from the novel
Chapter Two - The Safe Stuff
He started where he most often found the stuff: their paints. Girlie had a good eighty or ninety 5 oz. Utrecht tubes set out on butcher trays. All the reds filled one tray. The greens filled another, the yellows another. And so on, the whole length of her table. He could not find a palette. Turned out she mixed her paints in washed-out Purina catfood tins. On a shelf above, stacks and stacks upon stacks of Purina catfood tins. All neatly labeled. Rose madder, touch of sepia. A whole column of cadmium reds. The streetlights through the tall open windows made reading easy. He looked into every tin. What name might Girlie use? The stuff's scientific name -- copper aceto-arsenite? Probably one of the painter names -- emerald green or Paris green. One of Gypsy Blue's customers had labeled it "the safe stuff." Girlie was like a lot of these portrait painters. She had only huge abstracts in her studio. She considered them her career. The portraits she did only for the money, of course. But they lived, those portraits.
The subjects' bare arms and cheeks shimmered with life. That was how he had known Girlie
might buy the stuff. "Secrets of the old masters," she said when she bought it.
"Thank you so much." Her abstracts? Well, he didn't like them at all. He couldn't see anything in them. He pawed through all her brushes and cases and boxes. The file drawer had business records. He noticed her last year's IRS return. She declared forty thou from painting portraits. Wow. Then she knocked off over half for expenses. Talk about scams. He should have charged her more. He poked a screwdriver through her tool box. The stuff was not right out front, so she must have hid it. Why? Except for the four safe ounces she bought from him, copper aceto-arsenite would hurt only her. Mixing it into pigment and smoothing it into forearms and cheeks with tiny sable brushes. No one but an expert would even know what to call it. Where had she hid it? If he did not find it, he was going to have to wait until she came home. And what if
she led a crowd of friends for a late party? A large, wheeled staircase took Gypsy Blue to the balcony. Up there, she had huge fluffy beige pillows. A couch? She had a low blond-wood table, waxed, and a color TV. The waterbed had fins or whatever they said made it a smoother ride. He stretched his arms but could not touch the pressed-tin ceiling. He doubted she hid anything there. For sure, she did not sleep alone. He spied an alarm clock on each night table. Last night's half-full whisky tumbler sat next to 12:51. The empty wine glass on the right sat next to 12:30. What time was it? Whisky was reading Philip Roth. Red wine was reading a fat book with a crazy subtitle. Took almost the whole cover. 200 formulas for making paints, glazes, mediums, varnishes, grounds, fixatives, sizes, & adhesives for tempera, oil, acrylic, gouache, pastel, encaustic, fresco & other painting techniques. Published by Watson-Guptill, New York. And another, The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting. "Where she got that secrets-of-the-old- masters shit," he muttered. At the waterbed, he stuck his hand between mattress and frame. Slid it around all four sides. He went through the drawers t-shirt by t-shirt. Her panties made him pause. No. Nowhere did he find the stuff he had to get. It was all he had. At the front window, he looked across Pleasant Street. Sheehan's was still rocking. He looked at the sign on the bank.
Down four degrees. So whiskey's clock was set ten minutes ahead, wine's ten minutes behind. Crazy artists. He had been looking almost an hour for his stuff. The bars would close at one. A good bet: she would come home not long after that. He had noticed a door in the kitchen. Of course, the pantry. He clambered down the stairs. It had to be there. He pulled open the door and found a very small bathroom. Hey, even crazy artists had to shit. She had large nappy blue towels. He almost stripped for a hot shower. Boss canvasman at a circus, he had gone nearly a week without one. He found nothing under the sink except a frightened, tiger-striped kitty. It hid in the orange plastic dirty-clothes basket. "Hey, kitty. Hey." Kitty flattened its ears and darted off. He checked the toilet tank. No luck. At the kitchen sink, he pawed boxes and bottles out of the cabinets. He twisted open every spice jar. She had a good forty cookbooks. They all looked well-thumbed and batter-spotted. He started banging her utensils around. Who cares where they go? He wasn't breaking anything. He just wasn't leaving it where he found it. He had no time. He was going to hate it, if she came home before he found the stuff. In the box, he found a cold Bud. He popped it and took it and the broom back up the staircase. He pushed the broom deep under the furniture. Nothing. He had run this painter scam twelve times. Now number thirteen in the coupla years since The Great Canneloni gave him the stuff. Gypsy Blue used some in his clownpaints. The rest he sold, over and over again. But he never had that much trouble finding it. Often, the painters had already used some. Twice, they had resold some to another painter. So, really, it was down to about three ounces. But who weighed the stuff? This skinny Girlie, now, where was hers? The feds said copper aceto-arsenite was illegal for her to have. It had arsenic, a poison. However, the ingredients were cheap to buy. The pigment was easy to concoct in any painter's studio. She was like all Gypsy Blue's customers. They made their own and poisoned themselves. She done it for years, she said. What Gypsy Blue had sold her was copper aceto-arsenite that did not poison because of a special binder. Why not leave Girlie hers? Why not get more of that binder where he got it before? |
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by Douglas Anderson
irlie's cavernous loft had a ten-foot wide balcony running down
both long sidewalls. At the Pleasant Street end, the balcony stretched another five feet
wider. At the alley end, Gypsy Blue stood in Girlie's painting studio. He guessed three
first downs, at least, the loft's paint-splattered board floor.
Because that
would put Gypsy Blue deeply in debt where he did not want to be: The Great Canneloni,
first name Hector. Heckie, for short. Asshole.