What’s It Like to Kill for Art, David?
David and the Lion’s Den, chapter 13
Piecing it all together later, I figured out that Jill and Richard met my folks at the airport right about the time Good Cop started feeding me coffee and donuts.
Imagine Mom all Midwest-casual in designer jeans, silk blouse, and carefully careless hair, looking about as New York as a prairie dog in Central Park. Dad’s chinos and golf shirt were a better match. He and Richard dressed out of the same catalog.
Now imagine them scanning the arrivals area for me, only to be approached by this hard-looking, gum-snapping, nervous-sounding chick in too-tight jeans who was compulsively playing with her hair.
Mom: (Taking big steps backward) Jail! Arrested? What on earth? You don’t understand. We’re the Martins from Kansas City. You must have us confused with somebody else.
Richard: (Stepping up) Mr. Martin? Glen Martin?
Mom: (Shrilly, accusingly) How do you know my husband’s name, you … you …
Dad: (Confused) Do we know you?
Jill: (Brooklyn accent getting heavy) Look, we need to hurry down to the precinct.
Richard: (Patiently) Sir, if I could just speak to you quietly for a moment …
That’s one for the grandkids, that scene at the airport. Jill’s grandkids, anyway. The story’s gotten funnier over the years. Mom wasn’t laughing then!
They didn’t try to bail me out right away, not with it being Labor Day and court not in session, not even night court. Once Dad snapped out of it, he sprinted to a payphone and called his office. (Of course somebody was there on a holiday. Don’t be ridiculous.) He got the home number of an old law school buddy, interrupted the guy’s barbeque, and got him to grab a cab down to the precinct house, which everyone converged on as fast as they could get there through traffic.
No, no visits.
I wasn’t in an actual jail, just holed up at the police station while they figured out what to do with me. So, I never got any visits, unlike Howie who ended up in County for months, Jill going up every few days to try to cheer him up.
He couldn’t make bail, didn’t have much family, didn’t own anything worth real money, and didn’t know know any Midwest lawyers with old-boy-network connections.
I tried. I didn’t want to believe it. Everybody pointed out the obvious to me. “If you didn’t do it, — and you didn’t, right? Right? — then it had to be Howie. All those people didn’t just kill themselves.”
Valid point. Remorselessly logical. Who else could have slipped the poison into all those lunches? Who else could have chosen those particular lunches and only those lunches to contaminate?
If I didn’t do it, Howie must have.
I’m racing ahead of my story again. Let’s back up.
Good Cop stood up and glared at me. “I’m about fed up here. We’ve been at this for two hours. I’m doing my best to be your friend and help you. If you won’t cooperate …”
His eyes flickered ominously toward the door.
I figured his partner was lurking behind it. “I don’t HAVE anything to get off my chest! I wish I did. You can keep asking me the same questions over and over, but all I can say is I don’t know. I got no idea. None. Clueless here. I’m done trying to answer.”
Bad Cop roared in to take his place, kicking chairs around, throwing cardboard coffee cups at me, acting like the murdering maniac they were accusing me of being.
Even though I was expecting it, he scared me shitless.
He screamed and ranted, barely taking the time to draw in a breath, let alone give me a chance to speak — even if I’d wanted to. I think he was there to soften me up for his partner, who was probably planning to run back in and rescue me again, get me all nice and grateful so I’d confess my homicidal failings to him.
He never got the chance.
His arms were up in the air and he was screaming something about, “faggots and other freaky fucks,” when two sharp raps sounded on the metal door.
He stopped abruptly, red-faced and panting. “What?” he yelled, sounding exasperated.
The door swung open and the woman-cop receptionist clone stepped in, followed by an older, fatter uniformed cop frowning through skin of acne-pocked parchment.
He spoke quietly, but with an air of command and finality. “Sgt. Jackson’s going to escort Martin back to holding, Frank.” As the creepily nice woman guided me down the hall, two fingers light on my elbow, I caught breezy snatches of something about lawyers and lobbies floating down from the interrogation room.
I’d have felt a lot happier if I’d known Frank the Bad Cop was furious because everyone had piled into the lobby and marched up to the watch sergeant’s desk.
A tall man wearing bermuda shorts and smelling of charcoal, or so I’m told, stuck out a business card and announced, “I’m David Martin’s lawyer. Is he here? Any questions anyone has for him go through me first.”
Howie didn’t think to ask for a lawyer any more than I did, so I guess poor Frank wasn’t totally out of luck in the chair-kicking, cup-throwing department.
