The voices calling his name drew closer and closer, as did the barking dogs, loud and raucous.
Footsteps. Crunching. Closing.
His teeth chattered, and his lips shook so much, he thought they might squirm away.
Then the brush parted and he saw them: police officers, wearing wet raincoats and drenched hats. The foremost officer smiled, and let out a long exhale.
“Hey there,” said the officer, extending his hand. “Got a little wild man here.”
PART ONE
“Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master. Thus your art must be, as it were, God’s grandchild.”
~ Dante
Chapter 1
I
Los Angeles, CA, 1992
Okay, that’s interesting, thought Norman Ritter. A dump with a doorman.
An aged building, it squatted on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, older than many of its towering neighbors. In the blood-colored bricks, in the skeletal creak of the fire escape, one could probably glean some vague history of the whole city, a history so fast and full, stuffed into mere decades.
The man at the door looked homeless. Or, it was just an act. Ritter had seen plenty of the latter but usually dwelling coast-side, across the sands of Venice or Santa Monica. The beach-bum-hippie façade, often put on by middle-class white kids.
As he drew closer, though, this man seemed authentic. Shorter than average, he wore a brown trench coat, frayed at the shoulders. From the thin shadow of a derby—right out of old slapstick shorts—stared eyes sunk in a dwarfish face, a face certainly wise with the dark avenue.
He watched Ritter approach.
“Who’re you seeing?” asked the man, holding open the door.
“Um, Max Higgins.”
A mucus-clicked laugh. “He’s all anyone comes to see here.”
“Would make sense.” Ritter entered and the man spoke after him.
“Elevator’s broken, buddy,” said the man. “Gotta use the stairs.”
“Thanks.”
Goddammit.
Breath came heavy as he made his way to the fourth floor. A subtle nudge from God, he supposed, to get some exercise. Unfortunately, a broken elevator was bound to be as futile as the numerous hints and articles Angelica thrust at him.
He reached the door and knocked.
From inside. “Yeah?”
“It’s Norman Ritter, Mr. Higgins. From Direct Canvas. I’m here for the interview.”
“Hold on.”
Shuffling inside. Norman adjusted his glasses, clutched his notebook tighter.
The door opened. Save for the packet of hot sauce jutting from his lips like some square plastic raspberry, Higgins looked exactly as Norman had seen him in the occasional photograph. Hair droopy and dark blond, like dry grass. Complexion pale. Blue eyes watery and bloodshot. A long-sleeved flannel shirt hung loosely on his frame, and his jeans were streaked with paint. From his neck dangled a small gold cross.
“Come on in,” Max said. “Sorry for the mess.”
Norman walked in, stepping over an empty Taco Shack bag. Another bag sat against the wall, full of what appeared to be more hot sauce packets. Encrusted plates and utensils swelled the sink, mousetraps awaited their prey with wooden patience, and in an open closet stood two pillars of old newspapers.
That was the non-art side of the small apartment. The rest of the place was full of palettes, easels, paint rollers, canvases of all sizes, storage for finished or in-progress pieces, paint tubes and canisters of virtually every brand, posed wooden mannequins—anything and everything Norman had ever seen for sale in an art store.
Then there was the wall.
Covered in the yellowed gray ivy of clipped newspaper photos and articles, the wall looked like the work of some tenacious stalker, an unsettling shrine obsessively tended to, a thing uncovered after a terrible crime.
But this wall wasn’t centered on any single person. Rather, it was composed of numerous different people, many of them smiling. Reprinted yearbook or family photos. A variety of eyes stared dead and grainy out at Ritter from faces of multiple ethnicities and ages. Other eras, too; one girl’s photo was from 1979.
Stringing them all together in one sad theme was a harsh, underscoring word:
MISSING
“You collect...missing person photos?” Norman asked. And there’s the insanity, he thought. Every artist needs some form of insanity.
Max nodded. “Those are the faces of my paintings.”
“I see,” said Ritter, mesmerized by the wall of portraits. “Where did this come from?”
Many, understandably, had noted the faces in Max Higgins’ work. The eerie veneer of life in them, the closest in reality a painted visage could get to the haunted-house trope of a portrait’s pursuing eyes. Except, of course, these were not portraits but outlandish surreal pieces, taking cues from Dali, Magritte, with dashes of contemporaries like Kush. These worlds, these mindscapes, spoke to one’s fancy while the faces, oddly embossed from the weirdness, spoke to something else.
Max went to his Taco Shack bag and retrieved two more hot sauce packets. He bit down on one and began sucking it like a lollipop.
“Not sure where it came from,” Max said. “It just kind of came.”
Something lurked behind those words.
“Was there anything that may have inspired it?” Ritter asked.
“My father went missing when I was seven,” Max explained, sucking the hot sauce packet dry. “It was always kind of a dark hole in my mind.”
“And they never found him?”
Max shook his head. “He went off to work and never came back. And apparently he never even made it to work that morning.”
“Strange. I’m sorry to hear that.”
Several blocks over, an ambulance screamed. Ritter jotted notes, kept an eye on Max, whose gaze wandered from the wall to his scattered artwork, much of which was covered in blankets and linen sheets.
“I think I wonder about missing people,” Max said. “Because I’ve met them. Met them before they disappeared, I mean. Not only my father.”
“There were others?”
“Two, actually. One was a girl named Jessica, our figure-drawing model at Rheta Art College. I was in my...let’s see, junior year, I think it was. She disappeared during lunch.”
The story was darkly humorous to Ritter, and he suppressed a smile. He liked how Max put it: disappeared during lunch, in a tone that made the
