Minotaure

Jenean McBrearty

“Are you familiar with the Minotaure?” Epstein-the-bookseller said to the man in the dusk-colored linen suit who had been sifting through the stacks in the rear of the store. Epstein looked like Toulouse-Lautrec – short, bearded and bespectacled.

His question was a way to separate the connoisseur from the dilettante or, more likely, identify a genuine customer. Detective John Hall did look more like a cop than one of the 1930’s cult freaks who idled in the gay enclave of the Hillcrest cafes discussing Dada and decadence.

Hall clasped his hands together, closed his eyes, and held his fingertips to his lips. “Tell me you have an issue of the magazine,” he said, then followed the bookseller to his office. “For all their adulation of Feud and de Sade, Hitler must have scared the hell out of a bunch of young Jewish artists fascinated with unrestrained freedom and dismemberment. Wonder how they felt when their dreams became reality at Auschwitz.” Epstein stopped so abruptly Hall almost fell on him. “Dali did a cover for the magazine, as I remember,” Hall continued as Epstein eyeballed him. “The picture of a robotic looking woman with a lobster coming out of her belly.”

“Then you do know it.” Epstein took a right turn into his office went to a file cabinet, one of three against the wall opposite his desk, and brought Hall a file folder.

“Dali painted like a surrealist but never claimed the label.” He handed Hall an original cover protected by a heavy plastic wrapper, and an approving smile. “They were condemed by feminists, of course. All that bru-ha-ha over representations of women as body parts. Bullshit, I say.”

Hall nodded in agreement as he perused the cover, a picture of a mannequin-like figure with the head of a bull and an open drawer for a mouth. “1930’s art’s a hobby I acquired in college,” he said softly. It was a half-truth. He’d become fascinated with broken bodies by viewing crime scene photos. Each unique, yet a conglomeration of geometric shapes—like the shapes art teachers tell beginning students to imagine. Dr. Phelps said his obsessive interest in the visual was a coping mechinism—a coping mechanism that nurtured a curiosity about surrealistic art that mirrored Phelps’s own. That curiosity led him to the World War I veterans who became artists after they’d seen the toll of bombs took on the human body, and reflected the trauma in their work. Modern art – a term for exploding reality into fragments. Once strong, confident men humbled by machine guns and gas, pitting their art against the weaponry used by the Hun—then Hitler came to power and outrage morphed into terror. The Kaiser fought to preserve the past; Hitler to build a contra-future. Erection through annihilation. Hall closed the folder and handed it back to Epstein. “You’ve got an interesting collection.”

“ must,” Epstein said. He returned the file to the cabinet. “You’re the second person this morning who’s inquired about it since the article in the paper.” Hall wasn’t surprized. The spread in the Tribune was written to lure history aficionados and their money back to the inner city. Nothing sells like sex and violence. “Only—the other customer was more interested in this.” Epstein opened a locked cabinet and produced a first edition of Black Dahlia Avenger. “Do you think Steve Hodel is right about his father being the killer of the Black Dahlia?” It was another test.

“Hodel was part of the arty inner circle in the Hollywood of ‘47. He was a doctor—friends with Man Ray—knew Marcel Duchamp. There was a connection. But I guess if you can’t confess to a notorious crime yourself, the next best way to gain noteriety is to claim a relative committed a notorious crime,” Hall said as he took his checkbook out of the inner coat pocket.

“ is a very interesting magazine, isn’t it?” Epstein said.

“ is a remake of Dreams That Money Can Buy for sale,” Hall said. It was his turn to test Epstein. “Can you contact your other customer and have him call me?”

“I’m not interested in the toys. I’ll call him. You have a lot in common.”

* * *

Hall talked to Alphonse Silva—a.k.a. Alphonse el Greco—and made an appointment to meet him at the Starbuck’s in El Cajon. He’d be out of jurisdiction, but he didn’t care. Even if the lead didn’t yield a suspect in the Balboa Park murder, it’d give him access to San Diego’s art underground. A detective is only as good as his informants. It was possible Greco re-enacted the murder of Elizabeth Short—the wanna-be starlet who became the Black Dahlia —in the Park’s Spanish Village. What was he doing in the park alone at six AM? If he didn’t do it, it was possible he knew who did. Like LA’s European ex-patriots who knew whether Hodel really did molest his daughter and whether he really did kill Short.

