Jonathan Kellerman - A Cold Heart

“Jaguar Tutorials,” said Milo. “What, they train you to become a predator?”

The ambience said none of the occupants had made it to stardom/health/wealth: shabby gray halls, filthy gray carpeting, dehydrated plywood doors, a reek that said quirky plumbing, an elevator whose lights didn’t respond to a button push.

We took the stairs, breathing in insecticide and dancing around sprinkles of dead roaches.

He knocked on the Jaguar/SSA door, didn’t wait for a reply, and twisted the knob. On the other side was a smallish single room set up with four movable workstations. Cute little computers in multicolored boxes, scanners, printers, photocopiers, machines I couldn’t identify. Electrical cord linguini coiled atop the vinyl floor.

The walls were covered with enlargements of framed SSA covers, all of a type: maliciously lit, photos of young, malnourished, beautiful people lolling in body-conscious clothing and radiating contempt for the audience. Lots of vinyl and rubber; the duds looked cheap but probably required a mortgage.

Male and female models, Nefertiti eye makeup for both. Slashes of purplish cheek blush for the skinny women, four-day beards for their male counterparts.

A dreadlocked, dark-skinned man in his late twenties wearing a black and bumblebee yellow striped T-shirt and yellow cargo pants hunched at the nearest PC, typing nonstop. I glanced at his screen. Graphics; Escher by way of Tinkertoys. He ignored us, or didn’t notice. Miniearphones produced something that held his attention.

The two central stations were unoccupied. At the rearmost computer, a young woman in her midtwenties, also plugged in aurally, sat reading People . Chubby and baby-faced, she wore a black patent-leather jumpsuit and red moonwalker shoes, bobbed in time to what seemed to be a three-four beat. Her hair was unremarkable brown, sprayed into a fifties bouffant. She turned toward us, arched an eyebrow- an eyebrow tattoo- and the beefy steel ring piercing the center of the arch flipped up, then clicked down. The loop in her upper lip remained stationary. So did the score of studs lining her ears and the painful-looking little knoblet parked in the center of her chin.

“What?” she shouted. Then she yanked out the earphones, kept bobbing her head. One two three one two three. Waltz of the young and metallic.

“What?” she repeated.

Milo’s badge elicited twin tattoo arches. The outlines of her mouth had been inked in permanently, as well.

“So?” she said.

“I’m looking for the publisher of SeldomSceneAtoll .”

She thumped her chest and made ape sounds. “You found her.”

“We’re looking for information on an artist, Juliet Kipper.”

“What’s up with her ?”

“You know her?”

“Didn’t say that.”

“Nothing’s up with her, anymore,” said Milo. “She was murdered.”

The eyebrow ring drooped, but the face below it remained bland.

“Whoa whoa whoa,” she said, and she got up, walked over to the graphics guy, jabbed his shoulder. Looking regretful, he pulled off his phones.

“Juliet Kipper. Did we feature her?”

“Who?”

“Kipper. Dead artist. She got murdered.”

“Um,” he said. “What kind of artist?”

The girl looked at us.

Milo said, “She was a painter. We’ve been told you wrote about her, Ms…”

“Patti Padgett.” Big smile. A not-small diamond was inlaid in her left frontal incisor.

Milo smiled back and took out his pad.

“There you go,” Patti Padgett said. “Always wanted to be part of the official police record. When did we supposedly write about the late Ms. Kipper?”

“Within the last few months.”

“Well that narrows it down,” she said. “We’ve only put out two issues in six months.”

“You’re a quarterly?”

“We’re a broke.” Patti Padgett returned to her desk, opened a drawer, began rummaging. “Let’s see if whatshername Julie merited our… how’d she die?”

“Strangled,” said Milo.

“Ooh. Any idea who did it?”

“Not yet.”

“Yet,” said Padgett. “I like your optimism- the greatest generation and all that.”

Bumblebee-shirt said, “That was World War II, Patricia, he’s Vietnam.” He glanced at us, as if waiting for confirmation. Received blank stares and put his earphones back on and bopped, dreadlocks swaying.

“Whatever,” said Padgett. “Here we go. Three months ago.” She placed the magazine in her lap, licked her thumb, turned pages. Not many pages between the covers. It didn’t take long for her to say, “Oka-ay! Here she is right in our ‘Mama/Dada’ section… sounds like someone liked her.”

She brought the article to us.

“Mama/Dada” was a compendium of short pieces on local artists. Juliet Kipper shared the page with an emigrant Croatian fashion photographer and a dog trainer who moonlighted as a video artist.

The piece on Julie Kipper was two paragraphs, noted the promising New York debut, the decade of “personal and artistic disappointments,” the “would-be rebirth as an essentially nihilistic conveyor of California dreamin’ and ecological schemin.’ “ Nothing I’d seen in Kipper’s landscapes had connoted nihilism to me, but what did I know?

Kipper’s work, the writer concluded, “makes it obvious that her vision is more of a paean to the paradoxical holism of wishful thinking than a serious attempt to concretize and cartograph the photosynthetic dissonance, upheaval, and mulchagitation that has captivated other West Coast painters.”

Author’s credit: FS

“Mulchagitation,” mumbled Milo, glancing at me.

I shook my head.

Patti Padgett said, “I think it means moving dirt around, or something like that. Total foggoma, right?” She laughed. “Most of the art stuff we print is like that. Would-bes with no ability hitching a ride on the talent train.”

Milo said, “ ‘Leeches on the body artistic.’ “

Padgett stared up at him with naked worship. “You want a gig?”

“Not in this rotation.”

“Hindu?”

“ Make -do.”

Padgett told Bumblebee: “Be threatened, Todd. I’m in love.”

Milo said, “If you don’t like the writing, why do you print it?”

“Because it’s there, mon gendarme . And some of our readership digs it.” She spit out another laugh, set off a metal whirligig. “With our budget, we ain’t exactly The New Yawker , honeybunch. Our focus- my focus, cause what I like is what flies- is lots of fashion, some interior design, a little film, a little music. We toss in the finesy-artsy shitsy because some people think it’s cool and in our niche market, cool is everything.”

Milo said, “Who’s FS?”

“Hmm,” said Padgett. She returned to Bumblebee and lifted an earphone. “Todd, who’s FS?”

“Who?”

“The credit on the Kipper story. It’s signed ‘FS.’ “

“How would I know? I didn’t even remember Kipper.”

Padgett turned to us. “Todd doesn’t know, either.”

“Don’t you keep a file of contributors?”

“Wow,” said Padgett, “this is getting seriously investigative . What’s the deal, a serial vampire killer?”

Milo chuckled. “What makes you say that?”

“I dig the X-Files . C’mon, tell Patti.”

“Sorry, Patti,” he said. “Nothing exotic, we’re collecting information.” He smiled at her. “Ma’am.”

“Ma’am,” she said, placing a black-nailed hand over a generous breast. “Be still my fluttering heart- hey, how about you guys let me follow you around and write up what you do- day in the life and all that. I’m a kick-ass writer, MFA from Yale. Same for Todd. We’re as dynamic a duo as you could hope to encounter.”