Page 15 of Go Now
‘Oh!Oh yes.I’m afraid I can’t do any better than that, though, sorry.Oh – and… a baseball cap. Either gray or very dirty white.He wore it in the old-fashioned way.’
‘What’s that?’
‘As in, with the peak facing forward, not left or right or backwards.’
She paused, taking a step back from her overcrowded shelves.
‘I’m looking in the wrong place, sorry.It’s a big file.’She went over to a large, deep-drawered metal cabinet.‘I kept everything,’ she said, resuming her search.‘It’s in roughly date order, going back to the first one he got back in 2018.I used to write back with a comps slip, saying ‘thank you for your interest’ but it got to be a drag.Nowadays I just file them, in case.’
‘Wait, if you wrote back… does that mean they included an address?’
‘Mostly, yes,’ she said, as she located the folder – a large lever-arch file.‘Though I’ve never checked if the addresses were real.Here – you can file this one at the front for me.’
She passed him the letter that had arrived today: hand-written, as well as hand-delivered. The handwriting was relatively sane in appearance, the content a strange mixture of condolences and hell-fire.Just as Crendell said, the author believed Ashworth would now be burning in Hell, a sadly avoidable outcome, if he’d only been able to leave the second commandment alone.The address was a rented mailbox, right here in NYC.But it was signed with a name.Henk Steensma.
‘Can I hang onto these?’Marcus asked.
‘By all means,’ she said.‘But I want them back.’
‘There’s just one more thing,’ he said, as he stood up.
‘Really?You’re doing that?’
Marcus blinked.‘What’s the problem?’
She smiled.'Isn't it what that TV detective does? He says he's going, the suspect relaxes, then he says "oh, one last thing" to catch them out.'
‘Lieutenant Columbo,’ Marcus said.‘I can assure you I’m not trying to catch you out, Ms.Crendell.I wanted to ask you about the uncompleted work in the studio.It was a wooden sculpture, I think.It’s been quite badly bashed up, and it’s in pieces, but as it’s part of the crime scene, I wonder if you could shed some light on it.’
‘God and Ready,’ she said.‘That was the working title.It was his attempt to display the dichotomy between pagan and Christian religion.The pagans celebrated sexuality, the Christians were horrified by it.’
‘So it was…’
‘It was a sculpture of Christ in a… shall we say, highly excited state.’
‘In a… Oh.I get it.Right.’
‘You’re embarrassed,’ she said, with a faint smile.
Anger flashed through him.She saw him as the dumb cop who didn’t understand art.What the hell did she know?About the things he’d seen.The things that moved him.What right did she have to sneer at him?
‘I believe in free speech, ma’am, and I especially believe that artists should be free to create.Nobody should seek to silence somebody else, with violence or the threat of it. I’ll email you a receipt, and I’ll bid you a good day.’
CHAPTER SIX
Kate was back at the hotel with her laptop, after a fruitful telephone conversation with an assistant at the prestigious Hauptman Gallery, where Ashworth’s last exhibition took place back in June.The Hauptmann was a venerable East Coast institution; from a glance at the website alone, Kate could imagine its cool interiors, its elegant staff in their cocktail dresses and their pearls, the cloying scent of old money and freshly-cut flowers.
But the gallery was far from being stuck in another century.
During the protests that taken place throughout the exhibition’s twelve-day run, they’d captured clear photos, and in some cases, video and audio, of the 14 leading protestors, and even managed to get names and signatures. An intern had posed as a restless, but devout activist, and passed round a petition, to be taken to the Mayor’s office, demanding an immediate end to the exhibition.As it turned out, the protest had been noisy and obstructive, but without violence, although a couple of people had been arrested and later released without charge.
The relevant material had been emailed over to her in a matter of minutes, and Kate was now well stuck into the first task, which was matching names to images, followed by background research into each protestor's current whereabouts and status.Some were very easy to eliminate. For example, after attending Fourth of July celebrations, youth social worker Jordan O'Riordan had crashed his car on the Jersey Turnpike and had been in a coma at New York-Presbyterian ever since. Meanwhile, Miss Ava Grant-Knightly was still rattling around the four-floor Greenwich mansion she'd been born in, 87 years ago, but various factors, such as the wheelchair and the oxygen supply underneath it, made it very unlikely that she'd have murdered anyone.She'd done well enough to make it to the protest.
What Kate really wanted, of course, was someone who ticked every box.A strong, fit adult male with a history of violence and/or psychiatric illness.They were ten a penny out on the street; just go to a bar on the last Friday of the month and your eyes would be stinging from all the testosterone.But the kind of men who got into bar fights, fought about… what?Women, she guessed, and ice hockey, and perceived slights or advances. They didn’t get into fights about religion.She was willing to bet that, in no drinking den in this century, maybe even the one before, no-one had slugged someone else over their interpretation of the second commandment.
She was hunting a paradox.These people on her laptop were protesting because they saw Ashworth's work as an affront to something they held dearly, their Christian faith.But a big part of that same faith was, as Christ himself had put it, turning the other cheek.Christianity's history might, at certain points, have been full of torture and beheadings, burnings at the stake, and the dismemberment of heretics, but that was way back when.Not now.She was beginning to doubt that the killer would be found amongst the protestors.
But then, as soon as she had that thought, he appeared, like a glowering genie from a lamp. A broad saddle of a face, high cheekbones, handsome in a tribal sort of way.Neal Allenby ran a small construction business, just him and three employees, and he had a history of bar-fights, road-rage, and neighbor disputes, with alcohol usually somewhere in the mix. After the last court appearance, a Judge with a conscience – or perhaps with his own demons to conquer - had given Allenby a stark choice.Jail time, or completing a church-run 12 Step programme, from which he'd ultimately emerged, sober and faithful. But Kate could see, just from the way he glared at the camera, that violence had not entirely left his soul.Allenby was an angry man.
