Catalogue Raisonne (28 page)

O
ne thing hadn't changed. Despite some stiff competition, Saturday was still my least favourite day in the gallery. We had more scheduled events, and often more visitors, to tend to than on any other day. These gave the day a make-work feel. People strolling down a lacklustre midway. For all the bitching I did about it – mostly to myself by now – I found the gallery most tolerable at its deadest, when it was approaching Sean's installation piece fantasy, myself as one of the barely moving parts. I was talking on the phone to Angela, while directing kids with my free hand to the “Power Paint” session up in the lounge. Second-tier volunteers trying to contain the
finger-painting chaos, then serving milk and chocolate chip cookies baked by the third tier.

“I liked last night.” She didn't sound sleepy, though it was just after nine.

“Mm. Me too.” A little boy with straw-stalk hair was standing in front of the desk, rubbing his eyes and other parts of his face. “Listen. There's a policeman here who needs to ask someone about his interviews. Last Tuesday?”

“On a Saturday?”

“I guess it's not exactly nine-to-five. Just a detail, he says.”

“Well, I barely remember . . . sure, put him on.”

“Well, actually, he's just stepped into the washroom.” The boy had wandered off in that direction. “But I know what he wants. He just needs to know the name of the person he talked to in Administration. I guess he forgot to write it down. I told him Walter, but – ”

“No, Neale. Walter was out at a meeting. Why wouldn't he just phone?”

“I don't know. Good excuse for a donut. Listen, I've gotta go.”

I called for relief and went down to the basement. Luckily, Frankenstein, who didn't seem to have developed much bowel control yet, was away from the panel again. Otherwise Owen might have felt compelled to make a show of suspicious scrutiny, though he was still deep in Dick. Not even glancing up as I paged back through the LogBook.

On the page that had been blank on Tuesday, Neale was now signed in at 1:25 and out at 5:25. The slightly smeared ink a nice touch. You didn't leave a LogBook open and blow on it.

“Owen?”

. . . .

“Owen?”

“Yes.”

“Does Neale really work this late at night?” I turned the book to show him.

“Sometimes, yes. Neale and Peter. Neale sometimes comes in on his way back from Toronto.”

“But this is practically an all-nighter.”

“Neale practically slept here before the surrealist show.”

“But this is last Sunday. Or Monday, actually.”

“I can read.” As he resumed proving.

Claudia and I met at Rehak's just after five. I used to go there a lot, but hadn't been in a while. Rehak's served bad coffee and delicious cakes and pastries, which made it a natural stop after an especially good or bad rehearsal. It was close to Angela's old collection agency, too. I used to pick her up and we'd stop for coffee and dessert before walking back to the apartments we had then. It was where we'd started to get to know each other. Rehak's was a few blocks east of The Tulips, but on the north side of the street. A little place with a striped awning tucked in between Walnut and Ferguson; a German neighbourhood, with The Black Forest restaurant just a few doors down, and, on the other side of the street, Denninger's deli and a little musty bookstore that sold used German books and fairly recent German newspapers and magazines.

She was already there, sitting at one of the dimmer tables near the back, between dark wooden beams and against a white stucco wall like stale cake frosting. She was back in the baggy jeans and dirty T. Looking worse, but looking more herself. It was as if she were having an argument with herself about how much to care about how she looked. Different voices in her head, each with its own opinion on the matter. “We'd better get a move on,” she said.

Rehak's was funny about time. Though it was a pastry shop with this sideline of a few tables and chairs, it didn't adhere to the hours of either a retail store or a restaurant. 11 to 6, six days a week. Closed Sundays. We went up to the glass counter at the front and picked out our desserts. Claudia pointed to a square of plum cake, the server murmuring the German name, and I got one of the marzipan cookies, chocolate around a thin bit of cake around a sweet gooey centre. Really more of a candy than a cookie. One old man I'd shared a coffee with had said that “confections” was the right word for what Rehak's did. It was, really.

The waitress brought the plates and coffees over. Shiny blue short
skirts, with white blouses with puffed sleeves and embroidered flowers around the collars was the uniform for the Rehak women. The baker came out from the back sometimes, huge and rumpled and dusted with flour, took a grumpy look around for something he never found, returned to his trays and ovens.

“It could be worse,” Claudia said. “He could have me in that.”

“You got it then?”

“Yup. Back in the trenches.”

“No haggling about the outfit?”

“It's early yet. All he said was, ‘A good bartender is hard to find.' With a handshake and a little kiss on the cheek. I
am
a good bartender. But it's also five days after my brother died.”

“Piccone seems like a pretty shrewd businessman.”

