And Sometimes I Wonder About You

24

Entering the great copper double doors of the Gotham Artists’ Society at 8:28, I went to the reception desk, which was in the northmost corner of a chamber with a high ceiling held up by a dozen marble pillars.

“May I help you?” a middle-aged black male receptionist asked. His nameplate read TITO PALMER. Despite his age he was the same size as Midge, and he held himself with a sense of youth that was unconscious in the waitress/sculptor and engineered by Tito.

“My name is McGill,” I said. “I’m supposed to meet a Mr. Belair.”

“And what is your business with Professor Belair?” Tito asked with equal parts suspicion and flirtation.

“I’m supposed to model for his new class using sportsmen that have been out of practice for a while.”

“What sport did you do?”

“Boxer.”

Tito’s raised eyebrows expressed mild interest. There was something going on with me; all of a sudden I had become a magnet for the usually hidden passions of humankind.

“Third floor, studio F,” Tito said as if the words were a loan that he expected a return on.

Studio F was occupied by four souls. Three of these were students who had come in early to work on very technical and equally uninteresting studies of a woman with sagging breasts with well-defined nipples and a small protruding tummy.

The fourth resident of the light and airy space was a burly man just a centimeter or two north of six feet. He was dressed in a brightly stained white artist’s smock, bald on top, and filled with the passion of his self-imposed importance. If I wasn’t a boxer I’d have been a little intimidated by his strength and the energy that crackled around him.

“Can I help you?” he asked, more as a threat than as a request.

“Leonid McGill,” I said, handing him a card that said the same. “I’m a PI looking for a woman named Coco Lombardi.”

“Do you see her?” he asked, gesturing at his students, two of which were women.

“I see you,” I replied easily.

Something changed in the art professor’s eyes just then. He looked at my big scarred mitts and at the powerful slope of my shoulders. I wasn’t a minion and he wasn’t a lord — not right then, not right there.

“What do I have to do with this, this... whatever her name is?”

“She was a model for your class.”

“I have dozens of models. Do you expect me to remember them all?”

“I expect, from all my fellow citizens, the same things,” I said. “Civility, respect, and honesty. It’s rare to receive any of those commodities but I keep hope alive.”

“Are you threatening me, Mr. McGill?”

“If I was, your jaw would already be broken,” I said.

One of the drawing students was glancing in our direction. She was middle-aged and looked it.

“Let’s go to my office,” Fantu offered when he saw his student studying us.

Behind a screen of very large canvases there was an institutional-green metal door that opened onto a good-sized office space. Inside, the twenty-foot-high walls supported dozens of drawings and paintings in cheap frames hung very close together. They were all rendered by the same hand. If I were to bet I’d’ve said that Professor Belair saw this office as a museum dedicated to his work.

The furniture was a green metal desk and chair, a pine visitor’s chair, and a daybed with a sponge-sized pillow and a gray army blanket.

The bed was made, military style, and the blue linoleum floor was spotless.

“Have a seat, Mr. McGill.”

“Thank you, Professor.”

We achieved our seats and Fantu sat back giving me a stare that probably worked on people who hadn’t strangled a man to death when they were fourteen and living in the street.

“That’s not your real name, is it?” I said.

“Why are you looking for Coco?”

“You admit that you know her.”

“I just want to know why you’re looking for her.”

“Her family fears that she has fallen in with bad company and that her well-being is threatened.”

“You don’t talk like a detective,” he said suspiciously.

I took out my duly licensed.38 caliber pistol and laid it on the green blotter that clashed with rather than matched his desk.

“How many detectives do you know, Professor?”

Some people you just have to take shortcuts with. We could have talked for an hour about how the police and private detectives on his TV and in his library don’t talk like I do. But put a pistol on the table and that whole block of thought just disappears.

“She was modeling for my classes six, seven months ago,” he said, exhibiting his proclivity for not answering the question he’d just been asked. “I liked her very much, as a model, because even though she worked in the nude there always seemed to be something hidden.”

“You ever find out what that something was?”

“No.”

“Did you fuck her?”

“Excuse me?”

“I thought you wanted me to talk like Mickey Spillane so I threw in a curse word. I’m not sure if he cursed in his books but you got the feeling he might any second.”

“She stopped modeling for my classes at the beginning of last summer,” Fantu said. “I haven’t heard from her since then.”

“Did you fuck her?” I enjoyed disturbing the bully with my words.

“We were” — he stopped and looked up the way people do when they’re reaching for a difficult word — “friends.”

“What was she like?” I asked.

The question surprised him.

“She,” he said and then hesitated again. “She was very intelligent. She knew more about the history of art than most of my colleagues — myself included. She had a friend, a man who was not the same kind as her.”

“What does that mean, not the same kind?”

“He was shifty, unpleasant. For a week or so he’d come around after a session and take her away. Finally she left and never came back.”

“What was this man’s name?”

“She never said and he didn’t speak to anyone but her.”

“Did they meet here at the institute?”

“No. But I don’t think she knew him when she first came here. Soon after they met, our friendship faded and then she was gone... Why are you looking for her, Mr. McGill?”

“I already told you. Her family thinks she’s in trouble. It’s my job to find her and see if they’re right.”

“You’re supposed to drag her home?”

“I would if that’s what they asked for but all they said is that they’d like me to ask her to call them. Did she have any other friends here?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Have you seen her at all since she stopped modeling?”

“Well...”

“Where?”

“There’s a gentlemen’s club somewhere around the theater district, I don’t remember the name. I was there one, one afternoon and Coco was, um, serving drinks. I tried to talk to her but she ignored me and then she was gone.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, thank you, Professor Belair, you’ve been a lot of help.”

“Mulligan,” he said.

“What?”

“Frank Mulligan. I went to university at Santa Cruz in California. Some of the other art students and I did acid every day for two weeks. Soon after that I changed my name to Fantu Belair. I really don’t know why but I think it has helped me.”