A Cold Heart

9

We finished up and got into my car and Milo directed me to Light and Space’s address on Carmelina, just north of Pico. I knew the neighborhood: storage facilities, auto body shops and small factories, just a stroll from L.A. ’s western border with the city of Santa Monica. If Julie Kipper had been strangled a couple of blocks away, her uncle’s appeal to Milo would’ve been futile.

As I drove, Milo balanced a toothpick between the tips of his index fingers and radar-scanned the passing world with cop’s eyes. “Been a while since we did this, huh?”

Over the past few months we’d seen each other less and less. I’d put it down to his backlog of cold files and my workload. That was denial. There was mutual isolation going on. “Guess, you didn’t have enough weird ones.”

“Matter of fact, that’s true,” he said. “Just the usual, and I don’t trouble you with the usual.” A second later: “You doing all right? In general?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Good.” A block later: “So… everything with Allison’s… things are working out?”

“Allison’s wonderful,” I said.

“Well, that’s good.” He picked his teeth, kept surveilling the city.

His first contacts with Allison had been professional: wrapping up the Ingalls file. She told me he’d been deft and compassionate.

His first reaction upon hearing that we were seeing each other had been silence. Then: She’s gorgeous, I’ll grant you that.

I’d thought: What won’t you grant me? Then I figured I was being touchy and kept my mouth shut. A few weeks later, I cooked dinner for four at my place: a mild March evening, steaks and baked potatoes and red wine out on the terrace. Milo and Rick Silverman, Allison and me.

The surprise was Allison and Rick knew each other. One of her patients had been brought into the Cedars-Sinai ER after a car wreck and Rick had been the surgeon on duty.

They talked shop, I played host, Milo ate and fidgeted. Toward the end of the evening, he drew me aside. “Nice girl, Alex. Not that you need my approval.” Sounding as if someone had prodded him to make the speech.

Since then, he’d seldom mentioned her.

“A few more blocks,” he said. “How’s the pooch?”

“I hear he’s fine.”

A moment later: “Robin and I got together a couple of times for coffee.”

Surprise, surprise.

“Nothing wrong with that,” I said.

“You’re pissed.”

“Why would I be pissed?”

“You sound pissed.”

“I’m not pissed. Where do I turn?”

“Two more blocks, then a right,” he said. “Okay, I keep my trap Crazy-Glued shut. Even though all these years you’ve been telling me I should express my feelings.”

“Express away,” I said.

“That guy she’s with-”

“He has a name. Tim.”

“Tim’s a wimp.”

“Give it up, Milo.”

“Give what up?”

“Reconciliation fantasies.”

“I-”

“When you saw her was she pining for me?”

Silence.

“Whoa,” he said.

“Right turn here?”

“Yeah.”

Light and Space’s neighbors were a plating plant and a wholesaler of plastic signs. The gallery’s warehouse origins were obvious: brick-faced, tar-roofed, three segmented steel overhead doors in front, instead of a window. Black plastic letters above the central door read LIGHT AND SPACE: AN ART PLACE. Stout combination locks secured the outer doors but the one in the middle was held in place by a single dead bolt that responded to a key on Milo ’s ring. He pushed, and the metal panel slid upward into a pocket.

“They gave you a key?” I said.

“My honest face,” he said, stepping inside and flicking on lights.

The interior was five thousand square feet or so. Walls painted that vanilla white that brings out the best in art, gray cement floors, twenty-foot ceilings thatched by ductwork, high-focus spotlights fixed upon several large, unframed canvases.

No furniture except for a desk up front, bearing brochures and a CD player. The nearest wall was lettered in the same black plastic used on the outside of the building.

Juliet Kipper

Air and Image

Same title on the brochures. I picked one up, skimmed a few paragraphs of art-speak, flipped to a black-and-white headshot of the artist.

Juliet Kipper had posed in a black turtleneck and no jewelry, her face pallid against a gray matte background. Squarish face, not unpretty under chopped, platinum hair. Pale eyes, deep-set and watchful, challenged the camera. Her mouth was grim- tugged down at the corners. High, uneven bangs exposed a furrowed forehead. Concentrating hard. Or burdened. She’d made an effort to look the part of the troubled artist, or it had come naturally.

