An Artful Corpse Read online

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  Copyright © 2021 by Helen A. Harrison

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by The BookDesigners

  Cover images © pashabo/Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Harrison, Helen A. (Helen Amy), author.

  Title: Artful corpse / Helen A.

  Harrison.

  Description: Naperville, IL : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021] | Series: Corpse

  trilogy

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020001062 | (trade paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Benton, Thomas Hart, 1889-1975--Fiction. | GSAFD:

  Biographical fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A78345 A89 2021 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001062

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Art Students League of New York

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To Roy

  Always

  Thomas Hart Benton, Retribution, 1924–25, series: American Historical Epic. Oil on canvas, mounted on aluminum honeycomb panel, 60 x 42 inches.

  The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Bequest of the artist, F75-21/5. Art © T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jamison Miller.

  The Art Students League of New York

  Wednesday, November 1, 1967

  The solitary studio on the top floor was in darkness when the monitor, Christopher Gray, opened the door at 6:45 p.m. A tall, slender young man of twenty-five and a full-time student at the League, Chris was responsible for preparing the room for Raymond Breinin’s seven o’clock life drawing, painting, and composition class. Students would soon be arriving, and he needed to check that everything was in order.

  Only a faint urban glow was visible through the grimy windows, since the sun had gone down more than two hours earlier. Chris switched on the lights and squinted at the sudden glare. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the easels arranged in a rough semicircle around the model stand, on which lay a pile of crumpled fabric—an old banquet tablecloth salvaged from a catering service. Some instructors liked to partially drape the figure in it. Some used it to disguise a chair or stool in a seated pose. But it wasn’t supposed to be left in a heap on the stand.

  “Damn,” Chris muttered, “that should have been folded and stashed in the closet,” silently blaming the monitor from Charles Alston’s afternoon life class for leaving things in disarray. Grumbling under his breath, he stepped onto the low platform and bent down to tidy up the mess. He grasped the cloth and pulled it toward himself, expecting it to come easily, but it was held down by something wrapped inside. He bent over and untangled it, then jumped back in alarm.

  He had uncovered the body of a man, curled up knees to chest, hands tucked under his chin. He might have been asleep, except that he hadn’t moved at all when Chris tugged on the cloth.

  Chris stood still for a moment, stunned. Then he knelt beside the man and looked at his face. He recognized him, in fact had seen him in the cafeteria at lunchtime.

  He reached out his hand and touched the man’s neck, hoping to find a pulse, but there was none.

  One

  Thursday, September 28, 1967

  The Thursday evening life drawing, painting, and composition class, held from seven to ten o’clock, started in the usual way. The monitor, Bill Millstein, whose tuition was forgiven in exchange for housekeeping duties, arrived fifteen minutes beforehand, just as the sun was setting. With the skylights no longer adequate, he turned on the overhead lamps in the ground-floor studio, at the end of the hall that led back from the main lobby. Its atmosphere was heavy with the odor of oil paint and turpentine, so he flipped the switch to activate the ceiling fans, hoping to dissipate some of the art funk. He unlocked the storage closet and took out a long wooden pole, which he leaned against the wall by the model stand. He wiped down the bench easels and checked the uprights to make sure none were broken. He found a rickety one and replaced it with a spare from the closet.

  Just before seven the model arrived and began disrobing behind a privacy screen. Students
started drifting into the large classroom, greeting one another amiably. Those who had paintings in progress took them out of the racks, set them up on their easels, and laid out their palettes. Those who were there for life drawing carried their Morilla No. 36 sketch pads and boxes of Grumbacher charcoal sticks, or removed them from the rented lockers where they stored their supplies. One of them was Timothy Juan Fitzgerald, TJ to his friends, a sophomore at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the newly established training ground for law enforcement officers. At nineteen he stood head-to-head with his five-foot-ten father, whose ginger hair and high Irish coloring he shared, though he had inherited his mother’s eyes, the warm brown of Spanish sherry.

