Bad Cops and Dead Models
David and the Lion’s Den, chapter 12
I didn’t find out what the cops wanted until late the next afternoon. People had been coming and going all day in an unending stream of shouted names, clanging bars, and sickly wafts of overripe air. I gradually worked my way towards a corner as far as possible from the stinking toilet. Two or three times, somebody passed in plastic egg crates full of greasy brown bags and warm cardboard drink cartons.
I haven’t mentioned my parents, have I?
Dad’s a lawyer, retired now but a partner in a downtown Kansas City firm back then. Mom’s a chemist — worked for a multinational conglomerate. She started out in a lab, but when I was in middle school, she traded her white coat for tweed business jackets.
I was going to be a lawyer. Then a doctor. Then an engineer. Well, those were my post-eight-year-old contingencies if I couldn’t earn a living rocketing to Mars for NASA. Art was nowhere on the list. As a child, I didn’t even like museums.
Our grassy little commuter haven was an upper-middle-class exurban retreat, a beautiful place to grow up, but isolating in many ways. I remember living on my bicycle when the weather was nice, climbing trees, building snow forts, going to great schools with small classes and dedicated teachers.
Naturally, I was going to college just like all the other kids. I’d enter a profession, get married, have kids, and all the rest. By the time I was 14 or 15 I knew the marriage thing was probably out, but even then my plans didn’t go all radical. I just adjusted them to include a boyfriend instead of a wife. My family was liberal. Dad’s brother was gay, and he brought boyfriends to Thanksgiving and Christmas.
No big deal.
Mom and Dad and I never talked point blank about anything. They didn’t freak out until the summer after my freshman year of college.
“Is this because of some boy?” Dad wanted to know. He sounded miserable. “Dave, look, we all fall in love and get carried away sometimes. Make poor decisions out of romantic dreams. Then we look back and wonder what in the name of hell we’d been thinking.”
“Some boy? Is that all you think of me? Come on! I’m serious about this!”
Mom was ever the peacemaker. “Calm down, Dave. You too, Glen. We can work this out as a family.”
“But, I’m not even seeing anybody! This doesn’t have anything to do with anybody except me. It’s what I want!”
Dad’s voice started to rise. “Well if this is all about you, then think, man! What are you going to do three years from now with an art degree? Who would hire you? Get serious!”
They went apeshit on me the rest of the night trying to talk me into switching my major back to electrical engineering. I stormed off to my room, slammed the door, and pulled out a sketchpad. I slipped downstairs after midnight and found mom in her robe at the kitchen table, flipping through a pad I’d filled up already and left out in the den.
“Some of this is really good, honey,” she admitted with a guilty smile.
“It’s OK. I don’t mind if you look at it.” I was proud of it. I’d left it lying around on purpose.
“I’ve never known you to draw,” she mumbled. “When did this start?”
I thought about all my high school drafting classes and the club posters I designed, but I what I said was, “I guess it was this drafting class at college. I had to buy all this sketching stuff for it. I really got into it.”
“How did you learn this?” she asked, still leafing through my drawings. “This is an amazing likeness. And so stylish.”
I peered over her shoulder and saw one of my first sketches. Her and Dad at a softball game, him wearing a goofy cap, her pretending she was gonna brain him with an aluminum bat.
“I did that from a picture you sent me. Right before Halloween. Remember?”
“You learned this in drafting, honey?”
“I guess. I mean, I was just messing around. But second semester, I took some real art classes, all my humanities electives, um …”
She peered up at me over the tops of her reading glasses, eyes narrow.
“OK, I passed on a couple classes I would have needed for my B.S. But, Mom, look. I really, really love this.” I gestured at the pad and kept going, voice rising in pitch. “I draw and draw and draw. The more I draw, the more I want to. And lot of times, I can’t even make myself stop and go to bed. My teachers say I’m good, like serious good. I’m not playing games. I want this so, so bad. It’s all I ever think about!”
She brought Dad along — got his feathers smoothed down.
“Well,” he harrumphed a few days later, “I suppose you could always end up in advertising or illustrating. It’s not the end of the world. And there’s still law school as a fallback.”
They came to all my college shows, bragged about my talent to their friends. Dad even helped convert part of the garage into a summer studio for me. He never stopped dropping hints about law school, though.
You can probably picture the scene when I announced I was moving to Manhattan. It’s pretty funny, looking back. She assumed I was going to grad school, he figured I had a job as a commercial artist, and both of them had kittens when they figured out that I had no plans other than to paint.