She shot me the glance I was beginning to expect: like I wasn't keeping up with the play, and in my case that might not be good enough. “He's also an old-fashioned gentleman. That's part of it, for him. He sent this one long-stemmed red rose to the funeral parlor. Corny, but also nice. It stood out because one flower – one rose – was obviously for me. Not ‘With Hearfelt Sympathy for the Family'. I've got it drying upside-down in my room.”

No mention of the gallery's vase and flowers, which, I thought, for all Mrs. Soames's care, might have got pitched in the garbage. Or maybe sent home with her mother.

“And?” I said.

“And he's got a William Kurelek hanging on his office wall.”

“Real?”

“From ten feet away. You're not suspecting a forgery epidemic, are you?”

“No.” Something did occur to me, but I would ask it in a minute. Right now I needed to know Piccone's feeling about the new rental.

“He's not doing any bliss dance about it, but he seems to like it all right. It was hard to get him off the topic of the last painting. ‘Squiggles,' he kept saying, doing this prissy little thing with his hands, ‘like my granddaughter.' But he likes all the ‘little people' in the Kurelek painting. Working in the field, the barn . . . women bringing food out to picnic tables. But I think he finds Kurelek a little rough. He did
another thing with his hands, some crude fast thing. Maybe someone holding a brush in his fist and swiping. And Kurelek
is
a bit like that.”

“I guess after Krieghoff you're a bit spoiled for little people.” I took another bite of the cookie, a small one, trying to make it last. “And you never saw that when he had it?”

“Like I said Thursday, no. Maybe he took that one to the house. His prize.”

I thought about that. Who would be in Piccone's house? A wife making espresso and gnocchi. A grandmother in black, helping her. Sons coming home to change before hitting the clubs. His office was where Piccone really lived, where he could look at the painting. Where his visitors could see it.

“Does he know you paint?”

“I might've mentioned it, but I doubt he heard me. I'm his
bartender
. And a chick who won't wear his G-string.” She sipped her coffee and finished her plum square. “What about you?”

It was hard to imagine Neale, with his head filled with Breton and Spectrist quotes, planning on a practical, day-to-day level. But didn't that ivory tower vision of him have to be adjusted now, in light of the revised LogBook? With Walter away when the cop arrived – a lucky bit of timing, though
chance favors the prepared mind
– he had seen his shot to clear up Robert's midnight stroll through the galleries. Official clearance given, a little lax there on the security, admittedly – that faint, wry smile –
don't overdo it, be yourself
– as the notepad closes. Was there even a notepad? Cases got closed pretty quickly for drunken security guards doing sloppy swans off the Skyway. And then the name added to the LogBook, suggesting an alibi in the remote event that one was asked for. Extra caution? Neale didn't seem aware enough of himself to be paranoid. And not Peter's name. A difference of opinion? Neale the smarter, or at least subtler, man. He knew it was risky to be at the gallery any time that night. But riskier not to be. Why? Because someone was going to die. Had to . . . had. Why?

It was also hard, in relaying this to Claudia, to convey all the delicate
possibilities, the way they hung together like filaments in a web. They seemed to blow away in the telling, leaving a few tattered facts. Especially when you weren't allowed to mention the biggest fact, the spider that might be lurking near the edge, or hunkered down motionless right in the centre. Though Claudia sensed me skirting it, and asked.

“What's this got to do with my brother?”

“I don't know yet. Maybe nothing.”

“I told you that's all bullshit. This stuff you're talking about . . . it's just bullshit games.”

“Probably.” But why does it
have
to be? “It's just. You're probably right. It only starts to make sense if you know the people involved. Sometimes not even then.”

“I think I have met Neale.”

As soon as she said it, I thought of the “Adjusted” painting. Art rental's confidential policy regarding their artists and buyers. But how would Mrs. Soames stop Neale from meeting an artist that interested him? I'd thought of it before, promised myself to ask it, and then forgotten about it. The detective work was hard. Lots of things were, of course, but this felt hard in a new way. You
had
to pay close attention to details. Lots of them, and not let up. I felt like I'd been playing a lazy game of chess with Robert and someone sharp had sat down at the board. I'd got so sloppy I hadn't even noticed at first.

“Very tall. Good-looking,” Claudia said.

Good-looking? “I guess so. If you don't mind being stared at down a very long nose.”

She gave me a bit of the same stare: shorter nose, no glasses. “Cowboy boots.”

“That's him.”

“He stood behind me while I was sketching a couple of times. ‘Quite strong,' he said once. It startled me. But when I turned he was already walking away. It was like he was talking to himself.”

“
That's
Neale.”

“Well, not to brag, but a lot of people stop when I'm drawing. It's one of the reasons I don't do it in public anymore.”