Small Town

Not that anyone else was likely to respond as strongly as she had, but you never knew, and why take chances? She knew how good the man was, she’d learned to trust that bell in her chest, that tingling in her fingertips, and now, looking again at the pictures, taking more time with them, she found herself running through her client list, picking out those who’d be particularly likely to respond to what she saw.

Before the show she’d invite a few of her best prospects to preview the work. (The show would probably be in late October or early November, and if jury duty cost her a few days in early October, well, she could work around that.) Ideally, there’d be red dots on a third of the pieces by the time the show opened, even if she had to give some of the early birds an unannounced break on the price.

Of course a lot depended on the artist, on the likelihood of his continuing to produce work in quantity. Most of them kept at it, but sometimes an artist would stop making art as abruptly and incomprehensibly as he’d started. If Emory Allgood was likely to pull the plug, she’d do best for his sake and hers to get the highest possible prices for the work at hand.

But if there was more work to come, she could afford for both their sakes to take a different tack. Her goal would be to get those red dots up as quickly as possible, and to sell out the whole show in the first week. Then, when she showed his new work a year later, the buyers who’d been shut out the first time would be primed for a feeding frenzy. And she’d boost the prices and make everybody happy.

She returned to one image, frustrated by the limitation of a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object. She wanted to be right there in the room with the piece, wanted it life-size and smack in front of her, wanted to be able to walk around it and see it from every angle, to reach out and touch it, to feel the up-close-and-personal energy of it.

Eventually, of course, she’d go out and look at the work. She’d assumed they lived in Harlem, but the address Reginald Barron had given her was in Brooklyn, and she had no idea where Quincy Street might be. Bedford-Stuyvesant, she supposed, or Brownsville, or, well, some neighborhood unknown to her. She’d spent a little time in Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, and she’d been a few times to Carroll Gardens, and of course she’d been to galleries and loft parties in Williamsburg, but that left most of Brooklyn as foreign to her as the dark side of the moon.

The hourly news summary came on. A suicide bomber had taken eleven lives (including, thank God, his own) in a café in Jerusalem. A mining disaster in the Ukraine had left forty-some miners trapped and presumed dead. The mine, she noted, was a mere eighty miles from Chernobyl.

She turned up the volume when they got to the Marilyn Fairchild murder. That was the name, she hadn’t misheard it, and they identified her as a real estate agent and gave her age as thirty-eight.

The announcer moved on to something else and she lowered the volume, and Chloe buzzed her — would she take a call from a Mr. Winters?

She picked up and said, “I was just thinking of you.”

“You got a traffic ticket and you want me to fix it.”

“Silly. I don’t have a car.”

“Jaywalking, then.”

“I was thinking about Marilyn Fairchild. I knew her, Maury.”

“The actress? No, that’s something else.”

“Morgan.”

“That’s it, Morgan Fairchild. There’s something automatically sexy about a woman with two last names. Ashleigh Banfield, I watch her on MSNBC and I get a hard-on. She’s good-looking, but I think it’s the name as much as anything else. Who’s Marilyn Fairchild?”

“She was murdered the day before yesterday.”

“Oh, of course. The name didn’t register. Lived in the Village, strangled in bed. You say you knew her?”

“Not terribly well. She showed me five or six apartments, including the one I bought.”

“You still at London Towers?”

“Until I leave feet first. I love it there.”

“And you’ve been there what, three years?”

“Almost five.”

“That long? You stay in touch with her after the closing?”

“No.” She frowned. “I thought at the time we might get to be friends. They just said she was thirty-eight, so we were a year apart, and—”

“You’re thirty-nine?”

“Fuck you.”

He laughed, delighted. “So you’re thirty-seven. Two years is worth fuck you?”

“We were a year apart,” she went on, “and she was a successful professional woman living alone in the Village, and I’m a successful professional woman living alone in Chelsea, and, oh, I don’t know...”

“You identified.”

“I’m taller by an inch or two. Her figure was fuller. Her hair had a lot of red in it, but I have a hunch it would have been the same dark brown as mine without professional intervention. I don’t smoke, but she did, and that may have given her the throaty voice. She liked a drink.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Did I identify? I suppose.”

“ ‘If it could happen to her...’ ”

“It could happen to me.” She frowned. “Maury, you called me, and probably not because I was thinking of you.”