if I ask your name?”

“Do I mind, sure I do.”

“Well, can you tell me anyway?”

“Leonard,” he said.

“I’m Ethan.”

“You a cop, Ethan?”

“I work for the District Attorney,” I said, which wasn’t totally untrue.

“What about you, fatso,” he said to Isaac, who remained unmoved behind his sunglasses. “Whassis problem. Can’t he speak?”

“He’s more of the strong silent type,” I said.

“He looks more like the big fucking fatso type. What do you feed him, whole sheep?” He handed me back the photos. “I don’t know these sons of bitches.”

I couldn’t bring myself to come out and ask about Victor, scared as I was that he would turn out to
be
Victor, and that my questions would send him scurrying out the back door. In trying to dance around the central point, I allowed my questioning to get more and more convoluted, until, eyeing the Band-Aids on my face, he said to Isaac, “You must be the brains of the operation.”

“I’m looking for a man named Victor Cracke,” I blurted, half expecting him to press a button and drop through a trapdoor. But he only nodded.

“Oh yeah?” he said.

“You know him.”

“Sure I know him. You mean with the—” He wiggled his index finger atop his upper lip, meaning
moustache
, which was bizarre, because he had an actual moustache.

“He was a customer?”

“Sure.”

“How often did he come in here?”

“I’d say a couple times a month or so. All he ever bought was paper. He ain’t been by in a while, though.”

“Can you show me what kind of paper he bought?”

He looked at me like I was insane. Then he shrugged and led me to a tiny stockroom, metal shelves sagging with unopened boxes of pens, stencils, photo albums. Atop a card table sat a microwave, and in front of it, a plastic bowl with fusilli floating in watery marinara sauce. A fork rested atop a stack of comic books.

Leonard grabbed a box on the lowest shelf and dragged it to the middle of the room, huffing and puffing as he bent, revealing a preexisting split in the seat of his pants. He took a utility knife off his belt and sliced open the packing tape. Inside was a box of plain white paper, less yellowed than the drawings but—insofar as plain white paper can be positively identified—correct enough.

“How long has he been shopping here?” I asked.

“My father opened up after the War, passed in ’63, the same day Kennedy got his head blown off. I think Victor started showing up around then. He came in maybe twice a month.”

“What kind of relationship did you have with him?”

“I sold him paper.”

“Did he ever talk about his personal life?”

Leonard stared at me. “I… sold… him…
paper
.” Satisfied that he had impressed my own stupidity upon me, he went back to his lunch.

“Excuse me—”

"You’re still here?”

“I just wondered if you ever noticed anything unusual about Victor.”

He sighed, scooted around in his chair. “All right, you want a story, I’ll tell you a story. I once played him checkers.”

I said, “Pardon?”

“Checkers. You know what checkers is, dontcha?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I played him. He came in here with a little checkers set and put it down and we played checkers. He beat my pants off. He wanted to play again but I didn’t want to get beat so bad twice in one day. I offered to box him but he just left. The end.”

Something about the story broke my heart, as I pictured Victor—how I saw him in my mind’s eye, I can’t say; I suppose I saw his spirit, translucent and fuzzy—wandering the neighborhood, a board tucked under his arm, desperate for a competitor.

“Happy now?” Leonard asked.

“Did he use a credit card?”

“I don’t take credit cards. Cash or check.”

“All right, then, did he use a check?”

“Cash.”

“Did he ever buy anything else?”

“Yeah. Pens and markers. Pencils. What are you, the goddamned paper gestapo?”

“I’m concerned about his safety.”

“How the hell is knowing about a bunch of pens going to help him stay safe?”

Despairingly, I thanked him for his time and handed him a card, asking him to call if Victor came in.

“Sure,” he said. As I left, I glanced back and saw him tearing the card into confetti.

Because Samantha worked during the day, I did most of the footwork on my own. This, of course, implies that I did not work during the day, which was increasingly true. I felt restless and trapped at the gallery and kept inventing excuses to leave. Even when I didn’t need to go to Queens, I didn’t want to stay in Chelsea. I would take long walks and ruminate about Victor Cracke and art and myself and Marilyn, fancying myself a private investigator, narrating to myself.
He stumbled into the coffee shop and ordered a cuppa joe. Cue saxophone
. These self-indulgent fantasies, these stirrings of dissatisfaction, were all too familiar to me. I had them on average every five years.

