A Long Line of Dead Men by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

left me underwhelmed. Maybe I've seen too much of that kind of thing. Or maybe he has, because that's the feeling I got, that his source of inspiration wasn't his own childhood memories as much as it was the work of other artists he's been exposed to." She made a face. "But that's New York, isn't it? He's never taken a class or sold a painting, but he knows to bring slides. Who ever heard of a folk artist with slides? I bet you don't get that crap in Appalachia."
    "Don't be so sure."
    "You're probably right. Anyway, I told him I'd keep his name on file. In other words, don't call us. I don't know, maybe he's the long-lost bastard son of Grandma Moses and Howard Finster, and I just blew the chance of a lifetime. But I have to go with my instincts, don't you think?"
    They had served her well over the years. When we met I was a cop with a brand-new gold shield in my pocket and a wife and two sons in Syosset, and she was a young call girl, bright and funny and beautiful. We made each other happy for a few years, and then I drank my way out of my marriage and the police department and we pretty much lost track of each other. She went on doing what she'd been doing, saving her money and investing in real estate, keeping fit at the health club, stretching her mind in night school.
    A couple of years ago circumstances threw us together again, and what we'd had was still there, stronger than ever and richer for the years we'd lived through. At first she went on seeing clients and we both pretended that was okay, but of course it wasn't, and eventually I bit the bullet and said so and she admitted she'd already put herself out of business.
    We kept inching closer and closer to marriage. Last April she'd sold her old place on East Fiftieth and picked out an apartment in the Parc Vendome and we'd moved in together. It was her money that bought the place and I'd refused to let her put my name on the deed.
    I paid the monthly maintenance on the apartment and picked up the checks when we went out to dinner. She covered the household expenses. Eventually we would put all our money together, but we hadn't gotten around to that yet.
    Eventually we would get married, too, and I wasn't sure why it was taking us so long. We kept not quite setting a date. We kept letting it slide.
    Meanwhile, she had opened a gallery. First she'd gone to work at one on Madison Avenue with the intention of learning the business. She had an argument with the woman who ran the place and quit after two months, then got a similar job downtown on Spring Street. She didn't much care for the artwork in either establishment; the photo-realists at the uptown gallery struck her as sterile, while she saw the commercial can-vases at the SoHo gallery as clichead and cloying, a high-ticket equivalent of Holiday Inn seascapes and bullfighters.
    More to the point, she found the business itself unpleasant, the snobbery, the petty jealousies, the relentless courting of investors and corporate collectors. "I thought I quit prostitution," she said one night, "and here I am pimping for a bunch of bad painters. I don't get it." She went in the following morning and gave notice.
    What she wanted, she decided, was a sort of cross between a gallery and a curiosity shop. She'd stock it with things she liked, and she'd try to sell them to people who were looking for something to hang on the wall, or place on the coffee table. She had a good eye, everyone told her that, and she'd taken more courses over the years at Hunter and NYU and the New School than your average art historian, so why shouldn't she take her best shot?
    It turned out to be easy to get started. There were a lot of vacant storefronts in the neighborhood that season, and she checked them all out and charmed the owner of a building on Ninth and Fifty-fifth into giving her a good lease at a reasonable rent. Over the years she'd packed a locker in an Eleventh Avenue warehouse with things she'd bought and tired of; the two of us