Milo was pacing the gallery, setting off echoes as he drifted from painting to painting. I began doing the same.

A smug psycho-prediction of Julie Kipper’s art based upon the cheerlessness of her photo would have fallen flat. She’d created fifteen luminous landscapes, exuberantly colorful and textured, each marked by a master’s control of composition and light.

Sere arroyos, fog-shrouded, razor-hewn mountains, furious waterfalls emptying to mirror-glass streams, deep green forests pierced by gilded bursts that promised distant discovery. Two ocean nocturnes were livened by cerulean blue heavens and lemon moonglow that turned the tide to froth. Every painting bore the confident brushstrokes of someone who’d known how to move pigment around the canvas. Layers of color seemed to fluoresce; in lesser hands, the work would’ve veered into tourist kitsch.

Prices ranged from two to four thousand. I examined the canvases with another eye, searching for familiar locales, but finding none. Then I read the title tags: Dream I, Dream II, Dream III…

Juliet Kipper had created her own terrain.

I said, “To my eye, she was a major talent.” My voice bounced around the near-empty space.

Milo said, “I like her stuff, too, but what do I know? C’mon, let me show you where she died.”

The bathroom was too small for both of us, and Milo waited outside as I checked out the grimy spot where Juliet Kipper had been strangled.

A nasty little space, windowless, dank. Cracked sink, oxidized spigots. Black threads of mold curled in the corners.

With all that dirt, the series of faint brown smudges on the cement floor would’ve escaped my notice if I hadn’t known better.

I backed out of the room and Milo showed me the rest of the rear space. A large storage area to the left was filled with unframed paintings and office supplies and random pieces of cheap-looking furniture. The men’s room was no more generous or attractive.

The gallery’s rear door was striped by a push bolt.

“Another self-locking mechanism,” I said. “Another deliberate attempt to invite discovery.”

“Exhibitionist.”

“But he keeps it in check. Someone very measured.”

He pushed the bolt, propped the door open with a block of wood left there for that purpose, and we exited the building. An asphalt strip was backed by a ten-foot block wall. A Dumpster took up the far corner.

“What’s on the other side of the wall?”

“Parking lot of a plumbing supplies outfit. The ground’s higher on their side- two feet or so, but it would still be a climb. And there’d be no reason for the killer to scale it because all he had to do was walk right in.” He led me around the north side of the gallery and pointed down another tarred passageway that bordered the plating plant and opened to the street. Fumes rose from the plant; the air smelled lethal.

“Not much security,” I said.

“Why would a bunch of artists need any?”

We returned to the propped-open door, and I had a closer look at the lock.

“Same key as the front?”

“Yup.”

“I assume all the co-op members have keys.”

“Access is no mystery, Alex. Motive is. Like I said, I’ve already talked to all the co-op members, and none of them even remotely twangs my antenna. Fourteen out of twenty are women and of the six guys, three are of CoCo ’s vintage. The young ones seem like your basic, head-in-the-clouds creative type. We’re talking the Venice crowd, here. Make art, not war. No one’s being evasive. I ran checks on all of them, anyway. Clean. I’ve been fooled too often to think it can’t happen again, but I’m just not picking up any serious vibes from this bunch.”

We reentered the gallery, and I had another look at Julie Kipper’s paintings.

Beautiful.

I wasn’t sure that meant much in the art world, but it meant something to me, and I wanted to cry.

I said, “When was she divorced?”

“Ten years ago. Three years before she moved out here.”

“Who’s the ex?”

“Guy named Everett Kipper,” he said. “He used to be an artist, too. They met at Rhode Island, but he switched careers.”

“She kept his name.”

“Julie told people the split was amicable. And Kipper was at the opening. Everyone I spoke to said they looked friendly.”

“What career did he switch to?”

“Bond broker.”

“From art to finance,” I said. “Does he pay alimony?”

“Her bankbook shows monthly deposits of two grand, and she has no other obvious means of support.”

“So with her gone, he saves twenty-four grand a year.”

“Yeah, yeah, like any spouse he’s the first suspect,” he said. “I’ve got an appointment to talk to him in an hour.”

“He’s local?”

“Lives in South Pasadena, works in Century City.”

“Why so long to get to him?”