“Why’s he called el Greco?” Ron Smith said. Hall’s partner was leaning over his shoulder as he studied Alphonse’s Facebook profile, and breathing garlic onto the computer screen. “What’s a Neo-Surrealist? Some weird cult?”

“An exploding phenomenon—a throwback to an art movement that’s almost a hundred years old,” Hall said, “and el Greco means the Greek.”

“Like Jimmy the Greek, the Vegas bookie?”

“Just like that.” Hall waved Smith away and handed him a breath mint.

“ doesn’t look Greek to me. Too light-skinned.”

“ don’t look Italian and all you eat is Italian food.” Now he knew how Dr. Phelps must have felt during their first counseling sessions. Impatient with ignorane. “He’s called el Greco because he looks like he just stepped out of a Domenikos Theotokopoulos painting – elongated features, tall and thin.”

“With a name like Dominoes Theo-popp, I know why he got his nick-name.”

“ our Greek looks more like an alien geek, if you ask me.”

“Our Greek got an art degree from U.C.L.A. That’s interesting.”

“Why? The punk’s a trust fund baby. So what?” Smith finished off his manicotti and popped the mint into his mouth. “It means he’d be familiar with LA lore.” Hall said.

“ in I got L-Aed?”

Hall pushed his chair away from his desk far enough so he could snap his prosthetic hip straight and stand up. It’d been his decision to amputate the knee along with the lower leg after his squad car ran afoul of the guardrail on I-5, but he regretted it every time he had to lock and unlock his “walking device” as he preferred to call it.

After three years of therapy, Phelps got him to admit it wasn’t the decision he regretted, but losing the leg, period. “As in nobody in CSI has mentioned the similaries between the LA and San Diego murders because they aren’t familiar with LA lore, Ronnie”

“Not everybody’s into art lore like you, Johnnie. You all look and talk alike. Fuckin’ clones.”

“ all? Who are we all?”

“ all you middle-aged Goths. The rest of us guys aren’t old enough to be interested in lore or art, LA or otherwise,” Smith said rolling out his tongue and breathing air over what was left of the mint. “We’re still thinkin’ about sex. You’re still thinkin’ about that Dahlia chick, right?”

“Our vic’s a guy but that doesn’t explain the coincidences — body severed at the waist, arms arced at the shoulder, amputated right breast, the gashed in the thigh and groin area, the cuts from the corners of the mouth to the cheekbone same as the Dahlia —here, look.”

Smith turned away from the crime scene photos Hall had tacked to the bulletin board. “I’ve seen ‘em. Maybe the CSI folks were too busy gatherin’ up the parts to notice the whole,” he said, “but, if you wanna talk to this el Geek-o punk, we’ll talk.”

The proximity of the crime scene to the gay enclave led investigators to think the vic and the perp were gay, but Hall knew better than to work on easy assumptions. Maybe the LA CSI folks were shocked at what they saw in that field in ’47, as shocked as SDPD CSI was busy – whatever. They were all trained professionals who failed to see patterns. Connections. Relationships. “I’d rather go alone,” Hall said.

Smith wiped a feigned tear from his eye. “What, I’m not good enough for you to take me out in public? I thought we had a thing…”

Sergeant Bales rolled his eyes. The two plain-clothes detectives hadn’t noticed the blue-uniformed man. “They’ve ID’d the vic, if you sisters are interested. William Long,” he said tossing the coroner’s report on Hall’s desk before retreating down the hall.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Hall said, snatching up the report. “It’s opposites. Yin-yang. Short – Long. Real-ideal. Real-surreal.”

