Inside, the impression is better. Glossy concrete floors, zinc-topped café tables and aluminum chairs giving off a dull sheen under the track lights. The corners house overstuffed leather chairs, most of them occupied, and a series of rickety bookshelves bursting with fat paperbacks. As I make my way to the counter, a tooled mahogany buttress reclaimed from some old building – possibly this one – repurposed without being restored, no doubt intentionally, several students glance up from their laptops, making me as the Man.
A large square table, another refugee from bygone days, hosts a half-dozen middle-aged ladies crowned in various stages of blond, each of them clutching a copy of the same book. They pause in mid-discussion, turning to watch me pass. Judging by the volume of ink on skin, the multiple piercings, they’re doing their best to keep up with their daughters.
Over the counter, the menu’s inscribed in chalk on four large blackboards suspended from the rafters. I missed my morning coffee, so the first order of business is testing the house blend. The girl on duty is short and lithe, upholstered in nubby fabric from the developing world, dreadlocks tied back, a stack of tribal bangles protecting her wrists. But her glasses say ARMANI on the side.
The coffee is better than good. After two gulps I’m seeing the world with new eyes. My elbow on the counter, I scan the room, realizing I’m one of only three men present. Everyone else is female and white, affecting an affluent version of grunge. The girl behind the counter hovers a few feet off, seeming uncertain how to deal with my lingering presence.
“You have some studios here, is that right?”
She raises a pierced eyebrow, like she wasn’t expecting someone in a jacket and tie to know about the studio space, or even art in general.
“Umm,” she says. “Yeah.” Her ringed thumb indicates a set of double doors to the right of the counter. They’re painted the same matte black as the walls, so they blend in nicely apart from the crack of light running between them. “There aren’t any shows or anything today, though. And the studios are actually private.”
“Nothing is actually private.” I slide a card across the counter, then finish the last of the coffee.
She holds the card close, staring at the words through her designer glasses. It’s a while before she processes the significance.
“You’re a cop?”
“I’m a homicide detective.” I dangle the keys to Thomson’s studio, a long silver door key and a shorter brass one that looks like it might fit a padlock. “I need to take a look inside.”
“My manager’s not here,” she says.
“That’s okay. As you can see, I have the keys.”
“Well, but… I mean, don’t you need a search warrant?”
I lean across the counter, making eye contact. “Not actually.”
The double doors swing open at the first push. As I pass through, I half expect her to rush after me, but mine are the only footsteps along the tiled floor. The featureless hallway turns right, then dead-ends at a locked door. This is where the building renovation seems to have ended. Through the glass panel over the lock I see a long corridor of raw sheetrock lit by a string of exposed bulbs, the walls pierced by a series of garage-style openings sealed off by the same segmented metal pull-downs that secure self-storage units, each with a shiny padlock at its base.
The silver key opens the door. The pull-downs are numbered sequentially, but only some of them are labeled. Near the end of the corridor, one of the doors is slightly raised and I can hear music playing on the other side. Sarah McLachlan. That one I steer clear of. I check the names on the other doors for Thomson’s, but he isn’t listed, which means I have to go one by one, testing the brass key in every padlock.
I’m a quarter of the way down when the music stops and the raised door rattlesnakes toward the ceiling. A small black-haired woman peers out, wiping her hands on a pair of paint-mottled jeans.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
“Sure.” I cast a hopeless glance along the corridor. “You wouldn’t happen to know which one of these belongs to Joe Thomson?”
She leans against the doorframe, crossing her arms skeptically.
“Joe’s not here. Nobody is but me.”
“I know he’s not here,” I say, walking toward her. “I’m not looking for him, just his studio.”
Her eyes dart to my hand, where the keys glisten. She’s in her twenties, attractive in a candid, wide-eyed way, her hair wrapped in some kind of scarf, maybe to keep it clear of the paint. The baggy plaid shirt and loose-fitting jeans give her a squared-off look, hiding any figure she might have. Her feet, mostly concealed under a puddle of denim, appear to be bare.
“Are you a friend of his?” she asks.
I hand her one of my cards, giving her a moment to look it over. “Could you point me to the right door, please, ma’am?”
“I don’t understand,” she says, still looking at the card.
“A little help here is all I’m asking for.”
“I mean, what do the police want with Joe? Has he done something? He’s such a nice guy, always helpful. He’s, like, my art buddy. I can’t believe he’d do anything…”
Her reaction doesn’t seem right. There’s nothing strange about one cop showing up on another’s doorstep, no reason to assume there’s any guilt involved. Unless.
“Ma’am,” I say. “You realize Joe’s a cop, right?”
She blinks. “What do you -? No, I didn’t realize. How could he… I mean, we shared a… No, never mind what we shared. He’s a cop? Joe? You’re not making this up?”
“He was.”
“Was? He’s not anymore?”
“No,” I say. “He’s not anymore. Now, can you tell me which door is his?”
She holds the card in both hands, thumbs squeezing it into a parabola. Without speaking, she nods toward the lockup directly across from hers. I stoop to the ground, fitting the lock inside, twisting until the hook unclasps. The lock fits tightly. Once I work it free, the door springs up a couple of feet, then sinks several inches. I give the handle a good yank, lifting the metal skin clear.
“The switch is on the wall,” she says.
I flick the lights on. Thomson’s studio is narrow, not more than twelve feet across, but it’s almost twice that length. One wall is covered in shallow gunmetal shelving units that hold, in addition to a few cardboard boxes, an inventory of crude busts executed in plaster, clay, and in a few cases stone. Vaguely human heads on rustic pedestals, mostly looking – intentionally or not – like victims of blunt force trauma, with swollen lips and cratered eye sockets and half-formed ears. I stand there looking at them, uncertain what I’m seeing.
“Joe’s heads.”
I turn. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Roland March.”
“My name’s Jill,” she says. “Jill Fanning?” Turning the name up at the end like it’s a question. Either she isn’t sure who she is, or she thinks maybe I will have heard of her.
“These heads, that’s what he made?”
There must be thirty of them at least, lined up with methodical precision like cans on the grocery store shelf. On its own, I doubt any of them would be that remarkable, but it’s another story taken together. A kind of primitive power resides in their collective stare. This was therapeutic? Somehow I doubt it. Not so much the work of a man chasing away his demons as courting them, but then I’m no critic of art.
Turning from the sculpted glare, I take in the rest of the studio. The opposite wall houses a series of tables – folding metal jobs with dust-covered tops, a couple of tall, narrow wood platforms straight from the planting shed, some boards propped between sawhorses. Chisels and hammers of various sizes litter the surfaces, along with awls, files, and a rust-red saw.
A couple of scrap-metal sentinels stand in back, figures composed haphazardly of random parts. The welding gear sits in the corner. As I approach to inspect it, Jill Fanning gives one of the iron figures a tap with her knuckle, sending a vibration through its limbs.