“We played phone tag. I’m heading over there, next.” He fingered the knot of his tie. “Businesslike enough for Avenue of the Stars?”

“No business I’d want a part of.”

As we returned to the Seville, an old blue VW bus drove up to the gallery. SAVE THE WETLANDS sticker on the rear bumper. Above that: ART IS LIFE. A tiny white-haired woman sat low in the driver’s seat. A yellow-and-brown dog on the passenger side stared at the windshield.

The woman waved. “Yoo-hoo, Detective!” and we approached the bus.

“Ms. Barnes,” said Milo. “What’s up?” He introduced me to CoCo Barnes, and she gripped my hand with what felt like a sparrow’s talon.

“Just came by to see if you got in okay.” Barnes glanced at the gallery’s frontage. The dog remained in place, dull-eyed but tight-jawed. Big dog with a graybeard muzzle. Bits of dry leaves specked its coat.

I chanced petting the animal. It licked my hand.

Milo said, “We got in fine.”

“You’re all finished up in there?” CoCo Barnes’s voice was scratchy, veering toward abrasive, tempered by a Southern inflection. She looked to be seventy. The white hair was cut in a boyish cap and trimmed unceremoniously. Her skin was the color and consistency of well-roasted chicken. Slate gray eyes- more acute than the dog’s, but filmy, nonetheless- checked me out.

“What’s his name?” I said.

“Lance.”

“Nice dog.”

“If he likes you.” CoCo Barnes turned to Milo. “Any progress on Julie?”

“It’s still early in the investigation, ma’am.”

The old woman frowned. “Didn’t I hear something about if you don’t solve it quickly, you probably won’t solve it at all?”

“It’s not that simple, ma’am.”

CoCo Barnes ruffled Lance’s neck. “I’m glad I caught you, it saves me a phone call. Remember how you asked me to think about anything unusual that happened Saturday night, and I said there’d been nothing, it had just been your typical opening? Well, I thought about it some more, and there was something. Not at night and not at the opening, strictly speaking. And I’m not sure it’s really what you’re after.”

“What happened?” said Milo.

“This was before the opening,” said Barnes. “The day of the opening, around 2 P.M. Julie wasn’t even here, yet. Just me and Lance, here. Clark Van Alstrom was here, too- the man who does those aluminum stabiles?”

Milo nodded.

CoCo Barnes said, “I brought Clark along because I can’t lift that metal door by myself. Once I got in, Clark left, and I started setting up. Making sure everything was in order- a few months ago we had a power outage, and that was no good.” She smiled. “Especially because the artist worked in neon… Anyway, I was checking things out, and I heard Lance bark. That doesn’t happen often. He’s a very quiet boy.”

She smiled at the dog. Lance made a low, contented sound. “I’d set up a water bowl for him at the back, in the hallway near where Julie- just outside the bathrooms- but I’d left the door to the vestibule open, and I could hear him barking. He doesn’t have much of a bark, mind you, he’s fourteen years old and his vocal cords are pretty shot. What he produces is more of a cough.” She demonstrated with a series of dry hacks. Lance’s eyes shifted to her, but he remained inert. “He just kept it up, wouldn’t stop, and I went back there to see what was wrong. By the time I got there he’d shlepped himself up on his feet and was facing the back door. I wondered if he’d heard rats- we’d had some rat problems a couple of seasons ago, an opening that was absolutely disastrous, where’s the Pied Piper of Hamlin when you need him- so… where was I… oh, yes, I opened the door and had a look out back and there were no rats. But there was a woman. Foraging in the Dumpster. Obviously homeless, obviously quite mad.”

“Mad as in angry?” said Milo.

“Mad as in disturbed, psychotic, mentally ill. I abhor labels, but sometimes they do get the picture across. This one was mad as the proverbial chapeau maker.”