“’s that mean, surreal?” Smith said

“Well, you got real and fake. Then there’s conscious reality and its opposites—subconscious reality, dream reality, hidden reality,” Hall said, paying more attention to the cheese Smith dripped on his desk than to what he was saying. “You’ll see what it means when you meet Alphonse,” he said as he wiped his desk with a Kleenex. “I’ll introduce you as Jack ‘cause you don’t know jack shit about us old guys. We still fuck…and we can carry on a conversation, jackass.”

“ don’t wann’a be Jack. It sounds too much like Ron. I want a pretty name like Alphonse el Greco…” Maybe it was okay that Ron wanted to go to Hillcrest.

“Okay. You can be Jacopo Tintoretto.” Hall said.

“Gorgeous. Was Tintoretto a surrealist?”

“ no, but he’s famous.”

* * *

“This is my partner, Jack…Tintoretto,” Hall told Alphonse as they sat at an outside table. El Cajon was heating up. It’d be close to ninety degrees by ten o’clock.

Alphonse was wearing mascara and lip-gloss. A make-up melt-down seemed inevitable. “He knows nothing about art but has a large checkbook.”

The still standing now-Jack adjusted his balls and smiled at Alphonse.

“What’ll you have, Pal, I’m buyin’”

Alphonse smiled at Hall, a quick, perfunctory smile that said he was being nice to older folks, but gave Smith the once over. “Caramel latte, two per cent, no whip.”

“ whip. Right. I’m on it. The usual for you, Darlin’?” Jack leaned over close to Hall. The mint hadn’t worked and he gave him a square-on shot of garlic breath.

Hall nodded and said, “sure” and Jack went inside. “He’s a good guy. A little rough around the edges, but we all have rough edges,” Hall said.

“ appendages.” Alphonse looked 16th century alright. Pale, goat-teed, with a long face crowned by mounds of black hair. Dressed in black pants tucked inside black leather riding boots, and a white stocking shirt. He looked older than twenty-five and could pass for Count Orgaz himself. “I notice you limp,” Alphonse continued. “A friend of mine lost a foot to diabetic gangrene and walks like you. Fake foot?”

Alphonse put a non-filtered cigarette in a holder and lit up despite the no smoking sign on the table. “You don’t mind, do you?” he said as he settled back in his chair. Even if he said yes, he did mind, Alphonse would ignore him.

“’s your body,” Hall said. “And it’s my entire lower leg that’s fake.”

“Too bad. But it must make for an interesting sex life. Epstein didn’t sell you the Monitaure cover did he? He told me he wasn’t going to part with it.”

“Damn. Didn’t think of that. Did he show you the Picasso ad?” Now that he was close to him, Hall knew Alphonse wasn’t strong enough to overpower the six-foot two William Long. Two drags on his cigarette, and Alphonse was coughing. If he was an accomplice, he was probably a consultant. He couldn’t get close to dirt, much less blood. “Your partner is a crude proletarian. Do you mind if I have sex with him?” Alphonse said.

Hall made a mental note to warn Jack his wife was right. He was too convincing to work undercover. “No objection, if you can persuade him.”

“ is he as a lover?” Alphonse said. Jack was walking towards them, balancing three coffees in a cardboard tray in one hand, and three scones and a wad of napkins in the other.

“He’s a pain in the ass, but I like him,” Hall said and went to help. “Watch your backside,” he whispered to the man confounded by waiting. Jack grunted an okay.

“ long have you been a fan of art between the wars?” Hall said. Alphonse was staring at Jack who did look like a working class hero–thick hands and neck and a square jaw–a poster boy for the peoples’ revolution of 1917.

Alphonse removed the cigarette from the holder and squashed it on the cement with the toe of his boot. “Since I found out my Russian great-parents were Jews and communists. Real communists. The politics of the time—that’s what the art revolution was about—Dada, Surrealism, Magical Realism. The avant-garde preached anarchy, but they wanted the masses to free themselves from their chains, not reap the benefits of freedom. An agenda like that was bound to piss people off.”

Hall caught Jack staring at him with grinning that’s-what-you-sound-like-after-four-beers eyes. “Everybody decried the contradictions of individualism and ignored the contradictions of equality,” Hall said, and pulled a DVD case from his jacket pocket.

