The Death Artist Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Didn’t you get the announcement? No, well, gee, I’m sure I sent you one, but you’ll get one for my New York show, which is all set for November–the best month– and I’ve got an installation I’m trying to get together for Venice–the Biennale, you know.”
    “More horsehair?” asked Willie. “I saw a couple of nearly bald ones the other day, thought of you.”
    “No,” said Pratt-Smythe, without a trace of a smile. “I’m into dust now. Been collecting it for months. I mix it with my saliva and spread it into biomorphic patterns.” He picked at his dirty fingernails, looked bored, and asked, “And you?”
    “I’ll be there, too,” said Willie. “In Venice. I’m bringing an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner, setting it in the space, leaving it on all day, seeing what it collects, displaying that as my art. Hey, maybe it’ll be your dust.”
    For a split second Pratt-Smythe looked alarmed, then he allowed the tiniest grin to crack his tight lips. “Oh, I get it, man. You’re having me on. Good one, man.”
    “Yeah.” Willie grinned back. “Man.”
    “So I guess, you’re, uh, showing . . . what? Paintings ?” Pratt-Smythe said this as if he were discussing not only the lowest form of art, but the lowest form of all human expression.
    “Yeah,” said Willie. “I’ll be showing paintings –about thirty of them–in my one-man show at the Museum of Contemporary Art this summer.”
    Willie turned away, left the other artist on the corner of Prince and Greene Streets, trolling for someone–anyone–on whom to lay his current CV.
    Willie slung his leather jacket over his shoulder as he jogged between the two-way traffic on Houston, past Great Jones Street, heading into the East Village. He turned onto East Sixth Street, where the dozen or more Indian restaurants dispersed the scent of curry and cumin into the warm evening air, then jogged a half block to Elena’s three-story raggedy-ass tenement.
    A note, scribbled on cardboard, was Scotch-taped to the front door:
     

    INTACOM BROK
     
    “Oh, great.” Willie shook his head. Elena, he thought, has got to get out of here. The East Village renaissance is, like, over. He tried giving the old wooden door a shove. It groaned open.
    Inside, the place smelled musty and just a bit off, as if maybe the super hadn’t been dealing with the garbage–as usual. The front hall was lit with a dim yellow bulb.
    At the second-floor landing the smell was stronger; at the top of the stairs it was downright pungent. At Elena’s door, Willie knocked. “Elena? You in there?”
    Kate locked the Club across her steering wheel. Richard would go nuts if he knew she parked the Mercedes right on the street, in the East Village, no less. But to Kate, a car was a car, and she’d only be a few minutes, pick up the kids, then hook up with Richard at Bowery Bar, put the car into a nice safe lot.
    She started up the stairs at her usual determined pace, half her mind looking forward to the evening ahead, the other half still back at the Four Seasons with her pal Liz.
    And then there was that smell . . .
    Kate’s mind was suddenly filled with a rush of images–images that had lain dormant for a decade:
    A homeless man found under molding cartons.
    A suicide that the young detective McKinnon discovered hanging from an attic beam almost a full two weeks after the knotted sheet had stopped all air and blood to the brain and heart.
    Prying up floor planks of that oh-so-innocent-looking young man’s basement apartment to discover the two bodies in advanced states of decomposition.
    Now Kate was taking the stairs two at time, stumbling over her heels, the stairwell a blur, that damn smell getting stronger, killing other senses: She heard nothing, did not feel the scrape to her hand when she tripped on the top step of the second landing, was blind to the blood surfacing on her palm, across her knuckles. But at the top of the third-story landing Willie came into sharp