“You could tell this by-”

“Her eyes, for starts,” said Barnes. “Wild eyes- scared eyes. Jumping all over the place.” She tried to demonstrate with her own gray orbs, but they moved lazily. Blinking several times, as if to clear them, she turned to Lance and scratched behind his ear, and said, “Easy now, you’re a good boy… then there was the way she carried herself, her clothes- mismatched, oversized, too many layers for the weather. I’ve lived in Venice for fifty-three years, Detective. I’ve seen enough mental illness to know it when it stares me in the face. Then, of course, there was the foraging. The moment the door opened she jumped back, lost her balance, and nearly fell. Such fear. I said, ‘If you wait right here, I’ll fetch you something to eat.’ But she raised her hand to her mouth, chewed her knuckles, and ran off. They do that a lot, you know. Turn down food. Some of them even get hostile when you try to help them. They’ve got voices blabbering in their heads, telling them who-knows-what. Can you blame them for not trusting?”

She ruffled the dog some more. “It’s probably nothing, but in view of what happened to Julie I don’t suppose we can be too complacent.”

“No we can’t, ma’am. What else can you tell me about this woman?” said Milo.

The old woman’s eyes sparked. “So you do think it’s important?”

“At this stage, everything’s important. I appreciate your telling me.”

“Well, that’s good to know. Because I almost didn’t tell you, being as it was a woman and my assumption was a man killed Julie- the way she was…” The old woman’s eyes clamped shut, then fluttered open. “I’m still trying to rid myself of the image… not that this woman couldn’t have overpowered Julie. She was large- maybe six feet tall. Built big, too. Though with all that clothing, it was hard to tell, precisely. And we were only face-to-face for a second or so.”

“Big bones,” said Milo.

“Sturdy- almost masculine.”

“Could it have been a man dressed up as a-”

Barnes laughed. “No, no, this one was pure girl all right. But a big girl. A lot bigger than Julie. Which got me thinking. It needn’t have been a man at all, right? Especially if we’re dealing with someone not in their right mind.”

Milo’s pad was out. “How old would you say she was?”

“I’d guess thirties, but it’s a guess because that kind of misery- homelessness, mental illness- it overrides age, doesn’t it?”

“In what way, ma’am?”

“What I mean,” said Barnes, “is that people like that all look ancient and damaged- there’s a coating of despair. This one, though, she’d managed to hold on to some of her youth; under the grime I could see some youth. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

CoCo Barnes ticked a finger. “In terms of other details, she wore a thick, padded military-type camouflage jacket over a red, black, and white flannel shirt over a blue UCLA sweatshirt. UCLA in white letters, the C was half-gone. On the bottom were heavy-duty gray sweatpants, and from the way they bulked, she had on at least one other pair of pants underneath. White, lace-up tennis shoes on her feet and a broad-brimmed black straw hat atop her head. The brim was shredded in front- pieces of straw coming loose. Her hair was bunched up in the hat, but some had come loose, and it was red. And curly. Curly red hair. Add a layer of grime to all of that, and you’ve got the picture.”

Milo scribbled. “Ever see her before?”

“No,” said Barnes. “Not on the walkway or kicking around the alleys in Venice or in Ocean Front Park or anywhere else you see the homeless. Maybe she’s not one of the locals.”

“Is there anything else you remember about the encounter?”

“It wasn’t much of an encounter, Detective. I opened the door, she got scared, I offered to get her some food, she ran off.”

Milo scanned his notes. “You’ve got a great memory, Ms. Barnes.”

“You should’ve known me a few years ago.” The old woman tapped her forehead. “I’m accustomed to taking mental snapshots. We artists view the world with a high-focus lens.” Two rapid blinks. “If I hadn’t chickened out of my cataract surgery, I’d be doing a lot better.”

“Let me ask you this, ma’am: Could you draw me a picture of this woman? I’m sure it would be better than anything our police artist would come up with.”

Barnes suppressed a surprised smile. “Haven’t drawn in a while. Shifted to ceramics a few years ago, but, sure, why not? I’ll do it and call you.”

“Appreciate it, ma’am.”

“Civic duty and art,” said Barnes. “All in one swoop.”

As I drove back to Café Moghul, I said, “How seriously do you take it?”

“You don’t?”

“CoCo Barnes has cataracts, so who knows what she really saw. I still think the murder smacks of planning and intelligence. Someone well composed mentally. But that’s just a guess, not science.”

He frowned. “Tracking this redhead down means getting hold of the patrol officers where the homeless hang out, dealing with the social service agencies and the treatment centers. And if Barnes is right about the redhead not being local, I can’t limit myself to the Westside.”

“One thing in your favor,” I said, “a six-foot woman with curly red hair isn’t inconspicuous.”

