In fact, it was rare for Bryan to come on to his subjects faceto-face. His preferred mode of pickup was to sit in a private room on the third floor of the building in which Cuir de Russie (“Russian leather”), as the bar was called, was situated. He’d stare out the window for hours, doing an occasional line of coke. When he saw a girl who was young and nubile enough standing on the sidewalk for a chat with a friend or a smoke, he would call the number of the pay phone outside the bar, talk to his target, and invite her up to the owner’s lair.
Long after the death of the Lunen girl, people in the art world told stories of visiting Daughtry in his office, where he often had sex toys casually displayed on his desk and cabinet tops-handcuffs, collars, studded bands, and even leather masks like the one found on the corpse. In those same encounters he would refer to the ever-subservient Bertrand as “my executioner,” the enforcer who had been brought in to serve as a bodyguard against the rough characters Daughtry encountered in this underside of his life. No one took his words seriously at the time.
Also later, acquaintances admitted hearing stories of the sadomasochistic games that Bryan and his pals had favored, wild evenings of drugs and sex, complete with whips and chains, during which Daughtry increasingly lost his self-control.
Bertrand Gloster was picked up within days of the discovery of Ilse Lunen’s body. He had once been employed as a caretaker on one of the neighboring estates, and his borderline intelligence level made him an easy subject for police interrogators. He admitted killing the young girl, who had gingerly agreed to participate in the S amp;M activities in return for Daughtry’s promise of an airline ticket home to Sweden.
In Gloster’s chilling confession, he described Ilse Lunen putting on the leather mask and zipping its mouthpiece shut before Daughtry handcuffed her behind her back and directed her to kneel behind a large boulder in the woods. Then, Gloster said, the already floating art dealer snorted a few more lines and leaned over to whisper to Ilse, “You’ll be going home, all right-in a wooden box,” before he ordered Gloster to shoot her in the back of the head.
“End of story?” Chapman asked.
“Not exactly. Gloster’s doing twenty-five to life for murder, and the Westchester D.A. has never been able to nail Daughtry.” The testimony of an accomplice has to be corroborated by some other evidence-it’s not sufficient in and of itself to charge the coconspirator with the crime of murder. “There has never been a single other thing to link Daughtry to the child’s death.”
“So this friggin’ lunatic did eighteen months for tax evasion and now he’s back in business like he’s a normal guy, right? Man, I’d like just five minutes alone with him while you wait in the car. Whaddaya think, Coop? No loss to society, I promise.”
Mercer parked in front of Galleria Caxton Due, the newest Chelsea outpost, which Deni and Bryan had just been setting up for a fall premiere at the time of her death. It was too early in the day for the galleries to be open, so there were few other cars and little pedestrian activity on the street.
Mike paused briefly to read the sign that was posted below the bell: “ Service entrance in rear on Twenty-third Street. Hope that doesn’t mean us.”
The front door was unlocked, so Mike pushed it open and we followed him in. The cavernous first-floor space of the former auto repair shop had been completely whitewashed and gutted of all signs of its earlier life. New Age music played on speakers tucked up high in corners of the room.
“Guess they’re not set up for the exhibition yet.”
“You’re about to step on a masterpiece, Mikey. Read the sign.” I pointed to a piece of gray string, about twelve feet long, that extended out from the wall to form a triangle and was tacked to a point on the floor near my left shoe. He ignored me, looking around, instead, at similar strands of colorless yarn spread across sections of the gallery like giant cat’s-cradle forms. I called out the words written on the placard describing the display: “In these string sculptures, the space takes on an incorporeal palpability, concentrating on the planar or volumetric components. Illusion and fact are interwoven, with overlapping linear trajectories.”
“This is art?” Mike responded. “You think some horse’s ass is going pay money for these things? I never saw anything so useless in my entire life.”
Bryan Daughtry’s voice called down to us from a high balcony area off to the side of the airy room. “Don’t be so quick to declare this one the most absurd, Detective. There are several more floors above you might like to see. Why don’t you take the lift up here to my office?”
“Can I make it up there without hanging myself on any of this string crap you call art?” Mike said to Daughtry, rolling his eyes at the bizarre exhibit of yarn sculptures that stretched across the mostly bare space on the ground floor. Then he turned to me. “Let’s head up, blondie. Maybe if I dangle my handcuffs in front of him he’ll get a hard-on. You’re certainly much too old for his taste.”
There was a small lift in the far corner of the wide room. When the doors of the elevator opened on the sixth floor, I was struck in the eye by a blaze of light. The southern exposure of the building was a wall of glass, which let the bright midday sun flood into this most unexpected setting.
From this point, with no tall buildings in the immediate area, I could see over the rooftops of nearby galleries and garages and out to the Hudson River, which curved in toward the east just a few blocks below us.
The most striking surprise was that about three floors beneath where we stood, running from the north end to the south side of the airy atrium, was an actual stretch of railroad track. It was heavy, thick, covered with rust, and overgrown with weeds.
I stared down at it. “Is that real?”
Chapman was rapt. “I wish my old man could see this. Sure it’s real. Look,” he said, pointing to an opening where the track ran out of the glass-sided building and across the street, directly into a warehouse facing the Galleria Caxton Due.
I leaned against the railing to see that in similar fashion, the grass-filled ties also ran back out of the converted garage, crossing over the double width of Twenty-third Street and rolling on between two buildings on its north corner.
“What is it?” Mercer asked.
“The old Hi-Line Railroad. Another Hell’s Kitchen special. When they raised the tracks off Death Avenue north of the rail yards, they still needed trains to get down to the meat markets in the Fourteenth Street area. So, south of Thirtieth Street, this became the elevated line. Haven’t you ever noticed the old tracks?”
Mercer and I looked at Mike blankly and shook our heads.
“Just drive uptown on Tenth Avenue and look to your left. The air rights over the railroad tracks were sold off, so all these warehouses were allowed to build above and surrounding the actual path of the Hi-Line. Between every block in the twenties and even below that, till you hit the old Gansevoort Market, you can see the great tracks right from the street.”
Daughtry stepped out of his office, on the southwest corner of the floor, and looked across at us. “Amazing space, isn’t it? We’re the only gallery in the city smart enough to incorporate this bit of history into our design. Glad you appreciate that much.”
He invited us into his chilled office, and despite the temperature in the climate-controlled gallery, I was surprised to see that beads of sweat were pooled on Daughtry’s forehead. He repeatedly dabbed at the streaks running down the side of his neck.
Mike, Mercer, and I introduced ourselves, and he invited us to sit opposite his desk. There were no signs of his former indiscretions here, and although he resembled the photos I had seen in the press during the Gloster trial, Daughtry was paunchier now, and jowls had replaced the even line of his pointed chin.