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‘Why? Has Mr Bandini got a lot of aunts?’
‘Too many, and he doesn’t like them. Why don’t you just ring on his doorbell?’
‘I want to surprise him.’ Susie looked up at the second floor of the building. Visible above a neon sign was the window she was convinced must be the artist’s, and there was a light on inside.
‘Not a good idea. The last aunt surprised him, he was very unhappy. Mr Gabriel has a sensitive soul. He is an artist.’
Susie reached into her handbag and pulled out a couple of hundred-dollar notes. ‘Will this help make his soul less sensitive?’
Chung hesitated, then took the money. ‘Maybe – but I didn’t let you in.’
*
There was heavy metal music coming from inside the apartment, a roar of white noise that seemed to shake the walls. Susie knocked on the door, banging the brass knocker as hard as she could.
‘Go away, Chung!’ came the shout from inside.
She knocked again. This time Gabriel Bandini answered the door, barefoot, dressed in what appeared to be his painting clothes: an old T-shirt and jeans covered in smears of oil paint.
Shocked, he stepped back. ‘Jesus! What are you doing here?’
Susie pushed past him into the apartment. It was like walking into a wall of sound.
In the centre of the room a new canvas was half blocked out – the sketch of the outside of an apartment building and the figure of a woman framed in a window, apparent in ghostly outline. It had the unmistakable look of a Hopper composition. Opposite, propped up on another easel, was a painting of Gabriel’s own work that looked as if it had only recently been completed. Unable to think or hear, Susie walked over to the CD player. While she was there she noticed Gabriel’s mobile phone sitting by the machine. With her back to him, she slipped the phone into her pocket, then clicked the CD player off. Immediately the apartment was plunged into silence, except for the whirling of a fan and the chatter of Korean floating in from the open window.
Susie swung back to the artist. ‘So you know who I am?’
‘Of course I do. But I’m figuring this isn’t a professional call, right, Ms Thomas – or can I call you Susie? I suppose that witch La
tisha Johnson gave you my address?’ he asked. He returned to his palette and began wiping his paintbrushes clean.
‘I’m guess those are vintage sable, right?’ Susie pointed to the paintbrushes, then walked over to the canvas with the blocked-out Hopper composition. ‘You’re really good, but Felix probably told you that already. Same flat planes, same taut sensibility, even the atmosphere. And your research is almost impeccable. Almost.’ She picked one of the brushes out of a jar of murky turpentine. ‘See, brushes moult, they shed fine hair and sometimes that hair gets stuck in a thicker brushstroke, a slightly heavier layer of paint, and they can stay there for years, decades even. Which is fine if they match the kind of brush and hair the so-called author of the painting used. The trouble starts when maybe one day you run out of the right kind of brushes, and there’s this tiny area that needs correcting and you think no one’s going to notice or ever know, and you pick up a nylon brush… ’
Startled, Gabriel began searching for his mobile phone.
‘Looking for this?’ She held up his phone, then threw it out of the open window.
Gabriel watched in horror, then sank heavily down at the kitchen table. ‘What do you want?’ he asked, fishing out a package of cigarettes from his jacket.
‘I want to know all that you knew about Felix and Maxine, the last weeks of her life.’
He lit up a cigarette. ‘You won’t like what I have to say. Especially if you’re in love with him.’
‘I’m not in love with him. But you are.’
‘Then why don’t you let him go? You know he belongs to me. He always has; he just doesn’t know it – not consciously anyway.’
Sighing, Susie sat down opposite him. ‘Listen, I don’t give a fuck about your relationship with him. All I want to know is whether he was behind Maxine Doubleday’s death.’
‘Who was Maxine to you?’
‘My girlfriend. We lived together for five years before she came to New York.’
Gabriel got up and began pacing the room. Now she could see how thin the artist was, wired with nervous tension, manic in his movements.
‘I’ve watched her on YouTube, you know. You were lucky, just as Felix is lucky – only neither of you know it. You just throw people away, like old books you’ve grown tired of.’
‘I never threw Maxine away. She left me.’