“Assuming I find her, then what? What I’ve got is a probable psychotic who Dumpster-dove in the alley five hours before Julie got strangled.” He shook his head. “How seriously am I taking it? Not very.”

A block later: “On the other hand…”

“What?”

“If I don’t turn up anything else, soon, I can’t afford not to chase it down.”

I pulled up alongside the loading zone in front of the restaurant. A parking ticket was folded under the windshield wiper of his unmarked. He said, “Want to meet Everett Kipper?”

“Sure.”

He eyed the citation. “You drive- long as I’m renting, I might as well occupy.”

“Will the city reimburse me?”

“Oh, sure. I’ll FedEx you a box of infinite gratitude.”

Everett Kipper worked at a firm called MuniScope, on the twenty-first floor of a steel-and-concrete high-rise on Avenue of the Stars just south of little Santa Monica. Parking fees were stiff, but Milo’s badge impressed the attendant, and I stashed the Seville for free.

The building’s lobby was arena-sized, serviced by a dozen elevators. We rode up in hermetic silence. MuniScope’s reception room was ovoid, paneled in bleached bird’s-eye maple, softly lit and carpeted, and ringed by saffron leather modules. Milo’s badge elicited alarm from the hard-faced, hard-bodied receptionist. Then she recovered and compensated with toothy graciousness.

“I’ll ring him right away, gentlemen. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, tea, Sprite, Diet Coke?”

We demurred and sank down in yellow-orange leather. Down-filled cushions. No corners in the egg-shaped space. I felt like a privileged unborn chick nestled in high-rent surroundings.

Milo muttered, “Cushy.”

I said, “Put the client at ease. It works. I’m ready to peck through the shell and buy something.”

A man in a black suit appeared from around a convex wall. “Detectives? Ev Kipper.”

Julie Kipper’s ex was a thin man with a big voice, a blond-gray crew cut and the smooth round face of an aging frat boy. Forty or so, five-eight, one-fifty. His bouncy stride suggested gymnastics or ballet training. The suit was a four-button model, tailored snug, set off by a sapphire blue shirt, gold tie, gold cuff links, gold wristwatch. His hands were manicured and smooth and outsized, and when we shook, I felt barely suppressed strength in his grip. Dry palms. Clear, brown eyes that made eye contact. A subtle bronze veneer to his complexion said outdoor sports or the tanning bed.

“Let’s go in and talk,” he said. Confident baritone, not a trace of anxiety. If he’d murdered his former spouse, he was one hell of a psychopath.

He took us to an empty boardroom with a view all the way to Vegas. Oyster-colored carpeting and walls, and a black granite conference table more than large enough for the thirty Biedermeier-revival chairs that surrounded it. The three of us huddled at one end.

“Sorry it took so long to get together,” said Kipper. “What can I help you with?”

Milo said, “Is there anything about your ex-wife we should know? Anything that would help us figure out who strangled her?”

Putting emphasis on wife and strangled and watching Kipper’s face.

Kipper said, “God, no. Julie was a wonderful person.”

“You’ve maintained contact, despite the divorce ten years ago.”

“Life took us in other directions. We’ve remained friends.”

“Other directions professionally?”

“Yes,” said Kipper.

Milo sat back. “Are you remarried?”

Kipper smiled. “No, still looking for Ms. Right.”

“Your ex-wife wasn’t her.”

“Julie’s world was art. Mine is slogging through bond prospectuses. We started off in the same place but ended up too far apart.”

“Did you study painting in Rhode Island?”

“Sculpting.” Kipper touched the face of his watch. The timepiece was thin as a nickel with an exposed skeleton movement. Four diamonds placed equidistant around the rim, crocodile band. I tried to estimate how many paintings Julie Kipper would have had to sell to afford it.

“Sounds like you’ve been researching me, Detective.”

“Your marriage came up while talking to people who knew her, sir. People seem to know about your artistic origins.”

“The Light and Space bunch?” said Kipper. “Sad crowd.”

“How so, sir?”

“Maximally self-labeling, minimally talented.”

“Self-labeling?”

“They call themselves artists,” said Kipper. New edge in his voice. “Julie was the real thing, they’re not. But that’s true of the art world in general. There are no criteria- it’s not like being a surgeon. Lots of pretense.”

