The photographer screwed a filter onto a lens and bent over the camera, making adjustments that didn’t need to be made, hoping that she would simply go away. Stupid idea. Looking down at the camera, he could also see her legs, sturdy little fireplugs rooted firmly to the pavement.
“Young man, I’m talking to you.”
Gilette waved the photographer back, and now the architect stepped forward to loom over her. Gilette smiled as he looked into the angry slits of her eyes, with an intensity that forced her to step back a pace. “The photographer takes his orders from me.”
She had been planning to say something to him. What was it? She could only stare. He was so close. She couldn’t think.
Emma Sue had always been protected from her own mirror by a doting father who had insisted that she was truly beautiful. She was protected also by her father’s land and money, never suffering the plight of the homely girl at the school dance. Considered by every farmer in the county to be a good catch, landwise and moneywise, she was sought after by every landowner who had a son of marriageable age. She had always danced every dance and happily trod on the feet of the handsome, wild boys who feared their matchmaking fathers.
And money had protected her from her own dull-wittedness, with a generous endowment to an Ivy League college. Money could do anything. With money enough, black could become white and a bleating barnyard animal could become a peer of the art community in the art center of the world.
And yet, with all her protective armor, she was pinned like an insect and hadn’t a grasshopper’s wit to get loose. She could only stare at Gilette. He was so much more than just a man. There was something else in play here. He knocked the wind out of her by merely looking into her eyes and showing her something she couldn’t buy.
There was sex going on here, on the sidewalk in the daylight, in public view, and it was indecent and raw and-she could only stare. Would you care to dance, Gregor?
No, his eyes said, not with you.
Ugly and lonely and witless, she turned and walked away with slow agonizing steps, size nine shoes clattering on the sidewalk, lost now in the sounds of Manhattan traffic.
People had begun to drift through the arch and into the plaza. A policeman asked Gilette if he wanted them cleared out. Some of them sat on the benches in the open light, some took the shade under the ash trees that formed the plaza walls, and two children dipped their hands in the water of the fountain. Gilette shook his head.
“No. Let them be.”
He looked into the photographer’s lens to see the fountain through the camera’s eyes, bringing it into sharp focus. A young Spanish sculptor had won an international competition with this design to match Gilette’s own skill for making marble flow like water. The lines of the fountain carried the eye along with a fluid grace that defeated its own hard substance, echoing the lines of the building’s facade, and stone called out to stone across the plaza.
Reflections of the water played over the faces of two boys, and the camera’s shutter clicked.
An old man flung one brittle arm across the back of a bench, which curved to fit the contour of his body. He lifted his face to the light and smiled peacefully, and a shutter clicked.
A young woman in a yellow dress stood in the lush green shadows of the young stand of trees, starting as a flock of birds settled in the branches overhead.
A derelict hesitated at the arch and turned to the place where Gilette stood. The man’s face, with five days’ dust and beard, was washed new with dazzling light, and a shutter clicked.
The television crew was unloading equipment from the large trucks. All about him was the hustle of people passing to and fro, laying cables and checking sound equipment and cameras, a babble of orders and questions.
Oren Watt stood at the outer edge of the fray, with the sun on his face. Perhaps that was why she just seemed to appear there. One moment the sidewalk across the street had been empty, and now she stood there, smiling at him. He remembered her from the Koozeman shoot. She was the one who had removed the tapes on the gallery where Dean Starr had died. The young woman had smiled at him then, too, though not exactly a smile, more like bared teeth.
Now she pulled a black wallet out of her blazer and opened it to display a badge. The sun hit the metal and shot his eyes with gold. A truck lumbered between them, and when it had passed by, she was gone.
“I thought you were the technical advisor, Oren.”
He spun around to see her standing behind him. She was looking down at a clipboard.
“Did you tell them they were shooting in the wrong place?”
“What do you want from me?”
“I once asked a nun that same question, same words. You know what she said? ‘I want your soul.’ ” And now she was walking away from him, making a check mark on her clipboard as she left him.
“Well this is wonderful,” said Charles, as he stood at the desk in Mallory’s office and pored through the contents of the brown bag. He held up a brand of mustard he had never seen before. And a full complement of foreign beers filled out the bottom of the sack.
“Sorry about lunch,” said Mallory. She was sitting at one of the three computer terminals which dominated the room.
“Have you given any thought to how Quinn knew you’d be at the gallery today? Perhaps you don’t know much about his habits. New York is overcrowded with galleries. What are the odds he was just passing by? He’s stalking you. He’s not dangerous of course, but still.”
“He’s tied to my money motive for the old murders. Maybe he’s worried that I’m making connections he wouldn’t like.”
“You’re wrong, Mallory. Quinn’s presence kills your money motive.”
“Like hell it does. Having Quinn view the bodies fits very nicely with money. He’s an important critic. It all fits.”
“No, Mallory, the fact that Quinn was called in is an oddity. It doesn’t fit at all. He couldn’t have been called there for publicity value. The murderer would have called in a hack critic for that.”
“A review from Quinn is gold.”
“Well, no it isn’t, not for a bad artist. There was a time when a critic could launch a career. But not anymore. Today, the artist is promoted with media hype and a gimmick, not a critique. To have Quinn see the murder as artwork, well, that would only be important to a really talented artist. That description doesn’t fit Peter Ariel, Dean Starr or Oren Watt. It only makes sense as revenge against Quinn. You may have to accept his idea that Aubry was the primary target. The only other reasonable theory is a random act of insane violence.”
“I’m swimming in people who made money on those deaths. I’m right about this.”
“Why are you so stubborn about the money motive?”
“I need it for the Dean Starr murder. Without it I’ve got nothing. If it’s a random act of violence, then the killer disappears into the crowd, and there’s no trail.”
She wasn’t with him anymore, she was so intent on her computer screen.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m breaking into an artist’s network through an internet server.”
She looked up at him and smiled. He must have found her smile disquieting, because now he was leaving her, softly closing the door behind him, not wanting to witness any breaking and entry.
She had taken quite an interest in the artnets over the past few days. Once into the system, she proceeded immediately to the forum under the heading of Bliss’s Last Column. She passed over the familiar two-day-old comments of artists and interested parties, and happened on a conversation taking place in real time. Two of the players were opting out to a private room. She went into the data base and plucked the passwords to diddle the cyberspace lock so she could follow after them. Invisible to the screens of the others, she stole up on the more intimate conversation printing out before her eyes and learned that Andrew Bliss had spent two years in a seminary, studying for the priesthood.