  Two weeks into the fall term, each student had already staked out a favorite location in the large studio. The model held the same pose for a month, so it was necessary to get into position and stay there for the duration. Since the class met only once a week, consistency was especially important. Once you started on a full-figure painting or drawing, you were expected to finish it in detail, complete with hands and feet. No fudging the fingers and toes, not in Edward Laning’s class.

  Among the most popular of the League’s instructors, Laning believed in drilling the fundamentals into his students before encouraging them to experiment. To him, regardless of where one’s training ultimately led, figure drawing from life was the cornerstone of art education.

  After studying at the League in 1927–1930 and teaching there for a year when he finished his coursework, Laning had gone on to a distinguished career. He was a prolific muralist, best known for The History of the Recorded Word—from Moses’s graven tablets to Mergenthaler’s linotype machine—a huge mural cycle that graced the second-floor lobby of the New York Public Library’s flagship building on Fifth Avenue, where it was seen by every visitor to the main reading room. Those who looked up could marvel at Laning’s trompe l’oeil ceiling, lifted straight from the Tiepolo playbook, depicting Prometheus bringing enlightenment to humankind. This impressive achievement was completed in 1942 under the auspices of the WPA Federal Art Project, which supported Laning and many of his contemporaries throughout the Great Depression.

  He returned to the League in 1952 to become a fixture, teaching drawing, painting, anatomy, and mural painting. Although he was personally devoted to Renaissance-inspired naturalism, he was not doctrinaire or dictatorial like those instructors who churned out younger carbon copies of themselves.

  “It’s important to master the basics of pictorial representation,” he would tell his students, “but at the same time you mustn’t neglect the problems of composition, structure, form, and design that must be solved in every picture, regardless of style. Try different mediums and techniques. Go to the museums and galleries, study the antiquities, the old masters, and the moderns firsthand. Take what you need from them, but don’t just repeat it, make it your own.”

  Laning’s flexibility was perfectly suited to the League, which was founded in 1875 by rebels from the National Academy of Design. Too rigid, they complained, too stuffy, and besides the Academy was in debt and cutting back on instruction. So a few of them jumped ship, rented the top floor of a piano warehouse at 103 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Sixteenth Street, hired a model, and opened an independent art school run by the students themselves. Iconoclastic from the start, the school caught on and, rather surprisingly, was supported by some of the bigger names of the day, including William Merritt Chase, who advocated an impressionistic painting style, and Kenyon Cox, a strict traditionalist in the academic mold.

  By the time the twentieth century rolled around, the League occupied studios in the imposing American Fine Arts Society building on West Fifty-Seventh Street. With no overriding aesthetic philosophy, an open admission policy, and a faculty that covered the whole artistic spectrum, it attracted an equally diverse student body, from dabblers and hobbyists to hard-core aspiring professionals and those who, like TJ, were considering a career in art but not fully committed.

  * * *

  Ever since he was eight years old, TJ had been fascinated by art and toyed with the idea of becoming an artist, but he was well aware of the drawbacks and pitfalls. When he first broached it to his father, Deputy Chief Brian F. X. Fitzgerald of the New York City Police Department, and his mother, Detective Inspector Juanita Diaz, they had howled down the suggestion. Not that they pressured him to follow in their footsteps and join the force—they both believed in letting him make up his own mind about that—but they were adamantly against his getting serious about emulating his friend and mentor, the painter Alfonso Ossorio.

  The scion of a Philippine sugar baron, Ossorio met TJ back in 1956, when the boy and his family were on holiday out on eastern Long Island and became involved in a murder investigation. In fact Ossorio had been under suspicion. But after he was cleared and the crime solved, he and the Fitzgerald family became friends. In the following years they made annual visits to the artist’s East Hampton estate, The Creeks, with its collection of outsider art and exotic artifacts from various cultures, as well as Ossorio’s own Surrealistic creations and abstract paintings by his friends.

  Even as his initial astonishment wore off and the artworks became familiar to him, TJ enjoyed discussing them with Ossorio and his life partner, Ted Dragon, a former ballet dancer. Returning from a stroll around the estate’s spacious gardens or a paddle in Georgica Pond, which the house overlooked, Fitz and Nita might find the three of them deep in conversation before an impenetrable canvas by Clyfford Still, a grotesque figure by Jean Dubuffet, or one of Jackson Pollock’s perplexing drip paintings. After a while, what had begun as curiosity evolved into appreciation, understanding, admiration, and, much to his parents’ dismay, a desire on TJ’s part to follow in Ossorio’s footsteps.