The brown eyes shifted down to his oversized hands. Square fingers, glossy nails. A well-tended hand. Hard to imagine it working a chisel, and the look in Kipper’s eyes said he knew it. “That was my story.”

“You were pretending?” said Milo.

“For a while. Then I gave it up.” Kipper smiled. “I sucked.”

“You were good enough to get into the Rhode Island School of Design.”

“Well, what do you think of that?” said Kipper. Another layer of silk had been peeled from his voice. “Like I said, there are no criteria. What Julie and I had in common was we both won awards in high school and college. The only difference was, she deserved hers. I always felt like an impostor. I’m not saying I’m a total boob. I can do things with wood and stone and bronze the average person can’t. But that’s a far cry from art. I was smart enough to realize that, and got into something that fits me.”

Milo glanced around the room. “Any artistic satisfaction in this?”

“Not a whit,” said Kipper. “But I make a fortune and indulge my fantasies on Sunday- home studio. Most of the time my stuff never gets out of clay. Smashing it can be quite cathartic.”

His face remained unlined, but his color had deepened.

Milo said, “How did your ex-wife feel about your switching careers?”

“That was years ago, how can it be relevant?” said Kipper.

“At this point, everything is, sir. Please bear with me.”

“How’d she feel? She hated it, tried to talk me out of it. Which tells you something about Julie- her integrity. We were living like paupers in a hovel on the Lower East Side, doing odd jobs. Julie tried to telemarket magazine subscriptions, and I did janitorial duty in the building to make the rent. The day I got into finance was the first time we could count on a stable income. And not much of one, at that. I started off gofering for chump change at Morgan Stanley. But even that was a step up. Now we could buy food. But Julie couldn’t have cared less. She kept yelling at me- I was talented, had sold out. I don’t think she ever forgave me- not until she moved out here and looked me up and we reconnected. At that point, I think she could see that I was really happy.”

“You moved here first.”

“A year before Julie. After we divorced.”

“And she looked you up.”

“She called my office. She was really down- about failing to make it in New York, about having to draw stupid newspaper ads. She was also broke. I helped her out.”

“On top of the alimony.”

Kipper exhaled. “No big deal. Like I said, I do very well.”

“So give me the chronology,” said Milo. “Marriage, divorce, et cetera.”

“Sum my life up in one sentence, huh?”

“A few sentences, sir.”

Kipper unbuttoned his suit jacket. “We met right after we got to Rhode Island. Instant chemistry, within a week were living together. After graduation, we moved to New York and got married- fourteen years ago. Four years later, we got divorced.”

“After the divorce, what was your contact with your ex-wife?” Milo’d avoided using Julie’s name in Kipper’s presence. Emphasizing the severed relationship.

Kipper said, “Our contact was occasional phone calls, even more occasional dinners.”

“Friendly phone calls?”

“For the most part.” Kipper’s finger massaged the watch face. “I see where this is going. Which is fine. My buddies told me I’d be looked at as a suspect.”

“Your buddies?”

“Some of the other brokers.”

“They have experience with the criminal justice system?”

Kipper laughed. “Not yet. No, they watch too much TV. I suppose I’m wasting my time telling you I had nothing to do with it.”

Milo smiled.

Kipper said, “Do what you have to do but know this: I loved Julie- first as a woman, later as a person. She was my friend, and I’m the last one who’d ever hurt her. I have no reason to hurt her.” He slid his chair back several inches, crossed his legs.

“Friendly phone calls about what?” said Milo.

“Letting each other know what we were up to,” said Kipper. “And I guess what you’d term business calls, too. Around tax time. I needed to account the alimony and any other money I sent Julie. And sometimes she needed extra.”

“How much extra?”

“A bit here and there- maybe another ten, twenty grand a year.”

“Twenty would be almost double her alimony.”

“Julie wasn’t good about money. She tended to get into tight spots.”

“Trouble living within her means?”

Kipper’s big hands lowered to the granite surface of the table and lay flat. “Julie wasn’t good with money because she didn’t care about it.”

“So in total, you were giving her nearly forty thousand a year. Generous.”