“Exactly. Can any artist stand out when seven billion people can write, film, photograph and u-tube?” Alphonse said. “The real revolution of the 1920’s was technical—even ordinary people could afford a camera by then. And who needs painters to capture impressions of the world when Nikon captures the real thing?”

Alphonse looked past Hall and into the eternal air. “Only individual artistic vision can save us from egalitarian mediocrity.”

Jack looked up from his coffee into Alphonse’s half-closed blue eyes. “Yeah, democracy shouldn’t be wasted on those with no talent,” he said.

“Your ignorance is profound,” Alphonse said. “How much do you want for the film, Mr. Hall —you say it’s a remake?”

“UCSB grad students decided to update the film’s vignettes. The Girl With the Prefabricated Heart is a Japanese robot instead of a mannequin. That sort of thing. Twenty-five and it’s yours.”

Alphonse winced. “Anybody famous connected with it?”

“Scorsese saw it. Gave Sylvia Manning a bit part in Gangsterland. He thought the guy who shot the Narcissus bit shows promise—a new president practices his inauguration speech in front of a mirror.”

“This I gott’a see.” Alphonse handed Hall two tens and a five.

“ haven’t finished our coffee,” Jack complained as Hall shoved the money at him.

Alphonse gave Jack a doleful glance that Hall understood immediately. He wished he’d told Jack that the protocol for 1930’s artists was to spend hours at cafes doing nothing but talking about having nothing to do, and gossiping about other indolent artists. “Shall we play Exquisite Corpse?”

“Sure,” Jack said enthusiastically. “How does this work again?” Hall gave a napkin to each of them and took one for himself. Alphonse took a pen from his shoulder bag, and Jack one from his breast pocket.

“Usually we only have one piece of paper we fold into thirds, but this time we’ll each have our own piece. Alphonse, which do you want for round one? Head, torso, or limbs?”

Alphonse hesitated. “Head, I think.”

“Jack, you take the torso and draw whatever you want as the middle of the body and I’ll draw the bottom.”

“I’m no artist,” Jack said, but began to draw. “Then what?”

“When we’re done, we’ll put the drawings together, and create accidental art. It was a parlor game the surrealists played. They were too highbrow for poker and too dumb for bid whist,” Alphonse said. Hall thought Jack had blown it, but Alphonse seemed to like him, and was eager to meet again, reminding Jack that he must come too and meet his friends at the Rue D’Alene coffeehouse. The game provided Hall an entire body drawn by Alphonse, and as soon as they got back to the station, he packed all their efforts, face up, in a large plastic bag.

“Were all the surrealists like Alphonse—creepy smart ghouls?” Tintoretto-now-Smith-again said. He’d set the plastic bag in front of him and was staring at the drawings inside.

“Pretty much. Thirties people took themselves and their art very seriously ‘til they had to pay bills. After the First World War, they lost their patrons, and had to earn their keep. Most came to America and got teaching jobs or worked in New York. That was another contradiction in their politics – for people who swore they hated crass commercialism, they sure liked the money the movie industry gave them. Dali designed the sets for Hitchcock’s Spellbound, you know.” He sounded as pretentious as Alphonse even to himself. Smith had probably never seen Spellbound.

“ , I didn’t know.” Smith examined Alphonse’s body. “Are these drawings important?”

Hall was scanning his cell phone for a phone number. “I’ll know that after I’ve talked to Dr. Phelps.” He punched in numbers and waited. “This is John Hall—I need a consult for a case, Joanie… …Yeah, tomorrow morning…You don’t mind, Ronnie?” Smith nodded a no. “Okay. Thanks, Joanie.”

