The Death Artist Read Online Free PDF Page A

Museum? He’d actually had the nerve, the audacity to be condescending about Richard’s art collection, which, damn it, anyone who knew anything knew was one of the best contemporary collections in New York, maybe the country. Today, at the museum’s board meeting, it was all Richard could do not to leap out of his seat, reach across the table, grab the guy by his double chin, and squeeze the life out of him.
    Just thinking about Pruitt made Richard’s neck muscles practically go into spasms.
    He yanked the page of numbers out of his printer so fast the last few columns smudged.
    Willie nodded in time to De la Soul’s beat while he slipped into his new black leather jacket. William Luther King Handley Jr., Willie to his contemporaries, “Li’l Will” to the few remaining old school chums (a nickname tagged on in the eighth grade when he’d reached his full height of five feet six), and recently, “WLK Hand,” the signature he used on his funky mixed-media canvases, could not decide if wearing his pricey new jacket was pushing it a bit too far for some East Village art performance. Fuck it. He could dress any way he damn pleased. Anyway, he’d combined it with his usual black jeans, the frayed cuffs of which grazed his clunky black Doc Martens. The other high-priced item–the Yohji Yamamoto white shirt, which showed off his clear amber skin (from his mother’s side of the family) and green eyes (a genetic hand-me-down from his long-lost ancestor, John Handley, the white plantation owner from Winston-Salem)–was a gift from Kate, who would be happy to see him wear it. Kate, who was worse than his own mother when it came to how he dressed, if he was eating right, sleeping enough. Kate, who’d written about him in Artists’ Lives, made sure he was part of the PBS series, who’d gotten the first curators and collectors into his studio; and Richard, who’d actually bought the first painting, giving it, and Willie, the necessary stamp of approval. Mentors. Collectors. Surrogate parents. Kate and Richard were all that. And more.
    But Willie’s other genetic gifts–the full lips and perfectly straight white teeth–were distinctly his real father’s, or so it would appear from the man’s only known photo: a smiling, handsome African American in U.S. Army fatigues, taken somewhere in Asia, or was it Africa? Either way, the man had never returned.
    The fact that Willie’s parents hadn’t actually married made no difference to Willie’s mother, Iris. The photo, in a gilded Woolworth frame, had maintained a place of honor next to Iris’s bed in the crowded South Bronx tenement shared by Willie, his brother, baby sister, and grandmother, as long as Willie could remember. Six months ago, Willie had moved the three women into a garden apartment–which he paid for–in a middle-class Queens neighborhood, and the framed photo had been resurrected in Iris’s new bedroom.
    Willie’s success came as a surprise to Iris. Not from any lack of faith in her son, but because she didn’t know that kind of thing was possible. Willie knew she was proud of his making good, selling his pictures for big money. But Willie kept the exact prices (which had recently hit six figures) to himself, because Iris might see that as prideful and not quite Christian, though he couldn’t explain it to you unless you’d grown up in his family.
    Then there was Henry. Willie’s big brother. His “lost” brother. That’s what Iris called him: lost. Still, every few weeks he managed to find his way to Willie’s place, needing money for a fix. But Willie didn’t want to think about Henry. Not now.
    “I want to be an artist.”
    The words fluttered in the narrow hallway of the Bronx railroad flat, forever after to be associated with the scent of his grandma’s lavender powder and the Lysol Willie’s mother seemed to spray or wipe on everything.
    “A what ?” his mother said.
    “An artist.”
    “What does that mean? An artist