Carol O’Connell - Killing Critics

“Well, there’s quite a bit of crossover in art. Artists sometimes write art criticism the way authors review books by other people. No reason why a critic shouldn’t make art.”

“But isn’t that a conflict of interest?”

“Perhaps, but crossover is common practice. Take your most recent dead artist, Dean Starr. As you know, that wasn’t the name he was born with. His-”

“Starr is an alias?” Riker pulled out his pen and notebook and scanned the first page. “All the identification on his body was in that name.”

“Sorry, I assumed you knew.” Charles retrieved his discarded newspaper from the wastebasket and opened it to the obituary columns. He tapped the boxed mention of former art critic, current murder victim, Dean Strvnytchlk. “That’s it. Under his original name, he used to publish a rather bad magazine of local art coverage. He was the chief art critic. He also contributed reviews to local tabloids.”

Riker stared at the obituary. “How do you pronounce that?”

“Too many consonants. You’re on your own.” Charles opened a desk drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors. “If you followed the art news, you would have seen a review of his own show written under his real name.”

“The bastard reviewed himself? You’re kidding me.”

“Not at all. There’s historical precedent-Walt Whitman once reviewed his own work anonymously.” Charles carefully cut the obituary from the paper, trying to make straight edges so as not to annoy Mallory with an imperfection. “Starr’s gallery dealer, Koozeman, is also a critic. He writes a regular column for an international art magazine. Oh yes, it goes on all the time.”

Charles tacked the obituary on the cork wall below the medical examiner’s preliminary report on the death of Dean Starr. And now he noticed the next item on the cork wall was a blank sheet of paper. On closer inspection, this paper covered a photograph. He turned to Riker. “What’s this about?”

“Mallory did that for you. It’s the crime-scene photo of the old double homicide. She covered it over because you knew Aubry.”

Charles and Riker exchanged a look which acknowledged that neither of them had believed she was capable of this delicate courtesy.

Mallory paused near a pile of the television crew’s paraphernalia. Quinn watched as she neatly snatched up a clipboard. Anyone might have believed it belonged to her as she studied the pages on her way out the door.

He caught up with her on the street outside the Koozeman Gallery. “Hello again.”

She nodded, acknowledging that she recognized him, but not that she was particularly pleased to see him. She turned away and walked down the street.

“I wonder if you could explain something to me.” He walked beside her, matching his steps to hers. “The drawings of the bodies? Oren Watt has been selling them for years, and I still can’t believe he’s being allowed to profit on murder.”

“He gets around the profit-on-crime laws because he was never brought to trial.” One hand shaded her eyes from the light of the noonday sun as she looked up at him. “But your family lawyer would have told you that.”

It was impossible to miss her suggestion that he was making up useless small talk. And of course, he was.

A warm breeze ruffled a bright silk banner overhead, and he could follow the wind down the SoHo street with the lift and swirl of similar banners which hung out over the sidewalk to advertise galleries and trendy boutiques.

He was walking faster now, to keep pace with her, and casting around for some bit of unfoolish conversation that might hold her attention for a while.

Mallory broke the silence. “Did you know Koozeman scheduled another show of Dean Starr’s work?”

“Yes. I thought it might be going up today. I was surprised by the Oren Watt drawings.”

Her face was telling him she didn’t think he was all that surprised, and he wasn’t. She quickened her steps, putting some distance between them. He walked faster.

“Koozeman never handled Oren Watt before,” he said, in self-defense. “So, it is odd.”

“Koozeman says he’s not handling Watt.” She consulted the stolen clipboard as she walked. At the top of the first sheet was a network logo followed by a schedule of places and dates. “He says it’s a temporary installation. The television crew rented the space for the day.” She made a check mark by the Koozeman Gallery and this day’s date. “The Dean Starr show goes up in three days. Do you know why Koozeman’s so hot to have another showing of Starr’s work?”

“He’ll want to take advantage of the publicity on the murder. Also, he has to unload the work as fast as he can. It’s such a crock, it even strains the credulity of the amateur collector.”

“What about the artist who died with Aubry? Was he any good?”

“Peter Ariel? Well, for a dead junkie and a third-rate hack, he had one hell of a run on the secondary market. But what a critic thinks of his work doesn’t matter.”

“Explain.” It was an order.

He obliged her. “Collectors don’t listen to art critics anymore. They listen to their accountants, who tell them how the artist is doing in the primary market. Then, they can make projections on the staying power in the secondary market.”

“What is this, Quinn? Are we talking art, or stocks and bonds?”

“Same thing. The actual art means very little in the greater schematic of finance. The initial buyers paid a low price for Peter Ariel’s sculptures. After his death, the work was worth a small fortune on the resale market. The early resale buyers were ghouls who collect souvenirs of messy homicides. The amateur collectors misunderstood, bought the work at the inflated price, and held on to it too long. Once the ghoul market was saturated, the price declined to the cost of the artist’s materials.”

She stopped walking, and he stopped. By only standing there, she was tethering him to the same square of the sidewalk. “You never mentioned any of this to Markowitz, did you?”

Now how did she manage to frame a question as an accusation? “No, I didn’t. The focus was always on Aubry, not Peter Ariel.”

She resumed her purposeful walking, and he kept pace with her, still tethered. “There was another artist mentioned in Bliss’s review-Gillian, the vandal artist. What do you know about him?”

“He has an exhibition of photographs in a gallery at the end of this block. You might find it diverting.”

“Photography? I thought vandalism was his style.”

“Wait till you see the photographs, Mallory.”

They entered the Greene Street gallery by way of a narrow stairway to the second floor. The rough steel door opened onto a large white space filled with light from loft windows lining the street front. People were milling around, some looking at the photographs on the wall. A man stood by a desk, holding sheets of slides to the light. Done with one sheet, he tossed it onto a pile at his feet and went on to the next.

Quinn pointed to this man. “Some artists spend a hundred hours on a single painting, and the gallery director spends a minute looking at twenty slides of their work. Occasionally, I time them. Call it a hobby. This man’s about average, a minute an artist.”

They drifted to the collection of photographs on the near wall. The work was an amateur’s effort in bad lighting, with no eye for composition. The first photograph was of a crack in an old statue. Gillian’s signature was printed in the fresh wound. All the rest were much the same, differing only in the statuary. Each work of art was harmed by a chip or a crack and signed by the assailant.

Mallory looked bewildered for a moment, but made a quick recovery. “Is this what I think it is?”