* * *

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Minotaur myth is not just about the labyrinth as metaphor for the intricacies of the mind,” Dr. Phelps said. Phelps told stories and back stories, and knew how unrelated things were related—different from the other forensic experts on the department payroll. Hall never felt “sick” during his therapy, just in need of better education. “People forget that at the heart of the myth is Poseidon making Minos’ wife overcome a universal taboo and screw the bull—the Minotaur is a product of the ultimate degradation of the female—bestiality. And what happened to the bull and after the Minotaur was born? We don’t know, but if PETA and NOW had been around then, would it be okay to marry your German shepherd now? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“Why were the surrealists so enamored of the myth? Was it all that what lurked beneath the surface thing?” Hall said.

“Yeah, and they loved Freud and his mysterious subconscious. Loved him for the same reason we all love Freud even though we think he’s full of shit now. He was all about sex. Who doesn’t like sex? The deeper and darker the better. It doesn’t get much deeper and darker than the result of a woman mating with an animal. You ever see a woman in Tijuana screw the donkey? Positively fascinating. Can make a man with the biggest dick feel insecure. I thought the gal was gonn’a choke.” Phelps was at his bookcase, searching the shelves.

“Women can’t get pregnant by animals can they?” Hall said. “Sure. Where do you think politicians come from?” A blast of Phelps laughter followed. No one enjoyed his quips as much as he did. “I’m kidding, John. There’s a biological barrier that precludes cross-species fertilization. Mother nature doesn’t mind a monster now and then—one Jeffrey Dahmer is alright—but get one too many and the world goes to hell in a hand basket. Hitler, Stalin, Elvis Presley. Talk about Mother Nature gone awry.” He handed Hall Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. “Freud said we have to subdue the life force so we don’t kill each other off. Too much sex and too much death and there’d be no progress. It used to be a struggle to make civilization, but now most of us never have any fun.” Phelps grabbed a handful of gummy worms and sat at his desk. “We spend the first half of our lives squishing our desires into a social cube and the second half trying to find our inner spunk.” He held a gummy up to the light and wriggled it like live bait about to be hooked. “The surrealists were also crazy about the idea of sexual relations between man and machines disguised as women—or other men. Let’s face it, fucking feels good. Every man dreams of being a sex machine. But become a machine and you stop feeling.” Phelps slowly rubbed his chin with his fingers. “Good experts must be expert fuckers.”

Hall chose a random page and began reading while Phelps examined the bag of napkin drawings . “You’ve got some great combinations here,” Phelps said, “but I think this is the most artistic—Alphonse’s head and torso, but Smith’s lower limbs.”

Hall shrugged. Thinking of Smith as being more artistic than he was made his head hurt. Maybe Phelps was looking at the pictures with doctor eyes and not artist eyes. “So you think the killer will choose that combination?” he said.

“Let’s see if I’m right about the accidental art,” Phelps said. He made a copy of his choices and scanned them into the computer. “I developed this software – I call it Ariadne’s Yarn. It started out as an experiment and ended up my personal thread into the labyrinth, you might say.” He held the disc in his fingertips, inspecting the plastic carefully. “And I’m Theseus,” he said as he slipped a disc into Drive. Hall watched the monitor with him. “It reads my patients’ drawings as geometric images and patterns and matches them with an art database to see what picture is closest to them. It helps me link the patient’s inner self to an artistic vision. It sounds esoteric but it helps me understand where they’re living in here.” Phelps pointed to his head. “And in here.” He pointed to his heart. “And in here.” Phelps pointed to his chest. “All men are artists in their own way.”

In seconds a picture appeared on the screen. Hall recognized Dali’s 1936 black and white City of the Drawers – a recumbent nude woman’s head hanging down, obscuring the face, draped over her torso which was a series of open drawers, her nipples the drawer knobs, and the bottom, a drawer with a key hole over her groin area. One muscular arm was at her side bracing her torso, and the other outstretched, her long legs crossed left over right. “And if we use only my body drawings?” Hall said, curious about what he’d accidentally produced.

Phelps made another copy and scanned it into the computer. “I’ll be damned,” he said, “Will you look at this.”