I didn’t see a judge until late Tuesday morning. When the question of bail came up, His Honor didn’t sound like he had the slightest intention of unleashing a scourge like me on society.
I hadn’t seen the lawyer and didn’t know my parents were around. All I knew was that the detectives hadn’t bothered me again. They came and got us Tuesday morning, me and 5 or 6 other guys. They cuffed us, chained us at the waist and ankles, leashed us together, and marched us across the building to sit in another, cleaner cell.
I only knew we were going to court by listening to some of the chatter around me. Some of those guys in their chains and manacles sounded as casual and comfortable as subway commuters straphanging their way to a midtown desk job.
They took us one at a time. The emptier the cell got, the more my stomach hurt.
I was last.
Two white-shirted bailiffs elbow-walked me into court, ratcheting off my cuffs just before a plain little door that opened up on the back of the chamber, behind the judge. Ankle chains jangling, I shuffled toward a chair, blinking in the bright lights.
I felt like I was watching a movie. I saw everything in sharp detail. Colors snapped to my attention. The moulding on the oak rail in front of me glowed under its waxy coat. Sounds invaded my ears, roaring at me — shuffling, coughing, breathing, murmuring.
Nothing felt real despite my acute perception. I was floating in some alien bubble, struggling to connect vivid sensory input with a rational center, to integrate myself into the scene in some way that made sense.
I hadn’t slept in two days.
I drew in a deep breath to calm myself, then staggered back under a blinding assault.
Reporters. Photographers.
I’ve always found it eerie how flashbulbs are so silent, even while they’re filling your eyes with maximum visual cacophony.
I spotted them after I blinked away the worst of it, but while weird splotches still distorted their features. I noticed Hilda first, her eyes locked in my direction. Then I noticed she was wedged in between Richard and Jill, who were grimacing and scowling.
My heart beat a little faster when I squinted and made out Dad’s features right behind them, his hand raised in a greeting. Mom tried to smile at me, but it came out like some kind of gas-induced rictus, more digestive function than acknowledgement.
Even Alonzo was there. It crossed my mind that with two of his employees locked up, he was probably having a tough time managing Cucina.
Some bored-sounding woman with a machine for a voice read off the charges, then a young guy in a dark suit told the judge I was too dangerous for bail, and then the judge started reading something proforma off a card.
That’s when my dad stood up.
“Your Honor, if I might have leave to address the court?”
That’s when I noticed the other guy with him, a tall man in a bow tie. He stood up too, apologized for my dad, and started talking real fast about bail, bondsmen, home equity, and so forth, all while the guy in the dark suit looking progressively more pissed, face turning almost purple by the end of that speech.
They argued back and forth for a while until the judge help up a hand. “That’s enough. I’ve heard enough from both of you to be inclined to hear formal arguments. Is the defense prepared for a bail hearing?”
“Your Honor,” objected the lawyer in the dark suit. “This is highly irregular.”
“Is it? It may be early in the process, but we have two attorneys before us, one a regular litigator before this Court. If they’re prepared, I’d like to see some light shed on this matter. The Court is asking for their input. Besides, it’s the last case of the day and we’re running ahead of schedule. Let’s do this.
“That is, if defendant’s counsel is prepared to proceed?”
I found out later he was up for election in November. If he’d denied bail routinely, none of the big pack of reporters stuffing his courtroom would have so much have mentioned him when they filed their stories. I lucked out getting a hearing that day.
Dad told me later that he’d known all along I’d never get bail, at least not without a long fight. My bow-tie-wearing litigator put on a good show, anyway. He carried on about “paucity of evidence,” and “no threat to the community,” and “officer of the court,” while dad pledged to take charge of me personally besides just putting his house up as security.
When the judge ruled, the courtroom went silent with shock. Even my lawyer blinked hard and shook his head.
I had to go back to the holding cell while they sorted out the paperwork, dad’s office in KC faxing all sorts of documents to speed the process. The next time the lady cop called my name, she walked me past the interrogation rooms and into the lobby where Mom’s nose wrinkled as she ran up to hug me.
I put out an arm to stop her. “Mom, I can smell myself, even! Hug me after I get a shower, huh?”
Dad shifted back and and forth on his feet, looking uncomfortable as hell. He mumbled something like, “We’ll get this all straightened out soon,” as he half shook, half clasped my hand.’
Richard squeezed my shoulder, Hilda smiled, and Jill snapped her gum.
“Now what?” I asked.
We couldn’t go to my apartment. My lawyer Kevin warned me what to expect outside. He led the way, pushing through a dense mass of bodies all clustered around the door. My parents and friends surrounded me as we elbowed and shouldered our way toward Kevin’s car. I felt white hot lights burn my skin, and heard shouted questions.