“I drive a Ferrari,” said Kipper. “I don’t expect any merit badges.” His body shifted forward. “Let me explain Julie’s history to you: Right after graduation she had an initial burst of success. Got placed in a high-quality group show at a midtown gallery and sold every single painting. She got great critical notice, too, but guess what: It didn’t mean she made serious money. Her canvases were priced from eight to twelve hundred dollars, and by the time the gallery owner and her agent and every other gimme-type took their cuts, there was maybe enough to buy lunch at Tavern on the Green. The gallery kicked her price up to fifteen hundred a picture and told her to get productive. She spent the next six months working. Twenty-four hours a day, or it seemed that way.” He winced.

“Tough regimen,” said Milo.

“More like self-destruction.”

“She have help keeping up her energy?”

“What do you mean?” said Kipper.

“We know about her drug problem. Is that when it started? Cocaine can be an energizer.”

“Coke,” said Kipper. “She was into it way before that- in college. But yes, it got intense when the gallery demanded she make instant art at an inhuman pace.”

“What pace was that?”

“A dozen canvases within four months. A crap-monger could have splashed that together, no problem, but Julie was meticulous. Ground her own pigments, laid on layer after layer of paint, alternated with her own special glazes and varnishes. Was so picky that she sometimes made her own brushes. Could spend weeks making brushes. And frames. Each one had to be original- perfect for the painting. Everything had to be perfect. Everything became a project of immense significance.”

“Her current works have no frames,” I said.

“I saw that,” said Kipper. “Asked her about it. She said she was concentrating on the image itself. I told her it was a good idea.” One hand closed in a fist. “Julie was brilliant, but I don’t know if she would have ever achieved real success.”

“Why not?”

“Because she was too talented. What passes for art now is pure shit. Video-installations, ‘performances,’ crap put together with ‘found materials’- which is art-bullshit language for garbage-picking. Nowadays, if you staple a dildo to a pop bottle you’re Michelangelo. If you actually know how to draw, you’re disparaged. Add to that Julie’s absolute lack of business sense and…” Kipper’s shoulders sagged. His black suit didn’t pop a wrinkle.

“Not of this world,” I said.

“Exactly,” said Kipper. “She wasn’t keyed into her surroundings. Take the money thing, for example. I tried to get her to invest some of the alimony in low-risk bond funds. If she’d started investing back when I did, she’d have built up a nice little nest egg, could have plied her art in the way she wanted. Instead, she had to lower herself by doing commercial gigs.”

“She didn’t like commercial art.”

“She hated it,” said Kipper. “But she refused to take the steps that would’ve freed her. I won’t say she was masochistic, but Julie definitely had a thing for suffering. She was never really happy.”

“Chronically depressed?” I said.

“Except when she was painting.”

“Let’s go back for a moment,” said Milo, thumbing through his pad. “The New York gallery that took her on- the résumé on her brochure lists The Anthony Gallery-”

“That’s the one. Bloodsucking Lewis Anthony.”

“Not a nice man?”

“Few of them are,” said Kipper.

“Gallery owners.”

“Owners, agents, collectors.” Both of Kipper’s big hands had balled. “The so-called art world. We’re talking profoundly ungifted people- people so far from personal talent they wouldn’t recognize it if it chomped their gonads- living off the fruit of the gifted. Leeches on the body artistic. That’s what Julie and I called them. Talent’s a curse. Criminals get judged by their peers, but not artists.”

His smooth, round face was deeply flushed.

Milo said, “So Lewis Anthony pressured Julie to produce, and that kicked her coke problem up a notch.”

Kipper nodded. “She used coke and speed to keep herself working, booze and tranqs to bring herself down. Unless I forced her to eat and sleep, she didn’t. It was hellish. I started staying away. Which was easy because I had my new career. Working my way up the corporate ladder and all that.”

“Were you into drugs?”

Kipper hesitated. “I dabbled,” he said, finally. “Everyone did, back then. But I never got hooked. I’m not an addictive personality. That probably has something to do with the lack of talent- not enough intensity up here.” Touching his crew cut.

“The old genius-insanity link?” said Milo.

“Let me tell you, that’s true. Show me a brilliant artist, and I’ll show you one serious basket case. And yes, I’m including Julie in that. I loved her, she was a terrific person, but her resting state was turmoil.”