Hall read the small print at the bottom of the computer. Maxfield Parrish Prometheus. “The colors are beautiful,” he said. A bronze god, draped in a long, narrow piece of golden cloth seemed to be descending from heaven, the tip of one foot touching a mountaintop. In his right hand he held a brass scepter topped with a large white luminescent globe. Prometheus’ right leg was bent behind him to give the appearance of walking, but looking straight at the picture, all the viewer saw was the thigh—the lower leg missing. The self-portrait made him uneasy. Impersonal, involuntary self-disclosure. “What is Edison-Mazda on the banner behind him?”

“ lamp company. Parrish supplemented his income with advertising art. It ain’t exactly Paris Hilton hustling hamburgers, is it?” Phelps said, then again slipped into pensive silence. “How old’s your suspect?”

“Twenty-five. In the 30’s he’d have been considered an adult. Funny.”

Phelps nodded. “He’ll grow out of his romance with surrealism eventually. The movement didn’t survive once its gurus were gone. Even nihilism couldn’t survive Hitler’s armies. That’s the trouble with peace and progress. It sidles up to history and the next thing you know there’re cures for the despair it wreaks. Hope, beauty, faith, friendship, a new car, a favorite song sung by someone who cares. After a while, people have to work hard at sustaining misery. Most give up the ghost and adjust to mundane reality—even guys like Alphonse. Does he have copies of all of the drawings?”

“Yeah, he put them on his cell phone.”

* * *

Balboa Park gets crowded early on Sunday mornings, especially around the House of Hospitality Restaurant across from the Art Gallery. But this Sunday, the bridge leading into the prado area was closed, as were the entrances at Pepper Grove, Roosefelt Junior High School, and the Zoo. A nude body was found sitting in front of the carved gallery doors, leaning against them, propped up by one arm, the other outstretched as though begging for alms, head slumped forward on the chest, face invisible.

“CSI done here?” Hall asked as he side-stepped the blood pooled in the shallow cement pockets in front of the door.

“Yep. Even think they have the murder weapon,” Smith said as he knelt by the body. “Poor bastard. Look at his tits.” Over each nipple a drawer knob had been meticulously sewn, and a key-hole shaped piece of flesh removed from the groin. “I hope the bastard was dead before our Martha Stewart wanna-be got to him.” The body was unmistakably an exquisite corpse. “Who could have done this to another human being?” Hall marveled at his ignorance. Gestapo. Janjawed. Saddam Hussein. Torquemada. Vlad the Impaler. Caligula. He lifted the body’s head and gazed at the face. “The question is how, did Dr. Phelps get here in this condition?”

“You serious?” Smith grabbed the body’s hair and looked for himself. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he said, letting the head drop and pulling away. “It is him. Did Alphonse have any connection to him?”

“Because they were both artists, you mean?” Hall said. He made a quick visual sweep of the porch and steps. Maybe CSI missed something—anything that would tell them who and how—but the area was almost sterile.

“ mean in any way. Was Phelps a member of the Hillcrest crowd, you think?”

“Phelps wasn’t Alphonse’s type. Too refined. But he could have been William Long’s type, maybe,” Hall adjusted his walking device and crouched on one knee.

“’re missing something.”

“Clues. Suspects. Leads. Facts. No biggie.” Smith was making notations on his PAD.

Hall steadied himself, his hand pressing against the wooden doors, his fingers feeling the grooves and bumps of the Renaissance carving so painstaking recreated when the Art Gallery had its face–lift. “Add motive to your list. This might be suicide,” he said.

“Bullshit,” Smith said without hesitation.

“ bullshit. Phelps might have killed himself. Look at those sutures. No amateur did that stitching and no amateur carved up Long’s body.”

Smith brought his face within inches of the knobs. The black thread was laced with precision, each stitch no more than an eighth of an inch apart and no more than an eighth of an inch long. “If it wasn’t gruesome, it’d be as beautiful as my grandmother’s embroidery.”

* * *

The Rue D’Alene was a half a block from the Turn About Club, where female impersonators entertained straight men and women and made extra cash from drug deals and blowjobs in the bathroom. The Café building itself was set back off the sidewalk with outdoor seating on the patio that was shaded by a net awning. Nothing kept San Diegans from enjoying the sun they paid so dearly for in housing prices, Hall though as he and Smith waded through groups of artists who posed for the tourists, and admired each other’s period costumes and straight guys who looked like Smith.

