Small Town

Marilyn Fairchild, who’d found her the perfect co-op at London Towers, high ceilings and casement windows and an attended lobby and she could even walk to work, Marilyn Fairchild had let someone into her apartment, someone who hadn’t needed a knife or a gun, and now she was dead and—

He was probably a messenger, she thought, but he didn’t look like a messenger. He seemed too purposeful, somehow.

She buzzed him in, and when the attorney came on the line she said, “Hold on a sec, Maury. Someone at the door.” To the young man she said, “How may I help you?”

“Are you Miss Pomerance?” When she nodded he said, “I have these pictures, and Mr. Andriani said you might look at them.”

“David Andriani?”

“That has the gallery on Fifty-seventh Street?” He smiled, showing perfect teeth. “He said you might be interested.”

“You’re an artist?”

He shook his head. “My uncle.”

“Have a seat,” she said. “Or have a look around, if you like. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

She picked up the phone. “Sorry,” she said. “Maury, I got something in the mail the other day. They want me to report Monday morning for jury duty.”

“So?”

“So how do I get out of it?”

“You don’t,” he said. “You’ve already postponed it twice, if I remember correctly.”

“Can’t I postpone it again?”

“No.”

“Why the hell not? And why can’t I get out of it altogether? I have my own business to run, for God’s sake. What happens to this place if I get stuck in a courtroom?”

“You’re right,” he said. “Three days in the Criminal Courts Building and the Susan Pomerance Gallery would go right down the tubes, triggering a stock-market crash that would make Black Tuesday look like—”

“Very funny. I don’t see why I have to do this.”

“Everybody has to.”

“I thought if you were the sole proprietor of a business—”

“They changed the rules, sweetie. It used to be very different. Loopholes all over the place. There was even a joke going around for years, like how would you like your fate to be in the hands of twelve people who weren’t bright enough to get out of jury duty?”

“That’s my point. I ought to be bright enough to—”

“But they changed the rules,” he went on, “and now everybody has to serve. Lawyers, ex-cops, everybody. Rudy got called a couple of years ago, if you’ll recall, and he was the mayor, and he served just like everybody else.”

“I bet he could have gotten out of it if he’d wanted to.”

“I think you’re probably right, and that’ll be an option for you when you’re elected mayor, but for the time being—”

“I’m supposed to go to the Hamptons next week.”

“Now that’s different,” he said.

She grinned in spite of herself. “I’m serious,” she said. “Can’t you do something? Tell him I’m blind or I’ve got agoraphobia?”

“I like that last,” he said. “You’ve got a fear of empty spaces, all right. On other people’s walls. Do you have the letter they sent you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t throw it out, would I?”

“You might, but I meant do you have it handy.”

“It’s somewhere,” she said. “Hold on a minute. Here it is. You want me to fax it to you?”

“That’s exactly what I want.”

“Coming at you,” she said, and rang off, then found his card in her Rolodex and carried it and the offending letter to the fax machine. She sent the fax, and while it made its magical way across town she looked over at the young man, who was standing in front of a painting by Aleesha MacReady, an elderly woman who lived in rural West Virginia and painted formal oil portraits of biblical figures, all of them somehow looking as though they were undergoing torture, but didn’t really mind.

“That’s Moses,” she said. “That’s the golden calf in the bulrushes. She puts in a batch of props that don’t necessarily go together, but all relate to the person portrayed. She’s self-taught, of course. I suppose that’s true of your uncle?”

“My mom’s uncle,” he said. “My great-uncle. Emory Allgood, that’s his name. And he never had lessons.”

She nodded at the envelope. “You have slides?”

He opened the envelope, handed her a color print that looked to have been run off a computer. It showed an assemblage, an abstract sculpture fashioned from bits of junk. You couldn’t tell the scale of the thing, and the printing was bad, and you were seeing it from only one angle, but she felt the power of the piece all the same, the raw kinetic energy of it.

And something else, something that gave her a little frisson, a pinging sensation, almost, in the center of her chest.

“Is this the only—”

He shook his head, drew out a disk. “A friend of mine has this digital camera. He only printed out the one picture, but he said if you has, if you have a computer...”

She did, at the desk in her office, and she popped in the disk and went through the images, almost two dozen of them, and before she was halfway through the pinging had become a bell pealing in her chest, resonating throughout her whole being.

She said, “Tell me his name again.”

“Emory Allgood.”

“And you are...”

“His great-nephew. My mom’s mom, my gran, was his sister.”

“I meant your name.”

“Oh, didn’t I say? I’m sorry. It’s Reginald Barron.”