“Jesus.”
“Maybe he used drugs, Keller.”
“In this business? You screw around with drugs and you don’t last.”
“Well,” she said, “he didn’t. And don’t tell me there aren’t plenty of guys who use something when they’re not working. Or even when they are. Not everyone lives as clean as you, Keller.”
“Maybe he had a congenital heart condition.”
“Maybe. People die, Keller, and not all of them get a hand from a helpful guy like yourself. Far as that goes, people fall in front of subway trains.”
“Or jump.”
“Or jump. They don’t all get pushed.” She got to her feet. “But let me get your share of the fee from one who did, and you can go home. Say, what about that tree you fell in love with? What happens to it now?”
“Niswander will get it back, along with the rest of his paintings, since the mystery buyers represented by all those little red dots will fail to materialize. And I guess his new dealer will offer it for sale sooner or later.”
“At a much higher price.”
“Not necessarily, since the artist is still alive.”
“So he is. Will you buy it?”
“I don’t know. I really like the painting, I liked all of his paintings.”
“But?”
He frowned. “But I’m not sure I want to get into all that, Dot. The whole art scene. I think maybe I’m better off sticking with stamps.”
She pinched his cheek. “Perfect,” she said. “You know what they say, Keller. You stick to your stamps and your stamps will stick to you.”
Eight
Keller got out of the taxi at Bleecker and Broadway because that was easier than trying to tell the Haitian cabdriver how to find Crosby Street. He walked to Maggie’s building, a former warehouse with a forbidding exterior, and rode up to her fifth-floor loft. She was waiting for him, wearing a black canvas coat of the sort you saw in western movies. It was called a duster, probably because it was cut long to keep the dust off. Maggie was a small woman-elfin, he had decided, was a good word for her-and this particular duster reached clear to the floor.
“Surprise,” she said, and flung it open, and there was nothing under it but her.
Keller, who’d met Maggie Griscomb at an art gallery, had been keeping infrequent company with her for a while now. Just the other day a chance remark of his had led Dot to ask if he was seeing anybody, and he’d been stuck for an answer. Was he? It was hard to say.
“It’s a superficial relationship,” he’d explained.
“Keller, what other kind is there?”
“The thing is,” he said, “she wants it that way. We get together once a week, if that. And we go to bed.”
“Don’t you at least go out for dinner first?”
“I’ve given up suggesting it. She’s tiny, she probably doesn’t eat much. Maybe eating is something she can only do in private.”
“You’d be surprised how many people feel that way about sex,” Dot said. “But I’d have to say she sounds like the proverbial sailor’s dream. Does she own a liquor store?”
She was a failed painter, he explained, who’d reinvented herself as a jewelry maker. “You bought earrings for the last woman in your life,” Dot reminded him. “This one makes her own. What are you going to buy for her?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s economical. Between not giving her gifts and not taking her out to dinner, I can’t see this one putting much of a strain on your budget. Can you at least send the woman flowers?”
“I already did.”
“Well, it’s something you can do more than once, Keller. That’s one of the nice things about flowers. The little buggers die, so you get to throw them out and make room for fresh ones.”
“She liked the flowers,” he said, “but she told me once was enough. Don’t do it again, she said.”
“Because she wants to keep things superficial.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Keller,” she said, “I’ve got to hand it to you. You don’t find that many of them, but you sure pick the strange ones.”
“Now that was intense,” Maggie said. “Was it just my imagination, or was that a major earth-shaking experience?”
“High up there on the Richter scale,” he said.
“I thought tonight would be special. Full moon tomorrow.”
“Does that mean we should have waited?”
“In my experience,” she said, “it’s the day before the full moon that I feel it the strongest.”
“Feel what?”
“The moon.”
“But what is it you feel? What effect does it have on you?”
“Gets me all moony.”
“Moony?”
“Makes me restless. Heightens my moods. Sort of intensifies things. Same as everybody else, I guess. What about you, Keller? What does the moon do for you?”
As far as Keller could tell, all the moon did for him was light up the sky a little. Living in the city, where there were plenty of streetlights to take up the slack, he paid little attention to the moon, and might not have noticed if someone took it away. New moon, half moon, full moon-only when he caught an occasional glimpse of it between the buildings did he know what phase it was in.
Maggie evidently paid more attention to the moon, and attached more significance to it. Well, if the moon had had anything to do with the pleasure they’d just shared, he was grateful to it, and glad to have it around.
“Besides,” she was saying, “my horoscope says I’m going through a very sexy time.”
“Your horoscope.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you do, read it every morning?”
“You mean in the newspaper? Well, I’m not saying I never look, but I wouldn’t rely on a newspaper horoscope for advice and counsel any more than I’d need Ann Landers to tell me if I have to pet to be popular.”
“On that subject,” he said, “I’d say you don’t absolutely have to, but what could it hurt?”
“And who knows,” she said, reaching out for him. “I might even enjoy it.”
A while later she said, “Newspaper astrology columns are fun, like Peanuts and Doonesbury, but they’re not very accurate. But I got my chart done, and I go in once a year for a tune-up. So I have an idea what to expect over the coming twelve months.”
“You believe in all that?”
“Astrology? Well, it’s like gravity, isn’t it?”
“It keeps things from flying off in space?”
“It works whether I believe in it or not,” she said. “So I might as well. Besides, I believe in everything.”
“Like Santa Claus?”
“And the Tooth Fairy. No, all the occult stuff, like tarot and numerology and palmistry and phrenology and-“
“What’s that?”
“Head bumps,” she said, and capped his skull with her hand. “You’ve got some.”
“I’ve got head bumps?”
“Uh-huh, but don’t ask me what they mean. I’ve never even been to a phrenologist.”
“Would you?”
“Go to one? Sure, if somebody steered me to a good one. In all of these areas, some practitioners are better than others. There are the storefront gypsies who are really just running a scam, but after that you’ve still got different levels of proficiency. Some people have a knack and some just hack away at it. But that’s true in every line of work, isn’t it?”
It was certainly true in his.
“What I don’t get,” he said, “is how any of it works. What difference does it make where the stars are when you’re born? What has that got to do with anything?”
“I don’t know how anything works,” she said, “or why it should. Why does the light go on when I throw the switch? Why do I get wet when you touch me? It’s all a mystery.”
“But head bumps, for Christ’s sake. Tarot cards.”
“Sometimes it’s just a way for a person to access her intuition,” she said. “I used to know a woman who could read shoes.”