Alphonse was holding chairs for them, and stood and waved as they neared—so the crowd could see him with Smith. “Jack, over here,” he called to them, then turned to the waiter who was wearing a blue smock and a dark green beret and giving Smith the once over. “I’ll have iced mint tea, but bring my friends coffee.”

“ right. Alphonse didn’t do it,” Smith whispered as they walked passed a group of guys in tight tee shirts and short-shorts. They overheard the name Phelps a dozen times before they reached the almost unrecognizable Alphonse. He’d shaved his facial hair and gotten a haircut. The make-up was gone.

“Sounds like the art community’s abuzz,” Hall said as they sat down. “A body begging at the doors of an establishment art gallery—how symbolic.”

“ swear these people don’t know art from arthritis, “ Alphonse said when the waiter had left their drinks. “They’re all posers and I’m bored with them.”

“’m no artist myself,” Smith said. He and Alphonse were wearing khaki Dockers and madras shirts. Life imitating art imitating life.

“ at least you don’t pretend to be. That’s respectable,” Alphonse said. “Now that we’ve seen, let’s go where we can talk without yelling.” He led them to a small patio at the rear of the café where three bistro tables and six chairs lined the walkway around a white marble birdbath. “The owner lets me sketch here. The others talk a good line but it’s all for show, you know. I need quiet when I work. That scares me.”

“ all get old, if we’re lucky,” Smith said.

Alphonse shot him a look of approval, and unfolded a newspaper, revealing a picture of Smith standing by the Chief at a microphone. City Vows To Catch Phelps Killer, the headline read. “Respectable Pill Hill shrink dead? The SDPD’ll be right on it. Phelps wasn’t very old, was he?” Alphonse said as Smith, his face reddening, refolded the newspaper. “I wouldn’t have told me I was a detective either. It was stupid to think I wouldn’t be investigated after finding that body—or that you wouldn’t want to talk to me after another one turned up.” He turned to Hall. “You really are into art though, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Me and Phelps.” Hall patted his thigh. “I was a patient.”

“ didn’t kill anybody.” Alphonse said soberly.

“We know that,” Hall said “We—I think Phelps committed suicide after commiting the Long murder. What do you think?”

“ don’t know what I think. But the film you sold me was worth money.”

“’ve read all I can get my hands on about the Black Dahlia case. You probably did too after you found Long’s body—you saw the similarities immediately,” Hall said.

“ did every gay neo-artist in Hillcrest. The Black Dahlia is a cult icon. More glamorous and famous in death than in life. A drama drag queen’s dream.” Alphonse got that I’m searching-my-memory look on his face.

“Tell me about the Minotaure magazine—and the Picasso ad,” Hall said, “I first saw it when I was in college. Art students fall in love with movements the way interns fall in love with diseases. The ad is Picasso’s rendering of the Minotaur –showing the bulls head of course, but as a muscular man with ample sex organs—full frontal male nudity, not something everyone enjoyed back then.”

Alphonse stopped. Smith was looking at him, intensely interested. “Anyway,” he continued, “Picasso was having an exhibition in New York—and across from the ad was a poem by Charles Ford that went: The sinister is saved by a sense of humor, but love is lost. I remember thinking how tragically true that is. Laughter maintains evil, but destroys love. I remember I felt—well—sad when I read it.”

Smith nodded in agreement. “Guys hate being laughed at more than anything. That’s why florists do a booming’ business and I threw away my poetry in Middle School.” Hall bit his lip so he wouldn’t laugh.

“Then I felt guilty for feeling glad that love could be left standing alone on a stage, ridiculed into oblivion. That’s what made me a surrealist—I felt sorry for evil.”

