“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.”
“Maybe one day,” said Milo. “Do you keep a contributor file?”
“Do we, Todd?”
Off came the earphones again. Padgett repeated the question. Todd said, “Not really.”
“Not really?” said Milo.
“I’ve got a quasi file,” said Todd. “But it’s random- data inputted as it comes in, no alphabetization.”
“In your computer?” said Milo.
Todd’s stare said, Where else?
“Could you please call it up?”
Todd turned to Padgett. “Isn’t there a First Amendment issue, here?”
“Puh-leeze,” said Padgett. “These guys are going to let us ride with them, we’ll do a kick-ass law enforcement issue- use that strung-out Cambodian model for the cover, whatshername with the sixteen-syllable name, doll her up in a tight blue uniform, give her a riding crop, a gun, the works. We’ll rock.”
Todd cleared his screen of graphics.
It took a second. “Here it is. FS- Faithful Scrivener.”
Milo hunched lower and stared at the screen. “That’s it? No other name?”
“The proverbial ‘what you see,’ “ said Todd. “This is how the submission came in, this is how I log it.”
“When you paid, what name did you put on the check?”
“Right,” said Todd.
“Ha-ha-ha,” said Padgett.
“You don’t pay.”
Padgett said, “We pay the cover models and the photographers as little as we can. Sometimes if we get someone with a genuine résumé- a screenwriter with a credit- we can scratch up something- like a dime a word. Mostly we don’t pay because no one pays us. Distributors refuse to advance us the wholesale price until returns are caculated- we get royalties only for issues sold, and that takes months.” She shrugged. “It’s a sad day for entrepreneurship.”