Samantha’s job was to go down Richard Soto’s list of old cases. Right off the bat she concluded that the majority of them were irrelevant to us—the victim was either female or older or had been murdered without any sign of sexual assault—but she followed them up, just in case. Listening to her, I began to understand that the most outstanding feature of policework is its tedium; throughout November and December there were plenty of idle days, plenty of blind alleys, plenty of conversations that went nowhere. We groped blindly, crushing together hunches to form theories that we then discarded, trial-and-error but mostly error.

The week of Thanksgiving we began meeting at night at the storage warehouse. Samantha would take the train in after work, and we’d select a box at random, have Isaac lug it to the viewing room, and spend three or four hours flipping pages in search of bloodstains. The task went faster this time around than it had before, as I was looking now with a single criterion, rather than to evaluate the work. Nevertheless, I still had trouble focusing for more than thirty or forty minutes at a stretch. My headaches, though diminishing, still made squinting painful. At those moments, I would surreptitiously watch Samantha as she worked; her delicate fingers hovering over the surface of the page, her lips extruded in that beautiful pout, concentration coming off her in waves.

“I can’t tell whether he was sick or a genius,” she said.

“They’re not mutually exclusive.” I told her about the phone calls I’d received after Marilyn began spreading rumors.

“That doesn’t surprise me at all, actually,” she said. “It’s like those women who write love letters to serial killers.” She set aside the drawing she’d been looking at. “Would it bother you if he was guilty?”

“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it.” I gave her my mini-lecture on artists misbehaving, concluding, “Caravaggio killed a man.”

“In bed,” she said and laughed.

Eight weeks might not sound like very long, but when you’re spending much of that talking to or sitting alone with the same person—we essentially learned to forget about Isaac—often engaged in an extraordinarily monotonous activity, your sense of time begins to distort, much as I imagine it does in prison. No matter how hard we tried to stay on point, we couldn’t talk only about the case. I can’t tell you exactly when the thaw began to accelerate. But it did, and we dared to make jokes; we chatted about nonsense and about important things, or things I’d forgotten were important.

“Jesus,” she said when I told her I’d been expelled from Harvard. “I’d never guess.”

“Why.”

“Cause you look so…”

“Boring.”

“I was going to say normal,” she said, “but that’ll work.”

“It’s a façade.”

“Evidently. I had a rebellious phase, too, you know.”

“Did you, now.”

“Oh yes. I was into grunge. I wore flannel and played the guitar.”

I laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” she said gravely. “I wrote my own material.”

“What was the name of your band?”

“Oh, no. I was strictly a solo artist.”

“I didn’t know one could play grunge on one’s own.”

“I wouldn’t describe my own
personal
music as grunge. I would say that I was more inspired by the grunge lifestyle. Everything
I
sang sounded like the Indigo Girls. One time this friend of mine—” She started giggling. “This is actually really sad.”

“I can tell.”

“It is, but I”—giggling—“I’m sorry. Ahem. This friend of mine junior year had to have an abortion—”

“Oh, that’s hilarious.”

“Stop. It
was
sad, it was
really
sad. That’s not what’s funny. What’s funny is that I wrote a song about it, and it was called—” She broke up completely. “I can’t.”

“Too late,” I said.

“No. Sorry. I can’t.”

“ ‘The Procedure’?”

“Worse.”

“ ‘The Decision’?”

“I’m not going to tell you. But I will tell you that there was a lyric comparing a woman’s body to a field of flowers.”

“I think that’s very poetic.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Although,” I said, “Dalí said that the first man to compare the cheeks of a woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it may well have been an idiot.”

“In bed.”

“In bed. Well,” I said, “I think your parents got off easy.”

“By the time I was old enough to rebel they were too busy imploding to notice. It really pissed me off.”

“Did you write a song about it?”

“About their divorce? No. I wanted to write a poem, though.”

“ ‘The Separation’?”

