“How’s your mom? She found herself a new boyfriend yet?”
Lucy shrugged and looked out the window at the rain. “Dad, you know you’re not supposed to ask me that.”
“What happened to the last guy? He of the stutter and the Rolls-Royce.”
“Dad!” Laughing, tickled, she tried and failed to keep a straight face. “That was ages ago. She only saw him once.”
“I should think so. His toupee was an open book.”
“He looked like a cauliflower,” she said.
“With a million-dollar bank account, no? Your mom’s doing OK. She is OK.”
All this was cheap, no doubt, beneath me, but I couldn’t say I felt bad. Lucy and I had ceased to be just ordinary company to each other. Each meeting came freighted with an expectation I had to unload as quickly as possible; otherwise I felt challenged and overawed by my own little girl. Lucy was a normal enough kid, a tomboy, not too fond of school, happy most of the time, but with her senses overly tuned to whatever atmosphere prevailed between her mother and me. Our lightning rod, she wished the weather would always be clement; it rarely was.
“Thanks, Dad, these are the best,” she said, and as she leaned over to kiss my cheek, I was, if only for that moment, a fallen angel returned to paradise.
When we reached Draker Street the party was already in full swing. A young guy took our coats in the entrance and stuffed them into a rack beside a host of sodden others. Beyond that, in the gallery itself, everything was warm and dry, the overhead lighting was soft, and individual spotlights picked out each picture on the white walls. Waiters wafted nimbly through the crowd with laden trays. While Lucy went off to inspect the art, I positioned myself in the center of the room, where a fountain, set among palm fronds, blocks of grainy green marble, and orchids flown from Hawaii that morning, tinkled forth its message of wasted money.
The crowd was young and beautiful. What else is there to say? It was a typical Westside bunch. Some wore clunky boots and brightly colored flannel workshirts with small gold rings puncturing their eyebrows, their lips, their noses, and doubtless other bodily areas. They all looked about nineteen. The slightly older set, the ones who were making serious money already, wore cashmere and silk and grumbled about the weather spoiling their Doc Martens or their loafers by J. P. Tod. The oldest of these wouldn’t admit to being twenty-seven. And the only guy actually older than me was my friend Ted Softly, who owned and ran the gallery.
In his sixties, short, supporting a stout paunch, Ted was dressed in outrageous tweed. His white hair was clipped short and he kept stroking it as if it were a teddy bear. Sweating, his forehead covered with enormous beads of perspiration, he smiled in a friendly way and raised his glass toward me from the far end of the room, then laid his hands on the shoulder of an exotic-looking beauty from Japan. He was one of those guys who always seemed to be running, waving in a crowd, or honking from his car, a white convertible he’d bought from a homeboy, even though the engine was clapped out, because the homeboy’s father had died. That was Ted: a tender and funny fellow. When sober, he had good ideas, a sense of style; he was reliable; but then he was sober only fifty per cent of the time. He’d been a banker, a good one, and now, dealing in art, he used all his knowledge of art while displaying an unbankerly lack of cynicism. He supported artists whose talent was greater than their fashionable potential, and threw splashy parties, like this, where the pop of champagne corks was barely muted by the trill of Pavarotti. Somehow he made a go of it all, and was quite unlike anyone else on the Venice art scene.
Ted brought the young Japanese woman over with him. White-skinned, black-haired, she wore a short black dress and stood with aplomb on platform soles of maximum thickness. This wasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, his regular girlfriend, though I’d been drunk the two times we’d met. “I don’t know if I believe in God,” he said to the woman on his arm, whose name was Holly. His voice was soft and quick, and he laughed a lot, like someone wooing a lover, his intention no doubt. Ted was a terrible ham and liar, but he had great charm. I like and trusted him. He said, “Yet there’s a power that cares for goodness, right? Surely somewhere justice counts? Look at this guy — he cares. This is a great, a unique cop.”
He was drunk already. I said, “Cut it out, Ted.”
“No, listen, this is how Billy and I know each other, right. It was about ten years ago. Empty Westside apartment. Bill gets the call, goes in, there’s a body that’s been hacked into . . . how many pieces ?”
I said to Holly, “This man doesn’t know me. Besides, he’s just hoping to impress you. He’s inflamed with lust to the marrow of his bones.”
“Six hundred, right. Six fucking hundred.” He sprayed me with spit as he said that, booming the words so loud that people turned to stare. His reply to them was a grin and a sudden stiff-armed wave, more desperate than assured. I’d seen him wired and wild but never quite like this before. He went on, telling the story of the most vicious crime, the most horrible I’d ever seen, and I’d seen some bad ones. The unidentified corpse had been cut into more than six hundred pieces — in fact, it was 658. I sat in the crypt at the morgue with a doctor and an investigator from the coroner’s office while we sorted each of those body parts into tiny chocolate boxes and guessed where they belonged. The process, which became an obsession, went on for months, until we were able to establish that the corpse was young, male, Asian, maybe ten years old. We were able to reconstruct his neck, where there were bruises and lesions to suggest that he’d been strangled. This led me on a search for known sex offenders, both state and federal. Eventually, months later, more than a year after the crime, I found my guy, a Pakistani who’d fled back to Pakistan. The victim had been his son. He’d strangled his own blood, then strung him up in a shower and cut him into little pieces.
“It’s how Billy and I got to know each other,” said Ted. “The Pakistani guy used to come in here with his kid, that same kid. He stood right where we’re standing now, and talked about his collection of Robert Longo. The guy really had the eye. It was totally fucking unbelievable.”
“What happened then?” Holly said to me. She was fascinated now, by this story she’d rather not have heard. People were either frightened of me or else saw me as a turn, cocktail theater, a little too heavy for the entrée. It’s why cops tend to seek out other cops and stand with faces of defiant stone, brooding behind the barrier of being misunderstood.
“I went to Pakistan and brought the guy back.”
“Did he want to come?”
“Not very much.”
Ted threw his head back, roared, and grabbed a glass from a passing tray. The champagne flowed from glass to throat without the courtesy of stopping in his mouth. I wondered what was up — some problem with the gallery? No doubt Ted’s frenzied art world dealings brought him all sorts of hassle. Or was it Holly, who, faced with this crazy man, looked past him toward me without a smile. “Tell me,” she said, head tilted to one side. “Don’t change the subject. How did you make him come back?”
“Yeah, Billy,” said Ted, and covered his mouth to stop a belch. “How’d you do that? I don’t think I ever heard this part.”
“Trust me, you don’t want to hear about it.”
“Shock us,” said Ted. “We can take it. Whatever happened, it happened in Pakistan, right? Which of course completely excuses your behavior. No rules in Pakistan. No morality.”
“There’s that everywhere, Ted. Morality’s not a movable feast.”
“Oh, shut up and tell the fucking story. Amuse and amaze us.”
“OK,” I said, and shrugged. I told them that I’d asked the guards to leave me alone with the man in his cell. I had a metal case with me, which I opened, and from which I took fifty small white individual chocolate boxes, laying them carefully on