  After all, they reminded their son, Ossorio was rich and could afford to paint whatever he wanted all day, every day, without worrying about selling anything. Unlike TJ, who would have to work for a living, which for most artists meant a real job, like teaching or carpentry or working in a gallery or as a museum guard. So after high school, they suggested, if he went to John Jay and decided that law enforcement wasn’t for him, he might go into security at the Met or the Modern, where he could spend the day among the masterpieces he admired while holding down a steady job with benefits.

  TJ actually saw the wisdom in that, but he still longed to try his hand at creative work. “Just to see if I could do it,” he explained. “Maybe I don’t have what it takes anyway.”

  Fitz and Nita thought it over and decided to humor him. “You could go to night school,” they suggested, “but you’ll have to pay for it yourself.”

  His weekend job in Brother’s Candy & Grocery, the convenience store on East Fourteenth Street, around the corner from the family’s Stuyvesant Town apartment, paid only a dollar fifty an hour, but even after he contributed his room and board there was more than enough left over to pay the twenty dollars a month for Edward Laning’s Thursday evening life class.

  Two

  “Hi, there, TJ,” called Bill Millstein, a young man about his age, dressed in faded jeans and a rumpled work shirt. A head of shaggy brown hair framed a square-jawed, friendly face that always wore a pleasant expression, though there was something intense behind the genial façade.

  “Waddaya say, Bill,” replied TJ. He had taken an immediate liking to this character, who’d been attending art classes at the League since he was in grade school. So far all he knew about Bill was that, like TJ, he lived at home with his parents and was passionate about art, but, unlike TJ, Bill was determined to make it his life’s work despite the hardships.

  “Hangin’ in there,” Bill told him. “Still feel like I’ve got a long way to go.”

  “You can’t be a monitor forever,” said TJ. “They’re going to kick you out eventually, then how’ll you be able to afford classes? You’ll have to get a job.”

  “I think I can w
angle a gig with one of the instructors,” Bill said, “especially the sculptors, they’re always looking for assistants to do the dirty work. Everybody knows I’m reliable. Look how nice I keep this studio, and it ain’t easy. You guys are slobs. Crumpled paper all over the floor after every class, broken charcoal sticks, coffee cups, you name it. And the painters are worse.”

  “Better make sure your enrollment is current,” advised TJ. “Don’t want to lose your student deferment. If the League cuts you loose, Uncle Sam will have your ass for sure. Then it’s off to Vietnam, and you won’t have to worry about the future ’cause you probably won’t have one.”

  Bill’s expression suddenly changed from warm to cool. “Don’t say that,” he murmured, and TJ realized he’d made a faux pas.

  “Hey, I was only kidding,” he said hastily, eager to smooth over his gaffe. “I know guys who’ve been there and come back in one piece. Anyway, maybe you won’t make the cut. As long as you’re in school you should be okay.”

  “I’ve been lucky so far,” Bill replied, “but if I get called up I don’t think the draft board will accept the League. It’s not accredited. I applied to Cooper. They have a BFA degree program, and it’s free.”

  Founded in 1859 by the inventor, industrialist, and philanthropist Peter Cooper, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was among the most prestigious institutions for training in art, architecture, and engineering—and one of the hardest to get into. Not like the League, which had no entrance requirements. Full tuition scholarships for all undergraduates made it highly attractive to applicants, but the acceptance rate was less than 10 percent. Bill was facing very stiff competition.

  “Well, good luck with that,” said TJ. “From what I hear about Cooper, you’ll need plenty of it. Me, I’m okay as long as I’m full time at John Jay. I got three more years, and the war will be over by then for sure.”

  Just then the model, wearing only a G-string, emerged from behind the screen and mounted the stand. TJ looked around the studio and saw that his fellow students were settling down.