The Genius

“I’m looking for a man named Victor Cracke,” I blurted, half expecting him to press a button and drop through a trapdoor. But he only nodded.

“Oh yeah?” he said.

“You know him.”

“Sure I know him. You mean with the—” He wiggled his index finger atop his upper lip, meaning moustache, which was bizarre, because he had an actual moustache.

“He was a customer?”

“Sure.”

“How often did he come in here?”

“I’d say a couple times a month or so. All he ever bought was paper. He ain’t been by in a while, though.”

“Can you show me what kind of paper he bought?”

He looked at me like I was insane. Then he shrugged and led me to a tiny stockroom, metal shelves sagging with unopened boxes of pens, stencils, photo albums. Atop a card table sat a microwave, and in front of it, a plastic bowl with fusilli floating in watery marinara sauce. A fork rested atop a stack of comic books.

Leonard grabbed a box on the lowest shelf and dragged it to the middle of the room, huffing and puffing as he bent, revealing a preexisting split in the seat of his pants. He took a utility knife off his belt and sliced open the packing tape. Inside was a box of plain white paper, less yellowed than the drawings but—insofar as plain white paper can be positively identified—correct enough.

“How long has he been shopping here?” I asked.

“My father opened up after the War, passed in ‘63, the same day Kennedy got his head blown off. I think Victor started showing up around then. He came in maybe twice a month.”

“What kind of relationship did you have with him?”

“I sold him paper.”

“Did he ever talk about his personal life?”

Leonard stared at me. “I … sold … him … paper.” Satisfied that he had impressed my own stupidity upon me, he went back to his lunch.

“Excuse me—”

“You’re still here?”

“I just wondered if you ever noticed anything unusual about Victor.”

He sighed, scooted around in his chair. “All right, you want a story, I’ll tell you a story. I once played him checkers.”

I said, “Pardon?”

“Checkers. You know what checkers is, dontcha?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I played him. He came in here with a little checkers set and put it down and we played checkers. He beat my pants off. He wanted to play again but I didn’t want to get beat so bad twice in one day. I offered to box him but he just left. The end.”

Something about the story broke my heart, as I pictured Victor—how I saw him in my mind’s eye, I can’t say; I suppose I saw his spirit, translucent and fuzzy—wandering the neighborhood, a board tucked under his arm, desperate for a competitor.

“Happy now?” Leonard asked.

“Did he use a credit card?”

“I don’t take credit cards. Cash or check.”

“All right, then, did he use a check?”

“Cash.”

“Did he ever buy anything else?”

“Yeah. Pens and markers. Pencils. What are you, the goddamned paper gestapo?”

“I’m concerned about his safety.”

“How the hell is knowing about a bunch of pens going to help him stay safe?”

Despairingly, I thanked him for his time and handed him a card, asking him to call if Victor came in.

“Sure,” he said. As I left, I glanced back and saw him tearing the card into confetti.

20

ecause Samantha worked during the day, I did most of the footwork s^S on my own. This, of course, implies that I did not work during the day, which was increasingly true. I felt restless and trapped at the gallery and kept inventing excuses to leave. Even when I didn’t need to go to Queens, I didn’t want to stay in Chelsea. I would take long walks and ruminate about Victor Cracke and art and myself and Marilyn, fancying myself a private investigator, narrating to myself. He stumbled into the coffee shop and ordered a cuppa joe. Cue saxophone. These self-indulgent fantasies, these stirrings of dissatisfaction, were all too familiar to me. I had them on average every five years.

Samantha’s job was to go down Richard Soto’s list of old cases. Right off the bat she concluded that the majority of them were irrelevant to us—the victim was either female or older or had been murdered without any sign of sexual assault—but she followed them up, just in case. Listening to her, I began to understand that the most outstanding feature of policework is its tedium; throughout November and December there were plenty of idle days, plenty of blind alleys, plenty of conversations that went nowhere. We groped blindly, crushing together hunches to form theories that we then discarded, trial-and-error but mostly error.

The week of Thanksgiving we began meeting at night at the storage warehouse. Samantha would take the train in after work, and we’d select a

box at random, have Isaac lug it to the viewing room, and spend three or four hours flipping pages in search of bloodstains. The task went faster this time around than it had before, as I was looking now with a single criterion, rather than to evaluate the work. Nevertheless, I still had trouble focusing for more than thirty or forty minutes at a stretch. My headaches, though diminishing, still made squinting painful. At those moments, I would surreptitiously watch Samantha as she worked; her delicate fingers hovering over the surface of the page, her lips extruded in that beautiful pout, concentration coming off her in waves.

“I can’t tell whether he was sick or a genius,” she said.

“They’re not mutually exclusive.” I told her about the phone calls I’d received after Marilyn began spreading rumors.

“That doesn’t surprise me at all, actually,” she said. “It’s like those women who write love letters to serial killers.” She set aside the drawing she’d been looking at. “Would it bother you if he was guilty?”

“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it.” I gave her my mini-lecture on artists misbehaving, concluding, “Caravaggio killed a man.”

“In bed,” she said and laughed.

Eight weeks might not sound like very long, but when you’re spending much of that talking to or sitting alone with the same person—we essentially learned to forget about Isaac—often engaged in an extraordinarily monotonous activity, your sense of time begins to distort, much as I imagine it does in prison. No matter how hard we tried to stay on point, we couldn’t talk only about the case. I can’t tell you exactly when the thaw began to accelerate. But it did, and we dared to make jokes; we chatted about nonsense and about important things, or things I’d forgotten were important.

“Jesus,” she said when I told her I’d been expelled from Harvard. “I’d never guess.”

“Why.”

“Cause you look so …”

“Boring.”

“I was going to say normal,” she said, “but that’ll work.”

“It’s a facade.”

“Evidently. I had a rebellious phase, too, you know.”

“Did you, now.”

“Oh yes. I was into grunge. I wore flannel and played the guitar.”

I laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” she said gravely. “I wrote my own material.”

“What was the name of your band?”

“Oh, no. I was strictly a solo artist.”

“I didn’t know one could play grunge on one’s own.”

“I wouldn’t describe my own personal music as grunge. I would say that I was more inspired by the grunge lifestyle. Everything I sang sounded like the Indigo Girls. One time this friend of mine—” She started giggling. “This is actually really sad.”

“I can tell.”

“It is, but I”—giggling—”I’m sorry. Ahem. This friend of mine junior year had to have an abortion—”

“Oh, that’s hilarious.”

“Stop. It was sad, it was really sad. That’s not what’s funny. What’s funny is that I wrote a song about it, and it was called—” She broke up completely. “I can’t.”