I’ll leave the details to your imagination, but let’s just acknowledge that there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I hadn’t seen them since the previous autumn and had barely spoken to them. I couldn’t afford the interstate calls, and they were giving me the silent treatment, anyway. Mom checked in once in a while to make sure I was alive. That’s how they knew about the gallery opening.
Jill knew they were coming. I hoped she’d think to meet them at the airport. I sat in that filthy jail cell, head between my knees, wedged in between two guys who smelled as bad as I must have, and I admitted something to myself.
My parents had been right. I should have stuck with Calculus.
I managed to snag a bag once and found two slices of white bread and a sliver of dried-at-the-edges baloney. I traded it for a thing of juice — or whatever it was.
“Martin! David Martin!”
What really caught me off guard was how nice she was. My head jerked up off my chest, and I saw her standing by the open door hollering my name — a tall black woman with greying hair, wearing a police uniform.
“That you, Martin?” she asked as I struggled to my feet, heart pounding in anticipation or maybe dread.
She walked me down a long corridor, smiling, behaving like this was just some totally ordinary daily experience, like leading some dude to be interrogated was so normal it wasn’t even worth wasting thoughts.
“Just have a seat, Mr. Martin,” she told me after she unlocked a little room with nothing in it but a card table and three folding chairs. “The detectives will be right with you.”
She could have been the receptionist at my dad’s law firm, except when she left, she locked me in.
They kept me waiting in there for more than an hour. Who knows, exactly? My watch was locked away somewhere in a plastic bag. I supposed they were watching me at least part of the time through the mirror that took up most of one wall.
Where was Howie? I spent a good deal of time pondering that question. The rest I spent building up a head of steam. How dare they throw me in a jail cell for no reason! I was gonna give them a piece of my mind. Yes, sir! I had rights, damn it!
How’d it really go down?
I heard a key turn in the lock and saw the the same two cops who arrested me bust into the room, grim and red-faced. I stood up and spoke first. “What the hell is going on here is …”
They jumped on me like a pair of feral dogs on a three-legged cat. One of them kicked the chair I’d been sitting on — so hard that it hit the wall like it was going splinter into a million pieces. The other one threw the table out of the way and charged me, both of them screaming into my ears.
My head jerked back and forth. My breath tore in and out in ragged gasps.
They were circling me, towering above me, yelling out senseless questions in raspy voices. One of them shoved me, and I slammed into the other guy with the phrase, “sick little murdering freak,” ringing in my ears.
“Frank! Frank, take it easy, bro. Come on, calm down.” The cop I’d slammed into was talking, holding back his partner, pushing me behind his bulky frame, protecting me from a flurry of outraged fists.
I bought it.
I let the good cop get me a cup of coffee after he “forced” his buddy out of the room. I ate a donut, wide eyed and shivering, afraid to lick the powdered sugar off my fingers because of how filthy they were. I answered his questions, too terrified to ask any of my own, too shaken to remember that I should ask for a lawyer.
The questions weren’t making any sense. He kept asking me about my painting, my models. What the fuck? I thought.
“What’s your status, David?”
“Huh? Like single, unknown professional painter with a BFA? Waiter?”
“Don’t play games with me, kid. I’m on your side here. Do you have HIV or not?”
Oh! “Um, not? Why?”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“Hell, I’m positive , man. I mean, I’m sure that I’m negative. What do you care for? You can’t get it from talking to me, you know.”
“Some people are saying that could be a motive.”
“Motive?”
“I thought we agreed to no more games?”
“Motive for what?”
“David, why’d you kill ’em, man? Help me understand so I can help you!”
“Kill who? I don’t get it!”
“Be real with me, kid. Come on.’
“You be real. Who died? Give me a break!”
His eyes rolled back as he sneered at me. “You mean to tell me you never wondered why all your models died?”
How stupid can he be? “They had AIDS!”
“Martin, you really think we’re idiots? Huh? Look! every single one of your models … ” He growled out the rest slowly and deliberately. “Every Single One … died while you were painting them or within two or three days of you stopping. We ain’t dumb, kid. How do you explain that?”
His eyes bored holes in my head as my stomach raced up into my mouth. How could this be? If it’s true, how did I not notice?
“Just tell me what happened, David. Look, if it was some kind of accident, you’ll feel a lot better once you get it off your chest. Tell me all about it and I promise to help you out of this jam.”
His voice turned soft and kind. “Deal?”
You just read chapter 12 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.
