Expressionless throughout the contact; the who-me? demeanor of a kid trying something naughty.
The back room was a storage area set up with floor-to-ceiling vertical racks. Every gallery rear I’ve seen is crammed with canvases. Verlang Contemporary housed less than a dozen paintings, all wrapped in brown paper.
Medina Okash said, “I’m assuming you’re here because Marcella told you Benny worked here.”
Flat voice, matching eyes.
Milo nodded. “You know Marcella McGann.”
“Not well enough to know that’s her surname,” said Okash. “To me she’s Marcella the woman who takes care of Benny. She got Benny hired.”
“Did she.”
“Oh, yes. She showed up one day, told me about the place she worked, and asked if I could help out by giving one of her residents something to do, he liked to draw. My first thought was, Who needs the complication? Then I thought, You’ve always appreciated outsider art, Medina. Why not help an actual outsider?”
“What did Benny do here?”
“Swept up, straightened, accepted deliveries. If I was here cataloging he’d let me know someone was at the door. I’d send him to get food if a yummy truck was nearby. Mostly he just hung around. No problem, very sweet. And actually very diligent. At first Marcella or someone else from the home would walk him and pick him up. Then, maybe a week in, he began making the trip himself.”
I said, “Did he ever report any problems during the walk?”
“Never,” said Medina Okash. “So he still hasn’t come home? That’s not good.”
Sympathetic words. But no affect to match.
Milo said, “When did Marcella drop by?”
“Saturday morning.”
“Do you remember what time?”
“Maybe... ten? I came in through there.” Pointing to a second back door. “I wasn’t open for business, caught up prepping for the show. I heard pounding on the front door, figured some homeless person is going bonkers, went out to see. If it looked sketchy I was ready to call 911.”
“Have you done that before?”
“Not yet but one needs to keep one’s eyes open, right?”
“Right. So Marcella was the one knocking.”
“She and some guy. He’s just standing there but she’s waving her hands and looking agitated. I let them in and she goes on about Benny not coming home the day before. You’re here so I guess he still hasn’t.”
Milo said, “He’ll never come home, Ms. Okash.”
“What do you mean?”
Out came the card.
Okash read it, eyes scanning slowly. “Really? Oh, fuck, that’s disgusting. That is truly disgusting. What the fuck happened?”
Not shocked; annoyed.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Milo. “Did Benny show up for work on Friday?”
“Sure, the usual, around elevenish. Normally, he leaves between two and four, I’m flexible. That day I had to be out for the afternoon, got back at four thirty and assumed he’d left.”
“Benny was here by himself.”
Okash folded her arms across her chest. “He wasn’t a child and the deal wasn’t I had to babysit him.”
“He could just let himself out.”
“The door self-locks.”
“So Marcella showed up Saturday. You’d heard nothing from her the day Benny didn’t come home?”
Okash’s eyes turned icy. “All these questions. I have to say I’m starting to feel uncomfortable.”
“About?”
“Being questioned like a suspect. I did someone a favor, that’s all — and yes, turns out Marcella did call me on Friday. I was busy, didn’t check for messages.”
“Don’t mean to upset you,” said Milo. “It’s just in cases like these we need to talk to everyone.”
“There’s talk and there’s inquisition.”
The door to the front room swung open hard enough to bang against the wall. Letting in crowd noise and Geoffrey Dugong. The painter’s body canted forward.
Unlike Okash, an animated face: eyes blazing, cheeks flushed, mouth working.
“You leave me the fuck alone out there! I’m supposed to talk to these fuck-brains by myself?”
Okash regarded him the way a pedestrian looks at dogshit. “I’ll be out in a second, Geoffrey.”
“You better — who the fuck are you?”
Milo said, “Maybe potential clients.”
Dugong’s head snapped back. “Yeah. Fine. Doesn’t give you the right to fuck up my opening.”
He stomped out.
Medina Okash said, “Artists.” As if she couldn’t care less.
Chapter 25
As we made our way out of the gallery, I searched for Dugong in the crowd. In a corner, blocking one of his paintings as he sulked and gulped Prosecco. Not even pretending to listen to a shaved-head, six-foot woman’s arm-waving description of something.
Angry eyes. No red dots on any of the paintings indicating a sale. Reacting to that or was his emotional thermostat set permanently on high?
We stepped outside into soothing silence and headed up Hart. The same homeless people plus a few more. The stench of self-neglect assaulted the cool spring air in noxious bursts. This time Milo handed out money. A few blessings, a lot of stupor.
He said, “The mayor lets it get this way and also thinks he can be president — problem is maybe he can.”
I said, “Geoffrey’s got a temper problem.”
“He does, indeed. What’d you think of Medina?”
“Never had my belly button appraised before.”
“Touchy-feely but cold,” he said. “The way she stood in the doorway and did this.” Caressing his sleeve. “Like being prodded during a physical.”
“I got that plus a love-bump, here.” Patting my flank.
“Now I’m jealous — fine, you’re cuter.”
“She’s also got a protégé who comes unglued easily and the gallery was Benny’s last destination before being killed. I find all that interesting.”
“Fascinating,” he said. “I mean it.”
As I drove, he ran Okash through the databases. “Well, well, well, our girl’s got a record, all in New York. Three DUIs and one cocaine but also an assault conviction... looks like she cut up another woman outside a Lower East Side bar, served seven months of a two-year sentence at the Bedford Hills women’s prison. One bust but it’s still serious violence. Maybe she just got craftier.”
I said, “One thing for sure, she learned to suppress her emotions. Or never had a problem in the first place. Dugong’s a loose cannon but she wasn’t thrown an inch by his tantrum.”
“Yeah, I saw that, patronizing. You’re an idiot child, Geoffy.”
“She didn’t mention Dugong being with her on Saturday when she was setting up his show but artists often participate. And the prep could’ve begun earlier. As in Friday, when Benny was there.”
His shoulders bunched as he pushed his palms against the glove compartment door. “Okash coulda lied about leaving Benny alone in the gallery. If Dugong could get that pissed about Okash ducking out for a minute, a slow guy like Benny making some kind of mistake could’ve really set him off. He drags Benny to the back, shoots him in the head. Poor guy went in but never came out.”
I said, “Small-caliber bullet, the mess would’ve been manageable. But the show was coming up so the body needed to be moved. Friday, Benny doesn’t return, McGann gets worried about Benny and phones the gallery. Okash ignores her, so the following morning, before she’s due to leave for Mexico, McGann and Vollmann show up and ask the wrong questions. Like Coolidge said, Vollmann was a big guy, so he was subdued first with a knife then obliterated by a shotgun in order to delay identification. Okash and Dugong find the airline tickets, wait until after dark, and dump the bodies near the airport, where it’ll look like what Coolidge assumed: a wrong-way gang thing. They use Vollmann’s Camaro for transport and another vehicle to get away.”