Alphonse took a long drink of his tea. “’s unnerving to think Faye Ray could have stopped King Kong with a giggle, and Picasso’s work could degenerate into a porno Sendak creature,” he said after wiping his lips with a starched white napkin. “It was the same sad feeling I got when I read a book review of Black Dahlia Avenger .”

“The story isn’t exactly a back-slapping rib-tickler.” Hall said. “Neither was a review. I’ll never forget it because it speculated that Hodel’s motive for writing it was his frustration that he and his pals never got the recognition he thought they deserved.”

“Were they laughed at?” Smith said.

“More like ignored when other fads replaced them. Frivolous America.

Hollywood wasn’t the place for idealistic politics or serious art movements.”

“So, Hollywood made you sad too?” Hall said. “You left LA.”

“ left LA because I didn’t want to tell my parents I’m gay. Like they didn’t know.” Phelps said Alphonse would grow up. “I’ll never forget how the review ended: when accidental art replaces the genius of intentional art, we have nothing to distinguish ourselves. Man is the only canvass that can do justice to our muses. Signed—Theseus.”

* * *

“Sounds like that Theseus guy was excusing Hodel for using the Black Dahlia as a canvass. You think Phelps could have thought of William Long as his personal canvass?” Smith said as he and Hall walked into station. Joanie was waiting for them, sitting in the hallway outside the office area, sipping coffee, sans a white lab coat over her polyester pantsuit. “I’ll write up the Greco interview,” Smith said, and left them to say what people say after a tragedy.

Did she see Phelps’ meltdown coming? Not that it mattered. How does a nurse tell a shrink he needs to see one?

“ probably shouldn’t have done this, but I know you and Dr. Phelps were friends. Fifteen years is a long time,” she said. Her eyes said she was maternal, the kind of person Phelps needed to handle a calendar of crazies. Hall ushered her into one of the lawyers’ conference rooms. “This is for you,” she said. She took a thick file folder labeled JOHN HALL from a large zebra-striped handbag, and put it on the table.

“Thanks, but you have to return this immediately, Joanie. The department will ask a lot of questions if my file isn’t with the rest of the PD’s patients.”

“It’s only a copy—but a complete copy,” Joanie said. She stood up and patted his shoulder. “Ariadne’s Yarn software’s in there. Doctor Phelps couldn’t bear the thought of..it..being advertised like a Sham-Wow.”

. Myths were somebody’s religion, once.

“There’s nothing worse than a maze of unanswered questions, unless it’s carrying around a bunch of guilt. Neither of us saw this coming, John. I don’t believe any one can ever really know what’s inside people. I’ll see you at the funeral.” Hall watched her walk slowly away, each footstep repeating the word why.

Hall looked at each page of the notes and reports referencing his accident, his depression, his medications—three years of his life reduced to black and white sentences. He’d keep the file, he decided, and leave instructions that, when his time came, his death certificate be added to it. Then it really would be complete. At the back of the file was a manila envelope containing Ariadne’s Yarn and a strange drawing he’d forgotten he’d made. Shrinks often have new patients draw self-portraits as a clue about how the patient feels about himself. At the time, he’d assumed it was just a gimmick used to distract the patient while the doctor observed him. Now he knew detectives and shrinks searched for the same thing: motive. What drives a person to such self-hate? Losing a leg. Being laughed at. Desire for something unobtainable.

He’d taken all of three minutes to outline the disconnected circles and cylinders that were as inanimate and broken as he was, and didn’t know Phelps had saved it.

He didn’t know Phelps’ love affair with machines had been such a long one either. Attached to his crude drawing was a print out of Hans Bellmer’s The Doll—a collapsed mannequin with one stumpy half-leg and a big joint at the hip, a broken torso with a broken rattan-seated chair, a disconnected head resting on a chair leg and a human hand, palm up, off to the side. Surrealism at its best.

And behind the picture of the distorted, pitiful doll, was the copy of Parrish’s Prometheus. Glorious, beautiful, triumphant.

“ an ordinary man accidentally becomes a god,” Phelps had scrawled at the bottom of the printout, “he no longer needs Theseus to help him escape the labyrinth. He need only open the door and walk away.”

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