"I'm afraid of him," she said.
"Of Giles?" I said in a dull voice.
"No," she said, "I'm talking about Mark. I'm afraid of Mark."
Violet and I were sitting together on the sofa upstairs when his key turned in the lock. Before we heard the sound, Violet had been laughing at something I'd said, something I've forgotten now, but I remember that her laugh was still in my ears when Mark stepped through the door. He looked sad, a little sheepish, and very mild, but the sight of him turned me cold.
"I have to talk to you," he said. "It's important."
Violet's body had gone rigid. "Then talk," she said. Her eyes never left his face.
He walked toward us, moved around the table, and leaned down to embrace Violet.
She pulled away from him. "No, don't. I can't," she said.
Mark looked startled and then hurt.
In a low, steady voice, Violet said, "You lie to me, you rob and betray me, and now you want a hug? I told you I didn't want you back."
He stared at her in disbelief. "What am I supposed to do? The police want to talk to me." He took a breath, then stepped backward. His arms hung limply at his sides. "I know Teddy did it," he said. He narrowed his eyes. "I saw him that night." Mark sat down at the other end of the table. He let his head fall forward. "He was all bloody."
"You saw him?" Violet said loudly. "Who? What do you mean?"
"I went to see Teddy. We were going out. He opened the door and he was all covered in blood. At first I thought it was a joke, you know, a trick." Mark blinked, then looked at us steadily. "But then I saw him— Me—on the floor."
I felt as if my brain were rising inside my head. "You knew that he was dead?"
Mark nodded.
Violet's voice was steady. "What happened then?"
"He said he'd kill me if I said anything, and I left. I was scared, so I took the train to Mom's."
"Why didn't you go to the police?"
"I told you. I was too scared."
"You didn't seem scared in Minneapolis," I said. "Or Nashville. You seemed to enjoy Giles's company. I waited for you, Mark, but you never came."
Mark's voice rose. "I had to go along. I couldn't get away. Don't you see? I had to do it. It wasn't my fault. I was afraid."
"You have to talk to the police now," Violet said.
"I can't. Teddy will kill me."
Violet stood up. She disappeared and returned a few moments later.
"You have to talk to the police now," she said. "Or they'll come and get you. Call this number. The detectives left it for you."
"He needs a lawyer, Violet," I said. "He can't go without a lawyer."
I was the one who called Lazlo's cousin's husband, Arthur Geller, and it turned out that he was expecting the call. When Mark went in to the police station to speak to the police the next day, he would have an attorney by his side. Violet told Mark that she would pay his legal bills. Then she corrected herself, "No. Bill will pay. It's his money."
Violet let Mark sleep in his room that night, but she told him that after that he would have to find somewhere else to live. Then she turned to me and asked if I would sleep on the sofa. She said, "I don't want to be alone with Mark."
Mark looked aghast. "That's stupid," he said. "Leo can sleep at home."
Violet turned to him. She lifted her palms toward his face as though she were warding off a blow. "No," she said sharply. "No. I'm not going to stay alone with you. I don't trust you."
By posting me as night sentry on the sofa, Violet wanted to make it clear that life was not going on as usual, but my presence wasn't enough to break the spell of the everyday. The hours that followed Mark's arrival were disquieting, not because anything happened—but because nothing did. I listened to the sound of him brushing his teeth and to his voice wishing me and Violet good night in a curiously cheerful tone and then to his shufflings in his room before he settled down to sleep. The sounds were ordinary, and because they were ordinary I found them terrible. The simple fact that Mark was in the apartment seemed to alter everything in it, to transform the table and chairs, the night-light in the hallway, and the red sofa where I had made a temporary bed. Most unsettling was the fact that the change could be felt but not seen. It was as though a veneer had settled over everything, a banal mask that clung so tightly to the hideous form beneath it that it couldn't be pried off.
Long after the whole building was quiet with sleep, I lay awake listening to the noises from outside. "He has a good heart, my son." Bill had been standing at the window looking down onto the Bowery when he said those words, and I know that he had believed them, but years before, in the fairy tale he called The Changeling, he had told a story of substitution. I remembered the stolen child lying in his glass coffin. Bill knew, I thought. Somewhere inside him, he knew.
In the morning, Mark went off with Arthur Geller and spoke to the police. The following day, Teddy Giles was arrested for the murder of Rafael Hernandez and held without bail on Rikers Island while he waited to go to trial. You would think that the dramatic entrance of a witness would have ended the case. But Mark hadn't seen the murder. He had seen a bloody Giles and the dead body of Rafael. It was important, but the D.A. wanted more. The law has to muddle along with facts, and there were few facts. The case was mostly talk—gossip, rumors, and Mark's story. There was little evidence to be gotten from the corpse, because the police hadn't found a whole body in the suitcase. The boy had been cut into pieces, and after months of decaying under water, those fragments of bone, sodden tissue, and teeth had revealed his identity—nothing more. We did find out from the newspapers that Rafael Hernandez wasn't Mexican, and he hadn't been bought by Giles. When he was four, his parents, who were both addicts, had deserted him and an infant sister. The little girl had died of AIDS when she was two years old. Rafael had run away from his third foster family, somewhere in the Bronx, and found his way into the clubs, where he met Giles. He had turned tricks. He had sold Ecstasy to willing buyers and at thirteen had made a pretty good living. Otherwise the boy was a cipher.
Giles's arrest turned the perception of his work inside out. What had been seen as a clever commentary on the horror genre began to look like the sadistic fantasies of a murderer. The peculiar insularity of the New York art scene had often made obvious work seem subtle, stupid work intelligent, and sensational work subversive. It was all a matter of how the art was "pitched." Because Giles had become a sort of minor celebrity, embraced by critics and collectors, his new designation as possible felon was both embarrassing and intriguing to the world he had left so abruptly. During the first month after his arrest, art magazines, newspapers, and even the television news picked up the story of the "art murder." Larry Finder issued a statement in which he said that in America a person is innocent until proven guilty, but that if Giles was found guilty of the crime, he would vociferously condemn the act and would no longer represent him.
In the meantime, however, prices for the work went up, and Finder did a brisk business selling Teddy Giles. Buyers wanted the work because it now seemed that it mimicked reality, but Giles, who freely gave interviews from Rikers, mounted a defense that was just the opposite. In an interview for DASH, he argued that it was all a hoax. He had staged a murder in his apartment for the benefit of his friends, using artificial blood and a realistic replica of Rafael to do it. He had known that Rafael was leaving, going to visit an aunt in California, and he had used the trip to perpetrate an elaborate "art joke." Rafael Hernandez had been murdered, but Giles insisted that he hadn't done it. He cited the fact that his "fabricators" had known about his plan. Maybe one of them had committed the murder to frame him. Giles seemed to know that the police case rested on the shoulders of a nameless friend, a friend who had arrived that day and looked through the doorway into his apartment. Could the friend swear that the blood he had seen was real blood, that the body on the floor wasn't a fake? Perhaps the most curious aspect of the case was that Giles was able to produce an artificial corpse. Pierre Lange told the journalist that he had cast a simulation of Rafael's body on the Tuesday before he disappeared. Giles had instructed him about the injuries to the body, as he always did, and then he had worked with police and morgue photos to give the damage the appearance of believability. Of course, he added, the bodies were always hollow. Blood and sometimes crushed internal organs were added for effect, but he did not reproduce tissue or muscle or bone. According to the article, the police had impounded the faux corpse.