Milo tapped the pad. “Tell me more about Lewis Anthony.”

“What’s to tell? The bastard pressured Julie, Julie doped herself to the gills and produced three canvases. Anthony berated her, sold all three, remitted a pittance back to Julie and told her he couldn’t handle her unless she acquired a better work ethic. She came home, OD’d, and ended up in rehab.”

Kipper’s fingers opened and clawed black granite. “I’ve always felt guilty about that. Not being there when she needed me. When she came home with the check from Anthony, and I saw how puny it was, I went nuts- just lost it. Six months, watching her self-destruct- she lost twenty pounds preparing for that show- and all she had to show for it was two thousand bucks. I told her she was the chump of all chumps and went out to have a beer. When I came home, I found her stretched out in bed and couldn’t revive her. I thought she was dead. I called the paramedics, and they took her to Beth Israel. A few days later, she was transferred to the psych ward at Bellevue.”

“Involuntary commitment?” I said.

“For the first few days, whatever the law was. But she stayed there even after she could’ve left. Told me it was better being in the nut ward than living with someone who didn’t care. What could I say? I’d bailed on her. Bellevue cleaned her up and sent her home, and I tried to reconnect with her. It was like talking to a block of stone. She couldn’t work- no spark- and that freaked her out. She started doping again, we fought about it. Eventually, I moved out. I was the one who filed the divorce papers, but Julie didn’t fight it- didn’t do a damn thing to protect herself financially. I volunteered to give her half my income at the time as alimony, which was a thousand bucks a month. My attorney thought I was nuts.” Kipper ran his hand through his crew cut. “As things got better for me, I upped it.”

“Two thousand a month,” said Milo.

“I know,” said Kipper. “For a guy with a Ferrari, that’s bullshit. But Julie refused to take any more. I offered to rent her a nice house- somewhere she could have a studio. But she insisted on living in that dump.”

“The two of you stayed attached.”

“Like I said, we had dinner once in a while.” Kipper hung his head. “Sometimes we made love- I know that sounds weird, but sometimes chemistry reared its nasty little head. Maybe we were meant for each other. Wouldn’t that be a laugh?”

“A laugh?”

“Living in a weird limbo,” said Kipper. “I didn’t want to cut her out of my life, why would I? And now she’s gone. And you’re wasting your time, here.”

“Sir-”

“Hey,” said Kipper, “you’ve got carte blanche. Come over to my house and tear up the fucking floorboards. But once you’re through with that, would you do me a favor and get serious about nailing the motherfucker who really did it? And if you do get him, tell him he’s a fucking savage who cut a chunk of beauty out of this fucking world.”

Shouting. Red as a beet, the outsized hands white-knuckled.

Kipper exhaled and slumped.

Milo said, “I have a few more questions.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

“You attended the opening-”

“I attended and bought two paintings.”

“Your ex-wife didn’t mind that?”

“Why would she?”

“Being independent and all that,” said Milo, “weren’t you worried she’d view it as charity?”

“I would’ve been worried, except that Julie and I had discussed the paintings a while back. I’d seen them at her place and told her I really wanted two. She wanted to give them to me for free, but I refused. I said she should hang them at the show, red-dotted. As a strategic move- this is hot stuff, come and get it.”

“How late did you stay at the opening?”

“Until a half hour before closing.”

“Which would be?”

“Nine-thirty, -forty.”

“Where’d you go after you left?”

“Ah,” said Kipper. “The alibi. Well, I don’t have one. I got into my car and took a drive. Sepulveda to San Vicente, over to Seventh and down into Santa Monica Canyon. I know the area because there’s a gas station that sells 100-octane hi-test gas and a supplement that boosts it to 104. There’s one in Pasadena, too. I thought of taking a beach drive, decided I wanted more curves- the Ferrari loves curves- turned around, took Sunset all the way to Benedict Canyon, had myself a little spin.”

“Hi-test,” said Milo. “How much do you pay for that?”

“Right now it’s four-fifty a gallon.”

Milo whistled.

Kipper said, “The Ferrari thrives on it.”

“What model?”

“Testarossa.”

“Work of art,” said Milo.

“Oh, yeah,” said Kipper. “High-maintenance. Like everything else in my life.”