“Why’d you kill em, Martin?”
“David! David! Over here! What’s it like to kill for your art, David? Were you making a statement?”
“Guilty or not guilty? Did you do it? Give our readers a statement!”
I felt myself jostled and shoved from all directions, but somehow we forced through the scrum and piled in, Jill practically in my lap. Kevin zoomed off toward Eighth Avenue, then uptown towards Times Square. The reporters were camped out at our apartment building, so we headed to my folks’ suite at the Marriott Marquis.
Have you ever been to a gallery opening? Imagine the world’s most boring cocktail party. Add art, some of it really strange or really bad. Sprinkle in lots of black clothes, brie, cheap sparkling wine, and name-dropping.
Stir.
What, you thought I’d skip my first-ever New York show? I planned to, actually. I planned to shower off days of pit odor and grime, then sink down into one of those plush hotel beds and let the swirl of surrounding voices lull me into a week’s sleep.
No such luck.
Kevin had to talk to me and to everybody else — one at a time, then all together. “I need it all fresh and right now,” he insisted. “The longer we wait, the more details fade away.”
Mom ordered up trays of sandwiches and pots of coffee while Kevin got me alone in the bedroom, pulling me away from the group hanging out in the sitting room, installing me in a wing chair, then sitting on the bed to face me, laser eyes drilling holes through my head.
“So, David. Is David what you prefer to be called, Mr. Martin?”
I nodded. His cueball head, blinding white shirt, and yellow bowtie wavered in front of me, surreal.
“OK, David, listen to me carefully. We need to set some ground rules. Your dad hired me, but you’re my client, not him. Do you understand that?”
“Yeah, OK, whatever,” I mumbled, not unappreciative, just numb.
“OK, then” he pressed, voice fast and relentless. “Let’s get something out in the open right now.’ I heard a bedspring complain as he leaned forward.
“If you did anything, even a little bit of what they’re accusing you of …”
I started to open my mouth in protest, eyes widening with shock, but he stopped me, placing a finger up to my lips and shaking his head severely. “If you did any of it,” he repeated very quietly, coldly, and intently, “don’t, and I mean not under any circumstances, tell me. Is that clear?”
My head shook itself, not in negation but in simple shock.
“You’ll just make my job harder,” he explained. “I need to be free to tell the Court that you’re innocent, but I won’t knowingly lie. So, don’t tell me. Got it?”
I blinked.
“All right, then. Let’s get to work. You say you talked to the detectives? Damn it. Son of a lawyer too. You should know better.” He picked up a legal pad and whipped a gold pen out of his shirt pocket. “Tell me everything they said and everything you said. Don’t leave a syllable out.”
My head shook again. I think I was trying to clear it. I heard my pulse in my temples, felt my empty, acid stomach twist in violent protest of this entire, ridiculous experience. I wasn’t sleepy anymore.
I was pissed.
“What the fuck!” I rasped, voice breaking as it rose abruptly in pitch.
It was Kevin’s turn to blink.
I let it all come pouring out, all my anger and confusion and hangover pain and lack of sleep — all my offended, outraged, miserable despair. I vomited words out of my mouth and at Kevin.
“I did NOT fucking kill anybody, OK? What the fuck! What the hell is going on around here? What’s with all this murder bullshit? I’m a goddamn artist! I paint shit! I paint people, I don’t kill them!”
My voice expanded to fill the room as I began to stand. I needed to pace, to work off some angry energy. “I was painting sick people because they scared the piss out of me, and because I didn’t understand them, and because that’s what artists do!”
I felt a tear etch down one cheek, but I wasn’t crying. “Anybody who thinks I killed anybody can just fuck off, man. Jesus Christ, what a fucking horror show.”
His smile slowed me down, tempered the steely blade I was trying to thrust through him with my eyes. He’d stood as I stood, matching me move for move. His professionally neutral face melted as he smiled with genuine warmth.
He reached out a hand and laid it on my shoulder. “Excellent,” he murmured. “I haven’t defended an innocent client in a very long time. What a refreshing change of pace.”
You just read chapter 13 of a character-driven mystery set in Greenwich Village during the worst of the HIV Plague Years. David, Jill, Hilda, Richard, and Howie — and Raphael — are walking a path that leads to intense friendship and love, to the creation of gorgeous but wrenching art, and to the unraveling of a series of horrific events that nobody sees, not even as they happen.Because sometimes what you’re looking at isn’t what you see.