The fourth resident of the light and airy space was a burly man just a centimeter or two north of six feet. He was dressed in a brightly stained white artist’s smock, bald on top, and filled with the passion of his self-imposed importance. If I wasn’t a boxer I’d have been a little intimidated by his strength and the energy that crackled around him.
“Can I help you?” he asked, more as a threat than as a request.
“Leonid McGill,” I said, handing him a card that said the same. “I’m a PI looking for a woman named Coco Lombardi.”
“Do you see her?” he asked, gesturing at his students, two of which were women.
“I see you,” I replied easily.
Something changed in the art professor’s eyes just then. He looked at my big scarred mitts and at the powerful slope of my shoulders. I wasn’t a minion and he wasn’t a lord — not right then, not right there.
“What do I have to do with this, this... whatever her name is?”
“She was a model for your class.”
“I have dozens of models. Do you expect me to remember them all?”
“I expect, from all my fellow citizens, the same things,” I said. “Civility, respect, and honesty. It’s rare to receive any of those commodities but I keep hope alive.”
“Are you threatening me, Mr. McGill?”
“If I was, your jaw would already be broken,” I said.
One of the drawing students was glancing in our direction. She was middle-aged and looked it.
“Let’s go to my office,” Fantu offered when he saw his student studying us.
Behind a screen of very large canvases there was an institutional-green metal door that opened onto a good-sized office space. Inside, the twenty-foot-high walls supported dozens of drawings and paintings in cheap frames hung very close together. They were all rendered by the same hand. If I were to bet I’d’ve said that Professor Belair saw this office as a museum dedicated to his work.
The furniture was a green metal desk and chair, a pine visitor’s chair, and a daybed with a sponge-sized pillow and a gray army blanket.
The bed was made, military style, and the blue linoleum floor was spotless.
“Have a seat, Mr. McGill.”
“Thank you, Professor.”
We achieved our seats and Fantu sat back giving me a stare that probably worked on people who hadn’t strangled a man to death when they were fourteen and living in the street.
“That’s not your real name, is it?” I said.
“Why are you looking for Coco?”
“You admit that you know her.”
“I just want to know why you’re looking for her.”
“Her family fears that she has fallen in with bad company and that her well-being is threatened.”
“You don’t talk like a detective,” he said suspiciously.
I took out my duly licensed.38 caliber pistol and laid it on the green blotter that clashed with rather than matched his desk.
“How many detectives do you know, Professor?”
Some people you just have to take shortcuts with. We could have talked for an hour about how the police and private detectives on his TV and in his library don’t talk like I do. But put a pistol on the table and that whole block of thought just disappears.
“She was modeling for my classes six, seven months ago,” he said, exhibiting his proclivity for not answering the question he’d just been asked. “I liked her very much, as a model, because even though she worked in the nude there always seemed to be something hidden.”
“You ever find out what that something was?”
“No.”
“Did you fuck her?”
“Excuse me?”
“I thought you wanted me to talk like Mickey Spillane so I threw in a curse word. I’m not sure if he cursed in his books but you got the feeling he might any second.”
“She stopped modeling for my classes at the beginning of last summer,” Fantu said. “I haven’t heard from her since then.”
“Did you fuck her?” I enjoyed disturbing the bully with my words.
“We were” — he stopped and looked up the way people do when they’re reaching for a difficult word — “friends.”
“What was she like?” I asked.
The question surprised him.
“She,” he said and then hesitated again. “She was very intelligent. She knew more about the history of art than most of my colleagues — myself included. She had a friend, a man who was not the same kind as her.”
“What does that mean, not the same kind?”
“He was shifty, unpleasant. For a week or so he’d come around after a session and take her away. Finally she left and never came back.”
“What was this man’s name?”
“She never said and he didn’t speak to anyone but her.”
“Did they meet here at the institute?”
“No. But I don’t think she knew him when she first came here. Soon after they met, our friendship faded and then she was gone... Why are you looking for her, Mr. McGill?”
“I already told you. Her family thinks she’s in trouble. It’s my job to find her and see if they’re right.”
“You’re supposed to drag her home?”
“I would if that’s what they asked for but all they said is that they’d like me to ask her to call them. Did she have any other friends here?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Have you seen her at all since she stopped modeling?”
“Well...”
“Where?”
“There’s a gentlemen’s club somewhere around the theater district, I don’t remember the name. I was there one, one afternoon and Coco was, um, serving drinks. I tried to talk to her but she ignored me and then she was gone.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, thank you, Professor Belair, you’ve been a lot of help.”
“Mulligan,” he said.
“What?”
“Frank Mulligan. I went to university at Santa Cruz in California. Some of the other art students and I did acid every day for two weeks. Soon after that I changed my name to Fantu Belair. I really don’t know why but I think it has helped me.”
25
“Excuse me, mister,” a woman called out from somewhere behind me.
I was almost to the broad marble stairway that led down to the first floor. Turning, I saw the late-middle-aged woman who had been watching me and Mr. Mulligan. She wore a knee-length khaki skirt and a loose red blouse that partially hid her large breasts. She’d let her hair go gray but her face still had the creamy complexion of youth.
“Yes?” I said.
“You’re looking for Coco?”
“Yes?” I said, wondering if Mulligan had confided in her. It didn’t seem likely.
“Professor Belair is a wonderful teacher,” she said. “It’s almost like he can inhabit your soul and bring art out of you that would never happen otherwise. He sees inside, you know what I mean?”
She was wearing simple white-plug earphones connected to some music device in a khaki pocket.
“What about Coco?” I said, feeling like a shepherd of conversation.
“They had an affair,” the elder art student said. “She spent afternoons and evenings on that cot in his office. After the first few modeling sessions he let her stay there the first three months she worked here. I think he paid her extra, too.”
“There’s a name for that,” I said.
“She was in trouble.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. “Did she talk about it?”
“It was the way she was always so jumpy. She’d actually flinch if anyone, I mean anyone, walked into the room. And when she’d walk with Fantu it looked kind of like she was using him as a shield, you know what I mean?”
I nodded and asked, “Was she a friend of yours?”
“No. We never spoke other than to say hello now and then.”