“I’d call it ‘A Pair of Assholes.’ ”

I smiled.

“I took photographs, too,” she said. “God, what happened to me. I used to be so creative.”

“It’s never too late.”

She got very quiet.

“What,” I said.

“What you said. Ian used to tell me that.”

I said nothing.

“When I complained about my job he would tell me that.” She paused. “It’s not like that’s a very unusual thing to say, but I remember him saying it a lot. Maybe because I complained about my job a lot.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I can think about him now without getting hysterical. That’s a positive step.”

I nodded.

“I think about him now and it’s warm, rather than hot. You know? Like he was a really good friend. He was. You don’t want to hear about this.”

“I do if you want to talk about it.”

She smiled, shook her head. “We have work to do.…”

“What was he like?”

She hesitated, then said, “He and my dad were good friends. I think my dad took it harder than I did. I sort of expected that something would happen to him eventually. That’s the nature of the job. I didn’t expect that, though. Who expects that?”

I said nothing.

“Anyway, that’s that,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Now I’m on the rebound.” She grinned at me. “You were just a temporary stop on my road to recovery.”

“Whatever I can do to help.”

She smiled, started turning pages again. I watched her for a little while. Eventually she saw me staring and looked up. “What.”

“I don’t know why you’re unhappy with your job,” I said. “To me it’s way more interesting than what I do.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“It is.”

“If you say so.”

“What would you do, if not this.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never had a good answer to that part of the question. I wanted to do this and now I’m here. I had an idea that this was going to distinguish me from my dad. His father was a cop. My uncle is a cop. My mother’s father was in the Secret Service. Naturally, I didn’t want to become a cop, so I thought, oh, yeah, well, but a DA—now
that’s
different.” She laughed. “That was my final attempt at rebellion. I’ve accepted my fate.”

I said, “I think I felt the same way about my father.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I mean it,” I said. “Growing up I saw him as basically soulless and profit-driven—which he is. Unfortunately I chose the one line of work possibly more soulless and more profit-driven.”

“If you really feel that way, then why don’t you get out?”

“Lately I’ve been wondering. I don’t know what else I would do.”

“You could become a prosecutor.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a little old to start over.”

“I thought it was never too late.”

“For me it is,” I said.

“Can I ask you something?” she asked. “Why do you resent him so much?”

“My father.”

She nodded.

I shrugged. “I can’t give you one single reason.”

“Then give me a few.”

I thought. “After my mother died, I felt like a pet that belonged to her, and that he got stuck with. He barely spoke to me, and when he did it was to give me an order or to tell me I was doing something wrong. She was the only wife that he didn’t divorce, and whether or not they would have lasted—I have my doubts—when she got sick, they were still getting along. That’s why he’s hasn’t gotten married since: he idealizes her. I feel bad for him. I do. But I’m not going on Oprah or anything to make up with him.”

“Your siblings get along with him?”

“Well, my brothers work for him, so whether they like him or not, they kiss his ass. Amelia lives in London. I don’t think they have much of a relationship, but it isn’t overtly hostile.”

“That’s your specialty.”

“Correct.”

“You know anger shortens your life expectancy.”

“Then enjoy me while I last.”

She smiled wryly. “No comment.”

AFTER FOUR WEEKS IN MARILYN’S HOUSE the situation had become intolerable. Taking me in was incredibly kind of her, considering that things had already been tense between us before the attack. Although, looking back, I have to wonder if she didn’t extend the invitation primarily to keep an eye on me. If there were clues I missed them. When I returned home late at night, having spent the evening with Samantha, nothing Marilyn said or did indicated that she was silently building a case against me. And really, she had nothing to build on; even if she had somehow been able to eavesdrop at the warehouse, she would’ve come up with nothing concrete to hold against me. Everybody flirts, don’t they? If I flirted with Samantha while we worked, I did so under the assumption that it wouldn’t produce results. She had made that plain. So then what was Marilyn thinking, those nights when she greeted me in a kimono, pulled me up to the “boudoir” (her word), and threw herself on top of me? Did she think she would catch a glimpse of me with my eyes closed and learn the truth? She may have a keen nose for betrayal, but she’s not a mind-reader.