“You’re the top of my call list.”
* * *
—
Nothing from him until Sunday at six p.m.
“Finally got into Marcella and Steve’s apartment. No laptop but miracle of miracles, one of them did write down their flight info and magnet it to the refrigerator. Sunday morning, like Coolidge’s pathologist guessed. Called the airline and verified. No cancellation, just a no-show. So Coolidge is probably right: waylaid on the way to LAX.”
I said, “How early Sunday morning?”
“Seven forty-five.”
“They’d have to leave while it was still dark and the streets were relatively deserted. Perfect for running them off the road or some other type of blitz.”
He said, “The time frame also fits: Benny goes missing on Friday, McGann, by herself or with Vollmann, goes looking for him that day or Saturday, by early Sunday she’s history. But what bothers me is if she learned something, she didn’t report it.”
“Maybe she didn’t realize she’d learned anything, just had the bad luck to ask the wrong person the wrong question. Someone capable of the limo slaughter wouldn’t balk at taking out insurance. The question is, Where would McGann go searching? My guess is somewhere between the facility and the art gallery. Maybe the gallery, itself.”
“Benny did get to work,” he said. “He just never left alive…Jesus…hold on.”
A minute passed.
He said, “Called Verlang, a woman answered, so they’re finally open. You have time for a little culture?”
CHAPTER
24
I picked him up in front of the station at six thirty-five p.m. Dressed as close to stylish as I’d ever seen: gray suit, black shirt, skinny brown tie. Pointy black oxfords instead of the desert boots.
I said, “New shoes?”
“Italian. Rick’s.”
We took the Seville at his request: “We’re talking art and your wheels are a lot more aesthetic.”
The drive downtown was a surprisingly smooth cruise on the 10 East slowed by construction detours and the need to navigate mostly empty one-way streets.
I found parking at a lot on Sixth and we walked to Hart Street, passing dark storefronts and several homeless people with placards, all of whom Milo ignored. No less altruistic by nature than with the legless man; preoccupied.
We stood across the street watching as a swarm of people crowded the sidewalk in front of Verlang Contemporary. A sign in the window read Melted Visions: An Opening.
The two neighboring galleries remained dark, as were the jeweler and the building’s top two floors. The only other illumination on the block came from The Flower Drum motel’s empty lobby. Clerk sitting alone in a glass-encased booth working his phone.
Milo said, “Hipster crowd. Think we can fake it?”
I pointed to the tie. “That doesn’t do it, we could go arm-in-arm if you don’t tell Robin and I don’t tell Rick.”
He laughed but not for very long. Narrowing his eyes, he watched the crowd for a few seconds. A single car passed. Then a bicyclist wearing a knit cap, pedaling a rattling one-gear with effort.
“Okay, here we go.”
* * *
—
No security at the door, just a thin girl in a matte-black dress and matching hair offering every arrival a plastic flute of something amber-colored and bubbly followed by a nearly inaudible “Welcome.” Her eyelids were smeared with something waxy and charcoal-colored. Hollow cheeks, painted-on eyebrows, the right-hand arc pierced by a little black ring.
The robotic greeting and a faraway stare said human contact was a contagious disease.
Not even a glance at Milo’s tie.
The gallery was jammed with mostly thin people and a few obese exceptions drinking when they weren’t moving their lips. The layout was a single long room painted flat white and floored in scarred pine. Track lights suspended from a central beam fifteen feet above showcased twenty or so large canvases.
The artist: Geoffrey Dugong.
Milo said, “Isn’t that some sort of seal?”
“Sea cow.”
“Now I know why I brought you.”
The thickest clot of chatterers had collected in the center of the room, as if herded by a sheepdog. More eyes on one another than the art. Milo and I circulated slowly and gingerly so as not to be noticed. No need to worry, not a lot of other-directedness going around.
We finally arrived at the edge of the crowd and got a look at Geoffrey Dugong’s work.
The name of the exhibit was literal: loose acrylic renderings of the same white candle in various stages of liquefaction over a black background.
We took one-page bios from a stack on a card table. Dugong’s bio specified little beyond his birth in Key West, Florida, and his work on fishing boats. On the flip side, a brief note by the gallery’s owner, Medina Okash, was even less informative. Written in the least comprehensive language on the planet: artspeak.
Geoffrey’s assumption of the identity of an endangered benthic mammal: simultaneously idiomatic and conceptual.
Growing up near the Atlantic, the pedestrian impulse would be to morph-adopt-become a local avatar:
the manatee.
With incisive contrariness abandoning all notions of entitlement, loftiness, and class, Geoffrey made the excruciating choice to lade his consciousness with the unknown,
a snouted denizen of African/Pacific/non-Atlantic nobility:
the dugong.
Swimming against all tides, neap, ebb, and tsunami, represents Geoffrey’s approach to making art.
Be unexpected. Be woke. Be brave.
The candle is by nature transitory. So is life. So is reality. So is meaning.
Everything changes.
Everything melts.
Milo said, “Now I understand.”
We edged past a couple of the paintings. A man with a narrow goatee long enough to be constricted in two spots by gold rings said, “I did this one when I was thinking about migraines and perspiration.” Midforties, long, wild curly gray hair, deeply tanned, hawk-face. When he spoke, nothing but his mouth moved.
The woman listening to him said, “Sweat purifies. Lakota or Chumash?”
Beard-ring walked away from her. She turned to a bald, scowling man behind her. “I like his attitude, maybe we should buy one.”